Beer becomes a casualty of the Great War and Villa resurgent. September 7, 1918.

Prohibition, which was rising prior to World War One, gained massive momentum during the war for a variety of stated reasons and a series or more significant unspoken psychological ones.

On September 6, 1918, it received a big boost in the form of an emergency agricultural bill that had been amended to include a ban on brewing on December 1, 1918.  There was a certain logic to the ban, in that resources were really tight and the brewing of beer consumed agricultural products that could go elsewhere. But that only provided part of the reason for banning brewing.  The more significant one was that the American public had been persuaded by the war to take the country dry, in part due to concerns that soldiers in hastily assembled Army camps would booze it up in nearby, formerly quiet, towns and in part by fears that soldiers far from home would be corrupted by drink outside the eyes of their families, both in the US, and away in wine laden France.

That can be seen in particular by the paper above, which not only noted the passage of the bill, but the mustering of dry forces that would seek to carry on Prohibition post war. . .a move that was successful. . . and not.

Meanwhile, the war in France itself was going well, but Villa was resurgent in Chihuahua.

Francis W. Moeschen, Red Cross Nurse. Casualty to the Spanish Flu, September 7, 1918.

Recalling Mac & Cheese.

The A Hundred Years Ago blog posted an item about cooking macaroni.

Hundred-year-old Directions for Cooking Macaroni

It's interesting how something like this can really bring back certain memories. It's also interesting how something that's such a routine part of our daily life tends to be associated by us with the recent, in a way.

Macaroni was a staple of my childhood life.  But not the horrid stuff you get out of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese box. Ack.

Now, as I've mentioned here before, my mother was a terrible cook.  But I guess Mac & Cheese is hard to mess up, unless of course you include the boxed Kraft stuff, which is really disgusting.  Anyhow, as a kid everyone ate Mac & Cheese but the funny thing is that I don't recall the boxed stuff even existing.  Maybe it did but she didn't fix it.

In recalling something like this, particularly for people who are Catholics such as myself, its tempting to associate Mac &  Cheese with Lent or, if you are old enough, Fridays in general.  For folks who don't know, Catholics and the Orthodox abstain from meat on the Fridays of Lent.  The Orthodox fasting regulations, and those of the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, are actually much more extensive than that, and I'd have to look them up to recall what they are.  Prior to some date in the 1960s American Catholics had to abstain from meat on every Friday of the year except for certain feast days.

Anyhow, while that's a popular thing to say, that wasn't the case in our house.  My mom was simply a poor cook but Mac & Cheese is really easy and she made it frequently as a side dish.  It was never ever the main dish, ever.  In Lent, if we had it, it was the side dish to fish.

Anyhow, we had Mac & Cheese as a side dish pretty frequently and I always liked it, and I still do (but not that icky Kraft stuff).

My mother made Mac & Cheese using Velveeta, which isn't even really cheese but a "processed cheese food", whatever that this.  Now, I can't stand Velveeta and it doesn't seem to be used as much now, but it was the only cheese, other than cream cheese, she bought.  I would never make Mac & Cheese with Velveeta now, but it was as super common cheese in almost everyone's household when I was a kid.  Every mother had Velveeta.  If we had cheese sandwiches, they were made from Velveeta.

Anyhow, I can readily recall my mother's Mac & Cheese and how much I liked it, particularity when she put it in a casserole dish and baked it, which was frequently.  But for the post on A Hundred Years Ago, however, I would not have recalled that.  The oddity of this is that my mother fell quite ill when I was 13 years old or so and my father took over the cooking after that, so in recalling this, it's also the case that I'm recalling now something that I haven't had, by her hands, for 42 years. Quite awhile.

After my father took over cooking Mac & Cheese basically went away.  He had learned how to cook from his mother and was a very good cook.  The cessation of my mother cooking was a revelation as the quality of the food improved so much.  Velveeta also went away in favor of real cheese.  That may sound minor, but my mother even used Velveeta for things like tacos, which is not good.

Anyhow, after growing up I'd make Mac & Cheese for myself, but with real cheese, and I really like it.  I'll still do that for lunch on occasion.  But never that Kraft box stuff, which is disgusting.

My wife and kids feel differently about the gross Kraft pre packaged item, and they'll make it.  I just can't stand it and can't figure why anyone would ever eat it, but then I've also been surprised by the fact that this very pedestrian food has somehow achieved celebrity status.  To my surprise you can now find Mac & Cheese in lots of restaurants, particularly of the brew pub or ale house variety.  As I like that sort of fare, it's been a surprise to me.  And some of it has even gotten pretty fancy.  I'll never order it from a menu myself, as it seems like something I could do just as well as anybody else, but I've seen it ordered a pile of times and I'll admit, it looks pretty good.

Probably because of its American staple nature, Mac & Cheese has sort of a 1950s June and Ward Cleaver feel to it, which is how I think a lot of Americans view it.  An interesting thing about the item on A Hundred Years ago is that it shows that this has been around a lot longer than that, and that it's actually changed somewhat.  For example, I thought that all Macaroni was elbow macaroni, but that's not true at all.  There used to be a time, it turns out, when it was a series of rods you had to break.

What would probably be a bigger surprise to most people is that its been an American staple for over two centuries.  The line about Macaroni, while satirical and somewhat referring to something else, that appears in the Revolutionary War era song Yankee Doodle, was in fact a familiar reference.  Macaroni & Cheese was a common dish in the Americas at the time.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hV-yHbbrKRA" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Which is interesting for a variety of reasons.  Not only is this not something that became common in the boxed food era, or even a recently as a century ago. . . it's been around on the American dinner table for a long time.

Our fate, whatever it is, is to be overcome by enduring it.

Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est.

Virgil.  The Aeneid.

Blog Mirror: 60 Clicks; A Brief Guide to the Iconic Watches of The Vietnam War

Why?  Well because you need to know, that's why.

A Brief Guide to the Iconic Watches of The Vietnam War

For what is worth, here on the second day we've linked in a watch thread, most soldiers were never issued watches.  Never.

Not in World War Two, not in Vietnam, and not now.

They're issued on a need basis alone. For guys who need to time things precisely. And at least in my experience, if you have a watch with a second hand, and most people do, the services expects you to use your own.

