The murder of a National Guardsmen in Washington D.C. "If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied."

West Virginian National Guardsmen Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, age 20.  According to a former boyfriend, she was "not excited" to be deployed to Washington D.C.

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Rudyard Kipling, The Common Form.

I haven't commented on this as of yet.  For one thing, I wanted facts to be more fully developed before spouting off.

What we seem to know right now is that Spec 4 Sarah Beckstrom of the 863d Military Police Co., 111th Eng. Bde, West Virginia Army National Guard and SSG Andrew Wolfe of the Force Support Squadron, 167th Airlift Wing, West Virginia Air National Guard were shot by Afghan refugee Rahmanullah Lakanwal in what some complete and utter moron has termed the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Mission.

SSG Andrew Wolfe.

This was completely predictable in every fashion.

Indeed, right from the beginning, to those who know me, I predicated "they're going to get somebody killed".  When you put troops out on the street, sooner later, one of them gets killed, or one of them kills somebody.  It's the nature of that sort of thing.

Also predictable is the manic ranting of the demented King Donald, for whom they lost their lives.  Likewise, the utterly predictable Night of the Long Knives response of the administration, indicating the deployment of 500 more men in what has already been declared illegal, is predictable.  The administrations backlash against immigrants is predictable, with it being perhaps surprising that the Demented King Donald took his foggy rage out on Somalis first.

How did we get here?

Well, another part of why I"ve hestiated in the politicalization of this is bad enough as it is, and its impossible to comment on it without it getting political.

Nonetheless. . .

Let's take it step by step.

The first reason, of course, we are here is that the Demented King Donald wanted a bizarre show of force due to a criminal matter which came to the head with a DOGE  flunky nicknamed "Big Balls" getting beat up on the DC streets.  In the minds of the MAGA right, all American big cities are cesspools of violence, even though the data shows its been going down for decades.  The more cynical minded might suggest that putting troops out on the streets served other interests.

At any rate, it was always illegal and stupid.  Troops, even Military Policemen, make very poor city policemen.  It soon became apparent they needed to be armed, which makes some sense, but ever since I've been waiting for the moment a Guardsman, and I was a Guardsman, shoots somebody.  I'm amazed that it hasn't happened.

The second thing I've worried about is somebody shooting Guardsmen.  That's now happened. For the angry and unhinged, they're a natural target.  

By and large, thankfully, the Guardsmen have had nothing to do.  As a result of that the Service has used the classic military reaction and set them to cleaning things, in this case D.C. parks. 

Two unarmed National Guardsmen picking up trash in Washington D.C.

That's better than having the troops have nothing to do, but it's also demeaning.  So much for Pete Hegseth and the warrior ethos he wants to bring into the service.

Now we have the trash collector ethos.

So, the first cause.  Bringing troops into a situation, and keeping them there, where they are merely targets.

Trump gets the blame for that. So do his advisors. And so Patrick Morrisey, the Governor of West Virginia, whose Guardsmen these are.

So let's be honest here. They didn't die for a noble cause. They died for Donald Trump.

Let's go further.

Some would point out that the killer is to blame, and quite correctly, and then go further to note he was an Afghan refugee who was brought into the US under the Biden Administration and then granted asylum under the Trump regime.

The latter, I note, is important. Trump is denying it but it's true.

But here's the thing, bringing in Afghans who worked for us was a noble thing to do. They were going to be murdered, probably, otherwise.

What turned this guy into a murderer isn't clear at all. Something did. But frankly, bringing in CIA operatives is flat out dangerous anyway you look at it, normally.  Most will be okay and go to new lives, but not all will.

The bigger question is why we lost in Afghanistan.

We lost as the country as a whole lost interest in what was frankly a very low intensity ongoing war.  

The U.S. suffered 2,459 KIA in Afghanistan.

12,520 Americans died in the Battle of Okinawa.

No war is a good thing, but when you commit to a war you better know how you plan on it coming out, and what the exit strategy is.  And if it's an American War, you better plan on it lasting no more than four years. Four years is about our limit of commitment.  

When we went into Afghanistan we had the moronic Donald Rumsfeld concept of a limited war.  Limited war is essentially shorthand for losing the war.  Clausewitzian principals hold that you should go in with maximum moral force right from the onset and completely defeat your enemy.   We didn't bother to do that.  To make it worse, we engaged in a second war with Iraq for no reason at all at the same time.

Going into Afghanistan made sense.  How we did it did not.  Not sticking it out was a mistake.

And we should remember who decided not to stick it out.  Donald Trump.  He surrendered to the Taliban and left the Biden Administration to pick up the pieces.

So the second cause.  Fighting the war in Afghanistan badly, and then surrendering.

George Bush II and Donald Trump get the blame for that.

‪Republicans Against Trumpism‬@rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social‬

Asked if he’ll attend the funeral of West Virginia National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom, Trump said:

“It’s certainly something I can conceive of… I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”

So now what?

Well, determining blame only serves a purpose, really, as a corrective.  There are some lessons to learn here.

The first is that deployment of National Guardsmen to cities should stop immediately.  The West Virginian Governor should screw up his courage and order his men home over the weekend.  Pull out.  They didn't join the Guard for this.  Congress, the Republican portion of which is now a bunch of weak lackies, ought to start finding courage as well.  

Neither of those things is likely to happen.

And the lesson of getting into wars, getting out of wars, and not surrendering before things are done with is here as well.  The US is about to attempt to force Ukraine to surrender to Russia. That's a horrible idea.  Ukraine can actually win the war, but only with our help.  If its lost, thousands of Ukrainians who are already refugees will not be going home and fighting in Eastern Europe may revert to its old guerilla patterns.

Finally, I suppose, some pointing out that some of our leaders are real chickenhawks is overdue.  Trump never served, and back during the war in Afghanistan we had a VP who never had either.  It's worth calling people out on these things.

