Happy Birthday USMC

13th Rgt, USMC, Quantico, post WWI.

Officers, Gauntanimo Bay, 1911.

List of recessions in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

List of recessions in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interesting look at economic ups and downs, including quite a few of which I wasn't aware of.

Education and opportunity, 1910s

The Pritzker Military History Library runs a series of interviews of authors of notable military history books. Recently they interviewed Richard Rubin on his book, The Last of the Doughboys.  The book relates a series of personal interviews the author had with World War One veterans right about the point they were 100 years old, or older.

The reason that I'm posting this here, with this caption, is that the first interview of the book was of a centenarian who related how he'd graduated from high school just prior to WWI, and had been directed towards an insurance company in a neighboring town. He obtained a job there, and made that his career.

How remarkable that this was even possible, and it shows a difference between that era and our own.  First of all, it'd be nearly impossible for a person to obtain a lifetime career based on only a high school education now.  Moreover, most people wouldn't come out of high school with an education sufficient for a white collar career. I wonder if that tells  us something about the value of any education at that time, or the quality of the education received?  Or perhaps the quantity of education generally received?

Two mule loads of earth

 2 Kings:

Naaman went down and plunged into the Jordan seven times
at the word of Elisha, the man of God.
His flesh became again like the flesh of a little child,
and he was clean of his leprosy.

Naaman returned with his whole retinue to the man of God.
On his arrival he stood before Elisha and said,
"Now I know that there is no God in all the earth,
except in Israel.
Please accept a gift from your servant."

Elisha replied, "As the LORD lives whom I serve, I will not take it;"
and despite Naaman's urging, he still refused.
Naaman said: "If you will not accept,
please let me, your servant, have two mule-loads of earth,
for I will no longer offer holocaust or sacrifice
to any other god except to the LORD."

I wonder, by this measure, how much two mule loads of earth amounts to?

Too short rather than two long? Law school prof backs four-year requirement

Too short rather than two long? Law school prof backs four-year requirement

Goodness. Four years?  In many commonwealth jurisdictions now law school isn't even a doctorate level degree, as it is here.  You obtain a baccalaureate in the law and go on to practice from there.  I'd be opposed to that, as I feel that the undergraduate course of study has some value to it, and that perhaps a lot of 18 year olds who might start off on a course of study of the law wouldn't be sufficiently mature, but I see no reason to add another year to law school at all.  That would seem to mostly benefit the finances of law schools.

With there being a new lawyer unemployment problem in many parts of the US now, moreover, it would add insult to injury to force an additional year on a person that might have a poor chance of paying off.

Levis

Rancher, wearing blue jeans, in the early 1940s. The roll up cuff was extremely common at that time.

At the time I started this entry, I had just noted here a news story that every one in the US is well aware of, that being the supposed demise of Hostess and its most famous product, Twinkies.  I correctly noted in that entry that I thought the brand would be back, and was correct, but that's not the point of my entry here. Rather, this time I'll look at another major brand, which to my mind has declined over they years.  This time I'll mull over another famous brand name and product.

That product is Levis.  Or, more particularly, Levi-Strauss' signature product, the Levi's 501 jean.

In the popular imagination for those of a certain age, the Levi 501 has always been around. That's not really true, the jeans archetype actually took a real pounding in the late 1960s, when bell bottom jeans became inexplicably popular.  But they rebounded in the mid 1970s.  I can actually recall the exact moment when I knew that you could get them again here, locally.  I didn't like bell bottoms at all, but they were the only jeans you could get.  Walking one day in the hallway of the junior high I saw another student with the straight legged 501.  I went home that day and had my parents take me downtown and buy a pair.  That's probably the one and only time I ever had my parents go right out and get clothing for the reasons of "fashion.".  But I hated those bell bottoms and the 501s looked so much better.

Here, for example, is how the Levi Strauss company now conceives of those wearing its jeans, as featured on their website.  Most of these guys look like a stiff breeze would blow them over.  Heck, most of them look like they'd go running home crying due to stiff breeze and spend the rest of the day in bed watching the Lifetime Television network. What a pathetic state of affairs.  In some ways its pretty symbolic of what seems to have happened to the company, and maybe even a bit of American culture in general.

