Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Catholic Co Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston, Texas

Churches of the West: Catholic Co Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston...:

Catholic Co Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston Texas

This is  the new Co Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, which replaced the old one in 2005.  The new cathedral is a very large church located just one block from the old cathedral.

Best Posts of the Week of February 16, 2020

The best post of February 16, 2020.

Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian becomes City Park Church, the former First Baptist Church.

Presidents Day

Technological Acclimation and Mystic Pizza

In 1920, there were 1,000,000 black farmers in the United States. Now there's only 45,000.

In 1920, there were 1,000,000 black farmers in the United States. Now there's only 45,000.

What happened?\

Black Farmer, Erin New York, 1940.  Already at the time of this photograph this farm was the only black owned farm in its area.

February has been declared to be Black History month.  I disregard most such declarations as most of them came after this one and they increasingly have come to mean less and less. Indeed, they've always had a strong political aspect to them, but this has grown to be more the case as they've moved on and the appeal to whatever cause is being given a month is less and less broad.  I don't feel this to be the case for Black History Month.

There are are few items up on this site that specifically relate to African American  heritage, most specifically the examination of the history of blacks in the military.  But I haven't looked at this topic, which is a really remarkable one.

Black farmers in Marshall, Texas, 1940.

For a long time, African Americans have represented about 10% of the U.S. population, but they were 14% of the farm population.  Now they're 2%.  That's a really remarkable decline.  What occured is a legitimate question.

It may particularly be one if we stop to realize that African American association with agriculture was particularly strong, if particularly unwilling, early on.  That is, almost all of the early African immigrants to North American were slaves, and almost all of them were slaves on farms with farming duties.

Indeed, that fact dominated both the early history of blacks in North America and agriculture in North America.  American agriculture rapidly split into two types, one being yeoman farms owned by families that consumed, as a rule, the bulk of their own production and sold the surplus and the second being production "plantations" that were driven for market sales.  A person who had the economic bent to history, perhaps a product of the University of Chicago or one of the members of the Marxist school of historical thought would tend to note, accordingly, that capitalism in American agriculture can be argued to have its roots in slavery, although that's drawing the point too fine and perhaps mischaracterising it.  Still, plantations were production agriculture, which produced their own consumables of all types on the side.  Regular farms, on the other hand, tended to be subsistence farms which sold their excess.  People could and did become rich as yeoman farmers, which is important to note, and oddly enough planters, i.e., those who owned plantations, were usually so heavily in debt that their debts exceeded their assets.  On a day to day basis, however, a planter was more likely to live the life of the genteel than any yeoman was, while the nature of the labor on the respective agricultural units were much more grueling for the actual laborers on a plantation.

It'd be temping just to write the history of blacks in American farming from there, but that would be inaccurate.  Black slaves on southern farms principally learned farming as a trade and, moreover, they learned a lot about farming that an average yeoman wouldn't.  Typical yeoman farms were multi production units driven towards family consumption and the finishing of a product was only partially market oriented.  Yeomanry learned an incredibly diverse set of skills, but they weren't as diverse as those that existed on a plantation.  For one thing, given the nature of plantations, they included subsistence farming in addition to production farming as the slaves were expected to feed themselves and their owners.  Indeed, while rarely noted, slaves were typically lightly armed by their owners so that they could supplement their tables with small game, which saved the owner from having to slaughter production animals for their sake.  Given all of this, slaves learned, by force of course, the same skills that yeomanry did in subsistence farming, but also learned production farming and for that matter the finishing of many agricultural products that plantations generated.  In other words, the typical southern slave at the time of the American Revolution learned how to grow food plants, such as yams, onions and the like, but also learned how to harvest and mill grain, brew beer, harvest, cultivate, dry and process tobacco.  Only that latter crop, at that time, was a production crop.  In later years, of course, cotton would be added, which wasn't processed locally, and which is a legendarily back breaking crop to cultivate and harvest.  Indeed, the labor is so great that it was cotton that kept American slavery from passing away in the early 19th Century and which accordingly lead to the Civil War.

Anyhow, with that background its tempting to suppose that as soon ast he Union Army came through that slaves took off for the North, but they didn't.  The United States was overwhelmingly agricultural in the 1860s and yeomanry was every bit the factor in the North that it was in the South. The real difference was that in the South the  yeoman class, which made up the overwhelming majority of hte population, was poorer than it was in the North, which was itself a byproduct of slavery.

Freed slaves wanted to become freeholders.  The dream of early liberated slaves was to own "40 acres and a mule", the American Agrarian equivalent of Chesterton's later Distributist "3 acres and a cow".  40 acres of land meant freedom and self sufficiency and the American black population, cultivating American ground since 1619, was well aware of that.  The Radical Republican thought was to bust up the plantations and distribute the ground, Emiliano Zapata style, to those who worked it.

It should have been done.

The fact that it wasn't done provides the beginning of the answer to the question posed above.  African Americans were overwhelmingly farmers in 1865 and they lacked the means to purchase farms or move for the most part. Some who had them moved, and already by the late 1860s black cowboys, recently freed men who had driven cattle in the forests of the south, were a prominent feature in Western ranching.  But the fact of the matter was that for the most part blacks couldn't purchase ground.  They had to hire themselves out, and in hiring themselves out, they were guaranteed to be required to work for the lowest wages possible, often in conditions that mimicked slavery.

