Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2: Wilson.
Speaker 1: So there was a thing this week. We talked about
Speaker 1: the Beecham Sharp Tragedy, sometimes also called the Kentucky Tragedy,
Speaker 1: and there was a thing I thought about including in it,
Speaker 1: but I did not, okay, And the reason why is
Speaker 1: that it's long. Okay, hold on, I'm counting one, two, three, four, five, six,
Speaker 1: seven eight. I don't even know it's there. At the
Speaker 1: end of their lives and wrote a poem about their
Speaker 1: whole experience, with the intent that it would be engraved
Speaker 1: on their tombstone, which sounds lovely at least, you know,
Speaker 1: in ter of like from a sentimental point of view.
Speaker 1: But this poem is long. It's not it's not like
Speaker 1: a short little thing. It's like thirty or forty lines long.
Speaker 1: It's really really long. And I just and it did
Speaker 1: end up on their tombstone, and I just think of
Speaker 1: the poor person that had to engrave all of that,
Speaker 1: because it is not a brief piece of writing by
Speaker 1: any means. It would be like going, you know, I
Speaker 1: would like two of Shakespeare's sonnets engraved on my tombstone.
Speaker 1: Like today, that would probably be quicker work. We have
Speaker 1: machines to do it, mm hmm. Not in eighteen twenty six,
Speaker 1: and it basically is a very romanticized version, of course
Speaker 1: of their story. I also didn't note that a lot
Speaker 1: of people, I mean, I think it's it's pretty commonly
Speaker 1: believed that Anne really co authored that final document with
Speaker 1: her husband, that she had a lot of say in it.
Speaker 1: It was not written in his handwriting. Okay though that
Speaker 1: Initially when I read that, I was like, are they
Speaker 1: suggesting that this was a fake document? No, most people
Speaker 1: are actually indicating that Anne probably wrote it all down
Speaker 1: and was a collaborator on it. Whether that's just because
Speaker 1: he had poor penmanship or she was kind of driving
Speaker 1: the bus in terms of like how that document was
Speaker 1: written and what it contained is a matter of some speculation,
Speaker 1: But the two of them really wrote it together, right.
Speaker 1: This is such a mess of people lately, We've had
Speaker 1: a lot of discussions of people accusing each other of
Speaker 1: things that cannot be verified. Yeah, the whole thing about
Speaker 1: her child is so messy, so messy, and the only
Speaker 1: person who we can say knows for sure or knew
Speaker 1: for sure who the father was was her, and she
Speaker 1: never she never stated it was anyone other than but
Speaker 1: there are even some questions about whether she ever actually
Speaker 1: stated it was sharp. So it all stays a mystery.
Speaker 1: It's a little unsatisfying. Yeah, It's also an interesting thing
Speaker 1: in that obviously this was written or this whole thing
Speaker 1: took place in the eighteen twenties, so some decades before
Speaker 1: the Civil War, and reading some of the accounts, even
Speaker 1: though I know this was the case, it's still a
Speaker 1: little startling how casually people will just talk about the
Speaker 1: enslaved people that they own and how that makes them important.
Speaker 1: It's like, we know that that was going on, But
Speaker 1: then when I read contemporary accounts, it always feels like
Speaker 1: a punch in the gut, like, oh, nobody was Like
Speaker 1: I mean people were, but nobody in this you know
Speaker 1: who was writing this down and being yes, he was
Speaker 1: very wealthy, he had X number of enslaved people, although
Speaker 1: they of course don't word it quite that way. Those
Speaker 1: people never go own owning people. That seems that seems
Speaker 1: weird and wrong, Like I just I don't know, I know,
Speaker 1: that's my hippie dippy talking I just want everybody to
Speaker 1: have a moral compass. I don't know why that's so hard.
Speaker 1: It's also an interesting thing in terms of how completely
Speaker 1: gripped and entire community can be by the events and
Speaker 1: behaviors in the lives of a very few people, right
Speaker 1: because there was all of this infighting among legislators while
Speaker 1: farmers were seriously like are we going to survive? And
Speaker 1: some of those legislators really did seem more interested in
Speaker 1: just winning over one another than the actual constituents that
Speaker 1: they represented. We've never seen that before. But when you
Speaker 1: think about there are a bunch of people literally sitting there,
Speaker 1: going is my farm going to be foreclosed? Am I
Speaker 1: going to lose everything? While all of these men bicker,
Speaker 1: it's very frustrating. And then it becomes really really easy
Speaker 1: to see how there could have been political machinations involved
Speaker 1: in the murder that played out Like Beecham obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: towards the end was like, yes, I did it, but uh,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to do it, but also I don't
Speaker 1: know if I would have done it. I waited four years,
Speaker 1: but then this guy kept telling me I should do it,
Speaker 1: kept pointing out that my wife's reputation had been ruined.