Finally, for too long the Press has refused to treat the Trump administration for the proto fascist entity it is.  They need to be called out.  If nothing else that will serve to point out that Donald Trump is losing his mind.

Monday, October 20, 1975. Grain, Cubans, Primates, and AIDS.

The US and USSR entered into a five year grain sale agreement by which the US agreed to sell 6,000,000 tons of grain to the USSR each year, as its collective agricultural system tanked, and by which the US accidentally screwed Canadian farmers.

The Cuban Navy's El Vietnam Heroico, El Coral Island and La Plata brought the first Cuban soldiers to Angola to support the MPLA..

Presumably the El Vietnam Heroico didn't celebrate the numerous South Vietnamese who gave their lives in order to attempt to hold the Communist back South East Asia.

Cuban military support to Angola would lead to the introduction of AIDS into Cuba, that region of Africa having been ground zero for the disease.  Myths about the origin of the horrific disease, and a supposed ground zero in New York City, have abounded for years, but in reality SIVcpz, the strain in chimpanzees, was transmitted to humans via contact with infected blood, most likely during the process of hunting and butchering chimpanzees for meat.  It was a "crossover disease."  It spread undetected for some time in Central Africa, notably by hetrosexual sex, and into the Cuban population by that means of transmission.  In much of the Western World, of course, it spread through homosexual sex at first, and then by infected needle transmissions. 

FWIW, eating primates is a really bad idea. They're too closely related to us, giving rise to things like this.

It's an interesting example of how war brings plagues of all types.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 14, 1975. Operation Savannah.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Angola, Columbus Day, Namibia, Native Americans, Operation Savannah, South Africa, South African Army, Washington (Seattle)

Monday, September 3, 1945. The new Post War World.

"Japanese soldiers are shown marching through Nanking's residential section. These soldiers are still fully armed but under perfect control at all times. Photographer: Lt. Richard Loeb. 3 September, 1945."

Yeoman's Fourth Law of History.  War changes everything

This is something that somehow is repeatedly forgotten by those who advocate wars.  I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it should be remembered that wars change absolutely everything, about everything.  No nation goes into a war and comes back out the same nation.  People's views about various things change radically due to war, entire economies are dramatically changed, and of course the people who fight the war are permanently changed.

We've discussed this here from time to time in regards to specific topics, but this law is so overarching that the impact of it can hardly be exaggerated.  Every time a nation enters a war, it proposes, in essence, to permanently alter everything about itself.

On Monday, September 3, 1945, people woke up to a new world, whether they realized it or not. 

The prior day Japan, the last Axis hold out, surrendered.

May people had the day off, as it was Labor Day.

With this entry, we end our daily tracking of events 80 days in the past.  When we started tracking events 80 years ago, it was because we were coming up on the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Events of the 1940s otherwise are not really the focus of this blog, and 80 years is an odd period to look back to retrospectively, although no odder, I suppose, than 125 years, 115, and 120 years, which this blog otherwise does, although in the context of this blog's focus, that actually is less odd.  The tacking of those other dates fills in gaps left in the focus of this blog when we started posting on the Punitive Expedition from a 100 year focus.  Just as here we failed to fill in the dates from 1939 to 1941, which were very much part of the Second World War story, we failed to fill in the dates from 1900 to 1916, which were very much part of the overall story of the event we were focusing on.

We still occasionally post events 100 years past, and 50 years past, although not all that frequently.  And we will likely catch some 80 years past when they are very significant.  Should this author make to 2030, chances are good that we'll start again with the events of the Korean War, or perhaps just three years from now with the Berlin Blockade.

For now, we're finished with the 80 years retrospectives.

We would note that things were still going on in the Second World War on this date.  The war in the Pacific sputtered to a conclusion and in a manner distinctively different from the war in Europe.  In Europe, as we have seen, there were some German formations that fought on after the German surrender, but usually because they feared being taken captive by Communist forces.  Japanese forces however were often still quite well organized in the field and had not, in many locations, been defeated.  Their surrenders were bizarrely formally orchestrated, usually featuring meetings and formal surrender instruments.  Of course, Japan had not been occupied at the time of Japan's surrender, which was not true of Germany.  

Indeed, on this day, General Tomoyuki Yamashita formally surrendered the remaining Japanese troops in the Philippines to General Jonathan M. Wainwright.  Things like this would go on for days.

Also going on for days would be the  British reoccupation of its lost colonial domain in the East.  Other nations, notably the French and the Dutch, would try the same, but they'd have to fight their way back in, and ultimately, they lost the fight.

All that is part of the story of the post war world.  Colonialism was done for.  The British would have the wisdom soon to see that, whereas the French resisted it.  

Also part of the post war world would be the rise of Communism. 

Communism had been part of the global story going back into the late 19th Century, but the Second World War boosted its fortunes, in part because it aligned itself with anti colonial movements.

The struggle between Communism and Democracy, even imperfect democracy, had already begun before the end of the war.  In some places the struggle between Communist and Anticommunist forces was long established.  The Chinese Civil War had commenced before World War Two, and it had recommenced before the Japanese surrender.  In other places, however, the end of the war brought out movements that had not been significant before.  In Vietnam, for example, the Viet Minh has declared independence prior to the Japanese surrender and were moving towards contesting the French for control of the country, something that would be interrupted by the British at first, using surrendered Japanese troops.  That a Cold War was on wasn't widely recognized to be occurring as of yet, but that it was is clear in retrospect.

The rise of the United States as a global power, something that many Americans had not wanted to occur before World War Two, had been completed by the Second World War's end.  Economically, the United States was effectively the last man standing.  1945 would usher in a post war economic world such as had not existed in modern times.  The US became the globally dominant economic power because its factories had not been destroyed, and would enjoy that status well into the 1970s.  At the same time, the US became a major military power for the first time in its history, a status which it retains.

