Sunday, July 13, 1919. Day of Rest

Sunday by tradition and Christian canon is a day of rest, and that's what the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy somewhat did on that day. They didn't advance in their trip.  Indeed, the diary of their progress noted the day as one of rest.

In spite of it being day of rest a FWD truck was repaired.  FWD's were a really heavy truck of the period that had a very good reputation.  FWD stood for Four Wheel Drive and the company that made them was the Four Wheel Drive Auto Company.

1917 FWD advertisement in The Horseless Age.

Not surprisingly, during World War One the Army purchased quantities of FWDs, more specifically FWD Seagrave Model Bs and FWD Model Gs which look a bit like the truck in the advertisement above, but which were somewhat smaller. The Model G in fact had pre war service with the Army and had been used in the Punitive Expedition.  With four wheel drive, they were really pioneering trucks quite ahead of their times.

Elsewhere, rest came to Longview Texas where Federal Marshalls were now in charge and took the stop of temporarily impounding firearms in the town. 

Mr. Daniel Hoskins, the oldest resident of Longview Texas following race riots posted with temporarily impounded firearms, July 13, 1919.  The firearms are also pretty ancient and I suspect his depiction with them was for effect.

Of course, it being a Sunday, new movies were out, not all of which were wholly pacific.

A Man's Country featured a bar maid and a minister who come to see each other in a different, and of course romantic, light.

The Love Burglar featured one of those endlessly complicated silent movie plots which makes you wonder how they packed so much into something that had no sound and depended for story development solely on the acting alone, with print of course.

Speaking of love

They Cheyenne State Leader, being one of the few papers that put out a Sunday edition in 1919, reported that the George Washington, a troop ship was equipped now with a nursery to bring home the children of U.S. solders born overseas to French brides.  

The number of war brides brought over to date was 327, and of the 327 brides, 16 had given birth prior to embarkation. That really wasn't that large of a number in context actually.

Saturday, July 12, 1919. 1919 Motor Transport Convoy, Sewickley to East Palestine, Ohio. 35 miles in 7.5 hours.

I don't know what the Garford was. Garford was a manufacturer of heavy trucks at the time, and they'd been one of the manufacturers of the Class B Liberty Truck, an Army designed heavy truck that had been used extensively in World War One.

There were Liberty trucks in the convoy, and this may have been one of them.

The Liberty trucks had 425 ci engine, which is big, but it only put out 52 hp. It had a top speed of 15 m.p.h.

That's right.  15 m.p.h.

Friday, July 11, 1919: The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy goes from Greensburg to Sewickley PA. 43 miles in 10 hours.

We've been seeing some of the vehicles mentioned in these posts, and we can see that today one that having problems was a G.M.C. ambulance. 

That ambulance was almost certain a G.M.C. AA model truck in the ambulance configuration. They were a common World War One era military ambulance.  Indeed the 3/4 ton AA was most commonly used by the Army in the ambulance configuration.

The truck provided yeoman ambulance service during the Great War, but it was a truck of its era. At this point, it had driven over 100 miles in varying conditions and weather, and the brakes needed adjustment.  And by brakes, we mean mechanical brakes.

Brakes of this era still worked more or less like wagon brakes. They provided friction to drums, but the braking power was provided mechanically without hydraulic assistance.  Something was going wrong with the ambulance's brake adjustments on this day.

Next to the cell phone, the air conditioner has been humanities worst invention.

Everything about it (indeed both of those things) is awful.

The air conditioner  has benefited humanity not at all.  It's allowed our species to ignore the actual outdoor summer weather, which matters.  If it means that 50 million people can live and work in a sweltering hot spot somewhere where the summer temperature routinely reaches 150F in buildings that are built to be locked up air containers, that should perhaps cause us to reconsider those locations in terms of both dense living and building designs.  If you don't live such an area, and you don't unless you live 1) in one of those hot southern locations, or 2) on Mercury, just open your darned windows and let in a breeze when its hot or turn on a fan to move the air around.

Of course, if you live in a modern building designed to defeat those things and modeled on a sardine tin, you can't.

It's also caused us to think that the temperature is set by the calendar.  June and July?  We need to turn on the air conditioner because, well, it's June or July.  January?  Turn on the heat. . . it's January.

Air conditioning.  It's awful.

The Arctic Summer

I read somewhere that this summer has been the hottest summer on record. That may well be true, but it isn't true in my state.

It's been absolutely arctic here this summer.

Here's the odd domestic condition that applies to that.

There are certain people who are personally hot all the time. There's a variety of reasons for that, but they're hot.

People who are hot believe the entire planet shares their sense of hot and cold, and that people who don't, are lying.  Given they'll wonder around the office setting the temperature to Absolute Zero and the like.

This has played out personally for me this summer in two ways.

For one, my wife is one of those people who is hot during the summer.  I can't explain this, as she's not hot in the winter. But as soon as spring hits, the windows are all open as long as it isn't snowing.

This morning is a good example.  The official temperature this morning is 47F.  That means at my house it's probably barely 40F, if that.  But all the windows were open all night. 

This morning I closed them and turned on the heat in the room where this computer is.  The windows came back open as soon as my wife woke up.

My house is actually, due to stuff like this, incredibly uncomfortable for me to be in all summer long.  I actually suffer in the house.  I go outside to warm up.  When I get in my vehicles to go somewhere I pause to enjoy the warmth in them if the sun's been out.  It's awful.

At my town place of employment they're working on the air conditioning this year.  I missed the workman when he came around trying to access the temperature of each office, but I've had the conversation with him before.

Freezer Guy:  "Is it cold enough in here?"

Me:  "It's too darned cold!"

Freezer Guy"  "We're working on the system to get it to be colder everywhere"

Me:  "Turn it off!"

To no avail.

Message from Erik, the Freezer Guy.

Thursday, July 10, 1919. The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy goes from Bedford to Greensburg PA. 63 miles in 16.5 hours.