The Levis myth has the the birth of the company occurring when a California miner came in to Strauss' Sand Francisco shop and asked for a pair of trousers to be cut out of tent canvass, with Levi Strauss being that tent maker.  That's a nice myth, but it isn't really true.  Strauss operated the San Francisco branch of larger and more geographically spread mercantile firm, which sold a variety of things, including canvas and tents.  His San Francisco store was really part of a larger fine dry goods firm.  Stauss didn't really invent the iconic trousers either, but was approached Jacob Davis, a Latvian immigrant who was a tailor in the area. Davis, almost certainly not his real name, was continually buying canvas from Strauss and came up with the idea of making reinforced with rivets cotton trousers.  Davis and Strauss had another connection, although not too much can be made of it, as they were co-religious, both being immigrant who were Jewish.  Strauss, however, had been born in Bavaria, with Davis being born in Latvia. The cultural differences between the two were probably fairly pronounced.

But not so pronounced that they couldn't form a company for the new enterprise, which is what they did.  Davis was the actual patent holder, with the patent for the rivet reinforced trousers dating to 1873.  Knowing his market, the patent drafter depicted the design being worn by a miner.

Levi 501s appeared amazingly early, with the denim trousers being offered for the first time in 1890.  But, contrary to another widespread myth about them, they didn't become the trousers of the cowboy.  No cotton jean did.  Cotton jeans were the hard wear clothing of working men, engaged in heavy labor.  They appealed to the same set that buys Carhartts today.  Cowboys, in that era, wore wool trousers as a rule.  The highly accurate paintings of Remington and Russel are good illustrations of that, which if observed often shown cowboys wearing checked heavy wool trousers, or even in one instance NWMP wool breaches.

And Levi Strauss wasn't the only brand around offering blue denim trousers.  Prior to World War Two there were a variety of company's that manufactured them, with Lee, the manufacturer of Lee Rider's, being the biggest.  The brand that first popularized the idea that cowboys wore blue jeans was a brand oddly named Booger Reds, with those jeans being popular because their very dark blue color filmed well.  Levis were pretty much a West Coast item and were not well known elsewhere.

About the time that that movies started to depict cowboys as wearing jeans, the washing machine really came in, in earnest. That changed what people wore, particularly those who worked in heavy labor or dirty labor of any kind.  Before the washing machine cotton offered no advantages over wool, except that it was cooler in the summer.  By and large, the fabric people wore was wool.  The Army, a major consumer of cotton today, didn't even issue a cotton uniform for general wear until the 1930s, although it had long issued a cotton stable uniform strongly resembling modern Carhartts for quite some time prior to that.  But when washing machines came in, all that changed.  Cotton is easy to wash by machine.  Wool is not.

This is not to say that cotton wasn't worn at all.  It was, and obviously had been. Cotton was the major pre Civil War export item in the American South.  The growing and harvesting of cotton fueled slavery before the war, and the Southern states thought cotton so important, as a global commodity, that European nations would have no choice but to recognize the Confederacy as a nation.  In the odd way things go, the Southern succession actually caused the Egyptian cotton industry to boom, so cotton did not turn out to be the king that southerners believe it was, and in turn the British were more tied to Egypt, technically part of the Ottoman Empire, than ever.  Anyhow, that does demonstrate that cotton was from very early on an important textile plant, as with some other plants that can be sued for textile fibers.

Indeed "denim", the fabric that blue jeans came to be made of, had been around for eons prior to Levi Strauss ever making a pare of trousers.  While the first Levis were canvas, not denim, denim trousers had been around long enough to pick up that name from a French town which was associated with them.  They were a popular trouser with French sailors, and the French even made denim sails for ships.

And by the early 20th Century, and indeed well before that, cotton had become a popular cloth for shirts, and as we have seen, for the trousers of heavy labor. That doesn't diminish the importance of wool, which was huge, but it does show that cotton clothing of various types wasn't uncommon by any means.  Quite t he contrary.  Levis, on the other hand, weren't the only makers of blue jeans, and they weren't even the most common.

Between World War One and World War Two, blue jeans started to take off because of the introduction of the washing machine, crude and scary though they were, and the the movies.  With American households starting to turn to washing machines they started to turn more and more to cotton, although cotton didn't take over, overnight.  Cotton work clothing became increasingly common, as cotton was easy to wash.  Wool, however retained a hugely significant spot in clothing.  It remained the common cloth for most outerwear and mostly daily men's trousers, if they weren't working in some sort of dirty labor. 

