Mixed energy news

Kiewit  layed off forty-five workers earlier this week at its Wyoming Buckskin Mine.  More bad news for coal.

The state's actually looking at filing suit on the moratorium on leases for coal on Federal land, a suit which won't bring any jobs to the table, coals struggles right now are economic, not regulatory, but showing how the whole issue raises distracting issues at the local level, that in turn end up in political campaigns.

On the flip-side, however, one of the local drilling companies is now advertising for hands, quite a change over recent trends  Perhaps reflecting a bet on the stabilization of oil at the current price?

Twitterification

How is that we have become so unfortunate that every politician  now "tweets"?

My, what a change in a century. From an era when political oratory was so advanced that people would listen to it for hours, to one in which every politician now feeds snippets via Twitter.  A sad development indeed.

Boy Scouts Incorporated under Federal Statute, June 15, 1916

Boy Scout poster during World War One encouraging participatin in the Third Liberty Loan.

The Boy Scouts of America were incorporated on this date under a Federal statutory provision.  This is very unusual, as most corporations are legal creatures of state law, not Federal law.

The Boy Scouts of America were part of a huge international movement started by Lord Baden Powell, a British Army officer who had once been the British Army's chief cavalryman.  Distressed by the lack of outdoor skills in British soldiers during the Boer War, he created the scouts tin encourage manly virtues in youth.  A girls variant soon followed.  The early movement emphasized "scouting", i.e., bush craft, as well as many virtues and Christian morals.

Preparedness Day Parade, June 14, 1916.

With "he kept us out of war" getting to be an increasingly unlikely statement for his second term, President Wilson lead a Preparedness Day Parade, held on Flag Day, June 14, 1916.

The Naysayers Busy Bodies. People who feel they have to stop other people doing something harmless, or even fun, or know what you ought to do where you have no moral obligation to do anything.

Oh just stop.

You know who you are.  That person is doing that thing, something you probably don't do, and they're having fun doing it.  It isn't immoral, it isn't dangerous, it just bugs you.

Well, sir or madam, you have a problem and should knock it off.

Over the last several years I've been confronted with Naysayers and Busy Bodies. Indeed, I think I've written on one of these encounters before, but I'm not quite sure where that entry is, so I'm repeating the topic and adding to it.  In part because I am, quite frankly, irritated.

Now, first I have to note something.

I own some land.

That doesn't make me a massive land owners. By some, I mean a little.  I don't often note this, but one of these small parcels was recently noted here in the context of a garden that's on it.  And I own a little more than that. Not so much that I could make a living off of it or anything.

Now, I don't publicize this much on purpose. Say anything, and unless a person already knows you well, in which case they already know that you own some land, they make assumptions that are wildly inaccurate.  A person can be dirt poor and be a landowner, for example, but people will not assume that.

Now, one of these small plots of land is quite near an area which is itself now quite near the city.  When my family acquired it, this was not true.  So that means that we're likely the people with the oldest continual title to the land in the area, or nearly so.  As we also don't feel compelled to put up a house on something simply because we have it, so over time its become one of the few undeveloped parcels where it is.  This means, apparently, that people observe it. I'm fine with that, to a degree.  But I'm amazed by how people react to things in regards to that.

For example, there used to be a couple of teenage girls who lived about a mile away who had horses.  They'd ride them around the area and, as this lot is on the river, they'd ride down to the river on their horses.  I knew that somebody did that, as I could see their shod prints, but I like horses and riding and so it never bothered me.  

Apparently it bothered a neighbor, however, as the girls went riding by one day.  Knowing that they'd never asked permission to come on, they rode on by, but not before a neighbor came out and chewed them out as the horses deposited horse flop in the road.

Now, I find it exceedingly difficult to care about that, but the neighbor in question was so offended by horse flop in the road that after she chewed the teenager out she came over to inform me of just her doing that, and that they rode on my place.  I told her that was okay with me.  The girls then rode back by, on their way home, and entered the place, probably having witnessed the lady speaking to me and feeling they'd been caught.  They confessed their trespass.  I simply gave them permission to come on.

I guess I appreciate that my neighbor (now passed on) watched my place so carefully, but why the offense over the horses?

At the same location, about a decade ago, I stopped by on the way home from duck hunting, with my then young son, to see if there might be some ducks in the river.  I did get a passing shot.  Another extremely reclusive neighbor (I saw him for the first time today) called the sheriffs out as I'd shot.  They came on, thinking I must have been a trespasser, and they were sheepish when they found out that I owned the place.  Shooting is legal in the county and the neighbor had no business calling the sheriffs out on me on my own place, even if he didn't know who I was.  Today, if the sheriffs showed up that way, I'd read them the riot act. At the time I was pretty polite about it.

Well, just this past week my son was out on the place and fired a couple of shots from a pistol. The neighbor came out and yelled at him.  He hung around, probably recalling a decade ago, in case the sheriffs came out, but they didn't come.

It turns out they were called, which I now know, as I was burning dead timber, very carefully, when the neighbor came out and called over the fence to ask if I had a fire going. Well, of course I did, and I appreciate the concern over fire, but then asked about the pistol shots.  After learning they were ours, he went on about how you couldn't shoot there etc., he'd called the sheriff, until I did something I rarely do, which is to say "I'm a lawyer and I know you can shoot here". The grimace on his face told the story, he knew that he'd blown it.  I was polite about it.  He, and his wife, then went on a long conversation detailing other complaints of a minor variety he had in the area with other people.  The ultimate irony was that he was wearing a National Rifle Association hat.

