Pedro de Alvarado

In “L’il Abner”, there was a long-running gag about Joe Btfsplk, the very embodiment of bad luck.  Joe, who was always pictured with a small dark rain cloud over his head, brought disaster and calamity to any one around him.  Always well-meaning, Joe was a perfect jinx.

While Joe was Al Capp’s invention, there is a larger than life historical figure who brought disaster and ruin wherever he went.

Pedro de Alvarado was a Spanish conquistador in the early days of the Central American conquest.  Immigrating to Cuba in 1511, Alvarado quickly rose to prominence among the Spanish officials who carved out estates on the island.  Alvarado was tall and handsome, and with red hair and beard, he made a striking impression on those he met.  He was capable both of being affable to his friends but also of being cruelly violent to his enemies—the perfect combination of traits to be a successful conquistador.

Alvarado was on the little remembered first expedition to Mexico that was led by Juan de Grijalva in 1518, a year before the infamous Cortés expedition.  Grijalva, who brought Alvarado with him as his lieutenant, sailed along the coast of Mexico wary of the large war party of natives that generally opposed his landing on the coast.  Trading glass trinkets and metal knives, Grijalva and Alvarado were able to gather a considerable quantity of gold, most of which was in the form of 600 golden axes.  Perhaps most important, they learned of a richer settlement to the west, the Aztec Empire.

Upon returning to Cuba, the axes turned out to be made of copper, not gold, a failure that Alvarado successfully convinced the governor was not his fault, but that of Grijalva.  When the Cortés expedition left, Pedro was the second in command, a move that proved tragic.

Cortés eventually made his way to Tenochtitlan, where he was the guest of Montezuma.  Through the Aztec chief, Cortés learned that a new group of Spaniards had arrived on the coast, whom Cortés knew had come to arrest him.  (The governor had reason to believe Cortés was a little too independent and wouldn’t share the plunder.)  Cortés left Pedro in command and hurried back to the coast.  Leaving Pedro in command of a delicate diplomatic mission was sort of like letting the Taliban run Vassar.

During an Aztec religious festival—which Pedro interpreted as satanic rites—‘he massacred the priests and nobles.  By the time that Cortés returned to the city, the Spanish forces were under siege.  As you can imagine, Cortés was a little peeved at Pedro, and ordered him to guard the rear of the Spanish forces as they evacuated Tenochtitlan.

Tenochtitlan was built on an island that was connected to the shore of the lake by long causeways.  For defensive purposes, the Aztecs had constructed the causeways with removable sections, which Cortés soon discovered could also be removed to keep the Spaniards from escaping.  Using a makeshift wooden bridge, the Spaniards fled for their lives while the Aztecs surrounded the causeway with canoes filled with warriors who attacked the fleeing men with arrows.

The makeshift bridge became stuck in the first gap and the terrified men were forced to leave it behind.  The next gap was crossed by the surviving men climbing over the bodies of the men who had preceded them.  According to an account by Gonzalo Ocampo, Pedro de Alvarado, already wounded, crossed the gap by using a lance as pole vault.  

While Cortés and Alvarado, eventually returned and defeated the Aztecs, the night of their bloody and violent escape, July 10, 1520, is known as La Noche Triste, the Sad Night.  Pedro went on to conquer most of Guatemala and part of Honduras—partly by enticing native leaders to negotiate (occasionally by burning them.  Native tribes deprived of leadership were much easier to conquer. 

Eventually, Pedro got bored and hearing of the great wealth being discovered in Peru by Pizarro, decided to try his luck further south.  You can imagine just how excited Pizarro was to have the personification of bad luck suddenly show up on his doorstep.  Knowing that all Pedro really wanted was gold, Pizzaro gave him a fortune in gold bars simply to leave.

Pedro was halfway back to Spain before he realized that he had been paid in gold painted lead bars.  At least they weren’t copper axes.

Pedro went back to Guatemala where he had been appointed governor, but the conquistador didn’t exactly have the temperament for government, so be began planning an expedition to China and the Spice Islands.  The mischief Pedro could have gotten into in China would be enough material to fill a book, but unfortunately (Or, perhaps, fortunately!), Pedro never made it there.

There was a small uprising among the local natives, and Pedro was responding with a band of soldiers when his horse stumbled and fell on him, killing him.  His death left a political vacancy, so his wife, Beatriz de la Cueva was appointed to be his replacement. The bad luck continued! — a wall of the crater lake above the capital collapsed.  The water rushing down the side of the volcano carried off most of the inhabitants, but the new governor may still have been alive when an aftershock collapsed what was left of the chapel in which she and the remaining townspeople had taken refuge!

What's Next?

With America’s exit from Afghanistan, our longest war is over.  Personally, as a historian, I have no interest in rehashing America’s military and political missions during that time.   I have no doubt that shortly bookstores will be inundated with books, each detailing exactly what went wrong, with no two such written accounts agreeing on a single detail.

Instead of talking about Afghanistan’s past, I’d prefer to climb out on a limb and make a few predictions about the future of Afghanistan.  It should take only a few months for the reader to plumb the depths of my naïveté, fact-checking my predictions, allowing new grist for the people who delight in sending me hate mail.

Historically, one of the hardest jobs for a revolutionary army has been what to do with your military after the revolution is won.  A revolutionary army fighting a protracted guerrilla war is vastly different from the military needs of a new government that seeks to defend its borders and protect the very infrastructure it had tried so valiantly to destroy during the previous decades.

Military history gives us numerous examples of the difficulty of transitioning a revolutionary army over to a professional army, almost all of such efforts resulting in failures and either new revolution or protracted civil war.  Just off the top of my head, I can think of three main reasons for the failure.

First, there is the difficult problem of military demobilization.  Put simply, angry men with guns react negatively to being issued pink slips.  Angry men with guns who have few skills other than breaking things and hurting people react violently when being told they have to seek employment in an economy that has been crushed by decades of war.  In far too many cases, these men have historically found employment using the only skill they know—they enlist in a new revolution, fighting against the government they have only recently installed.

Demobilization, in general terms, has always been a problem for military leaders.  Julius Caesar gave his veterans land in newly created towns along the frontier, thus not only stabilizing the area, but moving potential threats far from Rome.  If you read the history of Honduras from the last decades of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century, the same names keep surfacing.  Soldiers rarely even stopped fighting long enough to change uniforms as various governments came and went.  In Afghanistan, there is another problem:  even if the new government keeps all of the Taliban fighters, what do they do with the 300,000 men who were in the Afghan army?

It is inevitable that the Taliban will begin fighting with Al Qaeda, who will fight Isis-K, and all of them will fight groups that we haven't even heard of yet.

Second, there is the problem of what to do with revolutionary leaders, as the skills necessary to lead a small band of guerrilla fighters does not easily translate over to the skills necessary to lead a mechanized unit or to maintain and fly helicopters.  The very nature of the skills necessary to be a successful revolutionary officer are not the same skill set required by a professional army trying to defend a nation’s borders. 

When Francisco Madero successfully overthrew the Mexican government of Porfirio Diaz, there were simply not enough high-ranking jobs in his new government to reward all of the officers who had led his revolution.  As a result, within a year, many of his former trusted officers were now leading a new revolution against Madero.  After his successful revolution, Fidel Castro solved this problem by “exporting the revolution” to Africa and South America.  Many of his former soldiers who didn’t die in those foreign wars ultimately ended up in Cuban prisons.  There is a very good chance that if the Bolivian Army hadn’t killed Che, Fidel would have had to do so.