Speaker 1: He was right. I did want to kill him after that. Like,
Speaker 1: it's a very interesting example of how levers can be
Speaker 1: pulled by people with intents that are dishonorable to manipulate
Speaker 1: the passions of other people to do things that are
Speaker 1: not necessarily on their backs but that will benefit them directly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like, one of the things that really struck
Speaker 2: me was how much leading up to him, like authoring
Speaker 2: or co authoring a confession, how much of it was
Speaker 2: based on absolutely circumstantial.
Speaker 1: The closest thing to.
Speaker 2: Like actual evidence being his wife's saying, like I recognize
Speaker 2: that voice, mm hmm, which I don't know maybe, but
Speaker 2: everything else absolutely circumstantial.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everybody that gave testimony just about someone else came
Speaker 1: along and said, that's not true. He never had that conversation.
Speaker 1: I don't know what they're talking about. That didn't happen.
Speaker 1: That's not what really took place. It's such a mess,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It also is a good, not a
Speaker 1: good example, but a clear example of the way that
Speaker 1: public opinion gets put in place, because again, right up
Speaker 1: until the sentencing, Beecham was very adamant that he didn't
Speaker 1: do it, and with no evidence. It took that jury
Speaker 1: less than an hour to go yep, guilty. It's like,
Speaker 1: did you just go off vibes Like, That's not how
Speaker 1: that's supposed to work. It's just a fascinator in a
Speaker 1: sad way. I don't have a funny story to add
Speaker 1: to this one. This weekly it was really heavy. I
Speaker 1: try to make sure there's some ding dong story I
Speaker 1: could tell about my own ridiculousness. I'll at least take
Speaker 1: the edge off. And there I've certainly, I'm sure done
Speaker 1: plenty of ding dong things in the last several days, even,
Speaker 1: but I don't have one ready to roll. I don't
Speaker 1: think i'd ever heard of this before. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I it's one that I stumbled across. It's another one
Speaker 1: of those great I was looking at a paper and
Speaker 1: I saw a headline on another part of the paper,
Speaker 1: and I was like, what's that about? And it was like, oh,
Speaker 1: this was one of the great things. Just kind of
Speaker 1: makes it light. You surely saw the corpse bride, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know where there's that moment. It's in a song
Speaker 1: where one of the characters is talking about all of
Speaker 1: the things that have been playing out again, revealing some
Speaker 1: some things that the characters in the movie have done,
Speaker 1: and they go and a murder most Fowl. I found
Speaker 1: that exact line as a headline talking about this case
Speaker 1: murder exclamation poem most foul, and I always thought that
Speaker 1: was very fun and cute and probably based on some
Speaker 1: you know, that is, I think, right, I think one
Speaker 1: of the Shakespeare tragedies. I'm pretty sure, yes, But I
Speaker 1: was surprised to find it as a headline in the
Speaker 1: Kentucky newspaper, Murder most Fowl, and it at least gave
Speaker 1: me a moment of corpse bride fund in the midst
Speaker 1: of a lot of yucky he said, he said, she
Speaker 1: maybe said, but we don't know stuff. Yeah. I feel
Speaker 1: like the fact that Anne Cook moved out to the
Speaker 1: country to be alone with her mother, out of society
Speaker 1: was probably a good indicator that she didn't want to
Speaker 1: talk about any of that right now. Whether or not
Speaker 1: that was an issue of feeling ashamed or I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe she just didn't want to get in the mess. Anyway,
Speaker 1: It's a lot of sad and so much hangs on
Speaker 1: the testimony of the neighbor, some of which seems to
Speaker 1: be almost contradictory of itself. It's unclear anyway, a murder,
Speaker 1: most foul. Let's go watch stop motion animation for fun
Speaker 1: after such sad stories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we talked about Wilfred Owen this week.
Speaker 1: We sure did.
Speaker 2: I have kept circling back to Wilfred Owen repeatedly. Deltiet
Speaker 2: decoram Est is a poem that we've read, I think
Speaker 2: in high school, maybe also in college, in like a
Speaker 2: different context and a more humanity's context in college and
Speaker 2: in literature class in high school. And I did not
Speaker 2: know anything about his life or biography when reading the poem.