Blog Mirror: 60 Clicks: A Brief Guide to the Iconic Military Watches of World War II

Because watches are cool, and field watches are the coolest of them all:

A Brief Guide to the Iconic Military Watches of World War II

Wyoming Labor Journal, September 6, 1918.

Another item we're running this week in observation of Labor Day, this past Monday, and of course in keeping with our recent 1918 theme, the Wyoming Labor Journal.

This is the issue of September 6, 1918 and followed the recent Labor Day observance in 1918.  While various unions that exist in Wyoming do publish trade journals today, as far as I'm aware there is no longer a general labor newspaper such as this.

Labor was in an odd position in the Great War as it was continually somewhat at odds with the administration while also supporting the war effort.  From the patriotic front page of the paper, you wouldn't necessary know that from the Journal.

Labor and the conglomeration of everything.

Grocer, 1944. This guy wouldn't be working for himself, in this occupation, anymore.

One show that does capture a little of the high school experience many of us had is “Freaks and Geeks,” to which I’ve devoted a few evenings lately. One character is a guidance counselor who’s a little over-invested in his students’ lives. He’s always around, questioning the kids’ decisions and reminding them that the choices they make in high school will echo down the hallways of the rest of their lives.

This is a pretty common theme, and one that today’s students are likely to hear as classes kick off this week in the state. Even Linus from “Peanuts” gets in on the action. He tells Charlie Brown: “I think that the purpose of going to school is to get good grades so then you can go on to high school, and the purpose is to study hard so you can get good grades so you can go to college, and the purpose of going to college is so you can get good grades so you can go on to graduate school, and the purpose of that is to work hard and get good grades so we can get a job and be successful so that we can get married and have kids, so we can send them to grammar school to get good grades, so they can go to high school to get good grades so they can go to college and work hard…”

Mandy Burton from her article in the Casper Star Tribune, quoting from the late Charles Schultz's cartoon, Peanuts.

Pretty observant article, but not true so much anymore.  Today, Schultz's characters would have to say:

“I think that the purpose of going to school is to get good grades so then you can go on to high school, and the purpose is to study hard so you can get good grades so you can go to college, and the purpose of going to college is so you can get good grades so you can go on to graduate school, and the purpose of that is to work hard and get good grades so we can get a job and be successful move to a city you are not from and have no connections to so that we can get married and have kids, divorce and abandon them, so we can send them to grammar school to get good grades, so they can go to high school to get good grades so they can go to college and work hard and move on to where they have no connections…”

Grim view, I know. But a realistic one in the modern American economy.

I've posted a lot on this blog about the disappearance of various small businesses.  I haven't posted as much on those that have persevered so far, as its always easier to ignore that, although I do have one in the hopper on bars.

As part of what we're observing here this week in regards to Labor Day and the American celebration of labor, we might want to take a look at the conglomeration of absolutely everything.  Indeed, to my way of thinking, it's one of the worst things that's happened to the United States, and indeed the world, in the past century.

Americans are fond of thinking that they live in a free market, but they really do not.  A free market, in a pure sense, is a market in which every individual competes on a level playing field.  But that sort of market, to be truly free, would exist in the absence of corporate entities.  Ours clearly does not.  Indeed, it emphasizes them.

Now, the reason that matters is that corporations, in a state of nature so to speak, would be partnerships, which are assemblies of individuals who are still individuals.  Partnerships, if they are conventional partnerships, exist in a much different legal environment than corporations do.  Corporations may be assemblies of people, and of course are as people are behind all entities and things at the end of the day, but corporations are creatures of the state, created by the recognition of whichever state entity they are formed subject to, and recognized at law as a "person".*

That last thing is a profound legal concept.  Walmart, General Motors, or British Petroleum, for example, are all people in the eyes of the law. You know that they aren't, but at law they are. That means that under the law nearly everywhere they are legally liable as people for their torts, as compared to conventional partnerships in which every partner can be held individually liable for the acts of the partnership.  If that was the law in regards to shareholders and the liability of corporations, there's no way that they'd have grown so large and so predominant.

Additionally, in the United States, thanks to a ruling by the United States Supreme Court, corporations have the same right of speech that individuals do. That's an almost shocking proposition, but it's the law.  It's hard to believe, for example, that every shareholder of Amalgamated Amalgamated holds the same view as the board of directors, but that board can decide what the corporation thinks and how it spends its money on getting its message across.   That's the corporations speech, even if Mrs. Anon Jones in Passedonby, Florida, who is a shareholder, disagrees.

Corporations have been around for a long, long time and there's legitimate reasons to be sure for big and small ones.  The oldest one is debated as to that status.  Some claim the Dutch East India Company, which disappeared in 1799, was the first one, but that status is certainly challenged.

Logo of the Dutch East India Company.

Some claim that status for the Hudson's Bay Company, which has the advantage over the Dutch East India Company in that it is still around with popular stores in Canada now commonly nicknamed "The Bay".

The flag of the Hudson's Bay Company.

While the Hudson's Bay Company hasn't folded in, like the Dutch East India Company, it isn't what it once was, sadly. None the less the company that could and should claim that it made it to the what would be come the American Pacific Coast well in advance of Lewis and Clark was formed on May 2, 1670, a long while back.**

Both of those corporations are sorts of exceptions to the early rule, which is interesting in that they were both retail and manufacturing, with HBC being particularly that way.  The manufacturing aspect of them is what caused the need for their corporate status to exist.  A giant financial enterprise on that scale simply couldn't exist as a partnership, and we won't pretend otherwise.  Corporations are not only the backbone to the Corporate Capitalist system we actually have, but a necessary element of it. The question explored here is a bit different than that.

Before we move on, determining the oldest corporation in the United States would be a little more difficult, although I'm sure it could be done.  There are some really old ones to be sure, with some old businesses that were not incorporated (at least originally) dating back to the 17th Century.  The oldest corporation, oddly enough, appears to be a perfume company, still in existence, but it's hard to tell that for sure.

What something like this tends to show us is that corporations really arrived on the scene for really large commercial trading operations in the 1600s and have been with us ever since.  And over time, they've come to predominate in all sorts of ways more and more.

