Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 1: a podcast that Sophie hosts talking about Lebron James and
Speaker 1: why she doesn't like a particular ref in.
Speaker 2: Basketball former ref, former ref, former ref because he got
Speaker 2: the acts Tonzo.
Speaker 1: I'm your other host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I know more
Speaker 1: about the nineteenth century than I do, okay, first century
Speaker 1: because I live in a cave in West Virginia. But
Speaker 1: this story is about a cave in West Virginia. Actually,
Speaker 1: i'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I might have already said
Speaker 1: that with me today as the actual guest is prop
Speaker 1: host of Hood Politics.
Speaker 3: How are you, babe? What's up?
Speaker 4: Margaret?
Speaker 3: Tam me something good?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I want a body roll this whole episode.
Speaker 3: I want a body roll. Tam me that you lab me?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I said, yeah, yeah, this one. This one's mostly positive.
Speaker 1: It's it's more positive than something. It's about hero But
Speaker 1: the things don't always go great.
Speaker 4: God damn it, man, this is supposed to be cool
Speaker 4: people who do like this. This person was like, this
Speaker 4: is this isn't the one shining light of our week?
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I just want to put it out there for those
Speaker 2: of you that play uh that that are able to
Speaker 2: play the cool Zone media drinking game. That was uh
Speaker 2: props props first one.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know what I'm saying. That's another one.
Speaker 3: Yes, Yes, it's bad. It's bad. It really is.
Speaker 4: You should see me editing, Like when I'm just at
Speaker 4: home recording myself doing the episode, I'm like, this is
Speaker 4: this is so bad.
Speaker 2: First of all, first of all, don't ever change. Second
Speaker 2: of all, we're at two or three and it's already
Speaker 2: already and you don't.
Speaker 5: Have to play with alcohol, but if you do, let
Speaker 5: me know how that goes for you.
Speaker 1: But I'm not allowed to with anything carbonated because Sophie
Speaker 1: has prevented me from drinking anything carbonated while I record.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's I don't think it's me you're prevented.
Speaker 5: I think it's your I think it's.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that until you talk for three hours.
Speaker 3: You're a burper.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I feel like that's the most common edit
Speaker 1: note I give its Sophie Well.
Speaker 2: Ian takes care of that. Shout out Ian Johnson, who
Speaker 2: is our editor of our podcast and our theme song
Speaker 2: is by Unwoman.
Speaker 1: Intro's done well, actually no, because this time we're going
Speaker 1: to say that Unwoman has a new album out coming
Speaker 1: out September twenty. It's called Desire Paths. So does prop
Speaker 1: Oh really, yeah, what's your album call?
Speaker 3: It's called The Possibility. It's the Final Terror Form EP.
Speaker 5: Hell yeah, amazing.
Speaker 3: When's it out? Is it already out or it's already out?
Speaker 2: Came out in what's the best what's the best place
Speaker 2: for people to get to get info on your projects?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, my website proptpop dot com. But on spot For
Speaker 4: some reason, the Spotify algorithm like gives you more like
Speaker 4: leverage when you're going into try to do other things,
Speaker 4: like you're yeah, that makes you know, book rooms and
Speaker 4: stuff like that. So if you're gonna stream the record,
Speaker 4: just propaganda dude on Spotify.
Speaker 1: Loop and then turn it down and then go to.
Speaker 3: That they just go to bed, you know what I'm saying?
Speaker 4: Like run him numbers up, Like I really I would
Speaker 4: really appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, listen, if you want to send me a link,
Speaker 2: less include that in the episode description. Can't do that,
Speaker 2: Send me whichever link you want to use, and Ian
Speaker 2: I'll throw that in there.
Speaker 3: Throw that in the show notes yep.
Speaker 1: Also, people should listen to politics. You probably already do
Speaker 1: because if you listen to this, you probably listen to
Speaker 1: all the Cool Zone show.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like one of those things. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: it's worth listening to him. Yeah, why wouldn't you, man,
Speaker 3: why wouldn't you listen?
Speaker 2: Because you've had some good episodes recently. I mean they're
Speaker 2: all good, but but you've had.
Speaker 1: Some longer history of hip hop. One that came out
Speaker 1: yesterday as is that fun?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: So far you can tell you on your Zone.
Speaker 3: Dude that Yeah, I was.
Speaker 4: I was in my bag there the next few episodes,
Speaker 4: like I'm in my bag because I'm like, this is
Speaker 4: this is one because like, okay, you know, election season
Speaker 4: is just like catnip for a show like mine, you know,
Speaker 4: And i mean.
Speaker 1: You know, selection season.
Speaker 3: I love it, I'm saying.
Speaker 4: And Joe Biden's like, I mean, he's just like a
Speaker 4: large cheese pizza, you know what I'm saying. Like it's
Speaker 4: just it's just not enough going on. So I'm like,
Speaker 4: I need a world like crisis, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Dang it, there it is, and I need the cartoon
Speaker 4: that is Trump. And it's just like the guy's just
Speaker 4: so full of criminal.
Speaker 5: Action and his little minions.
Speaker 4: And his little minions. And the one I just finished,
Speaker 4: like we need to get to this show. But the
Speaker 4: one I just finished is about of the eighteen of
Speaker 4: the eighteen co defendants in the Rico case, two of
Speaker 4: them is black and one of them is still in
Speaker 4: jail right now. They left that nigga in jail.
Speaker 2: They didn't have his bonds, figured it out beforehand, figured
Speaker 2: out ain't nobody helping.
Speaker 3: It's like, that's what your ass get you.
Speaker 4: Every ancestry you got was telling your ass you don't
Speaker 4: trust the white people.
Speaker 3: You should have known.
Speaker 4: I know your If your mama alive right now, she'd be.
Speaker 3: Like, what see that?
Speaker 4: What I tell you? What I tell you? Trusting them
Speaker 4: white people over there? You trusting white people? You know
Speaker 4: what I'm saying. I even said on this episode, God,
Speaker 4: we gotta move on. But I've even said I've even
Speaker 4: said on this episode. Now I'm talking systemically because some
Speaker 4: of you may point out that I am on cool
Speaker 4: zone media and I have in fact trusted them white people.
Speaker 4: You know what I'm saying, And I'm like, listen.
Speaker 5: I like to think of Sophie trust yeah, say that's.
Speaker 1: What I said.
Speaker 4: I was like, Robert and Sophie have earned it. They
Speaker 4: cool as hell. They welcome to the barbecue. And if
Speaker 4: you ask them, and if you ask by asked, day
Speaker 4: with me. Okay, just so, don't bring no heat, don't
Speaker 4: bring the smoke, day with me?
Speaker 1: Yo?
Speaker 3: Say it so.
Speaker 1: Anyway, prop Yes, what do you know about John Henry
Speaker 1: the steel driving man?
Speaker 3: I know a lot about John Henry the steel driving.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, okay, let's go.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of curious. The way I heard about John
Speaker 1: Henry as a kid, it was the same way I'd
Speaker 1: heard about Paul Bunyan's this folklore. There's no implication there
Speaker 1: was any truth to it. The basic story that I
Speaker 1: heard was there was a guy, his name is John Henry.
Speaker 1: He works on the railroads, and he's happy about it.
Speaker 1: Then the steam drill is invented, and he's like, whatever,
Speaker 1: I can beat the machine. I'm the strongest, biggest guy
Speaker 1: in the world. So they race, presumably basically for John Henry. EGO. Yeah,
Speaker 1: John Henry wins, his heart gives out from exertion, and
Speaker 1: he dies. And the moral of this story, as it
Speaker 1: was presented to me, is like kind of weird. It's
Speaker 1: just like, I don't know, worked really hard and machines
Speaker 1: are sucked that they're bad. Dying on the job is
Speaker 1: something to be proud of. That's how I had heard it.
Speaker 1: How would you heard it? Ex slave, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Found a job, was proud for that, and they worked
Speaker 4: him to death. So the moral of the story is
Speaker 4: don't trust in white people.
Speaker 1: So the moral of the story says the same, don't
Speaker 1: trust the white people. He was born a free man
Speaker 1: and he died a slave.
