May 16, 1920. The Canonization of Joan d'Arc

A doodle of Joan d'Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue on the margin of the protocol of the Parliament of Paris from May 10, 1429, two years prior to her death.  Clément de Fauquembergue was the parliamentary registrar and the news of the her victory at Orleans had just reached Paris.  The doodle is the only know illustration of her done during her lifetime.

On this day in 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan d'Arc, the 15th Century peasant girl who lead French forces in a revived effort to recapture lost grounds from the English after hearing voices commanding her to act for the French crown.  She ultimately paid for her efforts with her life, being burned at the stake after being falsely convicted of heresy, a charge now universally regarded as absurd and which was itself reversed in 1456.

Even no less of figure as Winston Churchill regarded Joan as a saint.  That the illiterate farm girl was able to gain access first to the French crown and then the army in the field commander was and is proof of her divine mission. With the army, she offered advice to its noble commanders which was frequently taken and French fortunes against the English in fact reversed and their army started to do remarkably well.

She is believed to have been born in 1412 in a region of Lorraine that retained loyalty to the French crown during the Hundred Years War, a contest between the Plantagenets, the Norman rulers of England, and the House of Valois, the rulers of France, over who should rule France. The house she grew up in and the village church there still stand.  As those who have ready Henry V know, the English long maintained that they should rule both kingdoms and they often regarded France as more important than in England.  That contest commenced in 1337 and featured a long running series of campaigns.  Trouble in the French royal family had been taken advantage of by Henry V who had been able to greatly expand the amount of English controlled territory in the 1415 to 1417 period.  By 1429, when Joan commenced her mission, half of France was controlled directly by England or by French duchies that were loyal to England.

The English commenced a a siege of the FRench city of Orleans in 1428, a town that was a holdout in its region for the French king, Charles VII.

Joan began to have visions in 1425, at which time she was 13 years old.  She identified the first figures she saw as St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who told her to drive the English out of France and take the Dauphin to Reims for his consecration.  At age 16 she made demands upon a relative to take her to see the crown which were received with scorn.  Nonetheless she was taken to Vaucouleurs where she demanded an armed escort to the royal court, which was denied. Returning the following year, she secured the support of two soldiers and their urgings and support she was conducted to the court after she reported the results of a distant battle she had not been at two days prior to messengers arriving to report it.  She as then escorted to the court disguised as a male soldier as it involved crossing hostile Burgundian territory.  At that time she was 17 years old and Charles VII 26.

She secured permission to travel with the army, which was granted.  Everything she used in the mission was donated to her, including the banner that she used.  She never used any weapons in battle but rode under her banner. She did, however, gain access to councils of war and was listened to. As noted, the fortunes of the French reversed in this period.  The siege of Orleans was broken by the French and Reims taken. The Dauphin was crowned as a result in Reims.

After a brief truce between the English and the French she was captured in battle in 1430 and put on trial for heresy.  Heresy being a religious offense, she was tried by English and Burgundian clerics, but the English officers oversaw the trial.  The trial was irregular and conducted without religious authority and without the individual commissioned to find evidence against her being able to find any.  Her conviction hinged on her having worn male clothing when under escort across hostile Burgundian soil.  She was convicted by this tribunal of heresy and burned at the stake in May 31, 1431.  Her executioner later greatly feared that his service in this role would result in his damnation.

In spite of her death, the dramatic reversal in French fortunes continued on and by 1450 the English had been pushed off the continent.  In fact, French borders surpassed their current ones, as France's resulting borders included what is now part of Belgium, a not surprising result given that Belgium is a multiethnic state.

A regular canonical trial to examine the first one's propriety was convened in 1455 and reversed the conviction in 1456.

She's been a popular figure ever since her death and in any age the nature of her mission is hard to deny.  Illiterate and born in a region separated from the retreating French royal lands, she nonetheless managed to convince the French crown and the chivalric leaders of its army that she had a divine mission, something that was aided by her knowledge of things that she could not have known but for her commission.  Under her, in spite of the fact that she was a teenage girl with no experience in military matters, French military fortunes permanently reversed.

It's no doubt her youth and gender that have caused her popularity to remain outside of France, but she is a saint whose nature should cause moderns to pause.

MKTH photograph of the statue of St. Joan d'Arc in Notre Dame de Paris.

She was not, as some no doubt imagine her, as some sort of proto feminist teenage leader in an age of male patrimony and would not have seen things that way.  She was singularly devout and saw her mission as a religious one.  She was known to be opposed to the heresies of her era and Islam. She was intensely Catholic and caused the army she lead to be adherent to the faith.  The war for control of France changed from a contest between two royal families to a war with religious overtones and even, as viewed from a modern eye, as one involving nationalism in an early form.  Her modern fans would do well to take note of her mission and the fact that its impossible to imagine it without crediting the divine voices that she attributed it to.

