Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This week we talked about
Speaker 1: Lillian exem Clement Stafford, who I find so interesting and
Speaker 1: so cool in so many ways, except for the United
Speaker 1: Daughters of the Confederacy and the eugenics part. Not a
Speaker 1: fan of either of those. Yeah, So to my knowledge,
Speaker 1: there has been no like biography of her written, which
Speaker 1: means that a lot of the research, like the initial
Speaker 1: research for the episode included a lot of things which,
Speaker 1: as we said in the episode, had come from local
Speaker 1: newspaper and magazine article goals from western North Carolina specifically,
Speaker 1: or from the state of North Carolina, not things that
Speaker 1: have source lists or footnotes or anything like that. So
Speaker 1: some of the things that they would reference, I was like,
Speaker 1: where are you getting this? Where did this traffic light
Speaker 1: thing come from? Like I could not find anything in
Speaker 1: either of the legislative session records from like the session
Speaker 1: that she was in in January through March and then
Speaker 1: the extra session that started in December. Like I just
Speaker 1: couldn't find anything about traffic signals in any of that
Speaker 1: at all. Similarly, like where are you getting this about
Speaker 1: her introducing eugenics legislation?
Speaker 2: Like I did not.
Speaker 1: Read line by line all eight or nine hundred total
Speaker 1: pages of these documents, right, I was keyword searching for
Speaker 1: all of the relevant words that could have been used
Speaker 1: in this kind of legislation and just finding nothing. So
Speaker 1: it's like, I don't I don't know where that came from.
Speaker 1: But also there were just so many mistakes in so
Speaker 1: many of these articles. There was the birth year confusion,
Speaker 1: which is absolutely understandable. It told like, when there are
Speaker 1: that many different years in the written records of a person,
Speaker 1: and your job is to write a brief newspaper feature
Speaker 1: on somebody, you're probably it's like, it's less likely that
Speaker 1: you're going to stumble onto the fact that there's none
Speaker 1: of these ages line up right. The things about the
Speaker 1: birth order totally makes sense that like there would be
Speaker 1: questions and misinformation based on the weird birth years. But
Speaker 1: like the idea, there are a lot of articles that
Speaker 1: say that an all male electorate voted for her in
Speaker 1: the general election, and that's just an easy one to
Speaker 1: see is not the case, but it is in so
Speaker 1: many places. One of the articles that I read about
Speaker 1: her said that she had died of pneumonia during the
Speaker 1: Spanish flu. Spanish flu we've done episodes about before that
Speaker 1: happened from nineteen eighteen to nineteen nineteen. Sort of trailed
Speaker 1: off after that, definitely not having something we call the
Speaker 1: Spanish flu in nineteen twenty five, and I mean, she no, Tracy,
Speaker 1: it was a weird Dorman strain, Like she's reported as
Speaker 1: having died of pneumonia that may have been flu related,
Speaker 1: but like the Spanish flu was not what was happening
Speaker 1: right at that point. So I just, I just I
Speaker 1: got a little frustrated.
Speaker 2: With that.
Speaker 1: And then when I realized that some of those things
Speaker 1: go all the way back to her obituaries, I was like,
Speaker 1: she she died, like she died five years after the
Speaker 1: nineteenth Amendment was dratified, Like that's not a big amount
Speaker 1: of time to have passed. So anyway, I got frustrated
Speaker 1: about all of that. My little note of what to
Speaker 1: talk about in behind the scenes has just sort of
Speaker 1: a keyboard smash in my expression of my frustration about
Speaker 1: this something that I had put in here in the
Speaker 1: episode that I wound up taking out because it just
Speaker 1: it felt like in aside that was kind of interrupting.
Speaker 2: The narrative. Is that on March.
Speaker 1: Twenty second, nineteen twenty one, so after the main legislative
Speaker 1: session was over, fellow Representative BG Crisp of Manio wrote
Speaker 1: her a letter. And I found this letter. I was like,
Speaker 1: this person I think would be a reply guy today.
