Homesteading then and . . .not now.

 Recently, this was posted on Today In Wyoming's History: May 20:

1862  Congress passed the Homestead Act.

As surprising as it is now to think of it, the Homestead Act remained in force until 1932 in the lower 48.  The last patents were taken out under the various acts in the 1950s, although entries could still be made in Alaska up until some date in the 1950s.  Homesteading remained quite active in the 1919 to 1932 period, as there were efforts to encourage veterans to homestead following World War One, and there was a lot of desperate homesteading in the 1929 to 1932 time frame.  A Wyoming Supreme Court decisions on a land contest from that period actually noted that no decision could be reached, as homesteading was carving up the contested lands so fast that the decision would be obsolete by the time it was rendered.  The repeal of the act in 1932 was followed by  the failure of many of the late smaller homesteads, and a reversal of the trend.  The Federal Government reacquired many of the late homesteads by default, and actually purchased a large number of them in the Thunder Basin region of Wyoming, as it was so clear that they would fail in the droughts of the 30s.

Following up a bit, it's interesting to note that there were more homesteads taken out under the various Homestead Acts in the 20th Century than there were in 19th.  The 1914 to 1919 period saw a huge boom in homesteading.

One of the most interesting things about the act was said to me by the grandson of Russian immigrants who had homesteaded outside of Cheyenne, WY, that simply being that "it was a good deal for poor people".  I suppose that is true.

How many folks here know of a homesteading ancestor in their family?

Homesteading, both the legal process by which people filed on the Federal Domain and "proved up" their claim, and the more general process of farmers of average means, at best, acquiring real property for farms and ranches is an indelible part of the American story. This is often thought to be particularly part of the history of the American West, but its actually part of the entire story of North America, no matter where people are or their ancestors are.  While there was no Federal Domain in the east, homesteading of a different type certainly was common in the East for the first half of the 19th Century.  Homesteading also occurred in the Canada, including the entry upon Crown Lands, i.e., land belonging to the government.  And it was also part of Mexico's  story up until the Mexican Revolution changed the nature of land ownership in the Mexico.

But is this now just a part of our past? That is, can average men and women enter farming or ranching today?  It's certainly not very easy, and not because it's "hard work," or the like. The price of land simply has taken most Americans out of the market.  There are a few exceptions that manage to break into it without being born into it, but  they are truly exceptional.

I have to wonder what this does to the soul of a nation like this one.  It's not easy to discount.  And I also have to wonder what it does to the aspirations of average Americans.  All in all, this is not a good thing.

People like to claim that the United States had its origin in a search for "freedom."  Sometimes, some specific freedom is cited, such as freedom of religion.  And that's quite true.  There are entire groups of people who departed their homelands in search of freedom of conscience, or in some related instances, they were simply fleeing oppression of one kind or another.  North America was unique in its extension of religious tolerance for many decades.  Sometimes people were fleeing for their lives.  Mexican political liberals who crossed over into the United States in the 1910 to 1913 period give us an example of people feeling for political conscience, for example.  And all of this still occurs today.  For example, the United States has become a haven for Middle Eastern Christians, who are being driven out of their homelands today and which are set, unless something dramatic to the contrary occurs, to become extinct in their native lands very soon in one of the great, largely unnoticed, tragedies of the post World War Two era.

But, as significant as those factors are, an equally important one, and frankly a greater one, was the desire to own land.

In most of Europe south of Scandinavia it was simply impossible for an average person to own land prior to the revolutions of the 1840s.  Indeed, on the continent the highly developed guild system meant it was darned near impossible to do much of anything outside of what your parents did prior to those revolutions and the situation wasn't any better, regarding land, in the British Isles.  Indeed, if you were Catholic in the United Kingdom your options were limited in the extreme, although Protestants could move into town and industrial employments.  And if you were Russian, to borrow the Bronx phrase, "forgetta about it."  Russians were born into serfdom and they were staying there.  For male peasants everywhere the Army was always an option, and often the only option.  Of course, for some men, it was the compulsory option on the continent, and some European armies in the 18th Century conscripted for life.  The British, at least, didn't conscript for life.  You joined for life.

Given that, perhaps it's no surprise that the great dream about American, and perhaps the great American dream, was to own your own farm.  And that wasn't just the American Dream, it was the North American Dream. The same impulse that lead people to immigrate to the United States took them to Canada, and in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, northern Mexico. For that matter, it took people to Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina.  It's a universal human constant.  It brought Italian farmers to the Australian coast, English farmers to Chile, Russian farmers to Kansas, Japanese farmers to California and Irish herdsmen to Wyoming.

Now, you can't do that.

And, contrary to what some may feel, that desire wasn't limited to a desperate first generation.  Nearly the entire history of the United States and Canada was controlled by this impulse up into the 20th Century.  It isn't very difficult to find examples of people born into middle class families who left their natives states to homestead on the Frontier.  In the case of the US, homesteading peaked in 1919.  Canada remained an overwhelmingly rural nation until the 1950s.  Even Quebec, which we now associate with as charming metropolitan French culture, was a rural province up until that time.

The U.S. Homestead acts were repealed in the early 1930s and the Canadian ones went away sometime in the mid 20th Century.  Mexico's died during the Mexican Revolution.  Since that time land has increasingly been owned in the European pattern of old.  It tends to pass into the hands of the very wealthy.  And as that occurs, the dollar per acre value of land climbs and climbs.  As that occurs, it climbs up out of site and beyond its productive value.

This has certainly happened in regard to ranch land in the West.  It was already the case, even at the time of my birth, that getting into ranching was very difficult as a start up proposition.  Land was simply too expensive.  It was difficult, but not impossible.  Now, I fear, it's become nearly impossible, and it's become difficult for ranching families to even have their younger members take up the ancient occupation.

There are a lot of factors contributing to this.  For one thing, mechanization of agriculture resulted in the concentration of farms as land that formerly worked by numerous farmers with horses and mules gave way, over time, to being worked by a single farmer with increasingly larger and larger mechanized implements.  The economics of that process had the impact of driving farmers off the land, particularly any who were slow to mechanize, didn't desire to do so, or who were somewhat inefficient in some manner.  Of course, it also ultimately has started to drive even big farmers off the land, as the enormous costs of mechanized implements has meant that they are now in the area where only corporate entities can really own them.  Additionally, mechanization in the form of 4x4 vehicles mean that ranches also could grow bigger and be worked with fewer people.

