Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 1: the podcast that does what it says in the title,
Speaker 1: I mean host Margaret Kiljoy, the Arbiter of Cool People,
Speaker 1: the Arbiter of cool Stuff. Also, I discovered today I'm
Speaker 1: the one who gets to determine who is sick and
Speaker 1: who is healthy with me today, as my guest is
Speaker 1: a cool person, a bona fide cool person. Since I'm
Speaker 1: the arbiter of cool people, this is a good bit.
Speaker 1: I'm very excited about this. Caitlin durante Um, best known
Speaker 1: perhaps for hosting the show The Beachtel Cast. Caitlin, how
Speaker 1: are you? I'm pretty good? Thank you? How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm okay. I've been driving all day and now I'm
Speaker 1: podcasting all day. I somehow I have two days today.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, yeah, I guess I already asked how are you?
Speaker 1: I'll answer again. All allow right, all right, all right.
Speaker 1: Let's you said that you get to decide who is
Speaker 1: sick and who is not. And that's a reference to
Speaker 1: when we were talking off Mike about how I've been
Speaker 1: a little sick lately and it's my responsibility to be
Speaker 1: so like just funny and good and charming on your
Speaker 1: episode today or I will stay sick. That will be punishment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so it's up to the audience to descernment. How funny, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: this is the worst and luckily humor is completely objective.
Speaker 1: That's true, so classically yeah, famously yeah, yeah, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what. Well, at the end, we'll let
Speaker 1: it'll be Sophie and I will decide how about that
Speaker 1: instead of as the audience, Yes, our producer, uh and
Speaker 1: fellow arboriter of illness and well healthy Sophie. Sophie, how
Speaker 1: are you doing? I mean, I'm doing well, and I
Speaker 1: feel like I feel like, uh, you know, Caitlin, who
Speaker 1: does have a master's integrating, we'll we'll do really well
Speaker 1: at um. I mean, I know you don't like to
Speaker 1: mention it, but we'll do really well. I mean, I
Speaker 1: hate it, will do really well and making us go ah,
Speaker 1: and therefore will not have to be unwell, Okay, Like
Speaker 1: I feel I feel confident that because Kaylin has a
Speaker 1: master's screwding, that this is going to go really well
Speaker 1: for all of us. I mean, I've met a lot
Speaker 1: of people with masters in screenwriting and otherwise who are
Speaker 1: not good at making people laugh, So it's not. But
Speaker 1: what I mean is, yes, s freaking funny. That's good. Good,
Speaker 1: I'm glad. So to considue our credits, our sound engineers Ian,
Speaker 1: and our theme music was written by the esteemable musician
Speaker 1: known only under the mysterious name on Woman, also under
Speaker 1: other names to friends. But so, Caitlin, you have a
Speaker 1: master's degree in screenwriting, is what I hear? That makes
Speaker 1: you kind of an expert on film stuff. And last
Speaker 1: time we had you on we talked about film stuff
Speaker 1: Max Shrek who Since that recording, we did a bectel
Speaker 1: past episode on Batman Returns, which famously has a character
Speaker 1: played by Christopher Walkin named Max Shrek. The character was
Speaker 1: named after the actor whoa he discussed at length. I
Speaker 1: watched a nose ferato Since the last time I saw you,
Speaker 1: I watched and you did not watch Twilight, so you
Speaker 1: will not get Caitlin eyes jokes that still continues to
Speaker 1: be true now. Instead I had to watch like something
Speaker 1: like Okay, who's the the director who likes getting shot
Speaker 1: on camera and jumping into thanks full of cactuses and
Speaker 1: making documentaries about how terrible the world is? Dead Pan Germany? Um,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, his name he did Grizzly Man and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, oh what is his name? I normally
Speaker 1: this is like a name I normally know in my
Speaker 1: daily life. Same. Uh it's um Oh. I am googling
Speaker 1: it because I have to know. I watched The Verner
Speaker 1: her Zog Knows ferrall too since last I really liked it.
Speaker 1: But then I watched on The Devil's based on Aldie
Speaker 1: Huxley book, and like, this makes me sound like I'm
Speaker 1: very much like an old film buff, which is I'll
Speaker 1: pretend like it's true in order to get the cred
Speaker 1: and viewed as pretentious that that will allow me to
Speaker 1: have access to but every every all the other movies
Speaker 1: I watched this, Like last week, I kind of wiped
Speaker 1: away by The Devil's Um, it was really good m
Speaker 1: But this time we're not talking about film stuff. I
Speaker 1: just like having you on. Thank you so much. Today
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about labor union Hobos. We traveled
Speaker 1: around the US on freight trains and later in r
Speaker 1: vs who were printers and printed newspapers. No kidding, I
Speaker 1: also have a master's degree in that, so I don't
Speaker 1: know this episode. Yeah, exactly master's degree in freight train writing. Yeah, excellent.
Speaker 1: So these tramp printers laid out a ton of the
Speaker 1: newspapers that did a ton of the political ship that
Speaker 1: made a ton of things happen in this country, lots
Speaker 1: of good things and bad things. M They were the hard, drinking,
Speaker 1: hard fighting, hard cussin book reading, lonely road rail writing,
Speaker 1: short living, morally complicated and not boring tramp printers. All right,
Speaker 1: but first, have you ever heard of a printing press?
Speaker 1: I have heard of a printing press. Yes, excellent. Um,
Speaker 1: I gotta I gotta talk. In order to talk about
Speaker 1: these people. I thought I'd be able to like cut
Speaker 1: right in, to be like and then they had a union,
Speaker 1: and then they did this off and then like slowly
Speaker 1: I realized that the like, the physical form of printing
Speaker 1: really ties into a lot of stuff about their culture.
Speaker 1: So we got a flashback to like, that's my guests
Speaker 1: for the date that a printing press was invented. Well,
Speaker 1: there might have been a printing press invented, but it
Speaker 1: is not when the printing presses we're talking about were invented?
Speaker 1: Is the main European one. I think it's in my script,
Speaker 1: and so therefore I totally know it and I don't
Speaker 1: ever forget things, and like a whatever animal it is
Speaker 1: that doesn't forget things. Um, that's also a good bit.
Speaker 1: It's a joke. Yeah, thank you, all right. So on
Speaker 1: some level, printing seems like a chore that is just
Speaker 1: part of what we read, right, It's part of the
Speaker 1: process of making things. But printing is really the core
Speaker 1: of media and mass communication, and like the origin of
Speaker 1: mass communication, without hands set type, there wouldn't be mass literacy,
Speaker 1: at least in the Western world. There was a good
Speaker 1: amount of literacy in the Eastern world going back a
Speaker 1: thousand years before Europe figured out how to read without
Speaker 1: using movable type, even though they had movable type. Whatever
Speaker 1: I'm getting ahead, mhm. Europe was kind of a backwater
Speaker 1: of the world until people they're figured out that they
Speaker 1: could colonize everyone and be monsters. And movable type, like
Speaker 1: a lot of things, was first invented in what is
Speaker 1: now China, or I guess was China at the time too.
