I"m putting up this interesting Out Our Way cartoon from this day in 1946 as it refers to something we've discussed here before, and its a bit surprising.
What we've discussed here before is hunting during World War Two.
I've always thought this was one of the more interesting threads on this blog, and it's one of the many ones I post and wonder why there's never any comments on it. But that's common for blogs. Usually, they don't get posts.
Anyhow, this cartoon by J. R. Williams sort of confirms what I'd suspected. Some people supplemented their table fare during the war by hunting.
Williams was, as we've discussed before, a Canadian cartoonist who moved to the U.S. with his family at age 15, locating in Detroit. He soon dropped out of school and became an apprentice machinist, providing topics for his cartoons which frequently depicted machine shops. He drifted after that, something not uncommon in that era, and worked as a cowboy in the West, as well as serving a three year stint on the U.S. Army as a cavalryman. All of that experience likewise reflected itself in his cartoons. Family life, in spite of his being a bit short (again, not all that uncommon for the time) also featured frequently.
He became a professional cartoonist in 1922 and remained one until his death in 1957 at age 69. He'd used the proceeds of his cartoons to buy a ranch in Arizona, before relocating later on to Pasadena, California. His cartoons carried on to some extent after his death in the hands of other artists.
Anyhow, one of the things about his cartoons is that depict fairly accurate slices of life, and this running gag from 1945-46 no doubt did. The father has taken an elk and a deer, and the family is keeping it in the ice box. The part that surprises me is that I really like venison, and these cartoons suggest that this venison was bad, which may be explained in an earlier cartoon I'm not familiar with.
Eighteen nations entered into an Agreement on Reparation from Germany.
This is interesting, but given as the Trump Administration is packed with dingbats, it's really hard to trust anything they put out. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is obsessed with what Americans eat, in a complete quack.
Having said all that, the advice against ultra processed foods is solidy given.
I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.
Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports. I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule. There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.
I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it. Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.
Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart. Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.
I've written a lot about how we got here. The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another. The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy. I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.
If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed. More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism. Again, France provides the model. After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party. The French right died.
I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way. Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump. By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026. The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.
That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him. Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump.
Not all of it will be capable of being repaired. A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.
But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think. In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S. Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans. The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence. We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.
Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.
Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do. A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration. The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to. Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair. The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.
The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice. Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.
If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference. Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial. The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere. Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.
In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur. A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it. While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.
The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation. Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place. We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that. Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit. Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor. Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves. Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else. Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end. Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein. Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.
Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away. Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States. But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.
Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.
Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there. The U.S. military won't be there.
China is imposing a 55% tariff on some (it appears quite a bit of) beef from Brazil, Australia and the United States.
In Casper, Vintage Wine and Spirits and Wyoming Rib and Chop are closed as of this morning.
Donald Trump vetoed a water project in Colorado which was passed unanimously by Congress, and which is in a district that is represented by MAGA Lauren Boebert and which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump mostly, it appears, as an act of revenge on Colorado.
The costs of at least 350 drugs in the U.S. are expected to rise in 2026.
Ad from the Sheridan newspaper, December 31, 1945.
December 31, 1945, marked the first peacetime New Years in much of the world, although not all of the world was at peace.
1945 marked the end of what we consider the oddly nostalgically recalled, but undeniably bloody, 1940s. It's the operation of Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History, which provides:
1945 was the end of World War Two, and the beginning of the post war era, and era which we still live in. It was the penultimate year of the 1940s, and to some degree, the penultimate year of the long 20th Century.1 It was the year that the Second World War ended with a massive technological nuclear flash, but it was also the year that featured the bloodiest fighting in a unified war that began as a series of wars in 1937 and 1939.
The end of the Second World War determined, or seemed to determine, questions that had arisen with the end of the Great War in 1918. World War One had caused the death of the old order in much of Europe, an order that saw aristocracies dominate in varying degrees in many of the European, and indeed international, states. The strain on the old order was obvious even before World War One, but it remained strong nonetheless. The Great War killed it.
The death of the old order did not answer the question of what would replace it. Every nation that fought in the war, however, would see immediate political evolution due to the war, with all of it reflecting forces that had been at work before the war. In functioning democratic countries with stable governments, that resulted in an expanded franchise. The UK extended the vote to entire classes that had not had it before the war, allowed Ireland to go independent, more or less, allowed its dominions to be actually independent, and extended the vote to women. The US extended the vote to women and soon made Native Americans citizens, with new states being admitted to the union prior to the Second World War. Canada and Australia obtained true political independence.