Over time, those who could did purchase ground and many became tenant farmers, or sharecroppers.  Black sharecroppers became a major feature of the South, but in fairness black farmers did as well.  They were always outnumbered by white farmers to be sure, but they were a definite presence throughout the South and even spread into other regions.  The  number of acres owned by black farmers in the United States was 3,000,000 acres. By 1900, it was 12,000,000.

After 1890, however, some significant changes in the US began that would reverse the trend.  By 1890 the nation's transportation infrastructure had advanced to where moving long distance had become much easier.  At the same time the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s had caused blacks to steadily lose rights in the South after that time on a year by year basis.  By the 1890s it was becoming very notable and the first strong efforts to push back started to occur.  Those early efforts weren't successful however and African Americans simply began to pull up stakes and move from Southern farms to northern cities.

Map showing concentration of African American population in the United States in 1900.

What began as a trickle in in the 1890s expanded to a flood in the mid 1910s.  As a black population base formed in northern cities, African Americans who were sick of the prejudice and poverty they faced in the South left for the north and left agriculture behind them.  The process continued on all the way into the 1970s.

As this occurred, the relief laws of the Great Depression came into and accelerated the decline in black farming.  Much Southern farm land remained owned by descendants of the planter class who leased it out to black sharecroppers.  In an effort to arrest the deflation of agricultural products the US government encouraged farmers to plow crops under and idle land giving no thought to the fact that, in much of the South, the land being idled was farmed by one person and owned by another.  Planters participated in the Government' idling of their land and benefited economically by doing so. Sharecroppers simply lost their livelihoods.

Combined with all of this is the decline in the number of farmers in general, something American society, which is welded to the concept of market forces being benighted, has done nothing to arrest.

The overall result has been a sort of tragedy, particularly if you regard farming as having a special merit in and of itself, as we do.  Beyond that, which we won't go into but which is part of the mysticism of the agrarian ideal, African American culture had particularly strong roots in agriculture, with not all of those roots being exclusively one of oppression.  Even well into the Great Migration much of the odds and ends of African American culture in the United States, from food to music, had really deep agricultural roots.  That's effectively been lost with the loss of African Americans to farming.

February 20, 1920. Washington D. C. Scenes

Secty. of War Baker today presented eleven Distinguished Service Medals and two distinguished Service Crosses previously awarded to officers and civilians. Distinguished service medals were presented to Rear Adml. Ralph Earle, Col. Joseph P. Tracy, Col Chas Keller, Col. Alexander B. Cox, Lt Col. Karl L.Baldwin, Col James Easby-Smith, Col. Milton A Reckord, Col. M.W. Thompson, Maj. Jos C. Byron, Mr Max Thelen, Mr Gerard Swope, Distinguished Service Crosses Maj Alvin Colburn, Chaplain John Carroll Moore.

Delivering motion picture reels to White House

Blog Mirror: Dumbest Blog Ever: Advertising Space

Advertising Space

The Test Drive

Not as satisfying, in some way, as the print edition, but I actually read more of it, and with breakfast, which is how I like to read the paper.

And it was ready well over 1.5 hours before the print one showed up this morning.

________________________________________________________________________________

Related threads:

Giving up on the print edition

Technological Acclimation and Mystic Pizza

Sometimes you don't realize how acclimated you've become to technology until you experience it in an odd fashion.

The other night I was flipping  though the channels and hit upon the movie Mystic Pizza.  I've seen it before. It's really not worth watching and I knew that when I hit on it.

For those who haven't seen it, don't bother.  A synopsis of the plot, or rather plots, is as follows, as it plays into what I've noted here as the theme of this entry.  The movie follows the lives and loves of three young Portuguese American women, who all  work at a pizza restaurant in the Connecticut seaport town of Mystic.  They characters are Kat Araujo, played by Annabeth Gish (no relationship to the great silent screen star Lillian Gish), Daisy Araujo, played by the then up and coming Julia Roberts and Jojo Barbosa, played by the Lili Taylor.

Note that none of the actresses are Portuguese Americans.*

Anyhow, the basic gist of the film is that Kat and Daisy are sisters, and Kat is bound in the near future for Yale, while Daisy is wild and not bound for Yale.  Jojo is tied up in romance with a Portuguese American fisherman and the film starts off with their wedding, which is interrupted for most of the film when she collapses during the ceremony, burdened with the thought of the seriousness of the obligation she's embarking upon.

None of which has all that much to do with what I'm noting, but two parts of the plot do, and they both involve telephones.

Daisy has met a "preppy" (this 1988 film was made during the preppy era) who is a failed law student. His booting out from law school hasn't interrupted his wealth somehow, to we have the Townie/Preppy romance thing going on, a theme that dates back in various ways to the silent film era.  Kat is not only working at Mystic Pizza, but is also baby sitting the daughter of a young architect whose wife is off in England.  Yeah, you can probably see how all these plots develop from there.