Speaker 2: The poem was really about like World War One and
Speaker 2: the horrors of trench warfare and the use of gas
Speaker 2: and things like that. It was not about Wilfrid Owen
Speaker 2: as a person, and so I did not realize that
Speaker 2: he had been a soldier and that he had been
Speaker 2: killed at the age of only twenty five, so close
Speaker 2: to the end of the war. And when I learned that,
Speaker 2: I kept just circling back to I'm kind of wanting
Speaker 2: to do an episode about it, And as I said
Speaker 2: in the episode, I just kept kind of wanting to
Speaker 2: hug him. I am sad that he had such a
Speaker 2: short life because of war. I got the impression that
Speaker 2: you had some similar responses as we were wrapping up
Speaker 2: the episode I did and his work, I never really
Speaker 2: studied him, so looking at this after you had sent
Speaker 2: it over to me, there's such a very obvious through
Speaker 2: line from his work too. Another recent topic, who is
Speaker 2: near to my heart Kurt Vonneguet in the way he
Speaker 2: talks about war. Yeah, I'm like, I guarantee he read
Speaker 2: his work. I guarantee it. I had not thought about that,
Speaker 2: but that makes absolute sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very not romanticized when he talks about it
Speaker 1: in any kind of way, even in his off hand
Speaker 1: to sides, it's usually all about how stupid the whole
Speaker 1: thing is and pointless, and that is the.
Speaker 2: Undertone of a number of Wilfrid Owen's poems as well.
Speaker 2: Regarding the height requirement to join the British Army, so
Speaker 2: as we said, he was a little more than five
Speaker 2: to five, just like a smidge over five to five,
Speaker 2: and the height requirement at the very beginning of the
Speaker 2: war had been less than that, and then they had
Speaker 2: such a surge of people trying to enlist that they
Speaker 2: raised it to just have a way to quickly weed
Speaker 2: people out, but then kept having to progressively lower it simultaneously.
Speaker 2: There were people underneath what had been the original the
Speaker 2: original limit, which I think was five foot three, and
Speaker 2: there were men under five foot three who wanted to enlist,
Speaker 2: and a lot of them actually who wanted to enlist,
Speaker 2: And so special battalions were formed, called Bantam battalions, named
Speaker 2: for they think rooster, right, bantam roosters. And a lot
Speaker 2: of the people who joined these bantom battalions were like
Speaker 2: doc workers, mine workers, people who were shorter than average,
Speaker 2: but also like really stocky and really strong. And I
Speaker 2: kind of went on a slight detour learning about bantam
Speaker 2: battalions and then was like, Tracy, you gotta get your
Speaker 2: mind back on your work. So I don't know if
Speaker 2: if that might be a topic for some kind of
Speaker 2: future episode, or it might be incorporated in a future episode.
Speaker 2: In some way, I got the impression that like, these
Speaker 2: were generally men who were very used to doing very
Speaker 2: hard work, and simultaneously the other battalions of men who
Speaker 2: were taller than that could be kind kind of patronizing
Speaker 2: toward them. Yeah, And so it seems like there was
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot of social expectation and ideas
Speaker 2: about masculinity kind of interwoven with all of this.
Speaker 1: Well, this also makes sense because you know, bantams are
Speaker 1: a smaller fowl. Yeah, and they're not just roosters, like,
Speaker 1: there are many fowl that could be characterized as bantam, Like,
Speaker 1: there are ducks that would be called bantam, as well
Speaker 1: as chickens.
Speaker 2: I think I've most often heard it with rooster. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but they are little and sturdy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I also have some thoughts about Harold Owen, Yeah,
Speaker 2: who I have not researched at all. I know zero
Speaker 2: about his life. But he went to such links to
Speaker 2: just black out parts of his brother's letters and in
Speaker 2: some cases cut out parts of them with scissors, without
Speaker 2: knowing that a person who is reading the elections of
Speaker 2: his letters that his brother had edited and published might
Speaker 2: think that, you know, these were letters sent from the front.
Speaker 2: Maybe they just got damaged in transit like that might
Speaker 2: be what illegible meant. No, illegible meant that Harold went
Speaker 2: through them and expurgated them.
