Still there yet

It's interesting to note that among the very first politicians, and indeed the first "local" politician, to hit the streets in Beirut was. . . Emmanuel Macron, the President of France.

He received nearly universal praise from the Lebanese, something he doesn't receive in France.

While there, he called for a new French relationship with its former colony, and for reforms in Lebanon, all of which was well received by the Lebanese.

And hence the strange relationship between France, which sees Lebanon as an extension of itself somehow, and Lebanon, which looks upon is former colonial rulers in ways that often express more admiration than it gives itself locally.

August 7, 1920. What shall she do with it?

Leslie's:  "What shall she do with it?", James Montgomery Flagg

Friday Farming. Buzzard's Beat: Debunking the Biggest Myths About Raising Cattle

Buzzard's Beat:  Debunking the Biggest Myths About Raising Cattle

The anniversary of nuclear strikes on Japan. Was it justified and moral?

I'll be frank, I don't think it was.

Hiroshima let, Nagasaki right.

I find all of the arguments that are used to support the use of atomic weapons against Japan to be unconvincing.  For that matter, I find some of the counter arguments also unconvincing.  At the end of the day, what convinces me is that it was a deliberate use of a weapon calculated to cause mass loss of life against civilians.

The United States went to war in 1917 as it was horrified by the German targeting of ships indiscriminately.  But by the end of the First World War we seemed to have gotten over such things.  The U.S. kept up attacks in November 1918 right until the last moment of the war, causing the loss of life and losing lives that didn't need to die with an Armistice about to take effect.  Pershing made statements making it clear that his view was that killing Germans right up to the end was a laudable goal as they posed such a danger to peace.  Some would argue that the events of 1939 to 1945 proved him right, but the reality of it is that those November 11, 1918 deaths, were just deaths. They didn't make the world any safer.

But what they do achieve is to demonstrate how the First World War had changed the view of western, and largely Christian, society.  By 1918 we were used to the concept of death from above and below, and by means of chemical and fire.  In the interwar years people worried, and frankly assumed, that a future war would mean airborne attacks upon cities.  The Germans had in fact paved the way with this, as with so many other things, by shelling Parish with long range rail artillery. That had no tactical goal and the strategic one was terror.

By 1920 and throughout the 30s it was assumed that cities would be bombed in a future war and that came to be truly fairly early in World War Two.  All sides kept to to targeting only military targets at first, but during the Battle of Britain the Germans began targeting cities, something they at first did accidentally but soon did intentionally.  Ironically, that change in targets aided the British as it provided relief to industrial targets and served only to give the British people resolve.

The British retaliated with nighttime raids on Germany which were ostensibly aimed at industrial targets but nighttime accuracy was so bad that large scale civilian deaths were inevitable.  When the United States entered the war it attacked targets in Europe during the day in order to be more accurate, but wide scale civilian deaths still occurred.  Targeting civilians, however, was never the goal of the USAAF in Europe.

In the war against Japan it became one as the US grew frustrated with Japanese stalwart resistance to US advances and good sense.  Japan's industrial base was minor compared to other combatants and ultimately the still controversial decision to fire bomb Japanese cities was made by the US with the intentional goal of making Japanese workers homeless. No home, no work, was the concept. Whatever the logical merits of that argument are, the results are inescapable  Civilians were targeted in a way that would result in fiery death.

It is at that point, it seems to me, that we crossed into the clearly immoral.  By the time that action was taken Japan's industry was already destroyed and we were acting to a degree in frustration.  Even to the extent it wasn't, targeting people in their homes for death isn't a legitimate military action of any kind.

Nor is simply blasting a city into oblivion.  No matter what Nagasaki and Hiroshima contained in the way of military targets, that was the goal.  We thought that Japan simply wouldn't surrender and it was an attempt to teach them a lesson so they would.  It seemed to work.

We know retrospectively that by August 1945 the Japanese were looking for a way out of the war, but we didn't know that then, and we still don't know if they would have found it. Even after the two atomic strikes some Japanese military figures were against surrender and the Japanese military was not above using force to get their way.  They might not have surrendered.

And that might have meant a bloody campaign in Japan in 1946.

But, as horrific as it is to say, that would have been a military campaign, and a just one.  It wouldn't have been a campaign against civilians with the idea of killing a lot of them in order to force our point.

And it wouldn't have left us with the legacy of being the only nation in the world to use an atomic bomb, and the only one to have used atomic bombs against cities.

