Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh Man, Yeah, Children's Morality Code. Yeah, yuck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had never heard of this. You sent me that line.
Speaker 1: I read the words National Institution for Moral Instruction and
Speaker 1: I was like, Hey, this sounds like Nazis. It's pretty awful.
Speaker 1: Not quite time for, like the Nazi Party had not
Speaker 1: developed yet, but something about it. Immediately I was like, mmmm, no,
Speaker 1: this seems like something bad. The hardest of passes. Man,
Speaker 1: this one is so yucky in so many ways. I
Speaker 1: mean it starts with the camera hidden in a briefcase.
Speaker 1: That's creeper. Banvier extremely creepy. The way he became super
Speaker 1: ablest and into eugenics super creepy. It's really really uh,
Speaker 1: it's just troubling, and it is one of those things
Speaker 1: we didn't go into it, but that when the Inquiry
Speaker 1: started being published in nineteen twenty eight, it got a
Speaker 1: lot of coverage in the paper and like one newspaper
Speaker 1: there's this huge with a graphic article about it about
Speaker 1: like the findings of kids and how often kids lie
Speaker 1: and how you know kids. There's a quote from the
Speaker 1: researchers that like they in one of their experiments, they
Speaker 1: had this setup where kids were supposed to write down
Speaker 1: in a journal like the various good acts they did,
Speaker 1: I think, And it was a voluntary thing. Students didn't
Speaker 1: have to do it. But the kids that volunteered turned
Speaker 1: out to kind of be the biggest liars in the
Speaker 1: class based on their other studies, like that they were
Speaker 1: just lying in their journals about the good things they
Speaker 1: had done. And this, of course became very newsworthy because
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties, before the depression, people really had
Speaker 1: time to discuss whether or not kids were worthy of
Speaker 1: being human beings. It's so weird. It's all so weird.
Speaker 1: I can't I mean, you know, Dewey had it right, right,
Speaker 1: He's like, this is just social intelligence, you guys, because
Speaker 1: people will learned these things. That's part of growing up.
Speaker 1: Just to be super clear in case people have forgotten
Speaker 1: since the episode, the Dowe we were talking about there
Speaker 1: is not Melville Dewey, creator of the Dewey decimal system. No,
Speaker 1: we're not saying that guy was right about anything. It's
Speaker 1: a different do we have issue. So the Dewey decimal
Speaker 1: system I have, how horrible Melvil Dewey was on like
Speaker 1: my short list for an episode, but I just can't
Speaker 1: deal with him in this moment. Yeah. Yeah, the whole
Speaker 1: idea that like kids needed these very like like you
Speaker 1: said it, it vibes very you know, Nazish, the use
Speaker 1: of the future must be perfect kind of ideology. I
Speaker 1: will say this, A broken clock is right twice a day, okay.
Speaker 1: And I did find it is listed in that PhD
Speaker 1: paper that we read as like a footnote that she
Speaker 1: found in something else. So I didn't include in the
Speaker 1: episode because at that point it's many times removed from
Speaker 1: anything I can look up and verify. But she noted
Speaker 1: that she found in a thing someone mentioning fair Child's
Speaker 1: list of immoral behaviors. And there are a couple of
Speaker 1: things in this that I was like, well, yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of them is opposition to proof of another's
Speaker 1: theories because of jealousy, Oh sure, degenerating into a propagandist
Speaker 1: of an unproved hypothesis instead of being true to the
Speaker 1: research purpose of discovering truth. Okay, that sounds great. We
Speaker 1: all need to learn that all the time, and then
Speaker 1: cowardice in supporting a verified generalization because it is unpopular
Speaker 1: and conflicts with selfish interests. I'm like, yeah, that's all true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why are you so messed up? I also think, like,
Speaker 1: you know, teaching kids about things like honesty, uh great,
Speaker 1: Like fine, fine, I'm not saying that that shouldn't happen,
Speaker 1: but like that. The list of laws really exemplifies the
Speaker 1: way that a lot of thinking in our culture and
Speaker 1: history has been like, if you're able bodied, you're good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but if you're not able bodied, obviously you're bad and
Speaker 1: it's your own fault somehow, and you should have not
Speaker 1: done that. And a boy, did I hate reading that.
Speaker 1: It's awful. It's awful. The whole idea that kids were
Speaker 1: basically going to be put in camps if they weren't moral. Yep,
Speaker 1: I hate it is so horrified, can you. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm I of course, because I'm a self centered person,
Speaker 1: because I'm a human. You know, you always project yourself
Speaker 1: into these scenarios. And I would be like, listen, I
Speaker 1: was the kid that always had Holly lack self control
Speaker 1: written on every one of my report cards because I
Speaker 1: wanted to chitter chatter with everybody in class. I would
Speaker 1: be a kid that sat in incarceration in his world
Speaker 1: because I never learned that lesson. I never learned not
Speaker 1: to say bad words or yell when people made me angry.