The period from 1945 to, roughly 1973/1991, would be sort of an American golden era, albeit one with many significant problems.  The legacy of that period haunts the United States today.  From 1945 until the early 1970s nobody could contest the US economically and that meant, at home, there were always decent jobs for Americans, no matter how well educated they were, or were not.  A college education guaranteed a white collar occupation.  That began to come apart in the 1970s and by the late 1980s that was no longer true, although Americans have never accepted the change.

Indeed, that's a major problem today.  The US is controlled by those who came of age in this era, and many elderly voters cannot look back past it.  When people pine for a return of a prior era, that's the era they hope to restore.  But it was never destined to be permanent.  World War Two was so massive it destroyed the global economy, but the economy would inevitably recover, and the Cold War against the Soviet Union could never have been won by the USSR.  The economy that had come into place in the 1990s was a more natural one, and interestingly restored the global economy to the state of globalization that it had obtained prior to the First World War.

The social changes brought about by the war were likewise massive, and that's been forgotten.

Ironically, one of the most cited social claims about the war is incorrect, that being that it brought women into the workplace.  It didn't.  That had been going on for a long time, but as often noted here, it was domestic machinery that caused that change.  Having said that, the immediate post war economic boom caused a massive introduction of that machinery into homes.  People who had never owned a washing machine, for example, now suddenly did.  And with the washer and dryer coming in, trips to the laundromat, or hours spent at home working on laundry, both being "women's work", went out. They now had time to go to work. . . or school.

This, as many of the trends we noted, was something that was already occurring. The war accelerated it. Even before World War Two more women graduated from high school than men.  College education remained predominantly male, but even at that the number of female college students grew from 9,100 (21% of the total) in 1870 to 481,000 (44% of the total) by 1930, with female university attendance receiving a big boost during the 1920s.  The war, however, boosted this.  Already by the 1920s the reduction in female labor needs at home had meant that a sizable number of well off and middle class young women could attend college.  The Great Depression dampened that, but the end of the Second World War dramatically altered the situation after 1945.

Young men also began to crowd college campuses like never before.

Prior to the Second World War a small minority of men attended, let alone completed, college. In 1940 5.5% of American men had completed a bachelor's degree or higher, which was a higher percentage than women at 3.8%.  Moreover, with certain distinct exceptions, American men who attended college were part of a WASP upper class.  Indeed, the extent to which Ivy League schools were protestant institutions has been largely forgotten.  Princeton, for instance ended its Sunday chapel requirement for upperclassmen in 1935, for sophomores in 1960, and for freshmen in 1964.  Harvard, we should not, ended its chapel requirement in 1886 and Yale in 1926, but the point is that most of those who attended private universities were of a WASP heritage. This was less true, of course, of state universities, which often had a agricultural, teaching or mining focus.  

World War Two, however, changed all of this through the GI Bill, with newly discharged men heading to university.  Included in student body were Catholics, a sizable American minority, who had largely not attended university before.

The implications of this were enormous.  Women leaving homes to live on their own before marriage had really started in an appreciable degree the 1920s, although it occurred and was possible before that.  My mother's mother, had a university degree prior to that time. Large numbers of young men doing so was really new, with perhaps the only real analogy being the camps of young itinerant workers in the Great Depression.

Of course, the Great Depression had practically acclimated young men to living away from home while young, and then the Second World War certainly acclimated large numbers of them.  The new environment was large numbers of young men and young women living away from home, and from very varied backgrounds.  Co-ed students from prior to the Second World War would have found a much narrower demographic than they did after the war.

This at least arguably accelerated the blending of distinct cultures within the overall American culture, although that's always been a feature of the United States.  Having said that, the "melting pot" of American culture melted more slowly prior to World War Two.   With the war having a levelling effect on ethnic differences, they shifted notably.

Prior to World War Two, and for some time thereafter, Catholics, Jews, Blacks and Hispanics were really "others".  It's certainly the case that distinctions and prejudice remains today, but the Second World War started the process of addressing them.  Catholics fairly rapidly moved from a disdained religious minority, albeit a large minority, to part of the general American religious background, that process complete with the election of John F. Kennedy.  At the same time, however, the uniqueness and identify of many of these groups, which had heretofore been quite strong, began to dissipate.

Sudden success and sudden cultural change often has within them the seeds of their own decay and downfall.  This seems to have been much the case with the second half of the Twentieth Century as "the American Century".  Americans came to very rapidly believe that their postwar economic good fortune was due to some native genius, rather than the good luck of having been outside the range of Axis aircraft.  Rapid cultural changes that saw young Americans step right out of high school and into good paying jobs, or off to college for even better paying jobs, all while being outside of their parents homes, began to seem like a decree of nature.  Liberalization of culture yielded to libertinism of culture and an attack on traditional value.  Everything seemed headed, in the end, in one direction.

It didn't.

The destroyed nations rebuilt, and at the same time, under American influence, democracy spread.  This was a huge global success, but it also meant that the US inevitably came to a point at which it could not dominate the world's economies.  Advances in technology an globalization ultimately wiped out he heavy labor segment of the American economy while at at the same time the same developments that freed up women from domestic labor enslaved them to the office place.  The post war arrogance that bloomed in the late 60s ultimately badly damaged the existential nature of the family in ways that are still being sorted out.

The post war world started to come to an end in 1991 with the fall of the USSR.  But like a lot of things, it took and is taking a long time to play out.  We're likely in its final closing pages now, as the Boomer generation makes a desperate effort to restore a lost world, but only selectively.  Very few really want to return to the point before these developments commenced.  The ultimate question remains however if World War Two, which the country had no choice but to fight, resulted in such existential damage to the country, and the world, that much of what came before the war was not only better than what came after it, but that whether the damage of the war was so severe that it cannot be recovered.

On this day, in addition to what has already been noted, British Marines landed at Pennang.  Hirohito opened the 88th Imperial Diet.

The Red Army opened Officer's Clubs.

