Behind the Scenes Minis: Alger and Carlo

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm tray cy V Wilson. And we talked about Alger Hisss this week. Uh huh, who is fascinating to me? And as I said at the top of that, like I grew up hearing about him all the time. I don't know why. There were two things that I promised I would talk about. Well, I promised one and I promised myself the other. The verse was the typewriter. So the case that his lawyers tried to make to counter that evidence that had been introduced that that typewriter was the typewriter in their home was intense. They did a lot of work It actually went on for a couple of years even after he had been incarcerated, where they actually had like an expert put together essentially a new typewriter that could mimic exactly what his is home typewriter did to show like people could totally do this. They could have built their own copycat typewriter. And there was also like work done where they were trying to make the case that potentially the typewriter that was produced, wasn't even hit as part of evidence in court, wasn't even Hiss's typewriter, but one that had been altered to look like his typewriter. Like, they made a lot of efforts to show the ways that those documents could have been forged and made to look like they came from the Hiss home. Sure, but ultimately the judge that heard those appeals was like, I just don't think Whittaker Chambers had the time and energy to do something like this, which is kind of interesting. I just find that fascinating. Like, I know what we'll do. We're going to hire a typewriter forgery expert to build a new typewriter. I mean, it's really interesting. I'm not even dogging it. I just think it's fascinating. Yeah, the other thing I was going to mention was his is not divorce. So apparently several years after he got out of prison, he asked his wife Priscilla for a divorce and she said no, And it seems like he may have met his second wife already at that point. I don't have substantiation on this, which is why I didn't want to put in the episode, but it's interesting and that he had wanted to marry her then, but he couldn't because his wife wouldn't give him a divorce, and so then they just had to wait, and then when Priscilla died, they got married shortly thereafter. Just kind of interesting. Yeah, there's a part of me. I'm not generally a conspiracy theorist, but there is part of me that's like, he did seem to want to unearth so much stuff. That part of me is like he might have been innocent. Mm hmm, Like I can't imagine, you know what I mean. It's one of those cases where if you are not innocent, why would you want to work so hard to have every possible document released? Right? But one thing that several historians have pointed out is that, you know, when like his lawyers, for example, would get information from documents, they would of course kind of cherry pick what made his look best. So it's like it's an interesting game of I don't know, I don't know, well we ever know conclusively? Probably not. Most people accept he was a spy of some sort, right, but I don't spies. Are you generally into Cold War history stuff? We haven't talked about it a lot on the show because it's so recent that really, in terms of like fictional depictions, I can find a good spy story really interesting and compelling. But I feel like having been born when I was born and kind of growing up in the very tail end of you know, the existence of the USSR and all of all of that, like we were not in the thick of the Cold War. Really, I would say that the things were a lot more heightened in terms of that earlier. But like I do remember sort of the looming fear of nuclear war when I was a kid, and it makes it less of a draw for me, Right, I think probably having a dad that was in the military shifted that for me a little. Yeah, it felt very much like that was always part of our households discussions. Yeah, yeah, which is kind of fascinating. Yeah. I love a good inconclusive story, though I do. I love a history mystery. I mean, on the one hand, like I just it's interesting to know that there there was obviously some group of people high up in our government that was communicating with the Soviets, right, and I'm sure the same was going on in reverse. Right. It's always just fascinating to me like that aspect of human nature where it's like you are in a seed of power and success and something about it makes you want to do dangerous stuff and like normalize dangerous stuff. I'm such a whimp. I want no part of dangerous things. So I'm always like, what is that headspace? Right? What is it like, Like how do you go about your day to day life. Does it constantly something you're thinking about or is it just like compartmentalized in a way that you don't give it a lot of thought beyond like the needs of the things you're doing in terms of logistics. I'm just I'm fascinated by it anyway. Yeah, which is why I wanted to do this one. Alger hisss. This is our on ramp to Halloween things. I promise Halloween stuff is coming, but this at least had pumpkins in it. Yeah. When I got the outline from you, I was like, I'm surprised this is not more Halloween themed. I read through it was like, oh, there's a ghost story article at a pumpkin Well, and I will tell you that part of that is accidental because I had looked at our calendar a while back and calculated