Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

The last garden I put in, 2017.

Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago.

The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

I've touched on this here in the past, but one thing that's very much different from our current, refrigerated, freezer, grocery store frozen food, transportation directly from Mexico, world, is the way we eat.

And by that I don't mean the latest wacky food fetish (you know, don't eat that, eat this, no don't, no do, um,. . . ).

No, I mean that it varied seasonally, by necessity.  And beyond that the seasons dictated to a certain extent what you ate at all.

On prior entries here you'll find photographs of  grocery stores with signs painted on them noting that they "bought vegetables".  Indeed, at the courthouse in Sheridan Wyoming there's a great photograph of downtown Sheridan in its early days with a store painted on its side with that it "buys and sells" vegetables.  I.e, it was doing the locavore thing by necessity.

Indeed, that local produce history, dimly remembered and somewhat inaccurately recalled, is one of the founding mythic memories of the Locavore movement, that movement which, as an environmental ethos, demands that you "eat local".

Pueblo Indian, 1890, living the lifestyle I would, were it an option.

I'm not dissing this.  Indeed, in my imaginary world in which I get to live just the way I'd want to, I'd be one of those guys who ate local as much as possible.  I'd put in a big garden every year and for meat I'd eat the fish, fowl and game animals I shot during the year.  Yes, I'd go full 1719 if I had the option.

Shoot, I might even brew my own beer.

My wife, who doesn't want to live in 1719, and prefers 2019, keeps this from occurring, although in years past I have put in a big garden (I'm on year two right now of a well failure I haven't addressed) and as we raise beef, we have a lot of grass fed beef that appears on our table.  But the idea remains attractive.

Anyhow, one thing about having in the past having sort of lived that lifestyle, first by necessity and then by design, and because I'm a student of history as well as everything else, I know that the concept of "eating local" isn't quite what a person might suspect, if they really apply it.

That's because you have to eat local, based on where you live.

"Modern Street Market", 1920s.

And that's at least partially what almost everyone did, in varying degrees, up until the 1950s.

Put another way, people had fresh vegetables in the summer and fall, as that's when they were available.

Let's consider the humble cabbage.

Cabbage probably isn't your favorite vegetable (I like cabbage, but my wife really dislikes it).  But cabbage doesn't keep all winter.  Planted in the spring, it's ready to eat about 80 days later. So that makes it available sometime in late spring or early summer depending up where you live.  And a lot of places it would be available all summer long into the fall.  But once it started to frost, that would be it.

So here, if you planted it, it would be first available in June, and last in September.  That's it.

You can't keep it after that.

And this would be true of most fresh vegetables.  You'd have them when they first matured.  If they are a crop like cabbage, lettuce or spinach that you can keep growing, you'd have them all summer.  If they were a crop like corn, peas, green beans or peppers, they'd be ready and fresh just once.  In some places, you'd get a second crop in, in others, not.

Well what about after that?

Just truck it in, right?

Well, not so much.

In 1919 the road system, as we've seen, did not allow for transcontinental transportation of fresh produce.  Indeed, an irony of the road system in the country is that it had deteriorated as the railroad system was so good.

Of course that would mean that shipping by rail was an option.  It had certainly been done for meat, and beer, in refrigerated rail cars dating back to the mid 19th Century.  I can find no evidence, however, that it was done with vegetables, and there's probably reasons for that.

If it was done, it was apparently not done much, but I'll take correction on that.

So no vegetables in the winter?

No, that was not the case at all.  It's just that they were not, as the item noted, "fresh".

1918 poster urging people to turn their backyards into gardens.

For one thing, canning was already a thing, both commercial canning, which was common, and home canning, which was also common. So you could buy canned vegetables all year around.  And this time of year thousands of people. . . mostly women, were busy canning their own garden produce.

Poster urging home canning from World War One.

The process for canning had been worked out in the mid 1800s, and it spread fairly quickly, in part due to armies picking it up to feed their troops in the big wars of the 19th Century.  One thing armies did, I'd note, is to can meat as well, in British parlance "potted meat", which few average people do, but the mother of my father in law did in fact do just that, the only individual person I've ever known to do that.

Famine was a real specter in World War One and World War Two. This Second World War urged home canning to combat it.

I'll be frank that home canning scares me and my family never did it, for which I'm thankful.  I'm not afraid of canned anything at the store, and I'm rather fond of some canned items, but home canning always makes me a bit queasy.  Too many stories, perhaps, that I heard as a child.  Anyhow, home canning was still widely practiced when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, again all by women.  I know very few people who do it now.

This World War Two era poster urged growing more at home and canning.

My parents always froze some of their garden crop.  But this wasn't an option for people a century ago.  People didn't have home freezers like so many do now.  For that matter, the overwhelming majority of people had an ice box.  Refrigerators weren't a common thing at the time.

Exceptionally nice ice box.  Most homes didn't have one this large or elaborate.

We've dealt with this before, but ice boxes kept stuff cool, not frozen, and had to be regularly replenished with ice for that purpose.  People were still using ice boxes into the 1950s although their days were rapidly waning then.  At any rate, suffice it to say, if you could only keep things cool at home, you clearly had no means of keeping things frozen. No frozen vegetables at any time of the year in 1919.

