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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production

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Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and

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Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And we talked about Alexander T.

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Speaker 1: Stewart this week. We did he is. There are so

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Speaker 1: many details about his life that, of course, in any

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Speaker 1: given show, like you can't include everything. I have a few, though,

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Speaker 1: that I will share now. One that I thought was

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Speaker 1: really really interesting was one biographer pointing out the strategic

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Speaker 1: use of the word ladies in his ads, particularly in

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Speaker 1: his early ads, because it made people think, if I

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Speaker 1: shop there, I will be considered a lady, a lady,

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Speaker 1: And so allegedly that first customer that walked in when

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Speaker 1: he opened the first day said I'm a lady interested

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Speaker 1: in fine fabrics, and that that was part of like

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Speaker 1: how he immediately won the favor of many of Manhattan's

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Speaker 1: women shoppers and became, you know, incredibly favored by them

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Speaker 1: for years and years and years. So it's just kind

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Speaker 1: of an interesting the psychological things that happened. There is

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Speaker 1: also an interesting thing that ties into many of our

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Speaker 1: other shows, which happened fourteen years after his death, which

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Speaker 1: is that in eighteen ninety, Joseph Pulitzer and several of

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Speaker 1: his employees were indicted for criminal libel and quote contriving

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Speaker 1: and intending to injure to fame and vilify, for disgrace

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Speaker 1: and vilify and disgrace the memory, character, name, and reputation

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Speaker 1: of Alexander T. Stewart because a series of articles had

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Speaker 1: come out and there often pointed to as really the

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Speaker 1: source of the modern interpretation that he was this miserly

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Speaker 1: mean person instead of as he always purported to be.

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Speaker 1: I'm just trying to be super fair to everybody and

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Speaker 1: like make clear rules. So that was interesting that that

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Speaker 1: happened later. And Hilton, who we mentioned was his right

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Speaker 1: hand man, Henry Hilton, and his executor was the one

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Speaker 1: that like really got upset about this and said, like,

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Speaker 1: I don't care that you said ugly things about me,

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Speaker 1: but this is a man that I respected and worked

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Speaker 1: with and who has been dead and please do not

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Speaker 1: mess with his memory for so long, which is kind

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Speaker 1: of interesting. Listen, there could be liable against you long

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Speaker 1: after you're dead. It turns out, Yeah, I think it's

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Speaker 1: possible that like a lot of these contradictory things were

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Speaker 1: simultaneously true, like that he could be ruthless in some

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Speaker 1: contexts and generous in others. Like that seems totally within

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Speaker 1: the scope of humanity. It does, and it also becomes

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Speaker 1: that thing. I found myself thinking a lot while I

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Speaker 1: was working on this, that, like any of those characteristics,

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Speaker 1: you know, greed, generosity, et cetera, some of that is

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Speaker 1: in the eye of the beholder, right where like, there

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Speaker 1: are also the lenses that any given person has on

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Speaker 1: a situation that will shift the reality. It's kind of

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Speaker 1: like that thing where people say there are always three truths,

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Speaker 1: yours mind and the reality. It always makes me think

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Speaker 1: about that because he is I mean, obviously he was

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Speaker 1: very hard working and very smart, and we don't know

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Speaker 1: if any of the stories about him being as ruthless

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Speaker 1: an employer as some people claimed are true. I mean,

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Speaker 1: as you said, there are people who love who stay

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Speaker 1: in a job for a long time, even if it's

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Speaker 1: not like a job that makes sense to other people,

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Speaker 1: something about it must appeal to them. You know. Got

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Speaker 1: me thinking about a lot of things. One of the

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Speaker 1: things that he would do, and it ties to this,

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Speaker 1: And I honestly don't know if I think this is

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Speaker 1: evidence of him being kind or being brutal? Is it?

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Speaker 1: In instances where smaller merchants were forced to go out

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Speaker 1: of business because they couldn't compete, he would often offer

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Speaker 1: them a job. And I'm like, is that really kind?

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Speaker 1: Like he's like, you will still have a way to

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Speaker 1: support yourself and your family, or is it like, haha,

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Speaker 1: you must become part of my enterprise that killed yours.

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Speaker 1: And I honestly don't know. And because we don't have

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Speaker 1: a lot of his papers, we don't know. We have

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Speaker 1: a lot of things written to him. Those we mentioned

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Speaker 1: in the episode, the letters to him asking for money

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Speaker 1: and the letters to his wife asking for money. There

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Speaker 1: is actually a book published that collects a bunch of them.

