Ida M. Tarbell vs. John D. Rockefeller, Part 2

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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 Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our episode on Ida tar Bell versus John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. If you somehow came to this episode without already hearing part one, I do strongly recommend listening to Part one first lays a lot of groundwork for this There are some things in it, specifically that we will refer back to in this one. Uh. Last time, we talked about Ida tar Bell's upbringing in northwest Pennsylvania during the Pennsylvania Oil Rush and how her family and her community clashed with Standard Oil during that time. Then we talked about her education and the years that she lived in France, and today we will get to her work for McClure magazine and the most important journalistic work of her life, which was the history of the Standard Oil Company. When Ida Tarbell returned to the United States from France in eight the country was still reeling from yet another financial crisis, this time the Panic of EIGHTEE, in which the failure of large employers sparked a stock market crash in Pennsylvania. The Tarbell family was struggling, and one of Franklin Tarbell's business partners had taken his own life. After spending some time reuniting with them in Titusville, Ida moved to New York to work for Samuel Sidney McClure at McClure's magazine. Although Tarbell's most well known and most influential work at McClure's was the history of the Standard Oil Company, when she started working for the magazine, it wasn't really focused on that kind of investigative reporting that it would later become famous for. Tarbell's first big project at McClure's was a biography Napoleon Bonaparte. This assignment came about because wealthy collector Gardner Green Hubbard had agreed to allow S. S. McClure to print previously unpublished portraits of Napoleon that he owned, but only if there was accurate, balanced texts to go along with them. This was a tricky proposition because the relationship between the US and France during the Napoleonic era had been complicated, and people tended to have a variety of very strong opinions about the man At first, McClure had assigned the article to a British writer who turned in a draft it was heavily anti Napoleon. When McClure assigned it to Tarbell, she was both excited and anxious. This was an opportunity to build on her previous research on Madame Roland, but at the same time, she had just left Paris, where she would have had access to primary sources that just were not available in the US. Tarbell took the assignment, though travel linked to Washington, d C. To conduct research. There. She boarded with Hubbard since he was wealthy, Her lodgings there were extremely comfortable. She also started making government and business connections in addition to doing her research work. She approached Napoleon much as she had Madame ral Dan, allowing the research to lead her wherever it might, even if that wasn't where she expected or hoped. The final result was an eight part biography that was enormously successful for the magazine that was credited with increasing circulation from twenty four thousand to a hundred thousand subscribers. The collected articles were then published as a book that went into multiple printings. Her next assignment was a biography of Abraham Lincoln. At this point, Lincoln's assassination was about thirty years in the past, and there was a general sense that there kind of wasn't much left to say about him. Turbell also wasn't sure she really wanted this assignment, because she was afraid that if she shifted away from French history, she might never get back to it. In the end, she went to Illinois, interviewing relatives and people who had known Lincoln, including some who had never been interviewed before. She combed through primary sources, printing some of those sources as part of her series. Like her series on Napoleon, the Abraham Lincoln series was generally well received, but she did face some criticism that she had glossed over or minimized Lincoln's various faults and missteps. The series was incredibly popular, though, and it was credited with boosting the magazine's circulation again, this time by another two hundred thousand readers. As with her Napoleon series, in nineteen hundred, this was printed as a book. It was titled The Life of Abraham Lincoln, drawn from original sources and containing many speeches, letters, and telegrams. Hitherto unpublished and illustrated, with many reproductions from original paintings, photographs, at cetera. By this point, the US had entered the period of social activism and reform that has become known as the Progressive Era. This has come up on the show in a number of previous episodes, but basically, Progressive era reformers hoped to counteract the negative impacts of industrialization and urbanization using social programs, laws, activism, and other efforts to just try to make the country a cleaner, safer, healthier, and generally better place. While Progressive era reformers campaign for things like voting rights for women and education for children, not all of their efforts are viewed in a positive light today. The Progressive Era also included things like prohibition, which of course failed spectacularly, and the eugenics movement. One of the Progressive era's traits was a focus on exposing and dealing with exploitation and corruption, and to that end, around nine s s. McClure started focusing McClure's magazine more on social issues, unless on the kinds of profiles and biographies that Tarbell had