Speaker 1: He made them illegible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And logically, with it being you know, the early
Speaker 2: twentieth century, if what was being cut out was in
Speaker 2: some way related to Wilfred Owen having feelings or relationships
Speaker 2: with other men that likely would not have been something
Speaker 2: he would have been writing openly about. So it seems
Speaker 2: like this could have been things that his brother would
Speaker 2: have been like able to see that people could like
Speaker 2: read into, or like his brother not being particularly guarded
Speaker 2: without how he was writing about things right but near
Speaker 2: that passage where Owen where Harold Owen and his biography
Speaker 2: of his brother described him as having no relationship with
Speaker 2: anybody because he thought it might interfere with his intellectual ability.
Speaker 2: Harold Owen said this about himself, quote, I deliberately chose
Speaker 2: the Roman Catholic religion because of its insistence on celibacy,
Speaker 2: and Wilfrid's thinking poetry supplanted religion. And I was just like,
Speaker 2: I have thoughts and questions, let me do if we
Speaker 2: had a time machine, I would just kind of want
Speaker 2: to go meet both of these brothers and talk to
Speaker 2: them more. This whole thing also illustrates why I can
Speaker 2: find the meme about historians describing lovers as friends to
Speaker 2: be frustrating, because this is the kind of things that
Speaker 2: his story are dealing with when writing about queer history.
Speaker 2: A lot of the time friends and family members who
Speaker 2: are very protective of somebody's legacy, who in some cases
Speaker 2: have gone through and cut parts of their letters out
Speaker 2: with scissors and will not allow historians access to the
Speaker 2: actual primary original documents to review them, only selectively give
Speaker 2: some stuff or some exp expurgated stuff or whatever. And
Speaker 2: it's only later, often after either those family members have died,
Speaker 2: or those family members have become more open about you know,
Speaker 2: their past family member, or in some cases, you know,
Speaker 2: something's been passed down through a family and they come
Speaker 2: into the hands of somebody who has different you know,
Speaker 2: social and political ideal ideals and beliefs than the person
Speaker 2: who was originally cutting stuff out of letters with scissors.
Speaker 2: That is when historians are actually able to get more
Speaker 2: into the real depth of a person's whole life. So
Speaker 2: as sure, there are you know, previous histories of or
Speaker 2: previous biographies of Wilford Owen, including once written by his brother,
Speaker 2: that don't touch on that at all, And one element
Speaker 2: of that is like just not having access to the
Speaker 2: original documents and their entirety to go through. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: always try to think about, like what that moment is
Speaker 2: where someone decides essentially to rewrite history, and I honestly
Speaker 2: am a little conflicted about it for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1: Obviously, like it sucks to not have original documents available
Speaker 1: to tell it an accurate story. I also do understand
Speaker 1: as frustrating it as it has been for me. Not
Speaker 1: just in cases like this where it's queerness being raised,
Speaker 1: but you know, with anyone where there's something about them
Speaker 1: that someone in their family thought it was best people
Speaker 1: not know. But I can also see as incorrect as
Speaker 1: this this move was, you know, someone like his brother,
Speaker 1: who clearly had his own stuff going on, worrying that
Speaker 1: his brother's legacy would be forgotten or tainted in some way,
Speaker 1: and wanting to position it in a way that he
Speaker 1: would be recognized for his writing and not the other
Speaker 1: things about him. Right, I mean, And it's hard because
Speaker 1: it's easy for us to go that's shortsighted. But like
Speaker 1: at the time, it probably seemed like, well, his work
Speaker 1: could be buried forever, or I can do this right
Speaker 1: and he can be seen in this other way. Not
Speaker 1: the same thing at all, but right, Like Queen Victoria's
Speaker 1: daughter trashed a bunch of her writing yeah, and she
Speaker 1: died rather than let people see it. And so I
Speaker 1: do understand that there's also a tertiary part of it
Speaker 1: for me where I also wonder how much grief is
Speaker 1: informing it, because if you've I mean, every one of
Speaker 1: us will experience a grief if you have not already,
Speaker 1: And I'm sorry, and it sucks. But there is a
Speaker 1: thing that happens. I have seen it happen to people
Speaker 1: where when someone has passed, without even being cognizant that
Speaker 1: you are editing the story, people start telling their version
Speaker 1: of that person's story, focusing on things that are different
Speaker 1: than other things and wanting to almost create this not
Speaker 1: always idealized, but a version that is what they remember
Speaker 1: and what they were part of. Yeah. Yeah, and wanting
Speaker 1: to like pare down anything that doesn't fit that. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: don't love it, but I do understand the motivation of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, And socially, the culture that you and I have
Speaker 2: grown up in and lived in in our whole lives,
Speaker 2: we eulogize people after they die, when like that's just
Speaker 2: sort of a baseline of what's expected. Is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't go to somebody's funeral and say a bunch
Speaker 2: of things about them that could be taken as really
Speaker 2: negative into a typical.