In countries that had strong aristocracies that opposed democracy, however, radical elements of the far left that had been underground to some degree leaped forward, the prime example being Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union. As forces of the far left advanced, finding a great deal of support in in the formerly disenfranchised working class, forces of the far right appealed to the same base and to conservative aristocratic classes, crushing democratic forces in between, as in Germany, where the Nazis gained power. In unstable democracies without long histories of democratic behavior, forces of the left and the right contested for total control, as in France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Mexico, with democracy faltering in many to some degree, sometimes totally.
World War Two was not, as some like to claim, a continuation of World War One, but rather a violent sorting out of the democratic, anti democratic, and populist forces it had unleashed. Starting in the late 1920s it seemed that the question the world was faced with was whether the future was democratic, fascist or communist. The Second World War determined, at least it seemed, that the world would not be fascist, but left the question of whether it would be communists or democratic undetermined.
Determining the question was bloody on a scale that we can no longer even imagine, although in terms of human history it was not all that long ago. The expenditure of lives in the war by all contestants was enormous, with the fascist and the communists states freely willing to waste the lives of men, and the democratic ones emphasizing technology where they could. All the combatants, however, acclimated themselves to conduct that at least the democratic ones would not have tolerated prior to the war, with mass bombing of urban targets being the most notable. By 1945 the US, arguably the most moralistic of the combatants, was willing to engage in fire bombing and ultimately the atomic bomb to bring the war to a conclusion.
Truman as Time's Man of the Year, posted under fair use exception.
The significance of the atomic age, contrary to the way things are currently remembered, was appreciated immediately. Truman was Time magazine's Man of the Year, pictured in front of a fist grasping nuclear firebolts. Newspapers, even by late 1945, were pondering what atomic warfare would mean.
We've argued it here before, but the Second World War created the modern United States, and more than that, modern American culture, in both good, and bad, ways.
Tire rationing came to an end on this day in 1945.
The most oblivious, at first was the change to the economy, which was little understood. Pent up consumer demand dating back to the start of the Great Depression meant that the country did not slide back into the depression as nearly all Western economist had feared. Adding to this, however, was the fact that none of the European industrial powers, along with Japan, had not suffered some level of industrial destruction. The U.S.'s industrial base was not only left intact, it had expanded. Only Canada could claim to enjoy the same situation, although its economy was much smaller. American workers took advantage of the situation nearly immediately with a wave of strikes demanding higher wages, strikes that were in fact largely successful. The economic golden age that current Republican populists imagine to have existed in the past reached its most pronounced form in the 1950s which is still looked back upon fondly, if inaccurately, in the same way that singer Billy Joel imagined it to have been in his lamet Allentown
Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore
Met our mothers in the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we're living here in Allentown
The obliteration of European industry created the illusion of some sort of American economic uniqueness that remains to this day and which the country is presently attempting to sort out by restoring it, which will not and cannot work. Part of that also involves an imagined domestic perfection that doesn't' reflect what was going on in reality either.
Prior to the Second World War the domestic culture of the United States was different in nearly every fashion. Even the horrors of World War One had not changes that. Most Americans lived closer to the poverty line than they do today, even if most Americans lived in families. Most Americans did not attend college or university, and most men didn't graduate from high school. There was a minimum of surplus wealth on the part of the average, although that had started to change by imd 1920s, only to be retarded by the Great Depression. Most people did not move far from home. Most men and women married people who grew up near them and were part of the same class and religion, although a surprisingly large lifelong bachelor class existed, particularly in certain occupations.
The war changed nearly all of that, and even during the war itself.
The first peacetime Federal draft in the nation's history took thousands of young men away from their homes starting in 1940 and 41, and of course became the major wartime draft that continued on until after the war, and with some hiatus, basically until 1973. The country would not have tolerated a peacetime draft prior to 1940, and barely did in 1940 and 1941. The country's views on the military, which prior to the war was sort of a type of disdain but acceptance of it as necessary, as long as it was small, completely changed during the war so that by the war's end the concept of a large peacetime military was fully accepted, and even admired, although that would be disrupted again due to the Vietnam War for a time.
Prior to the war, soldiering was, for enlisted men and junior officers, a bachelor occupation with servicemen largely looked down upon as lazy. The enlisted ranks often contained large numbers of immigrants, although that is still true. After the war, the view of servicemen, many of whom for decades were conscripts on relatively short enlistments changed radically.