Speaker 3: That's what it was.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, because he died slave, because he died as
Speaker 1: a prison convict.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know he was a real person.
Speaker 3: Oh, real person.
Speaker 4: Yeah I now, granted I found that out much later,
Speaker 4: Like you know, yeah, I had the same childhood you did,
Speaker 4: where it's like, oh, yeah, he's like a Paul Bunyan
Speaker 4: like character. And then my dad was like, no, no,
Speaker 4: he was, he was a person. Yeah, it's like wait
Speaker 4: what yeah, then told me this, Yeah, told me the
Speaker 4: story like freedman became a slave.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because your dad was your dad was into black
Speaker 1: power politics, right, yes he was.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's what I was learning is that the only people
Speaker 1: who were actually telling this story accurately were black radicals
Speaker 1: in the seventies. Like that is like, yeah, but the
Speaker 1: actual figuring out who he specifically was is only twenty
Speaker 1: years old or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to say there was a was there
Speaker 3: a documentary resent Oh, I don't know. I read a
Speaker 3: book about it, but maybe it was a book.
Speaker 4: This something came out recently, like you said, yeah, last
Speaker 4: twenty years. I was like, no, this guy is incredibly interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, and that's what we're going to talk about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: John Henry was a real person. I didn't know that part.
Speaker 1: He was a black man, he was a prisoner, he
Speaker 1: was forced to work. He was all of five foot one.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The like the model of like strong masculinity at
Speaker 1: like beating machines. I love that for.
Speaker 3: Him, homie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he really did race esteem drill and he really
Speaker 1: did beat it, and it really did kill him. He
Speaker 1: didn't have a choice in the matter. Is kind of
Speaker 1: the big, big thing here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: His legend is also tied into the history of basically
Speaker 1: every style of music in America, blues, jazz, folk, country,
Speaker 1: rock and roll. Well not every style of music, but
Speaker 1: every the basis.
Speaker 3: Of yeah, yeah, the foundation building blocks.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And do you know that he's the model and inspiration
Speaker 1: for Superman and Captain America.
Speaker 3: No, they're all.
Speaker 1: Based on him.
Speaker 4: So you're telling me Superman is five foot one, yeah,
Speaker 4: the black con he's a black as black convict.
Speaker 3: I love it. Yeah, I just I mean it doesn't
Speaker 3: feed it. I mean it.
Speaker 4: Plays very well with my just belief that like black
Speaker 4: people invented everything and.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah yeah, And I'm like, well, here it is.
Speaker 4: Here's some more proof of that where it's like I
Speaker 4: keep telling myself, I know that's not true, but I
Speaker 4: just but I feel it in my bones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it yeah, I don't have a counter argument
Speaker 1: that's true, you know, like yeah, oh god, the way
Speaker 1: it ties into country music that is real dark. I
Speaker 1: can't wait to tell you about that one. Okay, So
Speaker 1: today we're gonna talk about motherfucker John Henry, the Steel
Speaker 1: driving Man, who is mostly remembered. At first, he wasn't
Speaker 1: remembered as a hero. He was remembered as a martyr.
Speaker 1: He was remembered as a warning about the dangers of
Speaker 1: overwork and callousness and trusting white people and trusting white bosses. Specifically,
Speaker 1: most of what history knows about John Henry we know
Speaker 1: because of one historian named Scott Reynolds Nelson, who is
Speaker 1: He's still alive. He's a history professor at the University
Speaker 1: of Georgia. He writes books about reconstruction, about labor history
Speaker 1: and shit. He's like the person who knows the most
Speaker 1: about the Southern railroad labor history.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: His book on the subject is called Steel Driving Man
Speaker 1: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend, and
Speaker 1: it's worth checking out. And it's also the only book
Speaker 1: I've ever read for research for this show that has
Speaker 1: a cover blurb by Bruce Springsteen, which is.
Speaker 3: All that's pretty dope.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is a story about railroads and the infrastructure
Speaker 1: of the US. It's a story about West Virginia. So
Speaker 1: I extra like it. And the first time you came
Speaker 1: on the show, prop you were talking about how so
Speaker 1: much of American music was developed in Appalachia between ethnic
Speaker 1: white folks and black folks getting together to do something cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is.
Speaker 1: A story about that too.
Speaker 3: That's dope. I got really excited when I like as
Speaker 3: soon as I like good callback, Yeah, I was at
Speaker 3: a book fair.
Speaker 1: Basically, I was like, give me your history books. I'll
Speaker 1: you know, pretty much buy whatever. Ill. Yeah. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: there's a radical press that's mostly run by black folks
Speaker 1: that's out of Atlanta. And they were like, well, you
Speaker 1: know this book, John Henry is a real person. I
Speaker 1: was like, John Henry is a real person. This is
Speaker 1: the best present I've ever had as a history podcaster.
Speaker 3: Yes, Like I'm sorry what? Yes? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So before railroads, so I goanna talk about history railroad
Speaker 1: because okay, should I do?
Speaker 3: I love context? All right.
Speaker 1: So, canals were the main infrastructure in the US for
Speaker 1: moving cargo and people around before the eighteen thirties or so,
Speaker 1: and especially and most importantly, the canals were used, of course,
Speaker 1: to open up the West to steal shit from indigenous people.
Speaker 1: George Washington, famous horror monster of history with the wrong
Speaker 1: people's teeth in his mouth, was obsessed with making the
Speaker 1: Potomac River navigable past the Appalachian Mountains out out to Ohio. Yeah,
Speaker 1: canals were really nasty to build. It was not nice.
Speaker 1: Lots of people died also, and this continues to this day.
Speaker 1: It involved using taxpayer money to bolster private enterprise. Which
Speaker 1: is basically the history of the transportation of the US. Yeah,
Speaker 1: taxpayer funded infrastructure is either operated by or just utilized
Speaker 1: heavily by private enterprise who very conveniently don't pay a
Speaker 1: lot of taxes.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Also, do you know that apparently a ton of cities
Speaker 1: in the US the reason that they are where they
Speaker 1: are is because there was a waterfall and they were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't know.
Speaker 4: I do like Chicago, like Chicago, Chicago because of the canals,
Speaker 4: because it's like, that's you know, it's not the yeah,
Speaker 4: capitals or you know what I'm saying, or right, is it.
Speaker 3: Pure I don't know, I don't know, capital of Illinois.
Speaker 1: It's not Chicago, right, it's never a city you think
Speaker 1: except no, yeah, not even New York City. I was
Speaker 1: let's say, ecept New York City, and I'm like, it's
Speaker 1: not capitally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah, yeah, it was like Springfield, that's it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember third grade.
Speaker 4: No, but but yeah, yeah, Chicago is one of those
Speaker 4: cities that's like, yah, it's just because they made a canal. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's why it's there. But you said about waterfalls, yeah
Speaker 4: part of this yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Richmond, Virginia is where it is because there's a well
Speaker 1: there was there would have been a city wherever. It
Speaker 1: became an important city because there was a waterfall and
Speaker 1: people were able to hook up water wheels and then
Speaker 1: like run wild contraption like rope to go power all
Speaker 1: kinds of shit everywhere just using this one waterfall.
Speaker 4: Also a fun fact about this is why downtown La
Speaker 4: is where it is, because we're the one. Every other
Speaker 4: skyline is on the coast, Like if it's a coastal city,
Speaker 4: there's skylines on the coast, Like LA's downtown is way inland.
Speaker 3: And it was for a number of reasons.
Speaker 4: One it was because like, yeah, our our ports didn't
Speaker 4: give itself well to being part of the canal situation
Speaker 4: because it's way over there on the west. And then
Speaker 4: secondly because of the indigenous tribe because the La River
Speaker 4: used to actually be a river, like you know, so
Speaker 4: it's where the tribes were because that was where most
Speaker 4: of the fresh water was, right so the tribes.
Speaker 3: The Tongula tribe.
Speaker 4: And then when when the Spaniards came, they just built
Speaker 4: their you know, pueblos and ship you know what I mean,
Speaker 4: they're they're what.
Speaker 3: Am I their missions?