The Class B was almost certainly a Liberty Truck. We'll read more about it soon.

Note the wide manufacture of trucks involved in the effort.  Garford, GMC, Dodge and Militor all shos up here.

Roads were indicated as being slippery, and mechanical problems were frequent that day, but the convoy still made an impressive 63 miles, although it took a long 16.5 hours.

Signal Corps photograph of the convoy on July 10, 1919.

July 10, 1919. Wilson delivers the Treaty of Versailles to the U.S. Senate. Race Riots in Longview Texas

And in so doing, he delivered this address.

Gentlemen of the Senate: The treaty of peace with Germany was signed at Versailles on the twenty-eighth of June. I avail myself of the earliest opportunity to lay the treaty before you for ratification and to inform you with regard to the work of the Conference by which that treaty was formulated. 

The treaty constitutes nothing less than a world settlement. It would not be possible for me either to summarize or to construe its manifold provisions in an address which must of necessity be something less than a treatise. My services and all the information I possess will be at your disposal and at the disposal of your Committee on Foreign Relations at any time, either informally or in session, as you may prefer; and I hope that you will not hesitate to make use of them. I shall at this time, prior to your own study of the document, attempt only a general characterization of its scope and purpose. 

In one sense, no doubt, there is no need that I should report to you what was attempted and done at Paris. You have been daily cognizant of what was going on there,—of the problems with which the Peace Conference had to deal and of the difficulty of laying down straight lines of settlement anywhere on a field on which the old lines of international relationship, and the new alike, followed so intricate a pattern and were for the most part cut so deep by historical circumstances which dominated action even where it would have been best to ignore or reverse them. The cross currents of politics and of interest must have been evident to you. It would be presuming in me to attempt to explain the questions which arose or the many diverse elements that entered into them. I shall attempt something less ambitious than that and more clearly suggested by my duty to report to the Congress the part it seemed necessary for my colleagues and me to play as the representatives of the Government of the United States. 

That part was dictated by the role America had played in the war and by the expectations that had been created in the minds of the peoples with whom we had associated ourselves in that great struggle. 

The United States entered the war upon a different footing from every other nation except our associates on this side of the sea. We entered it, not because our material interests were directly threatened or because any special treaty obligations to which we were parties had been violated, but only because we saw the supremacy, and even the validity, of right everywhere put in jeopardy and free government likely to be everywhere imperiled by the intolerable aggression of a power which respected neither right nor obligation and whose very system of government flouted the rights of the citizens as against the autocratic authority of his governors. And in the settlements of the peace we have sought no special reparation for ourselves, but only the restoration of right and the assurance of liberty everywhere that the effects of the settlement were to be felt. We entered the war as the disinterested champions of right and we interested ourselves in the terms of the peace in no other capacity. 

The hopes of the nations allied against the central powers were at a very low ebb when our soldiers began to pour across the sea. There was everywhere amongst them, except in their stoutest spirits, a sombre foreboding of disaster. The war ended in November, eight months ago, but you have only to recall what was feared in midsummer last, four short months before the armistice, to realize what it was that our timely aid accomplished alike for their morale and their physical safety. . . . A great moral force had flung itself into the struggle. The fine physical force of those spirited men spoke of something more than bodily vigour. They carried the great ideals of a free people at their hearts and with that vision were unconquerable. Their very presence brought reassurance; their fighting made victory certain. 

They were recognized as crusaders, and as their thousands swelled to millions their strength was seen to mean salvation. And they were fit men to carry such a hope and make good the assurance it forecast. Finer men never went into battle; and their officers were worthy of them. . . . They were free men under arms, not forgetting their ideals of duty in the midst of tasks of violence. I am proud to have had the privilege of being associated with them and of calling myself their leader. 

But I speak now of what they meant to the men by whose sides they fought and to the people with whom they mingled with such utter simplicity, as friends who asked only to be of service. They were for all the visible embodiment of America. What they did made America and all that she stood for a living reality in the thoughts not only of the people of France but also of tens of millions of men and women throughout all the toiling nations of a world standing everywhere in peril of its freedom and of the loss of everything it held dear, in deadly fear that its bonds were never to be loosed, its hopes forever to be mocked and disappointed. 

And the compulsion of what they stood for was upon us who represented America at the peace table. It was our duty to see to it that every decision we took part in contributed, so far as we were able to influence it, to quiet the fears and realize the hopes of the peoples who had been living in that shadow, the nations that had come by our assistance to their freedom. It was our duty to do everything that it was within our power to do to make the triumph of freedom and of right a lasting triumph in the assurance of which men might everywhere live without fear. 

Old entanglements of every kind stood in the way,—promises which Governments had made to one another in the days when might and right were confused and the power of the victor was without restraint. Engagements which contemplated any dispositions of territory, any extensions of sovereignty that might seem to be to the interest of those who had the power to insist upon them, had been entered into without thought of what the peoples concerned might wish or profit by; and these could not always be honourably brushed aside. It was not easy to graft the new order of ideas on the old, and some of the fruits of the grafting may, I fear, for a time be bitter. But, with very few exceptions, the men who sat with us at the peace table desired as sincerely as we did to get away from the bad influences, the illegitimate purposes, the demoralizing ambitions, the international counsels and expedients out of which the sinister designs of Germany had sprung as a natural growth. 

It had been our privilege to formulate the principles which were accepted as the basis of the peace, but they had been accepted, not because we had come in to hasten and assure the victory and insisted upon them, but because they were readily acceded to as the principles to which honourable and enlightened minds everywhere had been bred. They spoke the conscience of the world as well as the conscience of America, and I am happy to pay my tribute of respect and gratitude to the able, forward-looking men with whom it was my privilege to cooperate for their unfailing spirit of cooperation, their constant effort to accommodate the interests they represented to the principles we were all agreed upon. The difficulties, which were many, lay in the circumstances, not often in the men. Almost without exception the men who led had caught the true and full vision of the problem of peace as an indivisible whole, a problem, not of mere adjustments of interest, but of justice and right action. 

