The Confederate Monuments and Contemporary Strife.

 

 The Virginia Memorial at Gettysburg.  This impressive memorial was only dedicated in 1917.

I run more than one blog, which some folks who stop in here know. Amongst those is our companion blog Some Gave All.  Some Gave All is a blog that was originally dedicated to war memorials, but it's expanded out to include memorials for those who "gave all", in some fashion, beyond service in war.  Like our blogs Churches of the West and Courthouses of the West, it got started as we get around a fair amount.  

It nearly lacks, however, any depictions of Confederate memorials. Nearly, but not completely. That may be because my trips to the South either preceded, by and large, my creation of Some Gave All or because most of my recent trips to the South have been to Texas and I haven't run into any Confederate memorials there.  Indeed, curiously, the one I ran into most recently was at Ft. Fred Steele in Wyoming, and I frankly have some questions about that one, and indeed some that directly tie in to contemporary times and the topic of this entry.

Unusual civilian headstone noting that this individual had served with a provisional Confederate unit at some point that had been raised in California.  The marker must be quite recent, to say the least, and was placed by something styling itself the "Twenty First Century Confederate Legion".  I don't know what the "Twenty First Century Confederate Legion is, but frankly it placing monuments on the old graves of men at Fort Fred Steele makes me queasy.  Would this guy have even wanted that?

The biggest collection of them I've ever run into were at Gettysburg, where there are a collection of impressive ones.

 

North Carolina's early (post 1917) monument to her Confederate forces, at Gettyburg.  North Carolina had a large black population in the 1860s, and at the time that this monument was placed. What did they think?

In order to grasp the contemporary story, it's necessary to grasp the the history of the monuments themselves which is somewhat complicated.

Contrary to what people tend to think, they didn't go up right after the Civil War.  By and large, they went up well after.  And that has a bit to do with how the Civil War itself was actually fought, and by whom.

The Southern states that attempted to secede from the Union did so over one singular issue alone, slavery. That's it.  Debates about leaving the Union at the time were clear on that point.  Moreover, the class that supported that movement was largely that class that was well off financially, in relative terms, or that depended heavily on slavery, such as the planter class, both of which are the classes that owned slaves or benefited from the social order that tolerated slavery. The white class on the outs, and often on the other side of this effort, was the yeoman class, which actually constituted a majority of Southern whites.  In some areas, but not all, the yeomanry was very hostile to secession.  Ironically, the yeoman class would do the bulk of the fighting for the South during the war, although Southern leadership was always vested in the more monied and propertied classes.  The slave owning class, which was most responsible for succession, actually benefited from the broadest service exemptions in the South in yet a further unfair irony.

When the war ended, most Southerners feared that the North would treat those who had served the CSA, voluntarily or not, as traitors.  And, at least at law, they clearly were.  In the immediate aftermath of the war, at least according to contemporary accounts, the yeoman class and the non monied white class in towns accepted the results of the war and what that meant and got along relatively well with the newly freed black slaves.  Indeed, one contemporary account by a Union solder noted how an assistance line in one town that had been segregated into white and black reformed itself into a mixed line, all the distressed together, independently.  It wasn't long, however, before the monied and propertied classes began to resist Reformation in all sorts of ways, including violently.  Indeed, that same soldier noted that the whites in the aforementioned class were basically harassed back into line segregation by the classes of which we've been speaking.

This story is well known, but less well known is that in some areas of the South a second civil war between yeomanry and propertied classes smouldered for years as the two contesting sides fought it out over land rights.  The propertied classes became more restrictive on the use of land and more possessive of political rights after the war and increasingly so.  The Southern yeomanry could never get around to seeing blacks as really equal to whites and so their combined political power, which could have been real, was never realized.  The South became a sort of white planter/monied oligarchy in the years following the war.

Southern political leaders, coming from that class, were not dense to the the divisions in their own land and by the 1890s were working to overcome it. As they defeated the yeomanry in various ways they realized that they needed to unite Southern whites in some fashion and they undertook to do it.  Part of that was the creation of The Lost Cause.

The Lost Cause myth presented a noble, mythologized, view of the Southern states and the war.  Emphasizing in part the yeoman nature of the Southern combatant, the better qualities of some Southern officers, and the genteel nature of the planter class, a myth was born of a uniformly brave, well lead and manly army in a democratic cause that was defeated in battle simply because it was outnumbered and outgunned.  While enough of that was true to make the myth believable, in reality it was far from the overall truth of an oligarchic state organized around wealth that used the poorer members of its society to fight in order to keep people who were enslaved due to race enslaved. The democratic argument of the South indeed is basically a lie if we consider that a large percentage of the population in every Southern state could not vote, because they were black, or did not vote due to economic disadvantage.  Had all native born Southerners voted on succession, irrespective of race, rather obviously there would have been no succession.

 

"Virginia to her sons at Gettysburg" presents the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia in allegorical terms, the figures represent, on the left,  a professional man, a mechanic, an artist, in the center a young mounted man, and on the right a businessman, a farmer, and a youth.  19,000 Virginians served at Gettysburg, the largest contingent of the Southern states, and one in four were casualties of the battle. But, if the monument was accurate, most of the men in the foreground would be shoe-less small farmers.  Truly, from the Confederate side, the Civil War was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight".  For the North, it was more of a middle class war.

The monied political class's embracing of the Lost Cause effectively managed to embrace the yeoman class that fought it, deserted from it in stunning numbers, or even fought against it, at the very time at which the old combatants and deserters were growing old and in need of assistance.  Not only, therefore, did memorials come, but stipends to elderly men who could prove they'd fought for the CSA, irrespective of what they'd thought of that at the time.  No pension was going to come from the Federal Government, to say the least, but it did come from the various Southern states, extending not only to the old veterans but to their spouses and children as well, resulting in payments that stretched on nearly throughout the entire 20th Century.  The last confederate pension receiving widow died in 2008.  Freed slaves, by contrast, ended up largely getting. .  .nothing.  Particularly after Reconstruction ended in 1876.

