Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Torrington Wyoming

Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Torrington Wyoming:

First Baptist Church, Torrington Wyoming

This Romanesque style church is the First Baptist Church in Torrington Wyoming.  I'm unaware of the history of the church itself, so I have no other details on it.

The Best Posts of the Week of September 6, 2020.

 The best post of the week of September

Labor. 1920, and now.

How did everything become so course, crude and polarized?

Mid Week At Work: The Reading Clerk.

The Socratic Triple Filter

Not my original thought. . . but. . .

The last mile.

 

Nothing, absolutely nothing, about September 8th's snowstorm was unusual

International Women's Fly Fishing Day

 

International Women's Fly Fishing Day

 

It's today.  September 12. 

This is the first one.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, about September 8th's snowstorm was unusual

Nothing.

Experts on the topic of human memory assert that the average person only recalls details about the weather for three years.  Outside of that, they remember the current weather being the normal, almost without fail.

Sage Chicken season opens on the same calendar date now as it did when I was a boy, September 15.  The question every year was whether we'd be snowed out before that date.  We were about half the time.

Snow in September unusual?  Not at all.  Only unusual recently.

September 12, 1920. A Restoration

Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church at the point of its reunification, Dimitrije Pavlović 

On this date in 1920, the Serbian Orthodox Church was reunified after a long period of separation due to its members being in various empires.  The aftermath of World War One changed that situation.  The church is the second oldest Slavic Orthodox Church, second only in that status to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.  The church today has over 8,000,000 members, mostly in Serbia, and is one of the Eastern Orthodox Churches in communion with Constantinople.

Residents of Cheyenne were disappointed by the failure of the mail plane to arrive, which was front page news.  The headline seemed to blame the failure on an errant pilot, but it was engine trouble in Utah that caused the delay.

Movie goers on this date were apparently up for a massive serving of turgid.

The Restless Sex follows the story of a young adventurous woman who is in love with her step brother, whom she grew up with, and whom she's been in love with since her youth, until he travels afar, and she's pursued by another.

Plot spoiler.

The step brother wins.

Hmmmm. . . . 

Movie goes who may have been pondering the "ick" quality of Restless also had the option of seeing Homespun Folks, also released on this date.

In that one a young lawyer makes good by getting the position of district attorney only to be accused of murder.

 

The last mile.

 

A return to the age of sale?

 Sailing makes a comeback in wind-powered car carrier

Will hold 7,000 cars, make the North Atlantic crossing in 12 days

The Aerodrome: Air Mail 100

The Aerodrome: Air Mail 100:

Air Mail 100

An organization has been retracing the route of the first U.S. Air Mail flights, something that we marked the centennial of here this past week.  Their website for the endeavor is here:

Air Mail 100

Air Mail 100

They were in Cheyenne on the route yesterday, September 10.

Ask a Ranger: First Thing First! How do you tie your ranger hat (...

Ask a Ranger: Fist Thing First! How do you tie your ranger hat (...: The hat band should read USNPS. You want the "N" centered in the front of the hat and the knot you will be on your left.  Wrap t...

Not my original thought. . . but. . .

 wouldn't it be nice if Americans were behaving as we did on September 12, 2001.

That is, all the time.

September 11, 1920. Making the cover.

Women featured prominently on the cover of the Saturday, September 11, 1920 journals. 

But not in the same rolls.

A Manly Pastime - A Baseball History Blog : "The Most Thrilling Ball Game Ever Staged in Brook...

A Manly Pastime - A Baseball History Blog : "The Most Thrilling Ball Game Ever Staged in Brook...: Exactly 100 years ago today, the Brooklyn Dodgers were in first place, although only by a single percentage point.  By this point in the sea...

The Socratic Triple Filter

Socrates:  "Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to say is true?” 

Man:  "No, I actually just heard about it, and …”

Socrates: You don’t know for certain that it is true, then. Is what you want to say something good or kind?” 

Man:  “No! Actually, just the opposite. You see …”

Socrates:   "So you are not certain that what you want to say is true, and it isn’t good or kind. One filter still remains, though, so you may yet still tell me. That is Usefulness or Necessity. Is this information useful or necessary to me?”  

