June 28, 1919. . . meanwhile, other things were also going on. . .

This entry will oddly appear just slightly before the extremely long one on the Versailles Treaty, but as it deals with the other things going on that day, it's here first.

On this day, Harry S. Truman, recently discharged artillery officer of the Missouri National Guard, married Elizabeth "Bess" Wallace.

The couple had known each other since their teens and in fact Harry Truman had proposed to her eight years prior, only to receive a rejection.

At that time he was working on his father's farm.  Undeterred, he determined to ask he again but not before he was making more income than a farmer generally did, keeping in mind that this was an era in which farmers had economic parity with the American middle class.  He started several businesses and then went off to serve as an officer in the Great War.  At the time of his marriage he was established in a haberdashery store with a partner in Kansas City, but went failed during the Recession of 1921.

Truman thereafter entered politics, becoming a County Court Judge in Kansas City, Missouri. That position suffers from a confusion of terms, as that position is more akin to a County Commissioner in most states than a court position. While he suffered a defeat early on he returned shortly thereafter to politics and in 1933 he was appointed the director of the Federal Re-employment program in Missouri, an appointment which reflected machine politics as it was an arrangement between the Democratic Pendergast Machine of Missouri and the Roosevelt Administration.

In 1934 he was elected to the Senate from Missouri even thought Pendergast opposed his entering the race at first.  In the primary he managed to overcome better placed Democratic candidates to secure the nomination and then defeated the Republican incumbent.  He rose quickly and became Roosevelt's third Vice President in 1944.

Truman was an exceptional man, but he was also the last American President who really reflected the average American.  He was never wealthy and he was the last American President who didn't hold a college degree.  He wasn't a lawyer and he had suffered business failure.  If he was ambitious, he was ambitious in a middle America middle class sort of way.  An argument can be made that he is the President who most closely reflected the average Americans of the era in which he was elected, with there being, at most, only a couple of others who can claim that status.

In Washington D. C. the automobile manufacturer's association held a parade.

June 28, 1969 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. This entry isn't about that . . .

even though it starts out by mentioning it.

Sigmund Freud. Wrong about most stuff and a central character in this drama.

Rather, it's about social evolution, and about evolution itself.

Okay, to start out with I suspect that this anniversary will be mentioned a lot this week as things that come in convenient numbers, like 50 or 100, get mentioned. We've been doing that a lot ourselves, with things 100 years old, and occasionally 50 years old.

And the Stonewall Riots do matter, although perhaps not as much as noted. But then rarely does a singular thing like a riot really mark a shift in anything, so much as serve as a punctuation mark along the shift. That's not always the case, of course.

At any rate, on this date in 1969 there was a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.  Greenwich Village then, as now, was a center of homosexual activity (which I'm putting that way for lack of a better way to put it).

The ostensible object of the raid was because the establishment was a bar but it had no liquor license.  Indeed, the conditions at the bar were pretty bad in general and it operated not only under the law, but below that which any legally established facility would have in terms of its physical plant. It had, for example, no running water and glasses were simply washed in a tub.  It was also owned by individuals who were in the Mafia.

Indeed, they'd only owned it since 1966, when they'd bought what had been a supper club with the intent to convert the establishment into a gay bar, which they did.  It operated more openly, if illegally, in that role than any other New York establishment.

On this day in 1969 the police raided the establishment as they did about once a month.  Normally when they raided they were paid off, and the establishment was normally tipped off about the raids in advance, but this doesn't seem to have occurred in this instance.  Arrests that normally would have been minor and somewhat perfunctory went badly, all the patrons were taken to the police station, and things descended from there into two days of rioting.  

It's the rioting that's the real story.   It commenced at the police station where the police handled the entire matter badly and it went into two days of riotous protests.  It was the first instance of homosexuals having openly protested in that fashion and it cracked a dam, of sorts, on that activity and therefore also in some homosexuals being open about their homosexuality, although by even the late 1950s there were those whose homosexuality was well known, if not discussed, in public life.

A lot of this fits into the times. . .1969. But not all of it does.  Events at the establishment showed both the evolution of thought in general but also the remaining gritty nature of New York in which organized crime played a very large role and there was a definite, even expected, element of police corruption.  There's some speculation, in fact, that the Mafia owners of the establishment failed to notify those present as it hoped to be able to blackmail wealthy patrons, although that's only speculation.  The fact that the Mafia had chosen to open a gay bar and run it illegally says a lot about the position of such an institution at the time, as the Mafia of course made most of its money by way of vice.  It can't help be noted that owning an illegal establishment catering to a disapproved conduct would have presented blackmail opportunities.

At any rate, what's really remarkable is how arrests gone wrong descended into a riot, which basically showed that at least locally views about homosexual conduct no longer reflected an older view that has supported its being regarded as illegal, although we'd note again that the police were not raiding the Stonewall for that reason and that in fact police conduct of the entire matter, from the raid in the first place, to arresting everyone inside the bar, to groping female prisoners in some instances, set the stage for the riots.

And all that takes us to Naomi Wolf.

For those not familiar with Wolf, Naomi Wolf is a "liberal progressive author" who has published frequently on feminist topics, often to the horror of her fellow feminists.*  I don't really have a problem in general with Wolf, in part because I've never read any of her books, I'm not going to, and therefore I'm not sufficiently familiar with them to really have a problem.  But I've read her comments on this or that, not all of which I agree with by some measure, but some of which I do and I'd note that part of the reason that she takes flak is that as a feminist she makes contra feminist statements which feminist don't appreciate.**

Anyhow, she's basically published on topics related to feminism up until now, but following the general trend, she recently attempted to publish a book on homosexuality entitled Outrages:  Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love in which she completely blew it on the story of the criminalization of homosexual conduct in 19th Century Britain.  The BBC got after her about that, as well it should have, and then that lead to the book being yanked, at least temporarily. 

Which takes us back to one of our own earlier threads, where we got things right. . . .

