Walking

For the overwhelming majority of human history, if a person wanted to get somewhere, anywhere, they got there one of two ways.

They walked, or they ran.

That's it.

Businessmen, Washington D. C., 1940s. Walking.

Alternative modes of transportation didn't even exist for much of human history. The boat was almost certainly the very first one to occur to anyone.  Or rather, the canoe.  People traveled by canoe before they traveled by any other means other than walking.

 

Nez Perce Canoe.  This type of canoe is basically the prototype for all watercraft.

Animal transport as an alternative to walking happened a long time ago, and gets pushed back further and further, in an example of Holscher's First Law of History.  We probably took up riding horses no later than 15,000 years ago, and in all likelihood probably earlier than that.  Maybe 20,000 years ago.  According to some, riding horses actually followed riding reindeer, and it may have been an observation of horse herding people, who were doing that from the ground, upon encountering reindeer herding people, who riding reindeer for the same purpose.  Something along the lines of "hey. . . .that looks easier than chasing horses. . . "

Imperial Russian soldier riding a reindeer.  Some students of the topic believe that people probably rode reindeer before any other animal. I don't know if any culture rides them today, but they were still used as a mounted transportation animal in Siberia within the past century.

It was never the case, however, that people rode horses by default.  The school age myth that "everyone rode horses" prior to the automobile, is just that.  It's a myth.

Saddle horse, indeed a Saddlebred, saddled and ready to go.  People have been riding horses for maybe 20,000 years or so and they remain a significant mode of transportation in some areas and for some things today.  From our A Revolution In Rural Transportation thread.

We've dealt with this topic at length before, in our A Revolution In Rural Transportation thread, but that dealt with the topic in a different fashion.  What we didn't emphasize there is the simple fact that prior to the automobile, most people walked in most places.  Even in the rural West, people who lived in towns and cities, and that was most of the population, walked.  Keeping a horse in town is expensive, and most people didn't do it, anywhere.

Black Horse Livery Stable, South Pass City Wyoming, from HABERS study, Library of Congress.  Livery stables were sort of the combo gas station/parking garage of their day, as you boarded your horse there while visiting a town or city.

The average working man, in the pre-automobile era, in the US walked seven miles to work, according to Henry Fairlie's "The Cows Revenge".  That's quite a hike, and that tells us a lot about conditions and how people lived, and how they viewed walking, prior to the car. Simply put, the introduction and acceptance of the automobile has bizarrely impacted everything about this topic.  It's impacted when we walk, how we view walking, how we build our cities, and even our health.

 Crowd walking to work in 1916.

Living in a world that was afoot, the default means of getting anywhere for everyone was shoe leather.  So, for most men, to get to work everyday, they walked.  So what you may ask? Well, that tells us a lot about how they lived.  As noted above, they tended to live within walking distance of their work. For the more well to do, that tended to mean that they lived within walking distance of the heart of the city or town, as that meant that they had the luxury of walking less.  If they were poorer, they lived further out, unless they were industrial workers, in which case they often lived right next to the plants or mines they worked in. The other day here, we had a thread up on Salt Lake City depicting "Greek Town", which is where working class Greek immigrants lived, right next to the industrial are of Salt Lake City at that time.

 Lawyer walking in early 20th Century New York.

That tells us something right there about how cities and towns were laid out, as opposed to now.  If people were largely walking to work, and the wealthiest lived closest to their businesses in the heart of the town, the current "suburban" and "bedroom" community natures of so many of our cities simply didn't exist. The very wealthy had country homes they'd retreat to in the summer, when they also could afford to be away from their businesses, but otherwise people generally lived in much more compact neighborhoods than they do now, and they didn't want to live in a place which wasn't within some reasonable walking distance of their occupations.  Indeed, while there's been a trend in recent years towards trendy city centers, the post World War Two trend of the middle class and wealthy living away from the city center with those who are less well off living towards it was the opposite of the historic norm, although there were always poor neighborhoods within cities.

For women, as conditions generally meant that they worked at home as a rule, it meant that they tended to walk to and from those areas strongly associated with their daily tasks, such as markets.  This meant, of course, that local markets were common, as there was no advantage to having a large store with a large parking lot, obviously, if people had to walk to it.  Such small stores were the norm. Today they are the exception.  And grocery stores within residential districts were also very common.  This city had at least three such grocery stores at one time, and now has a single one, which has become somewhat of a specialty store.

 Young workers returning to work, on foot, after break for noon meal.

Small shops, normally family run, tended to mean that the people who ran them, who usually worked very long hours, often lived in the shop.  People lived above their stores, which saved money on lodging, but also saved time hiking.  If you had to be in your grocery at 4:00 am, you probably didn't want to have to start walking by 2:30 everyday, particularly in the winter.  You just walked down the stairs instead.

 Lumberjacks walking home after work.  1944

And it even impacted how and where people worshiped.  I've noted here before, in a different thread, how many Catholic churches there are in Denver.  Some of them are not really very far from one another. Why is that? Well, if you had to walk to Mass on  Sunday, they would be far.  Now people think nothing of driving ten or more miles to a church.  If you had to walk that distance very Sunday, it would.  And that would be considered by the denomination as well.

Holy Ghost Catholic Church, downtown Denver.

 

St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church, Denver.

 

St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Cajetan Catholic Churches, Denver Colorado, as viewed from the Embassy Suites.

The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, downtown Denver.

 Mother of God Catholic Church, downtown Denver.

Downtown Catholic churches in Denver Colorado.

