Speaker 1: What's not sending Sophie the script my Robert. This is
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards a podcast about anti authoritarianism, and as
Speaker 1: an anti authoritarian, I reject the the hierarchy of Sophie
Speaker 1: demanding my scripts before the end. Here's my question, hower
Speaker 1: to the people, schools out for summer? Motherfuckers.
Speaker 2: Okay, but here's my question. Here's my question. Would you
Speaker 2: have survived the last five years without me?
Speaker 1: No, that's not what it's about. This is about principle, Sophie.
Speaker 1: This is about you know, a higher ethics, Daniel, I
Speaker 1: would appreciate it if you would put in a clip
Speaker 1: from the song schools Out.
Speaker 2: No No, as the authority on this soe no, no,
Speaker 2: what's summer? Okay, all right, we can have we can
Speaker 2: have one SoundBite?
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you, Sophie.
Speaker 3: Uh did you all listen to that song every summer?
Speaker 3: Like on the bus home?
Speaker 1: I think I listened to it every year because there
Speaker 1: was always like some sort of TV special or whatever
Speaker 1: that was summer themed that always had it it important.
Speaker 2: Yeah, back to back to Can I have the script? Please?
Speaker 1: No, Sophie, but yes, because I sent it? So Uh
Speaker 1: Margaret kill Joy, how how how are we doing today. Good,
Speaker 1: I'm doing great. How do you, uh, how do you
Speaker 1: how do you feel about our nations escalating war on
Speaker 1: the existence of people who don't have uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the money to stay indoors?
Speaker 3: Uh, well, someone's got it. I think I'm going to
Speaker 3: join that war.
Speaker 1: But on the other side, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty like dark times right now in terms
Speaker 1: of like right now we're kind of living through this
Speaker 1: this intense scapegoating because the right has kind of gotten
Speaker 1: there their ducks in a row and in terms of
Speaker 1: how to like push insurgent camp like moral panic hatred campaigns,
Speaker 1: and they've launched a few in a row, and one
Speaker 1: of the ones that's really taken off in the last
Speaker 1: really the last two years, has been this kind of
Speaker 1: escalating war against the houseless. And kind of on one side,
Speaker 1: you've got this huge right wing media ecosystem that like
Speaker 1: anytime there's like a homeless person who's set up near
Speaker 1: a fancy building somewhere in the West Coast, or anytime
Speaker 1: like some right winger sees poop on the street, or
Speaker 1: anytime there's there's like a broken window anywhere, you get
Speaker 1: these like like this whole fucking ecosystem of shitty websites
Speaker 1: and sites like The Post being kind of the bigger
Speaker 1: ones putting up these articles about how San Francisco's in chaos,
Speaker 1: or you know, Portland is in chaos, or New York
Speaker 1: City's in chaos, and kind of as a result.
Speaker 3: And it's never because people have been kicked out of
Speaker 3: their houses. It's always because there's people who haven't.
Speaker 1: It's not so like rent has doubled in like the
Speaker 1: last three or four years or anything like that, or
Speaker 1: that like a bunch of the companies that are responsible
Speaker 1: for making our food have seen record profits because they
Speaker 1: used stories about inflation as an excuse to jack up
Speaker 1: the cost of basic food stuffs. That made it untenable
Speaker 1: for a lot of people to like continue surviving in
Speaker 1: the same way that they had. No, we don't blame
Speaker 1: any of that. We blame you know, the folks who
Speaker 1: need to live in a tent because that's the only
Speaker 1: thing they can afford. And kind of a surge of
Speaker 1: fun new laws has come down the pipeline in the
Speaker 1: very recent past. This kind of like moral panic has
Speaker 1: sort of metastasized this year into a sweeping wave of
Speaker 1: new laws to criminalize houselessness. In Missouri, a state law
Speaker 1: recently took effect January of this year that makes it
Speaker 1: a crime for any person to sleep on state property.
Speaker 1: This doesn't just mean like you can't crash on the
Speaker 1: steps of the Capitol building or whatever. It means like
Speaker 1: if you're sleeping in a public park or under a highway,
Speaker 1: you can face up to seven hundred and fifty dollars
Speaker 1: in fines and get up to fifteen days in prison.
Speaker 1: The law went into effect right as Missouri cut funding
Speaker 1: for homeless services, making incarceration the best funded option for
Speaker 1: a lot of people living on the streets right now.
Speaker 1: Last August, Los Angeles' city council banned homeless encampments within
Speaker 1: five hundred feet of schools and daycares. This mirrored comments
Speaker 1: made two days before we recorded this episode by San
Speaker 1: Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, alongside a video that was just
Speaker 1: like these dramatic shots of homeless camps and like parents
Speaker 1: walking their kids to school and looking frightened. He made
Speaker 1: this post quote, the encampments make it hard for kids
Speaker 1: walking to school. They are forced into the street to
Speaker 1: get around them. Plus they're seeing things kids should never
Speaker 1: see now. Yeah, definitely, it's bad for kids to realize that,
Speaker 1: like our addiction to capitalism has human consequences. We should
Speaker 1: be we should be putting those people in fucking camps
Speaker 1: where where children won't have to realize that perhaps there
Speaker 1: are injustices in the system they live under.
Speaker 3: And none of those people in those camps are children,
Speaker 3: so it's not a problem.
Speaker 1: It is. James actually, just before we started recording this,
Speaker 1: sent me a link to an article by Or sent
Speaker 1: me a link to a post from the from Alliance
Speaker 1: San Diego, which is a community organization organized around kind
Speaker 1: of building collective power in San Diego and is trying
Speaker 1: to fight back against this criminalization of homelessness that the
Speaker 1: mayor is pushing for. And they had an interview with
Speaker 1: a woman named Zuleima who is homeless alongside her six
Speaker 1: year old son, and she's like, this means that my
Speaker 1: six year old son won't be able to, like, we
Speaker 1: won't be able to sleep near the school that he
Speaker 1: goes to. It's cool stuff, anyway, this is all very
Speaker 1: anti human and fucked up, and there's a shipload of
Speaker 1: bastardry in all of this.
Speaker 2: I mean Todd, Todd Gloria is a motherfucker.
Speaker 1: But there's Todd Gloria is a piece of ship.
Speaker 2: There's many Todd Gloria. Is that that Yeah.
Speaker 1: Todd's Gloria.
Speaker 2: I think the yeah Todd Gloria.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Also there's that wonderful thing where the thirteenth Amendment that abolished.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that says in case we're we're heading Margaret.
Speaker 3: That's uh, what this episode is actually about. Because I'm
Speaker 3: not just complaining, yeah, mostly be me fetching about these
Speaker 3: modern laws. This is kind of explaining the surprisingly deep
Speaker 3: and surprising origins of our of our war on on
Speaker 3: what have been most commonly called vagrants, and we will
Speaker 3: be using that term because that's the legal term that's
Speaker 3: all used. I don't think being a vagrant is a
Speaker 3: bad thing, very pro vagrant, but you know, it's it
Speaker 3: is the legal term that for most of our nation's history,
Speaker 3: and for most of like Western modern Western history, has
Speaker 3: been used for people who like don't have a home
Speaker 3: in the traditional sense of the word. I've been a
Speaker 3: vagrant a little bit when I was younger, and then
Speaker 3: my grandfather was a hobo in World War two or
Speaker 3: not World War two, in the Great Depression, you know,
Speaker 3: road freight trains around looking for work. Oh that's the
Speaker 3: oid line of yeah, yeah, no, I mean I think
Speaker 3: it's interesting when you kind of bring up the Great
Speaker 3: Depression generation because like that that generation gets lionized so much,
Speaker 3: particularly by conservatives, and like a most many, if not most,
Speaker 3: of like those people.
Speaker 1: Had a hobo period. My grandpa when he was seventeen,
Speaker 1: his dad was like, we can't feed you anymore, Garland,
Speaker 1: and gave him like a pocket full of cornbread, and
Speaker 1: he just like hiked two or three states down to Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: where he found work. But like, how is that not
Speaker 1: being a hobo? Like right, like he figured his shit
Speaker 1: out and good for him, but like it's it's I
Speaker 1: don't see a big difference between that and people who
Speaker 1: are like, yeah, I couldn't make rent. You know, I
Speaker 1: work a job. Most homeless people work a job. Like
Speaker 1: this is just what's the open meaning? You know?
Speaker 3: My granddad was my granddad was like greatest generation. He
Speaker 3: went from being a hobo to being a torpedo in
Speaker 3: the South Pacific and fighting in the one war that
Speaker 3: the US can say, well that was good that we
Speaker 3: did that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's a it's this is because I didn't
Speaker 1: include as much of the Australia context, but like Australia
Speaker 1: has a long history of anti vagrancy laws, but also
Speaker 1: like one of their proudest songs about like World War One,
Speaker 1: Waltzing Matilda, is about a guy who was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I used to just kind of wander around without like
Speaker 1: like you know, a backpack and a shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then I went and got my legs blown off by
Speaker 1: the Turks at Gallipoli. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, uh, homelessness. The
Speaker 1: this is this is a story kind of about our
Speaker 1: Western civilizations war on people who, yeah, don't fall through
Speaker 1: the cracks really, And it didn't start that way. This
Speaker 1: episode started because there's a band that I listened to
Speaker 1: a lot when I was younger called State Radio, and
Speaker 1: they've got a song called The Story of Benjamin Darling
Speaker 1: Part one, and it's based on the story of the
Speaker 1: It's based on the largely apocryphal details about the life
Speaker 1: of a very real guy. He's a was a freed
Speaker 1: slave who established an island community for mixed race people
Speaker 1: off the coast of Maine. And I wanted to tell
Speaker 1: that story because there's a lot of bastardury and like
Speaker 1: why the community stopped existing, And so I thought, just
Speaker 1: kind of based on my surface level knowledge of the
Speaker 1: story before I started digging in, I thought, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is going to be like a story about like a
Speaker 1: bunch of racists from cities and towns in Maine, you know,
Speaker 1: just going after these these people who were kind of
Speaker 1: like living off grid, doing their own thing. But the
Speaker 1: more I dug into the story, the more I found
Speaker 1: out that the evil in the story of like what
Speaker 1: Happened to Benjamin Darling's Descendants is a story about vagrancy
Speaker 1: and a story about the way our culture prosecutes these people.