Some vegetables keep a long time, however, if kept correctly.  Potatoes, for example, keep a really long time.  I've kept potatoes that were harvested in September or October all the way through until late February or March, when I was nearly ready to plant the next crop.  

That emphasizes why a crop like potatoes was such a big deal at one time.  They keep.  And a potato that's kept isn't much different in February, if kept properly, than it was in October.  "Meat and potatoes" weren't a staple as people lacked imagination or something.  You could have potatoes with your meat pretty much all year long.  And there's a few other crops in this category.

Additionally, some crops dry well. Beans are one, and so do peas.  Cowpeas (Cow Peas) were an 18th Century staple.  You probably know them by the name "Black Eyed Peas". Still a popular food in the United States, particularly  the South, they are a food staple in some parts of the world.

Other legumes and beans keep dried really readily as well.  The old jokes you hear associated with cowboys and soldiers about repeatedly eating beans are based on the fact that they keep and transport readily.  If you are on the trail, flour and beans are easy keepers. So "biscuits and beans" and "bacon and beans" would have been common foods out of necessity.

So during the summer you'd eat fresh heart vegetables, right?

Well, yes.  At least they were available during the summer most places.  If you were far enough south, they'd be available all year long.

But that's only part of the story.

The Fall 1919 Term of the United States Supreme Court Commences

Theoretically this blog posts something of a legal nature every Monday.

Theoretically.

Well, if we're to do that, we should note that the Supreme Court goes into session today.

This session, moreover, promises to be a big one.

Here's something in the offering.

1.  In New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York the court will consider whether New York's ban on transporting a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range is Constitutional.

Prediction:  My prediction is the Court will say that ban is not Constitutional. The bigger question is whether the Court will go further and rule on how much of a right to carry there is.  I'd expect a 5 to 4 decision on  this one.  My overall prediction is that the Court will rule that a right to carry is part and parcel of a right to keep, and state that the New York law was over broad, but not go further than that.  It'll hint that "reasonable restrictions" are valid, but not say what they are.

2.  In a case on abortion the court will look at whether a Louisiana law that restricts abortion clinics is unconstitutional.

Frankly, Roe v. Wade is widely, if quietly, regarded as defunct in the legal community and pretty much regarded as a poor job of jurisprudence at that.  Almost everyone believes that its due to be worked over and the question is whether it will simply be reversed.  The better legal views, irrespective of political view point, is that it should be, and only politics has kept that from happening.

Prediction:  In this case, that could happen and the Court will strike down Roe v. Wade.  My guess is that it will, and this issue will now go back to the states.

Ironically, while this will cause a howl in the left, the fact that the Court's decision in Obergefell was an item of judicial legislation will operate to mute that to some degree.  In Obergefell the Court clearly overstepped its judicial bounds in order to leap ahead of a perceived societal direction and took over a legislative role.  In returning something to the legislature it will be going in the opposite direction and those who would complain about that are hampered in complaining too much, as that becomes an argument of how much you ultimately think people should decide about their own states laws.

This will be a 5 to 4 decision.

3. Separation of church and state.  This session the court will take up the issue of payments to religious schools in the form of various types of monetary aid.

Apparently this is banned by quite a few state constitutions so an issue that will be presented to the courts is whether or not a state can enact such a ban.  It strikes me that it can, but some pundits are opining that this is likely to be struck down by the Court as a species of discrimination based on religion.

Prediction:  I doubt that will occur, frankly.  Particularly in a year in which the Court is going to take up guns and abortion.  I just don't see it weakening its street cred by going one further with a case on the topic of the establishment clause.

Having said that, nearly everyone agrees that the current interpretation of the establishment clause is inconsistent with the original, as incorporated, goal, which was to keep the government from following the path of the English Crown and establishing a state religion.  While that was clearly the original purpose, the Court long ago modified that interpretation substantially and stare decisis has operated in a much different manner.  I don't see the Court really upending that much of the current law here.

This will probably be something like a 7 to 2 decision, but might be unanimous.

4.  Obergefell is mentioned above and this session the Court will take up the question of whether an employee can be fired because the employee is a homosexual.

Prediction:  Pundits seem to think that this will be a difficult decision for the Court but I don't think it will be. The Court isn't going to overrule Obergefell with this decision, which it would nearly have to not to find that firing a person for this reason is Unconstitutional.  I'd expect a unanimous decision holding that a person cannot be so fired.

It won't go further than that, however, and reach an opinion on the same issue in regards to thinks like transgender employees.

5.  The Electoral College.  The Court will take up the question whether states can bind members of the electoral college to vote the results of their state's primaries, etc.

Prediction:  This issue has never been in front of the Court before.  My guess is that while such laws make instinctive sense, the Court isn't going to allow states to interfere with the Federal election system in this fashion and hold such laws Unconstitutional.  I'd expect something like a 6 to 3 decision.

