Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey Revisions History listeners, Malcolm here. Before we get started,
Speaker 1: I wanted to update you on a few things. First thing,
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Speaker 1: this is the main event. The heart of it is
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Speaker 1: think is my favorite thing we've ever done. Weird, moving, funny, heartbreaking.
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Speaker 1: A couple weeks ago, one of my producers, Ben at
Speaker 1: Afh Haffrey, came by the office because he had a
Speaker 1: story to tell me. Ben, Welcome to Hudson, New York.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me in Hudson, New York.
Speaker 1: Ben just took over writing and hosting a Pushkin show
Speaker 1: I love called The Last Archive, a show about the
Speaker 1: history of truth. Jill Lapour used to host it. Ben's
Speaker 1: worked on it since the beginning. He's always digging around
Speaker 1: in the stacks of some old library, and one day
Speaker 1: last summer he was in the medical history archives at
Speaker 1: Harvard where he found a story that blew his mind.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to play you some tape.
Speaker 3: Okay, go ahead, Ella, welcome back to Dallas. I'm marvelous.
Speaker 4: Oh, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be back
Speaker 4: here again.
Speaker 2: Do you recognize that voice?
Speaker 1: I no, tell me.
Speaker 2: That is the voice of Eliphantzterle and she's being interviewed
Speaker 2: in the eighties and Dallas, and she's about to tell
Speaker 2: this big story about how she got famous. It's a
Speaker 2: story she tells all the time, like an amateur knight
Speaker 2: at the Apollo Theater when she sings and everyone realizes
Speaker 2: she's got an amazing voice. But I want to play
Speaker 2: you this tape because I want to show you what
Speaker 2: happened when she tells it in this particular instance.
Speaker 3: Okay, Ella, as you look back on your life, here
Speaker 3: was a child from an orphanage and now, no, no,
Speaker 3: somebody wrote that up. Where did that get come?
Speaker 4: I had well, that was a publicity thing long time ago.
Speaker 4: But I have family, and I had family then. But
Speaker 4: my mother had died, and I guess that's why they
Speaker 4: used that. Mind that I was an awphoran, but I
Speaker 4: had family.
Speaker 3: At what age were you when your mother died?
Speaker 4: I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
Speaker 4: to the amateur contest.
Speaker 2: I was about fifteen, because from there we went to
Speaker 2: the amateur contest. It's not a lie, but she's skipping
Speaker 2: two years of her life, about two years, and she
Speaker 2: always skips these two years of her life when she
Speaker 2: tells this story. And what I want to do today
Speaker 2: is tell you a story about what happens in those
Speaker 2: two years, because it's a story not just about Elip Fitzgerald,
Speaker 2: but kind of crazily a story about the invention of
Speaker 2: this whole realm of social science that she is kind
Speaker 2: of bound up in that I think you'll be interested in,
Speaker 2: not just because it's a very you kind of thing,
Speaker 2: but also because it's a story that takes place half
Speaker 2: a mile from where we're sitting right now.
Speaker 1: Wow, welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. Today in the show, Ben tells me about
Speaker 1: the forgotten origins of social network theory and the missing
Speaker 1: chapter in Ella Fitzgerald's life. It's absolutely Banana's story. Just
Speaker 1: so you know, I'd read a little bit of Ben's
Speaker 1: research before we had this conversation, so I'm a little
Speaker 1: ahead of you, but still just wait, do you see
Speaker 1: how Ella Fitzgerald fits into this whole thing. Before we
Speaker 1: get to her, we have to meet the experimenter, a
Speaker 1: doctor from halfway around the world. Wait, so back up
Speaker 1: for a second. So we begin with this man Jacob.
Speaker 2: What's his middle name, Jacob Levy Marino.
Speaker 1: Jacob Levy Marino. Who is He's Austrian.
Speaker 2: He always claimed that he was born on a boat
Speaker 2: in the Black Sea.
Speaker 5: I was born on the boat the Black Sea, and
Speaker 5: I'll be traveling from one part of the world to
Speaker 5: the others and to find myself.
Speaker 2: Actually, he was just born in eighteen eighty nine in
Speaker 2: Bucharest to a fifteen and a half year old mother
Speaker 2: who had married a traveling salesman father and lived in
Speaker 2: Bucharest I think for the first five or six years
Speaker 2: of his life before moving to Austria.
Speaker 1: He's basically lower middle class Jewish immigrant living in Vienna,
Speaker 1: and yet he ends up getting a pretty serious education.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he goes to school at the University of Vienna.
