Behind the Scenes Minis: Journalism Carols

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Joseph Medill this week. We did. Throughout my research, I just kept muttering to myself, Joseph Medill is a pill because he was very bossy, not someone you could really reason with if you had made up his mind. Yeah, but also super interesting and like one of those people we don't really talk about in terms of like the people pulling the levers of power in the United States. But he sure did have a lot of influence. Yeah, he was not a name that rung a bell to me at all. There is a great story, apparently, when about his friendship with Abe Lincoln, Uh huh, when Lincoln would come to the offices and visit, and apparently Lincoln had gotten to the Tribune offices when Medill was not in his office he was doing something, and when he came back to his office, he found mister Lincoln sitting reading the paper with his feet up on the desk, his long legs extended, and according to many staffers, they heard him yell, get your damn feet off my desk, Gabe, which I just love somebody yelling that at Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I also really, I mean, we don't know if it's true. We only have Medill's account, but I really liked his account of like Abe Lincoln being like, I'm doing what you wanted, so maybe don't be a sucker and do what has to be done here. Right. It sounds somewhat unlike Abe Lincoln. Yeah, but also I love it, and it was enough that it cowed Medill and he wanted to admit as much. So I find that fascinating fascinating. He also didn't. I didn't get into it because eventually I had to cut some stuff for time. But like the Douglas Lincoln debates, Oh yeah, Madill followed that whole thing like he literally was the one newspaper man that was printing it every day that there was any news about it, like following the whole thing around, just like followed it like the grateful dead and reported every second of everything that was going on, which is another way that he supported Lincoln in the paper. Yeah, so this outline characterized him in his newspaper journalism career. As having a bias, and I was curious about whether whether like it was a bias or whether it was more like an informed perspective. I think he did have an informed perspective, however, because he was using his paper contacts to communicate back and forth with Abraham Lincoln about hone should be presented and maybe you want to know about this before it hits this other newspaper. Like, to me, that's the bias part, Right. I am helping you every way I can. Yeah, there is a journalistic integrity line that that crosses for sure. Yeah. And to be fair, all of the rules of journalistic integrity that we think about today weren't all necessarily in place yet at this point, right, But there's a reason they got put in place, and some of it is stuff like that. Yeah. Well, and today, like we have been living through an approach to journalism that is purportedly unbiased and taking a neutral stance on topics, but sometimes there's not an actual a neutral stance on that issue, right, And so having like just become deeply exasperated with reporting that makes it seem like there are two equivalent sides to issues that don't have equivalent sides In that way. I'm like, right, I kind of would prefer, like, you know, if the paper's position is slavery is bad and should be abolished, that like the reporting points to that. Yeah, yeah, say straightforwardly and you know, says it directly, because yeah, boy, I have various frustrations with the worlds of journalism and reporting. Oh point of I mean that was that was part of why I found this interesting. The other thing too, is that if you read his editorials, they are not like I am conveying information to you. It is like, here's the action you need to take. Okay, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, definitely not like reporting so much as shaping the way people perceive things. Yeah yeah, I mean granted, like I'm on board with his anti slavery agenda, less so with his anti union stuff. Lead in the game, right, So that made me laugh a little bit because he reminds me of my grandfather who was a union type setter and eventually got promoted into management, and he had been a union man. He raised my dad and my aunt we like, the union is why we have what we have. And then when he moved into management and actually had to deal with the union from the other side, he got a little a little more frustrated on that score, and so this reminded me of that in terms of like how he had gone from being a type setter and from having like a pretty progressive perspective leading into the Civil War to being a more anti union person having managed an entire city and a whole city, yeah, being the mayor. Yeah, yeah, his time as mayor is so fascinating. One of the things that started happening even before he was elected was that because he was writing these really like hopeful editorials in the paper of like, hey, everybody, cheer up, keep your heads up, We're all going to work together to rebuild. And those got reprinted all over the world. People from all over the world, like royal houses in Europe and other places, started sending money directly to him. Oh wow. And what he would do whenever he got it was he would give the money to his wife, Kitty, and she got to kind of manage the way that money was distributed, so she would basically like handle the philanthropic part of disbursement and be like, Hey, I've looked at these four hospitals, this one is suffering the most. I'm going to give them the biggest chunk. He kind of did all of that, But there's not a lot of documentation in how she did it, at least that I could find easily, But I would be curious how she made those decisions. Yeah, it's kind of interesting that he just became well before he was mayor, like when he was literally just writing his stuff in those that like month in between the fire and the thing, people were already just sending chunks of money to him, like thousands at a time, and he would be like, Okay, so fascinating. He also, I didn't get into it, but because I feel like we talk about it so much, people will think it is my special project. He was really instrumental in getting the World's Columbian Exposition to Chicago in eighteen ninety three, one of the things he worked on in his later life, which is just an interesting, interesting thing and it makes sense. He was very proud of what he had accomplished in terms of rebuilding