Speaker 1: In the eleventh century, guy named b Shang mostly used porcelain,
Speaker 1: but he also used wood, and he made movable type
Speaker 1: with all of the different characters and stuff and it
Speaker 1: didn't really catch on at the time he invented it,
Speaker 1: and it was used for some stuff, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: like it didn't replace woodblock cutting m pretty quickly. Uh,
Speaker 1: some folks in China and some folks in Korea figured
Speaker 1: out metal movable type started using it. Again, didn't really
Speaker 1: take off, basically, would block printing with whole pages carved
Speaker 1: at a time stayed the normal way of printing stuff.
Speaker 1: And there's lots of like reasons why this is. But
Speaker 1: like a lot of history that has to do with
Speaker 1: Western historians writing about Asian history, everyone's like, I'm not
Speaker 1: really sure if they're being objective or I'm not really
Speaker 1: sure he's being objective in these histories. Sure, it seems
Speaker 1: like it didn't catch on basically because it wasn't necessary
Speaker 1: based on the way that typography worked and like the
Speaker 1: way that the written language has worked in different places.
Speaker 1: So for like a thousand years, the Eastern world was
Speaker 1: using woodblock printed books and they were doing quite well,
Speaker 1: while Europe was still scribbling away by candle light with
Speaker 1: quill and ink. And so once again that's how I
Speaker 1: send my tweets out. It's quill and ink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: no that. Um, yeah, you know, I feel like at
Speaker 1: this point, tweets are probably about as long as I
Speaker 1: used to handwrite all my like fiction, no kidding, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I couldn't imagine doing that anymore. I don't know,
Speaker 1: because of a man named Johannes Guttenberg. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I said his first name, right. He was probably
Speaker 1: born around the year fourteen hundred. And I'm really annoyed
Speaker 1: because I was like, oh, I'm gonna do this deep
Speaker 1: Divan Gutenberg for this part of this episode. He's really boring. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, maybe some would have
Speaker 1: proved me wrong, but everything I've read about him not
Speaker 1: like the most interesting guy, one of the most influential
Speaker 1: figures in history, like kind of up there with like
Speaker 1: Jesus and Mohammed in terms of like pure cultural impact,
Speaker 1: you know. But um, by the mid fourteen hundreds, he
Speaker 1: was like, hey, guys, I've got an idea, and he
Speaker 1: changed basically everything about the world ever since. Not necessarily
Speaker 1: for the better, because Europe no longer being a backwater
Speaker 1: has actually worked out really badly for everyone, right, but
Speaker 1: he certainly changed the world. Okay, As a tangent, I
Speaker 1: used to stay in the squat in Amsterdam years ago,
Speaker 1: and there was this, um, this little piece of graffiti
Speaker 1: that said changed the world, make it worse, um, and
Speaker 1: then someone changed it to change the world, make it
Speaker 1: hoarsey instead of worse. But okay, nice anyway, I already know.
Speaker 1: And then I think about that one. I'm feeling really
Speaker 1: cynicals changed the world make it worse, which is what
Speaker 1: Guttenberg managed to do. Maybe I don't know. Whatever, I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to put a moral judgment on this particular character.
Speaker 1: He invented movable type again sort of in four it's
Speaker 1: like one or whatever date I said, right, yes, sorry, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: well for now we'll go on the wrong one, the
Speaker 1: one that I got off offers. Yeah, Um, I didn't
Speaker 1: ask you. I should have asked you. So historians like
Speaker 1: to argue about whether or not movable type found its
Speaker 1: way over from China or whether it was like invented
Speaker 1: whole cloth separately. Um. There's a couple other people who
Speaker 1: were like, no, I swear I invented at the same
Speaker 1: time over in the Netherlands. It just didn't like take off, right,
Speaker 1: And so a lot of people were like thinking about
Speaker 1: these concepts at the same time. And Gutenberg of force
Speaker 1: also didn't like solely invented. He was working with a
Speaker 1: bunch of other people whose names are forgotten from mystery,
Speaker 1: who I didn't feel like writing into my script, so
Speaker 1: they will continue to be forgotten. And he still did
Speaker 1: a lot no matter what. He got an immovable type,
Speaker 1: and he also invented an alloy of lead, tin and
Speaker 1: antimony called type metal that was very good to cast
Speaker 1: type out of, basically like making you know, casting each
Speaker 1: individual letter so that you can print with it. Sure,
Speaker 1: he developed really neat ways of casting type. He developed
Speaker 1: oil based inks that did a really good job of printing,
Speaker 1: and just like all around good job Gutenberg. He he
Speaker 1: took things further than anyone else had taken them as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, mhm. And this time movable type.
Speaker 1: It takes off. Within a decade, it's all over Europe.
Speaker 1: You've got this massive explosion of media and literacy and
Speaker 1: all kinds of neat ship. The most famous thing he
Speaker 1: did is in that fourteen fifty five or you know,
Speaker 1: before he even invented this, in he printed the Gutenberg Bible,
Speaker 1: which was the first type set Bible, which probably did
Speaker 1: a lot for people being Christians. I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 1: The printing press first reached Mexico and the fifteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: it first reached what became later the US in early
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds, when a woman actually started the first printing
Speaker 1: press in the United States, Elizabeth Glover feminist icon, I know,
Speaker 1: and like many medieval feminist icons or Renaissance femist icons
Speaker 1: or whatever, she became in charge of things through the
Speaker 1: old fashioned method of her husband dying. Her husband was like,
Speaker 1: we're taking this print and press to America, babe, and
Speaker 1: she was like, all right, that's cool. And then on
Speaker 1: the boat over he mysteriously died. I don't actually think
Speaker 1: she murdered him, but I wish she had. That would
Speaker 1: have been more. I like that headcanon though, And so
Speaker 1: you know, he probably died of smallpox. Because it's the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century, right, So women have been involved in printing
Speaker 1: since the beginning of printing, basically before it was the US.
Speaker 1: The first woman editor of a newspaper was named Katerina Zanger,
Speaker 1: who took over the business from her husband. And this
Speaker 1: time she took over because he was in jail for printing.
