Saturday, October 24, 1914. Woodrow Wilson spoke at the YMCA in PIttsburgh.

The Germans attacked Allied positions at Gheluvelt, Belgium and attempted to overrun French defenses on the main canal leading to the Lys at Armentières.

Rebel Boers were defeated in the Maritz Rebellion causing General Manie Maritz to flee to Germany.  He returned to South Africa and was convicted of treason in 1923, but freed by a Boer administration in 1924.  He became a Nazi sympathizer in the 1930.  He was killed in a car wreck in 1940 at age 64.

Woodrow Wilson spoke at the YMCA in Pittsburgh.

Mr. President, Mr. Porter, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I feel almost as if I were a truant, being away from Washington to-day, but I thought that perhaps if I were absent the Congress would have the more leisure to adjourn. I do not ordinarily open my office at Washington on Saturday. Being a schoolmaster, I am accustomed to a Saturday holiday, and I thought I could not better spend a holiday than by showing at least something of the true direction of my affections; for by long association with the men who have worked for this organization I can say that it has enlisted my deep affection.

I am interested in it for various reasons. First of all, because it is an association of young men. I have had a good deal to do with young men in my time, and I have formed an impression of them which I believe to be contrary to the general impression. They are generally thought to be arch radicals. As a matter of fact, they are the most conservative people I have ever dealt with. Go to a college community and try to change the least custom of that little world and find how the conservatives will rush at you. Moreover, young men are embarrassed by having inherited their fathers' opinions. I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible. I do not say that with the least disrespect for the fathers; but every man who is old enough to have a son in college is old enough to have become very seriously immersed in some particular business and is almost certain to have caught the point of view of that particular business. And it is very useful to his son to be taken out of that narrow circle, conducted to some high place where he may see the general map of the world and of the interests of mankind, and there shown how big the world is and how much of it his father may happen to have forgotten. It would be worth while for men, middle-aged and old, to detach themselves more frequently from the things that command their daily attention and to think of the sweeping tides of humanity.

Therefore I am interested in this association, because it is intended to bring young men together before any crust has formed over them, before they have been hardened to any particular occupation, before they have caught an inveterate point of view; while they still have a searchlight that they can swing and see what it reveals of all the circumstances of the hidden world.

I am the more interested in it because it is an association of young men who are Christians. I wonder if we attach sufficient importance to Christianity as a mere instrumentality in the life of mankind. For one, I am not fond of thinking of Christianity as the means of saving individual souls. I have always been very impatient of processes and institutions which said that their purpose was to put every man in the way of developing his character. My advice is: Do not think about your character. If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig. The only way your powers can become great is by exerting them outside the circle of your own narrow, special, selfish interests. And that is the reason of Christianity. Christ came into the world to save others, not to save himself; and no man is a true Christian who does not think constantly of how he can lift his brother, how he can assist his friend, how he can enlighten mankind, how he can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which he lives. An association merely of young men might be an association that had its energies put forth in every direction, but an association of Christian young men is an association meant to put its shoulders under the world and lift it, so that other men may feel that they have companions in bearing the weight and heat of the day; that other men may know that there are those who care for them, who would go into places of difficulty and danger to rescue them, who regard themselves as their brother's keeper.

And, then, I am glad that it is an association. Every word of its title means an element of strength. Young men are strong. Christian young men are the strongest kind of young men, and when they associate themselves together they have the incomparable strength of organization. The Young Men's Christian Association once excited, perhaps it is not too much to say, the hostility of the organized churches of the Christian world, because the movement looked as if it were so non-sectarian, as if it were so outside the ecclesiastical field, that perhaps it was an effort to draw young men away from the churches and to substitute this organization for the great bodies of Christian people who joined themselves in the Christian denominations. But after a while it appeared that it was a great instrumentality that belonged to all the churches; that it was a common instrument for sending the light of Christianity out into the world in its most practical form, drawing young men who were strangers into places where they could have companionship that stimulated them and suggestions that kept them straight and occupations that amused them without vicious practice; and then, by surrounding themselves with an atmosphere of purity and of simplicity of life, catch something of a glimpse of the great ideal which Christ lifted when He was elevated upon the cross.

I remember hearing a very wise man say once, a man grown old in the service of a great church, that he had never taught his son religion dogmatically at any time; that he and the boy's mother had agreed that if the atmosphere of that home did not make a Christian of the boy, nothing that they could say would make a Christian of him. They knew that Christianity was catching, and if they did not have it, it would not be communicated. If they did have it, it would penetrate while the boy slept, almost; while he was unconscious of the sweet influences that were about him, while he reckoned nothing of instruction, but merely breathed into his lungs the wholesome air of a Christian home. That is the principle of the Young Men's Christian Association—to make a place where the atmosphere makes great ideals contagious. That is the reason that I said, though I had forgotten that I said it, what is quoted on the outer page of the program—that you can test a modern community by the degree of its interest in its Young Men's Christian Association. You can test whether it knows what road it wants to travel or not. You can test whether it is deeply interested in the spiritual and essential prosperity of its rising generation. I know of no test that can be more conclusively put to a community than that.

I want to suggest to the young men of this association that it is the duty of young men not only to combine for the things that are good, but to combine in a militant spirit. There is a fine passage in one of Milton's prose writings which I am sorry to say I cannot quote, but the meaning of which I can give you, and it is worth hearing. He says that he has no patience with a cloistered virtue that does not go out and seek its adversary. Ah, how tired I am of the men who are merely on the defensive, who hedge themselves in, who perhaps enlarge the hedge enough to include their little family circle and ward off all the evil influences of the world from that loved and hallowed group. How tired I am of the men whose virtue is selfish because it is merely self-protective! And how much I wish that men by the hundred thousand might volunteer to go out and seek an adversary and subdue him!