Speaker 1: So let's get into it, because I think this is
Speaker 1: going to go some places you may not anticipate. The
Speaker 1: concept of vagrancy was established in the West in the
Speaker 1: early modern period, kind of the end of the medieval
Speaker 1: early modern period. During most of the medieval era, most
Speaker 1: poor people in kind of Western European countries were some
Speaker 1: kind of like peasant or surf and in England, like
Speaker 1: surfdom is kind of more of an Eastern thing, but
Speaker 1: in England and a lot of Western Europe there was
Speaker 1: this status called villainage. And it's not villains spelled the
Speaker 1: way we spell it, it's v I L L E
Speaker 1: I N. I don't know, maybe there's I should have
Speaker 1: checked to see if that was the root of our
Speaker 1: term villain. But I'm a hack and a fraud. But
Speaker 1: a villain, like in the medieval context, was a kind
Speaker 1: of surf. Basically, they're a person who's bound to a
Speaker 1: parcel of life and got to occupy it and farm
Speaker 1: it in return for laboring for his liege lord, usually
Speaker 1: working in the lord's fields, although I'm sure there were
Speaker 1: other options and thus in the countryside. For most of
Speaker 1: kind of this medieval period, anything approaching homelessness on a
Speaker 1: large scale was usually uncommon. You would have some people
Speaker 1: who were, you know, kind of roving between. Some of
Speaker 1: them would be like entertainers, some of them would be
Speaker 1: you know, you know, merchants, some of them would be
Speaker 1: kind of folks in a more desperate state. But there
Speaker 1: usually weren't like huge numbers of folks like that because
Speaker 1: it was kind of part of the system. Was like
Speaker 1: people generally had like a place they were supposed to be,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it was kind of when you sort of
Speaker 1: got large numbers of people who were, you know, didn't
Speaker 1: have a set place to occupy to live. It was
Speaker 1: generally because like a war or something had swept through
Speaker 1: their land, right and you'd have had like a bunch
Speaker 1: of villages burnt down and people uprooted. But the growth
Speaker 1: of cities kind of as the medieval period sort of
Speaker 1: leads to early modernity, the sort of growth of cities
Speaker 1: leads to larger and larger numbers of people who have
Speaker 1: no real means of support. A lot of this was
Speaker 1: the result of the increase increasing enclosure of common lands,
Speaker 1: which forced people out of their rural lifestyles. That's where
Speaker 1: there used to just kind of be land that was everyone,
Speaker 1: so you could graze your sheep on it, you could
Speaker 1: grow stuff on it, you know. And over time, like
Speaker 1: that started becoming the property of like generally members of
Speaker 1: the nobility, and so it was fenced off and separated
Speaker 1: from the people who had been using it, which made
Speaker 1: them unable to live the way that they had lived
Speaker 1: and force them generally into cities. Cities are rancid pits
Speaker 1: of disease in this period, So a lot of times
Speaker 1: people would die and they'd leave their kids orphaned, or
Speaker 1: like you know, a woman who'd had like you know,
Speaker 1: a husband who was supporting her would suddenly have no
Speaker 1: method of support, and this led to a growing vagrant class,
Speaker 1: and a lot of vagrants, by the way, were former soldiers, right,
Speaker 1: because in this period, you go to war for the king,
Speaker 1: your duke or whatever, and you lose an arm, good
Speaker 1: luck to you. You're not getting like you're not getting
Speaker 1: like a fucking disability payment, right, Like, there's not a
Speaker 1: va Yeah, you know, there are some things that kind
Speaker 1: of fill that gap, but not well, yeah, generally. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I looked up the etymology of a villain and village
Speaker 3: and they are the same, excellent hot and it comes
Speaker 3: from and villain basically came from like a rustic.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, cool satcha yeah, yeah, because that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of the way people lived out, you know, in the countryside.
Speaker 1: So there was always kind of a degree of sympathy
Speaker 1: and acceptance of the need for sort of charity for like,
Speaker 1: you know, some guy who's lost his arms, or some
Speaker 1: woman who's got like a family but no one to
Speaker 1: help raise them because you know, the husband died or whatever.
Speaker 1: There was some degree of sympathy for that, but there
Speaker 1: was a great deal and it kind of becomes this
Speaker 1: growing moral panic, particularly in England, and like the sixteen
Speaker 1: late fifteen hundreds early sixteen hundreds, about people who were
Speaker 1: in physically good shape but didn't have any means of support,
Speaker 1: and the term that started being used for them was
Speaker 1: sturdy beggars. This is a kind of slur, sturdy beggar.
Speaker 1: It's meant to imply both that a person is like
Speaker 1: healthy and can work and chooses not to. And the
Speaker 1: common idea was that, like, these people are con men.
Speaker 1: Right if like you're able to work and you don't
Speaker 1: have some sort of job, you're a con man. In
Speaker 1: townshend cities started keeping lists of sturdy beggars and their
Speaker 1: supposed crimes. And if you are looking to make some
Speaker 1: D and D characters this weekend, are these are pretty
Speaker 1: good places. So I'm just gonna read one from the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. But the guy the guys like crime was
Speaker 1: pretending to be insane and like following people until they
Speaker 1: gave him money to go away. And his nickname, his
Speaker 1: nickname was tom O Bedlam, which is fucking hell. I
Speaker 1: do love tom O Bedlam. Fucking cool name, guys. So
Speaker 1: in fifteen forty seven, furious British elites pushed through the
Speaker 1: First Vagrancy Act, which declared that any able bodied person
Speaker 1: who lacked employment should be branded with a V, so
Speaker 1: should be like branded with a V and sold into
Speaker 1: slavery for two years. It's pretty pretty bad. There were
Speaker 1: no sort of like there was no like separation between
Speaker 1: like if this happens like a dude in his thirties
Speaker 1: or like a six year old, and in fact, child
Speaker 1: vagabonds were regularly forced into labor. It was thought to
Speaker 1: be good for them. Laws agin teach them some life
Speaker 1: skill exactly. And these kind of these laws spread from
Speaker 1: the UK to other parts of Western year or to
Speaker 1: parts of Western Europe. Some of the laws are not
Speaker 1: it's not always like you get branded and sold into slavery.
Speaker 1: Laws in other places would demand that vagrants be whipped
Speaker 1: and then returned to their birthplaces. The idea was like, well,
Speaker 1: their people will like make them work, right, you know.
Speaker 1: Throughout the sixteen hundreds, while kind of this this sort
Speaker 1: of war on vagrancy, that's when it really starts. Kind
Speaker 1: of the late fifteen hundreds you get these very first laws,
Speaker 1: and then the sixteen hundreds it kind of it becomes
Speaker 1: the norm that it will be criminalized to be out
Speaker 1: and about in cities and towns without a visible means
Speaker 1: of support. Right now, while this is going on throughout
Speaker 1: the early sixteen hundreds, a couple of other big things
Speaker 1: are happening. One of those big things is the Atlantic
Speaker 1: slave trade, right, that's really starting to cook in the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. And another thing that's really starting to cook
Speaker 1: in the sixteen hundreds is the British colonies in the
Speaker 1: New World, right in the northeast coast of North America.
Speaker 1: And kind of while both of these things are happening,
Speaker 1: everyone has one of those like Reese's Pieces Peanut butter
Speaker 1: Cup moments where they're like, well, if we mix slavery
Speaker 1: and qualities to get a govna and you know, that's
Speaker 1: a you know that story, right, Like everybody's aware of
Speaker 1: kind of where that goes.
Speaker 3: It didn't go well, I mean no, it does not
Speaker 3: go well. Morally, No, morally, it did not go well. Yeah,
Speaker 3: morally it's a fucking nightmare. But yeah, to the economic
Speaker 3: power of empire, it did good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. For the Yeah, they make a lot of money
Speaker 1: off of it. So this that starts cooking, and you know,
Speaker 1: fast forward like one hundred and sixty hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: years something like that, and you know, you start to
Speaker 1: get I mean, I'm flattening out a lot of things.
Speaker 1: But it takes, you know, one hundred and sixty hundred
Speaker 1: seventy years before kind of the crusade for abolition which
Speaker 1: had always existed from as soon as like people were
Speaker 1: doing the African slave trade, people were like, that's bad.
Speaker 1: But it really abolitionism starts to really pick up legal
Speaker 1: momentum kind of one hundred and sixty hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: years later, in the late seventeen hundreds. Popular summaries of
Speaker 1: the battle to abolish slavery tend to focus on the
Speaker 1: first electoral successes of state abolitionist movements, which started when
Speaker 1: slavery was made illegal by Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three.
