September 11

The Best Posts of the Week for the Week of September 4, 2011

Economics

Wages

The Bible counsels us that workmen are to receive their just wage.  It also warns that the wages of sin is death.  And soldiers are specifically counseled to be content with their wages.

Politicians are long on a "fair days wage", and things of that type.  Marxist claimed that working men were "wage slaves" and that each was to receive according to their abilities and needs.  Apparently their political class had more ability and needs, as they received more than others. . . funny how that worked.

Anyhow, wages are an interesting deal in a lot of ways, not the least of which is how people perceive their wages, or rather their income.

A real oddity, and one that I've become particularly conscious of, is that people generally spend to their income level, if they receive a middle class or upper income.  Not everyone, to be sure, but a lot of people, and seemingly most people.  Almost everyone in the middle class and even the lower wealthy class believes they struggle to get by. And some really do.  I admit that at my present middle class income, I really wonder how those making less get by.  Of course, I'm the only breadwinner as well, which means that if I split my income in half and pretended that it came from two people, we'd still be two middle class income earners, but not doing spectacularly well.

But even those people who make to upper middle incomes in a household will often expand out.  People acquire, I guess. I do as well.

By the same token, some will invariably spend more than they make, no matter what their income is.  I'm not sure why, but they will.

Making a "decent income" is a big deal with Americans.  Of course, it should be, but it's so much of a big deal, that it's often the only focus some people have.  "What's it pay?" is frequently the only career question that somebody asks before launching off on a life altering path.

Because a certain income becomes something a family, if not an individual person, becomes acclimated to, a wage can become like a shackle.  That's extremely common.  Even if the wage earner is prepared to abandon a certain income level, his family may not be, and that's effectively a jail cell.

These random comments amount to nothing more than a casual observation.  I'm not arguing for anything.  But I note it somewhat in the context of this line from a Man For All Seasons:

Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?

Parking Lot

It's common to hear that everything about aging is bad, and believe you me, having seen a lot of the things that come at the end of life, for a lot of people there are some pretty rough spots. Frankly, a lot of those rough spots come in middle age, when you're dealing with the impacts of aging on your relatives and probably have job concerns and a youngish family.  You're pretty busy. Generally, according to statisticians, the middle years are the most displeasing to people.

But, not everything about being a middle aged married male is bad by any means.

Here's an odd example.

Almost every work day, when I pull into my work parking lot, there is a very beautiful young woman (say 20s, I'd guess) who arrives at the same time.  I don't know her, and I never will. That's okay with me.  Occasionally I say hello, and she often has some wry comment and seems to have a really dry wit.

What does this have to do with the comment above?

Well, this.

When I was younger, say single and closer to her age, this would be on my mind a lot. She's stunning really.  I'd wonder if she was single, could I strike up a conversation, maybe meet and get to know her.

But I don't worry about any of that. She's just another interesting human being I see in a very disconnected casual situation.  I can take her for what she is in that context, somebody I don't know, will never know, don't need to know, but who is sort of funny in a unique way.

That's a good deal. As we age, unless we manage to stay juvenile forever, it's actually much easier to know people as people.

There are a lot of other things that are like this.  You become much less concerned with how people will react to your opinions, if they will react.  If you aren't vain, you become almost entirely unconcerned about what people think about your car, and other trappings. All that is good stuff.

Economics

In the film rendition of Band of Brother, the Dick Winter character (the central figure) notes in a voice over that, after D-Day, he promised "himself and God" that if he survived the war, he'd find a piece of land somewhere and "live a quiet life".  The book, which does depart from the film somewhat, also notes that.  I haven't read the book in some time, but if I recall correctly, what he actually desired to do was to find a farm somewhere.

In actuality, Dick Winters did find a farm, but not until after the Korean War, some years later.  Between World War Two and his farm purchase, he was in business and in the Army, a second time, during the Korean War.  When he entered farming, he also started a successful business selling animal feed.

The Ambrose book on his unit somewhat overemphasizes his post war business career, underplaying his later farming life.

I note that as I think Winters desire and the portrayal of his desires gives us an interesting insight into the bipolar nature of the American psyche.  On one hand, a lot of people desire a quiet, rural, life.  ON the other, we're constantly bombarded with the message that our goal in life should be "success" in a "career".  It's an interesting dichotomy.