I have had the fortune to take part in affairs of a considerable variety of sorts, and I have tried to hate as few persons as possible, but there is an exquisite combination of contempt and hate that I have for a particular kind of person, and that is the moral coward. I wish we could give all our cowards a perpetual vacation. Let them go off and sit on the side lines and see us play the game; and put them off the field if they interfere with the game. They do nothing but harm, and they do it by that most subtle and fatal thing of all, that of taking the momentum and the spirit and the forward dash out of things. A man who is virtuous and a coward has no marketable virtue about him. The virtue, I repeat, which is merely self-defensive is not serviceable even, I suspect, to himself. For how a man can swallow and not taste bad when he is a coward and thinking only of himself I cannot imagine.

Be militant! Be an organization that is going to do things! If you can find older men who will give you countenance and acceptable leadership, follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with them. There are only two sorts of men worth associating with when something is to be done. Those are young men and men who never grow old. Now, if you find men who have grown old, about whom the crust has hardened, whose hinges are stiff, whose minds always have their eye over the shoulder thinking of things as they were done, do not have anything to do with them. It would not be Christian to exclude them from your organization, but merely use them to pad the roll. If you can find older men who will lead you acceptably and keep you in countenance, I am bound as an older man to advise you to follow them. But suit yourselves. Do not follow people that stand still. Just remind them that this is not a statical proposition; it is a movement, and if they cannot get a move on them they are not serviceable.

Life, gentlemen—the life of society, the life of the world—has constantly to be fed from the bottom. It has to be fed by those great sources of strength which are constantly rising in new generations. Red blood has to be pumped into it. New fiber has to be supplied. That is the reason I have always said that I believed in popular institutions. If you can guess beforehand whom your rulers are going to be, you can guess with a very great certainty that most of them will not be fit to rule. The beauty of popular institutions is that you do not know where the man is going to come from, and you do not care so he is the right man. You do not know whether he will come from the avenue or from the alley. You do not know whether he will come from the city or the farm. You do not know whether you will ever have heard that name before or not. Therefore you do not limit at any point your supply of new strength. You do not say it has got to come through the blood of a particular family or through the processes of a particular training, or by anything except the native impulse and genius of the man himself. The humblest hovel, therefore, may produce you your greatest man. A very humble hovel did produce you one of your greatest men. That is the process of life, this constant surging up of the new strength of unnamed, unrecognized, uncatalogued men who are just getting into the running, who are just coming up from the masses of the unrecognized multitude. You do not know when you will see above the level masses of the crowd some great stature lifted head and shoulders above the rest, shouldering its way, not violently but gently, to the front and saying, "Here am I; follow me." And his voice will be your voice, his thought will be your thought, and you will follow him as if you were following the best things in yourselves.

When I think of an association of Christian young men I wonder that it has not already turned the world upside down. I wonder, not that it has done so much, for it has done a great deal, but that it has done so little; and I can only conjecture that it does not realize its own strength. I can only imagine that it has not yet got its pace. I wish I could believe, and I do believe, that at seventy it is just reaching its majority, and that from this time on a dream greater even than George Williams ever dreamed will be realized in the great accumulating momentum of Christian men throughout the world. For, gentlemen, this is an age in which the principles of men who utter public opinion dominate the world. It makes no difference what is done for the time being. After the struggle is over the jury will sit, and nobody can corrupt that jury.

At one time I tried to write history. I did not know enough to write it, but I knew from experience how hard it was to find an historian out, and I trusted I would not be found out. I used to have this comfortable thought as I saw men struggling in the public arena. I used to think to myself, "This is all very well and very interesting. You probably assess yourself in such and such a way. Those who are your partisans assess you thus and so. Those who are your opponents urge a different verdict. But it does not make very much difference, because after you are dead and gone some quiet historian will sit in a secluded room and tell mankind for the rest of time just what to think about you, and his verdict, not the verdict of your partisans and not the verdict of your opponents, will be the verdict of posterity." I say that I used to say that to myself. It very largely was not so. And yet it was true in this sense: If the historian really speaks the judgment of the succeeding generation, then he really speaks the judgment also of the generations that succeed it, and his assessment, made without the passion of the time, made without partisan feeling in the matter—in other circumstances, when the air is cool—is the judgment of mankind upon your actions.

Now, is it not very important that we who shall constitute a portion of the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is right? And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the same weaknesses, knowing the same passions; and while we do not condemn, we are going to seek to say and to live the truth. What I am hoping for is that these seventy years have just been a running start, and that now there will be a great rush of Christian principle upon the strongholds of evil and of wrong in the world. Those strongholds are not as strong as they look. Almost every vicious man is afraid of society, and if you once open the door where he is, he will run. All you have to do is to fight, not with cannon but with light.

May I illustrate it in this way? The Government of the United States has just succeeded in concluding a large number of treaties with the leading nations of the world, the sum and substance of which is this, that whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year before anything is done; and my prediction is that after the light has shone on it for a year it will not be necessary to do anything; that after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and who was wrong. I believe that light is the greatest sanitary influence in the world. That, I suppose, is scientific commonplace, because if you want to make a place wholesome the best instrument you can use is the sun; to let his rays in, let him search out all the miasma that may lurk there. So with moral light: It is the most wholesome and rectifying, as well as the most revealing, thing in the world, provided it be genuine moral light; not the light of inquisitiveness, not the light of the man who likes to turn up ugly things, not the light of the man who disturbs what is corrupt for the mere sake of the sensation that he creates by disturbing it, but the moral light, the light of the man who discloses it in order that all the sweet influences of the world may go in and make it better.

That, in my judgment, is what the Young Men's Christian Association can do. It can point out to its members the things that are wrong. It can guide the feet of those who are going astray; and when its members have realized the power of the Christian principle, then they will not be men if they do not unite to see that the rest of the world experiences the same emancipation and reaches the same happiness of release.