Speaker 1: So BG Crisp had been very staunchly and vocally against
Speaker 1: the ratification of the nineteenth Amendment, and he.
Speaker 2: Wrote her this let there's a quote from it. Quote.
Speaker 1: I merely wish to express in writing the high admiration
Speaker 1: that I, with all other fellow members of the General
Speaker 1: Assembly of nineteen twenty one have for you, as a
Speaker 1: most intelligent and worthy representative who has made lasting impression
Speaker 1: upon all who observed you in that capacity. Your course
Speaker 1: was such as to challenge the highest admiration of all
Speaker 1: who observed it, and I happen to know some who,
Speaker 1: like myself were bitterly opposed to the ratification of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth Amendment, were most interested observers. It's like he wanted
Speaker 1: to basically make sure that she knew that it wasn't
Speaker 1: that he had been opposed to women having the right
Speaker 1: to vote, but that he thought that it should have
Speaker 1: been left up to the states and not a constitutional amendment.
Speaker 1: This was just kind of a weird letter. I was like,
Speaker 1: I feel like you felt the need to write to
Speaker 1: her and justify yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The legislation, the legislative session was over. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, in just a throwback to a recent episode, as
Speaker 1: I was just trying to confirm things about her life
Speaker 1: that I had not been able to really track down,
Speaker 1: I was looking at the newspaper reporting of her time
Speaker 1: in the legislature. One day, the giant front page headline
Speaker 1: was about investigation into pelagra. Just the whole title, the
Speaker 1: whole entire front page, whole headline space, covering the entire
Speaker 1: width of it. I have a question. Tell me what
Speaker 1: your question is. Why were they calling her brother, Clement.
Speaker 1: I think they were just calling her brother because they
Speaker 1: called each other brother, and so she was now part
Speaker 1: of their governing body, and so they also called her brother.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it's like on Star Trek when
Speaker 1: they call all the women captain sir. Oh.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, But I don't know.
Speaker 1: It just struck me as the oddest thing, And I
Speaker 1: don't know why I kept getting really I kept thinking
Speaker 1: about it while we were talking, and I'm like, why
Speaker 1: was that a good thing?
Speaker 2: I didn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, in like, that's sort of my conclusion of
Speaker 1: what was happening, sort of like the fact that they
Speaker 1: had never really thought about what would happen if somebody
Speaker 1: changed their last name, right, because they'd never had to
Speaker 1: think about it. Yeah, it had always only been men
Speaker 1: before that, and so they had never really had to
Speaker 1: think about what they would need to call a fellow
Speaker 1: legislator or a fellow attorney if that attorney or legislator
Speaker 1: was not a man, right. I mean, I actually feel
Speaker 1: like that too, is one of those things that persists
Speaker 1: a little bit.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There are women that I know in careers where they're like, well,
Speaker 1: I got married and I took my husband's name socially,
Speaker 1: but professionally I'm still this, oh yeah. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's because it's a complicated thing there's no
Speaker 1: one there, but yeah, I don't know how much of
Speaker 1: that is weighted by, you know, the fact that it
Speaker 1: would just be harder to rebuild the recognition that they've
Speaker 1: achieved in their field, or if some of it is
Speaker 1: like I don't want to confuse anybody, and I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of people now don't even do the name change,
Speaker 1: which is also perfectly fine. Ye you did not change
Speaker 1: your name, No I did. I had one of the
Speaker 1: most boring common names on Earth. I was ready to like,
Speaker 1: my name is my maiden name was so common that
Speaker 1: when I told people it, they said, you are a liar,
Speaker 1: and I would have to whip out my ID and
Speaker 1: be like, nope, that's really my name. Well, there were
Speaker 1: multiple Tracy Wilson's at my high school, and so when
Speaker 1: somebody was called to come to the office, they would
Speaker 1: have to put a middle initial in there. And the
Speaker 1: fact that Tracy Wilson is such a common name as
Speaker 1: why I have always used my middle initial professionally. And
Speaker 1: then I got married at the age of four, at
Speaker 1: which point I had, you know, two decades of professional
Speaker 1: working experience under the last name Wilson, and so that
Speaker 1: just seemed like a lot of effort, right, so try
Speaker 1: to change stuff around. Now I'm thankful, like it. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of work to change your name. And now
Speaker 1: it's like wow, now, since people are introducing legislation requiring
Speaker 1: names to match birth certificates, the fact that my name
Speaker 1: still does is like an extra convenience to me.