The effort was, no matter what it otherwise was, a stunning success.  By World War One the white Southern population had united behind the Lost Cause myth and Southern blacks were completely disenfranchised.  Many in the North, which had changed a great deal economically and demographically since the Civil War, embraced the romantic vision as well.  Portrayals like The Birth of a Nation  (the 1915 one, not  the 2016 one) fueled it.   Southern participation in the Spanish American War helped repair northern views over the South and its loyalty and Woodrow Wilson, who hailed most recently from Princeton but who was a Southerner, was elected to the Presidency over two competing Yankee contestants.  And monuments to the rebel army and its leaders went up everywhere in the South.

But wars and history keep on, keeping on.  Rising with the Progressive movement was the old civil rights movement dedicated to blacks and their position in the United States.  Woodrow Wilson may not have supported it, but many did.  The Great War saw blacks serve or attempt to serve in ways that were often heroic.  During the 1920s and the 1930s they kept on as support for civil rights slowly increased in most of the country outside of the South, even as romanticized portrays of the Antebellum South continued on in such things as Gone With The Wind.  World War Two came and basically made it impossible for a nation that had seen the horrors of racism carried to its extreme to keep on with racism in its own country in an official form and it began to crack in numerous ways. By the 1960s the game was really up even as Southern Democrats waged a rearguard effort to keep it, adding the old blood stained flag to state flags and threatening independent political movements of their own.  Neal Young decried the Southern Man while the South's own Lynyrd Skynyrd straddled both sides of the fence in Sweet Home Alabama.

In Birmingham they love the Gov'nor, boo-hoo-hoo

Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth.

Well the northern answer to Skynyrd's question was clearly "no", they weren't bothered existentially, at least on this, and the political and economic situation of American blacks improved enormously, even though it isn't apparent to younger generations now.  

But something weird is going on currently.

It's hard to peg what it is, but over the last decade racist elements that never really went away have been sort of bizarrely resurgent.  It might be attributable to the usual suspects in this category, those being economic stress and the like.  Or perhaps its more complicated than that.  What is also clear is, and also surprisingly, for the first time ever sufficient numbers of residents of Southern states no longer look upon the Southern heroes of the Civil War as heroes, or look upon the Southern cause as noble.  Indeed, during the twenty four hours during which I started this post, and then resumed typing on it, Baltimore, which was not in a state that bolted the Union but which was strongly Confederate in sympathy during the war, took down all of its Confederate monuments.  I'd never have thought I would have seen a thing like that. Charlotteville, Virginia, population 50,000, which has of course been in the news over the past few days, changed the name of the park where its Robert E. Lee statute is located to Emancipation Park about a year ago and clearly Marse Robert is coming down.

The Stars and Bars started coming off of Southern flags some time ago.  All of a sudden, and very surprisingly, states and towns began to take down Southern memorials, such as noted above.  It's really shocking, if simply because its so unexpected.  At the same time three, or maybe four, elements have risen to oppose the removal of the monuments.  Two or three are likely genuine, and one likely is not quite so much, or in the same way.

One is the one we saw strike out violently this past week.  This group is the last one mentioned in the paragraph above. They identify with the Confederate memorials in the same way, to a degree, that the KKK did with the Southern lost cause at its core. They're racist and they're celebrating the racist nature of the Southern cause.  That the South had a racist cause cannot be doubted, so in a way, they're celebrating what secessionist in 1860 would have welcomed.  If Robert E. Lee would have found them vile, maybe, many Southern politician would not have, or not have clearly.

A second group, however, would be Southerners who hold on to the Lost Cause myth but who are not racists today.  That's undoubtedly a larger group.  Having grown up with the myth and having embraced it, they see the Southern cause as one for the democratic rights of states.  For northerners its very difficult to grasp it as we can't understand how they work around the racist elements of the Southern cause.  I.e., how could the war have been for State's Rights if a large population in the state didn't have rights?  It's impossible for us to grasp, but that's how they see it.  Figures like Lee are particularly heroic to them as Lee isn't strongly associated with slavery and some suggest he opposed it, although the history on that is not very clear.  If so, he certainly was willing nonetheless to violate his oath of service to the United States and serve as an effective general in slavery's cause.  We'll come back to this group in a moment.

Another group here are those who identify, oddly enough, with the Southern yeoman.  The Stars and Bars has become for them what it never was for the original Southern armed combatant, a symbol of rural yeomanry.  This class doesn't think much about the slavery aspect of this at all, but rather looks upon the late Southern small farmer as models of independence and as sort of aggressively opposed to effete urban culture.  There are varying degrees of this and greater or lesser attractions to the South depending upon where the person is, but this explains why the same person can have a "Cold War Veteran"  and a "Stars and Bars Fighting Terrorism Since 1861" sticker on their truck and not think they're being inconsistent, or that this even makes sense.

The irony for this last group is that, in the South, this group was actually add odds with the people who lead the South into the Civil War. Economically, politically and culturally that class, the Yeomen, were highly independent but often not disloyal to the Union. They felt oppressed, because they were, by the big monied elements in Southern society.  In some cases they took up arms against the South with the example of "The Free State of Jones" being one such example, but not the only one, and they struggled against the resurgent Secessionist class after the war, ultimately unsuccessfully.  While this group may identify with Confederate symbols today, it didn't when the CSA was alive, or a fresh living memory.

