Justice Sotomayor on being a lawyer, and me one her being in "O"

I'm a member of the American Bar Association, which means that I get their weekly email updating me on events of the past week, legal wise, which rarely actually have anything much to do with the law.  They're interesting, but like most modern journals, they are also open to comments.  I sort of scan the comments, and usually wish I hadn't.

 Law office, Plymouth Massachusetts.  Not much of a place.

I'm not sure why, but the folks who comment on the ABA articles are amongst the most extreme on the planet.  This is particularly so where the topic is the occupation of practicing law.  Probably over half of the comments on any one such topic are extremely hostile to the practice itself.  A few always counter that its the greatest thing ever.  Hardly any middle of the road, reasoned, posts are ever there. A few people try, but they tend to get shouted out.  Or maybe just ignored.  The really hostile people are busy debating each other.  You get the impression that one half is practicing in a combat zone, and the other half rides unicorns to their job of dancing in daisies.  It's rather odd.

 Extremely well turned out New York City lawyer, 1914. This lawyer probably meets the public perception of a lawyer in more than one way, and probably was in the 1914 equivalent of "big law."  Note the tailored suit, bowler, walking stick and cigar.

For some reason, certain types of forums attract real extremists, while others do not.  Newspapers, for one, and general journals, such as the ABA Journal, really attract extremists.  It's odd, but true.  When I review newpaper articles online, which generally allow for direct commentary, I tend to find that the most extreme people on the planet make up about half the comments.  In the case of the local newspaper, it seems to be the same few really extreme people.  Having said that, however, New York Times articles seem to attract the same hostile, ill informed, elements.  People are hostile in their ignorance and like to shout everyone else down.  In at least one recent Casper Star Tribune example the comments were downright mean in a way that would be hard to justify, and which the paper really ought to take out.  I know the same people wouldn't express such views in public, even if they privately  harbor them.  The ABA online articles, which I'll confess I rarely actually read,  are the same way, as they attract serial hostile or extreme commentators.  It's a little weird, frankly as there seems to be a few people who are really miffed and want everyone to know that, weekly. It's pretty apparent, when you read them, that the same people post again and again, as the dueling commentators seem to recognize each other.

 Newspaper vendor yelling out the news.  Now a lot of people seem to spend time yelling in journals.

I'll note, however, that quite a few blogs and forums are not this way at all, including "Blawgs" (law blogs).  It must be something about the format, or perhaps that they're actively moderated, allowing for more intelligent and informed discussion to occur.

This topic isn't limited to lawyers by any means, but that there'd be some miffed lawyers commenting is no surprise, as the practice has really been the focus of investigation of the topic of discontent recently.  Maybe this has been the trend for awhile, but it definately has been recently.  The 2008 collapse of the economy was particularly hard on lawyers nationwide, and as a group there a group that the general public is particularly disinterested in.  People worry about assembly line workers at General Motors loosing their jobs, but they don't worry too much about lawyers loosing theirs, and a fair number of the general public laugh a bit about it.  That's not a new development, but what is a new development is that law schools had been producing record numbers of lawyers and the newly minted lawyers had unrealistic expectations about their careers and how lucrative they could expect it to be. The crash caused quite a deflation in expectations of all sorts.

 Lawyers as they actually are.  This lawyer, in 1914, is sitting in a library with papers and with a suit that's bit rumbled.  A scene pretty familiar to most courtroom lawyers who spent a lot more time in the library than the courtroom. This was the case when I first practiced, but today that same lawyer would be sitting in his office, alone, in front of his computer which would have WestLaw or Lexis up on the monitor.

Truth be known, being a lawyer is very hard work, which is why lawyers have traditionally done better than others in the economy, even though the period in which they did very well was very brief, and not the historical norm.  Any job that's somewhat difficult to obtain and has difficult working conditions pays better than others.  It's a law of supply and demand type of deal.  It used to be somewhat more difficult to become a lawyer than other things requiring a post secondary school education, if we take the approximate 1930 to 2000 time frame.  That is well known.  But what was very much less well known is that being a lawyer is really hard difficult work.

 Kansas lawyer, right, 1913.  Casual observers sometimes assume that lawyers dress formally as they're wealthy, when in fact its because its expected of them and part of their office. Goodness knows there'd be no other excuse for wearing a hat like that. 

Regarding that education, it's now not as hard to get as it once was, as there's been a shift in the concept of professional schools over time.  I also frankly wonder if many university degrees in general are just easier, in terms of content, than they once were.  The method of teaching law, which used to be focused on the Socratic method, certainly seems to have changed, which is sad in that at least in my experience, having a degree in the sciences (geology) and in law, I found the Socratic method to be very effective and engaging.  At any rate, now, professional schools view themselves as species of businesses themselves, even though many are publicly supported.  Law schools are no different.  Institutions that used to admit a very selective number of people admit a lot more than they used to.  Some law schools used to use their exclusivity as a selling point, in fact, noting that most people who attempted to get in, would not.  And their educational approach has shifted a great deal.  Land grant colleges, which are very common in the West, used to take the approach that they were educating locals for local employment.  That idea is almost completely dead, as the same professional schools now imagine themselves graduating students for a new, exciting, global practice that for most lawyers doesn't exist, and which they couldn't compete in no matter where they graduated from.  Universities like the University of Wyoming, University of Nebraska, Kansas State, and so on, used to be very focused on their immediate states, and regions beyond that.  Specialty schools, like the Colorado School of Mines, or Texas Agricultural and Mining, were the same way in their fields, albeit with more of a regional, as opposed to state, focus.  That doesn't mean that their education was bad by any means, it wasn't, but rather that the focus was geographic.  At least in some instances recently, with at least law schools, this is no longer the case and law schools imagine themselves providing new graduates  to the entire nation, a trend which, I fear, will not serve them well long term.  Indeed, it already is not, as law school applications are plummeting and there's now a great deal of discussion about some of them disappearing. At the same time, there's been some much needed focus on how law schools approach recruitment, which is long overdue.

 Medical service officers in training during World War Two, some of whom would have been lawyers in their civilian occupations.  Contrary to what people presume now, being a lawyer did not result in a direct commission for inductees during World War Two and the Army didn't bother to assign lawyers automatically to the JAG Corps at the time. The Navy didn't even have a JAG Corps.  Service lawyers were drawn to that specialty based on need, but otherwise being a lawyer didn't result in a special assignment, and an inducted lawyer was just as likely to end up as an infantry private.

That I guess takes me to the second part of this which is the perception of "lawyer discontent."  It seems like there's a massive perception that a huge percentage of lawyers are unhappy with their work, or maybe just unhappy.  There's reason to question that as statistically invalid, but before we do, why would that perception, which Justice Sotomayor was naively attempting to address, exist?

Part of that may be the flooding of the market that's still going on, as law schools are still disgorging graduates at levels above that which the econmy can absorb, and those who are finding work in some regions are now finding it well below their economic expectation.  That raises several issues.

One is that people who entered law school with a focus on money are going to normally be disappointed.  The law just doesn't pay what people think it does.  Indeed, none of the professions actually do.  Law schools are to partially to blame here for not disabusing their students of this notion.  The first thing any new student should hear, from the law school, is that if you don't want to do the job for a wage in the lower to middle, middle class, you better look for something else.  That doesn't mean that a person should hope for more, and if they do the work, receive more, but starting out at $100,000 per year is not really that common in the real world.

The ABA deserves to be criticized here too as its bizarrely focused on the wages that are made at "big law" and it goes on and on about it.  Big law is a freakish anomaly having little to do with what most lawyers actually do.  Sure, some students enter "big law" upon graduation, but most do not.  The focus on it leads to the mistaken concept that those who don't enter it are some sort of failure, which is absurd.  But if that's the expectation that exist on the part of the ABA, that's also going to be the expectation of at least some of those entering law school too.  If you review the various forums for disgruntled law students out there, there seem to be a fair number who actually believed that.  That's just crazy.  Indeed, there's a lot of commentary that if a person has gone to a "tier one" law school, they're just doomed, which is nonsense in many areas.  I don't know any lawyer who has graduated from a "tier one" law school, including any of the judges, state or federal, that I practice in front of.  Indeed, I think darned near every judge I can think of around here graduated from the same state law school that I did, something I wish the law school would keep in mind as it shifts away from a focus on the state.