Cowboying, however, is a type of dirty labor, and starting after World War One, cotton jeans came in, in a major way.  Jeans made good trousers for cowboys as they were relatively tight fitting (but not super tight, is in the Metro-sexual way Levis models now wear them)., they were relatively cheap, and they were easily washable.  That made them good clothing for ranchers and cowboys on the more modern pattern of ranch, which had fenced pastures and stable headquarters, where people generally returned to a house or bunkhouse every day.

Movies picked up on this right away, in part because a lot of early cowboy actors actually were cowboys. And jeans photographed well. The favorite jean for early movie makers was a brand called "Booger Reds", which were a deep blue, but Levis, a West Coast brand, show up as well.

Nationwide, however, Levis didn't dominate the market by any means. Probably the most common pattern of jeans, nationwide, were Lees.  Lees, like Levis, saw ranch use, and it was for that reason that Lee adopted the name Lee Riders for their jeans.  Prior to the Second World War Lee was the biggest manufacturer of jeans.

In addition to Lee, by the 1940s Levis already had a truly Ranch-centric competitor making a jean brand designed for ranch use in mind.  Lee was a fairly old company by the 1940s, but it already had a competitor in Casey Jones, a textile company which was already making a jean they sold under the name of Wranglers. Wranglers had wrangles in mind for the design, but Casey Jones didn't actually manufacture very many.  In the early 40s, however, Casey Jones was bought out by Blue Bell, a company that  manufactured overalls.  It acquired the Wrangler name, and in 1947 Blue Bell came out with the pattern of jeans still known as the 13MWZ, a pattern designed specifically for riders, and more specifically for rodeo riders.  

It was WWII that pushed Levis over the top as the dominant blue jean manufacturer.  It isn't as if nobody was making jeans going into the war, but Levis expanded enormous during the war.  Industrial work was the reason why.  So, perhaps ironically, a jean that was so commonly associated, early on, with cowboys in marking really expanded due to the industrial and heavy work during World War Two.

After the war, while it had competitors, Levis really took over as the dominant jean.  They remained, however, pretty strongly associated with physical work of one kind or another. By that time, people routinely believed that they'd always been the trousers of cowboys, which wasn't true, but they really were the trouser that most cowhands were wearing at that time.  For most people for everyday wear, however, assuming that they weren't in some physical labor, other trousers remained the norm. Wool remained pretty common in the 1950s, but cotton trousers had by that time come in pretty big as well. World War Two also caused that to occur as, while the Army was mostly clad in wool in Europe, every soldier had cotton khakis for stateside warm weather wear, and cotton combat uniforms had been introduced in varying patters in the Army everywhere.  Cotton "chinos", which were really simply the basic Army cotton khaki trouser, had come in.

In the 50s blue jeans busted out of the status of work only trousers when they became associated with rebellion. James Dean, Marlon Brando, Lee Marvin and others were all seen sporting them in films associated with 1950s rebellious youth. By the mid 1950s they were becoming the everyday wear for a generation. By the 1960s they'd completely taken over, with the Baby Boomer generation of the 1960s wearing bell bottom Levis for everything, and an older generation ahead of them wearing them a lot as well.  Colored (i.e., non blue) Levis came in as the cowboy stars of the 1930s and 40s had them made for color films of the 60s, expanding the myth that Levis were 19th Century cowboy clothing.  By the time I was in junior high and high school in the 70s and 80s, every boy wore Levis.  In the mid 70s, most girls did too, and indeed wore the same patterns as boys, except that they'd worn the new jeans into the bathtub and then out, until dry, to "shrink to fit" them to form.

So what happened to Levis?

Well, perhaps any company that becomes so dominant is bound to fall. But it is a surprising decline. By the 1970s Levis were so dominant that they'd become an item of smuggling into the Iron Curtain.  Levis were it.  Lee remained, but it had a mere fraction of the market it had once dominated.  Wranglers were there as well, but they were only worn by people who were strongly associated with agriculture, or, interestingly enough, by people who otherwise actually rode, reflecting the fact that their cut was designed for riders (white Wranglers are the trouser of professional polo players to this day).  Perhaps a market like that was doomed to be prey to students of marketing.

It came with women's jeans first.  By the late 1970s, designers were pitching new jean brands at women.  Calvin Klein comes to mind, but as pointed out in an emailed comment to a post on a companion blog of ours, locally young women turned to Rocky Mountain Jeans, a good brand pitched just at them.  Levis was slow to react, except that it started to expand into semi dress wear with "Dockers", a chino line of clothing probably reflecting that a lot of Boomers were no longer the rebels they once were.  Their market share declined.

