Behind the Scenes Minis: Unpacking Harriet and Watching Olympics

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday, Am Holly Frye, And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh Harriet. Yeah. I confess to Tracy before we started talking about Harriet that every time I hear that name, I think of so I married an ex murderer. So if you like me, think she's going to be a hard hearted harbinger of Haggitts, she's not. OK. There's so much to unpack with her. And I know you got real irritated about this sort of flip that she did where it made it seem like she was saying like I was disabled and now I'm not right. There's a whole other read on her illness though. Okay, go we didn't you go first that we didn't mention in the episode. That may or may not shift how you think about it, but I couldn't. I only found one person really writing at it in this way, so I didn't want to put it in the episode as though it was factual. But it's an interesting take. So, and it's that that biography that we mentioned in the magazine biography, that writer looked at all of Harriet's personal writings and kind of came to the conclusion that she wasn't sure she had actually had a spinal injury so much as she may have fallen into that thing that happened to a lot of women during the time, where if you exhibited any kind of you know, sign of not feeling great, they kind of lumped you under like hysterical, right, right, and that you were just a frail woman who had problems because you were inherently nervous due to being a woman, and that that would have even impacted you know, kids at that point. So it's unclear. Yeah, well, and it's like that's one of the things that can be so challenging to talk about things like chronic illnesses and disability with people who were living you know, I mean even more recently, but like so often the terms that were used to describe what was going on with people were really vague, and they could encapsulate a lot of things, and like somebody who really was just like bored and stifled in an unhappy marriage might be described as being mentally ill or disabled or whatever, and like that might not at all be what was going on. That can make it really hard to talk about it uh, but I just as I was reading it, I was like, I want to say really clearly that this does not mean that somebody who is disabled or has a chronic illness just isn't trying hard enough and they put their mind to it. If they put their mind to it, they could get better. Because man, not only is that false, it harms so many people so much. Yeah, I mean, that's why I wanted to read that quote. That's like, it seems like when she was no longer married, she was no longer ill. It was fine then because it was that, it didn't seem like it was so much. And that same writer even kind of makes the case that Harriet and Charles may have had some interlocking just unhappiness that they manifested. Like instead of saying I'm actually unfulfilled and not happy in marriage, it was like I must be sick. Yeah, because you know, I mean that happens, right. Two people can love each other and that doesn't mean their marriage is healthier, good, right, And I think that feels like the case here again were it's retroactive and we only have some of the letters because he burned them. He also burned all of his letters and wrote a note about it that was like, I don't want any of my life on record, but it does, as you said, it becomes very hard to unpick it all, and it's very very weird, and it is you know, I mean, none of that comes up at all in her later life except that, like the only time she ever mentioned it in interviews was to say, like, oh, well, when I was a kid, I had spinal problems and that's how I learned so much stuff. I was an autodidact. I was reading all the time, which is kind of a cool thing. We don't know if that's even true, right, And I will say, the same problem comes up. I only saw it fleetingly because she was not the focus of a lot of discussion related to her mother, where you know, when the family moved from Buffalo to California pretty abruptly. Most biographies about Harriet suggests that her father was you know, seeking financial benefit or like a business opportunity. But there was at least one I saw that was like, well, you know, her mother was delicate and needed Western air. And I'm like, huh, yeah, we don't know. It makes it so so hard. The other thing that may or may not mitigate your feelings of frustration with her over it is the fact that I think part of the impetus for her to hide that kind of ties back to everything she said constantly about how like, no, if I'm going to do business with men, I have to be ten times better than them at everything. I think she actually says four times. But I think she probably held some concern that if she let any kind of information that she may have had any kind of weakness leak out, that it would give people that wanted to maybe downplay her business acumen ammunition to be sure. Sure, I think that's really the big the probably the biggest reason. Yes, it still has the unfortunate repercussion of like, yeah, I'm no longer ill, I just decided