Speaker 2: He's studying to be a physician. He becomes really interested
Speaker 2: in psychiatry. He was noted on campus for walking around
Speaker 2: in a long green cloak and letting his beard grow
Speaker 2: in a way that no one else is letting in
Speaker 2: their beard grow and he never wear a hat. So
Speaker 2: he's just sort of striking larger than life figure on campus,
Speaker 2: which is kind of like it's always been the thing
Speaker 2: with him since he was a kid, like this. This story.
Speaker 2: His mother always told this story that one day she
Speaker 2: was holding him on the street and a woman was
Speaker 2: walking by and pointed at him and said, one day
Speaker 2: that boy will become a very great man. People will
Speaker 2: come from all over the world to see him. And
Speaker 2: so he had this kind of like self described megalomania
Speaker 2: and literally would play god as a child, which is
Speaker 2: a thing he continued to do for his whole life.
Speaker 1: So he's part of the intellectual scene in Vienna. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then makes his way to the United States.
Speaker 2: Yes, so he makes his way to the United States
Speaker 2: after World War One, and you know, psychodrama at this
Speaker 2: point is sort of his big idea.
Speaker 1: Well, wait to find psychodrama is doing.
Speaker 2: So it's like, you have a problem you want to
Speaker 2: work through the common way of working through that problem
Speaker 2: is to go to a psychoanalyst office and lie down
Speaker 2: on the couch and just talk about your problem. He thought,
Speaker 2: you have a problem, you bring it to the stage
Speaker 2: and you act out whatever problem you're having, and you
Speaker 2: have this kind of dynamic way of engaging with the
Speaker 2: issues you were facing, and then that would help you
Speaker 2: either have a catharsist and break through it or just
Speaker 2: like reimagine your own role within the problems you were
Speaker 2: having such that you no longer have them. So what
Speaker 2: he's really interested in is creative spontaneity. He thinks of
Speaker 2: children as a model. He did a lot of tutoring
Speaker 2: when he was in medical school, and he basically felt
Speaker 2: like the creative spontaneity kids have is a thing he
Speaker 2: wanted to give to everybody, like you can when you're
Speaker 2: like watch a group of kids playing, which he did
Speaker 2: a lot when he was a tutor, they just kind
Speaker 2: of like pick up roles immediately. And he'd see these
Speaker 2: groups of kids, you know, like, how does everyone decide
Speaker 2: all of a sudden they're playing cops and robbers or
Speaker 2: just sort of lock into some sort of performance and
Speaker 2: communicate it in an almost unspoken, instantaneous way. That sort
Speaker 2: of self creative freedom was a thing that he thought
Speaker 2: everybody should have. So his therapeutic theater stuff is really
Speaker 2: an attempt to figure out how does that work. Where
Speaker 2: does that spark come from? What are the dynamics between
Speaker 2: these people? What's a systematic way to think about those
Speaker 2: dynamics that promotes this kind of spontaneous interaction between them.
Speaker 2: That preoccupation of his is where social network analysis comes from,
Speaker 2: is basically like how can I study a group and
Speaker 2: figure out how the ideas are moving within the group
Speaker 2: and make it sort of rigorous in a way. He's
Speaker 2: really preoccupied with this question what goes on with a
Speaker 2: group of people because he's stuck between psychoanalysis, which is
Speaker 2: all about the individual and the self, and a lot
Speaker 2: of the social sciences in the nineteen twenties, which are
Speaker 2: these kind of big static numbers like averages or like
Speaker 2: the sort of information you get from a poll.
Speaker 1: So his principal objection to psychoanalysis is the fact that
Speaker 1: it's too focused on the individual on it self. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seemsus maybe it seems it seems like it would
Speaker 1: seemed decadent to him to lie on a couch and
Speaker 1: talk about yourself endlessly.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, he used to talk about this all the time.
Speaker 6: That's did people who go on the couch for six
Speaker 6: eight years, spending twenty thousand dollars and so for us,
Speaker 6: and then they come to us, and what do we do?
Speaker 5: We let him act out the problem as it is
Speaker 5: on the Reality lib.
Speaker 2: That tape is from where Cooper Union.
Speaker 1: He's giving a talk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like nineteen sixty something, so it's later in life,
Speaker 2: so he never really got over it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk a little about the how does
Speaker 1: he what is this big experiment at how does he
Speaker 1: come to conduct it?
Speaker 2: So basically, he's he's in New York. He's got this
Speaker 2: improv theater that like the critics all hate at Carnegie Hall.
