Standards of Dress: Office, city and town wear over the past century.

 A motivational poster from the 1920s.  By modern standards, nearly any city worker would "look the part", even if they didn't in the 1920s.  Experts on occupations maintain this advice is still correct today.

We've had several threads on this topic, but it might be interesting to just look at it as a general topic.  If a person was to transport themselves back to a city, in the year 2014, one of the first things they'd probably notice is that they were under-dressed.  The standards of dress in 1914, and for that matter 1924, 1934, 1944, 1954, and 1965, were much higher.  It wasn't until the mid 1960s that this really began to change.  What's up with that?

 Exceptionally well dressed, pre World War One, New York Lawyer.  This fellow, who is wearing bespoke everything, isn't dressed in a fashion that greatly departs from the standard for his occupation and era, but it is clear that everything he is wearing is exceptionally well made.  Woman behind him is dressed as per standards of the era.

Clearly, earlier eras were a much formal time.  It's interesting, in that context, to note that the society was, at the same time, much more rural.  A fairly substantial number of people in the early 20th Century, for example, were either right off the farm, or only one generations removed.

Newspaper vendor, circa 1920s. This photo is a bit unusual as the vendor is an adult, at at time at which this occupation was typically occupied by rough and tumble children.  He's turned out in suit and tie, and the suit is correctly buttoned leaving the bottom button unbuttoned, a sign that he knows the standard for wearing it (the bottom button on a man's suit is never supposed to be buttoned).

Formal wear extended to nearly every town occupation.  It was simply expected.  Occupations that we would be surprised to find wearing suit and tie today, did then. Storekeepers, office workers, nearly everyone with a town job, dressed up by today's standards.

George M. Cohan, playwright and composer, dressed to the business standard of today.  Now, a person of his vocation would be just as likely dressed to shock.

Dressing to shock simply didn't occur, until the 1920s. At that time it started to come in with youth of that period, who began to wear some eccentric clothing, some of which was regarded as fairly scandalous at the time.  Flappers wore short skirts, by 1920s standards, and men and women of that age adopted the raccoon coat as sort of symbol of rebellion.

Mary LaFollette, age 25.  I don't know if the daughter of "Battling Bob LaFollette", the "Wisconsin Bolshevik" was a flapper, but this raccoon coat is truly remarkable.

Youthful rebellion continued on in clothing styles into the late 1930s and early 1940s, with the Zoot Suit, a style that came out of California and spread to other urban areas of the nation.  Paradoxically, by modern standards, the Zoot Suit was, in fact, a suit.  It was more suit, if you will, that other suits, being longer and baggier.  So, in that earlier era, even youth aiming to shock didn't dress down, they dressed up.

Dancing Zoot Suiters. Apparently the photographer was so fascinated he forgot to include the heads of the dancers in the photograph.

Inklings of change in standards crept in by the 1950s, but it wasn't really until the social rebelling of the 1960s that things really changed.  The average high school student of the 1940s and 1950s probably had at least one nice set of clothing.  A young man probably at least owned a tie, and many probably owned suits.  By the time I went to high school in the 1970s, I didn't know how to tie a tie, and as noted, I didn't own a suit until I was in my last year of undergraduate studies at the University of Wyoming.

Men supervising irrigation project, 1914.  The men from the office are, here, all turned out is suit and tie, something that would be unlikely to see today.

Up until some point in the 1960s, most people dressed on a daily basis in a fashion that would be regarded as fairly formal today, but now mostly simply do not.  Most storekeepers, unless in a type of market, or selling a very upscale product, will not dress so formally on a daily basis.  Most office employees aren't so formally attired either.  Even in law offices, which people imagine to be a white collared world, on an average day many lawyers aren't dressed up. This is even true in some of the old style "white shoe" firms of the East, I'm told.

Firefighting class.  Probably around World War Two.  Everyone in this class has a tie on, and a couple are wearing very nice suits.

So why the formality?

I truthfully can't say, but it's very evident.  And not only is it evident, but it was universal, from the old to the young.  Indeed, in any one era, contrary tot he movie depictions we see, dress varied very little by age.  Young men in their mid teens can be found wearing the exact same style of suit and cut of shirt as men in their 80s.

One of the reasons might be that people simply had fewer changes of clothes and so less room for experimentation.  We tend not to appreciate it now, but in prior eras people had changes of clothes, to be sure, but not nearly as many.

Washing clothes was also difficult up until the washing machine was perfected, which really wasn't until the mid 20th Century.  Because of that, clothes tended to be wool, which is wears long if kept well.  Once washing machines came in, cotton pushed out wool everywhere, as it's really easy to machine wash.

Heating conditions in early 20th Century and late 19th Century buildings are sometimes cited as a reason, as the heating plants of those buildings simply wasn't that efficient, and therefore during the winter, they were cold. Conversely, however, during the summer they were hot, and people were still pretty dressed up, so that seems to be at least a questionable claim.

Another reason may actually be because this was a more rural society, and this was true not only in the US, but everywhere in the Western world.  People moving from farms to cities may have wished to somewhat disguise that fact by means of their dress.  Likewise, people who had blue collar jobs may not have wished to appear to be social inferiors to those with white collar jobs, in a society that was then somewhat more class conscious.  Indeed, just recently in our local paper a fellow was spotlighted who attends all of the local NCHS basketball games very well dressed, and upon being interviewed it was revealed that he'd worked in labor in Detroit, where he "was dirty all week" so he dressed up on the weekends.  A photograph of him did show a very well dressed man, something that would be unusual in that setting here.

Wisconsin farmer on a Saturday night, 1940s.  Note that while he's pretty stripped down at the time of the photo being taken, he had been wearing a three piece suit.

Finally, it seems there was just something in the 1960s that broke the back of the old formality.  That may be good or bad, or both, but it seems to have occurred.  

Is this good or bad, or is it just something that "is"?  Well, I'd probably be a hypocrite  if I commented very much.  I don't dress and suit and tie everyday, or even most days. And some days I go into the office in pretty informal attire.  Nonetheless, some aspect of this is bad.  For one thing, it disrupts the "uniform" of certain occupations.  Every occupation has a mental image associated with it, and when people don't match it, it can disrupt things about that, oddly enough.  And Americans have become perhaps the sloppiest attired people on earth.  Not only do a lot of people not recognize any distinctions in clothing, they have no self respect as to what they wear.  When people start showing up at markets in the jammies, something has gone amiss.

Related Threads:

Clerical Standards of Dress. 

Postscript 

I guess as an illustration of this trend, the last couple of weeks there's been a orthopedic surgeon with an advertisement in the newspaper showing him dressed in a canvas work type shirt and jeans.