Motor vehicles also made every agricultural unit closer to town.  Well into the mid 20th Century there were plenty of farms and ranches that were truly isolated. There are still some, but not like they once were. This meant that people in towns, and then cities, and then remote cities, could indulge themselves in participating in the ownership of rural land in a manner wholly impossible to earlier generations.  A remote big city rancher, for example, like Theodore Roosevelt, in the late 19th Century, had to leave his city life for nearly a year at a time in order to actually engage in ranch life.  Now, the wealthy can fly out for some big fun events, like brandings, and never really have to leave home, as they're only 12 hours away, if that.  In the 19th Century and early 20th Century, nearly ever town in Wyoming was at least 12 hours away from the next one.

And the reach of the very wealthy has accordingly been extended.  Even well into the 20th Century it tended to be the rule that very wealthy people might own some large block of land, or at least an additional "summer home" elsewhere, but it wasn't usually all that far, really, from their homes.  New Yorkers in that class, for example, had their second homes in New York.  Many people from wealthy areas located in what was in essence a community of like kind not that far from the town where their wealth was located.  Now, however, there is the ability and even a trend to locate that second block of land at a great distance.  Indeed, novelist Thomas Wolf provided that "a man in full" needed a Wyoming ranch.

And the scale of wealth has shifted so that there are more people in the bottom end of the middle class, where agricultural aspirations are approaching the category of pipe dreams, but there are also probably more of the super wealthy, as a subset of the wealthy.  Indeed, the price of land in some locations is now so high that it probably actually is the domain of the super wealthy alone.  Even a fairly wealthy person would have to invest nearly their entire savings in some outfits only to receive an economic return that would reduce their actual income far below what they were otherwise used to.

And, of course, a country of 300,000,000 people, headed towards 400,000,000, is going to have a great deal of inflationary pressure on real property no matter what.  There are densely populated agricultural nations, but they no longer tend to be first world nations.  When nations become this densely populated, they're urban nations and the land, save for government intervention, is going to go to the wealthy in the population.

What happens when a nation founded on agriculture reaches this state?  I fear that the answer isn't a good one.

In our modern world there seems to be an assumption that everyone wants to work with computers or IT, or something of the like.  But I know that's not true.  And the bloom is really off the rose in a lot of occupations which people have regarded as "good jobs" for decades.  Not a month goes by, it seems, where I don't read in the ABA Journal how young lawyers have diminished opportunities and that they regret what opportunities remain for them.  Law itself is loosing its regional base and jobs are migrating towards an urban center of mass, a process accelerated by the naive assumption that exams like the Uniform Bar Exam do anything other than hand the jobs of rural and small town firms to big city ones.  We are rocketing, in essence, to an all big city world for most Americans, irrespective of whether they desire it, or whether most of them are well suited for it.

In some ways this is part of an overall era of decreasing opportunities in the "Land of Opportunity."  Up through the 1960s the dream of the middle class for their children was that they obtain a college degree; a bachelor's degree, which would insure that they would obtain a "good job."  And a bachelors would indeed nearly guarantee employment in business in that era, irrespective of what that degree was in.  It was proof of ability and intelligence. By the late 1970s, however, with bachelor's degrees becoming increasingly common, the drive towards a second degree of some sort, a Masters most likely started.  Today, bachelor's degrees are nearly as necessary as high school diplomas once were in the 1960s to 1970s time frame (they hadn't been necessary for a lot of employments before that).  At the same time, starting in the 1970s, manufacturing jobs, once the destination for those who didn't really want an office job, started going overseas, from which they never returned, save, oddly enough, for some machinist jobs, which have recently returned, placing machinist in demand in some localities.  More recently, even one of the occupations long, long regarded as immune from decline, law, has.  A J.D. no longer guarantees employment anywhere, a situation which is particularly pronounced in some regions of the country.  Law Schools are struggling to portray themselves as relevant in the situation, even while some states simply hand the work of their rural practitioners to lawyers in remote big cities, giving us the bizarre situation of a State like Wyoming firing the gun at it practitioners with the Uniform Bar Exam, while a state like South Dakota tries to recruit lawyers to rural areas.

All of that may not seem directly related, and perhaps it isn't, but it is related.

It's often noted that civilization is closely tied to farming.  Indeed, more radical theorists note that humans in a true state of nature don't farm, they hunt.  However, that line isn't that clear, really, as there's been a fair number of hunter societies that also farmed as well.  Such farming, of course, was "subsistence" farming, but then so was much of American farming in the 19th Century, being agrarian, rather than production agriculture, in nature.

 Pueblo Indian hunter, probably also a farmer, as their society was not nomadic and engaged in farming ans well as hunting.

Be that as it may, it's inescapable that its farmers who are the ironic vanguards of civilization.  Civilization isn't really possible without farming, but with civilization comes urbanization, and that tends to push farmers out or off, or it pushes the land into the hands of what are effectively landlords, whether that landlord be an Dot Com Baron in the 21st Century, or a true titled Baron in the 11th Century.   That's effectively what we're seeing now, as agricultural land is increasingly owned by people whose connection with it is tangential, or effectively through an office somewhere else.  Or by people who simply wish to own farm ground, but don't have to make their livings from it.

That people wish to do that says something about the basic nature of human beings. Every the very wealthy, who do not need to ever wonder where their next meal is coming from, seem to have a desire to own farm ground.  I've often noticed an odd cycle here that used to occur (but now no longer does, due to the price of land).  That cycle was that the homesteader worked hard to build a ranch/farm that he could hand down to his kids, or more likely just one of his kids. The inheriting kid, in turn, worked hard so that he could send his kids off the farm/ranch, under a still common rural belief that every town job is a good job involving no real work.  Those kids went to university for a career and worked hard to send their kids to university for a better career. And that next generation worked hard to buy a "place", that being some kind of farm or ranch that put them back out on the land.  In essence, if they'd never started the up and out cycle, they'd have been where the latter generation wished to end up in the first place.

Now, however, just getting into agriculture increasingly seems to be a dream, and more and more Americans have to look to urban jobs in most places.  With our firm entrenchment in the economic system that we have, it seems unlikely that this will be addressed in any societal or legal fashion.  But what that does to a culture is an open question.  Even such an urban culture as France has taken steps to keep land in the hands of a farming class. What happens to ours when we don't, and what happens to that generation of farmer hopefuls that instead finds work in Denver, Atlanta or Los Angeles?