Speaker 1: Like pamphlets critical of the governor, and then later he
Speaker 1: died and so she became the first woman editor of
Speaker 1: a newspaper. Mm hmm. Western World gets ahold of the
Speaker 1: printing press and printing they did. And the thing that's
Speaker 1: really interesting is that for fucking hundreds of years, more
Speaker 1: or less than toil than eighteen eighties, the basic idea
Speaker 1: of how printing was done didn't change mm hmm. Like
Speaker 1: it was a stationary and not entirely right. There was
Speaker 1: like different things people developed, but overall more or less
Speaker 1: like a mature technology for like four hundred years. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, when it's not broke, don't fix it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: until whatever e eighties and then fix it. Yeah, and yep, Wow,
Speaker 1: amazing contribution, Caitlin. I'm killing it and being so funny
Speaker 1: and charming and hilarious. Yeah, you're totally going to get
Speaker 1: your cold here. Thank you, Sophie get at left. I
Speaker 1: don't know why I were doing this bit where if
Speaker 1: you don't perform, you stay sick. You invent I know,
Speaker 1: but but why did you let me? I thought you
Speaker 1: were in charge? No, this is yeah, you're the arbiter
Speaker 1: of accountability. So interesting, not funny kitly. Oh no, I
Speaker 1: feel so sick. So the way that people sit type
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years, going back to Gutenberg, is that
Speaker 1: type setters would spell out each word letter by letter.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen a type case, like an actual
Speaker 1: physical object that holds type. I have no idea how
Speaker 1: common about I think in real life, but I feel
Speaker 1: like I've seen it in a movie, maybe at the
Speaker 1: end of like Little Women or something like that. Yeah. Probably,
Speaker 1: you know. It's funny too to me because like, um,
Speaker 1: a lot of the like little like knickknack shelves that
Speaker 1: people have in their house, like the little tiny knick
Speaker 1: knack shells, a little tiny squares cut out of it
Speaker 1: or whatever, right, Like I think actually a lot of
Speaker 1: them are literally type cases wooden cases like trays meant
Speaker 1: for holding type. And certainly that that's an easy way
Speaker 1: to imagine a type case. And this is where upper
Speaker 1: case and lower case letters come from. Is like literally
Speaker 1: the capitals were in the upper case and the non
Speaker 1: capitals were in the lower case. So you pull out
Speaker 1: a letter one at a time, and you put it
Speaker 1: upside down and backwards onto something called a composity and stick,
Speaker 1: which is a little stick that you can fit type into.
Speaker 1: You do it one line at a time until it
Speaker 1: goes into an iron frame called a chase, and you
Speaker 1: fill everything, all the rest of it up with like
Speaker 1: blocks of wood or different slugs of lead and all
Speaker 1: this other ship in order to like fill it all
Speaker 1: up right to do the layout, and then that gets
Speaker 1: inked and printed. And some folks still do this. I
Speaker 1: got to do it once. I used to have business.
Speaker 1: I'm totally not pretentious. I used a business cards that
Speaker 1: I like. Yeah, I use my friends letter press to
Speaker 1: hand set all the type on my fun And did
Speaker 1: that take a very long time. It's like I don't
Speaker 1: have the longest name in the world. I don't even remember.
Speaker 1: I mean, I didn't know what I was doing. And
Speaker 1: my poor friend had likes it over my shoulder and
Speaker 1: be like, now you're doing it wrong, like several times. Um,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. I didn't didn't take an hour
Speaker 1: just to lay out my name or whatever. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess a business card doesn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: text on it. Yeah, unless I get into like the
Speaker 1: Dr Bronner's style business cards or something which food for thought. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if someone hand me a business carden, it was like
Speaker 1: full of indecipherable, complicated theology. I would probably be more
Speaker 1: interested in what in my own fighting into my life.
Speaker 1: So the type setting is a nasty business in the
Speaker 1: colonial era, and actually for a long long time, presses
Speaker 1: were cleaned with urine to get the end lie and
Speaker 1: all kinds of off. You don't really want to hang
Speaker 1: out with urine. I don't know, and I wish I did,
Speaker 1: and nothing I immediately read would tell me mm hmm.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether it's animal urine or whether like
Speaker 1: a lot of these printers drank a lot of beer,
Speaker 1: so it could have just been there urine, I don't know.
Speaker 1: In dark, unventilated basements is where you were working, they'd
Speaker 1: be like lit by like whale oil lamps or kerosene,
Speaker 1: depending on the era. Sometimes these rooms are a hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty degrees because of all the type molten crap
Speaker 1: that they're fucking dealing with. Typesetters would hold lead type
Speaker 1: in their mouths in order, you know, in the same
Speaker 1: way that you hold a nail while you're being a
Speaker 1: cartoon character on a ladder with a hammer. So they're
Speaker 1: getting lead poisoning. They're breathing in piss fumes, it's hot,
Speaker 1: it's you know, there's flammable lamps. Yeah, getting knocked over,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah, actually that gets us. That's guess
Speaker 1: to someone I want to mention. In the eight hundreds,
Speaker 1: at one point um it was estimated at twelve percent
Speaker 1: of printers had had the symptom spits blood. M I
Speaker 1: don't know. He's just spinning some blood up every now
Speaker 1: and then he's like, oh, hold on, guess it's some
Speaker 1: blood up, which I've seen a movie. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen a movie, but if someone is
Speaker 1: coughing there, they might die. If someone is spitting up blood,
Speaker 1: they are not even making it to the last act
Speaker 1: of the film. They're they're already dead. And that's what
Speaker 1: I will get sick with if I'm not funny Enough's
Speaker 1: blood my hardcore band. So they contracted a friend of
Speaker 1: the pod tuberculosis at about twice the rate of everyone else,
Speaker 1: which was saying something because everyone else got a lot
Speaker 1: of tuberculosis and venture and the presses themselves were crazy dangerous.
Speaker 1: Like at one point it was like like they would
Speaker 1: like eat fingers, you know, like because why it's just
Speaker 1: like you get your finger in the wrong way and like, whoops,
Speaker 1: it gets sliced off. Whatever. Sorry, I thought you were
Speaker 1: talking about the people who worked at the press and
Speaker 1: they were just just that's why the printers roamed as
Speaker 1: they needed new flesh eat. So it's like that movie. Um,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, this would have been a good joke
Speaker 1: if I could have thought of the title of the
Speaker 1: movie I just saw two days ago. No, klin are
Speaker 1: you coughing? You can't get the joke out. It's the
Speaker 1: Blood Bones and all buns and all. Well, that's a
Speaker 1: good name for a movie. I've never heard of it. Um,
Speaker 1: it's about like cannibal, like the early twenties cannibal people
Speaker 1: calling in love anyway, So you're speaking of the machine
Speaker 1: itself eats people's fingers, not the people. Are people probably
Speaker 1: not eating a ton of fingers, Like, can't say never sure,
Speaker 1: But you know what else won't eat your fingers? You
Speaker 1: don't know that. You know what else probably won't eat
Speaker 1: your fingers most of the time. Approved is it the
Speaker 1: products and services you're about to hear about? It is?
Speaker 1: And if it's one of those true crime podcasts about
Speaker 1: people who eat people, then I was wrong and we
Speaker 1: didn't authorize it. Here's some podcasts. No, here's some ads,
Speaker 1: usually for podcasts. And we are back, Kalen. What do
Speaker 1: you think of those, um buying goods and services? Oh
Speaker 1: my favorite. Yeah, they're so good, except for the terrible ones. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is a lot of them. So the other ways
Speaker 1: that prints would die, uh sometimes they would dry the
Speaker 1: type like the ink over flame. And sometimes for some
Speaker 1: odd reason, drying ink on paper over flame would ignite.
Speaker 1: Uh uh yeah, and so that wasn't very good. Um.