Speaker 1: And it's like, it's something that simple that literally would
Speaker 1: make you considered not worthy of being in society. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, this also reaches a tipping point. Pretend none
Speaker 1: of it is even about the incarceration of people that
Speaker 1: don't pass the morality code. At what point is a
Speaker 1: code like this invoked to keep people down? Do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Like, if you have this and
Speaker 1: kids are doing this every day and they're reciting all
Speaker 1: of the ways that they're going to adhere to these
Speaker 1: laws of morality, what happens when that kid comes into
Speaker 1: a situation that they have not been prepared for where
Speaker 1: a person in power is doing something wrong because they
Speaker 1: have been taught to be loyal and to not complain
Speaker 1: right and to like right, Nope, that's a big noplelope.
Speaker 1: It made me so angry. It made me so angry
Speaker 1: that I was like, we have to talk about this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gonna suck, but we have to talk about it. Yeah, man, yuck. Also,
Speaker 1: on the like you know, Bravo TV edition of this
Speaker 1: whole thing, we never found out, to the best of
Speaker 1: my knowledge, who the person was that put up that money. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I So, in addition to being like, hey man, this
Speaker 1: sounds like nazis what's happening, I went to try to
Speaker 1: figure out what this organization was because that was not
Speaker 1: a name I recognized from you know, the list of
Speaker 1: historical organizations in my head. And I found this one
Speaker 1: one thing that like listed all all the members and
Speaker 1: advisors and stuff like that, And I was like, who
Speaker 1: oh was this businessman that paid for this though? And
Speaker 1: that was not in there, no, by no anywhere, never
Speaker 1: found it. It's interesting, I know the work of the
Speaker 1: researchers that did the inquiry that oversaw it, Edward Thorndyke,
Speaker 1: he had been funded in his work, which was similarly
Speaker 1: trying to like dismantle these ideas or like show that
Speaker 1: they're not effective, was funded both by Rockefeller and Carnegie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I was like, well, those are the two people
Speaker 1: I would have suspected of putting up the money. So
Speaker 1: if they were working against it, who is this mystery person?
Speaker 1: I mean, will never know, maybe it was one of them.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe we will know at some point
Speaker 1: when somebody's writing a dissertation on some businessmen and find
Speaker 1: the transaction and they're led somewhere right the nineteen sixteen
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars, or it might have been earlier, right,
Speaker 1: because it might have been oh sure allocated before when
Speaker 1: the thing was announced. Yeah, and the twenty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: like that. I mean that was a lot of money
Speaker 1: at the time, so that is a significant transaction. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: I ache to know who it was. I ache who
Speaker 1: would have had a vested interest anyway. I could think
Speaker 1: and theorize for a very long time, but I don't.
Speaker 1: We may not ever know, or we may find out.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm sure glad that they stopped doing that.
Speaker 1: One of this week's episodes was on Mary Hunter Austin. Yeah. Who,
Speaker 1: I really thought that I was going to be writing
Speaker 1: an episode that was about walking in the desert and
Speaker 1: reading lots of quotes about her beautiful descriptions of the
Speaker 1: desert landscapes and the desert peoples that she was so
Speaker 1: in love with, And that was not the episode that
Speaker 1: we got. No, I did not intend this episode as
Speaker 1: like a counterpoint to Harriet Russell Williams Strong, who we
Speaker 1: talked about last year. I was gonna ask if I
Speaker 1: came up in the the friction stories about the irrigation issues.
Speaker 1: Yeah I did not. Yeah, I did not see Harriet
Speaker 1: Russell Williams Strong's name mentioned in any of it. But
Speaker 1: as I was doing the research on Mary Austin, I
Speaker 1: was like, what, why does this sound so familiar? We've
Speaker 1: talked about this on the show. When did we talk
Speaker 1: about it? H And just enough time had passed that
Speaker 1: I had to go digging to bring to mind what
Speaker 1: episode that was. In In addition to that dispute, it
Speaker 1: seems like Mary Austin had some conflicts with people. We
Speaker 1: mentioned John Muir at the beginning of the episode. I
Speaker 1: don't know what their disagreements were, but one of the
Speaker 1: sources that I used mentioned that there were disagreements that
Speaker 1: they butted heads in some way, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I wish I could find the details about that. Right
Speaker 1: we talked? We talked, Yeah, we talked about like being
Speaker 1: threatened with a lawsuit by HG. Wells and having a
Speaker 1: heart attack in the stress of all that. There was
Speaker 1: also apparently a falling out with Willa Cather. She just
Speaker 1: had all the greatest hits of arguments. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: don't think I don't think we mentioned Willa Cather at
Speaker 1: all in the in the episode. But she met Willa
Speaker 1: Cather probably sometime in like the nineteen teens. They became friends.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty six, Mary was going to be a
Speaker 1: way to have an abdominal surgery, unrelated I think to
Speaker 1: the breast cancer diagnosis, which I have various questions about
Speaker 1: me doing us with that, which they are unresolved. I
Speaker 1: have no answers to the questions about her breast cancer diagnosis.
