Behind the Scenes Minis: Derby Fury and Complex Lucy

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Fry and I'm Tracy v. Wilson. Oh, Tracy. We talked about the babies. We did the fury, Yeah, the fury and the anger. We had to stop a couple of times because I started crying. It makes me so angry. I just cry like it's that frustration that I can't fix anything. UM. I mentioned in the episode that I wanted to talk about one of the families that we couldn't quite fit into the episode because they weren't really a contender and we couldn't talk about all seventeen that made the claim towards it. Um. But they are the only black family that participated in this derby, and that was the Carter family. And they had had eight children, so they were close, but not really in the end group. Um. They had twelve children in total, and Mr Harder had told the press that if they won, he was going to share the money not just with all the other participants but with as many of Toronto's large families as he could, which is so lovely. But they did not win, of course, and he also kind of took advantage of the opportunity. I don't know if advantage is the right word, but he took the opportunity afforded by being interviewed by reporters to talk about how hard it was to be a black man looking for work. Even though he had a lot of experience. He had worked in a number of labor jobs and sometimes specialty labor jobs, but he still, particularly obviously in a depression period when a lot of people couldn't find work, he really could not find work. And he gave this one quote that was really striking to me, which I'm going to read. He said, no matter what education, what capabilities, the average negro has, he can't get work in Toronto. In the United States, he is told he can come only so far in mixing with white folk, but he can get a job working with his own people. There is no conscious prejudice against us, I admit, but I would rather be told don't come in than be told come on in, but I have nothing for you. And it was kind of like an incredibly um succinct way to sum up a lot of the problems that we're going on for black families at the time. So I wanted to make sure we gave them a shout out. The other thing is that Lily Kenny breaks my heart. Breaks my heart. Um, it's so weird to me that, like some of these articles you read go on and on about what an incredible artist she is and how skilled she is, and they're like, yeah, but she's kind of a bad mother. And it's like, Okay, if you think she's amazing and has a skill that is unique, why aren't you using your capabilities and your connections to try to elevate this person's life when she obviously is struggling. Yeah. Yeah, the hissing noises I made at my computer while reading this stuff, I was so angry. I was so angry. You have some feelings about Charlie Miller, I know, yeah, I do. I just I feel real judging for him because he had a lot of money. I do too. I'm not laughing at your judginess. It's just it's so the whole thing is so absurd. Yeah, Like he could have done something useful and philanthropic with his money after his death, and instead what he decided to do is intentionally make problems. And I'm like, I have no time for you, sir, Right, I mean, it's interesting when you get into some of the scholarship about the will, the ways that people interpret it and kind of obviously put their own lens on it. There are people that see his will completely differently, like I read, and we didn't really get into the will itself because I really wanted to talk about these families. Um. But there was one analysis that I read was like, no, Charlie Miller was trying to really challenge social morais of the time and point out to people that like, there were other ways of living than what they believed in, like particularly in in trying to, you know, make people who were teetotalers own and operate a brewery and make people who didn't believe in horse racing. But then I'm like, I hear you, and I love that as an idea, but like the the text does not support your assertion. No, no, and just the um. Even if he had some kind of positive motivation for the for the baby Derby, it doesn't feel thought through at all. And it was happening at the same time as a lot of eugenic stuff and a lot of xenophobia and a lot of racism, like all of that happening together and it. I'm like, you could have done something else with your money. Yeah, there is so much weird poverty. Voyeur is a in the coverage of it. Yeah, that is so I mean it's what was selling papers, which is also its own horrifying fact. But it's so disturbing because it is so much like there are rats all over this person's house and it's like, again, help them then, like clearly they are not living in a sanitary or healthy situation with children, and you know it, and now so does your readership, and no one is trying to fix it. Yeah, and it's there's so much still today, Like there are still headlines today where poor people, especially poor people of color, are uniquely judged for just trying to make ends meet. So like the you know, any parent but especially mothers being arrested for being at a job interview at a coffee shop while their child was playing at the park across the street, like that kind of stuff. Uh, and I super hate it. And there's so much of that that is evident in what we just talked about. Oh my gosh, it's like pervasive. It's so pervasive. There is definitely like this sense in a lot of the articles about it that is sort of like these people are stupid and or immoral, so they kind of deserve this horrible life. And it's m yeah, hissing, hissing at my screen. Never, never, My poor husband over the last several days it's been like, what are you hissing about? Now, Like it's more about the thing, and he's like, alright, alright, right, yeah, yeah, Thank goodness. We had a noodle email to take the edge off at the end of that one woof food for thought. It's always frustrating to talk about stories that seems so similar to stories playing out today but also important. Yeah, unlike the thing I said recently at the beginning of an episode where I was like, I had not heard of this before, and now I'm mad about it. I had heard of this before, but as like a, oh, it's so funny. It's a wacky piece of history. I so I'm going to put it in the same bucket of even though I had heard of it, I had not heard the details of it before, and now I'm mad about it. Yeah. Same. I mean, it was one of those things that comes up whenever you're kind of perusing lists of weird or nutty history that are pretty light in tone, and it's like, no, these were humans that were put in really, really jeopardizing scenarios because they were so desperate to try to help themselves when they had very little recourse to do so. And I didn't I did not include the details of some of the medical testimony because it is so upsetting and to think about a mother sitting there while a court ask questions of her doctors about details of the births of her children that did not survive, and you know what exactly played out and happened, and whether or not that should count, Like I cannot imagine the pain that caused. Yeah. So we talked about Lucy Parsons on the show this week, someone I found intriguing just from the couple of sentences in the Haymarket incident episode, because we talked about