Well, I don't appreciate being told that I can't do something that I know I can.  One real advantage of being a lawyer is knowing the rules.  I also don't appreciate the enforcement of a self declared set of rules by a guy who is, from my prospective, a new comer even if he's been there for years.  I further don't appreciate instructions on this score from somebody who isn't even from this country.  If he doesn't like life in the county, he can move to the city, or better yet back to his native country.

Well, on another piece of land that I have there are a set of building associated with it. They aren't on ours, but they're close.  I know on that land a person called up the owner to complain about the cows getting in, some of which are mind.  The buildings are indeed very old, but hey, they're not some remote persons and the cows are part of our livelihood.  Geez, man, give us a break, we're not tearing the old buildings down or anything.

Again, I know that this is whining, but I'm amazed by the degree to which people choose to police the harmless conduct of others.  The fellow who gets upset about our shooting has a yard that looks terrible in comparison to the prior owners.  We're not stopping him from doing anything, why is he trying to stop us.  People have a right to ride horses in rural areas here, why harass teenagers who are doing that?  And were the horses going down to the river that big of deal?  And why are you watching the old buildings on a place you don't own?

Golf returns to the Olympics for the first time since 1904

Silver medal winner in Olympic Golf, U.S. Golfer Chandler Egan.

Golf is returning as a sport to the Olympics.  It hasn't been one since 1904.

I don't care for golf. That doesn't mean that I don't know how to play it.  I find myself curiously like the Matthew Quigley character in Quigley Down Under, who in the final scene (spoiler alert) guns down the evil opponent with the opponents own Colt Navy revolver, which that character has provided to him, in a duel, and then states "I said I never had much use for one. . . not that I didn't know how to use one."  I know how to play golf, I just don't like playing it.

It's not like I hate the sport either, I just find it sort of dull.  I suspect that in its original version this wasn't so.  The origin of golf is murky, but nobody doubts that the modern game had is origin in Scotland.  Oddly, the first mention of it is when King James II banned it as a distraction to practicing archery.  King James IV lifted the ban.  He was a golfer.

I suspect that the origins of the game probably had something to do with bored Scottish sheepherders, and maybe Scotch Whiskey.  But that's just my theory.  In the modern era it became associated for a time with wealth, and then later with a sort of WASPish culture, but that was probably always somewhat unfair.  To the extent that reputation was warranted it probably stemmed from social conditions in which only the fairly well off had leisure, and golf takes quite a bit of time to master and play.

Woman's champion golfer, Katherine Harley, 1908.

Still, it had that reputation sufficiently by the 1920s that the occupation of female golfer was used for one of the well to do, Jordan Baker, in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  Of note, Tom Buchanan, the old money figure in the novel who doesn't really do anything, is defined by his college sporting activity of football and his present sport, polo, which sort of shows their position at that time.  But whether or not (and I think not) all golfers were well to do, it certainly also became as port widely played by professionals and businessmen at one time.

President Taft and his golfing pals.

Around here, when I was growing up, it seemed like golf was pretty popular generally.  At that time Casper had three golf courses and my mother played golf.  She was very good at it, and had one a trophy when she first moved here from a championship that involved people working in the oil and gas industry.  My father never played it, but it seemed like quite a few of the men that he knew did.  Golf was certainly played by a wide variety of people and by that time it didn't cost a great deal to do it, unless, like all sports, you wanted it to cost a great deal.  

I never developed an affinity for it, however, in spite of my mother's efforts to teach it to me. As a kid I spent one whole summer learning it and golfing fairly regularly.  I still know quite a few holds on the golf course by heart.  But it never took.  After that one summer I gave it up (I must have been in junior high at the time) and never looked back.

When I was first practicing law, however, my lack of golfing status was almost unusual.  Lots of lawyers played golf and the association with lawyers and golf, which doesn't come from Wyoming (where a golfer is just as likely to be an oilfield roughneck) is so strong that in some places not being a golfing lawyer is a surprise to outsiders. Recently, for example, I went to Florida on depositions and the area I was in, Naples, is apparently well known for its golf courses.  I didn't know that.  At the depositions the court reporter asked if we (me, and the opposing lawyer) golfed.  "No", came our reply and I noted that the same area is apparently noted for tarpon fishing, and I do fish.  No matter, the court report expressed surprise and went on to list the many undoubtedly fine golf courses in the area.

As an other example, some years ago I had a case with an older lawyer from Cheyenne, and every time we were anywhere in the case he asked if I golfed.  "No" came the reply, and each time he replied "oh, you should take it up" and a listing of the local courses.  

Well, I'm not going to take it up I think, unless I get lucky enough to retire and have some of my good friends also retire and they take up golf, something that appears unlikely to ever occur.  I'd rather fish and hunt, or do other outdoor activities.  Golf doesn't interest me that much.  I sometimes joke that a golf course is a waste of a good hay field, but in all honest I"m glad golf courses are t here, as when they disappear, they tend to turn into housing developments.  And there are now four courses here in town, although the one, on edge of the river, on the edge of town, has so many geese I also sometimes joke that it should be opened up for goose hunting in the Fall.