That doesn't mean that most of our role in World War Two, and indeed the roles of the Allies in general, wasn't just.  It was.  And that doesn't take away the legacy of the servicemen who fought in the war. They deserve to be remembered.  And it doesn't discount the fact that World War Two was so horrific that we can't even imagine a war like that today.  It's simply beyond us.

Rather, it should remind us that in times of stress and strain, it's easy to forget our better selves.  And later, it's easy to discount actions we've taken, if taken overall all in the context of a noble goal.

The Grim Measure of Force.

Yesterday, tragedy struck Beirut, Lebanon, a city that's had more than its fair share of misery.



As has been reported, the explosion was caused by a fire that spread and detonated a very large quantity of nitrate fertilizer stored at a warehouse on the docks.  The explosion was of a gigantic magnitude.  So large, in fact, that some Lebanese authorities at first wondered if they'd been hit by an atomic device.  That speculation, ironically enough, was strangely timely, as today is the 75th anniversary of the American use of an atomic device on Hiroshima.

So how does this historic event compare to other such blasts?

Should we even make that comparison for that matter? Well, we will, simply because perhaps such things are important to know.

As big as the blast was, and it was really huge, it still doesn't replace the accidental blast that's oddly analogous that occured at Halifax on December 6, 1917.  We marked the centennial of that tragedy here:

Roads to the Great War: Halifax: A Tragedy with a Unique Dimension

Roads to the Great War: Halifax: A Tragedy with a Unique Dimension: By most measures, the greatest non-nuclear explosion in history occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December 1917. The approximate casual...

Halifax was a 2.9 kiloton explosion.  Absolutely massive, and actually now larger than the lowest low yield atomic weapons in terms of their potential, but thankfully unexploited, yields. 

In contrast, the Beirut blast seems to be about 2.04 kt.  Massive, but still 1/3d less than the huge Halifax detonation.  Still, that yield is below the lowest, low yield nuclear weapons, although weapons in that class could legitimately be regarded as extremely low yield, in context.

Indeed, that's what makes them dangerous.  As big as the Beirut explosion was, it so far below Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we'll mention below, that there's no comparison. That fact is what might tempt the use of a very low yield nuclear weapon. . .which might provoke use of higher yield ones.

Hiroshima's mushroom cloud taken some minutes later and from a distance of six miles.

Hiroshima, whose 75th anniversary is today, was a 15kt atomic bomb.

Imagine that.  It was seven times as powerful as the blast in Beirut earlier this week.

August 6, 1920. The Denver Post Wrecked By Tramway Strikers.

The Denver Post was wrecked by Denver's tramway strikers.

And in Poland, the fate of Warsaw looked grim.

"STATE'S RIG COUNT REACHES ZERO"

Headline in the paper today.

Never thought I'd see that one.

August 5, 1920. Storm Clouds over Central Europe

On this date in 1920 it looked as if Britain and France were about to go to Poland's aid against the Red Army.

But as it turned out, Germany wasn't ready to see that happen. The Reichstag wouldn't allow Allied troops transit, in a vote taken this day, across its territory.  That effectively prevented an Allied mission to save the Poles.

The Poles would have to save themselves.

Six men standing in a row at one of the Capitol doors, Aug. 5, 1920

The Interior Conflict

"We'll be here, " Wilbarger said.  "You won't have to hunt us up"
"Wait a minute, " Call said.  "What's your horse brand, or do you have one?"
"I have one, " Wilbarger said".  "I brand HIC on the left hip."
"Are your horses shod?" Call asked
"All shod," Willbager said.  "Bring 'em if you see 'em".
"What HIC stand for?" Augustus said.
"Well, it's Latin," Wilbarger said.  "Easier than what you wrote on that sign."
"Oh," August said.  "Where'd you study Latin?"
"Yale college," Wilbarger said. Then he and Chick trotted off.
"I figure he's a liar,"Augustus said.  "A man that went to Yale college wouldn't need to trail cattle for a living."
"How do you know?"  Call said.  "Maybe the family went broke.  Or maybe he just wanted an outdoor life."

Lonesome Dove, page 105.*

Every now and then somebody I know will claim that I look like Theodore Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1904/05.  Colorado.

