Behind the Scenes Minis: George and Mad Jack

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracey V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about George Washington Williams this week, and I'm going to start with the sad part of behind the Scenes, and then we're gonna move on to stuff that's much funnier. Alrighty uh. Basically, this episode made me sadder than anything I have worked on in so long. I was so sad about George Washington Williams dying at the age of forty one. And I don't know if the trajectory of the Congo Free State would have been different if he had lived and had been able to bring more attention to it. It could have, don't really know, but the fact that he did so much and that his life was so short made me so sad. And then I was also sad that it was really thanks to the work of one other person that we know anything about him, that person being John Hope Franklin. I'm not sad that he did that work. I'm just sad that Williams fell into so much obscurity before he did. John Hope Franklin did like literally four decades of work, work that went until the end of his life. And then I was also sad that he died in two thousand and nine, so I couldn't like ask him about this or thank him for doing all of this words. There's like just layers of sadness. And then my absolute total coincidence, I started working on this episode on the first anniversary of the death of a dear friend who died at forty two of pancreatic cancer, so like that added an awful layer. And then the next day I said, Hey, you know who I think would really be into this episode is my old college friend John Mott, who I would characterize as a friend of the show. He and I mostly kept up with each other on Twitter. A lot of the conversations that we had were about the podcast, and he was always referring other people to the podcast, and I had not kept up with him since I left Twitter, so I went to see how he was doing, and I learned that he had died in November, and that was just two of the deaths that were part of my world last week working on this and it all came together and just like, man, this is I'm not even going to get into the details of the others, but it was a rough week and it was a very sad, sad topic to be working on that I just sort of wanted to acknowledge all of that before moving in to the funny part, which is that when I do research, I go and I bookmark a whole bunch of stuff, meaning to come back to it later. And I bookmarked this like a blog post type thing called What Tarzan taught Me about Ohio History by someone called Todd Book, And I was like, that's weird. I wonder why this came up in the search results, And I just bookmarked it and came back to it later, and then I was reading it and I'm just gonna read a couple sentences from it. Quote. That all changed when I was thumbing through the movie channels and stumbled on the Legend of Tarzan twenty sixteen. As I watched a George Washington Williams played by Samuel L. Jackson, introduced himself to Tarzan. He informs Tarzan of his desire to expose the evil deeds that King Leopold the Second of Belgium is inflicting on the Congolese in search of profits. He educates Tarzan that the Congo is threatened and that Tarzan must join him to expose this injustice to the world. I felt like my brain was melting. I was like, is this a real movie? Am I dreaming? A's Like what this? It just seemed so wild to me that like somebody had made a Tarzan movie about King Leopold in the Congo Free State. So then I went and I read the Wikipedia synopsis of the plot of this movie, which starts with the Berlin Conference and the scramble for Africa, and I was like, my face, I was involuntarily like making a face of absolute confounded bafflement that this is really a movie that got made. I could feel my face kind of contorting itself. Uh. And then I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna have to watch this movie, like, oh, did you watch it? I did? I did? Did you watch a whole thing? I watched the entire thing? And I watched an entire the entire thing, like sort of in the midst of a very crappy week, and I was like, I don't actually think this movie is gonna be good. And I feel like if I watch it now, while I'm having a very crappy week, at least I'm not spending time that could have been spent on something fun on a movie that doesn't turn out to be great, and it is a strange film. It's quite a task to attempt to make an anti colonial Tarzan movie. There's just a lot going on there. It's also kind of a choice to cast Samuel L. Jackson, who was almost seventy at the time, in the role of somebody who died at the age of forty one. And I did not appreciate how many times George Washington Williams was made the butt of the joke. I did not really like that at all. So yeah, I don't think I could really wreck amend this movie to anyone, but the fact that somebody did make a Tarzan movie involving George Washington Williams, I would rather just have a George Washington Williams movie, to be honest, you're making a face, well, because yes, I get that, but I think probably, like if that movie got made, nobody would go see it. Yeah, I think this logic is probably if we put Alexander Scarsguard in a loincloth, a lot of people will come and then we can be like a hah, it's really a history movie about colonization. There is a pretty a scene I appreciate. It is a scene where Tarzan gets a herd of Wi wildebeasts to just stampede through, you know, a Belgian colonial town. It does not make it seem like people are injured, but they do cause all the buildings to collapse. That was a more fun bit to watch. But I still am just like that. What a combination of things to put in a movie. That's an interesting and ambitious approach to it. Ultimately, you know not