The atmosphere in which the Conference worked seemed created, not by the ambitions of strong governments, but by the hopes and aspirations of small nations and of peoples hitherto under bondage to the power that victory had shattered and destroyed. Two great empires had been forced into political bankruptcy, and we were the receivers. Our task was not only to make peace with the central empires and remedy the wrongs their armies had done. The central empires had lived in open violation of many of the very rights for which the war had been fought, dominating alien peoples over whom they had no natural right to rule, enforcing, not obedience, but veritable bondage, exploiting those who were weak for the benefit of those who were masters and overlords only by force of arms. There could be no peace until the whole order of central Europe was set right. 

That meant that new nations were to be created,—Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary itself. No part of ancient Poland had ever in any true sense become a part of Germany, or of Austria, or of Russia. Bohemia was alien in every thought and hope to the monarchy of which she had so long been an artificial part; and the uneasy partnership between Austria and Hungary had been one rather of interest than of kinship or sympathy. The Slavs whom Austria had chosen to force into her empire on the south were kept to their obedience by nothing but fear. Their hearts were with their kinsmen in the Balkans. These were all arrangements of power, not arrangements of natural union or association. It was the imperative task of those who would make peace and make it intelligently to establish a new order which would rest upon the free choice of peoples rather than upon the arbitrary authority of Hapsburgs or Hohenzollerns. 

More than that, great populations bound by sympathy and actual kin to Rumania were also linked against their will to the conglomerate Austro-Hungarian monarchy or to other alien sovereignties, and it was part of the task of peace to make a new Rumania as well as a new Slavic state clustering about Serbia. 

And no natural frontiers could be found to these new fields of adjustment and redemption. It was necessary to look constantly forward to other related tasks. The German colonies were to be disposed of. They had not been governed; they had been exploited merely, without thought of the interest or even the ordinary human rights of their inhabitants. 

The Turkish Empire, moreover, had fallen apart, as the Austro-Hungarian had. It had never had any real unity. It had been held together only by pitiless, inhuman force. Its people cried aloud for release, for succour from unspeakable distress, for all that the new day of hope seemed at last to bring within its dawn. Peoples hitherto in utter darkness were to be led out into the same light and given at last a helping hand. Undeveloped peoples and peoples ready for recognition but not yet ready to assume the full responsibilities of statehood were to be given adequate guarantees of friendly protection, guidance, and assistance. 

And out of the execution of these great enterprises of liberty sprang opportunities to attempt what statesmen had never found the way before to do; an opportunity to throw safeguards about the rights of racial, national, and religious minorities by solemn international covenant; an opportunity to limit and regulate military establishments where they were most likely to be mischievous; an opportunity to effect a complete and systematic internationalization of waterways and railways which were necessary to the free economic life of more than one nation and to dear many of the normal channels of commerce of unfair obstructions of law or of privilege; and the very welcome opportunity to secure for labour the concerted protection of definite international pledges of principle and practice. 

These were not tasks which the Conference looked about it to find and went out of its way to perform. They were thrust upon it by circumstances which could not be overlooked. The war had created them. In all quarters of the world old established relationships had been disturbed or broken and affairs were at loose ends, needing to be mended or united again, but could not be made what they were before. They had to be set right by applying some uniform principle of justice or enlightened expediency. And they could not be adjusted by merely prescribing in a treaty what should be done. New states were to be set up which could not hope to live through their first period of weakness without assured support by the great nations that had consented to their creation and won for them their independence. Ill governed colonies could not be put in the hands of governments which were to act as trustees for their people and not as their masters if there was to be no common authority among the nations to which they were to be responsible in the execution of their trust. Future international conventions with regard to the control of waterways, with regard to illicit traffic of many kinds, in arms or in deadly drugs, or with regard to the adjustment of many varying international administrative arrangements could not be assured if the treaty were to provide no permanent common international agency, if its execution in such matters was to be left to the slow and uncertain processes of cooperation by ordinary methods of negotiation. If the Peace Conference itself was to be the end of cooperative authority and common counsel among the governments to which the world was looking to enforce justice and give pledges of an enduring settlement, regions like the Saar basin could not be put under a temporary administrative regime which did not involve a transfer of political sovereignty and which contemplated a final determination of its political connections by popular vote to be taken at a distant date; no free city like Dantzig could be created which was, under elaborate international guarantees, to accept exceptional obligations with regard to the use of its port and exceptional relations with a State of which it was not to form a part; properly safeguarded plebiscites could not be provided for where populations were at some future date to make choice what sovereignty they would live under; no certain and uniform method of arbitration could be secured for the settlement of anticipated difficulties of final decision with regard to many matters dealt with in the treaty itself; the long-continued supervision of the task of reparation which Germany was to undertake to complete within the next generation might entirely break down; the reconsideration and revision of administrative arrangements and restrictions which the treaty prescribed but which it was recognized might not prove of lasting advantage or entirely fair if too long enforced would be impracticable. The promises governments were making to one another about the way in which labour was to be dealt with, by law not only but in fact as well, would remain a mere humane thesis if there was to be no common tribunal of opinion and judgment to which liberal statesmen could resort for the influences which alone might secure their redemption. A league of free nations had become a practical necessity. Examine the treaty of peace and you will find that everywhere throughout its manifold provisions its framers have felt obliged to turn to the League of Nations as an indispensable instrumentality for the maintenance of the new order it has been their purpose to set up in the world,—the world of civilized men. 