While we won't catalog events hence force on a day to day basis, we will look in more depth at the changes World War Two brought about, for good, and ill.

Last edition:

Sunday, September 2, 1945. Japan signs the Instrument of Surrender.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Allies, Australia, Blog Mirror, Japan, North Vietnam, United Kingdom, Vietnam, VJ Day, World War Two

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 92nd Edition. Immigration. How did we get into this mess?

Our Nation’s ICE Officers have shown incredible strength, determination, and courage as they facilitate a very important mission, the largest Mass Deportation Operation of Illegal Aliens in History. Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People. ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.

In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!

I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day. The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos. That’s why I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia. Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.

To ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department, you have my unwavering support. Now go, GET THE JOB DONE! DJT

Trump on "Truth Social". 

Over the last few days soldiers of the California National Guard have been backing up ICE in immigration raids in Los Angeles.  The Marine Corps is as well.  The Marines, we now are told, have actually performed an arrest.  There are somewhere between 11.0 million to 18.6 million illegal immigrants, mostly, but not exclusively, from Central America in the country.  During his run for a second term, Donald Trump basically promised to deport them all, but he's really not been much more successful than President Obama was on the same topic.

Of that number, probably about 1.6 million came in during the Biden Administration, not all of them as Republicans seemingly like to suggest.

Lots of reasons are given for this situation, most of which are devoid of historical analysis, and therefore, inaccurate.  We'll take a more indepth view here.

As noted, most illegal immigrants into the US are from Central America. At one time, "illegal alien" almost always tended to mean an illegal entrant who was Mexican, but that never really reflected the entire situation.  As late as the 1980s, the second largest group of illegal entrant into the US were Irish, something almost uniformly ignored.  Indeed, illegal aliens in the US come from all over the globe.  Nonetheless, the big problem is a Central American one.

When you conquer a foreign people and arbitrarily draw a map of convenience for yourself on what you are keeping, you create a problem.

That may sound like a non sequitur, but we need to start there.  

The United States fought Mexico from 1845 to 1848, wi th most of the last part of that period being an occupation of the country.  The Mexican War is more complicated than its generally considered to be, and I'll not go into the origins of the war.  Suffice it to say, however, that a result of the war, the principal result in fact, was that the US acquired 55% of Mexico.

Now, that 55% is a bit deceptive in that the US did not acquire 55% of the Mexican population.  In 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Mexican representatives chosen by hte US to sign it, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans lived south of the Rio Grande.  There were, however, Spanish speaking populations north of the river, with most of them living in Texas, which Mexico had not regarded as properly lost, New Mexico, and California.  Mexican populations, however, stretched all the way up into Spanish speaking settlements in Colorado as well.  

Depending upon where they lived, many of those Hispanic populations were distinct with distinct histories, which also set them apart from the population of Mexico, although that population is more diverse then imagined.  The closer you got to the Rio Grande, however, the more "Mexican", the population was.

The border was extremely fluid, although real, and would be for decades thereafter.  People crossed back and forth over it fairly readily for various reasons.  To the extent there was control of the border, on the US side it was by the US Army, and on the Mexican side, the Mexican Army, both of which occasionally crossed the border in pursuit of Native Americans.

It was the Mexican Revolution that really began to change things.

Mexican refugees crossing into the United States in 1915.

The Mexican Revolution saw an increased rate of border crossing as various groups of displaced people picked up and fled into the US.  The US was a haven for combatant leaders and politicians from all sides of the war itself, which remained the case for decades.  Villa famously attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, but he also had taken refuge in the US prior to that.

The Revolution caused the US to really patrol the border in earnest for the first time, with the National Guard serving on the border up until early 1917, while the U.S. Army crossed the border in pursuit of Villa.  In the popular imagination the war ended in 1920 when Obregón sworn in as President after having rebelled against Carranza, but that simply isn't true.  Villa was assassinated in 1923 and Plutarco Elías Calles came into power as a radical anti Catholic in 1924, which resulted in heavy repression of CAtholicism even though over 80% of the population was Catholic. This sparked the actual last major rebellion against the government in the form of the Cristero War, which lasted until 1929.

As with earlier phases of the Revolution, the Cristero War caused refugee populations to migrate to the US.  Indeed, the Cristero's weren't even the first religious refugees of the war, as Mormon populations had in some instances migrated out of Mexico earlier.  As that had an ethnic component to it, the Mormons were mostly Americans culturally or in fact, we should note that migrant Japanese populations in Mexico were in some instances evacuated by the U.S. Army during the Punitive Expedition.

There were concerns about the large number of migrants even then, with it interestingly being the case that some of the existing Hispanic populations were amongst those concerned, which has tended to be the case more recently as well.  Colorado passed the first law in the US banning marijuana as Hispanics native to the state associated it with Mexican refugees, with whom they did not wish to be confused or associated.

These various events caused the Border Patrol to be created in 1924. By that time, the really hot period of the Mexican Revolution was over, and the Cristero War had not yet begun, so the early Border Patrol entered the story at a time that is quite different from the present.

Indeed, while the  Cristero War saw an influx of migrants, its end came with the arrival of the Great Depression, during which illegal immigration was not a major problem.

But that brings us to why this Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist is being published first here, rather than on Lex Anteinternet where  they normally are.

Let's take a look at pre World War Two agriculture. . . and economics. . . and marriage.  Well, let's take a look at the US before World War Two.

It's easy to say, "it's was a different country", but it wasn't.  It was much different, however.

Ironically, lots of rank and file Trump supporters look back to that era, or the one that came immediately after it in the 1950s, as a Golden Age they'd wish to return to.  And to some extent, now without good reason. . . although they themselves would largely choose to keep the moral laxity of the post 1960s, as long as it applied to men and women.  What they seemingly want, sort of, is the economy of the 1950s with the personal morality of the high Playboy era.  Or maybe they want the 60s themselves, but without the drugs and Vietnam, but with good paying industrial jobs, no fault divorce, and Fran Gerard.¹

The pre World War Two world, indeed, the pre 1980 world, was much less corporate than it is now.  While there were chain stores of one kind or another, Piggly Wiggly, Safeway, Woolworths, etc. much of retail was very local.

