The Enigma of Western Writers.

This post is on Western writers.

By which I mean writers from the West who write about the West.  By the "West", I mean the West of the Mississippi United States in general, and the various regions of the West as well. 

I don't mean writers like Annie Proulx, who move into an area, write something that they set in the area, and then are celebrated by reviewers outside of the area who are completely ignorant on the area in the first place.  Or even ones like Sam Western.

Nothing was western about the originator of Western writing, Owen Wister, who was an East Coaster through and through.

I'm not saying, well not saying completely, that a person has to be born in one area to write knowledgeably about it. There are certainly examples to the contrary.  Cormac McCarthy has notably written about the west of Texas and in the Southern Gothic style, but he's from Rhode Island originally.  Owen Wister, who is sometimes credited with inventing the Western novel (and at the time he wrote The Virginian he was writing about the recent past) was very much an Easterner.  His friend Theodore Roosevelt wrote beautifully about the West of his day, but he was a new Yorker.  Frederic Remington, the legendary illustrator and painter, is not only famous for his Western paintings and illustrations, which dramatically capture an era, but he was a writer as well, writing on the same topics that he depicted in his paintings.   Edward Abbey was from Pennsylvania and didn't experience the West until he was 18 years old.  Thomas Berger who wrote the only really great novel about Indians, Little Big Man, lived on the East Coast his entire life.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who was also a prolific reader and writer.

But I am saying that there's something different about writing on a culture that you are part of and about a region you are from.  I'd even go on to say that its really difficult to do that without being born in an area. Some writers can pull that off, but they are few.  So if you were born and raised in New England, or Zimbabwe, two actual examples for recent "Western writers", you can probably credibly pull off novels about the shipping news, or not going to the dogs tonight, but your regional novels aren't going to appear authentic to anyone from the region at all, because they are not.

Indeed, could Go Kill A Mockingbird have been written by anyone but a Southerner?  What about anything that Flannery O'Connor wrote. . . would they have been just as impactful if written by a Vermonter?   Would Doctor Zhivago have been what it was if it was written by a New Yorker?  Could Musashi have been written by anyone other than Ejii Yoshikawa?

I doubt it.

Boris Pasternak, who was born in Imperial Russia in 1890 and who died in the Soviet Union in 1960.  His famous work is the novel about the Russian doctor Zhivago, who would have been born right about the same time and and have experienced many of the same things.  Hardly anybody would maintain that a non Russian, let alone a non Russian who hadn't experienced these things, could have written a novel like Doctor Zhivago.

So I'm talking about writers who have spent their youth, even if not perhaps born here, in the real West.  Writers growing up, like Norman Maclean, in Montana, or writers growing up in Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, and so forth.  And writers, I will credit, from Texas.  Having said all of that, I'd currently exclude writers, for the most part, who may be from any of those regions but whose lives have been spent in the really big cities of the region, like Denver, Dallas or Houston. Big cities are their own thing, and that thing isn't the West.  Modern Denver, and indeed increasingly much of the Front Ranger for hundreds of miles around it, are no more The West than Newark is.  So too with Las Vegas, Phoenix, or any of the giant Texas cities.

Anyhow, some observations.

Western writers, as I've defined them, clearly have a deep, deep, love for the region.  If you read, for example, Norman Maclean's work, he clearly loved Montana.  Indeed, no other writer described the Rocky Mountain West as accurately and deeply as Maclean.  Nobody.

Mari Sandoz clearly loved Nebraska and the plains.  So did Willa Cather.

And what's so notable about that is that they all left the region they loved.

In the film A River Runs Through It and in the novella, Norman Maclean has his brother express the view that he, the brother, will "never leave Montana".  Indeed, Maclean has Paul, his brother, express the view that those who moved from Montana to the West Coast suffered from moral defects, a view a lot of Westerners do in fact have.  But both Paul Maclean and Norman Maclean, in real life, moved to Chicago. At the time that he wrote his works, late in life, Norman Maclean had spent more years in Chicago than in Montana.  He died in Chicago in 1990 at age 87 (his wife, Jessie, had a much shorter life, dying due to respiratory aliments in 1968 at age 63).

Mari Sandoz was born in Nebraska in 1896. She moved to Denver, which at that time remained a Western city, in 1940, at which time she was 44  years old, but then moved to New York City in 1943, where she remained until her death at age 69 in 1966.

Wila Cather, was born in 1873 and her family moved to Nebraska in 1883.  She was steeped in the West from her youth, but she moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, at which time she was an up and coming writer.  She moved to New York in 1905, which is where she remained for the rest of her life.

What's going on here?  It seems that "Western" writers don't achieve success at that unless they've moved to somewhere distinctly non Western.

Maybe some of that has to do with what Garrison Keillor, who is a Western writer (Minnesota and North Dakota are part of the West the way I've defined them) noted about the region in general.  Our number one export is our children.  While we often don't credit it, and we frequently argue about it, the West has both a small population and a good educational system.  We work hard here to educate our youth, but we really don't have anywhere for them to go, as a rule.  That's been noted by outsiders, such as non Westerner, Sam Western (who is in  the non Westerner import class of writer), but they rarely seem to grasp the nature of it.  The West remains the West, where it has, because of natural features which translate into economic ones.  This means that while we really appreciate the need for solid educations, it also means that we educate generation after generation of Westerners who have no place to go with their educations. So they go elsewhere.

