Acting Out

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey Revisions History listeners, Malcolm here. Before we get started, I wanted to update you on a few things. First thing, this August twenty fourth, the Revisionist History season begins in earnest, eight old school episodes in a row, the little narrative jewel boxes you've come to love. We've been feeding you a little bits and pieces so far this season, but this is the main event. The heart of it is a six part series on guns and violence that I think is my favorite thing we've ever done. Weird, moving, funny, heartbreaking. So mark your calendar's August twenty fourth is when it all happens. And by the way, if you want to get that whole mini series early and binge it all at once without ads, you can just by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. In fact, just six ninety nine a month or thirty nine ninety nine a year gets you every one of the Pushkin shows early and adfree. Just go to the Revisionist History show page in Apple Podcasts or Pushkin dot fm, slash plus to sign up. And one naice thing, speaking of things you should binge, the latest season of our true crime masterpiece Lost Hills has dropped. The new season explores a legacy of Malibu's dark prints. Mickey Dora. Mickey was a surfer known for his style, grace, and aggression who ruled the Malibu Beaches from the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies. Celebrated for his rebellious spirit, he was also a con man who led the FBI on a seven year man hunt around the world. Believe me, this is a show worth a listen, So sign up for Pushkin Plus and you can binge this one too. A couple weeks ago, one of my producers, Ben at Afh Haffrey, came by the office because he had a story to tell me. Ben, Welcome to Hudson, New York.

00:02:12
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me in Hudson, New York.

00:02:15
Speaker 1: Ben just took over writing and hosting a Pushkin show I love called The Last Archive, a show about the history of truth. Jill Lapour used to host it. Ben's worked on it since the beginning. He's always digging around in the stacks of some old library, and one day last summer he was in the medical history archives at Harvard where he found a story that blew his mind.

00:02:36
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to play you some tape.

00:02:38
Speaker 3: Okay, go ahead, Ella, welcome back to Dallas. I'm marvelous.

00:02:42
Speaker 4: Oh, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be back here again.

00:02:46
Speaker 2: Do you recognize that voice?

00:02:48
Speaker 1: I no, tell me.

00:02:50
Speaker 2: That is the voice of Eliphantzterle and she's being interviewed in the eighties and Dallas, and she's about to tell this big story about how she got famous. It's a story she tells all the time, like an amateur knight at the Apollo Theater when she sings and everyone realizes she's got an amazing voice. But I want to play you this tape because I want to show you what happened when she tells it in this particular instance.

00:03:11
Speaker 3: Okay, Ella, as you look back on your life, here was a child from an orphanage and now, no, no, somebody wrote that up. Where did that get come?

00:03:23
Speaker 4: I had well, that was a publicity thing long time ago. But I have family, and I had family then. But my mother had died, and I guess that's why they used that. Mind that I was an awphoran, but I had family.

00:03:38
Speaker 3: At what age were you when your mother died?

00:03:41
Speaker 4: I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went to the amateur contest.

00:03:50
Speaker 2: I was about fifteen, because from there we went to the amateur contest. It's not a lie, but she's skipping two years of her life, about two years, and she always skips these two years of her life when she tells this story. And what I want to do today is tell you a story about what happens in those two years, because it's a story not just about Elip Fitzgerald, but kind of crazily a story about the invention of this whole realm of social science that she is kind of bound up in that I think you'll be interested in, not just because it's a very you kind of thing, but also because it's a story that takes place half a mile from where we're sitting right now.

00:04:28
Speaker 1: Wow, welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Today in the show, Ben tells me about the forgotten origins of social network theory and the missing chapter in Ella Fitzgerald's life. It's absolutely Banana's story. Just so you know, I'd read a little bit of Ben's research before we had this conversation, so I'm a little ahead of you, but still just wait, do you see how Ella Fitzgerald fits into this whole thing. Before we get to her, we have to meet the experimenter, a doctor from halfway around the world. Wait, so back up for a second. So we begin with this man Jacob.

00:05:16
Speaker 2: What's his middle name, Jacob Levy Marino.