Speaker 4: They built their missions right where the natives were, because
Speaker 4: the natives knew where the water was. So that's why
Speaker 4: downtown LA is where it is. It's and it's like
Speaker 4: one of the one of the few major yeah, one
Speaker 4: of the only major like major skylines.
Speaker 2: Which is shockingly one of the things they actually teach
Speaker 2: in LA public schools learned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool,
Speaker 2: that's shockingly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't learn ship for local history. Sometimes though
Speaker 1: I talked shit on my history lessons as a kid,
Speaker 1: I also didn't pay a lot of attention.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they could have been telling you amazing things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like I didn't give a shit about history until
Speaker 1: I started caring about like what about politics and about
Speaker 1: like oppression and about fighting oppression and all these like yeah.
Speaker 1: Like once, I'm like I once I had a role.
Speaker 1: Once I was like, oh, this is a grand story
Speaker 1: that we are all part of. Then I was like
Speaker 1: history is a fucking amazing But as a kid, they
Speaker 1: were just like and I remember some of the lies.
Speaker 1: I remember because even some of the lies didn't make
Speaker 1: sense as a kid, like being told about Thanksgiving. I'm like,
Speaker 1: this doesn't track. But so nineteenth century Great Britain is
Speaker 1: like hell, yeah, we're gonna do railroads, and the US
Speaker 1: is like, oh, I want railroads too, and the actual
Speaker 1: they had like gravity roads as they called them before that,
Speaker 1: but like it became a thing once you get the
Speaker 1: steam engine around basically, so the US wants it, and
Speaker 1: it does it in the way that US does it.
Speaker 1: They use public resources to build them and give it
Speaker 1: to private companies. In this case, they turned the Army
Speaker 1: the Army Corps of Engineers, so taxpayer funded, privately owned
Speaker 1: the Army engineers surveyed and selected routes and build it,
Speaker 1: built all the structures and shit like that.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, also, you know, unfortunate for America
Speaker 4: to do what they normally do is like what aiden
Speaker 4: what the slaves are free now?
Speaker 1: So it was before then. This is before then.
Speaker 4: But oh okay, because I was someing like when they
Speaker 4: started bringing in the Chinese because they needed.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, no, we're going to slave labor.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, anyway, sorry, my bad, No, no, top too
Speaker 4: far forward?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it is in nineteen twenty seven you get
Speaker 1: the first passenger railroad in the country MH. And of
Speaker 1: course the South is building them with enslaved black people
Speaker 1: as well as underpaid Irish people who have it way
Speaker 1: better than the enslaved black people. And the late eighteen
Speaker 1: thirties there's a guy who gets called the mad French engineer,
Speaker 1: Claudius Croze, and he's like, hey, Virginia, if you give
Speaker 1: me a fuck load of money, I can build tunnels
Speaker 1: through the Blue Ridge Mountains which connect Richmond, Virginia to
Speaker 1: the Shenandoah Valley. This is still within modern day Virginia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Virginia is like, hell, yeah, we'll float that bill.
Speaker 1: That's what we do, even though it won't be publicly
Speaker 1: owned America rules. Is totally not a scam. It's definitely
Speaker 1: different than an oligarchy. They said all of that and
Speaker 1: the resources. By resources that they threw at it, they
Speaker 1: mean we mean enslaved black people. The longest tunnel, the
Speaker 1: Blue Ridge Tunnel, is almost a mile long, and it
Speaker 1: was paid. It was dug by two groups of people.
Speaker 1: There was eight hundred schittily paid irishmen who got less
Speaker 1: than a dollar a day, which is about thirty five
Speaker 1: dollars in today's money. Imagine fucking living off of thirty
Speaker 1: to five dollars a day, and then forty unpaid and
Speaker 1: slave black men. There were one hundred and eighty nine
Speaker 1: recorded deaths of workers digging this fucking tunnel.
Speaker 3: Of course there was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of them died from cholera, from the
Speaker 1: shitty conditions that they were all living under. It was
Speaker 1: finished in eighteen fifty eight. It took about twenty fucking years,
Speaker 1: a little less than that, just in time to help
Speaker 1: a bunch of racist militias get over to Richmond from
Speaker 1: the big But we want to own people tantrum that
Speaker 1: the southern elite threw, Yeah, eighteen sixty or so eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but how about but like but we but we
Speaker 4: like it, so we like, well how about this?
Speaker 3: How about we just keep owning them?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't understand I have power? Why would I
Speaker 1: give up power?
Speaker 3: Why would I? Why would I? Why would I do that? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 3: what's inn in front?
Speaker 4: I also think it's so you know, now, granted maybe
Speaker 4: I'm just not a titan industry, but like, I just.
Speaker 3: Think just just just.
Speaker 4: The just the gonads on a person to look at
Speaker 4: a mountain and be like, yo, let's just dig through it.
Speaker 3: We we dig through that, right, Like, well, what do
Speaker 3: you what do you think? Take a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, should we go around? Nah, I'll just go through.
Speaker 3: Let's just go through it.
Speaker 1: You're like, yeah, you're gonna go through a mountain. I
Speaker 1: just yeah, I'm willing to bet. No one who actually
Speaker 1: thought that they were going to be operating a hammer
Speaker 1: and a chisel thought to themselves, I'm gonna go through that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Like you just you just looking at the little less
Speaker 4: you know what I'm saying, hack pick, and you're like,
Speaker 4: I bet you If I just keep chipping at this,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna get to the other side of a mountain.
Speaker 6: Fa Yeah, yeah, no.
Speaker 1: This is how I felt when I first learned about
Speaker 1: mountaintop removal coal mining, which is a big problem in
Speaker 1: Appalachia where instead of doing deep mining they literally just
Speaker 1: blow up mountains to dig through the rubble to get
Speaker 1: the coal. And it it's like too much problem. I
Speaker 1: wasn't able to rap, I wasn't able to put my
Speaker 1: head around it. Yeah, you know, until I went and
Speaker 1: saw it, and then it's really devastating.
Speaker 4: Actually it's actually it's it it I imagine it's one
Speaker 4: of those things that looks exactly like the name is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're inside of a mountain. But you're
Speaker 1: on top of a mountain and it's gone, and everything
Speaker 1: is bad.
Speaker 3: Y'all just blew it up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So when they were digging through them, this enormously
Speaker 1: complicated feet of engineering and worker murder took about twenty
Speaker 1: years to complete, and it connected Virginia to Virginia. In
Speaker 1: order to reach Ohio, the Ohio Valley, which was the
Speaker 1: overall goal, there's the Alleghanies to get through, which are
Speaker 1: even bigger and actually harder, it turns out, and important
Speaker 1: to the story. The problem with the Alleghanies from Virginia's
Speaker 1: point of view in a lot of ways, is that
Speaker 1: these are full of people who are entirely culturally removed
Speaker 1: from the rest of Virginia. These are the mountaineers, or
Speaker 1: the mountain whites as they were called at the time.
Speaker 1: They're poor as shit. A lot of them are descended
Speaker 1: from the Scots Irish immigrants who worked as servants for
Speaker 1: the rich to the north and then moved to the
Speaker 1: mountains because land was really, really fucking cheap as because
Speaker 1: it was so hard to work. Couldn't you couldn't plantation
Speaker 1: it right? They lived on smaller homesteads. They had farms
Speaker 1: on such steep hills that the people would joke that
Speaker 1: the way you plant is that you like load seed
Speaker 1: into your gun and then just shoot.
Speaker 3: It at the hill. Brilliant.
Speaker 1: They also weren't nearly as invested in slavery. They retained
Speaker 1: way more European folkways, and they hated the rich fucks.
Speaker 3: Down in the Lowland.
Speaker 1: You can tell that I like them more than them.
Speaker 1: The lowlanders hated them right back, making fun of them
Speaker 1: for being backwards, mocking them for making furniture out of
Speaker 1: sticks that gets quotes, And how their women smoked pipes
Speaker 1: was a big like these fucking hills, that's a problem.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, okayt yeah yeah. So that was that some
Speaker 4: sort of colloquial way to say that, like their women
Speaker 4: are dudes.