Speaker 2: I'll just vanish into the night.
Speaker 1: Legislation requiring your ID to match your birth certificate in
Speaker 1: order to vote is bad. I will just put out
Speaker 1: my feeling on that. Yeah, it is bad for a
Speaker 1: lot of people. Yeah, if you're gonna write me an
Speaker 1: email saying but there'll be a form to fill out,
Speaker 1: I don't care. Overwhelmingly, men won't have to fill out
Speaker 1: that for right. Anyway, I'm hoping to visit Ashville in
Speaker 1: the near future. I will almost certainly drive by that
Speaker 1: historical marker at some point.
Speaker 2: I am sure I have driven before it.
Speaker 1: Now. I have been to Ashville since when it was
Speaker 1: put up, so I don't think I ever noticed it
Speaker 1: prior to learning about this, learning that she existed from
Speaker 1: a different podcast. I one of her out her suits
Speaker 1: is on display at one of the museums there. Oh nice,
Speaker 1: trying to remember which one. It's quite a smart suit,
Speaker 1: I quite like.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she looks lovely in every picture of her that
Speaker 1: I've seen. She's very smartly dressed and very very like
Speaker 1: neatly styled hair. So yeah, I wish there were a
Speaker 1: full length biography of her that would answer some questions
Speaker 1: that I have.
Speaker 2: Some of the things that I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's totally possible that there is documentation of it somewhere
Speaker 1: that's you know, not digitized, not generally available to the public,
Speaker 1: or that it is, and I just didn't find that
Speaker 1: in all of my research. I this morning, before we
Speaker 1: came in here to record, I did a second pass
Speaker 1: just to like try again to see Number one, is
Speaker 1: there anything I can find about her family in relation
Speaker 1: to the nineteen sixteen flood. Number two, is there anything
Speaker 1: I can find about her or her family in relation
Speaker 1: to the Spanish flu because she was actually alive when
Speaker 1: that happened. And my second past, first thing this morning
Speaker 1: found nothing about either of them. So we talked at
Speaker 1: the top of the episode about Gertrude Chandler Warner. Huh
Speaker 1: that you didn't read the box card stare They don't
Speaker 1: think I did. So I had this experience where I
Speaker 1: picked them up when I was still living in the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest and just mainline them. I was obsessed with
Speaker 1: them and I had found them in my school library.
Speaker 1: And then when I was nine, we moved to the
Speaker 1: Gulf Coast, and I remember thinking like, Okay, I will
Speaker 1: look for them in the library there, and they didn't
Speaker 1: know what I was talking about. None of those kids
Speaker 1: had ever heard of it. It sounded like some weird,
Speaker 1: far off thing that like I had made up and
Speaker 1: now and then when you were like, I never read them,
Speaker 1: I'm like, was this not popular in the South.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: It might have just been me if I like, I
Speaker 1: started reading pretty early and I read a lot, Like
Speaker 1: I was one of those kids that would get in
Speaker 1: trouble reading oh same in class instead of doing or
Speaker 1: reading ahead when we were reading aloud.
Speaker 2: Oh I got yelled at. Yeah. I had a lot
Speaker 2: of problems with that.