Homosexual conduct was made illegal in the UK, and in much of the US, but not in the way that people think it was.  Rather, it was never the case, as some believe, that "being" a homosexual was illegal because homosexuality itself has existed as a definition for only a little over a century. Rather, homosexual sex was illegal but then so were a lot of other types of sexual conduct or conduct that involved sex.  If you get right to it, the general societal view as that sex was properly something limited to married couples and that marriage was an institution that was a human norm for deep seated reasons and which involved, for part of that reason, children.

Well get back to Sigmund Freud and his role in this in just a minuted.

But first, back to 1969.

By the time of the Stonewall riots the United States Supreme Court had already made big dents in state's abilities to regulate conduct between adults in this area.  Griswald v. Connecticut, had already held that there was a right to privacy.  Griswald held that a blanket ban on contraceptive pharmaceuticals violated a right to privacy, which is frankly a highly dubious result for a Supreme Court opinion.  If a blanket ban on pharmaceutical contraceptives violates a right to privacy, than a ban on any pharmaceutical and substance of any kind also does.  What Griswald really reflects is that a liberal United States Supreme Court was taking the view that sex itself was some sort of Constitutionally protected super right and that all laws restraining it were likely unconstitutional.  That would have been a shocking proposition for the drafters of the Constitution, who were completely comfortable with a lot of laws that limited sexual activity to married couples, but that's what the Supreme Court of the 1960s was basically doing.

Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Appointed by Dwight Eisenhower, Warren presided over a court that was highly active in expanding civil rights.  Under Warren, however, the court ultimately would not only revive Reconstruction era doctrines to enforce the civil rights of blacks in the South, a  highly laudable goal, but would vastly expand the incorporation  of the Bill of Rights, something that people from the left and the right howl about today as it has had numerous unforeseen consequences.  While in my view Warren was correct about this, in his later years the Court expanded its sweep even further and began to create rights that fairly clearly hadn't actually been contemplated in the Constitution. Warren, it might be noted, could never be a Supreme Court justice today. He was an active Mason and was, ironically, the driving force behind Japanese internment during World War Two, during which time he was the Governor of California.  A person has to speculate over whether that role later was influential on his expansion of civil rights in a remorseful reaction to something that was very clearly morally wrong.

A host of cases that were coming up in the wake of the Sexual Revolution would go on from there and effectively gut the state's ability to really regulate effectively in this area.  While in 1960 it remained the case that every state had a law against sodomy, it was also the case that the court in this era had already hinted that it would preclude their enforcement under any circumstance, which became clearer by the early 1970s.  Supreme Court action was probably never really necessary to make that clear and it would theoretically take until 2003 for the Court to make that clear in regards to homosexual conduct.  It's all significant, however, in that the Warren Court of the 1960s was pretty clearly willing to extend a host of rights in regard to sexual conduct that it was largely creating out of whole cloth, having a "living Constitution" view of the the law.  What the Warren Court started in the 1960s the Burger Court continued, even though it was certainly more restrained than the Warren Court.  It was the Burger Court, for example, that issued the opinion in Roe v. Wade.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, who presided over the Court and voted in the majority in Roe v. Wade.  Burger was much more conservative than Warren, but not as conservative as the Chief Justices who followed.  Like Justice Kennedy, he may not have been able to see the logical consequences of some opinions as he notably supported the ongoing criminalization of homosexual acts in a Supreme Court decision in a five to four 1986 decision that upheld a Georgia law on that topic, although by that time the Court's earlier decisions in this area made the decision nonsensical in some ways and forced Burger to rely, to a degree, on Natural Law, something the Court has otherwise been reluctant to do in modern times.

As for the social mores in 1969, by that time the Boomer generation was already, in its liberal end, challenging all of them and the Warren Court was falling in line, as the Courts will sometimes do with the Zeitgeist of their eras.  Courts perceived as trailblazers are often slightly behind whatever is actually blazing a trail.  1968 saw the Hayes Production Code fall as Hollywood sought to recapture the salacious it had been forced to abandon in the 1920s and there was an immediate switch in film making towards more violence and more sex. By 1970 an x rated film with homosexual content, Midnight Cowboy, would win best picture.  By the late 1960s, Playboy magazine had lost all aspects of being something sold in brown paper bags but was sold openly in the grocery store check out line, a status it would lose again in the 1980s.  And in 1969 California passed the first no fault divorce law in the United States, a law signed into law by conservative hero and divorcee Ronald Reagan.  Clearly, as Bob Dylan would have it, "the times, they are a changing".

Ronald Reagan after being elected governor of California.  Reagan is a conservative hero, and probably deservedly so, but in this area he did a decidedly liberal thing that would have enormous long term consequences in the United States.  Like John Wayne having never served in the military during the nation's largest war, conservatives have managed to ignore the fact that Reagan has a bit of a built in conflict here as he was divorced from his first wife himself.

And indeed the raid that gave rise to the 69 riot didn't have enforcement of New York's sodomy laws in mind and it would have been very unlikely to have been a successful raid if it did. Whatever else the Stonewall was, it wasn't a place where that was going on.  It allowed dancing between homosexual couples, and homosexuals and transvestites openly hung out there, but that's about as far as it went. And none of that activity was illegal.  It had a host of other laws that provided the pretext.  A clear element of social embarrassment was involved in being arrested in a raid of that type, however, which gives rise to the blackmail speculation as well as to forming the basis for the riots.

Which is why Stonewall became a marking point in this social evolution.

By the 1960s the laws on all sexual topics, save for one singular area, were on their way out and largely already unenforced.   That fact meant that the time was ripe for a social reaction of the type that the riots reflected, which was all the more the case because of the ongoing Sexual Revolution which was challenging marriage itself.

The Stonewall Riots are a milestone in the development of what became a movement, and that movement is still going on.  In 69, when the movement can more or less said to have emerged more openly, the point was that those who engaged in homosexual activity didn't want to be subject to prejudice because of it.  The movement emerged at a time when all of the walls on traditional conduct were under assault and many were torn down completely, quite a few with highly negative results that are only now being appreciated.  By some point in the 1990s the movement had basically been a success and the real legal prohibitions that homosexuals were subject to were gone, which marks very rapid progress. At that point, however, it changed from a movement seeking tolerance to once seeking normalization and acceptance, both societal and legal.  It largely achieved that with the Obergefell decision which, remarkably, did not result in a hiatus in its goals, as Justice Kennedy in his naivety seem to assume it would.  It has gone on not only to seek full scale societal acceptance, but absolutely demands it. At the same time, it's gone from a movement that was actually fairly limited to homosexual conduct, to one that has embraced all forms of sexual conduct, arguing that there is no norm at all.