Man:  "No, not really.” 

Socrates: “Well, then, “If what you want to say is neither true, nor good or kind, nor useful or necessary, please don’t say anything at all.”

A Manly Pastime - A Baseball History Blog : 1920 Pennant Race - The Story Thus Far

A Manly Pastime - A Baseball History Blog : 1920 Pennant Race - The Story Thus Far: Historians have a natural tendency to attempt to categorize the past into specific time frames or eras.  While understandable, the pract...

Blog Mirror: Postwar Radio Sales Begin

Postwar Radio Sales Begin

Mid Week At Work: The Reading Clerk.

A. E. Cheffee, House of Representatives Reading Clerk, November 12, 1937.

The read bills, pronouncements and occasionally Presidential addresses.  There is one each for the majority and minority party.

The position still exists, having come into existence in 1865.   A. E. Cheffee, pictured above, was a Republican appointee who occupied his position from 1919 to 1957.  The current Democratic appointee, Joe Novotny, has occupied his position since 2010. The current Republican appointee, Susan Cole, has occupied her position since 2007.

And now canning supplies. . .

 are in short supply.

Due, that is, to a COVID 19 inspired boom in vegetable gardens.

Holscher's Hub: The bullsnake.

Holscher's Hub: The bullsnake.:

The bullsnake.

Taken just yesterday, one day before the big snowstorm hit.

How did everything become so course, crude and polarized?

I'm not naive enough to believe that there was a golden age of discourse in which all Americans behaved with cheerfulness toward their opponents. Lincoln was vilified.  Roosevelt castigated as a dangerous Red. Al Smith lambasted as an agent of the Pope.  It goes on and on.

But a person would have to be really naive to believe that things haven't been particularly weird recently, but which we can go pack, I think, to President Obama's first Presidential race, after which discourse started in a new and dangerous direction (and not due to him, I might add).

On a local highway some brave soul has put up a Biden/Harris banner. Biden isn't going to win here, and the person displaying it has to either be truly brave or extraordinarily naive.  Not too surprisingly, counter banners have appeared across the highway for Trump.  It's not that, but what they say, which is:

Trump

2020

Stop the Bullshit

and

Trump

2020

Fuck Your Feelings

First of all, putting up a Trump banner seeking to "Stop the Bullshit" really opens up the person putting it up to the charge of being naive as one of the primary claims of his opponents is that he's full of just that.  Indeed, while we haven't put it up yet, there's a remarkable dichotomy in the Trump Administration between public declarations and very quiet conservative actions.  It makes a person wonder exactly how the administration functions and its relationship to the Oval Office. 

We'll get to that later and this isn't a critique or criticism of his administration in any sense.  Some people, and I've certainly met at least one, really like the way he addresses the public. Rather, this is to point out that much like the use of H. L. Mencken's quote about Americans inevitably getting the President they deserve, a person needs to be careful to ponder whether their use of a slogan is easily subject to counter use.  Things like that don't advance any discourse.

The point of this post, however, is to show how crude we've become.  That we've reached the point where political posters, even aftermarket ones as these surely must be, are so crude means we've reached a new low in modern American political history.

Breakin' Through at the University of Wyoming, which is not occupied by leftists.

Along the same lines, sort of, a foundation that supports the local university posted on the recent anniversary of the university's foundings.  

That's nice, and worth noting.  Also worth noting is the weird controversy that happened a couple of years ago when the university adopted the "The World Needs More Cowboys" slogan, which did provoke some hypersensitive woke faculty to wring their hands over what that meant. 

That must have opened things up as when the foundation noted the anniversary it provoked a couple of comments of a negative nature, including:

Cool. Sad to see UW now being controlled by the extremist left agenda to destroy our country.

and

back when it was full of Americans. not the liberal toads that haunt it's halls today.

Now, now, most of the faculty at UW doesn't even teach anything remotely political.  There's no evidence that the university is "controlled" by "the extremist left", even if there are individual professors far to the left of the average Wyomingite, something that's been the case for a very long time.  And I'm not even sure what to make of it once being "full of Americans. not the liberal toads".  