Speaker 1: And then my other weird self insert about printing into
Speaker 1: this episode is that I apprenticed as a as a
Speaker 1: printer for one summer once when I was bored, and
Speaker 1: and the first day I showed up Charles Oberbeck, who
Speaker 1: wrote the book Tramp Printers, which is a lot of
Speaker 1: what I'm pulling from. It's a very good book. He
Speaker 1: was like, you need to tie your hair back. If
Speaker 1: that falls into the machine, it will rip your hair
Speaker 1: out of your scalp. So and that's the modern offset printers.
Speaker 1: That's not so. I don't know whether people were losing
Speaker 1: their hair or not. I can't speak to that part.
Speaker 1: I mean, if they're losing fingers, they're probably losing hair, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So the life expectancy for printers from about eight eighteen
Speaker 1: five D was you want to guess this fun was
Speaker 1: it like thirty seven years old? It's so optimistic less,
Speaker 1: I guess probably the average lifespan that during that time,
Speaker 1: let's thirty seven. So let's say twenty six, it was
Speaker 1: twenty eight years old. Okay, that's how long printers were lasting.
Speaker 1: Later they get unionized and we'll talk about that part
Speaker 1: of the story in a little bit, and their life
Speaker 1: expectancy went up dramatically, so much so that by the
Speaker 1: average printer lived to be forty one years Wow for them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so printing was actually this very no future job. It
Speaker 1: was very punk rock in all of the negative ways,
Speaker 1: you know. Hell yeah, printing was fairly cheap all told.
Speaker 1: During this time. With this style of printing, you could
Speaker 1: start a press without a ton of capital compared to
Speaker 1: a lot of other business ventures. So presses followed the
Speaker 1: westward expansion across the US as part of the great
Speaker 1: colonial project that they don't really have very many positive
Speaker 1: things to say about. Often, mere days after a town
Speaker 1: or something would show up, ox drawn carts would bring
Speaker 1: hand presses out to the frontier, and some of which
Speaker 1: were up and running and like printing that town's newspaper
Speaker 1: before buildings were erected to house the presses. Because the
Speaker 1: presses are these like giant hulking industrial machine, not giant hulking,
Speaker 1: but like they're sturdy, right, sure you can. You can
Speaker 1: have it out in the weather a little bit. And
Speaker 1: at least in the beginning of Paddington too, I've seen
Speaker 1: a printing press, yeah, totally. And I've know who Paddington
Speaker 1: Bear is. For those listening eight full twenty six minutes
Speaker 1: for Caitlin's reference Paddington And that is a new record,
Speaker 1: my friend. How long do you think it will take
Speaker 1: into my reference Titanic? It's right now. It just happened.
Speaker 1: We just well, we actually already talked about Shrekh, although
Speaker 1: in a different way to speak of the green ogre
Speaker 1: Shrek who was also have that come up? Mm hmm. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So one of the other dangers of printing presses was
Speaker 1: that you could say stuff with printing presses very easily.
Speaker 1: And some people don't like it when you talk shit,
Speaker 1: but it's a very good machine for talking. Ship a
Speaker 1: lot of people started getting shot and stabbed over what
Speaker 1: they said in their papers, especially in the US Frontier,
Speaker 1: especially when they were saying stuff like maybe pretending like
Speaker 1: you own people is a bad thing. So I don't
Speaker 1: know if you knew this, but the entire US had
Speaker 1: this whole big argument about that concept. At one point
Speaker 1: it got kind of violent. Yeah, yeah, I remember, I
Speaker 1: was no, I wasn't there. So take, for instance, Susan B.
Speaker 1: Anthony's brother. He was a newspaper editor named Daniel Read Anthony.
Speaker 1: He moved to Kansas and he set up an anti
Speaker 1: slavery newspaper because he wanted to, and that is a
Speaker 1: good thing to want to do and a good thing
Speaker 1: to do. So he's our first named cool person who
Speaker 1: did cool stuff in this episode. Nice. His first week
Speaker 1: running that paper living in Kansas, he was attacked three
Speaker 1: times by pro slavery mobs, and that motherfucker he spent
Speaker 1: his life walking around with two horse pistols on his waist.
Speaker 1: What is a horse pistol, you might ask, I was
Speaker 1: just gonna ask, I had to ask. I asked the internet.
Speaker 1: Horse pistol is his old timey pistol that's so large
Speaker 1: that you can't comfortably carry it at your waist, you
Speaker 1: carry it on your horse alongside the saddles. Just a
Speaker 1: big old pirate gun. And now do you think that
Speaker 1: when you saw that bit of graffiti in you said Amsterdam,
Speaker 1: and I said, like for originally it said what was
Speaker 1: it like, change the world make it worse? The world,
Speaker 1: make it worse, and then someone change changed that to
Speaker 1: said to say make it horsey. Do you think that's
Speaker 1: what they meant by make it horsey? Probably to introduce
Speaker 1: some horse pistols. Yeah. It was actually a a big
Speaker 1: second pro Second Amendment movement in Amsterdam where they said
Speaker 1: we should amend things so that we can carry horse pistols.
Speaker 1: Very specific argument that they that they were making. So
Speaker 1: our guy, Daniel Reid Anthony he uh, he carried two
Speaker 1: of them at his waist, even though they specifically were
Speaker 1: designed for being too big to carry at your waist.
Speaker 1: And the two of them, I think, I think these
Speaker 1: are single shot pistols. Is like long enough ago, right,
Speaker 1: I don't think that. I think that's why he is too.
Speaker 1: It's not so he's like dual wielding them anime style,
Speaker 1: but the whole thing has a very anime vibe of
Speaker 1: like two oversized guns mm hmm. He also got into
Speaker 1: arguments with other publishers. There was a rival pro slavery
Speaker 1: publisher who called him a coward. Daniel Reid Anthony, not
Speaker 1: being a coward, challenged him to a duel. I am
Speaker 1: not coming in one way or the other about the
Speaker 1: dual argument and masculinity and autonomy and all kinds of
Speaker 1: weird ship. Sure, he told the guy h and shot
Speaker 1: him to death in the street and was acquitted at trial.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure his defense was we were dueling, it's Kansas,
Speaker 1: leave me alone. I feel like that was a valid
Speaker 1: defense back in the day. Yeah, during the Civil War,
Speaker 1: after he shot a one pro slavery guy to death,
Speaker 1: he volunteered and joined the cavalry, and so he probably
Speaker 1: was able to vent this point to start keeping his
Speaker 1: horse pistols on his horse because using the cavalry. He
Speaker 1: later he gets out and he goes back to Kansas
Speaker 1: and he keeps publishing papers. A rival publisher shoots him
Speaker 1: in the chest, not in a duel, just ambushes him,
Speaker 1: and she was I know she was. People when you're dueling,
Speaker 1: consensual shooting. When you're dueling, you know what you're getting into.
Speaker 1: You're like, I might be shot. I might shoot someone,
Speaker 1: but we're both it's two consenting parties. Yeah, well I
Speaker 1: think that that's what Kansas was a fine, that's consent state.