Indeed, in that last most recent phase, while hardly noticed by the public its reached the point where many within the early scope of the movement are at odds with the most recent developments.  Homosexual men and women don't all embrace the categorization of "gay" that they are now all tagged with, and they don't all embrace the concept of "transgender" at all.  The new "Asexual" movement hat has tagged a ride along chaffs many in the other camps.  And the rather obvious fact that the entire LGBQT movement has become extremely trendy has meant that rather obviously a lot of people who now wear the badge of being LGBQT are frankly not, something not lost on those who genuinely have attractions outside the norm.

All of which goes back to the point that we made earlier, is any of this really real?

Clearly those who genuinely have same gender attraction would be baffled, and probably offended, by that comment, maybe, but there's no good reason to believe that in fact the actual nature of this is something that's been grossly misunderstood and overplayed.  That a minority demographic of human beings have such attractions is real, and can't be doubted, but it may well be that the current understanding of it is fairly far off the mark.  As our earlier entry noted, there's some who feel that defining people by their sexual attraction is not only a disservice to them, but it's actually fundamentally scientifically wrong.  Further, they'd argue, that by doing that it actual amplifies a behavior by emphasizing it, making, if you will, people "gay", and even "homosexual", by simply insisting that this is what such a person must be because of the attraction they feel. This is a matter of controversy among homosexuals themselves, not all of whom want to be forced to adopt the definition of being "gay" and what that means and others who insist they must do so.  There isn't very good biological evidence for the position that the hard definitions now in current vogue reflect basic human nature.  Indeed, there isn't any.

Leaping back to our earlier post, it must be remembered that the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are actually only a little over a century old and they reflect a psychological characterization of the time which held that all homosexual conduct and all sexual conduct directed towards oneself (which is what heterosexual actually means) was a psychological malady. Indeed, at about that same point it was assumed that excessive focus on sex by conventional males lead to heterosexual conduct as originally defined (we're not going to get too graphic here) that if unchecked evolved into homosexual conduct.  Indeed, that view isn't entirely gone as I've heard it posed fairly recently, and there actually seems to be some evidence to support it, that a strong attraction to pornography (some would use the word addiction) of the depicting female type, leads to more and more graphic pornography and then with some, pornography that's homosexual in character.  I'll note that I've heard that stated, but I haven't researched it and I'm not going to.  Indeed, this thread doesn't address the "cause" of anything.

But what it does address is defining a "cause" which is actually what the surviving term in its original sense, homosexual, does.  All the other current related terms in this set of movements are related to that history of the definition. And that history is one that's sufficiently ironic to call it into question.

Originally, the conduct was universally seen as immoral along with a host of other sexual acts outside of marriage.  It wasn't regarded as a category of anything, however, until Freud and his fellow travelers defined it as such, creating the concept that it was a deep seated psychological malady.  That process of creating that concept, contrary to what Naomi Wolf supposed, is what created the late 19th and early 20th Century treatment under the law and in society.  The condition went from being one that was thought of as a moral failing, but except in really pronounced exceptions one that didn't otherwise define the essence of a person, to one that did in every way.  That in turn created the conditions that people are aware of that existed in the early 20th Century that people presume, inaccurately, existed prior to that.  In the late 1960s as the lid came off of every type of sexual conduct, it came off of homosexuality as well but it was the only one, at that time, that was defined as a psychological malady.  That changed in the early 1970s when homosexual psychologists caused the DSM to be redefined to take that definition out.

But what's notable about that is that a large amount of the DSM and psychological treatment of sex has always been raving baloney in the first place.  So maybe what ought to really be questioned is the entire history of psychology and sex.  Indeed, that questioning has been taking place to some degree and almost everything Freud thought has gone down the tubes as a result, as he thought everything was about sex.

And it turns out it isn't.

Which doesn't mean that all of this doesn't have a psychological component.  Of course it does.  Everything about people has a psychological component. But what it may very well mean is that that component has been pretty badly misunderstood ever since Freud and his buddies first started defining the terms.  The earlier understanding that held it was simply something on the range of human conduct might turn out to be much more accurate.

If that seems to be arguing that society at large has finally grasped the truth here in the modern era, it hasn't.  It may mean that in this area the terms shouldn't really exist at all.  That doesn't mean that a small minority of human beings don't exhibit all of the traits that are unfairly lumped together here for classification.  That is, there are a minority of people who are attracted, in varying degrees, to members of their own gender.  There are some people who desire to dress in the clothing characteristic of the opposite gender (which doesn't necessarily mean that they're attracted to members of their same gender, although some are). There are people who have very little sexual attraction to anyone in their own species at all. But there are also men who are hyper attracted to women, and women who are hyper attracted to me. There are also attractions outside of all of these which we'll not go into as they stray into areas that almost nobody wants to be associated with, but those attractions also exist.

But perhaps outside of that last vaguely referenced area, which needs to be a defining trait for criminal law reasons, and which seems to be an indisputable psychological malady, all of these things are departures from the mean average which is the disputable norm and there would appear to be no good reason whatsoever that anyone should accordingly define themselves accordingly.  A tendency towards an act, in other words, probably ought not to devolve to being a person's entire identity.

Over Father's Day weekend I happened to be in Denver.  I seem to manage to be in Denver every time that some public presentation associated with a movement is going on (I've managed to be in Denver over "4/20" at least three times).  On this occasion, there was a Pride parade going on.  I didn't see it, but there were a fair number of people downtown who had marched in it or turned out to view it, and were self identifying in some fashion as being part of the demographic the parade recognized.