This has always been the case, but earlier on, before World War Two, the big "success in a career" stories were really exceptions to the American rule.  While we aren't living in that era, and while it was very imperfect, what seems to largely have been the case is that the primary concern for most men and women were family related concerns.  Most men and women married, and most of them worked towards a quiet family life.  You don't really find a large number of "success in a career" type stories.  Even businessmen of the pre 1940 era often had fairly low key lives, and were basically middle class.  If a person was in the middle of the middle class, the were regarded as quite successful.  Family, church, community, and the local life was typically a big deal for them.

Somehow, and increasingly the case, after World War Two "success in a career" really became a big deal.  Now it absolutely dominates, and beyond that a "successful economy" is a huge deal.  A successful economy is supposed to mean an ever growing economy.

What this means is that we now expect our children to go through college (and they nearly have to, I'm not saying otherwise), pick a "career", and do whatever it takes to succeed in that career.  If that career is a "high powered" career, so much the better.  This is supposed to mean that you'll move wherever the job takes you, go from town to town and city to city, and like it.  You'll be compensated by one measure only, that being money.  The more money the better.  As this type of career means you will have no roots, or even connections, in where ever you are temporarily working, you'll are free to buy a parcel of property and a house that the local infrastructure cannot support long term, and which is actually destructive to any rural base the local community has, or once had.  No connections with family, church, or community are expected to be predominant, or even exist.  All relationships, even those between man and woman, are merely temporary and expedient, all designed to support your "career".

Indeed, the entire economy is now supposed to support this goal.  We are told that the continued importation of immigrant labor is "necessary in order to support growing our economy", even at a time when we have an effective unemployment rate of  14%.  We are told that the development of land is necessary to support the housing industry, a "key sector of our economy".  We are told that the exportation of jobs that were once solid middle class jobs here, to foreign nations, is necessary in order that we can "grow the economy" by replacing production jobs with consumption jobs, with "low priced" consumption" itself necessary to this economy, as in the end, people don't really need all that much and can otherwise get along with a lot less.

This is largely the antithesis of the general culture before 1940, somewhat.  There was, to be sure, always a lot of movement in the American society, but what seems to be the case is that people basically aimed for stability in economics in order to support their families, which were central to their lives.  We've exchanged that for a system that is obviously self restricting at some point.  For real lives in a real community that we're really connected with, we've substituted lives based on principally on the acquisition of money.  Deep down, however, most of us know that this isn't satisfying, which is amply evidenced by the desire to try to satisfy that gaping hole by getting more, and more.  We still yearn for the life our economy left behind.  But that won't work, as what most, or many, of us really want, is that "quiet life".  Indeed, in film portrays, we interestingly sometimes still portray things that way, but not always, of course.

A Long Ago Hunt

Interesting look at a 1881 hunt in the Sweetwater area:

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

A difference in cultures

I haven't been following the Amanda Knox trial at all, but I'd note that on this morning's news, appellate arguments, or some sort of appellate proceeding, resumed upon the Court's return from its August holiday.

The court shut down for a month.

An entire month.

This isn't uncommon in southern European cultures.  The country shuts down for a month.  Americans make much of their Protestant Work Ethic, but in the final analysis, I"m not sure that gets us too much other than being overworked.  I can't imagine, fwiw, the entire country taking a month off, but I wish I could imagine it. 

 

Of course, knowing me, I wouldn't take the time off anyhow, actually.

Tomatoland

Tomatoland

An interesting NPR interview of an author on the tasteless industrial tomato.

He also details labor abuses.

It  is pretty disturbing, and if it doesn't convince you to grow your own, you're probably unusually resistant to disturbing news.

One things, though, is that the interview, while not on immigrant labor and farming, makes it pretty clear that the system depends on using, and abusing, immigrant farm workers.  A partial solution to this sort of thing, although one nobody ever seems willing to consider, is ending the practice of importing agricultural labor.  We didn't do that until World War Two, when we had to.  Before that, we did it ourselves, with our own population.

We have plenty of Americans to do the job, and having seen many absolutely rotten jobs Americans will do, the thesis that you "can't get Americans" to do this job is a fraud on the public.  What you can't do is to get them to work for substandard wages, in substandard conditions. And they shouldn't have to do that either.

Paying Americans humane wages to do a job in humane conditions would put a lot of Americans to work in an outdoor job and connect them with agriculture and the real world.  It would raise the cost of food, but perhaps its unrealistically low priced to start with to some extent, on some items.  Of course, we'd have to actually guard our borders from the import of food produced poorly by those paying the poor, poor wages, but so be it.

The Best Posts of the Week of August 7, 2011

Prejudice

Prejudice

Church in New Mexico, early 1940s.