That there should be a league of nations to steady the counsels and maintain the peaceful understandings of the world, to make, not treaties alone, but the accepted principles of international law as well, the actual rule of conduct among the governments of the world, had been one of the agreements accepted from the first as the basis of peace with the central powers. The statesmen of all the belligerent countries were agreed that such a league must be created to sustain the settlements that were to be effected. But at first I think there was a feeling among some of them that, while it must be attempted, the formulation of such a league was perhaps a counsel of perfection which practical men, long experienced in the world of affairs, must agree to very cautiously and with many misgivings. It was only as the difficult work of arranging an all but universal adjustment of the world’s affairs advanced from day to day from one stage of conference to another that it became evident to them that what they were seeking would be little more than something written upon paper, to be interpreted and applied by such methods as the chances of politics might make available if they did not provide a means of common counsel which all were obliged to accept, a common authority whose decisions would be recognized as decisions which all must respect. 

And so the most practical, the most skeptical among them turned more and more to the League as the authority through which international action was to be secured, the authority without which, as they had come to see it, it would be difficult to give assured effect either to this treaty or to any other international understanding upon which they were to depend for the maintenance of peace. The fact that the Covenant of the League was the first substantive part of the treaty to be worked out and agreed upon, while all else was in solution, helped to make the formulation of the rest easier. The Conference was, after all, not to be ephemeral. The concert of nations was to continue, under a definite Covenant which had been agreed upon and which all were convinced was workable. They could go forward with confidence to make arrangements intended to be permanent. The most practical of the conferees were at last the most ready to refer to the League of Nations the superintendence of all interests which did not admit of immediate determination, of all administrative problems which were to require a continuing oversight. What had seemed a counsel of perfection had come to seem a plain counsel of necessity. The League of Nations was the practical statesman’s hope of success in many of the most difficult things he was attempting. 

And it had validated itself in the thought of every member of the Conference as something much bigger, much greater every way, than a mere instrument for carrying out the provisions of a particular treaty. It was universally recognized that all the peoples of the world demanded of the Conference that it should create such a continuing concert of free nations as would make wars of aggression and spoliation such as this that has just ended forever impossible. A cry had gone out from every home in every stricken land from which sons and brothers and fathers had gone forth to the great sacrifice that such a sacrifice should never again be exacted. It was manifest why it had been exacted. It had been exacted because one nation desired dominion and other nations had known no means of defence except armaments and alliances. War had lain at the heart of every arrangement of the Europe,—of every arrangement of the world,—that preceded the war. Restive peoples had been told that fleets and armies, which they toiled to sustain, meant peace; and they now knew that they had been lied to: that fleets and armies had been maintained to promote national ambitions and meant war. They knew that no old policy meant anything else but force, force,—always force. And they knew that it was intolerable. Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgment demanded that, at whatever cost of independent action, every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom should tend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics. Statesmen might see difficulties, but the people could see none and could brook no denial. A war in which they had been bled white to beat the terror that lay concealed in every Balance of Power must not end in mere victory of arms and a new balance. The monster that had resorted to arms must be put in chains that could not be broken. The united power of free nations must put a stop to aggression, and the world must be given peace. If there was not the will or the intelligence to accomplish that now, there must be another and a final war and the world must be swept clean of every power that could renew the terror. The League of Nations was not merely an instrument to adjust and remedy old wrongs under a new treaty of peace; it was the only hope for mankind. Again and again had the demon of war been cast out of the house of the peoples and the house swept clean by a treaty of peace; only to prepare a time when he would enter in again with spirits worse than himself. The house must now be given a tenant who could hold it against all such. Convenient, indeed indispensable, as statesmen found the newly planned League of Nations to be for the execution of present plans of peace and reparation, they saw it in a new aspect before their work was finished. They saw it as the main object of the peace, as the only thing that could complete it or make it worth while. They saw it as the hope of the world, and that hope they did not dare to disappoint. Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty? Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world? 

And so the result of the Conference of Peace, so far as Germany is concerned, stands complete. The difficulties encountered were very many. Sometimes they seemed insuperable. It was impossible to accommodate the interests of so great a body of nations,—interests which directly or indirectly affected almost every nation in the world,—without many minor compromises. The treaty, as a result, is not exactly what we would have written. It is probably not what any one of the national delegations would have written. But results were worked out which on the whole bear test. I think that it will be found that the compromises which were accepted as inevitable nowhere cut to the heart of any principle. The work of the Conference squares, as a whole, with the principles agreed upon as the basis of the peace as well as with the practical possibilities of the international situations which had to be faced and dealt with as facts. . . . 

The role which America was to play in the Conference seemed determined, as I have said, before my colleagues and I got to Paris,—determined by the universal expectations of the nations whose representatives, drawn from all quarters of the globe, we were to deal with. It was universally recognized that America had entered the war to promote no private or peculiar interest of her own but only as the champion of rights which she was glad to share with free men and lovers of justice everywhere. We had formulated the principles upon which the settlement was to be made,—the principles upon which the armistice had been agreed to and the parleys of peace undertaken,—and no one doubted that our desire was to see the treaty of peace formulated along the actual lines of those principles,—and desired nothing else. We were welcomed as disinterested friends. We were resorted to as arbiters in many a difficult matter. It was recognized that our material aid would be indispensable in the days to come, when industry and credit would have to be brought back to their normal operation again and communities beaten to the ground assisted to their feet once more, and it was taken for granted, I am proud to say, that we would play the helpful friend in these things as in all others without prejudice or favour. We were generously accepted as the unaffected champions of what was right. It was a very responsible role to play; but I am happy to report that the fine group of Americans who helped with their expert advice in each part of the varied settlements sought in every translation to justify the high confidence reposed in them. 

And that confidence, it seems to me, is the measure of our opportunity and of our duty in the days to come, in which the new hope of the peoples of the world is to be fulfilled or disappointed. The fact that America is the friend of the nations, whether they be rivals or associates, is no new fact: it is only the discovery of it by the rest of the world that is new. 