been writing. While those had been very popular with readers. They just didn't really expose or offer insight into the issues of the day, at least not in a very direct, straightforward way. And to be clear, this was not just about the moral efforts of progressive era reformers. It was also about selling magazines. McClure understood that a well written narrative that exposed the immoral and unethical deeds of the rich and powerful could make for an incredibly compelling story. So McClure's magazine turned to a type of reporting that would become known as muck raking. This term comes from a nineteen o six speech by President Theodore Roosevelt, so to be clear, that term was coined after the publication of Tarbell's work on standard oil, which we haven't really gotten to yet. But Roosevelt would go on to say, quote in Bunyan's pill Rims Progress, you may recall the description of the man with the muck rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hands, who was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. The term muckraker became a disparaging term that was applied broadly to journalists who were focused on exposing corruption and wrongdoing, but Roosevelt's speech was actually a little more nuanced than that. In it, he praised journalists who were educating the public or who were exposing actual misdeeds, while criticizing the ones that were, in his opinion, sewing discord and division or sensationalizing their subject matter. In the same speech, he also said, quote the men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well being of society, but only if they know when to stop up raking the muck. Later on, Roosevelt said that he had really been more focused on publications of people like William Randolph Hurst, which had a reputation for being a lot more sensationalized. The staff at McClure's embarked on some smaller investigations as they considered where they should focus for something bigger. They were looking specifically at trusts. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, people used the word trust in a general way to describe big, interconnected businesses whose practices put other businesses who were not part of the trust at a disadvantage, especially if those business practices seemed unethical or unfair. But from a legal sense, it meant that the businesses were united under the same board of trustees, with those trustees managing and profiting from all the affiliated businesses. McClure's wanted to investigate a trust that would yield a really compelling and readable story, and they can uttered and discarded several ideas. One was a coalition of meat packing businesses in and around Chicago that had become known as the Beef Trust. But a key figure in the Beef Trust was Philip Armor, who had died in January of nineteen o one. McClure thought the story would not be as interesting or impactful if one of the key players was dead. One of Tarbell's colleagues that McClure's also wrote a shorter investigation into JP Morgan and the steel industry that ran in McClure's In November of nineteen o one, the team finally decided on Standard Oil. The Standard Oil Trust had been established on January second two with nine trustees that included John D. Rockefeller and his brother William, along with Henry Flagler. These nine trustees elected all the directors and officers of the roughly forty businesses that were part of the trust, essentially controlling the entire enterprise, and enterprise had a near monopoly on producing, refining, marketing, and transporting oil. This trust had already faced a lot of criticism, including being forced to break up and re establish itself in New Jersey after facing legal action in Ohio. In at this point, Ida Tarbell's family was really struggling. The Pennsylvania oil industry was being eclipsed by oil fields and other states, including Texas and California. The invention of the electric light had reduced the demand for oil. At this point, they didn't know it. This was a temporary drop in demand, but it made it a lot harder to turn a profit. That made it even harder for independent oil businesses to compete with Standard Oil's monopoly. Franklin Tarbell had mortgaged the family home, and a lot of other people in their community were in the same position. Tarbell's co workers knew about all of this, and they saw her family history with the story as an asset, making Tarbell uniquely suited to investigate and write about Standard Oil. She agreed to take on the story, working out the details with McClure in Europe while he vacationed there. Their plan was for about one total pages totally about twenty five thousand words, to be published across multiple issues of the magazine. She ended up with a nineteen part series. When it was published as a book, it took two volumes, each of them more than four hundred pages long. We're going to talk about this a little bit more after we first paused for a little sponsor break. When Ida Tarbell started researching the Standard Oil Company in nineteen o one, it was a story that, as we have laid out, had a personal importance to her and to her family, going back to her early childhood. She also had a working knowledge of various aspects of the oil business thanks to things she had learned from her father. But her father did not want her to do this story. He thought that John D. Rockefeller would destroy her and would destroy McClure's magazine, just like Standard Oil had destroyed the lives and businesses of so many people. The Tarbell's personally knew. Rockefeller himself was now in his sixties and he had largely retired from day to day business operations, but he was still the company's biggest