The Big Speech: Anonymous from a Gilbralter Sentry box

God and a soldier all people adore
In time of war, but not before;
And when war is over and all things are righted,
God is neglected and an old soldier slighted.

A Day In The LIfe, Comparison and Constrast. December 9

Yet another look at a fairly typical day here, and comparing it to a century ago.

December 9

0500 Got up, etc.

0730  Drove daughter to school.

0745  Arrived at work and packed up file for trip to accident location.

0800  Started drive to distant rural accident location.

0930  Met witness at road side pull out.

1000 Arrived at accident site and examined it until 1200

1200-1330  Drove back to office.

1300-1700 Worked on case.

1700.  Went home, etc.

Okay, what about the same date in 1913.

0500  Got up, etc.

0800  Go to train station.

1000 Arrive at small town near accident site.  There really is one there.

1000 to 1100 Ride out, probably by wagon, to accident location.

1100 to 1300.  Examine location.

1300 to 1400  Go back to small town and hope there's an afternoon train.

1500  If there was a train, this is when it would arrive.

1500-1700, ride back to town.

Or, wait for train the following day.

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Looking at the Vietnam War differently. Not a war, but as a campaign in the Cold War.

In a thread just below I noted the Vietnam War as a lost American war.  Now, in a somewhat contrarian fashion, I"m going to urge us to look at Vietnam in another way.  Not as a war at all, and not as an undeclared "conflict", but rather as a campaign in a larger war, that war being the Cold War.  If looked at that way, the war wasn't nearly as clearly lost, and arguably may have been a success.

Why did we go into Vietnam in the first place?  The question has been posed again and again as if it is a mystery, but the early statements on why we went in, and the early criticizm of the same, remain the most accurate analysis. We went into Vietnam not for the sake of the Republic of Vietnam, but because we feared what would happen if we didn't go in.  Even at that, it wasn't primarily our fear at first, although we shared it, but an Australian fear. The Australian fear, however, was not without reason. We feared that if Vietnam was lost, it would act as the first in a row of Southeast Asian dominoes, falling one after another, to Communism.

Because that didn't happen, it is argued, that view was absurd.  But it wasn't absurd at the time, and in retrospect, it might have actually be right.

Consider the world, as perceived in the West, in the first two decades after World War Two, rather than how it is looked at now. The US came out of the Second World War with the Bomb, the only nation that had it, and only the US and Canada had fought the war without any mainland damage to our contries.  The US and Canadian economies were strong, and the US economy effectively dominated the world. Things were looking good in 1945 and 1946.

Then, in 1947 the shocks started coming.  We had thought the Soviets were our friends and sort of naively believed, contrary to all evidence, that they were democrats at heart.  It became pretty apparent, fairly soon, that where the Red Army had liberated in 1944-1945 it was going to remain, and the Eastern nations that were occupied by the Soviets were going to be Communist countries for the most part (there were some exceptions).  The Soviets decided that Berlin ought to be theirs and made a dedicated effort to acquire it via blockade, bringing the world to the brink of a Third World War in-spite of the U.S. Atomic bomb monopoly.  The Red Chinese prevailed in the Chinese Civil War in 1947.  The British and Commonwealth nations, who had already fought against the Communist in Greece in 1945 started fighting them in Malaysia in 1948.  

In that same year, sparked in part by revelations revealed by a super secret U.S. Army intelligence program started during World War Two, the United States Congress started investigating domestic Communist infiltration into the U.S. government and to everyone's stunned surprise a Communist cell was found to have done so, even including State Department employees, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White (the latter of whom was not a Communist, but a "fellow traveler") who had positions of influence in the U.S. government late in World War Two.  In 1949 the Soviet Union surprised everyone by detonating their first atomic bomb, ending our nuclear monopoly.  In 1950 espionage was shown to have included individuals who were part of the American nuclear program, thereby allowing the Soviets to develop an atomic bomb as quickly as they did. That same year Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, which the US, and the United Nations, intervened in as the Korean Peninsula seemed to be a dagger pointed at Japan.  A near United Nations victory was turned into a stalemate when Red China intervened to prevent a North Korean defeat..

The French, even while fighting in Korea, were fighting their own war in Indochina, although the fight was a mixed one, designed in no small part to keep their colonial interests there.  They were defeated soon after the Korean War leaving the Vietnamese portion of Indochina split in two, in a Korean like fashion, with a Communist north and a non Communist south.  Soon, a Communist guerrilla campaign developed there.

Given all of this the question we so often hear about Vietnam; i.e., should we have stayed out of it, might be a false question.  The real question I think is would it have been impossible to stay out of it?  I don’t think so, if we place the war in the context of its times.

 

This is why that’s my suspicion.

If we go back to the end of World War Two, as we did above, we’d find that the first Western effort against a Communist force came in the British effort in the Greek civil war.  The UK was aware of the danger posed by Communism before the US was, and at that time the US basically felt comfortable enough with its wartime view that the Communists weren’t really that much to be concerned about.  The British went right from that effort into the Malayan Emergency, which was a Commonwealth backed effort that saw at least Australia and Rhodesia also commit some troops. 

The awakening really came for us when the Nationalist Chinese lost the Chinese Civil War, which we just weren’t anticipating.  That massively increased the territory on the globe dominated by Communism and at fist the USSR and PRC were at least outwardly friendly to each other.  No sooner had that occurred, with all sorts of domestic repercussions in the US about “who lost China” than the USSR risked a third world war over control of a city, Berlin.  Those events got us engaged.  As soon as that seemed resolved North Korea invaded South Korea.

The importance of the Korean War, in terms of the Vietnam War, cannot be overstated.  There’s really no way to imagine North Korea invading South Korea without the PRC standing right next to it.  Had the Nationalist won the Chinese civil war I can’t imagine the USSR giving license to North Korea to invade the South.  Just too risky if the Western Allies resisted it.  But with the great mass of China backing up North Korea geographically things were different. And that worked out for North Korea in that even though their invasion of the South ultimately failed, Chinese support kept North Korea around.