The next problem with the military is simply the motivation of revolutionary soldiers.  Often, the only bond holding a resistance movement together is a shared hatred of the existing government.  Once that government is toppled, the various fighting forces frequently  realize they no longer have a common cause and turn on themselves.  There is a sad truism that most violent revolutions, deprived of an external enemy, eventually form a circular firing squad.  There are numerous examples:  the French Revolution, the successful slave revolt in Haiti, or even the Republican Congressional revolution of 1994 led by Newt Gingrich.  The Taliban is, at its roots, a collection of tribal allegiances and its apparent unified front will soon dissolve into tribalism with no common enemy, ending with numerous warring factions led by tribal strongmen.

Last, but not least, naturally, the Taliban forces are going to expect to be paid.  Even the most dedicated army grows restless when its pay is withheld.  During the Mexican-American War, Winfield Scott had a very difficult time keeping his army in check when the payroll was not delivered on time.  I don’t relish the job of any general facing a horde of angry, well-armed men while he tries to explain why the promised wealth will be delayed…again. 

This last point brings up the last of my predictions.  The Taliban will never be able to establish a viable economy.  Throughout all of history, there are few examples of a successful revolution setting up anything close to a stable economy without the help of a genius like Alexander Hamilton.  (Though few have failed as spectacularly as Fidel Castro, who turned most of the Cuban economy over to the untrained hands of Che Guevara.  Among the many economic models to follow, Che chose to emulate the economy of Communist East Germany.  No, seriously!  It will be sort of like a car manufacturer’s deciding to reintroduce the Yugo, but with the fuel tank of a Pinto and handling of a Robin Reliant.)

The Taliban have already started imposing some harebrained economic policies.  Banks are forbidden from allowing their depositors to withdraw more than a $100 a day, thus destroying any popular trust in the banks.  There is a shortage of money circulating as people begin hoarding (a condition that is guaranteed to worsen when the Taliban begins issuing its own currency).  Gresham’s Law states that when a country issues suspect currency; the public supply of foreign hard money vanishes.  (Put more colloquially, Gresham’s Law is “Bad money drives out good.”)  

Argentina tried to legislate its way out of an economic crisis by restricting withdrawals from banks, forbidding capital from leaving the country, and issuing so many different kinds of money that, for a while, the most popular form of ‘currency’ in the country was a barter coupon that was the equivalent of an hour’s labor.  The government issued currency was so worthless that even a few airlines preferred payment in barter coupons.

It is almost inevitable that the Taliban will print its own money, legislating an impossible exchange rate with Western currency, thus ensuring inflation.  (When Venezuela did this, it immediately touched off hyperinflation.  The current exchange rate is $1 US will get you 4.6 million Bolivars.)  As the Afghan economy begins to fail, the Taliban will limit how much money can be taken out of the country, thus simultaneously ensuring the beginning of vast capital flight while discouraging any foreign investment.  As inflation gets out of control, the Taliban will probably institute wage and price controls, thus destroying what is left of the economy.  I would predict that Afghanistan, where 90% of the populace already lives in poverty and 1 person in 3 struggles to obtain food, will be back to a barter system of exchange within two years.

Afghanistan currently receives financial aid from Pakistan, China, and Iran, mainly because these countries had a vested interest in seeing America tied down in a war with little possibility of a political victory.  Now that America has left, there is far less incentive for these countries to continue to aid Afghanistan.  Iran is financially broke, and Pakistan, nearly so, and neither country is likely to put Afghanistan’s interests above their own.

I can almost hear the reader saying, “Wait, won’t they just grow more poppies and export opium?”

The Taliban will certainly try, but I doubt it will work as the world has changed since the Taliban were last in power.  Not only is the world market already fairly saturated with opium, but the market is shifting towards more powerful and easier to produce synthetic opioids.  Somehow, I just can’t imagine the Taliban setting up vast chemical laboratories and competing on the world market.  Afghanistan currently does, and will continue to export drugs, but I just don’t believe it can expand its market significantly.

So, the bottom line for Afghanistan a few years from now?  A long and incredibly violent civil war, the battles to be fought in a desperately poor country by impoverished people—with expensive modern arms and equipment left them by the US.  At least until those start to need maintenance.

How Many Monkeys Can It Hold?

“Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.”  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain.

This was how Twain introduced Huck Finn to the world, in chapter six of Tom Sawyer.  Even with such a prodigious head start, Huck still beat out Tom as the most memorable of Twain’s characters.  I can still remember the first time I read that paragraph—I was immediately filled with a sense of wonder.  Specifically, I wondered just what the hell was a hogshead.  I probably wasn’t the only one to wonder, because eight years later, when Twain gave Huck his own book, whenever he mentioned Huck’s temporary housing, he called it a ‘sugar hogshead’, furnishing a small clue.

Consulting the family’s venerable 1957 set of World Book Encyclopedias—an early analog version of Google—I learned that a hogshead was a barrel, a big barrel.  No, it had nothing to do with hogs, pigs, or even transporting bacon.  The term comes from the 15th century English term 'hogges hede', a large 63-gallon wooden cask, two and a half feet wide and four feet tall, more than big enough for a boy to sleep in, and perfect is incorrect:  they are casks.  A barrel is a specific size of a cask.  (All barrels are casks, but not all casks are barrels.)

Centuries ago, barrel makers (more properly called coopers) discovered that the best barrels were made from white oak obtained from 75-year-old trees, whose sawn timber was left to age for a minimum of six months.  After a master cooper quarter sawed the staves and bound them together with iron rings, the barrels had to age for several more months while the fibers making up the white oak staves slowly dried, and the tannins in the wood leached out.  Master coopers created watertight casks, while ‘slack coopers’ crafted the less demanding casks to transport dry goods.

Among the many reasons the Spanish Armada failed to defeat the English in 1587 was the raid by Sir Francis Drake on the seaport town of Cadiz the year before.  Besides looting and sacking the town, Drake set fire to some 1700 tons of barrel staves that were drying in preparation to make barrels to store food and water for the invasion fleet.  When the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel to attack England in 1588, the fleet’s food and water were improperly stored in green barrels which quickly contaminated their contents, poisoning the crew.  The crew of one ship, attempting to make landfall, found themselves too sick to maneuver their ship properly and simply ran it aground, ripping the bottom out.

Assuming that no pyromaniac pirates have been around, our seasoned barrel is ready for most uses, but bourbon distilleries learned that if the insides of the barrel was scorched with fire, it gave the aged whiskey a distinctive color and taste.  Across the Atlantic, the distillers of the best scotch learned that if the empty second-hand bourbon barrels were re-scorched, it produced superior scotch.  (Only one of the reasons that Laphroaig—my favorite scotch—tastes so good.)

Since barrels were so widely used for so many different commodities, it is not surprising that there was a wide and confusing variety of sizes of barrels and a guild was organized to regulate the training and pay of the coopers.  What is surprising is that the guild is still operating.  Among the many other guild halls in London, you can find the Worshipful Company of Coopers, which received its royal charter in 1501.  

Just an abbreviated list of the various sizes of wooden casks is confusing, but there is at least a little order to them:  There are 8 pints in a gallon, 4.5 gallons in a pin, 2 pins in a firkin, 2 firkins in a kilderkin, 2 kilderkins in a barrel, 1.5 barrels in a hogshead, 2 hogsheads in a butt, and finally 2 butts in a tun.  If someone says they drank a butt load, they consumed 108 gallons.  If they drank a tun, they imbibed 252 gallons.  The tun is a measurement of volume, not weight, though by a strange coincidence, a tun of water weighs a ton.

