Tuesday, December 8, 1874.. The James Gang robs a train.

Western Fictioneers: On This Day in the Old West: December 8:   Let’s talk outlaws this December. On December 8, 1874, the infamous Jesse James and the Younger gang robbed the Kansas Pacific Railroad in...

Last edition:

Monday, December 7, 1874. The 1874 State of the Union.

Labels: 1870s, 1874, Government, The written word, U.S. Grant, United States

Thursday, July 17, 1924. Barracuda.

 

The USS Barracuda, the first of the Navy's V-boats, was launched.  She was decommissioned in 1937, recommissioned in 1940, served throughout World War Two and never fired a shot in anger.

And;

July 17, 1924: Jesse Haines throws the first no-hitter in Cardinals history

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 16, 1924. First news story on Big Foot to go nationwide.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Army, Cryptozoology, Dawes Plan, First Around The World Flight, It was because of World War One, Newspapers, Oregon, The Press

Tuesday, March 17, 1874. John Younger shot and killed

 

John Younger of the James Gang was paid with the wages of sin when he went down in  a gun battle when he and Jim Younger ambushed Pinkerton detectives who had asked them for directions.  After detaining them, detective Louis Lull drew a hidden pistol and shot John in the neck, Jim killed Deputy Sheriff Edward Daniels, John pursued Lull into the woods and shot him.  John Younger then died of his wounds, Lull died three days later.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, March 15, 1874. The Second Treaty of Saigon.

Sunday, February 11, 1923. Gang Wars.

The truce between the Egan's Rats and the Hogan Gang came to an end in St. Louis.  The breach of the peace came when the Rats invaded the Hogan territory on the north side and killed Jacob Mackler, a Hogan lawyer.

Ah. . . the good old days.

Monday, December 3, 1922. Erin go Bragh

The House of Lord voted to approve the Irish Free State Constitution Act of 1922 with only one dissenting vote.  That came from Lord Carson, who had blocked Home Rule in 1914, thereby ironically bringing about the Anglo-Irish War a couple of years later, and guaranteeing that Ireland would become an independent state.

Lord Carson, whose opposition to any independence for Ireland helped set it on the path to full independence.

Rudolph Valentino toured St. Louis.

Saturday, July 1, 1922. The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 Starts.

Saturday weekly's were predictably patriotic on this July 1 Saturday of 1922.

The Saturday Evening Post went to press with what would have been a gender bending cover, women being an enduringly popular illustration topic then and now.

 

The Country Gentleman chose children as the theme, which they often did.

President Harding traveled to Gettysburg.

A group of Miners and Operators visited Harding at the White House.

Herbert Lord was sworn in as Director of the United States Agency of the Budget.

Lord had served in similar roles in the U.S. Army, from which he had just retired, and had proven very adept at it.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 commenced, with any major railroad strike being a national disaster at the time.  It would run into August.

In Wexford, the IRA derailed a train, that somehow being a revolutionary act that made sense, somehow.

Construction commenced on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. It was the first planned regional shopping center.  It is still in operation.

Monday, November 1, 1921 Dedication of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City.

 

August 31, 1920. Building.

On this date in 1920, John Lloyd Wright was given a patent for what would become Lincoln Logs.

Wright had been marketing the toy logs since 1918, and had based them upon his observations of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel's foundation, designed by his father, Frankly Lloyd Wright.   The foundation featured an interlocking log structure to give it flexibility during earthquakes.

The standing hotel following the devastating 1923 earthquake.

An election held on this date in Hannibal Missouri was the first to be conducted following the 19th Amendment going into effect.  Marie Ruoff Byrum was the first woman voter to cast a ballot to have been given the right to vote under the amendment.

Of course, women had been voting for some time in states that had adopted universal suffrage on their own, including Wyoming's female voters.

Mrs Byrum lived until age 73.  She had been involved in politics and had retired to Florida in her later years.

Tennessee, which had been the 36th state to vote to add the 19th Amendment, on this day voted to rescind their ratification in an effort to reverse course on it.  The effort came too late as retroactive post ratification rescissions are not allowable, assuming recessions are at all, which itself isn't clear.

It's odd that it was attempted in this context.  If the vote had preceded the adoption of the Amendment that would have raised a Constitutional question, but doing it after the ratification would fairly obviously do nothing.