Speaker 1: I yeah, I mean, I guess so right, because they
Speaker 1: weren't being like properly fem because they probably like fucking
Speaker 1: chopped wood around the house and like, yeah.
Speaker 4: Mad that that girl could beat you ass. Yeah. Because
Speaker 4: lots changed, thatesn't changes, okay anyway. In the case of
Speaker 4: the Alleghenies, in particular, when Virginia seceded from the US,
Speaker 4: about half of it went ahead and seceeded from Virginia
Speaker 4: and this is how you get West Virginia, aka the
Speaker 4: Better Virginia. I say, I'm not actually from West Virginia.
Speaker 1: I live here, but I was like, Okay, I live
Speaker 1: here now though, so I gotta I gotta rep it.
Speaker 1: It is not exactly utopia, but to understand some of
Speaker 1: the cultural differences. Scott Reynold Nelson's the historian who wrote
Speaker 1: the book on John Henry. He described driving from Virginia
Speaker 1: to West Virginia as quote, Confederate bumper stickers were slowly
Speaker 1: being overtaken by those that read Union. Yes, West Virginia
Speaker 1: was not historically a conservative bastion. It was one of
Speaker 1: the few places where, like the white rural working class
Speaker 1: was union and leftist. You get a lot of this
Speaker 1: is not what I'm covering today, but you get a
Speaker 1: lot of the unions were destroyed very consciously, and so
Speaker 1: a lot of.
Speaker 3: The blue collar stuff kind of actually left. But prop
Speaker 3: you know, it will never leave you, oh or forsake me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's of Jesus, that's right.
Speaker 1: We are sponsored by.
Speaker 4: We are sponsored by yahweh lohem ye.
Speaker 1: That is the only sponsor today. And as always, if
Speaker 1: anything else slips through the cracks, you can write to
Speaker 1: our complaint department at I write, okay on Twitter, here's
Speaker 1: some ads for God, and we are back. And so
Speaker 1: the tunnels have started. They haven't gotten far enough. There's
Speaker 1: bigger mountains in the way. The Civil Wars just ended,
Speaker 1: which brings us to when John Henry enters the historical record.
Speaker 1: So now we get to talk about him for a second. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: we get to talk around him a lot today more
Speaker 1: than we get to talk about who he was, right,
Speaker 1: because he didn't we don't have anything he wrote. Yeah,
Speaker 1: John William Henry was born a free black man in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty seven in New Jersey. He becomes one of
Speaker 1: the first murdered black men in the post Civil War
Speaker 1: legal slavery known as prison slavery.
Speaker 3: We only know.
Speaker 1: The scarcest bit about which is I'll get into it,
Speaker 1: but shocking no one was entirely racist and was the
Speaker 1: continuation of the racist project. So we only know the
Speaker 1: scarcest bit about his life himself, who he was, what
Speaker 1: he liked to do. We know what happened to him
Speaker 1: because of the legal record. More or less, he grew
Speaker 1: up somewhere. He never got particularly tall. He's five foot one.
Speaker 1: I spent a while looking up how tall this is
Speaker 1: compared to the average person in the nineteenth century, So
Speaker 1: the average men were huge in the United States compared
Speaker 1: to anywhere else in the world because the average man,
Speaker 1: the average white man fighting in the Union Army was
Speaker 1: five foot seven, and this makes the mismade men mend
Speaker 1: the third tallest.
Speaker 3: In the world at this point. Du yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Have a feeling that this also is like of the
Speaker 1: countries where they bother to keep tracking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: The average and slave black man was about five foot
Speaker 1: six at the same time, as best as I can tell,
Speaker 1: because nutrition was not being provided properly anyway, So he's
Speaker 1: still short by he's still.
Speaker 3: Homie even there. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: After the Civil War, Virginia is kind of a big
Speaker 1: open air graveyard because an awful lot of people died
Speaker 1: in the Civil War.
Speaker 4: It's his bodies everywhere, just on your way to the
Speaker 4: coffee shop.
Speaker 1: Hey look, yeah, I wonder that guy was I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: stay away from him.
Speaker 3: Though, whatever he owned a slave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, especially this place called City Point in Virginia
Speaker 1: on the James River southeast of Richmond, which is where
Speaker 1: General Grant set up camp during the end of the war.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of dead people around. More Americans died
Speaker 1: in the conflict died in conflict in the Civil War
Speaker 1: than any other war including World War Two, not just
Speaker 1: as a percentage of the population, but like straight up
Speaker 1: number of uniform corpses. The Union Army hired thousands of
Speaker 1: x slaves into the US Burial Corps who went to
Speaker 1: work burying people. However, meanwhile, a local fertilizer company was
Speaker 1: like a cash for bones business. At this point, no
Speaker 1: questions asked. So, wow, you could pick Yeah, you're you're
Speaker 1: really excited about the cash for bones business.
Speaker 3: That's huh.
Speaker 4: I'm just thinking it. There's bodies everywhere, like you could
Speaker 4: ball out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: People showed up and delivered bodies to either burials and
Speaker 1: got paid some amount. I don't know the amounts that
Speaker 1: you were getting paid one job for the other, but
Speaker 1: I just assumed that the sketchy one was probably paid better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what do you need? What do they want?
Speaker 3: Bones for? Grind? Mum music? This fertilizer. Oh you turn
Speaker 3: him into fertilizer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, which I mean, that's what I want when
Speaker 1: I die. I want to be company.
Speaker 4: Dude, I found a I found a company that I
Speaker 4: told my wife put this in my will. Hell, yeah,
Speaker 4: this is what I want. Turn me in a fertilizer.
Speaker 4: Take the bag of fertilizer. Plant a mango tree. Hell,
Speaker 4: that's what I want.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's yeah. My daughter's like what I want?
Speaker 3: So are we going to be eating? I'm like, this
Speaker 3: is the flesh of my I was like, that's this
Speaker 3: Like Jesus, Yeah, you say, take communion. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So John Henry, he's in the US Burial Corps. He
Speaker 1: just turned eighteen years old. The local racists, who I
Speaker 1: assume he just showed up, like, no one really knows,
Speaker 1: but it seems like he was like, I need work.
Speaker 1: We don't know what he was doing during the Civil War.
Speaker 1: We don't know whether he was like attached to the
Speaker 1: army and working in that way. But he's in Virginia
Speaker 1: and he gets paid. He's eighteen years old and he
Speaker 1: starts getting paid to bury people. The local racists who
Speaker 1: had just lost a war to preserve slavery, they are
Speaker 1: not happy about the fact that suddenly all these black
Speaker 1: people live there because all of these people started working
Speaker 1: in the burial corps. Right, yeah, And Actually, it's around
Speaker 1: this point that Richmond becomes a black city for a while,
Speaker 1: and it's not just because the burial core. One of
Speaker 1: the problems that John Henry faced, though, is that bitter
Speaker 1: Southerners weren't the only racists around. Is going to be
Speaker 1: shocking to you. I bet you didn't know that Northerners are.
Speaker 3: Just as racist. Wait wait, no, what I know.
Speaker 1: It's almost like white supremacy is an endemic problem.
Speaker 4: But I thought, okay, wait a second, and I'm gonna
Speaker 4: need a second.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm ready.
Speaker 1: All right, So there's his asshole. His name is Lieutenant Bird.
Speaker 1: He is a Union guy, and it's spelled with a U,
Speaker 1: not a I. I. I'm glad that an asshole wasn't
Speaker 1: named lieutenant Bird, because that'd be a cool name if
Speaker 1: it was with an eye. Yeah, he is a strange
Speaker 1: man with a strange story. He's a piece of shit.
Speaker 1: He's a Union officer from Maine, and he spent a
Speaker 1: long time as a prisoner of war, held by the
Speaker 1: Confederates who kept trying to get a musketball out of
Speaker 1: his head, like in his brain. He had a musketball
Speaker 1: in his brain, but it didn't kill him. Also, the
Speaker 1: musketball was probably friendly fire, with the implication that maybe
Speaker 1: he was such an asshole that one of his own
Speaker 1: men shot him in the head. It could have been
Speaker 1: an accident.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: List admit, I'm trying to tell you there's listen if
Speaker 4: y'all be a history buff, like, enjoy the past, but
Speaker 4: the past was a horrible place to live in.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like, dude.