Beyond that, it's the case that lawyers in the private sector work really long hours routinely, and for decades.  There's a gross mis-preception that this is only something the newly minted experience, and the ABA type focus on "big law" and what "big law" pays means about as much to most lawyers as what major league baseball pays.  Yes, it pays well, but chances of the New York Yankees calling most of us up who can play baseball are about as good as most of us ending up in "big law," assuming we wanted to end up in "big law."  And the "big law" lawyers are working hard for that salary.  Those not working "big law," however, are also working pretty hard, and for a lot less. That's part of the discontent problem too, as the ABA, through its focus on this area, and the various others who are focusing on it, seem to be suggesting that the "big law" folks only work hard for a few years, at which time they cash in their chips, and everyone else is hardly working at all.  That's all complete baloney.  Law is pretty much a seven day a week job which follows you home every night.  The concept out there that you'll make a pile of cash quickly is just silly.  I see a lot of complaints about student loan debt in this context, but there that's the same story as for every other occupation.  A person investing in an education through loans needs to have a realistic expectation about economic returns.  Perhaps they now do, as law school admissions are way down nationwide, and I'd guess the debt to income ratio may have something to do with that.

As past of that, something that the money focused entrants might not appreciate is that, depending upon the field they enter, and if they're aiming for big cash there's just a very few, they'll be dealing with a lot of people in trouble.  You'd think that self evident, but I don't know that it is.  All civil court work, and 100% of criminal work, involves trouble and conflict.  People whose have a high love of money don't necessarily have a high love of distressed people.  While I haven't finished it yet, another posts in the works here involves people who were lawyers who became well known at something else, and to my surprise, a really well represented group in that category is clergymen.  It shouldn't have surprised me, however, as being a clergyman is pretty cerebral and it'd be natural, for those with high intellect but a deep love of people to move in that direction.  People with a lot of intelligence but focused on money are probably going to be unhappy instead.

Given that, it doesn't surprise me that there's discontent, but a recent statistical study by a bar of one of the southern states (I forget which one) suggested that the disconent story isn't real.  It turned out in that state bar that most practicing lawyers were not discontented.  This brings up the forum thing again, as what I really wonder is if the discontented are barking a lot louder than everyone else.  If they are, that might merely be because they're discontented.  I strongly suspect a lot of barkers on any one topic are, after all, the most extreme for one reason or another.  But I also think it might be because there's a fair number of people who went to law school for the wrong reason, aren't too happy with what they find, make that known, and then depart.  Indeed, there's a lot of attrition at the entry level.  So the entire story may be one of doubly inaccurate conceptualizations.  On the outside, a lot of people feel that all lawyers are rich, greedy rats who  don't work at all.  On the inside, the perception is developing that everyone is unhappy.  In reality, a few lawyers are rich greedy rats, but they're very few, and most lawyers probably keep on keeping on as they're not so miffed as the internet chatter would have everyone believe.

If all of this is the case, it doesn't surprise me that the topic of Sotomayor's interview received some true hostility.  But, at the same time, the interview made me wonder about Sotomayor a bit.

Justice Sotomayor has recently written a biography, which is fine and which I have no problems with (although I'm not going to read it).  So, as a result, she's making the book touring rounds.  That frankly bothers me, however, as a Supreme Court Justice isn't supposed to be a celebrity.  And it bothers me more that she appeared on Oprah.  I frankly really dislike Oprah.  Not personally, but professionally.  She strikes me as vapid.  Anything that's a current pop trend shows up there sooner or later, and without any attempt at standards.  So we get things like Tom Cruise acting like a freak after dumping his first wife and taking up with an actress barely out of diapers.  Not very dignified.  A real intellectual commentator would have taken after him for that.  It doesn't suprise me, therefore that Lance Armstrong would show up there to confess his misdeeds.  It does surprise me that Sonia Sotomayor showed up there, however.  But, by the same token, it surprised me that President Obama showed up there.  It's just very undignified and they ought not to have done it.

Sotomayor's personal history is interesting, and it should make for an itneresting read.  The fact that I'm not going to read it doesn't mean it would be bad, I'm just not interested in reading it.  I haven't read any of Justice Thomas' books either.  I guess, as a practicing lawyer, the biographies of justices don't appeal to me much.  They may very well appeal to others.

As a total aside, I should note here that while she fits into a category of lawyer, and judge, that's highly unique demographically, in that she's a woman of Puerto Rican extraction, the somewhat common assumption that most lawyers were white (or rather white males) up until quite recently is incorrect.  Most lawyers were men up until at least the 1990s, although there's been women lawyers in the US for a century or longer, depending upon the state.  Barring women from admission to the bar was pretty common in many localities, globally, up until just about a century ago, but membership in the bar on the part of minorities was not uncommon.  Indeed, the law has been one of the professions that has tended to be open to minorities, making it a bit unique.  Black lawyers have existed for a very long time, and other disadvantaged groups, such as the Irish at one point, always had members of their group who were lawyers.  In part, that reflects a need and a ready market.  Black lawyers, for example, could depend upon having black clients in an era when it might be difficult for a black person to find representation otherwise, or at least representation that they could fully trust.

African American lawyer, early 1940s.  Again, note that he's in a law library.

At any rate, however, I found her comment that the discontented group should go back to the origins of their becoming a lawyer to be a rather naive, but highly Oprah like comment.  Sotomayor herself came from pretty desperate straights but managed to go to Yale, meaning that she was going to be a success no matter what. That's to her credit. She also went right into real work, very much to her credit, and practices as a bonafide real world lawyer for twelve years.  She's been on the bench since 1991.  I can't find anything there to find fault with at all, and the critics who go after her for not knowing what real practice may be are completely off base.  She must, as she's done it.  I think, therefore, that the comment she made was a bit of an Oprah inspired platititude.  I hope so anyhow.

The reason that I hope so has more to do with her other observation, about pracitcing law being "a gift," than her comment about going back to the origins of practice. The reason I feel that is that the gift comment makes more sense.  I suspect, knowing something of Sotomayor's background,that the gift observation is correct and that the inspiration, probably, for her career was escaping her deprived background.  She did that, and no doubt made a very good lawyer too.  But that inspiration, if I'm right, is probably more common in some ways than supposed, or at least admitted. The idea that most who enter the practice of law are inspired by some grand and glorious ideal is probably pretty much off the mark, and she should know that too. That does describe some people, but probably not very many.  And, historically, I suspect the number of people like that are a pretty tiny miniority.

Which isn't to say that some people weren't inspired by such goals, or perhaps (at one time) by romantic literary depictions of lawyers, now a rarity, such as that of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird.  Indeed, I've heard of people being inspired to enter the law by the portrayal of Finch.  If that's the case, at least that portrayal is much more accurate in some ways than modern portrayals in such things as Suits or LA Law.  Indeed, the portrayal of Finch should give wannabe lawyers pause, although few probably are inspired by it now, as he's a small town lawyer in the Lee's book and not really doing all that well.  He takes produce in for payment, and the couple of trials mentioned in the book are lost.  

As an aside, I will note that recently a father of a young man who is considering law school spoke to me and noted that Suits was the inspiration for his son's contemplation of law school, and of the father's support of it.  That does concern me.  I haven't watched Suits, and I'm not going to, but I can tell merely from the advertisements that Suits has about as much to do with the practice of law as playing Call of Duty has to do with actual ground combat in Afghanistan.  Not much.