It's easy to pretend this is a really modern trend, and it is if we take a long view of modern. But it didn't occur within just the last couple of decades.  Certainly big manufacturing came in with the Industrial Revolution.  Big retail came in shortly after that.  Department stores, which are the immediate predecessors of all big box retail, date back to the early 19th Century.  Macy's, which is in every American burg of mid size and up, was founded as a dry goods store in 1858, two years prior to the Civil War.  A whole host of companies that some would recognize now and some would not, followed.  All of them no doubt incorporated early on.

Indeed, at some point some of the older department stores yielded to the newer ones like Target.  Anyway you look at it, the most emblematic of the modern American giganto stores is Walmart, which is absolutely everywhere.

Its with Walmart that it gets tempting, although it would probably be a bit deceptive, to start to claim everything changed.  Before Walmart, for example, there was K Mart, and certainly at one time K Mart seemed like a big deal. But Walmart was exceptionally aggressive in moving into every single market and every single niche that seemed to exist.  At least at our local K Mart (which I haven't been in since the kids were small) you can now buy groceries, for example, but that's only because Walmart did it first.

Walmart has a business model which basically sets to sell everything on earth for the lowest possible price.  It does that by a variety of means, but one of the means is that, once it grew large enough, it pressured manufacturers to lower their costs.  The manufacturers had no choice and in order to do that they've had to do what any manufacturer in a global market has had to do under price pressure, manufacture overseas and with the cheapest parts that the consumers can tolerate using.

As this has happened its been devastating to local retail.

Walmart's backers like to pretend that its "low low prices" benefit everyone but that's very far from true.  What low low prices have done is meant that certain entire sectors of the local economy have closed.  It used to be the case that things like radios, televisions, stoves, and appliances, as well as clothing and the like, were typically bought by local vendors.  I'm in my mid 50s and I can well recall all of that being the case.  Maybe you'd also look at Penney's, Sears or K Mart, but chances are that the local prices weren't far off and were competitive.  Not any more.

And that has meant, by extension, that occupations that people once held in small retail have died.  A person would have to be willing to endure a lot of economic risks to open up a small dry goods store, or an appliance store, or a jewelry store today.  Indeed, a person would have to be willing to endure a whole lot of risk to open a conventional grocery store.

Now, not all of that can be blamed on Walmart, but on the overall trend.  Through the corporate vehicle, size and mass have spread into everything.

Take the popular television advertisement we see in which we're informed that "He want to Jared's" symbolizes undying love.  It might, but Jared's is owned by Sterling Jewelers, a company that was founded in 1910 and which is now owned by Signet Jewelers Ltd, a British company. The parent company has stores all over the globe and just purchased an internet based jewelry company.

 

 Sidewalk clock of a former jewelry store.  The store closed when the owner retired.  It was a family business that had been in that family for at least two generations.  I'm not saying that big national chains killed it or anything, but if I were entering the business today I'd surely consider my national and international competition before I did so.

Now, I'm  not saying that either of those business entities is bad in some fashion, but let's be fair. Jewelry stores used to almost exclusively the domain of families, which made a decent middle class, and independent, living on them.

 

Location of former grocery store in Ft. Collins, Colorado.

So were grocery stores, although that's long ceased to be the case.  All groceries used to be local but just over a century ago Piggly Wiggly moved into with a different business model and now almost everyone buys their regular groceries from a grocery store that's a huge chain.

The interior of the first Piggly Wiggly from our hugely popular thread on that topic.

Now in fairness to those chains, and fairness is due, a strong grocery union means that the jobs at grocery stores actually are generally good middle class jobs with benefits and retirement.  But they aren't small locally owned as a rule anymore.  Oh, sure, you can find a locally owned store, but it will likely be a specialty store.  And perhaps that's both the model and the exception to the rule.  And as noted, in recent years grocery stores, which at least were generally single purpose in mind, have had to compete with Walmart and the like, which now include groceries in them, thereby removing the connection with the local and the course more and more.

Local record store.

And there's hardly anything that hasn't succumbed to this model, or which isn't in danger of of falling to it.  There are still local book stores and record stores, but they struggle against national chains, or increasingly, the Internet.***  There are still local automotive garages, but think of the easy service end of that chain, such as lubrication, and once again you have the chains.****

 

Barling Garage, Meeteetse Wyoming.

And even industries which don't have a giant big box store to compete with face the problem of conglomeration.  Even in the legal field, which is generally a model of modern guild practice, we now see larger and larger firms in big cities planting roots in the mid sized ones, and giant ones based in huge cities moving into the big cities.  The trend is obvious.

You can, if you look hard enough, and live in a town big enough, find local businesses.  But if you stop to consider what the big box stores are offering and then compare that to the town in which you live, you'll get a clue as to what you'll find in the first instance. And then as you drive down the street and look at the national chains its all the more apparent.

Now, I'm not saying that everything local is gone. Indeed, just a couple of months ago, while working on one of our trucks, I was reminded of how many local industrial mechanics shops still remain and indeed, in order to rebuilt the batter connectors for our 1997 Dodge D1500 we had to go to those local shops as the big national chain batter shop here that had just opened a large new store didn't have what we needed. The small one catering to garages did however, along with a lot of helpful advice that proved critical to the enterprise.

But more and more this is an exception to the rule.

The question is, of course, whether or not this is bad.

And it is.

The problem with this gigantic conglomeration of everything is multi fold, but at least in part what it has done is to take middle class occupations and shoved the former owners of them down into lower wage brackets.  Local grocery stores that supported a family of owners, for example, are gone, and that family has had to do something else, probably a couple something else's, in order to support themselves.  Or at least, they are supporting themselves directly through what they own.

Likewise, families that would have owned any number of local enterprises to support themselves now must work for other enterprises quite often. Sure, there are multiple exceptions, and of course a lot of chains are actually franchises, which is another matter entirely.  But there can be no doubt that a young couple that might wish to open an appliance store and support a young family has to really question their decision.

Beyond that, there's a certain center of mass, or gravitational pull, aspect to this.  I've noticed this in the legal field for a long time.