What prompted me to think about all of this was a discussion in an economics class about the global oil market.  When someone asked how many gallons of crude were in a barrel, the prompt—and incorrect—answer was 55 gallons.  I volunteered that 55 gallons was the capacity of a modern drum, and that oil barrels were 42 gallons.  No one believed me, even after I explained that when I grew up in West Texas, we learned arithmetic in elementary schools by calculating oil depletions allowances.  I didn’t tell them that as true native-born Texans; The Doc and I actually own a whopping 1/214th of an aging oil well.  The well currently pays an annual royalty not quite sufficiently large enough to buy a single breakfast burrito.  

So how did the international standard for a barrel of oil come to be the somewhat arbitrary measurement of 42 gallons?

It started in America with Edwin L. Drake’s 1859 oil discovery at Titusville, Pennsylvania.  This was the first commercial oil well, setting off a drilling frenzy that today we would refer to as an ‘oil boom’.  For years, the oil was shipped in anything available, a confusing variety of hogshead, barrels, tierces, kilderkins, empty whiskey barrels and just about anything else you could fill and then hammer a plug into the bung hole.  Eventually, people noticed that the 42-gallon tierce, previously commonly used to transport fish, when full of crude oil weighed almost exactly 300 pounds—about as big a container as could be handled by one experienced worker.  Just as important, 20 of the wooden tierces would completely fill a standard railroad flat car.  

Within a few years, the tierce had become the standard container for oil transport.  So many oak barrels were needed that Standard Oil maintained its own oak forests to insure a steady supply of barrels, manufacturing so many that they were able to drop the production cost of a new barrel down to only $1.50.  The wooden barrels could be tipped over by a single man, then using the extended middle of barrel, could be rolled into place, before being righted.  For years after the steel barrels replaced the wooden variety in 1902, the steel barrel retained the traditional shape.  Though oil is no longer shipped in these containers, it is still sold in 42 gallon lots.

Personally, I find it a little difficult to visualize how much a barrel or a hogshead of something is, but I know a trick to help.  A standard American bathtub holds exactly 42 gallons, or one barrel.  It turns out that “a barrel of bathtub gin” is redundant…sort of.

Thanks for the Tamales

There are moments in history when leaders suddenly find themselves in a position to say something important, uttering words that will be remembered through all eternity.  Long after people have forgotten the circumstances, or even who made the statement, exactly what they said seems destined to be recorded in history books forever.  Let you give you a few examples:

During the Battle of the Bulge, when the 101st Airborne Division was surrounded at Bastogne with little hope of survival, the German army sent a demand for the Americans to surrender.  While few remember that it was General Anthony McAuliffe who replied, most people do know his answer, “Nuts.”  

Before King Xerxes invaded Greece, he attempted the impossible: he tried to get the warlike Spartans to surrender and accept Persian rule.  Confident that his much larger army could conquer the independent city-states of Greece, he implored the Spartan King Leonidas to surrender his arms.  In a reply that would later be echoed by numerous armies in later wars, Leonidas answered, “Molon labe.” (“Come and take them.”)

As a Roman statesman, Cato the Elder was furious that Rome had ended each of her two wars with Carthage by demanding only a tribute instead of the city’s total destruction.  For years, Cato ended each of his speeches in the Senate with the phrase, "Carthago delenda est!" (“Carthage must be destroyed.”)  Cato eventually got his wish when Carthage was burned in the Third Punic War and her surviving inhabitants were enslaved.  (The notion that the Roman army sowed the ground of Carthage with salt so that nothing could grow there is a 19th century invention.)

I was tempted to add the battle cry of the Finnish troops fighting the Russians during World War II, "Tulta munille!" (“Fire at their balls!”).  Unfortunately, this seems to be an invention of Väinö Linna's World War II novel, The Unknown Soldier.  If you have never read this excellent novel, you can read it free here.

As you have probably guessed by now, I have a nomination for another great line from a leader—one you have probably never heard of.  

Pascual Orozco was not your typical general of the Mexican Revolution.  Of Basque heritage, he was tall, fair-haired, and well-educated, and he had been a fairly successful businessman before the fighting began.  Born in the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico, Orozco was a muleskinner and was experienced in using long lines of mules to move men and supplies through the rugged terrain of the Chihuahuan mountains, which skill would become useful during the violent years of fighting in the Mexican Revolution.  The small mines of the region were yielding significant amounts of gold so that Orozco hired armed guards and earned enough transporting ore for the miners that he was able to purchase his own small gold mine. Then, recognizing a business opportunity, Orozco set up a series of small stores in the remote towns that made up border regions just south of the United States.

Dissatisfied with the corrupt government of President-For-Life Porfirio Diaz (who had made life difficult for businessmen who lacked political connections or great wealth—neither of which Orozco possessed), he raised a band of soldiers and joined the nascent revolution of Francisco Madero in 1911.  Since Madero’s revolution was incredibly small and highly unlikely to be effective against the large, professional army of a Mexican president who was backed by the United States, Madero eagerly accepted the support of inexperienced men like Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa (the bandit and cattle rustler who was also remaking himself into a military general).

Orozco, the experienced muleskinner, proved to be very effective at logistics and led his army to a series of small victories.  Mexico’s professional army depended on the nation’s railroads for deployments and the revolutionary forces soon learned that they were relatively safe if they moved through the canyons and deserts where there were no railroads.  When Mexico’s government seemed to be powerless to stop the revolution, popular support for President Diaz gradually vanished like the morning fog when the sun rises.  President Porfirio Diaz (until then the longest ruling dictator in Latin American history) eventually bowed to the inevitable and fled—along with the contents of the Mexican treasury—to a comfortable exile in Paris.

Madero became Mexico’s president and quickly learned that starting a revolution was a hell of a lot easier than ending one.  As he appointed men to various offices, there was no good office for a muleskinner/general who had little professional training.  When he offered Orozco a position in the Army—the same army that Orozco had so recently been fighting—Orozco had his feelings hurt and abandoned Madero.  Before long, he was again part of the revolution, fighting this time  against his former leader and within a few short years, the revolutionary general was ambushed and killed in West Texas by the Texas Rangers as he gathered men and horses for yet another revolution in Northern Mexico.

However, Orozco’s death occurred years after he uttered one of those great lines that deserves to be reprinted forever in the history books.  While fighting in the mountains of Chihuahua for Madero, Orozco proved to be a ruthless, if opportunistic, military commander.  There is ample evidence that he frequently used his army to attack his business competitors, “requisitioning” goods from the stores of his rivals while sparing his own stores.  Nor could captured soldiers expect clemency, as Orozco usually had prisoners quickly executed.

Early in the revolution, Orozco led his men into the badlands of Northern Mexico, and set up an ambush at the Cañón del Mal Paso (Canyon of the Evil Pass).  When the Mexican soldiers of General Navarro blundered into the trap, most of the men were slaughtered and the rest hurriedly retreated.  (You would kind of think the name of the canyon might have warned the men.)

Orozco had his men strip the bodies of the dead soldiers and sent their uniforms back to President Diaz with a note that read, "Ahí te van las hojas, mándame más tamales". 

In English, that translates as "Here are the wrappers, send me more tamales." 

We’re Poised to Fail Again

Even as the White House press secretary was denying the existence of inflation, the Treasury Department was announcing a 6.2% cost of living adjustment for Social Security recipients.  The first conclusive evidence of inflation is always the denial of its existence.