Anyhow, Sotomayor's inspiration for entering law, no matter what her retrospective view of that topic may be, probably was to get solid employment that would lift her out of poverty. That worked.  It's a noble inspiration, but just doesn't read very dramatically.  It might work, I suppose, as a revived inspiration for flagging lawyers, but probably a lot, indeed, most, of those folks didn't come from poverty so their frame of reference might not really fit it.  Looking back, however, isn't a bad idea (the whole blog here is about it) but a person probably ought to be realistic about that.  I've met a lot of current lawyers when they were quite new and knew what inspired a few of them, but only with a very few was the inspiration something so grand.  Some just had a taste for practicing law, but with quite a few it was a career path open to them that appeared to be interesting and which also had the appearance of at least being able to provide a decent wage.  Indeed, I'm always very skeptical when somebody tells me that they "always dreamed of being a lawyer" or that that they "always knew that they wanted to be a lawyer."  In fact, the only person I've ever known well, who had that declaration, recently quit being a lawyer, and that person isn't even 50 years old, and probably isn't even 45 years old.  So they likely ceased that occupation without even two decades in it, granted two decades is a long time.

 Courtroom lawyers in "domestic" case, 1902.  Probably no rich men here.

This isn't to say that the original goals weren't entirely worthwhile.  I think they are, they're just mixed, in all likelihood, and more mundane than grand.  At some point something about the law attracted them, and it looked like it would work for a living.  That's a fine goal really.  If people now are dissatisfied in general, that may tell us something about their goals being unrealistic.  Or it might not.  But I think it somewhat does.  The public portrayal of lawyers has gone form Atticus Finch, or the defense lawyer in Anatomy of  a Murder, or even the defense lawyer in A Few Good Men, to the icky portrayals of the overly wealthy suits in Suits, LA Law, or Boston Legal.  That sort of portrayal shouldn't inspire anyone, but it does seem to reflect the yammering of the ABA, which seems to think that everyone wants to practice law in a a super sized firm in a super sized city, and it isn't helped by the fact that law schools approach their task from a market prospective but aren't always honest with their charges about what a law degree actually means..  And, by extension, the discontent reflects the crying in their Perrier view of a lot of recent law grads on the net, who seem to think that's where the real law is.

Truth be known, the real law isn't there and never has been.  A lot of the really fine acute lawyers are out in the trenches and are graduates of third tier schools.  Gerry Spence, I'd note, who some regards as the nation's premier trial attorney, was a graduate of the University of Wyoming before practicing law in Riverton, Casper, and the Jackson, Wyoming.  I myself have tried a lot of cases, so many that I had to laugh at an ABA interview of a California lawyer who thought she'd tried a lot of them as, by career's end, she'd tried 13 (as if that's a lot, what a joke), against many fine lawyers, but not one of them was in a "big law" firm and the best of them were UW grads.  What that tells a person, I think, is that a law degree basically entitles a person to take the bar, and if they pass that, it entitles them to work at the profession. That's about it.  In terms of expectations, economically, that doesn't mean that they've won the lottery and it shouldn't.  An evolution in legal business thinking in the 1970s and 1980s, when the entire culture became very money focused, may have coincided with a bubble that meant that people were making more money, on average, than they did in earlier eras, but things like that tend to correct, and that's no longer so much the case.  If people coming into the practice now expect it to be, if they they came in some time ago and are disappointed that the reality doesn't match the perception, that's not reality's fault.

I suspect also that this is more common society wide than lawyers suspect, and tat perhaps that's missed as vocalization is a trait that lawyers are trained in.  The reason I suspect this, however, is that up until at least 1945, people did not go on to university as a rule, and the economic class that did was usually quite well off.  The professions were an exception to this, but overall what this meant is that people pursuing a university degree of any kind, if they were not WASPs, were pretty focused from the onset.  Now attending university has almost become an extension of high school, a mere expectation. For that matter, graduating from high school prior to 1945 was much less common. The GI Bill started a change in all of this, and it wasn't a bad change as it boosted the economic fortune of generations, but like all such things widespread college attendance may have run its course awhile ago.  Now, a lot of people are obtaining degrees, even advanced degrees, whose motives are not the same as earlier generations, and whose exposure to a world without such degrees is not as keen.  In other words, I suspect that law school grads, medical school grads, engineering grads, etc., etc., of 1923, or 1953, looked at the world quite a bit differently than some grads do today.  I've met some university graduates, even law school graduates, who came away with their degrees with a "well now what?" kind of view of the world, which isn't, I suspect what very many earlier graduates, unless they were members of the idle rich, would have had.

In noting that, I'm not really criticizing people, but I may be criticizing institutions.  It seems that our economy has moved to the point where the young, unless they are born into a viable business, must attend university or they will be doomed to a life at the bottom end of the service economy.  Indeed, with university degrees becoming so widespread, its' now the case that even a university degree may not always result in the opposite.  I see a lot of wedding announcements in our local paper in which both parties have university degrees but are working at jobs that shouldn't require them and which are more than "starter" or temporary jobs. Those folks have basically spent four years in university for no good reason, other than that our economy is now somewhat warped.

It's frightening to think that a Juris Doctorate may be on the verge of becoming such a degree, and I don't think it is yet.  But there is a very high initial attrition of new lawyers, and a lot of discontent at the entry level.  Part of that, I suspect, may be for the same reasons.  I suspect that some of these folks are just wondering into a really hard working profession.  They probably sort of meandered through their undergraduate, had no place else to go, bought into the law school and ABA propaganda, and found themselves in something they didn't naturally like but which requires massive dedication.  I'm scared to think that their may physicians who meet this description as well.  Anyhow, those folks probably would have been happier as machinists, or something, but who ended up as lawyers as there was basically no place else for them to go.  We can't expect them to be too cheerful.  And Justice Sotomayor's advice won't help them, as they never really thought out what they were doing from the onset.  Or at least that's my observational guess.

I also worry a little about the potential lack of diverse intellect that such an evolution in the law students may herald.  Lawyers tend to be polymaths, at least the goods ones are, and if people are wondering into it because they are supposed to have a college degree and couldn't think of any other degrees to get, that's not necessarily a good thing.  Better lawyers are curious people, and they often tend to have a lot of highly diverse, but sometimes intense, interests.  That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of really good lawyers who basically ended up there simply because the are polymaths and their interests were in everything, but there is a certain dullness of character for people just mushing their way through university, even if that mushing takes them to and advance degree. 

Okay, so what on earth does that have to do with the focus of the blog?  Well, maybe not much  But it does sort of relate to one of the characters I'm trying to develop, novel wise, and it is a topic that comes up a lot, in one way or another, on the Today In Wyoming's History blog.  It wouldn't be fair to say by any means that all the significant early, let's say pre World War Two, figures in Wyoming's political history were lawyers, but a lot of them sure were.  I've actually been surprised by the number.  Many of the early governors were, and many of the early Senators and Congressmen were.  And, and of course it would stand to reason, most of these men were graduates from out of state schools. The early ones had to be, or they had to have "read the law," as UW's College of Law didn't come about until, I think, 1920.  But I haven't really ran across much about them individually.  That is, why did they enter the law?  And why did they take their practice to Wyoming?  I note that a lot of them came to the state very soon after graduating from law school, and then pretty quickly entered politics or professional office. That has to lead me to believe that they were pretty opportunistic as a rule.  Later ones seem to have sometimes been mixed in careers, i.e., lawyers and ranchers, or lawyers and correspondents, and the like.  That probably reflects something else, and it reflects something that used to be fairly common here, but no longer really is.

 Lawyer from a western state, 1926.  He's basically turned out as expected, except for his hat, which isn't a bowler, rather obviously.

So what can we take away from all of this?  Well, I'd propose the following:

1.  Comments in general journals, the ABA Journal or the local newspaper, or even the New York Times, probably aren't worth much as the folks who comment are likely to be extremists.

2.  Comments on moderated forums and blogs mean more, probably.

3.  A person has to be careful about statistics, no matter what they're on, as statistics without analysis, or without careful science behind them, can be misleading.

4.  I wish serious people, like Sotomayor, would give interviews to interviewers I could take more seriously, rather than Oprah.  I really do.

5.  Are universities and professional schools failing people?  There sure seem to be a lot of people entering work that wouldn't require a BA or BS, and it's odd to think of people getting post graduate degrees and then finding them unsatisfactory, or does that just take us back to #3?

6.  What's it say about our economy that so many people now must obtain a university degree, even though they seemingly may not be suited for what they're studying?