I believe in the Young Men's Christian Association because I believe in the progress of moral ideas in the world; and I do not know that I am sure of anything else. When you are after something and have formulated it and have done the very best thing you know how to do you have got to be sure for the time being that that is the thing to do. But you are a fool if in the back of your head you do not know it is possible that you are mistaken. All that you can claim is that that is the thing as you see it now and that you cannot stand still; that you must push forward the things that are right. It may turn out that you made mistakes, but what you do know is your direction, and you are sure you are moving in that way. I was once a college reformer, until discouraged, and I remember a classmate of mine saying, "Why, man, can't you let anything alone?" I said, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going downhill"; and I borrowed this illustration from an ingenious writer. He says, "If you have a post that is painted white and want to keep it white, you cannot let it alone; and if anybody says to you, 'Why don't you let that post alone,' you will say, 'Because I want it to stay white, and therefore I have got to paint it at least every second year.'" There isn't anything in this world that will not change if you absolutely let it alone, and therefore you have constantly to be attending to it to see that it is being taken care of in the right way and that, if it is part of the motive force of the world, it is moving in the right direction.

That means that eternal vigilance is the price, not only of liberty, but of a great many other things. It is the price of everything that is good. It is the price of one's own soul. It is the price of the souls of the people you love; and when it comes down to the final reckoning you have a standard that is immutable. What shall a man give in exchange for his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men's souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire? What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this world as well as in the next. There is a text in Scripture that has always interested me profoundly. It says godliness is profitable in this life as well as in the life that is to come; and if you do not start it in this life, it will not reach the life that is to come. Your measurements, your directions, your whole momentum, have to be established before you reach the next world. This world is intended as the place in which we shall show that we know how to grow in the stature of manliness and of righteousness.

I have come here to bid Godspeed to the great work of the Young Men's Christian Association. I love to think of the gathering force of such things as this in the generations to come. If a man had to measure the accomplishments of society, the progress of reform, the speed of the world's betterment, by the few little things that happened in his own life, by the trifling things that he can contribute to accomplish, he would indeed feel that the cost was much greater than the result. But no man can look at the past of the history of this world without seeing a vision of the future of the history of this world; and when you think of the accumulated moral forces that have made one age better than another age in the progress of mankind, then you can open your eyes to the vision. You can see that age by age, though with a blind struggle in the dust of the road, though often mistaking the path and losing its way in the mire, mankind is yet—sometimes with bloody hands and battered knees—nevertheless struggling step after step up the slow stages to the day when he shall live in the full light which shines upon the uplands, where all the light that illumines mankind shines direct from the face of God.

 Last edition:

Thursday, October 22, 1914. Battle of La Bassée and First Battle of Ypres, German advances.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Battle of La Bassée, British Army, First Battle of Ypres, German Army, Kansas, Motorcycles, World War One

Friday Farming: Sheep

ATVs. Boo. Hiss.

I'm going to finally admit it, I'm sick of ATVs and I'm pretty darned sick of people who make excuses for using ATVs on wildlands.

 ATV tracks, off road, at over 8,000 feet in the Big Horns.

This frankly has more to do with my status of being a hunter, than anything else, and I'll admit that I'm somewhat hypocritical about this topic, for reasons that I'll mention below. But I really, truly, have had enough of them.

The reason I don't like ATVs is that I value wildlands.  I value them as a livestock owner, I value them as a hunter, I value them as a fisherman, and I just value them as somebody who loves nature.  ATVs are the antithesis of everything in nature.

Now, in terms of being hypocritical, I freely note here that I grew up with vehicles and have had 4x4 vehicles my entire life.

 

 My first car, before I was old enough to drive. A 1958 M38A1 Jeep.  I didn't put the big dent in the fender.

I grew up with vehicles and have always used vehicles to access nature. And as an owner of a large number of 4x4 vehicles over the years, I've never been without a vehicle that could take me way out back.  This admittedly is contrary to the natural state, and I've written about that here before.  One of the things that I think its most difficult for us, as modern people, to appreciate is the revolution in access to wildlands that automobiles brought about.   Not only was it revolutionary, but it frankly changed our relationship with it, making it impossible for many to appreciate the expanse, time and distance, and also making it so we tend to travel insulated from nature, rather than in it.

 

Me, in another context.  Nothing makes you appreciate the vastness of an area more than traveling it at, in essence, nature's pace.

But even with that, at least vehicles essentially basically stopped somewhere.  People drove distances, often distances that would have taken days to cover in prior eras, but they did get out and start walking (or riding on a horse/mule).  

ATVs have changed that.  

Now I constantly see people who have 3/4 ton or 1 ton trucks who are hauling them up to the back country. The ATVs have grown larger and now often take up the entire bed of the truck.  Once they get to the end of the road, they unload the ATV and then drive over the prairie, making little roads like the one depicted above on it. They basically never dismount.

I really question the effectiveness of this for hunting, as ATVs are noisy and a man on foot, or on horseback, can usually hear them miles and miles away.  I've taken game animals in areas where the ATV drivers had passed them by, the animals taking cover well before the ATV drove on by.  But that they have an impact on wildlands, making them less wild, cannot be denied.

That ATV owners know this is pretty plain. Almost every ATV owner I know, save for a few honest ones, who use them for hunting will claim "I only use them to haul things out."  Well, bull.  The "I only" claim is the classic claim made by people who know they are doing things wrong, and want to claim some legitimate reason to excuse it.  Like people who only claim to buy certain magazines for the articles, the overwhelming owners of ATVs in hunting and fishing country are using them for the very thing they claim they are not.

In recent years around here there's been an increasing number of areas where signs stating "No ATVs" have sprung up.  Quite a few of these are walk in access areas, and the ranchers don't want the ATVs in there wrecking the land and scaring cattle.  Indeed, around here, ATVs reached their zenith and began to decline in livestock work quite some time ago, and the most common use of ATVs I see now amongst ranchers is in the form of very small trucks that they use for fencing or to travel from one cow camp to another.  Herding cattle with them is mostly out now.