Indeed, some might note how in Italy there are a large number of dioceses, whereas in the U.S. this tends not to be true.  Wyoming or Montana, for example, have one Catholic diocese for the entire state.  In Italy, the next town might have its own diocese and its own Bishop. Why? Well, when those diocese were set up, which might be as long ago as the 1st or 2nd Centuries, the Priests had to walk.  Generally, the extent of a Diocese was defined by how far those operating from the Cathedral could walk in some reasonable number of days.  In England, this was done in a similar fashion with the Priest living in a central community within a days walking distance of a variety of places they served, and then returning to their central community.

Service people often also walked, although not exclusively.  Many policemen, for example, operated out of a district office and covered their "beat" on foot. This wasn't for more effective local policing, as is so often the case today, but because walking was the default norm for everyone.  Some were mounted of course, and that was for more effective coverage of an area.  Most soldiers, in an era before extensive logistical support, were infantrymen, as most combat solders remained, and they walked everywhere as a rule.  Officers, of course, rode, but because they were officers.

 Pedestrians, New York City, 1897.  Policeman to far left.

And when I mean infantrymen walked, they walked.  When we read of infantrymen during the Revolution walking from one northeastern location to another, that's what they did.  When we invaded Quebec during the war, most of the American troops walked in, and walked out.  Hundreds of miles. And we read of the Mexican War, in which the United States gathered and entered Mexico with one army, and then switched out to a second as call ups expired, we're reading about men who walked all that way to and from Mexico, for the most part.

French infantry, 1914.

In more modern wars, railroads entered the picture, and automobiles about a century ago, but still infantry largely walked.  German infantry in World War Two, for example, remained largely of the old type.  Walking everywhere.  When we see photos of German infantrymen in Russia during World War Two, those troops were largely on foot the entire time, some rail transportation notwithstanding.  

This changed, for Americans anyway, only fairly recently, as the automobile really came in.  Other forms of transportation added to that, of course, but as cars were fully adopted, and adapted to, Americans came to the idea that they should drive everywhere, and they largely do. This too has changed everything about everything, how we view our cities, how we view transportation, and even how we view ourselves.

 Unemployed, Great Depression, walking towards Los Angeles.

But it didn't change it for everyone, at least not completely. Some walkers of the old type hung on, and do even today.  If you are one of them, the change tends to be self evident, even if you don't conceive of it in that fashion.

I was one of the walkers, that is one of the people who kept walking for daily transportation.  My mother was, and perhaps because of the way I grew up, or the fact that I am just cheap, I continued to be and still somewhat am. When I was a kid, we still walked to get where we were going, normally.  My mother was a terrible driver anyway, and if we asked her for a ride, it was due to something exceptional going on.  Walking within a couple of miles was the norm for anything we wanted to do that was that close, including going to school.  Riding a bike was the norm beyond that.  When I went away to college, and every dime counted, I went fully over to walking.  I always walked to school, to church, to nearly everywhere, unless I needed to carry something or was going more than a few miles away.  When I returned home to work, I walked to work and back everyday until I got married, at which time I moved a greater distance from downtown.  During the summer I'll still ride a bike to work, however, if the weather is nice.

Given that prospective, some interesting observations nearly have to occur to you.  One thing is that Americans now tend to view walking as a form of "exercise", rather than something that just is.

There's no doubt that it is exercise, and as people like to point out, it's "good exercise".  But its actually exercise that we would have normally gotten just by living.  The automobile has not only caused us to forget that, it's helped make us unhealthy and fat to some degree, as we sit and ride where formally we would have walked. But even while accurate, the idea that walking is "exercise" is a peculiar thought, if you tended to walk to get somewhere anyhow.  

And how it exhibits itself as exercise is interesting.  People buy clothing and shoes just for walking.  Walking shoes, in fact, have existed for a long long time but that there are "walking shoes", when walking is the default means of transportation, is odd.  Walking clothing, on the other hand, is downright odd.

In any prior era, when people walked somewhere, including to work, they simply wore what they were wearing for whatever other activity they were doing.  Not now.  Now walkers dress in some cases like runners, in special athletic clothing.  Its not necessary and a little peculiar, as walking is simply something that humans do, or at least in most eras in most places it was something that they simply did.

For those who have retained the old ways, this is particularly striking.  When I lived in Laramie, every Saturday night I walked to Mass, a round trip of about six miles, and then the next morning I walked another round trip of six to buy a newspaper.  In doing that, I sometimes ran into an elderly couple that was headed in the same direction, probably to church, and an exercise walker who took that course on their exercise beat.  I just wore what I wore.  The elderly couple was dress appropriately for church.  The exercise walker was wearing exercise clothing.  The irony was that the elderly couple and I typically passed the exerciser and out paced him, probably because we were more used to routinely walking.  I always wondered about the special clothing, as I wasn't working up a sweat, but the fact that the exercise walker felt compelled to wear special clothing made you feel as perhaps you should too. Was I sweaty and didn't know it?

Not that walking in prior eras didn't also impact clothing, it did, and even the change in this is very noticeable to those who have experienced the change, which has continued to develop even in our own time.

Students of costume often note how heavily people dressed in prior eras, and how common hats were.  Well, hats were common as everyone spent part of their days outdoors, even if that only meant walking to work.  If you had to walk a mile when it might rain, you'd wear a hat.  And probably a real hat, rather than a cap.