to not be ill. But well, they're just there are also things that we can't really know conclusively, Like, right, you know, did she have conditions that as she grew older she found better ways to deal with or was it just like was she concealing information or like there are a lot or was she one of the seventy five percent of women who were deemed ill through hysteria? Right? It really were just being human, yeah with something, Yeah, something else was going on, or maybe nothing was going on and she was just branded that way. Yeah, because she had all of those letters burnt right, that like would have been a really handy resource to piece things together. Yeah, we'll never know. I do love that she figured out the grass thing, Yeah, because the reason people like, normally people will grow if they're growing a walnut orchard, they'll grow something like corn in between the trees. And the reason is, like when we say it's a support crop, what it really is is that those things grow much faster and can be turned into a sellable good. Okay, much faster than like a walnut tree from a seedling can actually produce anything viable. And so while you're waiting on the bigger and potentially more profitable walnut crop to come to maturity and fruition, you can be planting things in the interim that are like a few months flip over. And so it was unusual that she went with pampas grass instead of corn, because that's what most people would have done. But she was like, nah, I got another idea, which I think is very interesting. Like I love that part of her story where she's like, I'm going to crack the coat on this whole farming and ranching thing, and I'm going to figure out how to do it and make this work, even on this property that seems to have problems. And she did, and that I love about her, and of course it's to me super admirable. But then it gets that thing where I do feel like she started to reach that point where she thought her every idea was really good and why aren't people listening to me? Yeah? I I like the idea of being like, all right, can we figure out a way to control these floodwaters? Yes? Can we figure out a way to reuse the wastewater? Not as much of a fan of let's build a dam, right, I mean, there are so many repercussions, and part of the reason we don't get into them is they're huge, right, Like, there are wildlife repercussions, There are repercussions to the indigenous people that live in those places that in many cases are not being consulted about whether or damn should go there. Yeah, the United States went through kind of a heyday of damn building, not necessarily stuff as big as Hoover Dam, which is that's its whole own other story. But like, there are a lot of much smaller dams. A lot of them at this point are aging and unsafe, and a lot of them to a greater or lesser extent, like flooded land that was supposed to be the land that indigenous people were still allowed to use. And in more recent years there has been an effort to like safely dismantle a lot of these dams and sort of like do it in a way that's not going to just cause a massive flood downstream. Yeah, And so like, I don't know, this is like adds to the many things with her that I'm like, Man, I have thoughts, and then I have other thoughts. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because she did in many ways make that area of California livable. Like her ideas led to a lot of livability there in terms of you know, just a crops even like being able to figure out how to do that. And I feel like if she had focused more on teaching other ranchers how to like put together their own water pumps and stuff instead of being like, let's build a massive thing, it's right, I would be like, yeah, okay, But as she said, it's it gets into a whole other ball of wax. Yeah, Yeah, Harriet. Yeah, I feel like we're going to get emails who are mad that I am sort of judging somebody by modern standards, and I'm like this, it's more like thinking about the legacy and impact of decisions that people have made in the past that we're still living with today. Yeah, And I mean I will say, right, she ultimately was not the one who made those decisions. Sure she advocated for it, but was it. And I know a lot of people really love Harriet and I think she is completely fascinating as a really ingenious person. Like I love that she came up with a way to open and close windows from bed. I'm like, that's pretty cool. It's really you know, like a telescoping stick. I like the idea that she was so driven in those early years of being a widow, where she was like, how am I going to make money? And she kind of was like doing the I have a million good ideas. I'm very smart, like a scattershot approach of like I will innovate in the following four things, Like I see why people love her, But then there's like that thing of like, oh, and oh, she hates she hates people that aren't white settlers. Okay, that's a problem. Uh yeah, I don't. I don't know. If she had continued to age, who knows how she would have, you know, potentially shifted again in her her most mature years. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Harriet, Are you an Olympics watcher? Tracy? Not really? No, Like, there are some events that I really do enjoy watching. I in the winter, I enjoy the figure skating. In the summer, I enjoy the gymnastics. There's a lot of other stuff happening at the Olympics that I don't really care about. And there's just there's been so many changes over the years to how one watches the Olympics. Yes, going from you turned the television on and they're on there, to like figuring out where do I watch the Olympics now? Yes, And it's not something I love enough to put that effort into it. But often I will hear about some amazing performance somebody did and I'll go watch, you know, the like official video on YouTube or whatever, if that exists. How about you? I love the Olympics. Yeah, And the thing is I'm the opposite of you. I will figure out how to watch it, and it doesn't matter if it's a sport that I'm into or not, I will watch it. I have such a great memory of the olden times of our working together when we first started as employees of Discovery, when our company was part of that, having three days a week where we could telework. Oh yeah, because that meant that I could watch the Olympics the whole time I was working during the day, like I was working, but I had the on in the background constantly, And to me, that was the most fun. And I don't know why I get so into it, because I'm not into a lot of the sports, but I get completely fished into the whole thing. I want to watch all of the interviews with athletes, I want all of the human interest stories. I want all of the things. And I feel like we've talked. I don't remember if it was on this show or if it was on the other podcast we used to be on, which I'm not even going to name, because I just I don't encourage anybody to go listen to that at this point. I don't even know if you can find it anywhere. Yeah, I feel like things said extemporaneously well over a decade ago. We just don't need to go back to that, but we did have a conversation about how there was a time it might have been on this show, it might have been on that one. There was a time when the Olympics were really struggling in terms of getting anybody to watch them. Yeah, and adding in that focus on the athletes and the human interest stories around the athletes, like really brought a lot of renewed attention to it in a time when a lot of people just does not really care that much, yeah, because they couldn't connect to it right, Like, Yeah, I feel like for a lot of people, when you're watching, if you're not into a specific sport anyway, the idea of watching someone whose entire life is about very high level performance, it's just hard to like get into from a viewer's perspective right where it's like, I don't know curling. I don't know about that curling which has vanished for a bit. I don't know if it's coming. I haven't I don't see it, don't even know. Yeah, I mean it's it's fascinating to me and smart that someone on the broadcast side was like, you know what we need to do starting interviewing athletes, because you do realize like, yes, these are people that are very driven and they work very, very hard, But there are also people and I that is always helpful to remember They're not just machines that go fast or jump high or whatnot. They also have thoughts and feelings and are completely fully rounded individuals that might that have lives that expand far beyond their Olympic careers. Love it, man, I will watch gymnastics all day every day. I do like to watch gymnastics, and I do like to watch figure skating. I have a gymnastics thing that I'm scared make people angry with me. There is an aspect to gymnastics that I struggle with, aside from the scandals of it completely obviously, there have been some horrible scandals and that we should all be struggling with, just from an aesthetic point of view. Because I grew up a bun head taking ballet. It breaks my brain to watch gymnasts point their toes, yeah, because they don't do it the way you would in ballet, and to me they're doing great. I'm not actually criticiz, Yeah, I'm saying to me, like the aesthetic of it, I'm like, that is not how a foot should look when it is pointed that is not nearly pretty enough, and it is, it's perfectly fine, but I just am like, Eh, don't do that, Just don't do that. It's totally my hang up. Yeah, that is actually a segue to talking about when I was heavily in my ballet zone when I was much younger, and they introduced I think it was eighty four rhythmic gymnastics. Oh. I remember the rhythmic gymnastics because I remember a lot of people in the dance community being like, I think I could do that, yeah, and it being sort of a really exciting idea and it is very pretty. Yeah, I have a whole other thing that it might be its own episode one day. Okay, did you know you probably knew that for a while you could do art and get an Olympic medal. I do remember we had a talk about this at one point. Yeah. I love that idea in some ways and in others I hate it. So I've never really gotten deep into the thing because I'm like, art is subjective. There's no such thing yes objectively good art in my