stockholder and was one of the richest and most powerful people in the United States. Turmel's research involved going through decades of court records. We noted back in Part one that critics had questioned whether Standard Oil's business practices were legal almost from the very beginning, as Rockefeller's business partner, Henry M. Flagg Laire worked at a deal with Lake Shoreline in which the railroad reduced its shipping prices in exchange for Flagler promising the ship at least sixty car loads of oil products per day. Since that time, various states had passed antitrust legislation. The Interstate Commerce Commission had been established in eighteen eighty seven to regulate the railroad industry after years of complaints about railroad rates, including railroads charging higher rates for smaller businesses. So various state legislatures had investigated Standard Oil. The company had appeared before congressional committees in eighteen seventy two and eighteen seventy six. There was also that legal action in Ohio that had led Standard Oil to break up and moved to New Jersey and put itself back together again. Standard Oil had also been involved in investigations into the railroads that was associated with and their business practices. And then outside of the courts, there were things like articles of incorporation and internal documents and pamphlets and previous news reporting. There was just a wealth of material to go through on top of all of that. On July two nine, President Benjamin Harrison had signed the Sherman Antitrust Act or quote, an Act to protect Trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies into law. Trusts were deeply unpopular at this point, and the law passed through Congress almost unanimously. The only person who voted against it was Senator Rufus Blodgett, who was a railroad executive. The Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed trusts, monopolies, and other business activities that restricted interstate trade or trade with foreign powers. Parts of this law were vague, though, and the punishments that it outlined really weren't a big deterrent for people who had already become really wealthy through this kind of activities, such as the Rockefellers. If you had millions of dollars of five thousand dollar fine was just not something that would make you change your business practices. In the Supreme Court had also found that American Sugar Refining Company had not violated the Sherman Antitrust Act even though it controlled nearly all of the sugar refining in the United States. So that decision made this law harder to enforce. Even though the federal government wasn't really enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act on paper, it made a lot of standard oils activities that we've already described illegal. And then when Theodore Roosevelt became president in nineteen o one, after the assassination of William McKinley, he did make it a priority. He thought trusts were restricting business and eroding public trust. And that was just about the time that Ida Tarbell started researching standard oil for McClure's Tarbell and her research assistant, John Said all poured over years and years of legal documents, court filings, and other primary source documentation of standard oils activities along the way, and during the writing and editing process, they and S. S. McClure refined a process that would include practices that are standard in the field of investigative journalism today. Things like doing in depth research through primary source documents, and protecting the identities of people who acted as sources, and allowing subjects of reported pieces to correct and accuracies, but otherwise not to change or influence the writing in any way. And even though this story was so deeply personal to Tarbel, something that had made her frustrated and angry and upset at various points in her life, she also tried to put her personal feelings aside and instead to follow the story wherever the facts took her. In her words, quote, I've tried to lead neither to one side nor the other in my Standard Oil articles, but merely to tell the truth corroborated by court documents and pamphlets issued at various times. After extensive research and leg work, Tarbell sought out interviews with people at Standard Oil. Henry H. Rogers had once been an independent oil producer who had lived not far from the Tarbell's, but he'd gone on to work with John D. Rockefeller for twenty five years. He had become Standard Oil's highest ranked executive, and after hearing about Tarbell's investigation, he had contacted his friend Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, to suggest that he would like the chance for the writer to get their facts straight. So Clemmens got in touch with McClure's art director, who he knew, and after some back and forth, he ultimately relayed a message back to Rogers that Tarbell had agreed to speak with him. Rogers was generally really candid with her. He said some things to her that seemed kind of surprising, but he was also furious when he learned that she had gotten her hands on some internal documents that outlined how Standard Oil had colluded with the railroads to intend lely drive competitors out of business. In the end, Ida M. Tarbell wrote a series that outlined the general history of the Pennsylvania oil industry, the creation of Southern Improvement Company, other efforts to fix railroad rates in Standard Oil's favor and control the oil output from Pennsylvania, the establishment of the Trust, and various decisions along the way that undermined the principles of free trade to give the Trust an unfair business advantage. There