the city, even if people started getting frustrated with the way he was filling positions. Yeah, yeah, and they did. They did pass a law about not using pine for new structures, Yeah, which probably saved them a lot of trouble down the road. Yeah, I mean certainly it did. The place that I used to live has been having like an internal city dispute involving people being upset that they felt like a business was being unfairly penalized by the city over building codes. And then when like the whole, the whole, like the documentation of it was released and it was like, no, really, they were building a bunch of stuff out of wood in the densely constructed downtown without permits when wood cannot be used for those structures downtown because of the flammability and yea like this kind of reminded me about of that with like how much of Chicago was made out of wood at the time and how much that contributed to the fire. Yeah, there was early on, I think even before he was elected, as people were discussing these problems in Chicago, like, hey, this is a problem though, because that's the most economical thing I can possibly get a hold of. And the hart fastest a lot of the time. Yeah, And we read a lot of his inauguration speech, but we didn't read half of it. I mean, it was so long. But one of the things he does is he does this breakdown because he clearly did his research on it or talked to experts, because he was like, here's how fast pine rots, and how often you will have to replace parts of pine even if it doesn't catch on fire. We are stupid to use this, and it's actually more expensive if you amortize out the replacements you have to make over a twenty year period than if you just invest in a better building material right out of the gate. And I was like, man, he has very strong feelings about this, which were correct and great, and I do like that. He basically was like, okay, people, here's the real real. Here's how much money we owe people, here's how much we have gotten. Here's the gap. Here's how I'm gonna fill that gap. And he was really quite direct. There was no hemming and hawing of like I mean when I say he line item to that thing. He literally was like, this is how much it costs to run these four government offices. This is how like just anybody that was a numbers nerd was probably losing their minds with glee during this reach because it was like a spreadsheet being read aloud. So yeah, problematic in a number of ways. Like I said, some of his very early writing about teaching. I immediately ran across some very slurry, not cool language, and I was like, well, we're not going to quote this. I'll just say he didn't love teaching, but also incredibly powerful and quite smart. Yeah, if he didn't always use his smarts in the way we might have liked. Sure. Also, don't adopt raccoons. Don't try to adopt raccoons. That was a good listener mail. It made me wonder for a moment. I was like, I wonder if this person is talking about the shelter that I adopted my cats from, because they got a brand new, beautiful facility not that long ago. And then I was like, m no, you got to be buzzed in. So if somebody was just standing in the lobby, they couldn't. That couldn't be the same, right, right. Talked about Christmas carols this week, We sure did talked about William Sands. When we finally got to William Sands, we talked about the introduction to his book of Christmas Carols that was like forty percent of the length of the book, and then within that introduction there was a sixty page gap in which carols were not mentioned something that cracked me up. A couple of things cracked me up about that. One is that that introduction ends with him saying, quote, but it is time to close this introduction, which has imperceptibly almost extended to a link that the subject will not sanction. And I was like, yes, William Sands, the subject will not sanction it because a lot of this introduction is not actually about the subject. You're like, perceptible in point of fact, Yeah, well, and I mean some of the things that he was writing about are things that are part of the context, that are tangentially related or you know, they're part of the historical precursor of the Christmas caroling. But some of it just felt like wandering digression around Christmas, and I was like, I need to get back to the part that's relevant. I'm not going to be able to really put my attention to all of this that's not And so when I found the little margin note that some lack some past person had made where they put a little star and with the word Carrol's, I thought that was very funny. And then pretty consistently for a lot of the rest of the book, the things that I found useful and noteworthy and wanting to mention in the episode were also things that this past person with their pencil had written in the book. Maybe it's a future person, maybe you time traveled, and you were like, I'm really gonna need this help because this is a really sucking wow. And that at the one day we finally invent that time machine that we talk about on the show from time to time. I feel like the time machine that we one day build is going to be like the JWST or the very large array where we'll have to submit our proposals for usage just to get on, like the wait list. Yeah yeah, well, and a lot of the things that we've talked about using a time machine for on the show have been not the best use of the time machine. And I remember many years ago somebody pointing it out, either in an email or social media, I don't remember, but we had talked about wanting to go back in time to prevent people from trampling all over the crime scene. Uh huh, And somebody was like, did you think about maybe go back going back in time to prevent the murder from happening? No? No, it's like, well, yeah, now that you mention it, I suppose that would be better than just stopping the crime scene destruction. But no, that was not really what I had been thinking about. I just want to go back and tell the Lumier brothers I will hang onto this forever who thought that film was not ever going to be a money making thing. I literally still want to go back and go Rogue one made a billion dollars and then just vanish into thin air with a bee, so many dollars. By total coincidence. While I was working on this, an algorithm fed me a video. I did not know the name of whose video this was. Maybe I should go look it up, but they had. It was an a cappella performance of a song about the song God Rest you Mary