That seems to me to be the story for Maclean and Cather.  Norman Maclean obtained a degree in English from Dartmouth in 1924. What use would that have been in the Montana of 1924, or for that matter in the Montana of 2019?  It'd be limited, at best.  He clearly retained his affection for Montana and spoke of himself, from his actual home in Chicago, as a Montanan in his writings.  He married a woman from Montana in 1931, showing the extent to which he retained actual roots there. But he lived and died in Chicago.

The situation for Cather was likely even more pronounced.  An educated woman in the West in the 1890s, her career options were necessarily  highly limited.  Indeed, they were limited in the Western world in general. She never married, something very unusual for her era, and focused on her writing career, but that would fairly obviously be a lot easier to do from New York than from Nebraska.

Sandoz doesn't quite fit this mold, but maybe she provides another example.  Sandoz was a difficult character from her youth on but first found herself published while living in Nebraska, having relocated to Lincoln from the Sand Hills. She's struggled up to that point to establish herself as a writer, but when she did, it was with two novels both of which met with gigantic disapproval in Nebraska.  So she moved to Denver, and then on to New York.

And perhaps Michael Punke gives us another example.  Punke is the author of The Revenant.  Punke was born in Torrington Wyoming.  He's a practicing lawyer, as well as an author (and therefore obviously a much more disciplined person than myself), but he has worked nearly exclusively outside of the West, both inside of and outside of government.

And maybe Punke's example brings home that this phenomenon is widespread with Westerners in general.  At what point you cease to be a Westerner by leaving a region can be debated.  I think it that does happen, and am one of the many who disregard lamentations published in the letters to the editor section of the newspapers that start off with "I read the article about so and so last week, and while I left Wyoming forty years ago. . . .". 

But it's clear that people who were largely raised in a region conceive of themselves, quite often, as remaining part of it their entire lives.  Which I suppose makes sense.  Wendell Berry has lamented that modern American life means that people don't become "of" a place, but maybe they do more than we might imagine (which is another reason that novelist from Zimbabwe or Vermont don't become regional authors by moving here).  Beyond that, however, what we see with writers may be nothing more than what we see with legions of Westerners.

For a long time, at least for rural Westerners, which is a definition that would fit many in the West, growing up and getting an education has meant either narrowing the scope of your education or leaving.  I.e., if you are educated as a lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, school teacher, accountant, or engineer, you can find work here.  But if you have a PhD in English, you probably better be looking elsewhere.

Indeed, even with these other professions, as time marches on, this is becoming more and more true.  In 1990, at the time I graduated from the University of Wyoming's law school, it was already the case that maybe 1/3d of the class was headed to Colorado.  In some recent years over half the class has, as changes in the nature of practice have made that necessary.  Indeed, with the passage of the UBE, there's really no longer a reason for a Wyoming law school at all, and its only a matter of time until the legislature realizes that.

For some this is compounded with the American ethos of money meaning everything.  There are areas of various professions you can find work in the state, to be sure, but it won't pay the same lucrative amount that it might elsewhere.  So people move for the money.  Interestingly, they often find themselves in personal conflict after that, and are often among those writing to the editor with letters such as; "I'm distressed to read that such and so is going in near my beloved home town of Little Big Horn. . . I want it to be just like it was when I left in 1959 and I'm planning to return soon from the hideous dump of Los Angeles where I've been piling up cash since the early 1960s . . ." 

So, maybe it's the nature of the regional economy, and perhaps the national economy at that.  Writers gravitate to where the writers are, and the writers, by and large, are in the big cities.

Not all of them of course, but a lot of them.

Maybe.

Maybe something else is also at work, and perhaps that's most notable in what we noted above about Mari Sandoz. She didn't leave Nebraska for more futile publishing grounds.  She left Nebraska as she was taking a lot of heat after getting published.  Indeed, her second novel was censored in the state.

So maybe its the classic example of a person not really being too welcome on their own home ground in some instances.

In fairness, Sandoz's writing was always very critical of various things, and indeed quite frankly her histories, for which she remains famous, aren't terribly accurate in various ways.  At least her histories haven't born the test of time except, perhaps, for Old Jules, the book her extraordinarily difficult father asked her to write about him after his passing.  But still, maybe the West doesn't welcome its own writers much?

Or maybe it does.  Novelist Jim Harrison, who was from Michigan, which is pretty rural in some locations and the near west to a degree, lived in Arizona and Montana after leaving Michigan.  Garrison Keillor, mentioned above, flirted with New York after already being well known, but returned to Minnesota.  Patrick McManus, the humor writer, lived in the West his entire life.  Current crime writer C. J. Box, whose protagonist is a Wyoming Game Warden, is from Wyoming.  Tim Sandlin, whom I've never read, was born in Oklahoma but lives in Jackson.

Indeed, if Oklahoma is sort of like Texas in some ways, it's worth noting that Texas has had a lot of native authors who have continued to live in Texas, Larry McMurtry notable among them.  McMurtry grew up on a ranch outside of Archer, Texas, a town so far north in Texas its nearly in Oklahoma.