Unfortunately, the second sign of an imminent period of rising inflation is always some elected fool (pardon the redundancy) calling for price controls in an effort to stop it.  It is simply amazing how many times the same failed tactic has been tried to stop a market from following its inevitable path—Without one exception or even a marginal success in recorded history.

Don’t just take my word for it:  I recommend reading "Forty Centuries of Wage & Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation” by Robert L. Schuettinger and Eamonn F. Butler.  The book brilliantly outlines how the attempt to “set” prices always fails to reduce prices or to even eliminate shortages.  Using examples from Hammurabi, Ancient Egypt, Rome, Nixon, and all the way to today’s inept leaders, the result of such practices has always inevitably been abject failure.  To quote the authors:

By giving producer and consumers the wrong signals because “low” prices to producers limit supply and “low” prices to consumers stimulate demand, price controls widen the gap between supply and demand.

Of particular interest is the chapter on the French Revolution and the “Law of the Maximum”.  Over roughly twenty months, the Revolutionary Committee tried just about every form of price control (before or since), ultimately managing to “control” the most agriculturally rich country of Europe into a protracted period of starvation and economic collapse.

Despite price controls having a long record of total failure as an economic policy, politicians keep finding new ways to repackage the same old failures.  Under the guise of rent controls, minimum wages, or moratoria on evictions—and despite the name changes—these measures are all simply price controls and they will end up doing more harm than any supposed good.  The eviction moratoria will inevitably lead to higher rents and a housing shortage.  Even as you read this, landlords all over the country are converting apartments into condominiums.

Recently, I read of a proposal for a novel new method of price control that started in France, under which grocery stores are to be forbidden by law from disposing of unsold produce—it has to be donated to the poor.  Although it’s supposed aim is charity, it will inevitably lead to the stores’ purchasing less produce from farmers, lowering production, and leading to higher prices and less choice.   (Notice how the people who passed the law are being charitable with the property of someone else.)

Despite anyone’s best intentions to the contrary, market forces are as fixed as mathematics.  You can no more change the laws of supply and demand than you can pass a law successfully invalidating the Pythagorean theorem…Not that politicians haven’t tried.  Let me tell you about my favorite example.

My parents were older than sliced bread.  Literally, since sliced bread was invented in 1928 and both of my parents were born years before Otto Frederick Rohwedder started selling bakeries a single loaf slicing machine that rapidly changed the industry.  (While not the first bakery to use the new machine, it was Wonder Bread that made the novelty of uniformly sliced bread known across America.  

Sliced bread was more convenient to use, and housewives with large families hated the chore of slicing large amounts of bread before meals.  More convenient to use meant that more people ate bread, increasing sales and rewarding the stores, the bakeries, and the wheat farmers.  

Then came World War II and an era of price controls and rationing to meet the needs of full mobilization.  As is usually the case, the price controls created an active black market and raised prices, but because of international demand, production stayed high.  In America, the price of wheat grew by 25% while production rose by 50%, with most of the excess production being used to feed our allies.

While direct examination of the American wartime wage and price controls is made difficult by the elimination of some models of production, a steady decline in quality, and an active black market, it is obvious that the mandated measures failed—wages and prices still rose.

On January 18, 1943, the Food Administrator, Claude R. Wickard mandated that bakeries cease the production of sliced bread.  Reasoning that the metal used to create the slicing machines were needed for the war effort and that sliced bread needed heavier wrapping paper to keep the bread from drying out and becoming stale, Wickard banned the production of sliced bread as a measure to win the war.  The announcement was timed to come out simultaneously with a 10% rise in the cost of bread, hopefully encouraging less consumption.

Unfortunately, there were several things wrong with the plan.  First, the bakeries already owned the slicing machines and couldn’t have bought new ones since the factories that normally manufactured them had found more lucrative contracts producing war materials.  Second, after more than a year in the war, the bakeries were used to the vagaries of interrupted supplies and thus had already stocked up with a large supply of the waxed paper to wrap the sliced bread.

Bread consumption actually went up, since most people were unable to slice their bread into uniformly thin slices.  At any rate, there was little need to reduce wheat consumption by 1943:  Rising prices meant that the farmers were already growing more wheat and the government had already stockpiled over a billion bushels of wheat (enough to supply the needs of American consumers for over two years, even if no wheat were grown during that time).  

None of the above reasons was as important to the bureaucrats as the outcries of an angry public.  The public might be willing to ration sugar, automobile tires, and coffee, but even rationed gasoline wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread.  In less than three months, the War Food Administration reversed itself and the supply of sliced bread returned to store shelves on March 8, 1943.

Even with this dismal history, the United States seems poised to once again experiment with price controls.  Gee, I wonder what the results will be.

We Learned This at Valley Forge

The news today carries the tragic story of a Dickenson, Texas city councilman who died of Covid-19 just days after posting on social media about “the folly of vaccinations”.  It is strange to read about so many people being opposed to vaccinations, since I (evidently mistakenly) thought that this was a long-settled topic. 

Being almost as old as dirt, I remember the mass inoculations against smallpox and polio of the fifties—I still have a faint smallpox vaccination scar to prove it.  The vaccines were an incredible success—smallpox has been completely conquered and polio remains endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan.   

And those mass vaccinations some seven decades ago are far from the first such endeavors in American history.  Indeed, the very existence of our country may have depended on the very first large-scale inoculation program conducted at public expense.

In the mid eighteenth century, while smallpox was ravaging most parts of the world, the small British colonies of North America were usually spared from the epidemic.  Outside of a small handful of large settlements like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, most colonists lived in relatively isolated settlements with very little contact with the rest of the world.  While smallpox was not unknown, it was relatively rare.

In 1751, seventeen-year-old George Washington took his half-brother, Lawrence—then suffering from consumption (tuberculosis)—to Barbados for his health.  While there, he accepted an invitation to dine with a wealthy planter despite being warned that members of his family had contracted smallpox.  Ominously, Washington recorded his misgivings about the visit in his diary.  Shortly after the dinner, he writes “Was strongly attacked with the small Pox,”—his last entry in the diary for 24 days.  Washington, of course, eventually recovered, though it took weeks.  Having once had smallpox, Washington carried antibodies, making him immune to the disease.

During the American Revolution, most of the European troops brought to America were immune or benefitted from herd immunity because most had contracted the disease in childhood.  Not so, the American troops:  For the first time in their lives, these soldiers were brought from all of the corners of North America, living in camps with poor sanitation, which provided a perfect breeding ground for all kinds of diseases.  The cases of smallpox immediately began to increase.

There was something that Washington could do:  he could inoculate his troops against smallpox through a process called variolation (named after variola, the virus that causes smallpox).  It involved infecting a thread with live pustular matter from someone with the disease, then embedding the thread into an incision on a healthy person’s arm, deliberately infecting the person with smallpox.  While the patient always became sick, the disease was usually a milder form of the disease.  Still, depending on the source you read, somewhere from 3 to 5% of those treated died from the inoculation…And the patient always took weeks to recover.

Variolation had originated in Western Asia—probably Turkey—and had slowly spread west across Europe.  While the preventive treatment was known, it was still highly controversial and seldom used in the New World.  

Note.  There is a persistent story that Washington inoculated his troops with a different but close variety of the disease, specifically cowpox.  The story goes that milkmaids caught the disease from the cows they cared for, and some alert doctor realized that these milkmaids never caught the more virulent form of the disease.  While the story is quite true, the cowpox method of inoculation was not discovered by Edward Jenner until 1796, well after the end of the Revolutionary War.

