May 13, 1919. Scenes of devastation.

On this day in 1919 a Red Cross photographer toured the Chateau Thierry area.

American Cemetery at Chateau-Thierry, May 13, 1919.

A second U.S. cemetery.

Vaux, France.  May 13, 1919.

The Valley of Marnex with Chateau Thierry in the background, May 13, 1919.

German POWs, not yet repatriated, working in Chateau Thierry.

Belleau, France.  May 13, 1919.

Boresche, France.  May 13, 1919.

And photographers were busy on scenes at home as well.

Camp Merritt, New Jersey.  May 13, 1919.

Monday at the bar: Blog Mirror; Best Major for Law School

Hmmm.

I liked the last one of these I put up last week. And I still think it's good. Frankly, I don't think this one is too bad.  But I think there's one thing he missed.

Maybe the best major for law school is a major you can fall back on.

There's a lot that goes into this, particularly if you wade into the swamp of law school tiers.  The usually thing you hear is that you must, absolutely must, go to a first tier law school.

Well, that's clearly not true.  Indeed, in some areas (and my state is one) you used to be better off going to the state school if you were going to practice in the state.  Of course, that isn't nearly the case it used to be in my state since the Uniform Bar Exam, which is widely believed by practicing lawyers to have been adopted due to the law school, blew a gaping hole in the logic of attending the state school.

Be that as it may, if you absolutely know for sure that you want to be a lawyer, than most of the advice here is really solid.

But what if you're Moe Berg?

Or Owen Wister?

Having something you can fall back on might be nice.

I've known a lot of lawyers, fwiw, that had pretty technical degrees. . .although all of them had attended a state school I'll note.  I can  think of, off hand, two who were petroleum engineers, four who were geologists, one who was a mechanical engineer, etc.

Now, I confess my example might be bad, but over time I've come more and more to have a really practical orientation towards education.  If I were young and starting over, and took the same general direction, there's some things I'd do differently, including learning a skilled trade along the way.  I may not have ever worked it, but some of them are handy to know in general, and you just never know.

May 12, 1919. The draft Versailles Treaty is discussed in the German National Assembly, workers and Michigan Parks.

On this Monday, May 12, 1919, the German National Assembly met in horrified protest over the treaty that German delegates has been presented in Paris and indicated that they would not sign it.  Indeed, the Chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann indicated that the hand that would sign it would "wither".

Things didn't seem to be going well in Paris, now that that the German delegates were there.

Scheidemann had been the German politician who actually declared Germany to be a republic in November 1919, seeking to get in front of the Spartacist who were moving towards declaring the country a soviet.  The move was brilliant, but it ironically angered Ebert, who would soon be involved in trying to save that republic, as he felt it usurped the rights of the German people to declare their own form of government.  Those people would soon be embroiled in a civil war during the months in which the Allies worked on the treaty that was to formally resolve the war.

Scheiemann declaring Germany to be a republic in November 1919.

That the German government found the proposed treaty abhorrent was clear.  But what they could really do about it was not.  Southern Germany, about the only region of the country that wasn't a mess at the time, wasn't a mess as the Allies occupied it. Those occupied areas were de facto beach heads into Germany should the war resume.  The Allies were quixotically busy demobilizing, which made their military presence in Germany somewhat debatable, but they were there.

The German army itself was much reduced due to the armistice and what army there was was either fighting the Red Army in the Baltic's, where the Allies had required it to remain until it could be relieved from that tasks by Allied forces (again, a real irony), or engaged in suppressing Communist uprisings.  In that latter role, it had been forced to reply upon the Freikorps, unofficial, but well armed, militia units that sprung up and which were being illegally supplied and equipped by the government.  So while the Allies were demobilizing, and would have had a difficult time resuming the war if they had to, the Germans would have had no allies at all, and had little army with which to counter any resumed hostilities. The government also had a massive political mess on its hands.

In the US returning soldiers were resuming prior occupations as the American economy started to slow, but not everyone who had taken up a wartime job was ready to relinquish it.