So added to that, maybe these long distance travels aren't as far as they seem. . . in some instances.  In my grandfather's era Chicago was the hub of the western cattle industry and Denver just a very large city on the plains.  Chicago's role in that went away, but the point is that economists and politicians who are baffled by the fact that the West doesn't spawn very many large cities are potentially missing the point that it has. . . its just that everything is more spread out here.  So Chicago, a Midwestern city, may have more of a link to the West of an earlier era than we might suppose.  Denver serves that purpose for much of the Northern Plains now and, I dare say, Calgary does as well at a certain point.

Indeed, those cities filled that roles, or fill them, as they were, or are, centers of industry for regions.  And while we don't like to think of writing as an industry, it's a type of one, so perhaps some relocation makes sense.  Indeed, it might even now, in spite of the electronic age, which seems to be pulling the working population towards the city centers like a black hole draws in light.

Anyhow, something to ponder.

July 10, 1919. Wilson delivers the Treaty of Versailles to the U.S. Senate. Race Riots in Longview Texas

And in so doing, he delivered this address.

Gentlemen of the Senate: The treaty of peace with Germany was signed at Versailles on the twenty-eighth of June. I avail myself of the earliest opportunity to lay the treaty before you for ratification and to inform you with regard to the work of the Conference by which that treaty was formulated. 

The treaty constitutes nothing less than a world settlement. It would not be possible for me either to summarize or to construe its manifold provisions in an address which must of necessity be something less than a treatise. My services and all the information I possess will be at your disposal and at the disposal of your Committee on Foreign Relations at any time, either informally or in session, as you may prefer; and I hope that you will not hesitate to make use of them. I shall at this time, prior to your own study of the document, attempt only a general characterization of its scope and purpose. 

In one sense, no doubt, there is no need that I should report to you what was attempted and done at Paris. You have been daily cognizant of what was going on there,—of the problems with which the Peace Conference had to deal and of the difficulty of laying down straight lines of settlement anywhere on a field on which the old lines of international relationship, and the new alike, followed so intricate a pattern and were for the most part cut so deep by historical circumstances which dominated action even where it would have been best to ignore or reverse them. The cross currents of politics and of interest must have been evident to you. It would be presuming in me to attempt to explain the questions which arose or the many diverse elements that entered into them. I shall attempt something less ambitious than that and more clearly suggested by my duty to report to the Congress the part it seemed necessary for my colleagues and me to play as the representatives of the Government of the United States. 

That part was dictated by the role America had played in the war and by the expectations that had been created in the minds of the peoples with whom we had associated ourselves in that great struggle. 

The United States entered the war upon a different footing from every other nation except our associates on this side of the sea. We entered it, not because our material interests were directly threatened or because any special treaty obligations to which we were parties had been violated, but only because we saw the supremacy, and even the validity, of right everywhere put in jeopardy and free government likely to be everywhere imperiled by the intolerable aggression of a power which respected neither right nor obligation and whose very system of government flouted the rights of the citizens as against the autocratic authority of his governors. And in the settlements of the peace we have sought no special reparation for ourselves, but only the restoration of right and the assurance of liberty everywhere that the effects of the settlement were to be felt. We entered the war as the disinterested champions of right and we interested ourselves in the terms of the peace in no other capacity. 

The hopes of the nations allied against the central powers were at a very low ebb when our soldiers began to pour across the sea. There was everywhere amongst them, except in their stoutest spirits, a sombre foreboding of disaster. The war ended in November, eight months ago, but you have only to recall what was feared in midsummer last, four short months before the armistice, to realize what it was that our timely aid accomplished alike for their morale and their physical safety. . . . A great moral force had flung itself into the struggle. The fine physical force of those spirited men spoke of something more than bodily vigour. They carried the great ideals of a free people at their hearts and with that vision were unconquerable. Their very presence brought reassurance; their fighting made victory certain. 

They were recognized as crusaders, and as their thousands swelled to millions their strength was seen to mean salvation. And they were fit men to carry such a hope and make good the assurance it forecast. Finer men never went into battle; and their officers were worthy of them. . . . They were free men under arms, not forgetting their ideals of duty in the midst of tasks of violence. I am proud to have had the privilege of being associated with them and of calling myself their leader. 

But I speak now of what they meant to the men by whose sides they fought and to the people with whom they mingled with such utter simplicity, as friends who asked only to be of service. They were for all the visible embodiment of America. What they did made America and all that she stood for a living reality in the thoughts not only of the people of France but also of tens of millions of men and women throughout all the toiling nations of a world standing everywhere in peril of its freedom and of the loss of everything it held dear, in deadly fear that its bonds were never to be loosed, its hopes forever to be mocked and disappointed. 

And the compulsion of what they stood for was upon us who represented America at the peace table. It was our duty to see to it that every decision we took part in contributed, so far as we were able to influence it, to quiet the fears and realize the hopes of the peoples who had been living in that shadow, the nations that had come by our assistance to their freedom. It was our duty to do everything that it was within our power to do to make the triumph of freedom and of right a lasting triumph in the assurance of which men might everywhere live without fear. 

Old entanglements of every kind stood in the way,—promises which Governments had made to one another in the days when might and right were confused and the power of the victor was without restraint. Engagements which contemplated any dispositions of territory, any extensions of sovereignty that might seem to be to the interest of those who had the power to insist upon them, had been entered into without thought of what the peoples concerned might wish or profit by; and these could not always be honourably brushed aside. It was not easy to graft the new order of ideas on the old, and some of the fruits of the grafting may, I fear, for a time be bitter. But, with very few exceptions, the men who sat with us at the peace table desired as sincerely as we did to get away from the bad influences, the illegitimate purposes, the demoralizing ambitions, the international counsels and expedients out of which the sinister designs of Germany had sprung as a natural growth. 