6.  Immigration.  There are apparently a variety of immigration cases before the Court.  I don't know the details of them, but these will be hard fought cases.

Prediction:  Frankly much of the argument on these cases will be outside the Constitution. For that reason, I expect the Court to largely rule, 5 to 4, that the Executive's authority here is vast and the President largely has a free hand as to his policies in this area.

7.  Impeachment?  The Court probably hopes not, but if this occurs, the Court may have to end up getting involved.

Prediction:  It'll do everything possible not to get involved.

October 7, 1919. The White Sox Rally?

The Sox suddenly were back in the game on this October 7, 1919 game of the World Series.

Dicky Kerr was pitching again, the Sox's did well in a ten inning game.

On this same day, news hit the state of the impending start of a bit air race scheduled for this very week.  The race was sponsored by the Army Air Corps and was scheduled to commence on October 8.

In other news, the Germans, whom had been kept at first in the Baltic states by the Allies, but who had become very involved in the conflicts there, were being invited to leave.  And a terrible flood hit a small town in Colorado.

Cardinal Mercier continued his tour of Belgium, raising funds for the restoration of the Library at Leuven.  On this day, he spoke at Columbia.

In Czechoslovakia, the parliament was in session.

Confusion regarding the foundations of the law.

The too rapid growth of practice without a clear and solid theoretical foundation has its most serious consequences in the confusion regarding the very foundations of law.

Burke

The Aerodrome: Lt. Austin's attempted flight from the Canal Zone to Washington D. C., October 6, 1919.

The Aerodrome: Lt. Austin's attempted flight from the Canal Zone ...

Lt. Austin's attempted flight from the Canal Zone to Washington D. C., October 6, 1919.

October 6, 1919 Reds Win Again, Red Summer Continues On

Cincinnati's Hod Eller.

The World Series resumed in Chicago after a day's delay due to rain.  By this time, additional gambling money had been distributed to the Chicago players in the plot.

In spite of that, both teams played well and the Reds won by only one hit.  Cincinnati's Hod Eller pitched so well that he achieved a record for the most batters struck out in a row that was not tied until 1966, and has not been surpassed.  Of course, the record is marred by the history of this Series.

The headlines were also full of news of race riots that were raging throughout much of the country. The Red Summer was continuing on into the fall.

And Woodrow Wilson was reporting to be recovering.

Secretary of Labor Wilson, no relation to the President, spoke at the opening day of a labor conference that had been called by the President.

Cardinal Mercier of Belgium was touring the United States.

Daylight savings ended on this day in 1919.

Saint Catherine Hotel, Avalon California.  October 6, 1919.

If Labor Day seems like the official end of American summer, perhaps the end of Daylight Savings Time feels like the hard set of American fall.  Perhaps that's what caused the Gasoline Alley gang to seek out drinks, even if only soft drinks were now in the offering due to Prohibition.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Christ Lutheran Church, Rawlins Wyoming

Churches of the West: Christ Lutheran Church, Rawlins Wyoming:

Christ Lutheran Church, Rawlins Wyoming

This is Christ Lutheran Church in Rawlins, Wyoming.

I don't know any of the details of this church, other than it rather obviously has modern architecture.

Best posts of the week of September 29, 2019

The best posts of September 29, 2019

The Didache

It's that season again. . .

A Simple Solution To Internal Party Strife

Guns & Ammo & Legislation & Manufacturing

And nothing is working: Was Keeping the old ones. . .

Gluten and the American diet. A blog mirror rambling journey.

The 2020 Election, Part 3

1919 World Series,

Is it time to stop flying the old ones? The B-17 Nine-0-Nine Crashes

Mixed news for coal. .. and a glance at Glenrock.

Mixed news for coal. .. and a glance at Glenrock.

Wyoming's largest utility to retire majority of coal-fired power plant units by 2030

Wind Farm north of Glenrock as viewed from Muddy Mountain south of Casper.

This includes units at Dave Johnson, outside of Glenrock.

At the same time, the sale of mines to a Navajo corporation has been given the go ahead in spite of some questioning by members of the Navajo nation on whether the purchase is a good idea.

The reason that  might be questioned is because a person might legitimately look at the trend line for coal and not be too optimistic about it.  The closure of coal fired electrical generation units right withing the state really puts that into focus. Most of the coal  mined in Wyoming goes elsewhere, but if generating units are being closed down in the state, where transportation costs are obviously the lowest, there's reasons to be pessimistic about coal's future in general.  Particularly when the owners of one of those plants announced one of the units was being converted to natural gas.

Glenrock may be in the very epicenter of what we're seeing in terms of changing times and reflective of them.

I like Glenrock.

Indeed, in an odd tidbit, I guess, my wife and I spent our first night as a married couple in Glenrock where we stayed at the Hotel Higgins.

The little Converse County town between Casper and Douglas was originally Deer Creek Station, an Army post along the Oregon Trail.  It shares that sort of history with Casper, which of course was the site of at least three "stations" during the 1860s, and which is bordered on both sides, if you include the neighboring communities, by the locations of former Oregon Trail bridges.  In being an Oregon Trail place marker, Glenrock also shares a common history with Casper, as it was a marked place on the trail.  A small batholith there was the "rock in the Glen".