Speaker 1: But I think because I had started reading so early,
Speaker 1: I a lot of times would read books that I
Speaker 1: felt like were more grown up.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I could be really resistant to books that I felt like,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be babyish. And I think I might have
Speaker 1: had that impression about the box Car Children. Well, I
Speaker 1: started reading them when I was seven. Yeah, like I die,
Speaker 1: I'm not like, I've definitely heard of these books, right,
Speaker 1: I know what they are, but I don't think I
Speaker 1: ever read any of them. Yeah, I'm tickled because I
Speaker 1: definitely had a mix of I did the fashion thing
Speaker 1: of mixture high and low to get personal style. Because,
Speaker 1: since we've talked about before, I read Druma Capponi's in
Speaker 1: Cold Blood when I was way too young to be reading.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I tried to read like a totally like not
Speaker 1: a not an adaptation for younger readers, but the full
Speaker 1: on book Jane Eyre when I was in like fifth grade.
Speaker 1: And then when I read Jane Eyre again in college,
Speaker 1: I was like.
Speaker 2: Wow, sure missed a lot of this. Sure didn't really
Speaker 2: realize what was going on in this book. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My book like that was Neuromancer because I found it
Speaker 1: when I was twelve. Yeah, and I read it and
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it. But then when I went back
Speaker 1: and read it as an adult, I was like, what
Speaker 1: was I doing with this book in my hand? I
Speaker 1: have so many things it just tickles me. I will
Speaker 1: say this. I want to be very careful because I
Speaker 1: don't like to criticize other people's creative work. Right. I
Speaker 1: listened to audiobooks all the time.
Speaker 2: I love them.
Speaker 1: My husband doesn't love them because he doesn't like hearing
Speaker 1: other people read things because it's not usually the way
Speaker 1: he would read it if he were reading aloud, and
Speaker 1: he finds that jarring totally fine, But because I knew,
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I was trying to multitask a bunch of things,
Speaker 1: and I was like, I'll listen to the audiobook version
Speaker 1: of the first book, by which I mean the nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two version to catch up. Because it's only a
Speaker 1: couple hours long. I can do it while I'm running
Speaker 1: around the house doing you know, prep work, taking care
Speaker 1: of animals, et cetera. And the narrator who does the
Speaker 1: one that I read, does the voices of the children.
Speaker 1: I did not enjoy that at all. Yeah, I kind
Speaker 1: of got used to it, but it was a little rough.
Speaker 2: It was a little rough.
Speaker 1: But I will say there are in many cases if
Speaker 1: you experience something like this, dear listener. In some cases,
Speaker 1: particularly very popular books like this or Dracula, which I
Speaker 1: have mentioned listening to a lot of lately, there are
Speaker 1: often multiple versions of audiobooks, so you can see if
Speaker 1: you have another option that doesn't that doesn't quite great
Speaker 1: on you.
Speaker 2: I did not do that. I was like, I already
Speaker 2: have it in the thing, I'm just gonna gun it.
Speaker 1: Most of my audiobook listening is like on road trips,
Speaker 1: on some kind of travel where I'm going to be
Speaker 1: sitting in a place wanting a way to like occupy
Speaker 1: my mind. Yeah, because or you know, if there was
Speaker 1: something I was really into, I would listen while walking
Speaker 1: around or doing stuff around the house. But that's also
Speaker 1: when I listened to the podcasts that I listened to.
Speaker 1: So audiobooks are just not as big of a thing
Speaker 1: for me. Time out of them, more likely going to
Speaker 1: like read a book. No, I'll go right to sleep,
Speaker 1: I think, because we read so much for this job.
Speaker 1: That's true too, Yeah, that I'm like reading for leisure
Speaker 1: doesn't feel quite the same as it used to you
Speaker 1: to me, and my brain just goes, no, thank you,
Speaker 1: I don't why why don't we stare in the middle
Speaker 1: distance for a minute. There are some very cute stories
Speaker 1: of Gertrude Chandler Warner and her siblings growing up, and
Speaker 1: like I said, their youth seems almost idyllic. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that I thought was very cute and
Speaker 1: really quite ingenious is that they were trying to figure
Speaker 1: out distances from their house to other places in town,
Speaker 1: and they measured the circumference of the wagon wheels on
Speaker 1: their family's wagon and then they tied a rag to
Speaker 1: one of the spokes of it, and they would count
Speaker 1: how many rotations it made from their house to their destination,
Speaker 1: and then they would multiply that by the circumference of
Speaker 1: the wagon wheel and be like, that is two point
Speaker 1: six miles away from our house. That's amazing one point
Speaker 1: And I'm like, this is the most ingenious thing.
