Behind the Scenes Minis: Censorship Cats

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy P.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This week we talked about the President's House site at Independence National Historical Park. Yeah, how all the signs were taken down and some of them are up, not all of them, So you were on.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: You were on vacation.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: Otherwise we would have had like a slightly different episode because of the timing of when things happened, because the whole thing really was completely and totally written. When the order came that the site had to be restored.

00:00:49
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we would have recorded already if that had man.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And that would have been weirder than the many progressive rounds edits that I did on the thing before we actually recorded it. The tone of it became slightly different every time because what was being described in terms of the removal of things like it. It was different depending on what was back up. And for a while, news reports from Philadelphia made it sound like everything had been put back right, which I was kind I was like, that's impressive because I knew having seen what it looked like when the panels were taken down that the metal ones. What was left was like the mounting display with adhesive all over it. Yeah, And I was like, I don't know how they're going to put those back up, Like, how is that even going to happen? This looks like something that was supposed to be permanent that was like physically torn apart. And I think that is at least part of why they were not put back up. Yeah, I think there are real reasons that you can not have adhesive cure properly in sub freezing conditions, steering a blizzard. I think that's probably reasonable.

00:02:09
Speaker 1: Well, I also wonder and and you may have heard, but given the manner in which they were taken down, were they damaged?

00:02:19
Speaker 2: I think some of them have been damaged in some amount. Is in terms of like they have to be flattened back out, right, they were right, they were pulled off, so they have to be flattened back out. They have to like the adhesive has to be taken off of the frames that were still hanging on the walls at the site, like that old adhesive has to be removed, new adhesive has to be put on there. The panels have to be flattened back out. If they were damaged in any other way, that has to be repaired, and all of that has to be put back up. So I think it is probably really true that that was not something that could physically be done by the deadline that was initially set. Also feel like that fact allows the government to keep down the panels that they most wanted to take down in the first place, because that has like they have the most specific detail about slavery, specifically at the President's House and then more generally at the end of the eighteenth century in the newly established United States. I went back through my pictures from when I made that trip to be like, do I have pictures from the President's House. I did not take any pictures of the President's House site. I did take a selfie of myself with the Liberty Bill, though, So as a trip I took to Philadelphia where I walked all all over creation.

00:03:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: So Independance National Historical Park was specifically referenced in that executive Order as something that needs needing to be addressed, and one of the things in it says that at Independence National Historical Park, where our nation declared that all men are created equal, quote, the prior administration sponsored training by an organization that advocates dismantling Western foundations and interrogating institutional racism, and pressured National Historical Park rangers that their racial identity should dictate how they convey history to visiting Americans because America is purportedly racist. I went down a big rabbit hole trying to figure out what training that text is referencing, right, because that sounds to me like the most worst faith reading of a routinely normal anti racism training. But I did not I was not able to find out what specific training had prompted that text to be in the Executive Order. We've gotten a really lot a lot of like really great supportive email from listeners lately. We've also gotten a couple of people who have written to basically say, stop being so political. Yeah, so I just want to like spell it out. The President of the United States, which is the country that we live in and work in and our citizens of, has specifically called the kind of history that we talk about on the show improper ideology. M Like, there is not an apolitical response to that. No, if we vocally say no, that's political. If we say nothing and adjust our content to align with this executive order that is also political. That's not something we would do. I'm just saying that's a political move. Also, if we said nothing and didn't really change anything, that too, is political. There is no a political response to the President of the United States targeting the field that you work in.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: There's just not.

00:06:14
Speaker 2: No, there's really not. And here's my thing. And this may be a little heady, and I invoke this all the time, Okay, I don't understand the mentality of someone who wants to erase all of the uncomfortable and bad stuff from our history.

00:06:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the thing that I always find myself going back to is the writing of William Blake, like the blaky and ideology that you cannot in fact be truly good unless you have been tempted by evil, unless you have been you know, someone who has had that moment where you have done something that maybe is not truly good. And it's recognizing those two things existing and choosing the good thing as often as possible that actually makes a man or a person or an entity good And to me, that makes it so much more valuable. Like, that's why we need that's part of why we need to reckon with all of the uncomfortable parts of our history. Yeah, it has no value to say we have always been great and everybody's always been great and we've always done things right, because all that tells me is like, great, you lived in a vacuum where you never were forced to make any choices or do any growth. Yeah, Like, I don't, there's no value in that. That's a big fat like water of frosting with no cake under it. Like I don't. I don't understand it. So as much as I love frosting, Listen, I'll eat a can of frosting, but what I'm saying is just like, there's it devalues the good things we have done to ignore the bad things that have happened as well, right, right, And I don't know why anybody who would want to do that unless they just cannot deal with reality.