From Safeway's website.

Agriculture in much of the country was of the classic "family farm" type. Ranching definitely was.  Outside of the South, remote owners of farms and ranches was extremely unusual.  The South stood out as an exception due to historical reasons, as there was a tremendous amount of sharecropping in that region, but the owners of the land were still local.  Hobby agriculture was a thing, but it wasn't a major thing.

Economics were almost much thinner.  The middle class was much poorer than it is today and large portions of it lived very near the poverty line. The reverse is true today.  Much of the middle class slips into the upper class periodically, and drops back out of it, without realizing it. They don't consider themselves "rich", but they periodically, statistically, are.  

Indeed, while its disturbing to many, including frankly distributist, the modern American economy has had the effect of making Americans as a whole extremely wealthy.  Americans like to note that the average wage hasn't rising in years, but because average prices have effectively dropped, in comparison to inflation, their spending power has continually grown.

Not that everything has been perfect, by any means.  As often noted, it's impossible for families, for the most part, to get by on a single income, which cuts against what I just stated.  

Popular traditionalist meme with some truth to it, but it requires more thought than this.  Also, this pertains more to the 50s and 60s, than it does to eras before it.

Considering that, however, we need to start off with noting that what people imagine as "traditional" really means the 1950s, in this sense, with the "1950s" really being the years from about 1955 to 1965, that is from the end of the Korean War to the beginning of largescale troop deployments in Vietnam.  The "American Graffiti" era, in other words, which is set in the early 1960s, ot the 1950s as sometimes imagined.  The economy really was exceptional then for a wide variety of reasons.  Europe and Asia's economies had been flattened by the Second World War.  China's economy, which was not a major player in the world in any event, was removed from the international scene by its fall to Communism.  The US was really on the only major industrial power in the world that didn't suffer two decades of economic recovery due to the war.  Technological advances of the 30s and 40s came inot the American market on a largescale due to the end of the Great Depression.  American education advanced enormously due to the GI Bill.

Before 1940, however, families got by on one income due to home economics, to a large degree.  That is, people lived in smaller houses, they had one car, they didn't go on extended vacations, they didn't buy "home entertainment centers", and so on.  We've dealt with it extensively, but unmarried women and men living in the communities they grew up in, lived with their parents.  It was unusual for an unmarried man to own a home.  Men and women basically went from their families home and economic care right into marriage, as a rule.

If they got married.

We haven't dealt with that much either.  By and large, most people in American society got married.  But there were entire classes of people that did not.  One we've dealt with before is Catholic Priests.  As we've noted, the Priesthood, and religious orders, were two ways in which Catholic men and women could have what amounted to a middle class existence without getting married.² 

Other professions of that era had the same feature, however.  Enlisted soldiers in the services were largely unmarried.  They were not paid well, particularly in the lower grades, although that was somewhat made up for by the government providing housing, food and clothing.  If they were married, it was usually only after they'd climbed in rank, which in the pre World War Two Army took an extremely long time.  Junior officers were rarely married either, although more senior ones normally were.

And agricultural workers, those who worked for wages, were often unmarried.  Working cowboys almost never were.  Their jobs just didn't pay enough for them to marry.

Cowhands are a particularly interesting example.  The end of the open range meant that ranches became more established and were normally family outfits.  But the sons of those who were not to inherit the ranch, as well as some men who were just attracted to an outdoor life, provided a pool of men who became cowboys working for wages. There was more of a need for cowboys at the time than there is now, as machinery had not made inroads into agriculture like it has since.  There are lot of things a person could point to in the case of farming, which became much more mechanized in the 1950s, but this is also true of ranching, which had not yet seen the introduction of the 4x4 truck.  Cowhands were expected to provide their own equipment, but the ranch provided everything else for them.³ Even on farms, there were lifelong farm workers who were just that, unmarried men who spent their lives working on a farm they did not own.

That's where things circle back into the story of immigrants and agriculture.

Prior to World War Two, temporary agricultural labor was usually local.  Farms tended to be small in comparison to the giant ones that exist now, and the labor was often made up of the extended families of the farmers.  There was temporary labor, including Hispanic labor from Mexico near the border, but its need didn't exist to the extent it later did.  As noted, people lived closer to poverty, which meant that they endured those conditions more readily, by necessity.  The world was simply smaller too.  People didn't consider it odd to send teenagers, or even children, into the fields during the summer months.

World War Two removed thousands of those people from their pre war lives, including their prewar economic existences.  Men who had been sent all around the country, and overseas, didn't tend to return to agricultural work involving remaining single, and they didn't have to either, given the post war economy. Women who had worked in fields prior to the war worked in factories during it, and had grown used to a new life. They had no interest in returning to the pre war lifestyle either, and they also didn't have to.

Somebody had to do the work.

During the war, Mexican labor was brought in to do it under the Bracero program.  And to some degree, the situation it created, has been with us ever since.  Yeoman's Fourth Law of History at work.

So now what?

Well, in order to really reduce the number of immigrant farm workers, legal and illegal, at work in American fields, you'd need to create a situation in which Americans would do the work. That won't happen in the current farm economy, however.

After the Second World War the US went to a "cheap food" policy, and we've had it ever since.  We note this as one thing you could do is pay Americans the necessary rate to work in the fields, but that would be grossly in excess of what immigrant laborers are now getting paid.  That raises all kinds of moral issues, but one practical issue is that if we are going to address this, just like the topic of imported foreign products, the time to do it was decades ago, not now.  Indeed, in the case of immigrant farm labor, the time to address it would ideally have been 1945.

