The more things change...

As much as we think our situation is unique, the true nature of our economic downturn is that it has characteristics typical of other economic downturns throughout United States history. Most people use the Great Depression as the gold standard, so to speak, for economic turmoil, but before the depression of the 1930s there was the Long Depression, a downturn that followed the Panic of 1873. The Panic of 1873 was caused by a railroad bubble that relied on questionable finance which in turn caused a series of bank failures. Gee, that doesn't sound too familiar! Just substitute "housing bubble" and you might as well be talking about today. Unlike today, there was a run on gold which thankfully we don't have to deal with. But hey, have you noticed all of the "invest in gold" and "scrap gold" ads that have been playing on radio and TV?

And, not surprisingly, unemployment seriously spiked during this period, with the worst years being between 1894 to 1898. On March 25, 1894, 100 men led by a socialist firebrand named Jacob Coxey departed Massillon, Ohio, for Washington, D.C., to protest perceived government inaction regarding unemployment. Their intention was to demand that the government spend money on infrastructure projects and thus deal with the excess of labor, much of which came from the collapse of the railroad industry. Coxey's march itself was something of a failure, with activity petering out in May 1898, but the movement took off west of the Mississippi, especially with William Hogan's army of 500 which went far enough that it hijacked a Northern Pacific Railway train to take them to Washington, D.C. (they didn't make it past Montana). 

Not coincidentally, one of history's more notable stikes, the Pullman Strike, occured less than two months after the Coxey's march began. The Pullman Palace Car Company, responding to the sudden decrease in demand for their train cars, slashed employee wages by 25%, prompting their employees to go on strike. The strike, not surprisingly, crippled production, effectively shutting down Pullman factories. So bitter was the strike that it led to the boycott of Pullman by American Railway Union workers, who, beginning in June 1894, refused to switch Pullman cars onto trains. Pullman simply began to hire new workers, leading to outbreaks of violence and tampering with rail service by ARU men. Federal soldiers were called in to assist when the ARU, then under the leadership of E.V. Debs, refused to obey a court injunction demanding they end support of the strike. This is the action for which Debs was tried and sent to prison, which curiously led to him reading Karl Marx and becoming a socialist. Ha ha.

Mr. George Pullman's reputation took a beating for the strike (and the associated Pullman company town in Chicago) from which it never recovered. As the story goes, when he died in 1897 he had to be buried at night and in a rather complicated steel and concrete vault to prevent the desecration of his body. Say what you will about populist anger (AIG), it sure can be effective in shaming people. 

Flashback Fail: You say you want to market a gas oven?

Zyklon is just the German word for "cyclone." Fairly innocuous, one might think, until you remember that most of the rest of the world associates Zyklon with Zyklon B, a pesticide that the Nazis found to be efficient when blown into gas chambers. One could safely say that Zyklon has just a bit of baggage with it, which is why it was quite surprising when, earlier in this decade, the good folks at Siemens (who themselves have some Holocaust-related baggage) decided to apply with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the right to use the name Zyklon on a broad range of consumer products.

Fail.

One of those products was a gas oven.

Extreme fail.

Siemens (or Bosch Siemens Hausgeraete, as the consumer products venture is known) already marketed a line of vacuum cleaners in its domestic market using the name Zyklon, but again, Zyklon simply means cyclone, so it actually fit as the vaccums are bagless, "cyclone" style units.

The gas oven idea, though, is a real head scratcher. 

Siemens withdrew its application and subsequently claimed it never intended on trademarking the Zyklon name for use in the U.S. Nice try.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2233890.stm

Your Country's Army Needs You

Lord Kitchener, or Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, was Victorian Britain's most recognizable and lauded military man. So eager was Kitchener to fight that he joined a French ambulance unit during the Franco-Prussian War, earning himself a reprimand from the Duke of Cambridge for violating British neutrality. After returning from France (he picked up pneumonia while in a survey balloon) he received a commission from the Royal Engineers which took him through the Levant and Egypt as a surveyor. It would take forever to run through Kitchener's accomplishments (some of which were less than admirable), so here's a concise list of important things:

*His survey of Western Palestine (that is, Palestine west of the Jordan) is still used by archaeologsits and geographers working in the Levant today

*Led British and Egyptian soldiers up the Nile to create a suppy railway for arms and reinforcements

*Defeated the Sudanese at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898

*Brutalized the civilian Boer population by destroying their farms, killing their livestock and throwing women, children and the elderly into short-staffed, woefully inadequate concentration camps with high death rates

*For this, and for sucessfully assisting in the establishment of the Treaty of Vereeniging which gave South Africa self-governing powers, he was created Viscount Kitchener

*Was appointed Secretary of State for War by Herbert Asquith immediately after war broke out in Europe; he wisely predicted the war would be protracted and extremely costly, which was not the conventional wisdom at the time

Kitchener was right about the massive numbers of men needed to defeat Germany. A recruitment campaign began and one of the many posters used featured a picture of Kitchener lifted off of a magazine cover. A simple design, it has proved to be one of the most parodied posters of all time.

Kitchener's name is not even necessary. The designers felt it only needed the illustration of him pointing out to the masses. Everyone knew who he was, and that stern look, expertly crafted mustache, and marshal uniform got the point across that Britain needed its young men to volunteer. He was almost a walking flag in a sense.

Kitchener perished in 1916 at age 65 when the vessel he was traveling on, the HMS Hampshire, struck a mine West of the Orkney Islands while en route to Russia. Kitchener was on a diplomatic mission. His body was never recovered.

That he was a brutal fighter is not in doubt, but it cannot be said that Kitchener himself was a brutal man. The domestic policies he instituted in Sudan - making Fridays a holiday, rebuilding destroyed mosques, instituting religious freedom, and keeping Christian evangelists at bay - are those of a man who, while tough and merciless on the battlefield, believed in respecting the cultures of conquered peoples. He fought quite hard against the British Government and the governor of the Cape Colony when it came to guaranteeing the rights of Afrikaners to future self-government, which was not a very popular idea in imperialist circles. At the very least, Kitchener is a man of deeper contrasts than we are used to in military men, a committed, harsh soldier for the empire and a thoughtful administrator.