Showing posts with label Myths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Myths. Show all posts

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Tết: Năm của Rồng

Arrived last night.


It is the Vietnamese Year of the Dragon.  The Vietnamese years cycle in the following fashion:

Rat

Water buffalo Sửu

Tiger Dần W

Cat Mão

Dragon Thìn

Snake Tỵ

Horse Ngọ

Goat Mùi

Monkey Thân

Rooster Dậu

Dog Tuất

Pig Hợi

This is similar to a cycle used by some larger country to the north, whose cycle is the following:

Mouse 鼠, shǔ (子)

Ox 牛, niú (丑) Yin

Tiger 虎, hǔ (寅) Yang

Rabbit 兔, tù (卯) Yin

Dragon 龙/龍, lóng (辰) Yang

Snake 蛇, shé (巳) Yin

Horse 马/馬, mǎ (午) Yang

Goat 羊, yáng (未) Yin

Monkey 猴, hóu (申) Yang

Rooster 鸡/雞, jī (酉) Yin

Dog 狗, gǒu (戌) Yang

Pig 猪/豬, zhū (亥) Yin

These calendars match, so this is the Year of the Dragon on both.  Last year, of course, was the Year of the Rabbit on that calendar, while on the Vietnamese calendar, it was the Year of the Cat.

Pennant of the Nguyễn dynasty emperor. By Goran tek-en (source), Oppashi (derivative work) - File:Nguyen Imperial Pennon (m4).gifFile:Vietnamese Dragon blue.svg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64178781


As with China and other Asian lands, dragons have a long connection with Vietnam.  In Vietnam, they were used as dynasitc symbols nad national symbols at various points in time.

Coat of arms of the (French) State of Vietnam, 1954-1955.  .By Goran tek-en, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100564723

As a mythical beast, dragons are bizarrely widely spread in terms of appearance, with nearly every culture on earth, save for North and South America (in so far as I'm aware) having some variant of them.  This has lead to quite a bit of academic speculation as to how this came about.

Saturday, May 13, 2023

Saturday, May 13, 1943. The Germans lay down their arms in North Africa (after having sustained greater losses than they did at Stalingrad), Postwar careers of the Wehrmacht, Mary Wells born.

Today In Wyoming's History: May 131943  A measles epidemic was raging in the state.  As everyone in my family has the stomach flu today, I can sympathize with epidemics.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.
That was, of course, in 2013, when that entry was written.  Other health problems are visiting now, ten years later, of a more serious nature.

Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg (left), commander of the 2nd New Zealand Division, Brigadier Graham and Major General Kurt von Liebenstein at the surrender.

The German Army's 164th Infantry Division laid its weapons down and Major General Kurt Freiherr von Liebenstein surrendered the unit, becoming the last Afrika Korps unit to do so.

Of significant note, in the few days that the final Axis surrender in North Africa took place, 267,000 Afrika Korps troops became POWs.

In contrast, the Soviets took 91,000 German prisoners at Stalingrad.  In fairness, the Germans lost 500,000 men at Stalingrad.  However, in fairness again, during the entire North African campaign, the Germans and Italians suffered 620,000 casualties.  The British Commonwealth lost 220,000 men and the United States 18,500, one of whom was the brother of one of my father's good friends.

I note this as, once again, it sheds light on the Soviet propaganda of the time that they were fighting the war alone. The Soviets lost 750,000 men fighting the Germans at Stalingrad, which is a massive loss, and the battle is regarded as the largest in human history, but in terms of campaign loss, if viewed that way, the Germans and Italians loss more men fighting the British (mostly) and the Americans in North Africa.

Von Liebenstein would go on to join the Bundesherr in 1955 and retire five years later at his World War Two rank of Major General.  He died in 1975 at age 76.  His career dated back to World War One.

This raises a question I've never been able to get a good answer for.  Did the Federal Republic of Germany recognize per 1955 military service for retirement purposes for West German soldiers?  I'm thinking it must have.

The early Bundesheer was packed with former members of the Wehrmacht, and even a handful of SS officers, capped at major for career advancement, were allowed into it, after first being declined.  I don't know the percentage, but a roster of Bundesheer officers reads like a whose who of former Nazi era Heer rolls. 

Indeed, amazingly, the West German government called upon ten senior former Nazi era officers in the early 1950s, including Erich von Manstein, about how to reestablish a German army.  In 1953 Manstein addressed the Bundestag on this topic, noting that he favored a conscript army with 18 to 24 months mandatory male service, thereby looking back to the pre-1939 German system.  This system was in fact adopted.  Von Manstein himself was not allowed back into that army, but it's well known that he had a veto power over former German officers applying to join it, and that he did not want "traitors".

One American historian, a former Army officers, has called this group a "handful", but that's far from true.  There were a lot of them.  And more than a few of them had a background like von Liebenstein.  He'd started off as a junior Imperial German Army in 1916, had gone on to the Reichsheer after the German defeat, had served the Nazi's after that, and completed his career in the service of the Federal Republic of Germany.

How did he view his loyalties?

On this, it ought to also be noted, the post World War Two German Federal Republic's offices were simply packed with those who had served the Third Reich.  Over 70% of its judiciary in that era had.  This really began to come apart with the upheavals of 1968, which gave us the Germany, culturally, we have today.

FWIW, the post-war Austrian Army also had officers who had been in the German Heer, and before that, in the Austrian Army.

Famous Motwon singer Mary Wells was born on this day in Detroit.





Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Monday, May 3, 1943. The crash of Hot Stuff claims the life of Gen. Andrews.

Lt. Gen. Frank Maxwell Andrews, for whom Andrews Air Force Base is named, died in the crash of the B-24 Hot Stuff in Iceland, when it went down in bad weather.

He had been on an inspection tour in the United Kingdom.

Only the plane's tail gunner, SSgt George A. Eisel, survived the crash.  Eisel had survived a previous B-24 crash in North Africa.  He'd live until 1964 when he died at age 64.  Married prior to the war, he and his wife never had any children.

Hot Stuff was the first B-24D to complete 25 missions, well before, it might be noted, the B-17 Memphis Belle did the same.  Hardly anyone recalls Hot Stuff, as the Army went on to emphasize the Memphis Belle following the crash of Hot Stuff and the death of all but one of its crew.  Of note, Hot Suff, predictably, had a much more salacious example of nose art than Memphis Belle, and it's interesting to speculate how the Army would have handled that had the plane been popularized.  At any rate, the story that Memphis Belle was the first US bomber to complete 25 missions is a complete myth.

Andrews was the CO of the ETO at the time of this death.  A West Point Graduate from the class of 1906, he had been in the cavalry branch from 1906 to 1917, when he was assigned to aviation over the objection of his commander.  A prior objection had prevented his reassignment in 1914.

Sarah Sundin noted this event on her blog:

Today in World War II History—May 3, 1943: Lt. Gen. Frank Andrews, commander of US European Theater of Operations, is killed in a B-24 crash in Iceland. US II Corps takes Mateur, Tunisia.

She also noted the ongoing Allied advance in North Africa and the establishment of the British 6th Airborne Division. 

Mine workers called off the coal strike.

The United States Supreme Court invalidated a Jeannette, PA ordinance that required Jehovah's Witness members to acquire peddler's licenses before distributing religious literature.  The ordinance's license fee was a whopping $10.00/day.

Saturday, January 7, 2023

House of the Rising Sun Deconstructed. Anything seem a little odd?

Most of us know the song, House of the Rising Sun.  Probably most people who think of it, when they do, think of the version by Eric Burdon and the Animals.

It's a great song.

Anything ever seem a little off about it, however?

The song is about a house of prostitution, which most people familiar with the song are aware of.  As Burdon sings it, the lyrics are:

There is a house in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy

And God, I know I'm one


My mother was a tailor

She sewed my new blue jeans

My father was a gamblin' man

Down in New Orleans


Now the only thing a gambler needs

Is a suitcase and a trunk

And the only time he's satisfied

Is when he's all drunk

 

Oh mother, tell your children

Not to do what I have done

Spend your lives in sin and misery

In the House of the Rising Sun


Well, I got one foot on the platform

The other foot on the train

I'm goin' back to New Orleans

To wear that ball and chain

 

Well, there is a house in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy

And God, I know I'm one

Now, it is a great song.  And I like this version of it, which was released in 1964.

The interesting thing, however, is that song from a male point of view, which it is, it's sort of way ahead of its time.  Not that it isn't relevant, it's just a point of view that I can't think of any other song from the mid to late 20th Century expressing that view.  Basically, the protagonist is confessing that he's a sex addict and addicted to frequenting the prostitutes of The House Of The Rising Sun.

The song wasn't written by Eric Burdon, or any of his band. They were covering a song, which many are unaware of, that had already had a successful recording run when sung by Woodie Guthrie and Hudey Ledbetter (Leadbelly).  Indeed, I thought Leadbelly had written the wrong, but I was in error on that.

The Guthrie version, from 1941, has the following lyrics:

There is a house in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy

And God I know I'm one


My mother was a tailor

She sewed my new bluejeans

My father was a gamblin' man

Down in New Orleans


Now the only thing a gambler needs

Is a suitcase and trunk

And the only time he's satisfied

Is when he's on a drunk


Oh mother tell your children

Not to do what I have done

Spend your lives in sin and misery

In the House Of The Rising Sun


Well, I got one foot on the platform

The other foot on the train

I'm goin' back to New Orleans

To wear that ball and chain


Well, there is a house in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy

And God I know I'm one

Identical.  What about Leadbelly?  Well, he recorded it twice, first in 1944, which had these lyrics:

There is a house in New Orleans

You call the Rising Sun

It's been the ruin of many a poor soul

And me, oh God, I'm one

 

If I'd listened to what mama said

I'd be at home today

Being so young and foolish, poor girl

I let a gambler lead me astray

 

My mother she's a tailor

Sews those new blue jeans

My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord God

He drinks down in New Orleans

 

He fills his glasses to the brim

Passes them around

The only pleasure that he gets out of life

Is a hoboin' from town to town

 

The only thing a drunkard needs

Is a suitcase and a trunk

The only time that he's half satisfied

Is when he's on a drunk

 

Go and tell my baby sister

Never do like I have done

Shun that house down in New Orleans

That they call that Rising Sun.

 

It's one foot on the platform,

One foot on the train.

I'm going back down to New Orleans

To wear my ball and my chain

 

My life is almost over

My race is almost run

Going back down to New Orleans

To that house of the Rising Sun

Oh, now wait a moment, that's a lot different.  In this version, which is earlier, the protagonist, while sung through Leadbelly's male voice, is a girl entrapped in prostitution.  Frankly, the song makes a lot more sense all the way around.

Leadbelly's 1947 version of The House of the Rising Sun.

In the second recording, which is the one people normally here, Leadbelly had followed Guthrie's lead, and the protagonist was male.

The first one presents a really grim warning. The girl who is the subject of the song has obviously left the house, and now is returning? Why? Well, contrary to the way prostitution is portrayed in film, her reputation would have been completely ruined and by this point that probably would have been her only option to try to make enough money to stay alive.  Not only that, she's noting that she's expecting an early death.  

More on that in a moment.

Leadbelly, it should be noted, didn't get around to recording until very near the end of his life.  He died in 1949, and was first recorded in 1933.  He was born in 1888 and was preforming professionally by 1903.  Indeed, at first he preformed in Shreveport audiences in St. Paul's Bottoms, its red-light district, with his career interrupted by stints in jail, which are referenced in some of his most famous songs.  He was in fact discovered, and truly was a great musical talent, by Alan Lomax while serving a prison stint.