And indeed, her mission did have impacts on the religious map of Europe in ways that would not be possible to appreciate at the time of her execution at age 19 in May, 1430.  England was pushed off the continent in 1450 by which time Henry VI was king. That same year he was forced to put down a rebellion against the crown in England.  In 1533, a mere 83 years later during a period of time in which events often moved slowly, King Henry VIII would take the formerly devout England away from the Church and marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn, bringing the Reformation to England in a personal effort to generate a male successor through a fertile female. The following acts would result in crown licensed theft of church property, murder and decades of strife and war.  While France would fall to secularism in 1790, its position up until that time remained stalwart.

Blog Mirror: Hiking in Finland; Staying Indoors, Coping With Anxiety & Depression

Staying Indoors, Coping With Anxiety & Depression

In which our Finnish outdoor correspondent asks some thorny questions.

I think the entire times are depressing right now.  Unemployment is down, things that we rely upon for our daily routine are closed, except where they aren't. Things are so disorienting.  No wonder people are depressed.

And being forced to stay home would be depressing.

It may be where I live, which is very rural. But then Finland is fairly rural too.  But I don't get the orders that have required people to stay indoors in all circumstances.  Frankly, being out in the hills hiking, hunting, fishing, or skiing strikes me as a much better approach to things than staying the house watching reruns.

But I'm not a physician, so maybe there's just something I'm missing.

The Pandemic and Food, Part Three. A Good, Affordable, Steak

Then news headlines have been full of stories about there being a crisis in the meat industry.

Indeed, I'll be curious how this shakes out.  The crisis is frankly not really being deeply pondered, but my prediction is that it'll be used as an excuse by those who promote the deeply unnatural vegetarian and vegan diets as a reason to go unnatural. That shouldn't occur.

Rather, it should be a cry to go local.

So what's going on with meat?

Well, what is not going on is an increase in the price of beef on the hoof.  No, what's happened is another example of what we discussed in Part Two of this series, a disruption in the food supply chain.

Indeed, the food distribution system for meat sort of resembles a doubly frayed knot, and that's the problem.  Beef or pigs come in from producers all over the country. When they're ready to ship, they're sold to the second tier of the system which usually feeds them out.  From there they go, if you will, to the knot, or knots, which are the packers.

Now, a bit of disclosure, which also serves as an example.

My family has a close connection to the packing industry in a couple of ways. Today, we're a producer.  We raise cattle. But in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, we were packers.

My grandfather left his home in Dyersville Iowa for the first time around 1914.  He was 13.

Dyersville Iowa in 1912, when my grandfather would have been eleven years old and two years before he left school and first left Dyersville.

He left school because he was unhappy with the school itself.  That's another story and this isn't the time for it, but that was the reason.  He asked his parents if he could leave and go to work, and at that time and place, Dyersville Iowa of 1914 or 1915, they said yes.  It wasn't as unusual as it sounds

He went to San Francisco.  I don't know why, but he did. And when he got there, he took a job as an office boy for the Cunard Ship Line.

That seems really shocking, but the occupation of office boy, which we've touched on before, was as common white collar introductory job at the time.  I dealt with it, sort of, here:

15 year old office boy in  the office of N.Y., N.H. & H.R.R. coal yard, January 29, 1917.  My grandfather was doing this same job, about this same year, for the Cunard Steam Ship Company in San Francisco.  He was 13 years old.  A great grandfather had occupied the same job, a few decades earlier, also as a teenager, in an insurance company.

As  noted in that thread, two of my ancestors held this job and for both of them it was the introductory job into the office.  One of them, a maternal great grandfather, worked for the same company the rest of his life, rising to the position of CEO of it.  Andrew Carnegie secured his entry into the work world basically the same way.

In my grandfather's case, I know little about his time in San Francisco.  One thing that I think would surprise people, however, is that merely being on your own at an early age at the time didn't make you an indigent nor necessarily a candidate for a street gang.  Young workers were pretty common and while most of them lived at home, not all of them did. For kids like my grandfather, the Church provided a strong cultural center and likely explains how they were able to live away from home.  A good example of the central role of churches in the mid 20th Century can be found in another context in the film Brooklyn and while that film's plot strays to a degree from the likely course of its subjects, the strong central feature of the church, or more accurately Apostolic churches, for those who were members of them, is correct.

At some point, at least if a later obituary is correct, he returned to Dyersville.*  I don't know how long he worked for Cunard, but it was long enough that they gave him a framed portrait of a ship when he left.  So it must have been awhile.  Anyhow, he apparently returned to his large family in Dyersville.

Cunard ship Saxonia.  Cunard was a big ship line at the time.

In Dyersville, our family owned a store and some other business interests.  The family had come to Dyersville from Westphalia in the 1850s and established a successful general store there.  A successor store, a pharmacy, still existed the last time I checked.  The general store, being a general store, dealt in all goods, including livestock.

Again, according to the obituary,  he came back to Dyersville at some point.  I should know more, but the people I'd really have to rely upon for those details, are largely gone now.  Anyhow, he left again in 1924.  So, some time after 1915 he came back and he worked, most likely at the store with his parents and siblings, in Dyersville.  Of note, having been born in October 1901, even though he'd been working since at least 1915, he was still too young to enter the service in the fall of 1918 when the World War One ended.  At that time, he'd just turned 17 years old.

