Lex Anteinternet: Some Labor Day Reflections.

Lex Anteinternet: Some Labor Day Reflections.: 

Some Labor Day Reflections.

Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.

Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off.  I worked a full day. 

I was the only one in the office.

Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1.  Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.

Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s.  Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;

Deep Breath

A Labor Day homily.

Sadly, I'm working on Labor Day.

Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work.  There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did.  Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble.  Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.

When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism.  Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic.  But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.

One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part.  The advance of technology brought us the other part.  Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all.  The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking.  As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric.  Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.

Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult.  Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible.  Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.  

One of those is the law, of course.  Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.

Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.

Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades.  That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve.  Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for.  I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.

Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer".  I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become.  It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.

Oh well.

And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are.  And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things.  Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.

Lex Anteinternet: A comment about Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hog Leg. Sunday games, rural activities, and gatherings.

Lex Anteinternet: A comment about Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and...: 

A comment about Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hog Leg. Sunday games, rural activities, and gatherings.

Soccer, Scotland, 1830s.

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hog Leg: Nothing says America like shooting guns and watching the Super Bowl. A nice sunny afternoon was the perfect time to try out my newly borrowe...

This is interesting.

The Super Bowl used to be a bigger deal in this house than it now is. Seems like a lot of things once were.

I’m not a football fan at all, and I didn't really start watching the Super Bowl until my wife and I were married.  She is a football fan and will watch the season, and always watches the Super Bowl.  

When we were first married, there were Super Bowl parties.  We didn't have kids at first, and my wife's brothers were young at the time.  Later, however, it carried on until the kids were teens.  Then something changed, including the giving up of the farm (the farm, not the ranch), longer travel distances, and some residential changes at the ranch.  Ultimately, the parties just sort of stopped, although I'm sure my two brothers-in-law, who live in houses at the ranch yard, still observe a party, and my father and mother-in-law, who live a few miles away, likely travel to that.

Much lower key than it used to be.  No big gatherings like there once were.

Back in the day, we had a couple of them at our house.

Basically, the dining fare was always simple. Sandwiches bought at one of the local grocery stores, chips and beer.  Typical football stuff.

At some parties at the farm, there were bowling pin shooting matches. For those not familiar with them, people shot bowling pins from some distance with pistols.  It was fun.  Frankly, I don't think a lot of people are all that interested in the Super Bowl to start with, and at least at the Super Bowl parties with bowling pin matches people went out to the match, and it ran into the game, which says something.

The other day also, I wrote on community.

I note this because, at one time, Schuetzen matches were big deals in German American communities.  And while they involved rifles, and indeed very specialized rifles, they were also big community events.

And such things aren't unique to just those mentioned.  In parts of the country, men participating in "turkey shoots" were pretty common.  

Of course, shooting clubs and matches still exist nearly everywhere, and lots of men, and women, participate in matches.  

Less common, however, are the rural informal matches.

All sorts of rural activities were once associated with holidays, and events.  I guess that the Super Bowl is some sort of large-scale informal civil holiday, even though of course it always occurs on a Sunday.  Indeed, the playing of the game on a Sunday is curious.  I put a little (very little) time looking into that, and found this CBS Sports comment on it, which it must be first noted explained that football really started being popular in the 1920s.

Sunday was a free day during a decade where it was common to work on Saturdays, so the APFA played most of their games on that day. Fast forward 30 years to the advent of television networks, who were desperately looking for programming on Sundays in the 1950s.

That makes some sense to me, as I still work on Saturdays.

I'd note, however, that is this makes sense, it doesn't quite explain why baseball games occur all throughout the week, and I think there are Monday night professional football games as well, albeit televised ones.

I wonder, however, if it has deeper roots than that. American football is the successor to Rugby, and Rugby and Soccer were hugely popular in the United Kingdom.  Prior to major league fun sucker Oliver Cromwell taking over the English government, in the United Kingdom, Sunday had been a day for church and then games.

This went back to Medieval times, before the Reformation.  People worked, and worked hard, six days out of seven, but on the seventh, they rested. And resting meant going to Mass, and then having fun, and fun often meant games and beer, as well as other activities.  In spite of their best efforts, major Protestant reformers weren't really able to make a dent in village observance of tradition until Cromwell came in and really started ruining things.  To Calvinist of the day like Cromwell, Sunday was a day for church and nothing else, although contrary to what some may suspect they were not opposed to alcohol.  Cromwell's Puritan government banned sports.

It's no wonder he was posthumously beheaded.