Speaker 4: There's no other era in life I want to live in.
Speaker 4: The man walk around with a musket and as they're
Speaker 4: trying to figure out, like, okay, how we get it out?
Speaker 1: Like yeah, Yeah, they spend about seven months figure out
Speaker 1: how to dig it out, and then they just put
Speaker 1: larger and larger holes in his brain every time, and
Speaker 1: he kept surviving.
Speaker 3: It's just absurd. Yeah, these fools will give you like
Speaker 3: you about to Like the eye idea.
Speaker 4: Is if you get a if you get a cut
Speaker 4: on your arm, yeah, we're just gonna cut your arm off.
Speaker 4: And how we're gonna do that is give you some
Speaker 4: wood to bite down on and fit the whiskey. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and that's so just down this whiskey. Yeah, bite on
Speaker 4: this wood. Why saw through your bone?
Speaker 3: Nah? Give me the twenty first century fan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I would. I would turnique it's better technology. Yes,
Speaker 1: absolutely so. Yeah. He survives all these wild eighteen sixties
Speaker 1: brain surgeries. He has a musket ball in his brain
Speaker 1: for seven months before they dig it out, and he
Speaker 1: ends up with this like huge growth on the side
Speaker 1: of his head.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I think he was probably an asshole before it. I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to give him any excuses. He was in
Speaker 1: the Freedman's Bureau, which is supposed to help black people
Speaker 1: get back on their feet, but it end it ends
Speaker 1: up a policing agency as well. And again with this
Speaker 1: idea where it's like, well, we're gonna be a policing
Speaker 1: agency so that the racist courts don't get you, you know, promise.
Speaker 1: He's a racist and he's in charge of a military tripunel.
Speaker 1: He delights in putting down revolts by former slaves. There's
Speaker 1: good money in it for him. He illegally rents out
Speaker 1: the services of the Union Occupation Force to put down strikes.
Speaker 1: They put down a strike by black carpenters and blacksmiths
Speaker 1: at the South Side Railroad. They put down another one
Speaker 1: by black farmers, and then another one by black Steve
Speaker 1: Adores which is also just like, people don't talk about
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century being full of strikes by black people.
Speaker 1: People only talk about the white people on strike.
Speaker 3: Which is fucked them.
Speaker 1: So he's putting down all these fucking strikes. I had
Speaker 1: to look it up. A stevedoor or somebody who loads
Speaker 1: and unloads cargo off of a show.
Speaker 3: You had no idea what that was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So he's a private cop for the owners.
Speaker 1: Basically he sells off the services of him and his
Speaker 1: men to the highest bidders. His official duty was not
Speaker 1: any better. He ran a no jury military court for
Speaker 1: black people in the South, which meant that he enforced
Speaker 1: laws that were about to become illegal.
Speaker 3: But we're not illegal yet, not just yet. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Black codes, Yeah, the Black Codes included laws like
Speaker 1: all men and women must have employers or be declared vagrants.
Speaker 1: This was theoretically for everyone. This was not It was
Speaker 1: only ever enforced against black people. Black people weren't allowed
Speaker 1: to testify against white people in court, and punishment for
Speaker 1: property crime shot through the roof, which is I mean,
Speaker 1: as a clear example of how they continue this racist control.
Speaker 1: Right as you change, you're like, oh, everyone's property crime laws.
Speaker 1: The punishments have gone up. Never mind that we're only
Speaker 1: applying this or applying this wildly disproportionately to black people. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you just invent you'd like kind of invent loitering
Speaker 4: and trespassing. Yeah, you just invented, like I it's illegal
Speaker 4: to just be outside.
Speaker 1: Yeah what you don't have a job. Yeah, they just
Speaker 1: they just outlawed slavery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 4: I just I've been a slave for twenty years. I'm
Speaker 4: just yeah, I don't know. I don't know yet.
Speaker 3: It's been a day. Yeah, I'm just I'm getting some fruit. Like,
Speaker 3: I'm just there's a there's a tree. I don't see
Speaker 3: why I need a job.
Speaker 4: This is it's just it grows on the tree. I'm
Speaker 4: just grabbing the tree. Doesn't belong to anyone. I'm just Yeah. Also,
Speaker 4: that of a little of fun little doozy in those
Speaker 4: black codes of like when we now have the right
Speaker 4: to vote, was like, hey, well you can vote if
Speaker 4: your grandfather could.
Speaker 3: Vote, Oh yeah yeah, they tope at people.
Speaker 4: Yeah like okay, that's pretty creative, like all like that
Speaker 4: that was real creative. Yeah trash, Like yeah, trash, because.
Speaker 3: That's really creative.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they open up all the old slave pens
Speaker 1: for vagrants pending trial, and to quote that author Scott Nelson,
Speaker 1: men and women without labor contracts could be picked up
Speaker 1: by police and auctioned off to the highest bidder for
Speaker 1: three months of labor. Those who tried to escape during
Speaker 1: their three month term could be used for an additional
Speaker 1: three months and be bound with ball and chain. The
Speaker 1: old slave Patrol was brought back as a special police
Speaker 1: and Bird was selling people to the highest bidder, even
Speaker 1: though he was a union guy.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: This monstrous state of affairs peaked in spring eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: six in Virginia. The black codes continue like all throughout,
Speaker 1: but like this particular bad set in Richmond, Virginia and
Speaker 1: the surrounding areas peaks in eighteen sixty six. And it
Speaker 1: was during spring eighteen sixty six that our man John
Speaker 1: Henry got picked up ostensibly for shoplifting credit where it's due.
Speaker 1: Congress and the Supreme Court will working against these black
Speaker 1: codes and got most of the ones in Virginia struck
Speaker 1: down pretty quick. The Supreme Court was like, actually, you
Speaker 1: can't do a military trial while the civil court is
Speaker 1: in session. They passed passed the Civil Rights Active eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty six that said it's a crime to for state
Speaker 1: officials to subject people to different punishments, pains, or penalties
Speaker 1: by reason of his color. And then Bird the asshole
Speaker 1: with a bullet in his brain. He gets fired for
Speaker 1: corruption while while John Henry is awaiting trial. But you
Speaker 1: remember when they legalized merrill and they didn't let any
Speaker 1: of the black men in prison free who were in
Speaker 1: jail for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I totally remember that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that that's what happened.
Speaker 3: Did it again, Yeah, yeah, this is the prequel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so John Henry is still in jail even though
Speaker 1: the person arrested him as a literal whatever.
Speaker 4: Criminal and was said that you weren't allowed to do
Speaker 4: what you did. But he's still sitting in jail. Also,
Speaker 4: fun fact about this time too, that a lot of
Speaker 4: people don't know is that, like before they got these
Speaker 4: black codes up and running, like the amount of like
Speaker 4: black people that got elected to office like skyrocketed. Yeah
Speaker 4: you know what I'm saying, because like, oh well, we
Speaker 4: just gonna put us, you know what I'm saying, Like
Speaker 4: entire cities had entire black city councils, you know, because
Speaker 4: it was more of us. And too is like, oh,
Speaker 4: we're we get to say who in charge? Yeah, we
Speaker 4: get to wait, we get to choose them. Well, we're
Speaker 4: gonna choose this fool, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And then they was like, oh, whoa, whoa, the system
Speaker 4: works too well, let's uh, let's go ahead, and let's
Speaker 4: go ahead and throw some throw some poison in the
Speaker 4: well here here.
Speaker 1: I spend way too much of my time anytime I
Speaker 1: read anything about the nineteenth century in the US, I
Speaker 1: just like spend so much my time thinking about, like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck could have happened if if reconstruction had worked,
Speaker 1: if it hadn't been destroyed by dude racism, you know, like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so just like the flying cars, like
Speaker 4: the flourishing Yeah yeah, I'm saying, had we dealt with
Speaker 4: this shit two centuries ago?
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: The one thing that John Henry got out of all
Speaker 1: of this, the stuff that wasn't retroactive, is it did
Speaker 1: give him an actual trial instead of a Freedman Bureau's
Speaker 1: jury list court. All this did for him is slow
Speaker 1: down the inevitable and give it the veneer of legitimacy.