Indeed, that last comment seems to presuppose that if you are a political liberal, you must be 1) a toad, and 2) not an American.  The thought that should scare people who make comments of that type is that the "liberal toads" are almost certainly about to maintain their position in the U.S. House and take the Oval Office and that, moreover, they're as American as anyone else.  Nobody really has the right to declare their opponents to not be Americans due to their political views, let alone to declare that they're an amphibian.

Indeed, an old very conservative friend of mine once pointed out that one of the real hallmarks of the American Communists of the 1930s and 1940s was, by and large, how deeply patriotic they were. They weren't anti American, they were just extremely radical left wing Americans.  

I'm pretty conservative myself, which leads me in part to make this comment. We're truly about to get the most liberal political administration since the 1930s.  That's in part due to a massive left wing reaction to Donald Trump having been elected in the first place.  Part, but not all, of why he was elected was due to a real visceral reaction in some quarter to Barack Obama having been elected.  Declarations about people's background and origin, and their Americaness or lack of it, have become common. So too has it become common to call somebody a Marxist, a Socialist or a Fascist, when lots of people don't even really seem to know what those things mean.

Enough is enough, really.

September 8, 1920. The start of Air Mail

On this day in 1920, the U.S. Post Office inaugurated Air Mail in the United STates with early morning flights taking off from New Jersey and San Francisco, ultimately bound for the other location, and with distribution stops and refueling stops along the way.  Cheyenne was one of the cities on their flight path.

As the Cheyenne paper noted, unusually spelling it out, the reason for the numerous stops was that the Airco DH4 airplanes dedicated to the project didn't carry sufficient fuel not to make numerous stops.  The DH4 was a British designed World War One bomber which the US had ordered in sufficient numbers to make the United States the largest customer for the aircraft. After the war they were placed into mail service, which they'd continue to perform up until 1932.  Indeed, as late as that year the US seriously considered purchasing an updated variant.

On the same day an Italian crises continued as the Italian Regency of Carnaro, effectively declaring Fiume to be a city state, was proclaimed by Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet and wartime Italian army officer.  The move sought to formalize the Italian control over the city of mixed ethnicity but went beyond that in the formation of a proto fascist state.  It's independence would be more formalized the following year, but would be brief, as it followed a treaty with Italy that sought to incorporate it within the Kingdom of Italy. That effort lead to a brief war which Italy obviously won.

And this peaceful photograph was taken.

Y.M.C.A. Island & playground, Lynchburg Virginia.

Not only did snow arrive last night. . .

 after it had been in the high 90s on Sunday, it's still snowing and has snowed a great deal more than predicted. This is a major winter storm.

From summer to winter in 24  hours.

The New Owners

When we last visited this topic:

Lex Anteinternet: A Checkerboard Blunder?: Note:  This was teed up to run prior to the Governor's recent announcement confirming that the land had, in fact, been sold to another ...

And now we know that the high bidder was a combine of Orion Energy and Sweetwater. Their plans for the property were featured in today's Tribune. 

Labor. 1920, and now.

 

Jewelry workers, 1920.

A Labor Day post.

It can be difficult to take the necessary wrenching steps to prepare for the future, but looking back at the past may help us to see how important these steps are. The graphic below depicts how occupational employment has changed in America since 1920. Students entering the workforce today face a dramatically different landscape of jobs than their parents did in the 1980s or their grandparents in the 1950s. And the work world that their great-grandparents entered in the 1920s is almost unrecognizable.

Back then, about 25 percent of jobs were in agriculture and 40 percent were in manufacturing and other blue collar fields. Today, fewer than one percent of jobs are agricultural and only about 20 percent are blue collar.

In the 1920s, only about 5 percent of workers held professional jobs. This has exploded over the last 90 years and today about 35 percent of workers have professional jobs. Rapidly advancing technology has not only automated and eliminated many jobs that once provided manufacturing, blue collar,  and agricultural employment for millions of Americans, but it has also increased demand for professionals who create, manage, and explain this technology, many of them working in occupations that were unimaginable 90 years ago.

