May 29, 1919. It's all relative

On this day in 1919 Woodrow Wilson, showing that he did indeed learn from history, did what he should have done back in 1916 and denied permission to Carranza to transport Mexican troops across American soil so that they could go into action against Pancho Villa.

That failure in 1915 had lead to Villa's cross border raid into the U.S. on March 9, 1916, which in turn launched the U.S. into its expedition into Mexico. That expedition failed to run Villa to ground, although for a time it looked like he'd been essentially defeated.  It nearly brought the U.S. and Carranza's government into war with each other, as while Carranza was dedicated to Villa's defeat, he also couldn't stand the through of Americans in arms on Mexican soil and he basically detested the American government in general.

None of which kept him from asking him to repeat the practice and bring troops by rail into the area near Juarez so that they could be ready to engage a resurgent Villa. This time Wilson refused.

A long solar eclipse lasting over six minutes occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.  It was the longest solar eclipse since May 27, 1416.  A longer one would occur on June 8, 1937.

This event was significant in that Astronomers were able to detect the bending of light from stars during the event, confirming Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Does anyone here drive one of the old gassers daily?

You know, the ones that were made for leaded fuel?

1971 GMC Pickup, made just before unleaded started to come in.

I've had a lot of such vehicles over the years but in thinking about it the last one I used as a daily driver, made in 1973, I sold around 1996, just before unleaded really disappeared.  I have a vehicle , an old work truck, that takes unleaded, but I don't drive it very much.

I've read various things about whether unleaded is really that necessary for these vehicles or not.  Some say that after some date in the late 1960s it isn't. Some say it is.

Anyone who stops in here have any practical experience?

Flatbed

I don't know much about this one, other than it must be from the 1930s.

On these old flatbeds of 1 ton or greater size, I'm often impressed by how massive they were. They had very low horsepower, but fairly high torque, and were huge.

May 28, 1919. Russian POWs, Stargard Germany.

Prisoners of War were not immediately repatriated after World War One.

The Allies generally repatriated their men held in Germany within a month or so, while they themselves held on to German prisoners into 1920. While that sounds cruel, in fact Germany was aflame and returning discharged German soldiers to what was already a state of slow revolution involving discharged servicemen would have not been wise, nor would it have been particularly kind to the POWs, who were at least housed and fed.

An exception for Allied POWs was that of Russian POWs.  I don't know what became of them, but they continued to be housed in Germany following the end of the war.  The country that had sent them into war no longer existed in the form it had.  Imperial Russia was gone.  Men like this probably had no strong desire to fight for the Whites or the Reds but that would have been their fate had they been immediately repatriated.  Neither Germany nor the Allies wanted them in Red arms, and there was no way to guarantee that they'd end up as loyal combatants for the Whites.

Lost. How is this even possible?

Haleakalā, Maui, Hawaii

From a recent news story.

WAILUKU, Hawaii (AP) — A Hawaii woman who was found alive in a forest on Maui island after going missing more than two weeks ago said she at times struggled not to give up.

Amanda Eller told the New York Times that despite these moments, she told herself "the only option I had was life or death."

"I heard this voice that said, 'If you want to live, keep going.' And as soon as I would doubt my intuition and try to go another way than where it was telling me, something would stop me, a branch would fall on me, I'd stub my toe, or I'd trip," said Eller, 35, a physical therapist and yoga instructor. "So I was like, 'OK, there is only one way to go.' "

The Hana Highway on the wilder side of Maui.

Now a disclaimer.

I've never been lost.

Never.

I've spent a lot of time in the sticks and in the woods by myself and not once in my life have I been lost.

For that matter, I've spent a lot of time in big cities all over and I've never been lost in them.

I'm not exactly a globetrotter, but in my time on the ground in three countries (including the US, of course) on two continents, I've never been lost.

So perhaps I simply don't appreciate this.

But I've been to Maui, and I just can't begin to grasp how a person could possibly get lost on Maui.

Yes, there's some wild areas, sort of, on Maui, but come on.  All water flows downhill and its wet.  Walk downhill anywhere in Maui and you end on on a beach.  It's frankly not all that big.

