Behind the Scenes Minis: Marketing and Activism

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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 Tracy V. Wilson. And we talked about Alexander T. Stewart this week. We did he is. There are so many details about his life that, of course, in any given show, like you can't include everything. I have a few, though, that I will share now. One that I thought was really really interesting was one biographer pointing out the strategic use of the word ladies in his ads, particularly in his early ads, because it made people think, if I shop there, I will be considered a lady, a lady, And so allegedly that first customer that walked in when he opened the first day said I'm a lady interested in fine fabrics, and that that was part of like how he immediately won the favor of many of Manhattan's women shoppers and became, you know, incredibly favored by them for years and years and years. So it's just kind of an interesting the psychological things that happened. There is also an interesting thing that ties into many of our other shows, which happened fourteen years after his death, which is that in eighteen ninety, Joseph Pulitzer and several of his employees were indicted for criminal libel and quote contriving and intending to injure to fame and vilify, for disgrace and vilify and disgrace the memory, character, name, and reputation of Alexander T. Stewart because a series of articles had come out and there often pointed to as really the source of the modern interpretation that he was this miserly mean person instead of as he always purported to be. I'm just trying to be super fair to everybody and like make clear rules. So that was interesting that that happened later. And Hilton, who we mentioned was his right hand man, Henry Hilton, and his executor was the one that like really got upset about this and said, like, I don't care that you said ugly things about me, but this is a man that I respected and worked with and who has been dead and please do not mess with his memory for so long, which is kind of interesting. Listen, there could be liable against you long after you're dead. It turns out, Yeah, I think it's possible that like a lot of these contradictory things were simultaneously true, like that he could be ruthless in some contexts and generous in others. Like that seems totally within the scope of humanity. It does, and it also becomes that thing. I found myself thinking a lot while I was working on this, that, like any of those characteristics, you know, greed, generosity, et cetera, some of that is in the eye of the beholder, right where like, there are also the lenses that any given person has on a situation that will shift the reality. It's kind of like that thing where people say there are always three truths, yours mind and the reality. It always makes me think about that because he is I mean, obviously he was very hard working and very smart, and we don't know if any of the stories about him being as ruthless an employer as some people claimed are true. I mean, as you said, there are people who love who stay in a job for a long time, even if it's not like a job that makes sense to other people, something about it must appeal to them. You know. Got me thinking about a lot of things. One of the things that he would do, and it ties to this, And I honestly don't know if I think this is evidence of him being kind or being brutal? Is it? In instances where smaller merchants were forced to go out of business because they couldn't compete, he would often offer them a job. And I'm like, is that really kind? Like he's like, you will still have a way to support yourself and your family, or is it like, haha, you must become part of my enterprise that killed yours. And I honestly don't know. And because we don't have a lot of his papers, we don't know. We have a lot of things written to him. Those we mentioned in the episode, the letters to him asking for money and the letters to his wife asking for money. There is actually a book published that collects a bunch of them. Oh wow, it's the same thing. You don't know what to believe, right, Like some of these people obviously are just like I can probably wrangle some books out of this. And some people write these plaintive, really sad letters where they either believe or they have convinced themselves that this might be the ray of hope that will get them over a hump or through a difficult time. And it's it's simultaneously like I can't imagine what it's like to feel that many letters all the time of people just asking for things, and it's heartbreaking to know that there were definitely people who were like, I am desperate. I think we might be related. I have five kids. Can you please help me? Yeah, And we don't know necessarily if if he gave to any of those people are not there are It's the same thing. There are stories that say, yes, he absolutely did things like that, and others that are like, well, there's no proof, so we don't know. The final thing that I will talk about is the new grave. So I wasn't able to verify this. So if anybody knows that lives in Garden City, he and Cornelia were apparently buried in secret places so that there could not be another grave robber or grave robbing of them. Yes, and that some are like, well, he's they're in the church proper in part of it, and others are like, no, probably elsewhere. But the other thing is that allegedly it's a rumor, it's not substantiated anywhere I could find. Is that Cornelia was so worried about there too being desecrated that she had an elaborate alarm system included so that if something happened and someone broached the threshold, everyone would know. Wow, this reminds me of that whole live show that we did on Safety Coffins. Yeah, that was a fun