Behind the Scenes Minis: Accidental Mary Week

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Mary Elizabeth Lease this week, the mixed bag that is Mary Elizabeth Lease, which makes me want to talk about a subject I don't want to say it's near and dear to my heart because I don't like it. But a thing that grinds my gears and is a soapbox, and that is charity racism. Okay, because there are definitely people who are willing to ignore when someone does really racist stuff if they're like, but they do so much good charity work. I kind of feel like that's happening here. Listen. Have I gotten in a fight the socials with a friend of one of my relatives And when I talked to that relative and said, what the hell, dude, that person's super racist, and they're like, they raise money for charities that help people who are And I'm like, no, that there's still racists that doesn't include them from it and it makes me furious. But what's really weird here? And we didn't get into it in this show because we didn't talk a lot about Mary's law practice is that she did, like her first case was a very prominent case where she represented a black man and argued in ways that you would think would not be the same person that also said, you know, people of color, black people, and Asian people are inferior to us, so we gotta be the boss of them. Like I'm like, how do these two people inhabit the same body. It's so weird to me, but also so common that I know it happens all the time. She's such a pill in some ways, and I want her to be great and I want to be like, yes, Mary Elizabeth, but I'm constantly like, oh, Mary Elizabeth sush. It's kind of like if you've ever had a politician where you're like, I really like what you're saying. Oh you kept talking like those have happened to me this Yeah, this is our last episode recording session of the year twenty twenty four. And so this morning when I was looking over that line, I was also like distracted, kind of pulled in a bunch of directions getting everything ready to you know, have the year end. And so my initial read through had been sort of cursory, and when I got to the long quoted passages from the book. I just sort of was like, Okay, that's a book quote and didn't really thoroughly read it. And then I got to the end of the episode. The first time around, it was like, huh, I like, I feel like there was some problematic stuff in there, but not enough that like, not the amount that would have warranted the kind of discussion at the very beginning of the episode, right. And then on read through number two, when I actually read those quotes, I was like, Oh my goodness. I literally so the place that I read that book is an online source that's in the source list, and the way that it displays it when you're actually in the text of the book. It doesn't have like a header that says you know Mary Lease and the book title. It's just kind of all the text, right, And I literally kept going back and forth and being like, is this someone else's book? Like this get because this is messed up. Both filed this is messed up. But then when I was reading the biography by brookspear Or, which is really the one super comprehensive one there is and I'll talk about that again in a minute, she was like, Oh, this gets real. Weird and super colonizing, and I was like, okay, that is in fact the actual text I was reading, but it was very it was so discordant. Yeah. Well, and in addition to that part, the idea of like we'll just make everybody be farmers and then there won't be any you know, alcohol misuse or crime or whatever like that also has problems. Oh yeah, and it's like similar to prison reformers who were like, we will send people to these penitentiaries where they will be penitent and they will do hard work and like that that will make it all better. Yeah, that also has problems. Yeah, there are so many presumptions of superiority, like you know, the correct way of life, you know what is correct. It's like even if that is coming from what somebody believes is an altruistic point of view, those are exactly the kinds of things that so really gross stuff down the road, including thinking that we should colonize. As I said at the top of the episode, most of the quick biographies you read of her seemed to completely ignore all of this. And I literally don't know if it is a case where they're like I didn't read that book. It's so long and Windy and Meandery, and it is real Meandery. It's like she invokes historical stories now and again to like support her point of view, and you know, likens she was a very good order, but I think in the long form of a book she felt maybe a little whelmed. I could be wrong, That's just my supposition, but it is super weird. There's not a lot of close reading or acknowledgment of that outside of pretty heavy hitting biography study. And that is a little bit of a problem in and of itself because as I mentioned that Brook spear Or biography is the most comprehensive, and prior to that, there had only been one that was written quite a bit earlier that did not seem to apply the same rigorous standards of like research and citing primary sources versus secondary, etc. And the problem is that that biography, which is the people's joan of arc Mary Elizabeth Lee's Gendered Politics and Populist Party Politics in Gilded Age America, is as expensive as a textbook. It's a really expensive book. It didn't it was published by international academic publishers, so it is in that sort of textbook framework of cost. Right, Like I got the kindle edition of it, which are usually much less pricey, and it was more than eighty dollars, Like, it's a lot. So I think for a lot of people, especially people who are maybe even doing biographical research that maybe can't get directly to a primary source or look at public records, something like that is often going to be out of reach because that is a lot to spend on one source. Yeah, and even even if you do something like in her library alone, a lot of libraries are not going to have a lot of libraries are not going to have it, and the ones that do, like, there could be costs involved with getting it, definitely, there's going to be time involved, yeah, in getting it. Yeah. Yeah, So I mean I think that has unfortunately been a barrier to people really getting the full scope of the things that she advocated for. Also, i mean, let's face it, it's more of a feel good story to be like she fought the man she was. She was, you know, trying to be a voice for impoverished farmers who had gotten completely screwed over by you know, the industrialists and Wall Street, which she did, but like problems. Yeah, the stuff that got said about her in the press, though, I don't know how she bore it in some pieces, Like a lot of it was just like the same kind of petty, gross stuff that you would see