7.  What were those early Wyoming lawyers like?

The end of Saturday mail delivery

In the category of trends, the U.S. Post Office has announced that it intends to end the Saturday delivery of mail. This move will save the Post Office a great deal of money.  No doubt that's true, and the move can come as no surprise.

Rural mail carrier transferring mail to a second mail carrier, in Kentucky, in the early 1940s.

The surprising thing this go around, as this has been suggested before, is how this is now coming without a whimper or hint of complaint from the general public.  It just is.  This really shows a huge evolution in how we view the mail, as well as a big evolution in how the mail itself is viewed.

When I was a little kid, and at home from school for the summer, I used to really look forward to the mail.  It seems odd to look back at now and realize that.  The mail coming was sort of exciting.  There was "junk mail" then, and bills of course, but I didn't worry about the bills or the junk. The exciting stuff was the other stuff.  Magazines and letters.  My mother in particular wrote a lot of letters and received a lot of letters.  She had family correspondence that went all over. Letters from Canada, Florida, Massachusetts, Mexico and Hawaii were always arriving.  And the magazines were pretty interesting too.  My father, for his office, subscribed to both major news magazines of the period, Time and Newsweek, as well as Life, Look, and later on, People.  National Geographics, and a host of monthly magazines also arrived almost daily it seemed.

Rural mail carrier in Kentucky, 1940s.

Later, when I was in basic training, Mail Call was a huge deal.  Every mail call we hoped for some mail.  Letters were a great distraction from whatever else we were doing at Ft. Sill,and they were eagerly anticipated.

Such was also the case when I was twice at the University of Wyoming.  While in law school I had post office box at the campus post office, and I checked it darned near every week day.  Sometimes I checked it on Saturdays too, particularly if I was going to the early Mass at the Newman Center, which took me right by the post office.  Letters from family and the few magazines I received were always looked forward to.

Now this is much less the case. We still get magazines that we subscribe to by mail, and look forward to them.  Newsweek is gone, of course, now part of the Daily Beast online, as are Look and Life magazines. The National Geographic still comes, and some others. But the letters are mostly gone.  Getting a letter, by mail, is now almost a shock, it's so rare.

Almost all my correspondence is electronic.  All the friends I keep in touch with via correspondence I keep in touch with via email.  I don't even mail Christmas cards anymore, I just do an electronic Christmas letter.  The old vast flood of correspondence the mail used to bring is now all gone, a massive change over former times.  The mail now is made up of magazines, junk mail, and bills.  But even bills are slowly leaving the mail, as more and more people pay for things online.

This blog has, as one of is purposes, exploring the change in things over the past century, and here's a huge one indeed. The mail used to be absolutely central to people's lives.  Now, this is hardly the case.  There are some days we don't even check our mailbox out in front of our house, which is something that never would have been the case earlier.  Down at the office mail is still huge, of course, but even this is beginning to change.  We used to mail pleadings to every court.  Now we electronically file and serve in Federal court, and we also do the same for the Wyoming Supreme Court.  Ironically here, therefore, the Federal government's courts were the first to abandon the United States Post Office, in the legal world.

This trend is set to continue, there's no doubt. The Post Office is only accepting the inevitable, but the interesting thing this go around is that most people don't seem to care.  Shutting down Saturday delivery has been a topic of discussion forever.  Now it will happen, and it seems that most won't notice. 

Today In Wyoming's History: February 4: The Dams

Recently the Today In Wyoming's History blog ran this item:

Today In Wyoming's History: February 4:

1905  Construction starts on Pathfinder Dam.

Presently construction is undergoing to raise the height of the dam to take into account a century of silting.

 Walkway on the top of the dam, soon to be removed due to dam being heightened.

View from the top of the dam, on one of the rare occasions that water is released through a tunnel from it.

It occurred to me that this illustrates a massive physical change in our region.  One we're so used to that we hardly even recognize it.

Pathfinder Dam is on the North Platte River, a river that runs from northern Colorado, north into Wyoming, before turning East and Southeast and flowing to Nebraska.  It's one of the most controlled rivers in the world.  I honestly do not know the most upstream of the dams on the river, but I believe there's some sort of small such structure in Colorado.

In Wyoming, the most upstream dam is Seminoe Dam, which was completed in 1939.  Below that, just a few miles downstream, is Cortez Dam, a dam apparently so obscure that it doesn't get much mention anywhere, except by locals, even though its a pretty impressive structure.  It likely was built about the same time.  Below that is Pathfinder Dam, depicted above, the only dam of its particular vintage and necessarily the first of the dams on the river.  Below Pathfinder is Alcova Dam, which started impounding water in 1938.  A couple of miles below that is the very small dam, Grey Reef.  Miles downstream is Glendo, and then Guernsey.  All of these dams, except for Pathfinder, were part of the Kendrick project, a project designed to bring irrigation to Central Wyoming.

Prior to the dams, the North Platte River flooded every spring, and then was a trickle by fall.  Paintings of Ft. Caspar from the 1860s show the river in flood stage as being absolutely massive, something that would surprise people in the area today, but which squares with contemporary accounts.  In the Fall it was the opposite.  Very clearly the river as we know it today was not the river that existed at least prior to 1910.  It isn't even the river as it was known in the 1940s, as at that time the Bureau of Reclamation didn't worry about choking the river off in Fall to impound water.  Now it does, as that's a pretty destructive process.

The difference between having water all year long and not is too great to really expound on.  We're used to having it all year round, and its part of the background to our lives.  It wasn't always that way.

Citing a conspiracy involving Abraham Lincoln, the Queen of England, and the ABA, NH tries to recognize the “original” 13th Amendment, and defend state from “unlawful usurpation” by judiciary » Gavel to Gavel

Citing a conspiracy involving Abraham Lincoln, the Queen of England, and the ABA, NH tries to recognize the “original” 13th Amendment, and defend state from “unlawful usurpation” by judiciary » Gavel to Gavel

Wow.  Wouldn't have seen that coming.

The Company of Military Historians

For those who may not be familiar with it, the Company of Military Historians is the premier organization dedicated to the study of military history.  At one time its membership was by invitation, but now invitation is open to those interested in the subject.  It's journal is excellent.

The flyer depicted above is available at http://military-historians.org/join/Revisedshowflyerw-QRC130201.pdf

Advertising

 

 The Jordan Motor Car Company's legendary Somewhere West of Laramie advertisement.

I started this post during the Christmas season (and resumed it following the advertising laden Super Bowl), when particularly odd examples of this literary and cinematic genre crop up, particularly in the perfume industry.  Perfume and cologne are products marketed pretty much on the basis of image anyhow, so advertisements that are all image are not surprising, but this segment of the market offers a selection that's particularly odd.  None is more odd, this year, than the perfume and cologne campaign by Dolce and Gabanna.  This campaign features a nearly naked man who dives into the seas of some warm water somewhere to sneak up on a barely clad young woman who looks like an Auschwitz victim, as she's so thin.  Perhaps its my age, but what she looks like she needs isn't perfume, but a gift certificate to a local restaurant.  Any restaurant, particularly one that offers seconds on desert.  In the print version of the ad she has a pained look on her face, as if she's about to hurl.  Advertising folks must not have children, as they have obviously mistaken the appearance of estacy with the appearance of "drank expired milk."  In that advertisement the swimming male sports the most recent facial hair affectation among the trendy, stubble.  If Nixon debated Kennedy today, all the commentary would be on how "hot" he looked, with stubble.

What, a person might ask, does any that have to do with the advertisement set out above for Jordan automobiles? Well, everything really.

The 1923 advertisement set out above is legendary in advertising circles, as its regarded as the first advertisement to attempt to sell based solely on image and style.  The car can't really be seen, we get none of the details about the car. We don't know what engine it has, or even what type of car it is really. All we know is that "Somewhere west of Laramie, there's a broncho-busting, steer -roping girl" who apparently knows what the advertising copy writer it talking about.  If so, she's the only one, as the advertisement is purposely highly enigmatic.   Basically, we're left with the suggestion that we want to know the broncho-busting girl west of Laramie, and perhaps we want a Jordan automobile also.  It's an advertising masterpiece.