Yeah, the person who wrote this, I don't know anything about this person, Todd Book who wrote a post about this, but apparently was doing so from the George Washington Williams Room at the Ohio Statehouse, so there is a room named after him at the Ohio Statehouse. There was also one quote that I really loved from George Washington Williams written in History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five that summed up why our same reasons for not talking about events on the show that are super duper recent in history and he was writing that book roughly twenty years after the end of the Civil War, and he wrote, quote in writing of events within living memory, it requires both fortitude and skill to resist the insidious influence of interested friends and actors, to separate error from truth with an even and steady hand, to master the sources of historical information, to know where the material is, to collect and classify it, and to avoid partisan feeling and maintain a spirit of judicial candor. I was like, man, I've seen so many people who work in the field of history make these exact same points about how there's sort of a moment when you can have enough historical remove from something that happened to really look at it in a more analytical way. And he was making that point, you know, when history as a modern source based field was in its infancy. Yeah. So, yeah, he's complicated, and so much stuff happened in his life, which was just so tragically short. He was a very busy bee, incredibly busy at so many different things, a lot of gear changes, so many gear changes. Yeah. I had brunch over at a friend's house and I was talking about having watched this movie and one of the friends was like, wait, who's George Washington Williams? And as I was just kind of reciting all of the things, I was like, this is so many different things in one lifetime. Oh, John Mitton esquire, I don't think I'd ever heard of this person. Well, probably because he would make you real mad. Yeah, it's found him frustrating. I mean, do you know what I think of when I read his entire story? What's that Mama Odie from Princess and the Frog Okay, who at one point says, y'all ain't got the sense you were born with? Yeah? Kind of how I feel about him. I like, so we we talked about having an accidental theme. Neither of us remembered for sure, like how specifically we became aware of this person slash why they wound up on the list to do an episode. Both of them had such short lives, George Washington, Williams and John Whitton, But like the tenor of that lifetime is very different. For yes, yes, yes, yes, I am very fascinated by the Nimrod biography. And here is why if that biography, which is very frank about how much he loved this man, but if he has pulled out details he seems to have not pulled out a lot of details that would that would paint his friend in a bad light. He seems to have been pretty frank. If he did pull out details that man was insufferable. But he's pretty open about how bad things got, especially at the end, like it really sounds like Apperly and Mitton's mother and some of their other friends, like when he describes what he went through, because he was kind of like on full time watch with him in France, and it was his idea to take him out to the country and like sober him up and get him eating a good diet and like getting fresh air. And how well he started to do. And he's like, that was, you know, my idea, and it seemed like it was going great until we realized like all he was trying to do was get away from us, all right. He's pretty frank about how ugly the whole situation was and how like you could not talk reason to him because he didn't want it. And sometimes he talked about like they would say like if you keep living like this, you're gonna die, and he'd be like, I don't care. And so they were for a time, you know, kind of keeping an eye on him. He was going to end his life, but he also seemed so irrational they didn't even know if that was really what he wanted or if he was just kind of like in a state of madness. Right. It's not a pretty picture at all, So I it makes me tend to think like he probably wasn't whitewashing a lot of the rest of it. If anyone is wondering, because I know I did. And if you're very worried about hearing animal things, don't listen to the next minute and a half. But I will account for what happened to the bear and the monkey. Okay, because the bear, he did not have the bear put down after it bit him through the leg and kind of maimed him for life. But sometime down the road, the bear went after another person and at that point they determined that the bear was not safe to have in the house, and so she was euthanized at that point, which also sounded like it went horribly the monkey. This is really awful. He let the monkey drink. Oh no, the monkey was kind of an alcoholic, but that is not what killed it. At one point, the monkey drank a bottle that looked like alcohol that was poison like. It was like a household chemical. It wasn't intended to be poisoned, but uhuh it drank something and they died from it. So that's a skid. It's uh irresponsible animal care. I this is only tangentially related. Sometimes the TikTok algorithm will show me a video of someone having an encounter with a bear and they dress I'm not talking about the hiker sees a bear and does the appropriate things. I'm talking about somebody allows the bear to come up on their porch with their cubs and starts making friendly noises to the bear, and they stress me out so much. And this episode is kind of an example of like why having wild animals in this way is like not okay. Yeah, you know, listen, I understand the impetus to go, oh my god, hi, you're so cute. Yeah, but I also I've tried to be very