about someone today if they were trying to lobby against very powerful, wealthy forces. Right. There were a lot of kind of insinuations that she was the man in her relationship with Charles, and that he must be very effeminate and like just super heteronormative, stupid and stuff, and also like a lot of a lot of kind of gendered attacks like that that she couldn't possibly be a real woman, and just like stupid gross things that are easy to dismiss as well, that's stupid, But like she was getting it from all quarters all the time, Like even though she had a lot of supporters, she had just as many detractors who were just as happy to be loud about it. So it's a wild thing. But this is also one of those episodes that is both depressing and heartening for me because it's like, aside from the fact that who I really hung up about this, let's go colonize things she had going on. But aside from the fact that from that she was fighting for the same stuff that we are still trying to get sorted out today, which is awful and depressing, but also there's part of me that's like, well, I guess everybody has always felt so we're not that unique, even though we always feel like we're in the doomiest doom zone. Yeah. I don't know if that helps anybody. It's kind of a really a pessimist way to feel a little better about it. It's a little, it's a little. It's always sucked, and it always will suck. But I it's always sucked. There's always been terrible wealth inequality and people fighting to just get by and not not having the means to recognize or get around the manipulative ways that big business can hurt little guys without even caring. Right, one of our episodes this week, and our accidental Mary Week, everyone this week is named Mary, not on purpose, we talked about Mary McLeod Bethune. Let's talk about whether she was the first person in her family who was not enslaved from birth. Yeah. You messaged me during your research and you were like, this is a mess it. Well, so I started looking into this really early on, initially because I had at that point read like three or four really brief biographical sketches on places that should be pretty accurate. One would expect, like I don't want to name names. Actually, I just don't want to. I don't want to embarrass people or whatever. But like I had read, you know, some brief biographical sketches about her, and they all said this. They all said that she was either the fifteenth of seventeen children or the last of seventeen children. I think fifteen of seventeen is right. I think the number seventeen is also right. She gave an interview later on in her life in which she was asked to name off all of her siblings, and she did only name fifteen. But I do think she had some siblings that died when they were baby, right, And you know, birth records not always kept very well for enslaved people. A lot of times there were references of like how many people there were, but not necessarily their names and stuff like that. So we're just going to work off the assumption that she was the fifteenth of the seventeen children as correct. Now. Immediately, I was curious about this because seventeen is a lot of children. It is a lot of children at the time. It's a lot of children. For an enslaved mother who was enslaved for a chunk of that time, it's a lot of children. There is some physiology in involving how long it takes to carry a child, right, and how long a person's fertility lasts. Yes, And so the idea of somebody, even if she started having babies at a pretty young age, and even if she was having them very close together, the idea of having fourteen children and then a decade long gap before having it. I was like, it's not impossible, but it just seemed not that likely. So I was like, I should go check on this, and it was very easy to find quickly that there was this eighteen seventy census that listed a child who was one and one who was three in eighteen seventy, and that would mean both of them were born after the abolition of slavery. We're not even going to get into emancipation proclamation and anybody born between eight teen sixty three and eighteen sixty five. There's a lot of just questions there. So I was like, wow, Okay, this just seems to be a widely repeated bit of inaccuracy, which happens. It has happened on our show. I'm sure that we have, you know, repeated something that has been repeated so much, Right, it's just ubiquitously everywhere. Where I started to feel like I was losing it was brand new academic work, and brand new, as in within the last five years biographies written by people with terminal degrees in their field. In at least one case, for an academic press, like I would expect if you're writing a brief biographical sketch of somebody for a website, there's one level of research involved there. If you're writing a full on bioography of somebody, I would expect this pretty to me obvious gap to at least raise some questions, right, And so when it apparently hadn't, I was like, am I missing something here? Right? Did every copy editor not do a little math in their head? Yeah? I just there are a lot of eyeballs that are have looked at some of those whose job it is to catch weirdness. Yeah. I could see where it would make you feel like you were losing your mind. I really yeah. I was questioning my own ability to read and do math. And I was like, am I confused about when the thirteenth Amendment was ratified, and I think part of the reason that I got so focused on it is that there is a pattern that I have seen in working on this show for a really long time, in adding elements to the stories of black people, especially Black women, that make them seem almost romanticized or superhuman. And I can see aspects to this as positive, as like reclaiming a story and making it a story that is about inspiration and worth for black people who have not been covered that way in a lot of historical writing. But I also think it kind of adds into this idea that the black people who throughout history have been the biggest activists and the most effective at what they were doing, were somehow exceptional as people. It wasn't just that they have had access to education or that they can access to resources, but that they were somehow different from all of the other Black people. Yes, and it carries through into things like this is not the case with Mary McLoud Betune. There is a ton of academic work about Mary McLeod Bethune, but there are a lot of figures in black history, especially black women, where I can find children's books about them, but no academic scholarship, and I feel like all of this stuff is tied together, yes, interconnected. So anyway, that was how I wound up spending an inordinate amount of time on this one question and also questioning my own like mental faculties. Yeah. I love that she had faith in God