Rain

I sure wish somebody would.

Rain, rain,
Go away
Come again some other day.

I have read or heard that this has been the hottest June in recorded history.

Not here.

It's been absolutely freezing, and incredibly wet.

Weather reports that hold its going to be hot today fail, as the temperature struggles to get out of the 50s only to be defeated by torrential afternoon downpours that weren't predicted.  Prognostications that the next day will be hot fail by the next morning, to be replaced by predictions of . . . . rain.

Weather alerts on phones start going off about 2:00 and keep going off all afternoon long and into the evening.  "Severe Thunderstorm Warning".  Shoot, I've had two this morning, and this was supposed to be a hot, dry day.

I'm sick of it.

A military parade?

I just don't think of those being very American.

That is, except in the case of the country having just won a big war, but those parades are of a different nature.  More of a welcome home type of deal, or a victory parade.

But a big military parade because we can hold a big military parade?

National Guardsmen or a military unit in a local parade. That's different in my view.  But a full blown French Republic style parade?  Not so much.

Okay, maybe I don't care if football players (who are individual people) take the knee, but keep your Corporation's "opinion" to itself.

Note, this is one of the many draft posts that I started a really long time ago, and then never finished.  I have on the order of 300 posts, most barely started, that fit that description.

Writer's block?  No, just the nature of available time.

Anyhow, this item oddly shows right back up in the news again.

Some time back I posted on football players "taking the knee" during the playing of the National Anthem.  As anyone who read it may have noted, I'm sort of generally lukewarm on any opinion there, unlike a lot of people I see (if Facebook is any guide).  I.e, I didn't have a fit about football players taking the knee and, absent an individual athlete's protest reaching the level of that of the 1968 Mexico City, Olympics, I generally don't get too worked up about that.

At the same time, I also tend to disregard individual opinions of people who have risen to fame through their athleticism or because they're entertainers.  Recently, for example, I read where Beyonce was expressing opinions at a concert of some fashion.  It would be nearly impossible for me to care what Beyonce's opinion on anything at all actually is.  Indeed, I thought her daughter's instruction to "calm down" at a recent awards show was pretty much on the mark.

But opinions, particularly social opinions, by corporations really aggravate me.

Recently this has become particularly common, and while I'll give a few entities a pass, it smacks to me of being blisteringly phony.  If corporations, as a rule, suddenly endorse something that's been recently controversial, the issue has probably actually become safe to express.

What this amounts to, of course, is belated virtue signalling, and it's phony.  Corporations main goal, indeed, their stated and legal goal in almost every instance, is to make money for their shareholders.  That's their purpose and focus, and when corporations suddenly take up a cause, what they are often really doing has nothing to do with values and everything with trying to co-opt a movement for profit or not offend a group that's been lately in the news and has obtained financial power accordingly.

Indeed, it's frankly much more admirable when a corporation has a stated position that it adheres to in spite of financial detriment.  The fact that they know an opinion will be unpopular and they stick with it probably says its a real belief.

Which gets back to the perceived views of people in general.  If you look out at a crowed of people supporting anything, or in modern terms posting their support in some fashion on Facebook or Twitter or the like, probably over half, and I'd guess around 2/3s, have no strong convictions on the topic at all. They may believe they do, but in other circumstances they'd be there supporting the other side equally lukewarmly.

Today is American Independence Day.  The day came in the midst of a truly bloody war.  Around 23,000 Americans lost their lives in the war fighting for the Revolution, including those who died of disease, and a nearly equal number were wounded in an era when being wounded was often very disabling.  The British took about 24,000 casualties of all types, meaning they took fewer than the Americans.

But among the "British" were a sizable number of American colonist who fought for the Crown.  Up to 1/3d of American Colonist remained loyal during the war to the United Kingdom.  Only about 1/3d of the American Colonist supported independence or the revolution at all.  The remaining 1/3d took no position.

Even at that, it's not all that difficult, retrospectively, to find example of combatants who fought on both sides of the war.  Some captured American troops were paroled with the promise to fight for the British, and did.  The times being murky and records difficult to keep, some men just fought on both sides depending upon how the wind seemed to be blowing, a risky course of action, but one that some did indeed take.

Howard Pyle's illustration of Tory Refugees.

After the war those die hard Loyalist who couldn't tolerate living in the United States, including many who were so outed as Loyalist they had little choice on that matter, relocated to Quebec where there descendants are still sometimes self identified by initials that note an honorific conveyed by the Crown.  But 1/3d of the American population didn't pull up stakes and relocate, which tells you a lot.  And what that conveys is that a lot of people who thought that the Colonies were making a mistake just shut up.  Indeed, it proved to be the case during the War of 1812 that British soldiers met with sympathy and assistance in Virginia as they marched on Washington D. C., and that was because many Virginians, in that state which had been a colony, of course, retained a higher loyalty and sympathy with the United Kingdom than they did the United States.

But if you read most common commentary today you'll be left with the impression that the Americans, and by that we mean all of the Americans, were eager to shake off the chains of British tyranny.  And I'd wager that as the war began to turn in Congress' favor that view became common at the time and that it really set in by the time the American victory became inevitable.  So most of the men who spoke quietly in favor of King George III at the Rose and Thorne, or whatever, on Saturday nights in 1774 were praising George Washington by 1781.