This brings us back to the "Domino Theory", which was that the if any nation in Southeast Asia fell they'd all fall, one after another.  The general theory is that they'd fall all the way to India, in all likelihood.

It’s easy to dismiss the Domino Theory now, although erroneously in my view, but at the time dominoes really were falling.  One giant one fell, China, and another one, South Korea, nearly tipped over almost immediately thereafter.  With that history, with Communist insurgencies breaking out all over South East Asia, and with a big huge Communist neighbor behind nearly all of them, geographically, starting in 1947 things looked pretty darned grim. 

And not only in our view, but in the view of nearly every Western nation.  The UK had been in nonstop combat against some Communist force since before the end of World War Two up through 1954, and at least Australia had been involved in two wars against Communist forces by the end of 1954.  The French had been involved in two such wars, one in Indochina, and had actually sought our aid there, but the British vetoed it (we were reluctant) as they felt, probably rightly, that the French had a hard time distinguishing the difference between a war against Communist insurgents and a war against French colonialism, with the latter being doomed even if the two efforts were mixed.

Looking at it that way, with Communist insurgencies breaking out everywhere in Asia, with the potentiality for more breaking out where they hadn’t already, and with a lot of the insurgencies seeming to be successful, it’d be hard to imagine Western nations regarding any of the wars as mere local affairs without global implications.  A person might ask “why Vietnam” but the answer might just be that it was Vietnam’s turn.  The British and Australians had already fought one war against Communist in Southeast Asia and it reasonably looked like not putting the fire out where it broke out would make things worse.  Indeed, it almost certainly would have.  The Australians were, for their part, urging the US to take action in Vietnam before we did.  And in terms of the big Communist powers, China and the USSR, Vietnam did have a good deep water port which was strategic enough that the US had attacked it from the air, during WWII, when the Japanese occupied it.

The question almost would have been whether to draw the line in Vietnam or somewhere else, with all the other somewhere else’s being increasingly bad choices.  I don’t really see how the war could have been avoided.

And maybe the war, if considered a campaign in the Cold War, the campaign worked, although it certainly wasn't an unqualified success.  It would have been, rather, a type of extraordinarily long, and unintentional, delaying action.

The goal of a war like this wasn't to win it, in and of itself.  It was to keep a region of the globe from falling to a radical movement that conceived of itself, from day one, as a global millennial movement which would not only prevail, inevitably in its view, over the entire planet, but which conceived of itself as the final stage in history.  Indeed, often missed in the story of the Cold War is that the first rift in the Communist world, the split between Trotsky and Stalin, had been over whether or not the Soviet Union had to bring the Communist revolution to the globe immediately.  Trotsky argued that it absolutely had to.  Stalin argued that Marxism allowed for a start with "Socialism in one country."  Trotsky would have assaulted the Soviet Union's neighbors, immediately, in the name of the world revolution.  He failed, of course, and ended with an ice pick in his head, but even at that the argument was in part about the speed of the global pace of Communism, not that it had global ends.

Looked at that way, then, the Western wars against Communist here and there were really individual campaigns in the Cold War. The major powers never went after each other in a total war, like World War Two, but they did fight in their Cold War in regional conflicts where they felt they had to, or where it was to their advantage to.  The Soviet Union put down a German uprising in East Germany in the 1940s and it put down uprising in Hungary in 1958 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.  It also fought a low grade guerrilla war on some of its own territory post World War Two.  And, as prior to WWII, it sponsored Communist guerrillas elsewhere.  The Red Chinese, after 1947, invaded the territories to its west and fought border wars with India and Pakistan in the 60s,.  And it also sponsored Communist movements elsewhere.  And of course the West fought where it felt it had to as well, as noted above.

The Vietnam War did serve to arrest Communist expansion beyond Indochina.  The North Vietnamese were backing Communist forces in Laos as early as 1953 but that’s as far as it went and the country held out.  The fight was on, however, for South Vietnam by the late 1950s.  At the same time, guerrilla movements existed in Cambodia and  Thailand.

Had Indochina simply fallen soon after the French departure, or in the mid 1960s, it’d be hard not to imagine serious fights breaking out in Thailand or other regional countries, all of which we couldn’t have avoided.Indeed, one such war was already on, that being the one in Malaysia. The struggles in Laos and Cambodia have to be considered too.  Indeed, while its popular to criticize the “Domino Theory,” I think the Vietnam War really proved it.  North Vietnam was communist, the South did fall after we withdrew our support, and Cambodia and Laos also went.  Cambodia crawled back out first, but what a horror it endured.  I don’t know what the situation is in Laos today, as its seemingly always obscure. 

Anyhow, had the war not been fought as long as it was, I wonder if Thailand would have gone under too.  It did fight in Vietnam,  but in some ways I wonder if the war didn’t end up being a bit of a delaying action for Thailand.  And a person can speculate from there.  Now, people commonly will state that the theory was disproved as that domino and the ones next to it didn’t fall, but if the RVN had not been supported and had fallen in, let’s say, 1966, would Thailand have been able to resist similar Communist efforts?  Or would we have just ended up in a similar war there or some other locality?  I suspect we would have.

Looked at that way, the Vietnam War becomes a big campaign in the larger Cold War, which we did win.  Perhaps Giap won the campaign, but in the end, we did win that war.

OSU 49-Baylor 17-Wyoming 0?

A friend of mine who now works as an engineer in Oklahoma called me up to point out the OSU-Baylor score from last weekend.  OSU won, 49 to 17.

I'm not much of a football fan, as he knows.  That's not really why he called.

He really called to point out something about the history of OSU, and the University of Wyoming, that he'd recently just discussed with me, following the resignation of Robert Sternberg.

Sternberg, prior to being the President of the University of Wyoming, was the Provost of OSU (and before that, and still currently, as somewhat controversial psychologist).  My friend is pretty familiar with OSU, which I am not.  And what he said, and what people complaining about him at UW also somewhat said, is that in that roll he really cleaned house.  I.e., a lot of people high up in various departments were sent packing.

And the reasons weren't all that different than those which we've heard about at UW.  Department reputations had sagged, and OSU was no longer regarded as all that much.

Well, the end of the story is this. There were a lot of complaints at OSU about Sternberg, but the administration backed him, the house cleaning was accomplished, and it's standings, in football and academics rose.  Now its a major player in both.