Speaker 1: If you're if you have an opinion pro or anti
Speaker 1: slavery in Kansas, you're consenting to shoot or be shot
Speaker 1: at the other side. Yeah. So he survives getting shot
Speaker 1: right next to the heart, and like everyone thought he
Speaker 1: was dead, and he was like, no, I'm not dead,
Speaker 1: I'm fucking Daniel read Anthony, And so he kept publishing
Speaker 1: a bunch of dangerous ship and another paper. During all
Speaker 1: of this stuff. There was like he was not the
Speaker 1: only newspaper writer. It was like shooting and getting shots
Speaker 1: right all this He's just the one who I found
Speaker 1: most interesting. Another paper at the time wrote that someone
Speaker 1: should quote stuff and preserve a specimen Kansas editor before
Speaker 1: the race becomes extinct altogether, because they were all dying
Speaker 1: so much. Who knew that between having to work in
Speaker 1: weird little basements covered in piss while you're spitting up
Speaker 1: blood and getting shot all the time for the rhetoric
Speaker 1: that you're printing, that it would be one of the
Speaker 1: most dangerous professions of the time. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like a real like rough and tumble job. And and
Speaker 1: one of the things is going to come up a
Speaker 1: little bit later. But at the time, newspaper editors mostly
Speaker 1: came out of being type setters rather than later, once
Speaker 1: type setting became a less specialized craft with the additional
Speaker 1: addition additional machinery, more and more type setters were coming
Speaker 1: out of like journalism school. And I'm not making an
Speaker 1: opinion about this, um, but basically it was like we
Speaker 1: had to be a weird, rough and tumble type setter
Speaker 1: in order to end up being a newspaper editor for
Speaker 1: a while. So they should make a movie about that anyway.
Speaker 1: And actually, yeah, like the Cowboys of the West, but
Speaker 1: they're typesetters, type setters. Yeah, now these people like this
Speaker 1: is like why I like picked this topic because I
Speaker 1: had heard a little bits and hints because the person
Speaker 1: I promised underwrote the book about them and would talk
Speaker 1: about them sometimes, you know, and I would like to
Speaker 1: hear these little bits and hints of this like culture
Speaker 1: that I had no idea about, and no one I
Speaker 1: this is not a not to be like, oh I've
Speaker 1: uncovered this forgotten, but it's just like it's it's just
Speaker 1: not the ship we talk about, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: within the specific mythos of like the wild West that
Speaker 1: people talk about. Mm hmm. So there was another enemy
Speaker 1: that editors and printers faced, which was capitalist exploitation, and
Speaker 1: I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad that this
Speaker 1: is a it's a relic of the nineteenth century. It's
Speaker 1: thank goodness it's no longer. They figured out a way
Speaker 1: to fight against that, and which brings us to some
Speaker 1: of the coolest and some of the well the big
Speaker 1: one funk off on cool. Part of what we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about is their labor union done. That's my
Speaker 1: like clippanger even I'm about to go into it because
Speaker 1: at the end of the episode, thank you appreciate that
Speaker 1: we're going back in time again. The U S didn't
Speaker 1: even have a constitution yet. That would come next year,
Speaker 1: and it only had its name the United States of
Speaker 1: America for ten years. And so some printers in Philadelphia
Speaker 1: they were like, we're being treated like ship, and we
Speaker 1: don't like it. And a couple of years earlier, some
Speaker 1: printers in New York have been like, we're being treated
Speaker 1: like ship. We don't like it. If you don't pay
Speaker 1: us more, we'll walk off the job. And the editors
Speaker 1: have been like, all right, well, here's some money. And
Speaker 1: so they tried to do the same thing in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: They were like, we're being treated like shit. We want
Speaker 1: a dollar a day. Because at the time, a lot
Speaker 1: of labors are getting paid by the day, and you
Speaker 1: have this like nasty thing that employers would do where
Speaker 1: if you're paying someone by the day, you hire them
Speaker 1: during the summer when the days are long, and then
Speaker 1: you fire them in the winter when the days are short. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so the printers were getting that happening, and they
Speaker 1: were like, look, we want a dollar a day, and
Speaker 1: they went on strike. Only they didn't use the word
Speaker 1: strike because it was so long ago that strike wasn't
Speaker 1: used in that context in the US. Yet it became
Speaker 1: a in case anyone was curious. It became a verb
Speaker 1: in seventeen sixty eight when English sailors struck, which is
Speaker 1: probably a reference to them taking down the sales, striking
Speaker 1: the sales. And it's likely that it didn't become a
Speaker 1: noun like a strike until a long time later. But
Speaker 1: I don't know, I mean, I do know. I read
Speaker 1: some matemology about it, but I'm not sure entirely believe it.
Speaker 1: The thing I read claimed it wasn't until the eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds that people used to the down, and but it
Speaker 1: was like what it was a verb like hundred years
Speaker 1: before that anyway, whatever, I know, you really came here
Speaker 1: for the amology of strike. So what they did they
Speaker 1: called a turnout, and turn out they did, and they won.
Speaker 1: And this was America's first labor strike as America and
Speaker 1: um and it was one apparently fairly handily all right, nice,
Speaker 1: And so they start being like, printers are like, oh,
Speaker 1: we we stick together, right, And they already had kind
Speaker 1: of a guild model going on, sort of based on
Speaker 1: the craft guilds that you would have like the medieval
Speaker 1: guild system of apprenticeships and all that ship, right, And
Speaker 1: but it's like unionizing started kind of coming around. They
Speaker 1: were like, we're going to form a union, and it
Speaker 1: started off informally, like a lot of good things do.
Speaker 1: They agreed that they would never give up the right
Speaker 1: to strike, and they went for a long apprent They
Speaker 1: like coalesced and held strong this idea of printers would
Speaker 1: have a long apprenticeship program before they would like become
Speaker 1: guild members or union members or whatever, and they emphasized
Speaker 1: being like really good at the work and taking pride
Speaker 1: in a job well done instead of just like just
Speaker 1: being laborers or whatever. They also worked for closed shops,
Speaker 1: basically being like, no, everyone who works in the shop
Speaker 1: must be a member of the union. They also worked
Speaker 1: to keep printing a sort of secret society which had
Speaker 1: actually been going on for hundreds of years. There's this
Speaker 1: whole weird, ironic and kind of interesting thing I want
Speaker 1: to know more about some point where with a history
Speaker 1: of printing in the Western world, most information about printing
Speaker 1: passed by word of mouth rather than the printed word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's irony. I know, I mean, I think it is.
Speaker 1: I got my brain got broken when two people told
Speaker 1: me when I was a teenager and they told me
Speaker 1: that lensmore SAT's song ironic isn't ironic, And so then
Speaker 1: I just stopped comprehending the word people to even have
Speaker 1: the capacity to understand what irony is. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm like, is this irony? I still don't quite know.
Speaker 1: There was like a Freemason's but for like printers. Yeah, basically, wow,
Speaker 1: teenage Margaret's mind would have been blown, whoa, it isn't
Speaker 1: that ironic. Maybe I don't think it's probably not sardonic.