It had been our privilege to formulate the principles which were accepted as the basis of the peace, but they had been accepted, not because we had come in to hasten and assure the victory and insisted upon them, but because they were readily acceded to as the principles to which honourable and enlightened minds everywhere had been bred. They spoke the conscience of the world as well as the conscience of America, and I am happy to pay my tribute of respect and gratitude to the able, forward-looking men with whom it was my privilege to cooperate for their unfailing spirit of cooperation, their constant effort to accommodate the interests they represented to the principles we were all agreed upon. The difficulties, which were many, lay in the circumstances, not often in the men. Almost without exception the men who led had caught the true and full vision of the problem of peace as an indivisible whole, a problem, not of mere adjustments of interest, but of justice and right action. 

The atmosphere in which the Conference worked seemed created, not by the ambitions of strong governments, but by the hopes and aspirations of small nations and of peoples hitherto under bondage to the power that victory had shattered and destroyed. Two great empires had been forced into political bankruptcy, and we were the receivers. Our task was not only to make peace with the central empires and remedy the wrongs their armies had done. The central empires had lived in open violation of many of the very rights for which the war had been fought, dominating alien peoples over whom they had no natural right to rule, enforcing, not obedience, but veritable bondage, exploiting those who were weak for the benefit of those who were masters and overlords only by force of arms. There could be no peace until the whole order of central Europe was set right. 

That meant that new nations were to be created,—Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary itself. No part of ancient Poland had ever in any true sense become a part of Germany, or of Austria, or of Russia. Bohemia was alien in every thought and hope to the monarchy of which she had so long been an artificial part; and the uneasy partnership between Austria and Hungary had been one rather of interest than of kinship or sympathy. The Slavs whom Austria had chosen to force into her empire on the south were kept to their obedience by nothing but fear. Their hearts were with their kinsmen in the Balkans. These were all arrangements of power, not arrangements of natural union or association. It was the imperative task of those who would make peace and make it intelligently to establish a new order which would rest upon the free choice of peoples rather than upon the arbitrary authority of Hapsburgs or Hohenzollerns. 

More than that, great populations bound by sympathy and actual kin to Rumania were also linked against their will to the conglomerate Austro-Hungarian monarchy or to other alien sovereignties, and it was part of the task of peace to make a new Rumania as well as a new Slavic state clustering about Serbia. 

And no natural frontiers could be found to these new fields of adjustment and redemption. It was necessary to look constantly forward to other related tasks. The German colonies were to be disposed of. They had not been governed; they had been exploited merely, without thought of the interest or even the ordinary human rights of their inhabitants. 

The Turkish Empire, moreover, had fallen apart, as the Austro-Hungarian had. It had never had any real unity. It had been held together only by pitiless, inhuman force. Its people cried aloud for release, for succour from unspeakable distress, for all that the new day of hope seemed at last to bring within its dawn. Peoples hitherto in utter darkness were to be led out into the same light and given at last a helping hand. Undeveloped peoples and peoples ready for recognition but not yet ready to assume the full responsibilities of statehood were to be given adequate guarantees of friendly protection, guidance, and assistance. 

And out of the execution of these great enterprises of liberty sprang opportunities to attempt what statesmen had never found the way before to do; an opportunity to throw safeguards about the rights of racial, national, and religious minorities by solemn international covenant; an opportunity to limit and regulate military establishments where they were most likely to be mischievous; an opportunity to effect a complete and systematic internationalization of waterways and railways which were necessary to the free economic life of more than one nation and to dear many of the normal channels of commerce of unfair obstructions of law or of privilege; and the very welcome opportunity to secure for labour the concerted protection of definite international pledges of principle and practice. 

These were not tasks which the Conference looked about it to find and went out of its way to perform. They were thrust upon it by circumstances which could not be overlooked. The war had created them. In all quarters of the world old established relationships had been disturbed or broken and affairs were at loose ends, needing to be mended or united again, but could not be made what they were before. They had to be set right by applying some uniform principle of justice or enlightened expediency. And they could not be adjusted by merely prescribing in a treaty what should be done. New states were to be set up which could not hope to live through their first period of weakness without assured support by the great nations that had consented to their creation and won for them their independence. Ill governed colonies could not be put in the hands of governments which were to act as trustees for their people and not as their masters if there was to be no common authority among the nations to which they were to be responsible in the execution of their trust. Future international conventions with regard to the control of waterways, with regard to illicit traffic of many kinds, in arms or in deadly drugs, or with regard to the adjustment of many varying international administrative arrangements could not be assured if the treaty were to provide no permanent common international agency, if its execution in such matters was to be left to the slow and uncertain processes of cooperation by ordinary methods of negotiation. If the Peace Conference itself was to be the end of cooperative authority and common counsel among the governments to which the world was looking to enforce justice and give pledges of an enduring settlement, regions like the Saar basin could not be put under a temporary administrative regime which did not involve a transfer of political sovereignty and which contemplated a final determination of its political connections by popular vote to be taken at a distant date; no free city like Dantzig could be created which was, under elaborate international guarantees, to accept exceptional obligations with regard to the use of its port and exceptional relations with a State of which it was not to form a part; properly safeguarded plebiscites could not be provided for where populations were at some future date to make choice what sovereignty they would live under; no certain and uniform method of arbitration could be secured for the settlement of anticipated difficulties of final decision with regard to many matters dealt with in the treaty itself; the long-continued supervision of the task of reparation which Germany was to undertake to complete within the next generation might entirely break down; the reconsideration and revision of administrative arrangements and restrictions which the treaty prescribed but which it was recognized might not prove of lasting advantage or entirely fair if too long enforced would be impracticable. The promises governments were making to one another about the way in which labour was to be dealt with, by law not only but in fact as well, would remain a mere humane thesis if there was to be no common tribunal of opinion and judgment to which liberal statesmen could resort for the influences which alone might secure their redemption. A league of free nations had become a practical necessity. Examine the treaty of peace and you will find that everywhere throughout its manifold provisions its framers have felt obliged to turn to the League of Nations as an indispensable instrumentality for the maintenance of the new order it has been their purpose to set up in the world,—the world of civilized men. 