I'm sure that quite a few of the people in the parade were members of the demographic.  I'm also at this point pretty sure that quite a few people in such parades aren't members of the demographic by an inherent inclination, but are identifying as part of it as they like to be part of movements.  Some were just exhibitionist, which has nothing at all to do with having same gender attraction and which has everything to do with being an exhibitionist.  The most notable example of that was a young woman with black lipstick and heavy eye liner wearing a t-shirt you could see through.  That doesn't make her a lesbian. . . that makes her an exhibitionist.  For all the viewer would know, that's all she was.

But the most notable for this conversations were two very attractive young women who were wearing t-shirts that said "All Gay All Day".  Why would anybody be all anything, other than human, all day?  That's not much different from a t-shirt being worn by a male that stated he was attracted to women all day.  If a person defines themselves as "all" anything "all day", it ought to be something really deep, rather than glandular, in nature.

Now, I get the point of their t-shirts but what I'll also note is that they were otherwise decently dressed in the conventional fashion.  Whether their self declared attraction was real or not, what they weren't doing is affecting a "I'm a" so much as as a "I have this" in terms of this attraction, and that's the point here.  It may really be the case that on a society wide basis we're still afflicted by psychological malpractice from the 19th Century that causes society to insist on defining a people by their sexual attractions.  There's something about that which is really odd.

If that's the case, the views that predated the psychological definitions may actually be closer to the biologically correct one.  And if that's the case the ultimate irony is that much of the societal view and the legal views on sexual conduct that predated 1) the psychological intrusion first and 2) the Sexual Revolution secondly, are more correct.  That doesn't argue for a re-criminalization of homosexual sex, that should never have been criminal in the first place, but it would argue for a serious approach to sex in society and the law and what it means. And what it means for most people is that procreation results in creation and a deep seated human bond that the libertine standard bearers of the Sexual Revolution, following (not leading) Hugh Hefner and his juvenile pack of pornographers, failed to grasp.  That actually makes things simpler, rather than more complicated, as that refocuses such topics on where they ought to be, which is the protection of children, and the true dignity of people and in particular women, who are now prostituted in society in various ways to an unprecedented degree, something that all of the turmoil and upheaval in this area of the 1960s and 1970s forgot.

That would also mean that almost all of the recent, and we take a long view of recent here, developments in society, save for the decriminalization of various things which should never have been criminal in nature in the first place, are based on a faulty understanding of things influenced by a science that turns out to be pseudo scientific.  And if that's the case, basing societal institutions and norms on them, or more particularly changing societal institutions and norms of very long standing, and even simply basing societal and demographic labels based on them, is likely to be an error as well. 

And that's something that hardly anyone has bothered to contemplate.

______________________________________________________________________________

*Wolf is really quixotic in a lot of ways and she holds some extremely liberal and quite conservative opinions simultaneously.  Part of the reason, however, that I think she meets with opposition is that she's very attractive and presents that way.  In other words, she has always held major babe status and that likely strikes both of some her opponents and some of her proponents off guard.

**She's also been wildly off on statistical data before and what the current controversy might demonstrate is that in the age of the Internet you can no longer get away with that.

Recent Supreme Court Decisions. Go figure.

The Constitution prohibits a state from requiring a two year residency requirement in order to be licensed to sell alcohol, but it doesn't prohibit gerrymandering?

Weird.

June 27, 1919. Introduction of the Volstead Act, the men of the 148th coming to Casper, an uncertain Peace, horses and oil, violence in Tennessee, Annapolis and Rock Springs.

On this day in 1919 the Volstead Act, the bill that was tailored to carry out Prohibition under the 18th Amendment, was introduced into the House of Representatives.

On this day in 1919 there was still time to have a beer. Soon, there wouldn't be.

An enforcing act was necessary in order to make Prohibition actually come into effect, something that's occasionally missed in this story.  Compounding the overall confusion, many states had passed state laws on the topic, including Wyoming, so in those places Prohibition was coming into law earlier, and with different provisions.  In some localities, such as Colorado, it already had.

It hadn't come into effect just yet, which meant that Casperites had time left to toast returning members of the 148th Field Artillery, recently discharged from their military service, just as they were also contemplating Germany signing a treaty that would end the war, but which appeared likely to result in an uncertain future.

That uncertain peace headlined the Wyoming State Tribune, which also featured an article that would be regarded as racist today, because it was.  That latter storing being how Mexican women were going to be liberated from the chains of tradition by adopting more progressive, non Mexican, values regarding their gender.

The 15th Cavalry, it was noted, was also going to appear in Cheyenne for new billets that afternoon.

Cavalry of that period was still horse cavalry, of course, and horses remained an important part of the economy in every fashion.  Advertisements for a horse auction in Campbell County appeared right on the cover of Wright's newspaper, which noted that it was published weekly "in the interests of dry-farming and stockraising in Wyoming".

Today, of course, when you think of Wright, you think of oil, gas, and coal.  You probably don't think of farming at all, let alone dry farming, although ranching is still there.

A photographer visited the Burk Waggoner oilfield of Texas on this day, giving a glimpse of what oil production in 1919 was like.

In far off Tennessee, Sheriff Milton Harvie Stephens of Williamson County, was murdered by horse thieves.  He was 74 years old and had held the office for one year.  That crime demonstrates that the value of the old means of travel, and the crimes it was associated with, kept on. The fact that Stephens was employed as a sheriff at age 74 also says something about the working environment of the day.

In that same region of the country, sort of, riots occurred in Annapolis between Navy trainees who were training to be mess attendants and local residents. The riot is regarded as part of the Red Summer, but the oddity of it was that the rioters were all black on both sides.  Mess attendants were normally black or Filipinos in the segregated Navy of that period and in this case it was black local residents who were in conflict with the sailors. The cause was that sailors had been harassing local women.

Strife and violence also seems to have broken out that day in Rock Springs.

1st Battalion, 148th Field Artillery, mustered out of service and discharged at Ft. D. A. Russell.

Wyoming and Colorado National Guardsmen of the 1st Battalion, 148th Field Artillery, those being the Wyoming and Colorado Guardsmen assigned to the 148th, were mustered out of service and discharged on this date in 1919.  The were civilians once again.