About the only use of ATVs I don't object to is that by people who just flat out like ATVs and drive them on back roads to drive them.  Most of those people are honest about that.  I see them on the roads in the summer, with an increasing number thankfully wearing helmets now.  But generally those people  aren't driving over grasslands with them or hoping sagebrush with them, and then later claiming that "I only" use them for this or that.  Indeed, if a person "is only" using an ATV to haul game out, it's a pretty expensive way to do that.  It'd be cheaper to hire a rancher to haul one out with a horse.  But the evidence is that the "only" class doesn't "only" do what they claim.

And I'd like to see the use of ATVs on the prairie and in the mountains go.  I know that I'll never live to see that, but I wish I would see that. At some point people who love the wildlands have to say enough is enough, and keep them out.  And, frankly, at some point as a people we have to admit that all humans have a natural inclination towards laziness and if we want to really live, we have to resist it.  Getting out and walking would be a good way to start.

Panic

I listen to Meet The Press and This Week via podcast.  That means I usually catch up with a couple of days after its aired.

Recently, it's been all about Ebola. Given that its Ebola coverage wall to wall, pretty much (ISIL manages to edge in too) I was stunned when Chris Todd, the new moderator, allowed that the press had been telling everyone not to panic, but now we have a US death. . .

Really, the press has been telling us not to panic?  I must have missed that due to all the panicking in the press.

In the real world, the chances of Ebola becoming a major non African disease, or even a pan African disease, are non existent.  It will not happen.  It has killed 4,000 people so far, mostly in Liberia, where conditions are ideal for it (although one sizable Liberian Goodyear company town manged to halt it there).  That's 4,000 out of a population of about 4,000,000.  In contrast, in 2011 the flu killed 53,826 ,granted out of a population of about 350,000,000.  Still that rates comparable.  Why aren't we panicking about the flu?

We do, of course, from time to time, but only when it looks like a flu like the 1918 Spanish Flu might be lurking about. But the regular old flu is quite the killer, and to Americans, a bigger danger than Ebola.

Postscript

To my huge surprise, the topic of Ebola has now entered this year's Wyoming's gubernatorial race. 

Back during the primary we saw three Republicans running, those being the sitting Governor; Matt Mead, the current controversial Superintendent of Education; Cindy Hill, and  Tea Party sometimes third party candidate Dr. Taylor Haynes.  Both Hill and Haynes were in the Tea Party camp, with Haynes expressing some radical ideas on public lands ownership.  Those ideas enjoyed some popularity amongst Tea Party elements in the GOP, but overall those views must have had little popularity with Wyoming Republicans as both Hill and Haynes did poorly in the primary.

During the election the Republicans agreed amongst themselves to support whoever won, but that quickly broke down with Hill, who flat out refused to support Mead.  Locally, one Tea Party candidate that lost wrote an op-ed in the Tribune blasting the voters as being misinformed, which didn't sit very well with the people who read it, based on the reactions.  Still, yesterday Haynes broke his pledge and announced that he's running as an independent.

His stated basis for running was to give the taxpayers options and also because he feels that the state's preparation for Ebola is poor.

I generally don't express political opinions here, but the Ebola topic being interjected into Wyoming's gubernatorial race is just silly.  Haynes is a physician as well, which to my mind means he must at least have doubts about his stated reason for running as being a valid one, or he's so focused on hypothetical medical emergencies that he's grossly overemphasizing them.  Ebola isn't an American health emergency and its certainly not a Wyoming one.  It doesn't do Dr. Haynes very much credit to base his stated reason for running on Ebola.

Wars and Rumors of War

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed.

Matthew 24:6

This is a new "trailing thread" on the topic of wars that are ongoing.  It's just informational, so to speak.

Quite frankly, in spite of what we might think, the world has an all time low inventory of war. War has gone from something of a near human norm to a freakish but still occurring exception.  Indeed, violence in the world is at an all time low. 

But, wars are still history, still interesting, and still important. So here we have a thread on a topic written by every commentator on the human condition, ever.

_____________________________________________________________________

For our opening entry:  October 18, 2014

1. The Kurds in Syria have introduced conscription of military aged men in their zone of control. The conscription is not limited to Kurds. This has sparked protest by human rights groups, but it shows the extent to which the Kurds now act as a sovereign more and more every day.

2. Fierce street by street fighting between ISIL and the Kurds continues in Kobane, on the Syrian Turkish border.  Analysts are surprised for some reason, counting ISIL's advanced weaponry (some courtesy of the United States, via capture from the pathetic Iraqi Army,), but that discounts the fact that having weponry is one thing, knowing how to use it quite another.  The Kurds have a long history of infantry and irregular combat experience, so they're inherited knowledge is pretty vast.

3. The Egyptian air force has hit Islamist targets outside of Benghazi in Libya, which is undergoing a battle pitting a former Libyan general against Islamist forces.  This reflects the Egyptian military's understanding that the best interest of that state are found in defeating these extremist groups, of which they have their own.

_________________________________________________________________________________

October 22, 2014

Canada suffers the second home grown terrorist attack in a week. In the first attack, a convert to Islam drove his car into one in which Canadian soldiers were riding. Today, another convert to Islam killed a soldier standing guard at Canada's memorial to its unknown solders and then entered the parliament building, where he was killed by the Sergeant At Arms, Kevin Vickers, a distinguished retired member of the RCMP..

Thursday, October 22, 1914. Battle of La Bassée and First Battle of Ypres, German advances.

The Germans captured Langermark, Belgium.

The Germans forced the British out of Violaines.

Last edition:

Wednesday, October 21, 1914. The First Battle of Ypres.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Canada, Crime, First Battle of Ypres, Immigration, Sikh, World War One

Business Machines of Antiquity: Check Writing Machine

This machine has shown up on display in our office.  I don't know where it came from, and I really don't know how they were used.  My guess is that they were just a crisp means of drafting checks, but that is a guess.

