Blog Mirror: The Good Old Days.

The Good Old Days

- July 08, 2021

Among the blogs linked in to our companion blog Lex Anteinternet is the blog of the Adam Smith Institute.

I'll confess when I linked it in, I'd run across it and had confused it with another entity, perhaps The Philadelphia Society.  No matter, this British institution celebrates the thinking of Scottish economist Adam Smith, a person whom free marketers herald, and with good reason.

In terms of economics, I'm a distributist, which puts me in a group of about five people or so, all of whom have to spend endless time, if the topic comes up, just trying to explain what distributism is.  Distributism, a species of free market economics, hasn't been popular in the main since the Second World War, and to compound the problem of its obscurity, its not only saddled with an unfortunate name, but it attracts people who are sometimes on fringe of wacky, or not outright wacky.  For example, as its modern founders were Catholics (Chesterton and Belloc), and English, it'll attract very conservative  Catholics who have strayed into thinking they are monarchists.  As Belloc had an absurdly romantic concept of the Middle Ages, and as some Belloc fans think everything he said must be accepted without analysis, perhaps there was some inevitability to that, and to a completely inaccurate view of what Medieval economics were like (and I do mean completely inaccurate).

Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society posts some really thought provoking items, and todays' entry is not exception.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE RIGHT NOW - AND DON'T FORGET IT

I'll admit, I don't really fully agree with what the headline relates, but in some significant ways, this is really correct.  They correctly note, for example:

We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.

They go on to honestly note, however:

The good old days are now.

However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:

People had lower expectations and were less bombarded with images of all the other lives they could be aspiring to.

The nub here is that second important lesson of economics, there are always opportunity costs. The true price of something is what is given up to get it. If we have more choices then the price of gaining any one of them is giving up many more of those alternatives.

Here's an interesting item on this:

This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.

The article doesn't really draw any conclusions, save for one, these are the "good old days".  And it makes some pretty solid arguments.

All of this is in reply to a post in The Guardian, which posed the question of "when", or "what" were the good old days. [1].   It wanted reader comments on the same.

The Guardian is a notoriously left wing newspaper with frequently very radical ideas.  It's gained global circulation in the age of the Internet, and it now is fairly widely read in the US, helped in part by the fact that it lacks a "pay wall", unlike the Washington Post or New York Times.  My point here isn't to criticize those latter papers, but to simply note that's how The Guardian is now read by the same folks in rural Wyoming who read the NYT.  Indeed, perhaps they're more like to read The Guardian, even though its radically "green" position is likely to make some folks pretty upset locally and they are, in my view, often way off in left field.[2]. 

Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society likely is correct that in all sorts of substantial ways, we're in the good old days right now.  But it is interesting that female happiness is declining.  And what its declining to is the rate of male unhappiness.

A couple of years we reported on the finding that workplace discontent is way up over 50% in the United States. That makes it seem like Joanna might be right in her comment to Peter in Office Space that "everyone hates their job", but if that's true, it's really distressing, to say the least.

The Guardian item brought a lot of replies, and its clear that a lot of people really do look back on a prior era, material advances not withstanding, as happier than the current one.  Some people cited the 1950s, which seems to often hold this status in people's recollections, in spite of the really scary Cold War, the hot Korean War, and for the British the falling apart of the British Empire all being a feature of it.  One person commented that it was the 1970s, which wouldn't occur to me, as I lived through the 70s and have a pretty good recollection of it.

Indeed, there's a good case to be made that "the good old days" were the days in which you were young and without burdens, as your parents took care of them, or some past era you didn't experience, reflected through a mirror, inaccurately, with the bad things filtered out.  There are, for example, people who are real fans of the 1940s, and the 1940s were generally horrific on the main.  The British often look fondly back at the 40s, I'd note, as, at least in modern times, it really was "their finest hour."  Be that as it may, if you were on a beach at Dunkirk hoping not to become a casualty or a German prisoner of war, it would have been unlikely to be seen as a nifty time, at the time.

But I digress.

Focusing on the rising level of female discontent, the Adam Smith Institute correctly notes the following, in my view.

There are those who take this to mean that society should regress, to where those opportunity costs are lower and therefore we would be happier. The correct answer to which is that 50% child mortality rates did not in fact make people happier.

We’ll take the vague unease of having so many choices over parents having to bury half their children, thank you very much, we really do think we’re all truly happier this way around.

That's pretty hard to disagree with.

What that comment means is that the calls by those who would really return truly to the past are misguided due to the horrors of the past.  One of those was high infant, and female, mortality.