You'd also wear enough clothes to protect you from the elements.  Presently, if you go by any place their are young people, you'll notice some wear light clothing, including shorts, even in the dead of winter.  You wouldn't do that, and couldn't do that, if you had to walk to school a mile or more.  That's a byproduct of modern heating, and transportation.

Walkers who simply walk also will find that almost everyone else in American society finds that odd and resists it.  If you walk because you'd prefer to, you're going to be offered rides.  I've sometimes found that the same people will repeatedly offer you rides, convinced that you can't possibly prefer walking, and they can be quite persistent about it. It's a fairly surprising thing, given as sidewalks are everywhere and walking is our design norm.  Psychologically, however, it seems eccentric to many.

Everything Old is New Again. Yeoman's laws of History and Behavior and the U.S. Military Sidearm.

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Yeoman's Second Law of History.  Everything last occurred more recently than you suppose.

Here too, it doesn't matter what the topic is, it happened much more recently than you think it did.  Almost everything and every behavior is really durable, if it had any purpose in the first place.

For example, last bayonet charge?  Are you thinking World War One?  Nope, the British did one in Iraq.  Small unit, but none the less they did it.  And in the Second Gulf War.  Last cavalry charge?  Civil War?  No again, they've happened as recently as the current war in Afghanistan.  Last use of horse mounted troops?  Well. . . we aren't there.  It's still going on.  We're never as far from what we think is the distant past as we imagine.

From Yeoman's Laws of History.

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 Soldiers training with M1911 .45 ACP pistols during World War Two.

This past week, the U.S. Army announced that it is giving up on an effort to replace the M9 pistol it adopted in 1985 (basically because Congress forced it to) with another 9mm pistol.  It wants a pistol that shoots a larger cartridge.  Something in the .40 to .45 range.

The pistol that never really left.  A Greek soldier coaches a Polish soldier in the shooting of the M1911 handgun.  How exactly a scene like this comes about, I don't know, but the M1911 kept on keeping on in the hands of soldiers who really needed an effective handgun.

Instruction on the M9, the Army's current (well, one of the current) handguns, taking place in Afghanistan.

People who follow such things will recall that the U.S. Army had been using the .45 ACP cartridge and the M1911 pistol since 1911.  The Army never saw any reason to replace either, but Congress did and ultimately the Army was forced into adopting the 9mm cartridge, which was the NATO pistol standard.  The Army ended up adopting a Beretta pattern of pistol as the M9, and has been using it ever since, sort of.

Truth be known, just as with the 5.56 cartridge and the M16, there were those in the Army who were never very happy with the change, and ongoing criticism went on for a long time.  There were always efforts to paint a happy picture on the pistol situation, in spite of persistent rumors of the cartridge being inadequate and the M9 having problems, but they were basically officially denied.  Then wars happened.

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Yeoman's Thirteenth Law of Human Behavior:  The measure of the utility of something is how well it accomplishes a task, not how new it is.  Nonetheless, people tend to go with the new, even if less useful.

People tend to believe that they adopt new technology or implements because they are better or more efficient than what came before them.  Very often they are. But they aren't always.  Nonetheless, the new tends to supplant the old, simply because its new.

There are plenty of examples of this.  Some old tools and old methods accomplish any one job better than things that came after them, and some things remain particularly useful within certain condition or niches.  Nonetheless, it takes educating a person to that to keep those older things in use, because they are, well. . . older.

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For reasons that are a bit of a historical oddity, the U.S. Army has always been pistol heavy compared to other armies, and so unlike many other armies, the Army's pistol actually ends up being used in combat.  Given that, the .45 ACP began to creep back into use for special troops in the service, followed by the M1911.  Recently, the Marine Corps simply gave up on the 9mm M9 and readopted a new version of the M1911 for combat troops. The Army now appears set to do so, and in fact has been issuing variants of the M1911 to special troops for some time.  The Navy too has been issuing a .45 ACP pistol, although it's not a M1911, when conditions require it.  This follows the interesting story of the service's 7.62 NATO M14 rifle creeping back into use after decades of denying it was more effective than the 5.56 M16, although there's no indication that the M14 will replace the M4/M16, and I am sure it will not. The M1911 .45 ACP pistol may very well end up replacing the M9 and the 9mm completely. At least some big cartridge pistol will.  This basically proves the critics of the M9 and the 9mm to have been right all along.

 

U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.  All of the firearms that can be seen in this photograph are M16A1 rifles, a rifle that came into service due to being first adopted by the USAF for service (as the M16) in Vietnam.  The rifle supplanted the M14 over the objection of Springfield Armory, which ended up ceasing to exist in the process.  In spite of repeated efforts to fix various problems associated with it, which has resulted in the rifle remaining in service to this day, there have always been grumblings about it.



U.S. soldier of the 1st Infantry Division in Afghanistan, with an updated version of the M14 rifle.  Like the M1911, the M14 never really left the services, as it carried on in the hands of special troops before coming roaring back into service due to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's sort of an interesting story in context of the lessons of history.  The Army has played out this story before.

The U.S. Army went big into sidearms during the frontier era, when effective revolvers first became available.  Revolvers ended up being issued to every single cavalryman by the mid 19th Century, which was not the case for most armies, which relied much more on sabers and perhaps a long arm of some sort.  American cavalrymen, by the post Civil War frontier era, were all provided with a carbine, a saber and a sidearm.  In the field, sabers were often omitted.  Because of this, sidearms were regarded as a serious combat arm by the American military, and in spite of efforts to change that over the years, this remains the case.  American troops carry sidearms to an unusual degree.