Golf seems to have fallen a bit on hard times recently as a sport in the US, and at least by my observation that is reflected in the professions.  Younger lawyers I know don't golf.  When I first was practicing law in our firm, all but one of the lawyers golfed (or all but two, if I include myself).  Now, only one does.  Nobody younger than me, and I'm not young, golfs. The county bar association used to put on an annual match, but it's given it up and hasn't held it now for years.  I think all of this is associated with a decline in leisure time in the US, and frankly that isn't good.  Leisure it self has been defined by a wide variety of philosophers as the basis of civilization, with that thought being so wide that it has been stated by both Eastern and Western philosophers.  But in recent decades, at least in the US, time for anything but work has tended to evaporate for a  large number of people.

Well, back to golf in the Olympics.  I'm glad its returning, and I'm quite surprised, really, that it ever left.  Its an individual sport that a lot of people in a lot of places play. Good decision, Olympics, to restore it.

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Federal Building, Anchorage Alaska

Courthouses of the West: Federal Building, Anchorage Alaska:

This is the Federal Building in Anchorage Alaska, which was built in 1941.  The Art Deco style building is very substantial, and the building is one of several in Anchorage which show the extent of development in the city in the 1930s and 1940s.  It was, and is, a very modern building for the port city, which might surprise those who wouldn't have expected this type of architecture and development for Anchorage in this, pre oil development, era.

The courtroom was, and is, a prominent feature of the building.

Rushing to favorite conclusions and arguments: Terrorist strike in Florida

It's interesting, and a bit sad, that after any one particular type of act masses of people, from political commentators, to news article "comment" posters, rush to arguments they like to make as if they are really relevant to the issue at hand.

We're in a long term, mostly urban, domestic guerilla war being waged by a mostly foreign enemy but one that does have fighters on our own soil.  We haven't, as a society, ever dealt with a war of this type really.  The last Western nation to do so was France, in Algeria when it fought the FLN in Algeria, including Algiers, and in France itself.  In a war of this type, individuals and groups of individuals can and will strike on an almost entirely random basis.  But strike they will.

Some of these terrorists are weak minded and unhinged. Not all are. But some certainly are. And of those, some will act fully independently in a way that we cannot not only not predict, but, added to that, in ways that aren't even predictable to those whose campaigns these people adopt.

It can't be fully said that these people would not act in this fashion but for the guerilla war.  But that can at least partially be said.  And again, not all are weak minded. For the weak minded and mentally ill, the war gives them something to focus on and define themselves by.  Not every radical during the Russian Revolution had thought out Socialism.  Plenty of the German street fighters for the Nazis prior to 1932 who joined the SA hadn't delved into Nazism deeply.  There's no reason to believe that Muslim terrorists, foreign or domestic, have really struggled with their consciences and determined to act out of deep conviction.  Probably plenty of them were angry or confused young men, and women, prior to defining their anger by jihad.

Still, we should not discount that some have done just that. Islam does have dark passages that do indeed call for violence against the infidel and tens of thousands of young Muslims, some converts, have answered the black flag of ISIL. And ISIL is calling for its adherents to strike here.

Under these circumstances the instant argument on gun control that immediately comes up is really misplaced.  Firearms technology, in real terms, has changed very little since the 192s really and automatically cycling weapons have been available since just after 1900.  Handgun technology was perfected around 1911 and hasn't really changed at all since that time.  What has changed is that we're at war with a domestic enemy on our own soils.  And what has also changed is that we have a large number of mostly young men whom we've sidelined in our new computer driven technological world, with that world being one in which all morals are treated as simply being personal choices. We dealt with this in depth in our thread (once one of the most read here) Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.  And we also dealt with the very topic we're now addressing in this thread in our also once highly read Playing Games with Names and Burying Heads in the Sand. Mischaracterizing violence and ignoring its nature at the same time.

It isn't as if, however, pundits, politicians, and commentators of all types are going to come here and read this and be convinced of anything, however.  But mark my words, sadly, all the debate on this topic is darned near pointless.  Restriction and police action did nothing whatsoever to stop the FLN's campaign for Algerian independence.  Only Algerian independence did, although a counter terrorism campaign featuring terrorism itself darned near achieved the opposite result, before the French public became disgusted with it (I'm not suggesting here we adopt such tactics).  Control of various types did not prevent this same thing from happening in Brussels and Paris.  What will stop it is the defeat of ISIL, which is actually occurring. But that's a long term effort.

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Related Threads:

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Playing Games with Names and Burying Heads in the Sand. Mischaracterizing violence and ignoring its nature at the same time.

Movies in History: Barry Lyndon

I saw this film many years ago, in pieces (that is, I saw it on television, in chunks, which is never a good way to view anything).  I recalled liking it at the time, and only recently have I been able to view it again.

This film is a 1975 film by Stanly Kubrick which is a surprising effort by Kubrick to film William Makepeace Thakeray's novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon.  Thackeray's works satired English society of his own time, the 19th Century. The novel, like the film, was set in the late 18th Century and early 19th Century, and it is loosely based on an actual person.