Cromwell and his ilk did a lot of damage to the Christian religion in the Untied Kingdom, and if you really want to track the decline in religious observance in the UK to something, you can lay it somewhat at the bottom of his severed head.  Indeed, while hardly noted, what we're seeing going on today, in some ways, is the final stages of the Reformation playing out, and playing out badly.

Anyhow, after Cromwell was gone and the Crown restored, games came back, and they came back on Sunday.  Not just proto-football, but all sorts of games.  And games became hugely associated with certain religious holidays in the United Kingdom.  The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, is one such example, as is New Years, the latter of which is a religious holiday in and of itself.

I suspect, however, that this had a lasting influence.  I don't know for sure, but I think football is on Sunday as Sunday was the day of rest, and watching the village football game and having a tankard of ale was all part of that, after church.  I also suspect that this is the reason that some American holidays are associated with football, such as Thanksgiving, which had its origin as a religious holiday, and New Years, which as noted also is.

Now, of course, with the corrupting influence of money, it's become nearly a religion to some people in and of itself.  People who dare not miss a single football game never step foot in a church.

Also lost, however, is the remaining communal part of that.  Watching a game played that's actually local, rather than corporate national, to a large extent.  And one free of advertising.  Indeed, the Super Bowl has become the number one premiere venue for innovative advertising, some of which isn't bad.

Anyhow, maybe the Super Bowl Party, in some form if properly done, is a step back in time to when the game was more a vehicle than an end in and of itself, and when it wasn't such a show that a big freakish half-time performance was expected.

We can hope so.

Could you do Thanksgiving like it's 1621? An Agrarian Thanksgiving

I wrote out a blog entry for Lex Anteinternet on what the first Thanksgiving Dinner in 1621 must have been like.

Pheasants.

It really surprised me, even though it shouldn't.  We modern Americans are so used to the "poverty of resources of our ancestors" story that, well, we believe it.  In reality, that first gathering in English North America to celebrate God's bounty and give thanks for it, no matter how imperfect the Church of England and Puritan celebrants, and the native ones as well, was a really bountiful feast.  I've joked in the past that it probably consisted of salt cod, but in fact it seems likely to have featured waterfowl, maybe turkey, deer, mussels and quite an abundance of other foods stuffs.

Unlike now, what it didn't feature was pie, probably, even though pies of all sorts were a feature of the English diet, although at this point I frankly wonder. What would have kept there from being pie would have been a lack of wheat, as that crop wouldn't have come around for at least a few years. And the lack of a grain crop meant that there wouldn't have been beer, if that's something your Thanksgiving usually features (mine does).  It's an open question if there would have been wine.  There would have been a lot of fresh vegetables, however, as well as fresh foul, venison and fresh fish.

It would have been a good meal, in some ways one we'd recognize, but also one in which we might note some things were missing.  No potatoes, for example.

This set me to wondering what a killetarian/agrarian like me might end up with if allowed to do a  Thanksgiving Dinner all of stuff I'd shot or gathered.  Could I do it?

Well, there'd be no mussels on my table, but most years there would be fare similar to what the first celebrants had.  There are wild turkeys in my region, although I failed to get one this year.  Events conspired against me and I didn't get a deer (at least yet) either.  But if I had a major dinner, and time, I think I could muster it.  It might be pheasant rather than turkey, or a wild turkey, which is really no different in taste, only in bulk, from the domestic ones.

The challenge, however, would be vegetables, depending upon how feral I'd take this endeavor.  If I went full hunter/gatherer, here I'd really be in trouble.  I frankly know next to nothing about edible wild plants.

Now, starting off, I'd note that in my region, like the rest of the globe, a vegetarian would have starved to death in a few days prior to production agriculture.  It's not only an unnatural diet, but it's impossible up until that time.  Indeed, one of the ironies of agriculture has been the introduction of unnatural diets.  When you read, for example, of the Irish poor living on potatoes and oatmeal, while that's not what their Celtic ancestors had eaten prior to 1) row crop agriculture, and 2) the English.  Shoot, potatoes aren't even native to Ireland.

Anyhow, I note that as the native peoples of the plains were more heavily meat eaters than anything else, as that's what there was to eat.  But there is some edible vegetation.

I just don't know much about it.

I guess I'd start off with that I knwo that there's a collection of native berries you can eat.  I mostly know about this as my mohter used to collect some and make wine with them, and I've had syrup and jelly made with them as well. UW publishes a short pamphlet on them, which is available here.  There are also wild leeks, which my mother and father, and at least one of my boyhood friends would recognize, which my mother inaccurately called "wild onions".

And that's about all I know about that.