Both of those factors are well known but easily forgotten in romantic recollections of the past.  Indeed, its interesting to see how this has evolved over time.

To set things in a bit of context, if we went back, let's say, to the 1700s, we'd find that the normal state for men and women to live in was, not surprisingly, marriage.  No matter what moderns may like to believe, this is the normal state and for a society on thinner resources, it was actually the only one really safe if people were to yield to their reproductive instincts in any fashion.  This is not a surprise.

What might be a surprise, however, is that remarriage by males was extremely common at the time due to a high female mortality rate mostly associated with childbirth.  I.e., lots of women died in childbirth and the men usually went on to remarry.  It must of hung like a cloud over pregnant women like nothing else.

Additionally, infant mortality was really high.  Indeed, a lot of the illusion that we now live longer is based on the massive reduction in the deaths of infants and young children.  Take those figures out, and average lifespans aren't much different than they are now.  Additionally subtract those figures for women who died in childbirth and this is even more the case.

Not too many women in developed countries now die in childbirth and infant mortality is also way down.  We know this intellectually, but we have a hard time grasping it in real terms.  I don't know of a single person, personally, who has died in childbirth.  I know of couples that have lost infants in childbirth, but not many.

So the Adam Smith blogger certainly has a point.

But it also begs a point.  If being free from the high risks of death in childbirth and the risk of losing an infant aren't making women happier, why is that.

That gets back to what we've noted before.  People aren't really meant to live this way.  I.e, in an industrial society.

And that gets back to the overall happiness rate.

We noted the other day that what the Industrial Revolution achieved, in social terms, was to take people off the land and into factories and work places, but not all at once and not by gender all at once.  It took men first, due to their physical build in part but also in part as it was easier to spare them from the home.  I.e., you can take a young man with a child and send him down a coal mine without the child, but you really can't send a nursing young woman down the coal mine without the kid.  

We're so used to the concept of men being out of the home and away from their families that it not only seems the norm, it became celebrated as the social norm for a long time.  However, as we've also noted here in the past, the development of domestic machinery changed that for women over time and their labor became surplus to the home.  When that happened, they were redeployed in the economy in the workplace. That went from a more or less temporary matter in a lot of households to a necessary one over time and now the economy demands it.  It demands it so much, in fact, that a recent (and maybe still ongoing) effort in the U.S. Congress was to subsidize the workplace by government funding for daycares.  People are so used to this concept by now that they don't recognize that for what it is, which is a pure subsidy for employers so that women with children have no excuse but to go to work.

Starting to resist that are women themselves.  We just dealt with that more recently here:

A lamentation. The modern world.*

That post contained this item from a young woman in her early twenties from Twitter:

Kay (momma of two)

@jacelala

·

May 6

I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

I don't mean to keep belaboring this point, and this does all recall, kind of, Thomas Wolfe's comment that "you can't go home again and stay there". That seems to be sort of true, but then what Chesterton stated, and which is featured on the footer of this blog, about clocks being human contrivances and being capable of being set back is also completely true.  What we seem to have achieved, however, is to create a system that makes us materially much wealthier but its contributing to some degree to our misery.

Why is that?

Well, it might be that a major deep seated reason for all of these changes was to secure us from the wolf at the door, but it was never meant, psychologically, to take that door out of the field.    In other words, maybe we burned down the farm, in order to save it.

And we could always rebuild that.

Footnotes.

1.  My favorite reply to the question was this one:

I remember a time when nostalgia was a thing of the past.
I'll get my hat...

2.  The Guardian aids itself in being taken seriously, I'd note, by not prominently featuring Cheesecake like so many other British newspapers.

Worried.

 

The new "Delta" variant of Covid 19 transmits quicker, and is more deadly, than its predecessors.

And its breaking out in the United States.

Yesterday's Tribune reported that its broken out in Laramie County, which makes sense as its the hub of two interstate highways.  

Wyoming has 35.4% of its population. This means that Delta will break out here, and it will kill people here.

It will.

I don't understand the resistance to the vaccinations.  It's proven as safe as any other vaccine and vaccines are safe.  By not getting vaccinated people are not only putting themselves at risks, but entire communities, and beyond that they are hosting a vaccine for further evolution, making it harder to wipe out long term.  

Careful consideration really need to be given to this topic at this time.  We could wipe this virus out completely.  Or not.  We should wipe it out.*

Footnotes.

*Oddly enough, the vaccine does appear to be wiping out another disease in the SARS family, unintentionally.  It has a much lower transmission rate, and the vaccine is apparently somewhat operative on it, keeping it from spreading.