The practice of law used to feature a lot of very broadly practicing lawyers, many of them absolutely excellent, located throughout a state.  I've detailed it before already, but the practice of law began to shift in the 1970s when the Baby Boomers came into it as they shifted the business model to emphasize making money over everything else.*****Coincident with this, large firms began to increasingly expand into multiple states. The money aspect of this drew off a number of graduates of local law schools to the bigger markets, but the majority of graduates of state schools still went on to practice in their states, very often in the communities they were from.  This is no longer true.

Now, the gravitational pull had caused a cycle in which bigger and bigger firms sought to penetrate smaller and smaller markets, to the detriment of the local practitioner.  This created a crisis in employment for those just graduating law schools which in turn helped bring about the disaster of the Uniform Bar Exam, which allowed "transportability".  That transportability became a vehicle to accelerate the penetration by big firms, but ironically big regional firms have become the victims of giant national firms that seek to do the same thing.  The local lawyer has increasingly gone from a general practitioner skilled at everything to a specialized one occupying the markets that are suited for only the local.  But the practice hasn't improved at all.  Indeed, it's gotten increasingly unbearable for the practitioners and the overall quality certainly isn't any better.

The irony of all of this is that it doesn't have to be.  The concept of incorporation was never really meant to lead to the conglomeration of everything, and in prior eras when conglomeration grew too extensive, at least in the United States the law, in the form of the Sherman Anti Trust Act, stepped in to address it. Now things are far, far, more extensive than they ever were.  But only because we allow it.

During the recent primary election the GOP candidates all came around to how local business could and can be helped.  I doubt that anyone is really going to do anything, but here's an area that certainly could be done.  Large scale manufacturing is certainly a different animal, but retail and the service industries have become conglomerated simply because we chose to allow it to occur, or even encouraged it.  We ought to ask, at least a bit, if in doing that "for" our communities, we instead "doing" something to them, and it wasn't a pleasant thing to do.

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*Indeed, one of the really bizarre ironies of Capitalism v. Socialism is that modern Capitalism, which is really Corporate Capitalism, strong favors the big, but not as much as real Socialism, which doesn't work and which is pretty much extinct, which favors the biggest.  Socialist don't think of it that way, but real Socialism favors the creation of a giant monopoly in which a giant Corporation, if you will, the state, owns and controls everything with the people as the theoretical shareholders, if you will (but in reality, the government is and doesn't care much about its patrons, the people).

**It's odd to me that real backers of Capitalism so rarely cite the example of the Hudson's Bay Company which is the one real example we have a giant corporation serving its interests by basically ruling the northern half of a continent and successfully enforcing the peace while enriching its more or less subjects.  It's a Capitalists success story of epic proportions really.

***Indeed, Internet retailers are posed to be the next step in this, wiping out even big entities in favor of remote cyber ones.  It is, of course, happening.

****Garages themselves, however, hold on.  Perhaps their work is too individualistic to fail.

*****It was at that point that the "billable hour", much discussed in legal circles, came in and began to dominate. 

Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar on a Tuesday. Kavanaugh Hearing...

Yesterday I posted this:

Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar on a Tuesday. Kavanaugh Hearing...: Hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh commence today. . . which means, in all likelihood, a week of Democratic grandstanding, ...

And not to be disappointed, day one turned out to be just as big of circus as I thought it might be.  Even bigger really.

Which is not to say that there are not real reasons to seriously ponder the Kavanaugh nomination.  His views on executive privilege, for example, really do deserve close attention from both Republicans and Democrats. And the Administrations withholding of thousands of pages of documents pertaining to him is more than a little questionable.

But most of the cry will be egocentric in nature and amount to the odd claim that he's a threat to democracy as he would suggest that the Constitution doesn't favor Liberal enshrined rights and actually does protect those rights, but pretty much only those rights, it actually mentions, whether you are keen on those rights or not. Everything else, he''ll suggest, the people need to make their mind up on their own, through their legislatures.

So, once again, from the Liberal prospective here, at the end of the day, the biggest threat to democracy is the people.  You really shouldn't let them decide things for themselves.

Because you want to hear it live:

SCOUTUSBlog

 Live blog of confirmation hearing (Day Two)
We are live-blogging the second day of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senators will go through their first round of questioning for the nominee.

"Sincerely yours, Woodrow Wilson 21,000 officers and men, Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio, Brig. Gen. Mathew C. Smith, commanding". September 5, 1918.

The U.S. was big on these odd staged photographs during World War One.  This is one of the odder ones.

And we end up winning the Vietnam War after all.

Oh sure. . . they may have taken Saigon in 75. . . .



But the culture ends up winning after all.

Hah.

The Trappings of Office. Do you affect them?

You've seen him here before.  W. Morgan Shuster, New York lawyer, 1914.

Reddit has an interesting subreddit called r/Lawyers.  It's a closed Reddit so only members can participate or even read it. All lawyers, therefore.

Recently a thread was posted there on "expensive items" that lawyers use in the course of their work, or adorn themselves with, etc.  It was very interesting.

Now, I'll note first of all that I would hardly regard a Reddit thread as a scientific survey or anything approaching one.  And there's no way to know whether the replies reflect the norm or not.  But what I will note is that my observation is that over the past quarter century, lawyers dress a lot less formally, at least around here, than they used to, and that preception is common for other places as well.

Now, I've posted on this topic before, but this isn't quite the same thing.  The thread included any expensive item for which a more routine example might suffice. Brief cases, watches, shoes, etc., you name it.  And if the replies are correct, quite a few lawyers in various places still wear expensive items daily or frequently, and own other things that meet these definitions.

Indeed, it made me downright self conscious.

Now, part of the reason that I'm posting this is that I just notice the other day myself a lawyer I know well who dresses down every day wearing a really nice modern Omega watch.  Omegas aren't cheap by any means and they have a near cult like following with some. They are, legitimately, a really good Swiss watch.  Everything else he was wearing was clean, etc., but the Omega is an exceptional item.

Now, I don't know the story behind that watch, but it occurred to me that I know a lot of lawyers and indeed non lawyers who dress casually everyday but who have a really expensive good watch.  The Rolex is of course the premier example of this, but it's not the only example.  And I've really wondered about that to some degree.