I can see how you could get injured. There are rugged lands.  You could trip and break a leg, a real danger in hiking by yourself.  You could fail to appreciate the nature of volcanic terrain and take a bad fall and be killed.

But lost?

That's only possible as we've become so acclimated to our manufactured cubicle world that we're really clueless.

1934 Austin American

I put up a photograph of a Ford Model T yesterday and commented on how small they were.  And they were small.

We are used to American cars prior to the mid 1970s being just gigantic. They didn't start off that way, although they had acquired considerably bulk by the late 1930s.  Even at that, it's worth remembering that there was the odd exception to the rule.  Here's one.

The Austin Car Company was a company that was founded in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, and which went out of business in 1956, which was at the height of the dominance of the giant American automobile.  It was always an odd exception to the rule.

Austin was the American expression of a British company, and it made small cars.  It was the company that introduced the Jeep, but after making over 2000 of them, it lost out to Willys and Ford for the Willys variety.  That was because it lacked production capacity to really put its Jeep, which was lighter, but less powerful, into the level of production the U.S. required.  Their Jeeps did see action in World War Two, but mostly in Soviet and British hands. 

This 1934 example is a real classic example in fine shape.  This car would have competed with the Model A, which was considerably larger.

The Tragic Tryst of Blinn and Sayer, and the laws of 1919 and 2019.

Yesterday I ran an item from the Casper newspaper featuring the story of a young girl (18) who ran off with a 33 year old Lusk businessman. The man, age 33, was married and had six children. That items is here:

May 26, 1919. Monday scenes.

Treaty news still dominated, but other events were creeping in, including disaster and adventure.

As well as misbehavior and lust.  A Lusk businessman had departed that town with an 18 year old girl, still in school, and abandoned his wife and six children. The shamed couple had relocated to Venice California, where they'd opened a "root beer concession".

The youthful participant in the illicit tryst admitted she had "loved unwisely".  She was now with child.

I didn't go into it beyond that, but perhaps I should have. That story tells us a lot.  About then and now, but perhaps beyond that.

Okay,t he story itself.

Earl Blinn, a man with a business in Lusk, married and father of six, sold his business and drove to Salt Lake.  Bessie Sayer, of a well to do family, followed by train, as was prearranged, and met Blinn in Salt Lake. From there they traveled on to California. 

Based upon the story we know that they must have left weeks if not a couple of months prior, and more likely that. We also know that Sayer must have been 17 years old at the time as there's a suggestion that the Mann Act might be invoked, although that's not entirely clear.

Blinn had been arrested on charges of deserting his family.  It was expected that more serious charges were yet to come.

So would all that happen now?  And if not, should it?

To start with, a lot matters about Sayer's age. If she was 17 years old, the Mann Act would still come into play and indeed Blinn could be charged, and probably would be, with some variety of sexual assault.  That latter charge would have been highly likely in 1919 as well.  "Statutory Rape" is the common term for that offense. 

The Mann Act itself makes it a Federal crime to transport a "woman or a girl" across state lines for prostitution or "debauchery".

That's relevant here as Blinn would could potentially still have been charged with a violation of the Mann Act even if Sayer was 18.

And that's quite different from now.

In 1919, and for at least two decades there after, it was generally illegal to cohabitate in Wyoming without being married, and that was also the case for other states.  Some states addressed this through common law marriage, but in no state then, as now, could a person be married to more than one spouse and there was no such thing then, as now, as common law polygamy.

So Blinn could have found himself facing Federal criminal charges now matter what.

Blinn was charged in 1919 under state law with abandoning his family.  That's not a crime now.  Indeed, if she was 18, nothing in what we see here is now illegal at all.   You could do all of it, consequences don't matter.

And those consequences are quite real.  Mrs. Blinn was left with six children in Lusk after her husband sold his business and took up with the youthful Miss Sayer. Sayer was playing the "unwise love" card, but truth be known, she'd done a terrible injustice to Mrs. Blinn.  In 2019, that would play itself out in court and Mr. Blinn would end up with a divorce decree that split their property and he'd also end up paying child support.  If things work as they so often do, he'd frequently fail to pay it and there'd be little that could be done about.