Tuesday July 8, 1941. Intentions.

On this day in 1941, German General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff, recorded in his diary that at a meeting he attended Hitler expressed his intention to raise Leningrad and Moscow to the ground and to dispose of Moscow's population. lest they have to be fed during the winter.  Of course, the Germans would never take either city.

That, of course, was revealing as to the Germans genocidal intent, and also evidence of whatever they may have later claimed, nearly anyone of significance in the Third Reich was fully aware of the regime's genocidal nature and intentions.

Of interest, the inner circle was already having a heated debate about diverting from the original Operation Barbarossa plans with their being discussion about diverting troops to assist in taking Leningrad.  Some, like Halder, opposed that as they saw it vital to rush on to take Moscow.  Historians for decades have debated if those who argued along the lines of Halder were correct or not.

As for Halder, he was complicit in the orders that instructed genocidal actions be taken in Operation Barbarossa.  Given that, he was one of the individuals that would logically have received the death penalty at the Nuremburg trials post war, but in fact he was not tried in them, but instead in a German civilian court.  He was fortunate that he fell out of favor with Hitler in 1942 and was retired at that time, taking no more active role in the war.  In 1944 he was arrested following the July 20 plot, but was found not to be associated with it.  Nonetheless, he was found to have been a figure in prior plots to topple Hitler, so he spent the rest of the war in incarceration.  Following the war he worked for the U.S. Army and was instrumental in the development of the false "clean Wehrmacht" myth.

His German trial resulted in a not guilty verdict.  Shortly after that, his diaries were discovered and the German government sought to charge him again, but by that time he was working for the United States and the US wouldn't allow it to occur.  He went on to develop the still persistent myth of a clean Wehrmacht for the rest of his life, dying in 1972.

The B-17 was flown in action for the first time.  The mission was a RAF strike on Wilhelmshaven.  The daylight raid was carried out without loss, but also without effect.

We don't think much of the British using B-17s, but they did acquire some lend lease.

Japan replied to an inquiry from the US about its intentions in regard to the war in Europe.

MESSAGE IN REPLY SENT BY H. I. M.'S FOREIGN MINISTER AT THE REQUEST OF THE PRIME MINISTER FOR DELIVERY TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.A., DATED JULY 7TH, SHOWA 16

At a time like this all sorts of rumours are abundantly bred not only in Japan but in all countries. 

It is hardly necessary to state that the prevention of the European War from spreading to the regions of Greater East Asia and the maintenance and preservation of peace in the area of the Pacific have always been the sincere and genuine desire of the Japanese Government which have consistently contributed their earnest efforts toward achieving that high purpose. 

The Japanese Government wish to state, in reply to the last paragraph of the Message, that they have not so far considered the possibility of joining the hostilities against the Soviet Union. The position of the Japanese Government vis-à-vis the Soviet/Axis war was made clear in the Oral statement of July 2nd, 1941 of H. I. M.'s Foreign Minister to the Soviet Ambassador in Tokyo. One can do no better than attach hereto a copy of this Oral statement for the President's perusal in order to bring home the course of policy Japan has been compelled to pursue in the present circumstances. Of course, it is understood that the American Government will treat it as strictly confidential. Incidentally, the Japanese Government would like to avail themselves of this opportunity for definitely ascertaining whether it is really the intention of the President or the American Government to intervene in the European war as they are naturally and very deeply concerned at the prospect, disturbed as they sincerely are, by reports reaching them from a variety of sources.

The question to Japan was a fair one, but the Japanese at the time were not contemplating a war against the Soviet Union in the near term, and for that matter were having a hard enough time attempting to defeat China.  Realistically, a Japanese strike against the Soviet Union was out of the question for strategic reasons.

American journalist Richard C. Hottelet was released from four months of German incarceration.  He'd been arrested by the Germans as a spy.  Born of German parents, Hottelet spoke fluid German, but his work was reporting, not espionage.

Friday July 8, 1921. Whiskey in some jars but not others. End of the Anglo Irish War, Prohibition, and the formation of Land o Lakes.

On this day in 1921 the Irish Republicans and the British government agreed to a truce in order to commence discussions concerning Irish independence.  The truce was to go into effect on July 11.

De Valera's note to David Lloyd George at the conclusion of the meetings read:

Sir, The desire you express on the part of the British Government to end the centuries of conflict between the peoples of these two islands, and to establish relations of neighbourly harmony, is the genuine desire of the people of Ireland. 