In other words, it'd cause a huge spike in food prices.

Another thing you could do would be to try to address industrialization of agriculture.  When farms were smaller and there was less of a need  for extra labor.  That could be done by making the remote corporate ownership of farms illegal, although that would frankly not address all of the problem by any means.

Any way it is looked at, it would mean that Americans would pay more at the grocery store, and the question there is whether or not they're willing to do it for a major societal shift.  Hardcore National Conservatives are banking on Americans being able to be forced into this.  

Trump?

Richard Ortiz is a migrant worker in Nipomo, California where famous photographer Dorothea Lange took a photograph of the Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson in the 1930s

Florence Owens Thompson.   The mother of ten children, her first husband was the son of a farmer with whom she became a migrant farm worker.  Her second, if he was a second, would have been a common law arrangement.  She also occupied a wide variety of other occupations through the 1940s.  In 1952 she marred a hospital administrator and her life obtained stability.  Essentially, her life demonstrates exactly what we've set out above.

I somehow doubt it.  But who knows.

Suffice it to say, in much of this, basic morality seems to have gone right out the window.

Footnotes

1.  This is not how National Conservatives see things, however, which is one of the ironies of the Trump movement.  National Conservatives have a definite Benedict Option worldview and the libertine nature of the post 1960s American culture doesn't fit into that at all.  Immigrants frankly don't much either.

2.  I'm not suggesting that people's callings were not real.  Indeed, because of economic conditions, and society norms, particularly regarding the conduct of young women and men, callings were easier to hear.  I would note, however, that the economic realities of the era probably at least influenced the thinking of some people.

3. Good descriptions of this can be found in Louise Turk's book Sheep! and Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, all of which discuss this in the context of cowboys.  A good description of it in a novel can be found in Horseman, Pass By, by McMurtry.

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 7 and Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 91st Edition. Reality is hard.

Labels: Donald Trump, Economics, Immigration, law, Nostalgia, Populism, Taxes, The Second Trump Administration

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 91st Edition Postscript.

Labels: Donald Trump, Immigration, law, Populism, Racism, Remigration, The Second Trump Administration, Zeitgeist

European Farm Protests

French and German farmers have been protesting.

But why?

Some of it is related to costs.  Energy, fertilizer and transport costs have risen in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while at the same time, governments and retailers, have moved to reduce rising food prices in what basically amounts to a joint wartime effort to keep "cheap food" rolling.  

It's partially a "cheap food" policy, then, which the US has had since the Second World War.

And ironically, in that wartime category the cost of Ukrainian agricultural imports are down as the EU waived quotas and duties following Russia’s invasion in order to try to make up for the impact on the huge Ukrainian agricultural sector which was stressed due to Russian control of the Black Sea.

And extreme weather, which is been very notable in Wyoming this year, and if things don't turn around will lead to a major drought this summer (although we're not supposed to talk about that here), is impacting production in Southern Europe.

And then just as with Franklin Roosevelt's Depression Era agricultural programs, and the post World War Two cheap food policy in the US, Europe's six decade old common agricultural policy (CAP), a huge subsidy system designed for food security. . . for the consumer, massively favors economies of scale.

That has resulted in farm consolidation, just as it has here, with the number of farms in the EU dropping off by 1/3d since 2005.

Somewhat ironically, however, a EU program designed to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, based on a "farm to fork" or "farm to table" model, has been unpopular, as such things usually are with farmers, even when, if they stop to think about it, it'd help them.  Anyhow, the EU has the ability to impose rules, and its imposing rules to force this.

Among the rules being imposed are ones to cut the use of pesticides by 50% by 2030, cutting fertilizer use by 20%, and allowing land to be idled up to the rate of 25% of all European farmland.

That latter, which sort of resembles some policies in the US, no doubt is seen as a shocker, but as agricultural production has become more efficient, and the European population is rocketing into decline, it makes sense.

And environmental programs in individual countries, such as ending tax breaks on agricultural diesel to balance the budget in Germany, or reducing nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands, have been unpopular.

Well, what of this?

Interesting, at the same time, in Southern Europe there's been a trend of people returning to small agricultural holdings and making a go of it.  This has been occurring in France and Greece.  And maybe there's a thought there.

Farmers are among the most resistant people in the world to change.  So much so, that it must be an inherent part of the nature of farming. At the same time, they're also among the people who are most wedded to doing things in an expensive way, once they adapt to it.  The disaster that fence to fence farming would bring to individual farmers was something that Willard W. Cochrane warned about in the early 1960s, and he also worried about the evolving scale and expense of farm equipment.  He actually proposed to regulate it in favor of small farmers, but of course that's something that Americans, who are addicted to economies of scale to their own detriment, would never do.

European farmers, who were still principally equine powered until the end of World War Two, have become addicted to the petroleum fueled agriculture that the US brought in starting in the 1920s.  Sadly, we're likely to go to more and more automated farming, and by extension make large number of Americans more and more miserable.  Europeans are likely to follow suit.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Wednesday, March 19, 2003. The Second Gulf War Commences

F15E over Iraq.

The United States and a coalition of Allies, including its principal western allies, on this day in 2003, commenced operations against Iraq.  The war commenced with air operations.  

The causa belli of the undeclared war was Iraq's lack of cooperation with weapons inspectors.

President Bush went on the air and stated:

At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

Congress is just now considering a bill to deauthorize military force in Iraq, which at this point would be more symbolic than anything else.  

The initial invasion went well and swiftly, but the war yielded to a post-war, war, against Islamic insurgents that lasted until 2011.  Iraq has remained unstable, but not Baathist, and it has retained democracy, although frequently only barely.  Iran has gained influence in the country, which has a large Shiia population, which was not expected.