Washington had considered inoculating his troops in 1775, but rejected the idea because the treatment would incapacitate at least a third of his troops, inviting an attack from the British.  The general issued orders forbidding the army doctors from using the variolation technique on the troops.  Instead, the general issued travel bans, forbidding visitors from Boston (which was then suffering from a smallpox epidemic) from entering his camp.  In addition, those soldiers who did come down with smallpox were quarantined at a special hospital near Cambridge.

Then, as now, quarantines and travel bans had only limited success.  Over the next year and a half, increasing numbers of Washington’s troops succumbed to the disease.  There were even rumors that the British were intentionally sending infected people to strategic areas in a deliberate attempt to spread the disease.  Though this theory remains unproved, England had employed this tactic during the earlier French and Indian War.

Washington grew increasingly desperate, forcing him to reconsider using variolation to treat his troops.  In a January 6, 1777, letter to John Hancock, Washington wrote "Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army . . . we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy."

Finally, in February 1777, Washington ordered a mandatory inoculation of the troops, to be done in absolute secrecy to prevent a British attack, and to be carried out in stages beginning with the new recruits.  It was hoped that by the time the recruits received their uniforms, weapons, and a modicum of training, they would have recovered from the symptoms caused by the inoculation.  

This was the first mass public health initiative of the new country—one carried out with government funds.

“Finding the smallpox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our army, I have determined that troops shall be inoculated,” he wrote. “This expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects.”

Seldom mentioned in history books, but among the horrific conditions experienced by the troops during the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge was that the poorly fed, inadequately clothed, freezing troops were also suffering from the fevers and chills as a result of variolation.  Still, because of the treatment, not a single regiment among the revolutionary army was unable to fight due to the disease.

While Washington treated his troops, the British felt no need to initiate a similar program in their troops who enjoyed a measure of herd immunity.  As a result, the disease quickly spread among colonials, Native Americans, and slaves who chose to fight alongside the British, often making such units more of liability to the British cause than assets.

By the end of the war, Washington had inoculated some 40,000 of his troops and had lost only fifty due to the illness.  Despite the horrors of battle, a little math reveals that compared to the general population of the colonists left to suffer the ravages of smallpox epidemics that swept across America as the European troops traveled across America, a colonist had a better chance to survive the war as an inoculated soldier on the battlefield than as an uninoculated civilian.  

Then, as now, while there are a few dangers of being vaccinated, they pale in comparison to not being vaccinated.  There is no way of telling how many people have been saved by vaccinations, but the number is at the very least many millions of souls.  Vaccines work so well that most of us—unlike any previous generation in America—do not personally know anyone who has died of smallpox, diphtheria, measles, or polio.  After 250 years, you would think this debate would have ended.

The Spring Palace

Back in 1967, I had a front row seat while the city of San Antonio built itself a world’s fair, called Hemisfair ’68.  I remember being told that the event “would put the city on the map” and that it would “allow Texas to showcase its products and services”.  Basically, it was going to bring jobs and money to San Antonio.

In the decades since, I have learned that when a politician talks to me about ‘putting a place on the map’, the flagpole is about to be shoved through my wallet.  Whether it’s about building a Spaceport, a sports complex, or 750-foot tower in the middle of a fair, the politicians promise jobs and wealth that never really appear and the whole shooting match costs a bundle, raising property (and other) taxes for decades to come.

Back when I ran a hotel on Galveston Island, the city spent a fortune on a study of tourism.  Conducted by a high-priced consultant (a consultant is someone with an advanced degree who lives out of town) to see if the city could increase our revenue from tourism.  I’ll skip all the details, but it turned out that the residents of the city lost money on tourism since demand for city services went up while the meager trickle of increased revenue went to hotels and restaurants with out-of-state ownership.  While the tourist business brought new jobs, it also brought more low-income people looking for jobs.

In the words of one of the more astute city fathers, “The average tourist comes to the island with a five-dollar bill and a screaming kid with a dirty diaper.  By the time they leave, neither has been changed.”

By the time Hemisfair ’68 was over, the town had a few new buildings, the hotels and restaurants had made a small fortune, and the taxpayers were left to pay off millions of dollars.  The real winners were the various construction companies and banks that had financed the affair.  

The problem, of course, is than the novelty of such fairs and exhibitions has long since worn off.  The most famous of the world’s fairs, at least in the United States, was the 1964 fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.  As big as that fair was, the bondholders received less than $0.20 on the dollar for their investments.

The first truly “world’s fair” was the event organized by Prince Albert in 1851.  Called the Great Exhibition, it was showcased in The Crystal Palace, attracting six million visitors.  As the first of its kind, it was spectacularly successful.  It also set off a mania for such fairs in cities around the world.  I would be willing to bet that very few people know that this year’s fair is being held in Dubai.  Have you bought your tickets yet?

After the success of the Crystal Palace, there were seven more such fairs by the end of the decade.  In the 1860’s, there were twenty-eight more fairs scattered from Paris to Jakarta, in  the 1870’s, there were forty-three, and by the 1880’s, there were an astounding eighty-two such fairs.  Everybody had to have their own version, so I guess it is not all that surprising that the citizens of Fort Worth, Texas threw their ten-gallon hats into the ring, too.

The Texas Spring Palace was built to showcase Texas agricultural projects and more importantly, to attract immigrants.  Following the tradition established by Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace, the fair was housed in a single large building approximately three blocks wide and featuring the second largest dome in America—only slightly smaller than the dome on the nation’s capital. 

Built for only $35,000, the Palace was completed in only thirty-one days and was constructed using as many Texas agricultural products as possible.  The tarred roof, for example was not covered with gravel, but with kernels of Texas corn embedded into the tar.  The exterior also showcased animal hides, skulls, coal, wheat, seashells, and an impressive collection of horns and antlers.  

The general belief at the time was that visitors would be attracted by building something huge—something larger and more outlandish than anything anyone had ever seen.  Unfortunately, Texas was doomed to come in second best in this endeavor, since right about the time that Texas was building its exhibit hall, a guy named Eiffel was building an iron tower in Paris.  

Visitors could wander through the building and watch silkworms at work, or visit a log cabin, or a tipi, or watch waterfowl swim around in the fountain, or gaze upon Sam Houston’s walking stick.  And the livestock—there were a lot of various kinds of livestock.  (I can’t help but wonder what this non-air-conditioned building smelled like on a hot day.)

Incredibly, the fair was something of a success, attracting a surprising number of visitors, a full third of which came from outside of Texas, and the fair was very successful in attracting new businesses.  Hoping to cash in on a second season, the city fathers began work to double the size of the building in preparation for the 1891 exhibition.

Unfortunately, all those agricultural products used to create the building had dried out during the hot Texas summer.  On May 30, 1890, a fire started in the building, spreading so quickly that the visitors on the second floor were forced to jump from windows.   The huge building was completely destroyed in less than fifteen minutes.  Ironically, the same fate would later befall the Crystal Palace.  

The newspapers reported that the fire was started when a young boy stepped on a wooden kitchen match (commonly called a “Lucifer “ at the time) and the flame spread to an alfalfa-covered column, which in turn ignited painted canvas signs.

While there are no plaques or memorials in Fort Worth today to commemorate the Spring Palace, there is a statue honoring Al Hayne, a civil engineer, who lost his life while making sure that women and children safely escaped from the building.  Of the 5000 visitors present, Hayne was the only casualty.  Two years later, the city of Fort Worth organized a professional firefighting force.