In the mid 19th Century, cap and ball service revolvers were generally .36 or .44, with .44s being the more common issue arm in the U.S. Army (and also in the Confederate army).  .36s were used, but they were not used as much as .44s.  The .44 "Dragoon" revolver had come in the prior two decades, and it remained the standard up until 1873, at which point the Army adopted the M1873 Colt revolver in a .45 cartridge.  Why the change from .44 to .45 I don't know, as there was already a big .44 cartridge available, but that brought in the .45.  

Civil War Union Cavalryman with Colt 1860 model revolver.  This cap and ball revolver was the last of the series of successful cap and ball Colts.

The .45 as the service caliber remained in use for decades but in the late 19th Century an effort was made to replace it with a .38 cartridge and a new, double action, revolver was adopted.  It was used, along with old stocks of .45 revolvers, in the Spanish American War, but it was a failure in the Philippine Insurrection and .45 revolvers were reissued and a new one adopted.

 The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry on the San Juan Heights. Theodore Roosevelt carried, and used, a .38 Colt revolver that had been recovered from the USS Maine in the action.

Sound sort of familiar?

Finally, a brand new .45 cartridge and a new automatic pistol were adopted in 1911. That pistol and cartridge carried right on until 1985, and it appears set to come back on it.  History repeating itself.

  

American soldiers in France with captured German 9mm P08s. The 9mm cartridge is actually a little older than the .45 ACP.

This is an interesting story, to followers of things of this type, as it shows the "history repeating itself maxim, and it's a story the US has actually lived through more than one.  The US military had a .45 sidearm and started to replace it with a lighter .38, but that failed, and the US went back to the .45.  Later in the 1980s, the US again replaced the .45 with a lighter cartridge, this time the 9mm. Granted, politics and pressure were involved with it, and an aspect of it was the adjustment of the service to increased numbers of women combined with the erroneous belief that women couldn't handle the bigger handgun.  It's not really a simple story. Yet here again, the 9mm is set to be replaced, apparently, with a .45 again.

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Yeoman's First Law of History.  Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect.

It doesn't matter what the topic is, but the first occurrence of anything is always further back in time than originally thought.  This is why certain distant dates are continually pushed back, and will continue to be. So, take whatever you like, say the first use of the horse, or the first appearance of humans in North America, and you'll find the "first" date gets more and more distant in time.  Things that were thought to happen, say, 5,000 years ago, turn out to have happened 50,000 years ago, or 500,000 years ago, as we gain better data.

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We've done that with rifles too, actually.  At the turn of the century, when smokeless powder weapons were coming in, the .45-70 single shot "Trapdoor" Springfield was replaced by the .30-40 Krag in the Army.  In the Navy and Marine Corps, however, the .45-70 was replaced by the 6mm Navy Lee, which proved too light and was soon thereafter replaced itself.  

U.S. Marines on board the USS Wyoming, equipped with Navy Lees.

Ultimately, the .30 became universal in the US military until the 5.56 came in, but then the .30 started coming back in again, with the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The point?  I suppose there really isn't one, other than that this provides an interesting way to explore the operation of some of the prime Yeoman's Laws of History and Yeoman's Law of Human Behavior.

Mid Week at Work: Female mechanic in UK, World War One.

"Amazing" discoveries about early human's and Yeoman's First Law of History

There's been a couple of recent very interesting discoveries about our early ancestors recently, which have drawn some conclusions that, frankly, are less than amazing.  Its an application of Yeoman's First Law of History at work.

First of all, within the last couple of days human footprints have been found in the UK which are at least 800,000, if not 1,000,000 years old.  That's pretty cool.  The temperature of the UK, at that point in time, was also pretty darned cool.  Scandinavian like, in fact.

This has lead to a lot of pondering (why were they stomping around in the mud, for example?), but it's also lead to at least one amazingly dense comment from a scientist who wondered aloud if they had the ability to make clothing.

Seriously? 

Of course, they did. The question is idiotic.

Which leads me to my second item.

Scientist have recently confirmed that modern human beings of European descent carry a few genes they can trace to Neanderthal human beings, thereby confirming that Neanderthals and what were once commonly called Cro Magnums, but now are generally called "archaic" modern man, um. . .well you know.

No kidding, no surprise there.  Or at least there should be. We're actually all in the same species.  The bigger surprise there is that apparently Neanderthals, and we were on the edge of genetic comparability. That does surprise me because, as noted, we're in the same species.  Neanderthals were only unique in that they were genetically adapted to extreme cold by having short, but stout, bodies.  Modern populations of humans now feature quite a variety in body types, which our archaic ancestors actually did not at that time, so that's not as big of a deal as it might seem.  Included in our current adaptations are body forms that contemplate high heat and intense cold.  That an isolated population of human beings living in Ice Age Europe would have adaptations to their environment isn't that surprising.

But it's been oddly surprising to some that these populations would mix.  In our true European "we feel guilty about everything" outlook, we've often assumed that this must have been the result of violence.

Well, some probably were, but our surprise is probably because of the long-standing tradition of depicting Neanderthals as really ugly, which they probably were not.  They probably just looked different, as many current populations do.  Looking different, while often a cause of hatred amongst people, has often been an attractant too, and so far there hasn't been one single example of any group of people encountering another in which mixing didn't occur.  And chances are high that Neanderthals didn't look like brutes, but rather were dressed in a fashion similar to any new population they were encountering.  So, it's a pretty good bet that it didn't take long before some archaic member of our species was saying something like, "have you seen that cute Neanderthal girl that gets water down by the stream. . . . I wonder if she'd like to come over and share some Aurochs some evening?"