Speaker 2: And one day a Columbia graduate student in sociology named
Speaker 2: Helen Hall Jennings come to the improv theater and somehow
Speaker 2: they identify that they're both really interested in this question
Speaker 2: of rigorously figuring out the way groups work. And Moreno,
Speaker 2: as you can tell, is sort of like all over
Speaker 2: the place and wasn't a super focused or rigorous person,
Speaker 2: but had just a crazy number of ideas that were
Speaker 2: really pretty insightful. And what Helen Hall Jennings had was
Speaker 2: an extremely rigorous math background and also connections. And when
Speaker 2: they sort of figured out that they had this thing
Speaker 2: income and this interest they began working with each other,
Speaker 2: and so they begin to work up a science for
Speaker 2: mapping the way groups work. So they begin to go
Speaker 2: to classrooms. It was like a Brooklyn public school. They
Speaker 2: go to where they ask all the kids, like who
Speaker 2: do you most want to sit next to? And then
Speaker 2: they start creating diagrams of like how successfully integrated the classroom.
Speaker 2: It's like, are people sitting next to the kids they
Speaker 2: want to sit next to? They go to sing Sing prison,
Speaker 2: but the thing is like they're kind of fiddling around
Speaker 2: the edges, like these are small experiments and what they
Speaker 2: need is a really big experiment. And they kind of
Speaker 2: luck into meeting this woman named Fanny French Morse, who's
Speaker 2: the superintendent of the New York State Training School for Girls,
Speaker 2: which is women's reformatory located half a mile from here. Like,
Speaker 2: go out the door, turn right, walk down the street,
Speaker 2: and we'd be there.
Speaker 1: I mean, I go running up to that place all
Speaker 1: the time. It's a prison, now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's a place that really creeps me out.
Speaker 2: But the history of reformatories and the juvenile justice system,
Speaker 2: that's one of the big accomplishments of the progressive era
Speaker 2: is this idea we should not be treating kids who
Speaker 2: commit crimes the way we treat adults who commit crimes,
Speaker 2: because on some level people thought kids can change more
Speaker 2: than adults can. So rather than like locking them in
Speaker 2: a prison in a city with a bunch of adult criminals,
Speaker 2: they should have a different court system. They could be
Speaker 2: charged for different things. Like a lot of young girls
Speaker 2: were sent to reform schools just for being incorrigible or ungovernable,
Speaker 2: but they were sent to these places that were always
Speaker 2: in bucolic settings that were meant to take them out
Speaker 2: of contaminated cities and put them in places where they
Speaker 2: could become better versions of themselves. And so if Fanny
Speaker 2: frenchmore s runds the Hudson One, and it's always on
Speaker 2: the cusp of being a prison or a school, and
Speaker 2: so it's constantly a need of being reformed because it
Speaker 2: gets too strict or it gets too punitive, and they
Speaker 2: need to make it more re educative instead. And she's
Speaker 2: this lifelong progressive reformer who takes over the training school
Speaker 2: when it's become basically a prison, and she's kind of
Speaker 2: like a legend in this field. The first night she
Speaker 2: takes over, she makes a huge pile on the lawn
Speaker 2: of all of the straight jackets and the restraining sheets
Speaker 2: and the prison uniforms, and she lights it on fire.
Speaker 2: So she's this firebrand reformer who's really trying to do
Speaker 2: something at this school. She introduces art, she buys a farm,
Speaker 2: she gets all these antiques that the girls start reworking,
Speaker 2: trying to give them an aesthetic education. But notably, the
Speaker 2: thing that the training school really does is it's a
Speaker 2: miniature version of society. So if any French, Morris invites
Speaker 2: jail Moreno and Helen Hall Jennings to the school, which
Speaker 2: is thrilling to them because it's a totally closed environment.
Speaker 2: That's this microcosm of society with five hundred girls who
Speaker 2: are arranged in brick cottages with nice lattice work trim.
Speaker 2: So jail Moreno moves to Hudson with Helen Hall Jennings.
Speaker 1: And he goes for it because he's living. Is he
Speaker 1: at this point well known, what's his level.
Speaker 2: Of He's becoming better known. But he is a person
Speaker 2: who wants to be operating on the biggest scale possible,
Speaker 2: and this scale of experiment is an opportunity for him
Speaker 2: to do that. So I think he sees it as
Speaker 2: a big break.
Speaker 1: So the European genius Meglomaniac and his brilliant data minded
Speaker 1: research partner get on the train from Manhattan, come up
Speaker 1: two hours to Hudson to conduct one of the first
Speaker 1: and most dramatic experiments of his kind ever.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: An attempt to understand the social dynamics of a girl's
Speaker 1: prison reform school. There are five hundred girls in this school.