He's not dressed sloppily, or any such thing, just extremely informally.  Almost like what I'd expect of geologist spending a day in the office, given that it's basically an outdoor profession.  This sort of change in standards is quite pronounced, as even as recently as the 80s or 90s, we'd expect to see a doctor dressed in whites or with a dress shirt and tie.

Postscript II

The other day I went up to the mall (a dreaded experience for me) to try to buy a shirt.  While there I noticed all the nice khakis at Penny's and realized that I'd recently retired a couple of pairs and that my remaining pairs are getting a bit tired. So I bought two pairs.

Actually, I bought chinos, as opposed to "khakis", as that describes the sort of semi dress trousers that I bought.  "Khaki" is actually a color, although the phrase routinely is used to depict a style.

I don't know exactly when cotton khaki trousers came to be business wear, but  they are.  In some areas of the country they're casual business wear, and in others they're actual business wear.  I wear chinos, which are the type of trouser you normally think of in this category, a fair amount as they're generally dressy enough for work most days, and they're easy to wash, not being wool.  But they are an aspect of the trend discussed above.

Chinos were originally a type of trouser issued to soldiers for summer wear.  Up to World War Two, and even up into it, the U.S. Army issued a cotton khaki colored uniform for field and garrison use.

Summer field uniform, just prior to World War Two, and early in World War Two, featuring cotton khaki colored shirt and trousers.

Relatively early in the war, field uniforms advanced and the Army quit using khakis for field wear, having gone to various "olive" colored uniforms for that instead. But the cotton khaki uniform kept on keeping on as a semi dress item.

U.S. Army physicians, World War Two, wearing summer khaki garrison uniform.

As a result of this, a lot of khaki chinos were made in World War Two, and the recently discharged servicemen took them into the clothing short post war world, where they became pretty standard wear for a lot of men. As they were not jeans, they passed muster in those places where you couldn't wear jeans, which was a lot of places, and became semi dress trousers.

Textile worker carrying a load of Army chinos during World War Two.

So a sort of field uniform that could be worn in garrison, evolved into a sort of work sort of casual item for men who worked in offices, which is wear they are today.

They're quite common now, although I may wear them more than some others in my line of work I know.  And its interesting to see how you can get ones that vary from really cheap in price to very expensive in price. A company called "Bill's Khakis" specializes in making chinos that match the original GI ones, but at a much more expensive price, which I guess shows how things have gone in the U.S.  Still, they don't have universal approval.  One judge I'm aware of has a local rule prohibiting the wearing of khaki trousers in court and doesn't even like to see them being worn in the courthouse.

Support is ending for Windows XP - Microsoft Windows

Support is ending for Windows XP - Microsoft Windows

Boo Hiss Microsoft.

Postscript.

This is apparently a more significant deal than I'd imagined.  Our tech guy at work tells us if we have XP, we better get to something else, one way or another, within the next couple of weeks.

The computer I'm on right now runs XP.   

The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' & Beer and Prohibtion.

Always exploring the history of things, including social and material history, our eye was caught recently by a couple of items which relate 20th Century history, specifically the history of alcohol and Prohibition.  For example, there's this item:

NPR's "Salt" broadcast ran this recent item:  The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' : The Salt : NPR

I'm not really a whiskey fan, but at least locally whiskey has been in the news a lot recently, and here we have this NPR example.  All in all, I think I've read that whiskey consumption is overall on the decline nationally, but given the news content, you'd not know that.

As noted, I'm not really a big whiskey fan.  Right now, we actually have, however, four bottles of different types of whiskey upstairs in the cupboard, probably a personal all time record.  We don't have a liquor cabinet, and don't need one, so the cupboard suffices, even if that oddly places the whiskey right next to the breakfast cereal.  We have so much because of Christmas, and we're likely to have the present four bottles for a really long time.  We have, respectively, Wyoming Whiskey, a bottle of Pendleton and a bottle of single malt Irish whiskey, so not only do we have a record amount, we actually have a record variety as well.  You can probably fairly easily tell by the novelty of this that we're not exactly living the "Mad Men" life around here.

In spite of not liking it much, I know something about it, and that's probably because of law school.  It isn't like we were living out the Pogues "Streams of Whiskey" there, but there was a single malt Scotch whiskey revival going on at the time, so we became exposed to it a bit then, and being inquisitive, I learned something about the makeup of whiskey at the time.*  It's sort of an interesting topic.

The big American whiskey is bourbon.  The reason for this is found in the history of transportation, oddly enough.  Bourbon is a corn based whiskey and it was distilled on the eastern Frontier early on.  While beer was really a staple during colonial times, hardy Frontiersmen distilled a lot of whiskey. Why?  Because it keeps better than corn on the cob does.  And it's relatively easy to transport in barrels, and there's always a market.  It wasn't, therefore, that frontier farmers were making thousands of gallons of "corn likker" to get sloshed, although there was some sloshing going on, but rather because it's easier to keep it in the barn than it is to keep a pile of corn. It doesn't attract mice either.  

Like with all things which people make, a simple necessity became an art, and bourbon was born.  It's been the American whiskey for probably around three centuries.

Frankly, I can't stand it as a rule.  Even the best bourbons generally taste like something that ought to be fueling a jet to me, but it's been what Americans mean by "whiskey" for a very long time.  And it's been in the news here recently as Wyoming now has its own distillery, which makes "Wyoming Whiskey".

A bottle of Wyoming Whiskey.

Wyoming Whiskey is a new brand of whiskey that's distilled in the tiny Hot Springs County town of Kirby.  It came about, according to what I've read, as the Meads purchased farm ground in the area in order to have a steady supply of corn for their cattle operation, and then hit upon the idea of distilling whiskey in the county.  Hot Springs County is otherwise famous for, well, hots springs, and is of course the location of Thermopolis, which features the same.

When Wyoming Whiskey was released, the first batch (there have been only two to date) was big news. To my huge surprise, my wife actually signed us up for two bottles. She doesn't even drink whiskey except on extraordinarily rare occasions, so it was quite a surprise.  But we ended up with two of the very first bottles.

I like it, to my surprise. But the public reaction has been interesting.  Whiskey Magazine rated it as first rate, which is interesting in part because up until I read that in the Casper paper, I didn't know that there was a Whiskey Magazine.  Who subscribes to that. . . and why?  Anyhow, their reviewer thought it great.  Amongst people I generally run into, however, it seems a lot of people hate it.