On this, I'd also note that within the last year I've seen something that seemed to confirm that Neanderthals could "speak".  No kidding, they were human beings and talking is something we all seem to be able to do. For what it's worth, their brain cases had bigger volume than modern man's.  For that matter, archaic members of our own species also did, and I saw the same speech speculation about them a couple of years ago.  I have no doubt that both populations spent the evenings yakking it up and could speak just fine.  I also suspect that having a bigger brain case than modern humans means exactly what we might suppose it meant.

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

A virtual icon of the liberated strong woman, Rosie the Riveter proclaimed "we can do it" to the nation and became a symbol of the working woman.  In reality, most Rosie's put the riveter down and actually did return to their prewar lives.  This image pales in comparison to Rockwell's stunning original version.

In the popular imagination, it was World War Two that took women out of the homes, and into careers.  Removed from the domestic scene for the first time by the necessity of the workplace in the greatest war in human history, the story goes, women realized that they could do a man's job and refused to return to their domestic roles.  It's a nice simple story.

It also just isn't true.

 General motors worker, World War Two.

It wasn't beating the Axis that changed the domestic scene, it was the conquering of domestic chores by machines that changed things, and not all that rapidly at that.  Indeed, women didn't even experience the workplace in large numbers for their first time in World War Two.  They'd already been there during World War One.

Riveting is hard, dangerous work.  But dragging a plow in the absence of draft animals, is hard, dangerous, brutal work.  This World War One poster isn't a flight of fancy, it's actually an illustration of an actual photograph of three French farm women dragging an implement as they no longer have any draft animals on their farms, and they no longer have their husbands their to help.

It is, as is well known, very true that women picked up the laboring oar in the Allied countries, by choice and by necessity, during World War Two.  But they also had during World War One.  It was women who loaded the explosives in artillery shells in the Great War, at a time when that had not yet been automated.  The men who would have done it were largely in the service, and their smaller hands made it an easier thing for them to do. And women filled scores of other industrial roles as well.

 Women war workers in dormitory, 1917.

And they filled farming roles at a level which was not approached again, ever.  So many women were needed for agricultural roles that Canadian women were recruited to work as timber cruisers in Scotland.  Women plowed the fields and did the sowing in France, England and Germany.  And they also were pressed into that role in the US and Canada, although in smaller, but not insignificant, numbers.

 

Recruiting poster for the Women's Land Army.

 

 

 The YMCA also recruited for young women to work as farmers during World War One.

Indeed, in some warring nations the role of women was more significant in World War One, than it was in World War Two.  Women worked in every warring nation in both wars, in what had been men's roles, but the need for female heavy labor was greater in France and the UK in the Great War than it was in World War Two.  During World War Two, because of German occupation, French women did not find employment much outside their traditional roles, while in World War One they had been employed in heavy labor.  World War Two was a horrific nightmare for the UK, but it actually required less manpower than did the Great War, which was a British bloodbath.  Women were largely not employed in Germany, due to some strange Nazi revulsion against doing so, and a view of women that was rather creepy. 

And women entered military service for the first time in World War One, not World War Two. The U.S. Navy recruited "Yoemanettes," prior to WWII's "WAVES."  The British and Commonwealth forces used large numbers of female nurses, including tow of my mother's aunts, who traveled from Canada to France for the war.  British and Australian horsewomen broke horses for their respective armies.  Russian women found a place as theoretical combat troops for the first time in World War One, not World War Two, when the Imperial Russian Army rose a Women's Battalion of Death (it didn't see action).

So what changed?

Well, in one sense, not much. The concept that World War Two's working women stayed in the workplace is grossly exaggerated.  For the most part, they didn't.  Most in fact left their wartime employment and returned to domestic lives they'd hoped for, or at least expected, prior to the war.  Indeed, a lot of occupations did not open up for women for decades.  Lawyers I know, for example, who went to law school right after World War Two have related to me that it was extremely difficult for a woman to get through the schools as they were harassed, in part, by male professors (and students) who didn't feel they belonged there.  I know one woman who did go through law school in the 1940s, and was a highly respected lawyer, but she's an example of one. For the most part, women's occupations weren't a lot wider in variety after the war than they were before. A big exception was the role of secretary, which had become an exclusively female role by the 1940s, but then it was very much well on the way to that prior to World War Two.  And that role is telling as to the reason.  The reason women replaced men as secretaries (which was controversial at first) was due to a machine. . . the typewriter.

 

Manual typewriters, 1940s.

It was machines that changed the relationship of people to work, and by extension it was women who were most impacted.  For women, the machines that would have the greatest impact in their relationship to work were domestic machines.

Electric washing machine, with hand wringer, 1940s.

We've blogged about it here before, but it wasn't just women who had a different relationship with domestic chores.  Indeed, this is so much the case, that it's hard to appreciate it now. This impacted what men and women did, and had to do, on daily basis.

Most modern domestic machines are post World War Two inventions, or post War War Two perfections.  Consider, therefore what average conditions were like prior to the modern era.

There are certain things that everyone has to handle, in one way or another, every day.  We all need to eat, we all need to acquire food to eat, and we all need keep ourselves and our clothing decent in some fashion.  Seems simple enough, doesn't it. And, for us now, it really is.

For most of us, today, we can easily keep several days food in a refrigerator.  We can easily cook that food with a gas or electric, or microwave, stove everyday.  Most of us have clothing that is easily washable as well.  No big deal.  And when we go to clean our living quarters, that doesn't create much of a problem either.