I don't see it myself and I'm certainly making no effort to.  I think people say that as I have a heavy mustache, as Roosevelt did, and I wear very round glasses, as Roosevelt also did.  Having said that, Roosevelt normally wore the now long gone pince nez type of glasses which were more or less the contact lenses of their day.**  He wore more conventional glasses when doing something outdoors.  I have adopted contact lenses, which I hate, recently because I have to work with a computer daily and that allows me to wear reading glasses and therefore not be constantly changing glasses during the day.  When I wear glasses, which I almost always do outside of the office, I wear B&L rimless temple frames, which Roosevelt did not and which I don't think even existed in his day.  I wear those as they have small lenses and I hate large lenses.  I also just like the style of them.

All of which basically goes to say that if you have a heavy mustache and you work in town, people are going to claim you look like Theodore Roosevelt or Pancho Villa, depending upon your mindset and maybe the color of your hair.

Emiliano Zapata.  Now that's a mustache.

Now, I like Roosevelt, so I don't want to be taken to be holding otherwise.  I just don't want to be regarded as a Roosevelt impersonator.  That's not, however, why I'm bringing this topic up here.

I've been posting some fairly grim posts here recently.  One of them might be, although I hadn't considered it to be, my post on my occupational history the other day.  About the same time that I posted that I made a similar remark to two friends of mine, who happen to be married to each other.  The husband in that family is a lawyer, but also a psychologist of a specific type, and had an immediate reaction to it, which the wife also did in less scientific terms.

The basic gist of it was that "you're an intellectual and would have been miserable in any other occupation other than the law".  He's said something similar in the past and, as he's a European, he expanded that out a bit to include "the clergy and the law".

That's a really common view in a broad sense and one of the interesting things about it is that the view actually operates in society to keep you doing certain things.  Another interesting thing about it is the belief, and perhaps it's true, that a person who has that sort of makeup, an intellectual frame of mind and a strong attraction to the outdoors, is in someway at war with themselves.

Maybe, however, it's the modern world that's at war with people of that mindset.

The Roosevelt analogy people make is interesting in that Roosevelt was afflicted with asthma as a child. So was I. Indeed, the only really good written description of what its like to have asthma is given in David McCullough's biography of Roosevelt's youth, Mornings on Horseback, which is an excellent read.  McCullough there, and Edmund Morris in his masterpiece first volume on Roosevelt, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, go on to describe how TR's father told him as a child that he "had the mind" but "didn't have the body", and he'd have to "make the body".  Roosevelt certain did that.  Anyhow, as part of that, he not only conquered his asthma, but he developed an immense existenail fondness for the outdoor life.

My parents never said anything like that to me, but what they did do was simply raise me normally and make sure that I did have physical activity, which was mostly swimming.  I developed an immense existential love of the outdoors simply by being around my father and by being raised in rural conditions.  My attraction to the outdoor life, however vastly exceeded that of my father's, which is saying something.  I've never gotten over it in any fashion and its as intense now as it was when I was a teenager.

Morris notes in his book, although I'm not sure of where the quote can be found, that when Roosevelt was a young man an observer noted to him that as a man with a strong mind and a deep attraction to the outdoor life, he'd always be in an internal struggle.  If that's true, Roosevelt certainly managed it well.  But is that true?

Well, it may be.  But maybe people just don't like the idea very much.

Indeed, it's true now, it wasn't always true.  For one thing, people's careers tended to be much more fluid at one time and for that reason people didn't really think it weird to be a lawyer and a farmer simultaneously.  John Adams was.  And there's any numbers of similar examples.

I don't find that to be anywhere near the case now, although there are examples.  Indeed, usually a person who tries to do two things such as that is regarded as occupying the more outdoorsy one as a hobby or a retirement position.  And because its regarded as a hobby, or retirement, avocation, it's not taken seriously.

Cowboy, 1887.  At this time being a cowboy was a glamourous occupation.

Even rarer are examples of people who have pretty high intellects and opt for something that doesn't seem, in society's view, to reflect that.  Society tolerates, although only barely, a person being in agriculture if they were born into it. So a person born a farmer can stay in the family business.  But somebody breaking into it from the outside is pretty rare.  Rarer yet are people who simply enter an outdoor career as a "hand", so to speak, and economics is part of that.  Hands don't get paid as well and therefore people tend not to enter those fields, except perhaps temporarily, if they can do something else.  It's the great economic motivator.  Put another way, being an actual cowboy, as opposed to being a rancher, puts you in a state of lifelong poverty that most people will probably seek to avoid.