Why is that?  I don't know for sure, but I have my theories.  In part, Wyomingites are a hard sell on anything, and that may be a lot of it.  But I have also noticed, in talking to people, that the people who don't like it generally like bourbon, and people who do, like me, don't drink it much.  My suspicion is, therefore, that those people acclimated to bourbon, and who enjoy it, like the jet fuel nature of the taste. As I don't like bourbon, that's probably why I think Wyoming Whiskey is okay.  But if they have to rely on people like me to buy it, they're in big trouble, as the chances of me buying enough of it to be felt economically are nonexistent.  Anyhow, put another way, I think that bourbon drinkers expect bourbon to taste like bourbon, rather than the lower proof, milder, and softly minerally taste that this has.

Canadian Whiskey, I should note, is just blended bourbon.  Whiskeys are blended in order to take the harsh taste out of them, and blending is very common with all types of whiskeys.  Canada grows a lot of corn, and at some point, somebody must have hit upon the idea of borrowing American whiskey as a product. They probably did it, tasted the product and said something like "Ack!!!. . Grgemhph!  Eh?  Where's the water?"  So they blended it.

Unlike almost every bourbon, some Canadian Whiskeys I like.  Namely Royal Crown and Pendleton. That's it. The rest make me gag.  Again, it doesn't matter, as I buy so little that they don't care what I think, but those two aren't bad. And Pendleton, which is named after Pendleton Oregon, has a really neat bottle with a Steamboat like rider on it. Presumably the University of Wyoming, which owns that trademark, is making a few bucks off of that.

Royal Crown, by the way, is owned by the alcohol giant Diageo, which also owns Bushmills (Irish Whiskey), Guinness and a zillion other brands.

Bourbon basically got its start on the western slopes of Appalachia, and that's no surprise as that region was first settled by "Scots Irish", i.e., that demographic that immigrated from Ireland, but which were actually Scottish, placed in Ireland as a buffer in Ulster against the native Irish.  The Scots and the Irish both have a very long history of Whiskey distilling, and it's basically a Celtic concoction in the first place. So, they were simply using a process that they were already familiar with.  The word "whiskey" is itself a corruption of the Gaelic term uisce beatha/uisge beatha"  which means "water of life," sort of an odd description, if you think about it.

Scotch and Irish Whiskeys are very closely related, which is odd as Scotch is, in my view, horrid, while Irish whiskeys can be good, or can be horrid.  I think that this has something to do with the water. Both types are grain whiskeys, and can be made from any of the grass grains or a blend of them, but Scotch is made from bog water, and Irish Whiskey is made form water that flows from limestone sourced springs.  My personal theory is that this makes Scotch taste and smell like diesel fuel, as the water in Scotch peat bogs also has, well, peat in it. And, besides, anyone familiar with bogs knows that cows love bogs, and we all know, or should know, what cows love to do in bogs.  It explains a lot.

One of the grains that can be in Irish Whiskey or Scotch Whiskey is rye.  I did an item here on rye bread awhile back, which I really like, but I've never had Rye Whiskey.  An odd thing about Rye Whiskey, which relates to the theme of this blog, is that Rye Whiskey has a pretty bad reputation, but because of a historical event, that event being Prohibition.

As noted in the item above, Rye was actually a premium whiskey before Prohibition.  During Prohibition, however, bootleggers took up labeling bad whiskey as Rye in order to fraudulently peddle the bad stuff to people who remembered the good stuff. As a result, "Rye" came to be associated with nasty cheap booze, an reputation that came on fairly fast, which stuck up until recently.  Rye was such a shorthand for bad whiskey that Bill Mauldin had his Joe character, in the Up Front cartoon, joke that his "old woman" would be comforted by the fact that he had "give up rye whiskey and .10 cent ceegars", an ironic statement for an infantryman.  Recently, however, Rye has been making a comeback, the quality Rye apparently still being out there.

As I like rye bread I'd be curious if I like Rye Whiskey, but I'm too cheap to buy it, so I"ll have to keep wondering or be fortunate enough to be attending some social event where somebody serves it.  Liking rye bread probably doesn't translate into liking Rye in any event, as I like corn, but hate bourbon.

Related to the Prohibition story and Rye, Prohibition also did in breweries.  And here too there's both an interesting story, and interesting recent developments.

 

 Late 19th Century New York beer I've never heard of.  Apparently the plan in the picture is t drink a bunch of beer and then drive the cart, which is undoubtedly a very bad idea.

Beer has an even older presence in North America than whiskey because beer was a staple in the British Isles from some point in antiquity up until some point in the 20th Century.  And this was true not just of the British Isles, but an entire belt of countries in northern Europe. Basically north of the Rhine, and in the British Isles, up to the Baltic the average drink was Beer.  Below the Rhine it was wine.  Once you got out into Poland and Russia this was no longer true, and if there was a staple drink, I don't know what it was. Certainly a lot of vodka was being consumed out in those regions, but I don't think it would be as if people sat down to dinner and had a big heaping glass of vodka.  At least I hope not.  Beer was brewed in Europe everywhere, but as a staple its basically associated with these regions, and it's best from these regions.  Likewise, probably ever location in Europe ferments some wine, but it's associated with southern Europe for a reason.

A lot of the reason for that, by the way, is climatic.  So perhaps its not too surprising that the beer brewing also saw the development of some other spirits.  Anyhow, the English brought beer to North America.  Indeed, the Mayflower put in when it did not because that location seemed ideal, but because the ship had run out of beer, a genuine problem.

In the 19th Century there were a vast number of local breweries in the US.  I doubt very much that an accurate idea as to how many there were is known.  Prior to refrigeration for rail cars being worked out, which happened in the second half of the 19th Century, beer could not easily be shipped, so breweries needed to be local, or there was no beer.  Refrigeration in rail cars meant that beer could be shipped by rail for the first time, and shortly thereafter pasteurization of beer, a process of course worked out for milk, not beer, began to be employed which meant that beer could be stored for some time without refrigeration.  Light is the enemy of beer, and the dark bottle that's so familiar to everyone also played a role in beer storage, seeking to create a vessel that could store beer, allow the customer to see it, and also keep out the destroying elements of light.

Rail car refrigeration mean that beer could be transported long distances for the first time, and that gave rise to the first big breweries in the US, the Anhauser-Busch brewery in St. Louis being the first such example.  Nonetheless, all the way up to the Volstead Act in 1919, there were a lot of local breweries.  I don't know how many may have existed in Wyoming, or co-existed together at any one time, but at least Casper and Sheridan did have breweries.  Casper's pre Prohibition brewery was the Hilcreast Brewery, named after the Hilcrest spring which still provides cooler water for Casperites today.  None of the Wyoming breweries survived Prohibition.  Hilcreast's brewery building still stands, just as it did in 1919, being a three story brick building, but its an electronics store now.  When I was a kid, it was a potato chip plant, packaging Cook's Potato Chips, the kind we all bought locally.

 Trade card for Wiedemann Beer. This is a company that I've never heard of, but it turns out, they survived Prohibition, and they're still around.