Not enough of one, however, to save the Jordan company during the Great Depression.  The car wasn't all that hot of a vehicle and it was really a components car, a fairly common way of making cars at the time.  That is, the Jordan Motor Car Company bought a lot of components to make it, rather than make it themselves.  When money became tight, broncho busting girls and their admirers were apparently short of cash, and the Jordan Motor Car Company disappeared.

Edward S. Jordan, the founder of the company, had been an advertising man prior to founding the car company, and that's where he talents undoubtedly lay.  Advertising has never been the same since Jordan penned the copy and thought of the stylized ad, which ran first in a June 1923 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.  And it worked too. Sales of the Jordan leaped up.  A new advertising age was born.  The car might not have lasted, by the impact on advertising was permanent.

Prior to June 1923, not all advertisements were detail oriented by any means.  And some were based on image.  But none were so vague as to the product itself.  Stylized advertisements were common, but they often depicted a romantic allegorical view of their product if they were, such as this one below for Waterman Pens:

This imagine, already in a prior thread here, wanted to remind the reader that, following the horror of World War One, that the pen was mightier than the sword, telling us that the "portable "Ideal" pen by Waterman was "the arm of the peace,", also suggesting that it was used in executing the recent treaty of peace, upon which we see the Goddess of Peace sitting, in 1919.  Extremely allegorical, we also see the sun rising up on the year 1919 and a horn of plenty flowing out from below the bench upon which Peace is sitting.  But we do see the pen too and get a really good idea of what the Waterman "Ideal" looked like.

This example might be one of the most pronounced taking this approach, but it wasn't the only one, and a fair number of companies used allegorical advertisements up through the 1920s, with some of the allegories being so overdone that the advertisements are more than a little odd to the modern eye.  The style continued on into the 1940s, however, although it was beginning to pass away by that time.  World War Two gave it a boost, as the situation lent itself to that sort of advertising, as had World War One before it.

Boy Scout backed World War One vintage advertisement for Liberty Bonds.

Allegorical ads are fairly rare, now, if they feature true allegories, but they occasionally do show up. The best one in recent decades was a Super Bowl advertisement in which an athletic  young woman, representing Apple Computers, rushed into a room of  blandly clad men looking at a bland image on a huge screen, and hurls a sledge hammer into it, signifying Apple's intent to crush IBM.  Apple did basically that shortly thereafter.

Others advertisements from the turn of the prior century, before the girl from Laramie used simple art images, such as Coca Cola which famously used a series depicting well turned out and stylized young women, drinking their product.

Coca Cola advertisement from 1891.  Coke used this type of advertisement for at least two decades. 

It wasn't just soft drink companies that used ads of the type set out above.  Brewers did do, with Budweiser notably  having depictions of women which were quite similar to Coca Cola's, suggesting perhaps that Coke was the entry beverage to beer.  Brewers were also early users of other themes, however, such as cowboys, outdoors men, and outdoor imagines..

Advertisement for Widemann's Beer.

All this isn't to say that 1923 brought a complete change in advertising, that wouldn't be true at all.  Even today, ads like the ones immediately above can be found, including during the Christmas Season and the during the Super Bowl.  But 1923 did see the introduction of the odd enigmatic ad, which would be a minority type, to be sure.

In recent years the ones that seem to have really predominated in this category are perfume ads, which is perhaps because, as the end of they day, they're pretty much about nothing. The Dolce and Gabanna advertisement may be the very best example around, in both its print and film versions. It's about nothing at all, and it is all style. Style wise, moreover, it's truly weird.  It's a bizarre thing to think that the same two months that saw the U.S. Department of Defense decide that women could serve in combat would also see a product hawked to them marketed with the theme that some guy dives off of a cliff to rescue/abduct a waif who appears to badly be in need of a good square meal and who has a look which vaguely suggests that she's about to be violently ill.  Hopefully, if women are to serve in combat, she won't be one of them, as I have doubts about her ability to pick up a pencil, let alone a rifle. The Coca Cola girl immediately above looks like a better bet, defense wise.  Anyhow, the advertisement doesn't actually tell us anything about the product. We don't know if its uniquely pleasing, odor wise, or stenchy, or if the advertisement is meant to suggest to us the smell of sweaty people at the beach. All very confusing.

Alcohol advertisements in recent years have also really taken this on in spades.  The best example are the Dos Equis advertisements, which feature the Worlds Most Interesting Man. They're really a hoot.  They have nothing at all do do with the well known Mexican beer, or even with Mexico or beer.  Rather, viewers are treated to the improbable adventures of the unnamed "Most Interesting Man," which are presented sort of pseudo documentary style. Amongst other things we've learned, for example, is that the Most Interesting Man "speaks Russian, in French," and that he keeps a mountain lion for a pet.  Great stuff.

Also very enigmatic. Taking a page from that, Dewars Scotch whiskey has been using a very odd advertisement in which an actress with an extremely thick Scotch brogue addresses the camera, which is supposed to be a man named Angus. That is, we're the silent voyeurs of an address between the glamorous Scotch lady and Angus, who seems to be her husband.  Angus is getting a lecture on taking life "seriously," and we're lead to believe that taking life "seriously" will result in "serious benefits."  We're not told what the benefits are, but it isn't too hard to guess.  Anyhow, we're also lead to believe that taking "life seriously" involves drinking Scotch, which is very unfortunate for me personally, as I can't stand Scotch.  We're never actually informed that we should drink Scotch, let alone that we should drink Dewars, but the lady is swilling a serious glass of Scotch.  This all means, I suppose that serious people, or at least serious Scotsmen named Angus, ought to be drinking Dewars.  Fortunately, I guess, I'm not Scottish, nor am I named Angus, as I can't begin to figure the advertisement out, and if taking "life seriously" means I must drink Scotch, I'm not going to, even if it means I have to forgo "serious benefits."

Regarding the advertisement, Soctch and benefits,  at the end of it a voice over, done in the fashion of an old scratchy broadcast, declares, again in a brogue "All hail the drinking man!"  It's  brilliant touch as now not only is the viewer left wondering what the heck the ad is about, but where the voice recording originated.  I have no idea.  It sounds like a toast from some far off distant day, but probably isn't.  And how odd.  All hail the drinking man?  What the heck does that that mean?  Why are we hailing the drinking man?  Bizarre, but effective, advertising.

Odd booze ads, however, have followed this trend for a long time.  One of the most famous advertisement of the 1970s featured a man in a white suit, with a white fedora, declaring "Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff".  Smirnoff, of course, is a brand of vodka.  We're lead to believe that the man in the white suit lead a boring life until Smirnoff delivered him from it, and now he's off on constant exciting adventures.  Again, this is unfortunate for me, as I can't stand vodka either.  Indeed, I'm pretty convinced that the difference between the best vodka and the worst vodka is the price, and nothing else.  But I would think that, as I don't like any of them.  This may mean that I could have been well suited for a life of accountancy, but that seems pretty serious, and my dislike of Scotch already disqualifies me from that.

Not that all advertisements for alcohol are of the "girl from Laramie" variety.  Stella Artois, the Belgian beer, was advertised for awhile with a series of extremely clever story advertisements, all of which revolved around the quality of their beer.  One great early one had a the Germans coming into a tavern in search of a downed World War One British aviator, with the threat being that they would do away with the tavern's supply of Stella if the aviator was not turned over.  Another one involved a second WWI theme in which one soldier rescued another. The the rescued hero takes the rescuer home to meet his father, a tavern keeper, who gives his son a glass of Stella, but who steps on the supply line and pretends it is broken rather than poor a second glass of beer for free. A third involved bicyclists stopping in the mountains for a beer during ar arduous race, meaning that they'll now loose it, only to find that their ancestors had done the same.  All very well done.