Glenrock as a town is at least as old as Casper, or at least I suspect it to be.  It supported ranching in the area, when transportation was much more primitive, and was an established compact town prior to World War One.  Oil was discovered between Casper and Glenrock in 1913 and the Big Muddy field was in development by 1916, fueling the refineries in Casper.  A refinery was built in Glenrock in 1917 to take advantage of the production which was closer to Glenrock than to Casper.

My father took this photograph of sheep in a pen, but I don't have any of the other details and can't quite tell where it is. It's clearly on a railroad, and the building in the background makes me suspect that it's near Glenrock, but I don't know for sure.

Following that, like all of Central Wyoming, Glenrock was tied to the oil and gas industry, and it has been ever since. But at some later point, and I don't actually know when, the major Dave Johnston Power Plant was built there.

Dave Johnston borders the North Platte River and is just a few miles away from a coal bed that at one time fueled it.  It became the economic hub of the town for decades.  It's been there my entire life and its so much in the background that its one of those things I don't ever think of as having not been there.  At least one of my earliest memories involves me going with my father to hunt east of Dave Johnston when I was no more than five.  My father's 1956 Chevrolet truck became stuck and we started to walk out, but a railroad crew stopped and pulled us out before we had to walk too far.  I recall my father was impressed that I hadn't been worried by the event.

St. Louis Catholic Church in Glenrock.

During the 1970s and 1980s Dave Johnston was a mock target for the Strategic Air Command, and occasionally you could see B-52 bombers flying low over it, using it as a mock Soviet target.  And during winter months you always take note of the plants steam rising up from a distance, a marker that you are near Casper if you are heading that way, or not far from Douglas if you are going in the other direction.

For many years now, the workforce at  Dave Johnston has been declining, and the town has been hurting as a result.  During  the oil boom of the 2000s the town picked up in economic activity as oil and gas workers passed through it.  Some lived there, but  many more were temporary residents or Casper residents, pulling off of the Interstate Highway to access the oilfield north of town.  An effort to boost the local agricultural community by putting in a sale barn failed, as modern transportation, perhaps, continued to give Riverton and Torrington, the established barns, the regional advantage.

And as wind has been coming in, the same is true.  Now, when you go by Glenrock, you not only see the massive coal fired power plant steaming just east outside of town, but massive wind turbines turning north of town.  If you take the highway out of the town, you run right past them on the highway.

Where this leads is yet to be seen. Converse County is having a major oil boom right now.  And it has a lot of wind turbine construction going on at the same time. The ranches in the area remain, but the town has also seen, very slowly, a unique retirement phenomenon in which Casperites retire there, wanting to stay in the region but tired of Casper's growth.  No fewer than three of the men I've served with in the National Guard have settled their in retirement, with two in Glenrock.

Glenrock was a way station on the Oregon Trail. Then a small ranching town.  Then an oil and gas town, and a power company town.  Where it's headed can't be known, but through Wyoming's boom and busts, it's remained remarkably viable, if not always fully well, compared to many other Wyoming communities.  It likely will weather the storms it seems to be facing fairly well.

October 5, 1919. No World Series Update?

Nope.

The game was called due to rain.

Readers of morning papers would still find themselves reading about the World Series which, just like today, would have been the news of the prior day.  This was the era, of course, if evening and morning newspapers, with the evening ones, now that wire services existed, reporting on the news of that day.  Many readers of this paper, therefore, would have already read about the fourth game in yesterday's evening paper.

The Casper Herald was unusual for a Wyoming paper at the time in that their was a Sunday edition.  Most Wyoming papers took Sunday completely off.

Grim news continued to come from the Mexican border and appear on the front page, but for some reason now war with Mexico seemed a lot less likely than it had previously seemed. 

A sort of war, however, seemed to be raging in a lot of American cities.

And the President was reported to be improving.  The conspiracy of silence around his real condition had very much set in.

Blog Mirror: Today in World War II History—October 4, 1944

Linked in due to the item on Al Smith:

Today in World War II History—October 4, 1944

POSTED: Friday, October 4, 2019 by Sarah Sundin

I know I must sound like a broke record on this, but I've commented on the time below.

I'm 56 years old, a mere whippersnapper compared to the American front runners.  And I'm in good health.

Are you or were you as spry at 56 as you were at 46?

The Aerodrome: Is it time to stop flying the old ones? The B-17 N-O-Nine Crashes

The Aerodrome: Is it time to stop flying the old ones? The B-17 N...:

Is it time to stop flying the old ones? The B-17 Nine-0-Nine Crashes

I've been in quite a few B-17s and ridden on one.  If you go back and look through the posts here you'll find photographs of them.



Two of those B-17s were the Nine 0 Nine and the Liberty Belle.

The Nine 0 Nine.

Both are now gone.*  The Nine O Nine crashed this week at a demonstration, killing ten people including some who had paid to ride in the old classic bomber.