I have consulted with my colleagues and secured the views of the representatives of the minority of our Nation in regard to the invitation you have sent me. 

In reply, I desire to say that I am ready to meet and discuss with you on what bases such a Conference as that proposed can reasonably hope to achieve the object desired. 

I am, Sir, Faithfully yours, Eamon de Valera

With this, a major mental impasse had been reached in the conflict with the British all but agreeing to some form of Irish independence.

Land o Lakes agricultural co op was formed.  We noted their formation date, and the controversy surrounding their former promotional image, here:

Exit Mia.

On July 8, 1921, Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association, a dairy cooperative, formed for the purpose of marketing their products.  They didn't like the name, however, and held a contest that ended up selecting a submission made in 1926, that being Land O Lakes, noting the nature of Minnesota itself, although we don't associate lakes much with dairy.    In 1926 the coop received a painting of an Indian woman holding a carton of their butter, looking forward at the viewer, with lakes and forests in the background.  They liked it so much they adopted it as their label and while they had it stylized by Jess Betlach, an illustrator, the image itself remained remarkably consistent with the original design, which says something as illustrations by Betlach sometimes approached the cheesecake level and depictions of Indian women in the period often strayed into depictions of European American models instead of real Indian women.

For reasons unknown to me, the depiction of the young Indian women acquired the nickname "Mia" over time.

And now she's been removed from the scene, quite literally.

In 1928 the Land O Lakes dairy cooperative hired an advertising agency to come up with a logo for them. The logo that was produced featured an Indian woman kneeling in front of a lake scene, with forests surrounding the lake, and holding a box of Land O Lakes butter in a fashion that basically depicted the woman offering it to the viewer.  From time to time Land O Lakes actually changed the logo on a temporary basis, but it always featured Mia, but not always in the same pose.  On at least one occasion she was shown in profile near a lake and seemingly working (churning) something in a pot.  On another, she was rowing a canoe.

Frederic Remington nocturn, The Luckless Hunter.  This is a fairly realistic depiction of a native hunter in winter, on the typically small range horse of the type actually in use on the Northern Plains.

The adoption of Indian depictions and cultural items as symbols in European American culture goes a long ways back, so Land O Lakes adopting the logo in 1928 was hardly a novelty.  In ways that we can hardly grasp now, European American culture began to admire and adopt Indian symbols and depictions even while the armed struggle between the native peoples and European Americans was still going on.  Frontiers men dating back all the way to the 18th Century adopted items of native clothing, which may be credited to its utility as much as anything else.  In 1826, however, a tribe was romantically treated in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, which virtually defined the "noble" image of the Indian even as the "savage" image simultaneously kept on keeping on.  The popular genre of Western art continued to do the same in the last half of the 19th Century, and often by the same artists (with Russel being an exception, as he always painted natives sympathetically, and Shreyvogel being the counter exception, as always did the opposite).  Cities and towns provided an example of this as their European American settlers used Indian geographic names from fairly early on, after the original bunch of European place names and honorifics ceased to become the absolute rule, with some western towns, such as Cheyenne, being named after Indian tribes that were literally being displaced as the naming occured.

William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, i.e., Sitting Bull, in 1885, the year he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.  Sitting Bull received $50.00 per week, as sum that's equivalent to $1,423.00 in current U.S. Dollars.  He worked for the show for four months, during which time he made money on the side charging for autographs.  This came only nine years after he was present at Little Big Horn and only five years before his death at the hands of Indian Police at age 59, just two weeks before Wounded Knee.

The entire cultural habit took on a new form, however, in the late 19th Century, just as the Frontier closed. Oddly, the blood was hardly frozen at Wounded Knee when a highly romanticized depiction of American Indians began.  Starting perhaps even before the last major bloodletting of the Frontier had occurred, it arguably began with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, which employed Indian warriors who had only lately been engaged in combat with the United States.

The principal Indian performers, if we wish to consider them that, were men, as were most of the performers.  But women had a role in Wild West shows as well,  as did children.  As Cody was not unsympathetic to Indians in general, his portrayals of Indian women and children were not likely to have been too excessive, but this is not true of all wild west shows of the era, some of which grossly exaggerated female Indian dress or which dressed them down for exploitative reasons.

Nonetheless, as this occurred, a real romantic view of Plains Indians arose and white performers affected Indian dress or exaggerated Indian dress and an entire romanticization of a people who were still very much alive and not living in the best of circumstances oddly took off.  White performers made the circuit performing as romantic Indian couples and an adopted romanticized Indian culture seeped into the general American culture in various ways, including in the form of depictions and ritual.