00:05:19
Speaker 1: Jacob Levy Marino. Who is He's Austrian.

00:05:22
Speaker 2: He always claimed that he was born on a boat in the Black Sea.

00:05:26
Speaker 5: I was born on the boat the Black Sea, and I'll be traveling from one part of the world to the others and to find myself.

00:05:37
Speaker 2: Actually, he was just born in eighteen eighty nine in Bucharest to a fifteen and a half year old mother who had married a traveling salesman father and lived in Bucharest I think for the first five or six years of his life before moving to Austria.

00:05:52
Speaker 1: He's basically lower middle class Jewish immigrant living in Vienna, and yet he ends up getting a pretty serious education.

00:06:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he goes to school at the University of Vienna. He's studying to be a physician. He becomes really interested in psychiatry. He was noted on campus for walking around in a long green cloak and letting his beard grow in a way that no one else is letting in their beard grow and he never wear a hat. So he's just sort of striking larger than life figure on campus, which is kind of like it's always been the thing with him since he was a kid, like this. This story. His mother always told this story that one day she was holding him on the street and a woman was walking by and pointed at him and said, one day that boy will become a very great man. People will come from all over the world to see him. And so he had this kind of like self described megalomania and literally would play god as a child, which is a thing he continued to do for his whole life.

00:06:47
Speaker 1: So he's part of the intellectual scene in Vienna. Yeah, and then makes his way to the United States.

00:06:54
Speaker 2: Yes, so he makes his way to the United States after World War One, and you know, psychodrama at this point is sort of his big idea.

00:07:03
Speaker 1: Well, wait to find psychodrama is doing.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: So it's like, you have a problem you want to work through the common way of working through that problem is to go to a psychoanalyst office and lie down on the couch and just talk about your problem. He thought, you have a problem, you bring it to the stage and you act out whatever problem you're having, and you have this kind of dynamic way of engaging with the issues you were facing, and then that would help you either have a catharsist and break through it or just like reimagine your own role within the problems you were having such that you no longer have them. So what he's really interested in is creative spontaneity. He thinks of children as a model. He did a lot of tutoring when he was in medical school, and he basically felt like the creative spontaneity kids have is a thing he wanted to give to everybody, like you can when you're like watch a group of kids playing, which he did a lot when he was a tutor, they just kind of like pick up roles immediately. And he'd see these groups of kids, you know, like, how does everyone decide all of a sudden they're playing cops and robbers or just sort of lock into some sort of performance and communicate it in an almost unspoken, instantaneous way. That sort of self creative freedom was a thing that he thought everybody should have. So his therapeutic theater stuff is really an attempt to figure out how does that work. Where does that spark come from? What are the dynamics between these people? What's a systematic way to think about those dynamics that promotes this kind of spontaneous interaction between them. That preoccupation of his is where social network analysis comes from, is basically like how can I study a group and figure out how the ideas are moving within the group and make it sort of rigorous in a way. He's really preoccupied with this question what goes on with a group of people because he's stuck between psychoanalysis, which is all about the individual and the self, and a lot of the social sciences in the nineteen twenties, which are these kind of big static numbers like averages or like the sort of information you get from a poll.

00:09:09
Speaker 1: So his principal objection to psychoanalysis is the fact that it's too focused on the individual on it self. Yeah, it seemsus maybe it seems it seems like it would seemed decadent to him to lie on a couch and talk about yourself endlessly.

00:09:23
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, he used to talk about this all the time.

00:09:26
Speaker 6: That's did people who go on the couch for six eight years, spending twenty thousand dollars and so for us, and then they come to us, and what do we do?

00:09:34
Speaker 5: We let him act out the problem as it is on the Reality lib.

00:09:39
Speaker 2: That tape is from where Cooper Union.

00:09:41
Speaker 1: He's giving a talk.

00:09:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like nineteen sixty something, so it's later in life, so he never really got over it.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk a little about the how does he what is this big experiment at how does he come to conduct it?