The expectation of marriage changed as well, even at a time that wartime marriages came into periods of great stress. Prior to the war a fair number of blue collar workers and nearly all non owner agricultural workers were lifelong bachelors.
Cowboys Out Our Way from December 31, 1945. The two working hands are discussing "Sugar", their former ranch cook, who just married a rich widow, and Stiffy, the oldest cowhand on the ranch.
This ended after the war for a variety of reasons, one simple one being that entire classes of men who had never really lived any other life now had seen at least much of the country, and some large sections of the globe. Men who had planned on a life of working on the farm or ranch and living in a bunkhouse no longer found that appealing and no longer believed they had to do that. For those who returned to their states of origin, and huge number of them did not, this often meant taking up a job in towns and cities, rather than in fields. Quite a few used the GI Bill to advance an education that benefited them at a time in which a university education guaranteed a white collar job. Regions that had large reservations found that many returning Native American veterans chose to live in towns and cities near the reservations they were from, rather than on them where living conditions remained comparatively primitive. Lots of men married who would not have otherwise. The average marriage age notably dropped for the first time in decades and remained depressed in the 1950s.
Lots of couples got divorced in fairly quick order as well.
This was because of a "marry in haste" situation that had broken out during the war. Couples who figured that the male's chances of surviving the great blood letting were fairly slim and were willing to accordingly gamble, where as previously they would not have been. Moreover, many of the couples that married were of different backgrounds and different regions of the country, and not the literal "girl next door" so often portrayed. A really good portrayal of the this sort of situation was given in the brilliant 1946 film The Best Years of Their Lives, which gave a dramatic, but fairly accurate, examination of the domestic situation of the post war years. Of note, 1946 also gave the country It's a Wonderful Life, which really portrayed the prewar, not the wartime or postwar, domestic ideal.
The amazing film The Best Years of Our Lives which captured the immediate impact of World War Two on Americans.
It's a Wonderful Life, also released in 1946, but which really portrayed the nature of American life from the 1910s until the late 1930s, although it was set in 1946. It's gone on to be a sentimental Christmas classic.
The Best Years of Their Lives also depicts fairly heavy drinking, and not in an accepting fashion, but in a relatively realistic one .That was also something that the war really brought in. Returning veterans were often very broken men, and alcohol abuse was an enduring feature of their lives, along with chronic cigarette smoking. This bled over into the culture in general and an increased acceptance of heavy alcohol use became common, and indeed is something often featured in post war films in a routine fashion. Men who had endured killing on a mass scale often never really adjusted back to a normal life, and resorted to the bottle in varying degrees.
At least by my observation, some of these men became downright mean. We hate to say that about "The Greatest Generation", but it's an enduring theme of the recollections of many of their children. Alcoholic fathers who were extremely demanding on their male children seems to have been routine. Again, by my observation, many of the same children, who went on to rebel during the 1960s, returned to their childhood roots and became mean demanding fathers to their own children, making World War Two the domestic abuse gift that keeps on giving.
While certainly most returning veterans did not become mean, or abusive, it has to be noted that the Second World War started the country off on a destruction of the natural relationship between men and women we're also still dealing with.
Not since the American Civil War had so many young men been taken away from their homes and never in the country's history had so many young men been kept in the company of young men overseas. War involves the ultimate vice, the killing of other human beings, and all other vices naturally come along with it, in varying degrees by personality, and by military culture.
All wars involve the abuse of women, the most spectacular example during the Second World War being the mass rapes, often accompanied by murder of the victims, by the Red Army late in the Second World War. There are some examples by Western armies as well, but they are much smaller in scale. Also notable, however, was the largescale outbreak of prostitution in Europe, some of which was conducted nearly publicly in places that would never have tolerated it before the war. Economic desperation caused much of it in some areas, which included underaged European women prostituting themselves in some instances and the military simply accepting it.2
Bill Mauldin in 1945. The diminutive Mauldin appeared a little younger than he actually was, being 24 years old at the time of this photograph. Indeed, Mauldin strongly resembled, oddly enough, Rockwell's Will Gillis depiction of an average GI. Mauldin's appearance contributed to a public view of the cartoonist that fit very much in with the public's image of "fresh faced American boys" in general, but he'd already lived a hard life by the time he entered the service. She son of New Mexican farmer/ranchers who were partially native American, Mauldin's early life had been somewhat chaotic and his teenage years were more so, being somewhat on his own by that time and living a somewhat odd life by the time he was in high school. While Mauldin is associated with the typical GI, his status as a member of the staff of two separate Army newspapers lead to an atypical existence including have a teenage Italian mistress when he was in Italy. In some ways Mauldin reflects the best and the worst of Army life in his cartoons and for that matter in actual service life.