The film follows the life of Redmond Barry, who we understand to be a member of the Irish gentry of that period.  Not ever explained, but fairly obvious from the context for a person familiar with Irish history, is that Barry is a member of a minor Irish noble family, hence he's actually an Anglo Irish protestant.  While the film does not explain that, an understanding of that serves to make some sense out of the plot which might otherwise be a bit mysterious in some ways.

Barry's story commences with the death of his father in a duel, which effectively places the family into a species of poverty, and goes early on to a doomed romance between Barry and a cousin, who rejects him in favor of an English army office. The film takes place during the Seven Years War, which figure prominently in the plot line.  This launches Barry on a series of unlikely, but very well presented and, in the context of the film, and indeed of the times, seemingly plausible adventures and occurrences.  Barry is followed through service with the English, and then Prussian, armies and on into his marriage to an English noblewoman.  All along, the viewer is left wondering if he likes Barry or not, which would be consistent, apparently, with Thackeray's novel, in which a clueless Barry narrates his own story.

We, of course, review movies not so much for their plots (although we certainly consider that) but also for their service or disservice to history.  And Barry Lyndon gets high marks in those regards.  The acting in the film is curiously flat by many of the actors, but that actually serves the character of Barry Lyndon, as he is called after he marries Lady Lyndon, and Lady Lyndon, quite well.  This is one of two films by Ryan O'Neal, the other being Paper Moon, which was released two years earlier.  O'Neal's portrayal in Paper Moon is so different in character that the flat portrayal in Barry Lyndon must seem to be a directors choice, which does indeed serve the film well, given that much of it is a character study of European gentry and nobility of this period.  Frankly, the gentry and nobility do not come across particularly well.

Material details are very well done.  Clothing styles change appropriately over time.  The details of noble English households are very well portrayed, including the peculiar relationship that sometimes existed between Anglican clerics and those households.  The moral decline that was going on in this era amongst the well to do is a major subject of of the film and subtly and excellently portrayed.   Indeed, moral decline is a frequent subtle topic of Kubrick films, with Kubrick having been a devout Catholic.  The strange nature of European armies and their rank and files is excellently portrayed as well.  The details of the very strange custom of dueling are accurately portrayed.

About the only real criticism that can be offered here is that it's pretty obvious that Ryan O'Neal didn't know how to ride a horse, and those scenes in which he rides are painful to watch for somebody with knowledge on riding. Otherwise, the film is excellent.

Sunday Morning Scence: Churches of the West: St. Edward's Catholic Church, Wind River Reservation

Churches of the West: St. Edward's Catholic Church, Wind River Reservation.


These are photographs of St. Edward's Catholic Church, north of Riverton, Wyoming and near Kinnear. This church was moved to this location in 1977. It had originally been located in Pavillion, some miles away, and was built in 1924.

Boxing exits stage left

 

 C Club boxing match, Natrona County High School, 1980. This gym, and the boxing matches are now gone.

This is another one of those old threads I started months ago, but didn't finish. The recent death of Muhammad Ali brought it back to mind.

Boxing was pretty big when I was a kid.

It was even bigger prior to World War Two.

It's all but dead now.

Listening to the obits on Ali really bring this home.  Younger people hearing about it know that he was a great boxer, but they don't really know that boxing itself was once great.

Prior to football taking pride of place in American professional football there were really only three professional sports worth considering.  Baseball, boxing, and horse racing.

Yes, there were other professional sports, including football, which arrived as early as 1892, but football really wasn't a big deal.*  Baseball, boxing, and horse racing, were.  Only baseball really remains up there in the American mind, but even it has had to surrender pride of place to football.

Boxing was something followed by every American who followed professional sports.  It was a huge deal, and it remained that way all the up up through the 1970s.  Boxing was on the cover of sporting journals all the time and for much of my youth you could watch a boxing match on national broadcast television ever Saturday night.

It's hard to say what made it so big, but it was.  It was huge.

Part of that may have reflected economics and demographics.  Boxing has always been a sport populated largely by the economically disadvantaged.  Not always, but typically.  Legendary early boxer John L. Sullivan was from "Southie", South Boston, born of Irish immigrants, and had started off boxing illegally as the sport was banned in Boston.

Legendary Boston born Irish American boxer John L. Sullivan who fought over 450 fights in his career, an amazing total.  He was the last bare knuckle champion and the first gloved champion.

Indeed, the early sport featured a laundry list of the disadvantaged, including a lot of Irish American and Italian American boxers.  It also featured Jewish boxers, although it seems their legacy in the sport is largely forgotten now.

And it was integrated right from the start.

 The larger than life Jack Johnson.

Something about the individual nature of the sport, maybe, made it impossible for the color line to keep in it, and Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion in 1908.  Johnson was a controversial figure, and remains so, due to his blistering refusal to adhere to color boundaries, including in his personal life, which leads a person now to wonder to what extent it was Johnson and to what extent it was simply prejudice that created the controversy.  Anyhow, Johnson is sometimes regarded as setting the advancement of black athletes back, but I frankly doubt it.  His brashness was impossible to ignore, and that, in my mind, likely advanced the cause of black athletes.

At any rate, blacks were so well established in boxing that by the time Joe Lewis became the world heavyweight champion in 1937 he was a national hero, remaining that way his entire life.  Indeed, while people now tend to recall Jackie Robinson as breaking the color boundaries in professional sports, its interesting to note that boxing and horse racing (where they have oddly mostly disappeared) were integrated decades prior, and in boxing the lines were nearly completely erased by the 1930s.