And so, in my view, did their quality.  I still like Levis 501s and I still wear them today. But now that they're made overseas, they just aren't what they were. Sizing, for example, is inconsistent.  Wranglers are always the size they claim to be (and I wear them too).  Lees are more or less the same as they've always been. But Levis can be anything from big to small in the same sizing, and even the cloth isn't consistent. It's a sad decline of an iconic brand.

And their advertising is junk.  Rather than appealing to Hipsters, or whomever they're trying to appeal to, they'd be better off studying Wrangler whose wearers have brand loyalty.  Or perhaps they ought to study Harley Davidson, which also does.  Harley went through a rise and decline, only to recapture their market by remembering who bought them in the first place, and why.  Levis ought to ponder the same.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 10. Daylight Savings Time.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 10: Today, for 2013, is the dread advent of Daylight Savings Time, in which the weary are deprived of an hour of sleep.

And the day in which those, who on the evening prior, received the promise that "no, I won't be hard to wake up" have been told a fib yet again, as those who must be awakened transfer their anger and wrath about the early arrival of the dawn to the human messenger.

Postscript:

I don't know if its a product of age, but I find it increasingly difficult to adjust to either end of Daylight Savings Time, and as a consequence, I'm not so fond of it.

I used to be able to very easily switch from one time to another, but now I invariably wake up early when we go forward in the Fall.  I've been waking up earlier and earlier in recent weeks anyway, but I really don't want to start routinely getting up at 4:00. But now, I'm wide awake at that time.

I really wonder about the value of Daylight Savings Time in this modern age.  Is there one?  I'd be just as happy if we chose to hence forth forgo it.  Outside of North America, do other nations have it? 

T33 Soviet Tank.

T33 Soviet Tank.: This is a Soviet T33 tank on display in Spain, photo displayed by my friend Daniel Moratal who appears on the photographs.. This early So...

Cows at San Carlos, Costa Rica, courtesy of Juan S...

Cows at San Carlos, Costa Rica, courtesy of Juan S...: My friend Juan Sepúlveda took these fascinating photographs of cattle near San Carlos, Costa Rica.  Interesting photos, I've never se...

German 88 mm Anti Aircraft Gun in Spain

German 88 mm Anti Aircraft Gun in Spain: A very fine example of a German 88mm Anti Aircraft gun in display in Spain, photographs courtesy of my friend Daniel Moratal.  He reports...

The Big Picture: Mobilization Camp, Texas City, Texas 1914.

Dean Easton Resigns

Interesitng development at the UW law school as of yesterday:

Dear Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, and Friends of UW College of Law:

As a result of changes at the University of Wyoming, I can no longer be effective in representing the interests of the College of Law as your dean.  As a result, I have submitted my resignation as dean.  I will continue to serve as a faculty member, and I look forward to working with you to make the University of Wyoming College of Law an even better law school.

Ours is a very special law school.  As I tell prospective students all the time, I cannot imagine why anyone attends a law school other than UW College of Law.  Our law school has a strong tradition, plus exciting new programs.  In just the four and a half years that I have been here, we have seen many exciting developments, including:

• Continued growth of our energy and natural resources program, an area particularly important in Wyoming, including a rich curriculum that includes a fourth of our elective courses, a new energy competition that sends students to two national competitions (where they have already had substantial success), establishment of the Center for Law & Energy Resources in the Rockies, launching of our joint degree (with the Haub School) in environment and natural resources, a course offering a tour of Wyoming energy and mining facilities, and ground work for the establishment of an Energy & Natural Resources Clinic that will be added to our curriculum in the fall of 2014.  Few, if any, law schools can match our extensive energy and natural resources course offerings, even though almost all other law schools are larger, some much larger, than our College of Law.

• Expansion of our experiential education program in response to student and market demands to include new clinic-like courses.  Due in large part to generous private gifts, we have added programs in estate planning and international human rights law.  Through the support of the Wyoming Attorney General, we will be adding a year-long energy and natural resources clinic next fall.

• Adoption of a “clinic guarantee” that promises each student the opportunity to practice law under a faculty member before graduation.  About a dozen of our students brief and argue cases to the Wyoming  Supreme Court every year.  My colleagues at other schools are amazed at the practice opportunities provided to our students through the generosity of the Wyoming Supreme Court’s student practice rule and the professionalism of the practicing attorneys who oppose our students in litigation and other environments.