This has particularly been the case since World War Two.  Prior to the Second World War entire classes of Americans opted for occupations that didn't require university in part because not as many did, but in part also because it was foreclosed to them.***

Indeed, one of the great myths of the practice of law is that it's always been a profession of the elite. That's far from true.  For much of the post World War Two era it was the blue collar world's introduction into the white collar world. Indeed, a lot of blue collar parents pushed their children into it under the belief that: 1) it didn't actually involve work, and 2) every lawyer was rich.  Neither of those things was in any fashion true.  At any rate, if you know lawyers whose parents came of age during the Second World War or earlier you probably know somebody whose experience is just that.  A lawyer I practiced with for years had a father who was a career railroader.  Another one had a father who was a bar owner.  There are a lot of such examples.

Mistaken impression or not, what's come to be the case is a subtle, or sometimes outright, push towards certain types of careers.  Adding to that push is the fact that our modern world has eliminated outdoor jobs at a blistering rate so that people are really left with a selection of indoor ones, not all of which everyone can occupy.  You have to be good at math, for example, to be an engineer.

That also has meant that the push exists in a continual and understated way that few really grasp.  It's part of our culture.  In the film Stand By Me, for example, we learn that one of the early teen kids whose really smart, but from a blue collar family, overcomes what is portrayed as a negative fate by becoming, of course, a lawyer.  That's all the more there is to it. He's smart, so he becomes a lawyer.  Voila, success.

And maybe it is, but a person has to at least wonder how we got to this point.  And maybe that should give us pause.

In other words, in 1982 or 83 (can't remember which, probably 83) my CC history teacher suggested that I consider a career in the law based upon my written papers, was he acting responsibly?  No doubt he believed so, and I believe now he was as well. But he didn't really know me.  And its remarkable that only two figures I knew at the time every commented on it.  One was a geology professor I knew really well, also at CC, whom I caught back up with as I was getting to go to law school.  He mentioned another student who had done the same (I didn't know him) and regarded the decision with disdain.  The other was the mother of one of my friends whom I'd known forever, and who I, as an adult, regarded as a friend.  "I don't see you as a lawyer" was her comment, although I later became her lawyer.

________________________________________________________________________________

*Hic translates as "this".

**Which are oddly making a comeback as portable reading glasses.

***An aspect of that change is that its now the case that single wage earner households have become rare and the sort of situation that existed mid 20th Century, in which a person might work in some of them and still enjoy a middle class income on one job has ended.

Cooking Tech. How things have changed in the kitchen over the past two. . . or maybe three, centuries.

We've been taking a look at cooking and stoves here recently, getting back to more of the roots of this blog and its purpose.  

Frankly, we'd been remiss in doing that.  It's one of those areas that we should have explored, and in fact we did a little, but we didn't know, what we didn't know.  Or at least we didn't know it very well.

Back on August 8, 2009 (yes, this blog has been around that long, and actually as there's a prior variant of it, even longer than that), I posted an item here entitled The Speed of Cooking.  I'm resetting it out here:

The Speed of Cooking

I received an unexpected and surprising of how much things have changed even in my own lifetime this week, and in the kitchen at that.

Last week I happened to have to go to Safeway to buy some odds and ends, one of which was breakfast cereal. I'm bad about buying the same kinds again and again, so I decided to add some variety. It's been fall like here, so I decided to go with hot cereals for a change.

But not only did I decide to go with hot cereals, but I bought Cream of the West and Irish Oatmeal. That is, I did not buy instant Cream of Wheat, instant Oatmeal or quick oats.

Cream of the West is like old fashioned Cream of Wheat, except its whole wheat. Frankly, the taste is identical to "regular" Cream of Wheat. Irish Oatmeal, however, is really porridge, and it has to be cooked. It actually has to be cooked and allowed to stand, so it isn't speedy.

Anyhow, my kids have never had "regular" Cream of Wheat. They like "instant" Cream of Wheat, which has an odd texture and taste in my view. Sort of wall paper paste like. Anyhow, my son cooked some Cream of the West the first day I did, with us both using the microwave instructions.

He hated it. He's so acclimated to the pasty instant kind, he finds the cooked kind really bad.

Both kids found the porridge appalling. They're only familiar with instant oatmeal, and they porridge was not met with favor at all. I really liked it. It's a lot more favorable than even cooked oatmeal.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that all this quick instant stuff is really recent, but we're really used to it. During the school year my wife makes sure the kids have a good breakfast every day, which she gets up and cooks for them. But it never really sank in for me how much our everyday cooking has benefited from "instant" and pre made. Even a thing like pancakes provides an example. My whole life if a person wanted pancakes, they had the benefit of mixes out of a box. More recently, for camping, there's a pre measured deal in a plastic bottle that I use, as you need only add water. A century ago, I suppose, you made the pancakes truly from scratch, which I'll bet hardly anyone does now.