June 25, 1919. The 148th In Cheyenne

The men of the 148th who remained in the service, as some had already been discharged on the East Coast, returned to Cheyenne to a rousing welcome.

In far off Russia, American solders were in action against the Reds.  At Romanovka American troops were ambushed but repelled a Red advance.

In New Jersey, the American Library Association was meeting.

American Library Association, Ashbury Park, New Jersey

The Presidio and Ft. Winfield Scott, San Francisco.

The Rise and Fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, of Denver.

Capitol Hill District of Denver, circa 1898.  A careful observer of this photograph might be tempted to think this is the Capitol building, but it isn't.  It faces the wrong direction and must have been a courthouse or a city building.  Indeed, I suspect this photograph was taken from the capitol looking west.

Recently I put up a photo of a business of a morally dubious nature in downtown Denver on one of our companion blogs, that being:  Painted Bricks: La Boheme, Denver Colorado.

This caused me to recall earlier visits to Denver, and the up and down nature of its downtown.

The edge of the Capitol Hill District of Denver in 2018.  This view doesn't face the same way as the 1898 photo above.

Personal recollection figures on this blog from time to time, even though its main focus is on something else.  In the recollection context, it it occurs to me now that I have a personal connection with Denver that stretches back at least forty years, maybe a bit longer.  Longer than that of most of the people, I'd guess, who live there.  If I add a familial familiarity to it, which of course is less reliable, it would stretch back beyond the late 1920s.

Indeed, while I don't say much about it here, I have a familial connection with Colorado that goes back to the 1860s, much longer than many of the European American folks there. A great grandfather on my father's side moved from Ohio to Leadville to be a miner in the second half of the 19th Century, although he rapidly changed his occupation to shopkeeper in that high altitude town.*  So our family's association with Colorado is, well, nearly as old as the state of Colorado.

Colorado State Capitol during the period of time in which its dome was under reconstruction.

In fact, my father was born in Colorado, something I rarely mention.  All of his siblings except for his youngest brother, as well has my father, were born in Denver.  His parents moved to Scotsbluff Nebraska when he was seven, and usually if asked my father would just say he was from Scotsbluff, even though he left Scotsbluff for Casper when he was in his early to mid teens.** That means his association with Denver was nearly as strong as it was with Scotsbluff, although I don't know if the first few years of your life really count that way as you really don't recall much about them personally.

Be that as it may my father didn't talk that much about his childhood in Denver.  In fact, some of the more interesting details of that period in my father's family's history I know from other family members.  For instance, I know that my father started school when he was four years old as the parish priest felt he was ready for it, and he attended a Catholic grade school in Denver.  When they moved to Scotsbluff he was enrolled in the public school there, so he didn't grow up going to Catholic schools.***  His younger brother had the opposite experience, FWIW, attending the Catholic grade school here when the family moved from Scotsbluff, where he'd been born.

Be that as it may, he identified more with Nebraska and when Denver was discussed, when I was a kid, it often entailed relatives who continued living there after our family had left, some of whom still did when I was growing up.  The Bergers in particular were their aunt and uncle who lived there all the way into my high school years, outliving my grandparents by decades.  All of my father's family were extremely fond of them, although I can recall meeting them only once, when they came up here for some reason.

That reflects, I guess, my father's view of Denver, or maybe of travel.  My father didn't like travelling at all and he never went to Denver without a reason.  That reason came when I was in grade school, probably around 5th or 6th grade, which is coincident with my first trip to Denver.

When I was about that age. . . I'm no longer precisely sure of when it was, I developed asthma.  It arrived pretty suddenly. At that time, there were no allergist in our area at all, and the only recourse was to go to Denver, which we did.

To go to Denver to be tested for medical reasons isn't a good introduction to the town, but at the same time I recall looking forward to it for childish reasons.  I knew, of course, that it was a big city.  I also knew that a friend of mine had models that his father, who was a cartographer, brought home when he went to Denver for work.

Going to Denver for work is interesting in and of itself and I've been to Denver hundreds of times for work. But at the time, that seemed very exotic and strange, maybe even a little sad, in and of itself.  But that did introduce me to the concept that Denver had a store that sold really neat models.  While we were there, we went there.

That store was across the street from the Denver Dry Goods store, a huge department store whose building still exists, just off of 16th Street, in downtown Denver, but which is now an apartment building.  For some reason, when my father spoke to his siblings about Denver, the Denver Dry Goods stores was frequently mentioned.  It must have been a place they held in regard from the time in which they lived there.

The model store that was across the street from Denver Dry Goods also sold Avalon Hill games, the first time I'd ever seen them.  We didn't buy one, I know, as I didn't know what they really were, and of course back in those days you couldn't really look such things up anywhere.  A few years later, just a short view, I'd stumble into those games, which I really like even though there's nobody to play them with anymore.  I guess that first trip was my first introduction to them, in a way.

I can also recall that we stayed, on that occasion, in a hotel that was just off of downtown Denver. The building is still there and I still recognize it when I drive past it.  Just down from it was a Big Boy restaurant that we didn't eat in, but which for a long time thereafter was a landmark that I'd recognize. We had to go to National Jewish, the great Denver hospital that focuses on respiratory diseases.  The net result was the disturbing finding that I was allergic to a lot of animals, and some plants.  I'll not go into that other than to note, as is common with asthma, it abated in later years, then came back to some degree, and has abated again, although not before I had to go through three separate rounds of shots over three different periods of time; the first in the 1970s of which we're speaking, the second in the 1990s after I graduated from law school, and the third just recently as a prophylactic measure as we got a dog.****

Anyhow, that Denver of the 1970s was, by my recollection, much like Salt Lake City is now.  It was a big city, but it was a big business like city.  It didn't have the carnival atmosphere that it has now.  It was glass and steel with shops and the like that was unlike anything in Wyoming, but it was also cold and sterile and meant business.

The business that it meant was the oil business at that time, and the 1970s was the era of rampant oil activity in the region.  I didn't know it then, but I'd come to know that Denver had become a major oil hub at least as early as the 1950s.