This commentary, I'd note, isn't directed specifically at Americans in the 1700s by any means, but is more broader.  There are big exceptions to the rule of the get along nature of human opinion to be sure, for example I think the Civil War may be uniquely an exception to it, but people shouldn't make any mistake about this in general.  During the 1930s a lot of trendy social types teetered on the edge of real Communist sympathy while some conservative figures in the country spoke in admiration of Mussolini's and Hitler's governments in their countries.  By 1941, however, everybody in the country was an outright die hard opponent of fascism and militarism.  By 1950 nobody had ever been a Communist sympathizer, not ever.  

In 1968 and later a lot of young Americans protested vigorously about the American role in Vietnam. Quite a few of them vilified American servicemen.  By mid 1980s the same people were backing the troops and by the 1990s quite a few of them were for other foreign wars.

If this suggests that people's stated opinions are fickle and can't be trusted its meant to.  I was in university during the Reagan Administration and a college student would have had to been cavalier or in very trusted company to express any kind thoughts at all about Ronald Reagan.  One of my most conservative in every fashion friends of long standing would openly declare that Reagan was going to reinstate the draft and send us all to fight in Nicaragua, which was just the sort of nonsensical opinion common at the time.  One young computer employee in the geophysics department was unique not only because he was an early computer genius, employed with their super computer that probably is less powerful than a modern cell phone, but because as a recently discharged Navy submariner he was an adamant and open Anti Communist.  Nobody openly expressed views like that.

Which isn't to say that a lot of people didn't think them.

Which is also not to say that a lot of those same people, in the presence of the granola chick at the bar, didn't express the polar opposite.*

Which gets back to the topic of corporations.

If people's confused and muddled approach to what they declare their views is quite often the rule rather than the exception, this isn't the case with corporations.  More often than not, their goal is the bottom dollar.  They're looking out at the confused and muddled crowed and assuming its focused and distinct, and they then leap on board because they want to sell you pants, shoes, or whatever.  and that's cynical even if its self confused cynical.

Which is all the more reason to ignore, or actually buy from the company that is open about just wanting to sell you goods because that's what they do.

*Which recall Zero Mostel's character's line in The Front as to his reason for becoming a Communist.

July 4, 1919

Which was dry, or mostly so, we'd note.

There were celebrations in Washington D. C.

Secretary Baker issued decorations to officers for their service in the Great War.

At Ft. McHenry there were competitions.

And at U.S. General Hospital No. 1.

Jack Dempsey took the heavyweight title from Jess Willard.  Will had five inches and about fifty pounds on Dempsey, but lost anyway.

Mid Week At Work. 700 out of work in Gillette

Last Saturday I went to a funeral.

I'll not give the details on it, but one of the things was that before it, there was, as there often is now, a slideshow with photographs of the departed's life, which in this case was certainly highly poignant.  That was done to background music, as is also seemingly the norm now.

One of those songs was James McMurtry's Lights of Cheyenne.

I'm not sure how McMurtry is categorized musically.  I wouldn't classify him as "Country" music, now that I'm slightly familiar with him, as he seems to me to be more of a sort of folk balladeer.  Not a cheesy neo folk balladeer,  like Bob Dylan (sorry Dylan fans, but that's how he strikes me), but more of the genuine article like John Prine.

McMurtry is the son of novelist Larry McMurtry whose novels are concentrated on rural, and often historical, Texas.  Larry McMurtry wrote what I'd regard as by far the most accurate novel on the atmosphere of modern ranching, Horseman, Pass By, which was made into the very good, but not as good as the book, movie Hud.  Some of those descriptive abilities clearly passed on to his son, as they're in Lights of Cheyenne.

Okay, what's this have to do with Gillette and the coal layoffs?  Quite a lot.

Lights of Cheyenne does a really good job of describing the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds, of people from this region I've met in lawsuits and in the law in general, both plaintiff's and defendants.  I can't quite describe it, but he does in the song.



I should note that when people post such things, the first question is "are you referring to yourself?".

Nope.

Not at all in fact.  But rather the people I've met on both sides of litigation.

And frankly a lot of those same people are now out of work in Gillette.

The Houston Chronicle published an article sometime ago trying to describe the reason that Donald Trump won the presidency, and did it by saying that those people were described in the music of James McMurtry.  If you wanted to understand them, it maintained, listen to McMurtry.

That's too simplistic and definitely not fully accurate, but there's something to it.

I haven't written about coal for awhile, although there are quite a few items up on this blog about coal and trends applying to it.  What surprised me over the last year or so is that coal seemed to stabilize.  Then it became clear that it had not.  It was still in trouble, but it did look for awhile as if the coal companies might be able to hold on and work their way out of their immediate financial difficulties.  Then this came, so apparently not.  At least it doesn't look that way.  Seven hundred benign laid off at once is a pretty big message.

Where from here?  Well nobody knows.  But even on a day in which the Tribune leads its headlines with the disaster, in the help wanted a coal mine in Sweetwater County is hiring.  So some will make it back into coal jobs.  Chances are that these mines won't be closed forever either.

But the trend line is pretty hard to ignore.  People who were counting on a change in administration to reverse coal's fortunes must be disappointed and there's no way to realistically related this back to any prior era.  It's the era itself.  Half of Wyoming's coal production has disappeared over the past decade and a lot of jobs with that.  Now more are gone and a lot of them won't be coming back.