The war remains legally problematic in that it was a full scale invasion of a foreign power with no declaration of war, setting it apart from any post World War Two war, with perhaps the exception of the war in Afghanistan, that had that feature but lacked such a declaration.  At least arguably it was illegal for that reason.  Amongst other things, Art 1, Section 8, of the Constitution provides that Congress has the power to:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Presidents are the commanders in chief of the armed forces, and in Washington's day actually took to the field with it, so it would not be correct to assume that only Congress can deploy troops, even into harm's way.  But full scale wars. . . that seems pretty exclusively reserved to Congress.

The war also came while the U.S. was already fighting, albeit at a low level, in Afghanistan, and the Iraq episode would prove to be a distraction from it, leading in no small part to that first war ended, twenty years later, inconclusively.

The war redrew the political map of the Middle East, which it was intended to do, so to that extent it was at least a partial success, although it took much longer than expected.  It's effect on the national deficit, discussed this past week by NPR, is staggering and the nation still is nowhere near paying for it, something that will have very long term consequences for the nation going forward, and providing a reason, amongst others, that undeclared wars should not really be engaged in.  Congress, for its part, simply chose not to debate the topic in that context, an abrogation of its duty, although it did authorize military action in another form.

The war contributed to the rise of ISIL, which was later put down.  It increased Syrian instability, which has yet to be fully addressed.  

It also contributed to a rising tide of military worship in the US, while ironically would be part of the right wing reaction to "forever wars" that gave rise to Donald Trump.  

One of only two wars, the other being the First Gulf War, initiated by a Republican President since World War Two, the war had huge initial support from the left and the right, something that many of the same people who supported it later conveniently forgot.

Monday, February 15, 1943. Princess Elizabeth appears on the cover of Life, We Can Do It appears at Westinghouse.

Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth II, appeared on the cover of Life magazine.  The black and white photograph of the young Elizabeth is a shock to see today.

The Battle of Demyansk began, with the objective of encircling German troops in a salient and relieving the front near Moscow.  It'd more or less achieve the latter, but not the former.

Sarah Sundin's blog has a number of interesting items in it:

J. Howard Miller's little seen "We Can Do It" poster.  Note the "Post Feb. 15 to Feb 28" notation on the poster.

Today in World War II History—February 15, 1943: J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It” poster, now identified with Rosie the Riveter, is first posted at Westinghouse for a two-week in-house campaign.

The poster is one of the most recognizable in history now.  Ironically, it was little known to the World War Two generation itself, and only became widely known some forty years later.  In this sense, it's much like the "Keep Calm And Carry On" British poster, which was so rare in World War Two that it's debated if it was put up at all.

The poster, which is in fact not particularly skillfully executed, was limited to 1,800 runs and 17" x 22" in side.  In its original posting, it was put up only in Westinghouse factories, and in fact the female subject in the image wears a Westinghouse Electric floor employee badge. The workers who would have seen it were engaged in making helmet liners, and the poster was part of a gentle effort, in part, from dissuading strikes.  It was part of a 42 poster series by Miller.

Miller himself may be regarded as a somewhat obscure illustrator.  He was busy during World War Two and issued other posters that had an industrial theme.

Miller's female worker was based on a photograph of Geraldine Doyle, nee Hoff or Naomi Parker, it isn't really clear which, although some claim that it's definitely Parker.  It might have been both women, and more than just the two. The poster was painted from a photograph or photographs, and not a live model.

During the war itself, the Rockwell Saturday Evening Post illustration of a stout, defiant female riveter was the accepted depiction of Rosie the Riveter.  Rockwell, with his keen eye for detail, had painted "Rosie" on her lunch box.  

The name, Rosie the Riveter, was first used in a song by that name by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, recorded by The Four Vagabonds, which came out prior to Rockwell's May 1943, illustration.  The song, in turn, had been inspired by a newspaper column about 19-year-old Rosalind P. Walter who had gone to work as a riveter in Stratford Connecticut as part of the war effort. The model for the Rockwell painting was not an industrial worker, but a telephone operator, Mary Doyle Keefe, née, perhaps ironically, Doyle, who was Rockwell's neighbor.  She actually posed for a photograph for Rockwell's photographer, rather than for Rockwell live.

Keefe, who was not yet married, didn't like the painting as Rockwell had made her image so beefy, for which he apologized.  She attended Temple University, became a dental hygienist, married and passed away in 2015 at age 92.  Rosalind P. Walter went on in later life to become quite wealthy and was a noted philanthropist, particularly supporting public television.  She died in 2020 at age 95.

J. Howard Miller lived until 2004, but remained obscure, unlike his famous poster.

It should be noted that the depiction of the women and their story itself is interesting.  Vermonter Keefe was the daughter of a logger, but was obviously from a solid middle class Catholic family, something that would not have been surprising in any fashion at the time. As noted, she was not an industrial worker herself.  Geraldine Doyle worked only very briefly as an industrial worker in 1942, quitting as she feared injuring her hands as she was a cellist.  She later married a dentist later in 1943.  They met in a bookstore.  While her association with the painting is disputed, her World War Two factory photograph is remarkably similar to the poster.  Parker was employed in a factory prior to the war and continued to be during it.

The Miller image is used for a sign on the outside of the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in California, a Federal park dedicated to the World War Two home front.  World War Two, immediately following the Great Depression, had an enormous and permeant (and probably not good, really) impact on California, so the location is well placed.

Democracy returned to Uruguay.

Ready To Wear.

Racks of ready to wear clothing, Lord & Taylor, New York.  1948.

We recently had a big item on sewing.

Well, sort of. We had this item:

"Government Housewives". Sewing, sewing and seamstresses.

American soldier in Cuba in 1898 doing a sewing repair.

That entry, concluded with this:

So here we have an interesting trend, or rather several trends.  

And one of them again has to do with the division of labor.  Back in an era when clothes were more expensive, mending them was more common, and while both sexes did it, it fell more to women than men.  This wasn't part of the "patrimony", it had to do with the tightness of resources.

But more than that was going on, and to we really need to take a look back even further to really appreciate the change.