Not that I don't admire nice watches (although I think Rolex watches are gigantic and I don't particularly like the way they look.  I do like Omegas however, which are not nearly as gigantic.

Now, my father had an Omega, but then he'd bought it overseas during the Korean War.  By happenstance I've noticed that a lot of Korean War era servicemen had Omegas. They all bought them at PXs and BXs.  My father had a Zeiss camera as well that he also bought at a BX and he told me that these items were much cheaper at an overseas BX.  Indeed, they must have been as even when I was a National Guardsmen in the 1980s PXs remained associated with the concept that whatever they sold was nearly free which, at least by my semi casual observation at that time, was no longer true.

Be that as it may, since the 1950s these items have just skyrocketed in price and a modern Omega (which is the watch that James Bond wears in the newer films, I'd note) are really expensive. Far more expensive than I'd ever consider buying.  And Rolex's are off the charts. They aren't the only ones by any means.

Which made me think about the watches I wear (yes I have several).  None of them are off the map expensive by any means.  I like them, and some of them are pretty nice, but nobody would think "wow, he's wearing a Wenger field watch. . ."  No I don't think so.

But them I'm also pretty hard on watches.

Anyhow, this isn't about watches but on stuff, and what I found is that there are certain lawyers who maintain that not only do they affect such things as Rolex's, but they think doing so is mandatory.  Indeed, what I found is that the list of items that repeatedly reoccurs in this way are suits, shoes, watches, and apparently automobiles.

The thesis is that you have to present yourself as successful as a message to your clients and, most of all, your opponents.

Hmmm. . . I don't know that this would have occurred to me.

Now, let me say here that this post isn't an argument for "buy cheap stuff".  Cheap stuff is often cheap stuff as its cheap.  A person is definitely much better off buying quality, even when more expensive, in the "Buy It For Life" line of thought (another Reddit subreddit).  Indeed, high quality watches, although not necessarily the modern Rolex, might very well it into that mold. High quality items are often near term expensive and short term costs savings for that very reason.  And in some instances, such as boots for example, high quality items can help prevent injury where their cheap counterparts will not.

So I'm not speaking of that at all.

Rather, what I'm speaking of is the purchase of really expensive items to make a statement.

I wonder how common that is?

I've seen arguments printed arguing that very thing, usually in regards to bespoke suits or Rolex watches.  Indeed, I've seen it stated that a person in certain professions should buy a Rolex in order to make a statement.

And at least in one profession, real estate brokerage, presentation in this fashion is regarded as absolutely mandatory.  Real estate brokers, if you know them from the inside, will often complain about this as they have to have the best clothes and the best cars, they feel (and live in one of the best houses) as a form of advertising.  

Is that true for other professions?

Well, it is is, I've ignored it and so have most of the people that I've known in the profession that I'm in, except maybe in the case of watches (there are a lot of really nice watches out there).

Well. . . I'm not buying it.

Frankly, the only person I think who notices that expensive item routinely is another person who thinks it sends a message, in which case they realize it doesn't . . unless the display is so ostentatious that it has to be noticed. . .which sends some sort of message to everyone but not the right one to everyone.

Which is a good thing, because as a person in their mid 50s, I'm holding on to my vehicles in hopes of never having to buy another one and I'm too old to justify buying a Rolex.

But back to the caption. What's your view?

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This post is part of a Labor Day 2018 series of posts, that also include posts from 1918.  We don't usually do an entire week of such posts, but in this case, it seemed warranted for various reasons, including the century long contrast.

Others posted, at the time of this Tuesday September 4 post, were:

Labor Day, 2018. A Query
Labor Day 2018. A Contemplation
Lex Anteinternet: Labor Day, 1918. The local news
Labor Day, 1918.

Monday at the Bar on a Tuesday. Kavanaugh Hearings Commence. Let the bad analysis begin.

Hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh commence today. . . which means, in all likelihood, a week of Democratic grandstanding, Republican softballs, and bad analysis by the press.

And in Russia. . .

U.S. troops landed at Archangel on this day, September 4, 1918. They were already at Murmansk and Vladivostok.

On the same day, the Soviets arrested and executed members of the Russian Imperial household. That is, such figures as the lady in waiting Countess Anastasia Vasilyevna Hendrikova and tutor Catherine Adolphovna Schneider.  They were executed for no good reason whatsoever.  Imperial valet, Aleksei Andreyevich Volkov, managed to escape in a hail of bullets and lived as a refugee in various locations until dying a natural death in Denmark in 1929.

People who like to romanticize the Soviets, and there are plenty, would do well to remember instances like this which demonstrate what a bunch of real bastards the Reds were.

Those members of the household executed on this day have been canonized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Monday At The Bar: Supreme Court of the United States Blog; In Recess #9: “Hoofbeats in the Distance”

In Recess #9: “Hoofbeats in the Distance”



Haven't listed to it yet, but potentially interesting. We'll see.

Labor Day, 2018. A Query

 

I'm curious, amongst those who stop in here, of the following:

1.  How many of you work a job entailing manual labor?

2.  If you presently do not, how many of you have worked a job entailing manual labor?

3.  How many of you had parents or a parent that:

A.  Had worked a job entailing manual labor;
B.  Worked principally in a job entaling manual labor.

Labor Day 2018. A Contemplation

Today is Labor Day for 2018, but you knew that already.

 Steel mill taking in scrap steel, 1942.

Labor Day is one of those holidays on which I've sometimes posted a reflection here.  I'm doing so now influenced by the fact that, for me, this isn't going to be a day off. I'm just marking time until I go into work, which caused me to contemplate the nature of modern work and what most people are doing now days, and where things seem to be headed.

This day just doesn't mean what it once did to most Americans.  When the holiday started to come in, during the late 19th Century, the United States was in the violent throws of going from being an agricultural nation to an industrial one.  It had a long ways to go and that process hadn't just started by any means, and it wasn't near the end either.  But Labor was really coming into its own.

There was a lot of fear, legitimate fear, about radicalized labor. And indeed in many countries this process resulted in fully radical labor.  It never did in the United States, but from at least the 1890s well into the 1950s there was a section of American labor that was fairly radical. There was also a large section that wasn't and which was heavily patriotic as well.  The American experiment with handling the transition allowed for this to occur, and we must acknowledge that American labor unions, while not without their radical elements, were a major part of that.