My mother enters the picture there, actually as in 1957 or so she'd come down to Colorado from Alberta as my aunt Marguerite was getting married.  The family had gone into hard times during the Great Depression and they never really emerged from it.  Starting at age 16 my mother had gone to work and that work took her to Alberta, where she at first worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and then worked as an oil and gas secretary.  In 57 or so, however, my aunt had become engaged to a Quebecois engineer who had moved to Colorado to study.  The family circumstances being strained, the decision, nearly an order, was to send one member of the family to Colorado for the wedding and that person was my mother.  In order to do this, she had to quit her job in Alberta.

By her recollection, her employer and co workers in Alberta begged her not to go, and warned her that if she stayed to work in the U.S. which was easy to do, she'd be "worked to death".  Indeed, American oil companies that I've worked with make the reverse complaint about their Canadian colleges, claiming that they basically won't work. That does give testimony to the "American Work Ethic", and whatever it entails, for good or ill.  At any rate, she didn't heed their warnings and quit her job figuring that after the Colorado wedding she could find work in Denver, which was booming due to the oil business.

As it happened, and for whatever reason, the industry in Denver wasn't hiring, but prospective employers uniformly pointed her north towards our city, which is where she ended up and where she found employment, as an oil and gas secretary, right away.  All that leads into another story which I'll forgo now, and maybe just forgo.  But what it shows, in part, is that Denver was an oil town.

It was still an oil town in the 1970s.  And in fact at that time oil companies that were headquartered in Casper Wyoming were pulling out in favor of Denver.  Casper had been a major regional oil hub and the newspaper, as late as the 1970s, declared it to be "the Oil Capital of the Rockies".  It was losing its oil office workers by the late 1970s.  Then the crash of the 1980s came.

When that came it hit Casper hard, and it was devastating to Denver.

It was that Denver that I next became familiar with.

As a University of Wyoming student in the mid 1980s, I started visiting Denver for the first time in over half a decade.  A good friend of mine was highly familiar with Denver and knew his way around.  While going to Denver myself for any reason wouldn't have occurred to me, it was second nature to him, and our group of outdoorsy friends was ironically introduced to urban Denver, as it had very good outdoors stores.  We used to go down to Denver from time to time to hit the sporting goods stores and the outdoors stores, such as REI (then in a different location) or Eastern Mountain Sports, which was downtown.

In that same time frame, I also would go down from Laramie to Denver on the occasional day trip with a girlfriend of the time. As she was outdoorsy (we were all geology students) we'd go to the same sort of places, but she also had a strong interest in music which I did (and do) as well.  So the list of places we'd go to was expanded to include music stores, including ones that sold records.  One of those places still exists, Wax Trax, which has changed hardly at all.  A really neat one, however in a residential neighborhood off of downtown I couldn't possibly find today, assuming it exists.

Wax Trax in Denver, which has weathered the ages.

At some point in this time frame I also discovered the Tattered Cover bookstore, but I"m not sure who introduced it to me.  I suspect it was the girl I was dating, but I'm not sure.  Oddly enough my father knew of the store at that time, even though it was founded in 1971, well after he had left the city as a boy, so I have no idea how he was aware of it.

The Denver of that era seemed busy to us, but its downtown had taken a pounding.  Many buildings were closed at first, but by the mid 80s a new downtown was developing after 16th Street was closed to vehicle traffic.  A new retail district began to pop up.  Still, lower downtown Denver was a wreck dominated by the massive Gates Rubber Company building, which was completely abandoned.  Nobody dared walk in that era unadvisedly.  Five Points, the area just off downtown, was legendary for being rough and had a reputation for that which dates back into the 1930s.  While we tried to avoid it, occasionally you'd hit its edges coming and out of town past a traffic island park that was always covered with drunk people at any hour of the day.  Off of downtown, as you approached the Capital Hill District, you encountered neighborhoods that were highly decayed.  The large episcopal cathedral dominated the area near Wax Trax and was in such rough shape, with boarded up windows, that I assumed when first encountering it that it had been abandoned.

St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Cathedral in Denver.

Indeed, at that time, if you went to 16th Street you didn't stray much off of it.  Only a block away the town had a much different character.  Down by the Gates building it was a hobo jungle and completely dissolute.  Nobody in their right mind went there at all.

After 1986 I didn't go to Denver again for years.  We all graduated from UW and went off to work or unemployment.  I went on to the latter, as did most of the geology students I knew at the time.  The last time I was in Denver of that era was in 1986 itself, when I went down once by myself.  I wasn't in Denver again until the spring of 1990, when I was a law student.  On that single occasion I went down with a friend and was really left with no particularly noteworthy memories of the trip except for seeing a bagpipe player on the street who was playing Garryowen.  More than anything else the trip on that time left me with that sad feeling of old memories not really being capable of recapture.  The fun part of going to the town with my undergraduate geology friends was really gone, and the fact that I was there with a law school friend didn't make up for it.  Had I thought on it more, that trip, symbolizing an evolution of various sorts, would have probably made me pretty blue about the experience.

It was after I started practing law that I started going to Denver a lot.  And it was after the construction of Coors Field that the town began to change massively.

Coors Field.

You wouldn't think that the construction of a baseball field would change a city, but Coors Field did.  

Coors Field was opened in 1995 and was constructed where Gates Rubber had been. The classic baseball stadium brought new life to lower downtown Denver and absolutely everything about it began to change thereafter.  The nearly wrecked area of lower downtown started to rapidly evolve into a hip, cool and youthful area.  It's still evolving in that direction twenty five years later, the change being both complete and ongoing.  By the 2000s it was highly evident, and the areas around 16th Street that had been scary were swept up in it.

That's what brings me to La Boheme.

La Boheme, Denver Colorado.

This is a photograph of the mural on the side of La Boheme in Denver, which euphemistically calls itself a "gentleman's cabaret". By that it means, no doubt, something on the order of "strip club".

La Boheme, which means the female Bohemian in French, is located in what was once a pretty rough downtown Denver neighborhood which went through gentrification after Coors Field was constructed. The transformation in this area was remarkable and its still ongoing, Colorado's legalization of marijuana had reintroduced a feeling of decay into downtown once again.  At any rate, in spite of many old buildings being bought and converted into new upscale uses, and in spite of being located across the street from the downtown Embassy Suites, a nice Denver business hotel, La Boheme keeps on keeping on.

I can't recall this mural being there until just recently, so it's presumably a new addition.  Perhaps keeping in mind where it is, it's not shockingly skanky and is actually fairly well done.  It's placement resulted in a minor debate with my travel companions on whether it depicts Marilyn Monroe, Jenny McCarthy, or none of the above.  The first two choices would in some ways emphasize the tragic nature of the establishments purpose.  Anyhow, it's fairly well done except that the figures left hand, which isn't really visible in this photo, is quite meaty, making for an odd appearance.

I couldn't recall if it was La Boheme or not, and now in recollection, I realize it it wasn't. But in the 2000s I had an occasion to go to Denver for work and in so doing I parked downtown to walk to 16th Street.  Construction was ongoing just as it is now, as old dilapidated buildings yielded to new construction.  At any rate, I was walking towards downtown on a path that took me past a bar that was a strip joint.  This was probably around 11:00 a.m. or so.  As I did that, a girl came out of the club who was obviously employed as one of the "dancers".

She wasn't good looking, in the way that movies like to imagine girls so employed to look.  Indeed, she was skinny and extremely pale in the way that people who never see the light of day are pale.  Her occupation was betrayed by her dress, which was only suitable for one of two professions, both of which are a species of prostitution.  She barreled out of the door on her way to somewhere else, probably after having picked up her wages for selling her appearance the night prior, and perhaps having just finished up from whatever wreck of an evening it had been.

The old dilapidated Denver boldly defiant in the face of the new, cool Denver.

Well wherever that place was, it's gone now, I'm sure.  But La Boheme, the last of the really old seedy Denver, keeps on keeping on, out of place, and out of time.

Which doesn't mean that Denver has become a mythical bright shining city on a hill.

Indeed, quite contrary to that, Denver gives really good evidence of the human inclination to destroy everything through our worst instincts.  Denver is why we can't have nice things.

Union Station as viewed from the Oxford Hotel.  One of the really nice features of the revival of downtown Denver has been the introduction of an extensive light rail network which terminates at Union Station.

Denver's downtown was changing in character by the late 1990s in any event, and while it was getting increasingly vibrant, it was also getting increasingly grungy.  And then marijuana came.

As Denver's fortunes boomed based on a new, and largely consumer basis in a new economy, it drew in tens of thousands of people from elsewhere in the country, many from California.  "Californication" became a slam on the process but Colorado simply became overwhelmed, transforming the state.  It's a lesson for those who always have a growth is good mindset, as much of the old Colorado was killed in the process.  And as part of that process, a new California outlook came to the state's politics, which ironically went from the pro grown political right to the progressive liberal left.  With that came the push to legalize marijuana.

And legalize it Colorado did.

Marijuana has ruined Denver.

That statement might be too harsh, of course, but only a little.  With the legalization of marijuana all the predicted social problems that would never come about, it's backers claimed, have.  Law enforcement problems of all sorts have dramatically increased, for example. And the number of street people living on Denver's streets, which in recent years have generally been relatively warm in the winter, are now epic.

Street people were always a feature of downtown Denver, but the numbers and character have really changed.  In the 1980s these sad souls were concentrated in lower downtown and Five Points  Now they're just everywhere in the downtown area. And they aren't the same people.  In the 80s, they were sad victims of poverty and alcohol.  Now they tend to be the young who surrendered their lives to dope.

The social lesson there, and the legal one, is self evident, but being ignored.  Money talks and people are making money off of the drug, the human toll doesn't matter.  Denver is a good argument for making marijuana illegal, not the opposite.

And with the decline, the rise in self indulgent  artificial trend of the moment has captured Denver as well.  Denver's not only become wealthier, but an element of artificialness has crept in as well, the way that suddenly wealthy societies built on a false and temporary wealth are.  Think the Roaring Twenties.

Will it stay that way?  Hard to say. But watching Denver over a long period of time, and having noted its rise and fall of fortunes, it's not safe to say.  The one thing that can be said is that its a new Denver, and its not necessarily a better one.

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*This isn't a thread on Leadville.  I'll have to put one up someday.  But I will note here is that my grandfather and grandmother's location in Leadville put them in that town in its heyday, and in that period of time during which all of its famous residents, such as the Browns and the Tabors, lived there.  There was a apparently a community of relocated Leadville residents, which would have included the Browns, who lived in Denver after Leadville declined and who regularly met.

**He'd already been to one year of high school, maybe two, when he moved to Casper.  I'd thought for a long time that the entire family moved to Casper at that time but in fact my grandfather must have gone back and forth from Scottsbluff to Casper for some time, as it seems that he was already operating the meatpacking plant he purchased in Casper in 1940 or so.  Chances are that economically there was a period when they weren't able to get a second house and whatnot so there may have been a year or two when he was commuting back and forth very frequently.

***My mother, in contrast went to all Catholic schools. Quebec didn't have public schools at the time and all schooling was private.

****A typical condition of those with asthma is not to talk to people about it and most asthmatics, myself included, never speak of the condition to outsiders.  That's because its impossible to describe and involves some very odd experiences when a person is actively afflicted, including the knowledge that you are repeatedly brought to the edge of death and then back out.  Most young asthmatics, I suspect, spend the rest of their lives with the knowledge that life is very fragile and never have the illusion of long life or the expectation of it that other people have.  Simply having had the condition is its own Momento Mori.  I' only note that all here as childhood asthma creates a profound psychological impact on the person who endures it even if you outgrow it, which a large number of people afflicted with it do.