00:09:54
Speaker 2: So basically, he's he's in New York. He's got this improv theater that like the critics all hate at Carnegie Hall. And one day a Columbia graduate student in sociology named Helen Hall Jennings come to the improv theater and somehow they identify that they're both really interested in this question of rigorously figuring out the way groups work. And Moreno, as you can tell, is sort of like all over the place and wasn't a super focused or rigorous person, but had just a crazy number of ideas that were really pretty insightful. And what Helen Hall Jennings had was an extremely rigorous math background and also connections. And when they sort of figured out that they had this thing income and this interest they began working with each other, and so they begin to work up a science for mapping the way groups work. So they begin to go to classrooms. It was like a Brooklyn public school. They go to where they ask all the kids, like who do you most want to sit next to? And then they start creating diagrams of like how successfully integrated the classroom. It's like, are people sitting next to the kids they want to sit next to? They go to sing Sing prison, but the thing is like they're kind of fiddling around the edges, like these are small experiments and what they need is a really big experiment. And they kind of luck into meeting this woman named Fanny French Morse, who's the superintendent of the New York State Training School for Girls, which is women's reformatory located half a mile from here. Like, go out the door, turn right, walk down the street, and we'd be there.

00:11:34
Speaker 1: I mean, I go running up to that place all the time. It's a prison, now.

00:11:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's a place that really creeps me out. But the history of reformatories and the juvenile justice system, that's one of the big accomplishments of the progressive era is this idea we should not be treating kids who commit crimes the way we treat adults who commit crimes, because on some level people thought kids can change more than adults can. So rather than like locking them in a prison in a city with a bunch of adult criminals, they should have a different court system. They could be charged for different things. Like a lot of young girls were sent to reform schools just for being incorrigible or ungovernable, but they were sent to these places that were always in bucolic settings that were meant to take them out of contaminated cities and put them in places where they could become better versions of themselves. And so if Fanny frenchmore s runds the Hudson One, and it's always on the cusp of being a prison or a school, and so it's constantly a need of being reformed because it gets too strict or it gets too punitive, and they need to make it more re educative instead. And she's this lifelong progressive reformer who takes over the training school when it's become basically a prison, and she's kind of like a legend in this field. The first night she takes over, she makes a huge pile on the lawn of all of the straight jackets and the restraining sheets and the prison uniforms, and she lights it on fire. So she's this firebrand reformer who's really trying to do something at this school. She introduces art, she buys a farm, she gets all these antiques that the girls start reworking, trying to give them an aesthetic education. But notably, the thing that the training school really does is it's a miniature version of society. So if any French, Morris invites jail Moreno and Helen Hall Jennings to the school, which is thrilling to them because it's a totally closed environment. That's this microcosm of society with five hundred girls who are arranged in brick cottages with nice lattice work trim. So jail Moreno moves to Hudson with Helen Hall Jennings.

00:13:39
Speaker 1: And he goes for it because he's living. Is he at this point well known, what's his level.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: Of He's becoming better known. But he is a person who wants to be operating on the biggest scale possible, and this scale of experiment is an opportunity for him to do that. So I think he sees it as a big break.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: So the European genius Meglomaniac and his brilliant data minded research partner get on the train from Manhattan, come up two hours to Hudson to conduct one of the first and most dramatic experiments of his kind ever.

00:14:18
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:14:20
Speaker 1: An attempt to understand the social dynamics of a girl's prison reform school. There are five hundred girls in this school.

00:14:30
Speaker 2: Roughly five hundred girls.

00:14:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, So he descends on the school, he and Helen hel Jennings and what do they do.

00:14:38
Speaker 2: So the first thing they do is they hand out questionnaires to all the girls. That's say, you know, choose the top five girls in this community that you want to live with and now and tell us why, and then choose the five girls that you absolutely do not want to live with. And so it's kind of reading his account of this, it's like really dense. I mean, he doesn't really write in English very well at this point in his life, and there's a ton of data, but you get these kind of reprints of the things that the girls say. So we actually had an actress read one of them out, and this is One of the comments in the questionnaire Dee, I want in my cottage because I feel towards her, like she is my little sister I never had any and I like to take care of her.