That there should be a league of nations to steady the counsels and maintain the peaceful understandings of the world, to make, not treaties alone, but the accepted principles of international law as well, the actual rule of conduct among the governments of the world, had been one of the agreements accepted from the first as the basis of peace with the central powers. The statesmen of all the belligerent countries were agreed that such a league must be created to sustain the settlements that were to be effected. But at first I think there was a feeling among some of them that, while it must be attempted, the formulation of such a league was perhaps a counsel of perfection which practical men, long experienced in the world of affairs, must agree to very cautiously and with many misgivings. It was only as the difficult work of arranging an all but universal adjustment of the world’s affairs advanced from day to day from one stage of conference to another that it became evident to them that what they were seeking would be little more than something written upon paper, to be interpreted and applied by such methods as the chances of politics might make available if they did not provide a means of common counsel which all were obliged to accept, a common authority whose decisions would be recognized as decisions which all must respect. 

And so the most practical, the most skeptical among them turned more and more to the League as the authority through which international action was to be secured, the authority without which, as they had come to see it, it would be difficult to give assured effect either to this treaty or to any other international understanding upon which they were to depend for the maintenance of peace. The fact that the Covenant of the League was the first substantive part of the treaty to be worked out and agreed upon, while all else was in solution, helped to make the formulation of the rest easier. The Conference was, after all, not to be ephemeral. The concert of nations was to continue, under a definite Covenant which had been agreed upon and which all were convinced was workable. They could go forward with confidence to make arrangements intended to be permanent. The most practical of the conferees were at last the most ready to refer to the League of Nations the superintendence of all interests which did not admit of immediate determination, of all administrative problems which were to require a continuing oversight. What had seemed a counsel of perfection had come to seem a plain counsel of necessity. The League of Nations was the practical statesman’s hope of success in many of the most difficult things he was attempting. 

And it had validated itself in the thought of every member of the Conference as something much bigger, much greater every way, than a mere instrument for carrying out the provisions of a particular treaty. It was universally recognized that all the peoples of the world demanded of the Conference that it should create such a continuing concert of free nations as would make wars of aggression and spoliation such as this that has just ended forever impossible. A cry had gone out from every home in every stricken land from which sons and brothers and fathers had gone forth to the great sacrifice that such a sacrifice should never again be exacted. It was manifest why it had been exacted. It had been exacted because one nation desired dominion and other nations had known no means of defence except armaments and alliances. War had lain at the heart of every arrangement of the Europe,—of every arrangement of the world,—that preceded the war. Restive peoples had been told that fleets and armies, which they toiled to sustain, meant peace; and they now knew that they had been lied to: that fleets and armies had been maintained to promote national ambitions and meant war. They knew that no old policy meant anything else but force, force,—always force. And they knew that it was intolerable. Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgment demanded that, at whatever cost of independent action, every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom should tend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics. Statesmen might see difficulties, but the people could see none and could brook no denial. A war in which they had been bled white to beat the terror that lay concealed in every Balance of Power must not end in mere victory of arms and a new balance. The monster that had resorted to arms must be put in chains that could not be broken. The united power of free nations must put a stop to aggression, and the world must be given peace. If there was not the will or the intelligence to accomplish that now, there must be another and a final war and the world must be swept clean of every power that could renew the terror. The League of Nations was not merely an instrument to adjust and remedy old wrongs under a new treaty of peace; it was the only hope for mankind. Again and again had the demon of war been cast out of the house of the peoples and the house swept clean by a treaty of peace; only to prepare a time when he would enter in again with spirits worse than himself. The house must now be given a tenant who could hold it against all such. Convenient, indeed indispensable, as statesmen found the newly planned League of Nations to be for the execution of present plans of peace and reparation, they saw it in a new aspect before their work was finished. They saw it as the main object of the peace, as the only thing that could complete it or make it worth while. They saw it as the hope of the world, and that hope they did not dare to disappoint. Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty? Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world? 

And so the result of the Conference of Peace, so far as Germany is concerned, stands complete. The difficulties encountered were very many. Sometimes they seemed insuperable. It was impossible to accommodate the interests of so great a body of nations,—interests which directly or indirectly affected almost every nation in the world,—without many minor compromises. The treaty, as a result, is not exactly what we would have written. It is probably not what any one of the national delegations would have written. But results were worked out which on the whole bear test. I think that it will be found that the compromises which were accepted as inevitable nowhere cut to the heart of any principle. The work of the Conference squares, as a whole, with the principles agreed upon as the basis of the peace as well as with the practical possibilities of the international situations which had to be faced and dealt with as facts. . . . 