Speaker 1: By the early eighteen hundreds, the legal Atlantic slave trade
Speaker 1: had been ended, although that did not mean that people
Speaker 1: stopped doing that sort of shit. It just meant that,
Speaker 1: like they could get in trouble for it. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me that like kind of when we
Speaker 1: talk about, at least when I think about my education
Speaker 1: on sort of the history of slavery and abolitionism, it's
Speaker 1: sort of portrayed fairly quickly in this period sweeping over
Speaker 1: the North. And so there's this very quickly we have
Speaker 1: our good guys and our bad guys. Right, you've got
Speaker 1: the free States and the slave States, and that all
Speaker 1: builds up to the Civil War. That cuts out the
Speaker 1: fairly long period in which slavery was real popular in
Speaker 1: New England. And yeah, I think that's probably a mistake.
Speaker 1: And since our story involved slavery in New England today,
Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit about that. So
Speaker 1: here's a quote from an article on slavery in Maine
Speaker 1: in the Portland Press Herald. Quote, slavery in New England
Speaker 1: look much different than those large southern plantations. In New England,
Speaker 1: enslaved men, women and children were owned by prominent and
Speaker 1: wealthy merchants, but also by families of less prominence who
Speaker 1: used slaves to do the manual labor they had once
Speaker 1: done themselves. Northern slave owners were more likely to own
Speaker 1: one or two slaves than hundreds. The enslaved people became
Speaker 1: the foundation that moves those early household economies to a
Speaker 1: market economy because of the labor that the slave owner
Speaker 1: was previously was responsible for. Once he has the enslaved person,
Speaker 1: it frees him up to begin to build his own
Speaker 1: economic base, said author Patricia Wall, who researches and writes
Speaker 1: about slavery and Maine. Well, there weren't hundreds and thousands
Speaker 1: the way there were in the South. You can see
Speaker 1: that the enslaved people were at the base of the
Speaker 1: economy and these small communities in Maine and throughout New England.
Speaker 1: So a lot of what becomes kind of the upper
Speaker 1: class in these in these colonies, particularly these more rural areas,
Speaker 1: are families who start out with a couple of slaves
Speaker 1: to help them with, like you know, they're cooking food,
Speaker 1: they're cleaning, doing the laundry and stuff, and that frees
Speaker 1: up the free people to like make money which generate
Speaker 1: you know, in a lot of cases, when you're looking
Speaker 1: at a place like mad and the people who have
Speaker 1: like nice houses and money now two hundred years later,
Speaker 1: it's because you know, their ancestors enslaved somebody and it
Speaker 1: let him get a leg up.
Speaker 3: No, and that's so important for people to realize. I
Speaker 3: hadn't known as much about New England slavery, but that
Speaker 3: makes so much sense that basically, like all of the
Speaker 3: aristocracy of the United States comes from this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's cool to look into the people who are
Speaker 1: doing stuff like funding the Daily Wire now and see
Speaker 1: where they're their ancestors, what they were getting up to. Ah, Margaret,
Speaker 1: this is an awkward thing we recorded later for me
Speaker 1: to throw to ads because I forgot to do it
Speaker 1: when I was supposed to.
Speaker 3: Yay.
Speaker 1: I love being good at my job.
Speaker 2: If only somebody was messaging you to do them.
Speaker 1: I never read messages, Sophie, I just just vibes. We're back.
Speaker 1: So yeah, since Maine had no giant plantations, most enslaved
Speaker 1: people are used as personal servants or laborers, and industries
Speaker 1: often like shipbuilding and fishing. So the state you know
Speaker 1: this because Maine is part of the Massachusetts colony, right,
Speaker 1: So in Massachusetts, the new state makes slavery illegal in
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty three or whatever like that applies to Maine
Speaker 1: as well. You're not supposed to be, you know, buying
Speaker 1: those slaves or bringing them in and stuff. But that
Speaker 1: does not mean that, like after that point, Maine stops
Speaker 1: playing a role in the spread of slavery. For one thing,
Speaker 1: Maine has the second highest percentage of registered seamen in
Speaker 1: the United States and is a shipbuilding hub. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of stories in this period of like seamen
Speaker 1: from Maine taking slaves and like selling them in places
Speaker 1: like the Caribbean, and like illegally doing like slave runs
Speaker 1: and stuff. I'm proud of me for not laughing when
Speaker 1: I said seaman twice. You know, I feel like we
Speaker 1: should have known I laughed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry, I know, I'm not sorry, deeply disrespectful, Robert.
Speaker 1: All of this brings us to the life of a single.
Speaker 3: See people is the current.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's real new one.
Speaker 2: But it's funny when Magni says it. It's not funny
Speaker 2: when you make that.
Speaker 1: It's all about delivery. It's all about delivery. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: All of this brings us to the life of a
Speaker 1: single enslaved black American in Maine in the late seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 1: His name was Benjamin Darling, and we have no idea
Speaker 1: where or when he was born. He was probably somewhere
Speaker 1: in like his twenties, maybe thirties by the start of
Speaker 1: the seventeen nineties, but he might have been older. It
Speaker 1: is unlikely that he himself knew precisely when he was born.
Speaker 1: There's a good chance he was born somewhere and after
Speaker 1: Africa and was taken over to North America kind of
Speaker 1: during the latter stages of the Atlantic slave trade. He
Speaker 1: may have been born here and then separated from his
Speaker 1: family when he was sold as an adult, or as
Speaker 1: at least like a teenager. We simply don't know. But
Speaker 1: while we lack details about his life, we do have
Speaker 1: archives of history of slavery in Massachusetts in Maine which
Speaker 1: are filled with letters from slave traders that provide some
Speaker 1: grim context as to the kind of experience he might
Speaker 1: have had, especially if he was brought over from Africa.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from one of these letters now, Sir,
Speaker 1: I received yours by Captain Morris with bills of lading
Speaker 1: for five negroes and one hogshead of rum. One negro
Speaker 1: woman marked why on the left breast, died in about
Speaker 1: three weeks after her arrival, in spite of medical aid
Speaker 1: which I procured. All the rest died at sea. I
Speaker 1: am sorry for your loss. It may have resulted in
Speaker 1: deficient clothing so early in the spring. Benjamin Bullard to
Speaker 1: Sir William Pepperrell, June twenty fifth, seventeen nineteen. She is
Speaker 1: maybe a deck or two before this guy was born. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope they died pooping themselves to death pretty badly.
Speaker 1: But you see, like it's like it was pretty there's
Speaker 1: a decent chance, like almost to guarantee one where the other.
Speaker 1: This guy's got some pretty intense trauma in his childhood
Speaker 1: or early life. Now, there's two kind of broad versions
Speaker 1: of the story of Benjamin Darling. One was that his
Speaker 1: mother smuggled him out of slavery and into freedom and
Speaker 1: he just kind of entered life in Maine as a freeman.
Speaker 1: That is not the most common version of the story.
Speaker 1: The most you know, there are a couple little like
Speaker 1: he escaped on his own too, you get that. But
Speaker 1: the most widely told and enduring myth of Benjamin Darling,
Speaker 1: who was a real dude, is the one I'm going
Speaker 1: to relate to you right now. So whatever went on
Speaker 1: with this guy when he's you know, a kid and
Speaker 1: a young man. By the start of the seventeen nineties,
Speaker 1: he had been purchased by the captain of a small
Speaker 1: merchant vessel that ran the coast of New England up
Speaker 1: at least as far as Port and probably hauling Timber.
Speaker 1: The exact story of what happened is apocryphal, but the
Speaker 1: most common version of it is that one day, you know,
Speaker 1: this captain basically is this kind of he's a small
Speaker 1: business owner. He's somebody who has like a boat, probably
Speaker 1: not a huge one, doesn't really have the money for
Speaker 1: a large crew, and in order to kind of like
Speaker 1: make his business more efficient, and as we've talked about,
Speaker 1: build his economic base up, this guy buys Benjamin, right,
Speaker 1: and you know, they're they're running the coast of New
Speaker 1: England together, doing kind of like cargo loads. And one day,
Speaker 1: you know, they judge things wrong. A storm comes in
Speaker 1: stronger and bigger than kind of they had anticipated, and
Speaker 1: they're they're kind of caught with their pants down. This
Speaker 1: fierce gale overtakes the small ship. Buffeted by winds and waves,
Speaker 1: the boat crashes into a brace of jagged rocks off
Speaker 1: the North Main coast, and the captain has flung into
Speaker 1: the frigid, churning waters. Now ben in this situation is
Speaker 1: a dude who has been like probably ripped away from
Speaker 1: his family one way or the other to work for
Speaker 1: this guy. Ye like incredibly difficult backbreaking labor by on
Speaker 1: the sea. No reasonable person could have judged him for
Speaker 1: leaving that man to drown, especially given the fact that, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, most people don't know how to swim,
Speaker 1: even if you're on a boat in this period, like
Speaker 1: it's not common to be good at swim, and even
Speaker 1: if you are, like fuck, it doesn't matter how good
Speaker 1: you are at swimming. Diving in to try to save
Speaker 1: someone who's drowning is a terribly dangerous thing for the
Speaker 1: best swimmers in the world. Like, it's incredibly anyway, So
Speaker 1: for a lot of reasons, no one could have blamed
Speaker 1: ben for just kind of like trying to get his
Speaker 1: own ass out of here. But he dives into the
Speaker 1: water after this man who like bought and like uses
Speaker 1: him as chattel, pulls him out of the water and
Speaker 1: to Shuore saves his life. The captain, so the legend goes,
Speaker 1: was basically just overcome with shame. Once she regained consciousness
Speaker 1: realizes like, oh my god, I was like treating this
Speaker 1: person as like a fucking can opener, and they just
Speaker 1: saved my life like for no reason other than the
Speaker 1: goodness in their heart. So he immediately frees Benjamin and
Speaker 1: making Benjamin a freedman and disappears hereafter from the pages
Speaker 1: of history. Benjamin Darling does not disappear. He takes a
Speaker 1: job at a salt mill near Phippsburg, which is a
Speaker 1: ridiculously named town in Maine. I do not like it
Speaker 1: Phipps b U r G. I want to say Phillipsburg.