00:15:23
Speaker 3: Mostly she's just a lonesome little child you.

00:15:26
Speaker 5: Just have to be fond of.

00:15:28
Speaker 2: So they like gather all these questionnaires from the girls about how they feel about each other, and then they begin to calculate from that, you know, where are their mutual attractions, where does everyone hate each other? And like to what degree do these cottage groupings even make sense? And they want to start putting a number to that. But it's not just the questionnaires. They begin to do a lot of observing of the girls, like watching them work in the steam laundry, watching them make rugs, or like shine up antiques, and that becomes data too, And all of this is used in service of figuring out who's isolated in the community, who's rejected by the community, who's beloved by the community. But they're observing everything they're collecting, like Marina at one point says, they collect ten thousand pages of data. And one of the things about this new science is you have that much data and you can't conceive of it all like it's before computers. There's no way to really understand what that all means except for a map, and that is the critical thing that they do is create these really intricate maps of what the community looks like. So like this this map right here is the entire community of the school.

00:16:40
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it looks like a looks like a giant spider's web. Yeah, And he has nodes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve, thirteen. Is each one of these nodes a group of girls or a single girl?

00:16:58
Speaker 2: Each one of those big circles is a cottage?

00:17:00
Speaker 7: Oh?

00:17:00
Speaker 1: I see, Oh I see no, But I've been putting any further. Do we believe these maps? Say, do we think he is actually act? You're accurately capturing the patterns of relationships and influence within the community.

00:17:14
Speaker 2: I think he misses a lot. And also there's this kind of forced thing about it, like none of these girls are consenting to it, Like who knows about if they're telling him the truth? But I think that there is genuine insight there. And one of the reasons is there's this thing that happens. It starts on the Halloween night of nineteen thirty two, there's a party in one of the cottages and somebody creates a distraction and two of the girls, Ruth and Marie, run away from the cottage. And then something really weird happens, Like, over a total of fourteen days, fourteen girls run away. It's kind of this chain reaction. Nobody really understands why it's happening, but it's like a runaway rate that's thirty times higher than normal. And this happens after Marine has collected a lot of his data.

00:18:04
Speaker 1: He has an outbreak essentially of girls who are who get this idea to flee, to run away. Yeah, and he's trying to trace was he trying to trying to trace the source of the outbreak or to see how the idea of running away had traveled through the community.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's trying to see how the idea of running away travels through the community. Which is this kind of you know, you talk about this a lot, this idea of an idea being contagious. He posits that there's not some central reason why the girls are running away.

00:18:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so is he saying that his hypothesis would be the group who run away are all linked, are intimately linked according to his network analysis.

00:18:48
Speaker 2: Yes, so that's his explanation, and so he and Jennings go to their maps and try and figure out if it's true. What his theory is that there's some way that this impulse to run away is traveling through the network of girls, and he and Jennings trace this in the map and then call it proof that networks exist. And one of the rea he's confident in it is because then based on those same questionnaires about who likes whom, who doesn't like whom, he rearranges the cottages and over the next some period of months, the number of runaways dwindles pretty radically. And so the thought is that's the evidence that this is in some way meaningful, is that the rearrangement seems to work.

00:19:31
Speaker 1: This whole thing is started by two girls. Yeah, what does network theory tell us about those who originate the epidemic? Were they socially influential girls?

00:19:39
Speaker 2: So no, they're actually like pretty isolated girls. So this is like a map of them. That's one of those is Ruth, and one of those is Marie. And basically, like red lines are are lines of attraction, Black lines are lines of rejection, and so they're really close. They dislike the same people, they like the same people. They really like each other. But on the broader map, not a lot of lines of influence run towards them, except for, you know, a couple significant ones that connect them to the people who then begin to run away next.

00:20:10
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, so they Our first observation is the two who begin the epidemic are closely bound to each other but isolated from everyone else. So there's a little social there's not a lot of glue holding them in place.

00:20:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like the most popular girls in the reformatory runaway and then everyone follows suit. But like with all of this stuff, it's there's only so much he's seeing, and there's only so much he's allowing himself to say. And they also have this agenda of proving that their science works. Their account is the only account we have of what actually happened and how successful their stuff was. But so this is his explanation.