I've been thinking of trying to find a way to post this topic for awhile, but I hadn't gotten around to it, and I also hadn't quite figured out a way to post it effectively.

The topic is prejudice, but not racial prejudice. Religious bias may be a better way to phrase it.

Americans today are so used to the concept that the country was founded on religious liberty that they don't really question it. There remains religious prejudice in this, and every, country to be sure, but the way it was ingrained in society was once much greater than it is now.

To be more specific, I recently saw a topic concerning Roman Catholics and university attendance. The specific topic was the GI Bill. In the topic, a second hand citation to Catholics attending university in the time period was mentioned. More specifically, it was mentioned that prior to World War Two very few Catholics attended university. One of the people responding to that post found that assertion to be just ridiculous, but there were first hand recollections cited to support it (including mine).

I think that actually is correct, and it taps into the general theme of the website here. We look back at our country and figure, except for certain big historical facts that are generally known, that we share much in common with those who came before us. This is simply not always true. And this is one of the ways in which it was not true.

It has been frequently debated whether or not the country was founded on religious principals, and while it can be well supported that the country was not a theocracy in any fashion, it generally had some unity of religious thought, very loosely, early on. To call it a Christian republic might be too strong, but to call it a republic founded largely by Protestant Christians would not be. Generally, up until the 1840s, most Americans belonged to only one of several Protestant denominations. This made sense, of course, as most Americans descended from one of only several ethnic groups, and very early in the our history (our colonial history) immigration had been restricted to exclude members of other faiths, generally. Or more specifically, immigration had excluded Catholics.

This wasn't the case after we severed our allegiance to the United Kingdom, but still, it wasn't really up until the Irish Potato Famine got rolling, and the revolutions of the 1840s in Europe occurred, that this began to change. At that time, a lot of Irish immigrants began to come into the country and, at the same time, a lot of Germans from the Catholic regions of Germany began to do the same. An identifiable Catholic population existed in the US for the first time, excluding of course Acadians and Louisianans, who had been in it for a very long time, but in isolated pockets. Mexican Americans too, fit this latter description.

Prejudice ran strong against these new immigrants, particularly against the Irish immigrants who were inclined to congregate in cities. Prejudice against German Catholics also existed, but the German immigrants were much more inclined to strike out for German farming enclaves where English speaking Americans were less likely to encounter them. In regards to Irish immigrants, however, prejudice was so strong that they were typically defined as a "race", much like African Americans were and are.

Things began to change for Irish Americans during the Mexican War. During the war they were strongly represented (as were German Americans) in the Army, and that helped ease feelings against them. Still, lingering prejudice against Irish Americans well into the 20th Century. And immigration by Italian Americans, which came around the turn of the 19th Century, once again brought in what was regarded as a strongly alien, Catholic, population.

These populations, to a large degree, were much more isolated and communal in the American population until after World War Two. This varied by region, to be sure, but to a surprising degree these Catholic ethic communities remained segregated wherever they lived in a substantial urban area. And everywhere they were strongly associated, and self associated, with their church. Ecumenism was much less valued as well, so identification by Faith meant a great deal. This still occurs, but prior to World War Two to identify as a member of any one Faith, and most people did, meant a fairly strong allegiance to it.

These Catholic populations, the evidence seems to support to me, were also almost exclusively working class. In most urban areas Roman Catholics worked in laboring endeavors. In rural areas of the West, they were often ranchers. I can't really say much about rural areas elsewhere. There were always Catholics in the professions, such as law and medicine, but their clients were more concerned about Faith than they would be now. This is also true, fwiw, for African Americans, who had black doctors and black lawyers surprisingly early on, but those black lawyers and doctors had black clients.

In this era working class men had a much easier time making a living for a family than they do now. Laboring jobs were never easy, but they did often pay a living wage, if they were for skilled labor. A much smaller percentage of Americans attended college or university in general. Generally, Catholics did not attend. Some did, but not anywhere the percentage that now does.

World War Two seems to have changed all of that. It was likely changing anyway. Well before World War Two the nation had seen its first Roman Catholic Supreme Court justice (a Southern Confederate veteran). A Roman Catholic had attempted an unsuccessful, but serious, run for the Presidency prior to the war. General Terry de le Mesa Allen, a Roman Catholic, and Gen. Keyes, also a Catholic, had long running Army careers by the time World War Two broke out and they'd commanded large number of men. For that matter, Gen. McClellan of Civil War fame was a Catholic. But the war seemed to break an already breaking log jam, and after the war identification by class or religion was no longer a statistical factor in college attendance. By the 60s, Ivy League colleges that had effectively been Protestant schools were abandoning chapel requirements, thereby opening them up to members of non Protestant faiths.