 

And the same as to this one.  It clearly served the same purpose, but exactly how they were used, I don't know. Perhaps they did nothing other than serve as a clear way to print checks.

Wednesday, October 21, 1914. The First Battle of Ypres.

The First Battle of Ypres commenced with a German attack at  Armentières, Messines and Langemark, Belgium.

The British repulsed the Germans at La Bassée, but with high casualties.

Canadian immigration officer William C. Hopkinson was shot dead in a Vancouver provincial courthouse by Sikh Mewa Singh.  It was in retaliation for his testimony the day prior.  A feud had broken out in the Sikh community over the Komagata Maru incident.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 20, 1914. Woodrow Wilson to the American Bar Association.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, law, Professional Organizations, The Practice of Law, the spoken word, Woodrow Wilson, World War One

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyomingite

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyomingite

News from other countries

Every once and awhile you catch news from other countries which reminds you how different they are from your own.

I caught a couple of news stories from Ireland this past week in this category.  In one, a member of the Dail, the Irish parliament, was discussing a law that would require listing fathers on birth certificates, but in arguing her point in favor of it, she noted that "Celtic Tiger" immigrants had improved the looks of the Irish and the country needed to be mindful of expanding its gene pool.

What?

I can't imagine a member of Congress saying such a thing.  Shoot, I can't really imagine any rational politician, no matter what a person's view of the proposed law may be, making that particular argument.

The second article noted that an Irish politician had recently accused the IRA of having shot individuals who it suspected (rather, probably knew) abused children.  I don't know the details of this, and if that meant its own members or what.  Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political party that basically is the IRA, denied the claim, but his denial was in the from that essentially made it an admission.  He noted in his denial that one of the reasons that it was the wrong thing to do is that it failed to take into account the financial and social consequences of such murders on the families of the children.

Well, the IRA is a terrorist organization, so that it would use violence is not surprising, but that it used it in this rough policing fashion is.  And it also demonstrates how persistent the "old law" is.  Not the written law, but the harsh primitive law that all humans seem to have deep within them somewhere, and which seems to recognize the death penalty as the penalty for every serious transgression.  Now, I'm not advocating that by any means, but its interesting how quickly people seem to resort to it either in their hearts, or by their actions if they actually can.

Random Snippets: Occupational fates in Nazi Germany

The number of people who entered the fields of science, law and engineering went down in Germany during the Third Reich.

That law would decline in Nazi Germany makes sense.  In a society whose government is criminal what point would there be in becoming a lawyer?  That science and engineering would decline is a surprise however, but it did.  Science suffered in part because the Nazification of the sciences made them unscientific.

Medicine, curiously, saw a rise in entrants.

BBC News - Viewpoint: How WW1 changed aviation forever

BBC News - Viewpoint: How WW1 changed aviation forever

Today In Wyoming's History: 50th Anniversary of the Oil Bowl

Today In Wyoming's History: 50th Anniversary of the Oil Bowl: I was remiss in timely noting it, but October 3 saw the 50th anniversary of the Oil Bowl. This Oil Bowl.(it's not the only one nationwid...

A split of governance on the Wind River Reservation.

I'm a member of the bar of the Tribal Court on the Wind River Indian Reservation.  I'm not a member of either tribe but simply allowed to practice law there.  I've had several cases in Tribal Court and I've tried a civil jury trial there, which is a fairly rare occurrence.  Indeed, at the time I tried the case there, I could find no other lawyers who'd ever taken a civil case to a jury trial there, although later I did find one who had tried a civil jury trial before I had.

That's neither here nor there, but it does give me an opinion about events on the Reservation, and its caused me to be worried about the Arapahoe Tribe pulling out of the Joint Business Council.  I wish they hadn't.

For those who don't follow such things, the Wind River Reservation is the home to two sovereign nations, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Araphoe nations.  They share the same reservation and its territorial expanse.

This hasn't always been true.  The Reservation was established, at the request of the Shoshone, in 1868,  The Shoshone under Chief Washakie were allies of the United States and had contributed warriors to campaigns of the Army prior to that, and would do so after that.  The Arapahoes, on the other hand, were allied to the Sioux, but were a very small tribe in numbers.  They fought with the Sioux into the 1870s, but facing a disastrous winter they came to terms with the United States and were allowed on to the Reservation for what was supposed to be a short period of time.  However, the short time became a permanent one, and the Arapahoes have shared the Wind River Reservation since the 1870s.

The two tribes were enemies originally but have lived together since that time, not always on the best of terms.  But in the 20th Century they both came together to create a Joint Business Council to govern the Reservation, which after all is one territorial expanse.  The Joint Business Council was the Tribal Council for purposes of the entire reservation, and was made up of the Shoshone Tribal Council and the Arapahoe Tribal Council.

The Arapahoes just pulled out of the Joint Business Council and have decided to go it more or less alone, although they are taking the position that for certain necessary functions they'll continue to participate.  The Shoshones, which were opposed to their withdrawal, have stated that it isn't possible to withdraw without a vote of a council and therefore the Joint Business Council's role continues on unabated, but without Arapahe representation due to their withdrawal.

There are a lot of governmental functions that this might impact. The Court, for one thing, is a joint court.  There's more or less one system of law, although a few years ago the Arapahoe's drafted an Arapahoe business code.  There are all the functions of local governments that would normally exist, as well as social agencies that need to function.  There's a lot of oil and gas activity on the Reservation, and this needs to be regulated. There's an office that secures employment for Tribal members of both Tribes with those outside employers doing business on the Reservation.  This is a bad development.

What brought this about I can't say, and therefore I can't opine on whatever motivated this action.   But I hope the rift repairs or the decision is reconsidered.  In the last few years we've seen oil and gas exploration expand in the area, the Reservation won its long standing legal battle with the State which allowed casinos to be built on the Reservation, and a decision of the EPA seemed to expand  the territory of the Reservation in to the town of Riverton.  There are a lot of decisions that will have to be made jointly.  This would not seem to be a good time in which for this uncertainty and perhaps duplication to develop.