In 1924, at age 23, he went to work in  Denver Colorado for Cudahy Meat Packing.**

In 1925 he married Katheryn Hennessy, formerly of Leadville, Colorado, but who was now living in Denver with her family as part of a community or relocated Leadville residents.  Leadville was already past its prime at the time.  They likely met at church, indeed they almost certainly did, and the marriage had an interesting American pattern to it.  He was of 100% German Westphalian extraction.  She was of 100% Irish extraction.  They were both, however, Roman Catholics.  They were also unusually the exact same age, 24.

Victor Colorado in 1900, the year before my grandmother was born there.  Victor is very near Leadville.

His role there wasn't on the killing floor.  Rather, he went right into the office at age 23, which made sense as he already had office and business experience.  It seems shocking to us now, but this sort of thing wasn't unusual at the time.  He was familiar with business as he'd worked as an office boy, an established entry level white collar job, and he'd worked in a family business.  

He stayed there, rising up on the Denver operation, until 1937, in what amounted to a transfer, and worked for Swift Packing in Scottsbluff Nebraska (the plant was actually in nearby Gering).***  At some time after that he became interested in the packing plant in Casper Wyoming, which he bought in the early 1940s.  It's not exactly clear but it seems he may have bought it and operated it in Casper for a time before moving the family up from Scottsbluff,  likely because it was a very major expenditure.  Be that as it may, the family had moved up to Casper during World War Two.  My father had recollection of the home front in the region from both Scottsbluff Nebraska and Casper.  To complete the family side of the story, in 1949 he died at age 48, having just sold the creamery that he also bought.

 This is the former packing plant as it looks today.  It didn't look like this in the 1940s.  Indeed, the structures on the right, in this photo, were the original structures from the 1920s and were brick.  After the packing plant closed this property was purchased by a welding company which experienced a fire on the site a couple of decades ago.  It's current appearance reflects its time as a welding shop.

The back of the old packing house.  Packing houses were always built on rail frontage as cattle and beef were principally shipped by rail at the time.

The packing plant that he purchased had been built in 1921 by another family and it was also a family operation.  They were quickly up and running and marketed all meat products of all types, as well as related products like lard, directly to stores and directly.

The location was a logical one.  Casper was dead center in the the livestock range of Wyoming and also the center of business activity for the central part of the state.  The packing house took cattle in all over from central Wyoming and likewise marketed it all over as well.

In order to do that, of course, it had not only a plant, but associated farm ground as well.  Packing houses have to feed out cattle, and the company did.****

The original owners, as already noted, sold it after operating it for about twenty years, to my grandfather. We operated it, and acquired a creamery, until the late 1940s, when death intervened to stop it. At that time my father had just graduated from high school and was in junior college.  His death put the family in a financial crisis of sorts that they adjusted to by selling the plant.  

The plant itself continued in operation until the 1970s.  By that time the massive consolidation of the packing industry was well under way.  In its later years it made only Slim Jims, a beef stick product of General Mills.  While I was never really clear on what the story was, I know that as a child there were family grumblings about how the new owners were running it, with the though generally being that it wasn't being run well.  Having said that, as my father once explained to me, packing houses actually operate on a small economic margin, or at least they did.  So it was impossible after a time for local packing houses to compete against the consolidating national ones.

And that's a huge problem.

It's a huge problem economically, and as it turns out, it's a huge problem in a time of crisis, such as this one.

In the novel Red Storm Rising Tom Clancy imagined a third world war breaking out between the NATO powers and the Soviet Union. The war was precipitated, in the novel, by an Islamist engineer setting off a devastating terrorist attack inside of an oil gathering facility in the southern Soviet Union.  Clancy, whose novels were always extremely well researched, theorized that the consolidation of petroleum gathering infrastructure within the USSR made it vulnerable to a singular attack such as the one he imagined.  Clancy, being who he was, was probably correct on that.  Clancy went on to imagine that the attack largely took out Soviet oil production and caused the Soviets to gamble on an attack on the West before oil starvation put them in a position that would put them on their knees to the west.

The irony of this is that the American corporate capitalist infrastructure on some thing is similarly vulnerable and, as we've learned since the 1990s, not only to terrorism.  Indeed, so far the United States has escaped a devastating attack of that type and its frankly is probably largely immune from an attack disrupting the economy as the American economy is so vast and its infrastructure so large.  But it isn't immune from an attack of much larger, natural, forces.

Giant Gulf coast refinery at Port Arthur, Texas. The Gulf Coast from Houston in Port Arthur is practically one giant refinery.

We learned that, or should have, form Gulf hurricanes of the past two decades that had the impact of massively disrupting the petroleum refining infrastructure.  The US still refines petroleum in the nation's interior, but a massive shift has occurred in the system since the 1970s.  Up until then, petroleum tended to be refined near where it was produced as crude.  Starting with the 1970s, however, it started to be produced in giant refineries along the Gulf coast.  Now most of it is refined there and local refineries are basically hanging on until their practical extended life ceases.  The petroleum industry doesn't build refineries in Wyoming, Nebraska, or Oklahoma anymore, it builds them in Texas on the Gulf.