Speaker 1: His actual trial had an all white jury, and the
Speaker 1: judge was a Southern racist who was mad at the
Speaker 1: Northern radicals. The court really had to put in their
Speaker 1: best work. They really put in the overtime to make
Speaker 1: his case of felony, because you had to shoplift more
Speaker 1: than twenty dollars for it to be a felony. All
Speaker 1: of the goods to combine in the store that he
Speaker 1: supposedly robbed were worth fifty dollars. So they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you robbed half the store. But they couldn't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they couldn't come up with that. They couldn't.
Speaker 1: So what they did is even though this didn't it
Speaker 1: didn't have an apartment above it, it was just a
Speaker 1: fucking store, they pretended like the guy lived there and
Speaker 1: so that it was housebreaking. So now it's a felony,
Speaker 1: and you know, courts are racist. But another trial in
Speaker 1: Virginia is happening. This started the same day as his,
Speaker 1: which would have been a really interesting trial and I
Speaker 1: wish it had gone through. It is the first intererrational,
Speaker 1: interracial jury in the state's history. It is the treason
Speaker 1: trial for Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States
Speaker 1: of America. Oh wow, But the federal prosecutors lost their
Speaker 1: nerve and they call the trial off.
Speaker 4: Oh man, please don't let Do you think the history's
Speaker 4: going to repeat himself with that one?
Speaker 1: I know, That's all I was just thinking about. I
Speaker 1: was like, this is why all the racists are so mad,
Speaker 1: right that Trump's on trial, is that they're like, you're
Speaker 1: not allowed to put a president on trial. And it's
Speaker 1: probably we got away with it with Davis, you.
Speaker 3: Know, Yeah, yeah, dude, yeah, I mean, I don't.
Speaker 4: I would never second guess Georgia like them Atlanta prosecuted
Speaker 4: to say like, nah, we know we're doing this, like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: It'll be interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Day.
Speaker 1: But the trial that they're not afraid to call off,
Speaker 1: that's more important to the government than the trial of
Speaker 1: Jefferson Davis is a trial to put John Henry In,
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old black kid, in prison for maybe
Speaker 1: but probably not shoplifting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: Convicted and given ten years for house breaking in a
Speaker 1: store that wasn't a house. It is also completely possible
Speaker 1: that he never shoplifted a thing. Bird was arresting people
Speaker 1: for striking and accusing people of why old shit everywhere
Speaker 1: he could.
Speaker 4: Yes, and I mean and you again standing Yeah was illegal? Yeah,
Speaker 4: I can't so you just can't be standing there? Yeah,
Speaker 4: do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, this I can't
Speaker 4: stress enough how absurd that is.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, No, I like when I used to get a
Speaker 1: hassle for loitering when I was a street kid. At
Speaker 1: one point I finally like printed out the Maryland law
Speaker 1: about loitering and was like, brilliant, I'm not legally loitering
Speaker 1: in the cops like, I don't care, give me your ID.
Speaker 4: You know what's the crime? Yeah, Like the crime is
Speaker 4: standing here? Who is the victim?
Speaker 3: Yes? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So November eighteen sixty six, John Henry was transported to
Speaker 1: the Virginia Penitentiarre Pennant whatever prison on a steamboat up
Speaker 1: the river past the wreckage of the Civil War. At
Speaker 1: this point, the penitentiary, I think I got it right,
Speaker 1: held five hundred inmates, most of them were new because
Speaker 1: all but fifty inmates escaped in April when the Confederacy
Speaker 1: fell and the government fled Richmond. They were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're getting the fuck out of here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, woy would I stay?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Imagine being the fifty who are left, Like maybe they
Speaker 1: couldn't run, or maybe they were like.
Speaker 3: You're so pissed off. I know, I know you'd like
Speaker 3: y'all didn't waked me up. Yeah, nobody could have went
Speaker 3: Nobody woke me up.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I was saving corn brand for y'all this whole time. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we was in jail. I was saying extra food for y'all.
Speaker 4: Y'all ain't wake me up. Yeah, so pissed off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, John Henry was innate four hundred ninety seven, and
Speaker 1: this one was a new every day learned new bullshit
Speaker 1: about America. Any black convict who showed up who didn't
Speaker 1: have a scar was given one so that they could
Speaker 1: be identified because they can't kill black people apart.
Speaker 3: You just taught me some. Yeah, you just taught me some. Yeah. Wow, Okay.
Speaker 1: And I don't know whether this is because I know
Speaker 1: that at least the guy who's doing it there gets
Speaker 1: fired and we'll talk about that. But I'm sure that
Speaker 1: this is a regular practice. You know.
Speaker 3: Damn John Hennery, we were branded, but like, yeah, god dog,
Speaker 3: that's crazy. I didn't anyway, go on.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a whole new world. We can enslave people
Speaker 1: through shadow slavery, so we can't brand people like.
Speaker 3: Right now, we can't brand because of political correctness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whope culture has gone too far.
Speaker 3: Whope cultures too far. Can't brand our niggers. Yeah, I'm sorry, guys.
Speaker 1: No, no, John Henry had or received a scar on
Speaker 1: each arm. Black prisoners outnumbered white prisoners tend to one.
Speaker 1: Eighty percent of them were arrested for property crime, and
Speaker 1: so begins America's wonderful legacy of continuing to use black
Speaker 1: people as slaves. Yeah, but you know what.
Speaker 3: Won't do that?
Speaker 1: God, No, there's a lot of that in the Bible.
Speaker 3: Actually, Oh no, you'd be on the wrong side of
Speaker 3: history on that.
Speaker 2: We're good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe we should just do.
Speaker 3: Set the captives free.
Speaker 4: I've been hanging out with my moms. Man, Like I
Speaker 4: had to go, like hang out with my mom.
Speaker 3: So I like I was at her.
Speaker 4: Little her little Baptist starts with her recently. So I
Speaker 4: got all of it came back. Now, all the quotes
Speaker 4: came back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good shit in there.
Speaker 4: Look, look, look the greatest look, let me tell you
Speaker 4: the greatest rappers in orders you will ever hear is
Speaker 4: that black preaching boy? Yeah, my man got sayings anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know what else has sayings is whatever we're
Speaker 1: advertising today, which we definitely hand picked because we specifically
Speaker 1: care and we will be personally hurt if you don't
Speaker 1: buy these things.
Speaker 3: Hey, we're back.
Speaker 1: So prison slavery, convict labor is not the same thing
Speaker 1: as chattel slavery. It is good that we got wrote
Speaker 1: of chattel slavery, but it is I'm not being hyperbolic
Speaker 1: when I call prison labor slavery. The Thirteenth Amendments of
Speaker 1: the Constitution of the United States reads neither slavery nor
Speaker 1: involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime, whereof the parts
Speaker 1: shall have been duly convicted that shall exist within the
Speaker 1: United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Speaker 4: Yes, I look, man, every time somebody bring up the
Speaker 4: thirteenth Amendment, I just copy and paste the mug and.
Speaker 1: Be like, yes, did you read the second half.
Speaker 4: There's an asterisk, guys, Yeah, there's an asterisk. Read the footnote.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: We have more work to do. Is a good thing
Speaker 1: that we started and we need to continue it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these convicts, mostly black, are least to do labor
Speaker 1: all over the place. Richmond was rebuilt after the war
Speaker 1: to end black slavery with black slavery conditions are really
Speaker 1: bad within the prison. But this, this far is interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, a reformer steps in as the warden trying
Speaker 1: to set things right in the Virginia penitentiary. He's honestly
Speaker 1: a really interesting study in why reform has some problems
Speaker 1: in this kind of situation. Okay, Burnham wardwell, his name is.
Speaker 3: His name is?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: His name again, the warren is named Burnham Wardwell.
Speaker 4: Oh, some people are just it's you if some things
Speaker 4: are just destiny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, Sophie changed her name away from podcaster
Speaker 1: to try and get away from fate.