Speaker 1: I feel like I have a stronger handle on that,
Speaker 1: which is like sarcast. See I don't even know what
Speaker 1: sardonic means even a little bit unsick. Oh wait, grimly
Speaker 1: I'm not even joking about grimly, mocking or cynical. Well
Speaker 1: that describes me quite a bit. So yeah, you're fairly sardonic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean thanks, Yeah, wow, Okay. I was glad I
Speaker 1: had listened to beckdel Cast before I came onto beckdel Cast,
Speaker 1: because I was like, ah, I see this is the
Speaker 1: dry humor, which I really like. I really like dry humor.
Speaker 1: But thank you. Yeah yeah, so u s printers. They
Speaker 1: took this close shot mentality seriously and they distributed rat lists,
Speaker 1: which was that everyone who worked for too cheap um
Speaker 1: or otherwise betrayed everyone else, because if you took a
Speaker 1: printing job for less than the going rate, you funk
Speaker 1: up everyone's ability to get that rate. So these were
Speaker 1: like the scabs, yeah exactly. And it was kind of
Speaker 1: before this came about, even before they were a union,
Speaker 1: I believe, so it wasn't even quite scabbing. Because they
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily like working on a place that was on strike.
Speaker 1: But just basically, if you were like working for cheap
Speaker 1: as a printery, you or a fucking rat. And if
Speaker 1: you taught non union workers how to print, you would
Speaker 1: be ostracized, ship talked, or just jumped. And that actually
Speaker 1: will tie back into the really messy thing about all
Speaker 1: of this. Got it. Eventually they created the National Typographical
Speaker 1: Union in eighteen d two, which was the first national
Speaker 1: trade union in the US. And the union was so
Speaker 1: old school that it stuck to a bunch of medieval
Speaker 1: ship I think left over from it being basically a guild.
Speaker 1: The local union was called a chapel, and the chapel
Speaker 1: elected a father as the chairman, who is the most
Speaker 1: senior member of the shop. Okay, what about a mother? Well,
Speaker 1: sound we'll talk. Actually this isn't the big route. They
Speaker 1: did let women in. But first, do you know who
Speaker 1: else has a craft or profession that they operate within
Speaker 1: a marketplace in order to feed themselves and other people
Speaker 1: and then advertise the things that they create on podcasts?
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say, you know who
Speaker 1: else let women in? That's where I thought you were
Speaker 1: going with that, the Highway State Patrol. Who oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's advertised on this show in a
Speaker 1: very long time, maybe never on this one. No. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I we actually were able to get them removed. It
Speaker 1: just took an absurd amount of time and we had
Speaker 1: no power over it, and it made me very unhappy.
Speaker 1: I'm so tired. Well, all of the ads that you
Speaker 1: were about to listen to were handpicked by Caitlyn Durante.
Speaker 1: And if you have any problem morally ethically whatever the
Speaker 1: difference who those two words is? Speaking of words, I
Speaker 1: don't know the difference between I use all the time.
Speaker 1: You can talk to Caitlyn Durrante about your problems with
Speaker 1: the ads that are now about to be her, and
Speaker 1: you can tweet at her at at I right, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's okay, like oklahoma, not okay, like okay, okay, and
Speaker 1: we are back. Yeah. So your father was the most
Speaker 1: senior member of your shop most most of the time. Uh.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether or not any specific ones had mothers,
Speaker 1: or whether women in that role called fathers. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: cool thing, I don't know if you knew this, but
Speaker 1: sometimes we're written out of history and they only talk
Speaker 1: about boys. What. I've never heard that before. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that would be a massive Was that me being sardonic?
Speaker 1: I still don't understand quite now. I don't know mo
Speaker 1: being sardonic when you say that, I don't know, or
Speaker 1: am I being ironic? I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1: We should ask the expert. What if one day we
Speaker 1: get just giving people the we don't know ironic, the
Speaker 1: we don't know? I think Caitlyn sardonic. I think Caitlyn
Speaker 1: is sardonic as well. I take that as a huge compliment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's intended you don't give me the ick, and I
Speaker 1: haven't seen you being ironic in the last four minutes.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with sardonic. Yeah, okay, cool passive illumination. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be the thing that we get the
Speaker 1: most random Internet people giving us feedback on on anything
Speaker 1: that's done on the shop. Yeah. Actually, sardonic means blah
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. Also, um, somebody some I'm like again
Speaker 1: at I write okay on Twitter, that is where you
Speaker 1: can send that feedback. Yeah, and if you want to
Speaker 1: get through I write okay spam filters, you have to um,
Speaker 1: the secret code is you look up the word pedant
Speaker 1: and then you put the copy and paste the definition
Speaker 1: of the word pedant into it. All right, which wasn't
Speaker 1: a slight at I right, Okay, it was a slight
Speaker 1: about people who have a problem with Okay whatever. Anyway,
Speaker 1: all right, so all of this should have ruled all
Speaker 1: this stuff about the union, Like they sound fucking cool
Speaker 1: as hell, And I started off this episode researching and
Speaker 1: being like, hell, yeah, these people rule. Um. They did
Speaker 1: a lot of good stuff. They supported strikes, they organized
Speaker 1: legal defense funds, They built retirement homes for their union printers.
Speaker 1: They soon became the international type of epical union when
Speaker 1: they started including Canadian printers. They struck for the shorter
Speaker 1: hour work day for decades. They lost the fight for
Speaker 1: the nine hour workday in eight seven, but they won
Speaker 1: the eight hour worked in nineteen o seven after organizing
Speaker 1: strikes all across the country, and this paved the way
Speaker 1: for other trades to win the same concessions. So they
Speaker 1: did all of this amazing groundbreaking work. They were one
Speaker 1: of the first unions to let women in. Uh. They
Speaker 1: absorbed the Women's Typographical Union of New York in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, and the logic they used makes sense. They
Speaker 1: were like, well, if we allow women into the union,
Speaker 1: then women won't be hired as scabs, you know, because
Speaker 1: they're with us, right And and most of what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about today, the most of the stuff that's woken
Speaker 1: into the history is mostly about individual men. But there
Speaker 1: were women there too. For a lot of printing presses.