Anyhow, in once scene the Daisy character is supposed to go to dinner with Preppy dude and meet his parents, but Kat, who is supposed to fill in for her at the pizza joint, doesn't show up.  Daisy tries to call her but the handset has been kicked off the phone at the Architect's house where Architect, daughter and Kat are watching television.

That struck me there simply because now you'd call on your cell.  If nobody answered you'd text.

It didn't disrupt me watching the film, and indeed I didn't have much invested in it anyhow, but that just struck me.

More significantly, however, late in the movie Architect and Kat arrange to go to a giant 18th Century house he is working on Halloween night as the house is reputedly haunted.  Note, I didn't say this movie was good.  While there, the predictable happens.  Jojo, meanwhile, has agreed to participate in this evil by watching daughter, whereupon she discovers her love for children in a weakly developed part of the film which in turn will lead to the resumption of her nuptials.  Anyhow, just like a silent film, Wife returns from England and Jojo is forced into making up a strained lie as to the missing husband and babysitter.

At that point, automatically, a modern viewer will think, as this takes place in world not all that long ago and otherwise pretty much like ours, "why doesn't she call Kat on her cell phone or text?".  It's literally impossible not to.  Of course, she can't.  They didn't exist.

That's actually my sole point in noting this movie watching experience.  I'm now so used to cell phones that my first reaction is "why doesn't she use her cell phone?", and the thought keeps repeating as you are watching these scenes.

Okay, while on this, why did I watch this, again?

I don't really know.  I know that the first time I watched this movie on television it was a few years after its release as a fellow who was in law school at the same time I was, and who was from a somewhat well heeled family in Connecticut, took enormous offense to the movie at the time it was released.  I recall him asking me if I'd seen it one day at law school.  I didn't watch very many movies while in law school (maybe none) and I'd never heard of it.  I recall his view was that the movie maker, whom he knew, knew nothing about Portuguese Americans in Connecticut.  At the time, and upon the first viewing, I was pretty surprised that he'd be so wrapped up in that as he certainly wasn't a Connecticut Portuguese American either.

None of that justifies watching this film again, but there was nothing on and I was on the verge of falling asleep so I just left it on.  Having seen it now, I think I agree with the critic noted.  Everything, including the Portuguese nature of the protagonist, is pretty underdeveloped.  You only know that they're Portuguese as somebody says something about it now and then and their being Catholic is mentioned a couple of times and oddly inserted a couple of times.

FWIW, there really is a Mystic Pizza.  Most of the people who have seen this film apparently like it, as opposed to me, who does not, and following the film, the real Mystic Pizza was redone to look like the one in the move, which provides an odd example of art following life following art, I guess.

Presidents Day

Today is Presidents Day, a Federal Holiday which merged the birthdays of the generally acknowledged two greatest Presidents in U.S. history, Presidents Washington and Lincoln.  Indeed, it's hard to find any who compare to them in any fashion.

It's also a holiday that mostly isn't.  Most people in the US don't get it off as ignoring holidays of all kinds has become an American thing.  People don't take their vacations and they don't take off most of the civil holidays.

Christopher Columbus, who was added to the US civil holiday list when the Federal Government basically wanted to grant that Italian Americans were part of the nation in full.  My prediction is that he'll come back off the civil holiday list in the near future.

Indeed, some of the civil holidays have now faded into obscurity or even controversy.  The US recognizes ten Federal Holidays, three of which are actually religious holidays that are deeply ingrained in our culture, those being Christmas, New Years and Thanksgiving.*  The other Federal Holidays are Martin Luther King Day (Equality Day in Wyoming), Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day.  In at least my experience, people get all of the holidays off that were originally religious ones, but of the others, they only get Independence Day off as a rule.  Quite a few law offices, FWIW, do get Veterans Day off recently.  Columbus Day is not only rarely observed as a civil holiday anymore, it actually sparks protests by Native Americans or people who claim to support Native Americans.

The barely remembered President Millard Fillmore, whom nobody has proposed giving his own day.

Lincoln and Washington, for their part, were really great men, which doesn't make them perfect.  When this day was renamed and made into a single holiday it probably should have retained both of their names, such as in Washington-Lincoln Day.  A day named Presidents Day cheapens the day by lumping all of the Presidents together and thereby bringing along all the baggage that is associated with the office.

Jimmy Carter, who is a really nice guy, but who was a really ineffective President.

Of course, while not knowing it for sure, I suspect that part of the reason the day was renamed and collectively grouped is that, as time goes on, various people regard other Presidents as sufficiently great to merit their own day. Theodore Roosevelt is regarded as a great President by many, although he never faced the sets of problems that Washington and Jefferson did.  Some regard his cousin Franklin Roosevelt as a great President, and FDR did man the helm during the Great Depression and most of World War Two, troubling times to say the least.  In recent years I've heard mention of Ronald Reagan, who again never faced crises like this, but who did bring to an end the period of frightening inflation and whose strategy in regard to the Soviet Union helped bring it to an end.  At least Gutzon Borglum thought Thomas Jefferson sufficiently great to include both him, and Theodore Roosevelt, in his masterpiece at Mount Rushmore.