In mentioning all of this, I'm not seeking to start a debate. But it is interesting to note. Religious tolerance has always been a feature of American life, but how religion has been a factor in culture and even employment has been largely forgotten.

St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Cheyenne Wyoming.

On Holscher's Hub, French Frigate Shoals.

French Frigate Shoals.

The Old Homesteads

I went to a ash spreading (i.e., a type of funeral really) out at an old homestead the other day. By 4x4, it was a long way out. Long, long way, or so it felt. I learned while there that the original homestead had first been filed and occupied in 1917, a big year for homesteading.

It was a very interesting place, and felt very isolated. In visiting about that with my father in law, however, he noted that there had been another homestead just over the hill. And, as I've likely noted here before, there were tiny homesteads all over at that time. It was isolated, but sort of locally isolated. There were, as there were with most of these outfits, another homestead just a few hours ride away, at most, if that.

That is not to say that they weren't way out. I'd guess that this place was at least a full days ride from the nearest town at that time. Even when cars were commonly owned, and they were coming in just about that time, it would have taken the better part of a day to get to town, or a town (there were a couple of very small, but viable towns, about equal distance to this place at that time). It's interesting how agricultural units everywhere in North American have become bigger over time, even if they are all closer now, in terms of time, to a city or town.

Communications and Road Miles

I had a fairly typical experience, and a bit of an odd experience, yesterday which calls to mind the topic of this blog.

Yesterday I went to my office, then to Sheridan Wyoming, then to Ranchester Wyoming, and back.

On the way to Ranchester, we passed two Rolls Royce touring cars. The Silver Ghost type of car, really old ones. They were, of course, premium touring cars in their day, which would have been basically the years on both sides of World War One. Huge automobiles.

The trip basically entailed about 170 miles of travel one way, or a grand trip, in one day of about 300 or so miles. We were home by dinner.

On the way back, I pulled over by the Midwest exit where there was cell reception to make a work call to an attorney in Gillette, WY. My son took this photograph while I was doing that.

What does this have to do with anything?

Well, in a century's time, communications and travel have been so revolutionized that they've radically impacted the way those in my field, in this location, do business. A century ago I would not have taken a day trip to Sheridan and Ranchester. For that matter, while I could easily have gone from Sheridan to Ranchester, most summers, a century ago, that would likely have pretty much been a day trip in and of itself. No, an attorney, if he ever had any cause to go to Sheridan from Casper, would have taken a train. Most likely, you'd take the train up one day, and back the next.

A very adventurous person, if they owned a car, might have driven up to Sheridan, but it would have taken all day. And you would have stayed upon arriving.

This year, I suspect, the travel by car of that type, on roads of that era, would have been impossible. Everything is flooding. I doubt a person could have driven in these conditions from Sheridan to Ranchester. You might have had to take the train to do that. The rail line does run though both towns, then up to Garryowen, and on to Billings. It did then as well.

Even in the mid 20th Century this would have been a long road trip, but you could have done it in a day.

But even the telephone aspect of this didn't exist when I first practiced law, some 20 years ago. That's entirely new. It effectively makes your car your office. As internet connections continue to improve, very often you have internet service darned near everywhere for that matter.

An improvement, or just the way things are?

Knowing, or not, what we think we know.

An old thread, now revived, on SMH.

This thread fits in well with this blog, and is almost the theme of it. But, in general, how much do we really know of the routine of any one era? News tends to feature the rare, unusual, uncommon, or noteworthy, not the ordinary. But news in some ways tends to be what ends up being recorded as history.

The story of German horse use during World War Two is a good example. In popular histories, it tends to be reported that the German army of WWII was a mechanized, modern army. That's partially true, but to a much greater extent it was a hiking and horse using army. By war's end, it was the least mechanized army fighting in Europe.

Why is that not often noted? Well, the German propaganda machine would have had no interest in noting that, and every interest in emphasizing mechanization. Allied reports, for their part, would have emphasized the terrifying and dramatic. So, our view is not entirely accurate from the common sources.

Social and Cultural History and Film

I just posted a thread on this topic on SMH.

Repeating the topic here, I was wondering anyone who happens to stop in here might think in terms of what movies are particularly accurate in depicting any one historical setting.

I'm not restricting this to military films at all, as I noted on SMH, but films in general. And I'm not restricting this to a film about anyone era. Just what films do we here think did a particularly good job in this context?