• Growth of the Rural Law Center, which sponsors popular CLE seminars attended by citizens from across Wyoming and provides legislative and other assistance to those in Wyoming’s  rural communities.

• Adding two new funds to support our experiential education programs, the John M. Burman Fund and the Kepler Fund for Professional Education.

• Establishment of the Summer Trial Institute, a “boot camp” intensive trial advocacy program that is an attraction to prospective students and the envy of those associated with other law schools.

• Creation of the Center for the Study of Written Advocacy, with two of the top five legal writing professors in the nation.

• Initiation of a unique partnership with one of Korea’s elite law schools, Kyung Hee University, which has brought both students and professors to our law school and has provided the opportunity for us to teach an International Business Transactions course, via satellite, to students at both campuses and thus provide our students with experience in international transactions that they can put to use in energy and other practices in Wyoming and elsewhere.

• Raising our Wyoming Bar examination pass rates (with pass rates above 80% in the most recent Wyoming bar exam and in all states), after a brief, but difficult period on the Wyoming bar exam, in part via a bar exam preparation class offered for the first time in the spring of 2013.

• Bringing Civil Pretrial back into the active curriculum, to better prepare our graduates for litigation practices.

• Substantial success by several competition teams at the regional and national levels, including several regional championships and national Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight finishes (including both of our teams qualifying for the Elite Eight of the National Energy & Sustainability Moot Court Competition this year) and two national runner-up finishes (in the National Environmental Law Moot Court Competition and the National Client Counseling Competition, the ABA’s largest national competition, with approximately a thousand participating teams).

• Doubling (and almost tripling) our scholarships, including new scholarship programs provided through private giving from alumni and other friends, e.g., the Brimmer Scholarship, the Barrett  Summer Trial Institute Scholarships, the Energy and Natural Resources Scholarship, the Loretta Kepler Scholarship, and the Jack and Lynnette Cassari Scholarship.

• Holding the line on tuition increases, so our students can graduate with reasonable debt loads, not the crushing debt experienced by students at many other law schools.

• Increasing our enrollment of international students, who pay full non-resident tuition and enrich our teaching and learning environment by broadening our horizons.  During a trip through our law school, one might hear French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, or other languages, in addition to English.

• Maintaining enrollments within our target zone (to provide graduating classes of seventy some students) in an era when most law schools have plummeting enrollments (with a forty percent national reduction in law school applications in the past ten years).

• Expanding our continuing legal education programs and other services to alumni and other members of the bar, mostly in Wyoming but also in Colorado and other states.

None of these is “my” achievement, of course, and I do not mean to claim credit for them by listing them here.  Rather, all of these accomplishments were made possible through the dedication of you -- the faculty, staff, students, alumni, and other supporters of the College of Law.  To take just one example, I will always be amazed that seventy or so top attorneys, judges, and court reporters volunteer to come to Laramie at their own expense to teach in our Summer Trial Institute every year.  I personally want to thank you each one of you for all of your efforts on behalf of the College of Law and its students.

Special mention must be made, though, of the hard work of the staff and faculty of the College of Law.  During my four and a half years as dean, I have never been able to distribute raises to our staff and faculty.  Also, during that same period of time, the University of Wyoming has managed budget cuts by reducing staff positions.  As such, the College of Law staff, which was incredibly small when I accepted this position, has decreased dramatically during those four and a half years.  Despite a long period of no raises and decreased staff, the staff and faculty of the College of Law have added the new programs noted above.  Through their incredible efforts, the College of Law is an even better institution than it was before almost half a decade of flat salaries and reduced staffing.  I am confident that it will be an even better institution five years from now, if we are able to provide additional support to the staff, faculty, and students.