All of which probably should serve to remind us that all of our Presidents have been men, as in human beings, and we've had our share of duds.  Moreover, they were all flawed in various ways, some more so than others.  Latter day critics and hagiographers should consider that before being too laudatory or condemnatory.

Jefferson at age 78.

Washington, like his Mount Rushmore fellow, kept slaves.  Both men appear to have realized it was morally wrong, but they were sufficiently weak in character to be unable to free their desire to retain their wealth from participating in what they knew to be a moral travesty.  Washington only freed his slaves upon his death.  Jefferson didn't even do that, and as we know, his relationship with one of his female slaves was deeply weird.  

Black Hawk.

People rarely throw stones at tragic Lincoln, but I suspect its only a matter of time.  He was a militia officer during the Black Hawk War which puts him in the same camp as the vast majority of Americans of his time in being comfortable with the conquering of the continent from its native peoples and the basic destruction of their culture.  Endless such examples could be found.

Andrew Johnson, the first of three American Presidents to be impeached. . .and the only one to hold that distinction until quite recently.

And in this day in our own history, in which national politics are in a period of deep stress and extreme polarization, it's easy to forget that lots of people absolutely detested prior Presidents and that this isn't unique to our own era.

Washington was reviled while he was in office by a section of the population.  Jefferson had more than a few critics.  Lincoln was so unpopular with thirteen southern states that they attempted to leave the Union and pitched the country into the worst war of its history, something that hasn't come close to being repeated since.  Quite a few people thought Theodore Roosevelt a really dangerous radical and more than a few inside the Republican hierarchy thought he was nuts.  Frankly Roosevelt was initially widely distrusted by many Republicans. And I can personally recall Reagan being detested among the college set when I was in college.

Indeed, part of the reason I think the recent shock at the acrimony that now exists in politics is around is that people have forgotten that the periods of more or less decent respectful behavior in politics are interrupted by periods of the opposite.  In our own case, the long shadow of World War Two and the immediate sorting out of the early Cold War operated to keep the lid on extremism for a long time.  By the late 1950s the GOP wanted the country to forget that it isolationism had contributed to the onset of World War Two and the Democrats wanted people to forget that a lot of the accusations levied at it in the McCarthy era about Democratic administrations being penetrated by Soviet spies were correct.  Both parties agreed on a lot in that period out of necessity.

That started to unravel in the 1960s but even as late as the 1990s there were still a lot of older politicians around who retained roots in that period.  There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.  Now, the conservative Democrats don't exist and have been basically driven out of the party and the GOP is in a struggle between a conservative branch and populist branch.  Politics started getting weird during the Clinton Administration and they seemingly have become more strained with each election.

Which may mean that this holiday can serve to remind us that the period of acrimony will end.

That is, if anyone actually observes the day.

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*Contrary to what Americans believe, other nations don't recognize many more civil holidays than we do.  The United Kingdom recognizes fewer, there being eight, and France one more, eleven.

Of interest France, which is often noted as being "secular", includes four religious holidays on that calendar, those being Christmas, Ascension, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and All Saints Day.  The UK effectively includes three those being Christmas, Boxing Day and Easter Monday.

Railhead: Former Chicago & Northwester Depot, Lander Wyoming...

Railhead: Former Chicago & Northwester Depot, Lander Wyoming...:

Former Chicago & Northwester Depot, Lander Wyoming.

Up until now, I've somehow managed to miss putting up a photograph of this former Chicago & Northwestern Depot in Lander, Wyoming, which now serves as the Lander Chamber of Commerce building.  That may be because, as these photos suggest, downtown Lander, in spite of Lander being a small town, is pretty crowded in some ways and I missed the depot early on, and had a hard time catching it in a photographic state later.

Indeed, I never really did catch it in an ideal state to be photographed.

Lander was the western most stop on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad.  The line sometimes called itself the "Cowboy Line" and this lent itself to the slogan "where the rails end, the trails begin".  In 1973 the railroad abandoned the stretch of the line between Riverton and Lander, and since then of course it's ceased operation entirely.  The railroad, which like many railroads, was the product of mergers and acquisitions and was doing that right up to the late 1960s when its fortunes began to change.



In Wyoming its line ran astride the Burlington Northern's in many locations but it alone ran on to Lander.  Starting in the early 70s, it began to contract in Wyoming and then pulled out altogether.  The Union Pacific purchased its assets at some point, although its now the case that all of its old rail has been pulled.  Indeed, unless you know that the CNW had once run to Lander, you wouldn't know that Lander had once had rail service at all, let alone that it had it as far back as 1906.

Giving up on the print edition

When the local paper moved to a location 150 miles away for printing, I knew that there's be delivery disruptions. . .

frequently.

The paper insisted they'd be rare.  But that was optomistic.

This winter has proven me quite correct.  There's been a lot of days when the paper simply didn't make it here.

And if it didn't make it here, I can only imagine what it must be like in areas to the north of here.  After all, there's more or less a straight shot between the city of publication and the city, ours, whose name appears on their masthead.

And its become very expensive.

As a subscriber, I'm entitled to use their on line version, but I haven't liked it. Or I thought I didn't.

But then I learned just the other day, from a friend who only subscribes to the on line version and reads it on an Ipad, that in actually a setting allowed it to appear larger.