Woman welder, May 12, 1919.

The state of Michigan, with its eye's on more peaceful things, created its State Parks Commission on this day a century ago.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Southern Baptist Church, Casper Wyoming

Churches of the West: First Southern Baptist Church, Casper Wyoming:

First Southern Baptist Church, Casper Wyoming

This is the First Southern Baptist Church in Casper Wyoming.  This church features colonial style architecture.  I'm unsure of when it was built, but my guess would be the 1960s or 1950s.

Best Posts of the Week of May 5, 2019

The best posts of the week of May 5, 2019.

3.6 %. The lowest U.S. Unemployment Rate since 1969.

Poster Saturday: Victory Liberty Loan Poster

If you've been following the old newspapers that are posted here, you've seen that there was a 1919 loan campaign even though the war was over.

Perhaps for that reason, at least locally, the Government was having a hard time getting people to subscribe to the loan.  In the state, they did pull over the top on it and even exceeded the state's target goal, but it took awhile.

People were likely pretty tired of loan campaigns by this point.  Indeed, a little noted item about World War Two is that by late 1944 people were tired of them and the Government was having a hard time getting people to take them out.  The famous Bond drive featuring what was thought to be, at that time, the men who had raised the flag at Iwo Jima was actually engaged in for that reason, to boost interest in the loan drive.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Coal Trends. Cloud Peak Bankruptcy

We last wrote about coal about a month ago:

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Coal Trends: We ran this item last week: Lex Anteinternet: Coal Trends : We ran this item back in 2017: Coal: Understanding the time line of an indu...

Now Wyomingites are waking up to the news that Cloud Peak has filed for bankruptcy, showing how tough things for coal are right now.

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for May, 2019

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for May, 2019: 1.  May 9, 2019:  National Guard deployment.

May 11, 1919. Cartoons and the Cinema.

Entertainment on May 11, 1919. The ChicagoTribune cartoon section included one on movies. . . an a fair number of the same were released on this day a century ago as well.

Why Not Use A Tractor? 1919

Homestead Sheep

May 10, 1919. Homecomings, Mourning, Occupations, and Race Riots

A J. C. Leyendecker illustration was on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post this day in 1919, with a veteran recounting his service to two youngsters.

It's a bit odd to see an illustration of this type now, although they were common in the World War One and World War Two time frame.  The celebration of military service still occurs, but it tends to occur in movie form much more now, as opposed to illustrations, which was very common then.

Service went on, of course, for troops on occupation duty in Germany.

Germany itself declared a national week of mourning over the terms of the proposed treaty to officially end World War One.  The Germans were shocked by the terms.  Even some of the press in the United States was a bit shocked for that matter, and acknowledged the terms as severe.

In Charleston, South Carolina, a horrible race riot occurred when sailors from the Charleston Navy Yard went on a rampage directed against blacks in the town. The initial cause was that five sailors felt that they'd been cheated by a single black man, which developed to an all out assault by sailors, and then some white residents, of the town against blacks.  The Navy was forced to send in Marines and blue jacket Sailors to put down the riot, which involved over 1,000 sailors and some white civilians.  While there were some criminal charges that were filed shortly after the event, they came to nothing as the event had so overwhelmed the police that they were unable to treat the event as a conventional criminal one in their effort to address it.

The Charleston riot was the first of a series of race riots across the United States that year, contributing to the summer of 1919 being called the Red Summer.  The country was slipping into a recession which was in turn causing racial tension to rise.

May 9, 1919. French scenes.

Scenes, some sad, from the 1919 Fair Of Paris.

Convalescing U.S. soldiers in American Red Cross facility, France.

Red Cross Tent City, Paris, Champs de Mars, as photographed from a nearby Ferris wheel.

May 8, 1919: Wide Photographs and Transatlantic flights.

Camp Dodge, Iowa, was a photographic subject.

The U.S. Navy started its transatlantic stage flight, with the first stage being Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the NC-3 used for the effort then spent a couple of days.

3.6 %. The lowest U.S. Unemployment Rate since 1969.