Speaker 1: Unless you're a rabbel rouser, unless you're a rabbl rasler.
Speaker 2: Like the word eulogy literally has the idea that it's
Speaker 2: affirming there in the word yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah.
Speaker 2: The story of Wilfred Owen and all of his personal
Speaker 2: papers reminds me a little bit of and Lister, who
Speaker 2: we covered on the show before. Yeah wrote if you
Speaker 2: haven't heard that episode, and Lister basically wanted to marry
Speaker 2: a woman and figured out a way to make that
Speaker 2: work for herself and wrote many, many, many diaries extensively
Speaker 2: chronicling her life and also in chronicling all of her relationships.
Speaker 2: And when a family member later on, you know, this
Speaker 2: is all in the nineteenth century, when all of this
Speaker 2: would have been stigmatized and in some ways illegal. Family
Speaker 2: member cracked the code that she had written in, realized
Speaker 2: what they were about, and kind of went yikes, and
Speaker 2: put them back in the vault. And I feel like
Speaker 2: we're so fortunate that those things they went back in
Speaker 2: the vault instead of being burned, because that is something
Speaker 2: that could have happened and has happened with other figures
Speaker 2: from history and honestly people, now, I'm sure so Yeah,
Speaker 2: I still just want to hug Wilfrid now I love
Speaker 2: so desperately that he and his mother worked out a
Speaker 2: code together. Yeah, and a couple of different codes, a
Speaker 2: couple of different ways to stay in touch. I didn't
Speaker 2: know anything about these postcards until learning about the code
Speaker 2: that they had worked out together. And the postcards were
Speaker 2: just basically a fast way to let your loved ones
Speaker 2: know that you were alive.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It took you know, two seconds to fill the thing
Speaker 2: out and then it would just be mailed. And it
Speaker 2: had instructions printed on it very clearly that if you
Speaker 2: wrote anything on it other than your name, the date,
Speaker 2: and the date of the last letter you received from
Speaker 2: that person, it would just be discarded. And also, you know,
Speaker 2: the things in and of themselves a form of propaganda,
Speaker 2: because of all of the statements you could communicate with
Speaker 2: somebody were none of them were like yeah, none of
Speaker 2: them were like I am in the hospital and will
Speaker 2: never recover. Like that was not an option.
Speaker 1: I wonder too, since these were posts cards, if part
Speaker 1: of this wasn't an effort at concealment from like enemies,
Speaker 1: reading Oh yeah, maybe and trying to triangulate where people were,
Speaker 1: what kind of actions were happening, et cetera. I mean it, yes,
Speaker 1: it is propaganda. Still, I'm not trying to claim it's not.
Speaker 1: But like, if there is a secondary like intelligence and
Speaker 1: concealment aspect to it, maybe so maybe so I want
Speaker 1: to I can so easily picture a film about the
Speaker 1: leadership sitting around in a room going, well, we have
Speaker 1: to make it easy for them to communicate with their
Speaker 1: people back home. Okay, but then that's going to make
Speaker 1: it easy for our enemies to read them, and them
Speaker 1: figuring out this complex flow chart of what they could
Speaker 1: and could not include.
Speaker 2: Having had a job before where I had to write
Speaker 2: things that went through multiple levels of approval and revision,
Speaker 2: I am imagining the approval process of exactly what went
Speaker 2: on this postcard. I'm imagining that we can just write
Speaker 2: a whole musical about the whole writing and editing.
Speaker 1: Oh, you write the musical. I don't want the singing,
Speaker 1: but I would be really.
Speaker 2: Bad at that. I was just thinking about about Operation
Speaker 2: Min's Meat is just what that made me think of
Speaker 2: a show that I've only heard parts of. Anyway, Anyway,
Speaker 2: whatever's happening on your weekend. I hope it as good
Speaker 2: as possible. If there's somebody in your life that you
Speaker 2: want to go hug, I hope they're cool with that
Speaker 2: and that you're able to go give them a hug.
Speaker 2: We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic and something
Speaker 2: brand new on Monday.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Missed in History.
Speaker 2: Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 2: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 2: to your favorite shows.