opinion, or objectively bad art unless I hurt someone. But I'm fascinated by the idea. I love it, Like I said, I love it in some ways, and we've certainly talked about many other instances of like art competitions, but I get really hung up about it. Yeah. Have I ever told you about my extremely brief time taking gymnastics? No? Okay, I would have been maybe five or six, like I was elementary school age for sure, and I don't remember exactly what led to me taking gymnastics, but as a child, I was very very scared of heights, okay, and this included being on the balance beam that was not on the floor. The balance beam terrified me as a kid and still would also for all of my life, I have had very very tight hamstrings And the only time I have had like a reasonable level of flexibility in my hamstrings was when I was in a drum and bugle corps in high school, and that involved like just relentless daily stretching and effort. Yeah, and so like as a kid, I'm trying to take gymnastics classes and I literally can't touch my toes, And then think number three is I just could never manage to do a cartwheel or any other cartwheel like things. I just couldn't. I couldn't do it. Part of like throwing my head at the ground from I just I couldn't. I couldn't get over the I couldn't get over that. And like there were people that like compassionate and thoughtful gymnastics instructors who worked with me a whole lot to try to like get me to be able to do this, and I never could do it. And I have never done a cartwheel or a round off or whatever in my whole life. See, that is one of the few things I've retained. Yeah, I can still bust out a cartwheel. Yeah, now, if I overthink it, I'll mess it up. But right not me. I can still do a cartwheel. Similarly, you took me an incredibly long time to dive into a swimming pool. I can I do that. I don't think I ever managed to like dive into the swimming pool in a leaping kind of way. But I could kneel on the diving board and get into the water headburst that way. Oh yeah, I can't dive. I sort of feel like if I tried to do any of this now, at the age of forty nine, with no preparation, it would not go well for me. But can you hurtle yourself into the water and just go for a minute and see how far you go? Maybe we didn't read those press accounts of the plunge for distance because they are very unkind to the athletes, right, and like a lot of body shaming involved. Yeah, that's part of what I struggle with about sports like gymnastics and figure skating and stuff. There's just there's so much body stuff involved in all of that. Oh yeah, having been in a drum and bule corps, which is way less intensive than doing like gymnastics at a competitive level for your whole life. Like, I still have a lot of mixed feelings about my time in drum Corps and continuing to march and practice while injured and stuff like that, And a lot of that applies to various Olympic sports also, especially sports that like really young people are the ones competing. Yeah, I feel like, I mean, I'm no expert, but I do feel like that has changed in some ways in a lot of sports where people will kind of there is less of an impetus and a drive to like, no, you push through injury and you keep going. Like I think sports medicine has advanced so much in our lifetimes that there's just a realization of like, hey, don't do that, Like you gotta think longer term than this. So'm I know there are still athletes that compete well injured. I'm not trying to say that doesn't happen anymore, but I do think fewer athletes maybe are pressured to do so. It probably depends on their team and their coach and their sports and their parents. In some cases yes, and then you know, yeah, but I like the Olympic. It's just fine. Were you and you weren't in the in Atlanta when the Olympics were here? What year was that, nineteen ninety No, I was not. I was in college. That was wild. Yeah, that is the one and only time I have lived in an Olympic city, and it was bananas because there was a proposal to have the Olympics in Boston a few years ago and Boston said no, thank you. Yeah, I mean it's very expensive. It's often my understanding is it's a net loss fiscally for the city. It's kind of a thing you do for clout, not a whole lot else, and then you're often left with an aftermath that is really rough. Yeah, I don't know how much truth there is to this, but I do know the Atlanta Olympics a lot of people pinpoint as like a moment when Atlanta got a lot sprawlier and a lot busier in a way that seemed accelerated by like I don't know that I would say it got sprawly or it's always been real sprawly, but I do mark it as a like a moment of like sea change for the city because I remember when I came to Atlanta for college in the very end of the eighties, it was a city of like a million people. It was great. I mean, you know, and this isn't isn't like a negative on population density, but in terms of what the city could support in terms of infrastructure, housing, et cetera. That was a good number at the time. And then after the Olympics it was four million, and like a lot of that happened very quickly, and there wasn't