Camp Fire Girls in 1917.  The first half of the 20th Century saw the rise of the scouting movment and in the English speaking world this spread to girls after it has become very successful with boys.  The Boy Scout movement had military scouting and hence military men as the model for its idealized muscular Christianity movement, but no such equivalent existed for girls.  In the US this came to be compensated for, however, by the adoption of the Indian woman as the model, as she was outdoorsy and rugged by default.

This saw its expression in numerous different ways, including in its incorporation into the Boy Scout inspired female scouting organizations and in popular "Indian maiden" literature.  But it also saw the development of the use of depictions of Indians in advertising and popular culture.

Out of uniform Girl Scouts in 1912 in clothing and hair styles that were inspired by presumed native female dress.

In 1901 one of the legendary American motorcycle companies simply named itself "Indian", for example.  Savage Firearms named itself that in 1894, with there being no intent to demean Indians but rather to name itself after Indian warriors.  Cleveland called its baseball team the "Indians".  The NFL being a late comer to American professional sports, the Washington football franchise didn't get around to naming itself the "Redskins" until 1932 in contrast.

The psychology behind this cultural adaption is an interesting one, with a conquering people doing the rare thing of partially co-opting the identify of the conquered people, even as those people remained in a period of trying to adopt to the constantly changing policy of the post frontier American West.  Celebrated in their pre conquest state, and subject to any number of experiments in their day to day lives, it was as if there were two different groups of people being dealt with, the theoretical and the real, with the real not doing so well with the treatment they were receiving.  Indeed, that's still the case.

Following World War Two this began to be reconsidered, with that reconsideration really setting in during the 1970s.  Books and films, and films based on books, that reflected this reconsideration became widely considered. Thomas Berger's brilliant Little Big Man remains in its brilliant and accurate reflection of Plains Indian culture what True Grit is to the culture of the southern American European American West.  Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee destroyed any remaining claim the Army had to the event being a battle definitively.  The 1973 American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee brought the whole thing into sharp focus.  Kids who had gone to school their entire lives with Big Chief writing tablets would finish the decade out with Son Of Big Chief, who looked a lot more like he'd been with AIM at Wounded Knee or maybe even at Woodstock.

American Indian Movement flag.

As this occured, people questioned the old symbols and depictions. But it wasn't really until the late 1990s that the commercial and popular ones began to go.

Slowly, and sometimes controversially, after that time, people began to reconsider the depiction of people it had used in advertising where those people had been minorities.  It didn't just apply to Indians, of course, but too all sorts of things.  Sombrero wearing Mexican cartoon characters and bandits disappeared from Tex-Mex fast food signs.  Quaker Oats' "Aunt Jemima went from being a woman who was clearly associated with Southern household post civil war servants, who had only lately been slaves, in an undoubtedly racist depiction, to being a smiling middle aged African American woman whom Quaker Oats hoped, probably accurately", would cause people to forget what being an "aunt" or "uncle" meant to African Americans.  As late as 1946 Mars Inc. would feel free to do something similar but without the racist depiction and use the "uncle" moniker  and a depiction of  well dressed elderly African American for Uncle Ben's Rice, something they've kept doing as they'd never gone as far as Quaker Oats.  And these are just common well known examples.  There are leagues of others.

But removing labels and depictions has been slow.  The Washington football team remains tagged with the clearly offensive name "the Redskins".  Cleveland finally retired the offensive Chief Wahoo from their uniforms only in 2018.

So what about Mia?

She started leaving, sort of, in 2018 when the logo was redesigned so that the knees of the kneeling woman were no longer visible, in part because in the age of easy computer manipulation she became a target for computer pornification by males with a juvenile mindset. That fact, however probably amplified the criticism of the logo itself, which was changed to being just a head and shoulder depiction.  Now, she's just gone.

But did that really make sense, or achieve anything, in context?

A literal association between Native Americans and dairy would be odd and was probably never intended.  While native agriculture varied widely, no Indian kept cattle until after they'd been introduced by European Americans and cattle are, of course, not native to North America.  Indians did adapt to ranching in the West, something that's rarely noted for some reason, and indeed the entire Mexican ranching industry is a mestizo one and therefore a blending of two cultures by definition.  On the northern plains some Indians were working as cowboy and even ranchers by the early 20th Century and Southwestern tribes had adopted livestock in the form of sheep by the mid 19th.