From:  StatChat, University of Virginia.

Looking back a few years earlier, to 1915, reveals this interesting information:

Labor force participation. The 1915 annual average civilian labor force participation rate is estimated at 56.3 percent. This percentage isn’t strictly comparable to the 2015 annual average of 62.7 percent, because of differences in survey coverage and definitions.¹⁷ However, despite the similarity in overall labor force participation, the participation rates of men and women were very different from each other 100 years ago. The 1920 census shows that, among people ages 14 and older, the proportion of the population that was in the total labor force was 85 percent for men and 23 percent for women in January of that year. (Civilian labor force data by gender are not available for 1915.) In contrast, the Current Population Survey shows a 2015 annual average civilian labor force participation rate for people ages 16 and older of about 69 percent for men and nearly 57 percent for women. Table 1 points out that young boys were much more likely to be in the labor force in 1920 than now. Not surprisingly, women of all ages are much more likely to be in the labor force now than in 1920. Half of all boys ages 14 to 19 were in the labor force in 1920; nowadays, about one-third of boys age 16 to 19 are in the labor force. Labor force participation among girls those ages hasn’t shown as much change.

From:  Bureau of Labor Statistics.  And also from the BLS, this interesting statistic which we've discussed as a topic here before.

Education. A century ago, most jobs required little formal schooling, and most of the population had not gone beyond elementary or grammar school. In fact, high school graduates were a rarity: in 1915, only an estimated 18 percent of the population ages 25 and older had completed high school, and only about 14 percent of people ages 14–17 were in high school. Royal Meeker, appointed Commissioner of Labor Statistics by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, had recently written a New York Times article advocating compulsory public education through the intermediate grades. He noted, “Boys and girls drop out of school at all stages of the educational process, but fail to drop smoothly into any part of our economic system.”¹⁸ While failure to graduate remains a concern, more than 86 percent of the U.S. population age 25 in 2010–14 had completed high school or more. The average length of the public school term was about 160 days a century ago, compared with 180 days now, and the average number of days attended in 1915 was only 121.¹⁹ Many young girls and boys worked instead of being enrolled in school. In fact, New York City’s State Factory Investigating Commission in 1914 reported that “nearly 75 percent of factory women studied had left school before the eighth grade, as had nearly 40 percent of the female store employees interviewed.”²⁰ The legal age for leaving school was generally 14, compared with 16–18 today.

And this interesting set of figures, related to the "everything was cheaper back then" claim that people so often hear:

Of course, most prices of food in 1915 were much different from those in 2015, and several staple items are substantially more affordable today. Here are some examples of 1915 and 2015 prices (using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics):

Item	1915 price	1915 price in 2015 dollars	2015 price
Bread (1-lb loaf)	$0.07	$1.65	$1.42
Butter (lb)	.36	8.48	3.18
Eggs (dozen)	.34	8.01	2.81
Ground coffee (lb)	.30	7.06	4.61
Potatoes (10 lbs)	.15	3.53	6.55

Interestingly, in that chart, the only thing that's really climbed in adjustered prices is the price of potatoes, which is nearly double the current (or the 2015) prices.   The only thing that has near parity with its century old price is bread.

Blog Mirror: The life of American workers in 1915

 A fascinating read:

The life of American workers in 1915

Courthouses of the West: Experts tout proposals for Supreme Court term limits

Courthouses of the West: Experts tout proposals for Supreme Court term limits:   Experts tout proposals for Supreme Court term limits

September 6, 1920. Miske v. Dempsey

 Dempsey - Miske heavyweight championship fight, Labor Day, Sept. 6, 1920, Benton Harbor, Mich.

Dempsey knocked Miske out in the third round, the only time Miske suffered that fate in his professional boxing career.  It was the first boxing match broadcast on radio.

Miske died of Bright's disease in 1923.  He fought a final boxing match only shortly before that, even though he knew that the disease was fatal and about to take his life.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Grace Lutheran, Worland Wyoming

Churches of the West: Grace Lutheran, Worland Wyoming:

Grace Lutheran, Worland Wyoming

This is Grace Lutheran in Worland Wyoming.  Other than the name and the location, I'm afraid I can't provide any other details about this particular church.