America may be said to have just reached her majority as a world power. It was almost exactly twenty-one years ago that the results of the war with Spain put us unexpectedly in possession of rich islands on the other side of the world and brought us into association with other governments in the control of the West Indies. It was regarded as a sinister and ominous thing by the statesmen of more than one European chancellery that we should have extended our power beyond the confines of our continental dominions. They were accustomed to think of new neighbours as a new menace, of rivals as watchful enemies. There were persons amongst us at home who looked with deep disapproval and avowed anxiety on such extensions of our national authority over distant islands and over peoples whom they feared we might exploit, not serve and assist. But we have not exploited them. And our dominion has been a menace to no other nation. We redeemed our honour to the utmost in our dealings with Cuba. She is weak but absolutely free; and it is her trust in us that makes her free. Weak peoples everywhere stand ready to give us any authority among them that will assure them a like friendly oversight and direction. They know that there is no ground for fear in receiving us as their mentors and guides. Our isolation was ended twenty years ago; and now fear of us is ended also, our counsel and association sought after and desired. There can be no question of our ceasing to be a world power. The only question is whether we can refuse the moral leadership that is offered us, whether we shall accept or reject the confidence of the world. 

The war and the Conference of Peace now sitting in Paris seem to me to have answered that question. Our participation in the war established our position among the nations and nothing but our own mistaken action can alter it. It was not an accident or a matter of sudden choice that we are no longer isolated and devoted to a policy which has only our own interest and advantage for its object. It was our duty to go in, if we were indeed the champions of liberty and of right. We answered to the call of duty in a way so spirited, so utterly without thought of what we spent of blood or treasure, so effective, so worthy of the admiration of true men everywhere, so wrought out of the stuff of all that was heroic, that the whole world saw at last, in the flesh, in noble action, a great ideal asserted and vindicated, by a nation they had deemed material and now found to be compact of the spiritual forces that must free men of every nation from every unworthy bondage. It is thus that a new role and a new responsibility have come to this great nation that we honour and which we would all wish to lift to yet higher levels of service and achievement. 

The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.

The fight to ratify the treaty in the United States had begun.

Meanwhile, further west, another violent episode in the Red Summer of 1919 broke out, this time in Longview Texas.  The spark that caused the riots that broke out that night were the murder of a black defendant in the county jail by a mob a few days earlier.  He had been arrested for having relations with a white woman.  Local black leaders went to the authorities to seek to have the investigate the murder but nothing developed. Following that, a news article was printed in the Chicago Defender about the murder and a local black man who was a sometimes correspondent for the Defender was suspected of being the source.  On this day developments occurred in which a white mob sought to inflict revenge on that individual, leading to the riot.  Various buildings in the black community were set on fire. The next day law enforcement sought reinforcements and both the Texas National Guard and the Texas Rangers were brought in, resulting in order being restored.

Blog Mirror: Cow Hampshire; New Hampshire's Cow Appreciate Day

New Hampshire's Cow Appreciate Day

It's today!

Wednesday, July 9, 1919. The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy goes Chambersburg, Pennsylvania to Bedford. 57 Miles

And noting something we noted yesterday, "excellent driving for untrained personnel."

Tuesday, July 8, 1919. The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy goes from Frederick to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. 62 Miles

In spite of the difficulties it imposed, the 1919 convoy picked up speed on day two, while also fixing bridges and fording streams.

So what was the big deal about this 1919 convoy anyhow.  Just a road trip, right?

Well, no, it was a lot more than that.

Let's start with the state of, oddly enough, driving in the United States in general and the U.S. Army in particular.

Now, to be fair, training people to drive wasn't the point of the convoy. But as background to the convoy, at this point in our history, most people didn't drive.

Cars had been around for awhile, but the movie view of the past in which Model Ts suddenly appeared and all other form of transportation disappeared is completely inaccurate.  Cars came on rapidly after the Model T. . . in towns. . . but they didn't suddenly become the universal norm overnight.  That took some time.

Indeed, for those of us living today, cell phones might be a good analogy.  The first cellular mobile phone was introduced by Motorola in 1973, but that mean that everyone was using them by 1974. Far from it.  It wasn't until the 1990s that they seemingly were everywhere.  I didn't have a hand held cell phone until work made it a necessity for me, and that was sometime in the 2000s, well after my wife had adopted a good, for the time, hand held cell phone.  I didn't switch to a modern type Iphone until my work again made it necessity.  I don't know how long ago that was, but I remember it replaced my Ipod, of which I've ever had one.  I must be on the third, unfortunately, Iphone now.

Cars worked the same way.  Younger people, I suspect, adopted them more readily than the older.  I know that in rural areas of the East and Midwest they were not popular at all at first, and even a bit feared.  But the Model T served in the role of Iphone and once it came in it made a big change.  It was durable and relatively affordable, in an era in which average automobiles were actually hugely expensive.

But the Model T was only introduced in 1908, just a little over a decade prior to the date we're speaking of.  That means that the vast majority of Americans were only just now really getting an exposure to driving.  Most didn't know how to drive.

Driving, in fact, was a skill that was valued commercially.  People who did know how to drive, which also meant they knew something about being a mechanic as well, were in commercial demand. It was the golden age of chauffeurs.  And in military terms, that made it a valued special skill.  

Which takes us back to the military.

It's well known that wars spur technology.  World War One certainly spured truck production, but as far as technology goes, the technology remained more or less oddly the same.

Now, of course, the war was only four years long. But by the same token World War Two wasn't appreciably longer, and it had a huge impact on truck technology.  Indeed, World War Two, not World War One, doomed the horse as a the prime mover of all armies.

And the horse was that prime mover during the Great War. The truck played a valuable role, but one secondary to the horse.

None the less, the military could see and appreciate that day was changing and indeed was coming to an end. For that matter, that had been obvious to the farsighted since prior to the war.  That the day hadn't arrived was obvious, but that it was arriving was also obvious.

So the convoy existed in that world.  Trucks and cars were on the cusp of being seriously reliable for long distances, and becoming common.  Most Americans still didn't drive, but they would be soon.

The Army could see that, and it was getting ahead of the curve.

________________________________________________________________________________

Related Threads:

The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition.