Leadbelly preformed so early that some have speculated to what degree he was an indeterminable influence on the blues.  He definitely was, but he also was unique in that he played a twelve-string guitar, very unusual for bluesmen, and his songs were always in the blues format but in sometimes in a near blues, ten bar, format.  Indeed, some of those were converted to eight bar blues formats by later recording artists, probably basically by accident.

Anyhow, Leadbelly's songs often had a really old origin.  This seems to be one. And the fact that the first version he recorded was sung from a female point of view is telling. Taht's probably how he learned it.

How early is that version?

Well, the song first makes its appearance by reference in 1905. By that time, it was being sung by miners in Appalachia, which means that one of the references doesn't quite fit unless the song had really travelled in the South.  I.e., a song about somebody in New Orleans is out of regional context.  The first printed version of the lyrics appear in 1925, with this:

There is a house in New Orleans, 

it's called the Rising Sun

It's been the ruin of many poor girl

Great God, and I for one.

Just like Leadbelly had it.

The first recorded version came in 1933, later than I would have supposed, but still pretty early in the recording industry.  It was by Applachain artist Clarence "Tom" Ashley and Gwen Foster.  Ashley claimed to have learned it from his grandfather, which pushes the song back to the mid 19th Century. Ashley's version has a male protagonist:

There is a house in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun

Where many poor boys to destruction has gone

And me, oh God, are one.

Note, this one has a blunter warning than any others with a male protagonist. The male vocalist hasn't gone to "ruin", but to "destruction".

Hmmmm. . . . so was it a male or female song?

My guess is that it was originally a female one, but because of its compelling popularity, it's been switched back and forth from its near onset.

So, was there a House of the Rising Sun that induced poor girls into lives, and probably shortened ones, of prostitution?

Nobody really knows for sure, but applying Yeoman's Eighth Law of History, as we should, would suggest it's likely. That law, as you'll recall, stated the following:

Yeoman's Eighth Law of History:  Myths, unless purely fanciful, almost always have a basis in reality.

In cultures that write things down, the concept that myths, which were primarily related by word of mouth, have any basis in reality seems to come as a shock. But they normally do. 

It is the spoken word that is the default means of transmitting information, including history, in human beings.  The written word is a learned behavior, indeed one that must not only be learned but nurtured in order to take root.   Even now, a lot of people will take and retain information better orally than in a written form.

But oral transmission is always subject to decay with the teller, and the tricks the mind uses to retain the story warp it a bit by default. But that doesn't mean that the stories were never true in any fashion.

All the time we find that historians and archeologist are surprised to learn that something thought to be a myth has some basis in reality.  Probably most do. Troy turns out to have been a real city (and the war was probably over the teenage wife of a teenage king, I'll bet), the Navajo and Apache turn out to be from the far north originally and so their memories of their being great white bears and great white birds are spot on.  Myths, even very old ones, if carefully discerned usually have some basis in fact.

While that eight law mostly referred to old myths, it applies to more recent ones as well, as the basic principle is the same. The song clearly came out of Louisiana, and it traveled the South pretty extensively while persistently retaining its references to a House of the Rising Sun.  There likely was such a place in Louisiana, or at the chances that there was are pretty good.

Indeed, a whole series of theories hold that it was on Conti Street in the French Quarter or on Ursulines Street or on St. Louis Street.  In 2016 however, the New Orleans Times Picayune ran an article about an advertisement they'd found in which a hotelier was advertising the Mechanics Hotel, just outside of town, and with obviously pretty good rooming accommodations, which was noted to have formerly been "the old establishment of the Rising Sun".

Hmmm. . . .

The owners of the Mechanics Hotel wanted his potential guests to note that the hotel had a variety of rooms and offered a variety of services and accommodations, none of which included prostitution.  The prior role of the Rising Sun wasn't mentioned, just that the Mechanics Hotel was where it formerly was, or rather that it was being rebranded.  Perhaps it was also being repurposed. If so, that advertisement would have served two purposes, one being "don't stay away if you would have avoided the old Rising Sun", and the second being "don't come around if you are expecting the old services of the Rising Sun".

That advertisement, by the way, ran in 1828, which would mean that the song would have to have dated back to at least that approximate time.

So, what's the moral of the song?  It clearly has one.

The basic warning is against living a life of depravity, that's clear enough.  More than that, it was a direct warning about living a life of sexual depravity.  Further, it warns the audience that the vocalist can't get out of it, now that the protagonist is in it, even though it would see, that the protagonist has tried.  In the male variant sung by Guthrie, and in the female variant sung by Leadbelly, the protagonist informs the audience that the subject is at a railroad station with one foot on the platform, and one on the train, and is going back to New Orleans "to wear that ball and train".  That tells us that the male protagonist is going back to New Orleans where he intends, seemingly against his will, to resume visiting the House of the Rising Sun.  In the female protagonist version, she's going back to be a prostitute.

The female version is even grimmer.  In that version, not only does the lyrics indicate that the subject is a slave to the situation, she's a different sort.  Her slavery, in essence, is implied to be economic.  Her reputation is ruined and she can't do anything else at this point.  Moreover, she knows that she's going to die young, either at the hands of one of her clients, or more likely through disease.

Which takes us to this.  That in fact was then and is now the thing that kills prostitutes early.  It's odd how in Western movies like Lonesome Dove or Open Range this is ignored.  Prostitutes were nearly guaranteed to get a venereal disease at the time, and it was probably going to kill them. Regular clients were likely to get a "social disease" as well, and the number of men who came down with one even where they were not regular customers, but who had made a visit a few, or perhaps even one, times were likely to as well.


Indeed, it wasn't really until after World War Two that it was the case that VD could really be effectively treated. . Nearly all of the treatments before then were ineffective to varying degrees.  But that's not the last of it.  Girls who fell into prostitution didn't simply think it an economic option, but were often victims of what was termed "white slavery".  Kidnapped and drugged, or kept against their will in some fashion, sometimes by force, sometimes by addition.  This is also still the case.  

It's worth noting, in addition, that modern pornography has its origin in prostitution and indeed the word stems from it.  "Graphy" indicates depiction, and pornea is Greek for of or pertaining to prostitutes.  Very early pornography, going back to the first really easy to use cameras, came from photographing prostitutes to expand on their marketability.  I.e., the working girls were basically captives of their procurer, and those people expanded their profits, not the girls profits, by photographing and selling their images, which had the added impact of being a species of advertising.  This aspect of pornography was very heavy in the industry up until the mid 20th Century, when some of the subjects limited themselves to selling their own images in some fashion, but it's apparently returned in spades since the Internet, with many, apparently, of the images around now being once again of young girls trapped most likely by drug addiction.

The whole thing is pretty bad, suffice it to say.

Okay, we went down sort of a rabbit hole here, and for an odd reason. The trip to House of the Rising Sun started off as it refers to the mother of the subject sewing his blue jeans. We'll explain that in the other thread, but we would note that the song has one final aspect.  It's a warning about the decay of a family. 

Monday, November 28, 2022

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

One of the things that's aggravating for students of history is the way that popular portrayals botch the depiction of the topic of their interest or interests.  Sometimes this is mildly irritating, and sometimes colossally aggravating.  This is just part of the nature of things, which doesn't make it any less aggravating, and this is just as true of Wyoming history and the depictions of Wyoming and its citizens as it is with any other topic.  I suspect that the residents or students of any one area could say the same thing.

Before I go further with this, however, I should also note that this blog is very far from perfect, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. As a daily catalog of Wyoming's history it's doing okay, but even at that, it isn't anywhere near as complete as it should be, and with certain big events in Wyoming's history its grossly incomplete.  A blog of this type should allow a person to follow a developing story as it plays out, and so far, for the most part, this one doesn't do that, that well, yet.  It certainly isn't up to the same standard that the World War Two Day By Day Blog was before it sadly, and mysteriously, terminated on September 24, 2012.  It'll hopefully get better with time, and it's doing okay now, but it is an amateur effort done with very limited time, so it isn't as complete as it should be yet.  We can hope for better in the future, of course, and it is better this year as compared to last.  We can also hope that it gets more comments in the future, which would assist with making it more complete.

Anyhow, while noting that, it's still the case that there are a lot of aggravating errors and depictions out there.  Maybe this blog can correct a few of them, although with its low readership, that's pretty doubtful.  And people cherish myths, so that operates against this as well.

What motivated this is that I was doing a net search for an update of a recent entry here and hit, through the oddity of Google, a website devoted to the movie Brokeback Mountain, which I have not seen.  I'm surprised that there's a fan website devoted to the movie, which of course I have not seen, as I'm surprised by any fan movie site.  A movie has to be of massive greatness, in my view, before I can imagine anyone devoting a blog to it.  Say, Lawrence of Arabia, or a movie of equal greatness. There probably aren't a dozen movies that are that good.  

Anyhow, if a person wants to devote a blog to a movie they really like, but isn't one of the greatest movies of all time, that's their business, but there is a difference between fact and fiction. And the reason I note the site noted is that there's a page on the site the one I hit debating the location of the Brokeback Mountain. The blogger thought it was in one place, but cited author Larry McMurtry for another location.

Well, McMurtry notwithstanding, there is no Brokeback Mountain. The book and movie are fiction.  It makes no more sense to say that some mountain is Brokeback Mountain than it does to say that the Grand Tetons are Spencer's Mountain, unless the point was intended to be that some backdrop for a film was a certain identified location.  If that's the case, i.e., identifying an actual location, I get it, but that's not what they seemed to be debating.  I don't think the film was actually filmed in Wyoming, although I could be mistaken and perhaps some background scenes were (although I don't think so).  Of course, if I am in error, I'm in error, in which case they're trying to identify a location they saw in the film, and I'm off base.

Along these same lines, when the film Unforgiven came out, I went to see it.  The movie was getting a lot of press at the time, and it was hailed as great.  It isn't.  It's not really that good of a film frankly, and I didn't think it was at the time.  I think it was hailed as great as a major Western hadn't been released in quite some time, and it starred Clint Eastwood.  Eastwood has been in some fine movies to be sure, but he's been in some doggy Westerns also, and this one, while not a dog, wasn't great.

At any rate, while watching that film, I recall a young woman asked her date, several rows in front of me, where the town the film depicts, Big Whiskey, Wyoming, was located.  I thought surely he'd say "there isn't one," but, dutifully he identified its location, essentially morphing Whiskey Mountain, a mountain, into the fictional town.  Whiskey Mountain is a real place, but Big Whiskey, the town, is a complete fiction.  It doesn't even sound like the name of a 19th Century Wyoming town.  I don't know of any Wyoming town named after an alcoholic beverage, or even a beverage of any kind.  For that matter, I don't know of any named for anything edible or potable, save for Chugwater.  In the 19th Century, the founders of towns like to name towns after soldiers if they could, which gives us Casper, Sheridan, Rawlins, Lander and probably other locations.  

While on the topic of fictional towns, there's the fictional characters in them.  Big Whiskey, in the film, was ruled over by a well dressed tyrannical sheriff and a well dressed tyrannical Englishman, if I recall correctly.  Tyrannical sheriffs are popular figures in Western movies, and in recent years they're well dressed tyrants.  In quite a few films the tyrannical sheriff is the ally of a tyrannical (probably English) big rancher.

In actuality, sheriffs all stood for election in those days, just as now.  They often had a really rough idea of what law enforcement entailed, but they did not tend to be tyrannical.  They tended to be grossly overworked, covering huge expanses of territory.  They also probably didn't tend to be snappy dressers.  While some of them had been on both sides of the law, quite a few were Frontier types that fell into the job for one reason or another, like Johnson County's "Red" Angus or Park County's Jeremiah Johnson (the famed mountain man).  Sheriff's of that era tended to spend days and in the saddle without the assistance of anyone and often tended to resort to gun play, which average people did as well, but they did not tend to be agents of repression.  If they were, they would loose office pretty quickly.  Probably one of the better depictions of a Frontier lawman is the recent depiction of Marshall Cogburn in the Cohen Brothers version of True Grit.