This sort of historical theme was recently taken up by Barbisol, the shaving cream company, which has added a nice sarcastic spin to it.  In that series of advertisements, men address their distant descendants with contempt, advising them that if they can't act like men, they ought to at least shave like them.  It's really pretty effective, and it taps into a general feeling right now that a lot of men really don't measure up to their ancestors.  In one, a man driving a wagon on the Oregon trail, in "what will become Wyoming" gets after his descendant for a "juice purge" and calls him with contempt, "juice box."  The well shaved pioneer concludes by telling "juice box" that he ought to at least "shave like a man."  In an even better one, brilliantly filmed, a World War Two infantryman hits the deck behind some rubble while combat rages behind him. We can see the fighting going on.  It's so well done I thought it was, at first, a scene from Saving Private Ryan.  The infantryman calls his great-grandson "buddy" but then goes on to address him with contempt, while in comparison he's "fighting a little thing called World War Two."  He specifically gets after his descendant for criticising celebrities on Twitter and for using the tag line "LOL," while coolly taking time out to throw a German hand grenade back over the rubble.  He too advises his modern descendant to "shave like a man."

Another type of advertisement that's been around for a very long time is the one that intends to pull at your emotions.  That can only be done in certain circumstances, however, so an advertiser has to be careful at it.  I'd guess that at no single point in history have these really been any more or less common than they are right now.  Probably only during wartime do these get to be a bit more common.

World War One vintage recruiting advertisement for the Irish Canadian Rangers.  This advertisement is partially emotional, but partially allegorical, in that "mother" here may be taken to mean Ireland or the British Empire.  Apparently the draw wasn't strong, as the unit was undersubscribed at the time it shipped out for Europe.

A really excellent example of this type of advertisement appeared during the recent Super Bowl, with an old recording of Paul Harvey extolling the virtue of farmers voicing over scenes of farmers and ranchers, and Dodge trucks. Extremely well done. Another example of this, from the same event, featured soldiers and Jeeps.

Pride and Prejudice

January 28th was the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice.  I'll confess that I only recently read it.  Indeed, by odd coincidence, my reading of it bracketed the anniversary, which I wasn't aware of until just after I finished it.  I probably started reading it on January 24th or so and finished it on January 30th.

I also have to admit that I felt a bit odd about reading it, and do about admitting I read it, as it can have a bit of a reputation in some quarters as a "woman's book."  Well, whatever those folks may think, it's a great book and I can see why it is still so widely read.

A friend of mine who is a published author once told me that he intentionally, from time to time, goes outside of the genera he writes and reads other things, including popular novels, and even some surprising novels, just to get a sense of prose and topic. That was part of the reason I read it, but also I keep catching snippets of the last film very of the book on television, which appears to be a well done production, and I finally grew very curious. It was well worth the read.  The prose is amazing, and it gives good evidence that later authors that are still taught in school, such as the rather bland Hemingway, will inevitably pass out of the common library entirely while Austen will remain.  Indeed, in reading authors of that general era, such as Austen, or the translated Tolstoy, a person can't help be left with the realization of what a poverty of language the popularity of Hemingway and his ilk inflicted on the English language. We're all the worse off for it, and when the last copy of Old Man and The Sea goes into the library book sale discount bin, we'll all be the better off for it.

Not only is Austen's prose fantastic, however, but the keen observations on human nature and intricate portrayal of the characters is really only rivaled by Tolstoy's in War and Peace, another fantastic novel.  Both have a stunning insight into the human character and show, no matter what we may now generally believe, the same thoughts and concerns that motivate people now always have and we're really only modern to the extent that we fool ourselves into believing that we are.

And while mentioning Tolstoy here, I guess I'll also note that books like these, that long endure, but which many have not read, should be.  My impression of Austen, before reading her, was largely inaccurate.  Likewise, I've heard many people make light of the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace, but that book is the greatest novel every written, and I have to conclude that most who make fun of its bulk just haven't read it.  The more or less equally bulky Twilight series doesn't seem to get that treatment, and I'd wager that its think fare compared to Tolstoy's great book.

Finally, I'm amazed by the extent to which Austen's era comes through in the book, and the extent to which she addressed topics I didn't expect.  The fleeting nature of unions formed in passion come up in more than one location, quite an observation from a woman who remained unmarried her entire life.  Not only love, but lust, is addressed.  And she was surprisingly daring on some topics, including poking fun at the views of English aristocracy at a time when it was still dominant in the country in which she wrote, and even taking some shots at Church of England by basically lampooning the clerical character in the novel.

Quite a read.  I should have read it a long time ago.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 2: Common Law Marriages

Today In Wyoming's History: February 2: 1943  The Wyoming Supreme Court determines that it is not possible to contract common law marriages in Wyoming.

As folks who might stop in here from time to time know, this blog looks at historical topics and trends.  Here's an interesting one which shows up on the Today In Wyoming's History blog, the judicial declaration that common law marriages could not be contracted in Wyoming.

Wyoming is a common law state, like all but one of the US states, and like most of those states it generally recognized the earlier decisions of English courts.  One of the doctrines developed in the United Kingdom that most states recognized, and which many still do, was the doctrine of the Common Law Marriage.

Common law marriages are a bit misunderstood in modern times, and may have been equally misunderstood for the most part in earlier eras as well.  Basically, the doctrine held that if a couple held themselves out to the world as husband and wife, and acted as if they were husband and wife, by operation of the common law, they were husband and wife.

The reason for this doctrine, which is actually a fairly shocking one if considered in the context of its time, had to do with a breakdown in social order caused by the Reformation in England.  Most Americans don't study the English Reformation, and probably most English men and women do not either, but the sometimes assumed story that England was Catholic one day and the Protestant the next, due to fiat declared by King Henry VIII, is simply wrong.  In reality, England was strongly Catholic up until Henry began to seek to annul his first marriage and even when he split from Rome in his mind he was only going so far as to declare himself the head of the Church in England.  He didn't seem to think he was creating a new Church.  But, coming in the Reformation period itself, this couldn't help but open the door to more radical theologies.  This began a period of long struggle in England in which the Catholic church, in spite of strong and official repression, maintained a fairly vigorous presence, if often underground, and occasionally it gained support from those in high office, including two post Henry VII monarchs.  At the same time, more radical Protestant theologies sometimes claimed official support, or were in the ascendancy.   Ultimately Protestant Queen Elizabeth I is thought to have settled the matter by more or less officially creating the Church of England, but in reality the struggle went on for many, many, years.

None of the Christian denominations present in England would have in any way approved of couples living together outside of marriage, but the long protracted struggle created a degree of confusion in some quarters that inevitably lead to weak adherence in those quarters to some things.  It would not be true that people quit living their faith and ignored the institution of marriage, but it would be true to note that there were periods in which repression of various religions was pretty pronounced.  Even the major contending Protestant faiths, which did have radically different theologies from each other, repressed the others when they had the ability to do so.  In such an environment, local parishioners, whose world was very small, might see religious practices shift dramatically during their lifetimes, and perhaps shift back and forth.  Indeed, one major English rebellion, the Prayer Book Rebellion, was sparked by an official act seeking to install the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer into parishes countrywide.

When the Industrial Revolution hit the UK, which it hit early, rural populations moved into the cities, and away from their old parishes.  Having lost the direct connection with the practices of their original homes, it came to be the case that some simply lost a sense of adherence to past practices, and a certain percentage began to live in the fashion above noted.  It was not as if all did, but some did, and it created a social problem of great significance.

In the current age, in which marriage is too often defined as a big party for fodder on some show on TLC, it's often forgotten that marriage is a legal institution, in addition to being a religious institution, for a set of very concrete rules.  For one thing, the union of couples creates children.  Without a legal structure, those children were, and still are, left very much at the mercy of fate if the father departs.  The civil institution of the marriage, therefore, exists in major part not so much as to bind the husband to the wife, but the father to his children, legally.  It was not in the state's interest to allow children to fall into desperate poverty due to the departure of the father.