Which isn't enough to make much of a meal.

Now, a person could probably research this and learn more, and I should, simply because I'd like to know.  Indeed, on the Wind River Indian Reservation there's a "food sovereignty" movement which seeks to reintroduce native foods to the residents there in order to combat health problems, which is a really interesting idea and I hope it has some success.  I hope that they also publish some things on this topic, assuming that they haven't already.

So, in short, at least based on what the present state of my knowledge is, the Thanksgiving fare would be pretty limited, vegetable wise.

Now, what about grow your own?

Well, if expanded out to include what I can grow myself, well now we're on to something else indeed. . . assuming that I can get my pump fixed, which I haven't, solely due to me.

If I were to do that, then I'm almost fully there for a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner, omitting only the bread and cranberry sauce.

And I'm not omitting the cranberry sauce.

I'm not omitting the bread, either.

Frankly, I think the modern "bread is bad for you" story is a pile of crap.  People have incorporated grains into their diet for thousands of years.  To the extent that its bad for you, it's likely because Americans don't eat bread, they eat cake.  That's what American bread is.

Of course, I think the keto diet is a pile of crap too, which I discuss on another Lex Anteinternet post.  So here, I'd have to make bread, or buy it, and I'd prefer to make it. Soda bread more particularly.

On this, I'd be inclined, if I could to have an alcoholic beverage for the table, which is another thing, albeit a dangerous one, that humans have been doing since . . . well too long to tell.  The Mayflower sojourners started off their voyage with a stock of beer. . . ironically in a ship that had once been used to haul wine, but they were out when they put in at Plymouth Rock.  By the fall of 1621 it's unlikely that they'd brewed any. as they lacked grain.  The could have vinted wine, however.  If they did, we don't know about it.

So in my hypothetical, if I stuck to local stocks, I could probably do the same.  I don't know how to do it, but I could learn.  But I'm not going to do so, as frankly my recollections of that wine aren't sufficiently warm to cause me to bother with it, and I recall it took tons of sugar, which obviously isn't something I'm going to produce myself.

I'm not going to brew beer either, although plenty of people do.  I don't have the time, or the inclination, and either I'd end up with way too much or not enough.

And this reflects the nature of agrarianism, really.  A life focused on nature with agriculture as part of that.  I don't have to make everything myself, but I have to be focused on the land, have a land ethic, and focus on what's real.

Maybe next year I'll try this.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: What Did the Pilgrims Eat at the First Thanksgiving?

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: What Did the Pilgrims Eat at the Fir...: 

Blog Mirror: What Did the Pilgrims Eat at the First Thanksgiving?

What Did the Pilgrims Eat at the First Thanksgiving?

Some of the irritating town turkeys that live hereabouts.

If our current celebration is accurate, they ate giant turkeys, mashed potatoes, and yams covered with marshmallows. . . which you know can't be perfectly accurate.

As a contrarian, I've often maintained they ate salted cod. . . and I don't know that I am necessarily completely inaccurate, but as they were living in land with a low population density, unless they were inept or simply to scared to go beyond their villages, we all know that they likely were eating a fair amount of wild game.  Indeed, the current European American trend for veganism and vegetarianism is something that could only come about in an industrialized society that actually kills a lot of animals just getting the tofu to the fair trade store, but that's another story.

Anyhow, this interesting article maintains that they ate the follows:

What They (Likely) Did Have at the First Thanksgiving

• Venison
• Fowl (geese and duck)
• Corn
• Nuts (walnuts, chestnuts, beechnuts)
• Shellfish

Sounds likely, and pretty darned good too.

The article goes on to note:

What They (Definitely) Did Not Have at the First Thanksgiving

• A turkey centerpiece
• Potatoes (white or sweet)
• Bread stuffing or pie (wheat flour was rare)
• Sugar
• Aunt Lena’s green bean casserole

Frankly, I don't think turkey is actually impossible.  Wild turkeys lived in the area and wild turkey isn't much different from domestic turkey, except in plumpness. 

Something I was wholly unaware of was that there is actually a surviving letter about that meal.  It relates:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.

So, that tells us for sure that they ate fowl, by which I think they meant waterfowl, and deer.  Another surviving period letter, however, relates.

And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.

Hmmm. . . could have featured turkey and corn, which is what the author means by "Indian corn" (i.e., not wheat).

Why not potatoes?  Well, the Columbian exchange hadn't't gotten around to them yet, so they were unknown to the Mayflower colonists.  Later they'd start to spread, massively distrusted as a food at first.  Cranberries would make their appearance about fifty years later, which is really quite early.