July 3, 1919. But wait, what about Battery F? Battery F, 148th FA, returns home and Bisbee Riots.

One of the purposes of this blog is to correct errors and misconceptions, and we find that here we're victim of one.

Indeed, careful observers here will note that we've reported the 148th as basically mustering out twice. . . once in New York, and once at Ft. D. A. Russell outside of Cheyenne.  We think we figured out the origin of that confusion, however.  The Camp Mills event was the one that released the unit from the Army's rolls, and the Cheyenne one was the one in which the artillerymen were discharged.

That latter date was taken from a source we were relying on, but contained an error.

Battery F of the 148th wasn't home until this day.

For some reason Battery F had been delayed in returning home and just made it on July 3, something I hadn't run across before.  And upon arriving the men of Battery F were the subject of a big July 3 celebration welcoming their return to the state in Cheyenne.

Company F was entirely from the northern part of the state.  So not only were they the seeming last of the National Guardsmen to return home, they had further to go to get all the way home as well.

While celebrations were going on in Wyoming, riots were going on in Bisbee Arizona.

The riot started off as a confrontation between a while military policeman of the U.S. Army and black cavalrymen of the 10th Cavalry.  The town already had a marked racially tense atmosphere in which strong racial prejudices against Hispanics and Asians were highly exhibited.  In spite of this, black cavalrymen from the 10th Cavalry from nearby Ft. Huachuca did frequent the town. 

As with many towns near Army posts, the town had military policemen in it on frequent occasion and it was just such a confrontation that escalated into a riot.  What exactly occurred is not clear, but the main participants in the event seem to have been white policemen and black cavalrymen.

While there were serious injuries they did not prevent the 10th Cavalry from participating in the Independence Day march the following day.

July 2, 1919. Scenes of oil production in Texas.

The long lens on Prohibition and the United States Supreme Court

We've had an entire series of articles up recently on Prohibition, as any reader here knows, as today marks the centennial of Wyoming's law banning booze coming into effect.

In our made up myths on Prohibition, one popular one here is that Wyoming went into it kicking and screaming.  Far from it. Wyoming voted itself into Prohibition in advance of the Federal requirement to get there.  It was nonsensical in a way, as the passage of the 18th Amendment made it inevitable anyhow. . . although as we all know, that inevitability was rather temporary.  At any rate, Wyoming could have just waited for the Volstead Act to cause Federal Prohibition to become permanent, but it chose to get there first, and deeper, than the Federal law would require.

Even at that, Wyoming pushed the Volstead Act over the top, as the deciding vote for that law came by way of Francis E. Warren, who proudly took that act that determined that the US would go dry in 1920.

So what's the point here in the modern context?

Just this.

The United States Supreme Court has never, at least up until now, had a problem with the individual states prohibiting or allowing various substances. There were dry states prior to Prohibition coming into effect, and Wyoming would be one of them.  There were wet states right up until the Volstead Act came into full effect.  By the same token, there are states that ban marijuana, on the state level, today, and those which allow it.  That's always been the state of the law and it remains the presumed state of the law today.

Indeed, this fact allowed Wyoming's state Prohibition to become an odd sort of success . . .in its gradual repeal.

When the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st on December 5, 1933, by way of the vote of the State of Utah's delegees to a constitutional convention that pushed the 21st Amendment over the top, Wyoming stepped out of Prohibition in stages, putting in place a new system of heavily regulated alcohol sales and direct state involvement.  Similar processes were put in place all over the United States.

And now the United States Supreme Court has upset the apple car by way of its ruling a new case striking down Tennessee's two year residence requirement in order to hold a liquor license.

The decision is the wrong one.

It's hard to see where such decisions go, but this decision fits into a series of new decisions in which the United States Supreme Court is becoming, once again, hyperactive in asserting Federal dominance over everything, which is a bad trend. 

There's no real reason to suppose that that there's any Constitutional protection to alcohol dealers who wish to operate across state lines.  Yes, yes, we know the Commerce Clause and all of that, but for eons the law has supposed that on certain topics states have been free to regulate, and this is one of them.  If state's can be completely dry, they can certainly impose heavy restrictions on licensing dealers to sell and distribute alcohol.

And not just alcohol. At one time licensing requirements that featured absolute residency were common for all sorts of activities that involve an element of risk.  It was common (and also stricken down) for states to impose residence requirement for practicing law, for example. 

Beyond that, there are an entire series of areas which the United States Supreme Court previously maintained were really state matters entirely.  Defining marriage was one, for example.  Now that's gone by the wayside with Obergefell.

At some point the net result of all this is a sort of super-libertarian concept of everything.  States must not impose any local requirements on anything, it would seem, save for one certain thing we'll deal with in a moment, as that impedes . . . well it impedes.  No matter if states wish to impede. They can't.

And that's not so much a Constitutional view, as a libertarian view of the world.  Uniformity of regulation and law through its absence, more or less.

Except in political matters. As we've also seen from this session, the one area a legislature can act is in political boundaries.  Oddly, that's something that the Constitution does address in requiring the states to have a "republican form of government".  Gerrymandering, the common name for messing with those boundaries, defeats that.

The Court is comfortable allowing that to go forward, however.