00:20:48
Speaker 1: But he's got this big idea, and he and Jennings have the evidence he thinks proves it. How does he get the word out?

00:20:54
Speaker 2: Actually, the first place, he publishes as results it's kind of like a science fair. Is this big physicians conference that happens at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. I think it happens on like April second, nineteen thirty three. He goes to the waldorfath story, he takes the train down from Hudson, goes the water for his storia. They put the maps on the walls and it's kind of a big deal. Like The New York Times writes a story that says, like emotions mapped by new geography. He calls it psychological geography. He's riding high. He says he's going to make a map of all the emotions in New York City. And that's the first place he publishes it. But then he goes back to the school. And it's a year after that the book comes out called Who Shall Survive? She's the book you have which is this? This is actually one of the original books. This is from nineteen thirty four. I took it out from the library and it's like a year overdue now. So that's if anyone's listening to this, I will be returning it someday.

00:21:48
Speaker 1: That's a Pushkin promise. We always return our library books. And after the break, we'll find out what all this research has to do with el Fitzgerald. Okay, back did the reformatory. The social scientist JAYL. Moreno and his research partner Helen Hall Jennings had been making a study of a girl's reform school down the street from where we are right now in Hudson. It's the nineteen thirties. They've just debuted some of their research in Manhattan at the Waldorf Astoria. Big deal. And then someone new shows up at the school, right Ben.

00:22:32
Speaker 2: Yes, sixteen days after he publishes all this stuff on the walls of the Waldorf Astoria, a new girl has checked into the Hudson Reformatory. Ella Fitzgerald.

00:22:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the most one of the most famous and extraordinary singers of the twentieth century.

00:22:54
Speaker 2: Who, unbeknownst to everyone in her lifetime, was an inmate at the school in between the time when her mom died and the day that she became famous at the Apollo Theater singing in an amateur contest.

00:23:06
Speaker 4: I was fifteen, because from there we went to the amateur contest.

00:23:13
Speaker 2: She never talked publicly about this fact that she was an inmate at the training school for girls, and it wasn't even known publicly until after her death in the nineties, when this intrepid investigative reporter Nina Bernstein figured it out. But what we know is she's at the training school starting April eighteenth, nineteen thirty three. When she's held, it's like a week before her sixteenth birthday because her mother has just died. So her mother dies when she's fifteen, yeah, and she starts to take odd jobs, so she's running numbers. She's a lookout for a brothel. She gets picked up by the cops, sentenced to the training school, and she checks in just over two weeks after Moreno's shown his first diagrams from the research. She's then there for like about a year, and what we know of her time there is through Nina Bernstein's reporting talking to people who worked at the training school and remembered her. They would ask her to come back to be to talk to the girls, and she never would, so Bernstein talked to them about what's known about her. You know, people remember she had amazing penmanship, she was an excellent student. One day she was invited to a church nearby with a group of the black girls who liked to sing and was said to have sung her heart out, but she was there at the time that the study was being made, and her experience there's significant to me, not just because she's a really famous person who intersects with this place, but because it blies Loreno's study, like it shows what's actually happening there that's not captured in his maps and new science.

00:24:49
Speaker 1: And sure enough she.

00:24:51
Speaker 2: She is thought to have run away. Yeah, so basically she's checked in there. What we know from Nina Eernstein's reporting is she wasn't allowed to sing in the all white choir, must have stayed one of the two cottages the black girls were allowed to live in, probably like all of the black girls had to do laundry for the white girls. But she was also kept in the basement of one of the colleges at the training school and beaten. But then there's this vagueness around how she leaves the training school. But because of the parole records, it's plausible that she ran away and she's living back in New York, I think in Yonkers, and she's homeless, like she's wearing ragged clothes, and she and a group of her friends decide to enter the amateur Talent Night at the Apollo Theater, which is this competition where if you win, you get to play at the Apollo for a week. And she at this point thinks she's going to be a dancer, so she's playing to enter as a dancer. I mean, do you want to hear the tape of her telling the story? So this is her towards the end of her career talking to Andre Previn. When you first started, you had visions of not being a singer.