one. It was I love a Halloween live show. Anyway, I clearly find him very, very interesting, and he, obviously for anybody that's connecting dots, came up in the research but did not become an episode when we were doing our Resurrection Men season on Criminalia, and it was like he didn't quite fit the bill of any of the stuff we were talking about because we didn't know who did it, So most of the we were talking about the people who did the robbing, not necessarily the odd things that happened, although we did do some of those. But he just didn't quite fit in that season, and I thought he would be great to talk about because then every time I looked up stuff about him, I was like, what do you mean he built his own city? What? But what do you mean he he made a living out of nothing? Yeah, he's really interesting. Still considered one of the richest men in American history. Yeah, that that fortune's gone. We talked about Gonzales versus Williams this week on the show and I just I want to take a moment and talk about spellings, because Isabel Gonzalez's name is not spelled the same in court documents in the name of that court case as like she spelled it both in terms of accent marks and letters. So like the court case is Gonzales versus Williams g O N Z A L E S. But her name was Gonzales with a Z on the end of it and also with the accent mark over the A. And I could not tell you whether this was like carelessness, whether it was kind of an evolution and how we write words just from having had a job working on the internet with content management systems and style guides for however, how long have we been here, Like I don't know, two years, yeah, two thousand and five is when I started first working for a website. Like I know, there were like ap style guide standards and just the limitations of our content management system where things like diacritical marks would just ruin everything. I have an old export of our of like all the episodes of our show from like very long time ago before we were using our current content management system. And there are a number of things that are like people's names that had an accent mark of some sort gobbledegook, just include garbage characters. Yes, so yeah, I don't, I don't. I don't know if that if this was just carelessness, not paying attention, racism, evolution of spelling, lots of potential, some poor overworked court clerk, like, yeah, like a lot of reasons that some of them more valid than others. But also the way that Puerto Rico was spelled in the United States legally officially changed at two different points during the I think, I think both of them were in the twentieth century. It went from being Puerto Rico p u e r t o, like that word is pronounced or that like that word is spelled in Spanish, to Porto po rto like officially US changed that spelling and then changed it back. So a lot of the things that we read today have this spelling of po rt yeah, which I feel like the way a lot of us say Puerto Rico sounds a little more like Puerto than Puerto, but seeing it spelled po rt o is just like a lot harder in terms of all of those letters. Well, it is because it feels like you're reading something fictional. I don't know, it's like a weird My brain is like, that's not real, No, it is, it is. Yeah, I I am hopeful. I've said this about so many people on the show recently, especially women, that that I'm hopeful that there will be like a more personal biography of her at some point. I do have the impression from the research that I did that there are family papers and family family documents and family histories that could contribute to all of that. So maybe it is something that will happen at some point. It's there are lots of things about this that I'm curious about. Like I said in the episode that I really think that when she was being detained at Ellis Island, that her family was just desperate to get her out, Like she was pregnant, real close to her due you know, when she was expected to give birth. Also just being detained at immigration that's on its own a whole dehumanizing, uh insulting process, and so like I think they were just trying to make the arguments that they thought would work. But like that's just my interpretation. I don't I don't know if these you know, there's there's a letter written from one family member to another that was sort of like, Okay, this is what we're gonna try, and this is why, so you gotta we have to kind of fill in the blanks on some of it. Yeah, it's one of those uh things. I Stories like this always bring out the most simplistic hippie part of my soul where I want to just be like why borders though, man, Like why can't we all be cool? Real valid question, And for a long time in the United States, like if you could get here, you could stay here, right, And it was really into It was really when the US started like excluding Chinese laborers that really started to shift a whole lot. We've talked about the Chinese Exclusion Act in a number of prior episodes, and it came up today, so we did not not today. It came up this week and we talked about this uh this episode, so we didn't get into it and a lot more detail, but like that, Yeah, there was a big shift between the attitude of come on and the attitude of well not if you're any of these people, yea, with lots of different definitions of who all was these people? Yep. Yeah, So anyway, I'm glad we finally got to do This episode follow on a few weeks later to the insular cases. Whatever's going on on your weekend, I hope it's great. Whether it's fun stuff or less fun stuff, it's less fun stuff, I hope it's as great as they can possibly be in that circumstance. We'll be back to the Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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