Much of this has fallen away.  Titanic struggles between labor and capital resulted in legislative compromises that were so effective that labor not only succeeded in getting what it wanted, by and large, but it over accomplished that resulting in a claw back of some things starting in the late 1970s.  Unions still exist of course, but by and large they achieve very little, their achievements having been accomplished long ago.

More than that, however, an American economy that was born, to some extent, in the early 20th Century and which came into full fruition following World War Two transitioned into something else starting in the 1970s and carrying through the remainder of the 20th Century, which very much played into this process.  Coming into industrialization late, the United States did not really become a global manufacturing titan until the early 20th Century.  By the post war period it was gigantic in that status, in spite of the Great Depression.  World War Two demonstrated that dominance and the United States came out of the war as the only intact industrial power.  From 1945 until the 1970s the US absolutely dominated manufacturing globally.

But by then things were changing.  The countries whose industrial bases were wiped out by the Second World War were recovering throughout the 1950s and 1960s and came back into their own during the 1970s.  Some nations that had never been industrial nations in any significant global fashion, such as Japan, achieved that status.  This all cut into the US's dominance. All that, of course, is very well known.

Less well understood, as a topic, is that the US, either by design or default or a little of both operated to eliminate the bottom end of its manufacturing.  People who follow this sort of thing closely argue whether this is merely an example of Adam Smith at work or, rather, a calculated decision to make Adam Smith work (or work in something else) but it did occur.

During that period of time in which the United States was a true industrial giant, nearly everything was made here, from the very high quality to the very low.  Starting in the post war period, some overseas manufacturing became associated, in comparison, with junk.  "Made In Japan", for example, was sort of a joke in the 1950s and 1960s.  By the 70s it wasn't.

But what also wasn't by the 1970s were the really bottom basement manufacturing jobs that such industries began to support. As the US had a lot of better paying jobs, they were not missed.  Soon, however, by the 1970s the better paying manufacturing jobs were disappearing as well.  By now, a lot of them have wholly disappeared.

It's seems hard to believe now, looking back, that the US once had, for example, a major textile manufacturing industry and that it remained such a big deal that in 1979 a movie about a heroin organizing textile workers into a union would be a popular movie. But Norma Rae, with Sally Field in that role, was.  Likewise, those who watched The Deer Hunter in 1978, with its depiction of Pennsylvania steel towns, didn't find that setting odd, while now it very much does.  Lots of U.S. heavy industry has simply disappeared.

As it disappeared the tech jobs rose up with it, and for some economists this is argued to be more than a beneficial offset.  Technology, it is argued, allows employees who would have spent their days in steel mills, textile mills and doing other dangerous work are now able to do much more lucrative and productive work in high tech.

I've heard that argument made many times in many shades, to include not only folks who have an interest in economics or who are economists, but also by such notables as Barack Obama, who basically argued that not only were the old heavy industry jobs never coming back, but we didn't want them back as well (those left out in this transition made their voices heard in the 2016 election, and we're still seeing how all that will play out).

There's always been something about that argument which is distasteful as it assumes a lot about what people should want. But then, a lot of this entire topic assumes that.  People should want, the argument goes, these "better jobs".

That assumes that everyone is capable of doing them.  It assumes also that every wants them, and that they actually are better.

Indeed, that assumption has been made so well that, ironically enough, a lot of blue collar jobs the nation has now go wanting, including some fairly high paying ones.  People have been so schooled in the notion that those jobs aren't worth having, that people who are at the job entry level don't even consider them anymore, so they go unfilled.

Ironically, if you look at a lot of the "better jobs" we've gone to over time the evidence is that they may very well not be. And that takes me back to my working today.

I've worked manual labor jobs and so have a lot of lawyers my age and older, so I've seen both sides of work, indeed as this has more than one side, I've seen a lot of sides of work. But a lot of the younger ones never have.  And as I look out on the ones who have really followed the dream, by which I mean following the brass ring to the huge firms in the huge cities, I'm seeing a bunch of people who look to be living in misery and know no other way of life.  And that doesn't apply just to people in this field, but in everything, or at least everything that requires advanced education.  People leave smaller towns and smaller cities to work 24 hours a day in high stress situations.  Why is that?

Well, in no small part its because we are all told as a society that this is what we want, even if we don't want it.  People want to live in the big cities, people want to work in the glass and steel towers, people want to wear the expensive clothes and drive the expensive cars and be tied to a job whose income has to be large as their expenditures are also large.

Right?

Well, I don't think they do.  The entire economic culture of the country has has sold its soul to this idea and lots are lost.  We have confusion of every type as a result, and a large number of people seeking to identify themselves with something they know is lost but which they cannot any longer find.  The byproducts of that are frightening.

I suppose what we never asked ourselves is the question that Wendell Berry put to us so long ago, "What are people for?".  We've built an economy which doesn't seem to be for people at all, and we continue to rush head long into it. We did that when we created an economy that industrialized and then we amplified that with a consumer economy that was all about materialism. We've forgotten that there is any other purpose to an economy and now believe that so strongly we don't know any other way, even if that economy is making people unhappy. And the needs of that economy became so paramount that it took over everything else, and ultimately wiped out a lot of the achievements that labor had won so long ago, including a five day work week with two days of rests, and holidays that were actually days off.

Which I suppose takes me back to my comment about working today.  I'm doing that by necessity and I do normally take off Labor Day and I'm glad to do so. I'm not complaining about that, or if I am I'm not complaining much and that's not due to anything that I've noted here.  I don't live in the big city.  But I do note that as I occupy one of those many good jobs that at one time did in fact have many good side benefits. As the urban upper middle class miserable have spread their misery by insisting that all must partake in it, it begins to seep into everything everywhere.  I've noted here before that practicing law isn't what it once was due these developments, and indeed those from the wealthier classes no longer enter the profession much as they know that.  And that's all part of the same process that enforces every greater urban consolidation through such horribly misdirected policies as the Uniform Bar Exam, an exam boosted by law schools and the profession to make licenses "transportable" but which in actuality simply sink things down towards the center of gravity and make things worse for every member of the profession that refugees from the practice of law, such as law professors, claim they wish to help.