Postscript

The Casper Star Tribune's editorial for today decries this development, noting much or some of what we've noted here above. 

Tuesday, October 20, 1914. Woodrow Wilson to the American Bar Association.

Mr. President, Gentlemen of the American Bar Association:

I am very deeply gratified by the greeting that your president has given me and by your response to it. My only strength lies in your confidence.

We stand now in a peculiar case. Our first thought, I suppose, as lawyers, is of international law, of those bonds of right and principle which draw the nations together and hold the community of the world to some standards of action. We know that we see in international law, as it were, the moral processes by which law itself came into existence. I know that as a lawyer I have myself at times felt that there was no real comparison between the law of a nation and the law of nations, because the latter lacked the sanction that gave the former strength and validity. And yet, if you look into the matter more closely, you will find that the two have the same foundations, and that those foundations are more evident and conspicuous in our day than they have ever been before.

The opinion of the world is the mistress of the world; and the processes of international law are the slow processes by which opinion works its will. What impresses me is the constant thought that that is the tribunal at the bar of which we all sit. I would call your attention, incidentally, to the circumstance that it does not observe the ordinary rules of evidence; which has sometimes suggested to me that the ordinary rules of evidence had shown some signs of growing antique. Everything, rumor included, is heard in this court, and the standard of judgment is not so much the character of the testimony as the character of the witness. The motives are disclosed, the purposes are conjectured, and that opinion is finally accepted which seems to be, not the best founded in law, perhaps, but the best founded in integrity of character and of morals. That is the process which is slowly working its will upon the world; and what we should be watchful of is not so much jealous interests as sound principles of action. The disinterested course is always the biggest course to pursue not only, but it is in the long run the most profitable course to pursue. If you can establish your character, you can establish your credit.

What I wanted to suggest to this association, in bidding them very hearty welcome to the city, is whether we sufficiently apply these same ideas to the body of municipal law which we seek to administer. Citations seem to play so much larger a role now than principle. There was a time when the thoughtful eye of the judge rested upon the changes of social circumstances and almost palpably saw the law arise out of human life. Have we got to a time when the only way to change law is by statute? The changing of law by statute seems to me like mending a garment with a patch, whereas law should grow by the life that is in it, not by the life that is outside of it.

I once said to a lawyer with whom I was discussing some question of precedent, and in whose presence I was venturing to doubt the rational validity, at any rate, of the particular precedents he cited, "After all, isn't our object justice?" And he said, "God forbid! We should be very much confused if we made that our standard. Our standard is to find out what the rule has been and how the rule that has been applies to the case that is." I should hate to think that the law was based entirely upon "has beens." I should hate to think that the law did not derive its impulse from looking forward rather than from looking backward, or, rather, that it did not derive its instruction from looking about and seeing what the circumstances of man actually are and what the impulses of justice necessarily are.

Understand me, gentlemen, I am not venturing in this presence to impeach the law. For the present, by the force of circumstances, I am in part the embodiment of the law, and it would be very awkward to disavow myself. But I do wish to make this intimation, that in this time of world change, in this time when we are going to find out just how, in what particulars, and to what extent the real facts of human life and the real moral judgments of mankind prevail, it is worth while looking inside our municipal law and seeing whether the judgments of the law are made square with the moral judgments of mankind. For I believe that we are custodians, not of commands, but of a spirit. We are custodians of the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit of equal-handed justice, of the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with the perfectibility of human life itself.

Public life, like private life, would be very dull and dry if it were not for this belief in the essential beauty of the human spirit and the belief that the human spirit could be translated into action and into ordinance. Not entire. You cannot go any faster than you can advance the average moral judgments of the mass, but you can go at least as fast as that, and you can see to it that you do not lag behind the average moral judgments of the mass. I have in my life dealt with all sorts and conditions of men, and I have found that the flame of moral judgment burned just as bright in the man of humble life and limited experience as in the scholar and the man of affairs. And I would like his voice always to be heard, not as a witness, not as speaking in his own case, but as if he were the voice of men in general, in our courts of justice, as well as the voice of the lawyers, remembering what the law has been. My hope is that, being stirred to the depths by the extraordinary circumstances of the time in which we live, we may recover from those depths something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.

Last edition:

Sunday, October 18, 1914. The editor of Avanti!

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungarian Army, Battle of the Yser, boats and ships, British Army, French Army, German Army, German Kriegsmarine, Imperial Russian Army, Italy, Mussolini, Royal Navy, Socialism, World War One

The Big Picture & Monday at the Bar: Shreveport Court House

A view of us, by them, through the eyes of them.

Ah geez, yet again another literary commentator has decided that E. Annie Proulx somehow has a Wyoming association. Wyoming authors who are really from Wyoming just can't get a break.

Proulx is famouly associated with a certain short story made into a movie which set wrote while living in Wyoming and set in Wyoming, but she's not from Wyoming, and at the end of the day was just passing through, having moved on to Seattle. Even when she lived in Wyoming she spent part of the year in Newfoundland. She is not a Wyoming author in the real sense of the word.  She was complaining about getting ignored in a fashion by locals before she left.

Not that outside people who comment on local writings care one whit about that. Or that Proulx came to prominence with The Shipping News, which is set in her native northeast.  But it does cause us to suffer the indignity of so many presentations of people who live in this state are written by people whose connection with the state is temporary or perhaps in the form of immigration to the state.  It isn't as if locals, and very long term residents, don't write.  This must be what it was like for African natives back in the day of European colonization.  I'll bet the writings by English or French colonist don't have big appreciate following in Africa, for example.

It's even worse, of course, with cinematic presentations. They're hardly ever filmed here, and the actors as a rule try to effect an accent that we don't have.

Sunday Morning Scene: St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Casper Wyoming

 

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Casper Wyoming, from Churches of the West. An additional photograph appears on that blog.  This impressive structure dates to right around World War One, when a lot of construction was going on in Casper.