Well, that version gets here reliably, electronically, every day.

And its cheaper.

So, with some reluctance, I'm going to go with that next time my subscription comes up.

Which frankly seems to me to make the paper less viable long term.  But with the expense, and frequent road closures, well. . .

Blog Mirror: " 'Shocking' Results When WWI Helmets Were Compared to Modern Military Designs

WWI helmets protect against shock waves just as well as modern design. French Adrian helmet suggests simple geometry may save brains from overhead blasts.

February 16, 1920. Reviews and Troubles.

General Pershing reviewing troops at Jackson Barracks, February 16, 1920.

On this day in 1920, Columbia joined the League of Nations, Armenia made a statement to the League in Paris that it was ready to enter into negotiations to secure its borders, and the US and the European powers went into a spat about Yugoslavia in which the US threatened to back out of Europe entirely.

Cardinal Patrick O'Donnell

In Ireland, where there was no peace but low grade guerrilla war, there were now 41,000 British troops serving in the country, up from 25,000 prior to the war.  Bishop Charles McHugh of Derry accused the British of "military despotism", Bishop Thomas O'Doherty of Clonfert referred to British rule as a "regime of militarism" and Bishop, later Cardinal, Patrick O'Donnell stated that an "atmosphere of war and blood coupled with resentment, and the indignities of military rule, was in some danger of endangering wrong notions in regard to human life."

The statements by the Bishops was significant in that the struggle between the Irish and the English had a strong confessional based to it.  The Bishops weighing in lent support to the common Irish people's distress that that the British were treating them as occupied people and and unfairly.

Churches of the West: Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian becomes City Park Church, the former First Baptist Church

Churches of the West: Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian be...:

Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian becomes City Park Church, the former First Baptist Church.

I debated on whether to put this entry here or on our companion blog, Lex Anteinternet.  In the end, I decided to put it up here first and then link it over. This will be one of a couple of posts of this type which explore changes, this one with a local expression, that have bigger implications.

When we started this blog, some of the first entries here were on churches in downtown Casper.  These included the First Presbyterian Church and the First Baptist Church, with buildings dating to 1913 and 1949 respectively.  First Baptist, it should be noted, has occupied their present location, if not their present church, for a century.

Indeed, while I wasn't able to get it to ever upload, I have somewhere a video of the centennial of the First Presbyterian Church from 2013, featuring, as a church that originally had a heavy Scots representation ought to, a bagpipe band.  Our original entry on that church building is right below:

First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming

This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of which are separated from each other by City Park.

The corner stone of the church gives the dates 1913 1926. I'm not sure why there are two dates, but the church must have been completed in 1926.

Well, since that centennial, First Presbyterian has been going through a constant set of changes, as noted in our entry here:

Grace Reformed at City Park, formerly First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming

This isn't a new addition to the roll of churches here, but rather news about one of them.  We formerly posted on this church here some time ago:

Churches of the West: First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming: This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of whi...

People who have followed it would be aware that the Presbyterian churches in the United States are undergoing a period of rift, and this church has reflected that.  The Presbyterian Church, starting in the 1980s, saw conflict develop between liberal and more conservative elements within it which lead to the formation of the "moderate conservative" EPC.  As I'm not greatly familiar with this, I'll only note that the EPC is associated with "New School Presbyterianism" rather than "Old School" and it has adopted the motto  "In Essentials, Unity; In Non-Essentials, Liberty; In All Things, Charity. Truth in Love.".

The change in name here is confusing to an outsider in that this church is a member of the EPC, but it's no longer using its original name.  As it just passed the centennial of its construction, that's a bit unfortunate in some ways. 

We'd also note that the sought set of stairs is now chained off.  We're not sure why, but those stairs must no longer be used for access.

The changes apparently didn't serve to arrest whatever was going on, as there's a sign out in front of the old First Presbyterian, later Grace Reformed, that starting on February 23, it'll be City Park Church.

City Park Church, it turns out, is the name that the congregation that presently occupies another nearby church, First Baptist Church, will call its new church building, which is actually a much older building than the one it now occupies, which is depicted here:

First Baptist Church, Casper Wyoming

This is the First Baptist Church in Casper, Wyoming. It's one of the Downtown churches in Casper, in an area that sees approximately one church per block for a several block area.

This particular church was built in 1949, and sits on the same block as Our Savior's Lutheran Church.

What's going on?

Well, it's hard to say from the outside, which we are, but what is pretty clear is that the rifts in the Presbyterian Church broke out, in some form, in the city's oldest Presbyterian Church to the point where it ended up changing its name, and then either moving out of its large church, and accompanying grounds, or closing altogether.  I've never been in the building but I'm told that its basement looked rough a couple of years ago and perhaps the current congregation has other plans or the grounds and church are just too much for it.  At any rate, the 1949 vintage building that First Baptist occupies is apparently a bit too small for its needs and it had taken the opportunity to acquire and relocate into the older, but larger, church.  It can't help but be noted that both churches have pretty large outbuildings as well. Also, while they are both downtown, the 1913 building is one of the three very centrally located old downtown Casper churches, so if church buildings have pride of place, the Baptist congregation is moving into a location which has a little bit more of one.