like, even though they had done a lot of infrastructure work to be ready for the Olympics, it wasn't enough for a fourfold increase in right population. And it's not like those people all moved in on one day. It's you know, it took some time, but still it was it was very quick and I just feel like that is really when Atlanta traffic got its reputation of craziness. Just yeah, so jam packed all the time. Yeah, if I'm remembering rightly, I moved there in two thousand and three, so right, I only saw post Olympics Atlanta. Yeah, yeah, So it's it was an interesting thing to watch it change. I mean, that's also a year that's meaningful to me just in general because I met my husband that year and we got married that year, and like, we went to a couple of Olympic events, We went to a baseball game, to baseball games, and it was in some ways really fun. Like there were some interesting choices that I feel like we're smart in terms of preparation, right, Like we worked with some univer we like I had anything to do with it. The city worked with some universities where they basically like subsidized the building out of modern dormitories that were used for athletes and then and then became part of the university campus. And some of those schools really needed that kind of upgrade and that was great for them. But it did I mean that that corridor right through it. Downtown Atlanta just got clogged at a level that has never not been that again. Yeah. Yeah. The last time I was there was for when we uh, when we closed our union bargaining, got our contract. I don't know if we've said that specifically on the podcast, but I was having to take a lift to the airport to go back home, and I had kind of forgotten what a bad traffic day can be, like, oh yeah, and this was, you know, not a time that I would I know, the span of time you would describe as rush hour in Atlanta is very broad, but this was not a time of day that I would have expected to be particularly about in terms of traffic. And it was like we got onto the highway and then we just stopped, and I was like, I'm so glad I left with lots of extra time to get to the airport. Yeah. I always do. I mean, we have, like we have a route that doesn't go through downtown if downtown is clogged, and we can usually get to the airport fast. But it's like if we can't, we really can't. Yeah, And so I always leave super early and if I get to the airport early, great. I have my favorite restaurant, I go get a meal, and if we don't, we're usually still fine on time. Yeah. Yeah, I had come from from the airport on Marta because the hotel that we were staying at was at Peachtree Center. Yeah, but then like that's not where I was leaving from to get back to the airport, and I was not near Marta anymore. Well, and the rail to the airport, like those stations have been weird and getting I don't know if you walked by them while you were there, but the stations at the airport, one of them was shut one part of it was shut down completely for a while. Like that's been all a little bit trickier. Then it was not a problem getting to the hotel, so that part worked out great. It might have been back up and running by then, but I remember there was some time earlier this year where I was like, can the train come into the airport, And I'm not sure that it could all the time, which I'm sure was very problematic for a lot of people. But yeah, yeah, Atlanta was definitely very changed by the Olympic Games. Yeah, and I have I remember having a friend who lived in la when the Games were there, and him being like, oh, it was disastrous afterwards, because then it was just like a mess. And I I don't remember feeling quite like that about Atlanta. I'm sure some people do have stories like that, but I do remember just noting how different it was, Yeah, because I had lived there, like, I had lived here like seven years at that point, so I had a pretty good Anyway, Olympics, I'll be watching. Okay, we we didn't mention it in the episode, but of course the Olympics we were talking about, which were in the early phase of the modern Olympic Games. There weren't separate winter in summers yet, right, I remember when that change happen twenties. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember when that change happened in it being very controversial and there were well no, I mean, they didn't split winter and summer at all. There was only summer. Oh yes, until I think nineteen twenty eight. I'm going by memory, so if I'm wrong, apologies. But then when they split years, Yeah, that was a different thing that we were around for. Yeah. Yeah, and yes it was very controversial, but now here we are, we're all used to it. If you have a weekend coming up, I hope it's delightful. And if you can do a cartwheel and it's fun, do some If you can't find something else to do that's fun, play mind games like chess that can't be part of the If you don't have time off, I still hope that you have fun and do something delightful and that everyone is super cool to you. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday with a brand new one. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.