Which doesn't mean that they couldn't offer some controversy.  Muhammad Ali, who may be the greatest boxer who ever lived, stood on the shoulders of prior giants and was truly controversial in a political sense for much of his career.  But it was the popularity of boxing that allowed him to do that.  It was so big, it gave Ali a bully pulpit.

Well, that pulpit is all but dismantled now.

It's hard to see what happened to it, but it seems to have been a victim of its own success.  As a sport it was always plagued with those who were close to it having financial goals that didn't always comport with keeping the sport organized in a rational fashion.  After Ali its organization, which had always had elements that were ready to tear it apart, collapsed and a big national boxing hero, or rather international, had a harder time coming up. And in the heavyweight class, while there were clearly great boxers after Ali, none had quite what he did in terms of personality and wit, except perhaps for George Foreman, who is also now long past his boxing career.

Beyond that, however, something changed in a society where accidental early death and decay became less common.  John L. Sullivan was only 59 years old when he died.  Joe Lewis was 66.  Jack Johnson was an old 68.  In an era when strokes and heart attacks simply killed, these ages didn't seem all that unusual.   Muhammad Ali was a very aged 74 years old when he just died, and had been bearing the tragic consequences of his sport for a very long time.  That visible impact, which used to be called being "slapsy", was hard for the public to watch.  Arguably boxing became the first sport where head injuries became a real and ongoing concern, with it now passing on to other sports, including the big current national pass time, football.

Whatever it is, boxing isn't what it once was.  I don't even know who the current heavyweight champions are, although I believe there's more than one. At one time, everyone did.

 Victor in a C Club fight, 1980.  This scene will not repeat.

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*It's interesting to note in this context that football, while have a professional organization by 1892, was really regarded as a college sport until after World War Two.  There are historical reasons for that, including that both football and rugby were sports that were in fact normally only maintained early on by universities.  Beyond that, however, I wonder if it isn't simply demographic.  Even now, football is heavily associated with universities and the college teams are the training grounds for professional football teams.  Baseball, however, has tended to recruit right out of high school and has maintained its own farm system.  Boxing hasn't tended to come out of schools at all, but most professional boxers started very young. So boxing and baseball were very much average man sports in an era prior to the average man having any college at all.  Average men attending college only changed after World War Two, and by the 1950s professional football had really arrived.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Yellowstone and The First Visitors

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Yellowstone and The First Visitors: With all the crazy goings on in Yellowstone this summer, it would be nice to see some more positive news of, and from the park. News about ...

Roads to the Great War: Remember the Titanic's Rescue Ship RMS Carpathia?

Roads to the Great War: Remember the Titanic's Rescue Ship RMS Carpathia?: The Titanic 's rescue ship RMS Carpathia has some interesting connections to the Great War. RMS Carpathia Captain Arthur...

General Obregon receives a medal in Celaya, June 10, 1916.

General Obregon, with Carranza to his left, receiving a medal in Celaya in connection, in some fashion, with the effort to combat Pancho Villa.

Rural Heritage horse powered market gardening economics: the cost of using horses

Rural Heritage horse powered market gardening economics: the cost of using horses

Declaration of an Arab state: June 10, 1916.

Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, declares the existence of an Arab state stretching from Aden to Aleppo.  The Arab state, as he envisioned it, would never come into being and he himself would ultimately be driven out of the Hajez in 1924, after having attempted to claim the title of Caliph, which the House of Saud was not willing to accept.

Friday Farming: Roosians. 1915. A glimpse of ethnicity

Caption reads: A case of "Economic Need." Jacob Roomel [i.e., Rommel?] and his family live in this roomy shack, well-furnished, with a good range, organ, etc. They own a good home in Ft. Collins, but late in April they moved out here, taking contract for nearly 40 acres of beets, working their 9 and 10 yr. old girls hard at piling and topping (altho[ugh] they are not rugged) and they will not return until November. The little girl said, "Piling is hardest, it gets your back. I have cut myself some, topping." The older girl said, "Don't you call us Russians, we're Germans," (although they were most of them were born in Russia). Family been in this country eleven yrs. (See photo 4041.) Location: Ft. Collins [vicinity], Colorado

This is a photo from the Library of Congress depicting a Colorado farm family in 1915.  the photo tells us volumes in ways that it probably doesn't mean to.

For one thing, it's interesting that this family commuted from Ft. Collins to land they owned, or leased, to farm it for the summer.  A commuting 1915 farm family. Also interesting is that they were farming beets in this area of Colorado that is still pretty intensively agricultural, but right now is producing a final crop of houses in a way that should give any nation pause. 

Also interesting is they're identified in such a fashion as to cast doubt on what they were.  The photographer obviously felt they were Russians, as they were born in Russia.  The oldest daughter, however, was aware of their German ethnicity.  These folks would have been descendant of the Germans that went into Russia, at the invitation of the Russian crown, in the 18th Century.  In the early 20th Century they were immigrating to the United States, tired of cyclical Russian oppression.  They had a major impact of American agriculture at the time.