00:07:55
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Well, the draft of the outline from before the order came to put the stuff back up talked like more about what the content was that had been taken down and the fact that having been there, having looked at these signs, having read the text on them, I found them to be accurate and thought provoking and not something that would cause up person to like need to rip them down with crowbars, unless maybe their feelings were so delicate and unregulated that any mention of slavery causes a tantrum about dei or wokeness or political correctness or whatever we are calling it nowadays.

00:08:44
Speaker 1: Mandatory therapy, mandatory therapy for all just like that should not that should not be that upsetting. Yeah, it should be upsetting in the sense that it sucks that humans have treated each other badly, but it should not freak you out on that level. Yeah.

00:09:04
Speaker 2: So there's a whole book about the President's House site. I have not read it, but I wanted to say that it exists. It's called Upon the Ruins of Slavery, No, sorry, Upon the Ruins of Liberty Slavery the President's House at Independence National Historical Park and Public Memory. That sounds like it would be a very interesting read to me. It is just not something that I was able to read while working on this. There are also various books about hercules, about own a judge, about other people who were enslaved at President's House site, lots of other information available. A couple other things that kind of jumped out to me while I was working on this Like in the context that I was working on it, What is a lot of the focus of this executive order about removing signage from the parks and all of that has seemed to be focused primarily on things that happened during the Biden administration. Like the specific order was look at things that happened since twenty twenty, so since the last full year of the first Trump presidency. Like that's the focus of what.

00:10:21
Speaker 1: We're looking at.

00:10:23
Speaker 2: While this site, the President's House Site, was not dedicated until twenty ten, the vast majority of work on it was done during the presidency of George W.

00:10:36
Speaker 1: Bush.

00:10:38
Speaker 2: So it's like there's just been this big focus with the executive order specifically about Joe Biden, but like also an undertone of things that might have been done when Democrats were in the White House, right, But like, vast majority of the work on the President's Site, the President's House site was during the George Bush George W. Bush presidency. Also, Judge Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, her incredibly scathing order to put Everything back begins with a quote from George Orwell's nineteen eighty four basically framing all of this is dystopian government overreach. Also, the kinds of information that have been taken down. I had a whole paragraph about this, and I felt like this episode was getting really long and I wanted to try to rein it in a little bit. So the information that has been taken down at sites like, as examples, information about climate change and retreating glaciers has been taken down at Glacier National Park, where receding glaciers are directly relevant to the park. Multiple signs have been taken down from Acadia National Park in Maine, including ones on climate change and one on the site's cultural significance to the Wabanaki people.

00:11:58
Speaker 1: Signs about sea level.

00:12:00
Speaker 2: At Fort Sumter on the coast of South Carolina, also directly relevant to Fort Sumter. Sea level rise signs have been taken down about that display referencing the Lost Cose mythology of the US Civil War, which we've talked about on the show before. That was taken down from Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia. Those so there's just examples I learned, like you know, as I was having to go through and continually revise this as things were changing before it got recorded, Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts incorporates the boot Cotton Mills Museum. It is a mill museum like a factory museum, and the workers there were ordered to stop showing a film about what the conditions were like at the mills, like the one of the points of having a historical park at a mill. If not clear whether it's related to this executive order or some of the other executive orders of which there are many, but the words transgender and queer were completely scrubbed from the stone Wall National Historic Site website. Yeah, and they were also forced to take down the rainbow flag, citing rules about what kinds of flags can fly at federal properties.

00:13:20
Speaker 1: Didn't they just put it back up? Though? Did I see that somebody just went and put went back up.

00:13:25
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if they put it back up or if neighbors put it up adjacent.

00:13:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, even as the most bonkers, like there's no way to reframe stone Wall, right, that isn't that? Yeah, it's so bonkers. Yeah.

00:13:43
Speaker 2: So yeah, just all all of those things that have been taken down, like they all have the same it's like, it's not targeting information that's wrong. It's not targeting information that is inaccurate. It's all clearly targeting thing that are considered to be like progressive, left wing ideas, right, rather than climate change, which is a scientific reality.

