Arguably, debt, not communism, was the real specter haunting Europe at the end of the war.
Definitely. The book to read after this is Liaquat Ahmed "Lords of Finance" which is a very readable and personality-driven look at the Depression, in particular the role in it of war debt.
Nicely summarized. Tooze's ability to show the unpredictability of these years and the contingency of actual outcomes is fantastic.
the government then violently suppressed - Luxemburg was among those killed
Filling in on this-- Luxemburg was ordered arrested, and was killed by soldiers, but both the torture and her killing were at the initiative of someone pretty low in the ranks. From the very beginning, Germany's democratic government was weak, did not have support of the conservative judiciary or army. Following Luxemburg's killing, there were many hundreds of killings of politicians 1919-1922 by right wing militias which went basically unprosecuted, while the much smaller number of left-wing terrorist killing were prosecuted effectively. This from Peter Gay's Weimar Culture.
I skipped ahead. It turns out that right-wing militias become a bigger problem.
Nice summary, but I have to dispute this:
everyone (except the US) was already exhausted by the war, and without clear signs of a German collapse, no one was ready to commit to fight for unconditional surrenderBritain and France were entirely willing to do that (and both national governments had been elected on that platform), though they likely couldn't have without US money; though OTOH, Germany was only days away from total collapse, and once that happened running costs could have fallen drastically.
I meant commit as in make unconditional surrender a war aim. They were preparing to fight for as long as it took but didn't rule out negotiation.
Well summarized! The interior workings and relations between the various socialist movements was interesting--something that I'd not only never really read about, but something I'd never even noticed that I'd missed.
The way socialism bobs around throughout western Europe in the immediate wake of the war was interesting. Unfortunately, the French/German dispute at this conference seems to anticipate the next several chapters beyond the socialist realm...
I still get pissed off at the Germans every time that comes around. Their reparations to France barely seem to offset the deliberate damage done out of spite (e.g. flooding mines in retreat) without even considering the damage that was more directly related to the war.
Germans is assholes, is my point. Tooze mentions this from time to time, but not often enough.
5: Ok, that's fair.
8: I think Tooze is focused on getting the mentions of 'Americans is assholes' up to par.
In our own way, sure. But in this case, it's really just being short sighted that American can be blamed for. There are lots of moral failures in American foreign policy, but not loaning bunches of money to Germany (or forgiving French loans so that Germany could forgo some reparations) isn't one of them. It was a tactical mistake.
Epic grand-strategic level mistake actually. I grant you though qualitatively different assholery.
Though maybe some opinionated Native Americans/Filipinos would dispute that.
It was only an epic mistake because Hitler. Which, I think, makes it a better case that the U.S. should have financed peace by victory instead of peace without victory.
Though maybe some opinionated Native Americans/Filipinos would dispute that.
I'd be sort of surprised if either Native Americans of Filipinos had, as a group, strong opinions about whether the US should have forgiven French loans so that Germany could forgo some reparations.
An epic mistake because of right-wing xenophobic nationalists in multiple countries that quite likely wouldn't have gotten anywhere if America had tried to solve problems instead of adhering religiously to hard money and small-government. Small-minded rather than short-sighted.
Why, AL? Do you think only white people have obscure historiographical disputes?
White people have obscure historiographical disputes like this. Native Americans have obscure historiographical disputes like that.
15: Right-wing xenophobic nationalists was the antebellum government of Germany. I don't think you can make the case that more money to Germany would have kept right-wing xenophobes from running Germany. You would have gotten the Not-Hitler right-wing xenophobic nationalists, but to hold Wilson responsible for that requires foreknowledge of Hitler.
Also, the potential results of hard money, small-government, and the Ottomanizing Germany seem unexplored.
Right-wing xenophobic nationalists was the antebellum government of Germany.
Not really, certainly not exclusively.
I don't think you can make the case that more money to Germany would have kept right-wing xenophobes from running Germany.