Even where not completely sordid, plenty of misconduct occurred in all of the ranks. This is depicted in the recent series Master of the Air with at least one of the affairs depicted actually having occurred. In fictional form, it's portrayed in 1956's The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.
The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit from 1956, but which starts off in World War Two and the moral failings in combat of the central character, including the violation of his marital vows.
This was bound to have some impact on the wider culture, and we've argued that it lead to the wider acceptance of the objectification of women. Indeed, thousands of men became acclimated to the centerfolds in Yank during the war, making the introduction of Playboy in 1953 not all that much of the big leap as its claimed to be.
Playboy often gets credit for firing the open shots of the disastrous Sexual Revolution, but it can be argued that Yank did. At any rate, by the wars end, millions of men had served in places were morality of all types was at a low ebb, and had ogled the girls in Yank, and perhaps painted topless or nude figures on government aircraft. That this would have some effect, particularly later when bogus sex studies were released as scientific texts, isn't too surprising. The major erosion of the natural order between men and women that came into full fruition after the late 1960s had some roots that went at least as far back as the 1910s, but World War Two gave it a major boost.
The war also gave a major boost to automobiles.
Prior to the war, and during it, the US relied on rail transportation. But new types of automobiles, notably 4x4s, were introduced during the war, and cars overall simply improved. By 1950 it was clear that road building and automobiles had become a major American obsession, spawned in part by the heavy road use, in spite of automobiles, that occurred during the war. 4x4s, which were strictly an industrial vehicle, were introduced into civilian use shortly after the war, with pickup truck variants ending the need for ranches to have cowboys in the high country during the winter, and allowing any part of the country to be accessed to some degree by sportsmen or agriculturalist year around.
1947 Sheridan newspaper advertisement for what was probably a surplus Dodge WC.
Reliance on equine transportation, in contrast, started to decline markedly.
December 31, 1945 brought the news that Hirohito had renounced claims to divinity, with the nature of the Japanese monarchical claim on that point never understood by Westerners in the first place. He did not ever claim to have been a god, and it was soon learned that the majority of the Japanese had never believed in the imperial family's claim to a unique divine status in the first place.
The war ended, seemingly for good, Japanese militarism. It also seems to have ended German militarism as well, something assisted by the fact that the Soviets ended up with Prussia, it's source.
The war, of course, also advanced the frontiers of Soviet domination beyond its 1940 status, something the Soviets had been working on since 1917. This would prove to be temporary, as would the Soviet Union itself, but that could not be foreseen in 1945. A world that had worried about whether fascism, communism, or democracy would prevail, now worried over whether communism or democracy would be the ultimate victors.
In China, where on this day an unsuccessful treaty between the Nationalist and the Communists would be signed, a contest more resembling the pre World War Two one was going on, revived from its 1927 start and temporary hiatus during the Second World War.
1945 was a fateful year. For Americans it started with American troops fighting the Germans in Bulge in Operation Wachts am Rhein and in Alsatia in Operation Nordwind. For the Soviets, January 1945 would be the bloodiest month of the war, as it would be for the Germans. For the Japanese, it marked pitched resistance to Allied advances everywhere, and a desperate effort to advance in China. It all came to an end in August, 1945, and by December 31, 1945, the world was trying to sort out where it was going. Much of it could be anticipated, but much could not be.
The prewar world was gone forever. Sorting that out is still going on.
*I had typed out a very long and detailed look at the 1940s, and 1945, for the December 31, 1945 entry, before some computer glitch entirely wiped it out. It's completely gone.
I may try to reconstruct it a bit, but the fact that I started working on it some time ago is a deterrent to that. And even if I do, a reconstructed post is never as good as the original.
1. Like decades, centuries don't really track the calendar precisely either. The 20th Century arguably began around 1898 or so, and continued on, perhaps, to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
2. An interesting sympathetic depiction of a woman engaging in prostitution due to economic desperation in found in the 1946 Italian film Paisa'.
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