A fourth, and final, group doesn't sympathize with the Confederacy at all, or if they are Southern they may have some attachment to it but recognize what the Southern cause stood for and are repelled by that, but worry that removing monuments does violence to history itself.  I'm in that group.  I don't hold romantic views about the CSA at all, and I even somewhat sympathize with the basic motivation of those who would take these monuments down, but I worry that it does violence to history and our recollection of history.

Indeed, the Baltimore monuments, which came down last night, sort of symbolize that for me.  I've been to Baltimore and I think it's safe to say that whatever views that city's father's held that caused it to put up memorials to Southern officers from that state (of which Lee was one in a way, Arlington was his property) are long gone.  Baltimore was a Southern city, although Maryland did not leave the Union (with an occupying Union Army right there, it couldn't) , but it isn't any more.  Not like that, anyhow.  Most people probably don't begin to think of it  that way.  There's no earthly way the town would spring for Confederate monuments now.

But there was a time when it would, and by removing them, we are removing the evidence of that. And that's something to remember.

All over there's been a movement to remove monuments that were erected in earlier times to things that now are recognized as morally wrong.  Yale University, for example, has been fighting over the removal of symbols that demonstrate that some of its early donors were slave holders.  But removing them won't change that fact.  At least one other university went through something similar as well.  Probably almost any Eastern university has some money that came, originally, out of human trafficking and something that recalls that in honorific form.  Removing that causes that to be forgotten, it doesn't change the fact that it occurred. And it needs to be recalled that it occurred, and that something about earlier generations even celebrated it, or at least could but it out of mind.  Taking the evidence away doesn't correct the wrong, it just dulls the memory until it is erased entirely.

Indeed, such monuments, in my view, can serve as monuments to a greater historical reality, and that's what's occurred in my region of the country.  There are a lot of monuments put up in the early 20th Century to people and events involved in the Indian War that were massively one sided and even racist, as we'd view that now.  Some have come down, such as the "First White Man's Cabin" marker here in Natrona County.  But most have not. Rather, efforts have been made to correctly name things, such as changing the Little Big Horn battle ground to that name (which was always used here, oddly enough) form Custer Battleground, and where older monuments exist new explanatory ones have been added that enhance the understanding of what actually occured.

Monument at the Fetterman Battleground, placed in the early 20th Century.  The battleground itself has a large number of very good explanatory signs that explain the battle and what occurred there.

 

Of course, while that might make sense, making sense after things go badly awry is difficult to say the least.  And that's where we are now at.

Because of the first group, "white nationalist", or whatever they are called, things have now developed to where addressing this in a manner that doesn't do violence to history is probably impossible.  The monuments have been co-opted and adopted by these racist and almost nothing now can be done to address that.  People like me who would wish for the monuments to serve as historical lessons about the things I've discussed here cannot really argue for that in the face of such vile conduct by such hateful groups, as we do not wish to be associated with them in any way.  Those in the second group, cannot really either as even though they may hold romantic notions about the South, they don't hold contemporary racist views and can't effectively argue any position. So the monuments are likely doomed, and perhaps need to be, all things considered. 

And while this is occurring the further scary polarization of American politics continues on.  The "Alt Right" isn't a conservative movement, as fascism isn't a conservative movement.  It may not even be a right wing movement, showing the unfortunate nature of left right characterizations in politics.  A conservative movement would not be racist as it couldn't be.  Blacks form part of the original culture of the country that American conservatives seek to conserve.  But the Alt Right has managed to confuse the line between it and the legitimate "Right" which isn't aided by the incorporation of figures like Steve Bannon in the Trump Administration.  Trump's own inability to effectively speak on anything, an amazing lack of talent for somebody as well educated and successful as he is, only fuels this.  On the left, the extreme left, which is a sort of Alt Left in and of itself, has managed to further boost the blurring of the lines to discredit conservatives, to their horror and no doubt to the delight of the Alt Right, which proves Jean Shepherd's observation that what fanatics truly love is fanaticism, to some degree, and that fanatics admire each other in their fanaticism.  American politics, in the meantime, risks being buried beneath the rubble of wherever the old Confederate monuments end up.

The Big Picture: 4th Ohio Ambulance Company, National Guard United States at McKinley Monument, Canton, Ohio, August 16th, 1917

Lex Anteinternet: It's Fall

Yesterday I posted this?

Lex Anteinternet: It's Fall: Earlier this week I posted an item whining a bit about the "it's sure been hot" comments I was, up until recently, hearing i...

This morning it was so cold that I broke down and turned the heat on in the bathroom when I was shaving.  Just too darned cold.

Not that everyone appreciates this.  My wife doesn't believe its cold as its summer and she's always hot.  It'll be hot, in her view, until October, which is one of the reasons that I suffer in Spring and Fall.  The windows will all be open all night.  It wouldn't matter if polar bears were lurking around those windows, it'll be "too hot" to close them.

And down at work the blower for the air system is on.  Every morning recently I've come in with temperatures in the 50s and its still on.

But it's cold.

Early reports, by the way, have some clouds for Monday, the day of the eclipse.  We've had rain every day for days.  Yesterday we got a big rain storm in the morning, and a torrential one in the afternoon.  Casper's been billed with a place that has a high likelihood of being sunny.  Not so much this year.

Free Time

Fairly recently, I posted an item referencing fishing.*

This got me to thinking about free time.  More specifically, it got me to thinking about it on a then vs. now basis.

When I was a kid, my father was always very hard working.  But he did manage to incorporate a fair amount of time for his favorite pursuits.  He never took prolonged vacations (and frankly, I don't now) but we did go hunting and fishing a lot, and in the summer, he grew a substantial garden.  It seems to me, moreover, that this was close to the norm.  Quite a few men here hunted and fished a fair amount (and still do). Growing a garden was common.  People who pursued the winter sports found time to do so.  What this means is that even busy people managed to have their evenings and weekends off, usually.