No, but not crippling France by putting it to the choice of either extracting more from the Germans or going bankrupt (which is what the US did) you [aka we] made some form of war extraordinarily more likely.
to hold Wilson responsible for that requires foreknowledge of Hitler
No, it just requires acknowledging that the US was overwhelmingly the most powerful country in the world after 1915, but completely fucked up the management of the world. That's not Hitler level evil, but it is true in a real sense that Wilson and the US Congress could have prevented the outbreak of WWII and the blood of millions is at least partially on their hands. You don't get to be the most powerful country in the world and then get a free pass because "hey sure we were totes incompetent and led to the deaths of millions but at least we weren't as intentionally monstrous as Hitler."
That second one was unclear, I meant
No, but not crippling France by putting it to the choice of either extracting more from the Germans or going bankrupt (which is what the US did) would have been nice. The US insistence on debt repayment without strategic thought about the consequences made some form of war extraordinarily more likely.
And, also, more money probably would have kept lunatics from running Germany. I mean you had a right wing nationalist Germans (Stresemann, or for that matter Adenauer) running Germany who were basically totally fine.
No, it just requires acknowledging that the US was overwhelmingly the most powerful country in the world after 1915, but completely fucked up the management of the world
Why does this seem oddly familiar 100 years on?
Foreknowledge of Hitler was evidently not possible; but some people did understand that the terms of the treaty made another war in 20 years time more likely.
19.1: Until they started losing the war, right-wing xenophobic nationalism was close to required for being in the cabinet.
19.2: But the reason France faced the choice of extracting more from Germany or going bankrupt was almost entirely because of German actions. Not just the actions that were taken when the war was plausibly in contention, but a series of desperate gambles (e.g. the last offensives) and deliberate, pointless destruction of French industry and property that marked the end of the war. Wanting to fuck over Germany was something that was way over-determined for French people.
19.3: It seems better to have completely fucked up the management by refusing to do something than to have fucked it up by taking actives steps that were in the wrong direction. Which, you know, is a very real possibility.
but some people did understand that the terms of the treaty made another war in 20 years time more likely.
Tell me about it.
22: Right, but that seems to equally supportive (if not more supportive) of the idea that Germany should have been occupied.
23.1 isn't true, unless you mean immediately pre-war cabinet, and even then it's not true. See eg. Bethmann-Hollweg, who whatever his flaws was not a right-wing xenophobic nationalist.
23.2 - the book is good on this. Sure, France had totally legitimate reasons to want reparations. But the only way that post WWI reconstruction could have been financed was through the US. If the issue was rebuilding France/keeping the peace, the US did this in the worst possible way.
23.3 - I mean sure, Wilson wasn't a Nazi, so he's got that going for him, which is nice. But he probably shouldn't have been running the world (nor should our administrations in the 20s) and so the outbreak of WWII and global mass slaughter following the interwar period is much, much more directly on the hands of the USA than most people think.
18.1 et seq: one of the major points of the book is that there was massive popular support for centrist internationalist parties in Germany and Japan. Those parties eventually lost enough ground to be overthrown by the right in the thirties; competent economic management from the US would have done a huge amount to keep the centrists in power.
26.1: That was the guy who gave the "scrap of paper" quote about invading Belgium. Maybe he's a centrist xenophobic nationalist, which I guess is an improvement.
26.2: Right, but my point was that the only reason France was in the situation that only U.S. financing could fund reconstruction was because Germany was especially dickish is how it fought (or, more precisely, treated conquered territory), even compared to inter-Europeans wars in the couple of centuries up to that time.
26.3: That's not exactly what I was getting at. Tooze is putting forth a counterfactual history. Even if the U.S. had done the things that Tooze suggested, it isn't certain to me that WWII would have been avoided. What if U.S. loans worked and produced expanding economies in Europe? That might have just restarted the arms race that expanding economies in Europe helped fund before the war. That path could have easily lead to a war. That counterfactual war almost certainly wouldn't have been WWII-violent, but again, to say Wilson or Harding should have expected they were choosing between a standard European War (or even a second World War I but without the extra genocide) and Hitler seems to expect a bit much.