So the point?

Well, I don't know that there is one, really, other than this.

On this day of celebrating Labor, we don't have as much of it as we' used to.  And maybe we're worse off for that.  And as we continue to contemplate wonderful economies of the future, perhaps some contemplation into how people fit into that is merited. . . even if that means looking back rather than forward.

Lex Anteinternet: Labor Day, 1918. The local news

Somehow I missed the September 3, 1918 newspapers when I posted about Labor Day 1918 here, as the both Casper papers did run articles on the Casper parade that year, and on the front page too:

Lex Anteinternet: Labor Day, 1918.: This was Labor Day for 1918. In at least Casper and Cheyenne parades were held, something we don't see locally for Labor Day at all an...

Of course at least in one case, the headline was a bit odd, but liberties with headlines were a little more common at the time.

The battle, U.S. Government War Exposition, Chicago, Sept. 3rd, 1918

Labor Day, 1918.

This was Labor Day for 1918.

In at least Casper and Cheyenne parades were held, something we don't see locally for Labor Day at all anymore. The Casper parade had been the subject of some controversy earlier in the week when bar men had indicated that they would not participate given the sentiments in favor of prohibition, which seems like sort of a self defeating act.  Emphasizing that, the Anti Saloon League indicated that they'd take the place of the owners of dram shops in the parade.

Finding more out about the local parades that year is actually pretty difficult.  The war news dominated to near exclusion the front pages of the papers. Additionally, the Wyoming State Fair was just about to commence and it was a huge deal at the time.  So what happened, overall, we don't know.

Labor Day here now sees no real community events.  For years the Democratic Party held a large rally/picnic in a central downtown park (perhaps it still does) for what they then called Jefferson Jackson Day, but the party isn't keen on claiming Andrew Jackson as one of their own anymore and it feels somewhat queasy about Thomas Jefferson for that matter, given the details of his 18th Century Southern planter domestic life.  If they are holding such a party this year, I haven't seen anything published about it to date so maybe it doesn't even occur.

Is the day observed where you reside?

The television series The Monkees ends, Labor Day, September 2, 1968.

It had been running since 1966 and, as odd as it is to consider now, was sufficiently innovative in camera work to have won a couple of industry awards for the same.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Paul's Newman Center, Laramie Wyoming.

Churches of the West: St. Paul's Newman Center, Laramie Wyoming.:

This is St. Paul's Newman Center in Laramie Wyoming. This large church and Newman Center office is fairly difficult to photograph, due to the vegetation, and its long length.  It's located directly across the street from the University of Wyoming dorms on Grand Avenue.

The Best Post of the Week of August 26, 2018

The best post of the week of August 26, 2018.

Back on the Border: Battle of Ambos Nogales. August 27, 1918

Blog Mirror: Beanies, Brooms and Bother: UW Freshmen Get the Initiation Treatment (and Lex Anteinternet: Freshman Caps? The Wyoming Student, November 2, 1917.)

Speed Goat: Local beer makes good. . . really good.

Mid Week At Work: Today In Wyoming's History: August 29, 1870. Mt. Washburn ascended.

The 2018 Wyoming Election Volume Five: On To The General Election.

Railhead: Abandoned Chicago & Northwestern line, Powder River, Wyoming

Railhead: Abandoned Chicago & Northwestern line, Powder River, Wyoming

Railhead: Abandoned Chicago & Northwestern line, Powder River, Wyoming

This is an unusual picture if you know what you are looking at.  In the distance, you can see an abandoned Chicago & Northwestern rail bed.  The line provided rail service from Casper to Lander starting in 1906, but its fortunes declined when it lost the U.S. Mail freight in 1943.   Shortly after that the Chicago & North Western began to run on the Burlington Northern line between Casper and Shoshoni, which still exists and most of the rail pulled.  In 1972 the portion of the rail between Lander and Shoshoni was abandoned for the most part, although a small local line still runs in the Shoshoni area.

This photograph not only shows the 1906 to 1943 rail bed, but also part of the original state highway that has been moved here and there in favor of a better road grade, as well as the current highway.  The old highway is to the right, the new one to the left.  The Burlington Northern is just a few miles to the north, but of course can't be seen in this south facing photograph.

This photo has made me realize how many rail locations I pass by all the time and haven't posted here.  This entire line is one I frequently encounter and could have posted long ago, and its not the only one.

Bailleul, France after the German forces left on August 30, 1918. Photograph taken September 1, 1918

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: Food-Related Humor a Hundred Years Ago

One of the things about looking at earlier eras that's hard to appreciate is the sense of things at the time.  The sense of the times themselves, the sense of prospective, and even a sense of humor.

The A Hundred Years ago site has taken a look at that in its most recent post:

Food-Related Humor a Hundred Years Ago

What do you think?  Are the jokes still funny, or not? I thought they were.

The 100 Days Offensive: Pershing writes a letter. August 31, 1918.

General Pershing, following the events of yesterday, wrote Marshall Foch a lengthy memorandum on this day in 1918.

The memorandum was mostly a recap of the arguments that Pershing had set out the previous day in his face to face argument with Foch.  It contained, however, a concession.  Pershing thought the original planned offensive at St. Mihel could include a change in direction following its original objective without pausing.

That concession would prove key to breaking the impasse.

The 100 Days Offensive: The 27th and 30th Divisions fight the Battle of Vierstaat Ridge

On U.S. 27th Division and the U.S. 30th Division, attached to the British Second Army when it appeared that the Germans had abandoned Mount Kemel in front of them.  They were supported by the British 34th Division.  The advance soon demonstrated that while the Germans had in large withdrawn, they had left behind machineguns to cover their withdrawal in dug in positions.  These slowed the Allied advance but the Americans none the less took their objections by 17:30.

Insignia of the 27th Division.

The attack resumed the following morning at 07:00 and carried through September 3.

The 27th Division was a unit made up entirely of New York National Guardsmen, making it one of three U.S. Divisions that were comprised of National Guardsmen entirely from a single state.  At the time of the battle of Vierstaat Ridge it was commanded by John F. O'Ryan, a New York City lawyer who had been in the New York National Guard since 1900.