Monday, July 7, 1919. The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy departed Washington D. C.. .

Monday at the Bar: Blog Mirror: A HISTORY OF WATER LAW, WATER RIGHTS & WATER DEVELOPMENT IN WYOMING 1868-2002 June 2004 FUNDED BY: WYOMING WATER DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION And STATE ENGINEER’S OFFICE

A HISTORY OF WATER LAW,
WATER RIGHTS & WATER
DEVELOPMENT IN WYOMING
1868-2002

June 2004

FUNDED BY:

WYOMING WATER DEVELOPMENT COMMISSIONAndSTATE ENGINEER’S OFFICE

Aequa lege necessitas sortitur insignes et imos

Aequa lege necessitas sortitur insignes et imos.  Fate, by an impartial law, is allotted both to the conspicuous and the obscure.

Horace

So you were a Wyoming National Guardsmen (or one from anywhere else) and now it's Monday July 7, 1919.

What now?

My M1911 Campaign Hat, which serves as my fishing and hunting hat, hanging by the stampeded string on the chair where I type out a lot of this stuff.  Probably a lot of M1911s were seeing similar storage about this time in 1919.

You might have joined a pre war National Guard unit in your hometown, if it had one, or you might have enlisted when the call came, which was quite common. If you lived in a small town like Casper, and Casper was very small in 1916, you would likely have done the latter, as Casper didn't have a Guard unit until 1917.

And that call for Guardsmen came on June 19, 1916 for Guardsmen.

So you became a Wyoming National Guardsmen in the infantry branch.  All Wyoming Guardsmen were infantrymen.

From there, it was some training locally, briefly, before you went with  your unit to Ft. D. A. Russell in Cheyenne, where you received more training and you were equipped, if you weren't already.  Or, actually, you expected to be sent there, but the Army, quixotically, refused to allow the Guard to train there and you therefore ended up at a camp at Frontier Park in Cheyenne.*

You learned how to fire a bolt action rifle, perhaps for the first time in your life even if you were familiar with firearms (and if you were from Wyoming, you were), as this was the age of the lever action, before bolt actions became a popular sporting arm.**  If you were an officer, or an NCO, you might have learned the ins and outs of the brand new M1911 pistol, just introduced into service, and quite a bit different from revolvers that may have otherwise been familiar with.***  And then there were automatic weapons, which you certainly weren't familiar with.

And you marched and drilled and marched and drilled.

By and large things went pretty well, but at least one of your fellow Guardsmen, Pvt. Dilley, disappeared under mysterious circumstances, never to return.  He was an exception to the rule, however.

Just after that you entrained at the railroad station in Cheyenne and shipped out to New Mexico, following a celebrated departure from the residents of Cheyenne.

The Union Pacific Railroad station in Cheyenne.

On September 30, 1916, you were arriving in Deming, New Mexico, where you were to be encamped while receiving additional training.  By October 1, 1916, you were on the border and you were placed under the command of a Regular Army officer.

And there  you remained for the next several months, a bulwark with other Guardsmen against Mexican incursions that didn't come. the Regular Army, of course, was now far down into Mexico, and truth be known very soon the Wilson Administration would be struggling for a way to disengage from that mission and pull them out.  In the mean time, you patrolled the border, which was not a safe job, and you trained.

National Guard infantry (9th Infantry, Massachusetts National Guard)  on the border in 1916.

You got back in the state on March 4, 1917.  You were mustered out of service on March 9, but the way things worked at the time, you wouldn't have made it home right away.  You had to process out, and wait for arrangements for train travel to whatever station was last on your route.  If you were lucky, that train ran right to your hometown. But for quite a few, that station was quite distant, and that meant that hopefully somebody was waiting for you with a wagon, or at least a horse, at that station.

On March 15, 1917, you likely made it home, if you lived in Central Wyoming.  So if you were from Douglas, or remote, small, but booming, Casper, you arrived home on this middle of March day.

You had just made it home, when you were called back into service on March 27, 1917.  Just twelve days later.

So it was back into service.

Once again you mustered and went to Cheyenne, this time fleshed out with new troops who were signing up to be part of the country's effort in the Great War. The belief was that for the most part it would be the Navy, not the Army, that did the heavy lifting, and in fact a few of your colleagues who had served on the Mexican border, preferring not to miss the action again, joined the Navy.  War was declared in April.  In May the state was still raising troops.

Shortly thereafter you shipped out with your fellow Wyomingites to North Carolina, where you were to be trained, you supposed, on trench warfare.  On August 15, 1917, due to a curious legal oddity, you were officially conscripted into the Army.

It was not to be.

In early September the news came that your unit was being busted up.  Some of you were going into machine-gun companies, some into transport companies, and some into the field artillery.  No infantry, although a machine-gun company would be pretty darned close.  The machine-gun companies didn't' seem to come about, but the transport and artillery units did.  We'll say for our story here that you were one of the men who became an artilleryman.  If so, you made it to France later than your transport colleagues, and it'd take you additional months after the Armistice to make it back home as well.  Those Guardsmen you knew who went into transport were home months ago now.

Howitzer of the type used by the 148th Field Artillery, of which many Wyoming National Guardsmen became a part.

You would have made it to France on February 10, 1918, and you went to the front on July 9.  Soon thereafter you were firing missions in support of the American effort at Château-Thierry.

Your unit, unlike the 115th Ammunition Train that your fellow Wyoming Guardsmen were in, was kept on in the Army of Occupation after the Armistice.  This gave you a little time to see some parts of France and some of Germany while they were not at war, if not in good shape.

Finally, in June your unit was ordered home.  You boarded the ship in France.  At Camp Mills, New York the unit was released from the Army rolls.  You were still in, however, and went to Ft. D. A. Russell out of Cheyenne with those Guardsmen from the West, men from Wyoming, Idaho and Colorado.

There you were discharged from the Army on June 26. You stayed at Ft. Russell for a couple of days, however, while your paperwork was processed.