For Wyoming the question now becomes what the state can do with certain liquor related practices.  Wyoming allows out of state liquor dealers, so that's not an issue, but they must have an instate presence.  Wine vendors have violated this in the past with direct sales of wine.  Beer vendors started to, and about at that point the state clamped down and reminded everyone that you can't ship wine through the mail to end users and you can't have wine marketing parties on the model of Tupperware parties and the like. 

Or can you?

Well, it does impede interstate commerce and the wine industry has threatened to take it on.

All of which gets back to something else.  Local requirements may not be the most efficient things in the world, but they do reflect the local.  There's something to be said for that.

United States Supreme Court Blog Mirror: Friday round-up (from last Friday)

Friday round-up

Some notes on Prohibition on its centennial in Wyoming

We've been running some items on prohibition as we've run up to its centennial in the state.  In doing that, we noted some of the myths associated with it.  Indeed, we noted a bunch of them yesterday, so we'll re-post those here and fellow with a little additional commentary:

The movement to ban alcohol had been growing strength for years prior to World War One, inspired in no small part by the fact that the "Saloon Trade" was unregulated.  Widespread unregulated drinking was a huge social problem that had reached the point of disgusting a lot of people. There's only so many drunk seven year olds, basically, that you can take.

In addition to that, however, the Temperance Movement was boosted by the fact that it was a Progressive movement, and one of many.  Often missed in the story of any one movement is that movements tend to travel in packs, and indeed the limit of their success usually is the enactment of a bad idea into law that was travelling along with other movements that were good or better ideas. Then the reaction sets in.

The Laramie newspaper addressed the national law but, oddly, not the local one.

In this case, Prohibition oddly has a fairly straight line back to the mid 19th Century when the movement to abolish slavery reached full steam and ultimately success, albeit due to the Civil War.  Abolitionist typically had that as their focus, but some were generally fairly "progressive" in the modern context on other issues as well.  Quite a few of those individuals went right from the Abolitionist movement to the the issue of full franchise for women which, as we've seen, also just achieved success in 1919.

With those movements came also Temperance, which was thought of by many as being a generally a progressive platform.  As the country entered World War One it received a big boost for an interesting mix of reasons.

In contrast to nearby Laramie, Cheyenne's headlines featured Wyoming going dry.

One reason was that it consumed a lot of grain, and there was a genuine desire to conserve grains during the stretched wartime years.  That lead to the law that came into effect today, which brought distilling. . . and maybe brewing and vinting, illegal during the war.  Ironically the date that law came into effect was June 30, 1919.  I.e., the last legal day for hard alcohol nationwide, and maybe beer and wine, was this day.  July 1 was sort of dry.

Maybe.  As can be seen, the Federal government was having a hard time figuring out what the law actually applied to.

Sheridan, which like Cheyenne, had a military post claimed that Cheyenne had already depleted its stores of alcohol.

In addition to that, there was a visceral reaction to all things German, which beer was conceived of being, during the war and Prohibitionist took advantage of that to boost their cause.  As we've seen here earlier, there were a lot of accusations against brewers, some backed by Prohibitionist, claiming they were funded by or in league with the Germans.  The whole thing seems silly now, but it was front page news then. 

Indeed the war had the effect of actually effectively destroying German culture in the United States as many German institutions came to an abrupt end.  For many urban German Americans there had been a long tradition (as indeed their had been in England prior to the Reformation) of gathering after church for fellowship of one kind or another.  In rural areas that included such things as summertime shooting events of a special type, called a Schützenfest.  These events would feature shooting from special precision rifles, but also a fair amount of beer drinking.

Whimsical road sign in contemporary Germany put up for a From Wikipedia Creative Commons, with a special sign for a Schützenfest.  MalteFilmFan

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sign_-_Attention_%22Sch%C3%BCtzenfest%22_.jpg.  Use restricted in accordance with license.

While the tradition was just as strong, it might be noted, in the Irish American culture, the war did not impact the Irish culturally the same way. As part of the United Kingdom they were, of course, on the winning side of the war and, more importantly, on the same side as the United States, and they were also used to being a struggling minority.  It'd take economic success to really put a dent in Irish culture.

Compounding the story, quite a few Americans, and the United States was a more rural nation at the time with many more small communities that were more stable and less mobile than they are now, were horrified by the thought of their young men going over to booze drenched France, where they'd be confronted, they supposed, with gallons of wine and French women of questionable virtue.  That seems extreme, of course, and I'm putting it in that fashion clearly, but you can find examples of statements to just that effect.  One Wyoming legislator, for example, stated that he'd rather is boy die in France having never tasted alcohol than live on imbibing. 

World War One postcard that was part of a series on American soldiers in France.  This soldier is giving a ride on his horse to a French girl as two French villagers observe.  This is just what quite a few Americans feared was going to be going on while their sons were overseas. For what it's worth, the saddle on the horse is a M1917 packer's saddle, so this soldier is likely in the Quartermasters Corp, although not necessarily so.  Of note, he's wearing a watch.

Which takes us to the fact that this particular era was one of Evangelical Protestant revival.