John F. O'Ryan.

After World War One he pursued commercial pursuits and was active in protesting the German treatment of the Jews as early as 1933.

Shoulder patch of the 30th Division.

The 30th Division was also a National Guard Division, and had originally been designated the 9th Division after being mustered and assembled.  it was made up of National Guardsmen from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.  It was commanded at this time by Maj. Gen. Edward Mann Lewis, a career office in the U.S. Army.

Maj. Gen. Edward Mann Lewis.

American Troops under British and French Command in the Great War.

Yesterday I noted that the US 32nd Division was, at this point, advancing under French command.

They weren't alone.

It's really popular to imagine that General Pershing insisted that the US have its own Army in the field and that he was universally successful. So when Americans marched into battle in France, they did so exclusively under overall U.S. command.

That's a myth.

Indeed, we've already seen here recently that the U.S. First Army was only formed in August and that it only took over the St. Michel Sector on August 30.  But Americans had already been in heavy combat for weeks prior to that as individual divisions were placed under higher foreign commands by necessity.

And that hadn't stopped due to the First Army being formed.

The U.S. 33d and 80th Divisions were part of the British Fourth Army and had been fighting with the British as part of the Second Battle of the Somme, which we've read about here a bit.  The American II Corps was also part of the British Fourth Army and would be up until late October, 1918, by which time it had suffered 11,500 casualties under British command.  

In other words, the II Corps fought under the British Fourth Army until the end of the war as a practical matter with one final U.S. Division remaining under official British command at the war's end.

The 92nd and 93d Divisions, which were made up of black enlisted men, fought the entire war under French command.  The American III Corps was part of the French Sixth Army until mid September, when its two divisions became part of the U.S. First Army. 

In October the 37th and 91st Divisions were attached, by Pershing, to French Army of Belgium, at Foch's request.

All of this is significant in that the role of the U.S. Army is subject to a double set of myths, one being that the U.S. Army fought the whole war under American command and the other being that the US role was minimal.  In fact, while there did come to become a U.S. First Army, U.S. divisions served under French and British command in numbers that became significant during the German 1918 Spring Offensive and throughout the 100 Days Offensive.  While after the formation of the U.S. First Army, American command of its troops in the field became extensive, there was never a day when there were not U.S. soldiers under British and French command, and they were needed.

Birdseye view, N.D. Marine Barracks, Quantico, Virginia. August 31, 1918.

Daily News Bulletin, American Red Cross. August 31, 1918.

The 100 Days Offensive: The Battle of Mont Saint Quentin. August 31, 1918

On this day in 1918 under-strength Australian forces followed up on a failed front attack on German forces on the  Somme by charging up Mont St. Quentin. The bravado took the Germans by surprise who surrendered in large numbers which allowed the Germans to continue to the main German line and cross the Somme.

The Australians were pushed off the hill in a German counteroffensive but did hand on just below the summit which allowed them to retake it on September 1.

Friday Farming: "Working In King's Garden" Women pushing a cart possibly at Kew Gardens or Buckingham Palace gardens, London, England. August 30, 1918.

The 100 Days: Foch and Pershing Argue and the American Army takes over the St. Mihiel Sector

Pershing and Foch shaking hands in 1918, as Pershing was departing to return to the United States.

And they didn't resolve their dispute either.

The dispute was about a planned upcoming American offensive. Following Soissons, the U.S. First Army was formed which gave the US an independent army in the field, must like the British Expeditionary Force.  The US, in other words, was ready to fight on its own.  

And it had planned an offensive which contemplated the strategic situation at the time planning commenced.  The problem was, however, that it no longer did, and Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, knew it.

Pershing's plan, developed before the recent Allied advances had become so successful, called for the U.S. First Army to advance straight north from its positions on a broad front towards Sedan.  In other words, truly straight north, towards Belgium.  It made sense when first conceived of.

Foch, on the other hand, wanted to scrap that and have the U.S. Army, with a French contingent, close a salient sought of Verdun and take a hard right towards the German city of Metz, and take it.  Foch would have had the U.S. Army swing right.

Foch was right.

That would have meant, however, that the U.S. Army would not have been operating fully independent.  Pershing wouldn't have that.

The argument was not resolved.  It was heated.  Most American historians give Pershing credit for sticking to his guns and thereby making certain that the U.S. Army would be an independent one.

But, in reality, the proposed line of advance that Pershing wanted was now obsolete due to the spectacular recent advances of the British Expeditionary Force.  Foch's plan, however, was strategically dynamic and would have put the Allies right into a German city.

Foch was right.

On the same day, in spite of the argument, the American 1st Army took over the St. Mihiel Sector.

The 100 Days Offensive: The 32nd Division takes Juvigny

Insignia of the 32nd Division.

If you've been reading the posts here (and I know that darned few do), you will have been reading a fair amount the British Expeditionary Force, which comprised of units from all of the British Empire, advancing on the Allied left flank.

At the same time, you will have been reading of French advances, although I have not posted any of the campaigns in detail. Suffice it to say, the French were advancing as well, as the headlines indicated.

On this day, the U.S. 32nd Division, which was part of the French Tenth Army, took Juvigny, a strategically important location in the line of the French advance.  The 32nd was a National Guard comprised unit made up of units from Wisconsin and Michigan.  The unit compelled the Germans to withdraw in their sector and on September 9 the 32nd would become part of the U.S. First Army.

Juvigny is not a battle that's thought much of today, but the accomplishment of the 32nd was significant.  Moreover, the event demonstrates that while the U.S. First Army had only come into existence on this day, US units were engaged in the 100 Days Offensive already, attached to French and British commands.

Mutiny in the Home Guard?, Mexican border pacific, and bar tenders won't march: The Casper Daily Tribune, August 30, 1918.

A rumor that casualty figures were being suppressed was circulating in Casper's Home Guard, and causing discontent.  The story was originally attributed to Gen. Leonard Wood, who denied its accuracy.

Well, while things were getting heated in Casper, things seemed to be calming down on the border with Mexico.

But they were getting heated as to alcohol.  The Bartenders Union refused to march in the upcoming Labor Day parade in protest of the looming specter of Prohibition.  The Anti Saloon League was being asked to fill in.