The tyrannical local big rancher thing is way overdone as well.  The reason that there was a Johnson County War is that the old big landed interests were loosing control so rapidly, not because they were retaining it.  Films like Open Range, or Return to Lonesome Dove, which depict people straying into controlled territory are simply wrong.  The cattle war was more characterized by an ongoing struggle than Medieval fiefdoms.  There were some English and Scottish ranchers as well, but there were big interests that weren't either.  And the both sides in those struggles formed interests groups that involved lots of people, rather than one big entity against the little people, contrary to the image presented in Shane and so many other films.

As part of that, one thing that these period films never seem to get correct is that the West was a territory of vigorous democracy.  Yes, in Wyoming large cattle interests tried to squash the small ones in Johnson and Natrona Counties through a shocking armed invasion, but they also had to content with the ballot box. When things went badly for them in the Invasion, the legislature briefly turned Democratic and Populist.  Newspapers were political arms in those days as well, and they were often exceeding vocal in their opinions.  Their opinions could sometimes be shouted down, or crowded out, but the concept that some English Duke would rule over a vast swatch of territory unopposed is simply incorrect.  More likely his domain would be subject to constant carving up and the sheriff was less than likely to be in his pocket.

While on the topic of films, the way that characters are depicted, visually, is very often incorrect.  In terms of Westerns, to a large extent, films of the 30s and 40s depicted characters the way that film makers wanted them to look, films of the 50s the way that people thought the viewers wanted them to look, films of the 60s reflected the style of day, and so on.  It wasn't until the 1980s, with Lonesome Dove, that a serious effort was made to portray 19th Century Western figures the way they actually looked, with a few really rare exceptions.  Shane, which I otherwise do not like, did accurately portray the visual look of a couple of characters, the best example being the gun man portrayed by Jack Palance. Why they got that one correct, for the region, and few else, is a mystery.  The older film Will Penny did a good job in these regards.  The Culpepper Cattle Company is very well done..  In recent films, the film Tombstone was very accurate in terms of costume for the region it was set in, so much so that it received criticism for the odd dress styles it depicted, even though they were period and location correct.  Modern Westerns tend to botch this if set in Wyoming or the Northern Plains, and are almost never correct in these regards.

Hats get very odd treatment in this context.  From the 20s through the 30s, hats were fanciful in film, and didn't reflect what people actually wore.  In the 50s, the hats that were then in style were shown as being in style in the late 19th Century.  Only recently have historical films generally been correct, and they still hit and miss on films set in the present era.  A lot of movie makers can't tell the difference between Australian drover's hats and real cowboy hats, and would probably be stunned to find that a lot of cowboys look like they did over a century ago, to a large extent.

The expanse of territory is also routinely inaccurate in old and new depictions.  Film depictions of Wyoming either seem to think that Wyoming has the geographic expanse of Alaska or, alternatively, Rhode Island.  Distances seem to be rarely related to the period in which they are set, with some depictions set in the 19th Century seemingly thinking that a town was always nearby, while ones set now seemingly thinking there isn't one for a thousand miles.  Expanses in Wyoming are vast, but the state is not Alaska.  Conversely, ranch and farm geography isn't grasped at all, and frankly its forgotten by most Wyomingites, in a historic concept, now.  Up into the 1930s there were an increasing number of small homesteads, meaning the farm and ranch population, throughout the West, was much higher than it is now. 

Probably the single worst depiction of modern geography, geography in general and ranch geography, is the horribly bad film Bad Lands, a fictionalized account of a series of events that actually mostly took place in the Mid West but which ended in Wyoming, in reality.  In that film the teenage murderers are shown driving across the prairie and there's actually an absurd line about being able to see the lights of Cheyenne in the distance in one direction and some extremely far off feature to the north.  In reality, you can not drive a car, any car, across the prairie as the prairie is rough and cut with gullies, ravines, gopher holes, etc.  And there's a lot of barbed wire fences.  The thought, as the movie has it, of driving dozens and dozens of miles straight across the prairie is absurd.  Not quite as absurd as being able to see Cheyenne's lights from a safe vast distance away, however.  Cheyenne sits in a bit of a bowl in the prairie, and if you see its lights, you are pretty close, and if you are driving across the prairie, pretty soon you're going to be entering some ranch yard or F. E. Warren Air Force Base.

One of the best depictions of geography, however, comes in McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, which does get it basically correct, and which the film gets basically correct.  In the film, the cattle are driven across arid eastern Wyoming, which is actually correctly depicted as arid.  Film makers like to show Wyoming as being Jackson's Hole.  Jackson's Hole is Jackson's Hole, and while it is very beautiful, and in Wyoming, it's darned near in Idaho and most of the state doesn't look like that.

On the topic of land, a really goofball idea depicted in many, many, current depictions of Wyoming and Montana is that you can go there and buy a ranch. No, you cannot.  Well, if you have a huge amount of money you can, but otherwise, you are not going to.  In spite of this, films all the time have the idea that people will just go there and buy a ranch.  One episode of Army Wives, for example, had an episode where a Specialist E4 was going to leave the Army and buy a ranch.  Baloney.  Buying any amount of agricultural land actually sufficient to make a living on in the United States is extremely expensive, and you aren't going to do it on Army enlisted pay.  Specialist E4 pay wouldn't buy a house in a lot of Wyoming.  Part of this delusion is based on the fact that in Western conditions the amount of land needed to make a living on is quite large and Eastern standards, which most people have in mind, bear no relationship to this in the West.  Out of state advertisers sometimes take advantage of this ignorance by suggesting that people can buy a "ranch" in some area of Wyoming, by which they mean something like 20 to 40 acres.  That isn't a ranch in the working sense of the words by any means in that there's no earthly way a person could make a living ranching it ,or farming it, or even come anywhere close to making a fraction of a living wage.  I've run into, however, people on odd occasion who live very far from here but believe that they own a ranch, as they bought something of this type site unseen.  In one such instance a person seriously thought he would bring 100 cattle into a small acreage that was dry, and wouldn't even support one.  This, I guess, is an example of where a mis-impression can actually be dangerous to somebody.

On ranching, another common depiction is that it seems to be devoid of work.  People are ranchers, but they seem to have self feeding, self administering, cattle, if a modern ranch is depicted.  Ranching is actually very hard work and a person has to know what they are doing.  Even if a person could purchase all the ranch land and all the cattle they needed to start a ranch (ie., they were super wealthy), unless they had a degree in agriculture and had been exposed to it locally, or they had grown up doing it and therefore had the functional equivalent of a doctorate in agriculture, they'd fail.  This, in fact, is also the case with 19th Century and early 20th Century homesteads, the overwhelming majority of which failed.  People who had agricultural knowledge from further East couldn't apply all of it here, and often had to pull up stakes and move on.  And, often missed, it took a lot of stuff to get started.  One account of a successful Wyoming 19th Century start up homestead I read related how the homesteader had served in Wyoming in the Army for years, specifically saving up his NCO pay and buying equipment years before he filed his homestead, and he still spent a year back east presumably working before he came back and filed.  J. B. Okie, a huge success in the Wyoming sheep industry, worked briefly as a sheepherder, in spite of being vastly wealthy, prior to coming out well funded to start up.  Many of the most successful homesteaders, but certainly not all, had prior exposure to sheep or cattle prior to trying to file a homestead.

On erroneous depictions, one particularly aggravating one is when films attempt to depict what they think the regional accent is.  There is a bit of a regional speech pattern, i.e, an accent, but it's so rarely done accurately that it shouldn't be tried.  For the most part, native Wyomingites have the standard American Mid Western accent, but they tend to mumble it a bit.  That sounds insulting, but it isn't meant to be, and Wyomingites are so attuned to it, as are rural Coloradans and Montanans, that they generally cannot perceive it.  I'm from here, and no doubt I exhibit that accent.  Most people don't recognize an accent at all, and it takes a pretty attuned ear to be able to place it, although some people very definitely can.  I can recall my father having told me of that having occurred to him on a train in the 50s, and I've had it happen once in the 1980s.  In my father's case, the commenter noted that he must be from one of the Rocky Mountain states.  In mine, I was specifically asked by a fellow who had worked for the Park Service for decades if I was from the West Slope of Colorado, as many park rangers were and I had the same accent.  Most Wyomingites, at some point, probably get a puzzled question from somebody about where they are from that's accent based, but the questioner never reveals that.  It's a regional accent, so the best a person can do is tell that you are from rural Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana if they know what the accent entails, or that there even is one.  Film makers, who must be aware that there is an accent, occasionally try to insert one in a modern Western, but when they try it they present a bizarre laughable accent that doesn't occur anywhere on the planet.  Years ago, for example, there were advertisements on television here for the Laramie Project, which is another film I haven't seen, and which I couldn't have watched due to the horribly bad efforts an accent that the filmmakers were attempting. We do not drawl.  We speak more like Tom Brokaw, but perhaps with a bit of mumbling that we don't recognize as mumbling. 

I've read that Irishmen find American attempts at an Irish accent hilarious.  Some English attempts at an American Mid Western accent are really bad.  Our accent here is fairly rare, and there's no way that they're going to get it right, and they ought not try.  By not trying, they're closer to the mark.

Saturday, November 26, 2022

Prisoners of Myth I. The Russians in the war with Ukraine

How the Soviets,  and by extension the Russians, came to see themselves.  In reality the wool in the uniform may have come from the US, the steel nad munitions that supported his artillery did as well, when those jack boots wore out he may have worn service shoes, and he definately dug into SPAM for rations from time to time.

The danger of believing myths is that some become ahistorical.  

Not all, but some.

Which points out while studying history is so important.

Myth itself is something that's not existentially bad.  Cultures create myths for a reason, with that reason stretching back into antiquity.  The earliest human beings created myths, as their entire historical memory was oral.  Current events were reduced to stories, and the stories remembered through telling, with them evolving into myths over time.  For that reason, myths are often surprisingly accurate. There really was a Troy that the Greeks waged war upon. . . the Apaches and the Navajo had really once lived in a region where there were great white bears, you get the point.

The problem becomes that myth making can become a coping mechanism for a culture as well.  And that can become enormously dangerous to that culture in some instances.  The Germans adopting the theory that they hadn't been defeated on the battlefield in World War One, which they had been, lead them to adopt a "stabbed in the back" theory that lead directly to World War Two.  The myth of the "Lost Cause" resulted in rank and file Southerners forgetting that they'd gone to war over slavery and had been outright defeated on the battlefield with a huge percentage of Southern soldiers deserting before the war's end, resulting partially in the preservation of formal institutional racism well into the second half of the 20th Century.  The myth of the Stolen Election is corrupting American Conservatism and the Republican Party right now.

Russia, likewise, went into Ukraine believing in a set of myths, with one overarching myth, and its paying the price for it.

Modern Russia and the Myth of World War Two.

  • The basic myth.

At some point during World War Two itself the Soviet Union started telling the myth that the USSR, alone in its fight against Nazi Germany, and supported only weakly by two untrustworthy and cowardly allies, the US and the UK defeated the Germans.

Not hardly.

But this myth, or versions of it, became all pervasive in the USSR and are still believed in Russia today.  Indeed, amazingly enough, versions of this myth became relatively common, in a different form, in the West.

It's simply not true.

Now eighty years after the fact, the history of the Second World War is starting to be more accurately told, stripped away of many of its myths, including this one.  Let's flatly state the truth of the matter here.