Indeed, just looking around will reveal that.  Casper Wyoming was the home of three refineries up until the 1970s.  Now it has one.  In the 1940s, and perhaps later, Laramie had a refinery.  That's long in the past.  Midwest and Glenrock once had refineries.  The same story could be played out all over Wyoming and the oil producing regions of the US.

Petroleum isn't meat, of course, but the analogy is interesting similar.  Natrona County Wyoming had four refineries, three in Casper and one in Midwest, as the oil was produced here and in neighboring counties.  It still is, but now it has only one. That oil is going elsewhere to be refined.

Likewise, Casper had a meat packing plant as the beef was raised here.  It still is.  Now that beef is going elsewhere.

And hence the infrastructure weakness.  When hurricanes damage Gulf refineries it hurts the entire nation.

And when a viral storm hits the United States and impacts a meat packing plant, that's now the case for the US as well.

This need not be the case at all.

All of the constituents to feed out and pack beef that existed in the 1940s in Wyoming and Nebraska still do.  Near Casper Wyoming, where we've been discussing, there are still not only many ranches, but there's also production agriculture to the west of the city.  Scottsbluff, which we've also been discussing, remains even more ideally suited for packing.

And if that was the case, that local packer would employ locals at wages that are better than Walmart wages.  Not only people in the plant either, but truck drivers and professionals whose work would be ancillary to the plant.  Indeed, drivers, lawyers, doctors accountants, etc. etc.

And farmers too, in an era in which farm ground is constantly under threat from development.

And yet the nearest meat packing plant today is the Monfort plant in Greeley Colorado, which belongs to the Brazilian ag production giant JBS.  That ownership alone says something, and not something good either.

When my grandfather owned the local packing plant, two Marine Corps veterans came home from World War Two and founded a local grocery store, something else that's a thing of the past.  When they did that, they found they were short of cash and couldn't stock their meat counter.  My grandfather provided them the meat on credit.  I.e., he let them pay for it when they later could, which they did.  They were so grateful for it that they mentioned it on a radio interview decades later and repeatedly mentioned to me whenever I happened to stop in the store.

A big chain packer isn't going to do that.

*As this story developed, he died in his 40s and perhaps because of that I not only never knew him, or my other grandfather who also died before I was born, but most of the information I have about him was from my father and his siblings.  Perhaps because of his early death, which occured on the birthday of one of my aunts, they did not speak a good deal about their early lives. They did some, but not as much as a person normally does.  I think the event was simply too painful.

When they did, it tended to come in the form of singular stories that were unlikely to be repeated again, and their focus varied by the teller.  Stories told by my aunts were on different topics than my father.   Details on their grandparents were extremely rare, and if they were told were much, much more likely to be about their grandparents in Denver, perhaps because my grandmother of that line lived much longer than my grandfather.  Indeed, they were more likely to speak about their Colorado grandparents and even some Colorado relatives than their early lives and father.  This began to change once they were in their fifties, but not before then.

This being the case, a few details here are pulled from an obituary, which includes a few details that I wasn't previously aware of.  Knowing that obituaries are always pulled together from details provided by a family under stress, I wonder if some of them are in error.  For example, the obituary relates that he left Cudahy in 1938, but I know that it was 1937.  The obituary also relates that he purchased the local packing plant in 1945, but another one pulled from Nebraska suggests that it was actually in the early 1940s and he moved the family up a bit later, probably due to economic reasons.  I know that he was working in Scottsbluff in the early years of World War Two but I also know that the family was well established in Casper by 1945, and I know that the plant had World War Two era contracts and regulations it had to adhere to, so I suspect the plant was likely purchased around 1943 at hte latest but that it took some time so save the money to buy a house in Casper and that likely came in 1944 or 1945.

The information that he was in Dyersville at age 23 and moved from there is solely taken from the obituary which omits any reference to his having lived in San Francisco. I suspect that at the time of his death San Francisco, which he certainly wasn't ashamed of given his keeping of the Cunard photograph in his office, was something that was simply omitted as too difficult to accurately relate at the time of his death.  However, I cannot discount that the age of "23" was an error for "13", which may have well have occured at the newspaper obit printing level.

**Cudahy was actually Armour Cudahy, with Armour being famous for meat products in other contexts, including the famous early 20th Century military "Armour Rations".  It had been founded in Omaha in 1887.  In 1981 Cudahy was purchased by Bar S Foods.  It was subsequently sold to Mexican packer Sigma Aliamentos in 2010.

***The Gering plant was recently demolished.  It had been out of use since the early 2000s.

****Today that farm ground has all been developed as part of the Town of Evansville Wyoming.

_________________________________________________________________________________
Related Threads:

The Pandemic and Food, Part Two.

The Pandemic And The Table, Part 1.

Bread Box. A Hundred Years Ago Question.

Store Bread in a Bread Box

In this post, on A Hundred Years Ago, the question is posed:

I’ve never owned a bread box, and just put plastic-wrapped loaves of bread on the kitchen counter. Are bread boxes just an old-fashioned way of storing bread, or do they help maintain quality?