Speaker 1: Through a couple of the different decades that I'll be
Speaker 1: talking about, the majority of printers were women. Um, they
Speaker 1: were a minority of the tramp printers. They still did
Speaker 1: do that, but for a lot of well basically, women
Speaker 1: didn't have a fucking never have an easy time in
Speaker 1: the workplace, and so they faced a lot of harassment
Speaker 1: in the workplace. And so like randomly going to new
Speaker 1: shops all the time as a tramp printer meant exposing
Speaker 1: yourself to harassment on the road and meant exposing yourself
Speaker 1: to a whole new set of people. Um, just like
Speaker 1: being a comedian, like a woman in comedy. Yeah, going
Speaker 1: on the road, everyone's being gross at you. Anyway, Well,
Speaker 1: clearly you must have been doing it in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: because now that would never happen exactly if you imagine
Speaker 1: it happening, you're wrong and incorrectly assessing the amount of
Speaker 1: harassment that you're receiving. Yes, um, somehow I wish I
Speaker 1: knew what time they stopped using gas for gaslights, so
Speaker 1: I could somehow tight it in a little bit more efficiently,
Speaker 1: because no one got gasolate in the twentieth century because
Speaker 1: it was electrical. That's my joke. I'm desperately trying to
Speaker 1: make jokes as if I'm the one who's gonna get
Speaker 1: sick if I sucked this up. Well, you know what,
Speaker 1: the tables have turned. Helen Torrante decides who lives and dies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: put that on a T shirt and well, so one
Speaker 1: thing that was cool by the women in the Union
Speaker 1: were given equal pay same as men hundred fifty years
Speaker 1: ago printing women in the Union got the same equal
Speaker 1: pay for white women. That's the bad part. This is
Speaker 1: the part that we're going to talk about. Here's where
Speaker 1: the story gets shitty. They didn't let black people into
Speaker 1: the union. For a long time, I've run across conflicting
Speaker 1: information about this in a couple of books, like as
Speaker 1: best as I can tell. For the first very long time,
Speaker 1: at least for the first seventy years of the union,
Speaker 1: they either explicitly excluded black workers from joining or they
Speaker 1: have allowed individual locals to choose to exclude black workers.
Speaker 1: My this is the former, but I have read things
Speaker 1: that make both claims. Okay, the black author who have
Speaker 1: anything I've ever read by him for this show has
Speaker 1: just been a fucking hit and it's like amazing. W. B.
Speaker 1: Dubois wrote about this in UM and this isn't a
Speaker 1: magazine that on the front says is union printed quote.
Speaker 1: I carry on the title page, for instance, of this
Speaker 1: magazine the union label. And yet I know and every
Speaker 1: one of my Negro readers knows that the very fact
Speaker 1: that this label is there is an advertisement that no
Speaker 1: Negro's hand is engaged in the printing of this magazine,
Speaker 1: since the International Typographical Union systematically and deliberately excludes every
Speaker 1: Negro that it dares from membership, no matter what his qualifications.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that really cuts it. What's really
Speaker 1: important is now the label union made means white, maide
Speaker 1: in this union that tries to be the union of
Speaker 1: printers in the entire country. UM and this is awful
Speaker 1: A ton of levels like one. It's awful because fuck
Speaker 1: them for not allowing black people into their union. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And second of all, it makes everything they did that
Speaker 1: should have been really cool really shitty because closed shop
Speaker 1: unions are an important part of labor organizing practices right
Speaker 1: where you have to be union in order to work
Speaker 1: certain industries. If you're if your clothes shop union is racist,
Speaker 1: then it's systematically excluding people from entire industries, and it's
Speaker 1: not just any industry. Printing was the only form of
Speaker 1: mass communication for most of this time. Of course, black
Speaker 1: folks printed anyways, just not in the I t U.
Speaker 1: And since the I TU tried to maintain a monopoly
Speaker 1: over print shops, that put them in conflict in the
Speaker 1: I t U s eighteen sixty nine and eighteen seventy conventions,
Speaker 1: this whole thing was angrily and fiercely debated, and uh
Speaker 1: a sizeable minority of people wanted to not be a
Speaker 1: bunch of fucking racists. They lost out, and they used
Speaker 1: a peculiar and shitty and hypocritical logic of how they
Speaker 1: excluded black people. The first person who was specifically excluded
Speaker 1: for race was Frederick Douglas's son L. H. Douglas. He
Speaker 1: tried to join the Union, and the argument against letting
Speaker 1: him was, Look, this has nothing to do with race.
Speaker 1: We're not racists. It's just that he's a rat, and
Speaker 1: we hate him because he was a rat because he
Speaker 1: had worked printing jobs because he wasn't allowed being the union,
Speaker 1: which was the inverse of this is exactly the argument
Speaker 1: that they used about why they let women in, right,
Speaker 1: because they didn't want women to be rats, so they
Speaker 1: let them in. And I really don't like this. It
Speaker 1: just makes me really angry. I like, I discovered this, like,
Speaker 1: um like three quarters of the way through researching the topic,
Speaker 1: and I'm so angry. I'm so pissed off. It does
Speaker 1: really taint things. And I know that the national Organization
Speaker 1: did not pass a resolution um that some folks tried
Speaker 1: to pass stopping racial discrimination. And I don't know whether
Speaker 1: or not individual locals lead in black people, because I
Speaker 1: know there were black tramp printers because a couple of
Speaker 1: them came up in the reading, but they were likely
Speaker 1: from the later the twentieth century incarnation of tramp printing,
Speaker 1: which was also through the I tu the the Union,
Speaker 1: but it was a different time. And I can't find
Speaker 1: when the Union started letting black people in my guest
Speaker 1: is somewhere between the twenties and the fifties, because that's
Speaker 1: when most of the less radical American labor unions start
Speaker 1: to reckon with their racism. And I do know that
Speaker 1: they were like on the side of some splits within
Speaker 1: the labor movement that were like the good and less
Speaker 1: racist side of some splits in like the twenties and thirties.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I feel like I like get punished
Speaker 1: for like I've all the other times I've talked about
Speaker 1: unions on the show, I've been talking about like the
Speaker 1: radical unions, and the radical unions were always like what
Speaker 1: the funk That union won't let put someone in based
Speaker 1: on their race? Fuck them, you know. And I'm usually
Speaker 1: using these unions that are kind of examples of like
Speaker 1: when people are like, oh, everyone's racist the time, and
Speaker 1: be like not these fucking people, fuck you, you know,
Speaker 1: uh today, uh So anyway, whatever, Okay, So that's our
Speaker 1: our union. That seems really cool, but it's kind of
Speaker 1: sucked up when you look under the hood. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk a little bit more about the systems
Speaker 1: that they set up and how it ties in a
Speaker 1: tramp printing this is this is a real kill Joy
Speaker 1: strikes again our today with this particular episode. So if
Speaker 1: you're a printer, if you want to be a printer,
Speaker 1: and you're a white kid, you start off as an apprentice,
Speaker 1: he says. The whole thing is wildly old timey even
Speaker 1: for its day. The apprentices get called printers, devils um
Speaker 1: when they're working in the chapel under the father Nothing.
Speaker 1: I love this language. That. Yeah, and you start at
Speaker 1: the age of like twelve, there's the youngest twelve, and
Speaker 1: you get called a devil because you start off in
Speaker 1: the hot and toxic casting room, which is where all
Speaker 1: the damaged type gets dumped into a quote hell box
Speaker 1: in order to be melted down and recast. Sorry, let
Speaker 1: me back up for a second. They so it's this
Speaker 1: union that excludes black people number one, And it's also
Speaker 1: like child labor is awesome. What are you saying? Just
Speaker 1: checking just what I want to make sure I understand that,
Speaker 1: you think, Yeah, where you take the children and you
Speaker 1: put them in the room with the most toxic stuff. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: are they still cleaning things with piss? Believe? And actually
Speaker 1: one of the things that the union does a little
Speaker 1: bit later is someone develops like it was so excited
Speaker 1: that you were like yes, like is there pp cleaning products?