For what it's worth, they probably boiled a lot of the food they ate as well, although roasting was a common cooking technique of the period. Frying, however, would have been much less common.

They would have had fresh vegetables, at that time of year, including staples like cabbage and beans.

You know, all in all it sounds like pretty good fare, and food you'd recognize as appropriate for this holiday, if not necessarily completely identical.

What'd they drink?  We apparently know less about that, but we do know that the Mayflower had contained a store of beer and that in fact the ship put in when it did as it had become exhausted.  But beer is a somewhat complicated thing to make and it would have been unlikely that they had grown the constituents to make any of it in 1621.  They may have fermented something by the fall, or not.  None of the stuff they had brought with them to plant works well in that context.  There are berries that are native to New England that can be fermented for wine, but if they did that, no record of it is left.  They may very well have just had cold water.

Lex Anteinternet: On Labor Day, 2021

Lex Anteinternet: On Labor Day, 2021: 

On Labor Day, 2021

Today is Labor Day, 2021.

Steel worker in Denver Colorado working on parts for the hull of a ship, 1942.  I recently had a jury in Denver in which not one single person had a blue collar job.

I'll be working.

That shouldn't be too surprising, as I'm a "professional", which means that I have hours and whatnot that are outside of the hourly concerns that many employees have.  But my first observation is that. 

Labor Day in the no holiday era.

It's a holiday, but a lot of people will be working.

That shouldn't be the case.

For that reason, I'm going to forego going to any stores that are open.  Indeed, my wife tries to do that on Sundays as well, and while I'm not as good as her about that, I agree with her.

An overseas view and the American economy

The second thing I'm going to do here is to link in the British Adam Smith's Institutes blog entry on Labor Day.  It's interesting how this British institute sees the American holiday

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LABOR DAY

The Adam Smith Institute is vigorously pro free market, so perhaps its view isn't too surprising.  It's notable as it takes a really cheery view of the American economy at a time at which Americans have been doubting it pretty rigorously, with the bizarre emergence of socialist thought gaining some currency, supposedly, in the country.

I don't think that the "socialist" who self declare as that really grasp what socialism is, and are actually social democrats, but that's another topic. The bigger topic is that lots of Americans don't feel that the economy works very well for them anymore.

One thing Adam Smith couldn't have foreseen is an economy that was controlled by corporations to the extent ours was.  Smith was a free marketer, but that was mostly a free market economy that was more like that which distributist imagine, rather than capitalists.  Smith probably didn't magine a world in which a lot of people from middle class backgrounds would find themselves working at Wall Mart, rather than owning stores of their own.

The disappearance of the blue collar holiday

It wasn't all that long ago that this day still had a very blue collar tinge to it.  Even when I was first practicing law the labor unions had a picnic on this day in City Park, and this region of the country has never been keen on unions.

Maybe they still do elsewhere, but labor in the US has taken a pounding by the capitalist exportation of manufacturing overseas, and the good blue collar jobs with it.

Probably only President Obama was really honest about this, in terms of a national leader.  He flatly noted that the jobs had gone and weren't coming back, taking the capitalist position that this was okay as new jobs came in their wake. That's the capitalist theory.  We sent jobs overseas we no longer wanted and got back great new high tech ones we did.

Except that's a view that's only really easy to hold if you are at the top of the economic ladder.  Most people aren't nearly as rah rah about that sort of evolution of work, as most people don't really want to work in a cubicle.  Office Space was a popular movie for a reason.

Indeed, an entire category of nostalgia is based simply on the idea of economically having your own.  Your own little store.  Your own farm.  Yours.  Nobody is going to get rich doing that, but you'd have your own.

Money is supposed to be the solution to that, and I've been hearing a lot about that recently.  You are supposed to enjoy this evolution, and move up into it, as there will be more money.

But then what?

Well, that's the thing.  You are supposed to make more money as you'll have more money.  And you'll like that as you'll have more money.

American money is just weird paper backed by nothing whatsoever, of course.  But in the spirit of the times, that's supposed to "bring you joy".

Gen X and Gen Y

But apparently it doesn't.

Indeed, as we've already noted here, Gen X and Gen Y, and even the Gap Generation, have many members who don't see it that way. They'd like to have a life, live where they want, have their friends, families, dogs and cats, and just, well, be.

And lots of them aren't going back to work post COVID at all.

Sooner or later they'll have to. And that will be pretty soon.  But the voting with their feet they're goind right now says a lot about how the economy, and the labor it entails, is viewed right now.