While it will be dealt with more in another spot, or perhaps on Lex Anteinternet, the entire thing would seem to be potentially emblematic of the loss that Christian churches that have undergone a rift like the Presbyterian Church in the United States has sustained when they openly split between liberal and conservative camps.  The Presbyterian Church was traditionally a fairly conservative church, albeit with theology that was quite radical at the time of its creation.  In recent years some branches of that church have kept their conservatism while others have not and there's been an open split.  As noted elsewhere this has lead in part to a defection from those churches in a lot of localities, and a person has to wonder if something like that may have happened here, as well as wondering if the obvious fact that a split has occurred would naturally lead to a reduction in the congregation as some of its members went with the other side.  We've noted here before that the Anglican Community locally not only has its two Episcopal Churches in town, but that there are also two additional Anglican Churches of a much more theologically conservative bent, both of which are outside of the Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming.

A person can't really opine, from the outside, if something like this is "sad" or not, but it's certainly a remarkable event.  We've noted church buildings that have changed denominations of use before, but this is the first one where we've actually witnessed it.  And in this case, the departing denomination had occupied their building for a century.

Poster Saturday: An Heroic Sacrifice

February 14, 1920. A Sober Valentine's Day.

Zintkala Nuni

Zintkala Nuni, who was found as an orphaned infant on the bloody grounds of Wounded Knee died of the flu contracted from her husband on this day in 1920.

Her story is uniformly tragic.

She was found by an Army burial detail still tied to the back of her dead mother.  She was raised at first by members of her tribe, who named her "Lost Bird", but was soon taken into the home of Gen. Leonard Wright Colby who referred to her, at first, as a "curio" of the massacre.  Colby and his wife Clara Bewick Cody adopted her in 1891, with Clara, a suffragette and publisher of Women's Tribune principally raising her.

When she was five, her adoptive father abandoned Clara and Zintkala and married Zintkala's nanny, thereafter moving to Beatrice, Nebraska.  Her childhood was rough as an Indian child raised among the white privileged.  Like many Indian she was educated in Indian boarding schools for part of the time, in part because Clara was so busy.  At age 17 the rebellious Zintkala was sent to live with Gen. Colby and became pregnant soon thereafter.  The father of her child is unknown but some historians suspect Colby of sexual abuse of her.  After she became pregnant Colby committed her to a reformatory for unwed mothers, where the child was born stillborn.

She then returned to Clara's home and married, leaving her husband after a few weeks of marriage and after having contracted syphilis from her husband.  The Spanish Flu ultimately brought about her death.

On the same day Konstantin Konstantinovich Mamontov, former Imperial Russian General and then serving as a White Russian General, a Don Cossack, died of typhus at age 50.

Konstantin Mamontov

And in Chicago, the League of Women's Voters was founded.

Friday Farming: February Fields

February Fields

February 13, 1920. Leagues Founded. Leagues Joined. Leagues Not Joined.

On this day in 1920, the National Negro Leagues were founded and professional black baseball was launched.  Black baseball teams already existed at the time, but the NNL was the first association of them to last for more than a year, and hence some stability was brought to the African American leagues in an era in which segregation kept players out of major league baseball otherwise.  The effort was lead by Rube Foster, owner and coach of the Chicago American Giants.

Rube Foster

Foster would serve as president of the league but suffered from a near fatal asphyxiation from a gas lead in 1925 from which he never recovered.  He became increasingly erratic thereafter and died in 1930, after which the league, suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, disbanded.  A  new one would be formed several years later.

On the same day Switzerland was admitted as a neutral member of the League of Nations.  And in the US Robert Lansing, Wilson's Secretary of State, was effectively terminated by Woodrow Wilson.

Robert Lansing

Lansing had fallen increasingly out of favor with President Wilson since the end of World War One.  Lansing did not regard the League of Nations as being vital to U.S. interests, in contrast to President Wilson.  And he called the cabinet together several times for consultations during Wilson's absence, and further urged the Vice President to assume the duties of the President during his illness, which Wilson regarded as disloyal.

Both Nichols and UW fought to keep the records pertaining to her firing as the President of U.S. confidential. . .

but the Court ordered them opened. 

They served to be embarrassing, in part as Nichols wasn't made aware of them while they were going on and couldn't contest them.  Nothing horrific, but simply allegations of abrasive behavior, which might be untrue.  Nonetheless, the Press fought for their release, they spread it around.

Since then they've been complaining that the news that they spread around, which she didn't want released, is an awful thing as she couldn't contest it. She couldn't, but now she has to defend her reputation in the public sphere, to the extent anyone cares about it now, which is pretty hard to do.

And today the press is running a story that UW spent $42,000, which really isn't all that much to hire a competent attorney to takes this on, as they did, fighting the release. Presumably the press will also report on how much it spent to drag the story out in the public.  All in all, I'm surprised by how low the legal fees were, but that probably isn't the point of the stories, which don't grasp how expensive and difficult legal work really is.

Something is simply amiss here.

Risk. Coronavirus, Influenza, and Other Scary and Not Scary Things.