According to my friend, the complaints about UW programs not only extend to the law school, but the college of engineering as well, and student graduates are hurting as a result.  He feels UW took a blow when our administration wouldn't back up Sternberg, and I agree with him.

Over the weekend, one of the UW trustees who had been on the board when Sternberg was hired wrote an Op Ed in the Casper Star Tribune, supposedly on the topic of keeping the academic search confidential.  At the end of it, I couldn't tell whether the former trustee wanted it open or closed.  The faculty, however, wants it open, and voted on that yesterday, with only three dissenting votes.  One commenter in the paper noted that had the search been open, hiring Sternberg could have been avoided.

And that's just the point, and why it should be closed, but why it'll probably be open.  Having managed to effect a coup, keeping the search open will cement it.  Those people high up in other schools will be reluctant to publish their desire to move on, and therefore will likely pass risking it to some degree.  And the faculty can make certain that anyone it might disapprove of for any reason is thoroughly complained about in sufficient time to prevent their being hired.

But what about the students?  If my friend is right, a decline appears to be setting in, in two schools at least.  That might not be apparent to them, and probably isn't.  It'll become apparent when they start looking for work, and it'll reflect itself in the types of jobs they obtain.  A university exists for the students future, not so much their present, and for the good of the state.  Let's hope the trustees have that fully in mind.

Postscript:

This morning's Casper Star Tribune reports that UW Interim President McGinty, in his delivery to the Legislature yesterday, stated:

The response to those requests or urgings from the state were slow, reluctant, and, I think, at least indifferent or unenthusiastic – and some people would apply stronger adjectives than I would.  But the governor and Legislature have been growing increasing insistent, and that led to leadership changes that occurred in the past year, going back to the resignation of President Buchanan.

 Very interesting statements.  Essentially, McGinty has acknowledged what  Sternberg was acting in reaction to real concerns, and by extensions, that the entrenched forces of inaction are what brought Sternberg down.  Those who rejoiced at Sternberg's downfall may, perhaps, done so a bit too soon.  Or at least it would appear that changes of the type he was creating, but perhaps too quickly, are coming anyway.

Postscript II

Well, that didn't last long.  McGinty's already backpedaling on that statement, indicating he didn't quite mean it the way it sounded. 

A Day In The Life: Comparison and Contrast, Now and Then December 6 2013/1913

Sort of an interesting exercise, to compare daily activities now as compared to some earlier time.   In this case, let's look at December 6, 2013 vs December 6, 1913, just to see how things are different.

 Tucumcari, New Mexico 1913

December 2

0500  Got up to the sound of my son going out to plug in the 1/2 ton truck. Temperature -20F.

Turned heat up a bit as it was cold in the house.

0505  Made coffee with coffee maker, poured a bowl of cereal for breakfast (Cheerios) and read the Casper Star Tribune.

0530  Shaved

0545  Ironed a shirt.

0600  Turned on computer, checked email, etc.

0710  Fired up pickup.

0730  Took daughter to school and drove to work.

0800  Arrived at work, fired up work computer, checked work emails and started int.

0900  Participate in telephone conference call hosted in Houston.

1000  Resumed working on pleadings.

1210 Took a break for lunch.

1300  Resumed working on pleadings, different case.

1530  Remembered the office was doing the firm tree with accompanying small party when secretary and paralegal reminded me.

1600  Finished up pleadings and joined party late.

1730  Came home.

1800  Ate dinner with family.

1900  Watched movie (The Memphis Belle) on television.

Okay, so what would have happened in 1913, under similar circumstances?

Well, probably something like this:

0500 Get up.  Probably the only one up.

0505  Do something furnace wise, not quite sure what.  It'd be really cold inside the house, however.

0510. Put some wood in the kitchen stove and light it.

0520  Put a coffee pot on the kitchen stove and start boiling coffee.  Probably put a pan of water on the stove also to start boiling water for oatmeal.

0530  Coffee probably done.  Oatmeal probably not quite.

0535  Oatmeal probably done, take off stove to cool event.

0540-0600.  Eat breakfast and drink coffee, while reading the morning Casper paper.

0600 Shave.  This would involve a straight razor and whipping soap chips into lather. Something folks don't do much now.

0615 Get dressed.  Hopefully I'd have a starched shirt ready to go as otherwise I'd to iron one, which would be quite a process as irons were heated on a stove at that time.

0700  Walk to work.

0730  Arrive at work and to the typical work for a law office of the period.

1200-1300  Take a break for lunch.

1300-1800  Typical law office work for the day.

1800  Walk home.

1830  Get home and warm up.

1900  Eat dinner

1930  Help do the dishes, no automatic dishwasher in those days.

2000 Read evening paper.  Most towns had a morning and evening paper in those days.

2030  Read a book

Quite a bit different in a lot of ways.

Technological Habituation

I forgot to bring my cell phone with me to work today.

That should be no big deal.  There's a phone here at my desk, although I do have a few clients who are routinely used to using my cell phone. But to my surprise, I fee odd without it.

The reason I feel a bit odd is several fold, but it shows how acclimated we become to technological changes, for good or ill.

When I started practicing law in 1990 I did not have a cell phone. Cell phones weren't even available, I think.  I know that we didn't have them as college students.  The first cell phone we had at all, in my family, was one that my father bought for some reason. It is what they called a "bag phone", which is a relatively large cell phone which you plugged into a vehicle's cigarette lighter (which is what we called a "power point" at that time) for power.  It had no power of its own.  And it was designed for use in a car.

Exactly why my father thought we needed one I don't know.  Maybe it was so that we would have it when we were out in the sticks. We didn't use it much, but we did have it for a period of years.  I know that I still had it when I started dating my wife, which was after my father had died, but only barely.  It seems to me that I also had it when first married.

I'm not really keen on cell phones, even now, and didn't have one for a long time after they became available.  My first one was a cast off from my wife.  Now, however, I have an Iphone and the reason is that it essentially became impossible for a lawyer not to have one.  You need it to check your email while traveling. That sounds like an excuse, but it is not.  I skipped the whole Blackberry thing but there came a day when I was working on a case, while I was on the road, and settlement negotiations broke out while I was traveling.  Having not adopted the smart phone at the time, I found that I was reduced to making piles of calls, where I had cell phone coverage, to see what the heck was going on.  That week I had an Iphone.