I don't seem to be able to manage finding as much free time, and I think this is the norm now.  Indeed, sociologists say that this is the case.  Americans now don't even take their full amount of allotted vacation days.  Something is going on, and that something isn't good.

Believe it or not, this was originally drafted for publication in 2014. But I didn't get around to finishing the post, so I'm doing it now.   Does that say something about free time?  Probably not really.  It all probably says something about me.

Maybe this entire post actually does, in concert with the general topic.  I probably don't have as much free time (most of these posts are done early in the morning before I go to work) because I'm bad at creating free time for myself.  But also, societally, people have less, maybe, because of the encroachment of technology into everything, which has brought work with it.

It's Fall

Earlier this week I posted an item whining a bit about the "it's sure been hot" comments I was, up until recently, hearing in the elevator.

This past week, a couple of days ago, I had the chilliness I'd been experiencing confirmed to an extent by the National Weather Service, which reported:

You may be thinking that it really doesn't feel like August? For Cheyenne, in the 2000s this is the coldest start to August, having an average high temperature of 75.4 degrees. This beats out the runner up in 2014 by almost a 5 degree difference!

It's been cold.

Now, that's Cheyenne. We're 150 miles to the north and I'd be surprised if our average high temperature was 70F.  I wouldn't be surprised if its been a lot colder than that.

And its been wet.

Indeed, it's raining right now and it has every day for days. Cold, wet, . . . it's mid September. . .temperature wise.  I wouldn't be surprised if we saw snow any day now.  

Indeed, I'd be surprised if we didn't. 

At least people are now acknowledging it.  I've been hearing a lot of comments about how cold and wet it is.  

What I haven't heard people start to worry about much is if the weather we're having this week, we'll have early next week, when all sort of eclipse related tomfoolery is scheduled.  It was so dark yesterday afternoon that the street lights were on by 4:00.  Who knows. . . .

Curious Caps I. An early logo cap?

I published this item this past week: 

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Children Processing Tobacco. A...: 

 

 Boys working tobacco, ages 9 and 11. 

I got to looking at it, and I noticed the boy's hat on the left.

Let's take a closer look:

Hmmm. . . .

That cap sure appears to say "Coca Cola" on it.

This is a surprise.

Now, we've posted on headgear before, and indeed one of the most popular posts on this site pertains to hats and caps.

But I frankly would never have guessed that there were logo caps out there at the time, let alone one advertising a brand name. 

It appears, however, that there were.

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Related Threads:

Caps, Hats, Fashion and Perceptions of Decency and being Dressed.

The Big Picture: Graduating officers, 3rd Provisional Training Regiment, Madison Barracks, N.Y., August 14, 1917

Sharp Headgear and the Unversity Student.

From the Laramie Daily Boomerang, April 17, 1913. The height of the bowler era.

I wonder how many university students decked themselves  out with bowlers in 1913?

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Related Threads: 

Caps, Hats, Fashion and Perceptions of Decency and being Dressed.

Yup.

August 13, 2017

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Stop! Don't change that Church!

From our companion blog, Churches of the West:

Churches of the West: Stop! Don't change that Church!:

Now, normally this is just a photo entry, linking in one of the pasts posts, and generally going from the oldest slowly towards the newest, from that blog.  But here we're doing something different. For one thing, we're linking in a new post, which is very unusual. Secondly, we're posting a commentary post from that blog, and those are unusual.  And thirdly, as this is a commentary post, it's not actually in the category of a comforting Sunday morning post so much as one that might be upsetting to some people, and depending upon who actually reads it (which will not be that many people, after all) definitely will be upsetting. 

So here we go, the text of the linked in blog post:

A theme, if not always an obvious one, of this blog is architecture.

And  nothing does more violence to traditional, serviceable, and beautiful architecture, than "updating" it for any reason.

Just don't.

A case in point.

The photograph above, unfortunately not entirely in focus and in black and white, dates from November 1958.  It depicts St. Anthony's of Padua Church in Casper Wyoming on the occasion of my parents wedding.

Now, St. Anthony's remains a beautiful church today, but if we had a picture of the interior (which I don't from this angle) and if we had this picture in sharper focus (which it isn't) and in color (which it is not), we'd notice some changes right away.

And they aren't good ones.

The altarpiece and the altar are all still there.  The cross painted on the wall behind the altarpiece is also still there.  But many other things have changed.

Most obvious, the beautiful marble altar rail in this photograph, a gift of the Schulte family when the church was built, is gone.  I was told that a part of it can be found now in a local restaurant, which I hope is not true.  If it is true, I've never seen it, so it must be some place I don't go to.  It's not clear here, but the gate for the altar rail was marble with heavy brass hinges.  A true work of art in every sense.

The heavy brass lanterns hanging from the ceiling are also gone.

What appears to be a marble ambo is gone as well, replaced by a very nice wooden (walnut?) one.

The statute of St. Patrick moved across town to St. Patrick's, which sort of makes sense. The funds to build St. Patrick's came from St. Anthony's donors, many of whom were Irish, to that we'd ultimately send the statute of the Patron Saint of Ireland over there, which we did only fairly recently, does square with the general them there.. The statute of St. Anthony has been moved to a different spot, but it looks good where it is.

I'm not certain what sort of floor covering we're looking at here, probably carpet, and of course we have new carpet.  But what would strike anyone looking at this photo about what is next to the carpet, the pews, is that the pews are now cantered to face towards the center of the alter.