Gasoline Alley, February 9, 1920.  In 1920 there was a great deal of concern about the revival of the prior two years horrific flu epidemic.

Let me by start off by noting that I'm not saying that the Corona Virus is just a bogus scare.  It might turn into a true human disaster.

We don't know that yet.

It might, but it might not.  It probably actually won't.

None of which is a comfort to you if you are dying from it.

According to some statistics that are probably now completely obsolete as they change every day, there have been 37,592 confirmed cases in the Coronavirus, almost all of them in China.  814 people have died (more than that as the death toll reached 100 in one day this past week, and these figures are from January).  2,920 people have recovered from the virus after having it. Add that up and it tells us that most of the people who have been infected are infected right now.

Scary?

Well, last flu season 45,000,000 Americans were infected by the flu virus, of which 61,000 died.  Over 800,000 were hospitalized. Last year was a really bad year for the flu, we'd note, and the number of Americans who died from it were about double the norm.  So far, this year, between 21,000,000 and 30,000,000 Americans have come down with the flu, of which about 30,000 have died.

This, we would note, places the current flu season in the category of being a bad one. February is the worst month for the flu, normally, and we already have seen a year which would be more or less average for infection and death.

Which brings me to my point.

Yes, people worry about the flu, but not like they do strange new exotic viruses.  

But the flu is a real killer.

The flu killed millions in a pandemic that we've discussed here, which raged across the globe killing tens of millions just a century ago. That pandemic still isn't understood very well, and it may never be.  But if you are reading this today, you have DNA from that flu virus in you.  Every living human being, save perhaps those who live in truly remote regions where it never touched, does.  Today, in fact, the same strain still exists, in closely mutated form, and will make you sick. But it won't kill you.

Sooner or later there will be something like the 1918-19 Flu again, most probably.  Perhaps we've developed our medical technology so far that this won't occur, but it probably will.  And with the larger human population of today, it'll be every bit as bad, probably, as the 1918-19 Pandemic was.  Maybe worse.

But if you were a betting medical man, the bet would be that it will be the flu. . . not Coronavirus, SARS or Ebola or any of the other viruses that the news media and the general public like to freak out about.

Indeed, while the scientific memory of the 18-19 Flu remains very strong, and causes the annual focus on the developing strain in the medical community, the scientific knowledge of the American public has bizarrely declined in recent decades to the point where while we now have vaccines that  can address it, people will forgo having themselves or their children vaccinated or even treated because they are ignorant of science.  Just this past week a four year old child died because his ignorant mother took advice from an Anti Vaccination Facebook group about treating him with Tamilflu.  She's a moron.  They're idiots.  They are culpable in his death. But such things are now common in the US now, while also running around like chickens with our heads cut off about new viruses also is.

Sailor and Red Cross nurse at the site of a munitions plant explosion, October 5, 1918, wearing mask for protection against the flu.

Indeed, the ability to calculate risk is a really interesting topic, and the topic of infectious disease, and health in general, gives many such examples.

Humans, in their long history, have battled with many killer diseases.  Interestingly, in earlier eras, while these diseases did scare us, rightfully, we often carried on carrying on in the face of a massive death toll anyhow.  This is so much the case than modern historians now like to assert, falsely, that the news of an outbreak was suppressed.

This is very much the case with the 18-19 flu.  It was bad, and communities did end up closing schools and churches, but for the most part people carried on to a remarkable degree.  Now you hear all the time that the news was suppressed in the press.  It most definitely wasn't.  It was front page news the entire time, including the daily death toll in the community.  People very much knew what was going on and just how bad it was.

Diseases like smallpox provide another example.  Smallpox plagued humans for centuries and people worried greatly about it, but for the most part they carried on enduring risks we would not if faced with a similar disease today.  In really desperate situations people would inoculate themselves or have themselves inoculated, risky as it involved a live vaccine, but that's because they were living and working in conditions where they couldn't avoid the disease.

American with smallpox, 1912.

The only disease that's really been like that in modern times has been the flu.  It visits us every year, and some years its really bad.  We know what we can do about it, but we don't worry all that much about it really, even though it remains a first rate killer.

Instead we worry about the exotic.

In recent years the first disease we really freaked out about was AIDS.  AIDS is a horrific disease, but it's also largely behaviorally based.  During the height of the freaking out about it there were suggestions that it was going to become airborne or the like.  There was never any chance of that. Rather, it was always a sexually transmitted disease, of more than one strain.  In the Western world the overwhelming majority of individuals who contracted it and still do, do so through homosexual sex.  In Africa, where the strain is different, the overwhelming majority of people who contract it do so through heterosexual sex.  There are definitely other ways it has been transmitted, but the key to it was sex.  It's a sexually transmitted disease. As a sexually transmitted disease, it's one whose mode of transmission is an automatic limiter and it was never going to be as deadly as the flu in any one year or even close to being.

This is the case, we'd note, with all sexually transmitted diseases, all of which have increased in recent years as sexual conduct has become less and less governed by common sense, morality and science.  People are bad at calculating risk.