27: That's an argument that the United States should have stopped the Great Depression. There's a whole economic boom (shared even by Germany - I don't know about Japan) in between World War I and that.
28.2 is true, but doesn't excuse US incompetence.
28.3: restarted economies might have restarted arms races and started wars. They definitely would have resulted in vastly improved lives for millions of people. And the US joining a meaningful multilateral defense treaty and arms control system could quite easily have prevented the downside risk.
29: I haven't got there yet, but ISTR Tooze does in fact argue just that.
I wasn't really expecting him to argue that the United States should have encouraged the Great Depression. It just seems a separate issue.
It isn't! Combined and uneven development!
But after very substantial, U.S.-backed, restructuring of reparations that we haven't gotten to yet.
I just started the Great Depression chapter and (SPOILERS!) Tooze uncharacteristically spreads the blame around pretty evenly, at least in the early bits that I've read. In fact he poses the question "Why were all the major nations so unanimous in following the disastrous course that they did during the early stages of the depression?"
There's fucktons of stuff we haven't gotten to yet and I barely remember, so I should be less strident I guess. But writing 33 was enjoyable.
But after very substantial, U.S.-backed, restructuring of reparations that we haven't gotten to yet.
Much better than nothing but still fundamentally not done seriously, is I think the Tooze line on those. But I am at "barely remember."
Maybe he's a centrist xenophobic nationalist, which I guess is an improvement.
Not a xenophobe, not particularly nationalist (certainly no more so than the leaders of any allied power).
I've only gotten to the occupation of the Ruhr. I stopped because Tooze violated Godwin's Law.
I think you get a pass on that when writing the history of 1930s Germany.
I do think the weight of the argument up to 1918 about how the US fucked up is more on the side of Wilson shouldn't have gone around the Entente to negotiate, than it is about the loan issue which becomes bigger later. Whether that had meant occupying Germany, I don't know (but probably), but negotiating as victors might have counterintuitively lead to less rigid reconstruction financing, because the allies would have had more direct influence on the German economy.
I think 42 gets it right. Also "occupying Germany" needn't have been the same thing as "crippling Germany for the fun of punishment," as post WWII shows. Probably doing both would have been best, but you needed $$$$ to make that work.
It may be easier to get dollars to occupy a recently defeated enemy that it would be to get dollars to help a recently defeated enemy pay for the damage done to your allies. Or even than it would be get get dollars to forgive debts of your recent allies.
I didn't end up using it in the summary but the Wilson quote about thinking 100 years ahead was especially galling. Focus on the problem in front of you, dickhead.
Okay just woke up from a nap, and it has been a while since I read the Tooze, but the question of interwar geopolitical economics doesn't seem at all so distant or exotic because:
Why does 2008-2016 Germany act the way it does in the European context? What means austerity? Why did Japan go with high interest rates and fiscal restraint throughout the twenties (trying to leave the gold standard aside, though it does rhyme with the euro)
My early and tentative impression is that economists and bankers believed that domestic consumption and export earnings/positive trade balance (ergo domestic investment) were inversely correlated.
Keynes spent most of his life trying to figure this out and sell a different plan. I don't think we have really gotten a grip on it yet. At fucking all. There is certainly a class struggle element, but that is not all of it.
Why does Obama support the TPP?
In the post-WW2 era German economists have been generally pretty terrible, and German politicians have been dogmatically anti-Keynesian. Their approach seems to be a) pretend history started in 1946, b) notice that Germany's economy grew by export growth, and c) fail to notice that means somebody else has to import.
American politicians have been Keynesian since FDR (though that may have ended for the Republicans with the Tea Party).
I was just noticing what a near run thing Wilson's re-election was. Less than 4,000 vote difference in California, while more than 40k voters went for minor parties.
Charles Evans Hughes might have been a good president. There's a theory that he'd have won if he and Hiram Johnson had figured out how to work together.