A revolution in the kitchen.

Early posts here, as you can see, tended to be short.

Now, since that time I've also posted a major thread here on the revolution in the home, that became a revolution in the workplace, in the form of the advance of domestic machery;  That thread, which Iv'e linked into numerous others, is here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Post have grown in length, as you can also see.

Anyhow, given all of this, the ways that cooking has changed over what really amounts to a relatively short time frame should have occured to me.  And it sort of did, as I noted in this "Maytag" entry:

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.

Wood burning stove in Denver.  Typical pre 1920 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1930 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1940 stove.

Turn of century advertisement for stove polish.  Cleaning a wood burning stove would be no treat.

Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.

 World War Two era propaganda photograph, trying to depict an inattentive woman letting toast burn, and therefore wasting resources.  Note how complicated this electric toaster is.

You'll still occasionally see old fashioned toasters in sheep and cattle camps, and probably elsewhere. They just hold the bread so that the toast can be toasted over a burner.  Pretty simple, and not much of a labor saving device, right? Well, consider the totality of it.  To toast you had to watch the toast, rather than just slip the bread down into the toaster.

For that matter, everything was relatively labor intensive save for boiling and roasting, which is probably why things tended to be boiled or roasted.

 Man cooking in a cow camp for cowboys.  He's using two cast iron dutch ovens (I still use one routinely) to cook over a fire.  This photo first appeared on this blog in 2009 in a very early entry on cooking changes.

Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

But nonetheless, it didn't really occur to me that the cast iron stoves of early 20th Century, and late 19th, were an innovation in and of themselves, nor did I really think much about what cooking was like before that.

The recent A Hundred Years Ago thread on igniting a coal stove caused me to ponder this and take a look at what that was somewhat like.

Somebody already has, of course, and in this very interesting Internet article:

Foodways in 1910

I just linked this in recently to another post here.  One of the things that's interesting to me about it, in an odd sort of way, is that its on a website that's sponsored by a woodburning cookstove manufacturer.  Frankly, looking into this pretty much convinces me that I want nothing to do with wood, or coal, burning stoves, but anyway.

It did not occur to me, as part of that cast iron stoves of all types are really a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.  But of course, they'd have to be.  It's not like average people are going to cast their own stoves.  So how far back do they really go. Well, that article gives us a pretty good look at that, noting:.

Most American homes did not have stoves until well into the 19th century, so cooking was done in an open hearth, using heavy iron pots and pans suspended from iron hooks and bars or placed on three-legged trivets to lift them above the fires. Pots and pans were made mostly of heavy cast iron. Along with long-handled spatulas and spoons, most kitchens featured long-handled gridirons to broil meat and toasting forks to hold slices of bread.

Though some women used Dutch ovens and some had clay ovens built outside, until after the Civil War when stoves with ovens became more common, people ate pancakes more often than bread. Because bread was hard to bake at home, most towns had bakeries. Bread was often the only prepared food that could be bought in town

That's a different type of cooking entirely.

And a different style of eating, for that matter.

Or, for those who use a cast iron frying pan alot, maybe not.

Well, anyhow. . .

Because it isn't all that long ago, it's one that we know a fair amount about, historically, even if we don't think about it much.   And due to reenactors of one kind or another, and historical sites that are accurate, we also can observe ir or even experience it if we wish to.  And thanks to the excellent Townsends series of vlogs about the late 1700s in North America, we can view the topic if we wish to.  Indeed, they've done a comparison and contrast edition of Colonial v. Modern kitchens, which is well worth looking at:

The part of this that's the real shocker, in my view, is the heath.  I.e., fires on bricks right in a house.

It's another one of those things I never would have thought of.

The video mentions smoke, which must have been a constant feature of life before modern stoves.  I've already mentioned the smoke from wood and coal burning stoves, but smoke from a hearth would be right in the house.    Life must have been. . . smokey.

And more than a little dangerous.

Before we move on, on that, we'll have to note cast iron here.  I love cast iron and indeed one of the additional "pages" on this blog is devoted to it.