Speaker 1: Every time I look at it. I'm livid. Fuck you people,
Speaker 1: Fuck Phipsburg. Anyway, Benjamin lives in Phipsburg, and he takes
Speaker 1: a job at a salt mill, and he develops a
Speaker 1: reputation very quickly as a reliable worker and a good citizen.
Speaker 1: And this may seem hard to believe, given where the
Speaker 1: story goes, but from what I've read, it seems fair
Speaker 1: to say, actually that like a free black man in
Speaker 1: rural Maine in this period was one of the better
Speaker 1: situations you could be as like a free black guy.
Speaker 1: For one thing, fear and hatred of Indigenous Americans by
Speaker 1: white settlers was much more like the thing that white
Speaker 1: people were flipped out about in Maine in this period.
Speaker 1: So like a free black dude was seen as like, well,
Speaker 1: if he's like one of us, then it's it's us
Speaker 1: against these these dangerous you know natives, Right, yeah, there
Speaker 1: was there was. This is like the historians ever would
Speaker 1: be like he might have faced kind of less discrimination
Speaker 1: in this particular period in main than you might expect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what we have, the actual like official documents from
Speaker 1: like that that kind of got recorded in the local
Speaker 1: government about Ben are all really positive. He's described as
Speaker 1: a sturdy and industrious individual. He marries a white woman
Speaker 1: named Sarah Proverbs, and one of the very few details
Speaker 1: we get about his life after this point is that
Speaker 1: he is mauled by a bear defending his neighbor's corn patch,
Speaker 1: which probably yeah, yeah, which probably describes why local records
Speaker 1: call him a man with many staunch friends, right, Like
Speaker 1: he's he's like, he's like a solid just saves people.
Speaker 1: You can rely on Ben, He's got your back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know he lives up to his last name. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a darling. And so he marries Sarah Proverbs, giving
Speaker 1: her a much better last name. Like I cannot overstate
Speaker 1: what a glow up darling is over Proverbs.
Speaker 3: I feel you, but Proverbs is weird. It is weird
Speaker 3: in a nice way. I mean that anyone listening to
Speaker 3: this his last name is Proverbs. Congratulations, you seem like
Speaker 3: you are a character who exists to make everything more interesting.
Speaker 1: If I if I get a time machine, Margaret, I'm
Speaker 1: going back to these people and I'm gonna explain to
Speaker 1: them our modern concept of hyphenating names, because Darling Proverbs
Speaker 1: would be a pretty cool last name, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So he's a he's he develops a lot of respect
Speaker 1: in his local community. He seems to be like having
Speaker 1: a pretty good life. He gets married, he has kids.
Speaker 1: You know, this is at the time a crime called missagenation.
Speaker 1: But also he's kind of in rural Maine, so it
Speaker 1: may just have been a thing where like people aren't
Speaker 1: really like flipping out about it right now so much,
Speaker 1: although they could have, and they were in most of
Speaker 1: the United States. That said, that may have been something
Speaker 1: that did cause him problems because in about seventeen ninety four,
Speaker 1: when he and Sarah have two sons, he buys an
Speaker 1: island off the coast of Maine. So he's like, now,
Speaker 1: islands aren't that expensive back then, right, Like, now having
Speaker 1: an island means like island of money. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: big thing. Back then, it's like, oh, you want like
Speaker 1: a rock to die on. Like yeah, it's like, do
Speaker 1: you have any idea how are these islands are to
Speaker 1: live on? But you know, that does probably also insinuate
Speaker 1: that he was pretty thrifty and resourceful. I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: it wasn't like nothing. But anyway, he buys this island,
Speaker 1: Horse Island, probably saved the life of the person who
Speaker 1: is selling. Just keeps saving people, getting till he's given
Speaker 1: an island. So he gets this.
Speaker 3: Mountain lion just jumps out of nowhere, fucking cold cox it.
Speaker 3: Here's the deed to my lion or island. I don't
Speaker 3: know why I said lion. Oh you said mountain lion. Anyway, whatever,
Speaker 3: So he and Sarah and their sons moved to this island,
Speaker 3: Horse Island, and kind of, you know, they have some
Speaker 3: more kids, their kids get married to other people, and
Speaker 3: they this community starts to build on Horse Island, mostly
Speaker 3: of mixed race people, right, And it's it's kind of
Speaker 3: like you do kind of get the feeling that like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe once they started to have kids, the white people
Speaker 3: in Pitpsburg and stuff were a little bit less welcoming
Speaker 3: of Benjamin. Either that or he was just smart enough
Speaker 3: to be like, you know, it's probably not going to
Speaker 3: be safe forever to hang out around all of these
Speaker 3: like white people who are not going to treat my kids. Well,
Speaker 3: we should just kind of do our own thing out
Speaker 3: in the sticks.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Either way, he kind of establishes this. You might call
Speaker 1: it like a mixed race commune kind of. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's like a like a lot of
Speaker 1: you know, it's not like a political thing, but it's
Speaker 1: like that's the way it works, right, Like, when you've
Speaker 1: got people living off grid in a place like these
Speaker 1: islands off the main coast, which are desperately hard places
Speaker 1: to survive. We are not talking fertile soil. We are
Speaker 1: not talking a shitload of stuff that you can like
Speaker 1: you know, pick out of the ground or whatever to
Speaker 1: live off of. You're you're pulling stuff out of the sea,
Speaker 1: and you're you are you are working your ass off
Speaker 1: to like make that place habitable. That said, you know,
Speaker 1: when he moves to Horse Island, part of what drew
Speaker 1: him there may have been the fact that he had,
Speaker 1: you know, lived in the area for a while, and
Speaker 1: he had heard plenty of stories about the folks who
Speaker 1: lived out in those islands off the off the coast
Speaker 1: of Maine, and kind of in this period of time,
Speaker 1: these islands, because there's there's hundreds of them, had come
Speaker 1: to be inhabited by this kind of growing population of
Speaker 1: people who were considered who were either considered undesirable by
Speaker 1: mainstream society back on land, or who themselves considered settled
Speaker 1: society back on land undesirable. A good number of them
Speaker 1: were what you'd call were what was called maroons, and
Speaker 1: these were formerly enslaved Africans who had freed themselves, right,
Speaker 1: who had gotten away. But like that's not a safe
Speaker 1: legal position to be in. And they figure, if I'm
Speaker 1: hanging out in this fucking island off the coast of Maine,
Speaker 1: people will anyone trying to come and get me is
Speaker 1: probably got to die finding me, right, Like it's sorry
Speaker 1: out here. Yeah. One source I found on the matter
Speaker 1: notes quote, these early settlers maintain their ancestral languages and
Speaker 1: lived in caves to avoid detection, which is pretty dope,
Speaker 1: cool story. Yeah, it is unlikely. Well it's possible that
Speaker 1: Been and his family kind of lived this way, but
Speaker 1: you know, they had been pretty integrated to some extent
Speaker 1: into kind of like mainstream American society for a while.
Speaker 1: Kind of however, life, whatever life was like on Horse
Speaker 1: Island for this community. They established the relationship that he
Speaker 1: has with his wife, and the existence of their kids
Speaker 1: is illegal in the state of Maine, as are the
Speaker 1: marriages that all of their kids are going to have
Speaker 1: later on, because they're all mixed race. Heedless of this, though,
Speaker 1: the Darlings spread and multiply and start to kind of
Speaker 1: like seed into little communities all throughout these islands through
Speaker 1: the early to mid eighteen hundreds, from Horse Island and
Speaker 1: some of the areas and the mainland around Pitpsburg down
Speaker 1: to Portland and his descendants, it seems like are as,
Speaker 1: you know, thrifty and successful as their patter familias, and
Speaker 1: right as the Civil War starts to or sorry not
Speaker 1: right as the Civil War comes to an end, and
Speaker 1: kind of like the period where shit's starting to build
Speaker 1: in the US towards that I think it's eighteen forty seven,
Speaker 1: two of Darling's granddaughters sell the family interest in Horse
Speaker 1: Island and use it to buy all forty one acres
Speaker 1: of a nearby island, which they start calling Malaga for
Speaker 1: reasons that aren't really known. We don't really know why
Speaker 1: they called it that, but they start calling it Malaga Island.
Speaker 3: I wonder if those are like one of the other
Speaker 3: languages that people were speaking around there, you know, I
Speaker 3: don't know, because you're saying that people were like speaking
Speaker 3: African languages there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Malaga is also a place in Spain, so interesting.
Speaker 1: I kind of wonder if it's maybe like some you know,
Speaker 1: some kids there, you know, as their kids. He's got
Speaker 1: bought them some books or something, and they're like reading
Speaker 1: about other parts of the world, and they just like
Speaker 1: when they buy this island. I've heard about this place
Speaker 1: called Malaga. That's a pretty name. Let's call it that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't really know, no one does it is It
Speaker 1: is a mystery. Today. Malaga Island, population zero, lies just
Speaker 1: a short span of water away from the Krabby Lobster
Speaker 1: Shack on the mainland and directly across from the Kennebec Kennel.
Speaker 1: But back in the late so it's like today, if
Speaker 1: you look at it, it's not that far from stuff.
Speaker 1: Like you know, you can kind of like take a
Speaker 1: boat across in a few minutes and then you're back
Speaker 1: on the mainland where there's like city or towns and stuff.