Christianity has no prohibition on alcohol at all, and many of those ordering a draft at East Coast taverns on Sunday afternoons had no doubt been to Mass than morning, in the case of German and Irish Americans.  The concept that Christianity is antithetical to alcohol is a false one, although it very clear is opposed to drunkenness.  At any rate, some Evangelical Christians in the English speaking world saw alcohol as a prohibited substance and they accordingly were very much against it. As they were in the rise at the time, that contributed to the movement.

Another French postcard, one that most soldiers would have been ill advised to send home.  The French translation does not match the English, with the French one stating "We quickly get to know each other.".  By 1919, Americans had somewhat overcome their concern about French women, who were now entering the United States as war brides in large numbers.  Newspaper articles had gone from soldiers' reports about how they still looked back at the girl back home more favorably, to ones in which they were impressed with the French lasses, to reports of a lot of them coming home as the spouses of the troops.  Those women, of course, were coming from a culture in which wine made up a substantial portion of the average person's daily caloric intake to another which was now officially dry.

For this reason, even without the wartime act, alcohol was on its way out in the United States.  Many states had already banned it, and Wyoming was one of them.  This adds to the confusion of the headlines, however, as the local papers were following the national news on the wartime ban, and the local news on the arrival of state Prohibition.

And added to that was the passage of the Volstead Act, which we've just read about.  That act was to bring about the enforcement of the 20th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was not self enacting.  It was only introduced in June of 1919, so the full Federal law on permanent Prohibition hadn't arrived.  Indeed, a person has to speculate on the extent to which the decision to enforce "wartime" Prohibition in 1919 was due to that fact. The wartime measure could have been viewed as a stopgap until the full law arrived.

What could we add to that?

Well, a couple of things.

For one thing, the press was solidly behind Prohibition.  Solidly.  It was a movement by 1918-19 and it had the absolute backing of the newspapers. 

It also had the absolute backing of nearly every politician, in most places, who was willing to say anything. By 1919 there weren't very many "wets".

And the success of Prohibition. . . in 1919. . . was seen as inevitable social progress by the classes that strongly believed in social progress.  Sure, some people somewhere were unhappy, but they'd fall in line.

All of this is significant in terms of a forgotten lesson. What you often hear about Prohibition is that its an example of how "you can't legislate morality" or that you can't impose an unpopular law on the majority of the nation.  It's not an example of either of those things.

It was hugely popular when it passed.  A minority of people opposed it. But that minority was a large minority and soon would grow in scale.. 

And that gives us the first lesson. At any one time people who believe that the success of any movement is assured are believing that in vain.  Inevitable progressions of history turn out not to be that.  Today, progressives argue for the legalization of new drugs as inevitable progress.  In 1919 the same class argued to ban alcohol and was even beginning to think about taking on caffeinated drinks at this point.  The "right" side of history in 1919 is now regarded as the wrong one.  Things aren't nearly as linear as they might seem.

And the second lesson is hinted at above.  Alcohol prior to 1919 was nearly completely unregulated. When it came back, it came back heavily regulated.  That's what actually addressed the underlying problems that most people worried about.  So Prohibition turned out to be a sort of a success in that fashion. And, as we've discussed here above, the health of the nation actually did improve during Prohibition, in spite of the myths to the contrary, so to the extent people had backed it for that reason, they weren't actually wrong.

July 1. Wyoming's State Prohibition Act goes into effect

Today In Wyoming's History: July 1:

1919.  Wyoming's state prohibition act went into effect. I can't help but note that Prohibition went into effect immediately prior to the big 4th of July Holiday.

And of course, Wartime Prohibition ironically went into effect on the same day, although exactly what it prohibited remained unclear.

The Wyoming State Tribune took the occasion to have a really unusual front page, framed by a cartoon, the only example of that I've ever seen.

Casper noted John Barleycorn's passing for all time (the papers had persistently been, we'd note, on the "right side of history" on this one, i.e., for Prohibition and its inevitable triumph, but also noted the big July 4th celebration it was planning, which would stretch over three days.

The Cheyenne State Tribune was still featuring the Dempsey fight and advertising its upcoming Frontier Days.

The always sober Laramie Boomerang didn't even note the arrival of state prohibition.

Monday, June 30, 1919. The last day of legal drinking in Wyoming. . .

and for that matter, much of the rest of the United States as wartime prohibition came into effect on June 30, just as Wyoming's state prohibition act also did.

New York City bar on the last day of legal drinking, June 30, 1919.  Note the hot dogs or sausages on the small grill.

The fact that a lot of places went "dry" on this day, prior to the passage of the Volstead Act, shows that the arrival of prohibition was more complicated than many might remember and accordingly the headlines are confusing.

What occurred was this.

Casper was reported as being in a "Hilarious Mood" on the eve of Prohibition.  It's probable that not everybody was approaching the deadline of midnight with hilarity, including most particularly tavern owners.

The movement to ban alcohol had been growing strength for years prior to World War One, inspired in no small part by the fact that the "Saloon Trade" was unregulated.  Widespread unregulated drinking was a huge social problem that had reached the point of disgusting a lot of people. There's only so many drunk seven year olds, basically, that you can take.

In addition to that, however, the Temperance Movement was boosted by the fact that it was a Progressive movement, and one of many.  Often missed in the story of any one movement is that movements tend to travel in packs, and indeed the limit of their success usually is the enactment of a bad idea into law that was travelling along with other movements that were good or better ideas. Then the reaction sets in.