Sunday, October 18, 1914. The editor of Avanti!

The socialist editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, declared in favor of intervention on the side of the Triple Entente.  That editor, one Benito Mussolini, was subsequently expelled from the Italian socialist party.

The Germans took Nieuwpoort, Belgium. Armentières,  Messines were halted or slowed.

The Russian Army advanced over the Vistula due to a late deployment of Austro Hungarian troops in aid of German troops.

The submarine HMS E3 was sunk by the U-27, with all hands going down with her.

Last edition:

Saturday, October 17, 1914. The Siege of Naco.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Álvaro Obregón, Arizona, Art, British Army, French Army, German Kriegsmarine, Imperial Japanese Navy, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Pancho Villa, Royal Navy, The Siege of Naco, Venustiano Carranza

All About That [Upright] Bass - Jazz Meghan Trainor Cover ft. Kate Davis...

Today In Wyoming's History: Governor, State Supt. Public Instruction 2014 Gene...

Today In Wyoming's History: Governor, State Supt. Public Instruction 2014 Gene...



The Superintendent of Education race is one of the state's more interesting races this election season.

Today In Wyoming's History: Sec of State 2014 General Election Debate

Today In Wyoming's History: Sec of State 2014 General Election Debate

Saturday, October 17, 1914. The Siege of Naco.

Pancho Villa ordered his forces to attack a garrison  loyal to  Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón at Naco, Sonora, Mexico, commencing what would become a 119 day siege. 

The town is on the border with Arizona.

The British took Violaines and French cavalry Fromelles .  French forces recaptured Armentières.

The German Navy lost a torpedo squadron trying to lay mines at them mouth of the Thames.  A German torpedo boat sank the Japanese cruiser Takachiho.

Last edition:

Friday, October 16, 1914. Kiwis depart.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Battle of the Yser, Belgian Army, British Army, French Army, New Zealand Army, World War One

Friday Farming: Cheyenne Frontier Days

Video: Cowboys of the Sky | Watch Main Street Wyoming Online | WYOPTV Video

Video: Cowboys of the Sky | Watch Main Street Wyoming Online | WYOPTV Video



Wyoming PBS takes a look at airmail.  Interesting topic.

Friday, October 16, 1914. Kiwis depart.

Belgian and French troops held back the Germans at the Yser.

The British took Aubers at the cost of 1,000 casualties.

The New Zealand Expeditionary Force left New Zealand for Australia.

Last edition:

Wednesday, October 14, 1914. Border tensions.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Arizona, Arizona National Guard, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, National Guard

Ethnicity, rise, decline, and regeneration. A study of Salt Lake City

I've posted here a couple of times on ethnic neighborhoods in posts inspired in part by the City of Denver. I happened to be in Salt Lake the other day when the same thing occurred to me. That is, ethnicity and how it strongly impacted urban areas and regions in the past.

Salt Lake is a city which, if looked at in terms of demographic groups, is normally associated with the Mormons for obvious reasons. That's so strongly the case that we just don't think of it being a big urban area with strong ethnic neighborhoods, but apparently that''s just flat out wrong.  Around the turn of the last century, it definitely did.

The first time I became aware of that is when a friend of mine pointed out the impressive Catholic cathedral there.

The Cathedral of the Madeline, Salt Lake City Utah.

The Cathedral of the Madeline is a huge beautiful Gothic cathedral. Built in 1900, it is just off downtown in a hilly area.  The cathedral, I learned, was built due to the large Irish Catholic population that was working in the mines and plants just outside of the city.  Building the cathedral, in some ways, showed that they'd really arrived, and were doing well.

But that's not the only, or even the most surprising, example.  Just recently I was in a part of the city down by the old railroad station.  Located in that area of the city is a Greek Orthodox cathedral.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Salt Lake City.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral, which still has its own school, was built in the 1920s, just a bit later.  That Salt Lake City had a significant population of Greeks was surprising.  More surprising, however, is that they were the largest immigrant ethnicity in Salt Lake City at the time, and the part of the city that the cathedral is located in was called "Greek Town".

 

Greek Town was in a part of the city which was quite industrial at that time, so the location of the cathedral reflects that condition that existed in many urban areas of the time, that being that people lived, went to church, and worked, all in a concentrated area.  They apparently weren't the only immigrant group working in that area.  Only a couple of blocks away from the cathedral is a church built specifically with the immigrant Japanese population in mind.

Japanese Church of Christ, Salt Lake City.  This church was built in the same year as the Greek Orthodox Cathedral.

That Salt Lake City ever had such a significant population of Japanese immigrants that a church would have been built with them in mind is a surprise.  But obviously it did.

Salt Lake by the late 19th Century had a sufficient population of Jewish residents that they had two synagogues built in the last decade of the 19th Century and the first decade of the 20th Century just off of the downtown area.  Presumably the existence of two synagogues within a block of each other reflected some division in faith.  Here too, this was a bit of a surprise to me when I first learned of it.  That the two synagogues were so close to each other would also suggest that the neighborhood they were in was Jewish at the time, although this assumption could be in error.

B'nai Israel Temple, Salt Lake City.  This building is no longer a synagogue, but rather is an architecture firms office.

St. Peter and St. Paul Orthodox Church in Salt Lake City, which was originally a synagogue.

All of this shows a much more diverse ethnic diversity in Salt Lake City a century ago than I would have expected, and it stands in contrast with the common presumption about the city.

 Former Firestone facility in Salt Lake City.

Of interest as well, while some of the buildings shown in this thread have been kept in their original uses, the neighborhoods have clearly gone through changes.  Greek Town, as noted, was once very industrial and was associated with a Firestone Tire Company plant.

 

 Firestone plant location, now a restaurant, in Salt Lake City.

 California Tire & Rubber Company building, Salt Lake City.