The role which America was to play in the Conference seemed determined, as I have said, before my colleagues and I got to Paris,—determined by the universal expectations of the nations whose representatives, drawn from all quarters of the globe, we were to deal with. It was universally recognized that America had entered the war to promote no private or peculiar interest of her own but only as the champion of rights which she was glad to share with free men and lovers of justice everywhere. We had formulated the principles upon which the settlement was to be made,—the principles upon which the armistice had been agreed to and the parleys of peace undertaken,—and no one doubted that our desire was to see the treaty of peace formulated along the actual lines of those principles,—and desired nothing else. We were welcomed as disinterested friends. We were resorted to as arbiters in many a difficult matter. It was recognized that our material aid would be indispensable in the days to come, when industry and credit would have to be brought back to their normal operation again and communities beaten to the ground assisted to their feet once more, and it was taken for granted, I am proud to say, that we would play the helpful friend in these things as in all others without prejudice or favour. We were generously accepted as the unaffected champions of what was right. It was a very responsible role to play; but I am happy to report that the fine group of Americans who helped with their expert advice in each part of the varied settlements sought in every translation to justify the high confidence reposed in them. 

And that confidence, it seems to me, is the measure of our opportunity and of our duty in the days to come, in which the new hope of the peoples of the world is to be fulfilled or disappointed. The fact that America is the friend of the nations, whether they be rivals or associates, is no new fact: it is only the discovery of it by the rest of the world that is new. 

America may be said to have just reached her majority as a world power. It was almost exactly twenty-one years ago that the results of the war with Spain put us unexpectedly in possession of rich islands on the other side of the world and brought us into association with other governments in the control of the West Indies. It was regarded as a sinister and ominous thing by the statesmen of more than one European chancellery that we should have extended our power beyond the confines of our continental dominions. They were accustomed to think of new neighbours as a new menace, of rivals as watchful enemies. There were persons amongst us at home who looked with deep disapproval and avowed anxiety on such extensions of our national authority over distant islands and over peoples whom they feared we might exploit, not serve and assist. But we have not exploited them. And our dominion has been a menace to no other nation. We redeemed our honour to the utmost in our dealings with Cuba. She is weak but absolutely free; and it is her trust in us that makes her free. Weak peoples everywhere stand ready to give us any authority among them that will assure them a like friendly oversight and direction. They know that there is no ground for fear in receiving us as their mentors and guides. Our isolation was ended twenty years ago; and now fear of us is ended also, our counsel and association sought after and desired. There can be no question of our ceasing to be a world power. The only question is whether we can refuse the moral leadership that is offered us, whether we shall accept or reject the confidence of the world. 

The war and the Conference of Peace now sitting in Paris seem to me to have answered that question. Our participation in the war established our position among the nations and nothing but our own mistaken action can alter it. It was not an accident or a matter of sudden choice that we are no longer isolated and devoted to a policy which has only our own interest and advantage for its object. It was our duty to go in, if we were indeed the champions of liberty and of right. We answered to the call of duty in a way so spirited, so utterly without thought of what we spent of blood or treasure, so effective, so worthy of the admiration of true men everywhere, so wrought out of the stuff of all that was heroic, that the whole world saw at last, in the flesh, in noble action, a great ideal asserted and vindicated, by a nation they had deemed material and now found to be compact of the spiritual forces that must free men of every nation from every unworthy bondage. It is thus that a new role and a new responsibility have come to this great nation that we honour and which we would all wish to lift to yet higher levels of service and achievement. 

The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.

The fight to ratify the treaty in the United States had begun.

Meanwhile, further west, another violent episode in the Red Summer of 1919 broke out, this time in Longview Texas.  The spark that caused the riots that broke out that night were the murder of a black defendant in the county jail by a mob a few days earlier.  He had been arrested for having relations with a white woman.  Local black leaders went to the authorities to seek to have the investigate the murder but nothing developed. Following that, a news article was printed in the Chicago Defender about the murder and a local black man who was a sometimes correspondent for the Defender was suspected of being the source.  On this day developments occurred in which a white mob sought to inflict revenge on that individual, leading to the riot.  Various buildings in the black community were set on fire. The next day law enforcement sought reinforcements and both the Texas National Guard and the Texas Rangers were brought in, resulting in order being restored.

July 2, 1919. Scenes of oil production in Texas.

The Mexican Border War: The Third Battle of Ciudad Juarez. June 15-16, 1919 Part 3.

The Juarez racetrack on June 16, 1919.  The large hole in the cupola was caused by it being hit by American artillery.

And with this, the story of the United States and the Mexican Revolution, which we started following nearly daily with the 1916 Columbus Raid, and which became as story which bled into World War One, while not definitively over, is significantly over.

As we saw first on June 14, the Villistas launched their anticipated attack on Juarez very late in the night of June 14.  That attack first met with success, but by morning the Villistas had been pushed back.  American forces that had moved up in anticipation of crossing the Rio Grande accordingly went back into Ft. Bliss.