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Speaker 1: Oh wow, it's the same thing. You don't know what

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Speaker 1: to believe, right, Like some of these people obviously are

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Speaker 1: just like I can probably wrangle some books out of this.

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Speaker 1: And some people write these plaintive, really sad letters where

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Speaker 1: they either believe or they have convinced themselves that this

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Speaker 1: might be the ray of hope that will get them

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Speaker 1: over a hump or through a difficult time. And it's

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Speaker 1: it's simultaneously like I can't imagine what it's like to

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Speaker 1: feel that many letters all the time of people just

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Speaker 1: asking for things, and it's heartbreaking to know that there

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Speaker 1: were definitely people who were like, I am desperate. I

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Speaker 1: think we might be related. I have five kids. Can

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Speaker 1: you please help me? Yeah, And we don't know necessarily

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Speaker 1: if if he gave to any of those people are

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Speaker 1: not there are It's the same thing. There are stories

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Speaker 1: that say, yes, he absolutely did things like that, and

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Speaker 1: others that are like, well, there's no proof, so we

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Speaker 1: don't know. The final thing that I will talk about

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Speaker 1: is the new grave. So I wasn't able to verify this.

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Speaker 1: So if anybody knows that lives in Garden City, he

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Speaker 1: and Cornelia were apparently buried in secret places so that

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Speaker 1: there could not be another grave robber or grave robbing

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Speaker 1: of them. Yes, and that some are like, well, he's

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Speaker 1: they're in the church proper in part of it, and

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Speaker 1: others are like, no, probably elsewhere. But the other thing

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Speaker 1: is that allegedly it's a rumor, it's not substantiated anywhere

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Speaker 1: I could find. Is that Cornelia was so worried about

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Speaker 1: there too being desecrated that she had an elaborate alarm

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Speaker 1: system included so that if something happened and someone broached

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Speaker 1: the threshold, everyone would know. Wow, this reminds me of

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Speaker 1: that whole live show that we did on Safety Coffins. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that was a fun one. It was I love a

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Speaker 1: Halloween live show. Anyway, I clearly find him very, very interesting,

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Speaker 1: and he, obviously for anybody that's connecting dots, came up

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Speaker 1: in the research but did not become an episode when

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Speaker 1: we were doing our Resurrection Men season on Criminalia, and

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Speaker 1: it was like he didn't quite fit the bill of

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Speaker 1: any of the stuff we were talking about because we

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Speaker 1: didn't know who did it, So most of the we

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Speaker 1: were talking about the people who did the robbing, not

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Speaker 1: necessarily the odd things that happened, although we did do

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Speaker 1: some of those. But he just didn't quite fit in

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Speaker 1: that season, and I thought he would be great to

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Speaker 1: talk about because then every time I looked up stuff

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Speaker 1: about him, I was like, what do you mean he

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Speaker 1: built his own city? What? But what do you mean

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Speaker 1: he he made a living out of nothing? Yeah, he's

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Speaker 1: really interesting. Still considered one of the richest men in

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Speaker 1: American history. Yeah, that that fortune's gone. We talked about

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Speaker 1: Gonzales versus Williams this week on the show and I

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Speaker 1: just I want to take a moment and talk about spellings,

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Speaker 1: because Isabel Gonzalez's name is not spelled the same in

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Speaker 1: court documents in the name of that court case as

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Speaker 1: like she spelled it both in terms of accent marks

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Speaker 1: and letters. So like the court case is Gonzales versus

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Speaker 1: Williams g O N Z A L E S. But

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Speaker 1: her name was Gonzales with a Z on the end

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Speaker 1: of it and also with the accent mark over the A.