Okay, what's up with all of that, and was it an improvement?

Well, I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder, as all such things are, but in my view, the answer is a very distinct "no".

It's funny how these things work.  I can remember all of the features depicted here, including the altar rail, even though I was very young when at least that feature came out.  But, at the time, I don't think I thought much about it, if I thought about it all.  I don't remember the Mass being in Latin at all, although when I was very, very young, it must have been.  Anyhow, while these things didn't bother me at the time, or the one change that I recall from when I was a bit older, the cantering of the pews, didn't bother me much, now they do.

That may be because I now have a greater appreciation for history and tradition than I did when I was just a boy, although I had a sense of that at the time.

The cocked angle of the pews, remnants of a decision made by a Priest in the 1970s or perhaps early 80s,  has been something I've never liked, even if I understand the intent behind it.  Not visible in this
photograph, a row of pews that were in the middle of the church were taken out to facilitate twice as many Communion servers.  It's awkward and always has been and should not have been done.  Indeed, as this was the only Catholic Church in town with it was built, it was probably jam packed nearly every Mass and they seemed to manage to get by just fine. For that matter, I've been in plenty of packed Catholic churches where everyone came up to the front of the church and it always worked just fine as well.  Having said that, changing the angle of the pews didn't do a great disservice to the church even if it didn't really help it any.

Another matter, however, is the altar rail.

Now altar rails turn out to be a surprisingly hot button item to people not familiar with them.

All Latin Rite Catholic Churches and Anglican Churches had altar rails. Chances are very high that other churches close in form to the Catholic Church also had them, I just don't know. Their purposes was to provide a place for communicants to kneel when receiving communion.  Prior to Vatican II (1962 to 1965) all Latin Catholic in modern times received communion on the tongue.  Communicants would kneel at the altar rail and receive communion.

You'd think that finding a public domain photograph of communicants receiving communion at an altar rail would b easy, but it isn't.  This almost illustrates it in a better fashion, however.  British solders lined up, as if there is an altar rail, and receiving communion in the field in North Africa.  Off hand, I suspect that this is an Anglican service.

Now, before we get too far down this road it should be noted that people can get really up in arms about this in all sorts of ways and some traditionalist will insist that communion can only properly be received kneeling and on the tongue.  This doesn't seem to be true and certainly wasn't universally the case.  Indeed, originally, the very first Christians, received communion in the hand and you can find very early writings that effect.  However, traditionalist will hotly dispute what those writings and the other evidence actually means. Given as I'm not getting into that debate, I'm not going there and that isn't the point of this entry.

What is the point is that altar rails were an integral part of the design of churches for an extremely long time. Take anything out of a well designed building and you risk subtracting from its design. That's exactly what I think occurred here.

Which isn't to say that I feel that St. Anthony's is a bad looking Church now, far from it. It's still a beautiful church. But it was more beautiful before the marble altar rail was taken out.

Indeed, the problem with making alterations to these well designed structures is that any time that this is done it risks giving into a temporary view in favor of a more traditional element that was integral in the design of the structure while doing damage to its appearance.  All Catholic churches up until the id 1960s were designed to have altar rails.  Taking them out may have served what was, and perhaps is, the view of the day in regards to worship, but it also means that a major feature of the interior of the building, to which careful consideration had been given, was now missing.

And it turns out that, contrary to widely held belief, they did not have to be removed.

Most people believe that the altar rails were taken out as it was somehow required post Vatican II.  It wasn't.  Rather, for whatever reason changes in the Mass now allowed them to be.  They didn't have to be.  Theoretically it was apparently up to individual Pastors on whether they thought an altar rail should be removed, but given as in Wyoming they are nearly all missing, it might have been the case that the decision to remove them was made at the Diocesan level.  The motivating thought here was that the altar rail served to act as a sort of barrier to connection between the people and the Offering of the Mass, and those who supported altar rail removal often felt fairly strongly about that (as we'll see below).  This was, I think, part of an overall change in the Mass at that time, when it went from Latin to the local vernacular, as the Celebrant had faced Ad Oreintum while offering the Mass.  That is, the Priest faced his altar, as a rule, with his back to the Congregation.  

Now all of this gets into some fairly complicated symbolic matters.  There's some truth to the view held by those who argued for the new position and removing the altar rails, in at he "we're all one together sense". There a counter point, however, that maybe the Ad Oreintum orientation actually served that better, as the Priest was facing the same direction for significant portions of the Mass that the parishioners were.   That is, by way of a poor example, if somebody faced you in a large group they're more likely to have some elevated authority over you than if somebody has their back to you, in which case they can be argued to be working with you.  Interestingly in recent years there's been a slow return in some areas to the Ad Oreintum orientation, particularly following Cardinal Sarah's suggestion that this was a better form. The Cardinal occupies a high position at the Vatican and therefore his views cannot be easily discounted.  As has been noted in regards to this there's actually never been an official position on which orientation is better, and in some ancient and modern churches the Ad Orientum position is actually impossible.

In any event, what that did was in part to remove an item that was closely connected to the church and hence the parish and the parishioners.  In this case, the altar rail itself had been a gift from a family early in the parish's history.  In Catholic parishes the pastor is usually there for about seven years and bishops can be in office for long or short periods. However, as the parishioners are often there for decades, that means the traditional in which they participated was removed by individuals who were there on a more temporary basis.  It was certainly "legal", if you will, but it might not have been well advised.

The same is true of most, but not all, of the interior changes to the church. A person can debate the aesthetics of the heavy brass lighting, but the church was built with it in mind and the features that once decorated where it attached to the building remain there to this day.  The removal of one confessional, the relocation, in an awkward fashion, of a place for "music ministers" to stand that resulted, and all of that, were done in a heartfelt fashion, but often to the ascetic detriment of the church which was not built with remodels in mind.