The strength of the law school, despite severe resource limitations, was recently confirmed.  As many of you know, the ABA/AALS site visit team recently concluded its visit to the College of Law.  Based upon my exit interviews with the site visit chair and the entire site visit team, I expect the report to be quite favorable.  Based upon the exit interviews, though, it is likely that the site visit report will express substantial concern over the limited resources, especially staff and administrative resources, provided to the College of Law by the University.  We are almost certainly trying to run the law school with the smallest administrative staff of any law school in the country.  Several site team members noted that the staffs at their home law schools were much larger than the staff at UW, even though their law schools were only moderately larger than UW.  The site visit report is also likely to express concern about the law school building (other than the William N. Brimmer Legal Education Center, including the two new moot courtrooms, which are extraordinary facilities), especially the lack of facilities for our three centers and the remote offices for our clinic programs.  Quite simply, we are in need of either a new building (other than the William N. Brimmer Legal Education Center) or a substantial addition to the current building to house our centers and clinics within the main law school complex.  The site visit report could note other, more minor, concerns, but overall the site visit team was very impressed with our integrated approach to legal education that teaches our students about the theory of law and provides them with the skills they will need in practice.  They were also impressed with our faculty and its scholarship and teaching, with the students, and with the staff -- though the small size of the staff is a major concern.

It is crucial for the College of Law to continue to offer a comprehensive legal education, not an education that is overly focused in one particular area of the law.  This helps us attract students who have a wide variety of interests, which we must do to thrive in a very competitive environment for law students.  It also helps us prepare these students for practice in a wide variety of legal specialties.  We cannot allow an emphasis on one area of the law to detract from our duty to prepare great attorneys for the citizens of Wyoming.  As such, it is incumbent for the College of Law to provide a comprehensive legal education.

It is also crucial for the College of Law to comply with the ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools, including Standard 205(b), which provides that the “dean and the faculty shall formulate and administer the educational program of the law school, including curriculum [and] methods of instruction.”  In executing this important responsibility, we have always welcomed the suggestions of others who have the law school’s best interests at heart.  This is reflected by our active Advisory and Alumni Board, by holding regular Town Hall Meetings with students, by my frequent attendance at Board of Trustee meetings and conversations with individual Trustees, by a meeting we held with general counsel from several energy corporations, who provided advice about how best to prepare students for energy practice, and by the open door policy of our administration, which is always receptive to suggestions for improvement of the College of Law.  However, the faculty and the dean must govern the College of Law, if it is to continue to enjoy the accreditation that allows the College of Law to maintain its reputation, allows its graduates to take the bar exam in Wyoming and in every other state, and allows its alumni to take advantage of opportunities available only to graduates of ABA-accredited law schools.

Recent events cause me concern in this regard.  Important decisions affecting the College of Law have been made without meaningful consultation with me or others on the faculty.  If the concerns that have led to this lack of consultation are with me, my resignation will remove this impediment and clear the way for the effective faculty governance of the College of Law that the accreditation standards require.  I cannot continue to serve as your dean while critical decisions are made about the College of Law without the input of the administration and faculty of the College.

Let’s pull together to defend and build the law school that we all love.  With your help, we can continue to make the University of Wyoming College of Law an even better law school for its students and for the state of Wyoming.

Thank you for your support of the College of Law and of me.  The work you have done for the College of Law is amazing.  It has been an honor and a pleasure to serve as your dean.   I look forward to continuing to work with you as a member of the faculty.

Sincerely,

Steve

Stephen D. Easton

Dean and Professor of Law

University of Wyoming

College of Law

Dept. 3035, 1000 E. University Avenue

Laramie, Wyoming 82071

(307) 766-6416; FAX (307) 766-6417

Economics of Farming with Horses

 This interesting article appeared some time ago in Rural Heritage:  Economics of Farming with Horses.

 Cotton farmer, 1937.

At the time it ran, I subscribed to the magazine, and I even wrote a few articles for it.  None of mine dealt with this topic, however.  Nor could they, as I'm not a farmer, and I wouldn't know how to use a horse in farming.  Or a tractor, for that matter.

 Unhitching horses, 1937.

The same topic, horse vs. petroleum economics, is being explored here on the SMH site, but with a different prospective.

 Army freight wagon, 1940.

It's an interesting topic, and one that we usually don't consider in this fashion. The slow (and it was slow) switch from horses to petroleum horse power, was an economic decision more than anything else.  There are other factors, but the "inevitable" march of progress type of prospective is wholly in error.  Gasoline powered vehicles of all types were enormously expensive originally, and gasoline was as well, contrary to the popular concept that it was darned near free.  Early on, gasoline was actually more expensive in real terms than it is now, and for that matter, so were automobiles.  The switch away from horse was influenced by other factors in various areas, including convenience and easy maintenance in urban settings, but dollars and cents mattered more than any other factor.

 U.S. Army recruiting poster from 1919, the year after the Allied victory in World War One.