But dairy cattle are a different deal and there's no, in so far as I'm aware, Native American association with it.  Indeed, 74% of Native Americans are lactose intolerant.*  This isn't surprising as its fairly well established that lactose tolerance is a product of evolutionary biology.  By and large, the vast majority of cultures have had no reason over time to consume the milk of cattle they were keeping, which were kept first for food, and then for labor, and then as things developed, for labor until they could not, at which time they became food.  Milk wasn't high on the list.  And for Native Americans, being one of the three inhabited continents in which cattle were not native, it was obviously off the list.**

Some critics have called the imagery racist. North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, says it goes “hand-in-hand with with human and sex trafficking of our women and girls, by depicting Native women as sex objects".  But that comment seems misplaced with this logo. She's definitely not the odd blue eyed "Navajo" woman wearing blue beads that still appears on the doors of the semi tractors of Navajo Express.

Indeed, the irony of Mia is that in her last depictions she was illustrated by Patrick DesJarlait, who was a Red Lakes Ojibwe from Minnesota.  He not only painted her, but he painted her wearing an Ojibwe dress.  So she was depicted as an Indian woman, by an Indian artist.

It's hard to see a man panting a woman of his own tribe, fully and appropriately dressed, as being a racist or exploitative act.

Indeed, the opposite really seems true.  The original dairy co-op was really trying to honor their state in the name and they went the next step and acknowledged the original owners.  Mia was the symbol of the original occupants.

And now she's gone, and with that, the acknowledgment of who was there first.

Which doesn't seem like a triumph for Native acknowledgment.

________________________________________________________________________________

*As are 70% of African Americans and 15% of European Americans. Surprisingly 53% of Mexican Americans are, in spite of dairy products being common to the Mexican dietary culture.  A whopping 95% of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant.

Just recently I've come to the conclusion that I'm somewhat lactose intolerant myself, something I seem to be growing into in old age.  Only mildly so, and I've only noticed it recently.  My children, however, have problems with dairy.  My wife does not. So they must get that via me.

***Cattle are not native to the new world or Australia, but are found just about everywhere else.

Prohibition raids were going on in the Washington D. C. era on this day a century ago.

Pouring whiskey into a sewer

In legal proceedings elsewhere, French observers at German warc rime trials departed after declaring the German proceedings "a farce".

Roads Traveled.

On Wednesdays I sometimes run a series called "Mid Week At Work".

Two items on that.

One is that the current issue of Wyoming Wildlife is really about wildlife and outdoor oriented careers.

I seriously considered that at one time.  I guess a lot of people have.  I know at least one other lawyer who has my exact same career path. . . wanted to be a game warden. . . studied geology instead. . . has military experience dating back to right when he was out of high school, ended up a lawyer.

Well, like the Grateful Dead used to sing, "what a long strange trip its been".

Except it doesn't seem all that long.

What also doesn't take along at all is to a career path to really set in.  You start one direction, you dip your toe in the water, and 30 years later, that's your career and its almost complete.  People like to celebrate those who radically start over, but the story of people having economic collapses or forced early retirements is actually much more common.  

I know of (not know, but know of) one lawyer who attempted to start over as a film maker.  Didn't work.  I also know one who went to Rabbinical school.  He might be a Rabbi back east now, but I also think he's practicing law back east also.  One lawyer I know who dropped out to become a farmer dropped back in and became a Federal magistrate.  At some point, careers sort of stick.

Anyhow, for those young enough, worth reading.  Indeed, I'm often struck by the fact that we tend not to know what all is available out there until years later.  How would we?

Secondly, as I was traveling yesterday I was listening to Pritzker Military History podcasts on the way back and heard an interview of a well known historian.  The interviewer, another historian, asked him how he had found his career.

He related that he first became interested in history in that sense as a small child and expressed an interest in following it into college by high school. As he was living in a small town, the normal reaction was "but what will you do with it?".  A history professor in high school encouraged him to follow it simply because he'd enjoy it. That's what he'd do with it, was the reply.  

He followed it and became a distinguished military historian.

That's also bold advice.  I don't know that I'd give that advice to anyone, but then maybe its really good advice too. 

I didn't receive any advice in high school, from anyone.  I didn't ask for any either.  I didn't know who to ask for one thing.  And high school career guidance was a bit of a joke back at that time, where I lived.  Hopefully its better now.

I did get some advice from my father, as I noted here before, but that was merely as a comment.  Not real advance, but a studied observation.  It wasn't until junior college that I got any advice, and I ended up following it.

Blog Mirror. Lost Rails: Of Semaphores and Streets

 I often find posts on Lost Rails to be haunting.  This one is no exception.