I've never owned one either.  Nor did my parents.

I wonder what the answer to the question is?

I'm not a Harding fan. . .

and we'll inevitably get to some of his more problematic aspects as the century delayed day by day rolls on, but we thought we'd note that this speech, which we noted just today on this thread: Lex Anteinternet: May 14, 1920. Flights, would probably sell really well, with some slight adjustments, today:

Warren G. Harding.

Warren G. Harding, Presidential candidate for 1920, urged a return to normalcy in a speech at the Home Market Club in Boston.:

My countrymen, there isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational; sometimes there have been draughts upon the dangerous cup of barbarity, and men have wandered far from safe paths, but the human procession still marches in the right direction.  

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. It is one thing to battle successfully against world domination by military autocracy, because the infinite God never intended such a program, but it is quite another thing to revise human nature and suspend the fundamental laws of life and all of life’s acquirement. 

This republic has its ample task. If we put an end to false economics which lure humanity to utter chaos, ours will be the commanding example of world leadership today. If we can prove a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government rather than what the government may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded. 

The world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation, and that quantity of statutory enactment and excess of government offer no substitute for quality of citizenship. The problems of maintained civilization are not to be solved by a transfer of responsibility from citizenship to government, and no eminent page in history was ever drafted by the standards of mediocrity. More, no government is worthy of the name which is directed by influence on the one hand, or moved by intimidation on the other. 

My best judgment of America’s need is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet, to make sure of the right path. Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war, with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people. We want to go on, secure and unafraid, holding fast to the American inheritance, and confident of the supreme American fulfillment.

Blog Mirror: COVID-19 and China: A Chronology of Events (December 2019-January 2020)

COVID-19 and China: A Chronology of Events (December 2019-January 2020)

May 14, 1920. Flights

 "General William Mitchell, Chief of the Air Service today formally opened the big air tournament at Boling [ie. Bolling] field, the first of its kind to be held. Congressman P. P. Campbell accompanied General Mitchell on the opening flight."  May 14, 1920.

On this day Mexican revolutionaries captured the Carranza cabinet, but not Carranza himself who managed to elude capture, taking with him a body of seemingly loyal troops and coins from the treasury.

The rebels were offering Carranza safe passage into exile, but he was having none of it.

The rebels also on this day called the Mexican congress into session to solve the problem of leadership in advance of an election.

Warren G. Harding.

Warren G. Harding, Presidential candidate for 1920, urged a return to normalcy in a speech at the Home Market Club in Boston.:

My countrymen, there isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational; sometimes there have been draughts upon the dangerous cup of barbarity, and men have wandered far from safe paths, but the human procession still marches in the right direction.  

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. It is one thing to battle successfully against world domination by military autocracy, because the infinite God never intended such a program, but it is quite another thing to revise human nature and suspend the fundamental laws of life and all of life’s acquirement. 

This republic has its ample task. If we put an end to false economics which lure humanity to utter chaos, ours will be the commanding example of world leadership today. If we can prove a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government rather than what the government may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded. 

The world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation, and that quantity of statutory enactment and excess of government offer no substitute for quality of citizenship. The problems of maintained civilization are not to be solved by a transfer of responsibility from citizenship to government, and no eminent page in history was ever drafted by the standards of mediocrity. More, no government is worthy of the name which is directed by influence on the one hand, or moved by intimidation on the other. 

My best judgment of America’s need is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet, to make sure of the right path. Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war, with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people. We want to go on, secure and unafraid, holding fast to the American inheritance, and confident of the supreme American fulfillment.

Harding had entered the race some time earlier, but he was not doing well in it.

Harding campaigning in 1920.

The speech changed that, and its primary tag line, "a return to normalcy", became the theme of his campaign.  

The Republican nominee would have been Theodore Roosevelt, who by that time really didn't want it, but for his death in January 1919.  Suffice it to say, a return to normalcy would not have been the theme of Roosevelt's campaign, had there been one.

On the same day, Bulgaria ceded Western Thrace to Greece.

Storm Clouds

Yesterday we published this:

Lex Anteinternet: Gathering Storms.: Economists are openly speculating now that we may be entering a period of deflation. A drop in petroleum prices combined with a drop in so...

Today more disturbing headlines and news appeared in the Tribune.

Casper's Wyoming Machinery, a major industrial manufacturer in Wyoming, laid off 13% of its workforce.  This comes on the heels of all sorts of other layoffs, large and small.

On the same day, the City of Casper announced that its budget for next  year could fall 54%.  Cheyenne has already had layoffs.

Gathering Storms.

Economists are openly speculating now that we may be entering a period of deflation.

A drop in petroleum prices combined with a drop in some agricultural products prices at the producer level, which has not been felt at the grocery store, is fueling the concern.

"Great, lower prices!", tends to be the initial reaction to such news, but a prolonged period of deflation is always disastrous to an economy.