1862 French map used as a template in 1920.

French Genera Henri Gouraud issued a decree that set Lebanon's borders in anticipation of creating a separate Lebanese territory the following day.

Depicting Jesse James

There is very little to admire about Jesse James, and yet Americans for generations have.

Jesse James, 1876.

James, as everyone knows, was the Missouri born leader of what was essentially a family, and indeed an ethnic, gang based in Missouri that successfully operated for a time in the Post Civil War Missouri region.  James and his siblings had been exposed to extreme violence as Confederate guerillas during the war and were endowed with the "Little Dixie" region of Missouri's views on the world, none of which would draw sympathy from many people today, but which allowed them to operate relatively safely in the region in spite of their criminal activities due to the feeling that they were, in some ways, continuing the Southern cause.  Those views didn't hold up everywhere in Missouri and they certainly didn't outside of the state, which brought the end of the gang following an extremely failed attempt to raid a bank in Northfield Minnesota.

In spite of the fact that James-Younger gang is not admirable in any sense, they've been the topic of fascination of Americans since their very own time and therefore have been the subject of numerous movies.  Indeed, there are at least twenty screen depiction of James and his gang including one television series from 1965-66.  Numerous Americans claim to be related or descendant from James no matter how dubious their claims may be and, just like for Butch Cassidy, plenty of people claim that James didn't die from a bullet to the back of the head fired by Bob Ford in 1882.  He did.

I haven't seen most of the films that portray James, but there are three that really stand out that a lot of people have seen and which are worth mentioning.  I'll deal with them here, in chronological order.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is a 1972 film limited to the raid on Northfield Minnesota and the events leading up to it.  It has a notable cast, including a young Robert Duvall as James and Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger.  It's a fictionalized version of the raid containing fanciful and strained elements but it's really notable for Duvall's portray of James as a homicidal maniac.  It's worth watching for that reason as Duvall, in a portrayal that perhaps could be regarded as an example of an early anti Western, portrays a really disturbing James which served to strip him from the heroic portrayal that was more common up until then.  Robertson, however, steals the show with a really eclectic portrayal of an intellectually curious Younger.

The film isn't bad in terms of material details.

Returning, however, to a more sympathetic portrayal is the sweeping 1980 The Long Riders which is really unique for casting actors who were in fact brothers to play characters in the true story who were actually brothers.  While this film is only eight years later than The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid it placed really close attention to material details and has the look and feel of mid 19th Century Missouri right.  

As noted, the film made use of actual siblings, with the Keach bothers playing the James brothers, the Caradine brothers playing the Younger brothers, the Quaids playing the Miller brothers, and the Guests playing Bob and Charley Ford.  In some odd way that makes the film feel that much more accurate.

This film starts before the Northfield Minnesota Raid and also features James Whitmore, Jr. as a Pinkerton agent.  It concludes with Ford's killing of James.

As does the 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  The awkwardly long title of the film in some ways sets this film up nicely for what it is, a beautifully filmed and very accurate movie which starts after the Northfield Minnesota Raid and deals with the gang and its central post raid figures.  Extremely moody and presented almost like a narrated book, Brad Pitt's portrayal of James as a highly intelligent, charismatic, and mentally deranged figure is brilliant.  Casely Affleck's Robert Ford is really the main focus of the film and his portrayal of James "assassin" is likewise brilliantly done.  The portrayals are so effective that they risk actually defining the real individuals, which may not be fair in context.

This film is superb on material details and it has the look and feel of mid 19th Century Missouri, and then briefly late 19th Century Colorado, just right.  The film concludes with the death of Bob Ford, showing how its focus is really on the Ford character, not on James.  In some ways its a subtle morality tale which none of the other James movies are.  If a person was going to watch just one of these films, this one would be the one to watch.

June 28, 1919. . . meanwhile, other things were also going on. . .

This entry will oddly appear just slightly before the extremely long one on the Versailles Treaty, but as it deals with the other things going on that day, it's here first.

On this day, Harry S. Truman, recently discharged artillery officer of the Missouri National Guard, married Elizabeth "Bess" Wallace.

The couple had known each other since their teens and in fact Harry Truman had proposed to her eight years prior, only to receive a rejection.

At that time he was working on his father's farm.  Undeterred, he determined to ask he again but not before he was making more income than a farmer generally did, keeping in mind that this was an era in which farmers had economic parity with the American middle class.  He started several businesses and then went off to serve as an officer in the Great War.  At the time of his marriage he was established in a haberdashery store with a partner in Kansas City, but went failed during the Recession of 1921.

Truman thereafter entered politics, becoming a County Court Judge in Kansas City, Missouri. That position suffers from a confusion of terms, as that position is more akin to a County Commissioner in most states than a court position. While he suffered a defeat early on he returned shortly thereafter to politics and in 1933 he was appointed the director of the Federal Re-employment program in Missouri, an appointment which reflected machine politics as it was an arrangement between the Democratic Pendergast Machine of Missouri and the Roosevelt Administration.

In 1934 he was elected to the Senate from Missouri even thought Pendergast opposed his entering the race at first.  In the primary he managed to overcome better placed Democratic candidates to secure the nomination and then defeated the Republican incumbent.  He rose quickly and became Roosevelt's third Vice President in 1944.

Truman was an exceptional man, but he was also the last American President who really reflected the average American.  He was never wealthy and he was the last American President who didn't hold a college degree.  He wasn't a lawyer and he had suffered business failure.  If he was ambitious, he was ambitious in a middle America middle class sort of way.  An argument can be made that he is the President who most closely reflected the average Americans of the era in which he was elected, with there being, at most, only a couple of others who can claim that status.

In Washington D. C. the automobile manufacturer's association held a parade.

Wyoming, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Missouri push the 18th Amendment over the top.

On this day in 1919, Wyoming, in combination with North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska and Missouri ratified the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  These legislative acts secured a sufficient number of votes to make the 18th Amendment the law. The Senate had passed the original proposal on August 1, 1917 and the House a revised variant on December 17, 1917.  The various states passed it in the following order:

1. Mississippi (January 7, 1918)
2. Virginia (January 11, 1918)
3. Kentucky (January 14, 1918)
4. North Dakota (January 25, 1918)
5. South Carolina (January 29, 1918)
6. Maryland (February 13, 1918)
7. Montana (February 19, 1918)
8. Texas (March 4, 1918)
9. Delaware (March 18, 1918)
10. South Dakota (March 20, 1918)
11. Massachusetts (April 2, 1918)
12. Arizona (May 24, 1918)
13. Georgia (June 26, 1918)
14. Louisiana (August 3, 1918)
15. Florida (November 27, 1918)
16. Michigan (January 2, 1919)
17. Ohio (January 7, 1919)
18. Oklahoma (January 7, 1919)
19. Idaho (January 8, 1919)
20. Maine (January 8, 1919)
21. West Virginia (January 9, 1919)
22. California (January 13, 1919)
23. Tennessee (January 13, 1919)
24. Washington (January 13, 1919)
25. Arkansas (January 14, 1919)
26. Illinois (January 14, 1919)
27. Indiana (January 14, 1919)
28. Kansas (January 14, 1919)
29. Alabama (January 15, 1919)
30. Colorado (January 15, 1919)
31. Iowa (January 15, 1919)
32. New Hampshire (January 15, 1919)
33. Oregon (January 15, 1919)
34. North Carolina (January 16, 1919)
35. Utah (January 16, 1919)
36. Nebraska (January 16, 1919)
37. Missouri (January 16, 1919)
38. Wyoming (January 16, 1919)
39. Minnesota (January 17, 1919)
40. Wisconsin (January 17, 1919)
41. New Mexico (January 20, 1919)
42. Nevada (January 21, 1919)
43. New York (January 29, 1919)
44. Vermont (January 29, 1919)
45. Pennsylvania (February 25, 1919)
46. New Jersey (March 9, 1922)

Connecticut and Rhode Island told Congress to pound dry sand and didn't ratify the amendment, not that that matter in context.  There were, of course, only 48 states at the time.

The 18th Amendment provided:

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

While the intent of the Amendment was clear; "bone dry prohibition", it didn't actually provide any definitions and so it required legislation to make it effective, which was quick in coming. 

As this list should indicate, Prohibition was actually massively popular in the United States including the Western United States.  Only two states refused to ratify the proposed amendment.  I'm not sure what the situation was in Connecticut, but Rhode Island was heavily Catholic with a large Italian demographic and likely found the proposal abhorrent for that reason.  Still, it's somewhat telling that Wyoming's ratification came with a slate of late Western states that voted for it.  Still, the entire process really only took one year once Congress had passed it.

Everyone is well aware of how the history of Prohibition worked and its generally regarded as a failure.  Like most popular history, it's become mythologized, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself as myths are the means by which humans originally remembered their history.  However, like other instances in which an event quickly turned into an unacceptable defeat, the myth isn't completely accurate.  The popular myth is that Prohibition was unpopular from the start and is a failed example of legislating morality.  While it may be an example of such a failure, it very clearly wasn't unpopular at first and in fact the opposite was very much the case.  Indeed, as late as the election of 1922 it remained so popular in Wyoming that William B. Ross, the Democrat who ran for office, ran on a platform of more strictly enforcing its provisions.

So a person might reasonably ask what happened to cause it to so rapidly fail and to be so inaccurately remembered.  Quite a few things really.

For one thing, the final push to pass Prohibition came in the context of World War One.  While momentum to pass it had been building for well over a decade, the war caused an enormous fear that American youth would be exposed to the corrupting influences of European culture.  If that seems really odd, and it is, we have to keep in mind that American culture in the 1910s remained predominantly Protestant in outlook (and indeed it still is).  English speaking Protestants took a distinctively different view of drink in this period than their Catholic fellows, in part because their history with it was considerably different.  While early Protestants had not been opposed to drink at all, this had evolved and by this point there was a strong anti drinking culture in the English speaking world.  People feared that progress on the anti drinking front would be lost when young Americans were exposed to French wine and, frankly, French women.

But for the most part the cultural impact on Americans, who were not in the war long, was much less than it would be for later wars, even where they fought overseas.  So this fear did not really last that long.  The short but deep depression that followed the war, moreover, reminded people that alcohol was an agricultural byproduct, and like a lot of things that impact a person's wallet, that had an influence.  The lid coming off of the culture in the 1920s had an additional big impact on things as the 1920s started to Roar and Prohibition became fashionable to flaunt.  That in turn inspired criminal activity that became a major problem.  By the early 1930s Americans had substantially changed their minds as a second depression, the Great Depression, again depressed the agricultural sector along with every other.  So, after a short stint, Prohibition went from massively popular to substantially unpopular, and the 18th Amendment was repealed.

French Legion in St. Louis, Missouri., Sept. 26, 1918

Mid Week at Work. Teenage rail worker, 1916

LOC Title:  Title: 15-year old boy who says he works some for the railroad. Mountain Grove, Missouri / Lewis W. Hine. Published August 25, 1916.

Movies In History: Paper Moon

Paper Moon

This 1973 film came about some decades prior to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? but it also really has the feel of the Depression right, in this case in the Missouri Kansas border region.  The film surrounds the story of a con artist who arrives in the story just in time for the funeral of a woman with whom, the film strongly suggests, he has, unbeknownst to him, had a child.  The association with the deceased mother, we understand, was illicit in nature, and he never acknowledges at any point in the film that he's the child's father.  He does accept, however, a charge to take the child to an aunt.  From there, a series of adventures ensues.

The gritty nature of the film, filmed entirely in black and white, and the desperation of the protagonist, even though it's a comedy, really come through.  The lack of, or failure of, the social structure also shines through, with it not seeming all that odd, by the end of the film, that a little girl has been essentially been adopted, outside the law, by a man who was in the end a kindhearted stranger, or who may be that.

Filmed in black and white, as noted, even though well within the color film era, the cinematography and the excellent cast give it the right feel.

The protagonists are portrayed by actual father and child Ryan and Tatum O'Neal.  This is Ryan O'Neal's best film, to the extent I've seen his films, and he acts in it quite well.  Tatum O'Neal was brilliant in the film.

In terms of material details, the film is excellent, with the portrayal of Dust Bowl Kansas significantly added to by the use of black and white cinematography.

Sunday, April 18, 1909. St. Joan d'Arc beatified.

 St. Joan d'Arc was beatified by Pope Pius X before a crowed of 30,000 in St. Peter's Square.

Drawing of St. Joan d'Arc made during her lifetime.  

A patron saint of France who lived from 1412 to 1431 before being executed, her canonization would follow in May, 1920.

Remarkably, an example of her signature exists.

The 1909 St. Louis Cardinals were photographed.

Last prior edition:

Saturday, April 17, 1909. Soccer riots.

1900s, 1909, actors and actresses, children, Rhode Island, Soccer, Sports, Teenagers, Washington DC, William Howard Taft