Speaker 1: But back in the late eighteen hundreds, antiques stores I've
Speaker 1: been to, I've been to the coast of Maine. It's
Speaker 1: antique stores. It's nothing but antique stores back then. It
Speaker 1: is I cannot exaggerate. This is like maybe the most
Speaker 1: isolated place in the United States, or these islands off
Speaker 1: the coast of Maine. Like you are out off the
Speaker 1: fucking grid, right, I mean there's not a grid, nobody
Speaker 1: has power, but like everyone's off grid, I guess. But
Speaker 1: these guys are off off grid, right, like you are
Speaker 1: really kind of out out in the wilds. And as
Speaker 1: a result, the people who live in these islands are
Speaker 1: able to kind of develop communities separate from mainland culture
Speaker 1: and the rest of the world in a way that
Speaker 1: does not exist anymore. These little islands around Maine central
Speaker 1: coast then are kind of settled over the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: you know that started out as a lot of these
Speaker 1: maroon communities and people like Darling. They get added to
Speaker 1: by these sort of ragged bands of loaners, madmen, and
Speaker 1: people whose existence had been criminalized by the state. Darling's granddaughters,
Speaker 1: and this sounds like a rule it does, it's you're
Speaker 1: not going to stop thinking that it sounds pretty fucking cool.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: So Darling's granddaughters and their families establish an isolated free
Speaker 1: community on Malaga Island, and over time they're joined by
Speaker 1: a couple of dozen other refugees from mainstream You get
Speaker 1: You get what I did there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I was trying to make this pun earlier,
Speaker 3: but I didn't have a good space.
Speaker 1: I wrote it into the script, Margaret, and I capitalized
Speaker 1: them so people would know it wasn't just a misspelling.
Speaker 1: If anyone caught a glimpse of my script, proud of me.
Speaker 1: So the people who kind of join with the Darlings
Speaker 1: descendants on this island are a mix of there's some
Speaker 1: white folks in there, there's some a number obviously of
Speaker 1: like free black people. There's Native Americans, and there's mixed
Speaker 1: race residents and these kind of These folks all come
Speaker 1: from very different backgrounds, but they're united primarily in their
Speaker 1: desire to get away from the rest of the country
Speaker 1: and raise their children in peace. This is not an
Speaker 1: easy life, as this rite up from Soulofamerica dot com
Speaker 1: makes clear, Malaga Island was typical of many island communities
Speaker 1: of the eastern Castbay, which were seldom occupied by legal owners.
Speaker 1: Fishermen would store their gear in crudely constructed sheds or
Speaker 1: shacks and often remain on the islands as unchallenged squatters
Speaker 1: for generations. Having little contact with the mainland. These individuals,
Speaker 1: who are not counted in the census, seldom paid taxes
Speaker 1: and rarely voted. Illness and even death were taken care
Speaker 1: of at home, as was education. Most of the inhabitants
Speaker 1: of Malaga Island were direct descendants of Darling, including his
Speaker 1: sons Isaac and Benjamin, both of whom married women of
Speaker 1: the island and raised a total of fourteen children over time.
Speaker 1: Other groups also inhabited the island, including Irish, Scottish and Portuguese.
Speaker 1: And again this is a tough place. The soil shit,
Speaker 1: so you're not going to grow a lot of food.
Speaker 1: You can raise some livestock, but they've got to be
Speaker 1: like goats and shit, really like hardy animals, and most
Speaker 1: of what they live on period is going to be
Speaker 1: taken from the sea. This includes huge quantities of like shellfish,
Speaker 1: which is part of why we know what we do
Speaker 1: about them, because when they would shell you know, the
Speaker 1: stuff they were eating would toss the shells and these
Speaker 1: large middens in the community, and they would toss other
Speaker 1: stuff there. And that's a really good way to preserve
Speaker 1: certain things. So actually, like a surprising amount gets preserved
Speaker 1: because of the nature of their diet. One of the
Speaker 1: things that's preserved this way are ledgers and papers from
Speaker 1: a school that was established on the island. Linda Wyman
Speaker 1: of the Pitpsburg Historical Society notes, the papers written by
Speaker 1: the students show their penmanship was perfect and their spelling
Speaker 1: was better than mine. It absolutely shows that kids were educated,
Speaker 1: not illiterate or so called feeble minded or any of
Speaker 1: those things. They're going to be accused of being that
Speaker 1: quite later. But from everything we know, not only did
Speaker 1: these people survive in this difficult place, but they put
Speaker 1: a premium on making sure their kids were educated, which
Speaker 1: is pretty fucking dope, I think. So something like fifty
Speaker 1: people live on Malaga at its height. Again, forty one
Speaker 1: acres is not big, especially considering not all of the
Speaker 1: land is the land that you could put a house on.
Speaker 1: They survived in a mix of Some people would build
Speaker 1: these small houses. A lot of folks are basically like
Speaker 1: taking boats and shoving them up on land and then
Speaker 1: converting the boats into houses. Some of the houses like
Speaker 1: float and they can float them to other islands if
Speaker 1: they like decide to move, which is pretty It's kind
Speaker 1: of it's kind of dope. It's kind of cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like band's gonna be on goat back. I'm just
Speaker 3: gonna get like six goats and a hell yeah house.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah on the goats have a palanquin of goats. Absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Like if you're thinking about life in the eighteen fifties
Speaker 1: eighteen sixties rough for everybody, compared to modern standards, this
Speaker 1: seems like, yeah, one of the better places to live.
Speaker 1: That's that's where That's kind of how I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: it right now. The Portland Press Herald notes, quote Malaga's
Speaker 1: people lived like so many others, eking out an existence,
Speaker 1: trapping lobsters, hooking cod, digging clams, or laboring at boarding
Speaker 1: houses and farms on the mainland. And so yeah, that's
Speaker 1: also an important point is these people are not totally isolated.
Speaker 1: A lot of them make money, at least a side income,
Speaker 1: sometimes seasonal, working for folks on the mainland. One woman
Speaker 1: on the island. We know, was a laundress for a
Speaker 1: bunch of boarding houses in Pitpsburg. So she would take
Speaker 1: their water, their laundry handle, you know, a large volume
Speaker 1: of washing, and then return it once it was dried.
Speaker 1: So for on the main land, Yeah, on the main
Speaker 1: very nice, very nice, getting away with a lot of that. Well,
Speaker 1: you know who else likes ads, Sophie, You the listeners.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, the same people who were
Speaker 1: largely responsible for the worst parts of this story. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's ads. So yeah, you know, for a time, life
Speaker 1: seems to have been is about as good for the
Speaker 1: denizens of Mlaga as it could be, particular for people
Speaker 1: who weren't white as hell in the United States. In
Speaker 1: this period of time, they were isolated and in very
Speaker 1: poor obviously, but they were pretty much completely free, right
Speaker 1: in a way that very few people in all of
Speaker 1: history have ever been. Yeah. Yeah, So back on the mainland.
Speaker 1: Slavery reaches its peak in the United States and shortly
Speaker 1: thereafter its calamitous end. Freedom comes to black men and
Speaker 1: women in the United States, but it was not freedom
Speaker 1: as the Malagites knew it. In the occupied South, white
Speaker 1: men started even before the end of the war, scheming
Speaker 1: for a way to maintain what they saw as the
Speaker 1: natural order. In eighteen sixty two, Union troops took the
Speaker 1: city of Memphis. Quite understandably, freed black people started fleeing
Speaker 1: there right There was a lot of areas where they
Speaker 1: had been kept in bondage near Memphis. If you could
Speaker 1: kind of escape and get through the Confederate lines, then
Speaker 1: you get to be a free person in Memphis, which
Speaker 1: sounds a lot better than not being a free person.
Speaker 1: So it kind of was for a while. Memphis is
Speaker 1: sort of this like Southern Canada almost. You might see
Speaker 1: it that way, where it's like, if we can get
Speaker 1: to fucking Memphis, then we're, you know, we're free. By
Speaker 1: the wars end, the city's black population had gone from
Speaker 1: three thousand to twenty thousand, So this is a pretty
Speaker 1: dramatic change. But while that's great, you know who's not
Speaker 1: going to be happy about a demographic change like that.
Speaker 1: This isn't an advertiser based pro shop. Yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: Beast pro shop pyramid owners, who I am blaming for
Speaker 1: all of what we're about to talk to. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote next from an article and a website
Speaker 1: called Zocallo by Christopher Hager quote. The growth of Memphis
Speaker 1: free black population meant that West Tennessee plantations were proportionally emptied.
Speaker 1: To the dismay of cotton planters who needed laborers in
Speaker 1: their fields, vagrancy laws provided a convenient solution to the
Speaker 1: labor shortage. Memphis blacks who could not prove gainful employment
Speaker 1: in the city were presumed guilty of vagrancy and subject
Speaker 1: to arrest impressment into the agricultural labor force. They were
Speaker 1: brought back onto the plantations and forced to sign labor contracts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty pretty fucked up and terrible. So vagrancy laws
Speaker 1: had come to the United States from like our whole
Speaker 1: legal system, right, We get it from England, you know,
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons. And so during the colonial days, the
Speaker 1: British had kindly given us their anti vagrancy laws. Now
Speaker 1: these had for the most part, these were not commonly
Speaker 1: enforced in most parts of the United States prior to
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds, and when they were, it was
Speaker 1: mostly in the South against freed black people who had
Speaker 1: the bad luck to exist in slave states. These laws
Speaker 1: were also enforced on the border between free and slave
Speaker 1: states and places like Pennsylvania, where such laws were used
Speaker 1: to maintain a form of racial hierarchy, even in an
Speaker 1: area in which black people were supposed to not be
Speaker 1: subject to slavery. But as the Civil War came to
Speaker 1: an end, white people across the political spectrum were faced
Speaker 1: with a tear rible specter large numbers of black people with,
Speaker 1: as they saw it, nothing to do, and so the
Speaker 1: enforcement of vagrancy laws against black Americans became one of
Speaker 1: the first political issues to unite Northern abolitionists and Southern
Speaker 1: plantation owners. Because when these laws are instituted and executed
Speaker 1: in the North, it's going to be abolitionists who pushed
Speaker 1: them right, and the South it's former Confederates who want
Speaker 1: to get black people back on the plantation. In the
Speaker 1: North it's abolitionists. They are a huge part of this.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting they want people to work because
Speaker 1: they want people to work, right. That's that's the short
Speaker 1: end of the story. So in the South, the use
Speaker 1: of law enforcement to cement racial violence should not surprise anybody,
Speaker 1: But the North was host to a dedicated population of
Speaker 1: what were called charity reformers, and most of them, including
Speaker 1: most of the kind of driving figures behind this movement
Speaker 1: were people who had been dedicated radical abolitionists prior to
Speaker 1: the Civil War and kind of the become charity reformers afterwards.