Of Semaphores and Streets

Monday July 7, 1941. Marines in Iceland, Churchill writes Stalin, Patton in a turret, protests in New York City, rebellion in Yugoslavia.

U.S. Marines landed in Iceland.  President Roosevelt sent a note to Congress explaining the act as one necessary to protect Greenland, a Danish possession and frankly to protect arms shipments to the United Kingdom.

Marines in Iceland during World War Two.

The July issue of Life magazine featured George S. Patton in the turret of a light tank. The photograph remains a famous one.

On the same day Churchill sent a letter to Stalin praising Soviet resistance and vaguely promising British support to the USSR.  Churchill noted the UK's "growing resources".  On the same day, a protest in New York City urged the US to stop supplying arms to the UK.  Stalin wasn't impressed by the letter and asked for a formal written alliance between the two countries.

Serbian poster urging rebellion and the recruitment of partisans.

The Communist party in Servia revolted against the Serbian puppet regime and a rebellion also broke out in Herzegovina.

It was becoming clear that Yugoslavia was not going to enter the Axis sphere and would require a constant German presence.  The country had rebelled against its own government in order to oppose cooperation with the Axis in the first place and the rebellions of this date were at least the third to break out in that country.

Saturday July 5, 1941. The Ecuadorian-Peruvian War commences.

Border disputes between Ecuador and Peru erupted into full scale war.  Who started full scale combat is disputed, but the war generally went Peru's way during the month long fighting.

Ecuador was very outmatched in the fighting and has always maintained that it was invaded by Peru, which Peru has always denied.  At any rate, Peru's military was much more advanced than Ecuador's and this showed in the short war.

In 1942 Ecuador declared war on Japan, but not Germany, in order to improve its international position and in order to receive American military material support, which it did receive.  Peru declared war on the Axis powers in 1945.

The countries would fight two more border wars in the 20th Century.

This war was the first South American war to feature paratroopers, which Peru used in the war.

The Battle of Damour commenced in Lebanon. Damour was the French seat of government in Lebanon and is located to the south of Beirut.  The battle was fought principally by Australians on the British side.

On the same day, Auchinleck assumed his duties as the British Commander in Chief in the Middle East.

Auchinleck would be initially successful but would prove to be one of several British commanders in the Middle East who was unable to bring about a British victory.  He achieved early success against the Africa Korps after being assigned as CoC in the Middle East, but then suffered setbacks that Churchill felt merited a replacement.

Auchinleck had a major role in preparing the British Empire in that he modernized the Indian Army between the wars.  During that time, he met and married American Jessie Stewart who was regarded as a great beauty. She was 16 years his junior.

Jessie would in turn have an odd role in the British command during the war in that she commenced an affair with Auchinleck's friend, RAF commander Sir Richard Peirse.  The affair caused Peirce to be regarded as neglecting his duties and caused him to be recalled to the UK, with Mrs. Auchinleck going with him.  Peirse would be accordingly retired during the war, his career ending in a type of disgrace during the war itself.  Auchinleck never recovered from the divorce and carried Jesse's photograph in his wallet for the rest of his life,   That he genuinely adored Jesse is clear, and that the divorce also changed him is clear, but there remains a scholarly debate on whether Auchinleck himself my have had homosexual inclinations.  His biographer maintains that these rumors are false, but another writer asserts the opposite, citing "moral aversion" for Montgomery's inability to get along with him.

And as detailed here, German U-boats began patrolling in the Arctic.

Today in World War II History—July 5, 1941

An American Story?

This goes to post on July 4, 2021, rather obviously.

But it's about events in the 1860s and 70s.  And maybe about today as well.

Just recently I ran across an article about an African American woman who was researching her family's history.  She was aware that she had white ancestors, and indeed nearly every African American whose family is traced back to the 19th Century does.  By the same token, while its rarely mentioned, nearly every white Southern American whose family can be traced back to the 19th Century in that region also does, making all the fighting and whatnot from 1865 forward over race really odd.  

There's a lot of interpretations on what this means, of course, with the word "rape" commonly appearing in such discussions.  This isn't gong to go into things like that.

Rather, what the article revealed is an oddly human story that probably ought to just cause everyone to pause and ponder it.

It dealt with a  man who came from a slaveholding, relatively well off, plantation owning family.  Not a massively wealthy, Gone With The Wind type situation, but relatively well off.  Not so well off that, when the Civil War came, he entered the Confederate army as an officer, however.