Speaker 1: But she was going to be in Saint Louis having
Speaker 1: an abdominal surgery, and Willa Cather was going to be
Speaker 1: passing through her neighborhood, and she was like, Hey, you
Speaker 1: can stay at my house while I'm away, and Willa
Speaker 1: Cather said great, And she wrote part of Death Comes
Speaker 1: for the Archbishop staying there at Mary Austin's house, and
Speaker 1: she acknowledged like she acknowledged this, I think in an
Speaker 1: inscribed book that she gave to Mary later on. But
Speaker 1: in Earth Horizon, Mary Hunter called Willa Cather's praise of
Speaker 1: French missionary priests a calamity and Willa Cather like publicly
Speaker 1: denied having written any part of any book at Mary
Speaker 1: Austin's home, and I was like everywhere. I think she
Speaker 1: may have met Willa Cather at Mabel Dodge Leuhan's house.
Speaker 1: That was the wife of Tony Luhan, who was the
Speaker 1: person that they had worked with to get permission to
Speaker 1: take pictures at taus Peblo. Mary Dodge Luhan seems like
Speaker 1: an incredibly fascinating person to maybe possibly do an episode
Speaker 1: about one day. She was an heiress and a promoter
Speaker 1: of the arts, and her home became kind of a
Speaker 1: gathering place or their home they were married. They became
Speaker 1: a gathering place and a retreat for writers and artists,
Speaker 1: and that included people like Georgia O'Keefe and Willa Cather.
Speaker 1: So she was sort of a central figure in the
Speaker 1: literature and arts and culture of this part of the US. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm, I don't I know, you have no answers,
Speaker 1: but I'm like, oh, she lived way past the nineteen
Speaker 1: oh nine huh, I guess I'm not dying of breast
Speaker 1: cancer moments. So I think, yeah, like a long time
Speaker 1: after that. Yeah, I have absolutely no detail on like
Speaker 1: what kind of examination she was given when she was
Speaker 1: told that she had breast cancer. I have no idea
Speaker 1: what diagnostic tools went into that, really no sense of
Speaker 1: what her symptoms were besides this arm pain that had
Speaker 1: led her to go to the doctor. I just have
Speaker 1: a lot of questions about all of that too. Also,
Speaker 1: I have a lot of feelings about her daughter, Ruth, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because part of like the time when Mary was trying
Speaker 1: to parent Ruth with no resources, Some of that sounds
Speaker 1: offul really awful. I'm not really completely clear on how
Speaker 1: old Ruth was when Mary would go to work as
Speaker 1: a teacher and leave her by herself at home, like
Speaker 1: whether she was of an age that people might think
Speaker 1: that was okay. It seems like she was. She did
Speaker 1: not have the ability that she would needed that she
Speaker 1: would have needed to do that safely. So some of
Speaker 1: this just sounds really terrible. But the judgment that people
Speaker 1: passed on her for finding other arrangements was also really awful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I felt like, personally, I had personal feelings about that
Speaker 1: because my mom her entire career was working with disabled people.
Speaker 1: She started working with disabled adults in a day program
Speaker 1: teaching things like literacy and math and life skills and
Speaker 1: things like that in a day program, and most of
Speaker 1: the adults that she worked with might be able to
Speaker 1: live in a group home setting or with family some
Speaker 1: kind of situation where they had additional help and additional support.
Speaker 1: But then she started working with children in a long
Speaker 1: term care facility, and the children that she worked with
Speaker 1: a lot of them had multiple disabilities. A lot of
Speaker 1: them had, I mean all of them. All of them
Speaker 1: had multiple disabilities. All of them had very high support needs,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them also had medical needs where
Speaker 1: they really needed like twenty four hour medical care on site.
Speaker 1: So like kids that needed breathing support, that needed to
Speaker 1: be suctioned on a regular basis, or had feeding tubes
Speaker 1: or some kind of stoma on their body, like all
Speaker 1: kinds of things like that. And sure there were parents
Speaker 1: that probably seemed inattentive or callous in that whole situation.
Speaker 1: There are also a lot of parents where it was like,
Speaker 1: what was the other option? Right, Like, this child needs
Speaker 1: care all the time, this child needs a lot of
Speaker 1: support all the time. The whole family also needs to
Speaker 1: have a home and eat and have electricity and all
Speaker 1: of that, and so like, it may not be possible
Speaker 1: for this child to be cared for at home. There
Speaker 1: are some ways for people to be cared for at home,
Speaker 1: but a lot of times those are extraordinarily expensive, they
Speaker 1: can be really hard to arrange. And sometimes there are
Speaker 1: just ways to have subsidized care in a residential facility
Speaker 1: that doesn't exist for somebody trying to stay at home.