out how many episodes I had to have ready that were not Halloween before we got to October. I mean, I would talk about Halloween stuff year round, you know, but that's not really appropriate for most people I had. I have talked to several people lately who are like, I don't like the Halloween stuff in September, not related to our show, but just our life. And I was like, I don't understand. You get out of the car. I don't really You can like it or not. That's fine. I love it year round. But I just miscalculated. So I thought this was going to be the end of September, and then I realized, no, it's in October. But there's October. There's October coming, I promise, yeah, promise. Well, and I don't know what order we're going to put these in, but we also today recorded the one about the medieval and Early modern Animal Trials, which has some you know, witchcrafty witch trial. Yeah, parallel, so similarly kind of a on ramp. It's like ish, it's ish, it's in there. It's an on ramp. So hopefully you are ready for Halloween happenings. Listen, there's witchcraft coming up, there's some murder coming up. Wild things are afoot here at stuff you missed in history glass. I don't know how wild it'll actually be, but hopefully you'll enjoy it. Oh, we talked about Carlos Jeswaldo this week. I don't know how he got on my list either. I feel like all of them lately, I've been like, where did I get this person? But I will say there are a lot of people while I was researching this that went on the list. Because there are people that got obsessed with him. Oh sure, and some of them are very interesting, So they may pop up this year and then maybe later we'll see, Yeah, we'll see. Did you know about Carlosious wild Over Wore? No? I don't think this is even a name that really rang a bell from the music composition standpoint, definitely not the murder standpoint. No, the murder stuff is whoof yeah yeah woo. He is one of those figures that people just become obsessed with, and I understand why, because he was obviously eccentric, obviously capable of great violence. There is that natural instinct to want to pick apart. How a person like that ticks M. I think personally, for a lot of people, it's like actually a distancing mechanism, right when you're like, I want to know how this played out with this person, because that way I know that I am not like that, and people in my life are not like that. Like I think subconsciously, that's part of what you're doing. It's creating a space between you and something scary. Yeah, you and I don't live in a time and place where an honor killing is a legally acceptable remedy. Yeah, but there are places in the world where that is still the case the case. Yeah, So simultaneously hearing about it in this context was like, that is so bizarre to me that this would be People would say, oh, yeah, you did have the right to go and murder them, but like simultaneously acknowledging that there are places where like that does still happen and is still sort of seen as an appropriate legal action for something that either has happened or is alleged to have happened. Yeah, And what's interesting here, And I really appreciated the fact that there is a degree of nuance because there were people then who were like, nuh uh, that was not okay because of the manner that he carried things out, and because of the level of brutality of it, there was sort of a recognition that even with that pretty horrific acceptability level in place, that there were limits to it, which I just find interesting, right, And I also am kind of interested in this idea that for a time he essentially like blew up the social structure of Naples by like making the most powerful families all kind of have this really horrible and problematic issue at their core. That's very interesting to me. As far as how he got things chill enough with those families to go back to Naples, it's a little unclear, and I think I only found one mention of it where it was essentially like he eventually made peace with Maria's family, and I'm like, but how, how how did that work out? And I don't know. One of the other interesting things about his biography and particular is that it's a really good example of something you and I see all the time, where when there's a case like this that has some existing documentation on it, like the church's court records about what happened and their determination exists, that document remains. It's an Italian so I was reading obviously translations of it, but there aren't a lot of such documents about him, and so there becomes that sort of rabbit hop, a game of as you're reading one account, it's referencing another account that you already read, and that's tying back to another historian that has studied it, and like you kind of get the round robin of source names being like played out over and over. But what I also found really fun in this one, as much as you can find fun in such a grizzly tale, was about those relationships, because in a lot of cases it would be like, well, in this version that came out in the seventeen hundreds, they say this, but we all know that's wrong now, and then later on another historian would reference that person and say, well, you know that person that contradicted that, we all know they're wrong now. Like, there are a lot of interesting developments. One of the other things that I didn't work into the episode