Likewise, the civil institution of the marriage also brings into operation the laws of intestacy.  This is rarely thought of by marrying couples today, but it was a huge matter in much of European history, and it remains significant today.  It is almost always the case that one spouse dies before the other, and when that occurs, if there's no will, the law of intestate succession applies. Such provisions vary from place to place, but generally what happens is that both the surviving spouse, usually a widow, and the surviving children, inherit.  The thought really was that this required the children to take care of the widow, as neither would inherit enough to otherwise get by, no matter what they were inheriting.  Generally, in spite of its rough and ready manner, that actually worked pretty well.

At least it worked well if there was a marriage. If there wasn't, it didn't work at all.  A mother of children who was not married had no claim on the father or on his estate.

Legally, this needed to be addressed and was addressed in a variety of ways.  From the first instance, in most localities (including Wyoming) couples living together outside of marriage was a crime.  And it wasn't a crime that was winked at.  I've read of at least one instance in which the male member of such a union was ordered by a court to marry or go to jail by a Wyoming court.  But in addition to the criminal sanction, the law also recognized common law marriages.

It was never the case that a couple simply living together, or even one living together and having children, were married at common law.  The law held that if they held themselves out as married, they were.  This was, however, a fairly easy standard to meet, and most couples of earlier eras that lived together without being married did meet that definition. The distinction was not a slight one, as it meant that the common law wife had a claim on the income of the common law husband, and the children were legitimate at law.  Intestacy laws applied to the spouses as if they had a conventional marriage.

This was the law in Wyoming, like elsewhere, early on, but some time before World War Two Wyoming liberalized laws in this quarter, and did away with the "hart balm statutes."  Now regarded as quaint, the heart balm statutes were laws that provided civil remedies for misconduct between men and women.  These included actions for "breach of promise," "alienation of affection" and "criminal conversation."  In the same order, breach of promise was a failure to carry through with a promise to marry.  Alienation of affection was an act by a party that caused a spouse to leave his or her spouse.  Criminal conversation was adultery.

Even when I went to law school in the late 1980s, it was popular to snicker at these old civil causes of action, but that amusement, once again, failed to appreciate the wisdom of the old law or the reasons that the actions had come about.  A promise to marry, even well into the 19th Century, often caused a party to suffer significant financial loss as resources were so thin at the time.  A man receiving a positive reply to a proposal to marry often went into significant debt trying to make himself ready to support a wife via his trade or occupation.  A woman might begin to incur financial obligations in preparation for the marriage. Both, at that time, were regarded as clearly off limits from the advances of other suitors, and thereby they passed on the opportunities such associations may bring.  Marriages based on financial advantage, not hugely common in the US but a very grave consideration in the upper classes in the UK, could suffer a major disruption if not carried through with.  Alienation of affection likewise provided a remedy for somebody whose spouse took off on them, due to the advances of another person.  In the era when that might mean that a person was suddenly left at home with financial or time obligations that they could not meet, the cause of action made just as much sense as the modern "negligent interference with contractual relations" does today.  Criminal conversation, although oddly named, likewise served such a purpose.

When these were all done away with in Wyoming there was no repeal, by specific statute, of common law marriages. But, in 1943, the Wyoming Supreme Court reasoned that, if the Heart Balm Statutes were gone, common law marriage must be also.  It was not an unreasonable interpretation.

It was a big shift in the law, and it's on that continues to have an impact today, even though almost all of the formerly unapproved of conduct is ignored now.  There may be no ability to contract common law marriages in Wyoming, but the state does recognize them if they're contracted under the law of another state.  As there's no common law divorce, that can and sometimes does create some really interesting legal problems, particularly when a person who has contracted a common law marriage, and then later legally married somebody else, dies.  And a claim of common law marriage is often the claim of last resort for the long term, usually female, member of an unmarried union who is suddenly left with no inheritance. As Wyoming doesn't recognize such marriages to the extent that they're contracted here, that person is often left wishing that they'd paid more attention to the traditional union rather than ignoring it for whatever reason it was, earlier on.

Winter Travel

This hasn't been much of a winter so far.  Hopefully that changes, or this Spring is going to be really grim.  

But that doesn't mean there hasn't been any weather at all, and as luck would have it, I recently traveled through some of it.  This isn't that unusual, I've had it happen zillions of times, and in much worse weather than I recently experienced.  I guess because the weather has been so good recently I became a bit spoiled about it, while as in most winters I just expect to travel through some bad weather every winter.

Perhaps the worst driving condition weather I've ever driven through, in a work context, was when going to Denver a few years ago for a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals argument.  It snowed the day prior, and just a few miles outside of town it became evident that the road was horrifically dangerous.  I actually thought of turning around and getting an airplane ticket to Denver instead, and had my wife call on it, but by the time I had the answer, it was too late and I carried on.  On other occasions I've driven through heavy snow when a driver shouldn't really be out.  This week, the roads were in really bad condition in Northeastern Wyoming, but not as bad as I've sometimes seen.  The weather, particularly in Rapid City, was also extremely cold, which has not been the norm this winter either.

Anyway, as this blog is supposed to explore historical changes, it occurred to me that I wondered how this was experienced in earlier eras for people traveling for the same reason.  It occurred to me that it was frankly just unlikely that it would have been done the same way, to the same extent.  Lawyers, at any rate, traveled somewhat less in earlier decades.  Probably travel like this became common in the 1950s.  In the 50s, in a car, I would have had to pull over by Sundance the other day, and the depositions would have had to cancel.  A person wouldn't have taken a 4x4 pickup truck of that era that kind of distance.

Before that, say in the 40s and earlier, I don't think this would have been done that often.  Probably if an out of state deposition needed to be taken some other arrangement, such as a train trip to a larger city, would have been undertaken.  Be that as it may, prior to the 1960s, not many depositions were taken in most civil cases, so the occasion to do something like this would have been much less common.  If we go back to the 1930s or earlier, depositions in general were pretty rare, and just basically didn't occur at all.  There were out of town court appearances and arguments, however, but the planning for them was probably generally more advanced in some ways, and people presumably more cautious about setting out in the weather.  In the automobile era, that was no doubt always dangerous, although when more trains were around, that was no doubt the preferred method of travel.

Of course, you couldn't always go everywhere by train, and there was an era prior to common automobile travel.  In that era, when weather couldn't easily be predicted, winter travel must have been hazardous in the extreme.

Power Struggles

Every once in a great while there's an event that's a gift to pundits, real and wannabe.  Such an event is the recent legislature coup of the office of Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction and the accompanying delusional announcement by the deposed of her intent to run for Governor. What a show!

I'll have to admit that I have paid next to no attention to the office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.  That probably speaks poorly of me, but I really haven't paid it much regard.  I suspect, however, that I'm not the only one who hasn't been following it, and that's part of the problem..  Cindy Hill, the current occupant, has not been popular and has been under the gun for some time, but she did secure election in spite of the Democrats running Mike Massey, who is generally well regarded.   That combined event probably tells us how very dominant the Republican Party has become in the state, and how little attention most of us pay to an office of this type.  Or perhaps her performance has met expectations, or other events during her period of office have lead to discontent.  I honestly cannot say, as it's just not an office that I pay very much attention to, even though I should.

Plagued with all sorts of criticism, Mrs. Hill has been in continual controversy nearly the entire time she's been in office, and feelings that she's ill equipped to occupy that office have been very widespread, in spite of the voters causing her occupation of it.  While they deny that Mrs. Hill is the reason for their actions, and they're denials are probably partially correct, the Legislature got into the game this session (with Mr. Massey being one of the bill sponsors) and passed an act removing nearly every power that Mrs. Hill has and vesting it in a new officer, who is to be a Gubernatorial appointee.

Frankly, the action in creating an appointed eduction secretary was long overdue, but frankly, I think its uunconstitutional under the Wyoming Constitution.  The State Attorney General feels otherwise, and the Governor has signed the act into law, but Mrs. Hill has sued, with a couple of supporters, and this is obviously headed to our Supreme Court.  Mrs. Hill, moreover, is not a stranger to the law herself, as she is a lawyer also.  Now, apparently not content with taking this on in court, and operating under a delusion that election to an office that most voters weren't paying attention to equates with real support, Mrs. Hill has announced that she's running for Governor. She's going to fail massively.

Well, what of all of this?