I'm generally not inclined to tell people what to do with their own property. That's not something that squares with my own world view,  nor with what we might generally call "American Values", although increasingly there are plenty of Americans who are ready to tell other Americans exactly what they can and cannot do with all sorts of things.  And I'm not of the view that merely because something is old, it shouldn't be used.  I use plenty of old things myself, including driving on occasion an old truck that probably some feel shouldn't be driven due to its age.

Nine O Nine.

But few of us have something that's an historical treasure.  Once all of the flyable models of any one aircraft are done for, and the law of averages alone will bring that day upon us, more likely than not, there are none left and the history associated with them is gone as well.



B-17s weren't made to fly for 70 years.



Indeed, nothing made in the 30s or 40s that flew or rolled was.  Simply nothing was expected to last that long.

While most B-17s were made in the 1940s, during World War Two, the plane's first flight was in 1935.  In 1935 when the plane first flew flight itself was only 32 years in existence.  That's over 80 years ago now, and if we look back the other way, eighty years prior, people were not only not flying, they weren't driving either.



Trains didn't last for eighty years.  Wagons certainly didn't.  Automobiles, when they first came out, tended to be used up very quickly, in spite of their vast expense.  And airplanes cycled through generations incredibly quickly.

View from the now gone Liberty Belle.

The first "heavy" bombers came into existence during World War One, but just as with fighter aircraft, the bombers of mid war were already obsolete by the end of the war.  The first U.S. bombers to have the "B" designation (fighters had a "P" designation, for "pursuit") came into service in the 1920s and exited service nearly as quickly as they entered.  The fact that the U.S. Army Air Corps was up to the number "17" with the B-17 shows us how very quickly they cycled through the service.



The heavy aircraft that came into military service with the US largely made it through World War Two.  None the less, there's no doubt that aircraft like the B-17 and the B-18 were obsolescent by the time World War Two started, already primitive in comparison to aircraft like the B-24. They were kept in production not because they were first rate modern aircraft at that time, but because it was necessary.  Save for odd uses, as soon as the war was over, they were phased out of service. For that matter, the aircraft that made them obsolescent were already obsolescent themselves. In terms of heavy bombers, which were really something that only the United States and the United Kingdom fielded, the world had gone from the aircraft of the mid 1930s, to the those of the late 30s and early 40s, to the B-29, which made them all obsolete.  And the B-29 would only remain a first rate bomber until the late 1940s when jet powered bombers made their appearance. The B-36 had its first flight in 1946. The B-47 in 1947.  The B-52 in 1952.

The B-52 is still in Air Force use, and will be for the foreseeable future.  It will be, most likely, the first military aircraft to see 100 years of continual use.  But it was built in a completely different era.  Vastly more expensive than the B-17, which entered service less than 20 years prior to the B-52, it was designed to be flown by men who would have college educations and who were already use to a technical world. The B-17 was designed to be flown by farm boys who were used to tractors and made the Model A.



There's no earthly way that the designers and builders of the B-17 imagined them flying for 70 to 80 years.  Chances are, they didn't see them flying for more than ten.  During World War Two, those savvy to aircraft development didn't see a future for aircraft like the B-17 beyond the end of the war and, had they been quietly asked, would have already regarded it as obsolete.  It only had to offer its crew a chance of living through their tour.



And the fact that it did offer such a chance is why there remain any around today. They were rugged.



But they weren't built to fly forever.  And the flying ones will not.  The time has come to let them rest, while there are still any left that are capable of flight.



That is sad.  The fact that they still fly from town to town allows people to see them who would otherwise never get the chance.  But the end conclusion to continuing to allow them to fly seems evident.

_______________________________________________________________________________



To add to this sad tale, I've also been in an HE-111 that crashed later.  And I've viewed a P-51 which did.

October 4, 1919. Sox down again.

Cicotte was pitching again, so the results were somewhat predictable.  Having said that, he pitched a better game than his first as he was determined not to look so bad as he had in the first.  Accordingly, for much of the game he played well, and then made a couple of amateur errors, on purpose, that threw the game.

This was showing that, to a degree, it was hard for good players to throw a game and have it look like it hadn't been thrown.

The headlines were otherwise full of strife and concern.  Labor riots and race riots continued to sweep the nation and labor problems were also getting into the headlines from the United Kingdom.

President Wilson seemed to be improving, however.

October 3, 1919. News on Wilson's condition breaks. White Sox win game three.

If you read about it today, you'll be left with the impression that the public was kept completely in the dark about President Wilson's condition.

But as you can see from headlines of the time, this simply wasn't the case.

The Cheyenne State Leader lead with Wilson's condition, although the World Series had pride of place as well.  Shocking news came out of Mexico as well in this morning edition newspaper.

By the end of the day on October 3, the papers were reporting Wilson's condition as "grave".  Grave meant, and everyone knew it, near death.

The Wyoming State Tribune reported on Wilson's troubling condition and baseball, but also noted that it had snowed 3" in Casper.

Indeed, his family had been summoned, which was usually done in anticipation of death.

Baseball and Wilson's condition were the big headlines, but a terrible train accident at Orin Junction had occurred as well.