That rate is not only stunningly low, it's disturbingly low.

Traditionally economist have regarded 7% as "full employment".  If we keep in mind that at any one time there's a certain percentage of the available workforce that's idled by choice, that makes sense. That's not throwing stones at anyone, its just that some folks choose not to work. That's different from being unemployed.

Now, some will tell you that some of those people have given up looking for work, but anyway you look at it, the current unemployment rate is bizarrely low.

3.6% is so low, it's actually problematic, or it could be.

Usually when unemployment reaches this sort of unemployment rate, bad things begin to happen.  For one thing, it's usually a sign of a "super heated" economy, and very soon prices and wages begin to rise and inflation sets in. 

Indeed, that is what happened the last time the rate was this low. That was in 1969 and the reason it was that low is that the Vietnam War was at its height.  We had 500,000 men in Vietnam, a huge military deployment elsewhere around the globe, and a massive amount of military and social expenditure going on. At first, the government actually welcomed inflation, as it reduced the value of the loans it had to pay back to afford all of that, but by the early 1970s it was totally out of control.  It took Ronald Reagan coming into office and intentionally throwing the country into a severe recession to fix the economy, and we've lived with that fixed economy since then.

This could wreck it.

Indeed, if we look at other historical low unemployment rates its disturbing.  3.2% was the unemployment rate in 1929. . . and we know what happened to that super heated economy.  During World War Two the unemployment rate was below 2%, but that was due to our being in the largest war of the 20th Century and the government was forced to put in wage controls to handle the resulting labor shortage.  It wasn't even possible to leave some critical defense work if you occupied such a job.  The Korean War dropped the unemployment rate down that low once again.

The oddity now is that there's  no wars going on. . . or at least nothing like the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and so far inflation hasn't really gotten ramped up.  Indeed, while its debated, some claim that the American middle class remains in wage stagnation, although there's pretty good evidence that's not true.  So, so far, so good.

But also, this can't keep going in this direction. 

Assuming that it's not a statistical glitch, and that it doesn't straighten itself out on its own rapidly, this will be inflationary at some point absent external forces.

Of course, those external forces may be at work right now.  It could be automation that's keeping inflation from getting rolling. As labor shortages develop, some of those shortages might be getting filled by machines, which might in turn keep the inflationary drive of wage hikes from occurring.  That would be good in the short term but when this trend reverses, and it will, it won't be. The robots will keep their jobs. . . or just be unplugged until they're needed again.

An external force that would seem to be available would be job exportation, always a hot topic. That may still be going on as well, in the form of globalization.  If it is, what's surprising here is that there' hasn't been an effort to translate that into a similar economic regime south of the Rio Grande.

Or maybe it is.  Mexico's unemployment rate right now is 3.2%, even lower than the American one.  That's up from a nearly incredible 2.9% the prior year.  The Canadian unemployment rate, in comparison, is a more normal but still really good 5.8%.  Anyhow, the combined Mexican and American rates go a long ways towards explaining why Central Americans are hitting the road and going north.  Would that the Central American governments were more stable, perhaps this would translate into a rise for them as well.

Interesting economic times at any rate.

Particularly as current American politics have gotten so odd that a really low unemployment rate doesn't seem to translate into the normal political conversation.  From national politics, you'd think we were in a fairly severe recession, but we're not.

Mid Week At Work: "Sewing foot of boot onto sole of Goodyear welt system. Cowboy boot shop, Alpine, Texas"

May 7, 1919. War and Peace

On this day,, at 3:00 p.m., the German delegation to the Paris Peace Conference received the text of the treat for the first time.

For that matter, a lot of the world was seeing it for the first time, and the treaty's terms proved to be surprising even in Allied countries.

After a speech by Clemenceau and one by the chief of the German delegation, which acknowledged that the text was received and not yet reviewed, the Conference adjourned for the day.

In Paris, British, American and French delegates executed the Treaty of Guaranty, which guaranteed the French border against German aggression.  Of course, the delegates executing it did not bind nations such as the United States which required legislative ratification for a treaty to take effect. The U.S. Senate did not ratify the treaty.