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Speaker 1: And I could not tell you whether this was like carelessness,

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Speaker 1: whether it was kind of an evolution and how we

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Speaker 1: write words just from having had a job working on

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Speaker 1: the internet with content management systems and style guides for however,

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Speaker 1: how long have we been here, Like I don't know,

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Speaker 1: two years, yeah, two thousand and five is when I

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Speaker 1: started first working for a website. Like I know, there

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Speaker 1: were like ap style guide standards and just the limitations

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Speaker 1: of our content management system where things like diacritical marks

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Speaker 1: would just ruin everything. I have an old export of

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Speaker 1: our of like all the episodes of our show from

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Speaker 1: like very long time ago before we were using our

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Speaker 1: current content management system. And there are a number of

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Speaker 1: things that are like people's names that had an accent

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Speaker 1: mark of some sort gobbledegook, just include garbage characters. Yes,

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Speaker 1: so yeah, I don't, I don't. I don't know if

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Speaker 1: that if this was just carelessness, not paying attention, racism,

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Speaker 1: evolution of spelling, lots of potential, some poor overworked court clerk, like, yeah,

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Speaker 1: like a lot of reasons that some of them more

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Speaker 1: valid than others. But also the way that Puerto Rico

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Speaker 1: was spelled in the United States legally officially changed at

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Speaker 1: two different points during the I think, I think both

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Speaker 1: of them were in the twentieth century. It went from

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Speaker 1: being Puerto Rico p u e r t o, like

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Speaker 1: that word is pronounced or that like that word is

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Speaker 1: spelled in Spanish, to Porto po rto like officially US

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Speaker 1: changed that spelling and then changed it back. So a

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Speaker 1: lot of the things that we read today have this

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Speaker 1: spelling of po rt yeah, which I feel like the

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Speaker 1: way a lot of us say Puerto Rico sounds a

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Speaker 1: little more like Puerto than Puerto, but seeing it spelled

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Speaker 1: po rt o is just like a lot harder in

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Speaker 1: terms of all of those letters. Well, it is because

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Speaker 1: it feels like you're reading something fictional. I don't know,

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Speaker 1: it's like a weird My brain is like, that's not real, No,

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Speaker 1: it is, it is. Yeah, I I am hopeful. I've

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Speaker 1: said this about so many people on the show recently,

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Speaker 1: especially women, that that I'm hopeful that there will be

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Speaker 1: like a more personal biography of her at some point.

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Speaker 1: I do have the impression from the research that I

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Speaker 1: did that there are family papers and family family documents

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Speaker 1: and family histories that could contribute to all of that.

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Speaker 1: So maybe it is something that will happen at some point.

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Speaker 1: It's there are lots of things about this that I'm

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Speaker 1: curious about. Like I said in the episode that I

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Speaker 1: really think that when she was being detained at Ellis Island,

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Speaker 1: that her family was just desperate to get her out,

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Speaker 1: Like she was pregnant, real close to her due you know,

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Speaker 1: when she was expected to give birth. Also just being

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Speaker 1: detained at immigration that's on its own a whole dehumanizing,

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Speaker 1: uh insulting process, and so like I think they were

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Speaker 1: just trying to make the arguments that they thought would work.

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Speaker 1: But like that's just my interpretation. I don't I don't

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Speaker 1: know if these you know, there's there's a letter written

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Speaker 1: from one family member to another that was sort of like, Okay,

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Speaker 1: this is what we're gonna try, and this is why,

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Speaker 1: so you gotta we have to kind of fill in

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Speaker 1: the blanks on some of it. Yeah, it's one of

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Speaker 1: those uh things. I Stories like this always bring out

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Speaker 1: the most simplistic hippie part of my soul where I

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Speaker 1: want to just be like why borders though, man, Like

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Speaker 1: why can't we all be cool? Real valid question, And

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Speaker 1: for a long time in the United States, like if

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Speaker 1: you could get here, you could stay here, right, And

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Speaker 1: it was really into It was really when the US

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Speaker 1: started like excluding Chinese laborers that really started to shift

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Speaker 1: a whole lot. We've talked about the Chinese Exclusion Act

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Speaker 1: in a number of prior episodes, and it came up today,

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Speaker 1: so we did not not today. It came up this

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Speaker 1: week and we talked about this uh this episode, so

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Speaker 1: we didn't get into it and a lot more detail,

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Speaker 1: but like that, Yeah, there was a big shift between

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Speaker 1: the attitude of come on and the attitude of well

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Speaker 1: not if you're any of these people, yea, with lots

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Speaker 1: of different definitions of who all was these people? Yep. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So anyway, I'm glad we finally got to do This

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Speaker 1: episode follow on a few weeks later to the insular cases.

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Speaker 1: Whatever's going on on your weekend, I hope it's great.

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Speaker 1: Whether it's fun stuff or less fun stuff, it's less

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Speaker 1: fun stuff, I hope it's as great as they can

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Speaker 1: possibly be in that circumstance. We'll be back to the

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Speaker 1: Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff

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Speaker 1: you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.