In 1919, he stood a good chance of going to jail.  Not that this would address Mrs. Blinn's financial distress.

The Blinn's were highly likely to get a divorce as there certainly was fault here, an element of that action at that time.  No Fault divorce didn't exist.  Chances are high that Mr. Blinn would find himself paying alimony in 1919, something that's uncommon here in 2019.  His support obligations would go on.

Chances are good two that Miss Sayer would face a legal action from Mrs. Blinn in 1919.  Sayer committed a tort called Criminal Conversation as well as the tort of Alienation of Affection.  The newspaper article reminds us that Sayer was from a "well to do" family, and she may have had some resources.  So her troubles may very well have not ended.

Indeed, in practical terms, they were far from over.  Sayer was pregnant and going to end up having a baby in an era when out of wedlock children, let alone ones that were the product of adulteress affairs, resulted in scandal.

So what's the best result, that of 1919 or 2019? 

It's certainly the case that in 1919 the law backed marriage up and in fact required it in certain ways.  The divorce rate was low, and fault was required for divorce.  Children born in to the circumstance of that which was about to be that of the seventh Blinn child were much lower.   The law may appear to have been harsh in some ways, but were the results less harsh?

May 27, 1919: The Peace Conference waits on the Germans, Wyoming troops wait on discharge, Tragedy in Casper.

David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson in Paris, May 27, 1919.  Of interest, only Orlando wears the Edwardian suit, a somewhat less formal alternative to formal dress clothes. Everyone else were's morning coats, which were not i the nature of tuxedos today, but conventional formal wear.

The peace conference continued on with the question still being, would Germany sign, or not?

The Wyoming State Tribune was reporting that British and American Marines had been landed, as a result of the uncertainty, in Danzig.  I've never read that claim before and I frankly wonder if its correct.

In the same issue, a building story about the perception that troops from the West were not being mustered out as quickly as those from elsewhere was reported on.

And the news that the NC-4 had nearly made it to Portugal was featured.

It was also featured in the Casper paper, which also had the story about Western troops. The big news in Casper, however, was a tragic explosion near town.

It wasn't Memorial Day, like it is now, but the weather was certainly more holiday like.  Casper was enjoying a warm spell in 1919.  It isn't now.

 Seattle, May 27, 1919.

Seattle Washington was photographed.

They were so small. Model T Doctor's Coupe

I don't know the year, but this is a Model T Doctor's Coup.  The Colorado license plate features the year 1926, and it would be a fair guess that 1926 was the year of manufacture for this example.

Odd to think of.  In an era when families were larger than today's, this was a really small car.

The Doctor's Coup was called that as it was thought they were suitable replacement's for the Doctor's Buggy, a type of horse drawn buggy that was called that as physician's favored them for house calls.  they were not particular large either, so perhaps the marketing made sense.

The Model T operated in a somewhat different fashion from a modern automobile so you actually have to be taught to drive them specifically.  The reverse, for example, is not identical to a modern standard transmission.

May 26, 1919. Monday scenes.

Oil brokers, May 26, 1919.  Wichita Falls Texas.

In Wichita Falls, oil brokers conducted their business on the busy curb side.

Treaty news still dominated, but other events were creeping in, including disaster and adventure.

As well as misbehavior and lust.  A Lusk businessman had departed that town with an 18 year old girl, still in school, and abandoned his wife and six children. The shamed couple had relocated to Venice California, where they'd opened a "root beer concession".

The youthful participant in the illicit tryst admitted she had "loved unwisely".  She was now with child.

 Hotel headquarters of the American Red Cross in Berlin.

The Red Cross was extending a helping hand in Germany, now that the war was over. And Germany certainly needed one.

Churches of the West: Unknown former church, Cody Wyoming (but probably the original Methodist Episcopal Church)

Unknown former church, Cody Wyoming (but probably the original Methodist Episcopal Church)

This structure in Cody Wyoming was very obviously once a church, which is even more evident if you are closer to it and can see where some of its features have been removed.  It's been converted into a two story retail establishment.  I don't know its story, but it is located directly across from the current Cody United Methodist Church which might, or might not, give us a clue about its earlier history.  At least the story told about the building of Christ's Episcopal Church in Cody would suggest that this is the original Methodist Episcopal church, in which it was built in 1902.

This too is a poor Iphone photograph, and I will replace it with a better photo if the situation presents itself.

The best posts of the week of May 19, 2019.

The best post of the week of May 19, 2019.

Union Pacific 4014 "Big Boy" and 844, Laramie Wyoming, May 17, 2019

May

Union Pacific No. 535, Laramie Wyoming.

May 25, 1919. Red Cross Office Work.

D.M. Merritt, 1st Lieut. American Red Cross, Bureau of Requirements. Capt. Hampton Anderson Publicity Man.  American Red Cross Headquarters. Berlin.  May 25, 1919.

Does anyone here know the real history of the packer boot?

PACKER BOOTS

Packer Boots were originally worn by enlisted soldiers in the U.S. Army in the 1800's who would not make a career out of military service, but muster out of service in the west. The packer boot is suited for farm and ranch footwear, and was made for people in the Rocky Mountains working with packhorses (thus the name). Form and functionality make these boots the preference of outdoorsman everywhere.These are lace-up boots, and are usually 10" high, but fasion packers can be taller, as high as the knee. They have a kilty (false tongue) and are made of very durable, thick leather. Most packer boots are brown, but they are also available in black and other colors. They usually have rubber, neoprene, or sometimes Vibram® soles.

Is that right?

History

In the mid-1800s, the most popular boot in America was the Wellington, a leather military-type, pull-on boot that was worn by many Civil War officers. Unfortunately, these boots did not hold up well over time, so most enlisted men, who were primarily farmers, wore boots that laced up and served them well on the farm. After the war, shoemakers began to make early cowboy boots of waxed leather and added the Cuban angled heel that horsemen preferred. Frontiersmen had long preferred lace-up boots, so the angled heel was added to the lace-up style, forming what is known as the "packer boot," the style favored by ranch hands.

Then there is the packer.  As was mentioned, the lace-up was common on the American frontier. Enlisted men were less likely to be career men and often mustered out of the service in the west. There are the historical photographs of cowboys sitting on the top rail of the corral watching a hand ride out a bronc. In not a few of these photographs the men wearing lace-ups outnumber the men wearing traditional western boots. Hyer Boot Company, in their 1926 catalogue offers at least three pages of lace-up styles--for the ranch hand 

Can anyone expand on this?

If anyone knows the definitive origin of packers, leave a comment!

I shut this blog down for a day and. . .

worked on my novel instead.

Soldier peeling onions, May 24, 1919.  Note his leggings, which are in rough condition, but which he's wearing even while on KP.

I'm a compulsive writer.  I like writing.

And I write really quickly.  Almost 100% of this blog is written in hours between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m.  Its almost never written at any other time of the day.

But for some reason, as its lazy writing, it's easier to write than other stuff.

The entire point of this blog was to get information for the novel.

Time to get to work on that.

Railhead: Union Pacific No. 535, Laramie Wyoming.

Railhead: Union Pacific No. 535, Laramie Wyoming.:

Union Pacific No. 535, Laramie Wyoming.

Union Pacific No. 535 is a 1903 vintage Baldwin steam engine that's on display in Laramie, next to the Union Pacific's Laramie depot.  People who have long associations with Laramie or who lived in the city prior to February 2011 will recall the engine being in LaBonte Park, where it was part of a nicely maintained display.

In 2011 this engine was moved to its current location at Railroad Heritage Park, the park that surrounds the Union Pacific depot.  At some point following my residence in Laramie during most of the 1980s, this engine fell into a fairly poor looking state and its been vandalized with graffiti.  

535 is a small steam engine that was built as a coal burning engine and then converted in its later years to oil, as many steam engines were.  In its current location its mocked up with a retired Union Pacific wedge snowplow.

Oddly the railroad yard facing side of 535 is in much poorer appearance than the street side.  Hopefully the condition of this display is addressed at some point in the near future.