Best post of the week of August 30, 2020.

 The best post of the week of August 30, 2020.

A Sunday Morning Scene Blog Mirror: Russian Christmas. Native Americans and Christianity

Ft. Halleck, sort of. Near Elk Mountain Wyoming

September 1, 1920. Lebanon, Submarines, and Chicago.

Blog Mirror: Expansion of hunting opportunities on public lands announced

 Expansion of hunting opportunities on public lands announced

A Wyoming Headline: RECORD HIGHS IN WYOMING’S WEEKEND FORECAST; 80% CHANCE OF RAIN, SNOW MONDAY IN CASPER

 Record highs Saturday and Sunday.

Snow on Monday.

Sure, why not?

Friday Farming: Deadly indifference

From Lex Anteinternet: September 3, 1920. Stepp appointed postmaster. earlier this week:

September 3, 1920. Stepp appointed postmaster.

1920 Alonzo Stepp was appointed the postmaster of Fontenelle, Wyoming.  He was an area rancher.

That may not seem remarkable, but Stepp was an African American who was exceptional for his era in numerous ways, one of which was that he was one of few black ranchers in the state at the time, with there remaining few today.  The Kentucky born Stepp was college educated, having received a classical education, but immigrated to Wyoming with his wife, whom he'd met in college, to pursue ranching after having worked on a Wyoming ranch one summer while in college. That introduction to ranching came through the invitation of a college friend, who was a white student.  Lon Stepp ultimately moved back to Wyoming and into ranching, working on area ranches and purchasing land over the years until he had a full time operating ranch.  By 1920, he's already served as an elected district road supervisor.  He occupied the postmaster position until December 15, 1941, when he died.

The Stepps would continue to ranch in the area until their ranch was one of the ones that was taken over by the government for Fontenelle Reservoir in 1963.  The Stepps fought the condemnation for the reservoir in court but ultimately lost.  

Fontenelle Reservoir in 1972.

Perhaps ironically, the dam for the reservoir on their land which they had opposed has proven to be leaky and the reservoir has had to been hurriedly drained twice.  Irrigation from the reservoir never really developed due to the difficulties of doing that in a high desert region, and therefore the lake has principally been used for recreation.

Stepp family members remain prominent in the area today.

More on the Stepps can be found on the WyoHistory.org page on them.  This entry is based on that one.

From here.

I have to say, something like this would break my heart if it happened to me.  How unfair.  

Now, I'm very far from having the view that the dipshits at the Western Watersheds Project do, whose views would actually destroy the West by pushing agriculture out so development would come in (they don't realize that's the impact of their argument. . . which is why they are dipshits).  But Fontenelle, whatever its merits, certainly didn't live up to its claims and original purpose.

Indeed, while I'm also not in that "tear down the dams" camp, it ought to be sort of obvious that the late dams in the dam building era weren't really successful.  We have this 1963 example, which at least works better than the 1960 Anchor Dam in Hot Springs County.

As far as I know, the Stepps, when bought out against their will, didn't go back into ranching, even though their descendants remain in the area.  Some would have relocated elsewhere, but it isn't that easy to do.  This tragedy is all the more that, frankly, as they represented an already declining demographic, black agriculturalist, and one that in Wyoming was very underrepresented.  

The Stepp's ranch was not subject to flooding, of course, because they were black.  It was merely accidental.  And a person can't rationally argue that the dam shouldn't have been built simply because of their ethnicity.  But the entire matter is a tragedy nonetheless as black agriculturalist were well represented early in the 20th Century and are highly unrepresented now.  There's a lot of reasons that occurred, but simple indifference to them is one of the reasons for it.  And indifference can be just as destructive as an intentional act.

Which might cause us to want to circle around and see what we're indifferent to in agriculture today.  There are undoubtedly those areas in which we are, including being indifferent to the production value of land vs. its entertainment value, and what that means in terms of our ultimate ability to feed ourselves and the ability for people who would make their living from the land to really be able to do so.