43. Also "occupying Germany" needn't have been the same thing as "crippling Germany for the fun of punishment," as post WWII shows
Actually, "as post-WW2 in West Germany shows." The Russians stole everything that wasn't nailed down in East Germany, and of course there were other forms of "punishment" meted out. It would probably pass as a case-control study. The DDR did better than other Russian satellites but they were stripped bare too, and besides the DDR was full of Germans, but it's still an instructive comparison.
what a near run thing Wilson's re-election was
What a near run thing everything was. That the German army was literally days away from total defeat; just a few days' difference and the whole post-war changes drastically. If nothing else this book really does a good job showing contingency.
WWI seems more contingent than most of history. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was so fucked up that if they made a movie about it, Leslie Nielsen would be reincarnated to play a role.
Speaking of farcical organization, can we have a vote on scheduling? Thorn suggests in email we cover 13 & 14 this week and 15 & 16 next Monday. I say yes.
I thought that was already decided - two posts this week, like a war on two fronts.
Thorn is bossy like that, yes.
It was really interesting in these chapters to see how much was happening at once and how much was contingent on other things. As others have said, in some sense I'm sure that's always true, but it's particularly vivid here.
Thorn is bossy like that, yes.
It was really interesting in these chapters to see how much was happening at once and how much was contingent on other things. As others have said, in some sense I'm sure that's always true, but it's particularly vivid here.
Damnit, I paused and checked that it hadn't double posted and then it did anyway? Cruel, blog!
57: Just when you think you've achieved absolute power, it shows you who's really in charge.
I'm fine with however we do it. 13-15 (and maybe 16, not that far yet) are all about the negotiations over the peace and it makes some sense to look at them together. Then again, pacing is good. So I'm happy to go with whatever Thorn wants, although I wish we didn't have so many people badmouthing her. *checks pseuds* Oh.
Thorn would be the benevolentest despot ever. I would totally elect her dictator.
60 was our post-coup plan for Equatorial Guinea, IIRC.
I'd nominate Thorn to win a convention coup. All the conventions.
I think I was just responsible for all the displaced or orphaned children. I'm not sure I'm ready to go up against Halford for dictator, but MAYBE. Definitely if I could smite people with lightning bolts.
Her Equatorial Majesty, Queen Thorn of Guinea. Make it happen people.
Definitely if I could smite people with lightning bolts.
Ah, one for essear there, I think.
He could be my court magician! It might cause some problems because at least in photos, Selah always seems to insist he's me (she's looked over my shoulder at the other place and even when I enlarge the profile pic she's adamant I just had different glasses or something) but I suppose seeing both of us in one place would end the confusion. Clearly since the people have spoken, I'm willing to make the supreme sacrifice and take on despotism, no bikini ninjas necessary.
Court magician _and_ anti-assassination double.
My problem with reparations is the way they were framed around France being an innocent victim, as opposed to a party with equal responsibility for starting the war. Yes, France lost a bunch of money, but maybe they should have thought of that in 1913 when they were paying the Russian Empire to squeeze Germany from the east.
You can go back with that tit-for-tat stuff between France and Germany, but I don't think you get "equal responsibility" since France didn't actually start the war. Nor did France make the escalations that turned the war into a World War (e.g. invading Belgium, going out of their way to give the United States a reason to want a war with Germany). And the reparations weren't just covering war damage from the fighting, but the German army deliberately fucked up France as they retreated even after they knew the war was lost. Tooze goes into that a bit, but I've seen more of it in other places.
Both sides were problems, but Germany's greater responsibility is clear enough.