Speaker 3: I get it, man, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: He was a radical Republican Quaker. Quakers are really interesting because,
Speaker 1: in one hand, they were the largest organized group of
Speaker 1: white people fighting and dying to free black people before
Speaker 1: the Civil War. They also invented the penitentiary and the
Speaker 1: modern prison system by accident. Yeah, and Burnham he is
Speaker 1: to descended from convicted wizards.
Speaker 4: Oh oh so now so now the vinn diagram has happened.
Speaker 4: Our worlds have converged right here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yes, his ancestors got murdered in the Salem
Speaker 1: which trials for being wizards. I would own the ship
Speaker 1: out of that. If I was him, I.
Speaker 3: Would be tattoos. Yeah, like no waker would wizard in
Speaker 3: my blood.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he had moved before the war. He was living
Speaker 1: in Richmond and he was a successful businessman. I want
Speaker 1: to say he was an ice dealer or something that's
Speaker 1: not code for anything.
Speaker 3: He sold ice. Would you say that he was a
Speaker 3: rich man north of oh nice? I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: I've been trying to work this in all the time
Speaker 4: since we're doing Virginia.
Speaker 3: Wow, I apologize.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: It was. It was low hanging fruit.
Speaker 1: Literally, we're literally being a poet.
Speaker 3: You were trying.
Speaker 5: You can't turn that part of your brain off.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear prop sing snead O'Connor, you
Speaker 1: can check out Oh yes, the episode on the history
Speaker 1: of hip hop.
Speaker 3: So I needed to put some respect on old girl
Speaker 3: name boy. I'd say Eric, Yeah anyway, the terrible person.
Speaker 2: But the remix of her song with Biggie's song when
Speaker 2: Connor mac gregor walks out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's hard, it's pretty dope.
Speaker 3: It's pretty dope. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So our guy is an iced dealer living in Richmond,
Speaker 1: and he refuses to leave on the South seas. I
Speaker 1: think he wants to stay and look after his business.
Speaker 1: But he's really obviously an abolitionist and a Quaker, so
Speaker 1: he spends the Civil War in Confederate prison. He actually
Speaker 1: sat on the mixed race jury for Jefferson Davis, and
Speaker 1: there's a photo of him in the jury, and I
Speaker 1: wish he had just been one of the men to
Speaker 1: convict Jefferson Davis instead of one of the people who
Speaker 1: got the US going on convict labor. Because this reformer,
Speaker 1: he's put in charge and he wants to fix it
Speaker 1: around the prison. He cleans and he fumigates the place,
Speaker 1: he gets he gets better blankets for the coming winter,
Speaker 1: brings a Quaker from Philly to run a school for
Speaker 1: the inmates. He replaces all the shittiest guards, including the
Speaker 1: guy in charge of scarring black men. And he also
Speaker 1: got rid of and I can't believe that this was
Speaker 1: a thing that they had to get rid of. He
Speaker 1: got rid of the well, he got two things. One
Speaker 1: was the literal medieval rack that they had for torture.
Speaker 1: And he also got rid of you know, the like
Speaker 1: the phrase the hole for solitary confinement. Yeah, yeah, in Virginia,
Speaker 1: it was a hole in the ground and they put
Speaker 1: you in the hole and then they put wooden boards
Speaker 1: across the top. He got rid of all that shit
Speaker 1: because he actually genuinely cared and did the wrong thing
Speaker 1: after this, because he was like, well, all this reform
Speaker 1: costs money. Where can I get some money? Previously prisoners
Speaker 1: had only been leased out seasonally. He's like, well, these
Speaker 1: railroads need work. Why don't I lease out these prisoners
Speaker 1: year round to the railroads? What could go wrong?
Speaker 4: I wonder if in his head he's like, this is
Speaker 4: an honest day's pay, like this is reform because he
Speaker 4: seems to have but yeah, yeah, like a smudge of
Speaker 4: dignity inside of him. So he's like, let's let's give
Speaker 4: these guys dignity. They could work for work to earn
Speaker 4: their key.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, And he personally goes out to check out the
Speaker 1: railroad camp. He is like, I need to make sure
Speaker 1: that these people will have like food and shelter, and
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, yeah, And he was like the food
Speaker 1: is fine.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: He was like, Okay, this is going to be okay,
Speaker 1: let's go, and he leased out two hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five black men to the railroad, including John the Hammer Henry,
Speaker 1: who was probably not called John the Hammer Henry, but
Speaker 1: it could have been. He was twenty one years old
Speaker 1: at this.
Speaker 6: Point and.
Speaker 1: Wardwell later he's not only like, oh, I was definitely wrong.
Speaker 1: He spent the rest of his life fighting against prison
Speaker 1: labor and the convict lease system. Wow he is so interesting.
Speaker 1: Wow he gets yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: He was just like, God, I like I regret it,
Speaker 4: Like I regret what happened. I thought I was doing
Speaker 4: a good thing, and I tried to make it right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, dang.
Speaker 1: He gives speeches about how convict labor does two bad things.
Speaker 1: One it fucks up the free working class who can't compete,
Speaker 1: and two that it killed convicts because, unlike free laborers,
Speaker 1: they couldn't quit if the conditions got too bad. So
Speaker 1: he like knew what was wrong with it. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just like, oh, it would have been fine, but the
Speaker 1: conditions were bad. He was like, no, this is a
Speaker 1: bad idea to its core. His tombstone, says, has a
Speaker 1: lot of quotes on It's a big quote quote filled tombstone,
Speaker 1: and it includes when the innocent is convicted, the court
Speaker 1: is condemned and remember them that are in bonds so
Speaker 1: like yours. But he takes it seriously. Ice dealer is
Speaker 1: not his main fucking vocation.
Speaker 3: Look man, that's just a sigh hustle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I dealer got got some cold quotes.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, so also did some cold blooded shit.
Speaker 3: Hey cold blooded you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Because the railroad camps that he sells all these men to,
Speaker 1: they get way way worse. Railroad politics of reconstruction era
Speaker 1: America are convoluted as fuck. But basically it's the same
Speaker 1: thing where public money fund funds private enterprise. Shortly thereafter
Speaker 1: he goes out and he checks out the railroad. Then
Speaker 1: the railroad changes hands and it's now owned by an
Speaker 1: asshole named Covis Potter Huntington, which is just not a course.
Speaker 1: If you're an American and your name is Covis Potter Huntington,
Speaker 1: go back to England. I don't care where you were born.
Speaker 3: Yeah you don't. Yeah, just this ain't your hood.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: It became the Chesapeake and Ohio instead of the Covington
Speaker 1: in Ohio, and they were given millions of dollars from
Speaker 1: the state. Plus all these convict laborers and they were
Speaker 1: given six months to build a railroad to Ohio, which
Speaker 1: everyone was like, that can't be done, but he was like.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have it.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do it. He goes to West Virginia and
Speaker 1: he founds a town named Huntington. Also, you just shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Other people can name towns after you, but if you
Speaker 1: name you are on the town man yourself.
Speaker 3: You had a blaze of creativity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like, he's looking for a name, he doesn't
Speaker 1: know many words, looks at his lease or whatever the
Speaker 1: fund has. Yeah, Ton's the that's the ending of a town.
Speaker 3: How about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Virginia almost bankrupted itself funding the cno railroads construction.
Speaker 1: And I've read some stuff that talks about how this
Speaker 1: impoverished the South and led to a lot of the
Speaker 1: like newly freed people going hungry and fucked up the economy.
Speaker 1: And it gets a little bit beyond my understandings. Hunting
Speaker 1: And is like, I can do it in six years,
Speaker 1: and people are like, but it can't be done, and
Speaker 1: he's like, well I can thanks to the miracles of
Speaker 1: modern science. Nitroglycerin, which is about ten times as explode
Speaker 1: as gunpowder by volume, so the same drilled whole packs
Speaker 1: of like packed full would be wildly more effective. It
Speaker 1: is insanely dangerous to handle a box of this stuff
Speaker 1: in San Francisco. Had just like it was like in
Speaker 1: the wrong place. Since some workers tried to take off
Speaker 1: the lid. It took out several city blocks of San Francisco.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Yeah, whose box is it?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Hey, put it over there.
Speaker 1: It's not ticking. I'm sure it's fine.