Confusion over their ethnicity caused them to be called "Roosians" in some areas, an intentional mispronunciation of  Russian, recognizing the Russian element but not fully crediting it.  As they almost exclusively settled in agricultural belts that were already heavily settled by ethnic Germans, and as they often shared the same religion as the local German American communities they settled in, their ethnic identity tended to be absorbed into the local one, and today many of their descendants would tend not to know that their German ancestors had a long period of residence in Russia.  There are quite a few efforts today to preserve their heritage by their descendants in the US. 

A very large number immigrated to the US and Canada prior to World War One.  The tragedy of the Great War caused more to move, particularly after the Russian Revolution arrived and brought in forces that were fully opposed to their farming enterprises and religious faith.  Those who remained were heavily oppressed by Stalin. Even with that, however, enough remained that following the reunification of Germany some of their descendants claimed German citizenship and immigrated to Germany, where culturally they provided an odd window into an earlier era, and linguistically they struggled with a language they largely no longer spoke.

Throwback Thursday? Old soldiers never die. . .

A person would likely have to have had military service to recognize what's on this pencil.  How did it end up in my office?

For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds. Generations: Part Three of Three

 Father and son working on team.

From a Pew survey:

For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds: For the first time since 1880, Americans ages 18 to 34 are more likely to be living with their parent(s) than in a household shared with a spouse or partner.

I saw this first in a Singletary column in the Washington Post, and she viewed this as a good trend.  Here college age daughter, about to enter grad school, lives at home with her parents.  As noted, in some ways, it's actually a return to the age old norm. So, in terms of a long term analysis, maybe we just exited a 100 year, or even more like a 40 year, period of abnormality.  We seemingly aren't looking at it that way, but maybe we ought to at least ponder it.

Of course, pondering things like that are the line of country of this blog.  Indeed, so much so that this post was really more developed than the other two in this series at first and wasn't intended to be part of a series at all.

Some comments on the Pew study.  Let's start with this one:

This turn of events is fueled primarily by the dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35. Dating back to 1880, the most common living arrangement among young adults has been living with a romantic partner, whether a spouse or a significant other. This type of arrangement peaked around 1960, when 62% of the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds were living with a spouse or partner in their own household, and only one-in-five were living with their parents.

This is bull.

Okay, not "bull", but a bit misleading in its use of politically correct, probably by necessity, terminology.

Not the statistics, but the way its phrased, that is.  "Romantic partner" is a term that has no meaning, or at least doesn't hold this meaning, in the context of what's stated.  Rather, for much of the period looked at, let's say from 1880 to approximately 1980, the most common living arrangement was to live with a spouse, not a "romantic partner".  The fact that we have to use the term "romantic partner" is part of the big story here. And that a "romantic partner" has evolved in the past two decades or so from a type of illicit relationship into a second type of common law marriage is significant, but seemingly missed.

Indeed, the whole use of the term "partner" is both absurd, really, and rather Orwellian.  In practical terms, it's come to really mean common law spouse, whether or not the couples are married, as marriage is a natural institution and the societal acceptance of a a type of marriage without a ceremony has in fact altered what was for a while a counter cultural act into simply the same old institution but without the legal benefits, or many of them, that the institutional structure for marriage confers.

Even the terms husband and wife, an spouse, demonstrate that.  "Wife", as a word, derives from an old Germanic word meaning "woman".  Originally a term that translates as the modern Housewife was the more common for what we now refer to as a wife, as a House Woman for a spouse meant more sense that just Woman.  Likewise, Husband derives from an Old Norse word meaning Householder.  Spouse comes to us from a circuitous route that takes us back to a Latin word for Betrothed, which derives from a Latin word for Promise. So, Spouses are "promised", a way of referring to the relationship to the betrothed that still exists today.

Anyhow, "partners" are those engaged in a business relationship from  which they each drive a benefit and bear a burden. How romantic.  The reduction of these relationships from illicit ones to quasi legal ones borrows from teh concept of business partners, and not too surprisingly these quasi marriages suffer conceptually from that reduction.  And I hate it when the PC, as is so common now, chooses to address married couples as partners, or when some phrase sensitive person simply uses the term to refer to all relationships. This is how the term will eventually evolve to have the same meaning as spouse, thereby making it meaningless anyhow, however.

But let's not fool ourselves, the use of the term is a bit silly, and while the statistic tells us something, it has to be analyzed for content to really derive a meaning.

Carrying on, the analysis notes:

It’s worth noting that the overall share of young adults living with their parents was not at a record high in 2014. This arrangement peaked around 1940, when about 35% of the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds lived with mom and/or dad (compared with 32% in 2014). What has changed, instead, is the relative share adopting different ways of living in early adulthood, with the decline of romantic coupling pushing living at home to the top of a much less uniform list of living arrangements.

Ah, now this is interesting.  Contrary to the way that this news tends to be presented, it doesn't quite mean that everyone is now living at home at the same rate as the past.  Nor does that mean it was as high in 1880 as it was later.  We learn here that the last true year of the Great Depression in the United States, 1940, saw the peak of adult children living at home.  Now that's interesting.   And we also learn that this recently peaked again in 2014, and has declined slightly since then. Rather, what we also learn is that a decline in marriage, or whatever Pew must call it given the societal etymology problem earlier noted, has mean living at home has been pushed back up to a really high statistical significance, higher than any other living arrangement.