Speaker 1: But people spoke about the parents whose children were living
Speaker 1: at this facility with a very broad brush and spoke
Speaker 1: as though everyone was just awful for having to place
Speaker 1: their child. And sometimes I'm just like, there, what would
Speaker 1: the other option be though? Right, take the fact that
Speaker 1: Ruth was disabled out of it, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: not to erase her or anything. But like, even if
Speaker 1: Mary had what would be called an easy baby, right,
Speaker 1: a kid that like hits all of their developmental marks,
Speaker 1: isn't especially fussy, seems well adjusted, she did not have
Speaker 1: a good model of parenthood to work from to begin with.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, yea. So even if she had a child
Speaker 1: with no disabilities, perfectly you know, healthy, and had had
Speaker 1: just an easy time in the world, I don't know
Speaker 1: that she would have been equipped with the tools to
Speaker 1: know how to be a great mom. Yeah, which, like, yes,
Speaker 1: especially at this time when it's not like there were
Speaker 1: a kajillion parenting books. Yeah, particularly not for parenting kids
Speaker 1: with disabilities. Right, Where was she gonna learn any of that? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: and also with her husband not really involved, right, but
Speaker 1: she's essentially a single parent. Yeah, she still would have
Speaker 1: needed to work to earn enough money to keep them
Speaker 1: housed and fed. So yeah, it's it's Uh. There are
Speaker 1: times in the accounts of that where I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: this sounds awful, and in this, you know, in this
Speaker 1: part of the situation, it seems like she did something
Speaker 1: really messed up. Uh. But there are also a lot
Speaker 1: of times where it seems like she was doing her
Speaker 1: best with no resources in a society that had no resources,
Speaker 1: that didn't even consider that there needed to be resources
Speaker 1: right for disabled children and their families, none of which
Speaker 1: I was prepared to be writing an episode about out
Speaker 1: surprise when I thought we were going to have an
Speaker 1: episode about walking in the desert, Uh surprise. So yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of Mary Hunter Austen's work is in the
Speaker 1: public domain, not all of it, Some of it is
Speaker 1: a little bit too recent to have come into the
Speaker 1: public domain yet, so there is a lot of it
Speaker 1: that you can read, uh on places like you know,
Speaker 1: Archive dot organ Project, Gutenberg. In places like that, I
Speaker 1: feel like her assertion that she could figure out English
Speaker 1: and writing on her own and she wanted to spend
Speaker 1: her college education on something else, that there was some
Speaker 1: hubris there, because it does seem like she struggled to
Speaker 1: work out things like, you know, craft and style and
Speaker 1: all of that. One of the reasons it took her
Speaker 1: for a really long time to get longer work published.
Speaker 1: It wasn't in addition, in addition to the fact that
Speaker 1: she was trying to care for a child, she was
Speaker 1: having to kind of learn as she went things like
Speaker 1: structure and form and and all of that. I also
Speaker 1: have only read some of some of her works. By
Speaker 1: no means have I tried to do a thorough survey
Speaker 1: of all of it in the time we have to
Speaker 1: prepare a podcast her almost one book a year for
Speaker 1: thirty two years. What you didn't buzz through thirty books?
Speaker 1: Real quick? Well? Difficult? Difficult? What are you a quitter?
Speaker 1: I am working on an episode upcoming about a writer
Speaker 1: that I love and even revisiting all of their works
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, taking some effort and time. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of audiobook action going on. Yeah, if you want
Speaker 1: to send us a note about this or any other
Speaker 1: podcast or history podcast atiheartradio dot com, whatever is coming
Speaker 1: up for you on your weekend, I hope it is
Speaker 1: as good and smooth as possible. If you've got stuff
Speaker 1: in your life happening right now, I know a lot
Speaker 1: of us do stuff that's not great. I hope you're
Speaker 1: able to take some moments for yourself to take some
Speaker 1: deep breaths, Maybe get yourself a little treat of some sort.
Speaker 1: Maybe just sit under a tree where things are starting
Speaker 1: to turn green and bloom here in the Northern Hemisphere.
Speaker 1: If you're in the Southern Hemisphere getting ready to look
Speaker 1: at the oncoming of winter, I hope it's going to
Speaker 1: be a great winter. I guess autumn is closer because
Speaker 1: we're getting just about to spring. We're not exactly this
Speaker 1: summer yet. I just visited my parents and was able
Speaker 1: to cut some of the earliest blooming flowers in the
Speaker 1: yard to bring into my mom So, yeah, nice. We
Speaker 1: will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with
Speaker 1: something brand new on stuff you missed in history. Class
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