were details that people knew already but had not necessarily connected the dots on, as well as places where she filled in the gaps or found documentation that had not been unearthed before. She laid out a pattern of intimidation, predatory, competition, bribery, corporate espionage, secret dealings, payoffs, and collusion, and it connected to oil production, refining, railroads, pipelines, and marketing. Tarbell and said, all We're still doing research as this series was being published, and they kept on earthing new information, including that Rockefeller's father was still alive, which came to light in nineteen o three when Tarbell printed her biographical profile of Rockefeller after her main reporting was complete. She disclosed his father's masquerading as a deaf mute peddler and allegations that he was a horse thief. After Tarbell finished that nineteen part series, as Tracy just mentioned, she wrote a two part biographical profile of Rockefeller and that ran in July and August of nineteen o five. And while she covered his devout religious beliefs, his church attendance, and his philanthropy, and noted that he had a brilliant business sense and ability to strategize, her critical tone was not as restrained as it had been for the rest of the report. In the second part, she calls him a quote money maniacs secretly patiently eternally plotting how he may add to his wealth. There is also a lengthy and unflattering description of his appearance, including the loss of all his hair from alopecia, describing him as looking like a living mummy. As another example, in this biographical profile, Tarbell ruminates on weather charities are right to accept Rockefeller's money, considering how he got it and whether they're doing so is hypocritical, before rhetorically asking does all this pay? And she continues quote, there is no sharking the answer. It does not pay. Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner. For the kind of influence he exercises from him, we have received no impulse to public duty, only lessons in evading it for private greed. No stimulus to noble ideals, only a lesson in the further deification of gold. No example of enlarged and noble living, only one of concealment and of a Jian. No impulse to free thinking, only a lesson in obscuring vital ethical issues by dressing them in the garbs of piety and generosity. In a article on the muckrakers that was published in Media History, monographs. Tim B. Klein calls this profile un characteristically mean. Rockefeller offered almost no public commentary on any of this or on Tarbell, although he was known to call her miss tar Beryl went among his friends. Ida Tarbell's History of Standard Oil was an incredibly popular and widely read piece of writing. One of S. S. McClure's practices at his magazine had also been to make his writers known as writers. He published their bylines, which wasn't something that came into practice until the late nineteenth century, and he also marketed them individually as much as he marketed the magazine as a whole. So, along with her earlier works that we've talked about, the history of the Standard Oil Company made Ida tar Bell famous as well. But at the same time there were people who were critical of her approach to the story, sticking only to what she could substantiate with facts. Apart from that two part profile of Rockefeller himself, she mostly used straightforward and moderate language. She didn't pull punches, though early on she described the approach of discriminatory freight pricing in Pennsylvania this way quote an evil in their business which they were only beginning to grasp fully. In eighteen seventy one was the unholy system of freight discrimination which the railroads were practicing. So she could be pretty direct about things that she could back up, but she also offered praise where she thought it was due. She called the Standard Oil trust quote the most perfectly developed trust in existence. Or here is how she described John D. Rockefeller in the wake of the oil war of eighteen seventy two. Quote. If Mr Rockefeller had been an ordinary man, the outburst of popular contempt and suspicion which suddenly poured on his head would have thwarted and crushed him. But he was no ordinary man. He had the powerful imagination to see what might be done with the oil business if it could be centered in his hands, the intelligence to analyze the problem into its elements and to find the key to control. He had the essential element of all great achievement, a steadfastness to a purpose once conceived, which nothing can crush. Henry D. Lloyd, who had written a piece about Standard Oil that was way more scathing about a decade before, claimed that Tarbell had been duped, and Samuel Clemens joked that Rockefeller must have bought her off. The story of Tarbell's work on this became its own sensation. On November, just a couple of months after the last part of the series was published, The Lion and the Mouse opened on Broadway. This fictionalized, romanticized story about a young woman going up against a huge company had a love story and a happy ending, but it was clearly rooted in Tarbell's investigation of Standard Oil. That play ran for six d eighty six consecutive appearances on Broadway, making it the longest continuously running show on Broadway at the time, followed by a touring production, a novelization, and in a feature film. On November nine, six, prompted in part by material that Ida Tarbell had unearthed in her reporting and the fewer that had followed, the federal government charged the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and its affiliates with violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Although Standard Oil argued that all of its associated businesses were not a monopoly because they competed with each other, it was found to be in violation of the Act. And we will talk more about the later career of Ida Tarbell at Can we pause for a sponsor break? In addition to the federal charges being filed against Standard Oil. In nineteen oh six, Id Tarbell left McClure's. Tarbell and several others at the magazine had become frustrated with S. S. McClure's shifting priorities and politics, among other things. He wanted to move away from muckraking and into literature, so the people who left McClures moved on to the American magazine. Tarbell kept investigating issues that were related to business in the US, starting with tariffs. She published The Tariff in Our Times in nineteen eleven, which chronicled fifty years of a practice that she described as a quote defeat of the popular will. As Tarbell was researching tariffs, Standard Oil was facing legal action. On November twentie, nineteen o nine, a federal Circuit court unanimously ruled that Standard Oil had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered that the company be dissolved. Standard Oil appealed, and in nineteen eleven, the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the verdict. The Supreme Court's ruling established the idea of the quote rule of reason, meaning that the federal government could only break up trusts that created an unfair restriction of trade, not all trusts across the board. Justice John Marshall Harlan concurred with the ruling in general, but dissented with the establishment of this standard, arguing that it created a restriction that had not been part of the law as it was passed. As a consequence of the Supreme Court decisions upholding that earlier ruling, Standard Oil was broken up into thirty four separate companies. Some of these still exist today, although with various names. A lot of them that were separate merged in the intervening years various changes in branding. Ones that still exist today include chevron X on Mobile and BP. And if you're thinking, wait, doesn't BP stand for British Petroleum, Yes, it does. BP acquired a majority stake in Standard Oil successor Standard Oil of Ohio in the nineties seventies. None of Standard Oil's executives really faced any sort of justice for the business practices that had led to Standard Oil being forcibly broken up by the federal government, and that breakup made John D. Rockefeller and various other stockholders and trustees incredibly rich, much richer than they had been before the breakup. The ruling allowed Standard Oil stockholders to receive shares from each of the newly created businesses, so even though these were ostensibly separate companies, the stock was still held by the same people as before. The breakup of Standard Oil also happened just before Henry Ford started using an assembly line for car manufacturer, and that made cars far more available, which then, of course, drove up the demand for oil enormously. Together, this probably made Rockefeller the first billionaire in the United States. As a side note, when he was a child living in poverty, he had told a friend that one day he would be worth a hundred thousand dollars. He barely made it. In nineteen fourteen, the Federal Trade Commission was established and other laws were passed in the US to try to protect free trade. In nineteen sixteen, President Woodrow Wilson offered Tarbell a position on the Federal Tariff Commission. He had said of her quote, she has written more good sense, good plain common sense about the tariff than any man I know of. But by that point she had moved on from tariffs since she wasn't really interested, so she turned the offer down. Some of Tarbell's later work shows that she wasn't particularly anti capitalist or against big business. She was just against business passes that seemed unfair and exploitive. She wrote favorably about the idea of scientific management, also known as tailorism, which was meant to analyze people's workflows and make them as efficient as possible. Labor activists had really criticized this practice, describing it as reducing workers to automatons who were expected to crank out cheaper goods at a lower quality and to do it faster, rather than being treated as human beings with the capability for their own analysis and thought. Tarbell also wrote profiles of United States Steel Corporation CEO Albert H. Gary and O. N. D. Young of GE that were far more positive than her work on Rockefeller. She said the difference in their tone and scope was because she hadn't found their businesses to be home to the kind of corruption that she had seen at Standard Oil. In spite of her commitment to never marry or become a mother and breaking a path that was not open to most women when she lived, Tarbell didn't really support the women's suffrage movement or the women's rights movement. Some of this was evident in the Peace about Women Inventors that we read from in part one. She felt that in a lot of ways, suffrages talked about women in a way that made them into victims and undermined their abilities. She also thought that the movement and many other movements were ultimately coercive, whether they involved protests or changes to the law. As she said in a letter to J. S. Phillips quote, part of what seems to me the most dangerous fallacy of our times, and that is that we could be saved morally, economically, socially by laws and systems. Tarbell also thought women were best suited to being wives and mothers. Later on in her life, she said she had regretted not having children. Her later works involving these themes include The Business of Being a Woman in nineteen twelve and The Ways of Women in nineteen fifteen. Tarbell stopped writing for America Magazine in nineteen fifteen, although she continued to do freelance work. This included going to France to report on the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War One in nineteen nineteen. In nineteen twenty two, The New York Times included her on its list of the twelve Greatest Living American Women. In nineteen twenty six, Tarbell traveled to Italy to interview fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had risen to power four years before. That was an assignment she took because it was lucrative enough she didn't think she could afford to turn it down. Tarbell criticized Mussolini's totalitarianism while also praising reforms he had brought to Italy. Many of Mussolini's most infamous deeds and his alliance with Adolf Hitler had not happened yet when Tarbell did this work, but even with that in mind, this drew criticism from people who thought she was way too soft on him. Tarbell's last works included The Nationalizing of Business eighteen seventy eight to ninety eight, which came out in nineteen thirty six, and her autobiography All in the Day's Work, which came out in nineteen thirty nine. In that autobiography, she said of Standard Oil quote, they had never played fair and that ruined their greatness for me. John D. Rockefeller died of a heart attack on May nine, thirty seven. His estimated net worth at that time was nine hundred million dollars at various points during his life. His actions in the oil industry and written work by people like Ida Tarbell had made him deeply reviled, but by the time of his death his image had been at least partly rehabilitated, thanks in large part to the public relations work of Ivy lad Betterly, which may be a subject for another podcast. Ida's Harbell died a little less than seven years later, on January six, nineteen forty four, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She had developed Parkinson's in the later years of her life, and her cause of death was pneumonia. Obituaries of John D. Rockefeller had frequently mentioned Ida M. Tarbell, and then he was frequently mentioned in hers. Her history of the Standard Oil Company continues to be held up as a foundational work in the early years of investigative journalism. Rockefeller biographer Alan Nevins called it quote the best piece of business history that America had yet produced. I just have a lot of feelings. Do you have a lot of listener mail? I do have a lot of listener mail. Uh. This listener mail is from Andy and Andy Rope to say Hello, Tracey and Holly, I'm a longtime listener of your show, and I'm incredibly thankful for the hours of unique insights, entertainment, and companionship you've given me over the years. I live in Washington, d C. With my husband and our two dogs, and your podcast has helped me emotionally navigate the various ups and downs in the last few years. We even saw your live show about and Royal in I'm writing today, however, about the sunken city of thoughnest herak Leon, which you covered in the most recent episode of Unearthed. In fall, my family went to an exhibit about the city at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I had intended to write you both last year, but life got in the way. The exhibition was gorgeous, informative, and almost pilgrimage like. The curators paid particular attention to ancient Egyptian religious practices, including a candlelit shrine to Osyrus. The exhibit focused on how even by the fourth century BC, Greeks, Romans, and other ancient peoples were already interpreting and reinterpreting Egyptian religious beliefs to meet their spiritual, social, and political needs. That reminded me that past podcast subjects like Madam Helena Blovatsky and Alistair Crowley were part of a long tradition of people who found spiritual solace and ancient Egyptian religion, albeit largely void of its original context and meaning. One October, it might be fun to do an episode on Egyptian religion in its fornic text and then explore how other people have adapted it. Roman worship of Isis, medieval hermetics, early modern resicructionism, nineteenth century Egyptian revival, synagogue architecture, etcetera. I also wanted to share our favorite part of the Thoughtest heracleon exhibits. During the pandemic. My husband and I had grown pretty elaborate lockdown beards, so we were tickled when we encountered so many heavily bearded gods at the exhibit. While it is well known that the Greeks considered the Egyptians animal headed deities to be absurd, the curators made it clear that the Egyptians viewed the unkempt, scruffy Greek gods to be just as silly. Anyway, we decided to lean into the beards for a Halloween costumes last year, and I think they looked pretty fantastic. Below our our takes on the syncretic deities Sarapist, my husband and Zeus am on me. Andy ends by thanking us for all our hard work. Thank you Andy for these pictures. They are fabulous. I love it. Those are indeed some amazing beards and some amazing interpretations of these deities. So thank you so much for sending this email. This email in these pictures, I did not know anything about that exhibit. I spent a little time poking around the website to get a sense of what it was all about. It seems amazing. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts were at history Podcasts at i heart radio dot com, and we're also all over social media at miss in History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or wherever you want to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H