The Soviet Union, following its own self interests, was an occasional defacto Axis ally from 1939 until the spring of 1941.  In that capacity, it helped the Germans subjugate continental Western Europe, but the Germans were unable to defeat the British.  Unable to do just that, Germany turned its eye on Soviet resources, which the USSR was well aware it was going, and the two nations bargained on greater German access to them.  Stalin overplayed his hand and sought a post-war position from Germany, at the expense of the British Empire, which was too much for the German's to agree to, and the Germans, contemptuous of the Slavs in any event, were ready to break off the effort and go to war with the USSR, the heir to Imperial Russia, which the Germans had defeated in 1917.

The German invasion came in June 1941.  The Red Army made some heroic stands in the summer and fall of 1941, but by and large it was thrown back in defeat.  The real Soviet achievement in 41 was not being outright defeated, but it was thrown back again, on a massive scale, in 1942.  Only in the winter of 1942 did the Soviet fortunes turn, but it would take titanic efforts and massive loss of life in order for the Germans to be pushed back and ultimately defeated.

Added to that, much of the Red Army was simply never very good.  Materially, the Soviets were unable to supply their own army adequately, and that fell to the UK and the US in large part.  Only 55 to 60 percent of the Red Army was Russian, with the balance being made up of other ethnicities, including large numbers of Ukrainians, 7,000,000 of whom served in the Red Army. At no point whatsoever did the Soviets ever fight, moreover, alone.  There was always a "second" or even third and fourth front which was manned by other Western Allies alone.

  • The actual truth
It's odd to think of the myth of the invincibility of the Red Army when it's also so commonly known that the Soviet state spent so much time destroying it after the Civil War.

Contrary to the way we came to imagine it, the USSR did not spend a lot of time trying to become a military titan before World War Two.  The Reds, not without good reason, somewhat feared what an effective standing army would mean to its political leadership.  People have often been mystified by the purges of the Red Army, but in context they made sense.  After the fighting of the civil war had ended, the only powers powerful enough to challenge the Communists core running the country were in the Red Army, or in other established Communists.  Both took a pounding during the purges.  Indeed, while it hardly justifies murder, it's far to ask if Stalin would have been able to remain in control of the country if political opponents like Trotsky had run around unaddressed, or if powerful military leaders had not been done away with.

Added to that, the Russian armies, and it's fair to use the plural, that we have as examples in the 1900 to 1941 time period were bad.  The Japanese had defeated the Imperial Russian Army in 1905, the same army in World War One did not turn in a stellar performance.  The Whites and the Reds did fight each other tooth and nail during the Civil War, but all civil wars tend to work that way.  The Soviets did well in some of the Russo Polish War but were ultimately defeated, and thereafter they lived in mortal fear of hte Poles, and the Romanians, even though logic would dictate that neither country was capable of being a serious military threat to the Soviet Union.

And, of note, it's clear that the Russians still fear the Poles today.

The USSR was fought to a standstill in the Winter War with Finland just before World War Two. And only in the final months leading up to June, 1941, did the Soviets undertake a real effort to build a capable modern army.  It had some raw elements of that, including some good armor and aircraft designs, but it also had a weakened military institution with no NCO corps and a murdered officer corps.  It realy wasn't able to fix this, and nobody would be, prior to the German invasion.

What the Soviets did have was a  massive amount of territory and a leader in singular control.  

What it also had on 1941 was a British Empire that was already fighting the Germans, with ground combat having been going on in North Africa since June 1940.  The German invasion of the USSR was the second front, or the third if the Battle of the Atlantic is considered.

The UK was already receiving substantial US material, and frankly military, support well before Barbarossa, but the British were a major military materials producer itself.  Both the US and the UK immediately started to offer the Soviets material support.  It would take months before it really began to arrive, but of note, it took months as well for the Red Army to become really effective.

During the war, that aid would become enormous.  The US supplied 400,000 vehicles to the Soviets, changing what had been a horse-drawn army into a mostly vehicle transport one.  Studebaker's 6x6 trucks were for all practical purposes a dedicated Soviet truck, not even entering the US military in substantial numbers.  14,000 aircraft were supplied to the Soviets, including some, like Studebaker trucks, that were essentially models dedicated to Soviet use.  13,000 US tanks were supplied, with additional numbers of British tanks also being supplied.

15,000,000 pairs of Army service shoes, the legendary U.S. Munson Last boot, were supplied to the Red Army. If you see a photo of a Soviet soldier wearing lace up boots, those are almost certainly US made ones.

107,000 tons of cotton went to the USSR for their use.  2,700,000 tons of petroleum products.  4,500,000 tons of food were supplied.

An entire Ford tire factor was supplied.

80% of the copper used by the USSR during the war came from the US and UK.  55% of the aluminum.  

Immediately after the war, before the myth really set in, Soviet sources outright admitted that the USSR could not have fought without lend lease supplies. As late as 1963 a Soviet marshal was known to have stated the same.

The Western Allies, of course, provided this for their own purposes.  It was not charity.  The Soviets were always reticent to some degree to really acknowledge it at that.  But its important to note that the option not to provide it existed.

That would have been risky, which is in part why the leaders of the Western Allies were so ready to engage in it.  The Soviets were a known potential enemy, but the Germans were a present actual enemy.  Prior to June 1941, the British had gone it alone, but they had been fighting a defensive war the entire time.  It was possible to imagine a Germany, particularly one that made some sort of accommodation to the Soviet Union, consolidating gains in Europe to the point where it would have been impossible for the British to ever dislodge them.  Even after December 7, 1941, that remained a possibility.  The Western Allies needed the Soviets in the fight, just as the Soviets needed the Western Allies in order to fight.  The Patrick Buchanan view that the Western Allies should have allowed the USSR and Nazi Germany to destroy each other is wrongheaded, as chances are good that the Germans would have forced the Soviets into a peace of some sort that secured southern Russian materials and left Germany in a position basically impossible to deal with.  Having said that, at the same time, it's not impossible either to imagine the Soviets getting to that point.

It was, after all, the Russians who had given up in the Russo Japanese War and who had collapsed in World War One. And the Soviets, who had been defeated by the Poles after the Great War. And the Soviets, who had accommodated in the Winter War, after invading Finland.  Throughout World War Two, Stalin worried about the Western Allies reaching a separate peace, but that may have really  revealed more about Soviet thinking than anything else.  The Western Allies had fought the Germans to the bitter end in 1914-1918, which the Russians had not.

Moreover, for all its self-congratulatory propaganda.

Additionally, or all its self-congratulatory propaganda, the Soviet casualty list does not suggest what it might.  Massive Red Army losses in World War Two were in no small part self-inflicted, reflecting a poorly formed army that was badly trained and lacking a NCO corps.  It also reflected a leadership that was completely immune to concern over human losses, truly viewing Soviet soldiers as cannon fodder.  The German view as quite similar.  The fighting on the Eastern Front was in part savage, as the two armies engaged had leadership which didn't really care about high losses as long as goals seemed obtainable.  The Western Allies did not fight this way as, being from democratic societies, they could not contemplate using their citizenry in such a callous fashion.

Additionally, and seemingly completely missed by Soviet propaganda, the Western Allies went int alone on the seas, with the Soviet Navy being largely irrelevant the entire war.  While the Soviet Union had a navy, it didn't really matter, which effectively means that in a war fought on the land, air, and sea, the Soviets only fought on two out of the three.

And, as earlier noted, the Soviets were latecomers to the war and, in fact, had been on the other side early on.  If the US and UK did not take such massive losses, it was because, as noted, that they didn't fight that way.  They were, however, fighting, and fighting in more areas than the USSR was.  They were not, of course, fighting on their own ground, however, which does make a real difference.

And it goes beyond that.

Over 7,000,000 Red Army troops were Ukrainians, as noted, with indigenous Poles, Turkic peoples, and others filling the Red Army ranks.  But around 1,000,000 Soviet citizens provided aid to the Germans during the war as well.

This is a complicated story, as that aid varied in nature substantially.  The most pronounced anti-Soviet variants of it might be found in Cossack elements that went over wholesale to the Germans and who served on the Eastern Front, the Western Front, and in the Balkans.  But they were not alone.  Other Soviet citizens willingly took up arms with the Germans and fought against the Moscow.  Others, particularly in Ukraine, fought against the Soviets and the Germans, reprising the odd role of the Ukrainian Greens of the Russian Civil War who fought against the Reds and the Whites. Large numbers of Red Army POWs joined Vlasov's White Russian Army, but probably did so out of a desire simply to survive the ordeal of being a German POW.  

Soviet civilians aided the Germans in varying ways as well.  The examples are too numerous not to take note of, with Soviet civilians providing all sorts of minor aid and comfort to the Germans in spite of the fact that the Germans were barbaric towards Soviet citizens, visiting death and rape upon them at a scale that was too large not to be regarded as institutionally sanctioned.  Indeed, early on Russians and Belorussians greeted the Germans as liberators, with their view largely changing due to German barbarism.  Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt, a traditional Ukrainian greeting.  They, too, came to change their views under German repression.

  • Bringing the myth forward.

After the war, and even by its late stages, the Soviets were developing a myth that they had won World War Two basically on their own.  Their leadership knew better, which showed itself even as late as the 1980s, when the Soviets lived in real fear of a NATO attack upon the Soviet Union.  But the myth has solidified, and it's showing itself now.

The logical question would be why such a myth would have been developed and fostered.  There are, however, a series of reasons for that.

All nations have foundational myths that are central to their identify in a way.  The American one dates back essentially to the Revolution, and was redefined by the Civil War, giving the country the foundational story of rising up against tyranny, which isn't really true, to form a self-governing democratic republic with a unique mission in the world. The Australian one involves a history of mistreatment by the British culminating in the disaster of Gallipoli, which in truth the Australians were only one nation involved in a much larger Allied effort. Other examples could be given.

The Soviet Union going into World War Two already had the Russian Revolution, but the imposition of Communism on the Russian Empire had not been universally accepted by any means, and various peoples struggled against it into the 1930s.  The USSR had only been saved from defeat by the support of Western, capitalist, nations during World War Two, after it had first conspired with the fascist Nazi Germany, for its own reasons.  During the war, large percentages of its population, in spite of massive Nazi barbarism, had sided with the Germans, and resistance movements went on in the country until the late 1940s.  A myth of a Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets came to call it, served to counter all of that.

The modern Russian Army is not the Red Army.  For one thing, it lacks the huge number of Ukrainians that the Red Army had.  But the Red Army, without the West, was never all that good.  It was bad going into World War Two, and it survived World War Two thanks to the West.  After the war, it continued to rely on Western technology for a time, in the form of purchased Western material, and in the form of acquired German knowledge, but over the decades it had to go over to simply acquiring it however they could, and often they simply did not.

The current Russian Army retains all the vices of the old, plus one more.  Its equipment is antiquated and poor.  Its leadership is bad.  

And it believes that it was invincible during World War Two, forgetting that it wasn't defeated due to Western support, the very thing Ukraine is getting now.

Monday, October 31, 2022

Something interesting to note.

 


Troops of the 38th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division going up the bluff at the E-1 draw in the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach, Normandy, on June 7, 1944.

The first three soldiers, and the seventh and eighth, are carrying M1903 Springfield bolt action rifles.  The fourth's weapon isn't visible at all, and if he's carrying one, it's probably a sidearm.  The fifth one is carrying an M1 carbine, as is the sixth and seventh.

These men have the appearance of being infantrymen, but the lack of M1 Garands suggests they might be combat engineers. At any rate, this photo nicely illustrates how prevalent the M1903 still was during World War Two.

The second man was 18 years old Pvt Vincent Mullen, who would be killed in action a few days after this photograph was taken.