Over the years to come, the city fathers tried repeatedly to organize a new exhibit, but were never able to get enough popular support.  After Dallas began holding an annual State Fair, Fort Worth changed its plans slightly, turning the plans for a renewed Spring Palace into the annual Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, (which eventually became the more health-conscious  Fort Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo).

The Battle of Newark Bay

Perhaps one of the strangest naval battles ever recorded involved the USS New Mexico (BB-40), yet this is not only a battle that almost no one in New Mexico has heard of:  almost no military historians have ever heard of it, either.  

I wouldn’t know about this battle if I wasn’t abnormally attracted to the obscure, a trait that the reader probably shares or they wouldn’t be reading my blog.

Years ago, I was a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, I was a non-traditional student (that translates as old fart) that spent a lot of time reading for classes.  On good days, I could sit outside of Zimmerman Library and read in the sunlight.  I may have mentioned it before, but I like libraries very much and visit them frequently.

Near the library was a bell tower containing a brass bell, and the plaque on the tower explained that the bell was from the battleship USS New Mexico.  Besides a brief history of the ship, there was a mention that the bell was a gift from the Lipsett Corporation.  Who the hell were they?

The USS New Mexico was the lead ship of a new class of three battleships built during World War I.  Commissioned too late to take part in the battles of the Great War, she escorted President Woodrow Wilson to the Versailles Peace Conference.  After the war, the New Mexico served as the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, her role in the fleet slowly being replaced by more modern battleships that were larger and faster. 

Transferred to the Atlantic Fleet shortly before Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II, the New Mexico escorted convoys across the Atlantic.  Transferred back to the Pacific Fleet, the New Mexico took part in the Navy’s numerous shore bombardments, her 14-inch guns helping to destroy coastal defenses before the landing crafts hit the beaches.  During these engagements, the ship was repeatedly attacked by Kamikaze planes, one of which struck her bridge, killing the commanding officer, Captain Robert Walton Fleming and killing or wounding 85 other sailors.  Among the killed was Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden, the British representative to General MacArthur.  General Lumsden was the highest-ranking British Officer killed in combat during the war.

The USS New Mexico was part of the American fleet in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese formally surrendered aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.  Leaving Japan a week later, the ship sailed back to Boston while the Navy figured out what to do with their superannuated battleships.  The photo at right shows the New Mexico with Mount Fuji in the background.

And this is where Morris Lipsett comes into the picture.  Lipsett was only 23 years old and was working as a salesman in a men’s wear shop when he bought a condemned hotel in Jamestown, New York.  Demolishing the building and selling off the contents and wreckage for salvage, Lipsett began a long career in salvage operations.  Though Lipsett had no formal engineering training, his company became one of the largest ‘wreckers’ in the world.

Over the next six decades, Lipsett demolished houses, commercial buildings, bridges, dams, New York’s Second Avenue El, the old Madison Square Garden, the Third Avenue El, and the old Penn Station, and cleared most of the land necessary to build the Chase Manhattan Bank.  Branching out, Lipsett began scrapping surplus ships after the war, including the SS Normandie—perhaps the greatest ocean liner ever launched—and the first aircraft carrier named Enterprise.

At one point, Lipsett even salvaged a tunnel through a mountain in Pennsylvania.  I would love to have more information about that—how do you scrap a tunnel?  If you dig a tunnel out of a mountain—doesn’t it just leave a bigger tunnel?

In 1946, Lipsett bought the decommissioned battleships New Mexico, Wyoming, and Idaho, with plans to tow the three ships, one at a time, to Newark and begin the long process of cutting them up.  The first ship to be moved was the New Mexico, with two tugs towing her to the docks at Newark.  Unfortunately, during heavy seas, the tugs were forced to cut the lines, setting the 624-foot dreadnaught adrift with a crew of three very worried men who briefly had the largest private navy in the world.

Surprisingly, it took a whole day for the ship to be relocated.  A Coast Guard plane spotted the abandoned vessel 58 miles off the coast of New York.  With the help of a Coast Guard cutter, the tugs were finally able to tow the ship towards Newark, where the city had mobilized its own private navy to block her entrance to the bay.

Well, it wasn’t much of a navy—just two fire fighting vessels—but both were armed with high-volume fire hoses that could pump enough water to potentially swamp a vessel.  And in case you are wondering, yes, the New Mexico still had her guns, just no ammunition.  The aerial photo at left was taken while the ship was being towed to Newark.

The city of Newark had just budgeted $70,000,000 to a new ‘Beautify Newark’ project, hoping to change the harbor’s image from that of a junkyard to something more attractive to new investors.  Effectively, the City of Newark was declaring war on the New Mexico.

The standoff, which the newspapers called the Battle of Newark Bay, lasted for only a couple of days.  Both Lipsett and the mayor of Newark made frantic phone calls to Washington to intervene and force their opponent to surrender.  Even the governor of New Mexico got involved in the public argument, claiming that the honor of the state was being insulted by Newark.

The Coast Guard wisely took no side, just standing by to make sure that there were no unintended nautical accidents.  What the Coast Guard could have done if there had been any intentional incidents is still open for debate, for Washington mediated a peace treaty:  Lipsett would be allowed to scrap the three battleships in Newark, but he had to promise to pay a hefty daily penalty if the scrapping process took longer than nine months.

Lipsett met the deadlines.  While dismantling the ships, he recovered the two ship’s bells, the larger of which is on display in a museum in Santa Fe, while the slightly smaller bell still stands in front of the UNM library in Albuquerque.  

Nearby is a nice bench—it’s a great place to read a book.

Freddy the Pig

When I spotted the yellowing paperback in the stack of used books for sale, I knew I had to buy it.  It felt like being reunited with an old friend.

A half century ago, there were a couple of regular events that I always looked forward to.  Twice a month, the Fort Worth Library sent its bookmobile west to our little town for a whole Saturday, turning the red dust of an empty lot into a magic portal where I could lose myself in books.  I still rank the invention of the bookmobile as one of the most important in human history, above the invention of penicillin and only slightly below the development of the seed drill.

Note.  Why aren’t there more bookmobiles?  I checked and there are only three in all of New Mexico.  The state’s central planners ignore the Southern end of the state, evidently because we’re the red-haired stepchild of regions as far as our overlords in Santa Fe are concerned.  For the price of what we have spent on never-to-be-used Chinese electric buses or tourist trains to nowhere, the state could operate a fleet of a thousand bookmobiles.  

The second eagerly awaited event was the once a month distribution of the Scholastic Press book catalog at school.  The little 8-page catalog described all the books that could be ordered though the school and bought at modest prices—most selling for 35 and 50 cents each.  My parents would graciously submit to a reasonable amount of begging and could be counted on to purchase a couple of the books, to which I could augment by scrounging through sofa cushions and car seats for loose coins.  If all else failed, I could skip eating lunch, buying only cartons of milk at the state subsidized price of two cents a half-pint, and saving the rest of the lunch money for books.  (Forced to make a choice, I’d still prefer books to lunch.)

About two weeks later, the books would be delivered to school and parceled out to the students.  Over the next week or two, a few of the books would be swapped with my friends for other books, and the favorites read and reread until the cheap pulp paper began to wear out.  Even with access to the beloved bookmobile, I owe a sizeable debt for my early education to the wonderful people at Scholastic Press.  And since Scholastic Press published the Harry Potter series of books, my sons can probably claim the same thing.