Speaker 1: Part of why is that the eighteen seventies, right after
Speaker 1: the Civil War, the US has its first really great depression,
Speaker 1: right like the I think eighteen seventy five is when
Speaker 1: it kind of hits its death. But this is like
Speaker 1: a calamitous economic collapse, and it's a partial consequence. One
Speaker 1: of the things that contributes to this is that, like
Speaker 1: you've got all these soldiers who had been paid by
Speaker 1: the government and now suddenly they're all demobilized, and that
Speaker 1: causes some problems. So one of the things that happens
Speaker 1: is there's a huge increase in starving people begging for money,
Speaker 1: and this really pisses off a large number of kind
Speaker 1: of like upper class liberals who had been who were
Speaker 1: staunch abolitionists, and many abolitionists. One of the reasons why
Speaker 1: this is the case is that a significant chunk of
Speaker 1: the abolitionist movement hated slavery, not because they weren't racist,
Speaker 1: although they were generally less racist than you know, the
Speaker 1: plantation owners, but because they saw slavery as violating the
Speaker 1: sacred contract between labor and its employer. Right. That was
Speaker 1: like a big part of their issue with it is
Speaker 1: that they believed that workers had a sacred right to
Speaker 1: choose where they were going to labor, but they didn't
Speaker 1: have a right to not choose to labor.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's a big part of this to them. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from a paper in the Journal of
Speaker 1: American History by ad Stanley. In the eyes of charity reformers,
Speaker 1: there was a clearly etched line of distinction between laboring
Speaker 1: for wages and begging. The wage laborer was an independent person,
Speaker 1: self supporting, one who participated in the vast social exchange
Speaker 1: of the marketplace and obeyed its rules. The polar opposite
Speaker 1: of the slave, the beggar, was a dependent person who
Speaker 1: neither bought nor sold, but prayed on others. The wage
Speaker 1: journer abided by the obligations of contract, the beggar eluded them.
Speaker 1: Charity reformers derived their view of beggary from the best
Speaker 1: thought of the day, the teachings of classical economists and
Speaker 1: other liberal and scientific thinkers. Composing a constituency of state
Speaker 1: and city officials prominent industrialists and businessmen, intellectuals and moral ways,
Speaker 1: most of whom had been abolitionists. They were air to
Speaker 1: an intellectual tradition that dissociated relations of personal dependency from
Speaker 1: transactions based on voluntary contract. That indeed had been the
Speaker 1: ideological lesson of the Civil War and emancipation the basis
Speaker 1: for vindicating the free wage system. Now, I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: I hate it.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that at all. Yeah, and it's interesting.
Speaker 1: Stanley points out that like two wage laborers, who none
Speaker 1: of these wealthy liberals are talking to ever in their
Speaker 1: entire lives. To wage laborers, this does not make sense
Speaker 1: because wage laborers know that like, yeah, man, sometimes there's
Speaker 1: no work right, Sometimes the you know, the factories closed.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you can't make money, and you like have to
Speaker 1: beg or your family's going to starve. That's like begging.
Speaker 1: Wage laborers don't see begging as separate from like them.
Speaker 1: They be like, yeah, sometimes you wind up like yeah,
Speaker 1: meeting charity because like shit's fucked, it's it's tough out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but these liberals.
Speaker 3: Have all the part communities take care of each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, that is not how these wealthy liberals think
Speaker 1: these kind of intellectual leaders because they've been building in
Speaker 1: their head this kind of uh at, this kind of
Speaker 1: like belief system that is kind of going to become
Speaker 1: what we you know, a lot of it's going to
Speaker 1: become like kind of the traditions of modern capitalism. But
Speaker 1: they're sort of building this belief system based on how
Speaker 1: they think the social order works between wage journers and
Speaker 1: you know, the poor and the rich and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Like they've they've set up this kind of view of
Speaker 1: the world that they've made without talking to any of
Speaker 1: the people who like exist in the in the situations
Speaker 1: that they're trying to define. And it is one of
Speaker 1: the things that it has kind of like laid out
Speaker 1: in this belief system, which is also going to play
Speaker 1: a lot into the eugenics beliefs that are just around
Speaker 1: the corner, is that like beggars are fundamentally immoral, right,
Speaker 1: it is it is an act of social evil to
Speaker 1: not have a means of visible support.
Speaker 3: We get the like we talked about a little bit
Speaker 3: of the medieval stuff, you know, like the deserving poor concept. Yes,
Speaker 3: and so there's this like very Protestant idea of like
Speaker 3: the deserving poor should get something, but most people are
Speaker 3: not deserving poor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's when this is starting to really get
Speaker 1: cooked up, and there's this idea, Like the kind of
Speaker 1: conclusion these people come to is that like giving money
Speaker 1: to beggars or is going to disincline people to work.
Speaker 1: So when you have deserving poor, the social aid they
Speaker 1: receive needs to be so painful to receive that no
Speaker 1: one but the deserving poor will seek it out right, totally.
Speaker 1: One of the things I find interesting is that in
Speaker 1: this period, when you've got these people talking about the
Speaker 1: dangers of like charity or of social aid for folks
Speaker 1: that like don't have work, you have kind of two
Speaker 1: different boogeymen they cite. One is socialism, right, which makes sense,
Speaker 1: you know that they're that they're they're citing that. The
Speaker 1: other is monarchism, right, because a lot of Americans in
Speaker 1: this period believe that monarchies inherently create this like huge
Speaker 1: class of dependent people who were utterly dependent on the state,
Speaker 1: and that's seen as anti American. So it's both monarchism
Speaker 1: and socialism usually by like slightly different chunks of this
Speaker 1: movement that you see cited as like the nightmare scenario, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: interesting to me. I didn't know that idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the things that really it just really quickly
Speaker 3: the one of the things that really Like, I read
Speaker 3: this book called Russia through a shot Glass about a
Speaker 3: hobo in Soviet Russia, right, and I didn't know about
Speaker 3: poverty in Soviet Russia. Right in USSR And there's this
Speaker 3: conversation with a beggar who's like, oh, I do this.
Speaker 3: I don't actually need to go beg. I mean he
Speaker 3: kind of needs to rate doesn't have a job, but
Speaker 3: he's like, I go out and beg every day because
Speaker 3: I'm doing a social good because when people give me
Speaker 3: twenty bucks or whatever, they feel better, like I am
Speaker 3: good for people. And I've thought about that ever since,
Speaker 3: like ever since now that I'm employed, when I give
Speaker 3: money to directly to people who were asking for money,
Speaker 3: it's like I feel good about myself. They are doing
Speaker 3: a social good by like helping people feel good about themselves.
Speaker 1: Anyway, it's I think that there's a the like panhandling
Speaker 1: is a complicated historical topic. I do think there's a
Speaker 1: degree to which it's it's one of our one of
Speaker 1: our like dying communal art forms. But yeah, it's it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I think a lot about the way homelessness works in
Speaker 1: the United States and how how not inevitable it is
Speaker 1: that that be the way society like treats this sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Like just one of the kind of memorable
Speaker 1: conversations I had, you know, when I was in Mosul,
Speaker 1: I was kind of bunking up with this civil defense unit,
Speaker 1: which is like they're guys who pull people out of
Speaker 1: like the wreckage of air strikes and shit. Like their
Speaker 1: job every day was to like go and help people
Speaker 1: who had been injured in the bombings and fight and
Speaker 1: stuff from the previous day. And we're kind of like
Speaker 1: just chatting about life. I was living in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: you know at the time, and like they're asking me
Speaker 1: about LA because you know, everybody knows about Hollywood, even
Speaker 1: if they don't know much about the city, and I'm
Speaker 1: talking about like, you know, the good things and about
Speaker 1: the problems, and I'm like, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like homelessness, and they like kept questioning me about that,
Speaker 1: and they were so upset with the idea of like
Speaker 1: people living on the street where they were like what
Speaker 1: about like their families, Like was it like doesn't anyone
Speaker 1: take them in? Don't they have Like there was this
Speaker 1: like this is kind of like because Iraq's got plenty
Speaker 1: of problems, but like the the idea that like there
Speaker 1: would be large numbers of people just kind of completely
Speaker 1: abandoned by their families and community was like so alien
Speaker 1: to these guys who were like dealing with some really
Speaker 1: nasty aspects of their own country, you know, on a
Speaker 1: daily basis. But like, yeah, that was it was really
Speaker 1: just like the kind of disbelief they had that like
Speaker 1: this could have, that could happen on any kind of
Speaker 1: large scale, that people would just like let it occur
Speaker 1: was so interesting to me. Yeah, anyway, So we had
Speaker 1: talked about a little earlier that in the late or
Speaker 1: in the seventeen eighties. Massachusetts is the first US state
Speaker 1: to ban slavery, right, That's something Massachusetts can take great
Speaker 1: pride in. Massachusetts is also the first Northern state to
Speaker 1: criminalize begging. In eighteen sixty six, the Republican Legislature of
Speaker 1: Massachusetts passes the Act Concerning Vagrants and Vagabonds. Ad Stanley
Speaker 1: Wright's Massachusetts was the first of the Northern states to
Speaker 1: enact new rules against beggars. In eighteen sixty six, the
Speaker 1: Republican dominated legislature passed an Act concerning vagrants and bat vagabonds.