I've outgrown it and mostly had by the time I had graduated from high school.  Indeed when I enlisted in the National Guard I stated that I hadn't been afflicted since age 13, even if I was, or might have been, fudging on that age. Even at that, however, it came back to a degree while I was in law school when I acquired a new allergy that was a real seasonal problem for several years and which caused a second round of shots.  As that went away, which thankfully it did, the Manx cat volunteered to live with us and took up residence in our home in spite of my theoretically being allergic to cats.  For whatever reason, however, he never caused me to have very many problems, although he did cause some, and when he sadly passed my wife campaigned for a dog, which she had always wanted. That caused the third round of shots.

Swing back to Denver, I'm allergic to something there, but only mildly.  I have no idea what its, but for much of the year if I'm simply there I have a slightly runny nose and feel slightly allergic to something.

June 24, 1919. Marching towards Versailles, on the border, and home.

Wyomingites received the official news on this day that the Germans were going to sign the Versailles treaty.

Clearly, a lot of them were not happy about it and there was some resistance to it still in some quarters.

They also learned that things were still tense on the country's border with Mexico.

Fitting for the day, they also learned that the last of Wyoming's National Guardsmen, those in the 148th Field Artillery, would be arriving back in the state that night.

Opinion analysis: Justices allow “peace cross” to stand (Updated)

Opinion analysis: Justices allow “peace cross” to stand (Updated)

This is clearly the correct decision in this matter. The cross in question had been in place in a cemetery outside of Washington D. C. since 1925.  The mere fact that some crabby group with its own goals would come around now and challenge that is frankly an insult to their service. 

The surprising thing, however, is the two dissents. Justice Ginsberg read hers from the bench, something that's usually reserved for the strongest dissents.   And it seems as if the very nature of the cross being religious in nature is what offended her.  Reading her dissent is interesting in that she very clearly recognizes the "Latin Cross" as a religious symbol.  Ginsberg of course is not a Christian, so ironically she got the symbology better than perhaps those in the majority did.

Which still begs the question.  Putting up a cross a  memorial, even if it was done in an avowedly Christian manner, is not the establishment of a state religion.  Like a lot of Constitutional provisions that were highly modified over the years, the real question here is things have just gone too far.  When the establishment clause was put in the Constitution in the first place, the goal was to preclude the United States from making some separated church in the Church of England the Church of the United States, which was a laudable goal including for religious regions.  But Christianity as a whole is a wider definition encompassing a large number of diverse groups.  Those of us in the Catholic Church are well aware that the country is, and always has been, a Protestant country, but that doesn't make any one of the many Protestant churches a state religion.  Even if the placement of a cross "elevates" one faith over another, as Justice Ginsberg claims, that doesn't "establish" it.

Justice Sotomayor silently joined the dissent, making this a seven to two decision.  I have to admit that next to former Justice Kennedy, Justice Sotomayor is my least favorite justice of the Supreme Court.  Sotomayor drew some back channel criticism from some of her former clerks at the time she was appointed, who were liberal and who wanted a liberal justice, on the grounds that she wasn't a first rate judge and not really of a first rank intellectual caliber.  Maybe that's nothing at all, she's certainly well educated and that speaks for itself.  She did get a rebuke, I'd note, form Kennedy during an oral argument on a case involving an abortion clinic for referencing in oral argument having looked at the party's website, which deserved a rebuke. A justice isn't supposed to be doing that.

Anyhow, Ginsberg, while I think she is flat out wrong, is a first rank intellect.  Indeed, I'd put all of the justices on the bench in that category except perhaps for Sotomayor.  She just doesn't strike me that way and her silent dissent, which is certainly nothing unual in terms of Supeme Court decisiosn, does leave me wondering.

But I haven't read all of her opinions by any means either.

A new species of cat has been identified on Corsica

Yes, a new species.

It's about the size of a house cat, but it isn't, and it isn't even that closely related to European wild cats which are pretty closely related to house cats genetically.  It's more closely related to small African wild cats.

Shepherds had said they were around for years, and in spite of their diminutive size, they supposedly attack sheep.

Based on the one in captivity, they look like large orange tabby's and they appear not to like to being held in captivity.

Now, here's the real question.

Corsica has been occupied by humans since at least the Mesolithic.

We're just finding a new cat species there now?

June 23, 1919. The collapse of things German.

On this Monday in June 1919, the German government confirmed it would sign the Versailles Treaty.

The German government had collapsed, as we've seen, over the issue which had required the Reichstag to form a new government.  In so doing, that body formally voted to accept the treaty by a comfortable margin.

It didn't happen, of course, before the German Navy took steps to sink itself, which was still in the headlines.  Less noted, German airmen took the same step with Zeppelins on this day, which was more in the nature of an act of defiance.  As it was, it hardly mattered as the day of the airship as an offensive weapon of war was over.

A person could debate these sentiments, but in the next war they wouldn't occur  Aircraft were advancing too fast and there was no escape from the carnage anywhere.

It was a day of defeat of German interest in general, as Estonian and Latvian forces defeated the Baltic German Landswehr, which had been their allies in their wars against the Reds but which had then gone on to install their own pro German government in Latvia, at the Battle of Cēsis. 

Member of the Baltic Landswehr carrying German equipment and uniformed in the German style.

This would end the Baltic German bid for control of the region and bring to an end a process that had started in the Medieval era.  Oddly,as the German empire collapsed German military interest had fought on, and then turned their effort over to the local Germans, with vague imperial aspirations in mind.

Baltic Germans would hang on the region thereafter but a series of resettlement programs commenced in 1939 and carried through during the Soviet administration of the in cooperation with Nazi Germany. Even after the Nazis captured the region after attacking the Soviet Union Baltic Germans were not allowed to return and by the wars end additional efforts were made to take them out, given the fate that the Nazis had dealt them. Today some Baltic Germans remain in the region but the numbers are quite small.

The day is celebrated as Victory Day in Estonia, which also traditionally celebrates the day as St. John's Day, an event that stands as a major holiday on the calendar in the region.  The day traditionally marks the commencement of summer.

Elsewhere in the north, more or less, Czech forces were being pulled out of Vladivostok.

Czechs on a tug in Vladivostok harbor waiting to board the Archer on their way out of Russia and war.