And then you boarded a train in Cheyenne that, in a bit of a roundabout route, and a series of transfers, took you all the way home to Casper a couple of days later.  Your service was celebrated everywhere you stopped.  By the 29th, you were back home in Casper.

Not the Casper you left, however. That Casper was gone.  The war had changed it forever.  It was much larger now.  And it was a refinery town in a major way, with a giant refinery on the west edge of town that operated night and day, as all refineries do, in an unyielding fashion.  It dominated the town.

So now you were home, but that home was much different than the one you left.  And just after you came home a couple of notable events happened.

The first was that state prohibition arrived.  That may not seem significant, but with you just arriving home on the 29th, and state prohibition going into effect on July 1, you or your friends probably planned for a night downtown at the bars, and there were a lot of them, on the 30th.  One last night where the beer flowed freely.  It had flowed very freely in Casper before you left, and certainly wine had made an appearance in France. So a night on the town.

That probably meant that you slept in on July 1.  Not a day to go looking for work.  July 2 might be, but it's only two days away from the big July 4 celebration, and this year that celebration was to kick in on July 3.  So you probably  held off on July 3, 4, and 5.  The 6th was a Sunday and you probably went to church with your family.

And then, on Monday July 7, it was out to find a job.

But where and doing what?

The options in the town were plenty in 1919, but they were all dominated by oil production now.  That no doubt would have figured in your reasoning to some extent.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*There's no rational basis for the Army's decision, but in this period there was a fair amount of tension between the Regular Army and the National Guard.  Indeed, that tension would last as long as the Vietnam War.

**Which isn't to say that bolt actions weren't around and in use.  For American civilians the bolt action that was by far the most common was the Krag Jorgensen, surplus from the U.S. Army where it had been briefly the standard rifle prior to the M1903.  Surplus bolt action Navy Lees were also around but much less common.  Sporting bolt actions, mostly of European manufacture, were available but rare.

***Semi automatic pistols were also a recent innovation for most civilians, with revolvers being far more common.

Monday, July 7, 1919. The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy departed Washington D. C.. .

with an intended destination of San Francisco, California.

World War One vintage Motor Transport Corps recruiting poster.

This would be a long trip by contemporary standards, but in 1919 it was daunting in the extreme.  Only adventurers with cash tried to drive across the United States as a rule.  While it had been done quite a few times by 1919, it was not a short trip by any means.  People who wanted to cross the country did it the logical and safe way. . . by train.

The purpose of this trip was several fold.  A primary one was to test the inventory of trucks that the Army now owned, thanks to the Great War, in order to determine which ones were the best and weed out those that couldn't endure.  Additionally, however, problems with the railroads during World War One, by which we mean labor problems, inspired the service to see if trucks were a viable means of transporting men and equipment for mobilization in time of war.

The scale of the test was massive.  Over 250 men were detailed to the experimental operation which included repair vehicles and bridging equipment.  Vehicles were highly varied and ranged from artillery tractors to to motorcycles.  It's significance was appreciated at the time, and the Signal Corps was detailed to film the convoy in route, which was proceeded by a Publicity Officer and a Recruiting Officer who arrived in towns along the route several days ahead of the convoy.  The route was that of the already established, but far from modern, Lincoln Highway.

Lincoln Highway route as of 1916, which was the same as it would be in 1919.

Command of the overall operation was in the hands of Lt. Col. Charles W. McClure with the actual "train" commander being Cpt. Bernard H. McMahon.  Officers who were familiar with motor transport, including Bvt. Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, were detailed to the operation.

So how did day one go?  Well, the official log of the trip gives us a picture, albeit a brief one, of the same.

Forty six miles. . . in 7.5 hours.  And that on excellent roads.

The Cross

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the Cross.

Flannery O’Connor

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale Colorado

Churches of the West: Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale Colorado:

Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale Colorado

These are very poor photographs of the Abbey of St. Walburga, a Benedictine Abbey in Northern Colorado.  The Abbey was dedicated in 1997.  In the bottom photograph a small heard of hte Abbey's cattle can be seen.

Best Post of the Week of June 30, 2019

The best posts of the week of June 30, 2019.

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

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

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

Some notes on Prohibition on its centennial in Wyoming

The long lens on Prohibition and the United States Supreme Court

Mid Week At Work. 700 out of work in Gillette

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

The 2020 Election, Part 1

3 Acres?

"Where was that photo taken?"

"Where was that photo taken?"

There are a lot of photos on this blog.  Indeed, a blog without at least some photos, and there are some, is sort of like a ship on the ocean without sails.  It might float for its owner but most folks aren't going to want to get on board.  

I.e, want readers?  You need viewers.  And viewing means that if you are putting something up on the screen you need a few photographs.

Anyhow, we get questions and comments on photos from time to time, but the photograph below is unique as its been getting some unique attention recently, and it's not a recent arrival here on the site.

Indeed, this photo appears at the bottom of this website and has been incorporated into the site itself. When that was done, a quote from G. K. Chesteron was added to it. 

The photo also appears in several other locations on this blog in posts.  In its unaltered form, it looks like this:

It's one of my favorites, which is why I've used it more than once and in more than one place.

For those who might be wondering, the location is Camp Kearny, California.  It was taken in December, 1917. The written notation on the photo states:  "Captain Valentine in command of Remount Station, 100k head of stock."

Camp Kearny, which I've never seen or been to, is in San Diego County California.  I've never been to San Diego County either.  The Army started operating it in 1917, only shortly before this photograph was taken, and it served the country in the build up of the Army during World War One.

Camp Kearny, 1918.

The camp was closed following demobilization from the Great War in 1920, although the 15,000 acre facility was retained and the airfield was kept open for use by arrangement.  In 1932 the Navy took over the site as it was big enough for airships and it isn't really all that far inland, although it is inland.  In turn, they leased the facility to the Marine Corps, which is an odd thought as the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy and isn't crystal clear as to why the Marines would need to lease something from the Navy, or how one department of the Federal government leases anything from another department. During that time it was expanded to 26,000 acres.