Speaker 1: Good to know? Fantastic? At one point, I don't think
Speaker 1: this person in the script at one point, uh, the
Speaker 1: union like they often try to stop new technologies that
Speaker 1: are specific I mean a lot of the new technologies
Speaker 1: are specifically like let's break the union and by creating
Speaker 1: these new technologies that lets us fire a bunch of workers.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the technologies they stopped was
Speaker 1: a way to clean with like these like rolling devices
Speaker 1: that didn't involve hearing. In the union was like no,
Speaker 1: we we want our piss um. That was probably the
Speaker 1: signs that they held up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they
Speaker 1: successfully stopped that technology. So as a as a young
Speaker 1: printer's devil, Caitlin, it's your job to build up the
Speaker 1: shop fire in the morning, hall water, wash rollers and
Speaker 1: forms m piss yes, yes, with piss fold newspapers, maybe
Speaker 1: deliver the newspapers that her seems likely kind of blurry,
Speaker 1: seems to tie into the newsiest thing, and it's probably
Speaker 1: different in different place. I was gonna say, wow, there's
Speaker 1: a lot a lot of tie ins. Yeah, you would
Speaker 1: also dis the type as well, which means you take
Speaker 1: they used letters out and you put them back in
Speaker 1: the case, which is how you learn the type cases
Speaker 1: so well, as you spend years just taking all the
Speaker 1: like when they're done printing, you just like take out
Speaker 1: each individual letter and put it back. M hm. And
Speaker 1: the apprentices were hazed mostly in jovial ways, because the
Speaker 1: mean part of hazing was the job, you know, like
Speaker 1: hanging out in lead fumes and having a short life expectancy,
Speaker 1: like you're twelve, you're halfway done, kid um. The fun
Speaker 1: hazing was that you would like send them out for
Speaker 1: impossible task. This kind of ship still happens in offices
Speaker 1: and stuff like go find a left handed wrench, or
Speaker 1: check the case for type place, or go get a
Speaker 1: paper stretcher which doesn't exist. Okay, so these these people
Speaker 1: have a sense of humor, I know, I'm noticing. They
Speaker 1: actually attempted to do it in an attempt to get
Speaker 1: me to spare their lives. So m and as an apprentice,
Speaker 1: you would be exposed to basically the two types of
Speaker 1: journeyman printers. The more experienced printers. There's the home guard
Speaker 1: who work in a shop day in and day out.
Speaker 1: They get steady paychecks, they get steady work. They get
Speaker 1: that thing sorts of the p that you get at
Speaker 1: the end of your job if you have a job
Speaker 1: that isn't like my job, pension pension. And then there's
Speaker 1: the tramp printers, a huge percentage running from twelve to
Speaker 1: six in different years of like some books of like
Speaker 1: Charts and ship of It, of the union printers of
Speaker 1: the I T I TU. They would take out a
Speaker 1: travel card from the union, which was basically the right
Speaker 1: to show up at any chapel in the country and
Speaker 1: get a job. And so some printers do that for
Speaker 1: a little while, or some people do it because they
Speaker 1: want to move from one place to another every now
Speaker 1: and then they're like, oh fun this job. I want
Speaker 1: to go somewhere else, and and or others the real
Speaker 1: tramp printers who just tramped, they're just fucking rambled, just
Speaker 1: going on the road, road road dogs. An apprentice would
Speaker 1: see two distinct cultures. They would see two options in
Speaker 1: front of him or her, you know them if and basically,
Speaker 1: I like to imagine it's like you're a girl in
Speaker 1: a mid teens y a series. You know, um, you
Speaker 1: can pick between the home guard and the tramps. They're
Speaker 1: both fighting for the same team, the union, the white
Speaker 1: supremacist organization that m that loves child labor and piss yes. Then,
Speaker 1: after years of hard work, most apprentices intentionally apply at
Speaker 1: the toughest shop in town and go work there for
Speaker 1: a little bit. To kind of close out their apprenticeship
Speaker 1: by like proving they can that done. They apply for
Speaker 1: a journeyman's status. Journeyman's status they joined the I t
Speaker 1: U and they get a travelers card. They get a
Speaker 1: set of clothes and some tools, and off you go
Speaker 1: on the freight train or the riverboat. Time to wander
Speaker 1: and put words into print, but that will have to
Speaker 1: wait until part two. Getting better at these cliffhangers, I think,
Speaker 1: mm hmmm, Caitlin, how are you feeling? I feel good.
Speaker 1: It's because you were funny. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not
Speaker 1: spinning up blood. So there's that love that, Caitlin. Where
Speaker 1: can people follow you and or see your work? You
Speaker 1: can follow me on such social media platforms as Instagram,
Speaker 1: TikTok Yeah I do. I'm kind of I'm more of
Speaker 1: these like young hip people who's on TikTok now and um,
Speaker 1: you know Twitter, uh on live Twitter jk um and
Speaker 1: you can follow me at all those places at Caitlin
Speaker 1: Durante and check out my podcast that I co host
Speaker 1: with Jamie Loftus called The Bechtel Cast. It is produced
Speaker 1: by a one Sophie Lichtman Hi and we analyze movies
Speaker 1: through an intersexual feminist lens. And guess who's been a guest.
Speaker 1: It's me Margaret kill Joyce. Oh my gosh. She's great. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as she's kind of pretentious, well overrated, maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit sardonic, maybe a little bit ironic the second, but
Speaker 1: never gives any of us the yeah exactly, yeah, yeph Sophie.
Speaker 1: Do you have anything you want to plug? Uh just
Speaker 1: act cool zone media and all the things. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: have anything to plug. Oh my god, Margaret, you have
Speaker 1: a new thing to plug and it's very very well
Speaker 1: titled go Yeah. Thanks. So I used to plug my
Speaker 1: old book, my boring book that came out in November.
Speaker 1: But um, I have a new book coming out in February.
Speaker 1: It's called Escape from Insul Island and it is available
Speaker 1: through the publishers Strangers and the Tangled Wilderness and you
Speaker 1: can pre order it at Tangled Wilderness dot org. Um,
Speaker 1: and if you preorder it, you get a poster, and
Speaker 1: you also make the book industry, which is otherwise in
Speaker 1: trouble continue a little bit, because pre orders make the
Speaker 1: world go round in a way that I wish they didn't.
Speaker 1: And it's a fiction book. It's full of lies. You
Speaker 1: can't trust a word in it. Oh my gosh, who
Speaker 1: printed it? Though? Was it? Now? I wish I like
Speaker 1: kind of. I don't feel great about the decisions that
Speaker 1: small presses sometimes have to make in terms of working
Speaker 1: with the printers that are not as ethical, well actually
Speaker 1: maybe about equally ethical, depending on what time period of
Speaker 1: I you were talking about. That's what I got. I
Speaker 1: will see you all on Wednesday. Goodbye, Goodbye. Cool People
Speaker 1: Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts.