Joseph Pulitzer and the Rise of Yellow Journalism (Part 1)

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, have you noticed we keep bumping up against Joseph Pulitzer. His name just keeps returning. I mean that's normal because he's one of those pivotal figures in history. His influence continues right on through today, more than a century after his death. A lot of times, if you talk about history and the time he was alive, something is going to connect to one of his papers. Uh. And while he started out in pretty privileged circumstances that did not last, and well before he was a famous name associated with journalism, he was an immigrant in the United States with no money. And today we're going to talk about his early life right up through his rivalry with William Randolph Hurst. But this is actually a two parter, although each of these could more or less stand alone without too much confusion. Uh. And that's largely because there are two really big events that were pretty significant in his life and in the world of journalism, but that he wasn't around four, and we've kind of centered each episode around that. To some degree. One of them will appear in this episode and the other in part two. But like I said today, his birth through that Hurst situation. So, Joseph Pulitzer was born in Maco, Hungary on April tenth, eighty seven, to Philip and Lee's Pulitzer. The Pulitzers were pretty wealthy. Philip was from several generations of successful merchants, and Joseph and his siblings were educated in private schools. They had private tutors. When Joseph was eight, the family moved to pesh for better business opportunities, and they found them. Pullip Pulitzer did just extremely well there, and though Joseph had impressive educational opportunities, he also had a bad temper that made him a troublesome student. He loved to read, but he really hated the restrictions involved with formal schooling. Yeah, there's one story about him that I read in a biography that he was such a pain in the neck that he drove one of his tutors to jump out the window, which is presumably a first floor window. But he basically was like, I cannot wait to get to a door. I want away from this child. But while he was still young. There were also some tragedies. Joseph lost several of his siblings and then his father, Philip, died in eighteen fifty eight at just the age of forty seven, So from the ages of nine to twelve, Joseph had lost five siblings and his father, and to make matters worse, his father's illness before he died had drained their savings, and his mother at least did not really know how to manage the family's remaining money and didn't really have a vocation to make more. So they were soon broke. But things could have gotten really dire, but then Eli's remarried to a man named Max Fry. At the age of seventeen, Pulitzer moved to the US with the intention to serve in the US Civil War, fighting for the Union. This was not his first effort at joining a military. According to some accounts, there are stories that he had tried to enlist in the Austrian Army but was refused due to poor health and bad eyesight. Undaunted, then he tried to enlist in the French Foreign Legion under Napoleon, which was recruiting for soldiers to go to Mexico. He ran into the same issue and was disqualified again because of his health. His next try was with the British Army, which needed men to serve in India. Was not accepted there either, But then he met a bounty recruiter in Germany who was looking for recruits for the US Union Army, and that's how Pulitzer found himself bound for Boston on a ship called the Garland. But Pulletzer had realized that bounty recruiters, who were basically brokering the deals to recruit almost anybody, we're pocketing and outsized portion of the bounty payments. And in the case of this particular agent he was working with, he was procuring people to serve it lieu of wealthy young men who would otherwise be drafted. And Joseph allegedly tried to skirt this system by leaving the makeshift enlistment point the bounty hunters had set up on Deer Island. He instead made his way to shore by waiting across a shallow channel headed to New York. He wasn't, to be clear, trying to get out of service. He had, after all, been hunting for a military contract. But he got to a recruiting tent that had been hastily assembled in City Hall Park, and there he made a deal with a young man named Henry Vosberg, who was a farmer, to serve in his stead, and Pulletzer got paid two hundred dollars for this. He used some of the money to send his mother a gift to let her know he was doing well. Pulitzer had lied about his age to enlist. He said he was twenty when he was only seventeen. But he knew how to ride a horse, so he joined the Lincoln Cavalry. This was made up mostly of German soldiers, but he had trouble getting along with his fellow soldiers. They were not especially welcoming to bounty hunted recruits, especially new bounty hunted recruits. He served, though, and was honorably discharged at the war's conclusion, and when the war ended, Joseph looked for work in New York, but he found this to be a pretty fruitless effort because so many other soldiers, who unlike him, could speak English, were doing exactly the same thing. After he finally received some money from back home, he used that to move to St. Louis, and there he started his career in journalism. He did not jump right into it though. First he did various low level service jobs while he taught himself in English from library books. And he also started studying law the same way during this time. And it was in the library in eighteen sixty eight that he met two men who regularly played chess there, and, not knowing who they were, Pulitzer made a comment about a mistake he felt that one of the players had made, and a conversation ensued. It turned out the two men were editors for the vest Leecha Post, and this was a German language newspaper that catered to St. Louis's German speaking community. They offered him a job working as a reporter, and he accepted. Pulitzer worked really hard as a journalist for this paper for several years. The thing that would really change his trajectory from employee to mogul was really a matter of chance. In eighteen seventy two, the papers owners were nearly bankrupt and they offered Joseph Pulitzer the chance to purchase a controlling interest in the paper as they tried to bail themselves out. He took that chance, and that meant when he was only twenty five, he owned his first paper and he could call himself not just a journalist, but a publisher. But then he sold the vest Lecha Post pretty quickly. He made money on that deal. And even before he had taken the vest Lecha Post job, Joseph had become a U. S citizen and his brother Albert had joined him. We'll probably talk a little bit more about Albert in the behind the scenes on Friday. And before he purchased that portion of the paper he was offered, Pulitzer had also become involved in the Missouri political scene through the papers contacts. He was elected to the state legislature in eighteen sixty nine in part because he was able to leverage the paper to support his campaign. He would continue to use his news organizations to promote the ideas and politicians and politics that he favored and to attack those that he did not. As the eighteen seventies began, Pulitzer was a member of a group of people who wanted to reform the Republican Party. They felt like there was too much corruption in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and that was something a lot of people agreed with these reformers eventually founded the Liberal Republican Party. It was the Liberal Republican Party that nominated Horace Greeley for president in eighteen seventy two. That campaign was disastrous, though likely led to Greeley's demise, and when the election was over, a really disheartened Pulletzer switched to the Democratic Party and he remained there for the rest of his life. In the eighteen seventies, Pulletzer flipped another German language newspaper, once again in St. Louis. In eighteen seventy four, he purchased stats Zeitung, which had mediocre subscriber numbers, but it was a member of the Associated Press, so Pulletzer sold that paper to the St. Louis Globe, and that meant that the Globe would get membership in the Associated Press, something its owners had wanted but had not been able to secure to that point. This was a legal move, but it was also a legal move through a loophole, and it made some other St. Louis papers pretty angry. But it made Pulitzer between eleven thousand and twenty thousand dollars profit. The exact number is unknown, but he added that to the money he had already made flipping the Vice Lecha Post. His estimated ready capital at that point was somewhere between thirty thousand and forty thousand dollars, and he started investing. He also returned to his law studies and passed the Bar exam. Coming up, we'll talk about significant changes in Pulitzer's personal life and that first big event we mentioned at the top of the show. First, though, we will pause for a sponsor break. In eight, Pulitzer had two pretty big events happened in his life, one professional and one personal. On the professional front, he made a much bigger move in the newspaper industry when he bought a controlling interest in the St. Louis Dispatch and then also acquired the St. Louis Post, and it was at that point that the two papers were merged into one entity, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, which continues to exist today. And on a personal front, he married Catherine Davis, who went by Kate. When the two of them married, Pulitzer was thirty one and Kate was twenty six. This was a match that would have been way out of Pulitzer's league socially, only a few years earlier. Kate was from a prominent family from Washington, d c. And one Pulitzer biography, her family was described as Southern landed gentry, although they didn't have the kind of wealth they once did. I'm taking this to a lot of places that just involved plantations in the aftermath of the Civil War. That is a fully fair place to take it. Uh. There was also a bit of exception in this match because Joseph wasn't entirely honest with Kate in her family about being Jewish. While her family had noted that Pulitzer looked Jewish, he had told them that his father was Jewish, but his mother was Catholic, and as Jewishness is considered to pass down maternally, this explained away any characteristics that would have been perceived as Jewish, while still smoothing things out with Kate's Episcopalian parents. He was honest with her about who he was as a person, though he told her plainly in letters that he was selfish and cold, and as they were planning their wedding and their honeymoon, he switched up the plan repeatedly, often because of his business interests, but Kate really rolled with this inconsistent behavior, and at one point you wrote to her, your pluck is really splendid, which that's a great description. Yes, I made a note that in the outline that I want that on a shirt. Yeah. He also took off for New York just a few days before their wedding to see about a possible investment. He told her to always expect him to prioritize these kinds of opportunities. He made it back to St. Louis two days later than planned, and then the wedding finally happened. This is one of those big society events because between his business connections and her family connections, all the most powerful people in St. Louis were there. The newlyweds went to Europe for a two month honeymoon, but Joseph was just continually distracted by ideas about work or politics. I feel like he's not a person I would want to be married to. And it doesn't sound like they had the best marriage ever. Um, But they did have seven children, Lucille, Ralph, Joseph Jr. Constance, Edith, Catherine, and Herbert. The Pulitzers were not exactly what you would call hands on parents, as you may have expected from what Joseph said, he was gone a lot. They both sort of lived their lives, and they let a governess take care of the kids most of the time. Joseph didn't even meet some of his children until weeks after they were born. Catherine died when she was still a toddler, and their daughter Lucy died at the age of seventeen after contracting typhoid, which was really awful experience for everyone. For the next four years after getting married, Pulitzer ran the Post Dispatch and dominated the news market in St. Louis. He worked just NonStop, constantly at his desk, managing the paper right down to the minutia, often working long hours to the exclusion of any other pursuit, so he just he had no concept of work life balance. One of the ways he grew readership was by positioning the Post Dispatch as the paper of the people and focusing on investigative journalism. Pulitzer's writers chased down every story of corruption that they got even the faintest lead on, and that really became the paper's identity. This also drove up readership numbers significantly, and what had been a lagging paper on shaky financial ground really grew into a successful business. But then in two some events unfolded that made St. Louis less hospitable to Pulitzer. And we're actually going to veer away from Joseph Pulitzer story here to tell this one, because while there are plenty of very short mentions of it in accounts of Pulitzer's life, it's something that was a very big deal at the time, certainly a huge deal in St. Louis, and it changed the trajectory of his business dealings, even though he wasn't directly involved. That was really not prepared for the direction this is about to go me either. When I found it. I read one line about it in a biography, went wait to wait, what what happened? And then I kept digging and it became huge. Yeah. So this was a matter with serious consequences, as we've been alluding to, But it started with just a bunch of dudes bickering. They started with a disagreement among lawyer John M. Glover, Colonel James Broadhead, Colonel Alonso slay Back, and John A. Cockerell. Broadhead was running for Congress in eighteen eighty two and The Post Dispatch published a lot of criticism of him, just really a lot. His associates got drawn into the criticism and tried to defend him, and that included his friend and law partner, Cardinal Alonso slay Back. Slay Back had fought for the conspederacy during the Civil War and had then become a school teacher and a lawyer after the war ended. On October twelfth, eight two, slay Back attended a meeting of Democratic voters of the Eighteenth Word of St. Louis, and at that meeting he made a public statement that Pulitzer's paper needed to stop targeting Broadhead. In the October thirteenth edition of the Post Dispatch, a letter from a man named John Glover was printed, and that was very insulting to Alonso Slayback. This was not, it seems, at all, about his behavior at the meeting, but about an exchange that the two men Glover and slay Back, had during a court trial that they had both been involved in. The letter is framed in a way that makes it seem that Glover wanted to respond to the paper's account of what had happened during that exchange in the courtroom, and among other things, Glover had apparently been insulted by Slayback, called an impertinent young puppy, and he wanted to put his own version of the events that had taken place in print for everyone to see. But the paper did not only print Glover's note, it also printed this intro quote, Mr Alonso W. Slayback, an individual whose chief claim to distinction rests upon the fact that he is the law partner of Colonel James O. Broadhead, rose in a meeting of Democratic word politicians in this city last night, and without personal provocation, proceeded to apply a string of vile and virulent epithets to the Post Dispatch and its conductors, making charges which he knew to be false. And then it sets up the situation that, oh, do you remember this is the same Alonso Sleeback that got in a rather public argument with another lawyer, Glover. And then it prints the Glover letter to elaborate. So Glover wrote quote. Now in simple justice to the colonel, it must be stated that he did not use the language quoted until I had told the court several times that I had no respect for him, and, as he correctly says, had induced him to discontinue a certain line of remarks by telling him I would slap his face at any time and place he might appoint except that courtroom, that he declined this invitation and pocketed those insults as he names these expressions of abstract truth. He will be able to prove, as he says, by everyone in the courtroom, and candor compels me to make the same admission. But when he says that the presence of the court and the ladies restrained his valor, perfect frankness requires me to say that, on the contrary, they account for it. In fact, so far from being a brave man, the colonel, notwithstanding his military title, is a coward. He dare not be brave except in a courtroom or at church. And he will beg or cringe out of any difficulty into which his vaporing humor may have gotten him. That's a cutting letter. It's a lot. So Glover's note continues, and it continues to insult Slayback, including a reference to him quote once marshaling a female sewing society. So sexism aside, that was very insulting. H And here's the thing. That piece that Glover wrote that they printed was for more than a year earlier. It was dated November eleven, so the paper had dredged it up and reprinted it, undoubtedly knowing that it was going to anger slay Back, and it did. This decision on the part of the paper was not out of nowhere. There was ongoing conflict that led to it. Slay Back in the paper's managing editor, John A. Cockerell, had gotten into a lot of arguments over the preceding months. They ran into each other at events and social gatherings, and there was also an incident at the Elks Club in which slay Back had very vocally insulted Cockerell as a person and as an editor. Cockerell had demanded an apology that night and had gotten one, But when slay Back was making a speech in support of Broadhead's campaign a few days later, he accused Cockerell of blackmail. So much bickering so that same evening that the paper printed Glover's letter, so remember that was October, slay Back went to the offices of the Post Dispatch. He had gone there with a friend, William H. Clopton, and according to Clopton, Slayback's intention was to slap the editor's face and then demand an apology and a retraction. But that is not what happened. Instead, Cockerell pulled out a revolver and shot slay Back in the heart at close range. When I got to this part of reading this the first time through, I went, WHOA that escalated quickly. Was not what I thought was going to happen. So what exactly happened in this incident was relayed in two completely different ways by the eyewitnesses to the events. William H. Clopton said that as he followed his friends slay Back into the editor's office, he saw him taking off his coat, telling Cockerell to put his pistol down. But three employees of the Post Dispatch who were there stated that they saw Slayback pull a gun first, and that Cockerell fired in self defense. There was a pistol produced, but it was not proven to have been in Slayback's hand. Yeah, there was no doubt that Cockerell had a pistol, But this other pistol Cloppton had said didn't exist, And yet Cockerel's eyewitnesses were like, yes, we have it right here. Cockerell had initially left the scene, but friends convinced him to turn himself into the police, and he spent three days in jail, during which he was described as being very remorseful about how things had gone in the newspaper office. He was released on bail and a grand jury examined the evidence available to determine if this case should go to trial, and Cockerell came out looking pretty good in that analysis. He had several witnesses to support the account that Slayback had threatened his life with a firearm, and slay Back had come to his office. Cockerell had not sought slay Back out. He Eventually, three different grand juries ended up looking at this matter, and none of them determined that it should go to trial. Cockerell was a freeman, although he was kind of reviled by most of St. Louis, and by extension, Joseph Pulitzer was also finding St. Louis to be a bit too hot for his personal liking. He was also having a number of health issues. His vision, which had always been a little poor, was really starting to fail, and his general health was not well. No doubt this was connected to his refusal to ease up on his work schedule at all, and even if there had been no public outcry against the paper and it's part in the death of Alonso Slayback, was still a really stressful situation. So Pulitzer's doctor directed him to go on vacation. He and Kate planned to head to Europe in early eight eight three, but they first had to travel to New York to board the steamer that would take them across the Atlantic, and as it turned out, Joseph Pulitzer did not board that steamer. He took a meeting instead, and that meeting was with Jay Gould, who was today often characterized as a robber baron. Gould had made a fortune in the railroad industry and had turned that fortune into a lucrative financing business. Pulitzer and Gould discussed a New York newspaper that was like other papers that Pulitzer had purchased in a precarious state when it came to money. That was The New York World, a paper that Gould owned and was pretty eager to get rid of because it was not making him money, and so Pulitz are offered to buy it. So those doctor's orders to take a break really went out the window. When Pulitzer bought The World, Pulitzer threw himself into his work once again, determined to turn this lagging paper into a success in the same way he had done in St. Louis. He moved John Cockerell to New York to serve as managing editor of the World. And this was something that a lot of people saw as rewarding a man who had shot somebody with an even more lucrative position. It just seemed like a reasonable interpretation. Yeah, it's interesting how that particular detail gets relayed. Some people put it that way. They're like, oh, he got rewarded, and others are like, well, Pulitzer had to get him out of St. Louis because he wasn't safe there anymore, because people were really really angry about the whole thing. I suppose it's a matter of point of view. But coming up, we're going to dig into the relationship that Pulitzer is probably most famous for, not with his family or friends, but with rival William Randolph Hurst. But first we will hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class. Going the last two decades of the nineteenth century, we're a time when journalism changed really considerably, and a lot of that is due to decisions that Pulitzer made. The World suddenly became very politically slanted in favor of the Democratic Party, and it also started to publish a lot of features about Republican politicians caught in scandals. And this is also when sensationalism became just a huge part of selling papers. In seven, Pulitzer started to publish The New York Evening World to supplement the news cycle. That same year, though Pulitzer also stepped away from his hands on involvement in the papers. Up to that point, he was involved in the day to day running and decisions of the World and the Evening World. Even small decisions really came down to him. If you listen to our two parter on Charles Chapin, it's right after The New York World building was completed on Newspaper Row that Chapin made his way to New York and ended up working for Pulitzer's news organization. We mentioned in that story that Chapin ended up being very powerful at Pulitzer's Papers, and it was because Joseph Pulitzer felt that he needed somebody else to handle business because of the issues that he was having with his vision and his general health. Yeah, later down the road in the timeline, there was a big reorg and Chapin was one of the people that ended up with a lot of power. Uh. And in addition to health issues, Pulitzer in a way became the victim of his own success or more accurately, of his competitor's attacks. Because of his success, he had grown the world to a staggering circulation of six hundred thousand, and other publishers were just tired of losing readers to Pulitzer. The New York Sun's publisher, Charles Anderson Dana, had his own reporters dig up as much information on Pulleitzer as they could, and then they combed through it for information that could be used in personal attacks against him. The main message that Dana ran was that Pulitzer had hidden his Jewishness, something that really did not go over well with the large Jewish readership of the world. Pulitzer, like a lot of Jewish businessmen at the time, had really downplayed his Jewish heritage. He and Kate belonged to an Episcopalian church where their children had been baptized, but that really didn't matter. In addition to alienating Jewish readers, Dana's efforts also played on growing anti Semitic bias in New York, so it also alienated non Jewish readers who were more aligned with that bigoted stance. And all of this took a further toll on Pulitzer's physical well being, and he handed off even more of the paper's management. But even as he ceded the majority of daily decisions to trusted managing editors in make no mistake, Pulitzer was still involved at a high level making sure that the policies that those managing editors based all of their decisions on were what had wanted. A lot of journalism innovations that are credited to Pulitzer into the New York World are the results of the competition between Pulitzer and William Randolph Hurst. In eight seven. Hearst's father had let William take over the San Francisco Examiner that was a paper that had really turned into a money pit, first modeled its makeover on what Pulitzer had done with the New York World. He admired The World's success, but he did not admire Pulitzer, who he referred to with various anti Semitic sentiments in Hearst. With both the family money and the confidence that came with making The Examiner successful, bought the New York Journal and immediately started trying to take market share from Pulitzer. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that purchase on Friday because it involves Pulletzer's brother Do Dot done. Uh. There are some more fun aspects to the chain, just that Pulitz are made at the world that we'd really think of today as the ingredients that make up a well rounded newspaper. Although these were, as we said, tied to his ongoing competition with Hurst. This was a time when the New York papers introduced features like sports pages and illustrations and even fashion coverage. And another major component that Pulitzer helped to introduce was regular comic strips. We've referenced the Yellow Kid comic strip on the show before. This was really where that started. This character that came to be known as the Yellow Kid started out as an ensemble in a strip called Hogan's Alley. Hogan's Alley was intended as a portrait of the lives of the city's poor residence. The Yellow Kid was bald, suggesting that his head had been shaved to either treat or prevent lice, and he wore an oversized yellow night shirt. His shirt was a canvas for the Yellow Kid's dialogue, which was usually a quippy commentary on the topic of the strip. This strip, created by Richard f Outcoll, became really popular, and the Kid, whose name was actually Mickey Dougan, was the breakout character. Hogan's Alley had initially appeared in a weekly magazine called Truth in eighteen four, and then Pulletzer picked it up for the World in eight and Hogan's Alley was a Sunday comic and it ran in color, and it was very popular, so popular that William Randolph Hurst hired Richard f out Called Away from the World to draw the strip for the New York Journal. But the Yellow Kid and Hogan's Alley was not copyrighted Outcohol didn't own it, so pullets Are just hired another artist, George Lux to continue the Hogan's Alley strip in the World. Those two strips ran concurrently and often with very different tones, While both of them retained the tenement setting and the social commentary hearst paper tended to be more extreme and sometimes evener. There was a lot more violence, and all of that was reflected in the trajectory of the writing of the Hogan's Alley