00:14:13
Speaker 1: Anyway.

00:14:13
Speaker 2: Anyway, we talked on the show about when the National Park Service had signs put up with a QR code that people could submit their commentary. We talked about that in an installment of On Earth that's connected to all of this. With the executive order, the Sierra Club did foyer requests to see what kinds of things people have put in in these QR code things. Some of them are like legitimate needs that need to be addressed, like the bathroom stall door is broken, there's not enough parking, like these are things I'm remember I can't get the link to open right now while also running the thing that is recording in our podcast.

00:14:59
Speaker 1: But like there's there's stuff.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: That people have submitted using these QR codes that are like actual legitimate things that something is in disrepair that needs to be repaired or something similar. And then there's a lot of it, a lot a lot of comments where people have taken the opportunity to say this directive is a whitewashing of history. And then there is a segment of them that are just I would classify as trolling. So I think if you like google something like Sierra Club, Floyer Request National Parks, you can get to these and read them yourself.

00:15:34
Speaker 1: Nice. I can't. I can't get it to open right now.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: So anyway, there are still a number of ongoing community efforts to document signs at the parks, Save our Signs Project as one of them. So again, a lot of this is an ongoing, ongoing, developing story.

00:15:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, we also talked about Tayo phil Steinlan and his art and politics this week. We did do that. One thing we didn't talk about was anarchism, okay, as a political concept, Yeah, which I think is important because listen, if you're a kid like me who grew up listening to the sex pistols, you have a different view of anarchy than a lot of other people like we. I think, especially in America in the US, we think of anarchy as always being very about violence and destruction and like chaos, chaos. Thanks John leyden irony there, because that's not what he is anymore. But really, when you look at the concepts of anarchy historically politically, there certainly were part some parts of it that were interested in in violence and overthrowing things by using violence, but a lot of it, and certainly the part of it that I think tayafiel Steinlan was most attracted to was this idea that if you got rid of centralized government, and this is a little bit sweet and perhaps naive, that people could be taking care of each other without needing all of that fuss. Yeah, yeah, which is a beautiful way to look at it, and it seems very much in line with the way he lived his life, yeah, and his pacifism more so than that more kind of violent approach to it. But I just I wanted to point that out in some context as we talked about this this week, because, like I said, if you're like me and you grew up in the eighties, anarchy was very much pitched as like destroy everything, right, just mash all of it. No, No, A lot of anarchy is about actually taking care of one another.

00:17:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, and I think a lot of it also sort of like acknowledges.

00:17:51
Speaker 1: The harm that governments have done. Right.

00:17:55
Speaker 2: So, even though we have a lot of things that I think are good that come from governments, sometimes like the harm that is done at the behest of governments can get less of a focus. I mean not with gigantic things like starting wars, people acknowledge that, but a lot of stuff that happens day to day on a smaller scale that I think anarchy kind of confronts more than a lot of people really think about.