Brief deflationary period have occurred rarely in the past thirty years, but they've been very brief.  An economy with next to no inflation is ideal, but when you have that, you'll occasionally dip into deflation, particularly when your economy is dependant in part upon a product that's produced largely overseas and which has a volatile nature, which is the case for petroleum.  But prolonged deflation is usually a sign of something else, and that something else is a public that has decided its not spending any money.

And that is what economist are now worried about. 

With the COVID-19 Pandemic resulting in mass economic uncertainty, and what appears to be about 25% unemployment at least for the time being, a lot of people aren't spending money, or can't.  When either of those occur, prices drop by necessity.  But the prices dropping, in that environment, don't usually end up spurring purchases.  For people whose incomes are completely independent of the economy, and there are some in that category, their purchasing power is suddenly on the rise, but for most people, there's something else.

And that something else is an economic depression.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan. . .

a terrorist attacked a maternity ward in Kabul and killed sixteen people, including two infants.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for this so far but the range of suspects is pretty short. Suffice it to say, somebody who would do such a thing is a real bastard.  It's no surprise that nobody has claimed the act, even though the act itself is impossible to hide.

The Reassessors: St. Ignatius of Loyola

He was ordained a cleric at an early age, but received a release from his vows and became a soldier.  He was noted to be vainglorious in this period.  A battlefield wound lead to a long period of painful books during which his request for books about chivalry was met instead with religious works as the castle he was recuperating in had those and not the former.

This lead to a profound conversion, lead an austere life, dedicated himself to study, and ultimately returned to the clergy.  He founded the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.

May 11, 1920. Necessity, Long rides, and Representatives.

Necessity, Texas.  May 11, 1920.

Sailor Tony Pizzo passing through Washington on a Coast to Coast bicycle run handcuffed to his machine. The Handcuffs were sealed by Mayor Hylan in New York April 24th and were not to be opened until his return to that city.

 Prince Kalanianaole, Hawaii's delegate to Congress.  May 11, 1920. 

May 10, 1920. Carranza ousted, Flappers appear, Home Rule denied, Sims criticized.

On this day in 1920 it became clear that Carranza had been ousted from control in Mexico, the price he paid for trying to dictate who his successor would be.  Mexican rebels were now in control of 25 of 28 Mexican states.

We'll play out the story of Carranza, a major figure in Mexican history, over the next few days. Suffice it to say, however, it's hard to feel sorry for him.  He was a haughty arrogant person who was responsible, if indirectly, for the demise of one of the most admirable figures of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata, and now his story was playing out like that of those whom he'd replaced.

The pattern was also set by these events, although it had been by prior ones as well.  The Mexican Revolution was consuming itself.

Another place where a revolution was going on, Ireland, saw an attempt at reviving home rule as a solution when a bill to restore an Irish parliament was considered in London. That bill was defeated.

Ireland had its own parliament from 1297 until 1800, so in considering the bill, the British parliament was considering reviving an institution, on a wider grounds, that had ceased to exist 120 years prior with the Act of Union.

Irish history is really complicated, but the creation of the first Irish parliament really reflected the Anglo Norman ascendency in the country.  Ireland had no unity prior to the Norman invasion of the island and the Normans looked to the English crown for protection.  Over time the native Irish came to increasingly ignore the Anglo Normans and their parliament and as a result in 1494 the Irish parliament subordinated itself to the English one, effectively acknowledging English rule.  Following that, in 1541 English King Henry VIII, apparently not content with making a mess of things in England, declared a separate Irish Kingdom with himself at the head and began the long English attempt to dominate England and protestantise it.  That ultimately resulted in laws that banned Catholics, which the overwhelming majority of Irish were (and are), from occupying various professions, including that of parliamentarian, although the story is complicated as it did not occur all at once and things went back and forth over a long period of time in that context.

Oddly, Ireland was granted legislative independence in 1782, only to be joined to the British state in 1800 with the Act of Union. That eliminated the Irish parliament.  It didn't in any fashion end the complaints of the common Irish and even more of the more prominent Irish, who suffered under discriminatory legislation and second class citizen status.  Revolutionary movements sought to remove the English throughout the 19th Century and movements in Ireland and England were seriously considering "home rule" by the turn of that century.  That direction was firmly dominant just prior to World War One when the war put an end to the discussions, leaving Irish republicans ascendant.  Following the war the Anglo Irish War broke out and by this date in 1920 discussions on home rule were really too late.

In the US a drama was really playing out between Josephus Daniels and Admiral William Sims which dated back to Sims accusations that the US had not been prepared for the war.  While this controversy resulted in a lot of dramatic headlines at the time, Sims would emerge with an unscathed reputation and go on to a second tour as head of the Naval War College.

On this day the 1920s image of young women acquired a name.

Washington Post Photo, Miss Elizabeth Burrnett  wearing sash with a barrel labeled "Fill the Barrel" for Salvation Army fundraising campaign.  May 10, 1920.

Women's styles, and the presentation of young women in image, had been changing rapidly following World War One and probably at least partially due to it.  We've noted before that World War One saw a large percentage of women go to work to support the war and following the war there was a society wide restlessness that expressed itself in all things.  One thing that really was new was the concept of a young woman on her own.