Speaker 3: It's fine, it's just sitting there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then a guy named Alfred Nobel, more famous for other works, hmmm,
Speaker 1: found a way to stabilize nitroglycerin, mixing it with gunpowder
Speaker 1: and clay, inventing dynamite, which was a trademark name. I
Speaker 1: had no idea serious, it's like clean handed, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I did not know that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: forgot to write down the name of the main competitor.
Speaker 1: There's another person.
Speaker 5: Anderson was dynamite for Halloween once.
Speaker 3: Did you get so? Was Henom?
Speaker 5: Yeah, instead of barking, that's just what came out of
Speaker 5: her mouth.
Speaker 3: That's hilarious. That's crazy.
Speaker 4: I didn't know dynamite was like dang, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's like Xerox Kleenex coke for your side of the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, oh no, I'm a I grew up in
Speaker 1: soda Land.
Speaker 3: Oh you're in soda Yeah, okay, near mind.
Speaker 1: About ten years after today's story, a black anarchist in Chicago,
Speaker 1: Lucy Parsons is a quote about dynamite that I'm just
Speaker 1: going to work into this because I think it's fun.
Speaker 1: Dynamite of all the good stuff, that is the stuff,
Speaker 1: several stuff, several pounds of this sublime stuff into an
Speaker 1: inch pipe, plug up both ends and sert a cap
Speaker 1: of the fuse attached. Places in the immediate vicinity of
Speaker 1: a lot of rich loafers who live by the sweat
Speaker 1: of other people's brows and light the fuse. A most
Speaker 1: cheerful and gratifying result will follow.
Speaker 2: Yo.
Speaker 3: That was poetry.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, she is an amazing writer and she's hard
Speaker 1: as fuck. All of our all of our stuff is
Speaker 1: like I mean, all of our stuff is really poetic
Speaker 1: stuff about how you should stab and kill all the
Speaker 1: rich people and take everything back from them. The actual
Speaker 1: result in Chicago wasn't really cheerful gratifying. Her husband actually
Speaker 1: ends up hanged basically for publishing her words, and that's
Speaker 1: why we have May Day, the workers holiday. But that's
Speaker 1: a different story that you can hear the first episode
Speaker 1: of the podcast.
Speaker 3: You slooped in so many things right now?
Speaker 4: Oh that was you know, you're watching birds and they're
Speaker 4: just kind of like doing the thing.
Speaker 3: All of a sudden they get into sync. That's what
Speaker 3: you just did right now. Thank you, thank you. Yes.
Speaker 1: So, Nigel Glistenering is on the scene and a lot
Speaker 1: of Irish laborers who are doing most of the work
Speaker 1: as we talked about, but not all of it. They
Speaker 1: were like, I'm not touching that shit. That is too dangerous.
Speaker 1: So out west they start and out west, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's entirely related to the Irish. I
Speaker 1: think the Irish were mostly on the East coast. They
Speaker 1: start relying more and more on indentured Chinese labor.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say it is Chinese over in San
Speaker 3: Francisco in there. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that doesn't get talked about
Speaker 1: is that most of the Chinese laborers who built the
Speaker 1: Transit trans Continent a railroad were indentured, held for like
Speaker 1: four or five year stints. So they now have dynamite
Speaker 1: instead of gunpowder, and they had trained cars to pull
Speaker 1: the rubble out. The only slow part of the process
Speaker 1: left was the drilling, which means steam drills, which means
Speaker 1: a life and death race between man versus machine, which
Speaker 1: means a legend will be born, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: on Wednesday. It's a douche. I've been working on my cliffhangers.
Speaker 3: That was good man. Yeah, they liked it. That was
Speaker 3: a good one. That deserves three body rolls one.
Speaker 2: All right, well, I'm glad you remember the body rolls.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, no, no, everyone in the audience has thought
Speaker 1: you've been doing it the whole time.
Speaker 4: The whole time, like it's hours where the body rolls. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Well we talked a little bit about how people can
Speaker 1: find you, but how can people find Yeah.
Speaker 3: Hey, I think, uh you know, let's let's get you
Speaker 3: guys some cold grew coffee.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, go to our website, the terra form coldbrew dot com.
Speaker 3: It's really good, it really is.
Speaker 4: Use promo code hood get you fifteen percent off man,
Speaker 4: you know, just for our cool zone folks. Yeah, dude, man,
Speaker 4: prop hip hop is all the things still on Instagram
Speaker 4: and X because listen if if a platform wants to
Speaker 4: change his name, I will honor if they're choosing it.
Speaker 4: You know, listen, if that is your choice, pronoun now,
Speaker 4: I will honor your choice.
Speaker 1: X Yeah, they changed the verb to post.
Speaker 3: They changed their verb to post. If you're going to
Speaker 3: change your verb, yeah, who am I to judge you? Now?
Speaker 3: I don't have to use it.
Speaker 5: Your logo looks like shit.
Speaker 4: But yeah, all right, when I tell you that logo like, wait,
Speaker 4: where did I hear this?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 4: Cody said, it look like a men's what do you say,
Speaker 4: like a like a men's soap, like a men's lotion bottle. Yeah,
Speaker 4: from twenty years ago, from twenty years ago.
Speaker 3: Just distressed.
Speaker 4: My man took an x at put distressed filter on it.
Speaker 4: Photoshop three point Oh that's not even like, that's not
Speaker 4: even creative suite.
Speaker 7: That's just three point oho photoshop. Yeah, this is incredible. No,
Speaker 7: he just never changed his aesthetics from the late nineties,
Speaker 7: and he had the worst possible aesthetics available in the
Speaker 7: late nineties.
Speaker 4: Just bleeding cowboy font Yeah, defont dot com.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I gets a tattooed with the distress too.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, of course it's a tramp stamp. Oh, I'd
Speaker 3: be flawless, and it's I'm on.
Speaker 1: To it when he when he fights Zuckerberg.
Speaker 5: It's not fighting Zuckerberg, I know, but.
Speaker 3: I dream Zuckerberg.
Speaker 4: Zuckerbird is the hero, and this because he's now or
Speaker 4: at least a miracle worker, because he figured out how
Speaker 4: to make us cheer for him.
Speaker 3: I know, I know, I'm.
Speaker 4: So mad at you for it, but I'm like Judo,
Speaker 4: like that's full respect man like you.
Speaker 1: Because he would wipe the floor with him, and I
Speaker 1: want it to happen. And I'm like, why do I
Speaker 1: want it to happen? Zuckerberg is evil, but not as
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I'm cheering for Mark Zuckerbird, which is happening right now.
Speaker 2: Zacho beat that man's ass in like five seconds. That's
Speaker 2: why he's not doing it. It's so I'm barrossing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: I can't wait for this to hang off the cliff.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no one, I'm just going to step on
Speaker 1: your toes for two days and then I'm going.
Speaker 3: To pull you up.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, you can.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I had the thing I was going to remember to plug,
Speaker 1: and then I remembered what it was, and now I've
Speaker 1: forgotten again. I don't know what it is there. There's
Speaker 1: this thing I keep thinking. I'm like, I need to
Speaker 1: remember to plug this thing, and I don't remember what
Speaker 1: it is, but I guess. In the meantime, I'm on Substack.
Speaker 1: I post weekly. I have another podcast called Live Like
Speaker 1: the World's Dying about individual community preparedness. A bunch of books.
Speaker 1: Most recent one is called Escape from Insul Island. It
Speaker 1: does what it says on the cover. You can read
Speaker 1: it if you have a short attention span. This is
Speaker 1: the book for you. It is very short and fast.
Speaker 1: Pay uh, Sophie, what do you got?
Speaker 2: I got a plug for a mini series running on
Speaker 2: It could happen here around the time. This episode is
Speaker 2: originally dropping done by James Stout, so look out for
Speaker 2: those James Southberry, talented journalist and writer. We haven't named
Speaker 2: it yet, but it's it's about the Marshall Islands.
Speaker 1: Oh, that explains the messages from him about the Marshall Islands.
Speaker 1: It's all coming together. He was just there, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: all right. I'll see you on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 2: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5: Visit our website
Speaker 2: Cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.