Of course, once they came in, petroleum fueled farm equipment not only came in because of an economic tipping point, they changed the economics of everything as well.  After awhile, all farmers nearly had to switch to them, or such was the perception.  That impacted what they could farm, and then what they had to farm.  The irony of mechanization is that in the end, it not only meant fewer farm horses, it meant many fewer farmers.

 World War One vintage recruiting poster for the Indiana National Guard.

Standard Transmission

U.S. Army mechanic servicing a transmission on a heavy truck, during World War Two.

My son recently obtained his "regular" driver's license and therefore is now competent, in the eyes of the state to operate conventional motor vehicles on the public roads.  The vehicle that we own that he's generally allowed to drive is a 1997 Dodge D1500 4x4 pickup truck.  For some reason, over time, this locality has become Dodge central.  We have three Dodge pickup trucks, and they're all standard transmission trucks.  We also have a Chevrolet Suburban, and its an automatic.  Maybe all newer ones are.  Anyhow, the topic of driving came up the other day and he mentioned that a friend of his asked him about how to drive a standard transmission, which is a question I don't think I'd have thought to ask anyone when I was 16 years old.  I knew how to drive a standard transmission.  I think that all the boys I hung out with did.

Which isn't to say that we all drove standard transmissions all the time when we were first driving.  Thinking back, at age 16, I'd owned a vehicle, a Jeep, that had a standard transmission for a year by the time I obtained my license.  But my next vehicle, a Ford F100 (yes, F100, they don't make a "light" half tone any more, but in 1974, the year mine was made, they did) was an automatic transmission.  So was the next vehicle I owned after that, a 1974 Dodge D150.  But since the D150 I've never personally bought another automatic.  I prefer manual transmissions.  I have owned two, sort of.  I inherited a 1973 Mercury Comet, a great car, that was an automatic, and the car that we bought a decade ago for my wife is the aforementioned Suburban.

But I've owned a lot more standards and the only times I've actually purchased a vehicle new, they were standards.  I've owned just about every type as well, from "three on the tree" types, now a thing of the distant past, to the once very standard four speed transmission, to the current six speed.  As most of my vehicles have been 4x4s as well, I've also always had, on my vehicles, the manual shifter for the transfer case.  On one older 4x4 I once had, I had three levers, one for the transmission, one for the high and low range of gears in the transmission, and one for the transfer case, a once very common arrangement that  even those who drive modern standard transmission 4x4s would probably be baffled by at first.

I can't say really why I prefer standards, but I do.  I guess I like the ability to determine what gear I think I should be in, rather than have hydraulic pressure determine that for me.  And most more work like trucks were standards. But that's soon to be a thing of the past.  My guess is that within the next decade a person will have to be driving a very heavy truck in order for it to be purchased with an automatic. When electric vehicles come in, and they will, standards will be irrelevant completely, as they work differently.

Even within the past three decades this trend has been pretty evident.  At the time that I was getting ready to leave the National Guard for law school, thinking that I wouldn't have time to be a Guardsman and a law student (an erroneous decision that, hindsight being 20/20, I would have made differently, staying in the Guard while in school and after) the Army was acquiring automatic transmission heavy trucks to replace the old standard transmission trucks.  Training time, and lack of soldier familiarity with standards, was the reason why.  Since that time I think it's become almost impossible to acquire a manual in a pickup truck except if it was made by Chrysler, and the end of that day is in sight.

Gear shift and Transfer Case shifter, for my (rather obviously dirty) Dodge D3500.  A view of this type will soon be a thing of the past for new vehicles, I suspect.

This is not to say that I'm lamenting this.  I do think manual transmissions are a better option for folks who know how to really use them for trucks, but most people no longer learn how to drive a standard transmission. Shoot, most people don't even call them "standard transmissions" and automatic transmissions really are the standard today.  When electric vehicles come in they won't feature a transmission of this type at all, and neither the current automatic transmission or the manual transmission will remain, although to most drivers of automatics the difference will not be noticeable.

But what a difference it makes in regards to some people's ability to drive.  Back when standards were the norm, there were some who had problems driving simply due to that. My mother barely learned to drive an automatic, I can't imagine what driving a standard (if she ever did) was like for her.  And today, many people simply can't do it. They don't know how.

 Note:  We've added a poll on this topic off to the side.

Wyo Whiskers: Fenimore Chatterton | Wyoming Postscripts

Wyo Whiskers: Fenimore Chatterton | Wyoming Postscripts

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