I never thought I'd be a person who texts, but I do, and that is what makes not having the Iphone here today odd.  Throughout an average day I'll send a few text.  My wife texts me, and some times my son does, even from school.  I like the fact that this means they're sort of connected to me all the time.

That's something that was totally different before the cell phone.  I was, and remain, used to the idea of being out in the sticks in contact with nobody.  And prior to the cell phone when I was at work, I was out of contact except via the office phone, which I limited pretty much to work calls. At that time I can recall it being a real irritant that some office staff took huge numbers of personal calls in a day. People still do, I'm sure, but  they aren't tying up an office line now by doing it. 

More significantly, when I was away at school, I was really away.  That wasn't so pleasant, but that's something that the current generation will really not experience, again for good or ill.

This is, of course, a species of habituation.  I'm habituated now to having a smart phone.  And a computer.  But it wasn't always so.  And perhaps it isn't a good thing.  Indeed, I have some changes coming up regarding that.

One thing I've been doing for a couple of years, and which I'm electronically habituated to, is updating a couple of historical daily calendars.  One is my Today In Wyoming's History blog and the other is the daily  history thread on the Society of the Military Horse website.  I've done those, for some time, every day before I head to work.  I'm stopping that, however.

Indeed, I've already stopped updating the Wyoming History blog entries, as of about December 1.  I have the old posts set to keep posting daily until December 31, but after that I'm changing the format of the blog to stop daily entries.  I have been updating it for over a year, and I have most of the daily events I can readily catalog entered, so there's no need for it to be repetitious.  I'll keep the blog, and hopefully find a way to make a calendar for it so people researching any one day can do so easily, but after December 31, 2013, the blog will only be occasionally updated with new entries pertaining to Wyoming's history. 

I'm also gong to stop updating the SMH calendar as well.  Maybe somebody else will take over it, but it's run for several years and is very complete.  Most days, I don't add anything new to it, so there's no reason to update it.  Or at least somebody else would add more flavor to it.

This means that my morning routine is starting to change, and I like it.  I may not turn the computer on as much in the  mornings, or at all, as I've grown used to.  My blogging will continue on as for some reason I have a compulsion to write, but the daily entry type of stuff will cease and I may go back to reading in the mornings, like I used to do.  Indeed, I did that this morning and didn't miss the computer really.

Persistent Myths III: Pacifist Canada, Cowardly French, Invincible United States

The Canadians have never fought a war.

 World War One Canadian Army recruiting poster. The thought that an Allied loss would cause Canada to disappear from the earth seems dubious, but lots of Canadians signed up.

Here's a really weird, but very common, one.  There's a sense in the United States that Canada has never been in a war.  A few years back a junior high middle school teacher actually lectured a class my son was in to that effect.

Well, guess again.  Canada fought in the War of 1812, and in its view, probably correctly, it beat the stuffing out of the US in it.  Canadian militia pretty much wiped up on American troops in the War of 1812, to be followed by the British landing in the US itself and beating the tar out of us, which relates to another myth below.

Canada also fought some Indian campaigns, just not as many as we did. And it also occasionally had to repel Irish rebels who somehow thought that launching an invasion from the US into Canada would achieve something.

And Canada fought in the Boer War. And Canadians bled in vast numbers in World War One and World War Two. And Canada fought in the Korean War as well.

What Canada did not do is fight in the Vietnam War.  Because the Canadian government at the time was sympathetic, for some reason, with American draft evaders in that period the myth seems to have been created that Canada is a pacifist nation.  It isn't.  Indeed, Canada has been fighting with us in Afghanistan.

"Surrender" is a French word.

 This intrepid French aviator is not amused that people accuse France of surrendering easily.

This rumor is even nastier than the idea that Canada is a pacifist nation.  It's common in the US to accuse the French of being cowardly.

This rumor seems to have come out of the French defeat at the start of World War Two, but it oddly hasn't attached to any of the other nations that Germany ran over at the start of the war.  And it shouldn't even apply to France.  The French were defeated on the battlefield in 1940 and the government did surrender, but it was being overrun and simply being realistic. Even at that, however, French troops kept fighting where engaged in order to allow the British to evacuate the continent, a valiant act.  A sizable number of French troops never surrendered and effectively disobeyed a legitimate order of their country to keep on fighting.  When the opportunity came in 1943, the French armed forces were pretty quick to get back into the war against the Germans even though it was technically an act of rebellion.

At any rate, accusing the French of cowardice ignores the fact that the French nation bled itself white in the Napoleonic Wars.  I don't admire Napoleon, but like him or hate him, the French troops of that period, which made up in some ways one of the first modern armies, sure weren't cowards.  They died in such numbers that nearly the entire army died in Napoleon's service.

And the French fought hard, if to defeat, in the Franco-Prussian War.  They fought extremely hard in World War One. After World War Two they put up a real fight in Indo China and Algeria, and they've fought with us in Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. They fought with the British and Israelis in the Suez incident.  And they've been involved in third world fights, mostly in their former colonies, to an extent we can hardly appreciate. The French have conducted over 200 combat air jumps since World War Two. We've conducted less than twenty.

The United States has never lost a war.

 American naval heroes of the war of 1812. The naval war was about the only thing that went well for us, at least at first, although a war in the Atlantic was highly irritating to New England's merchants who thought about succeeding form the nation and who didn't support the war.  On the ground, we were pretty much a universal flop.

This may be a matter of perception, but  I'll occasionally hear that the Untied States has never lost a war.

Arguably, we lost the War of 1812.  We may pretend otherwise, but basically the Canadian militia wiped up with us in Canada, and the British pasted us everywhere else.  The war basically ended when the British defeated the French in Europe, and then dictated to us what the peace would be. We were allowed to enter into the peace or suffer the consequences. We did.

The US also lost Red Cloud's War. This may be a minor matter in the overall scheme of things, but still, we lost. Red Cloud's Sioux won.

We also lost the Vietnam War and there's no reason to pretend otherwise.  This isn't a simple story, in my view, and it is true that militarily we won. We were not defeated on the battlefield, but the American populace grew tired of the war and in 1975 when the North invaded for the second time in the 1970s, we threw the South under the bus.

If viewed as a campaign in the Cold War, however, which is how I feel the war is more properly viewed (and I'll blog on that in future) the result is a bit different.