because it just was convoluted, but I thought was interesting is that that Alex Ross piece from the New Yorker mentions that even today there's sort of new information coming out. And I say today that was written in at twenty eleven, so fifteen years ago, but not quite fifteen. There are still new pieces of information coming out, and that it's possible that the building that still exists that everyone has believed forever was where these murders took place. Now there are some people that say that is not accurate, that it was actually a different building. And this becomes important because he was actually if that's the case, he would have been renting that home from a relative of Fabrizio. So just look to like further cement how intertwined all of this stuff was and how complicated it was socially. That struck me as fascinating. Yeah, hopefully that more Halloween will be fun and not so grizzly. I'm in a grizzly murder stage right now. I don't know why, just em Yeah. I always say I'm fine. I'm not, you know, going through anything. I just sometimes sometimes you gotta talk about a murder. Sometimes I like talking about dark stuff fascinating. I will add that I really appreciated the quote that was in here from WB Ober Yeah, about using what would have been modern methods in nineteen seventy three to try to diagnose him. Yeah, that whole field has come, of course through a lot many things have developed since nineteen seventy three, But like a lot of the core things that he was saying are still absolutely true. Like even when we do know more about a person than we know about Gswaldo personally, like that still does not provide the same kind of background and depth as actually being examined by someone. Yes, I might ruin that moment for you in a moment, okay, because Ober said all that as sort of the precursor to go. But here's what I think it was. What would that cracks me up? But what did he think? I mean? He basically was making the case that Gisualdo probably had may have had some you know, repressed sexual issues that he didn't know how to express that like that he may have been He kind of makes the case that he may have been homosexual. He doesn't really say he could have been bisexual, but he does say, but he did father children with women, which is kind of interesting, and that he may have just had like some you know, very specific fixations that you can kind of see playing out in his later life when he's hiring people to beat him when he is having trouble you know, using the bathroom without that being in play, Like he talks it through, but he's like, you know, I will only ever make a comment that is supported or based some way in something we actually know his approach to doing that and saying like it's worth talking about what was going on, but we have to be careful that he would never make a leap of faith and go, I think what's happening is he would say like this, this seems like it might be the case, but we have to also factor and these three things we know, like, who's careful about it? But it wasn't. It was still a but here's where he might have been there we could have been going on with him. Yeah, as a person who's not a psychologist but has read a lot of things about like trying to diagnose people from history and about the history of psychology, that feels like a pretty like dated interpretations. Well for sure, but the points about all of the severe limitations of trying to diagnose someone from three hundred and fifty years later, that all holds up. Yeah, in my opinion, Yeah, it's almost like he's like, I know, this is what people want and that was all from a journal that was written about medicine and was about, you know, people trying to unravel this thing. So it is sort of the most responsible approach you could have had for it in the early seventies, although, as she said, some of those ideas are very outdated. Man, yeah, we'll never know. I think that was probably a tortured human who made a lot of chaos, A tortured human with time on his hands, who made a lot of chaos as a result. Like if he had been a busy bee, if he had had work to do outside of just being driven by his own stuff, he might have found more I don't know, structure, some sort of peace somehow, I don't know. He clearly did not have peace in his heart or mind. Just sad. Uh. Yeah, Carlo's Aswaldo. Don't be like Carlo. If you find him interesting, rest assured you can find hours and hours and hours of both musical analysis as well as you know, people looking at his life story YouTube has you covered? Man, You can listen to those madrigals for a long time. Although there are funny things that people write like, oh, don't listen to them for a long time. They'll just make you feel weird. And it's like, I mean, I guess I didn't feel weird. I had a lot of his stuff playing when I was writing, and some of it is quite striking, but I never felt weird. So right, Carlo, If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you find some peace in your heart and your mind and that you get some time to just relax, hang out. Man, we need it. If you don't have that kind of time, that's stinks, and I'm sorry, but I hope everybody's really nice to you, and that we're all busy taking care of each other. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode and then a fresh one on Monday. 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.