Painted Bricks: The Black Fourteen, Laramie Wyoming Mural

Painted Bricks: The Black Fourteen, Laramie Wyoming Mural: The Black Fourteen were fourteen University of Wyoming football players who lost their positions on the football team in 1969 when they ...

May 22, 1919. Mixed Signals, Suffrage, and Ireland.

The Casper paper was warning, on this May 22, 1919, that the Germans were about to "invade" the occupied zone and resume the prosecution of the war.  The US was ready for them, however.

At the same time the news was also reporting that the size of the army of occupation was about to be reduced.

Mixed signal?

The 126th Infantry, which had been part of that body of men in Germany until recently, was on parade in Kalamazoo Michigan.

In Laramie, the Boomerang reported that German maneuvers were just a bluff, perhaps reading the wind more accurately.

All the way around the papers were reporting on the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution bringing in Women's suffrage.  It wasn't there yet, but it was making its way out of Congress.

The same issue ran an article on Sir Henry W. Thornton condemning the departure of American citizens to Ireland in aid of that country's Republicans.  Thornton was an American businessman whose expertise in transportation and railroads had lead him to Canada.  In 1919 he became a British subject and returned to Canada where he lived until shortly prior to his death.  He was a prominent figure in the British war effort, while still an American.

While Sir Thornton was condemning Americans departing for the Irish cause, also in Laramie poetry in celebration of that cause was being heard on campus.

The paper in Jackson remained more primitive.  It apparently hadn't updated its press during the war and from this issue it didn't appear to have joined any of the wire services that contributed to up to date news in Casper and Cheyenne.

Of interest here is the advertisement for Levi products.  Levis didn't become the big deal they later would become until World War Two, as we've discussed on this blog previously.  Here their overalls and coveralls are receiving higher billing than their trousers.  And I didn't know that they'd ever made "Rombers for Children".

May 21, 1919. The birth of Wyoming's cavalry.

Bundling newspapers, May 21, 1919.

The Casper paper reported on this day in 1919 that Wyoming's National Guard would become cavalry now that the Great War was over.

And it was correct.

One of the popular myths of history is that "World War One was the end of the cavalry".  It wasn't. We dealt with that old saw previously here in a couple of posts, those being:

The Horsey World War One Edition

 U.S. Remounts, World War One.

It's commonly stated that the First World War demonstrated what any competent observer should have been able to know by simple deduction, that being that the age of the horse in war, or more particularly cavalry in war, was over.  This appears again and again in everything from films to serious academic histories.It's also complete bunk.In reality, cavalry served effectively on every front during the war and the Army that acted to keep its cavalry fully separate to the extent it could, rather than folding cavalry elements into infantry divisions, had the most effective cavalry, that being the British.  There are numerous examples of cavalry deployments from every front in the war in every year of the war, with some being very effective deployments indeed. Generally, properly deployed, cavalry proved to be not only still viable, but extremely effective.  And it was also shown that not only did the machinegun not render cavalry obsolete, but cavalry was less impeded by machineguns than infantry, and it was more effective at deploying light machineguns defensively than infantry was.

And

Persistent Myths XI: The World War Two Horsey Edition.

The World War Two Horsey Edition.Following on item VI above, its also commonly believed that the retention of horse cavalry in any army, or horses in general, during World War Two was just romantic naivete.Actually, it wasn't.  Every single army in World War Two had some mounted forces they used in combat. Every single one.  There are no exceptions whatsoever.  The simple reason was that there were certain roles that still could be preformed in no other way.One of the major combatants, the Germans, attempted to eliminate independent cavalry formations while retaining organic formations in infantry units and found the need so pressing that it ended up rebuilding its independent cavalry formations and incorporating irregular ones.  The United States and the United Kingdom both ended up creating "provisional" mounted formations in Italy, as they couldn't fill the reconnaissance role there in any other fashion.  One army, the Red Army, had huge numbers of cavalrymen throughout the war.The last mounted combat by the United States, prior to Afghanistan, actually took place in the context, with a mounted charge of sorts being done in late 1944 or early 1945 by a mounted unit of the 10th Mountain Division. The last German charge was in the closing weeks of 1945, when a German cavalry unit charged across an American armored unit, in part of their (successful) effort to flea the advancing Red Army. When the last Soviet charge was I do not know, but the USSR kept mounted cavalry until 1953.In terms of transportation, the Germans in fact were more dependent upon transport draft horses in World War Two than in World War One, which is also true for artillery horses.  Germany, the USSR, China, Japan, France, and Italy (at least) all still used horse drawn artillery to varying extents during the war.