Let's look at it a bit closer:

Among young adults, living arrangements differ significantly by gender. For men ages 18 to 34, living at home with mom and/or dad has been the dominant living arrangement since 2009. In 2014, 28% of young men were living with a spouse or partner in their own home, while 35% were living in the home of their parent(s). For their part, young women are on the cusp of crossing over this threshold: They are still more likely to be living with a spouse or romantic partner (35%) than they are to be living with their parent(s) (29%). 

Now that is, I suspect, a real change from the past.  At one time, this would have been more common for women than men. That truly reflects a change in society over the past century, which we've addressed here before.

Pew attributes all of this to an increase in postponement of marriage and economic factors, which is no doubt correct. But how much of that, from what we look at on this blog, is actually a return to the historical norm, and what does that mean?

Earlier in this thread we looked at the Boomers, and frankly we were a bit hostile to them when we probably ought not to have been.  But what should stand out regarding them is that there is indeed a lot of Boomer Exceptionalism, if you will.  Leaving home, which the Boomers, in casual conversations, regard as a norm, or a right of passage, may instead simply be a statistical glitch applying mostly to them, and mostly reflecting American post war affluence.   If that's correct, what we're seeing now is the norm, not the exception, and that may mean we're returning to an economic regime that's more the historical norm than the current one, or rather the recent one.

If we step back what we would find, and indeed as we have discussed in other contexts before, is that prior to the introduction of domestic machinery, the living arrangements of the young were much different than they came to be in the 1945 to 2000 period.  As was noted in that thread:

The example of single men and women at the time is telling.  Young men in this era typically did two things when they were of working age, if not married. They lived at home, if they stayed where they were from, until they were married.  If they never married, they just kept living at home.  Presently there's a bit of a supposed mini crisis of adult children returning to their parent's homes, but if that is a new trend, it's only a return to a former condition, to a degree.  These men weren't exhibiting being tied to their mother's apron strings, they were acting in accordance with reality.  By staying home and contributing to the household, the things they couldn't do were being taken care of by their mothers and probably by their sisters.

The other common male option was to live in a boarding house.  Men who did that paid for these tasks to be taken care of as part of their lodging.  We don't have boarding houses much today, but they were common right through the 1940s.  Indeed, the soldiers' song still common in the 1940s, "Hard Tack and Bully Beef" is actually simply a variant of "There Is A Boarding House."

There is a boarding house, far, far away,
Where they have ham and eggs three times a day
O how them boarders yell
When they hear the dinner bell,
They give the landlord

Three times a day.

The fact that this was used as a soldiers song based on this says something about another young man's option.  We don't think of food and lodging being an incentive to joint the service today, but it provided one in part of that bygone era.  With the age old custom of soldiers' grousing, of course, the ham and eggs becomes hardtack and bully beef, with other sarcastic comments worked in.

Young man engaging in the dangerous endeavor of cooking dinner in an apartment over a Primus gas stove. These aren't meant for indoor use at all. 

Of course, some men took apartments in towns and simply ate out every day, or resorted to less than desirable means of cooking.  Even now, quite a few men engaged in heavy labor hit a working man's restaurant early in the day, and pack a lunch of some sort with them for lunch.  The point is, however, that for most working men, the conditions of the day didn't give a great number of options in terms of getting food cooked, clothing washed, etc., and still allow them to work.That work, that is the domestic work, fell to women, but not because of some societal conspiracy thought up by men so much as by necessity.  The were some female out of the house occupations, as noted, but they were generally few, and the women who occupied them tended to be just as oppressed by the needs of every day life as men.  When you look at old advertisements that seem quaint or even a bit odd now, in which some poor young woman is depicted as being in desperate straits as she's in her late 20s and not married, it should be kept in mind that for most women getting married did indeed improve their lot in life as they'd be taking care of their own household, rather than be auxiliary to somebody else s.

This discussed living at home and other living arrangements in a different context.  It's still illustrative of something, even in our much different domestic machinery and economic (maybe) regime today.   Boiled down to its essence, prior to World War Two, and for some time after it, young men and women generally lived at home until they married for reasons that had, in essence, something to do with resources, until they married.  And now, in 2016, this is becoming the norm again for the young. They're living at home until they marry or enter into what is effectively a species of common law marriage.

Now, that may be the condition we're observing, but why?

In order to answer that, we probably have to look at the conditions that reflected the prior arrangement.  We basically have done that above.  But looked at another way, what we find is that conditions and resources made this the most practical, and in some circumstances the only practical, living arrangement.  And maybe, in looking at this, we out to step out of location and take a look at Europe of the same period.

Now, that may seem odd, but the reason that may be illustrative is that we see the same thing in Europe, but it persisted.  Indeed, in some situation the prevalence of adult children living at home is so pronounced that it continues on after those children have married.  Indeed, that's  the norm with farm families.

Now, that is also the norm in American agricultural families as well, but in Europe the norm is and was for everyone to live n hte same house.  Indeed, it's typical to have three generations all living in the same house, with their relative position in the family determined by their location withing the house.  Simply put, in a densely packed region, the resources for individual living simply do not exist.

The US, of course, is a big country, but something that's been missed over the last several decades is that the American tendency to simply assume that the American geography is ever expandable so as to keep the conditions in the country ever the same are simply wrong, and that has expressed itself in housing values.  Americans, unlike many Europeans, tend to aim towards owning their own houses (in some European countries that's not the norm, nor even the general desire) but they are becoming increasingly un-affordable. This tends to cause housing "bubbles" of course, as much of hte current pricing really isn't very realistic, but it also reflects a situation in which moving up into a house is no longer as easy as once was, although there has always been a sector of the economy for which this hasn't been easy at all.