The counterfactual in which Germany simply decides to stand on the defensive on the Western Front is a very interesting one:
-- no invasion of France or, especially, Belgium makes British entry to the war much less likely; so no blockade of Germany, because the French fleet probably couldn't manage an effective blockade on its own
-- Germany took huge losses in its offensive actions in 1914; if it had pursued a defensive strategy it would have been in prepared positions on its own soil, fighting from inside concrete bunkers against idiot French generals who believed in attaque a l'outrance; basically "two, three, many Verduns"
-- no atrocities against civilians in Belgium or France helps to get foreign sympathy on their side, as does the fact that they're fighting a defensive war against French revanchism
-- more and faster progress on the Eastern Front
-- maybe even Italy remains part of the Triple Alliance
Bismarck wasn't running things for so long just because he was named after a doughnut.
And on reparations, it is important to realise that these were not indemnities, they were reparations. As in, they were recompense for damage done. They weren't just a punishment for losing a war, unlike, say, the enormous indemnities imposed on a defeated France by Germany in 1871, or the enormous indemnities imposed on a defeated France by Germany in 1940. If Germany had fought the war in the West on its own soil, its troops would have had no opportunity to commit the atrocities of which they were so fond, and Germany (had it lost) would probably not have had to pay any reparations at all.
Unlike, say, the enormous indemnities imposed on a defeated Belgium by Germany in 1914 for the crime of being in the way.
IIRC the Germans actually kept a "stand pat in the West, deploy to the East" plan updated up to something like January 1913 before finally committing 100% to the Schlieffen plan. The Bavarians and the artillery and engineer people were keen, and of course the four main E-W rail routes that were the key of the mobilisation would work as well going west to east as east to west.
Chris Clark's The Sleepwalkers is pretty damning about French culpability and the fact they saw linking a bunch of chaotic terrorists in the Balkans to the central deterrent balance as a feature, not a bug. But that's another reading group...
That university library was looking at us funny. Plus we had reliable intelligence that it was being used to store missals.
68. Additionally, per Chris Clark, you could add French culpability for encouraging Serbian expansionism as an outlet for French financial ambitions.
One of the interesting effects of reading The Sleepwalkers straight through is that it convinces you in consecutive chapters that every participant* was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war, and you wind up concluding that it doesn't matter how the blame is allocated, the politicians in every country were all bastards who deserved to die horribly.
*The exception being Britain, which wasn't directly involved in the events of early summer 1914, but one faction of the government convinced all the others to get involved for shits and giggles.
Concur that The Sleepwalkers is excellent.
I think I mentioned that I've been rereading The Struggle For Mastery in Europe. I just finished the Bosnian crisis of 1908-09, and it's striking what a dry run it was for the outbreak of WWI. Once you put the Schlieffen plan together with unconditional support for Austria-Hungary, it starts to look pretty inevitable.
The chancellor of Germany during the crisis retired soon after and apparently he realized how dangerous the situation was. His outgoing advice to Wilhelm II was "Do not repeat the Bosnian affair."
76.2 is great. I love that people are bringing in outside reading. (Mine recently has been The Towers of Trebizond, which occasionally mentions people or places that come up in Tooze, but just enough to make me happy and not enough to carry over to conversation here.)
It strikes me that a general understanding that one need not abide by one's treaty commitments if one's counterparty is behaving like a complete wombat would have been a very good thing to have in pre-war Europe.
Blast! I just signed off on the mediation agreement without adding that wombat clause.
3rd or 4th on the Sleepwalkers.
70 is interesting but remember in 1914 everyone was (for reasons that are a little mysterious) terrified of the Russian Army, which was seen as an unstoppable colossus. So the (not great) German idea was knock out France first and Russia's funding and then you can fight the real war against the Russians.
Also explains (at least partially, as Clark says this was a collective international delusion, also for reasons that are a bit mysterious) why the Germans were willing to risk war right then -- Russia was the main threat and given even more time to rebuild they'd be unstoppable, so things needed to go off quickly if they were going to go off.
realized how dangerous the situation was
Everyone at the German court did, except the one guy who could actually do anything, who was insane. I've mentioned Röhl 's book on Wilhem II before. He shows virtually everyone at the court writing in their journals some variation on "I am living in a nightmare". None of them do anything. Germans is assholes.
But don't worry about Wilhelm. Imperial Germany was substantially a liberal democracy, or so I've heard.