Those troops were soon back out.  Villa's renewed attack was proving successful and the troops reassembled to cross the Rio Grande.  This time they also brought up two armored gun trucks, the first time they'd been used by the U.S. Army in this locality.  Searchlights were also deployed to illuminate Juarez's streets and buildings in the night.

As the battle raged in Juarez shots inevitably began landing in El Paso, wounding and killing American civilians.  At first the Americans held their fire, but ultimately after taking a few casualties the U.S. Army intervened.  The final blow for the U.S. Army was when Pvt. Salvatore Fusco was killed by Villista sniper fire and Pvt. Burchard F. Casey was wounded.  With that, the American troops were ordered across the border to restore order.  The armored gun trucks crossed the Santa Fe Bridge followed by the 24th Infantry Regiment.  The 5th and 7th Cavalry, under Col. Tommy Tomkins, crossed the Rio Grande directly and moved to the western part of the city with the goal of creating a pincer movement in which Villa would be caught.  Near the Juarez racetrack the infantry encountered withdrawing Constitutionalist who informed them that the Villistas were dug in at the racetrack, which the 82nd Artillery then shelled.  Cavalry advanced from the east on the racetrack but encountered no Villista forces.

 Pvt. Salvatore Fusco.

At daybreak, the Cavalry returned to the river to water their horses and then moved south into Mexico in hopes of assaulting Villa's base.

They did in fact locate it, shell it and then assault it.  However, the Villistas, while at first surprised while eating breakfast, rapidly abandoned the camp, leaving their wounded as well as horses, mules and equipment.

The American infantry remained in Juarez itself while this was going on and received a protest from the Constitutionalist forces for entering the country without invitation, which was ironic under the situation as they were outnumbered and well on their way to defeat at the time that the Americans intervened.  Indeed, they speant the rest of the battle in their barracks.  The Americans soon  nonetheless withdrew, deeming their mission accomplished.   Three Americans were killed in the battle, Pvt. Fusco, Pvt. Anthony Cunningham of the 24th Infantry and Sgt. Pete Chigas of the 7th Cavalry.

Col. Tommy Tomkins in Juarez, whose brother Frank Tomkins had led American cavalry across the border following the Columbus Raid, and who lead the U.S. Cavalry contingent across the border in the Battle of Juarez. The Tomkins effectively bookended the Border War.

The battle was not only the last battle of the Border War, it was the last battle to be fought by Pancho Villa.  He did not retire thereafter, but instead actually conducted areal warfare through an air corps formed in his service. Although he remained very resentful against the US intervention in the battle, as well as of course earlier American intervention in the Mexican Revolution, he never participated in another battle against American troops and he was not really capable of doing so after the Battle of Juarez.  Villistas may have raided in Arizona as late as 1920, when some Mexican forces attacked Ruby Arizona, but the loyalty of those troops is not known.

Funeral procession for Pvt. Fusco.

While the battle didn't result in Villa's capture and it didn't fully end his activities, for all practical purposes he was done for.  So in a way, the 1919 battle achieved what the 1916 intervention had not.  Villa was effectively destroyed as a force in the field.  Once again, the U.S. Army was frustrated in a desire to capture Villa, but it didn't really matter.  Villa, while sufficiently resurgent to have mounted such a campaign, was not the force he had been earlier in the Mexican Revolution even if the Constituionalist forces in Juarez proved inadequate to contest him.  The American reaction to his presence in Juarez, justified by American troops being in harm's way, ended his career as a serious contender in the Mexican Revolution.

June 13, 1919. Misleading Headlines

American troops had not been sent into Mexico.

They were taking up positions near Columbus, New Mexico, however.  As well as standing ready in El Paso.  It was clear by this day that Villa was going to attempt to move north. . . maybe to Juarez, and less likely on Columbus.

And it was unlikely that he was going to try to cross the border.  But being on guard was well warranted.

Vladivostok was also a location where a lot of troops, and refugees, were in evidence on this day in 1919.  In this case, White Russian troops, and refugees fleeing the Reds as the lines changed every day.

June 10, 1919. Meanwhile, in Texas. . . .

The "World's Wonder Oilfield", Burkburnett Texas.  June 10, 1919.

Burkburnett, Texas oilfield north-west extension from opposite Golden Cycle well.  June 10, 1919.

Oil exploration was going great guns in Texas, but guns were beginning to sound again just south of the border.

No peace had yet arrived with Germany, officially, and things were getting pretty tense in Juarez as residents began to flee the border town just south of El Paso.  And Mexican revolutionaries were reported as active elsewhere.

The huge strike in Winnipeg and the impending Telegraph strike were also on the front page.  In fact, the strike in Winnipeg had not been broken and the municipality had been forced to fire nearly the entire town's police force.

And the Boy Scouts were in town.

May 26, 1919. Monday scenes.

Oil brokers, May 26, 1919.  Wichita Falls Texas.

In Wichita Falls, oil brokers conducted their business on the busy curb side.

Treaty news still dominated, but other events were creeping in, including disaster and adventure.

As well as misbehavior and lust.  A Lusk businessman had departed that town with an 18 year old girl, still in school, and abandoned his wife and six children. The shamed couple had relocated to Venice California, where they'd opened a "root beer concession".

The youthful participant in the illicit tryst admitted she had "loved unwisely".  She was now with child.

 Hotel headquarters of the American Red Cross in Berlin.

The Red Cross was extending a helping hand in Germany, now that the war was over. And Germany certainly needed one.