Well, consider now the situation prior to World War One.  That's now a century ago, but it's part of our modern era.  Quite recognizable to most of us, and when presented in film seemingly a dressier, if somewhat different, version of our current era.

But in that recognizable era there was no domestic refrigeration.  People did preserve food in the house, but via an "ice box."  Indeed, my father had grown so accustomed to this term when he was young that he always called the refrigerator the "ice box" even though he'd probably not lived in a house that had one since he was a small child.  

Woman pouring mild for her son, kept cold in a trailer equipped with an ice box. This is a WWII vintage photo of a Defense War Worker trailer. The really telling thing depicted by this photo isn't the ice box, which was an old technology, but that the woman is dressed in shorts, which reflected a very recent change.  She could appear as modern in nearly every home today, which her World War One counterpart would not.

Folks who cooled food with an ice box, acquired food everyday. If you wanted fresh food, you bought it that day.  Many women went to the market for fresh meat everyday.  There was little choice but to do that.  And ice was delivered periodically also, by a horse drawn wagon.  Both of my parents had recollections of the ice wagon.

Cooking the food was a long precess also. Nothing existed that was already prepared.  People didn't have frozen food to prepare. Canned food, of course, did already exist.  But by and large people had to prepare everything that day, whatever meal was being considered.  And part of that was due to the fact that modern stoves were only coming in during this period.

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.

Wood burning stove in Denver.  Typical pre 1920 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1930 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1940 stove.

Turn of century advertisement for stove polish.  Cleaning a wood burning stove would be no treat.

Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.

 World War Two era propaganda photograph, trying to depict an inattentive woman letting toast burn, and therefore wasting resources.  Note how complicated this electric toaster is.

You'll still occasionally see old fashioned toasters in sheep and cattle camps, and probably elsewhere. They just hold the bread so that the toast can be toasted over a burner.  Pretty simple, and not much of a labor saving device, right? Well, consider the totality of it.  To toast you had to watch the toast, rather than just slip the bread down into the toaster.

For that matter, everything was relatively labor intensive save for boiling and roasting, which is probably why things tended to be boiled or roasted.

 Man cooking in a cow camp for cowboys.  He's using two cast iron dutch ovens (I still use one routinely) to cook over a fire.  This photo first appeared on this blog in 2009 in a very early entry on cooking changes.

Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

And such innovations weren't limited to kitchen and the laundry room but other devices entered the house that saved domestic labor in all sorts of ways.  For example, the vacuum cleaner came in.

Woman in Montana vacuuming in her home, about 1940.  Of note, the book case on the right is a barristers case, something normally associated with lawyers.  She's vacuuming a large rug on a wooden floor.

It might be easy to scoff at that, but it shouldn't be.  Homes built before the vacuum cleaner generally didn't have wall to wall carpeting, and for good reason, but people did have large area carpets in them, like the one if the photo above.  And they were cleaned by beating them.  For those with large area rugs, of course, that's still done today after a while, as they can't really be adequately cleaned simply by vacuuming, but you don't have to do it as often.

To beat a rug, what you do is roll it up and cart it out to the clothes line, a feature in the yard that's actually prohibited in many subdivisions today, and you whack it repeatedly until the dust quits flying out of it.  It's a two person job for a heavy rug.  

Of course, as noted, wall to wall carpeting was not the norm, as cleaning wouldn't allow for it, nearly anywhere.  What that meant is that people had to take on the rest of the cleaning of the floor by some other method.  The other flooring surfaces were wood and tile, with both being in most houses to some extent.  Tiles were cleaned as they still are, with mop, scrub brush, and sponge.  Wooden floors, however, were polished.  Floor wax is something most of us don't think about today, but they did then.  A wooden floor was damp mopped occasionally and then polished with floor wax.  In larger commercial buildings there came to be a machine for this, and there still is.  A floor polisher is a large machine with a circular disk that will do this. At Ft. Sill, where I went to Basic Training, we polished the floor every Sunday.  My father had a floor polisher for his office, so I knew how to operate that before I went to Basic.  Now, most folks don't have floor polishers.

Although, I'll  note as an aside, tile and wood floors have come roaring back into the use. They were always pretty, but when the machines came in, people went berserk with carpeting. All carpeting wears and becomes dirty, but people carpeted everything, including having carpet laid over the top of beautiful wood and tile floors.  By the 1970s carpet became shaggy, the way that the eras teenagers did, and sometimes came in hideous loud colors.  On odd occasion, if you can find an office or home that's never been updated, you can see the special in all of its bizarre glory.

Okay, so we now have a lot of appliances of all sorts. So what?  How can that support the thesis stated above.  Well, consider how things worked prior to these things started to really come in during the 1920s.

Let's start with a farm example. The US was much more rural a century ago than it is now, and many more men and women lived on them than do now.  Indeed, a fairly high percentage of the country did.  And lets take the example of a labor intensive time of the year, say harvesting.

Some years ago I saw a documentary which interviewed old men who had been boys in Wisconsin during the waning days of big horse farming.  One of them described very well how this worked, and serves as an excellent example.  Harvesting was communal in nature, just like branding remains here today.  So a collection of farmers worked on each other farms to get it done. And in order to get it done, the women started the day really early, about 4:00 a.m.  They started the day that early, as they pooled their labor in order to cook a large breakfast for the collection of men who would be harvesting.  That large breakfast was necessary as they were going to expend a lot of calories that day. All that cooking was done by hand, nothing was prepared in advance as nothing could be.  They fed the men about 5:00, who then went to work in the fields.  