Which we'll do next. . . 

Which brings us to this.

Prior to the early 19th Century, pre manufactured clothing didn't exist at all.

This is something that's difficult for us to really imagine now.  We don't think of our daily clothing being homemade, or anything of the type.  Indeed, this is so much the case that we pass right over the references to it on the rare instances in which they occur. For instance, in the song House of the Rising Sun, which we discussed here recently.  In the classic Eric Burdon version, we hear:

My mother was a tailor

She sewed my new blue jeans

My father was a gamblin' man

Down in New Orleans

And as we know from the lengthy discussion the other day, in the original version we find:

My mother she's a tailor

Sews those new blue jeans

My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord God

He drinks down in New Orleans

What?  Sew blue jeans?

Now, in fairness, my mother, who had learned to sew and wasn't bad at it (although she doesn't compare in that category to my mother-in-law, who is a true and very talented seamstress) actually did sew some trousers in the 70s that I can recall, right about the time that women started to wear trousers.  As we've also discussed here in the past, women didn't really wear trousers until the 20th Century, or didn't wear them much, and it was the combined impact of the First and Second World Wars that really started to open that up.  Contrary to popular myth, the Second World War did really move women into the workplace, but it did certainly help move them into trousers.  As part of that my mother sewed some jeans, and they truly had really long wear as I can remember her wearing them into the 90s. They weren't blue jeans, however.

And they were bell-bottoms.

But I digress.

Royal Navy sailors, 1850s.

Bell-bottoms are a good place to start this discussion, in fact, as before the American Civil War the only pre-made ready to wear clothing of any kind for civilians was made for sailors.  Sailors were their own rootless class, and they didn't often have wives and sisters at home to make clothes for them, particularly if they shipped out of an English port and wore their clothes out prior to returning to it, but they stopped in an American port, or any version of that you might imagine.

Interestingly, the only other group for whom ready to wear clothing were made, at least in North America, was for slaves.

Port towns had ready to wear clothing made in a single size.  Most sailors were pretty good with a needle and thread as it was necessary knowledge for the age of sail, and they or a member of the crew had to tailor what they bought to fit after they bought it.

This, by the way, was a pretty common male role.  In addition to civilian sailors, and slaves, soldiers also had ready to wear clothing issued to them, and it too tended to be altered by a member of the company, which in the case of cavalrymen at any rate, was usually a saddler, who had to be particularly adept with needle and thread.  Interestingly, this role carried through all the way to the end of the horse cavalry and artillery and was picked up by parachute riggers for the airborne during World War Two, who likewise were good with needle and thread and who heavily altered the uniforms issued to U.S. paratroopers.  Modern riggers should be envious of their Second World War predecessors skills.

Clothing for slaves was advertised as "Negro Clothing", for what it's worth.  It was produced by seamstresses working for low pay, better than that for slaves, which was nonexistent, but hardly a wealthy class.  Singer, the sewing machine company, actually noted in its advertisements that its sewing machine was particularly suitable for making "Negro clothing".

As an example of the operation of Yeoman's Fourth Law of History, it was the Civil War itself that really got ready to wear clothing rolling.  Military clothing, unlike that for sailors and slaves, was sized.  What it wasn't, prior to the war, was massed produced. The war took care of that.

While we don't tend to think of military clothing of being readily adaptable to civilian wear, in facts it's an old maxim, which had broad truth to it, that all men's clothing comes from war or farming, although in recent years some of it seems to have come from toddler departments.  While the uniforms of Civil War ear soldiers don't look immediately close to civilian wear, particularly as the war went on, they were much closer than we might at first imagine.  In terms of clothing, the soldier wore wool undergarments (an unpleasant thought) wool trousers, a cotton shirt, and a wool coat year around, unless for some reason he chose to strip himself of the coat in hot weather, which was rare, or to equip himself with some civilian clothing that could be worn under the wool trousers and coat.

Mass production of Army uniforms lead to post-war mass production of clothing in general.  The entire industry exploded after the war, as clothing was really expensive in general, and this offered a cheaper way to obtain this basic need.  By the 1920s, ready to wear clothing had so expanded that it had taken over the female clothing market in addition to the male.  

As mass production clothing rose, it had a leveling effect.  Finely tailored bespoke clothing had a much different appearance than "home spun".  It was easy to tell the difference from a wealthy person, or an in town professional, and a farmer or rural person simply by this fact.  When mass-produced clothing came in, it not only represented a cheaper option, it was frankly also generally better looking than homespun was likely to be.  That upgraded the appearance of people of more modest means, and over time it also caused those of middle class income to opt for the cheaper option as well, and even some wealthy individuals did.  It's no wonder then that when we look at scenes of the 1920s through the early 60s that so many people we know to be of modest means were "well-dressed". While still a significant expenditure, they were able to "dress up" to a higher standard, while those of middle class and even wealthy means would "dress down" to it.  There were, of course, exceptions.

This didn't mean that everything was off the rack, and particularly with more dress wear, some tailoring was needed.  If a person bought a suit, for example, it would often need alternation by a tailor. The same was true for dresses, with it often being the case that more was required for women's wear.  Still, there's a big difference between going into Brooks Brothers, for example, and buying a suit that's finished by a tailor, and going into a tailor to have a suit made.

For much in the way of daily wear, however, ready to wear really took over by the early 20th Century.  People generally don't have, for examples, shirts made, J. Gatsby not with standing.  Most sizing problems, even with suits, have long been adjusted with belts and suspenders.  Nobody has their "new blue jeans" sewn by a seamstress, and only a few would ever have them tailored.

Which gets us to a claim I saw the other day that "everything now is poorly made".  Is it?  We'll take a look at that.

Sources:

Much of this entry relies upon the excellent:

A Brief History of Mass-Manufactured Clothing

Sofi Thanhauser on the Early Days of Ready-to-Wear

By Sofi Thanhauser