October 1

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

(Linked in from Lex Anteinternet on October 1, 2017).

Helene Ethel Fairbanks (nee Cassidy) (1882-1944), wife of Warren Charles Fairbanks and daughter-in-law of Charles Warren Fairbanks, Vice President of the United States to Woodrow Wilson.  No, this photograph doesn't have a direct relationship to this topic, but then again it does.

Normally Sundays are a slow day here on Lex Anteinternet, but we've posted a bunch this morning.  It's just one of those days, I guess.

One thing we'd note, having noted it in the Casper Star Tribune this morning, is that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Coming at the start of a week in which the past week saw the death of Hugh Hefner, ossified creep, who pretty much seems to have thought of women as nothing more than a set of breasts and one other organ, perhaps his death can serve to at least emphasize the terrible nature of this deadly killer.  I wonder how many of his young female subjects who prostituted their images in his slick print journal came down this this?  You know that some did.  That has to be the case as it strikes a massive number of women. The figures are staggering.

So here's hoping that perhaps this awful disease can be stopped, and here's to hoping that women pay attention to it, and I'm sure most do, so that they don't fall victim to it.  For folks who don't bother with their local paper anymore, on a day like today, it's worth picking up.

 

 Depression era WPA poster.

1800         Spain cedes Louisiana to France in return for Tuscany. Spain retained, however the right of first refusal on the territory.

1886  242 town lots were sold in Douglas.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile to the market at $825 a piece.  The start of the revolution of rural transportation had begun.

1901  Casper businessman Louis T. Holscher born in Dyersville, Iowa.  Holscher was from a large German American family in Dyersville that had been in commercial activities in that state since the family had immigrated from Westphalia in the 1840s.  Leaving home, with his parents permission, at age 13 he traveled to San Francisco, where he worked for awhile for the Cunard ship line as an office boy.  Making his way back west to Colorado, he went to work for the Swift Meat Packing company where he worked for many years, both in Denver and in Scottsbluff, rising to the managerial level.  In the early 1940s he purchased a meat packing plant in Casper which he operated, together with a creamery, until is death in the late 1940s.

1916   Sunday State Leader for October 1, 1916: Guard arrives at border and placed under command of a Regular
 

The news broke that the Wyoming National Guard made it to the border; Deming New Mexico to be exact.

And UW went down to defeat against the Colorado Aggies in football.

Wilson apparently warned that voting in the GOP risked war, an ironic statement, given what we knew would happen in a few short monts.

Europe, 1916

 

From the October 1916 edition of The Masses.

1917   The Laramie Boomerang for October 1, 1917. Liberty loans and a shakeup in the officer corps.
 

The Monday, October 1, 1917 edition of the Laramie Boomerang presented a grim cartoon for Monday morning readers as well as news on the first big Liberty Loan campaign that was kicking off.

Chances are, however, that men and women with sons in the National Guard were more interested in the article indicating that the Army was culling the officer corps of the Federalized Guard, which it was..

This is a story that's well known to students of the Guard in World War One and World War Two, but perhaps less so to others.  Having just run an item here on the Guard during the Vietnam War in which I sought to correct something that's a bit of a slight to the National Guard it might seem here that I'm doing something that's a bit of the opposite, but history is what it is.

Truth be known, while the Guard had been reforming itself and drawing closer to the Army since the passage of the Dick Act early in the 20th Century, which made it an official component and reserve of the Army, old aspects of the more independent state militia system lingered on in a couple of forms.  One was the existence of "Champagne Units" which were nearly fraternal military organizations for the very well heeled.  These units were not necessarily bad, we should note and indeed at least one of them was very good. But that was truly an oddity. Often over subscribed these units, typically cavalry, were hard to get into and saw men who were millionaires serving as privates.  Again, having said that, they weren't bad units.

More problematic is that the officer corps of the National Guard could be inconsistent.  The degree to which this was truly a problem remains debated, but that there was some problem can't be doubted.  Some men were simply unsuited to be officers and others were not fit enough to be officers.

Having said that, that wasn't completely untrue in the Regular Army, although it was much less true, and it would also be true of the Army raised to fight the war.  All in all, most men were suited and indeed sometimes highly suited for their wartime roles and the National Guard gave a good account of itself.  The war couldn't have been fought, from the American prospective, without the Guard.  The lingering Regular Army resentment over the Dick Act, which had not been universally popular with the Army, played a role in what would occur with National Guard officers as well, and that would continue on in to World War Two.

By World War Two, however, the National Guard would be closer yet to the Regular Army. That war would draw it much closer and by the time of the Korean War it was much more like it is today in those regards.  Today, it's very close.

As an aide in this paper, it's odd to see the headline about a "star athlete" opting to attend the university.  With a big war breaking out, that's not a headline we expect to see.