That didn't mean a break for the women, however.  Immediately after breakfast they started cleaning, by hand (no dishwasher) the dishes and cooking implements.  That took some time, which left just enough time to start cooking a large noon meal, which they delivered to the fields. After that, they cleaned again, which left just enough time to cook a large dinner, following which the men worked until low light shut the day down.  The women, in turn, were kept working in that task until late.  It was a long, long, day for men and women, and labor intensive all the way around.

Okay, that's a farming example, but it'd be different for folks in town, right?  Well, not really.

Elsewhere on this blog I have Henry Fairlie's excellent essay "The Cow's Revenge" up somewhere.  In that, he ably describes life of a century ago in towns and cities, for the average working man.  They average blue collar worker walked to work an average distance of seven miles.  He worked about ten hours a day, and he obviously didn't go home at noon.  To support that, once again, he ate a pretty hardy breakfast and packed a pretty hardy lunch.  Many also packed the tools of their trade with them on a daily basis. And with all labor being more intensive at the time than it is now, he ate a pretty hardy dinner to replace the calories expended during they day.

If a man is working ten hours a day, six days a week, and if the preparation of food, the washing of clothing, and even just keeping the house was a full time job, he wasn't going to be able to do it himself, or at all.  

Indeed, for most white collar workers, a much smaller percentage of the population, the same was also true, even though their working conditions were very much different.  Consider doctors or lawyers.  This was before the pay bubble, now ending, in which these professions were high paying as a rule, so offices were modest or even inside of their homes.  But they still lacked the individual ability as a rule to prepare their own meals or take care of their homes, offices, clothing etc.  

In other words, there was just too much labor to go around.

The example of single men and women at the time is telling.  Young men in this era typically did two things when they were of working age, if not married. They lived at home, if they stayed where they were from, until they were married.  If they never married, they just kept living at home.  Presently there's a bit of a supposed mini crisis of adult children returning to their parent's homes, but if that is a new trend, it's only a return to a former condition, to a degree.  These men weren't exhibiting being tied to their mother's apron strings, they were acting in accordance with reality.  By staying home and contributing to the household, the things they couldn't do were being taken care of by their mothers and probably by their sisters.

The other common male option was to live in a boarding house.  Men who did that paid for these tasks to be taken care of as part of their lodging.  We don't have boarding houses much today, but they were common right through the 1940s.  Indeed, the soldiers' song still common in the 1940s, "Hard Tack and Bully Beef" is actually simply a variant of "There Is A Boarding House."

There is a boarding house, far, far away,
Where they have ham and eggs three times a day
O how them boarders yell
When they hear the dinner bell,
They give the landlord

Three times a day.

The fact that this was used as a soldiers song based on this says something about another young man's option.  We don't think of food and lodging being an incentive to joint the service today, but it provided one in part of that bygone era.  With the age old custom of soldiers' grousing, of course, the ham and eggs becomes hardtack and bully beef, with other sarcastic comments worked in.

Young man engaging in the dangerous endeavor of cooking dinner in an apartment over a Primus gas stove. These aren't meant for indoor use at all.

Of course, some men took apartments in towns and simply ate out every day, or resorted to less than desirable means of cooking.  Even now, quite a few men engaged in heavy labor hit a working man's restaurant early in the day, and pack a lunch of some sort with them for lunch.  The point is, however, that for most working men, the conditions of the day didn't give a great number of options in terms of getting food cooked, clothing washed, etc., and still allow them to work.

That work, that is the domestic work, fell to women, but not because of some societal conspiracy thought up by men so much as by necessity.  The were some female out of the house occupations, as noted, but they were generally few, and the women who occupied them tended to be just as oppressed by the needs of every day life as men.  When you look at old advertisements that seem quaint or even a bit odd now, in which some poor young woman is depicted as being in desperate straits as she's in her late 20s and not married, it should be kept in mind that for most women getting married did indeed improve their lot in life as they'd be taking care of their own household, rather than be auxiliary to somebody else s.

It was mechanization that changed all of this. With the introduction of domestic labor saving machinery, there was time in time in the household that didn't previously exist. With the extra time, came other options of filling it, in one way or another.  And with the machinery also came the option to look at a wider range of careers if they wanted.  The implications of that were and are vast, but the cause of it seems rather widely misunderstood.

SUVs before SUVs

A 1962 Dodge Power Giant Carryall.  Not mine, I saw it for sale the other day while driving through town.  It appears in nice shape, and still features bias ply tires.  This is a D100 Carryall, which means its rated at 1/2 ton, although it has a two speed rear axle.  Of course, I don't know anything about it or what is, or isn't original.  It looks pretty original, however.

Anyhow, it's interesting how SUVs are supposed to be a modern concept, with the Chevrolet Suburban supposedly sort of ushering them in. But Suburban's themselves go way back, and before them were vehicles like this Dodge Carryall.  Carryalls, in fact, go all the way back to World War Two.

Of course, these aren't easy to drive.  It has a manual transmission and armstrong steering.  And, of course, conventional hydraulic brakes.  Not something a soccer mom, or dad, would probably drive.  Still, it's interesting to note how far back the concept of a full sized 4x4, built on a truck frame, goes.  About as far back as 4x4 trucks themselves.

Terrorism. Always with us.