Indeed, diseases provide interesting examples about the miscalculation of risks of all sorts.  During the height of the AIDS epidemic the common advice for members of the demographic most threatened with it was to employ condoms, which given the failure rate of the same is really a poor calculation of risk.  The obvious recommendation that could be made that would have completely avoided the risk was rarely given.  "Avoid sex" or at least "avoid sex with people you know with certainty not to be infected" wasn't the common advice.

The flip-side of this is provided by the decades running advice on avoiding "red meat" out of cancer and other health concerns.  In reality, the danger posed by red meat is very small, statistically.  Abstaining from meat of all types is, on the other hand, universally dangerous to people who practice it, requiring that such persons go to great lengths to find artificial substitutes for the things they would have acquired from meat.  And yet, because of this marginal risk, people abstain from meat and chose instead to incur greater health risks in the exchange.

Interesting examples of poor calculation of risks are provided by smoking and drinking as well.  Drinking, as it has an interesting mixed history, is one we'll look at first.

Alcohol poses very real risks to those who consume it, which has been known for a long time. Alcohol itself is a poison.  Simply drinking too much alcohol in a single setting will kill you.  However, we also know that human beings have a genetically developed tolerance for the poison up to a certain level, in most, but not all, populations.  That tells us, from an evolutionary biological prospective, that at some point human beings developed a tolerance for something that's a manufactured poison, for some reason.  That's downright odd.

The reason for it initially seems to be that primitive beer was a food source.  Liquid bread, basically.  As grains aren't capable of being harvested around the calendar, beer was a way to keep it.  Early beers were flat and probably heavy duty, sort of like Guinness Stout, basically.  Every grain growing cultures seems to have developed them.  Even early on, however, the intoxication aspect of it was known, which is reflected in graffiti in huts left by the builders of the pyramids.

Additionally, brewing beer provided a safer liquid to drink than water in many places, indeed darned near all places, that routinely brewed it.  In a very primitive world water was basically safe to drink, but as soon as there were sufficient people and sufficient domestic animals belonging to those people, that changed.  Water from early times up through the dawn of the 20th Century was often pretty darned dangerous.

People debate on this a bit, but basically the attention required to brew beer, or to vint wine, in and of itself, was sufficient to make it safe for consumption. So in a way, as some people like to argue, the process, rather than the alcohol, made it safe.  Others say, no, the alcohol did it.  No matter, which ever did it, it was safe to drink and was drank in many areas in gigantic quantities year around.  Medieval European farm workers, for examples, drank liters of beer per day.  Scandinavians in the Middle Ages started the day off with hot beer.

And while the Middle Ages were very full of beer and wine, European cultures continued a really heavy alcohol consumption up through the 1950s.  It's really only after that it started to drop off, and for much of the original safe drink water concern reason.

But that didn't mean that Middle Ages Brew was 100% good for you.  It meant the water was riskier.

In modern terms, now that the threat of the water is over, the risk calculation has really changed.  Physicians debate it but alcohol consumption is somewhere between 100% risky to some degree to okay if done very moderately.  Most drinkers who are more than casual drinkers exceed the recommended consumption rates routinely.  There are some known health benefits to drinking, as is often cited, but as often pointed out, they're marginal.  People make the risk calculation today, but frankly they probably, much like the condom example given above, err on the side of the risk, rather than the safe approach.

Alcohol isn't the only drug like this, by the way.  Opium poppies were first used to season bread by Medieval Italians specifically because their lives were so hard and painful it dulled their wits.  That's a hard thing to accept but it was the case.  So it was like alcohol in a way.  Having somewhat dulled wits is a bad deal, but the risk calculation to overcome the pain was deemed worth it.  Modern poppy seed bread isn't made with opium poppies today and the risks associated with opium in any form grossly exceed a casual use such as that.

Coca leaves in the Andes actually served a similar function for natives living at  high altitudes. While their physical morphology actually has evolved to endure high altitude living, it's still so problematic that adults at one time spent a lot of the day chewing on coca just to have dulled wits and therefore not endure the pain of daily living the same way.  In modern times, however, the drugs that stem from coca are far riskier to use for any purpose than any calculation of risk would support.

Tobacco use, and soon marijuana use, travel the same path. Tobacco was claimed to have benefits at one time but it never really did.  Marijuana use will prove to be the same.  They're risky and their users grossly underestimate the very well known risk associated with them.

Indeed, this takes us back to the vaccination topic. Are there any risks at all in being vaccinated for an infectious disease?  Well, yes, but not the ones that are promoted by people whose claim to fame is having been a Playboy Photographic Prostitute.  Some people do get sick from vaccinations, and indeed I'm one of them, having been put in the hospital due to an Army vaccination for yellow fever. It turned out that I was allergic to one of the constituents.  And I've actually seen a person come down with a mild case of smallpox due to an Army vaccination, which must have meant that there was a little live vaccine in the vaccine we received and he hadn't been previously inoculated.

But those are rare examples and the risk run that a person has a reaction of that type are much lower than the risk posed by not getting the vaccination.  Yellow Fever is really bad, and so is a full case of smallpox.

All which gets back to risk.  People are bad at calculating it.  Everyone runs risks every day, but people chose to freak out about the small risks such as coronavirus suddenly being everywhere or eating red meat, and forgo worrying about the ones they are seemingly acclimated to, like the flu.