It's really odd how this entire image has been morphed into "it was because of World War Two" when, at the same time, the events of the Roaring Twenties are really well known. We'll look at it elsewhere, but on this day the new on their own women acquired the nickname "flapper".

Oddly, flappers had probably been better presented already by the just released F. Scott Fitzgerald short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair.  But today the film The Flapper introduced the name.

The movie has a fairly typical melodramatic plot for the time involving a flirtatious 16 year old girl at a private school who passes herself off as being 20.  Probably not worth bothering with.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Brendan Catholic Mission Church, Jeffrey City, Wyoming.

Churches of the West: St. Brendan Catholic Mission Church, Jeffrey City ...:

St. Brendan Catholic Mission Church, Jeffrey City Wyoming.

This is St. Brendan Mission Church in Jeffrey City, Wyoming.  The Church is served by Holy Rosary Church in Lander Wyoming.

This is one of those photos here that isn't particularly good, as light conditions were completely wrong for the photo when I took it.  However, as I take these when the opportunity presents itself, I went ahead and photographed the church.  If I have the chance, I'll swap it out for a better photograph at some later date.

This small church appears to have been converted from a building used for some other purpose originally in small Jeffrey City.

The Best Posts Of The Week Of May 3, 2020.

The best posts of the week of May 3, 2020.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Trouble in the Red Hermit Kingdo...

And as the race heats up, mud files, and Twitter tweats. . .

The Tragedy At Kent State

Mid Week At Work. Their careers and lives. Lex Anteinternet: May 5, 1920. The Contest

The Reassessors. Smedly Butler

The 2020 Election, Part 7

The Pandemic and Food, Part Two.

May 8, 1945. Victory In Europe. Seventy Five Years Ago Today.

Pandemic

May 9, 1970. Strange Days.

President Nixon visited the Lincoln Memorial and chatted with protestors who were sleeping there in anticipation of a protest organized in reaction to the American and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The President encountered about nine protestors and chatted with then in the early morning hours.

Protests were occuring all across the country on this day in reaction to the Cambodian invasion and in reaction to the shooting at Kent State.

On this day, about 450 Canadian peace activist crossed into the United States at Blaine Washington, location of the Peace Arch, and committed acts of vandalism in the town.  The presence of Canadian peace activist was completely nonsensical and their act of vandalism contrary to the claimed spirit of their actions.  It reflected more on events in Canada than it did in the United States in which the formerly highly conservative country was rocketing into a state of liberalism in which it remains, although it is contested, that started under the leadership of Pierre Trudeau.  Canada, in the less than one hundred years prior to 1970, had fought in the Boer War, World War One, World War Two and the Korean War.  It opposed the Vietnam War in a way, although it's often forgotten that it contributed a hospital ship to the allied forces there at one time and its contribution in terms of military volunteers approximated the number of American draft evaders who sought refuge there.

Another Canadian protest occurred on the same day on Parliament Hill when Canadian pro abortion activist protested a recently passed Canadian law addressing abortion.  This occurred three years prior to Roe v. Wade in the United States. At the time, just ten years following the advent of birth control pharmaceuticals, the direction things were going in seemed obvious.  Canada would repeal its law eighteen years later and no Canadian federal law has passed since.  Since that time, however, support for abortion in the United States has reversed to the point that the majority of Americans oppose it and its only a matter of time until the weakly reasoned case of Roe is repealed and the matter is returned to the states.  Canada, which is highly liberalized, has been slower to follow but has started to, with there being a small resurgent conservative movement that has come about over issues such as this, but also due to really extreme social speech provisions enacted in Canadian law.

Showing how odd the times were, retrospectively, Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke to a disappointing crowd of 10,000. . . 100,000 had been expected, at Georgia's Stone Mountain Park.  The Park is the location of a giant carving into natural stone depicting Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Stonewall Jackson, all mounted.  It's impossible to imagine an American politician speaking there today.

The memorial had first been proposed in 1914, which was in the midst of the boom in Confederate memorial building across the south. As we've discussed elsewhere, most of the now controversial monuments to Southern rebel figures and to the Southern Civil War cause in general date from this period.  The monument itself does not, however, as its construction had an exceedingly odd history.  

Land for the monument was purchased in 1916 but a sculptor was not hired until the early 1920s, with that sculptor being Borglum, of Mount Rushmore fame.  He was fired over a financial conflict in 1925, however.  Congress got into the act in 1926 with the approval of the sale of commeorative coins for the effort thereafter.

After Borlum departed he destroyed his models which lead to the Association dedicated to the effort seeking to have him arrested.  In a sort of retaliation, the Association had the face of Lee that Borglum had partially completed blasted off of the mountain.  Subsequent sculptors took up the work but it lingered until 1958 when the State of Georgia purchased the area in order to complete it in a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education.  The state park was dedicated on April 14, 1965, 100 years plus one day after Lincoln's assassination in 1865.  The dedication of the monument occured in 1970, with Vice President Agnew appearing for the event, but it wasn't actually completed until March 3, 1972.  It's now the biggest tourist site in Georgia.