comic. But the real legacy of Mickey Dougan the Yellow Kid was that the term yellow journalism was coined because of his oversized yellow shirt. It was actually called yellow Kid journalism before it got shortened, So yellow journalism came to mean the prioritization of circulation and numbers and income over journalistic integrity. You'll also see it described in different ways or defined in different ways of people like making just ridiculous claims or comparisons in their their journalism. And this all happened as Hurst and Pulitzer battled for readers of New York and both of their papers opted for outlandish and i grabbing headlines and writing instead of even keel well researched news reporting. This competitive, sensationalized news approach of the world and journal in New York in the eight nineties is often I did as at worst instigating the Spanish American War and at best influencing it. There was just a lot of melodrama in the press about things that were happening in Cuba. Sometimes what was reported was fully fabricated. Then, when the USS Maine sank in Havannah, harbor Hurst's papers pointed to Spain as having been the likely attacker, running headlines that read quote, destruction of the Worship Maine was the work of an enemy. Naval officials think Maine was destroyed by a Spanish mine. The set off a huge wave of anti Spanish sentiment in the US that escalated tensions between the two countries until talks broke down. There was really no evidence that Spain had attacked when the journal ran that headline. The US Navy inquiry determined that the main had been blown up by a mine, but didn't attribute intense or blamed to anybody in the incident. In the court of public opinion, though, Spain became the villain. Yeah, there have even been historical maritime researchers who even think it's possible that the main had a malfunction that caused that explosion. But as far as it was printed in the press, it was all Spain's doing. Pulitzer had become an absentee publisher, and we're going to talk more about this in the next episode. But he was perpetually sending urgent telegraphs to his editors about how they must handle things, and in the game of sensationalism, the World had really lost a significant amount of readers to Hurst. And this is when the incident that we mentioned in the Charles Chapin episode happened, where the World published an article based on a fake one that was purposely planted by Hurst. Uh And then, of course that incident was embarrassing, and Hurst pounced to capitalize on it and point out, they are literally really copying us. They had no leads. Pulitzer re orged the institution and instructed his editors to become men of action and to do whatever was needed to right the ship and stop the behaviors and articles that were completely tanking the world's name. Pulitzer, always working remotely, made policies for The New York World that changed its tone considerably, so gone where the sensationalized yellow journalism style articles replaced by the investigative journalism exposing corruption that had been the hallmark of all of his papers before his battle with Hurst. So that's where we're going to end part one, and part two we will get into Pulitzer's most high profile legal battle and his more personal struggles. Do you also have listener mail? I do I do? This is from our listener eron and it's kind of a reminder to myself and an example of how things fall through the cracks and a promise that I will get on top of it. Uh are in right side Dracy and Holly. I recently visited San Francisco for the first time and only had a day and a half in the city before returning home. During the short trip, I tried to see as much as possible, so I wrote a cable car, I ate at some iconic restaurants, and I walked twelve miles up, down, and around the island. During my walk, I listened to a few episodes about San Francisco from Stuff You Missed in History class to learn more you know full tourist mode. I have an inquiry about something mentioned in San Francisco nineteen o six, the Great Quake and Fire. Holly said she would be doing an episode on the graph Trials. I haven't found that episode and wondered if these trials were still on your subject list for a future episode. I'd love to learn about what went down after the disaster. If you have covered it and I missed it, I apologize. I'm a new listener to stuff you missed in history class and haven't gotten caught up yet. I've loved everything I've heard and can't wait to learn more. You have a new fan and subscriber in me. Have a great day and happy holidays. Uh. This will come out after the holidays, but thanks Sarah, I'm going to presume my hat a happy holidays. Um, I haven't done that episode. It's one that I kep prowling around and I haven't done it yet. So I'm hoping because I'm kind of working through the holidays, that I will get on top of it and that in the new year when this when you hear this, that it will be well in process. But that happens right like things every episode, I mean, I'm not every episode. Most episodes, though, UM kind of spawn a little side marginal in the notebook of like, oh, this could also be an episode. This could also be an episode. This could also be an episode, And then sometimes I get to them and sometimes I don't. But that was a really good one. So thank you Eron for the reminder because I need to get on that uh. If you would like to write to us and remind me of stuff I said that I forgot about, that's cool. You could see that at the History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you have not subscribed to the podcast, you can do that on the I heart radio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.