Saturday, September 24, 2022

Thursday, September 24, 1942. Hitler sacks Halder

Adolph Hitler, demonstrating increasing concern of the increasingly slow rate of advance on the Eastern Front, and thereby demonstrating a better understanding of the tactical situation than he is sometimes given credit for, sacked Franz Halder of the Chief of Staff of the OKH.

Long term, this proved to be a lucky break for Halder who had a role complicit with German atrocities in the East.  Losing his position in 1942, he became a favorite of Western militaries post-war and was involved in the creation of the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth.  He lived until 1972.

He was replaced by Kurt Zeitzler.  Zeitzler was a professional staff officer who grew increasingly frustrated in his role and came to be estranged from Hitler.  He sought to resign in 1944 and ultimately was allowed to do so, to be followed by Hitler cashiering him from the German Army in January 1945.  Zeitzler was somewhat unusual in that he did not serve any time at all after the war unlike most very senior German generals.  He was called as a witness for the defense in the Nuremberg Trails.  He died in 1963.

The German Army broke through at Stalingrad, advancing to the Volga, and cutting the Red Army 62nd Army in two.

The Japanese landed on Maliana in the Gilberts.

The last entry on the excellent World War Two Day-By-Day Blog, linked in down in our disconnected blog's thread, was on this day, which provided:

Day 1120 September 24, 1942

In the North Atlantic 300-500 miles East of the tip of Greenland, U-432 sinks American SS Pennmar at 1.44 AM (1 man is crushed between a raft and the ship and another drowns, 59 survivors picked up later in the day by US Coast Guard cutter USCGC Bibb), U-617 sinks Belgian SS Roumanie at 1.58 PM (36 crew and six British gunners killed, chief engineer Suykerbuyk is found on a raft and taken prisoner by U-617) and U-619 sinks American SS John Winthrop with 5 torpedoes and the deck gun (all 39 crew and 13 gunners lost).

At Stalingrad, German 94th Infantry and 24th Panzer Divisions wipe out the Soviet defenders in the pocket in South of the city. Furious at the delay in taking Stalingrad and lack of success reaching oilfields in the Caucasus, Hitler dismisses General Halder as OKH Chief of Staff, replacing him with General Kurt Zeitzler.

In the Mediterranean, Greek submarine RHS Nereus sinks small Italian freighter Fiume 7 miles Southwest of Rhodes. At 11.35 PM 36 miles Southwest of Tiros, Lebanon, U-561 sinks Egyptian Sailing ship Sphinx with 22 rounds from the deck gun.

Off the coast of British Guyana, South America. American SS Antinous (torpedoed yesterday by U-515) is taken in tow by British rescue tug HMS Zwatre Zee (most powerful tug in the world at 4200 Horse Power) but is sunk at 6.25 PM by U-512. At 9.24 AM, U-175 sinks American SS West Chetac (22 crew and 9 gunners drown trying to abandon ship, 17 crew and 2 gunners on 3 rafts picked up on October 1 20 miles off Trinidad by US destroyer USS Roe and landed at Port of Spain).

At 1.30 PM, a Japanese fighter spots Australian destroyer HMAS Voyager beached at Betano Bay, East Timor. At 4 PM, Japanese bombers return and damage HMAS Voyager beyond recovery (no casualties) but the 400 Australian commandos (2/4th Independent Company) have already landed safely.

On Guadalcanal, Japanese General Kawaguchi has regrouped 4000 troops (following the failed assault on Edson’s Ridge 10 days ago) in the Matanikau Valley, 5 miles West of the US positions at Henderson Field. US Marine General Vandegrift sends out 2 battalions to ‘mop up’ what he believes are only 400 Japanese in Matanikau Valley (Colonel ‘Chesty’ Puller 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment will go inland over 1200-foot high Mont Austen while 1st Raider Battalion under Colonel Samuel Griffith takes the coastal route into the Valley).

US bombers Douglas Dauntless dive bombers from Henderson Field (Marine squadron VMSB 231 and Naval squadron VS 3) attack Japanese destroyers Umikaze and Kawakaze on a “Tokyo Express” run, bringing troops and supplies to Guadalcanal from Shortland Island at the Western end of the Solomon Islands. Umikaze is damaged by a near miss (8 killed) forcing the convoy to abort landings and causing Umikaze to be repaired Truk. USAAF B-17 bombers raid the Japanese naval base on Shortland damaging Japanese seaplane carrier Sanuki Maru.

British destroyer HMS Nizam sinks a Vichy French merchant ship Southwest of Madagascar.

220 miles West of the tip of India, Japanese submarine I-165 sinks US freighter Losmar (3 killed, 14 survivors rescued by British ship Louise Moller on October 5 and another 7 survivors reach the West coast of Ceylon on October 17).

That entry came a decade ago, and then the entries suddenly ceased.

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

The Post World War Two increase in divorces. . . maybe.*

Monroe's third marriage, Miller's second (he'd go on to a third).

The other day, I had a thread discussing the youthful (16 years old) marriage of the then Norma Jean Baker to James Dougherty.1   It was this post, here:

Friday, June 19, 1942 . James Dougherty and Norma Jean Baker marry.

The marriage didn't last.

We know the rest of the story, of course.  Norma Jean would divorce Dougherty while he was serving overseas in the Navy so that she could sign a modeling contract.  She changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, became a famous actress, married and divorced Joe DiMaggio and then Arthur Miller, and then died from a sleeping pill overdose in the early 1960s.  Her life, really, was fairly tragic.2 

She's still regarded, justifiably, as one of the greatest beauties of all time.


It's tempting to sort of sum up her early marriage history, the first one, as a wartime phenomenon.  Youthful marriage, followed by long separation featuring wartime female employment, followed by divorce.

And then followed by societal expansion of divorce.

And certainly there's some evidence to support that.

Indeed, the Monroe story is hardly unique.  Bill Mauldin provides us another example.  

Like Monroe, his early years were a mess, with messed up parents and a lack of parental supervision quite frequently.  He also didn't finish high school, although a large percentage of men did not at the time.  And he also ended up married three times.

He married his first wife, Norma Jean Humphries (Jean) in 1942, before he deployed overseas.  Neither she nor Mauldin would be faithful during his wartime absence, and they quickly divorced upon his return.  Indeed, the length of their marriage was nearly identical to the Dougherty's and Monroe's, although infidelity did not play a role in the latter's divorce.3



The phenomenon of wartime marriages followed by marital trouble was so common that it became a film trope.  It shows up in the great immediate post-war drama The Best Years Of Our Lives, with the Fred Derry character's marriage falling apart immediately after the war.  Indeed, divorce is portrayed as the solution to Derry's problem, with a youthful female character played by Teresa Wright actually plotting to break his unsuccessful marraige up.  Infidelity shows up in The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, although divorce does not.



Well, just the way wars work, right?   Maybe World War Two is responsible for our current situation regarding marriage, shacking up, and divorce?

Maybe.

And maybe not, and this might not really have quite the story that it might seem at first.

The current state of the law regarding divorce is a "no fault" regime. This wasn't always the case.  Indeed, an entire highly developed set of laws existed regarding marriage, promises of marriage and divorce prior to the second half of the 20th Century.  No state had no-fault divorce until California adopted it in 1969.

That development came about in no small part as divorce was becoming more common.  But note, that was 1969.

Not 1949.

And I had never read, nor could I find, a recitation of a post World War One spike in divorces.  Although, while working on this entry, the following showed up from 1922 on Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit:


So apparently there was a perception of divorce rates really climbing.  I posted a query on that, and a respondent noted that it had in fact climbed from a tiny 1 for every 1,000 to 1.7 for every 1,000 marriages by 1928.  It was around 2 per 1,000 in 1940.  It was 3.4 by 1947, but dropped back down to about 2.2 by 1960.  It started t climb in the early 70s, and really started to jump by the late 1970s.

Given that, World War One didn't seem to have much of an impact.  If anything, the war caused a spike in post-war marriages as American doughboys brought home French, English and Russian (yes, Russian) brides home with them.  For that matter, a few who had served in the brief post-war occupation brought German wives home with them, although fraternization between Americans and Germans was extremely heavily discouraged for a variety of reasons.    One British study noted:
Unmarried motherhood increased during the war, probably because the absence of men at war prevented marriages following the woman’s pregnancy. There was continuity before, during and after the war in levels of unmarried cohabitation and parenthood, mainly due to the restrictive divorce laws in England and Wales, though not in Scotland. Liberalization of the divorce law in 1925 and 1937, mainly due to pressure from newly enfranchised women, increased divorces only to a small degree because divorce remained difficult, expensive and stigmatizing for women. Deaths of men at war perpetuated but did not create a female majority in the population – women had long outlived and outnumbered men – and it had only a small effect on marriage patterns. The demographic effects of the war were limited, most significant was reduction in infant mortality due to government efforts to replace men killed in the war. The war permanently expanded employment opportunities mainly for middle-class women, and, after gaining the vote in 1918, women were more active in campaigning for social and legal reforms to increase gender equality and improve social conditions.
And, for example, this article from Colorado discussed Russian war brides coming into Colorado.


Leadville Herald Democrat, June 16, 1920.  I've seen others discussing French war brides coming in, in numbers, to South Carolina.  

Clearly, the war brought about a lot of marriages of couples who hadn't known each other all that long, and who weren't from the same cultures.  No gigantic corresponding spike in divorces seems to have occurred at any point.

And for that matter, while World War Two did result in a spike in divorces, it was marginal.  Divorce rates had climbed to 2 per 1,000 by 1940 and were up to 3.4 per 1,000 by 1947, but they fell back down to around 2.2 for a long time thereafter, and it wasn't until the 1970s when they began to climb.

So, what are they now?

2.3 per 1,000.

So what gives?

Indeed, is there a story here at all, or is the "skyrocketing divorce rate" just a long, really persistent, myth?

Let's start with the status quo ante.

Prior to the second half of the 20th Century, divorce was obtainable in the United States and most English-speaking countries, Ireland being the exception, together with Newfoundland in Canada.4   Indeed, we might note that divorce was obtainable in most of the protestant countries of Europe, something that isn't surprising if we consider the history of the Reformation.5   Be that as it may, however, there was no such thing, generally, as no-fault divorce pretty much anywhere until Soviet Russia introduced it in 1917, something which is quite telling, really.6

The body of law that governed male/female relationships, to obfuscate it a bit, has been collectively referred to as the "heart balm laws", but frankly, there was nothing romantic or warm and fuzzy about them. They were very serious statutes that bluntly took into the account the realities of those relationships and biology.  Indeed, they were much more realistic on those topics and the fundamental nature of marriage than the law today, including recently evolutions in the law that Obergefell has brought about. On that, they were wholly unconcerned with love.  They were pretty concerned, however, with sex, and what sex could bring about.

And indeed we see that, albeit in a disturbing way, in the story of the nuptials of Chester Linkfield and Ernestine Burnett.7  But not only there, we see it in one of the retained sets of laws that remain in effect.

Because this has taken me so long two write, I read of an even more youthful marriage than the one involving Marilyn Monroe just the other day, on Reddit.  It was this one.


Yikes.

The news story was apparently regarded as an odd human interest story, so it made it all the way to print in New Zealand, where it actually gave more details:


Yikes again.

FWIW, for most of Western society, including American society, marriages involving very young couples, let alone teenagers, were uncommon.  Marriage ages change a lot less than people generally think, as we reported here:

Let's take a table that somebody else has generated and see if it changes things at all:

Year --- Men --- Women
2015 ----29.2 ----27.1
2010 --- 28.2 --- 26.1
2000 --- 26.8 --- 25.1
1990 --- 26.1 --- 23.9
1980 --- 24.7 --- 22.0
1970 --- 23.2 --- 20.8
1960 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1950 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1940 --- 24.3 --- 21.5
1930 --- 24.3 --- 21.3
1920 --- 24.6 --- 21.2
1910 --- 25.1 --- 21.6
1900 --- 25.9 --- 21.9
1890 --- 26.1 --- 22.0

But what a strange story.8

Obviously there was more to this story than the press reported, although there are hints at it.  Fighting a duel for the affections of a twelve-year-old is exceedingly odd under any circumstances, however.  Linkfield was shot in the duel, but apparently only Carpenter was locked up.  Why? Dueling was illegal under any circumstances at the time.  Did getting shot suffice for Linkfield's punishment, or was Carpenter regarded as the aggressor?

Also hinted at, Linkfield and the young object of his affection obviously met back up, as she was almost certainly a pregnant 13-year-old when they married, which is more than a little icky.  As the young husband, married to a true child bride, apparently had no means of support for a family, they moved in to his parent's home.

It's hard to imagine this story developing this way today.  Almost impossible, in fact.  And that it was treated somewhat as a love story in the paper is a bit hard to fathom.

If you look at the Reddit entry, you'll see that by and large people were pretty shocked by the 1922 story, and I can include myself in that group.  As always with such stories, you get a minority who will come in with the "well, back in the day everyone married young", or "at one time child marriages were common".  Nope, they weren't, and they haven't been since the Church decreed that marriage could only occur with consent and in particular with the consent of the bride.9

Burnett did marry Linkfield, as noted, which gets us back to the law, as noted when we took this diversion. The retained set of laws, and we'll get more into the law in a moment, are those dealing with "statutory rape", the concept that below a certain age people cannot consent to sex.  How this works varies by state, and indeed it changed in my own state over time.  I haven't kept up with it as it's outside my area of the law, but all US jurisdictions and probably every Western World jurisdiction has a law that essentially says that below a certain age, consent doesn't matter, it's rape.  Some modify this with age provisions, such as if the couple is both below the age of consent but close in age, or if the couple is close in age, etc.  As noted, I haven't kept up with it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up.

All states also have provisions that hold that below a certain age, you can't consent to marriage.  Again, I'm not going to see what it currently is here, but at least when I was first practicing law, you had to have your parent's permission if you were younger than 18 years of age, and the court's permission if you were younger than 16 years of age.

As noted above, I have known some people who were married younger than age 18, but frankly the youngest of them would be about 60 years of age now.  This isn't common at all, and it hasn't been at any point in my lifetime.  It hasn't been for eons, frankly, and it's a super rarity now.  The very few people I know, outside of one example, who fit in this category would be up in their 80s or 90s now, but for the fact that they're dead.

Save for one example I know of in which a couple, originally from Louisiana, were married when he was 19, and she was 13.

That's strange, to be sure.  She wasn't, I'd note, "in trouble".

Anyhow, I digress. The point here is that if you read the story of Linkfield and Burnett, it's pretty clear that she was "in trouble" and the options that were left were to marry her off to the father or send him to the pokey.  Marrying her to the father relieved, at some point, the parents of Linkfield and Burnett and provided some sort of family for the child.  Sending Linkfield to reform school or jail would have left her in desperate straights, along with the child, and would have imposed a financial burden on her parents and probably a hostile financial burden on his parents.

Not as romantic as the news stories made it appear, but then they were written at a time when the readers understood all of this without having to have anyone explain it.

Which brings us to shacking up, or um, cohabitation.

These laws changed over time, but if you combine the civil law and the statutory law, generally what you find is that cohabitation was illegal in some places, or it resulted in common law marriage in others.  A promise to marry, an engagement, was legally enforceable and "calling off an engagement" could result in a civil action by the party that had not sought to call it off (breach of promise).  Divorce was generally allowable, but there had to be a cause, such as abandonment or cruelty, to justify it.

So what was the thinking?

It's pretty straight forward, actually.

Rather than the current mushy thinking about male/female relationships, our ancestors knew that at a certain point in time in our development, once we passed our childhoods, we were male and female, and attracted to the opposite, and at some point that could lead to children.

We've dealt with this before, so I won't go into it in great detail here, but laws regarding men, women, marriage and divorce, and everything related to the topic, was, in some way or another, related to that.  Cohabitation was illegal or brought about "common law" marriages, as the law didn't want society to be responsible for any children that came about by way of the relationship.  In other words, the law operated to attempt to force men to comply with their obligations to their offspring, and to protect the long term economic best interest of those offspring.

Breach of promise type actions existed, as there was a general assumption that a single woman who had accepted a proposal of marriage might now be "damaged goods" that other suitors would avoid.  In a world in which female employment was harder to come by, particularly good paying jobs that didn't involve manual labor, there was a fear that a woman who had been engaged, with her fiancé backing out, would be left "ruined".  Burnett, for example, certainly would have been and likely would have had to face life as an extremely young mother basically alone, her moral status irreparably tarnished, and her child a problem for any potential suitor that wouldn't have existed had the father been absent due to death, rather than disinterest.

And this all ties into another set of statistics, part of which involve cohabitation, and part which don't.

Let's go back to the "divorce rate".

Frankly, the divorce rate was probably never as high as people imagined it was, and according to even a news story that has it a lot higher than Census Bureau reports, it reached a fifty-year low last year.  Not that this would be great, as 1972, fifty years ago, is when things started to climb.  

Percentage of divorces per 1,000 is one figure, but the overall number of marriages that end in divorce is quite another.  

When we look at the start of the 20th Century and the overall low divorce rate, that equated pretty well, without really looking it up, with a generally low overall percentage of the population that divorced  I.e., some marriages ended in divorce, but they were few, and the implications were pronounced.  Being tagged a "divorcee" wasn't a good thing. This remained the case up until the 1970s really, although to less of a degree than had previously been the case. 

Indeed, by way of a couple of examples, when I was young there was a neighboring couple that my parents really liked, but it was noted from time to time that they'd both been divorced prior to their current marriage. My parents didn't hold it against them, but it was sort of a mark against them.  It was an odd character defect, if you will.

As another example, my mother was friends with a woman who had at one time worked for a friend of my father's.  My father's friend was divorced and remarried, which was likewise regarded as a bit of a character defect.  My mother's friend held it bitterly against him, her former employer, even though she was herself divorced.  She may have felt liberty to criticize as her divorce from her husband, whom I understood to be an alcoholic, may have left her raising their son alone, but she never remarried. She remained faithful, in essence, to her marriage by not remarrying.

Or, as a final example, two of the kids I was friends with in grade school lived in homes in which their mother's had divorced their fathers and remarried.  It was regarded as so unusual it was a topic among parents, and we were all very conscious of it.

Now, meeting divorced and remarried people are very common.  I'm sure hardly anyone can't list several friends or associates that haven't been divorced, and some have been divorced and remarried.

It may be just me, but I think I see a bit of a trend here as well.

I know several people that have been married multiple times, but interestingly, this seems to be something that applies mostly to a generation that cuts off at age 50.  I may be wrong, but I don't really see younger generations getting serial divorces.  Part of the reason for that may be the rise in cohabitation.  I'll go onto that in a moment, but of those whom I know who have had serials marriages, a couple of them probably fit into that category of too immature to marry when they first married, and maybe when they married a second time, but the third time it really stuck.  On the other hand, some just seem to have a light attachment to the meaning of marriage, or they have bad skills in regard to whom they have chosen to marry.

Some would now claim that the rise of cohabitation has caused the drop in the phenomenon noted immediately above, but there's no evidence of that.  On the contrary, statistically it's been shown cohabitation does not in any fashion make subsequent marriages more stable. Quite the opposite is true, it increases the instances of divorce.

And indeed, cohabitating men in particular never quit looking.  It's been shown that by not being bound, they really don't regard themselves as bound.  Quite a few, to at least some degree, still are heding their bets just a little.

And in someways this takes us to what we might call "stealth divorces".

As we noted above, cohabitation was generally illegal, certainly in the 19th Century, and in some places in the early 20th Century.  It was societally regarded as absolutely scandalous.  That taint began to wane with the Sexual Revolution.

Now, we don't want to fall into the error of claiming that before 1968 everyone's behavior was absolutely correct.  Having said that, studies in more recent years have shown that the groundbreaking sexual studies of the late 40s and early 50s were erroneous to a whopping degree.  Indeed, well into the 1950s, most men and women had no sexual relations with anyone until they were married.  This was the societal standard, and it was very largely adhered to.  Not absolutely, but fairly well.l

The Second World War clearly made some inroads into that, and frankly the Great War had dented it as well, but after both wars the standards revived, even if they'd temporarily eroded during the war.  They started to steadily erode starting in 1954 following the December 1953 release of Playboy magazine, and that definitely had a cultural impact that's apparent in films of the late 50s and early 60s.  The 1960s, however, bust things wide open, which exploded all over the 1970s in the form of the Sexual Revolution.

It's a fairly short line from sex outside of marriage to cohabitation, but here again it didn't happen instantly.  Even as late as the 1980s when I was in university, cohabitation was regarded as semi scandalous society wide.  People really didn't know how to take it, and where it occurred it was pretty uniformly regarded as a temporary arrangement.   Again, by way of personal recollections, one politically highly liberal friend of mine was scandalized by the conduct of a female roommate who, well, we will skip it, but this is in the mid 1980s.  Of my college friends who married about that time, only one had "lived with" his girlfriend prior to their marriage, although their story presents an interesting one in terms of trends.

By the late 90s things were really changing in this regard, and you started to run into couples, for the first time, that seemingly cohabitated with no thought of getting married.

Having said that, some of this trend, like much in the way of widely reported social trends, may be exaggerated.  Nonetheless, the trend is there, and in 2019 the Census Bureau found:

In 2018, 15 percent of young adults ages 25-34 live with an unmarried partner, up from 12 percent 10 years ago.

It further reported:

Fifty years ago, in 1968, living with an unmarried partner was rare. Only 0.1 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 0.2 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds lived with an unmarried partner, according to the Current Population Survey. 
The measurement of cohabitation from 1968-1995 was less precise. The estimate came from an indirect measure of opposite-sex partners sharing living quarters, and the late 1960s through the early 1970s had particularly low reports of cohabitation. 
Also, when comparing 2008 to 2018, years in which the Current Population Survey asked a direct cohabitation question, cohabitation only increased for 25- to 34-year-olds and slightly decreased for 18- to 24-year-olds. 
So, although cohabitation has increased for young adults over the last 50 years, it is important to note the limitations in measurement and that certain periods of time did not produce increases in unmarried young adults living together. 
In contrast to the rising rates of cohabitation, the proportion of young adults who are married has declined over time. 
Today, 30 percent of young adults ages 18-34 are married, but 40 years ago, in 1978, 59 percent of young adults were married.

So, what the Census Bureau found was that, basically, cohabitation had jumped enormously for young adults in fifty years, but was decreasing for other sections of the population.  Also of note 59% of young adults, if we run the "young" criteria up to age 34, which is a questionable way of doing it (at one time 34 was actually considered "middle age", and not all that long ago) were married.  Now, 30% of the population in that age range is, although it's still the case overall that the majority of Americans live in married households.

That is quite the change, but I'd also note that it actually sort of, but only sort of, replicates a situation that had existed in the 19th Century when "common law" marriages came about.  That legal creation was created by the courts to deal with the byproducts of just such unions and to handle the legal problems they created.  And in looking at that, we an find a surprising number of notable common law marriages in the United States in the 19th Century, particularly in the wilder regions of the country.

Indeed, looking back even further, it's hard not to recall that it was not until well into the Middle Ages that marriages needed to be witnessed at all.