And that carries on to rent.  What used to be fairly easy for a lot of people is to move on and into a rental unit. But now, apartments are blisteringly expensive in many regions.  Indeed, Denver Colorado prides itself on its ever expanding population while continually noting that its rental rates are sky high and going higher.  No wonder.

In such a situation living outside the home is simply impossible for many young people.  It might be once they marry, as two incomes is now the American married rule, but it might not be at that.  A good friend of mine, for example, recently related to me that his married son and his daughter in law are living with him while they save money for a house.  Here we see a return to a very, very old norm, and the re-establishment of the European norm in the US.  This isn't uncommon.

Also worth noting is that the average age of marriages is rising, sort of.  Frankly, this figure is complicated by much of what I've noted above.  If the reality of common law marriages, no matter what htey are termed, are considered, this may actually not be nearly as true, but because of the transitory nature of quite a few such arrangements, which effectively has introduced something akin to common law divorce into the picture, that's a risky assumption.  Anyhow, what is often noted is that Americans are "postponing" marriage until their "careers are established".

Or maybe they are not.

To some extent this is undoubtedly true. But at the same time for quite a few American ethnicities, this isn't true.  So we have the truly peculiar fact that while it is true that "people married younger" and in some instances very young, there's a strong demographic element to it that ran the other way.  This is particular true with some ethnicities such as the American Irish, which did not marry young at all.  Men tended as a rule to be in their early 30s and women in their late 20s, both in Ireland and the United States, amongst people with an Irish Catholic background.  The simple reason was economic.  Men couldn't afford to marry any younger, as a rule. And they nearly always lived at home until they did.  Indeed, the fairly legendary devotion of Irish and Irish American men to their mothers is no doubt a partial product of this, with it being the case that they frequently had lived well into their adulthood in their parents homes providing support while they saved to go out on their own. Boomers who find their adult children now staying at home are, in part, experiencing the exact same thing, as the American economy which allowed an 18 year old high school graduate to go out and find good work is dead.

Indeed, I've experienced, in one fashion or another, nearly all of this, and the reaction to it, in one fashion or another.  My own parents were in their early 30s when they married and my half Irish, half German father resumed living at home when he returned from university, and then Air Force service, and lived there until he met and married my mother.  My mother, on the other hand, had struck out adventurously on her own in her early 20s, but her family bonds were incredibly strong right up until her death.  When I first went to school, I stayed here in town and continued to live in my parents home. When I came back from law school, I moved back in for what I thought was going to be a brief stay, but when my father fell very ill, I stayed. I stayed on after he died out of loyalty to my mother, and then left home when I married.  So I guess I was a pioneer in the demographic trend.  Right now, my 18 year old son is living here at home, but he intends to rent my mother's old house while attending college, a sort of price supported living arrangement which recalls for me the old boarding house arrangement to some degree.

It's interesting to see how Boomers and others react to this.  The old Boomers, strongly influenced by a culture which really emphasized that they should move out and move on, tend to not like the idea of anyone staying on locally, if they didn't.  Missed in that is the fact that their own parents who left home early often had done so due to war, a unique situation, which made those people adults really quickly.  In contrast, the pushing out of the fledglings in the new economy, and culture that was at least somewhat damaged in the wake of Boomer excess, isn't nearly as good.  The foundering of Millennials has become legendary, but then no wonder really.

Again, while making resort to movies for examples is something a person has to do with caution, movies here can show us how societal views have changed on this topic, and living conditions have changed, if we consider what they accidentally depict about their own eras in these regards.  Its' sort of an interesting exercise.

Take again the film Marty.  Released in 1955, the Academy Award winning film presents a "small story" concerning the life of a blue collar, big city, bachelor.  Some might define the film in terms of presenting a "romance", but if it does, it's the most unromantic romance every filmed.  The interesting thing here, however, is that the aging bachelor, plaid by Ernest Borgnine, who was then in his late 30s, is shown living in an apartment with his mother as an important, but routine, detail of the film.  Indeed, during the film his aunt moves from another, married, son's house into the same apartment (while cast in ethnic terms, the same situation is explored, with many of the same movie themes, in the the 1991 film Only The Lonely, one of John Candy's best films).  Similar living arrangements are shown in the much loved film Its A Wonderful Life (1946) and the legendary post war film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).   The point is that in all of these films unmarried men and women living with their parents is shown as common and expected, requiring no explanation.

Take in contrast a film like Failure To Launch (2006) in which the protagonist, played by Matthew McConaughey, is depicted as "still" living at home.  McConaughey was 37 years old, one year old than Borgnine at the time Borgnine filmed Marty, and yet this living relationship is depicted as comedic and abnormal.  It probably seems less so in 2006 than it does now in 2016.

So, I suppose, we are left with the question of what all of this means.  And what it seems to mean is really two things.  The post war period in which everything about the United States seemed exceptional really was, and for various reason the conditions that prevailed prior to it, in a lot of ways, are back.  And if that's true, perhaps what Pew is calling the "Modern Era", isn't.

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