It's widely claimed that Prohibition did in the quality of American beer and that when breweries re-emerged from Prohibition, the beer wasn't what it once was. There were certainly a lot fewer breweries and that any managed to survive is amazing.  Some did, however, and rapidly went back into brewing.  According to at least Europeans, American beer was pretty bad however, and real beer fans maintained that to also be the case, which made for a small market, up until the late 1970s, for import beers, which were regarded as very exotic.**  The trend toward brewing singularity actually increased after Prohibition ended, which is odd, in that the large commercial brewers began to purchase the smaller one, a trend which continues to this day, although they no longer tend to wipe out the distinctive natures of the individual breweries as they once seemed to.

This is because of the rise of the "micro brews."  Defining what a micro brew is; is difficult.  But some time in the late 1970s very small breweries began to develop with very distinctive beers in reaction to the blandness of American beers.  This started slowly, but after it got rolling, it really got rolling.  When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, around here, the beers that you saw in the summer when men went fishing, etc., were Coors (really a regional beer), Olympia, Hamms and maybe Rainier.  Of course, Budweiser, which was and is the American giant (now owned by Belgian company) was around, but it seemed that at least amongst the men I knew, none of them ever drank it.  There were some other brands, of course, but those are the ones you tended to see.  Starting with Anchor Steam, however, small breweries began to make major inroads into the large brewers' markets, brewing beers with strong distinctive flavors and sometimes brewed with old fashioned, methods.  Anchor Steam, New Belgian, Odell, Sam Adams, and any other number of brewers rose up in this fashion, some becoming pretty big in the process, and there seems to be no end in sight to the revival of small breweries and the multiplicity of beer types.***  Recognizing a declining market when they see it, the big breweries have gotten into the act themselves and have come out with "micro brew" type beers, even though they're from big breweries.

Probably with that in mind, and returning to the them of our post here, Coors just recently introduced a beer that they claim is "Pre-Prohibition" style lager.  Being unable to pass up something which claims to be an historic exploration, I bought a six pack and then looked it up.  Indeed, it might at least partially answer the question that I had.  According to the information on the beer, the recipe for it was discovered by Coors' employees in Greeley in a part of their brewery they no longer use. That there is such a quarter in their brewery surprises me, but perhaps it shouldn't, as the Greeley brewery has long ago overlapped the walls of its original facility.  Anyhow, in finding  the old recipe, which dates to the immediate Pre-Prohibition era, they determined to make it.  At first they only offered it on tap, but now they're selling it in bottles.

One beer, of course, can't tell us what all beers were prior to the Volstead Act, but this one is revealing.  Coors has long been a major local beer here, and its not bad.  It's a really light beer, and so Coors was well positioned to move into the "light beer" market when it came about, although I've always wondered if that hurt their regular beer sales, which aren't much different.  But it's never been my favorite.  Their Pre-Prohibtion beer, sold as "Batch 19," on the basis that Prohibition came in that year, 1919, is much different.  It's stronger, in terms of alcohol content, and it has a lot more flavor.  I like it, but I suspect that it won't appeal to die hard Coors fans.  It might appeal, however, to micro brew fans.

If Batch 19 indicates what American beer was like prior to Prohibition, what we could take away from that is that at least some American beers were German style lagers but with a stronger taste. Sort of a collision between German lager and British lager.  For beer fans, therefore, the Volstead Act probably was sort of a small beer burning of the library at Alexandria, temporarily.

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*Streams of Whiskey is one of several sodden tunes by the excellent Irish band the Pogues, which sadly no longer exists as a band.  The band celebrated a certain boozy view of things which undoubtedly would have disastrous effects on a person's health if actually followed, for example:

Last night as I slept
I dreamt I met with Behan
I shook him by the hand and we passed the time of day
When questioned on his views
On the crux of life's philosophies
He had but these few clear and simple words to say

I am going, I am going
Any which way the wind may be blowing
I am going, I am going
Where streams of whiskey are flowing

Not content to limit the commentary to whiskey, the song also provides:

Oh the words that he spoke
Seemed the wisest of philosophies
There's nothing ever gained
By a wet thing called a tear
When the world is too dark
And I need the light inside of me
I'll walk into a bar
And drink fifteen pints of beer

I am going, I am going
Any which way the wind may be blowing
I am going, I am going
Where streams of whiskey are flowing

More than one Pogues song was a modern, hard core, hard edge, Irish drinking song and the primary force behind the music, Sean MacGowan acquired a reputation as a hard drinker as a result.  It's interesting to note, therefore, that at least one interview of a close associate of MacGowan's has related that he did not, in this period, actually drink all that much, but that as a result of the music people insisted in buying the band drinks wherever they were.

While the Pogues no longer exist as a band, all the band members are still with us, suggesting that they didn't drink as much as the songs might suggest, and they have independent music careers.

**Having said that, complaints against American beer go all the way back to the colonial period, when British soldiers complained about he bad quality of American beer compared to English beer.

***I wonder if the micro brew explosion is beginning to run its course, however.  When it started, in the 1970s, the goal was "good beer."  Micro breweries still claim that as their goal, but in recent years a weird, and probably bad, trend has been going on where the exploration they're engaged in really is towards making stronger and stronger beers, alcohol content wise, which isn't the same as good beer.

For some reason its often missed that a lot of really excellent beers, particularly those of the British Isles, are very low alcohol content.  This makes sense to me, as the beer was brewed to be consumed in a pub, at a "session."  Beers of that type are called "session beers."  Session beers are very common British Isles beers, and are low alcohol as a rule.  Guinness Stout, for example, which defines "stout," is only a little over 3% alcohol.  It almost qualifies as a "light beer" by American standards.  Even the post Prohibition Coors, widely regarded as a classic American beer in some quarters, was pretty low in alcohol content in the classic "Banquet" variety.

German beers, on the other hand, have always been higher in alcohol content, for reasons that are completely lost to me. Even so, they probably rounded out somewhere in the 5% neighborhood.  Now, however, American microbreweries are rushing to brew what they call "IPAs,", or "Indian Pale Ales."  IPAs were a type of beer originally brewed by British breweries solely for consumption in India, and were shipped incomplete, with high alcohol contents and lots of hops, on the thesis that this would keep it from spoiling on the long, and extremely hot, trip to India.  At one time, however, it had some slight popularity in the UK when some accident required an unfinished batch to be sold on the docks when it couldn't be shipped.  It's become popular with microbreweries however, and so now they're all rushing to brew very bitter, very high alcohol content, and very icky beers.  This has expanded into other offerings, such as stouts, where high alcohol stouts are now offered as well, when historically, stouts are actually low alcohol.  This trend is taking micro-brews out of the "good beer" category into some weird high alcohol arms race, which may mean that they've about run their exploratory course, which was, perhaps, inevitable. That may mean, however, simply a return to the era of the local brewery.