All these memories came flooding back to me while I stood there staring at a dogeared copy of Freddy the Detective by Walter R. Brooks.  Using the excuse of buying it for one of my grandchildren, I purchased the book for several times the original cover price of half-a-dollar, and reread the book cover-to-cover that same day, some fifty-eight years after I had read the original.  And tomorrow, I’m going to mail it to my granddaughter.

There is no way of ever being completely sure, but I think this might be the first detective story I ever read.  I obviously enjoyed it, as I am still addicted to reading mystery stories.

Starting in 1927, Brooks wrote twenty-six books about Freddy, a remarkable pig that walked on his hind feet, could talk, read and write, and though a domestic animal on the Bean family farm in upstate New York, still managed to travel extensively and have exotic adventures, usually accompanied by a wide variety of other farm animals.  Over time, Freddy traveled to the North Pole, wrote poetry, became a pilot, and in a volume that mocked the hysteria of the Cold War Space Race, even built a rocket ship.

The books are significant for several reasons:  the author never talked down to his readers, he used a rich vocabulary and humor that are still relevant to address universal themes, and the books were obvious serious influences on later prominent authors.  It is impossible to read any of the books in the series without noticing the similarities between Brook’s books and E.B. White's Charlotte's Web that was written decades later.

The most obvious parallel is with George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Written between November 1943 and February 1944, the book is a satire on the events leading up to the 1917 Russian revolution and the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin.  In particular, Orwell—himself a socialist—satirizes the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals of the revolution.

In 1939, Brooks released the sixth book in his series, Freddy the Politician, in which the animals of the Bean farm set up a republic and elect a president to lead them.  Through crooked deals and the use of force, the election is overturned and Grover, a woodpecker named after President Grover Cleveland, seizes control of the farm.  Written just before the start of World War II, Brooks is rather obviously satirizing the rise of fascism through legal elections that ultimately turned into brutal dictatorships.

In many ways, Brooks’ book is the better read of the two volumes as it contains humor, and instead of the corrupting forces’ triumph in the end, as in Orwell’s book, Brooks has Freddy victorious, eventually forcing out the evil hummingbirds.  And surprisingly, the Freddy version is longer, more descriptive, and (in my opinion, at least) contains better written dialogue than Orwell’s version.

There is little doubt that Orwell knew of Brook’s series of books, as the series was extremely popular before the war.  Not only were the American books frequently reviewed in the British press but Freddy the Politician was favorably reviewed in the London Times while Orwell resided in London and worked as a writer.  That a London based writer did not follow the literature section of the London Times is highly improbable.

Happily, while some of the books of the series are rather hard to locate today, Amazon has the more popular editions available for the Kindle.  I would suggest you start, as I hope my granddaughter does, with Freddie The Detective.

By the way, Walter R. Brooks had another series featuring a talking animal—one that you are probably more familiar with than Freddy the Pig.  Starting in 1937, Brooks wrote more than two dozen stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Argosy about a slightly alcoholic writer and his talking horse.  When CBS turned these stories into a weekly television show, it was called Mr. Ed.

Cows Make Crappy Sailors

Safely transporting animals at sea has been a difficult problem ever since Noah accidentally penned the lions next to the unicorns.   For livestock at sea, voyages have pretty much always been dangerous, even if lions stayed on their side of the boat.

From the earliest day, sailing ships frequently carried caged animals to provide food for the crew.  Sheep, chickens, and pigs were the most common, but by the 17th century, merchant ships were larger and more efficient, providing enough space for even cattle.  Ships of the line needed large crews and didn’t have much space, but still managed to haul just enough livestock to supplement the meals of the officers.  The rest of the crew ate salted meat or did without.

Still, there were difficulties—the animals died frequently, succumbing to diseases brought on by tainted water, rough treatment, and lack of exercise, but the most common reason for the livestock perishing prematurely was because the ships ran out of proper forage for the animals.  The exception to this were the pigs, who frequently were fed the same daily rations as the crew. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the crew wasn’t very happy to learn they were only fed as well as the pigs.

Among the host of reasons why the United States was victorious in its revolution against the British was the near impossibility of Great Britain’s supplying its Army with enough food to mount an offensive against the rebel army.   In 1775, the British mounted the largest attempt to supply an army in a foreign land until the African campaign of World War II.  A fleet of cargo ships carried hundreds of tons of food and 4,000 head of sheep and pigs.  It was a magnificent attempt and a tragic failure.

After a storm delayed the fleet, only 148 animals reached the Americas alive.  The only food stocks to survive the trip were sauerkraut and porter, the latter greatly diminished by a thirsty crew.  (No mean feat when you consider that each of the crew was already rationed a gallon of beer a day.)    

For decades, the cattle that ranged across the Argentine pampas were only consumed locally, with just their hides and tallow being shipped across the Atlantic to Europe.  This changed dramatically in the years 1876-77 when the fist refrigerated ships began shipping hard frozen beef to France.  Ten years later, there were more than four dozen such ships operating between Buenos Aires and Great Britain and merely a decade later, there were almost 300 such ships.  (Railroads largely killed off the American cowboys, but in Argentina, the gauchos were the victims of refrigerated ships.)

Today, with flash frozen food processes and high-tech refrigerated cargo ships, you would think that such problems are exclusively the interest of retired historians with an overly eclectic taste in reading material.  Unfortunately, animal losses while being transported at sea is not only still a problem, but losses happen more frequently than in the eighteenth century.

Last December, the Elbenik set sail for Turkey from Spain loaded with 1800 bulls bound for special slaughterhouses where the cattle would be killed, butchered, and prepared as halal to meet the dietary requirements of Muslims.  The ship should have made the journey in only 11 days, but the Covid pandemic closed ports and left the ship stranded at sea for 90 days.  Despite humanitarian efforts by the Greek navy, the Elbenik ran out of fodder for its cargo and the bulls slowly starved to death, their bodies being thrown overboard and left to rot in the coastal waters off Turkey.  By the time the ship finally made her way back to Spain, the 1,600 bulls still clinging to life were so sick that authorities were forced to euthanize all of them.

Today, the live animal trade is a $18 billion a year industry, transporting an estimated 2 billion cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens.  Far more often than you would think or wish, those animals die in transit.  To be fair, in any large group of animals, a few would die under the best of circumstances.  Australia, whose regulations are pretty much the ‘gold standard’ when it comes to setting up animal safety guidelines, requires adequate food and water, safe and sanitary enclosures, and the presence of a veterinarian on long voyages.  While Australia tries to keep animal losses to 0.05%, they actually average 0.11%.  For other countries, the averages are much, much higher.

Outside of Australia, there are almost no requirements for safely shipping livestock.  To put this bluntly, a shipload of sheep and a shipload of wool sweaters have exactly the same international shipping regulations.  

While any delay in a ship’s completing a voyage—whether it is due to an overcrowded port or an engine failure—can result in a ship’s running out of food for the animals it carries, this is not the only way animals can perish at sea.  Unless the animals are shipped from Australia, the animals are likely to be caged in crowded and unsanitary conditions, and with inadequate ventilation.  One UN health agency reported that the average conditions on such ships were “ideally suited for spreading disease.”—some of which diseases can be transferred to humans.

And you may not believe this, but no life preservers or lifeboats are built to meet the needs of a 1,700-pound steer.  For livestock, every maritime emergency is a reenactment of the sinking of the Titanic.