Speaker 2: I've ever heard heard.
Speaker 1: For like three little kids to come up with this,
Speaker 1: I don't know how little they were at the time,
Speaker 1: but I just thought that was very, very charming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's a thing that was wild to me. The way
Speaker 1: she wrote her books. And when I read it at first,
Speaker 1: I was like, are you saying this is how she
Speaker 1: did it when she was a kid? Nope, pretty much
Speaker 1: the whole time, until presumably her eyesight started to fail.
Speaker 1: She had a typewriter, but she didn't love it, and
Speaker 1: she usually did four passes on any of her books,
Speaker 1: like to do her own editing and get the manuscript
Speaker 1: to a point she liked. But her first pass she
Speaker 1: would get a notebook and write in it with a pencil,
Speaker 1: and she would write only on the right hand facing pages,
Speaker 1: and when she got to the end of the notebook.
Speaker 1: She would flip it over and then continue on what
Speaker 1: was then the empty right hand facing pages.
Speaker 2: The other way. That's wild. That was exactly what I said.
Speaker 1: And also it made my hand crampy because that's a
Speaker 1: lot of handwriting. I know people used to handwrite that much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but O hand crampy.
Speaker 2: We've talked about.
Speaker 1: How I find writing with a pen laborious, and I
Speaker 1: mean I don't. That's actually how I prefer to keep
Speaker 1: a lot of my lists and stuff. There's just something
Speaker 1: about the tactile nature of it that I really love.
Speaker 2: M m. But I can't.
Speaker 1: Imagine writing a paragraph let alone, like I'm talking bullet lists.
Speaker 1: I can't like a manuscript sounds really really intense and unfun.
Speaker 1: But that idea of like half a notebook one way,
Speaker 1: half the other way.
Speaker 2: M hmm.
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's the way that like suspicious people write manifestos.
Speaker 1: What are you doing, Gertrude, Gertrude, what is going on?
Speaker 1: But it worked for her apparently, Okay, I just thought
Speaker 1: that was nutty. She also had this one piece of
Speaker 1: advice that I stumbled across for writers that I really
Speaker 1: liked because she recognized that, you know, because she did
Speaker 1: her own editing a lot before she ever handed off
Speaker 1: a book. She too had the same thing that all
Speaker 1: of us have when we write, which is like, you
Speaker 1: look at something you wrote and you're like, dear credo,
Speaker 1: I'm terrible at this. But her thing was don't ever
Speaker 1: throw anything away because you might want it later. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's actually a really good policy. It's hard.
Speaker 1: You sometimes want to destroy the evidence of mediocrity, but
Speaker 1: she's like, don't do it, don't do it. One thing
Speaker 1: we didn't talk about that will come up a little
Speaker 1: on our upcoming episode about Children's Morality Code was that,
Speaker 1: And I will tell you why we didn't talk about
Speaker 1: it was the sort of inherent Christian morality of a
Speaker 1: lot of her work, because she isn't heavy handed about it.
Speaker 1: There are not mentions of any kind of religion or
Speaker 1: you know, God or anything. But she did publish a
Speaker 1: book that I couldn't find much information about other than
Speaker 1: just a mention in one of those pretty simple biographies
Speaker 1: I read, which is that she published a book in
Speaker 1: collaboration with a missionary named Leyla Anderson. And this person
Speaker 1: apparently had a parakeet named Peter Piper that traveled the
Speaker 1: world with her on these missionary trips and talked and
Speaker 1: they wrote a book about the bird. I really would
Speaker 1: like to find that book, like a good copy of that,
Speaker 1: but I have a feeling it was a very small
Speaker 1: run and they're probably in antique shops I haven't uncovered yet.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Peter Piper the parakeet. Yeah, writing manifestos anyway,
Speaker 1: I will say this, this is a thing. I didn't
Speaker 1: do this on purpose, but I have recognized that I am,
Speaker 1: in our troubled times revisiting a lot of the things
Speaker 1: that gave me joy as a kid, and it's very comforting.