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Epilogue:

This past week the extent to which local brewing has returned to Wyoming became apparent to me when I became aware of a couple of breweries or brewpubs I was previously unaware of.  The first couple were in Gillette, when I drove by one restaurant that advertised it was the home of a brewpub and then later that same day I walked pass a storefront on Gillette Avenue that advertised that it would soon be home to the Gillette Brewing Company.

Today, in the paper, the Wonder Bar, which has been around for decades, is advertising it's bar brewed beer, indicating that it is indeed brewing on the premises.  I knew, as indicated above, that it could, but I wasn't sure that it was.  It is.

Anyhow, quite a change.  Soon, it would appear, every substantially sized town in Wyoming is likely to have a brewpub.

Epilogue II

If this story references another which includes "nostalgia for the good stuff" perhaps some recollection of the bad stuff is also warranted, which is provided this week by a story in the Casper Star Tribune.  The Tribune reports:

Wyoming men who are alcohol-dependent earn about 5 percent less than co-workers who don’t have a problem with alcohol.

They also are somewhat less likely to be in the workplace at all.

These are two of the findings from a report compiled by the University of Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center for the Wyoming Department of Health.

The UW report concluded that alcohol is more of an economic burden on society in Wyoming than tobacco or drug abuse.

The study estimated that elimination of alcohol abuse would save $843 million a year, based on 2010 costs. Costs were for health care, lost productivity, crime and accidents.

Elimination of tobacco would save $689 million per year, and the elimination of illegal drugs $391 million per year. “Illness studies are routinely used by government agencies to justify and prioritize prevention, intervention, and research programs,” the report said.

Nanette Nelson, associated research scientist at the UW center, said she and her colleagues were surprised that alcohol was the most costly. “We thought we would see tobacco to be the front-runner,” she said.

As alcohol is a legal drug, it's easy to forget how much of a burden on society it really is.  It's also easy to forget that those advancing Prohibition, prior to 1919, were not wacky really. They had a valid point.  At that time, in a lot of places, the "saloon trade" was completely unregulated.  To open a bar, you just opened one.  We've never gone back to that.  Indeed, the impact of alcohol has been smaller post Prohibition than it was pre Prohibition, as Prohibition did have a lasting social impact. Still, the burden imposed by alcohol today remains real.

Epilogue III

Examples of local breweries from the regional past:

June 12

1890  The brewery in Laramie sold its first beer.  Up until Prohibition, small local breweries were extremely common in the United States.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

 From Today In Wyoming's History.

Epilogue IV

A NPR article on the explosion of small breweries across the U.S.   This demonstrates the increase in small breweries, but it's considerably below the number I'd expect.  I read awhile back that Denver now has something like 200 brew pubs, which would suggest the number of small breweries is higher than reported here.

Old Picture of the Day: Milk Delivery Truck

Old Picture of the Day: Milk Delivery Truck

Not your granddaddy’s river

Not your granddaddy’s river

Indian Territory, fur traders and forts along the Platte

Indian Territory, fur traders and forts along the Platte

Letter from Ireland

Letter from Ireland

Wednesday, March 18, 1914. "Among the things that Wyoming may be thankful is that it is not on the borderland of barbarous Mexico". Enduring jingoism.

British Wilson, border news?

Wilson was in fact an anglophile, but his government certainly wasn't dominated by the British.

And Mexico barbarous?

Some old headlines are oddly contemporary, as are some jingoistic views, we have to say.  This almost sounds like a Trump rally, as over the weekend he declared that some migrants aren't human.

Barbarous?

Is the cigarette ad a football helmet, or a pilot's helmet?

And the brown bottle thing is correct:

The Boomerang was less dramatic, but it did have an interesting item on pipe smoking at a St. Patrick's Day party.

St. Patrick Street, Cork

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: The Irish in Wyoming

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: The Irish in Wyoming: Just recently we posted our "green" edition of this blog with our St. Patrick's Day entry .  Given that, this is a good time ...

Today In Wyoming's History: March 17: St. Patrick's Day

Today In Wyoming's History: March 17: St. Patrick's Day: Today in St. Patrick's Day.  The feat day falls on the anniversary of his death in Saul, Ireland, in the year 461 or 493.  St. Patr...

The Big Picture: Troopship Mongolia, 1919

Student Loans, maybe we're looking at that the wrong way too.

Having just expounded on declining law school enrollment, and why maybe the legal community ought not to worry too much about it, and perhaps if it is going to worry it ought to reconsider its approach to the problem, if there is one, I'll separately note this topic.

Recently, there's been a lot of commentary about how students amassing debt to go to law school can't pay it off with the depressed wages they're now receiving as lawyers. 

The question this raises is this. Why give student loans to people who want to go to law school?

That may sound harsh, but in a flooded market, why fund failure?  Indeed, why do we give loans to go to art school, or just about any degree program we can think of?

Student loans, as a species, stem from the GI Bill, which allowed, very successfully, a lot of demographics to go to college for the first time in our nation's history.  This, it is often noted, resulted in a huge economic boon to the country, repaying the country in economic gain again and again.  The thought, correctly, was that student loads would do the same thing.

They did, but that also resulted in a vast expansion of fields of study, and over time, we graduated so many into the general population that it's really no longer true.  Or at least its not true for all fields.  Perhaps the time has arrived to give loans where our society needs them.

So, perhaps it's time to fund people to go into engineering or the sciences.  For certain targeted minorities, law still makes sense.  But it doesn't make sense to give loans out to everyone who, at age 18, decides they want to go to college in any field.  It can end up hurting them, and it doesn't seem to be benefiting society at large.

This may seem harsh, but perhaps its not as harsh as funding somebody all the way through a Masters in Art when there's no job to be had, and then asking them to pay it back on wages they won't be making.

Declining Law School Enrollment. Maybe we're looking at it the wrong way.

Yesterday I, and most likely every other member of the Wyoming State Bar, received a letter from the current interim dean of the College of Law, whom I hope becomes the permanent dean.  Having met her, she's an impressive individual.  Part of her impressive nature is that she's very honest, and will directly answer a question, and honestly.  She noted that her young attorney assistant probably cringes over what her answers are to certain questions.

The letter was soliciting donations for scholarships at the UW's College of Law and it mentioned some interesting facts and figures.  One of the most impressive, which I was already somewhat aware of, is that law school applications nationwide have fallen 50% over the last few years.  Her figures noted a recent high of 100,000 applications to the nation's law schools and that it's now under 50,000. The New York Times indicated back in January that it was more like 30,000, although that's three months ago so perhaps its changed.

This is causing a lot of consternation at law schools, including our states, but perhaps we ought to take a step back and consider a couple of things about this.  In other words, this might not be a bad thing for anyone, actually.

There were plenty of warnings that this was going to occur and prescient observers of the law noted that we were reaching this point some time ago. Truth be known, the era that law schools and the law have been living in was a freakish anomaly to start with.  For most of our modern history law hasn't been dominated by big multi state law firms with hundreds of lawyers, and for most of it it hasn't been a path to riches either.  The recent history, say 1970 to the current era, was a bit of a bizarre period in our greater economic history which saw the rise and fall of a lot of "entrepreneurial" activities and the attempt to convert the practice of law sort of into one.  That recruited a lot of people to the practice of law, but that this would fall off should have been inevitable.

Not so inevitable, however, that most state bars have failed to catch up with it, and failed to appreciate it. They worry, along with the law schools, but their focus is basically without important aim.  They've also failed to appreciate that while the giant multi state firms are still with us, in the Internet age they're significantly endangered. 

Also with the Internet has come an era when, in spite of what people may want to believe, the average citizen of the globe is much more educated on everything than he once was, and that includes legal matters.  It isn't the case that everyone now has the training that lawyers have, but a lot more people know a lot more stuff than they used to. This makes lawyers less of a needed commodity.

So, what happened is that the ranks of the law were swelled by an economic anomaly that occurred in the 1970 to about 2000 time frame which is now over, and likely over for good.  At the same time, developments in technology have made the need for lawyers smaller.  In other words, there's been an oversupply of lawyers graduating into practice every year, and now there's an overpopulation of us.

Law schools have, unfortunately, worked to make this worse as they've generally backed (although as I know the UW law school had no direct role in it) the UBE which makes a license, and hence a degree, "portable".  Our new interim dean was frank that she would have supported it, even though she understands why many practitioners do not support this change, as it makes the degree more attractive.  That's the same view that almost all law academics take, as they believe that aids them in recruiting students, as a student who is recruited to, say, Wyoming can come here knowing that his degree will let him practice, say, in his native Colorado while still keeping his options open.

Of course, what that also means, for younger lawyers, and indeed even for older ones, is that the population of practicing lawyers in Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana, all UBE states, has effectively swelled to include not only the combined population of lawyers from those states, but of the much more densely populated Colorado as well.  I'd guess there's more lawyers in  Denver alone than in all of Wyoming, but now we're more or less in competition with them. As a result, our incomes will go down, and so will theirs, making everyone's ability to keep on keeping on somewhat impaired. 

A disaster right?

Well. . . . somewhat, but perhaps there's something else we should consider.

Law schools don't exist for their own sake, but to serve the career aims of their students and the needs of the general public. The public is telling the legal community that they have enough lawyers.  That's not a tragedy, that's a good thing, really.

And perhaps it's not that glum for students.  According to the ABA, when its not crying in its double latte over the sad tragic fate of gigantic East Coast white shoe firms, the practice of law has been suffering from lawyers abandoning the practice at record numbers, and has been since before this started. Also, according to the ABA and various state bars, lawyers are suffering from an internal existential crisis like never before, and one that sets them apart from nearly every other career.  There's been a lot of hand wringing about it, but pretty much nobody has been able to come up with any better ideas about this than to suggest that lawyers stop and smell the roses, or perhaps add to their burdens by taking on cases for free (pro bono). 

Maybe part of that overall set of problems is partially explained by the practice recruiting a lot of entrants who actually had not actual interest in the work to start with.  A 50% decline in applications would suggest that an awful lot of potential recruits were fairly easily dissuaded and went on to something else (it'd be interesting to know what).  If that's right, it would probably mean the remaining 50% are pretty darned dedicated and know what they want to do, and that's good for everyone.

And if that's the case, maybe the time has come simply to cut back in law school classes.

The dean's letter indicates that UW actually hasn't suffered from a decline in applications, and that theirs have gone up. That should be a bit of a relief, but their worried anyone.  I'm not too surprised, however. With declining enrollment students can be choosier in where they apply, and its a good school.  So far, people who graduate form it are, I think, largely finding employment within a year or so (although I haven't studied that, so don't take my word for it).  The dean also noticed the role of scholarships in keeping that number up, however.

But what if law schools nationwide simply cut back on the number of students they were taking in, and hence graduates they were putting out. Why not? 

Historically, UW graduates about 60 to 80 students per year.  It's done this for a very, very long time, even though the population of the state has increased over time.  A population increase, of course, would seemingly translate into an increased local need for lawyers, but it's also been the case since about 1991 that a very large number of graduates are going elsewhere, some years well over half.  That pretty strongly suggests that the school is graduating way in excess of the state's requirements, and knows it.  Indeed, the emphasis on Wyoming's law has declined over the past two decades. 

So what if UW, for example, was to cut the graduation target number down to 40 students, or even 30?  Sounds extreme, to be sure, but if a person looks at the graduating classes of the 40s and 50s, they're smaller than that.  Critics would note, and correctly, that perhaps a modern law school can't economically graduate classes that small as it would mean the infrastructure and academic body would be too small to support the education. That may well be correct, but at the same time, perhaps its time to consider that the Internet (that thing again) may mean that the old brick and mortar, wood pulp and cardboard, requirements that seem to exist might be a bit obsolete.  Perhaps this is completely in error, but it might be worth looking at.

In the greater sense, nationally, some law schools just need to go, and that's all there is to it.  The bottom couple of tiers could simply disappear with no harm done to the nation at large and frankly no injury done to the real lives of those who would have applied there. Some of those schools are going to die anyhow, and frankly, they deserve to.

I suppose it might also be time for law schools to make good on a canard that they've shoveled out for decades that a law degree can be "used for a lot of things".  No, it cannot, for the most part.  But law schools still claim this.  They can make it true, however, by doing what Harvard did years and years ago and creating a law school degree that's tacked onto a second course of study.  Indeed, as its generally the case that in most Common Law countries the study of law is not a graduate course of study, but a baccalaureate course, perhaps its time to consider making this mandatory.

That could be done in one of two ways.  One way would be to simply take the approach of other Common Law nations and not require an undergraduate degree to study law.  A four year course of study would work just as well, for most students, if they were required to study more than law, maybe.  Or maybe not.  But if done in that fashion, the prospective lawyer could be required to take a real minor (not "pre law" or some such thing).  Something like business, or the sciences, or engineering.  These degrees might actually be transferable to something else, at least at first, if the student couldn't find employment or decided to abandon law.