Governor Gordon Launches Meat Processing Expansion Grant Program

 

Governor Gordon Launches Meat Processing Expansion Grant Program

 

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Mark Gordon has announced the launch of the Wyoming Meat Processing Expansion Grant Program to provide support for Wyoming meat processing facilities and Wyoming citizens impacted by supply chain disruptions and regional shut-downs of processing facilities resulting from the COVID-19 public health emergency.

The Governor has appropriated $10 million in Federal CARES Act funds to the program, which seeks to strengthen Wyoming's’ local food supply chain and address meat shortages at retail locations and food banks within the state. Wyoming-based meat processing businesses and nonprofits may submit grant applications for capacity-related improvements made before December 30, 2020. . 

“As anyone who has tried to get a beef cut up this year knows, processing in Wyoming is facing significant bottlenecks in 2020. The First Lady’s initiative has seen this across the state,” Governor Gordon said. “That is why we have set up the Meat Processing Expansion Grant Program, which will help improve our meat processing capacity and ensure our citizens have access to high-quality products.”

Applications will open September 15, 2020 and be reviewed by a group from the Wyoming Business Council, Wyoming Department of Agriculture, and the Governor’s Office.  The grants require a portion of processed and retailable products to be provided to local food banks, pantries, soup kitchens, prisons, schools, or other charitable organizations to help feed hungry or underserved populations. 

For additional information on the program, visit the Wyoming Department of Agriculture’s website. 

-END-

Smoke

It rolled in around 10:00 p.m.

When I got up this morning I looked towards the mountain to see if that orange glow was up there in the darkness.  It wasn't.

This morning I read that it's blown in from Johnson County and Montana, which would mean two separate fires at least.  

It's been a smoky late summer.

September 3, 1920. Stepp appointed postmaster.

1920 Alonzo Stepp was appointed the postmaster of Fontenelle, Wyoming.  He was an area rancher.

That may not seem remarkable, but Stepp was an African American who was exceptional for his era in numerous ways, one of which was that he was one of few black ranchers in the state at the time, with there remaining few today.  The Kentucky born Stepp was college educated, having received a classical education, but immigrated to Wyoming with his wife, whom he'd met in college, to pursue ranching after having worked on a Wyoming ranch one summer while in college. That introduction to ranching came through the invitation of a college friend, who was a white student.  Lon Stepp ultimately moved back to Wyoming and into ranching, working on area ranches and purchasing land over the years until he had a full time operating ranch.  By 1920, he's already served as an elected district road supervisor.  He occupied the postmaster position until December 15, 1941, when he died.

The Stepps would continue to ranch in the area until their ranch was one of the ones that was taken over by the government for Fontenelle Reservoir in 1963.  The Stepps fought the condemnation for the reservoir in court but ultimately lost.  

Fontenelle Reservoir in 1972.

Perhaps ironically, the dam for the reservoir on their land which they had opposed has proven to be leaky and the reservoir has had to been hurriedly drained twice.  Irrigation from the reservoir never really developed due to the difficulties of doing that in a high desert region, and therefore the lake has principally been used for recreation.

Stepp family members remain prominent in the area today.

More on the Stepps can be found on the WyoHistory.org page on them.  This entry is based on that one.

From here.

Also on this day, Way Down East was released.

You've seen part of it at least. The scene with the protagonist, played by Lillian Gish, on ice flows heading toward a waterfall.

Wave goodbye to the handshake amid coronavirus concerns

Wave goodbye to the handshake amid coronavirus concerns: As the new disease also known as COVID-19 spreads, Americans must eliminate long-established physical greetings. Here's how you can change the social script — and help break the chain of transmission.

I sure hope this article is right.

Shaking hands is an awkward custom and I wouldn't miss it. 

Gee. . . that would almost seem to suggest that New York City isn't the Benighted Shangri La that its politicians and press suggests. . .

 Suburban Home Sales Boom as People Move Out of N.Y.C.

Headline from the New York Times.

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste: Debate continues about nuclear power's role in electricity production, particularly as it revolves around climate change. As a zero-emissions source of

Interesting article on this topic.