Speaker 2: Roughly five hundred girls.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So he descends on the school, he and Helen
Speaker 1: hel Jennings and what do they do.
Speaker 2: So the first thing they do is they hand out
Speaker 2: questionnaires to all the girls. That's say, you know, choose
Speaker 2: the top five girls in this community that you want
Speaker 2: to live with and now and tell us why, and
Speaker 2: then choose the five girls that you absolutely do not
Speaker 2: want to live with. And so it's kind of reading
Speaker 2: his account of this, it's like really dense. I mean,
Speaker 2: he doesn't really write in English very well at this
Speaker 2: point in his life, and there's a ton of data,
Speaker 2: but you get these kind of reprints of the things
Speaker 2: that the girls say. So we actually had an actress
Speaker 2: read one of them out, and this is One of
Speaker 2: the comments in the questionnaire Dee, I want in my
Speaker 2: cottage because I feel towards her, like she is my
Speaker 2: little sister I never had any and I like to
Speaker 2: take care of her.
Speaker 3: Mostly she's just a lonesome little child you.
Speaker 5: Just have to be fond of.
Speaker 2: So they like gather all these questionnaires from the girls
Speaker 2: about how they feel about each other, and then they
Speaker 2: begin to calculate from that, you know, where are their
Speaker 2: mutual attractions, where does everyone hate each other? And like
Speaker 2: to what degree do these cottage groupings even make sense?
Speaker 2: And they want to start putting a number to that.
Speaker 2: But it's not just the questionnaires. They begin to do
Speaker 2: a lot of observing of the girls, like watching them
Speaker 2: work in the steam laundry, watching them make rugs, or
Speaker 2: like shine up antiques, and that becomes data too, And
Speaker 2: all of this is used in service of figuring out
Speaker 2: who's isolated in the community, who's rejected by the community,
Speaker 2: who's beloved by the community. But they're observing everything they're collecting,
Speaker 2: like Marina at one point says, they collect ten thousand
Speaker 2: pages of data. And one of the things about this
Speaker 2: new science is you have that much data and you
Speaker 2: can't conceive of it all like it's before computers. There's
Speaker 2: no way to really understand what that all means except
Speaker 2: for a map, and that is the critical thing that
Speaker 2: they do is create these really intricate maps of what
Speaker 2: the community looks like. So like this this map right
Speaker 2: here is the entire community of the school.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it looks like a looks like a giant
Speaker 1: spider's web. Yeah, And he has nodes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve, thirteen.
Speaker 1: Is each one of these nodes a group of girls
Speaker 1: or a single girl?
Speaker 2: Each one of those big circles is a cottage?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 1: I see, Oh I see no, But I've been putting
Speaker 1: any further. Do we believe these maps? Say, do we
Speaker 1: think he is actually act? You're accurately capturing the patterns
Speaker 1: of relationships and influence within the community.
Speaker 2: I think he misses a lot. And also there's this
Speaker 2: kind of forced thing about it, like none of these
Speaker 2: girls are consenting to it, Like who knows about if
Speaker 2: they're telling him the truth? But I think that there
Speaker 2: is genuine insight there. And one of the reasons is
Speaker 2: there's this thing that happens. It starts on the Halloween
Speaker 2: night of nineteen thirty two, there's a party in one
Speaker 2: of the cottages and somebody creates a distraction and two
Speaker 2: of the girls, Ruth and Marie, run away from the cottage.
Speaker 2: And then something really weird happens, Like, over a total
Speaker 2: of fourteen days, fourteen girls run away. It's kind of
Speaker 2: this chain reaction. Nobody really understands why it's happening, but
Speaker 2: it's like a runaway rate that's thirty times higher than normal.
Speaker 2: And this happens after Marine has collected a lot of
Speaker 2: his data.
Speaker 1: He has an outbreak essentially of girls who are who
Speaker 1: get this idea to flee, to run away. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he's trying to trace was he trying to trying to
Speaker 1: trace the source of the outbreak or to see how
Speaker 1: the idea of running away had traveled through the community.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's trying to see how the idea of running
Speaker 2: away travels through the community. Which is this kind of
Speaker 2: you know, you talk about this a lot, this idea
Speaker 2: of an idea being contagious. He posits that there's not
Speaker 2: some central reason why the girls are running away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so is he saying that his hypothesis would
Speaker 1: be the group who run away are all linked, are
Speaker 1: intimately linked according to his network analysis.
Speaker 2: Yes, so that's his explanation, and so he and Jennings
Speaker 2: go to their maps and try and figure out if
Speaker 2: it's true. What his theory is that there's some way
Speaker 2: that this impulse to run away is traveling through the
Speaker 2: network of girls, and he and Jennings trace this in
Speaker 2: the map and then call it proof that networks exist.