00:18:22
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. One of the other things I want to talk about is actually to me quite funny. It's in our show notes, but it's in a write up on EPSCO where they talked about all of those like French censorship laws that we kind of went through, oh yeah, and one of them is this very funny thing that is described in that write up where theater censorship laws had played out in such a way that shows could not include certain portions of a script, but the plays that they were producing could still be printed in their original state. And what started to happen was that crowds would take their printouts and go to the shows and they would shout out the original versions and it kind of became this anti censorship demonstration. But to me, I'm like, this is the first Rocky horror Picture show and it's very political, and I love this idea. It was like, this is the weird rocky horror. I love it. I love it. I love it so much. Just the concept of that and how that gets started, and like the disorganically developed of people wanting to yell at the stage, the parts that the actors were leaving out I envision I don't know. I never found a write up on specifically any of these instances, but I envision actors taking a dramatic pause while we were like your turn, and the the audience yells out the part of the play that they can't say. I think that's brilliant. Yeah. We talked a little bit at the end of the episode about chat noirs everywhere. Yeah. When I say everywhere, I mean everywhere, Like if you do an Internet surge, you will find them in like small towns around the world. Yeah, where they're just like a cute cafe that somebody opened up and they love, like, you know, this idea of the late nineteenth century Paris bohemian culture, or some of them just seem to really love that poster and they want to base ahole color scheme around it, and others go all out and they try to replicate the time and stuff. So I think that I don't know, part of me, thinks it would be fun to try to just do a tour of them, but that might never fun. I think I love it. There is a very funny I almost put it in the episode, but I didn't. Funny to me Antiques Road Show that features a teofil Steinland okay, and it is a lithograph. This woman initially thinks it's a painting, but it's a lithograph, and when the guy tells her it's a lithograph, she looks disappointed at first, and then he was like, no, it's still really valuable. But it's one of the original lithographs of He did this this dual cat portrait thing that is a summer cat and a winter cat, and the summer cat is kind of out. He looks like he's sitting out on a like the wooden you know, what is the word I'm thinking of? You know, I don't know, like the thing that goes around your deck railing, Yeah, there you go, railing of evaded me. He looks like he's sitting on this wooden railing and he looks actually kind of grumpy. It's a great piece of work, and this woman has brought it to Antique's Road show, and the first thing she says is I don't like cats, but she had been told it was valuable, so she kept it. Yeah, but because she didn't like cats, she had kept it outside on her porch for like fifteen years. But it obviously was a very well covered porch because I haven't degraded much. Although the person that's doing the evaluation has says kind of like, hey, you know, unfortunately, because this was framed directly against glass in probably varying weather, cans that some of the lithographic material has stuck to the glass a little bit and kind of but it was very funny. I think he evaluates it as being like worth ten to twelve thousand dollars and then he's like, do you like cats now? And she's like, yeah, I think so, and it's just this very funny exchange. But like anyway, one of the last thing I really want to talk about, okay, is that prison narrative again, because there is a lot of interesting writing in it. Some of it is very just funny. I mean, I will say, when we think of a prison narrative today, we think of modern prisons, and this definitely seemed to be a more relaxed scenario than we would associate with prison today. Right, Like, these men were essentially living in a cell together, but it was like they had like furniture and tables and chairs, and you know, people could come visit them, and people that visited them could bring them with food they wanted, and so they kind of had like they were isolated and they were certainly, you know, not free, but they they could have a lot of comforts of home there that we might not associate with it. So some of it is just like kooky anecdotes about their life in prison. Yeah, but there was one passage that I read and I haven't found a full English translation of it, so I had translated pieces of it with my you know, sometimes murky but overall okay French, and then I you know, consulted some other friends that translate as well, and there was one passage that really really struck me. And it's so pertinent to the way we all think about incarceration and how important it is to recognize the danger of incarceration creating a person that is not really gonna be able to participate in recid it viso because they're changed so much by the experience. And that passage reads, man is an animal who, however unsociable he may seem, can only live in society. His confinement within four walls dulls his senses, his faculties, his organs. The brain, no longer stimulated by a succession of images, becomes numb. If the seclusion is prolonged and the prisoner does not find sustenance for his activity, there is a danger of intellectual death. And I really loved how poignant that was, so I just wanted to read it. Yeah, that it will ruin the person in ways that people probably were not considering, right, and that was sort of part of their whole often very funny takedown of the whole justice system. It's like nobody's thinking stuff through. Nobody's right. They literally just want to tick boxes and say they did a thing to uphold the law, but they don't. They're not really considering the consequences of the way they carry that out, which is really interesting.

00:25:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been a super long time, but we did an episode on the Attica Prison Uprising yes back some years ago, and one of the things that we talked about was how like the system of prison was basically just leaving people worse off than they had been when they were sentenced to prison and not having a way to escape that cycle. And it reminds me of that.

00:25:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Tafield Steinland, now we all know who he is. He can get proper attribution for his beautiful work. Cannot confuse him with to lose the trick. No, I understand it there. You know, if you had asked me, that's what I would have said. A lot of people would. Yeah, a lot of people would. And especially because they knew each other. Yeah, they knew a lot of the same people. They were sometimes portraying similar subjects in their art. It makes sense.

00:25:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, they had some similar subject matter of like their commercial arts especially.

00:26:01
Speaker 1: For sure, for sure. But that is Tefield Steinlend. I hope that if this is your weekend coming up, you have time to look at beautiful art, whatever it is that touches your soul the most, or inspires you, whatever fits your tastes. If you don't have time off, maybe sneak in some art looking online if you get a few minutes. It's always good for the soul. More make art if that makes you happy. Nothing makes me feel more at peace. And when I'm just making something, we hope that everybody is being kind to one another these very very stressful times we live in. Every human kindness helps, in my opinion. We'll be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode. Thanks for spending this time with us.

00:26:45
Speaker 2: 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.