00:25:58
Speaker 7: You were going to be a dancer. Is that right right?

00:26:00
Speaker 5: Tell me that, Oh you really want to hear that?

00:26:03
Speaker 3: Will just started back in my hometown and Yonkers and I was what they called, you know, the greatest little dancer in Younkers. And we used to go down to the Pollow on amateur night, my girlfriends and I and you know, like they always tell you if you want to be an amateur, to shine and drop your name in the box. And being from young because we never thought anybody would send a postcard to young Kers, and the three of us we put our names in and I was the one who was chosen and I made up you know, they say, well if you don't go, you're chicken. So we went, and believe it or not, I was the first amateur that they called. And there were two sisters who were the dance and the sisters in the world called it Edward Sisters, and they were starring at the Pollow and they closed the show with up and I when I saw those ladies dance, I says, no way, I'm going out there and trying to dance, because they stopped the show. I was the first one was called, and when I got out there, somebody hollered out. Nobody is, what is she gonna do?

00:27:18
Speaker 2: So this is like a story she tells all the time. What nobody knew is that when she was on stage at the Apollo, she was just out of the training school.

00:27:29
Speaker 3: And my mother had a record of Miss Connie Boswell, who I think was one of the greatest singers that ever lived.

00:27:37
Speaker 5: And she used to.

00:27:38
Speaker 3: Play Obtic of my affection and Judy and I got so I had, you know, used to sing it. So the man said sing something, well, I tried to sing Judy, and I think miss Connie boswa because then I tried to sing like her and I sang if a voyage ben break the whole of the sproom that's Judy and everybody says all that girl can sing, and the people plought it so much. I sang Object of my Affection. That was the other side of the record, and I won first prize. So then that made me feel like, you know, well, I wanted to try to be a singer.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: I just I love it so much. And I think it's the You know, it's obvious, but if she's a note in these maps, we know her so well as a person. But obviously, like every single person in the maps had a full life.

00:28:34
Speaker 1: Too, and you actually think.

00:28:37
Speaker 2: You found Yeah, I think I found a notation.

00:28:42
Speaker 1: You found her place in the social diaga.

00:28:44
Speaker 2: Yes, I found a girl who's plausibly ele Fitzgerald, but I can't know for sure.

00:28:49
Speaker 1: It's a black girl named Ella.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: In this book, there's a mention of a girl named Ella. All the girls on the maps are given initials, like two letter initials that don't correspond with their names, and there's mention of a girl named Ella. She's given the two letter initial GA, and then like one hundred pages later there's a map with a GA on it that specifies the Gas is a black girl. So there's a Ga named Ella who's a black girl, and we know that Marina was making the study at the time when Ella was also in the school.

00:29:20
Speaker 1: Do you make this discovery or did.

00:29:22
Speaker 2: I'm in this discovery because I read this.

00:29:24
Speaker 1: You've contributed to the legend of both Elafazgerald and Jail Marina.

00:29:29
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, Yes, this is correct.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: And what happens when Moreno and Jennings's research comes out.

00:29:36
Speaker 2: It has a pretty significant reception. Moreno has gotten involved in the new Deal, but like the most significant thing that comes out of the ground swell of support is he launches a journal called Sociometry. But it's this really influential journal and you know, like six degrees of separation is tested there. All of these leading lights of social science like George Gallup, Margaret Mead, John Dewey, they're like involved in the editorial board or publishing in the journal. It's finally like a platform for him to share these ideas about social networks basically with a broader public. And that field social network analysis doesn't really take off until the seventies or eighties, but he's credited with being a major forerunner of it and doing it in this experiment. This story is significant to me in part because it's sort of the story of science in the twentieth century, or like one kind of science in the twentieth century, which is I think in the quest to institutionalize his ideas and to be as big a player as he could be. I feel like Jael Moreno kind of pulled his punches, like he had ten thousand pages of data. I don't believe that he didn't know what was actually going on at the school, and specifically what was happening to the black girls at the school. And it's not that that kind of thing wasn't sayable in the nineteen thirties, because the Attorney General had already said that the school should be desegregated.