the fact, at that point already had been pretty well established that her mother had been enslaved, and she had been born in Virginia and then moved to Waco. That part of it, uh, and then that then she married a man who had previously been a Confederate soldier. And I was like, there's got to be some story there that it's the last unpacked with that um and then we were talking about Maggielena Walker. Some of those same themes had come up, but in a way that we didn't have as much documentation of the life involved. And I had kind of gone down a little rabbit hole at that point. And then there were other times that Lucy Parson's name just came up as a like a another example or in a footnote or whatever, and I was like, Okay, I gotta move her up to the top of the list. I wasn't quite aware of how complicated her identity was going to be when I did that, because I, you know, I am a forty six year old white woman who has not had to deal with the kinds of institutional racism and violence that she was having to deal with for her whole life. And I am not in any way judging any of her decisions, but I do wish I knew what was going on in her mind with some of the things that she did. Like her her decision to have her son committed was really hard and U and like I, we don't know, we don't know her thinking behind that. It doesn't appear that she had really contact with her family back in Waco after leaving, and it's like, I know people who are estranged from their families and they have found that lack of contact to be a relief. Was that the case with her? Was it not? Don't know? Um and and a lot of it is just not possible to know at this point. Yes, she's so tricky. As I said while we were getting ready to record, she's simultaneously in some ways so inspiring and others just like so infuriating and an upsetting because it's like, Oh, I understand your ideology, but I don't love the way you're expressing it. Sometimes. Who like, Hey, everybody learned to make a bomb? I'm like, wow, hey back it up? Yeah, well, and I do. I should have probably clarified in the episode that, like, she did use a lot of very direct, violent rhetoric in her writing, but it does not appear that she ever attempted to plan any actual violence. So in her particular case, more of a rhetorical tool and not an actual threat of harming people. Definitely not the case for everybody she was associated with. The No and I like you, I just I cannot I struggle. I cannot get past institutionalizing her son. Yeah, that one's rough. It's really hard. Um, and don't don't know. I have no idea. Yeah, we could speculate, but we don't know. The biography of her that I mentioned that, which is called Goddess of Anarchy. The Life and Times of Lucy Partinson's American Radical Jack by Jacqueline Jones is a much thicker book than I expected when I went to get it, because often, um, when we're talking about the life of a woman that's maybe not as well documented as we would like. Um, often it's the you wind up with a book that's maybe, uh, you know, a couple of hundred pages long. H This one, including its index and its notes as like four fifty pages long. I was like, this so much book, um, And a lot of it does talk more about Albert. We didn't talk as much about Albert because this episode was not about him, and a lot of the more specific details of like the places that she went and the the work that she did, and the acknowledgement of times when it's like this is kind of a baffling and even horrifying decision that we know nothing about the motivations for Yeah, it's hard to parse them out when you don't have that context, we're kind of left going, yeah, but wait, yeah, we can't know it. It's very tricky. Oh lucy, why are you so difficult? I listened to several interviews, UM with folks who were kind of talking through, you know, the the the evolving understanding of her her racial and ethnic background, because there have been a lot of folks that have kind of claimed her as part of their community in a way that has then been important to that community, Like this is an example of, for example, a Hispanic woman who was doing this kind of work during the the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. UM. And then people's own thought process of realizing that the story was a little more complicated than that, and a lot of the interviews that I listened to where people sort of talked themselves or talked the interviewer through their own process on it, UM all kind of arrived at the same place of like, I don't feel like I can judge that part of it, Like, uh, you know, I cannot say I would not have done the same thing in that situation if I had the chance to, uh, to start over and maybe have a life that was not as heavily restricted and not as threatened that I would not necessarily choose to do something else. I don't think I would institutionalize my family member involuntarily for trying to join the army when I didn't want them to do them. I would hope I would not do that. No, no, um, I have definitely known family members to threaten such things. But but yeah, I I it's such a weird thing. I mean, just like, in terms of human psychology, if you do not believe the same thing as me, you must be crazy. Mm hm. That's like a whole other parcel to unpack that way outside the scope of this. But it's one of those things where I'm always like, this is one of the problems with you. Yeah. Um. People have also commented a lot about the discrepancy between her basically advocating against the idea of free love but also kind of living the life that, at least to some extent, free love advocates were advocating for. Yeah, that one is a contradiction, for sure. Yeah. That to me though, is like I feel like I see that play out to some to greater or lesser extent. Uh, in a lot of different contexts where a person's own behavior doesn't necessarily align with what they think is the ideal behavior, right, um, and again we're like, did you imagine this is did you see this as a contradiction in your own self? Don't know, I don't know, not documented. That's one of those moments where I always think, like, is it because you think you're above the pitfalls of this or do you just have a disconnect? We don't know. That's a good question, and we don't really know. I don't really know, And yeah, probably not possible to know. Again at a lot of this point the time machine list, Yeah, we're just gonna go knock, knock, knock. We have some questions, have some questions for you that we go really well, So anyway, she's I think she's probably the most complicated uh figure I have tried to write about in a while, and made it challenging to get a episode outline to a place where I felt like it was comprehensible and also acknowledging some of those contradictions and complexities. So, uh, definitely, if you want to know more, check out that book. It's only the second by biography of her that has ever liked, only the second full length like book biography of her that has been written so uh again. Happy Friday. I hope everybody has a great weekend whatever is on your plates. We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday Classic and then Monday with something brand new. And send us an email if you want. Where history podcasts at my heart radio dot com. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.