My own undergraduate degree is in Geology, and I know quite a few other lawyers, oddly enough, who have the same undergraduate degree.  And I've known a few who had engineering degrees, one who is a doctor of chemistry, and so on. Some worked in their fields, or others such as banking or journalism, so I don't want to be overly critical here.  There is more diversity that a person might suppose, but in some cases there flat out isn't, and those people are then in a bad spot when they start out, if they need to take a fork in the road.  In spite of what their profs may have said, in most spots they're not very interested in hiring a JD with a background in pre law to work at a non law job.

Another way to approach this, however, and one which interests me a bit more is to provide the opportunity for the students to add to their degrees in the Harvard like fashion, and apparently UW is working on doing that.  In that way, a graduate could come out of school like Mitt Romeny with a JD and a MBA, for example.  In this part of the country, the same ought to be looked at in terms of something combined with the energy industries.

But let's not stop there.  The Dean's letter urges action, in the form of donations for scholarships, to the law school.  But maybe the solution isn't to encourage students to keep applying to law school.  Frankly, enticing those into such a dicey situation as we presently have seems like a poor idea, for the most part, and perhaps we're just better off letting the free market dictate who goes and who doesn't, although I can think of a single exception were I would like to see more done (that being in regard to enrolled Tribal members from the Wind River Reservation, which I think is under served by the law, and where an increased population of native lawyers, I think, would be a very good thing).

But, in not stopping there, perhaps its time for State Bars, rather than hand wringing, to acknowledge their part in this and to address it.

One way they could address it would be to dump the UBE and even the Multi State Bar exams.  Have real, state, exams, and don't grant reciprocity to out of state lawyers.  While I have nothing against them personally, anyone practicing law in Wyoming knows that  in litigation a person is nearly as likely to run into a Colorado lawyer as a  Wyoming one.  Some are Wyoming expatriates, and others just opportunistic, but if we didn't grant other states reciprocity, and there's no good reason at all that we should, the same work would go to people who make their homes here. The long term impact of that would be to boost the practice in rural regions and smaller state, and to somewhat hurt it in big urban areas, which are hurting anyhow.  Yes, that's very provincial, but it's not unreasonably so in that arguing that a lawyer should actually be a member of the bar where he is routinely practicing seems like a rather good idea.

Another concept, even though the impact would be relatively minor, would be to reverse the recent trend of pretending that jurist can serve in their extremely advanced old age.  There have been efforts in Wyoming to eliminate the retirement age for state judges, for example, and there is no retirement age for Federal judges as it is.

Recently a Circuit Court judge retired here and, in his remarks, noted that he felt it was important to retire when a person still had all their faculties.  I fully agree.  To this end, perhaps we should take a page from the history of the U.S. military.

At one time, the military had no retirement age, and as a result the services kept a lot of men who reached a state of infirmity.  Sometime after the Spanish American War, the service began to address this and put in a retirement requirement at age 65.  Later it was lowered to 60.  It's 60 now, with some exceptions.  The service also, as noted in our earlier thread about retirementt, has gone from a 30 years of service requirement to a 20 years of service requirement, for early retirement.  This serves to make the thing green line, younger and physically fit, than it would if a long period of retirement and no age cap was present.  Indeed, I'm sure there'd be Army officers in their 70s and 80s if there was no such requirement.  An 80 year old Army officer would have learned his trade 60 years ago, or more or less at the time of the Korean War, when World War Two weapons were still the norm.

Well, and 80 year old judge learned his trade at the same time, before much of the modern law came into being and before all of the modern research tools existed.  Why not acknowledge that.  We could create a Federal retirement cap at age 65, and do the same for state judges.  That would serve the interest of the public, and frankly it'd open up a few positions, and open them up more frequently, as well.

We might wish to consider the same for lawyers who work for the government, although I'd generally note that they do take advantage of retirement, and recently they've tended to have the last laugh about that in regards to private lawyers who often seem to be unable to do so.

Not that all of this, or any of it, will stem the tide of declining enrollment.  But maybe that's just the tide going back out, and we shouldn't worry much about it.  Some schools will go out with that tide, but perhaps that's an effect of the cause we can do little about.

Standards of Dress: Clerical dress

Recently, I did a thread on changes in standards of dress for average people, or more particularly, those living in cities and towns.  We looked at how those standards have changed greatly over the past century, and even how the dress of the early 20th  Century, or at least male dress, still looks familiar, it was much more formal, day to day, than it is now.

Here we look at a more specific topic, clerical dress.

Clerical dress, i.e., the clothing of priest, pastors, rabbis, etc., has seemingly changed less, which is not to say that it hasn't changed at all, in comparison to other vocations.  This probably makes sense, given their roles.

In looking at this topic, this is one area where we really have to start with the present standards, which are the only ones most people are really familiar with, and work backwards.  This reveals some interesting trends, but it also tends to show how stable this particular area of dress is.  And to start off here, with really have to look at the Roman Catholic Priest.

For the most part, in North America, and indeed in most of Europe, the dress of Christian clerics falls into two camps, one of which takes its inspiration from the standards of the Catholic Church, and the other of which takes its standards from business wear.   Almost never, but not quite never, do Christian religious take a standard from elsewhere, although there are few notable exceptions, such as The Salvation Army.  There are solid reasons based in tradition and even theology for this, but we won't really get into that, as that's a topic for some other forum

The clothing of Catholic Priests is governed by regulations within the Church pertaining to that.  Generally, Catholic Priests must wear black, and they must wear a shirt that accommodates a Roman Collar.

Catholic Priest in Europe, courtesy of Wikipedia.  This Priest is wearing a cassock, which is a type of dress which is unusual in the United States.  The Priests clothing features the Roman Collar.

The actual origin of the Roman Collar is disputed, and even the name "Roman Collar" isn't universal.  Some claim a Reformation origin for the collar, but the better evidence takes it back to ancient times with there being some attribution to it serving a purpose associated with medical emergencies in the Medieval Black Plague.  No matter, in the modern world black dress with Roman Collar is the regulated norm for Catholic Priests.  Roman collars are also the norm for Orthodox Priests in North America.  And they are the norm for Protestant denominations that have an origin associated with the Catholic Church, such as the Lutheran and Episcopal Churches.

Lutheran Priest with Roman Collar, but with checked sports coat.  In the sports coat, he departs from what would be the Catholic standard.

Roman Collars today are also frequently worn by ministers in denominations that have no close association in origin with the Catholic Church, however. In these instances, ministers of those denominations are in denominations that have adopted the wide practice of other Christian denominations or, sometimes, the individual ministers have. 