The Laramie newspaper addressed the national law but, oddly, not the local one.

In this case, Prohibition oddly has a fairly straight line back to the mid 19th Century when the movement to abolish slavery reached full steam and ultimately success, albeit due to the Civil War.  Abolitionist typically had that as their focus, but some were generally fairly "progressive" in the modern context on other issues as well.  Quite a few of those individuals went right from the Abolitionist movement to the the issue of full franchise for women which, as we've seen, also just achieved success in 1919.

With those movements came also Temperance, which was thought of by many as being a generally a progressive platform.  As the country entered World War One it received a big boost for an interesting mix of reasons.

In contrast to nearby Laramie, Cheyenne's headlines featured Wyoming going dry.

One reason was that it consumed a lot of grain, and there was a genuine desire to conserve grains during the stretched wartime years.  That lead to the law that came into effect today, which brought distilling. . . and maybe brewing and vinting, illegal during the war.  Ironically the date that law came into effect was June 30, 1919.  I.e., the last legal day for hard alcohol nationwide, and maybe beer and wine, was this day.  July 1 was sort of dry.

Maybe.  As can be seen, the Federal government was having a hard time figuring out what the law actually applied to.

Sheridan, which like Cheyenne, had a military post claimed that Cheyenne had already depleted its stores of alcohol.

In addition to that, there was a visceral reaction to all things German, which beer was conceived of being, during the war and Prohibitionist took advantage of that to boost their cause.  As we've seen here earlier, there were a lot of accusations against brewers, some backed by Prohibitionist, claiming they were funded by or in league with the Germans.  The whole thing seems silly now, but it was front page news then. 

Indeed the war had the effect of actually effectively destroying German culture in the United States as many German institutions came to an abrupt end.  For many urban German Americans there had been a long tradition (as indeed their had been in England prior to the Reformation) of gathering after church for fellowship of one kind or another.  In rural areas that included such things as summertime shooting events of a special type, called a Schützenfest.  These events would feature shooting from special precision rifles, but also a fair amount of beer drinking.

Whimsical road sign in contemporary Germany put up for a From Wikipedia Creative Commons, with a special sign for a Schützenfest.  MalteFilmFan

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sign_-_Attention_%22Sch%C3%BCtzenfest%22_.jpg.  Use restricted in accordance with license.

While the tradition was just as strong, it might be noted, in the Irish American culture, the war did not impact the Irish culturally the same way. As part of the United Kingdom they were, of course, on the winning side of the war and, more importantly, on the same side as the United States, and they were also used to being a struggling minority.  It'd take economic success to really put a dent in Irish culture.

Compounding the story, quite a few Americans, and the United States was a more rural nation at the time with many more small communities that were more stable and less mobile than they are now, were horrified by the thought of their young men going over to booze drenched France, where they'd be confronted, they supposed, with gallons of wine and French women of questionable virtue.  That seems extreme, of course, and I'm putting it in that fashion clearly, but you can find examples of statements to just that effect.  One Wyoming legislator, for example, stated that he'd rather is boy die in France having never tasted alcohol than live on imbibing. 

World War One postcard that was part of a series on American soldiers in France.  This soldier is giving a ride on his horse to a French girl as two French villagers observe.  This is just what quite a few Americans feared was going to be going on while their sons were overseas. For what it's worth, the saddle on the horse is a M1917 packer's saddle, so this soldier is likely in the Quartermasters Corp, although not necessarily so.  Of note, he's wearing a watch.

Which takes us to the fact that this particular era was one of Evangelical Protestant revival.

Christianity has no prohibition on alcohol at all, and many of those ordering a draft at East Coast taverns on Sunday afternoons had no doubt been to Mass than morning, in the case of German and Irish Americans.  The concept that Christianity is antithetical to alcohol is a false one, although it very clear is opposed to drunkenness.  At any rate, some Evangelical Christians in the English speaking world saw alcohol as a prohibited substance and they accordingly were very much against it. As they were in the rise at the time, that contributed to the movement.

Another French postcard, one that most soldiers would have been ill advised to send home.  The French translation does not match the English, with the French one stating "We quickly get to know each other.".  By 1919, Americans had somewhat overcome their concern about French women, who were now entering the United States as war brides in large numbers.  Newspaper articles had gone from soldiers' reports about how they still looked back at the girl back home more favorably, to ones in which they were impressed with the French lasses, to reports of a lot of them coming home as the spouses of the troops.  Those women, of course, were coming from a culture in which wine made up a substantial portion of the average person's daily caloric intake to another which was now officially dry.

For this reason, even without the wartime act, alcohol was on its way out in the United States.  Many states had already banned it, and Wyoming was one of them.  This adds to the confusion of the headlines, however, as the local papers were following the national news on the wartime ban, and the local news on the arrival of state Prohibition.

And added to that was the passage of the Volstead Act, which we've just read about.  That act was to bring about the enforcement of the 20th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was not self enacting.  It was only introduced in June of 1919, so the full Federal law on permanent Prohibition hadn't arrived.  Indeed, a person has to speculate on the extent to which the decision to enforce "wartime" Prohibition in 1919 was due to that fact. The wartime measure could have been viewed as a stopgap until the full law arrived.

At any rate, if you were in far off Wyoming, this was your last day to get a drink.