Speaker 2: And one of the rea he's confident in it is
Speaker 2: because then based on those same questionnaires about who likes whom,
Speaker 2: who doesn't like whom, he rearranges the cottages and over
Speaker 2: the next some period of months, the number of runaways
Speaker 2: dwindles pretty radically. And so the thought is that's the
Speaker 2: evidence that this is in some way meaningful, is that
Speaker 2: the rearrangement seems to work.
Speaker 1: This whole thing is started by two girls. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: does network theory tell us about those who originate the epidemic?
Speaker 1: Were they socially influential girls?
Speaker 2: So no, they're actually like pretty isolated girls. So this
Speaker 2: is like a map of them. That's one of those
Speaker 2: is Ruth, and one of those is Marie. And basically,
Speaker 2: like red lines are are lines of attraction, Black lines
Speaker 2: are lines of rejection, and so they're really close. They
Speaker 2: dislike the same people, they like the same people. They
Speaker 2: really like each other. But on the broader map, not
Speaker 2: a lot of lines of influence run towards them, except for,
Speaker 2: you know, a couple significant ones that connect them to
Speaker 2: the people who then begin to run away next.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, so they Our first observation is the
Speaker 1: two who begin the epidemic are closely bound to each
Speaker 1: other but isolated from everyone else. So there's a little
Speaker 1: social there's not a lot of glue holding them in place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like the most popular girls in the
Speaker 2: reformatory runaway and then everyone follows suit. But like with
Speaker 2: all of this stuff, it's there's only so much he's seeing,
Speaker 2: and there's only so much he's allowing himself to say.
Speaker 2: And they also have this agenda of proving that their
Speaker 2: science works. Their account is the only account we have
Speaker 2: of what actually happened and how successful their stuff was.
Speaker 2: But so this is his explanation.
Speaker 1: But he's got this big idea, and he and Jennings
Speaker 1: have the evidence he thinks proves it. How does he
Speaker 1: get the word out?
Speaker 2: Actually, the first place, he publishes as results it's kind
Speaker 2: of like a science fair. Is this big physicians conference
Speaker 2: that happens at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. I think
Speaker 2: it happens on like April second, nineteen thirty three. He
Speaker 2: goes to the waldorfath story, he takes the train down
Speaker 2: from Hudson, goes the water for his storia. They put
Speaker 2: the maps on the walls and it's kind of a
Speaker 2: big deal. Like The New York Times writes a story
Speaker 2: that says, like emotions mapped by new geography. He calls
Speaker 2: it psychological geography. He's riding high. He says he's going
Speaker 2: to make a map of all the emotions in New
Speaker 2: York City. And that's the first place he publishes it.
Speaker 2: But then he goes back to the school. And it's
Speaker 2: a year after that the book comes out called Who
Speaker 2: Shall Survive? She's the book you have which is this?
Speaker 2: This is actually one of the original books. This is
Speaker 2: from nineteen thirty four. I took it out from the
Speaker 2: library and it's like a year overdue now. So that's
Speaker 2: if anyone's listening to this, I will be returning it someday.
Speaker 1: That's a Pushkin promise. We always return our library books.
Speaker 1: And after the break, we'll find out what all this
Speaker 1: research has to do with el Fitzgerald. Okay, back did
Speaker 1: the reformatory. The social scientist JAYL. Moreno and his research
Speaker 1: partner Helen Hall Jennings had been making a study of
Speaker 1: a girl's reform school down the street from where we
Speaker 1: are right now in Hudson. It's the nineteen thirties. They've
Speaker 1: just debuted some of their research in Manhattan at the
Speaker 1: Waldorf Astoria. Big deal. And then someone new shows up
Speaker 1: at the school, right Ben.
Speaker 2: Yes, sixteen days after he publishes all this stuff on
Speaker 2: the walls of the Waldorf Astoria, a new girl has
Speaker 2: checked into the Hudson Reformatory. Ella Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the most one of the most famous
Speaker 1: and extraordinary singers of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: Who, unbeknownst to everyone in her lifetime, was an inmate
Speaker 2: at the school in between the time when her mom
Speaker 2: died and the day that she became famous at the
Speaker 2: Apollo Theater singing in an amateur contest.
Speaker 4: I was fifteen, because from there we went to the
Speaker 4: amateur contest.