Cast iron has been around for a long time, of course, but I frankly don't really know how long.  I can find references to it in Asia going way, way back.  At least 2,000 years.  It shows up for the first time in English in 679, but that use didn't refer to a cooking vessel, but a vessel of another type.  By 1170, however, it was showing up in references to cooking vessels.  The Dutch Oven was actually patented in 1708, later than I would have thought, however. At any rate, they've been around for awhile, and in their modern form are highly associated with sand casting, something that was coming in during the 17th Century.

There was obviously cooking in vessels before cast iron, but as this isn't the complete history of cooking from antiquity until the present day.  For the history we're concerned with, cast iron was undoubtedly the default cookware.  Indeed, it's well worth noting that Dutch Ovens were one of the most popular trade items with Indian tribes.  People think of guns, but cast iron was really valuable and rapidly became the Indian cookware of choice once it was available.

Anyhow, the important thing here is up until the Industrial Revolution really took hold, people cooked with fire in ovens and on hearths.  The fuel source was, according to the Townsends, whom I trust to get it right, wood or sometimes charcoal.  That would impact the type of cooking you'd do, of course, but perhaps not quite as much as I imagined as cooking over wood or charcoal does leave you a lot of options.

Cast iron stoves seem to have come in during the 1830s, as industry began to really change the average American's daily life.  It would be a mistake to think, however, that everyone had them overnight. They were expensive and, frankly, wouldn't have fit the way the average person's house had been built at the time.  Still, they may have come in pretty rapidly.  Just imagine what a revolution in cooking and simply life they meant.  No more building fires on the floor, for one thing, and that's a pretty big thing.  A fire that was more reliable, contained, and safe is another.

By 1900 coal was the main fuel for stoves and every family had one.  That was a big change over a period of time of less than a century.  By 1930, however, gas was replacing coal as the fuel for stoves, and no wonder.  It was cleaner and it didn't involve the constant endless cleaning that a coal stove did.  And for the first time some sort of heavy smoke didn't have to be contended with.

It's really gas stoves that brought in modern cooking.  Gas sped up cooking, for one thing, and it sped up the decision making process for meals as well.  Without  having to bank the stove and build the fire, and all of that, cooking, which had been an all day process was reduced down to one that was much less time consuming.  Electric stoves, which started to come in about the same time, accomplished the same thing.  Still, during the 1940s 1/3 of Americans still cooked with coal or wood, probably a partial effect of the Great Depression which slowed the introduction of new technology.  

Now, of course, hardly anyone does.

August 4, 1920. Resolving disputes.

Conbro Clothing in Washington D. C.  August 4, 1920.

The US and the UK entered into a strange conflict as the Navy was ordered to block the British ship Colonia from laying an underground cable for Western Union from Miami to Barbados. The US had not licensed the cable.

The dispute would drag on for two years.

In Mexico, President de la Huerta, having learned a lesson his predecessors had not, removed all military officers from his cabinet, save for his minister of war, and sent them overseas on diplomatic missions.

Bikini's in Baggs? Midriffs in Medicine Bow? Rare beauties in Rawlins?

Hmmm. . .

Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition features Carbon County

Really?

Shoot, last I saw there was a warning about blue algae at Seminoe.

August 3, 1920. A mostly grim Tuesday.

The headlines were fully correct.  The Red Army was advancing on Warsaw and a Soviet victory appeared inevitable.

In Center Texas, a mob broke into the jail and lynched 16 year old Lige Daniels who had been in the jail for suspicion of murder since July 29.  The grisly image of his lynching was turned into a postcard.

He was totally forgotten until 1999 when his image appeared on the cover of the book Without Sanctuary which was written by an antique dealer who had collected such images that had seen such use.

On the topic of lynching, this map from a report to Congress shows the "Red Record of Lynching" in this time frame.

Probably some of this is surprising, but in other ways it isn't.  If states show up where lynchings are a surprise, as in the 34 for Wyoming, keep in mind that a lynching is an extrajudicial murder and actually not a racist hanging.  Many, and indeed in the South undoubtedly most, were racist murders, and some of those, as we've recently seen, extended outside of the South. But they'd also include the murders of others by any means that were extrajudicial in nature.

President Wilson's physician, Admiral Cary Travers Grayson, went on faction, the President now being deemed recovered from his stroke.

Admiral Grayson

The news broke that Mildred Harris of Cheyenne, originally, had sued Charlie Chaplin for divorce.

Given her tender years at the time of their marriage, if the whole affair had occurred today it would have been part of the Me Too set of stories.