Today its Naval Air Station Miramar, which is likely how most people who have heard of the location know of it.

So what's the deal with the photo here? Well, it fits the era the blog is focused on, and it fits a lot of the theme.  Were 100,000 horses really at Camp Kearny? That seems like an awful lot, but there were horses there and they were important. Even so, this is the modern era, a century removed.  There's just something about it.  A location and a scene in both worlds.

And then there's Chesteron's quote. . . which is quite true, no matter how much we moderns are afraid of it and what that means.  Radical free will includes the option of looking back.

The greatest danger occurs at the moment of victory.

The greatest danger occurs at the moment of victory.

Napoleon Bonaparte

3 Acres?

That's the size of the farmed. . . or gardened, plot of land here:

WORK TRADE FOR ACCOMMODATION: VALLICAN, BC AT WHERE THE PAVEMENT USED TO END FARM

One of the links on our eclectic set on the right hand side of this blog, under agriculture, is the site of a Canadian agrarian organization.

Now, for those not into this stuff, in the agricultural world there's a wide spectrum on farming and, beyond that, what it means to be a "farmer".  If you are deep into production agriculture, you can find those who are aggressively "get big or get out".  You'll also find a lot of traditional farmer, by which we mean commercial farmers who are operating solo or family farm operations of scale.  Then there's the part time farmers that do that, and also do in town jobs (very common).  

And then there's the hobby farmers, who really do something else full time but who live just outside of town on Rustic Acres, or what have you, and who do a little farming on the side, which describes all sorts of activity from having a big garden to near substance farming.

And then you have the radical agrarians.

Agrarianism itself can be described in all sorts of ways. Agrarianism, by its very nature, has a strong subsistence element to it, as with pure agrarians, subsistence is the goal. 

American, and Canadian, farming had its roots in agrarianism from the very onset, something that people basically know in a way and which influences, to this day, the way that people look upon farming.  The "forty acres and a mule" type of view of farming, in which a family sets out to support itself on the land, is an agrarian view of farming, and frankly it was always been starkly at odds with the type of farming that had come up in the English speaking world (but not in all of Europe) in the Medieval period, post 1066.  The sort of farming that subjects of the English crown left when they departed to North America was a sort of production tenant farming, where farming labor was expended for the landlord.  In the Colonies, it was expended for yourself.  We'll expand on that at some later point, but we'll note here that what we're stating about the American Colonies was also true, but in distinctly different ways, for the French one in North America as well, that being New France.  I.e., Quebec.

Chesterton famously saw Distributism, that agrarian doctrine he advocated, resulting in Three Acres and A Cow for the English (and frankly English Catholic) farmers.

But that three acres?

That's what the unit above references.

And here's the question.  Could a modern market garden, in the right North American market, really be viable on three acres?

Pretty tough.

We've addressed this before, and not really in the kindest fashion, in this old thread:

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

But we raise it again here, more gently.

Three acres.

Recipe for small scale success, or a quick trip out of agriculture?

Part of that probably depends, I'd guess on how broad your individual duties may be.  I'd note that as the "young Agrarians" often depicted in happy tones on those sites depicting them are not only young, but they're single.  Indeed, a young woman that a relative introduced me to, via the net, in order that she might garner agricultural advice (with it being questionable at best what the quality and value of that advice might be), to give her help in her agrarian goals was obviously in a permanently sterile relationship with her rather despondent long time male "friend", whom I otherwise met and who rather obviously was despairing of a relationship which he was taking more seriously and not happy with the idea of having a permanent playmate.  To put it more bluntly, they were having sex rather obviously, but she was medicating with the goal of avoiding the byproduct of that, which is ironically starkly anti agrarian.

That is, agrarianism, if you look at realistically, didn't have the goal of supporting a class of Norwegian Bachelor Farmers. . . or sterile Friends With Benefits. . . but families.

And modern Agrarianism doesn't seem to be doing that well.

There certainly are families that attempt it, and some of them have goals that square with agrarian philosophers of earlier times (most agrarians themselves have never been philosophers), and of today as well, such as Wendell Berry.  Indeed, some of those individuals stand in stark contrast with other modern agrarians in viewing their enterprise just that way.  

But they certainly find it tough.

One such individual Jason Craig, who is a Catholic farmer, writer, and who lives on a small farm in North Carolina.  Another one is Kevin Ford, who is a stated Catholic agrarian and blogger who has had a series of blogs, the most recently one being Good Ground, but which has one single entry.

One who formally attempted this was Devon Rose, who admits that he went into the enterprise with low knowledge and failed.  He humorously turned his experiment into a book entitled Farm Flop:  A City Dweller's Guild to Failing on a Farm in Two Years Or Less.  Less humorous was the treatment explored in Salon, which we featured quite some time ago in this entry here, which we already noted above:

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

 

In the "you must be deaf category" is the author of this story that appears on Salon and which has been commented upon by Forbes:

What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable 

You'll have to hit the link to follow that one.

That entry, I'll admit, wasn't charitable about the topic, even though I'm sympathetic with the overall goals.  But I'm sympathetic in a Wendell Berry sort of way, not in a neo hippy wort of way.  And that takes me back to the original entry here.

Three acres isn't very much ground. . .anywhere.

Or is it?

Maybe I'm prejudiced by my own location and point of view, but three acres wouldn't be enough to make a living on here unless, maybe, somebody was farming an illegal crop.  And I really doubt that three acres will support a family anywhere.  Indeed, the stated American dream was always 40 acres and a mule, but I'll see these tiny plots suggested from time to time and really wonder.

The Bee

I don't know if I should feel lucky to have been stung by a bee for the first time at age 56, after a lifetime of outdoor activity, or despondent that to confirm that yes, I'm allergic to bee stings.