September 16, 1920. Wall Street.  A horse drawn wagon laden with explosives blew up blew up at noon, killing 38 and injuring 143. Believed to be the work of Italian anarchists, it has never been officially solved.  It was the biggest such attack in the country's history. But even at that, it was only ten years following another such act.

Cartoon depicting bombers and organized labor in teh "flareback" of the Los Angeles Times bombing.

That act was the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times by members of an iron workers union.  They were caught and convicted.  The bombs were timed to go off when nobody would have been in the building, but a faulty primer and a late addition of the paper sent the bomb off early, killing 21 and wounding 100.

The Joy of Field Rations

Somebody recently drew my attention to this blog, and it is neat;  The Joy of Field Rations.

Now, most people wouldn't regard field rations as joyful, but they'd sort of be missing the point of the blog if they didn't look beyond the title.  The blog isn't really about compressed rations, like C Rations, K Rations, or the dreaded Armor Rations.  It's about Army food served in the field. And not just the American Army, but all armies.  Most of the entries are actually about the rations of foreign armies.

It's really interesting, particularly in light of the theoretical focus of this blog, as its also a look into food habits and field food of earlier eras.  Now, nobody would claim that, in the case of most armies, that armies in the field routinely ate well.  But what could be done, and therefore was done, is interesting.  So, while we know about hard tack and bad bacon for the U.S. Army, those who have studied the topic also know that this is an incomplete picture.  This blog presents a much more complete picture.

Many of the entries are really interesting.  For example, here's one for Beef Pot Pie, but with biscuits for the crust. This recipe dates to the 1940s, but given its nature, I suspect it was probably a much older one that was still around.  I really like pot pies, and this one is cooked in a dutch oven.  I've made pot pies with pie crust in dutch ovens, but it would never have occurred to me to try this.  I may give it a try.  I note that there's some similar recipes for British meat pies.

More in keeping with the time period we're trying to focus on here, here's one for Beef Hash.  I don't know if I've never had beef hash (although this recipe will work for pork or corned beef, according to the blogger), but I love corned beef has.  Problem is, I very rarely ever have it. And by rarely, I probably mean once ever five years or so. Again, this is another recipe I'll have to try.  I'm surprised to find it as a U.S. Army recipe, but I probably ought not to be, given as its something made from scraps.

Army menus, even early on, were more varied than most suspect, and I've seen a recipe for Army chile dating back to the 19th Century.  The recipe isn't that much different from generic ones now, except that it was pretty much a complete do it yourself type of deal, rather than "dump in canned beans now", type of affair.  I really like chile, and make it quite often, but mine does feature the "dump in canned beans now" type of procedure.  Anyhow, one thing this blog helps illustrate is the variety in Army cookbooks, even quite a ways back.  For instance, here's a recipe for El Rancho stew, which apparently is still in the Army cookbook, but which has evolved considerably since its 1917 appearance.

There are a lot of bread recipes on the blog, which probably isn't surprising, given how much of a staple bread is.  And I must say, they look good.  Sheepherders bread is the only type of bread I've ever tried to cook in the sticks, and its easy to do.  Some of these are probably tougher, but they look good.  For example, there's this field recipe from 1916 for a yeast bread.  It looks good.  Here's another, meant to be cooked in a mess tin.  And regarding breads, here's one for coffee cakes.  Given that its' from 1941, this shouldn't surprise me, but it does.  I'd think of this as more of a mess hall item, and I wonder if it was.

Anyhow, this is an interesting effort, and I hope the blogger keeps it up. It's surprisingly varied too, with German, British and Russian entries, in addition to US ones, so far. 

Some native examples of Holscher's First & Second Law of History

Recently I posted an entry on Holscher's Law of History.  In doing that I expounded that the first law is "Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect" and the second law is "Everything last occurred more recently than you suppose.". 

Here's some interesting example from the story of American Indians.

This photograph was taken in 1906.  We'd tend to think of it as well after the Indian Wars, but it really is not.  Indeed, at this point in time, amazingly, one last conflict between Native Americans and the U.S. Army was yet to occur, although that scrap was an accident.  Be that as it may, we see a family with some native attire, and some not.  The degree to which native attire is hanging on in this photographs is a little surprising.  This photo, for context, was taken after the invention of the airplane and the introduction of the Model T.

But what's really surprising ins the sewing machine.  I wouldn't have expected that.  An example of the first law, to a degree.

This family, by the way, was photographed on the  Crow Reservation of southern Montana.

How about this photograph of a woman drying fish?  She's in a traditional camp, with a teepee and all, drying a traditional food.

This photograph was taken in 1913.  World War One would break out the following year.  Here we see, however, an Indian woman engaged in a very traditional activity.

 

What about this photograph?  For all the world, this photo looks like it was taken in the 1870s or so, but for the fact, perhaps, that the Indian rider (here a Crow Indian in Montana0 is riding a western stock saddle, a detail that's hard to catch without knowing what to look for.  But this is also a 20th Century photograph, taken in 1908.

While this scene comes near, if not in, the 20th Century, it's telling none the less.  This member of the Crow tribe is out riding in winter, probably hunting or otherwise out in some activity that requires his presence outdoors.  In Wyoming, I've seen photos of Indians from the Wind River Reservation out tenting (with teepees) while hunting, on the North Platte, as late as 1912, long after some maintain that long range native hunting forays did not occur.

What about this photograph?  The front rider (the father of the boy in back) is dressed in fairly typical Western attire with modern tack.  He retains the long braids of traditional Indians.  The boy, or rather young man, in back is wearing a newsboy cap.  The 1910s?  1920s?

No, 1941.