and in Mary Bethune. That's such a great quote. It is a great quote. She definitely accomplished so much, and so much of it traced back to being given the opportunity to go to school and being able to get scholarships for a more formal education. Sometimes she's described as the only, like the first person in her family to go to school at all, and that does not seem one hundred percent right to me. It does seem like some of her older siblings who were school age after the Civil War did have like they were able to go to a little bit of school, right, But it did have to be you know, very specific in the windows of time when that could happen. She was the first person who had higher educational opportunities. There were not that many opportunities for black students to even in a lot of cases get beyond like elementary school, Like a lot of the first schools that were established for black students were more like elementary school level of education, so like getting to high school was a you know, there were access issues there, and then like getting to college a whole other thing. So anyway, yeah, I mean I I you know, she is one of those cases where she was clearly exceptional. Yeah, because which to me is evidenced by the fact that it took a lot of drive for her to continue to do all those levels of education. Sure, obviously even if you have access, like that's a lot of drive. But also like when her education was done, it was like she never slowed down. More on the plate, Please, more on the plate. I could do more than this. I still have a little bit of room. You could put one more responsibility. I could take one more thing on. That's no problem, just one sure, that's not a problem. Like throughout her life, I get exhausted just reading her life story. I'm like, did you ever just sit down quietly with a cup of for an hour and chill out? Like what happened? What happened there? She also did all of that, well a lot of it, while essentially being a single parent, And like I didn't find a lot written about her son other than that he did feel like that he did not get a lot of attention because of his mother's work and her other you know, everything that she had going on in her life. So like I didn't find a ton about him either, but like she still was like she was educating her son along with those those first students that she had, and she was raising him while also doing nine thousand things like let's start a school and a hospital and a mission for turpentine workers. Yeah at the same time. Yeah exhausting, Yeah, yeah, why down, Mary? Like I just wonder. I also found myself thinking when you were talking about the period later in her life where she like retired and I'm air quoting that because she unretired, like in those roles, what is the transition for her going back into them, Like, yeah, did someone do that job? And then go, no, I can't really handle this the way you could anyway, So have at it or like I mean, is it? I picture everything, all of the plates kind of spinning and then maybe hitting the ground when she's like, oh, I'm I'm unwell, I can't work for a little while. Yeah. More likely, I think she was so driven and organized that she probably had failsafes in place for times when she couldn't be there. But I just am like, I don't know how the world kept going when she was like I need downtime. Yeah, yeah, because that was a lot of stuff, right. I mean, I get fussy when we have to, like in cases like this, hurry up and get everything done before the holidays so we can like have a little bird on the couch with a cup of coffee not doing anything for a what So I can't even imagine. Yeah, Well, and there were definitely times where how much she was doing and how much effort she was putting in does seem to have led to some like maybe not led to, but at least contributed to some pretty serious illnesses. Yeah, and uh so yeah, Yeah, I mean I see why she believed in Mary m Hugh. Yeah, because I do. Yeah, She's a very incredible person. I've had her on my list for really so long, incredibly long time, and like one of the reasons that I have I had not moved her up to the topic list sooner is that there is just a ton out about her already, and so sometimes I have focused on people doing similar work that were maybe not as well known. But still she does not I think that the men who were her contemporaries, who were also working toward a lot of the same issues, specifically for black Americans, for like the freed people after the end of Civil War, have I think more name recognition than she does in a lot of areas today. So yeah, I'm glad we finally got to do this episode. Me too. I have a question that you will be answering now, because we're recording this before it comes out. Oh sure, did pass you or future you? Time travel is hard watch this the day had dropped on December twentieth, Probably not on December twentieth, because I am making a visit to see family, and when I go to see my parents, I tend to spend all of my time with them, doing stuff for them at their house, that kind of thing. And I don't know if there will be like downtime on the twentieth to watch a whole movie that is, I don't know. Maybe maybe my parents would like to watch it too, maybe not. I pretty much my mom has control of the remote and is the decider and what we are going to watch. It's fair, but I probably will watch it over the break after I am back home again. The break meeting, meaning this time where we recorded the episodes in advance so that I can take it off. Yeah. Yeah, I'm working that day, so maybe i'll watch it while I work. Yeah, that'd be cool. Sit here and cry for a while. Yeah, try to type about something else happen. Yeah, I don't. I have no idea how how the you know what? What the like? There are a lot of different ways you can focus a movie like this, since it is both about the Postal Directory Battalion and also about World War Two, So it's like, how much war movie is it and how much is it about these women? Don't really know hasn't come out yet as a will find out find out I as a person who has like a lot of pacifist ideals, I yet still will find sometimes war movies incredibly moving. So we'll see, we'll see. Maybe I will report back afterward, although at that point it's going to be, you know, weeks after the movie, right, right, great? So yeah, whatever is happening on your weekend, which is like three full weeks after the day we're actually recording this episode. Whatever's happening. I hope it's great. I hope you're able to you know, if you are pushing really hard on something that is important to you. I hope you're able to take a minute to breathe, because that minute to breathe can really help you get through all the minutes after that. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and 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.