As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, the reestablishment of National Guard unis after the Great War was very badly handled, as the Federal Government simply discharged all of the men in Guard units and didn't actually return them to state control.  This left the Guard having to rebuild without its existing structure intact.  Some states handled it better and more quickly than others.

But something else that did occur, and which was more structured, is that the Federal Government played a greater role on what the post war Guard units would be, thereby making them more useful upon mobilization.  In the case of Wyoming the Guard had been infantry when mobilized for the Punitive Expedition and then infantry again when first mobilized for World War One, but it soon became artillery and transport during the Great War.  

After World War One, and apparently as early as 1919, the decision was made to make the post war Wyoming National Guard cavalry.  That unit became the 115th Cavalry Regiment at some point after its introduction in the early 1920s.  It remained that until it became the 115th Cavalry (Horse Mech), a horse mechanized cavalry unit, shortly before World War Two.  Horse Mech was an experimental cavalry organization which featured both horses and vehicles and which was supposed to combine both types of transportation.  That's what the 115th was upon mobilization in 1940 for World War Two, but the use of the unit for cadre purposes meant that it did not deploy until late in the war, by which time it was the more conventional mechanized cavalry of the post 1943 pattern.

The Wyoming Army National Guard, which it became after the creation of the Air Force, retained cavalry into the 1950s, but by that time artillery units were being reintroduced to the Wyoming Guard.  Cavalry, by which we'd mean armored cavalry at that point, was phased out of the Wyoming Army National Guard at some point after the Korean War.

But from the 20s up until some point during World War Two, it was a horse featuring unit.  While it certainly could be disputed and probably should be, to some extent, that was its glory years.

May

Constitutional Carpet Bombing

Curtis B. LeMay.  Not a model for jurisprudence.

The basic gist of the theory of the U.S. Constitution is that there are certain rights which are are set forth in it which the Federal Government may not trespass upon.  In the humming background of the Constitution was the idea that a greater law yet, the Natural Law, was at work and that people ought to try to tack as close to it as they could discern to be possible.

Beyond that, there were things that were good ideas, and bad ideas, and one of the bad ideas was to be ruled by a distant government.  That was one of the basic complaints about the British government.  It was a long ways away, and it did stuff it shouldn't have in an unknowing distant fashion.

In the 18th Century and early 19th Century, the seat of the Federal government was itself a long ways away from where most people in the country were. That reflects itself in the Constitution.

That's why the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, originally restricted what the Federal Government could do.  Not the state governments.  The scriveners figured that locals would take care of what they wanted and didn't locally.

Through the development of Constitutional Law, it's come to be the case that the states may also not trespass upon the rights set out in the Bill of Rights, although they originally could.  That was an expansion really of the Natural Law theory of government, and it also reflected a basic distrust of state governments.

That's inherently anti democratic.

Let's state that again.  It's contrary to democracy.

Now, I don't want to get bogged down in one of those silly arguments about "we're a republic not a democracy".  M'eh.  A republic is a type of democracy.  We're not a parliamentary democracy, that's what we're not.

And we're not a pure democracy.

In a pure democracy, or total democracy, examples of which are exceedingly rare, the voice of the population is absolute on everything.  Ancient Athens is cited as an example of the same, even though it really wasn't as it had an enslaved population that couldn't vote.  Setting that aside for the moment, however, its voters could vote to do anything.  And as a result, they frequently voted to do bad things such as execute people as those people were currently unpopular.

As pure democracies do indeed frequently do bad things, no modern state has a pure democracy as nobody wants anarchy except Reddit Anarchist, who really don't want it either.  So every modern state has some sort of constitution that sets out what it can and can't do, save for the United Kingdom which has the mysterious and mostly non existent "English Constitution", but which has been operating on that fiction so long it behaves as if it really has a constitution.