82.2 explains very well why they didn't do it; I'm just saying that it would have been rather better for them if they had.
And the Russian army in 1914-15 wasn't that bad; OK, they got Tannenberged against the Germans, but they pulled off some absolutely cracking work against Austria-Hungary (the Brusilov Offensive) and Turkey (the capture of Erzeroum). It was just that they started to fall apart after a couple of winters in the field.
Armies do that, if you don't feed them.
70 is interesting but I think is
the war in the east. While Germany is defending in the east, Russia is fighting at the end of very long supply lines; as soon as Germany attacks that situation reverses, and the more Germany wins the worse it gets. IIRC Schlieffen himself preferred the France-first option because overrunning France quickly was at least plausible, whereas a Russian campaign threatened to expand endlessly.
+guilty of thinking Russia would have lost the same way in your counterfactual war in the east
In a democracy, one of the more compelling arguments is 'fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here.'
I'm not calling Germany exactly democratic, but you can see the appeal.
Or in the case of Prussia, "fight them in Poland so we don't have to fight them here".
(I've been meaning to read up on the post-war: my grandmother lived in occupied Koblenz as a young girl -- her father was a US Army officer -- and I have no idea what the Army was doing there. I do know they liked it a whole lot better than Texas [while her father was chasing Pancho Villa]. I've ended up with the Meissen tea and dessert plates the family acquired at the time.)
90: One of the things I recall from The Guns of August (I think it was that book) was that Prussian reluctance to let the Russians get into Prussia meant that they didn't go all in on a "France First" policy and thus lost the war. That is, they altered Schiffen's plan by pulling troops from the west to protect Prussia.
AIUI they never had the mobility to beat France; a few more divisions wouldn't have made a difference. And they needed the troops in the east, because the Russians proved a lot better than anticipated and the Austrians much worse.
91: My great-grandfather somehow served in concert with Senegalese troops, though I don't know the details. I should have asked my grandmother if she still had stories. I've only heard ones that really aren't about the war at all.
92: They didn't keep the right wing strong!
They did win in the east though. If I hadn't dropped out of grad school I would have written an essay titled "How Schlieffen won the Battle of Tannenberg from the grave". His staff practiced those exact manoeuvres repeatedly.
These counterfactuals are reminding me of discussions I've had/seen about the latest Game of Thrones episode, where the results are highly contingent and a lot of talk isn't distinguishing between the best possible decision and the best possible decision given the information the characters actually have.
Obviously, uncertainty and lack of information play a big role, but much of German decision making was clearly based on wishful thinking and/or self-delusion (e.g. Belgium won't fight, the U.K. won't care about the invasion of Belgium, nobody will care if we burn down parts of Belgium, the Zimmerman Telegram, ....)
A lot of it feels like desperation more than delusion. The staffers were smart enough to know the numbers were just impossible but were too Prussian to accept there weren't any military solutions. Schlieffen kept juggling numbers to his deathbed. At the end he was strengthening the right wing with 40 year-olds that he knew couldn't possibly march fast enough. But the staff had to plan, so plan he did.
The difficulty of marching at 40 years of age is why modern, light-weight camping equipment is so great. You can carry 15 pounds of stuff and be in more comfort than a guy in 1914 carrying 30 pounds of stuff even if that guy isn't carrying weapons.
And Belgium is all flat, so it would have been even easier.
Yes indeed. I was reading a book by a pioneering ornithologist in the thirties, and at one point he mentions how helpful he found it to get a light-weight one-man tent made which only weighed fourteen pounds.
I think my tarp/net tent combo is under 2.5 pounds, including stakes and all.
101: Also, marching at any age is probably more comfortable when you're not wearing one of those silly looking spiked helmets.
Wearing a silly looking hat is crucial if you are outdoors all day.
106: I've recently converted to broad brimmed hatdom when walking outdoors. I've pretty much resigned myself to the idea that any hat with a brim wide enough to keep the sun off is going to be dorky looking.