Speaker 1: The eighteen sixty Criminal Code had punished beggars along with
Speaker 1: a motley band of jugglers, tricksters, common pipers and fiddlers, pilferers, brawlers,
Speaker 1: and lude persons. Sounds like literally my friend the best people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone I hang out with on a daily basis. Yeah, tricksters,
Speaker 1: comic drivers, lewd persons, yeah, for sure. But the new
Speaker 1: law dealt more specifically on the crime of begging. It
Speaker 1: was promoted by the Board of State Charities, which explicitly
Speaker 1: called for additional legislation sentencing sturdy beggars to enforced labor
Speaker 1: directed against idle persons without visible means of support. The
Speaker 1: Act punished at forced labor for not longer than six
Speaker 1: months in a house of correction or workhouse. Quote, all
Speaker 1: persons wandering abroad and begging, or who go out from
Speaker 1: door to door or place themselves in the streets, highways
Speaker 1: or passages well from other public places to beg or
Speaker 1: receive alms. One month before the new law took effect,
Speaker 1: Congress enacted a civil rights The Civil Rights Act which
Speaker 1: ended the Black Codes in the South. These had been
Speaker 1: the legal basis for a lot of the vagrancy arrests
Speaker 1: of freed black people. So Republicans both spent the post
Speaker 1: war years cutting down the legal apparatus for one means
Speaker 1: of suppression and forced labor, and voting in a new
Speaker 1: one based around anti vagrancy laws. Because these spread rapidly
Speaker 1: towards the Northern States, towards the Northern States, kind of
Speaker 1: outside of Massachusetts, over the next twenty years, many states
Speaker 1: followed mass The Tramp Acts, as they were often called,
Speaker 1: were passed in Pennsylvania in eighteen seventy one, in Illinois
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy four, and in New York in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty and eighteen eighty five. Massachusetts also regularly added new
Speaker 1: laws to their vagrancy laws. Every time the economy takes
Speaker 1: a dip, they'll make more laws to criminalize and force
Speaker 1: people who are like ruined by economic collapse into the
Speaker 1: forced labor system. Right, this is like a regular thing
Speaker 1: where they're constantly like as the economy keeps going up
Speaker 1: and down, they're constantly like making new laws to put
Speaker 1: people in workhouses. You know, when they fall through the cracks.
Speaker 1: Under the Illinois Vagabond Law, begging was punishable with six
Speaker 1: months in the workhouse. In New York, beggars were given
Speaker 1: hard labor in prisons. States soon began extending the time
Speaker 1: of sin from generally like six months or so at
Speaker 1: the start to as long as two years. And again.
Speaker 1: The organizing impulse behind all of these laws is the
Speaker 1: work of charity reformers eighty Stanley Wrights. Many of the
Speaker 1: statutes were the direct accomplishment of charity reformers. Among the
Speaker 1: central tasks the Conference of Charities assigned itself was showing
Speaker 1: how legislation ought to travel. As one member declared, suppression
Speaker 1: of vagrancy in street begging was probably the most important
Speaker 1: work of charity reform. Even before the Conference of Charities
Speaker 1: organized the effort, both public and private philanthropic agencies vigorously
Speaker 1: promoted laws against begging, all of which entailed forced labour.
Speaker 1: By eighteen sixty six, New York City charity officials had
Speaker 1: concluded that the only way to prevent sloth was compulsory labor.
Speaker 1: A few years later, a commissioner of the New York
Speaker 1: State Board of Charities recommended that the laws must be
Speaker 1: more stringent regarding vagabonds and professional beggars. In Illinois, charity,
Speaker 1: police and prison officials all pressed in the mid eighteen
Speaker 1: seventies for what one police chief cond a good vagrant law,
Speaker 1: and both the Industrial Aid Society in Boston and the
Speaker 1: Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor in New
Speaker 1: York City, agencies with close ties to the Republican Party
Speaker 1: promoted penal laws and involuntary labor as a cure for begging.
Speaker 1: And again, folks, I know, you know, we all hit
Speaker 1: Republicans around here. When we're talking about Republicans this period,
Speaker 1: we're talking about liberals. That's who is is Democrats, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's like, let's be fair here. We are talking
Speaker 1: about like liberal intellectual and social elites who are pushing
Speaker 1: these laws alongside the police who are always super supportive
Speaker 1: of criminalizing homelessness. Because these vagrant laws. Here's a fun thing.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about this more at the end. The way
Speaker 1: they're written means that cops can just decide someone's vagrant
Speaker 1: and then they get to do anything they want to them.
Speaker 1: That's cool, yay, great, hey, great so much. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: deeply infuriating. Margaret informersly states a good deal of the
Speaker 1: you get.
Speaker 3: Some Oh, I was just thinking about how okay, So,
Speaker 3: like in my current life, I don't get harassed by
Speaker 3: police very much. But when I lived out of a
Speaker 3: backpack in hitchhiking, and to be clear, I chose that
Speaker 3: because of the way that I was choosing to do activism,
Speaker 3: I chose that riding freight trains in hitchhiking was a
Speaker 3: good way to do activism right, just to be clear
Speaker 3: about that. But I interacted with police so so much
Speaker 3: that like, roughly daily I would have my ID run.
Speaker 3: I never understood how people did crime. Like when I
Speaker 3: meet people who just sort of do drugs or like
Speaker 3: have drugs or move drugs around, I'm like, I don't understand.
Speaker 3: You get searched every day, and it's because of this
Speaker 3: vagrancy shit. It's because of this. Like everyone, if you
Speaker 3: have a backpack, you are the enemy of the police,
Speaker 3: like and just you will be constantly harassed. And I
Speaker 3: don't think you will quite understand the degree to which
Speaker 3: that harassment is just ever present even when you're not
Speaker 3: And it annoys the shit out of me because you
Speaker 3: have this like ostensible freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
Speaker 1: But you don't.
Speaker 3: And then also capitalism presents itself as the system that
Speaker 3: you're like, well, if you don't like it, just don't
Speaker 3: do it. Right, Capitalism is all about choice and the
Speaker 3: freedom of the individual. It is not like if you
Speaker 3: don't work, if you choose not to work, if you
Speaker 3: ask other people for money or just choose to just
Speaker 3: eat trash instead of asking people for money, you are
Speaker 3: breaking the law. I hate this stuff so much.
Speaker 1: And it's no, it's like, yeah, I you know, I
Speaker 1: lived out of a car again by choice with two
Speaker 1: other people, you know, and it was kind of like
Speaker 1: an adventure. We were going up and down all throughout
Speaker 1: the US and Canada. I had like three notable interactions
Speaker 1: with police and all of them were really negative and
Speaker 1: took like an hour or two to get through. They've
Speaker 1: tried to bring out dogs and shit, but that was all.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like a daily thing. It was because like
Speaker 1: we were in a car, right, and like, while if
Speaker 1: they see that you're sleeping in a car, you get
Speaker 1: shipped from the cops. If cops just see people in
Speaker 1: a car, they think like that is that is the
Speaker 1: world happening? Is it's supposed to happen a person in
Speaker 1: a backpack is not supposed to exist outside of a
Speaker 1: car or a school campus, you know, like it's it
Speaker 1: is interesting the way that that works, because we were
Speaker 1: like just as vagrant a city, but like we were
Speaker 1: ye letting out of the back of a Toyota Prius.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you don't look like they expect
Speaker 1: you know, then you're you're generally okay, yep, cool stuff.