Speaker 1: So I do encourage people if you had a book
Speaker 1: that you loved as a child, or a game that
Speaker 1: you loved, just anything that you associate with fun times
Speaker 1: in childhood and delight. It's very soothing to go back
Speaker 1: and readincare own it for the most part. Obviously you're
Speaker 1: going to find things and go yo, that's racist or
Speaker 1: oh sure this is a problem, but overall pretty delightful.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Revisiting the Box Car Children honestly made me so happy.
Speaker 1: I had quite forgotten about their dog Watch and his
Speaker 1: whole little sub story, yeah, which is really cute, just
Speaker 1: that they find this poor dog wandering in the woods
Speaker 1: with a big thorn in its paw, and Jess carefully
Speaker 1: takes the thorn out, and the dog becomes like attached
Speaker 1: to her at the hip going forward and takes care
Speaker 1: of the children and warns them when there's trouble, and
Speaker 1: it's just very I forgot about Watch the Dog anyway.
Speaker 1: I love the Box Card Children. I have not read
Speaker 1: any of the modern versions. Some of them have been rewritten.
Speaker 1: They're essentially the same story she wrote, but they're rewritten
Speaker 1: with modern scenarios, modern characters, etc. And I haven't revisited
Speaker 1: any of those, so I cannot speak to their value
Speaker 1: or quality.
Speaker 2: Okay, but I love.
Speaker 1: The originals, even though we don't know why Grandpa hated
Speaker 1: that Mom. I kept thinking about. This is kind of
Speaker 1: not entirely related, but like Grave of the Fireflies, which
Speaker 1: is a very incredibly sad film, but most Americans seeing
Speaker 1: this film interpret it as an anti war film because
Speaker 1: of the horrific things that the children go through in it,
Speaker 1: while the filmmakers explicitly said that no, it's about how
Speaker 1: children should behave themselves and respect their elders because they
Speaker 1: were in the care of an ant and they leave
Speaker 1: to try to make their way on their own. And
Speaker 1: that's what I kept thinking about with these children having
Speaker 1: a grandfather who was an adult there for them, but
Speaker 1: instead they went to live in a box car totally
Speaker 1: different setup, not at all like the same tone in
Speaker 1: any way, But I kept thinking about that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a yeah, and he's like the richest man in town.
Speaker 1: Everyone knows who he is, which is very funny. So
Speaker 1: like the kids do a lot of like hiding of
Speaker 1: their names, right, there's an event where they're actually like
Speaker 1: with Henry's with a lot of townspeople, and he lies.
Speaker 1: He only uses his first and middle name and doesn't
Speaker 1: say his last name because he knows people are looking
Speaker 1: for him. But he doesn't recognize his grandfather because they
Speaker 1: never really knew him. So it's a it's it's again,
Speaker 1: why did he not like their mom? With that? Listen,
Speaker 1: if you have time off coming up in the next
Speaker 1: couple days, I hope you get to revisit something that
Speaker 1: brings you joy, whether it's from your childhood or not.
Speaker 1: Just find the stuff that makes you happy or offers
Speaker 1: you an escape, because the real world is going to
Speaker 1: be there when you go back to it, and it
Speaker 1: is good to take care of yourself with joy. There's
Speaker 1: no shame in that game. I also hope that everyone
Speaker 1: you encounter is kind to you. If you have to work,
Speaker 1: that goes doubly so I hope nobody's a jerk to
Speaker 1: you while you are just trying to make a living.
Speaker 1: I hope everybody treats each other as kindly as they
Speaker 1: possibly can. Again, it's a high tension life we were
Speaker 1: living right now. But we will be right back here
Speaker 1: tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we
Speaker 1: will bring you something brand new. Stuff you missed in
Speaker 1: History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
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