Some of the current cohabitation going on is basically in the nature of common law marriages, even if not recognized as such.  This is particularly true of the ones that use the extremely irritating word "partner" to describe the putative spouse.  Others are just examples of people playing house, and there's everything in between.  We note it here, however, as these couples do split up, and often without any sort of intervention of the law at all, and therefore they create a sort of stealth divorce.

Some of how this works overall, as a social observer, is interesting.  Some of these couples get around to marrying later, some never do, but with some it's almost impossible not to view them as common law marriages.  It speaks in part, however, to the breakdown in standards in society, but this thread is already broad enough without going there.

So what is going on here?

It's actually pretty hard to say.

When I started this thread off, I had intended to look at the often claimed link between "marry in haste" marriages during World War Two leading to a breakdown in marriage itself, which isn't a theory that I came up.  However, much like the popular theory that "World War Two caused women to enter into the work force forever" claim, it really doesn't have the facts to back it up.  There was in fact a jump in divorce rates after the war, but it wasn't titanic, and overall societal divorce rates returned to what they had been just before the war and remained there into the late 1970s.  And frankly, attitudes towards divorce, while they changed, didn't change all that much until the 80s.

So if the war played a role, it was indirect.

What does seem to have played a role, however, was the combined impact of increased wealth and a big focus on materialism, and we're still living with that, although it seems to be breaking down in recent years, with a boost in that from COVID 19.

For most of human history marriage played a variety of roles, but the big societal one was making sure that children were protected, and then widows were. This doesn't mean that marriage doesn't have an important religious aspect to it, particularly in Apostolic Christian churches.  It does.  But societies, and by this we mean all societies, regulated male/female interactions for the reasons noted above, as society didn't want the tribe, the village, the shire, or whatever, to be stuck with the burden of raising children or taking care of widows.

There was really no thought at all to doing so until the post-war era, for the most part.  "Mistakes of nature", as children born out of wedlock were sometimes referred to, were a disaster, for the most part, for the economic well-being of the mothers, save for the instances when the fathers were well-to-do.  Contrary to what progressives like to claim, however, the overwhelming majority of women took the children to term.  Giving the children up for adoption was a very common option, particularly for teenage and early twenties mothers, who were often "sent away" for a time until the children could be delivered in hopes of trying to salvage some element of the girl's reputation.  Quick marriages, or the proverbial "shotgun marriage", were also solutions, and there's some question of whether the Linkfield marriage described above may have been one of those.

Anyway you looked at it, abortion and living with heavy public support were not options.  As readers here will note, I don't feel that abortion should be now.  But its undeniable that public money to aid the mothers of unwed children, and the children, came about following the introduction of the Great Society.  Indeed, the often heard claim of people for sympathy about a protagonist that "she's an unwed working mother" just would not have been made prior to that time, and probably not until the 1990s really.

What also came about was a change in sexual behavior due to the Sexual Revolution, with the Quartermaster of the Revolution being pharmaceutical birth control.  We've dealt with that before here as well, but the overall mix of birth control combined with Playboy's separation of the concept that sex can result in children really hit in the 1960s, right at the time that a youth rebellion was underway.  None of the results would have been possible without that combination, and added to it was the post World War Two massive increase in societal wealth.

The huge increase in societal wealth meant that it was possible for government to imagine, if erroneously, that it could address the desperate plight of unmarried mothers and their children, which came partially, but only partially, true, just at the same time that the Sexual Revolution broke down sexual mores. 

And added to that was the change in people's views about what their own lives were for that accompanied the backside of the youth rebellion.  

As we've noted here before, prior to the 1960s, and very much prior to World War Two, the United States may have been a capitalistic society, but it was also one which, for most people, was actually family oriented.  When the authors of I'll Take My Stand assaulted the New Deal, they in part emphasized that, as it was so much the case.  I.e., they expected a sympathetic audience to the argument that Rooseveltian capitalism/liberal government was super pro business and was destroying familial leisure.  A person can take that for what it's worth, but in the 1970s that really became true.  As late as the 1970s and 1980s, you'd still occasionally hear parents encouraging their children in post high school academic careers on the basis that "you'll get a good job, so you can support a family".  

I haven't heard that argument made for decades now.

Now, people are urged to get a good job as it'll produce a high income and that means lots of stuff. And that's the real difference between then and now.

People now routinely leave friends and family for their careers, and in doing so abandon their spouses and "others".   Since the 1970s, and very much since then, societal propaganda has been full of "fulfilling career" arguments, arguing, particularly to women, that their path to a meaningful life and a sense of self-worth is solely linked to their careers and completely internalized.

Of course, another concept that didn't exist is that people had to approach something really serious, sex, as entertainment and that they were doing something wrong if they weren't acting like alley cats in heat in at least a certain point in their life.

The basic psychology of sex is pretty well known in our species, and it does in fact vary enormously by species.  As we've gone into that before, we'll not plow into it again, but sex serves more than reproductive purposes in our species, which is one of the reasons we're one of the few mammals that will act sexually in spite of a female not being "in season".  Cattle, for example, don't act that way.  If a cow isn't in season, they're perfectly content just lying around doing nothing, and they don't hit on the cows.

The basic reason has to do with our evolutionary biology, which has a child-rearing strategy that entails along childhood. Given that, children need a long period of nurturing and protection, and that means that both of the parents need to be involved.

Interestingly, that also forms a certain basis for why women and men are not the same in regard to sex drive.  Once a source of 1950s and 1960s style ribald jokes, women, particularly if they have children, are less interested than men, which doesn't mean disinterested.  Anyhow, according to evolutionary biologists, the deal that nature imposed on our DNA is that men would stick with their mates and secure them food and protection, with the biological bargain being struck in favor of sex.  

Now, modern social critics, who often have a poor understanding of biology, fail to note one thing and miss another entirely here.

The missed one is that it's well demonstrated that psychologically sex trips a trigger in our psychology and that what it does to us, in terms of the opposite, is to create a bond pretty much instantly.  That bond never goes away.  Indeed, old romantic tales of people pining for a "lost love" or somebody that they met decades ago are probably related to, or barely disguised depictions of, people having this intimate bond very early and then moving on for some reason, but not getting over it.

The thing social critics bring up about this is "what about cheating men", etc…, but that says something, once again, about wealth.

And survival.

As early in our species' history, by which we pretty much mean up until last Thursday, women died at a high rate, in part because of child bearing, men tended to outlast them.  As recently as the early history of the United States, this remained so much the case that an average "middle class" or "upper class" man was presumed likely to have at least two or three marriages during a lifetime.  It's grim, but it was accepted that women stood a fairly high chance of dying relatively young.  Indeed, not only was this the case for women, but children struggled to make it past about age seven.

A good example of this is provided by Martha Jefferson, who was just 33 years old when she died.  Her health was wrecked by multiple exposures to disease and bearing very heavy children.  But the example doesn't stop there.

Martha Jefferson had been born Martha Wales.  Her father was John Wales and her mother, Martha Wales, née Eppes.  Her parents were married just two years at the time of her birth,   Eppes was a widow when they married, when she was 27 years of age.  Her first two children were born stillborn and the third, the woman who would grow to adulthood and marry Thomas Jefferson, lived, but she died five days latter, essentially a casualty of the birth.

Her father then married Tabith Cocke, who died sometime prior to 1860, meaning that they'd been married six to ten years (her date of death isn't really known).  Martha, her stepdaughter, didn't get along with her.  Her father then married Elizabeth Lomax, who was a widow, and who died but a year later.  Martha didn't get along with her either. Her father then took his slave Betty Hemings, who was "half white" by descent (her father was an English sea captain) into a sexual relationship, producing more children.

Martha Jefferson make Thomas Jefferson promise not to remarry, as she didn't want her children to endure a stepmother.  Jefferson didn't, but then took one of the Hemings as his concubine, or what have you.   This relationship was fairly widely known of, but less well known today is that Sally Hemings was, according to the way Americans account "race" now, 3/4s white and 1/4 black.  Indeed, it was often noted that she bore a resemblance to Martha Jefferson.

Now none of this is meant to be a charming story.  Some of it is downright creepy.  But what we see from it is that people were dying left and right all the time, and women were particularly likely to die young.  Men usually remarried within a couple of years.  In this instance, the perversion of slavery made it easy for both of the men involved to end up taking enslaved concubines, with whom they actually shared a close cultural connection.  Jefferson upheld his promise to Martha not to remarry in that fashion, but only in a deeply weird and sort of technical way.  What this shows us overall is that a biological imperative operating in nature basically regards men as incompetent to raise children on their own and then, death having intervened, they're off and running looking for new female help.

Now things have dramatically changed, and life is about self fulfillment and the like, and if people get in the way of that, even if they are infants, they are to be dumped.

Prior to the 1970s people didn't really have that concept.

Because its not true.

And therein, more likely than not, lies the answer.

If its all about you, after all, leaving them, whomever they are, is not only easy, its the right thing to do.

Of course, it isn't.  And there's some indication that the generations Post Generation Jones know that. As we noted the other day, they're Quiet Quitting and Laying Flat. And there's some indication that they're groping back to social conservatism as well

The Wayles and Jefferson story provides additional illustration of a fundamental truth.  We live in a fallen world, so this area of our lives, like all of our basic genetic instructions, can be set to run off kilter, and sometimes in a very destructive way.

Just as the imperative to eat can go awry in some people to their ultimate demise, the sexual one can get pretty fouled up, and fouled up society wide, as well.  In Wayes and Jefferson's day, that was obviously operating, in that they'd defeated the basic human rights of women to say yes or no to a married relationship. We can't know what conversations Wayles and Hemmings had with two different generations of Hemings women, but we sure know that they were at a colossal disadvantage.  Both women were born into bondage, and saying no was going to be pretty freaking difficult for them.  We don't really know if they ever had said no, as slavery silenced their voices.

So there we have a massive perversion, although certainly not one without a historical precedent.  Arab raiders took Irish women for sex slaves in raids designed just for that purpose, for example.

We benighted souls, of course, endure no such horrors in our modern lives.

Or do we?

In our live the grand perversion, already referenced, is the divorce of sex from reproduction and sex from reasons.  As a super rich society, we've reduced everything to entertainment.

This corruption came first in those parts of our society with the most money and the most free time.  The lives of noble aristocracy, for example, reads like a novel sold that should be sold in a brown paper bag.  Even such a figure as Czar Nicholas II, who was fiercely devoted to his wife and who lead a very conventional moral life as the Russian Emperor, no matter what else we might think of him, had a mistress early on who went on to be his brother's mistress.10   In North America, real libertine behavior or hit first in Hollywood where there was a large surplus of cash, time and superficiality, leading to scandals of all sorts, but more thing that simply never became scandals.  Indeed, even in pre-1945 North America the commonality of divorce amongst celluloid entertainers, when it was fairly rare for everyone else, was blistering. 

Mathilde Kschessinska, Czar Nicholas II's mistress prior to his marriage, who survived the revolution, moved to Parish, and died at age 100.

The association here with Hollywood is important, actually, as the entertainment industry became an agent for the pornographication of the culture and an ally of the destruction of standards during the Sexual Revolution. Why wouldn't it have been? Sex sells, as everyone knows, and in many ways when Hollywood portrayed something in an "avant-garde" fashion, it was merely portraying its own moral standards as practiced behind the movie screen.  People have a long history of normalizing their own conduct, no matter what it is.

And that went on to convert the culture from one in which sex was in fact relegated to marriage as a standard and in reality, to one in which such shows as The Big Bang Theory or Friends operated to tell people there as something wrong with them if they didn't engage in sex readily and casually, and with multiple partners.

Which is a corruption of the basic genetic roadmap nearly as profound as that of Wayles and Hemings taking enslaved women to bed.