Speaker 2: She never talked publicly about this fact that she was
Speaker 2: an inmate at the training school for girls, and it
Speaker 2: wasn't even known publicly until after her death in the nineties,
Speaker 2: when this intrepid investigative reporter Nina Bernstein figured it out.
Speaker 2: But what we know is she's at the training school
Speaker 2: starting April eighteenth, nineteen thirty three. When she's held, it's
Speaker 2: like a week before her sixteenth birthday because her mother
Speaker 2: has just died. So her mother dies when she's fifteen, yeah,
Speaker 2: and she starts to take odd jobs, so she's running numbers.
Speaker 2: She's a lookout for a brothel. She gets picked up
Speaker 2: by the cops, sentenced to the training school, and she
Speaker 2: checks in just over two weeks after Moreno's shown his
Speaker 2: first diagrams from the research. She's then there for like
Speaker 2: about a year, and what we know of her time
Speaker 2: there is through Nina Bernstein's reporting talking to people who
Speaker 2: worked at the training school and remembered her. They would
Speaker 2: ask her to come back to be to talk to
Speaker 2: the girls, and she never would, so Bernstein talked to
Speaker 2: them about what's known about her. You know, people remember
Speaker 2: she had amazing penmanship, she was an excellent student. One
Speaker 2: day she was invited to a church nearby with a
Speaker 2: group of the black girls who liked to sing and
Speaker 2: was said to have sung her heart out, but she
Speaker 2: was there at the time that the study was being made,
Speaker 2: and her experience there's significant to me, not just because
Speaker 2: she's a really famous person who intersects with this place,
Speaker 2: but because it blies Loreno's study, like it shows what's
Speaker 2: actually happening there that's not captured in his maps and
Speaker 2: new science.
Speaker 1: And sure enough she.
Speaker 2: She is thought to have run away. Yeah, so basically
Speaker 2: she's checked in there. What we know from Nina Eernstein's
Speaker 2: reporting is she wasn't allowed to sing in the all
Speaker 2: white choir, must have stayed one of the two cottages
Speaker 2: the black girls were allowed to live in, probably like
Speaker 2: all of the black girls had to do laundry for
Speaker 2: the white girls. But she was also kept in the
Speaker 2: basement of one of the colleges at the training school
Speaker 2: and beaten. But then there's this vagueness around how she
Speaker 2: leaves the training school. But because of the parole records,
Speaker 2: it's plausible that she ran away and she's living back
Speaker 2: in New York, I think in Yonkers, and she's homeless,
Speaker 2: like she's wearing ragged clothes, and she and a group
Speaker 2: of her friends decide to enter the amateur Talent Night
Speaker 2: at the Apollo Theater, which is this competition where if
Speaker 2: you win, you get to play at the Apollo for
Speaker 2: a week. And she at this point thinks she's going
Speaker 2: to be a dancer, so she's playing to enter as
Speaker 2: a dancer. I mean, do you want to hear the
Speaker 2: tape of her telling the story? So this is her
Speaker 2: towards the end of her career talking to Andre Previn.
Speaker 2: When you first started, you had visions of not being
Speaker 2: a singer.
Speaker 7: You were going to be a dancer. Is that right right?
Speaker 5: Tell me that, Oh you really want to hear that?
Speaker 3: Will just started back in my hometown and Yonkers and
Speaker 3: I was what they called, you know, the greatest little
Speaker 3: dancer in Younkers. And we used to go down to
Speaker 3: the Pollow on amateur night, my girlfriends and I and
Speaker 3: you know, like they always tell you if you want
Speaker 3: to be an amateur, to shine and drop your name
Speaker 3: in the box. And being from young because we never
Speaker 3: thought anybody would send a postcard to young Kers, and
Speaker 3: the three of us we put our names in and
Speaker 3: I was the one who was chosen and I made
Speaker 3: up you know, they say, well if you don't go,
Speaker 3: you're chicken. So we went, and believe it or not,
Speaker 3: I was the first amateur that they called. And there
Speaker 3: were two sisters who were the dance and the sisters
Speaker 3: in the world called it Edward Sisters, and they were
Speaker 3: starring at the Pollow and they closed the show with
Speaker 3: up and I when I saw those ladies dance, I says,
Speaker 3: no way, I'm going out there and trying to dance,
Speaker 3: because they stopped the show. I was the first one
Speaker 3: was called, and when I got out there, somebody hollered out.
Speaker 3: Nobody is, what is she gonna do?
Speaker 2: So this is like a story she tells all the time.
Speaker 2: What nobody knew is that when she was on stage
Speaker 2: at the Apollo, she was just out of the training school.
Speaker 3: And my mother had a record of Miss Connie Boswell,
Speaker 3: who I think was one of the greatest singers that
Speaker 3: ever lived.