This touches, moreover, on the larger topic of church architecture itself, which as been addressed in another one of our rare commentary threads here.  These older churches are better looking as the architecture and design that came in during the 1970s was not as good as earlier architecture, and according to some focused more on the congregation than on the Divine.  This blog was at one time going to avoid all such churches in general, but as time has gone on its put up posts of quite a few.  Many of these churches are just not good looking. By the same token, many alterations to older churches are not good looking either.

As I noted when I started off, a lot of this stuff did not bother me when I was a child and experiencing it, but it does now.  Indeed, the removal of the altar rail in this church frankly makes me mad when I think of it.  I wish it could go back in.  It won't, of course, but the whole thing upsets me.  I'm not alone, I think, on this sort of thinking and I think it reflects a generational befuddlement with the generations immediately preceding us which seems to have had, in many instances, low respect for tradition in general.  In civil society, in terms of structures, this is probably why we now see all sorts of effort to restore the appearance of old buildings whose owners in the 50s, 60s, and 70s didn't give a second thought about making them ugly through renovation. A prime example of that is the Wyoming National Bank building in Casper Wyoming which was made to look hideous by the additional of a weird steel grating in the 1950s to its exterior which was supposed to make it look modern.  It mostly served to house pigeons and was removed in the 2000s when the building was redone and converted to apartments.

Now, not every one feels this way, I should note.  Particularly in regards to churches.  When I posted this same photograph on Facebook, a friend of mine with a few years on me posted this reply (I hadn't commented on the altar rails in my original post):

So happy that the railings have come down and the hats came off! The church is still so beautiful.

I agree that the church remains beautiful, and I agree that the women wearing head coverings is a tradition that I don't miss, but I don't feel that way about the altar rail at all.

I suspect my friends comment goes to a "spirit of Vatican II" feeling that she's old enough to have experienced and which I not only am not, but which I don't really share enthusiasm for.  It's important to note that Vatican II and "the spirit of Vatican II" are not the same thing.  "The spirit" thing was a zeitgeist of the times which took a decidedly more liberal and less traditional view of things, no doubt an "open the windows and doors and let some fresh air in". Some of that was likely needed but as is often the case with people who are in a "let in the fresh air" movement the realization that cold winds high winds can come in through the same windows and doors and do damage is rarely appreciated. 

And its all too easy when traditions which are simply traditions are tossed to begin to toss out with them things that are more than tradition.  I'm not saying that occurred here with altar rails but I will be frankly that the 1970s saw a lot of innovations, some of them very local poorly thought out that were, in some cases, quite problematic. The generation that thought removing the altar rails was a good idea proved willing to entertain a lot of things in this area that turned out to be big problems for everyone else.

Part of that is because traditions are anchors in a way; moorings to the the past.  People of a "fresh air" bent will claim that a person shouldn't be bound by the past. That's true, but tradition is also in some cases the vote, or the expression of experience, of the dead and should not be lightly discounted.  Not only does casting out traditions tend to sever anchors, but all too often the severing simply puts people adrift in seas that they're not well prepared to handle. At its worst, the severing of traditions is a rejection of the long and carefully thought out in favor of the temporarily current and the poorly thought out.

Which is why, for many people of the post Vatican II generation the "Spirit of Vatican II" generation, when moored in their own changes, can seem now old fashioned.  Ironically younger generations have been busy for some time "reforming the reform", which means in the mainstream keeping the reforms that proved worthwhile and reversing those that did not.  Tradition has, in some instances, come back in the opened door after having been swept out it, but with a younger generation.

All of which is well off point on what this thread started out being about.  And I'm not going to start a "restore the altar rail" movement, locally or on the internet.  But I feel it was a shame that it was taken out, and to the extent that alterations that should not have taken place for ascetic reasons in regards to older structures can be repaired, they ought to be.

Okay, you may be thinking, this is all interesting or boring enough, but it's limited really to Catholics and the peculiar battles that go on between "progressives" (increasingly an older demographic in the church), "conservatives" (increasingly a younger demographic in the church), traditionalist and "rad trads".

Well. . .  yes. . . but it's more than that.

The post itself went into a bit of this, but what this post does, more than anything else, is to complain (yes, its a complaint) about ignoring tradition and architecture.  More particular than that, it's about ignoring tradition in architecture, which has given us, since the 1970s, a host of ugly and sometimes dysfunctional buildings.

 

St. Matthew's Catholic Church in Gillette, Wyoming.  In my original caption I stated the following:  "This is St. Matthews Roman Catholic Church in Gillette Wyoming. It's unusual contemporary design, unlike most of the churches featured here. It's quite hard to photograph, due to the large trees at the front of the church"  Let's be frank in this post here.  It's ugly from the exterior.  I have no idea what it looks like inside the church, but from the outside, it is not an attractive looking church.

First Lutheran Church in Watford City, North Dakota.  Watford City has never been a large town.  Notice the contrast with the church immediately above?

Now, in this post here, I don't want people to get the wrong idea.  Even if this is a Sunday morning post, I'm not limiting my comments to church architecture by any means.  Courthouses, another category of building that have long been subject to very traditional architecture, ceased to be so subject starting with the Boomer influenced everything of the 1970s.  As a result, there are now some powerfully ugly courthouses around.

 Laramie County government complex in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  I don't feel that this courthouse is ugly, but it's blah, in my view.  My original caption stated:   "This is the Laramie County government complex, which houses the District and Circuit courts of the 1st Judicial District. This fairly new building is quite modern in design and appearance."  That was being polite, it's nice enough but it doesn't have the feeling of a courthouse so much as an excessively sterile government structure.  But wait, it could be worse.The Federal District Court of Cheyenne is so blah I haven't even posted a photo of it on that site, or at least I can't easily find it.  It's just a big office building.