Related Threads:

Persistent Myths

Persistent Myths I. The Great Income Tax Bracket Myth

Persistent Myths II: The First Amendment Protects...

Cold Then and Now: CST; December no colder.

The Casper Star Tribune reports today that, in spite of a common perception to the contrary:

[D]ata from the National Weather Service shows the weather system that brought sub-zero temperatures this past week to Wyoming wasn't unusual. Weather service meteorologist Chris Jones poured over decades of temperature data and said that, despite conventional wisdom, Decembers have not been getting warmer in Wyoming.

I'll admit I'm in the surprised category.  My recollections matches that of the person interviewed (whom I slightly know) who recalled it being colder, or at least snowier, than presently.  That person recalled that there seemed to be snow here all winter long, and that's basically my recollection too. The meteorologist claimed that people recall cold exceptional winters, but tend not to recall the more average ones.  Perhaps that's correct.

Tool Room. National Cash Register Company. 1904

The Big Picture: No Man's Land 1919

The Big Speech: The United Kingdom Declares War on Japan

Sir,
On the evening of December 7th His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom learned that Japanese forces without previous warning either in the form of a declaration of war or of an ultimatum with a conditional declaration of war had attempted a landing on the coast of Malaya and bombed Singapore and Hong Kong.
In view of these wanton acts of unprovoked aggression committed in flagrant violation of International Law and particularly of Article I of the Third Hague Convention relative to the opening of hostilities, to which both Japan and the United Kingdom are parties, His Majesty's Ambassador at Tokyo has been instructed to inform the Imperial Japanese Government in the name of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom that a state of war exists between our two countries.
I have the honour to be, with high consideration,

Sir,

Your obedient servant,

Winston S. Churchill

 

The Big Speech: President Roosevelt asks for a Declaration of War upon Japan.

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.

And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.

As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the un-bounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 7

Today In Wyoming's History: December 7: Today is, by State Statute, WS 8-4-106, Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.  The Statute provides: (a) In recognition of the members of th...

Cold, then and now.

 Crow Indians, early 20th Century.

There's a really arctic cold snap predicted for Wyoming later this week and its 17F right now.  Bitter, bitter cold. The paper has the temperatures regularly dropping down below 0F.  Some folks I've spoken to, who must get their weather report from elsewhere, have even more dire weather reports.  I've heard predictions of temperatures reaching -21F.  I've personally seen temperatures here below -40F, so it isn't impossible.

So, what will occur is that we'll plug in our vehicles and keep the temperature up a bit at night.  And we may run facets at night as well.  Most folks will run their vehicles awhile in the morning before heading out to work, to let the cab heater (or whatever we call them) heat up a bit.

We'll also worry about the heat bill. Those of us with electric heat (such as me) will particularly worry about that.

So that's what we do in 2013.  And frankly that's not really any different than what we did a half century ago in 1963.  Cars seemed to be more sensitive to extreme cold at the time, but I don't remember much else being different.

But what about 1913?

In 1913, in most places, heat was by coal or wood.  I suppose folks with coal furnaces, which would have been most folks, made sure they had a plenty of coal in the coal bin. That houses had coal bins is probably something most folks don't know now, but I can remember being a bit fascinated with a house that one of my aunts and uncles had which had a heavy iron door for a coal chute.  The house, of course, had long prior been updated and didn't use coal.

Coal burns dirty, and smelly.  Even really high quality coal has a distinct petroleum smell.  A lot of people do not recognize that smell at all anymore, as they've never smelled it, but every now and then you'll run across somebody who heats even now with coal, almost always as an auxiliary to their main heat.  Towns must have smelt like and had a layer of smoke over them all winter.  This must have been particularly true during heavy cold snaps, as that almost always causes a temperature inversion, at least around here.

 Coal furnace.  I've never seen one.

Even now, where people burn a lot of wood for heat, and in some places in the west that's common, you'll often smell wood smoke during the winter, and that's just from auxiliary use as a rule.  This became more common in the 1970s and 1980s than previously, reflecting the nationwide rise in fuel costs.  A quarter century ago while a student in Laramie I lived in a rental house where we did that.  We largely heat the house with a wood burning stove and with wood that we'd cut in the Snowy Range on a Forest Service permit.

 World War One vintage poster urging the early ordering of winter coal.

Of course, this all deals with houses. What about office buildings, or even substantial apartment buildings?  I know that heat was provided via a boiler, but what was the fuel?  Oil?  I can't imagine that a building like the Con Roy Building, for example, was heated through burning coal. And it's been around since 1917.  Plenty of substantial buildings in the west are older than that.

 World War One vintage poster urging coal conservation.

In 1913 the majority of people walked to work, but cars were around to be sure, with a majority of those cars no doubt being Model T Fords.  I don't know how hard to start they were in cold weather, but they started with a hand crank, so I'm guess that they wouldn't have been easy to start.

Walking, of course, implied heavy dress, in weather like we're speaking of, and frankly the winters of that era imply heavy dress in general,  walking and being out in the cold on a regular basis will mean that the person who engages in it will dress warmly.  Indeed, people who work outdoors a lot will tend to wear warmer clothes all year long, rather than the current trend, for our indoor age, of people wearing shorts in the middle of the winter.

 Jack and Etta Johnson in winter finery, 1910.

Winter clothing of the period was heavier, sometimes considerably heavier, than now.  All the modern synthetics that most people sport in winter to some degree did not exist, and therefore natural fibers, and furs, were what were used to avoid freezing.  Heavier dress even applied to some extent indoors, as buildings were simply not heated as well as presently, and were sometimes fairly cold even under the best of circumstances.

German soldier, 1914 or 1915.

Postscript

Today provides a good example.  I got u pat 05:00, it was was -1F.  I turned up the electric heat a bit.  What would I have done had it been 1913?  Threw some logs in an iron stove?  Checked the coal burning stove?  I'm not sure.

I went and made coffee with an electric drop coffee maker.  I know I wouldn't have done that in 1913.  I would have had to put some logs in the kitchen stove and boiled coffee on the stove top.  And I had cereal for breakfast, which I likely would not have done in 1913, unless it was oatmeal, which I would have had to cook on the stove top again.

Any my truck is warming up outside.  If it were 1913, I doubt I would have driven downtown, I probably would have walked.  Had I needed an automobile for something, it probably would have been a Model T, which no doubt is okay in snow, but not the same as my Dodge D3500.  And I would have had to hand crank it in subzero weather, which would have been iffy.