And this has had the impact of wearing the trigger.

Even in the early history of the country, in which more than one wife was common, we're really just looking at men who had a handful of "sexual partners".  For Jefferson, it was basically two.  For Wayles, it was four.  It's extremely unlikely there were anymore.  And there is no evidence that the triggers were pulled again until their first "partner" had died.

Playboy, on the other hand, came around and told American men that women should be putting out constantly as women were sterile ditzes and male urges were all that mattered.  The Sexual Revolution came about and changed the standards, and it was really women who were made to suffer.  Their trigger falls, if you will, on a much harder hammer, and they are accordingly much less likely to move on, not having the same evolutionary drive to the same extent as men, as in antiquity, while they might need to move on, they were less likely to. Additionally, choosing wisely was always more of a concern for women, biologically, as they were going ultimately end up with the product of the relationship, children, no matter what.  Single fathers exist, in other words, but not at the same rate as single mothers.

Added to that, the study of pedophiles has shown that one of the statistical factors in their backgrounds is having had five or more sexual partners.  I.e., the risk factor that somebody will become a pedophile increases when they reach that level, which makes sense as by that time the natural unifying aspect of sex is pretty clearly breaking down to yielding instead to urges.  If a person can, in other words, defeat their DNA to the extent that satisfying the base urge, it seems to break down other barriers to satisfying it. When we realize that when we started off looking at this, most Americans did not have sex until they married, and now the average number of "partners" in the US is seven.

This matters to our story as it demonstrates another part of this story.  If the "there's something wrong with you if you aren't doing it" view can break down a person's ingrained inclinations to view the opposite gender as potential lifelong mates and allow some people's eyes to turn to children, it's pretty clearly going to weaken the inclination to stay together at all.

Now, for most people, this isn't going to be the factor leading to a divorce.  It's only one of the background factors in society at large, and that's the overall story.

Most people live according to societal standards pretty much, and accept societal standards pretty much.  Indeed, even in areas as substantial as the ones we're talking about, people will tend to live up, or down, to societal standards.  More than that, they'll tend to comport with them and incorporate them into their own views.

We've already noted some of this. When the standard we're addressing here, that regarding divorce, had a pretty high bar, society at large also had one.  For example, there were real questions on whether or not Ronald Reagan could be elected President, as he was a divorced and remarried man.  In contrast, this didn't even come up with Donald Trump, who is a serial polygamist.  

In other words, all that we've discussed above operated to weaken the bounds of marriage in general and make divorce more common.  It also operated to change the nature of marriage in American society in particular, and in the Western World in general, different from what they had been, which made the obligation to enter it to in a somewhat grave fashion, or enter into it at all, lighter.  

Indeed, due to the latter, a lot of divorces might really be compared to that oddly disused means of separation, annulment.  People tend to think of annulment solely as a religious procedure, but it isn't.  Wyoming, for example, has statutes covering legal separation, annulment, and divorce.  Annulment is rarely used, and legal separation has fallen into disfavor as well.  People simply get divorced. 

But things may seem to be slowly changing, at least by observation.

That the Sexual Revolution was a complete and utter disaster is clear.  It turned out that people didn't go on to happy lives a la Friends or The Big Bang Theory.  Their lives tended to end up a mess.  And over time it seems that younger, post Boomer generations, or at least those that followed after the forgotten and trapped Generation Jones, have tended to grope back, although largely in the dark as all the lights are off, to the prior standards.  Average sexual partner figures were dropping, albeit slightly, for those between 25 and 49.  A separate figure for those now in their teens so surprised the figures at the highly conservative and religious First Things that they did a podcast episode on it noting, in their (rather odd here) view, that teens were abstaining in record numbers for recent times, but for the wrong reasons, giving us once again the odd Boomer view that Gen X,Y, & Z can't do anything right.

Now, it's probably not safe to assume that we're going to return to the standards of the middle 20th Century anytime soon, but by the same token, things are changing.  And in terms of what this blog serves to do, we've certainly seen an interesting long term trend that's important to appreciate.  Starting with the 1960s, fictional depictions of past eras tended to present them with modern, or rather Hollywood modern, mores. But that what things were like.

Which were never accurate, actually.  Divorce rates were never as high as thought to be, and experienced a rise, and fall.

Where we are now, is not where we are going.  Having experimented, it seems younger generations are deeming the experiment a failure, and looking, at least to some extent, for a way back.


Footnotes.

*A thread like this really runs the risk of some people thinking "you are picking on divorced people", or just the opposite, "you are endorsing divorce".

I'm doing neither in this thread.

This is a social history, just trying to track a trend.

To the extent that I'd make any observations on the topics above it would be this.  As standards have changed, the view society takes of divorce has changed also, and as we'll show below, that means that people may be (but in actuality might also not be) more likely to get divorced.  

People generally hold the concept that "marriage is forever", and in the Christian religions it is, although it's really only in the Catholic Churches that this remains a hard and fast rule.  Out in society, and the US is a Protestant country no matter what people might otherwise like to claim, this remains the ideal but with large exceptions, although perhaps not anywhere near as large as commonly imagined.

Societies adapt to even existential changes amazingly rapidly, but often only temporarily.  It's an interesting aspect of our character as a species.  Often, when some big huge change and society is introduced, if it's somehow enforced either through laws or societal standards setters, it'll gain widespread acceptance, sometimes nearly overnight. But the interesting thing on this is that long term views can turn back, particularly if not grounded in our evolutionary makeup.  There are multiple recent examples of this.  

Without adding a thread to the thread, divorce gained widespread acceptance as a concept after 1970, and it retains it, so much so that even a lot of Catholics divorce and remarry, though the Church absolutely prohibits it.  What this means in terms of members of the Apostolic Faiths in general, and Catholics in particular, is one thing (you can't be adherent and ignore these concepts), but what it means out in the larger society at large, which is what we're discussing, and how average people in the statistical majority view it and act up on it, is another.

1.  Well not really the other day, it's now quite some time ago, actually.

This is another post I started some time ago, and then ended up not finishing.  This is unfortunate as, in part, I don't quite recall where I was headed with this, but given as it's an interesting societal topic, I’m going to blather on anyhow, in part because I sort of remember where my brilliant insights were going, and in part because this tied into something completely different that I started writing about, or sort of completely different.

2.  During her marriage to Miller, Monroe was heavily addicted to prescription drugs, both to sleep and to wake up.

I'm really mystified by Monroe's marriage to Miller.  Her marriage to Dougherty makes sense in the context of the times and her, frankly, desperation.  So does her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.

But Miller?

Why?

Frankly, the divorce wasn't surprising either, and in a different context, or perhaps this context, this marriage likely could have been anulled.  She was only 16 and in pretty desperate straights when they married.

3.  The Mauldin story has a surprising end, however.  Bill and Jean Mauldin never lost touch with each other, and towards the end of his life when he became incapacitated, she moved into his house and took care of him.  In the end, therefore, she resumed the role of a wife in a really deep sense.  The couple, in spite of their early rocky start, may have been truly well suited for each other after all.

4.  Outside the US, most English-speaking countries had some variant of an 1857 English law.

5.  Note, however, as a religious matter, the Church of England, like the Catholic Church, disallows divorce.  Be that as it may, since the Second World War the churches of the Anglican Communion have very much diluted their adherence to this expressed belief.

6. We should note here that prior to the Russian Revolution Russia had, of course, a state church in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church, part of the churches that separated from the Catholic Church during the Great Schism.  Eastern Orthodoxy, like Catholicism, is an Apostolic Church, and it holds largely the same set of beliefs, even though a reunion of the two major branches of Christianity has not occurred.  One of the differences between the two branches, however, is that the Orthodox actually allow up to two divorces and three remarriages under some circumstances, although it's a little difficult to grasp what governs this for the non-Orthodox.  It's basically regarded as a concession to human nature.  The Church, that is the pre Schism Catholic Church of which the Orthodox were then part, very clearly did not allow for divorce early on and so this is a development in Orthodoxy which has occurred since the Schism.

7.  So how did this all work out?  Like the protagonists in Chuck Berry's Teenage Wedding?

Not hardly.

According to the Reddit follow up, Chester Linkfield was in and out of jail for the rest of his life, which wasn't all that long.  He worked as a repairman and died of TB at age 32.   At that young age, he'd literally been married to Ernestine for half of his short life.


She remarried less than a month after he died, which is peculiar. She would have known that his death was coming, of course, as TB was a slow but sure killer. Her new husband was Denzil Swan, who died in 1950, and who was listed as divorced at the time, although that doesn't mean that the devorce was from Ernestine, she may have predeceased him.

Their son, born in 1922, was named William Chester Linkfield.  From what little I can tell of him, he served in the Second World War and moved to Pennsylvania at some point.  As odd as it is to realize it, he would have been 16 years old when his father died, the same age his father had been when he married his mother.

8.  Or was it?

To some extent, a person has to wonder if this was just an Appalachian story for the time.  

Appalachia is a region of the country which has remained culturally distinct, and poor, for a very long time.  In most poor cultures, poverty operates against early marriage. A good example of this would have been pre Celtic Tiger Ireland, where generally marriages occurred late due to circumstances, and indeed a fair number of men remained unmarried their entire lives.

As history certainly rhymes, if not repeats, part of what we see now in current late marriage trends may be due to something similar.  The press likes to imagine that young college educated couples are busy pursing their super glamorous careers, 1970s/1980s career propaganda wise, but in fact many are stuck in jobs that pay relatively poorly and can not find a means of actually getting married economically.  This same trend reflects itself in the current trend of multiple generations living in the same household, or older children returning home ot lvie with their parents, all of which are norms of the past.

At any rate, two teenagers dueling over the affection of a young girl isn't hugely surprising in a region where generational feuds had persisted into the late 19th Century.  Her age remains surprising, and icky.

Consider, however, Alvin C. York, the great hero of World War One.

Alvin York after World War One, his mother and younger sister are in the photo.

York was a wild youth who had been involved in violence prior to his profound conversion to Christianity.  He was one of eleven children.  His wife Gracie was 19 at the time of their marriage, almost immediately after his return from service, and they had obviously planned the marriage before he entered the Army.  He'd entered the Army almost exactly two years prior to that.  He was twelve years older than she was.

In other words, York, a Tennessean Appalachian, was from a huge rural family and his wife was relatively young in context, alhtough certainly not twelve, at the time of their marriage. . . but, wait. . . .

Honest compels me to admit here that my wife was 21 when we got married, and I was 31. We became engaged when she was 20.

9.  This is one of the many areas in which the Church, by which we mean the Catholic Church, was an enormously liberalizing force, in spite of what modern day self-appointed pundits like to think.  Up until Christianity giving away girls at a fairly young age was in fact common. The Church put a complete stop to it by simply providing that women couldn't be married to anyone they didn't consent to be married to, a radical, and frankly very protofeminist, position.

10.  Depending upon where you wonder to in social media, sooner or later you'll stumble upon modern monarchist, an exceedingly odd group.

By monarchist, I don't mean English citizens who want to keep their constitutional monarchy.  No, I mean people who really believe in monarchy.

They tend to be highly traditional and often radically Christian traditionalist (never mind that today's real ruling monarchs are Muslims).  They have a variety of reasons they cling to the now long dead body of monarchy, sometimes saying that God has decreed it the ideal form of government, but one of the primary ones is that the monarch is there to set the moral standards.

Which leads me to believe that they've never looked at the lives of real monarchs.

The sexual mores of monarchs, quite frankly, tended to be like something out of Playboy long before Hugh Hefner though it up.  If you read the lives of Kings, for example, its surprising when you find one that didn't have multiple mistresses.

Related Threads:

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?



Et Ux*: A legal and societal history of marriage