Speaker 1: So in former slave states, a great deal of the
Speaker 1: actual punishment work of the vagrant law system was done
Speaker 1: by employees of the Freedman's Bureau, which had been created
Speaker 1: in March eighteen sixty five with the stated goal of
Speaker 1: helping freedmen adapt to their newfound liberty. The first superintendent
Speaker 1: of the Bureau, though, made it clear that his organization
Speaker 1: was about control as much as support. He stated his
Speaker 1: determination that quote freed people shall not become a worthless,
Speaker 1: lazy set of vagrants living in vice and idleness. His
Speaker 1: successor added that Memphis had six thousand black people who
Speaker 1: were lazy, worthless vagrants, and so in Memphis, the Freedman's
Speaker 1: Bureau started organizing patrols to arrest black people at random
Speaker 1: and send them to work for white employers, often the
Speaker 1: same plantations that had owned them or their relatives. Patrolmen
Speaker 1: were given bounties of one to five dollars per head, right,
Speaker 1: and then just told like, get us people. You know,
Speaker 1: they recreate slave patrols. They but the freedman's bureaus running them,
Speaker 1: and they're doing it to provide cheap labor for you know, plantations,
Speaker 1: and shit, oh god, h this piss is off a
Speaker 1: lot of freed people. You know, they don't take this
Speaker 1: lying down. And those who could, for one thing, wrote
Speaker 1: letters to the Bureau commissioner. Obvious in this period, literacy
Speaker 1: is not super widespread among the community of freed people,
Speaker 1: yet for very obvious reasons, it had been illegal for
Speaker 1: them to learn to read and write in most of
Speaker 1: the places they came from. But there were always people
Speaker 1: in the community who had either who had taught themselves
Speaker 1: to read, who had benefited from some sort of education,
Speaker 1: And so they would organize in groups where like everyone
Speaker 1: would come and bring their complaints, and like the people
Speaker 1: who could write would would write letters for everybody and
Speaker 1: then send them in right in order to kind of
Speaker 1: do like they were organizing, you know, like in order
Speaker 1: to like exert a kind of political power, right, the
Speaker 1: way that people do so for whatever reason, And I
Speaker 1: guess it does make sense. Most often, like the most
Speaker 1: common job for the people who would be like the
Speaker 1: letter writers in their community were barbers, right, this was
Speaker 1: a lot of the people doing this are barbers. And
Speaker 1: one of these barbers is a guy named Warner Madison
Speaker 1: who had taught himself to read. Now his pros is,
Speaker 1: obviously it's not like as polished as the writing, and
Speaker 1: say the government notices organizing vagrant patrols. But he got
Speaker 1: his point across. And even with this kind of distance,
Speaker 1: you can you can feel the rage that radiates off
Speaker 1: of his words, burning like a fucking cinder. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote again from that article in Zocalo. In
Speaker 1: a letter to Friedman's Bureau Commissioner Fisk, he began by
Speaker 1: describing what was going on. They go around and arrest
Speaker 1: all they can find, regardless of whether they are employed
Speaker 1: or not. Just ask if you don't want to go
Speaker 1: with mister whoever. It may be that they don't find
Speaker 1: out whether you want to go or not at all,
Speaker 1: They make out the agreement to sell you for the
Speaker 1: price that the man gives them. Then Madison narrated in
Speaker 1: an instance of a young African American man being taken
Speaker 1: away by the point of the bayonet at the direction
Speaker 1: of a Friedman's Bureau agent. As his letter rose to
Speaker 1: a pitched fury, Madison began to punctuate almost every word
Speaker 1: as if stabbing at the paper with his pen. I
Speaker 1: think it is one of the most obnoxious and foul
Speaker 1: and mean things that exists on any part of this bureau.
Speaker 1: Why do my children have to get passes now to
Speaker 1: go to school? Nathan Dudley of the Freedman's Bureau was
Speaker 1: sent to investigate these claims. He looks into whether or
Speaker 1: not children are getting like arrested for vagrancy while they're
Speaker 1: heading to school, and here's here's what he writes. I
Speaker 1: can find no evidence whatever that school children with books
Speaker 1: in their hands have been arrested except in two or
Speaker 1: three cases. First off, I can't find evidence that they
Speaker 1: got arrested if they had books. And second, I can't
Speaker 1: find any evidence except for this evidence other than these people,
Speaker 1: these kids who got arrested, I can't find any evidence
Speaker 1: of this is happening. Very funny, not funny, infuriating, but
Speaker 1: you know it happened. So, yeah, that's frustrating, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: fair to say irritating Malaga. We're thinking back to our
Speaker 1: friends on Malaga living free of all of this bullshit
Speaker 1: because they're very isolated, have a lot of protection from
Speaker 1: this wave of vagrancy laws sweeping the country. So, you know,
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, the stuff, they were not
Speaker 1: really dealing with consequences of this because of how far
Speaker 1: off the grid they are. But by the start of
Speaker 1: the nineteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, the
Speaker 1: unique communities that had formed both on Malaga and these
Speaker 1: surrounding islands were starting to gain the attention of mainland culture,
Speaker 1: in a mainland culture that had been influenced by this
Speaker 1: anti vagrant hysteria. We can illustrate this well with the
Speaker 1: story of John Darling, a third generation descendant of our
Speaker 1: buddy Benjamin. He was born in eighteen fifty to Isaac
Speaker 1: and Rebecca Wallace Darling in Phippsburg. His brother remained in
Speaker 1: the area, marrying and having children. At twenty one, John
Speaker 1: got married to his first cousin, Aurelia Darling, and she
Speaker 1: gave birth first to a set of stillborn twins and
Speaker 1: then a son, dying soon after. At twenty nine, John
Speaker 1: married again to a woman named Albertina Gilliam from Orr's Island,
Speaker 1: and the family moved to Or's Island to live with
Speaker 1: her parents. This was a good life for some years,
Speaker 1: but then in eighteen ninety seven, the land that his
Speaker 1: wife's family lived on was sold to a syndicate of
Speaker 1: Philadelphia businessmen who sold the land off for summer cottages.
Speaker 1: The Darlings were evicted, so they fled to Pond Island,
Speaker 1: a half miles to the south and squatted on it,
Speaker 1: building a two room house that John Darling insulated with
Speaker 1: newspaper rags and dirt, which is just kind of like
Speaker 1: what you did at the time, right You can't just
Speaker 1: pop down to the home depot. His wife eventually took
Speaker 1: sick and had to return to the mainland for treatment,
Speaker 1: while John passed into local legend, living alone as the
Speaker 1: Hermit of Pond Island. From a write up by the
Speaker 1: Harpswell Historical Society, the hermit was featured on postcards and
Speaker 1: histories and as an example of what might happen to
Speaker 1: a child if they didn't work hard and learn those
Speaker 1: ABC's The story of finding John frozen solid in his
Speaker 1: bed of rags and eaten by everything from rats to
Speaker 1: seagulls has been told around media campfire, So he becomes
Speaker 1: kind of this like people will like glimpse him or
Speaker 1: sail by to look at him, and he's like this
Speaker 1: kind of figure of low like mockery, right, because he's
Speaker 1: he's living alone out there now. Despite kind of this
Speaker 1: public image of him, johnis by all accounts a resourceful
Speaker 1: and tough man who like lived alone in the most
Speaker 1: like and and made a life for himself, built a
Speaker 1: fucking house out there and survived to an advance. Doesn't
Speaker 1: sound lazy, no, he's he sounds like today, a man
Speaker 1: with the kind of skills that he have would go
Speaker 1: on one of those game shows like Alone where you
Speaker 1: have to like live alone in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 1: with like a knife and win. He would like win
Speaker 1: every time. Like no, no modern man could compete with
Speaker 1: John Darling on one of those shows like yeah, oh
Speaker 1: I gotta be I gotta not talk to anyone for
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty five I do that without trying,
Speaker 1: like fuck it. Yeah, So again, he's by all accounts
Speaker 1: a pretty resourceful guy. And he minds his own fucking business.
Speaker 1: But as the nineteen hundreds were alife, he represented to
Speaker 1: people on Maine, in places like Pipsburg and Portland, a
Speaker 1: provention backwards past that they wanted to jettison because it
Speaker 1: made them feel embarrassed about themselves. Photos were taken of
Speaker 1: John and published in breathless news and magazine articles to
Speaker 1: crying his primitive state and the fact that he was
Speaker 1: a squatterner. John's physicality was particularly well suited to this
Speaker 1: sort of thing. He was over six feet tall and
Speaker 1: at least two hundred and fifty pounds, which again suggests
Speaker 1: he's pretty good at surviving out there if he's that big.
Speaker 1: But they're like, look's they basically treat him like an ogre, right,
Speaker 1: like he's this, like this, like dangerous, like almost inhuman
Speaker 1: hobo living you know, alone on this island. There were
Speaker 1: rumors in local reporting that he was illiterate and uncultured,
Speaker 1: although there's no actual evidence of this. The Harpswell Historical
Speaker 1: Society notes his signature has not been found on any
Speaker 1: town records or petitions, and it is quite likely that
Speaker 1: he did not read or write, but it may also
Speaker 1: be that he was just not a very sociable person
Speaker 1: and did not concern himself with the affairs of others
Speaker 1: or the town, preferring to keep to himself, and therefore
Speaker 1: did not sign or make his mark on the public record.
Speaker 1: The treatment of John Darling would be mirrored with greatly
Speaker 1: enhanced brutality against other descendants of Benjamin Darling on their
Speaker 1: kin and their kin on Malaga Island. And that is
Speaker 1: the story we are going to talk about when we
Speaker 1: come back in part two. But Margaret, you know what
Speaker 1: time it is right now?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 3: No more, ads, I don't know. It's time to advertise myself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's time to plug plug plug plug your bluggables.
Speaker 3: Well, if you like the opposite of this show, where
Speaker 3: we talk about people who fought these things, you might
Speaker 3: like my show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Available
Speaker 3: wherever podcasts are found, specifically from cools on Media, also excellent.
Speaker 1: I am I don't know whether on comes out.
Speaker 3: I'm either kickstarting or have kick started a tabletop role
Speaker 3: playing game called p Number City that I'm making with
Speaker 3: a bunch of people have been working on for a
Speaker 3: very long time. The kickstarter is doing amazingly. We're at
Speaker 3: like three hundred percent or something of our goal, and
Speaker 3: so you should check out p Number City and or
Speaker 3: Cool People Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 1: Excellent, and you can check out me anyway. You can
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Speaker 1: Radio Lab people for years now, no real.
Speaker 2: Reason that seems logical to me.
Speaker 1: You have to pick an enemy and then destroy them
Speaker 1: with with almost unthinkable violence. And that's that's what I
Speaker 1: want to do to those Radio Lab motherfuckers.
Speaker 2: You know what else people can listen to now, and
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Speaker 1: No, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Our dear friend Jake Hanrahan's newest podcast that is part
Speaker 2: of cool Media.
Speaker 1: Jake Canrahan or Jan Rahan as he has never been
Speaker 1: called by anyone. Don't call him that and we'll make
Speaker 1: him angry.
Speaker 2: But you should. You should check out his new show.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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