Given this, it's probably surprising to learn that Roman Collars, while an ancient style of clerical dress, haven't always been the rule in North America, to the extent that they currently are.  Indeed, while at one time Roman Collars were the rule in Europe, in North American Catholic Priest's clothing regulations  caused them to be dressed in apparel that was of the type worn by secular businessmen, this being the norm until the mid 19th Century. The reason for this is that prejudice against Catholics was so strong, that the Church did not wish for clerics to stick out too much, lest they be harmed by anti Catholics. We have to keep in mind here that, prior to the American Civil War, bias against Catholics was so strong in the United States that it defined some political parties.

This type of prejudice began to wane after the Mexican War and Civil War, in which Catholic Irish Americans played such a significant role, and even though decades would pass before being strong anti Irish would not be regarded as acceptable, it did mean that the Roman Collar returned to Catholic clerics by the second half of the 19th Century, in North America.

This didn't mean, however, that clerical dress became identical to what we commonly see today. At that time cassocks, a long outer garment somewhat resembling a frock coat, were the clerical norm for most denominations using the Roman Collar.  This remained the case well into the 20th Century, but during the 20th Century, a coat based on the single breasted man's business suit coat became increasingly common.

Catholic Priest, mid 20th Century, wearing cassock.

Fairly typical wear for Priests, mid 20th Century.

This trend has continued into the the present era, where cassocks are now rare, but where the Roman Collar with simple black suit jacket is common.  For Catholic priests, the reaming clothing is always black, unless they occupy an higher ecclesiastical rank.  For other denominations, however, this is not necessarily so, and you will sometimes see colored shirts of various colors, with blue seemingly being the most common.

Roman Collars have become so common in North America that they have spread to Orthodox and Eastern Rite denominations in North America, which was not always true.  The Roman Collar does not have as long of history in these denominations as in the ones discussed above, with those denominations having had very traditional clothing of their own, which is still worn where these denominations exist in large numbers.  Those watching the recent dramatic events in Ukraine have seen Priests wearing this clothing out in the streets, in support of Ukraine. Typically news reports indicate that they are "Orthodox Priest", but chances are just as high that they may be Ukrainian Greek Catholic Priests, there being no ready way for an average person here to be able to tell the difference by simple observation.

 Greek Orthodox Priest, mid 20th Century, in Jerusalem.  Well into the 20th Century similar dress would have been the norm in North America for Eastern Rite and Orthodox clergy.

Perhaps before going on from here it would be good to note that in at least the Orthodox and Catholic Faiths, the clothing Priests wear is governed by regulation, and so it various but little. Chances are high, but I don't know for certain, that this is also the case with at least the Episcopal church as well.

Amongst the regulated clothing, for many years, was a requirement that headgear be worn.  Some of the photographs set out above demonstrate that.  At one time Catholic Priests wore distinctive headgear on a daily basis,  and in some localities on some occasions they still do.  But for average parish priests this passed away in the 1960s.  At that time, for those areas still requiring it, the requirement in North America was for a hat of a formal type, such as a fedora, so the former requirement of a distinctive hat had passed away, for the most part.  Orthodox Priests have a much more distinctive headgear that survived well into the 20th Century and may still be a requirement for some Orthodox denominations, but I'm not familiar enough with their situation to be certain.

None of this has addressed vestments, which Priests and other religious wear during services, and which would make up a lengthy separate topic.  Suffice it to say, the denominations mentioned above all wear vestments, and while these remain clearly identifiable over time, you can tell the era in which they were made by stylistic differences that occur over time.

Catholic Priest offering Mass, World War Two.  Vestments are being worn, Priest on far right is wearing a cassock.  The distinctive headgear shown would indicate, I think, that three of these men are Bishops.

 Episcopal Priest with recently married couple, mid 20th Century.

For those denominations where Roman Collars are not worn, and shirt and tie is, basically they have tended to follow the more conservative end of business dress over the years.  This continues to the present time, making them one of the few groups that routinely wears formal wear in their official capacity.

Protestant minister discussing problems with his congregation after services, in what appear to be a cold setting in Maine, 1940s.

Presbyterian minister, mid 20th Century.

With all this emphasis on clothing and how it was worn, and what it generally means (I've skipped pretty much information pertaining to higher Church ranks) one surprising thing is to learn that in the United States, distinctive religious clothing has been nearly wholly omitted on occasion for some specific roles, such as military chaplains.  American chaplains wear the standard military uniform of their branch of service.

U.S. Army Chaplain, Civil War.

Confederate officer, holding position as officer and Chaplain, Civil War.

U.S. Army Chaplain, World War One. This photo shows that at the time at least some Army chaplains wore an open collar coat, which was not the service norm, with Roman Collar.

More typical World War One appearance for a U.S. Army chaplain with stand up collar service coat.

Col. William R. Arnold, Chief of Chaplains during World War Two, and a Roman Catholic Priest.

Their uniforms have always featured distinctive insignia,and in field conditions you will still see some specific items being worn while they are performing their official roles. But by and large, they look a lot like other servicemen.  This does not tend to be the case for other nations.

 British Chaplain, wearing Roman Collar, in World War One.

 Catholic, Protestant and Jewish Chaplains, U.S. Army, World War Two.

U.S. Army chaplain, in dress uniform, World War Two.

So far, of course, I've written only about Christian clerics.  In the time frame covered by this blog, it would seem that some discussion of at least Jewish clerics would also be in order.  My problem here, however, is that to the extent I'm familiar with their dress, I'd only be a danger in discussing it.

The Jewish faith is, of course, presently divided into various branches, and it would seem that dress in general in the branches various.  I've seen photographs of rabbis in the mid 20th Century, for example, that are simply indistinguishable from men in typical business attire of the day.  Others have very distinctive dress. So, given that, I can only assume custom and practice varies by branch. As is well known, Hassidic Jews today wear very distinctive dress in general, so perhaps rather than make any more errors than I already have, I should leave that topic alone.

So far I've also omitted any discussion of the dress of female religious.  Generally, up until perhaps the 1970s or so, most female religious were nuns, and perhaps globally that may still be true.  The Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, Episcopal Church and Lutheran Churches all have religious orders for women, which most people simply refer to as nuns.

 Nuns on Long Island sea shore, 1940s

Nuns traditionally wore distinctive dress which is referred to as "habits".  While these vary, all nuns of all denominations wore some variety of distinctive dress, with most habits resembling one another very generally.  It's interesting to note that orders dedicated to hospitals were once so common in Europe that for a long time European nurses wore clothing that strongly resembled habits, and a common term for a nurse in Europe is "sister."  The German word for a nurse is Krankenshwester, or "sick sister".  

This is an area that has changed enormously post 1960.  While there are still orders of nuns in all faiths that have nuns that wear habits, the largest population of nuns in North American was by far in the Catholic Church, which generally greatly diminished the requirements for habits after the early 1960s, at which point many orders simply did away with them.  Not all did, and interestingly those which have retained them tend to be amongst those which remain the strongest today.