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

I recently posted on Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church on our companion blog, Churches of the West.  That post is here:

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver ...: This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado. Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", imm...

The entire entry is below, followed by my commentary.

To add what I posted in the entry linked in, as is sometimes the case with Catholic churches, I not only took a photograph, as it was Sunday, I attended there.

I won't say that I attended "Mass", as the Eastern Rite doesn't use that word.  It uses the term Divine Liturgy instead.

Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado.

Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", immediately have what, in the English speaking world, are frequently referred to as "Roman Catholics" in mind.  In fact, however, "Roman" Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics whose churches use the Roman Rite.  Roman Catholics make up the overwhelming majority of Catholics, and indeed the majority of Catholics, on earth.

They aren't the only Catholics however.   The Roman Rite itself is just one of several Latin, or Western, Rites.  There are also several Eastern Rites, of which the Byzantine Rite is one.

The Byzantine Catholic Church, which is also called the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, uses the same liturgical rite as the Greek Orthodox Church and shares the same calendar.  It dates back to the conversion of the Rusyn people in the Carpathians to Christianity in the 9th Century.  That work, done by St. Cyril and St. Methodius brought to the Rusyn people the form of worship in the Eastern Rite.  They Rusyn church initially followed the Orthodox Churches following  the schism of 1054, but in 1645 the Ruthenian Church started to return to communion with Rome, resulting in the Rutenian Byzantine Catholic Church, which is normally called the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States.

Immigration from Eastern Europe brought the Church into the United States. Originally a strongly ethnic church, in recent decades it has become multi ethnic and its strongly traditional character has caused it to obtain new members from both very conservative Latin Rite Catholics as well as very conservative former Protestants.  Indeed, while this church is very small, it has been growing and now has a Byzantine Catholic outreach to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where it holds services in Roman Catholic Churches.

We pick up from there.

When people hear the world "Catholic", they tend to think of what they sometime call "Roman Catholics".  The term "Roman" Catholic is itself a post Reformation English term, which the English tagged on to the Church in their effort to justify the position that the Church of England had a theological basis for separating from the Church.  Serious conservative members of the Anglican Communion still take that position and I suppose that Episcopal clergymen are schooled in it in some fashion, although it appears to be the case presently that the Episcopal Church is ordaining at least some members of their clergy who attend seminaries in a remote fashion, which is very much the opposite of how the Catholic Church does that.*  Anyhow, there aren't really "Roman" Catholics, although in the English speaking world Latin Rite Catholics have themselves adopted the term and don't regard it as a pejorative, as it originally was.

I heard some statistics on it the other day and I won't get them precise, but they were interesting in what they conveyed.  The largest single religion in the world, and in spite of what some modern statisticians might suggest almost all humans are members of a religion, is Christianity.  Christianity is in fact growing in most of the world and only in the rich Western World is there really a more lackadaisical approach to faith.  Even in parts of the globe where Christianity has historically had a difficult time penetrating this is the case.  About 30%, for example, of Koreans are Christians.  While numbers are very hard to come by, good anecdotal evidence suggest that post 9/11 conversions to Christianity in the Middle East rank in in the millions in an area in which open conversion is illegal.  Conversion by Muslims immigrating to some regions of Europe have been so high that they've filled the pews in Churches in some regions that were formally only used by locals.  Both France and Germany, in some areas, have seen large conversions of that type.

Of Christians on Earth, the largest denomination by far, if we want to put it in those terms, are Catholics. Catholics dwarf all other denominations, something that's hard to grasp in the U.S. as the U.S. was and is a Protestant country.  Indeed, of interest there, the U.S. and areas strongly influenced by the US are really the only regions of the world were certain types of Protestantism that refuses to acknowledge that the Catholic Church dates back to Christ in an uninterrupted fashion, although both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches both have uninterrupted Apostolic Succession and can note the same.  That statement surprisingly amounts to fighting words for some Protestant denominations in the English speaking world but in an era in which resources are so easily obtainable it cannot really reasonably be debated by anyone any longer and indeed most of the larger original Protestant churches don't debate that and never have.  The Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is part, for example fully acknowledges that as do all branches of Lutheranism.  Some other branches of the old Protestant world have claimed apostolic succession, thereby recognizing its importance and the Catholic history on it, and others have gone so far as to occasionally find bishops in the Orthodox or Old Catholic faiths who are willing to do ordinations in an effort to clear up any question regarding it, which again acknowledges the position.  The original "protest" wasn't over that, which was always fully acknowledged.  People who insist on debating it are debating a non point, as its indisputable and if a contrary position is a person's only theological point, it's a lost one.

The point on that isn't to start such a debate, but to note something else.  Most Catholics are in the Latin Rite, which actually is several rites, and of these most are in the Roman Rite.  Hardly any Catholic has ever been in a Catholic Church that celebrates another rite.  Something like 80% of the Christians on Earth are Roman Rite Christians and if we include the the Protestants who are familiar with that style of worship, and many do, its even higher.

The percentage of Christians who are Eastern Rite is really small.  If we include both the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics its still only around 10% or less of all Christians. 

But it's growing.

Okay, we've discussed the Great Schism here before and we're not going to go into that, but as we've previously noted, the Eastern Rites of the Church date back to prior to the schism and all Eastern Rite churches use the same forms of worship.  Lost to a lot of people, that means that there are plenty of Catholics, although a small minority of Catholics over all, who worship in the Eastern Rite.