Postscript II

Or what about a day like today.  -22F when I got up at 05:00.

Postscript III

One thing that weather like this serves to illustrate is how much easier cars have gotten to start in cold weather.

Even up to the 1970s, weather like this required that a car with a substantial engine have its block heater plugged in overnight.  Every vehicle I've ever owned has had one, but frankly it has to get this cold before I plug them in anymore.  They just don't need it as they'll start in very cold weather.

This is particularly true of diesels.  I have a diesel now, and I've had one made in the 1990s before it. They both start in very cold weather.  When its this cold, I use the block heater. But at one time people wouldn't even buy diesels in this region because they'd freeze up, sometimes on the highway, during winter.

Also, it's interesting to note how much better insulated houses are. This started to be emphasized in the 1970s during the country's first energy crisis.  The cries has waxed and waned, but the emphasis on insulation has not, and modern houses are very well insulated as a rule.  Not all, of course, but most are.

The degree to which this has changed is perhaps best illustrated by my wife's belief that we need to run the water at night if its really freezing, which happens to this level a couple of times a year.  The only places I ever lived in that required that were in Laramie, and were very poorly insulated.  Here, I've never done that, and we've never needed to.  It still, however, makes her uncomfortable.  But then the farm house she lived in was probably built in the teens.

The Big Speech: Today In Wyoming's History: December 6. President Roosevelt's telegram to Emperor Hirohito

Today In Wyoming's History: December 6:

1941  President Roosevelt sent a telegram to Emperor Hirohito reading:

Almost a century ago the President of the United States addressed to the Emperor of Japan a message extending an offer of friendship of the people of the United States to the people of Japan. That offer was accepted, and in the long period of unbroken peace and friendship which has followed, our respective nations, through the virtues of their peoples and the wisdom of their rulers have prospered and have substantially helped humanity.

Only in situations of extraordinary importance to our two countries need I address to Your Majesty messages on matters of state. I feel I should now so address you because of the deep and far-reaching emergency which appears to be in formation.

Developments are occurring in the Pacific area which threaten to deprive each of our nations and all humanity of the beneficial influence of the long peace between our two countries. These developments contain tragic possibilities.

The people of the United States, believing in peace and in the right of nations to live and let lives have eagerly watched the conversations between our two Governments during these past months. We have hoped for a termination of the present conflict between Japan and China. We have hoped that a peace of the Pacific could be consummated in such a way that nationalities of many diverse peoples could exist side by side without fear of invasion; that unbearable burdens of armaments could be lifted for them all; and that all peoples would resume commerce without discrimination against or in favor of any nation.

I am certain that it will be clear to Your Majesty, as it is to me, that in seeking these great objectives both Japan and the United States should agree to eliminate any form of military threat. This seemed essential to the attainment of the high objectives.
More than a year ago Your Majesty's Government concluded an agreement with the Vichy Government by which five or six thousand Japanese troops were permitted to enter into Northern French Indochina for the protection of Japanese troops which were operating against China further north. And this Spring and Summer the Vichy Government permitted further Japanese military forces to enter into Southern French Indochina for the common defense of French Indochina. I think I am correct in saying that no attack has been made upon Indochina, nor that any has been contemplated.

During the past few weeks it has become clear to the world that Japanese military, naval and air forces have been sent to Southern Indo-China in such large numbers as to create a reasonable doubt on the part of other nations that this continuing concentration in Indochina is not defensive in its character.

Because these continuing concentrations in Indo-China have reached such large proportions and because they extend now to the southeast and the southwest corners of that Peninsula, it is only reasonable that the people of the Philippines, of the hundreds of Islands of the East Indies, of Malaya and of Thailand itself are asking themselves whether these forces of Japan are preparing or intending to make attack in one or more of these many directions.

I am sure that Your Majesty will understand that the fear of all these peoples is a legitimate fear in as much as it involves their peace and their national existence. I am sure that Your Majesty will understand why the people of the United States in such large numbers look askance at the establishment of military, naval and air bases manned and equipped so greatly as to constitute armed forces capable of measures of offense.

It is clear that a continuance of such a situation is unthinkable. None of the peoples whom have spoken of above can sit either indefinitely or permanently on a keg of dynamite.

There is absolutely no thought on the part of the United States of invading Indo-China if every Japanese soldier or sailor were to be withdrawn therefrom.

I think that we can obtain the same assurance from the Governments of the East Indies, the Governments of Malaya and. the Government of Thailand. I would even undertake to ask for the same assurance on the part of the Government of China. Thus a withdrawal of the Japanese forces from Indo-China would result in the assurance of peace throughout the whole of the South Pacific area.

I address myself to Your Majesty at this moment in the fervent hope that Your Majesty may, as I am doing, give thought in this definite emergency to ways of dispelling the dark clouds. I am confident that both of us, for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.

Customer Service

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What, you're still there?  Well then, press amongst our following options to be better help you.

Press one if you are calling about billing (we really care about that one).

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Press one if you can fix it yourself

Press two if you have ever been to Lithuania.

Press three if you are about to meet your ultimate demise due to our product, in which case you will be put on prema hold.

Press four to speak to a customer representative.

Hello, this is the automated line for customer representatives.  Please answer the following questions by speaking into our phone, which only recognizes the telephonic accent of a person born in Botswana who has learned to speak English solely through movies featuring Sean Connery.

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Sign of Times Past

Remember how you used to see these everywhere?

Random Snippets. Inspiration for Helmet For My Pillow.

Robert Leckie, whose World War Two memoir about being a Marine in the South Pacific, Helmet For My Pillow, is regarded as a classic, was inspired to write it after walking out of a Broadway production of the musical South Pacific.

I have to tell the story of how it really was. I have to let people know the war wasn't a musical.

Leckie.

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 2) | Endless streams and forests

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 2) | Endless streams and forests

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 1) | Endless streams and forests

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 1) | Endless streams and forests

The Big Picture: Mulberry Indiana Horse Show and Motorcycle Meet. 1910

The Joy of Field Rations: Roasting Coffee in the Field

The Joy of Field Rations: Roasting Coffee in the Field

The Best Post of the Week of November 24, 2013.

Friday, November 29, 2013

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

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

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