The treaty had been created to address the concerns of the French over the possibility of renewed German aggression.  In exchange for the guaranty of the French border, the French relented on wanting to redraw the French border all the way to the Rhine.

It's doubtful that the Germans would have willingly agreed to the loss of the Rhineland, and frankly the proposal, in my view, may have caused the war to resume.  The Allies, given Germany's condition, could likely have won it in rapid fashion, but then they would have found themselves occupying a collapsed, unhappy, German state.  The French demands, while understandable, were unrealistic.

Also unrealistic was Wilson's thought that the United States Senate, in 1919, would have ratified a treaty committing the United States to the defense of France.  1945 was one thing, 1919, quite another.

Communications staff at the American Red Cross Home Service Station, Brest, France.

An uprising in the southern Ukraine tossed the Reds out in that region. . . only temporarily, of course.

When You Can’t Any Longer, Go Drink Some Tea

Spiritual Father's Advice: “When You Can’t Any Longer, Go Drink Some Tea"

Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok

Random Geopolitical Observations.

1.  When a major power suggest to opposition forces in another country that they ought to engage in an uprising, it does them a disservice unless they're going to actually support the uprising.

This was the lesson of the Hungarian Revolution of 1958, and it's the lesson of Venezuela right now.

Prior to the 58 Hungarian uprising, we suggested that if an Eastern Bloc nation tried to throw off the Soviet shackles, we'd be there.

We weren't.

And we just suggested to the opposition in Venezuela that it ought to overthrow the strongman in power.

They tried, and we didn't do anything.

Maybe we should have done anything in Venezuela, and no doubt we couldn't do anything in Hungary. That's not the point.

The point is, that by acting like we'd show up, we made the opposition show up, and that does them no favors if they can't prevail.

2.  Not everything is the economy.

Over the weekend North Korea launched missiles into the sea east of the country.  This raises serious concerns over North Korea's willingness to bargain with us to denuclearize the peninsula.  President Trump, however, issued a statement that North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, will come to the table as he understands the "great economic potential" that the country has that could be developed if they'd treat with us.

What makes us think that?

Societies that have fairly open economies or develop them think that way, but lots of countries don't. And no country full thinks that way.  Kim Jong Un surely knows that the most effective way of modernizing his country's economy would be to reunite the North with the South in a democratic government, which would effectively be opening the border and asking to come into the Republic of Korea, much like the DDR did with the BDR (East and West Germany) when communism collapsed there.

But it's not like Eric Honaker decided that was a nifty idea.

That will probably occur at some point, but will Kim Jong Un take North Korea there?  It seems unlikely.

3.  It's good to finish up on existing wars before getting into others.

Right now the U.S. Navy is demonstrating in the Indian Ocean in a move directed at Iran.

I'll be frank that I don't completely follow our current policy on Iran, but get it that the country isn't our friend and it sponsors groups we really don't like.

But we still have troops in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.  Now, all of those struggles do involve Iran in one way or another, and maybe that plays into this.  But at a time at which it seems like we'd like out of all of those places, is it really well thought out to be looking like we're willing to take on Iran?  I'm sure we could, but do we really want to do that?

Monday at the bar: Blog Mirror' Should You Go To Law School

I ran across this video series by accident the other day.

I'll be frank that I don't care for most series of this type, most of which generally fall, in my view, pretty far off the mark. But this is a good one.

Advertising in the Great War: Supporting “Meatless” and “Wheatless” Days

Posted on December 29, 2017 by SCblogger

One hundred years ago, as December 1917 ebbed into January 1918 the United States had  officially been in the Great War since April 6, 1917.

May 6, 1919: Getting the news, and unhappy with the news.

Muriel Wright, Librarian of the American Library Association, delivers magazine to sea plane pilot who will take them to Marines, May 6, 1919.

Marines were getting magazines a new way on this May 6, 1919.

In Wyoming, part of that news was that Governor Carey wasn't very happy about the 148th Field Artillery staying in Europe on occupation duty.