Speaker 5: And she used to.
Speaker 3: Play Obtic of my affection and Judy and I got
Speaker 3: so I had, you know, used to sing it. So
Speaker 3: the man said sing something, well, I tried to sing Judy,
Speaker 3: and I think miss Connie boswa because then I tried
Speaker 3: to sing like her and I sang if a voyage
Speaker 3: ben break the whole of the sproom that's Judy and
Speaker 3: everybody says all that girl can sing, and the people
Speaker 3: plought it so much. I sang Object of my Affection.
Speaker 3: That was the other side of the record, and I
Speaker 3: won first prize. So then that made me feel like,
Speaker 3: you know, well, I wanted to try to be a singer.
Speaker 2: I just I love it so much. And I think
Speaker 2: it's the You know, it's obvious, but if she's a
Speaker 2: note in these maps, we know her so well as
Speaker 2: a person. But obviously, like every single person in the
Speaker 2: maps had a full life.
Speaker 1: Too, and you actually think.
Speaker 2: You found Yeah, I think I found a notation.
Speaker 1: You found her place in the social diaga.
Speaker 2: Yes, I found a girl who's plausibly ele Fitzgerald, but
Speaker 2: I can't know for sure.
Speaker 1: It's a black girl named Ella.
Speaker 2: In this book, there's a mention of a girl named Ella.
Speaker 2: All the girls on the maps are given initials, like
Speaker 2: two letter initials that don't correspond with their names, and
Speaker 2: there's mention of a girl named Ella. She's given the
Speaker 2: two letter initial GA, and then like one hundred pages
Speaker 2: later there's a map with a GA on it that
Speaker 2: specifies the Gas is a black girl. So there's a
Speaker 2: Ga named Ella who's a black girl, and we know
Speaker 2: that Marina was making the study at the time when
Speaker 2: Ella was also in the school.
Speaker 1: Do you make this discovery or did.
Speaker 2: I'm in this discovery because I read this.
Speaker 1: You've contributed to the legend of both Elafazgerald and Jail Marina.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, Yes, this is correct.
Speaker 1: And what happens when Moreno and Jennings's research comes out.
Speaker 2: It has a pretty significant reception. Moreno has gotten involved
Speaker 2: in the new Deal, but like the most significant thing
Speaker 2: that comes out of the ground swell of support is
Speaker 2: he launches a journal called Sociometry. But it's this really
Speaker 2: influential journal and you know, like six degrees of separation
Speaker 2: is tested there. All of these leading lights of social
Speaker 2: science like George Gallup, Margaret Mead, John Dewey, they're like
Speaker 2: involved in the editorial board or publishing in the journal.
Speaker 2: It's finally like a platform for him to share these
Speaker 2: ideas about social networks basically with a broader public. And
Speaker 2: that field social network analysis doesn't really take off until
Speaker 2: the seventies or eighties, but he's credited with being a
Speaker 2: major forerunner of it and doing it in this experiment.
Speaker 2: This story is significant to me in part because it's
Speaker 2: sort of the story of science in the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: or like one kind of science in the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: which is I think in the quest to institutionalize his
Speaker 2: ideas and to be as big a player as he
Speaker 2: could be. I feel like Jael Moreno kind of pulled
Speaker 2: his punches, like he had ten thousand pages of data.
Speaker 2: I don't believe that he didn't know what was actually
Speaker 2: going on at the school, and specifically what was happening
Speaker 2: to the black girls at the school. And it's not
Speaker 2: that that kind of thing wasn't sayable in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 2: because the Attorney General had already said that the school
Speaker 2: should be desegregated.
Speaker 1: So the school is segregated, and then New York State
Speaker 1: turn General has asked that it be desegregated, and the
Speaker 1: school Morse doesn't want to do it. And in his analysis,
Speaker 1: Moreno is kind of oblivious or or disregarding of this issue,
Speaker 1: is what you were saying.
Speaker 2: He covers the fact that it's segregated. It's just not
Speaker 2: like the sort of like beating of the girls in
Speaker 2: the basement, but more like the corporal punishment stuff. The
Speaker 2: other reasons why girls might be running away. These sorts
Speaker 2: of issues aren't in the text, and like the degree
Speaker 2: to which the segregation is institutionalized isn't really covered either.
Speaker 1: But I'm you know, it's ninety we're talking about the
Speaker 1: early thirties. Nothing's integrated in the early thirties.