May 5, 1919. Passings, Oil Towns, Parties

L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz.

L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, suffered a stroke on this day in 1919.  His last words were "Now I can cross the Shifting Sands."  He would pass away on May 6.

Texas oil towns, or at least oil fields, were getting a lot of attention on this Monday, May 5.

And the marine rail yard at the Charleston Navy Yard was photographed as well.

As was Margaret Wilson, the daughter of President Woodrow Wilson.  It looks like she borrowed the trench coat of some Colonel for this photographs.

Margaret shared her father's middle name, "Woodrow" (his first name was Thomas).  She'd was born in Gainesville Georgia even though her parents were living in the North at the time but her mother did not want her born amongst Yankees due to the strong Southern identification both parents had.  She served as the White House social hostess for a time after her mother's death, until her father remarried.

She never married herself and indeed was 39 and 40 years of age when she was White House social hostess, an old age for a woman to be unmarried at the time.  In 1938 she traveled to India and became a devotee of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, an Indian spiritual community, where she remained for the rest of her life.

The Italians decided to return to Paris and captured the headlines as a result on this day.

Also on the front page, a party for returned veterans was being planned in Casper.

April 25, 1919. Anzac Day, J'Accuse, Canadians return.

On this day in 1919, the French film J'Accuse was released.  

J'Accuse can legitimately be regarded as one of the very first anti war movies ever made.  The message of the film was made all the more potent by the fact that the director had used actual French soldiers for its filming while the war was still on.  Reportedly 80% of the soldier extras in the film were killed in action before the war was over.

The movie famously features the ghosts of the dead in accusation, but it also features a somewhat complicated betrayal by a love interest plot fairly typical of early films.

Also on this day, Australian soldiers marched for ANZAC Day parades in several cities, but those in Sidney were cancelled due to the Spanish Flu.  Contrary to widespread popular claim, this was not the first ANZAC Day. The official date had been established in 1916.  This was the first post war ANZAC Day.

While Empire troops were marching in Australia, they were arriving in New York on their way home to Canada as well.

Canadian officers Sir Henry Worth Thornton (president of the Canadian National Railway in civilian life) and Air Commodore Alfred Cecil Critchley arriving in New York City on the Aquitania.  Both general officers are wearing classic examples of British officer dress.

The troop ship Aquitania arrived with Canadian soldiers on their way home, greeted by at least one British dignitary.

Gen. Thornton with Sir James Benjamin Bell, Timber Comptroller for the British government.

Ranger Texas, April 25, 1919.

Ranger Texas was photographed.

Ranger was where famous western historian Walter Prescott Webb went to school, being from a nearby farm.

April 24, 1919. Oil Town, 130th Field Artillery arrives, Well Dressed Students

Burkburnett Texas, April 24, 1919.

On this day in 1919, Burkburnett Texas got a formal portrait.  Seems like the oilfield was a bit close.

Officers of the 130th.  The officer on the left, as viewed, is carrying a sidearm with that sidearm being a revolver, probably one of the two M1917 revolver types issued during World War One.  Why he's under arms is unclear, unless of course the revolver is one that he owns, in which case it wouldn't have been a M1917.  He's also wearing private purchase "trench boots", high leather boots, rather than the official issue field boots.  Private purchase boots were common for officers.  The officer next to him wears the regulation leather puttees that were common for artillerymen.

The 130th Field Artillery, part of the 35th Division and an artillery unit made up of Kansas National Guardsmen, arrived in New York on April 23 aboard the Mobile.  the Bain News Service published its photographs of the unit on April 24.

The student staff of the Wyoming Student was photographed for this issue of their paper.  

The Wyoming Student was the paper that became The Branding Iron, the student newspaper today and for many years.  The presentation was quite a bit different, with the presentation both then and now being pretty good.  What surprised me about this issue, and why I put it up, was the high standard of dress exhibited by the student staff.  I don't think this would be repeated in a paper today, as I don't think you could find that many young men who owned suits.  Quite a change in a century.

February 18, 1919. Changing maps, stopping by the Red Cross, Maintaining the Headquarters, Tragic news at Bates Hole, Pilot County Crisis, Turkish wives.

Political cartoon that ran on February 18, 1919.

 British serviceman, left and American servicemen, right, entering a Red Cross canteen on this day in 1919.  Note the unit patches on the uniforms of the American soldiers, which were really a post World War One item.

British serviceman on left, American on right.  Note the unit patch.

The work of the Red Cross carried on.

Headquarters troops, Southern Department, Ft. Sam Houston, February 18, 1919.  Throughout the war, not only training occurred in Texas, but the Army continued to patrol a tense border with a country still in revolution.

Meanwhile, revolution or no (and in spite of the Allies actually requiring, for the time being, the Germans to keep troops in the Baltic's as a hedge against the Red Army, a new armistice limited the Germans to 25,000 troops.

A tragedy occurred locally at Bates Hole, an area I'm well familiar with, when news arrived that a soldier from the ranching reaching who had served in France had been killed in the war..  

It's funny how things work as there's a selection of names that I associate with Bates Hole, and Galehouse isn't one of them.  Time moves on and names are lost.

Pilot County, which never occurred, was still much in the news.

And women who had worked during the war were proving reluctant to leave their jobs.

And a Cheyenne paper reported that sailors who had been interned by the Turks during the war were returning with a lot of "beautiful" wives.