Nuclear power should be something that Greens, particularly radical Greens, should be screaming for night and day.  Indeed, any really scientific thought on energy that was designed to address safe, sustainable, and clean energy, would be based on nuclear power.  Opposition to it is so unscientific as to make Godzilla movies look like actual paleontology.  

September 2, 1920. Changing views.

Most of the time when I put a newspaper up here, it's to mark some big or at least interesting century old event.  Every now and then, however it's to comment on something and how it was perceived, which by extension comments on how we perceive things now.

I see around here fairly frequently stickers that say "Welcome to Wyoming--Consider everyone armed".  It's an amusing joke based on the fact that firearms are really common here.  That's been the case as long as I can personally recall, but it also refers to the fact that over the past two decades there's been a real boom in the concealed carry movement.  I've taken a look at that and its history in this old post here:

Packing Heat

Now, by mentioning this here, I don't mean to suggest that I'm opposed to these state laws allowing for concealed carry.  I'm not. But I do want to point out how carrying hasn't always been perceived the way it is now.

In 2020 we can take it for granted that the press is universally liberal, and indeed "progressive", unless we specifically know otherwise about a particular outlet.  In 1920, however, its a little more difficult to tell.  Papers were Democratic or Republican and generally weren't shy about noting it, but they were also pretty slavish followers of social trends, unless they were absolutely bucking them.   All of which makes the headline about Gerald Stack engaging in an act of "Slander" against Wyoming men interesting.

Under the same circumstances today, there aren't very many Wyoming men who would regard his comment as slanderous. Some would find it childish and inaccurate, and some on the political fringes would hold it up as a positive or negative example. But quite a few people would take some secret pride in the thought that everyone in the state was packing.

In 1920, however, Wyoming was seeking to overcome its frontier image even while preserving it. The Cheyenne newspaper knew that his comment wasn't true and pointed it out. Beyond that, they pointed it out as being slanderous. An insult, as it was, to the men of Wyoming.

Apparently it wasn't an insult to women, presumably because women weren't thought to be packing.

In actuality, quite a few people at the time, including quite a few people were packing and the ownership of pocket pistols was common.  Chicago, for its part, didn't have a gun control law addressing handguns until 1981, much later than most people would suppose, and it hasn't been a huge success by any measure.  Having said that, Illinois restricted the carrying of concealed handguns in 1949, following World War Two, at which time, contrary to our general myth, there was widespread national support for banning handguns.  New York City, in contrast, passed a firearms licensing act for concealable handguns in 1911, making the carrying of them without a license a felony.

Again, this isn't an argument for anything.  It's just an interesting look at how we often inaccurately imagine what the past was like.

On something completely different, Boy Scouts from Mansfield Ohio returned home after an epic multistate bicycle trip.

September 1, 1920. Lebanon, Submarines, and Chicago.

The flag of Greater Lebanon featuring the Lebanese cedar and the French tricolor.

 

On this day in 1920, Greater Lebanon came into existence as a French administrative unit.

Syria had attempted to define Lebanon as an administrative Syrian unit in its short lived state that was brought to an end by France in 1920.  It's origins went back to the 1860s when European powers entered into a series of treaties with the Ottoman Empire in an effort to protect the Christian population of the region which has been subject to religious violence.  The boundaries of the state were larger than those originally regarded as Lebanese and were based upon the map featured here yesterday. The expanded boundaries were created in order to attempt to give the region, which was anticipated as having statehood in the future, a large enough territory to have some sort of economic base.

The League of Nations would approve the creation of the entity in 1923 and it was declared to be the Republic of Lebanon in 1926 while still under French administration.  It's status became a matter of contest during World War Two when the French Vichy administration allowed the Germans to transport arms through Syria to be used against British forces in the Middle East.  Free French General Charles de Gaulle declared it to be independent in 1941, under pressure from the Allies to do so, in a move that would have been legally questionable.  