But there are getting to be more.

The Byzantine Catholic Church is more fully referred to as the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.  There's also a Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. The two use the same liturgy and their services would be very similar, but the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church is extremely small and has a different history.

The Ruthenians were one of several Eastern Rite churches that followed Constantinople when the Great Schism occurred.  Indeed most, but not all, of the Eastern Rite did that, reflecting the Eastern Rite's strong association with Constantinople.  Ironically, perhaps, the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church reflected the fact that not everyone in the Eastern Rite in Greece did, and that in fact there remained churches that continued to accept the Bishop of Rome as the head of the church rather than the "first among equals", as the Orthodox have stated it.  The Ruthenian Church, however, did wholly follow Constantinople at first but, in the 17th Century, came back into communion with Rome, something that a variety of Eastern Rite churches have (not all Eastern Rite churches, it should be noted, followed Constantinople even at the onset).  The Church had a presence in the United States since the second half of the 19th Century as Eastern European immigrants brought it over from Eastern Europe. At first it frankly unfortunately had a rocky relationship with the larger Latin Rite, which was in fact attributable the the Latin Rite's view at the time that in a country where Catholics were a minority it was better if everyone who was Catholic was Latin Rite. That view has long since passed however and today the Catholic Church not only encourages the Eastern Rites in the U.S. but discourages anything that would stand to erode them.

Now they're not only not eroding, they're growing.

This is an interesting phenomenon in and part its due to the collapse of conservative doctrine in the old Protestant churches. As conservatives in those churches have found themselves unable to accept the adoption of positions that run counter to what Christians have held for eons, they've looked out at other churches that retain the traditional holdings and nothing is more traditional than the Eastern Rite, be that in the Orthodox or the Catholic spheres.  

Indeed it's the Orthodox who have primarily benefited from this development, and they're aware of it. As we posted here some time ago, the new Orthodox church in Cheyenne holds itself out as an "Orthodox Christian" church, not a "Greek Orthodox" church, which it is.  In fact, as this evolution occurs, those cultural monikers matter less than they did.  The Greek Orthodox in the U.S. hold Divine Liturgy in English.  So does the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.

And like the Orthodox, the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church is also expanding, and in part for the same reason just noted above.  It's not really hard to find at the present time converts in a Byzantine Catholic Church.  In our recent trip we met a very devout parishioner who self declared as a convert.

In addition, however, to Protestants entering the Byzantine Catholic Church, it's clear that Latin Rite Catholics are as well.  And some of this is for the same reason, while some of it is not.

Conservative Roman Catholics who have grown weary of the reforms of the 1970s which seem to hang on in some parishes have, in some instances, gone over to Eastern Rite Catholic churches where the big reforms never took hold.  About the only thing really notable in terms of reforms in Eastern Rite Catholic Churches is that the services are in English, not the original languages.  This is true, however, of the Eastern Rite in general.  Additionally, Eastern Rite Catholics are really serious Catholics, their knowledge boosted by their minority status.  The service we attended was shockingly serious, with the Priest addressing, in what started off as a children's liturgy, the Problem of Evil.  And he addressed it in a remarkably effective fashion.

In recent years there's been a struggle, mostly in the large Latin Rite, over reforms and direction.  It's pretty clear to nearly every observer that those who would take the Church even further in the "spirit" of the 1970s have a losing argument and that this will have a negative effect.  It's also clear, from the slow return to things that predates those developments, that the opposite has a strong positive attraction to many of the Faithful.

In this context, there's lessons to be learned from the Eastern Rite.  It's growing, and its attractive to an element of those in the Latin Rite.  It has conservative, but married, Priests.  This is not to say that the Latin Rite needs to become Eastern, but it shouldn't ignore the positive examples that the Eastern branch is giving.**

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*Indeed, one of the reforms of the Counter Reformation was the introduction of the seminary system in the Catholic Church, as the Church concluded that the Reformation had been caused in part by badly educated clergymen.  That system has existed for the past 500 years and recently its been enhanced in the original direction.  It was common, up until the last couple of decades, to allow very young men, indeed not really young men so much as boys, into seminaries but reflecting social evolution this is no longer true.  Seminarians now are at the college age, at least.

**That example isn't as well received by everyone, I'd note.  In this case, of us four, my son and I were hugely impressed for a variety of reasons.  My wife and daughter were not.  In that latter example, they frankly found it just too foreign.

In speaking with a colleague who was a cradle Catholic, who fell away from Christianity in college, who re found it in the form of Evangelical Protestantism late in college, and then came back to the Catholic Church as a lawyer, he'd experienced the same thing in a different fashion.  Noting what I noted above, he studied the early history of the church and found that it was in fact, as is clearly demonstrable, "Catholic and Apostolic" and therefore briefly went into the Greek Orthodox church which can legitimately claim to be Apostolic (with the Orthodox and the Catholic church separated by a schism, something that's severe, but not as severe as the gulf between them and Protestant churches).  Anyhow, his wife had been raised in a Protestant church, as was mine, and she was likewise shocked by how foreign the Eastern Rite is.  In contrast, the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Gillette, Wyoming is made up completely of converts from an Evangelical Protestant church that converted after engaging in a study of the early church.