This area of Salt Lake is no longer industrial, and its undergoing some changes. It clearly fell into a state of dilapidation, and there are still some areas of it that can be pretty rough.  I'd be careful walking around this area at night.  Nonetheless, during the day there's some trendy cool looking restaurants and bars in the area.

That Salt Lake's history apparently reflects a pretty common urban story probably shouldn't be surprising, but in some ways it is.  It isn't a city we really think in an industrial context, with immigrant populations, but it was.

Porridge Aficionados Vie To Make Theirs The Breakfast Of Champions : The Salt : NPR

Porridge Aficionados Vie To Make Theirs The Breakfast Of Champions : The Salt : NPR

Oatmeal.

I like oatmeal.  I've always liked it, which puts me in an odd category I suppose.  By liking it, I mean really like it, not tolerate it in a blurry eyed oaty slime to go with your coffee sort of way.

My mother used to occasionally call oatmeal porridge, something she learned when she was growing up in Quebec.  It's one of the oldest of breakfast "cereals", and is a true a cereal. That is, it's a cereal in that oats are cereals, i.e., grains.  Cooking it the old way takes some time, but not too much. Well worth making.  

Mid Week At Work: Riot Duty.

Washington D. C., 1968.

Civil Holidays

 Leann posted an item on her blog about Columbus Day, urging Congress to consider changing it to Indigenous Peoples Day.  I'll confess that I think that's not a good idea, and that taking one unobserved civil holiday and converting it into a second, ethnic based one, would probably only serve to create additional unobserved civil holidays.  But it does raise the question in my mind a to what holidays we observe, and which we do not, over time.

 Columbus Day Parade prior to World War One.  I know that some places still have Columbus Day Parades, but not all that many.  It's mostly an unobserved holiday most places.  Apparently this wasn't always the case.

I didn't even take note that it was Columbus Day, although I should have, as I didn't get any mail. That's the kind of holiday it is. Federal offices close, but that's about all that happens, other than some stores trying to take advantage of the marketing opportunities it probably doesn't provide.  Most places, people just ignore Columbus Day.

Presidents Day has gone that way too.  At one time, I think people did stop to observe Washington's Birthday or Lincoln's Birthday, but combining all the Presidential observances into one day didn't do them any favor.  Sure, I might wish to honor Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelt's, etc., but I'm not too keen on honoring some others.  I'd be hard pressed to raise a glass of milk to Millard Filmore, for example, and I'm not going to toast John F. Kennedy, who was a terrible President in my view (yes, I know that we're not supposed to say that, but he was).  It hardly matters anyhow, as now the day is so diluted that nobody pays any mind.  These days, Presidents Day and Columbus Day, have passed off of everyone's personal observational calendar.

But some days are in, for sure.  Martin Luther King Day seems widely observed with some civil events in most places.  In Wyoming, it's Equality Day as the legislature balked at recognizing a Civil Rights leader when it seemed to them that we'd been honoring civil rights long before that. They were wrong, but at the time I thought that passage might be easier if they made it Washakie-Ross-King Day, in honor of Chief Washakie, Nellie Tayloe Ross, and Martin Luther King.  I still think that would have been nifty.  I note that everyone around here calls the day "Martin Luther King Day", showing that people weren't as worked up, I think, as the legislature apparently was.

Americans also heartily observe Thanksgiving Day, as to Canadians, although the north of the border holiday just occurred.  Christmas and Easter, religious holidays, are also widely observed by everyone.  Veterans Day remains a huge civil holiday in most places, as does Memorial Day, which brings me to my next curious item.

June 6, the anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy during World War Two, have practically become auxiliary Veterans and Memorial Days.  Both Veterans and Memorial Days actually honor the same people, veterans and more particularly lost veterans, but June 6 has come to be a memorial to World War Two veterans.  November 11 has to hang on as the memorial for World War One veterans, which is how it started off.  December 7 has also taken on that status, and to a certain extent September 11 has now as well, although its officially Patriots Day.  This is interesting in that it shows that honoring veterans remains a huge deal in the United States, to such an extent really that there are two days associated with big events in World War Two that are nearly axillary holidays simply by popular acclimation.

St. Patrick's Day is that way too, although its really degraded over the years.  St. Patrick is the Patron Saint of Ireland, and originally St. Patrick's Day was simply celebrated with a huge celebration wherever there were a lot of Irish expatriates.  Generally local Bishops gave a dispensation for Lenten observances on that day (it's always during Lent) and there were big Irish parties, often with a lot of beer, but there were also quite a few Masses as well.  Now there are still a lot of parties, but generally its an excuse for people to wear green and drink a lot of beer, irrespective of their ancestry.

Cinco de Mayo is approaching the status that St. Patrick's Day had perhaps 30 years ago, being a celebration of all things Hispanic on that day.  It's curious in that it isn't a big day in Mexico itself, even though it commemorates a Mexican battle. The widely made claim that its "Mexican Independence Day" is flatly wrong as that day is September 19.  A big day in strongly Hispanic areas can also be found in Our Lady of Guadalupe's feast day, which  was a big day long before Cinco de Mayo was.

All this is interesting, I think, in that it shows us what people value at any one time.  Columbus Day has gone from being essentially a day in which Italians could point to somebody they were proud of to being largely ignored, or controversial to the extent its observed.  At the same time St. Patrick's Day has become a huge unofficial holiday and Cinco de Mayo is becoming one.  People want to honor veterans so much that we're basically observing four veterans' days.  We have fewer civil holidays than most other people, we don't observe all that we have, but we do observe a few that aren't official.  I wonder what days we would have found being observed a century ago?

Wednesday, October 14, 1914. Border tensions.

Things were getting tense on the border with Mexico and Arizona, and Arizona's governor was getting ready to call out the National Guard.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 13, 1914. October 13, 1914: Braves finish off shocking World Series upset in Game Four

Labels: 1910s, 1914, 1914 World Series, baseball, German Army, Paris France, Sports, World War One