The U.S. Constitution in its amended form has, as we know, the Bill of Rights.  Americans pretend they all love the Bill of Rights but in reality nearly every group in  the country has something in the Bill of Rights it absolutely despises.  That might be a sign that the founders of the country got the Constitution basically right.

At any rate, the rights set out in the Bill of Rights are really minimal.  Far more minimal in their original intended form than they've been interpreted to be.  But where they apply, they apply.  So, for example, you can't go around conducting unlawful searches and seizures, no matter how much the public secretly supports them (and they do), because a person has a right to be secure in their person.

But this also means that the Bill of Rights is inherently anti democratic.  You can't do those things as its against the Constitution.  If you want to, you have to change the Constitution.

Or what you do is argue to have the Constitution construed beyond its meaning to support your view of what it ought to say.

Now, this has really interesting results.

One of those results is that its made the Federal Courts, and more specifically the United States Supreme Court, a Big Deal.

The Federal judiciary is addressed in the Constitution, but not in a really terribly clear fashion.  It's clear that it was to be an independent branch of government, free of being influenced, theoretically, and much, by the Legislative and Executive branches, but beyond that, what's specified is surprisingly low.  For one thing, the Constitution never actually states that the Federal judiciary is the body that interprets the Constitution.

Early on, it decided it could and then ruled in favor of the Government in a master stroke in a decision. That established the precedence, and it seems logical that the Supreme Court would have to had taken that position, but it actually, at the time, didn't.  It could have said that everything the Legislative branch did was political and therefore they weren't to touch it. But they didn't.

We should all be thankful for that, as that's what makes us a "nation of laws", but by the same token, that actually makes the Supreme Court by far the most powerful body in the United States by far, particularly in an era when Congress has ceded a lot of its clearly delegated powers to the Executive.  And that in turn means that the room for mischief at the Supreme Court level is vast.

When we get down to Constitutional law, most of the Constitution is fairly straight forward, whether as an individual likes what it says or not.  The real challenge, therefore, should be interpreting new scenarios, what with the advance of technology and occasionally, but very rarely, some philosophy, presents a new scenario.  Are electronic communications of all type covered by the 1st Amendment?  Are remote drone strikes acts of war that require a declaration of war?  Can a state government use eminent domain to boost a local economic concern?  Do Bitcoins trespass on the the rights of the executive?  Stuff like that.

And questions like that do come up.

But its also proved an enormous temptation for the Court, in various eras, to act like Plato's wise oligarchs.

Indeed, both sides of that temptation prove to be constant sources of criticism for the Supreme Court.  If it sticks to the text, which is what it really should do and which is a basic rule of jurisprudence and statutory interpretation, it won't do and won't authorize a lot of things that some people want.  In some of those instances, those people will be upset as the Federal government doesn't have the power, if it the Constitution is correctly read, to do certain things and they either can't be done at all or the topic is left to the states.  In that latter case, people with causes in particular that are not popular at the local level get particularly upset as they feel that the Supreme Court should override democracy and create a right so that their view is forced on everyone, even if lots of people don't want it, or don't have their minds made up about it.

And in a democratic society, which this is, that's particularly problematic.  Truth be known, people are often much more personally conservative and traditional than certain other people like, and given a chance, they vote that way.

When an issue that is really heated comes before the Supreme Court, therefore, they should be really careful about finding rights that don't really exist, or conversely interpreting rights that clearly exist to be out of existence or nuanced in some odd way.  When they leap out in violation of either of those principals, what occurs is the polar opposite of what they figure they're doing.  They don't settle an issue, as people can read and look at the text and decide for themselves "that's not really in there" or "that's clearly in there and you're just making that up". And that causes contempt for the Court and preserves an argument.  It doesn't solve it.

During World War Two the U.S. Air Force became convinced that heavy bombing solved military arguments.  After the war, it was found that all it did was make the people bombed made.  In spite of that, we tried that again in the Korean War and the Vietnam War.  We didn't learn our lesson (at that time).  Misconstruing the Constitution works like that.

B-29s over Tokyo.  Late war we fire bombed Japanese cities.  That didn't actually cause the Japanese to surrender.