Natrona County, Wyoming, Hall of Justice, which formerly housed the county court (it no longer does) and which still houses the city court.  Not a horrible looking building, but it doesn't look much like a court.

Indeed, if anything, courthouses may have been more subject to this trend than churches.  There's a lot of courthouses around that look more like the headquarters for Innertrobe than courthouses.  It's as if every architect post 1970s felt that he positively, absolutely, had to make everything look "modern" by making it look like an ugly office building, including office buildings.  

In recent years part of what has sort of oddly driven this is the feeling that all courthouses must have technological updates.  This has, unfortunately, begun to afflict churches as well. This has been a very unfortunate trend in the law (and in churches) and a very misunderstood one, combined with a failure to incorporate technology into the practice of law that would actually be useful.

 

Lawrence County Courthouse, Speerfish South Dakota.  There's no doubt what purpose this building serves.

This sounds like something stated by a Luddite, I'm quite aware, but frankly a lot of "let's update this old structure with new technology stuff" is fairly detrimental in some circumstances and indeed, the "let's build a new building with the latest nifty technology" can be as well.

In the law, for some time the trend has been to incorporate computer and visual technology in an apparent effort to distract and bore jurors.  Jurors actually expect a trial in the courtroom, but lawyers have gotten to the point where they apparently wish to present a giant intensely dull video game. Every lawyer who wins a case using technology is now convinced that the technology won it, which drives the possibly erroneous unsupported belief that it does.

This is in part because trials are battles and like armies in battle the commanders of those armies believe that they absolutely must have the latest weapon or they will loose, and if they win, they'll attribute it to that.  Its the same reason that we hear so much about tanks in regards to the Second World War but don't hear much about cavalry, which was used in it. Or that we hear about helicopters in regards to the Vietnam War but not all that much about artillery.  As another odd example, the French while fighting in Algeria actually found the war to be embarrassing as the equipment that proved to be best suited for it was regarded as obsolete while the latest military technology was pretty useless. The French, for example, resorted to using surplus American World War Two light bombers in the war as the latest Mirage jets didn't cut it for the war they were fighting, which didn't keep them from wanting them.  Anyhow, a person who wins at trial is going to believe that the technology did it.

This is aided by the fact that anyone who has every used an audiovisual aid imagines in their own mind that it looks like the best one every done, which it hardly ever does.  In the mind of the presenter they come on looking like a movie star and present a stunning cinematic presentation that carries the day.  More often than not, however, the presenter spends five minutes trying to get the technology to work in the first place, then stumbles on to their files of cat gifs and shows the jury fluffy sleeping upside down on his head, before stumbling through little league photos and on to something about the trial. The jury, in the meantime, is pondering lunch.

Not that technology should be ignored. But when a nifty new courtroom is built and equipped with tiny counsel tables, or the old counsel tables in an old courtroom are shoved aside in favor of a giant screen, things are going wrong.

That's true as well for churches but if anything the presentations of this sort of technology are much worse.  I've been to Masses where the pastor thought, for some reason, that a gospel that was originally designed to be a letter read to a congregation by a Priest is accompanied by an illustration or set of illustrations put up on a screen that look like they were drawn for children's books in the 1950s.  Not good.  If the original audience, which no doubt included the illiterate, was able to grasp what are sometimes extremely deep theological points by having the letter read to them, a modern audience with nearly 100% literacy sure can.  Diverting attention with bad illustrations, or photographs of sunrises, isn't going to serve to get the message across. The projection screen, however, will serve to detract from the appearance of the church.

Indeed, if a person really wanted to have illustrations that were tired to the message of the Gospels it would like cause a lot of people in the pews to gasp, which is why it won't be done.  Consider, for example, St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians:

Do you not realise that people who do evil will never inherit the kingdom of God? Make no mistake -- the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, the self-indulgent, sodomites,

thieves, misers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers, none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.*

This could in fact be effectively illustrated, and it wouldn't have to be with pastel cartoon like prints recalling the 50s.  It'd be easy to do it with modern photographs or even snippets from popular televisions shows, and really drive a point home.  Followed, quite soon, with by protests. Shoot, you could illustrate this just through slides of Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Sex In The City, Vanderpump Rules or Below Deck.  Pretty much any modern popular media, or even snippets of the trendy in the news, would do.

Now, having said this, it should not be taken to mean that every church or courthouse or older building of any type must remain exactly the way it was.  Far from it.  For one thing, heating and cooling have enormously improved and, given that I work in an old office building (vintage 1917) and I can attest that old heating, in particular, is bad.  Updating heating is good.  The same is true, I'd note, for cooling.  Modern appliances, wiring for the internet, etc., are all well worth doing and indeed  are modern necessities.  Modern windows are so far superior to old ones it isn't funny.

But things that impact the architecture itself?

Well, proceed with caution.

___________________________________________________________________________________

*Not surprisingly there are various translations of St. Pauls letter to the Corinthians, all of which are upsetting to various modern people.  This is so much the case that one local Univeralist minister dismisses St. Paul's letters as just his opinions, which pretty much dismisses the concept of divinely inspired text entirely in favor of . . .well whatever you like.

Best Post of the Week of August 6, 2016

Child Labor on Connecticut Tobacco Farms, August 6, 1917.

Everyone is wrong about American Immigration Policy

Youth organizations. Their Rise and (near) Fall, or is that a myth? And, did you join?

Eee gads, I almost missed it.