I'm sure it would look even dorkier with a spike on top, though.
A broad brimmed hat with a spike on top is, basically, a wizard hat.
REI doesn't have any hats like that.
107: Can you pull off a Panama hat with a linen suit? Admittedly might not be the best hiking gear.
You can pull of a Panama hat with pretty much any reasonable sized piece of cloth. There's no strap or anything.
Wearing a silly looking hat is crucial if you are outdoors all day.
I would like to speak up in defense of headscarves! I hate hats.
Can you pull off a Panama hat with a linen suit?
I'm worried I might be mistaken for René Belloq.
112: Headscarves don't seem like they would do much for keeping the sun off your face, though.
I'm even willing to speak up in defense of heatstroke, if I'm honest. Hats, ugh!
114: If you wind the tails and wrap them Heidi braid-style along the hairline, that's an easy fix. You can also leave a little triangle for neck-covering, which is my major sunburn-avoidance need. There are options!
The role of headgear in determining the outcome of WWI is an understudied issue. Maybe if the German army in 1914 had been wearing stylishly wrapped headscarves instead of clunky spiked helmets, that would have given them the extra marching speed they needed to make the Schlieffen plan a success.
We can call this the Thorn-AcademicLurker hypothesis.
I've taken to opening my umbrella against the tropical sun, like a blushing delicate memsahib of the Raj. But screw hats, I'll need the umbrella anyway for rain later, and fuck but its hot.
It's possible our hypothesis isn't distinguishing between the best possible decision and the best possible decision given the information the characters actually have.
but that doesn't make it wrong!
Thorn is uncharacteristically completely wrong about giant hats. Yes, they look dorky, but you are in the shade at all times and it's worth it.
120: I think women's sun hats are kind of cool looking in a 1930s Hercule Poirot mystery novel sort of way.
It's men's sun hats that are inescapably dorky looking.
All the municipal workers here wear those giant conical straw peasant-stereotype hats. Definitely invented for a reason.
118: I see people here doing that. They are all East Asian.
Hats, I mean, not East Asians. I'm sure you'll get ripped off if you buy your indentured labor at a hiking place.
Straw peasant-stereotype hats? No.
East Asian people? Probably, but it's nearly all white people.
Remember, Irish doesn't count as white.
It does in Pittsburgh because the standards are lower here.
I wish hats would come back. I'd like to wear one every day but don't want to be taken for a hipster.
I'm perversely proud of the seamless thread derail accomplished by 105 and 106.
You need dedication. I saw a white guy here wearing a classic British pinstripe business suit, complete with toothbrush mustache. In conclusion, Moby needs to wear top hat, tails, and walking cane.
I'm too self-conscious about my limping to carry a cane.
That's why you get a sword cane. Dedication.
I was in court today with a man in a threepiece seersucker suit, white bucks, and a gold watch chain coming out of his vest pocket. No visible hat, but still, respect.
I, of course, was litigating against some unrepresented dude in a plaid shirt and knee-length basketball shorts.
That would make you look like a really shitty lawyer if you lost.
REI doesn't sell coolies or lascars in the US. It's not worth it to try to get them through customs. Pick them up at your destination.
So they just wait at the trail entrances? Makes sense I guess. Like sherpas.
I have a hat with a big floppy brim I wear when I'm gardening, and that's it. To keep the sun out of my eyes at other times, I have sunglasses and a baseball cap, and unlike a wide-brimmed hat both of them can go in a pocket when I don't need them.
I've never liked hats too much, except knit caps for cold weather. It's partly because I strive to be nondescript, but also, I have a big head (literally. Although...) and it's hard to find hats that fit.
134: I really want to try seersucker someday. I know I extol DC life around here, but the heat is definitely a problem. I've heard about this quasi-mystical formal-but-well-designed-for-hot-weather fabric for years but never seen it as far as I know, and definitely never worn it.
134, So you were representing the guy in the three-piece etc? I hope you got a selfie with him.