And of course, a request for a visit by a major foreign dignitary had to be refused.

Even the morning papers hadn't been optimistic.

And all this was occurring in a week where the news was already tense.  The Versailles Treaty was in trouble in the Senate, and race riots were occurring in the South and Midwest.

Pennsylvania Avenue, October 3, 1919.

Baseball was also occurring, of course, and while we now know what was happening, people following the game, except for a few savvy reporters who were suspicious, did not.  Adding to the delusion that all was well, the White Sox beat the Reds on their home ground of Chicago in game three of the 1919 World Series.

Honest player, Dick Kerr.

Game 3 may be emblematic of how messed up the White Sox were as a team.  The game was pitched by rookie Dickie Kerr, who was not in the plot.  This contributed to the plot.  Adding to that, however, most of the plotters hadn't been paid and when you don't pay people in a plot, they loose their allegiance to it.  Kerr played a great game and even those in the plot played good ones.

A former baseball player, Bill Burns, who had some still unclear role in the plot, suffered due to the honest play and change of hearts, temporary though they may have been, in this game, as he bet all he had figuring the fix was in.  It left him broke, a fate he deserved.

Shades of 1919. . . .Voice of America: Stand Up And Be Counted: Ethnic Poles In Belarus Gear Up For Census

Stand Up And Be Counted: Ethnic Poles In Belarus Gear Up For Census

Gluten and the American diet. A blog mirror rambling journey.

Wheat field, Walla Walla Washington, 1941.

This interesting item appeared on the always interesting A Hundred Years Ago blog just recently:

1919 Farwell & Rhines Gluten Flour Advertisement

As folks here know, I'll riff off of the excellent blog A Hundred Years Ago from time to time. When I do, I usually have already posted on the thread there and I usually post a link to my item here, if I build one based on one of the many interesting topics there.

In this case, I didn't comment and I'm not going to post a link back, as I want to avoid unintentionally offending, which would be easy to do with this post.

That's because I'm a "Gluten Skeptic", if you will, and somebody there has already noted in a comment to this post that they've had to give up foods with gluten.  I'm frankly of the opinion that most people who give up foods with gluten don't need to, just as I'm of the opinion that about 90% of our modern "must give up" food fads is not only a fad, it's part of the remaining Puritan DNA in our American culture.*  If we're not suffering we're just not living right.

Before we look at this, what the heck is gluten anyway?  Well, here's a snipped from an article in Scientific American:

Gluten is a protein found in many grains, including wheat, rye and barley. It's found in most breads, cereals, pastas and many processed foods, according to WebMD. People who have a condition called celiac disease develop an immune reaction to gluten that damages the intestine, and so they need to avoid the protein. About 1 percent of the population has celiac disease.

Wait a minute. . . not only do we now know what gluten is, but did that say 1% of the population has celiac disease?

Yes it did.

1%.

Now, in a country that is as populated as the United States is, 1% is not a small number.  It'd mean something like 3,600,000 people.  That's a lot.

But if you go through the store and read the articles and talk to people who really follow the latest trends in things, you'd be left with the impression that something like 30% of the population is wheat intolerant now, and that's just flat out bull.

The headline of that article was, by the way, the following:

Most People Shouldn't Eat Gluten-Free

Gluten-free products made with refined grains can be low in fiber, vitamins and minerals

Yup, most people ought to knock that off.

The article further noted:

For most other people, a gluten-free diet won't provide a benefit, said Katherine Tallmadge, a dietitian and the author of "Diet Simple" (LifeLine Press, 2011). What's more, people who unnecessarily shun gluten may do so at the expense of their health, Tallmadge said.

This article, I'd note, is kind.  I've seen others that just flat out state that most of the people who are dead set convinced they have some sort of intolerance to gluten are just flat out wrong.

While I'll not go into it, I'll also note that there's some speculation why we've arrived at a point where this is a concern when it wasn't previously.  If it hasn't always been the case that 1% of the population has been so afflicted, then there's something going on. And nearly anyone over 30 years of age can recall a time when there was no concern in this area whatsoever. That would suggest that this is a disease, for those who actually have it that has come on in very modern times. Why?

The same has been noted for allergies, I'll note.  The percentage of the population that suffers from allergies is higher today than at any time in t he past, and I'm in that group.  Why?

In my case, I'm certain its genetic.  I didn't lead a sheltered life indoors as a kid prior to my developing asthma, and my mother didn't douse the house with more anti biologic agents than are used in a biological weapons lab like most modern mothers seem to do (Americans are insanely germ phobic).  It's in my DNA, darn it.  And so is the case, no doubt for most of those with celiac disease. 

But if more people than the historical norm are developing this condition otherwise. . . something is going on.