Gentleman, and where in that phrase the comma should go? And I found it so funny. I'm just I'm gonna have to look at my phone because I feel that, you know, people, people would appreciate this. Ramsey's the Pigeon is the name of the account, and I have no idea of anything about this account other than that there is a song that's God Rest You Marry Gentleman. That is a song about where in the song title the comma should go and how the position of that comma changes the titles meaning. And I found it so funny, which is always great when a random thing on the Internet is so funny. Yes, yes, I would like more of that on the Internet. I remember when it felt like most of the Internet was random things that were so funny. Those were the days instead of AI slop and hate speech. Those were the days. My favorite recent one, since we're on this brief tangent is a post from Happy Camper Tattoos on Instagram, Okay, and it says girl dinner and it's a praying mantis holding her mate's head, and it's very cute and it's done in like the old school kind of slightly cartoony tetes style, and I thought it was the most brilliant thing I'd ever seen, and it made me laugh literally so hard. I was crying, and I sent it to everybody I knew. Christmas, Carol. Yeah, as is often the case with anything we talk about, do you know what this episode made me think of? Sorrow Wars, bobs Burgers. You're close, Okay, there's a great They always have great Christmas episodes, some of which make me cry and cry, but one is very funny, where the b plot is Linda and the kids and their handyman Teddy, walking around this very rich neighborhood Christmas caroling in the hopes that someone will give them hot coco. And there's one house that's known as the Murder House, and then it turns out that really the guy that lives there is just bad at decorating, and he comes out and sings in a beautiful voice Adeste Fidelis, and then they're all friends. But it's so lovely, and that's all I can think of the whole time. This episode made me think about being raised as a kid and being raised Methodist as a kid, and I don't know how the Methodist Church, well, the Methodist Church had a schism, so I super don't know what's going on with Methodist Church leadership now except the general sides of the schism. But when I was a kid, we were United Methodists. We went to United Methodist Church, and at that time, the United Methodist Church moved the preachers around every few years, so you would get a new preacher periodically, and the types of services that would happen for Christmas could change a lot when there was a different preacher. Like a different preacher could come to the church and sort of have a different idea of what would be good to do for Christmas. And so there were years that we had either on Christmas Eve or sometime during Advent, we would have like a service of lessons and carols. And there were a lot of Christmas carols that were sung as part of church services during Advent. And sometimes there would be like a Christmas Eve specific service that might or might not specifically be lessons in carols, but there would often be Christmas carols sung. And I don't know, it just sort of made me think about the many different iterations of Christmas observances that there were at church when I was a kid. Yeah, and how also sometimes the youth group would go caroling. I don't think, I don't remember if I actually did that very much, but that was like a group activity that would happen, would be going caroling house to house, which we did not like. That was not something that happened near where I lived, because we lived out in the country on a busy highway. But you know, the church was located in a town, and say there would be caroling through the neighborhoods around the church often a neighborhoods that a lot of members of the church lived in. Yeah, I don't know that I've ever gone caroling. If I did, it was probably part of like some theater program saying oh sure, sure, yeah, I don't recall ever caroling just for funsies. Yeah, I think I remember one time going caroling at a nursing home. Oh yeah, like room to room at the nursing home. Somehow, what you just said reminded me of the year that the summer theater that I did in the summers when I was a kid, that we did Scrooge, which was funny because it was July in the summer. Yeah, it was, And we did restage that one at Christmas time, if I recall correctly. And then my high school tried to do Scrooge and it went not great. The theater program was kind of floundering at my high school by the time I got there. And the thing that I remember from the high school production of Scrooge was that one of the early scenes, like the early crowd scenes around the town, the town being London, there was a bottle that either someone dropped or it got put down on the stage. A bottle was on the stage that was not supposed to be there. That was like a prop, And rather than anyone having the presence of mind to create a reason to strike this prop from the stage, everyone just danced around it through the production numbers. I find this now hilarious. But boy was our theater teacher not pleased with us for doing that. Well, anyway, I have good news theater teacher. Now it's only thought of with love. Well, she is no longer among the living, so hopefully she did not carry any resentments about our poor performance of Scrooge in the year in nineteen ninety three to the beyond with her anyway. So the Carol's episode came out on Christmas Eve. Now it is Boxing Day, the day that's behind the scenes is coming out. Whatever is going on with this season of the year, whatever it is that you are celebrating or not celebrating, I hope that it is just all going as well as possible. It has been a rough year, yeah, and I know a lot of folks need a break, And so if you need a break, I hope you're able to get one before the new year turns over. It will be a whole new year by the time our next behind the scenes comes out. So happy New Year, a little in advance to everyone. Yeah, I hope everybody has the means and the ability to eat something delicious feast and remember to take care of other people that need the meats. Yeah, and figures across for twenty twenty six. Is that the year that's coming? It sure is. I almost said twenty twenty seven. I almost blipped us right by that. Biz, that'd be funny. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow. We will have something brand new 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.