On November 8, 1943 Lebanon held elections for an independent government and declared the League of Nations mandate over it to be terminated, which brought immediate Free French reaction in the form of arresting the government.  However, on November 22, 1943 they were released under Allied pressure. The French left in December 1946, at which point both Syria and Lebanon had been admitted as founding members of the United Nations.  No formal end of the mandate was ever declared.

Flag of Lebanon.

Lebanon has always had a troubled existence and its independence has not changed that.  Regarded as a bright spot in the Middle East in the immediate post war world, regional violence has made the tiny state highly unstable and its religiously and ethnically diverse population have not always gotten along well since that time, with civil war dominating the 1970s and 1980s.  Created as a state that was specifically to be a home for Maronite Arab Christians, members of the Catholic church whose branch dates back to Christianity's early days, demographic changes in the country, including a high immigration rate to the West (although Lebanese also have the highest return from immigration rate in the world) and an influx of Shia's have made the original political informal balance unstable.  

This is a story that has a tangential impact on me, as one of my late uncle's was half Lebanese and half Irish by descent.  His mother was Lebanese although I've lost track of whether she was born in Lebanon (I think she was) or the United States.  Her parents had brought the entire family over when she was young.  She had met and married her husband in Nebraska, but in latter years the extended family had a significant presence in Casper Wyoming where there was a small Lebanese immigrant community.  

This reminds me that many of the divides that are commonly assumed to exist in the U.S. really don't in the way they're sometimes understood to.  In Catholic communities the mixing of people of highly diverse ethnicity is frankly common.

France, for its part, which has taken an interest in the region dating back to the Middle Ages continues to do so today.

On the same day the USS S-5, an American submarine, sank accidentally when a crewman failed to close a value, and in attempting to rectify the mistake, jammed it open.  No lives were lost.  It was refloated, but sank again on September 3 while under tow.

Sonar image of the S-5 today.

The S-5 was just going into service when the accident occured.  She was an S Class submarine, which was a new type adopted during World War One but which came too late for any of the class to see service during the war.  A fair number of them remained in service when World War Two broke out and saw service, in spite of being dated, in both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy.  Thirteen of the boats served all the way through the war for the U.S. Navy, with all but one decommissioned in October, 1945. The last remaining one in service was decommissioned a year later.

A killing in Chicago was attributed, by the killer, to widespread firearms carrying in Wyoming.

The details, at least as known at the time, were that wealthy real estate broker Gerald Stack was visiting Chicago when he pulled a pistol to use it to pistol whip a man, a discharged marine, who had insulted a woman in the bar.  A tussle resulted and Stack claimed that the gun discharged several times, killing the other party.

Questions were raised about why Stack was packing heat, and he attributed that to the custom in Wyoming.

A question can actually be raised to the extent to which Stack's statement was accurate, and it would take somebody with more time to really find out. Certainly, firearms weren't uncommon in Wyoming and in 1920 it would still have been probable that many people in rural areas went about armed, and indeed, that's still the case.  Indeed Wyoming train robber Bill Carlisle attributed part of his reason for moving to Wyoming to the fact that firearms were common and therefore you could always hunt for food if you were out of work, a statement that was apparently untrue as he took up train robbery.

Carrying firearms in town, however, wasn't universal anywhere in the West as so often believed and had actually been illegal in some Wyoming towns in the late 19th Century, although I don't know the status of that in 1920. Certainly one other murder earlier in 1920 which we've also featured here also featured a girl and a bar, showed the parties to have ready access to firearms.  

An interesting aspect of both of these stories is the alcohol aspect of them.  By this time, alcohol had been illegal for awhile, and yet it was clearly showing up.  That fact is often oddly overlooked in the story of American violence, which has dramatically declined in recent years.  When it occurs, it tends to occur between people who know each other and when they don't know each other, it's like automobile accidents. . . booze or drugs show up.  Nobody seems to ever really ponder the latter.

Carrying a handgun in Chicago in 1920 doesn't strike me as a bad idea, given that the town has been notoriously violent since its earliest days and still is. Some would argue that carrying in Chicago today would be a good idea, and should be more widely allowed than it is.

It's also interesting how often the age old mix of men and women and a contest between men over women show up at any time as the roots source of such events.