Enrico Caruso acted a caricature artist at a benefit fair.

The Big Picture. Nashville Terminal, 1905.

Nashville terminal, 1905

Cooking Stoves in the 1910s

So, following up on this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror/ A Hundred Years Ago: 1920 Direction...: Nice coal burning stove.  This highly modern AGA stove wasn't introduced until 1922 and they're still being made. This is just ...

In the 1910-1920 time frame what would have been the most common fuel for cooking stoves?

My guess is wood, but until the other day, I hadn't contemplated coal fire cook stoves even existing.

Looking into this, I found an interesting article on this on a site called On Line Old House.  Another interesting one appears here, in an article called Foodways in 1910.  Both articles make similiar points, but this one noted:

Coal became more and more popular through the 19th century as railroads brought it from distant mines and as forests near cities were cut down. By 1900 it had replaced wood as the main source of home energy. More and more, the household was becoming dependent on spending money in the market rather than upon family members’ labor. People switched to coal because it took less work than wood. It was a more concentrated energy source, so less of it needed to be hauled. Also, it burned longer and more evenly. Cooking was easier and tending the fire took less time.

Yet another interesting article appears here, noting how technologically advanced stoves were actually becoming, and some were supposedly capable of burning gas, coal or wood.  And, by that time, electric stoves had appeared.  On the same site, another article appears, that notes:

The typical cookstove in the 1880s was cast iron or steel and “was a wood- or coal-burning monstrosity” (Cohen, 1982, p. 19). The typical urban house in the 1880s used a coal-burning stove, although it might have had a gas range if it was very modern (Cohen, 1982, p. 5). In the 1890s, housewives across America most likely continued to cook on a coal or wood-burning stove (Cowan, 1983, p. 155). Cooks brought in wood or coal, fed the fuel into the stove by hand, and had to carry ashes away, which made it hard to keep the kitchen clean. Temperatures were hard to regulate (Cohen, 1982, pp. 19-21). During the nineteenth century, coal became more popular than wood because of availability and price, and the fact that coal was a more concentrated fuel that burned longer (Strasser, 1983, pp. 40-41).

All of this is really a surprise to me as I've simply never thought of coal as being a primary cooking fuel.  Apparently in urban areas it was.

Yet I still feel like I'm missing part of the picture here for some reason.

So, if a person lived in the Rocky Mountain West in 1910-20, would they have been firing their stoves with wood, or coal, to heat up that pot of coffee in the morning.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Belfield North Dakota.

Churches of the West: St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Belfield North Dakota.:

St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Belfield North Dakota.

There are at least two Lutheran churches in tiny Belfield Montana, including this Prairie Gothic church.

Best Posts of the Week of July 26, 2020.

The best posts of the week of July 26, 2020

Misunderstanding demographics

Depicting Jesse James

Forty years ago right now I was between my junior and senior years of high school trying to decide what I was going to do for a living.

What are you reading?

Blog Mirror/ A Hundred Years Ago: 1920 Directions for Building a Fire in a Coal Stove

The 2020 Election, Part 8

Pandemic, Part 3.

It is now completely impossible to view the shift away from an agrarian society. . .

August 1, 1920. Denver Tramway workers go on strike.

Denver Tramway Building in Denver, which now houses the giant Denver REI outlet.

Workers for Denver Tramway, the cities streetcar company, went on strike on this day in 1920.

Founded in 1886, Denver Tramway had expanded aggressively and become a monopoly in the city.  Its workers founded a union in 1918 and were demanding fare increases in order that their wages could be raised.  Denied their goal, they went out on strike on this day.

 Cable car barn on 14th and Arapahoe.

The company responded by bringing in strike breakers, with the first street car piloted from the cable car barn at 14th and Arapahoe by strike breaker John "Black Jack" Jerome, whom the company had hired to organize strike breakers.  The strike would soon turn violent and up to 1/3d of the cities police reported by August 6 to have received serious injuries.  Denver's mayor called for armed citizens to enforce the peace on that day and Federal troops arrived later that day and restored order.

Cheyenne State Leader from August 1, 1920, noting that strike breakers were being brought in.

The net result was that the union was broken and would not be reorganized until 1933.  Seven Denverites were dead, all of whom were in the nature of bystanders to the violence.