War Horse

A thread about the horse behind the horse on SMH.

Remembering what places were like

An interesting edition of the Casper Star Tribune's history column appeared this week, under the title "Routines Disrupted". The following caught my attention, showing what the town was like early in the 20th Century. It's easy to imagine everything being slower paced and more relaxed, and easy to forget the atmosphere that actually prevailed at the time:

Because the city authorities stopped them from selling liquor and insisted that there must be no more piano thumping in their houses, the landladies of the bawdy houses of Casper held an indignation meeting one day last week and decided to suspend business entirely, and accordingly all the inmates of the three places on David street were discharged on the first of the month and Saturday morning fifteen of them left town on the east-bound train, it is hoped to return no more.

“These people got the notion in their head that they could do just as they pleased so long as they remained in the restricted district, and high carnival was held nearly every night for awhile, and it was seldom that a big fight was not pulled off by some of them two or three times a week. They caused the authorities so much trouble that it kept one man on watch nearly every night to quell the disturbance. But after tolerating it until it could be tolerated no longer, the order was given out to cut out the booze and the music, and this made the madams mad and they have closed up their houses, and threaten to ‘kill the town.’ ...

“[I]f the places are ever opened up again, which they undoubtedly will be before the end of this week if they are permitted to do so, the people should, and no doubt will, insist that the places be conducted along lines that will not disturb the decent people of the town.”

Food and diet

It's really easy to romanticize the past, including the kitchen table of the past, but a recent Freakanomics podcast I listened to suggests that some caution should be involved in that. That's no surprise really, but it is something that we rarely consider.

In our minds, the table of the past was always the place where home cooked meals were served, with fresh food of all kinds. But this really wasn't so. For one thing, refrigeration was not really terribly advanced until the 1930s or so. Prior to that, a lot of people had an "ice box". My father still referred to the refrigerator at the "ice box" in the 1970s, not really switching over to "refrigerator" until the 80s. An ice box isn't anywhere as efficient as a refrigerator.

People compensated for that by buying food every day, but that couldn't really take care of the entire problem. Fresh food simply isn't available every day, everywhere. Frozen food wasn't really fully available year around. Canned food was, in the 20th Century of course, but it wasn't always as good as the canned food we have now. Salted and pickled food made up for part of the problem.

And food variety was necessarily much more restricted. It isn't as if you could expect to buy oranges everywhere easily prior to relatively efficient transportation. Something like a Kiwi fruit would have been unheard of. Even when I was a kid fish came from the river or from a box in the freezer section of the grocery store. In the early 20th Century here fish would have been from the river, and that's about it.

Food related diseases, such as rickets and goiter, that are attributable to a simple dietary deficiencies. Vitamin D is now put in milk to address rickets, but when most people bought milk in glass bottles that was from a local creamery, this wasn't true. Iodine is now in salt, but it wasn't always.

In looking at images from the past, a full farm larder is easy to imagine. But that isn't always the way things were.

An interesting look at an aspect of this, in military terms, is on this Society of the Military Horse thread.

The distance of things, and self segregation

Sometimes its helpful to actually know what I'm writing about (d'oh!).

In the post The Distance of Things I commented on how remarkably close in proximity Mother of God, Holy Ghost, and the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception are, and were not, in terms of transportation in earlier times.

Well, they are close now, to be sure, but Mother of God Church was not a Catholic Church until about 1949, so my analysis there fell sort of flat. Of course, Holy Ghost and the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception have always been Catholic Church's, so my analysis still made sense there.

Be that as it may, another church also provides an interesting example of changing times, that being Holy Rosary. Holy Rosary is probably no more than five miles, maybe less, from the Cathedral, but it's north of I70, and it would be hard for people in the neighborhood to get to the Cathedral even now, so I can understand why it is there. Having said that, what surprised me is that, in reading the parish history, how ethnic it originally was.

The church, built in 1918, originally served a principally South Slavs population. Another Catholic Church existed within just a few blocks, but it was principally Polish in population. Prior to the construction of Holy Rosary, the South Slavs attended that church, but they wanted one of their own. That's probably understandable given language differences between the various parishioners. Of interest, a Russian Orthodox Church was and is located very nearby.

What all this shows is that there was a rich population of Eastern Europeans in this section of Denver early in the 20th Century. They all lived in the same area, but they also maintained certain distinctions between themselves. Overall, that's not surprising, but the degree to which the distinctions were maintained perhaps is.

Occasionally, things throw back.

Great video.