First, her lawsuit raises a real point.  And it's a point that's steeped in Wyoming's history.

Education is, by virtue of an opinion of the Wyoming Supreme Court, a fundamental right in Wyoming.  That the framers of the state's constitution, moreover, would choose to have it placed under an elected officer is not a surprise, in the 19th Century context of the early history of the state.  At that time Wyoming was one of the state's heavily influenced by budding Progressivism which, amongst its other tenants, sought an expansion of the franchise, both in who could vote, and what and who people could vote on.  Beyond that, the framers of the Constitution, at that time, were making a bold statement on how important they thought education was.

At the time Wyoming adopted its constitution, not every state had state run public schools.  Education was regarded as extremely important in the new Western states and they wanted to make sure that an education was offered to all, and that it was a real education.  By placing it under an elected Superintendent, the framers were assuring that education would be real everywhere in the state, a much more difficult proposition than people now would generally understand.  Indeed, in many Wyoming towns there was little in the way of public education, and what their was generally existed via local subscription, which was uneven, and often temporary.  The importance of the office to the framers was further demonstrated by the fact that the Superintendent has a place on the State Land Board, which makes sense given that the State's lands were intended to be the source of funding for the State's schools.

This served the early state well, and has served the state fairly well for over a century, but there's evidence now that the system is falling short.  Mrs. Hill is the third Superintendent in a row that has been subject to stout criticism, and at least the last one was faced with a barrage of criticism relating to testing requirements that he wasn't responsible for, but for which he became the focus of.   It's becoming an office that is seemingly becoming more difficult for an elected official to fulfill.  Perhaps in this more technical and professional era, that should not be a surprise.

Education has become much more the province of professionals at all levels in recent years, and the administration of it is generally both bureaucratic by necessity and scientific.  It makes much more sense, in the view of many, to have the state Department of Education appointed by an officer chosen by the Governor, and now that's the law.  This would mirror, on a grander scale, how the various school districts operate, with each having an elected school board, but with that board hiring a district administrator who handles the day to day operation of the district.


The newly passed legislation had that goal in mind, but it only partially achieved it.  The office of Superintendent still remains, but without any power, other than to sit on the State Land Board, which would mean that in order to be Constitutional the Constitution would have to allow for the appointment of officers with no real role to play in anything.

But it's probably not Constitutional. And it wouldn't have come up at this time but for the widespread legislative discontent with Mrs. Hill.

The reason that Mrs.Hill is correct, in my view, of her reading of the State Constitution is that the Constitution cannot be presumed to create an executive office which the Legislature could deprive of power.  If the Legislature can eliminate the power of the Superintendent, then it can do the same with any other executive position, perhaps even the Governor's office.  But I doubt that it can do that.  It was clearly the intent of the framers that the Superintendent would have real supervisory power, and the Legislature cannot legislate that away.

What should really occur, and I am sure will occur, is that the state Constitution needs to be amended by the electorate to allow for this office to be eliminated and a new Cabinet type office appointed.  We don't, after all, vote on the office of State Attorney General, and there's no really good reason anymore why we should vote on this office.  I'm fairly confident that most voters would agree.  And in declaring the Legislature's actions a coup, Cindy Hill is basically correct.  And, of course, if the voters decided to vote no, it would mean that the opinion of the electorate directly disagrees with the Legislature, and the Legislature cannot take this step.  I don't think that will occur, however.

Mrs. Hill shouldn't take comfort in that however, and her announcement of her intent to run for Governor is a bit delusional.  She's not going to win the primary, and she's going to look even more discredited than she already does.  This is not a dignified way to proceed, in light of what's going on.  It's easy to see how she could have come to this mistaken impression, however, as she seems to have some dedicated followers.  While listening to a person's friends can be a wise course of action, in a matter like this not letting in the opposite opinions can be a terrible mistake.

So, what I'm fairly confident what we'll see is this. Her lawsuit stands a good chance of prevailing.  And, as a result, in the next Legislative session a bill to amend the state Constitution will be passed. That'll go to the electorate in November, 2014, at the same time that Ms. Hill will see Governor Mead likely reelected.  Her office will likely simply cease to exist in January 2015.

The one thing that this doesn't address, of course, is whether the State Superintendent of Education should be elected or not. After all, what I've suggested is that the voters shouldn't get to directly choose this position.  And that is what I feel. The executive branch of the state should have the power to appoint a professional to the position, and if we do not like that, that would be part of the issues taken up when the Governor ran for reelection.  It'd be a position similar to the State Attorney General, or State Geologist, if done that way.  Given the increasing demands upon eduction in this modern world, that seems like the best option.

It does make for less democracy of course, and that is troubling. The founders of the State felt that education was so significant to the electorate that the electorate should have a direct say in how it was conducted, at the state level.  Of course, at the time, the State was mostly agricultural and local schools were matters of significant interest and pride.  Now Wyoming's well funded schools are in an environment when many of the students are in them only temporarily, and perhaps the topics that they teach are so vast that things have just changed.  That may be a sad trend, but it appears to reflect reality.  It's a sad situation indeed that things had to become such a circus in order for them to be addressed.

Railhead: Arminto Wyoming

Recently I received some interesting comments on my post on the Railhead blog on Arminto Wyoming.  The link to it is here:

Railhead: Arminto Wyoming: This is what is left of the sidetrack at Arminto Wyoming, and of a hotel along the rail line, which was located where the grove of t...

The comments were from a former resident of Arminto who lived there in the commentor's youth.  The first hand recollections are very interesting as to what the town was like at that time.  As people familiar with the town know, it's  mere shawdow of its former self today, and is even less now than what it was when I was in my late teens in the early 1980s.

This provides a really interesting example of how the fortunes of a town can rise and fall. Arminto was once the busiest sheep shipping point on Earth. Not in the US, but on the planet.  Now the sheep are mostly gone, and the town is mostly gone as well.

Field Bread from The Joy of Field Rations

As it looked interesting, Marcus tried the field bread recipe that's found on the Joy of Field Rations Blog.  Here you see the results.  It came out very well, and it's good tasting bread.

I make soda bread from time to time in a Dutch oven, a type of bread that's sometimes called "Sheepherders Bread" as sheepherders make it (or at least used to) by preparing the recipe and then putting it in coals over night.  Soda bread, of course, doesn't use any yeast, and I've never had the slightest bit of luck cooking with yeast, outside of a bread maker.  It wouldn't really have occurred to me that anyone would attempt to bake yeast bread out in the boonies, but following the recipe, he did something I've never been able to, which is to make some very tasty yeast bread.  This recipe, if you follow the instructions and cooking method found on the Joy of Field Rations blog, would be very suited to a similar cooking method, as you could leave the mess kid tins in the coals overnight, although given that they are Aluminum, a person would have be quite careful about that.

Part of the purpose of this blog, as the very few readers are aware, it to explore topics of the turn of the previous century, and as we're looking into Punitive Expedition themes, this proved to be a topical project.

Holscher's Hub: The Conversion of St. Paul

Holscher's Hub: The Conversion of St. Paul: The Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio. January 25 is the memorial of the Conversion of St. Paul, so I'm posing this (public domain...

January 24. St. Francis De Sales

Painting of St. Francis de Sales, public domain in the United States.

Today, January 24, is the memorial day on the Roman calendar of Saints for St. Francis De Sales, the patron of writers.

St. Francis, 1567-1622, had started off studying law, but his hear lay elsewhere, and he became a cleric, ultimately rising to be a Bishop. In that capacity, he was also a writer, and one whose books remain both highly readable, and in print today.

When Prohibition Ended

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1933 vintage Budweiser advertisement.

Prohibition didn't actually end in Wyoming in 1933, that was the national repeal of the Constitutional prohibition on the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol.  3.2 beer was allowed in Wyoming in 33, and full repeal of the state ordinance concerning prohibition came in 1935.

Snowmobile? Sled?

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Modified Excelsior motorcycle, 1915.

Opening the Cheyenne Airport

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Women's riding togs

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Divided (riding) skirts.  A thing of the long gone past.

The Washakies

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Descendants of Chief Washakie.