Humans have eaten grains, we now know, back to the neolithic age.  For years and years archaeologists and anthropologists used to have the nonsensical idea, which a lot of them still advance, that there were hunters and gathers and then suddenly one day farmers sprang up and everyone moved to the farm.  That never made any sense and we now know that hunters and gatherers, in the regions friendly to grains, started cultivating it.  They did that for an extremely long, long time, before they settled on farms.  While that's another story, one we've already told, what that also tells us is that humans have been eating grains for a really long time, although not necessarily wheat for the whole time, but other grasses in addition to, or in place of, wheat.  Wheat has been cultivated, according to archaeologists from between 9,000 and 8,000 years ago, which means that in reality it's almost certainly been cultivated for 10,000 to 14,000 years.

It's never been grown everywhere, and that's important to note. The reason for this is that it's also fairly clear, but widely ignored, that individual human populations are evolved to eat certain foods more than others, or even where others are not. This is the entire basis of certain people being lactose intolerant. Cultures that have drank cow's milk for a long time are not lactose intolerant, as evolution operated against that condition.  Where cow's milk was not drunk, it wouldn't matter, and when the ancestors of people from those cultures encounter milk it can be unpleasant.

Mediterranean cultures have been growing wheat forever and it spread all over the grain growing regions of Europe in antiquity.  It was grown way out in the steppes, all over North Africa, as far north as Greenland, and into regions of Africa that are deserts and grow nothing today.  But that isn't everywhere.  That alone may explain the rise in gluten, which is in wheat of course, but also in rye and barely.  It isn't in rice, which is the other major grain spread all over the world.

But it isn't in simply everything either, and if its a much bigger problem now than it once was, there's a reason for that. The reason may not be there and it might not be a much bigger problem than it once was.  Or, if it is there, there's an explanation, but what is it?

One of the hypothesis that was advanced is that modern wheat flours had more gluten in them.  Indeed, the item noted above had been blended to triple the amount of gluten in the what in issue.  At least one study, however, has been skeptical of that explanation.

In response to the suggestion that an increase in the incidence of celiac disease might be attributable to an increase in the gluten content of wheat resulting from wheat breeding, a survey of data from the 20th and 21st centuries for the United States was carried out. The results do not support the likelihood that wheat breeding has increased the protein content (proportional to gluten content) of wheat in the United States. Possible roles for changes in the per capita consumption of wheat flour and the use of vital gluten as a food additive are discussed.

None of which gets back to the item originally linked in. . . or does it? 

A century ago, we find an advertisement, amazingly, for something with added gluten.  Why was that?

One thing is that it changed the consistency of bread, improving it.  It also boosted protein, but I don't know that this was the reason.  Indeed, I don't know what the real reason for really adding gluten was.

Quite a change from what we see today, of course, at the grocery store, where there are things you darned well know never had gluten in them, advertised as "gluten free".

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*The Puritan comment alone is likely to offend some and be cheered by others for the wrong reasons, but its meant sincerely.  One of the real offshoots of the Reformation was that certain strands of Protestant theology that rapidly developed contained a very strong sense of suffering and double predestination which provided no relief from it.  The Puritans, if recalled today positively for their "work ethic" and various virtues, were notable in this regard, although contrary to what people imagine, they weren't opposed to alcohol and they were very much not opposed to marital sex (something nearly completely forgotten about them).

This post doesn't deal with their theology in any meaningful sense, and it's not going to.  There are still those who fairly closely adhere to some variants of it, and this isn't intended to debate them. Rather, what it notes is that their early views and developed ones had a very strong influence on current cultural views, and likewise strains of thought developed during the Reformation continue to have an influence on European secular thought as well, even though those holding them would hardly recognize that and in fact would likely deny it.  A certain irony exists here, however, as the cliches of "Catholic guilt" and "Jewish guilt" are in fact largely wholesale myths, whereas the inherited need for suffering that springs to some degree from the Reformation isn't even really recognized.

The Puritans, whom we used to cite, and did cite up until very recently, as the foundational cultural pioneers of America, were opposed to all other religions and religious tolerance itself, and they were also extremely strictly opposed to a lot of activities that average people enjoyed, including sports, for example.  Activities on Sundays were extremely strictly limited where they held sway.  All this caused them to really be hated by people who had to deal with them who were not Puritans, including outright banning their presence in some areas of Colonial North America, but none the less,  as time developed in the United States, offshoots of their lines of thought continued to be influential and highly opposed to certain things.  Added to this, a very literal reading of certain portions of the New Testament, and the omission of study of others, lead to a sense that everything was foreordained and that most people were going to Hell, which made suffering on Earth the basic norm.  This line of thought, we should note, was by no means limited to the Puritans and it spread to some other Protestant regions during the Reformation, although it did not characterize all of them by any means and it has very much waned even among those Protestant faiths that descend from denominations that were sympathetic to that view.  Of interest to an upcoming post, it spread to Scandinavia late but took hold very strongly there, which has an impact on certain things today.

Be all that as it may, and without intending to offend anyone, in the modern United States the Puritan heritage in particular, and certain reformation strains elsewhere in Europe in general, while very much cast off by the population in religious terms continues to express itself in the idea that we must suffer, and suffering in diet is a good way to do that.  It also expresses itself in a certain desire to spread the suffering in a puritanical cultural way.  A person can hardly go to a restaurant, for example, in a group without somebody who has chosen to endure food deprivation of some sort making it public in the group and basically casting implied aspersions on those who don't join in the culinary grief.  We like to imagine that all of this is very much past us, but it isn't.  A person ordering a steak with a big side of wheat rolls is just as welcome at a lot of dinner tables in 2019 as a person ordering a bucket of beer would have been in 1919, or a person suggesting in a that everyone go enjoy a football game in England in 1645.