Mid Week At Work: Children Processing Tobacco. August 9, 1917. Hazardville, Connecticut

The Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917 (Lever Act) becomes law

Poster Saturday: Carry On!

Is there any good reason to lift a truck?

And yes, I'm serious.

I have a 2007 Dodge.  It's showed up here or on my other blogs in the background fairly frequently.

I've had my 2007 Dodge since 2007.

I love the truck.  It's had its problems, to be sure, but all in all its been a good one.  It has nearly 150,000 miles on it, but with a Cummins diesel engine, it'll last for a long time.  It's not rusting out, it still does good on the highway (although I'm noticing a slight wobble in my steering. . . probably need to get it aligned, it'll tow any kind of trailer with ease.  It's been a good one.

But there's one thing about it that's always been a problem. Every year, during elk season, if I have an elk license, I managed to scrape the undercarriage with a rock or something or I get it high centered.

Now, it's a long truck.

 

And that no doubt explains a lot of this.

My across the street neighbor has a truck of nearly the same vintage which is also a crew cab, but with a short box.  He's put a leveling kit on his and the next biggest set of tires (the biggest that will go on the truck's rims) and it truly looks like it has more clearance.  But then, it's not a long box.

And the factory Dodge Power Wagon (the ones they make now, not the old ones, which are a completely different deal) seem to come with that suspension from the factory, or something like it.

Recent model Power Wagon, with slightly higher suspension and larger tires.

I'm tempted, but is it a bad idea?

Some say go for it, but mostly, in the knowledgeable truck community, the opposite opinion seems to hold sway.  For one thing, larger tires change the gear ratio, by default, some.  For another, however, some warn that this contributes to the dreaded "Death Wobble", about which I know little, but which I wish to avoid.

And then there's the cost.

Opinions?

Ummm. . . . .

I received this by way of an electronic advertisement.

Okay, Granted, they are not obscenely expensive, but they look worn out and dirty.

$40 isn't bad for jeans at all, but you could still get a nice pair of new blue Levis for that.

Go out and dirty them up yourself, doggone it.

Man, it's sure been hot. . .

Oh really?

People are so acclimated to saying this phrase that they say it irrespective of reality.

This summer, here, has simply not happened.

It was a cold spring, followed by a cold early summer.  We had about three weeks, at most, of normal summer weather, which wasn't all that hot, followed by fall.

August has been freezing.  Summer here is over.

It's been an odd summer, weather wise, to say the least.

Which still hasn't kept people in the elevator from looking over, on a day that's in the 50s and drizzly, and saying "it sure has been hot!"

The Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917 (Lever Act) becomes law

On this date in 1917 the controversial Food and Fuel Control Act became law.  Popularly known as the Lever Act, the law created two wartime agencies, the United States Food Administration and the United States Fuel Administration.

 

United States Fuel Administration poster.

Both agencies were provided with the ability to regulate prices and attempt to control supply in an effort to make sure that adequate stocks of these vital items were available to citizens and industry.

 Poster aimed at immigrants by the United States Food Administration.

The United States Food Administration was headed by Herbert Hoover who was appointed by Woodrow Wilson.  Remembered commonly now only for his unsuccessful Presidency, Hoover was a very capable businessman and civil servant.

Herbert Hoover in 1917.

Harry A. Garfield, the son of James Garfield, a lawyer and academic was appointed head of the Fuel Administration.  It's interesting to note that Hoover may have seemed the more logical candidate for this post, as he was a geologist.

Harry A. Garfield as Fuel Administration chief.

The Fuel Administration was organized on a state by state basis.  By January 1918, in spite of its efforts, fuel supplies were short enough that "Idle Mondays" were ordered for non essential industries.  The crisis in supply was not immediately alleviated by the wars end, and the agency continued to operate until 1922 when it was deemed no longer needed and passed out of existence.

 

Hoovers Food Administration performed a similar role in regards to the food supply.  A special grain purchasing agent, the United States Grain Corporation, was formed and operated under it specifically to purchase and regulate the supply of grain.  The agency largely passed into a new entity, the American Relief Administration, with the war's end, although the United States Grain Corporation continued on with some functions, including supplying relief wheat to Russia, until it was eliminated in 1927.

 

Like the Fuel Administration, the Food Administration took towards having "less" days, such as meathless, wheatless and porkless days.  As I've mentioned on prior posts, this must have seemed like an added burden for Catholic and Orthodox Americans, who already had fast days that included at least two out of the three of these.

 

People were also urged to garden at home (something already widely done), to eat fish instead of meat, and to use oats and corn where possible, rather than wheat.

 

The approach of both agencies was considerably different than that adopted by the later Democratic Administration of World War Two, which frankly might be telling in some ways.  Rationing was never enacted on a national level, although at least one state, Montana, did enact it on a state level, so perhaps that shows it proved its efficiency in another way.

Both agencies resulted in a large number of dramatic well done posters, from what must be regarded as the golden age of American posters, and to the extent they're remembered today, that tends to be why.  But both were major entities during the Great War and controversial ones at that.  Their existence shows the extent to which Americans of that era were willing to depart from normal concepts of business and economy during the war, and the extent to which resources were truly very tight at that time and people lived closer to the margins on a wider scale.

1st Regt. Ohio Engineers, Co.s E.F. Hdqrs. Co. and Engineers Train, Gordon Park, Cleveland, Ohio. August 10, 1917

1st Regt. Ohio Engineers, Co.s E.F. Hdqrs. Co. and Engineers Train, Gordon Park, Cleveland, Ohio.  August 10, 1917

Mid Week At Work: Children Processing Tobacco. August 9, 1917. Hazardville, Connecticut

Girls working tobacco at age 8, 9 and 10.

Boys working tobacco, ages 9 and 11.