Now, of course, a lot of the smaller Confederate monuments have come down, but many more remain.  It's amazing to realize that as late as the 1970s there were still Southern public efforts to put them up, and that they were very associated with protest over desegregation.  The degree to which the support for the war had been lost was demonstrated by Agnew's failure to draw a crowed in the highly conservative south where opposition to the war had not been strong.

On the same day, Jimi Hendrix played in Ft. Worth and the Doors played in Columbus, Ohio.

May 8, 1945. Victory In Europe. Seventy Five Years Ago Today.

The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945.

Dwight Eisenhower.

The official surrender, however, came today.

Today In Wyoming's History: May 8:

May 8

1945    The German surrender becomes official.  President Harry S. Truman announced in a radio address that World War II had ended in Europe.  End of the Prague uprising.  Hundreds of Algerian civilians are killed by French Army soldiers in the Sétif massacre, ushering in what would ultimately become the French Algerian War.  In day two of rioting, 10,000 servicemen in Halifax Nova Scotia loot and vandalize downtown Halifax during VE-Day celebrations.

The Pandemic and Food, Part Two.

(Note, I actually thought I'd published this already. . . the Coronavirus is leading to a backlog of posts).

Until just the other day, I was apparently really naive about the degree to which Americans eat in restaurants.

Fourteen year old waitress, 1917. Nobody in my family has ever worked this occupation, and I was really clueless on the extent to which people dine out.

I probably shouldn't have been, as I'm well aware that lots of people eat out every day at noon, or a lot of days anyhow, and that a lot of people start the day with breakfasts from a fast food joint.

But I was.

That's likely because I never start the day at a fast food joint and never have.  I don't know if I've ever had an Egg McMuffin and frankly the thought of starting off at McDonalds doesn't appeal to me at all.  If I haven't eaten at home for breakfast, I just don't eat.

And I almost never eat lunch at a restaurant either.  I have, of course, but it's almost always in some sort of context, such as meeting a friend or as part of a work meeting, or something like that.  And for that matter, we don't eat out all that much for dinner either, although we do eat out a lot more than my parents did.

And at that, I'm often amazed by the amount of food people eat outside of dinner, the American main meal  I'll skip breakfast and lunch fairly routinely and not miss them, which means by extension I don't really eat much at those meals.  But I'll find that even people who bring in meals for lunch often eat really big lunches, often as much as I eat for dinner.  I couldn't do that.

All of which has lead me to being ignorant as to people's actual practices, even though they are there right out in the open for me to have observed.  Indeed, my father always ate lunch downtown during the work week, which was, in his case, always a bowl of soup at restaurant that he and his friends ate at every day.

I definitely differ there.  I hate soup.

Anyhow, waking up on this, it's now evident to me that a lot of people grab something from a fast food joint for breakfast, something else downtown at noon, and eat out at night a lot.  Some people eat out three for dinner, in one fashion or another, three or more times per week, which is just stunning to me.

The net result of this has been strain on the food supply system and is contributing to the odd sense of there being a shortage on the production end when in fact the shortages are in the dual distribution system.

This ought to give us some pause, and part of that may be the extent to which we've really suspended cooking at home for eating out in a major way.

Now, I don't want to suggest anything that leads to a crisis for working people, and people who work in restaurants, restaurants of all types, are certainly working people.  Indeed, right now, servers in restaurants are in a real state of crisis.

But relying on eating out to the extent that we do is not good.  It contributes to an unhealthy diet, no matter what we may think about what we're ordering, and it dissociates ourselves with our food.  No natural diet of any type is severed at the 50% rate through restaurants.

With all of this being the case, I wonder to what extent people will now reassess this part of their daily lives. As things open back up will people who have learned how to cook keep on doing it, or will they immediately given it up for something served through a drive up window on the way to work.

Beyond that, this really raises what we've called here the Distributist Lament from time to time.  We have a system that's obviously better served through the local, but in the name of efficiency and a false economy, we've defeated it.

There was a time when restaurants bought their food, often daily, from local grocers.  Now they don't do it at all.  The extent to which they don't do it never occured to me until now.

Indeed, the only real familiarity that I have with restaurant supply chains, other than a brief stint at Burger King, a job I truly hated, comes from the National  Guard and Army. The service bought its food locally when serving through GI kitchens, so I just assumed that restaurants did as well.  I don't know why I assumed that, but I did. I know why the service did, it wanted locals to know the economic benefits of a military establishment in their municipalities.

And that benefit would exist elsewhere, if that's how this was generally done and there was a single, not a double, food distribution system.

Something to consider.

And we'll have more to ponder on this topic as well.

Related Threads

The Pandemic And The Table, Part 1.

Burlington Northern to layoff 130 and to close two maintenance facilities in Wyoming.

The facilities are in Rozet and Guernsey.  

The slow down in the economy is being cited for the reason, brought about by the COVID 19 pandemic. Combined with that, the BNSF heavily relies upon coal hauling, which has been in decline with the decline in coal.

Suffice it to say, bad news for the employees and for the state as well.