Again, this isn't intended to be a religious comment.  There remain those who hold views very close to those held by the Puritans, the Congregationalist is a direct descendant of them, and there are those who hold views that are close to theirs on most things or even stricter in regard to some.  The theological points that could be debated regarding those views aren't going to be debated here now or at any time. Rather, what's interesting about this is that the United States, culturally, is a very Protestant country, as are some European countries, even among those who don't recognize that or who are not Protestants of any kind.  It gets back to our Third Law of History.

October 2, 1919. Woodrow Wilson suffers a severe stroke. Red Summer in the News. The White Sox throw, barely, a second game.

On this day, Woodrow Wilson, who had collapsed during a speech given in Pueblo Colorado as part of his grueling transcontinental speaking tour in support of the Versailles Treaty suffered a debilitating severe stroke.  This may have in fact simply been a followup stroke to one that had occurred in Pueblo, as his symptoms on the train ride back to Washington D. C. strongly suggest that in fact is what had occurred.

Somewhat ironically, Wilson was a  hypochondriac, but one whose health fears turned out to be somewhat correct. The stroke wasn't Wilson's first.  He'd first suffered a stroke in 1896.  That stroke was "mild" and his doctor didn't regard the matter as a serious one even though he did not regain the use of his right hand for four months.  In 1906 he suffered a second serious stroke that nearly left him blind in his left eye.  Prescribed rest by his physicians, he returned to work after a trip to Europe.  He was afflicted again in 1913.  In 1915 he was finally diagnosed with high blood pressure and was at that time likely warned that his condition was serious.

In 1914 Woodrow Wilson's first wife, Ellen, died of Bright's Disease in the White House.  Woodrow Wilson remarried the following year to Edith Galt, with that wedding occurring in December (they'd met in May).  She was fifteen years younger than he was.

Woodrow Wilson with Edith Wilson in the President's first official photograph following his stroke on this day.  This photograph was taken in June, 1920, and what it portrays is quite accurate.  Edith is overlooking his shoulder and guiding his actions.

Following the stroke Edith Wilson and Woodrow Wilson's doctors at first kept his condition secret from his cabinet and himself, although Wilson had experience with strokes and was likely aware of his situation soon enough.  Quite soon the President's inner cabinet conspired to keep it a secret from anyone but themselves and Edith took over routine details of the Presidency making her the nation's first, if unofficial, female chief executive.  Edith also acted to control access and communications with the President.  She would later assert that she never made any decisions on her own, although she certainly influenced decision making, and termed her role of that of "steward".

In spite of the secrecy, some news of the President's general condition was leaking out and it was generally not good. Therefore, while the public never knew how grave the President's condition was, it had reason to suspect he wasn't doing well, even as early as this very day.

The Casper Herald, a morning newspaper, which reported that the President had not rested well the night prior on its front page.

Woodrow Wilson never did recover from his stroke fully and in the current age he likely would have been removed from office under that special constitutional provision allow for that to occur in certain emergencies. That provision did not exist at the time.  The nation proved to be lucky that Edith Wilson was a capable steward, whatever that may have meant, as a less capable one would have caused a disaster and a Constitutional Crisis.  Nonetheless there's good reason to believe that a better result would have been for Wilson to have resigned and Vice President Thomas Marshall to have taken over.  Marshall already had experience running the government due to Wilson's absence from the country during the Paris Peace Treaty sessions and he would have been more likely at that point to have brought the country into the Versailles Treaty, which Wilson's stroke doomed.

Edith Wilson lived until December 1961, long outliving her husband who would die three years following his stroke.  Marshall died in 1925 at age 71.

The news on October 2 was dominated by the results of the second game of the fixed World Series and race riots, both the ones in Arkansas that had started yesterday and the ones in Omaha which were now over.  

In terms of race riots, the papers were tending to take a position to blacks in a way that's not only biased, but shocking.  Blacks had to feel that they were under siege everywhere in the U.S. in 1919, and indeed they were.

In the second game of the World Series the fix brought about the insider anticipated results.

A problem was setting in, however, in that Cicotte was the only conspirator who had been paid to date.  In the second game, the players in the conspiracy carried on with the plot, but the White Sox pitcher Lefty Williams actually pitched a fairly good game.  The game was not a runaway.  Partial payment came after the game, but full payment was yet to come.

Of course, as always, other things were going on elsewhere.

Great Falls, Va., site of historic mill built by George Washington.  October 2, 1919

Rheims France, October 2, 1919.

Coal and Oil, San Juan, Puerto Rico.  October 2, 1919.

Life Magazine, in its issue that came out on this day, ran a cartoon that's hardly intelligible to us a century later:

"Sensations of the young man who thought "quite informal" meant a dinner coat"