Last year, 6,000 cattle and 40 crew members perished when a cargo ship sank off the coast of Japan.  The year before, 14,000 sheep were lost when a docked ship caught fire.  Far more regular, however, are the losses due to mechanical breakdowns that delay a ship’s arrival in port, thus starving the animals.  If a ship’s water-making system breaks down, if there’s a water leak in the fodder storage area, or if a ship’s engine develops a problem that forces the ship to travel at a slower rate—any of these relatively “normal malfunctions” can result in the livestock dying..

In 2015, a livestock carrier capsized off the coast of Brazil, causing loss of all 5,000 cows loaded aboard.  As the photo to the right shows, many of the drowned cattle washed up on shore.  

Most present-day livestock carriers were converted from aging container ships and are no longer able to compete with newer and much larger ships.  The Elbenik, for example, was 53 years old when the bulls perished and the vessel had failed several safety inspections in recent years.  According to one study, due to age and lack of maintenance, livestock carriers were twice as likely to sink compared to the average cargo ships.

The problem is extremely difficult to regulate as the animals usually die in International Waters and few international bodies like the UN or the EU want to deal with the problem as many of their constituent nations are engaged in either the export or the import of livestock.  Australia, the only nation to tackle the problem, has established strict guidelines and regulations to insure animal safety, but the cost of implementing these reforms has made it cheaper for their customers to buy from those competing nations with fewer restrictions and a larger appetite for profits.  The only nation currently considering similar regulations is New Zealand.

Perhaps it is time that all the developing nations act together. Banning the import or export of livestock for human consumption would be a good start.  Transporting livestock for breeding purposes, racing, and for other commercial purposes could continue.  A century and a half after the invention of refrigerated ships, there is no longer a real need for continuing the cruelty of shipping live animals on unsafe ships.

There is a simple reason the problem still exists—a cargo hold full of sheep are just not very photogenic.  Take another look at that photo of the beach covered with dead cows, but this time imagine them standing up in a crowded cargo hold.  That image is not very photogenic, it is not the kind of thing that Greenpeace will show on a commercial begging for your donation.  You might donate money to save the whales, do you care if 14,000 sheep drown?

Back Through the Looking Glass

Having just finished reading the latest scholarly article proving definitively that the protagonist in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was not Alice Liddell, I pulled my rather well-worn copy of Lewis Carroll’s book from the shelf and spent a few minutes enjoying the clever verses.

The author of the scholarly piece had presented numerous well-reasoned arguments, including statements from both Carroll and Alice, and I suspect that the piece was part of the author’s tenure packet at her university.  The article was (and as I suspect the author realized) completely wrong.  There is a hell of a problem coming up with a new topic if you are writing about 19th century English Literature.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a close friend of the Liddell family and a frequent guest in their home.  The Liddell children (including Alice), were enchanted with his magical ability to tell long stories involving animals and make-believe places and frequently begged him for more stories.  Because Dodgson/Carroll kept meticulous diaries, we know exactly when his most famous story was invented.  On July 4, 1862, while on a boating holiday, he told the Liddell children the story that would eventually make him famous.

Alice Liddell was enchanted with the story and begged Carroll to write the story down for her.  After a long delay, he obliged, presenting her with a hand lettered copy of the manuscript.  A second copy was delivered to an editor, and the so-called ‘Alice’ books (of which Through the Looking Glass was a sequel to the original novel) became a world-wide phenomenon.  

There is little doubt that the story was created for Alice Liddell, Carroll’s own diaries document this.  Alice kept her original copy of the tales until late in life, when pressing financial needs forced its sale to an American collector for what today would be more than a million dollars.  Following World War II, a fund was raised in America, the book was purchased and given to the people of Great Britain in admiration for the country’s resistance to the aims of Adolf Hitler before the United States.  Today it is on display at the British Library.

There are other obvious clues.  The book is dedicated to Alice Liddell, both the real and literary Alice are the same age and share the same birthday, and the last 21 lines of the book contain an acrostic.  Reading down, the first letter of each line spells out Alice’s full name:  Alice Pleasance Liddell.  Carroll was also a prolific photographer and took several pictures of Alice.  There is even speculation that the six-month rift in Carroll’s friendship with the Liddell family in 1863 may be because the author asked the family to arrange a marriage with the eleven-year-old Alice.  Exactly what happened will remain a mystery since the relevant pages in Carroll’s diaries were cut out by one of Carroll’s descendants.  An alternate theory suggests that Carroll was romantically interested in the family’s nanny.

If arranging a marriage with a pre-teen sounds….strange…, remember that this was the Victorian era and such arrangements were common, though the actual marriage would normally be delayed until the bride was a more suitable age.  Carroll’s brother became engaged to a girl of fourteen, with the marriage delayed for six years.

Carroll was an academic, more interested in math and logic than in writing fiction.  There is a great story, possibly apocryphal, that Queen Victoria was fan of the Alice books and asked the author for a copy of his next work, so he promptly mailed her a copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equation.

Less well known are Carroll’s many inventions, most of which involved the written word, perhaps because Carroll suffered from stammering and found writing more comfortable than speaking.  He invented a nyctograph, a device that allowed the user to write notes in the dark, an improved postal money order, a device for the bedridden to more easily read books, and several ciphers.  Carroll also invented a ranked voting system similar to what is currently befuddling voters in New York City mayoral election.

Carroll had a fondness for word games, inventing a precursor to the game Scrabble.  Even his pen name is a complicated word play on his real name translated into Latin.  Newspapers still regularly published a puzzle that Carroll invented, that the author called a Word Ladder.  You’ve seen these, you start with a word and by changing one letter at a time, you end with a different word in a stated number of steps.  For example, HEAD becomes TAIL in five steps: HEAD, HEAL, TEAL, TELL TALL, TAIL.  The game is known by a variety of names, and though it is played in many languages, few today remember the inventor’s name.

There is one invention by Carroll that I am particularly fond of:  his postage stamp case.  Carroll was a prolific letter writer, sending and receiving tens of thousands of letters in his life, each carefully recorded in a journal system he invented.   The case, called the Wonderland Postage Stamp Case, was illustrated with scenes from his novel and included 12 slots for various sized stamps.  Since a first edition is worth well over $8,000, and I would love to own one, it is not really the case that intrigues me:  Included inside the case is a small pamphlet titled, Eight or Nine Words About Letter Writing.  It is fascinating reading.

The Internet seems to have killed off the art of writing letters.  Rarely do I receive an actual letter in my mailbox unless it is one of the infrequent missives from one of my granddaughters.  This is a shame since a letter from a friend is a cherished item and a courtesy we should not let die out.  As Emily Dickinson said, “A letter is a joy of Earth—it is denied the Gods.”

Here is one of his rules, one that should be required reading before anyone is allowed to open an account with Facebook:

My sixth Rule (and my last remark about controversial correspondence) is, don’t try to have the last word! How many a controversy would be nipped in the bud, if each was anxious to let the other have the last word! Never mind how telling a rejoinder you leave unuttered: never mind your friend’s supposing that you are silent from lack of anything to say: let the thing drop, as soon as it is possible without discourtesy: remember ‘speech is silvern, but silence is golden’! (N.B.—If you are a gentleman, and your friend a lady, this Rule is superfluous: you won’t get the last word!)

I think we would all be better off if we wrote more letters and posted on social media less.  The rules and advice that Carroll gives in this small pamphlet reflect a courtesy that we need to recapture.  Fortunately, you can read the pamphlet without paying the $8,000 a first edition would set you back.  You can read it here for free.

And you can write me and tell me what you think of his rules.