He did enter it, was wounded, convalesced at home, and then reenlisted and fought again.

Now, the cause of the South, anyway you look at it, was slavery. That's what the war was about.

And in his household among the slaves was a young female slave.  

When he was home convalescing.  Something happened.  Nobody noticed until he'd gone back into the Confederate army.  She was pregnant.

He was the father.

He returned from the war alive, and this story doesn't go in the direction you'd suppose.  Interracial marriage was illegal in the South (and often elsewhere as well) but he did not abandon her, or their child.  In fact, in the early 1870s when there was very briefly a brake in the prohibition on interracial marriage, they married, and they lived the rest of their lives as a married couple.

That couldn't have been easy. They lived in the South, and they must have been outcasts.  But they carried on anyhow.  When he died, he was buried in an all white cemetery. When she died some years later, she was buried in an all black cemetery.  That shows, I suppose, the attitudes of those around them.

I suppose the fact that their descendants today are regarded as African Americans also does. The half white, half back, children of that union were black under the strange American "one drop of blood" viewpoint, and they must have slipped into the black community where they lived.

It's an interesting story, however.  A son of a planter and a Confederate soldier develops a relationship with a black slave owned by his family, during the war, and later marries her.

Postscript.

Oddly enough, on the same day I posted this, I ran back across this being linked into one of my cousins' Facebook feeds.  A very powerful essay.

You want a Confederate Monument?  My Body is a Confederate Monument.

Friday July 4, 1941. Independence Day

It would be the last peacetime Independence Day in the US until 1946.

Vale Oregon held a large Independence Day celebration that year.

Vale is a small town in Eastern Oregon with a population of less than 2,000 people.  In 1941 it had about 700 fewer people than it does now.  It's the county seat, and the county presently has about 30,000 residents.  It had about 20,000 then.  The population of the county and the town have actually decreased slightly over the past decade.

I wonder if they still have a big 4th of July celebration.  They do have a rodeo.

In another rural location, Hot Springs County Wyoming, a museum opened.

1941  Hot Springs County Museum opens.

That museum, of course, would be in Thermopolis.

Franklin Roosevelt delivered a speech in which he warned that the country couldn't survive as an oasis of democracy in a desert of dictatorship.

In the United Kingdom, the British Communist Party, formerly against the war, decided it was for it.

Communist parties all over the globe had opposed their nations entering the war against Germany right up until Operation Barbarossa.  They changed their minds at that point virtually overnight, making it fairly clear that they danced to the tune Moscow was calling.

In Yugoslavia Communist leader Tito called for a revolt against German occupation.

Monday, July 4, 1921. Independence Day.

July 4, 1921, was a Monday, and a day of celebratory parades across the nation.

There were some protests too, including this protesting parade float from that day, protesting Prohibition.

Source:  Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today Subreddit.

Walter Reed Hospital had a parade.

And in the Petworth District of Washington D. C. there was also a cebration.

Events in Vienna Virginia featured a horse race.

In Ireland, Eamon de Valera held a peace conference in Dublin.  Various southern Unionist attended, but James Craig, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, refused as his invitation was wrongly addressed.

The U.S. Navy took stations off of Tampico in anticipation of rioting due to refineries being shut down as a result of the recent Mexican tariff on oil exports increase.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Latter Day Saints, West Casper Wyoming

Churches of the West: Latter Day Saints, West Casper Wyoming: 

Latter Day Saints, West Casper Wyoming

This LDS building is in west Casper. I'm uncertain of the date, but I'd put it roughly in the 1990s.

The Best Post of the Week of June 27, 2021

The best posts of the week of June 27, 2021.

Wednesday, June 30, 1971. Dropping the voting age to 18, Soviet Space Disaster, the Pentagon Papers.

June 30, 2021. An odd day.

Friday, July 1, 1921. Reds in China.

On Arguing and Evolutionary Biology

The 2022 Election Part IV. The Film Noir Edition

Wars and Rumors of War. 2021

Saturday July 3, 1971. Death of Jim Morrison.

Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris, France, on this day in 1971.

Morrison as he is best recalled. By the time of his death he had gone to having a heavy beard.

Morrison was an iconic figure of late 1960s rock and roll.  He was the son of a Naval officer who would rise the rank of admiral.  His upbringing was somewhat unconventional and necessarily nomadic and, following graduation from UCLA's film school, he took up a career in music and went from being unknown to being a major figure in the 1960s rock scene by the late 60s.  Dependent upon alcohol and a user of drugs, the actual cause of his death at age 27 is not known.