very diligent with myself and not letting myself behave that way towards wild animals to visit our house because also it's you're harming them, but they don't need to get used to you. Yeah, it's not just that they are in danger to humans. It's that humans are a danger to them, and if you accustom them to being around humans, you are probably going to put them in a position where later their judgment is flawed. Yeah. Have I don't remember if I've talked on the show about a book called A Libertarian Walked into a Bear. I think that's the name of it. Is that what it's called. One of my other friends was just discussing this the other day and I was like, Oh, I know this book. Yeah. It's a book about a group of libertarians who like try to take over a town and make it a libertarian paradise, intertwined with basically people habituating bears to human presence and letting feeding the bear's donuts on purpose. Things like that. Yeah, don't do that. And it's a book that I really liked in a lot of ways. It does have some stuff about animals in it that's really upsetting. But there are two people, if I remember in correctly, who are like seriously harmed by a bear, and they had nothing to do with any of the feeding bear's donuts, right. It was like they were the victims of other people's inappropriate treatment of these animals. Yeah, it's not good Yeah, there are so many more stories about him than we could include where you're just like you dang dong. Like at one point, as he was having to start selling his stuff off, I don't know if it was his solicitor or like one of his advisors was like, you know, if you just cut back and for like the next several years, you could live off of six thousand pounds a year, you're gonna be fine. You will be able to like we can get all your stuff in order, you won't have to sell your things. You'll be fine. And he was like, I'm not interested in living that way. And for clarity, six thousand pounds at this point was like several several hundred thousand pounds in today's dollars. Yeah, there are. It's very interesting because we talk all the time about how it is really hard to convert currency through time. But I have noticed we mentioned that the National Archives of Britain has a converter in the episode, but also is it the Bank of England that does like a conversion thing on their site? And I'm like, oh, I guess if your country has been around for a long time and people have family property that's probably been profsh past like you might actually need to be trying to do this in a more real way than we would ever know. But yeah, I mean it's like basically going, I can't live on seven hundred thousand dollars a year. That's no life. I would rather lose it all and keep living in my incredibly extravagant and weird ways. And I think we can all agree that is ding dongri. Yeah. I also feel like this is a historical person that it's tempting to want to armchair diagnose. Oh yeah, but beyond just the obvious like excess alcohol consumption, right in some other way, and I try to resist doing that. Yeah, I mean, he definitely had impulse control issues, but that's also not a diagnosis. That's just kind of acknowledging what's going on there. I mean, it sounds like he would be really fun to be around if you were his friend. His friends adored him, and the people that lived in his area who were not wealthy friends seemed to adore him because he was so generous and like they kind of knew they could be taken care of if something went wrong by his his estate or his you know himself. But also like, oh dude, you could have done so much more actual good if you could just like focus it up and like use rational thought for a minute. But if you're not interested in that, you're not interested in that. And I know I can't travel back in time and fix him. He's another one, though, where I feel like, because he had such a gumption and you know, such a kind of like iron constitution, and he had some impulses that seemed pretty good, I'm just like, man, if you could have just been like assisted or molded inside, yeah, that you didn't die very young, you could have actually been like such a high achiever. You know, he had all of the resources on earth and did nothing with them. People were like, you should start breeding programs with your horses and your dogs. You'd be like, oh no, Like he could have sustained himself probably just doing either one of those things and not have had it all fall apart. But you know, you can't. You can't make a person do what they're not going to do. He apparently was also really really resistant to advice of any kind, Like even if his most trusted friends and or advisors said things like, hey, you know, maybe don't do that, and he would be like, I'm gonna do it ten times harder. Look out for me like he just didn't anyway, Listen, I understand I fight these impulses in myself all the time. But don't be like Minton. Just just be a little more focus. He really is a hogarth engraving even though he lived. Maybe he used those as like a roadmap instead of the cautionary tale they were intended to be, like the Rake's progress. He's like, I could do that. Yeah, h he wrote a bear into a party. Don't do his writing habit. So many reasons you should not do that. Don't do that. If this is your weekend coming up, don't write a bear. If it's not your weekend coming up, don't ride a bear. I hope that if you have time to yourself that it is, however, is the most productive and restorative for you. Sometimes those things are the same. If it's not your time off, I hope you get a little time to yourself where you can rest and relax and have some joy. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday with something brand new. 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