Speaker 2: But there was an expectation that this place would be
Speaker 2: I mean, this is. And it's also like Harlem Renaissance
Speaker 2: is going on. There's a lot of black power in
Speaker 2: New York City as of the nineteen twenties. And when
Speaker 2: there's an investigation into the school after Moreno's study, not
Speaker 2: because of it, there is, it's led by a black
Speaker 2: doctor in partnership, but the governor. There's a level of
Speaker 2: state support for the idea that this is, this shouldn't
Speaker 2: be happening that suggests that it's not really so beyond
Speaker 2: the realm of possibility.
Speaker 7: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: The person I'm I, the person who I would fault
Speaker 1: is not Morse so much as Moreno. He's the outsider.
Speaker 1: He's the one who's who sees himself as a revolutionary,
Speaker 1: who's not who doesn't at least profess to be held
Speaker 1: by the you know, the standards of the rest of society.
Speaker 1: Who is, as you say, coming up with a new
Speaker 1: idea that professes to paint a picture of the whole community.
Speaker 1: And you could easily see that someone who was if
Speaker 1: he was as revolutionary as he claimed to be, he
Speaker 1: can easily see a version of this where he would
Speaker 1: have said, look, this is what segregation does. Like he
Speaker 1: came with a tool to see what was wrong with
Speaker 1: segregation and turned a blind eye to it. I mean interestingly,
Speaker 1: of course, social science becomes hugely important in the strategy
Speaker 1: of the civil rights movement and the legal strategy of.
Speaker 2: The civil Brown versus borders and on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the fifteen sixties, So like there's an opening.
Speaker 1: This is what's so fascinating about this story is that
Speaker 1: this here's this brilliant man who he's blind in so
Speaker 1: many ways to the possibilities of his own fame and greatness. Right,
Speaker 1: he had the tool that everybody would end up using
Speaker 1: twenty years later to break down the door of prejudice,
Speaker 1: and he didn't understand he had the tool and went
Speaker 1: back to doing psychodrama like he had it. Right, does
Speaker 1: he continue over the rest of his life pursuing social
Speaker 1: network theory or doing psychodrama?
Speaker 2: I mean he stays involved with sociometry. I think he
Speaker 2: just wanted to be a direct there. Like there's a
Speaker 2: story he tells about when he was a kid that
Speaker 2: to me is kind of structured the way I think
Speaker 2: about him. And I think he's sharing it because he
Speaker 2: thinks it has some fundamental truth about himself contained in it.
Speaker 2: But I just want to play you this one thing,
Speaker 2: this is about when he's a child, I think in
Speaker 2: Bucharest still.
Speaker 7: One saturday my parents got away, a crowd of children
Speaker 7: gathered in our house in the basement, and I still
Speaker 7: remember that. They came to me and said, now, you Jack,
Speaker 7: this was my first name. What are you going to
Speaker 7: do today?
Speaker 6: I said, let's play God. Well, I said enough, But
Speaker 6: one of the children said, and who is God? I said,
Speaker 6: I am God, and you are my angels. And then
Speaker 6: they all said, let's have it's God the heaven.
Speaker 7: And we went with the basement and we do all
Speaker 7: the chairs in the house, and they built the various
Speaker 7: heavens up to the top, and on top they had
Speaker 7: a chairir for God himself, and I was in help
Speaker 7: for all the children to sit there on well as
Speaker 7: it is, I was gone, and I stood still the
Speaker 7: dangers began to run around to sing, and suddenly while
Speaker 7: the angels said, why don't you fly? And I stretched
Speaker 7: my arms and I fed down and my right art.
Speaker 2: It's just like I just loved the story, but like
Speaker 2: that's kind of his whole thing. It's like he tries
Speaker 2: to play god, he falls down, he breaks his arm,
Speaker 2: like he always wants to be the guy who sits
Speaker 2: above and looks down, and that's a fatal flaw of is.
Speaker 1: We think that's I think that's a nice I think
Speaker 1: that's a nice think it's a nice way to end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: Yeah. For more psychodrama, go subscribe to the Last Archive
Speaker 1: to hear six episodes of Gripping Intellectual History Ben Scott
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Speaker 1: wiretappers turned evangelists, and time travel. Subscribe, but you'll also
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Speaker 1: today coming soon. He won't want to miss it. Ben
Speaker 1: produced this episode of Revisionist History as well, with help
Speaker 1: from Jacob Smith and Kiara Powell. We were edited by
Speaker 1: Peter Clowney and Julia Barton, Engineering by Nina Lawrence, Mastering
Speaker 1: by Sarah Bugaire. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John
Speaker 1: Evans of Stellwagon Sinfinnat. I'm Malcolm Gladmo