Jerome, who was born Yiannis Petrolekas in Greece, would go on to have a successful career in his dangerous profession.  A poor immigrant to the US who had arrived in 1905, he had first sought his fortune in aviation but in 1917 he changed his name and founded the Jerome Detective Agency.  Having worked in the streetcar industry, he offered its services to strike and union breaking, which made him a rich man.  His company expanded during this time and at one time even employed Dashiell Hammett, prior to his becoming famous.

He invested in real estate and, during the depression, in horse and dog racing.  In 1933 he returned to Greece a rich man, while still retaining business interests in the United States.  He died in San Francisco in 1953, his funeral delayed as an undertakers union went on strike in protest over his having broken a strike of theirs in prior years.

The Pandemic and Outdoors

Fish and Game agencies are reporting a big increase in license sales as people who have been cooped up due to Coronavirus, or whose regular activities have been curtailed.  In Wyoming big game applications increased by about 10%.  Colorado, which has put in place a new regulation requiring users of state game agency managed lands to hold a license, saw fishing licenses increase by 90,000.

All in all this is a good thing as it means people are getting out.  It also means, however, that some licenses are now a lot harder to get, which is frustrating if you are trying to get one.

Something else that's difficult to get now if is fishing gear.  Last Sunday I bought a new spinning reel as the one I had on a rod (well, actually I have this problem with a couple rods) was 40 years old and had quit working right.  It turns out that there's been a run on this type of equipment and the one I bought was the display model, the last one left.  I guess it's been like this for months.  I had no idea.

The salesman at the store was predicting that next year he thought there's be a lot of kayaks and outdoor gear for sale.  I hope he's wrong  While I like having the outdoors to myself, I also think it's a good thing that people are rediscovering it.  I hope that rediscovery sticks.

July 31, 1920. Sojourns

Bearpaw Mountains, Montana.  July 31, 1920.  Viewing scenes like this before the widespread introduction of the automobile was a fairly involved endeavor.  After the automobile. . . not so much.

The hottest month of the year was coming on, and people were getting out in automobiles, still a new innovation in 1920.

And accordingly still being celebrated on the cover of magazines.

In a hot region of the United States, the U.S. border with Mexico, Laredo, Nuevo Laredo and Ft. McIntosh found themselves being photographed.

Cities of Laredo Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. July 31, 1920.

Fort McIntosh, Texas, 1920.  This post dated to 1849 and was named after a U.S. Army officer of the Mexican War.  It's now part of the Laredo Community College.

At the same time it looked like the Mexican conflict in Lower California was cooling down.

Worried about the male casualty rate of the Great War, France banned every type of contraceptive.  Part of that concern was founded in the fact that France's pre war birth rate was at 2.5 children per woman, which is statistical replacement, not growth. France had slipped below replacement during the war, and it never returned to it, pointing out something that I discussed in another post here earlier this past week.

Communism continued its bloody rise as lands went over to it and others hoped to take lands into it.  Byelorussia saw the formation of a local Communist Party on this day following the recent occupation of Minsk by the Red Army. The Communist Party remains strong there to this day.  In the UK, the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed.  It reached its high water mark in 1946 with 60,000 members, but fell so low that it disbanded in 1991 following the fall of the Soviet Union.

It is now completely impossible to view the shift away from an agrarian society. . .

Experimental farm, Willson North Dakota.  1914.

as anything other than a tragic mistake, at best.

We've exchanged a life outdoors and close to nature for one indoors that's artificial.  We've lost our connection with nature in its real, and often not always kind, but always existentially beneficial, sense.  We've lost our connection with other animals in the same way.  In the process, we've made ourselves increasingly physically and mentally ill.  We know that, and in struggling to deal with it, we're moving in the opposite direction.

We've forgotten who are neighbors are.  We don't found real bonds of love with anyone.  We've forgotten what a community really is, as we don't live in them.  We have no connection with the place or the land.  We don't understand ourselves as creatures.  We're obsessed with money even when we claim we aren't.

The past was certainly not perfect by any measure.  And the present certainly isn't.  This year, 2020, has been a disaster.  A horrible pandemic that originated in the densely packed cities of China spread rapidly through the densely packed cities of the rest of the globe, and while we struggle to deal with it, the best we can come up with is to hide indoors.

Perhaps it's time to really reconsider what "progress" is, and where we're progressing to.

Indicators

According to a statistic kept only since 2005, and therefore of some doubtful value, Casper's economy was at its all time worst since the statistics started being kept.

Again, in order to have real value, more than fifteen years would really be required.

Nationally, Second Quarter economic figures for the country were at historic lows.