00:30:59
Speaker 1: So the school is segregated, and then New York State turn General has asked that it be desegregated, and the school Morse doesn't want to do it. And in his analysis, Moreno is kind of oblivious or or disregarding of this issue, is what you were saying.

00:31:24
Speaker 2: He covers the fact that it's segregated. It's just not like the sort of like beating of the girls in the basement, but more like the corporal punishment stuff. The other reasons why girls might be running away. These sorts of issues aren't in the text, and like the degree to which the segregation is institutionalized isn't really covered either.

00:31:42
Speaker 1: But I'm you know, it's ninety we're talking about the early thirties. Nothing's integrated in the early thirties.

00:31:50
Speaker 2: But there was an expectation that this place would be I mean, this is. And it's also like Harlem Renaissance is going on. There's a lot of black power in New York City as of the nineteen twenties. And when there's an investigation into the school after Moreno's study, not because of it, there is, it's led by a black doctor in partnership, but the governor. There's a level of state support for the idea that this is, this shouldn't be happening that suggests that it's not really so beyond the realm of possibility.

00:32:18
Speaker 7: Mm hmm.

00:32:20
Speaker 1: The person I'm I, the person who I would fault is not Morse so much as Moreno. He's the outsider. He's the one who's who sees himself as a revolutionary, who's not who doesn't at least profess to be held by the you know, the standards of the rest of society. Who is, as you say, coming up with a new idea that professes to paint a picture of the whole community. And you could easily see that someone who was if he was as revolutionary as he claimed to be, he can easily see a version of this where he would have said, look, this is what segregation does. Like he came with a tool to see what was wrong with segregation and turned a blind eye to it. I mean interestingly, of course, social science becomes hugely important in the strategy of the civil rights movement and the legal strategy of.

00:33:21
Speaker 2: The civil Brown versus borders and on.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the fifteen sixties, So like there's an opening. This is what's so fascinating about this story is that this here's this brilliant man who he's blind in so many ways to the possibilities of his own fame and greatness. Right, he had the tool that everybody would end up using twenty years later to break down the door of prejudice, and he didn't understand he had the tool and went back to doing psychodrama like he had it. Right, does he continue over the rest of his life pursuing social network theory or doing psychodrama?

00:34:04
Speaker 2: I mean he stays involved with sociometry. I think he just wanted to be a direct there. Like there's a story he tells about when he was a kid that to me is kind of structured the way I think about him. And I think he's sharing it because he thinks it has some fundamental truth about himself contained in it. But I just want to play you this one thing, this is about when he's a child, I think in Bucharest still.

00:34:26
Speaker 7: One saturday my parents got away, a crowd of children gathered in our house in the basement, and I still remember that. They came to me and said, now, you Jack, this was my first name. What are you going to do today?

00:34:40
Speaker 6: I said, let's play God. Well, I said enough, But one of the children said, and who is God? I said, I am God, and you are my angels. And then they all said, let's have it's God the heaven.

00:34:53
Speaker 7: And we went with the basement and we do all the chairs in the house, and they built the various heavens up to the top, and on top they had a chairir for God himself, and I was in help for all the children to sit there on well as it is, I was gone, and I stood still the dangers began to run around to sing, and suddenly while the angels said, why don't you fly? And I stretched my arms and I fed down and my right art.

00:35:27
Speaker 2: It's just like I just loved the story, but like that's kind of his whole thing. It's like he tries to play god, he falls down, he breaks his arm, like he always wants to be the guy who sits above and looks down, and that's a fatal flaw of is.

00:35:44
Speaker 1: We think that's I think that's a nice I think that's a nice think it's a nice way to end.

00:35:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree.

00:35:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. For more psychodrama, go subscribe to the Last Archive to hear six episodes of Gripping Intellectual History Ben Scott stories on mid century songwriting, machines, invasive species, panics, freelance wiretappers turned evangelists, and time travel. Subscribe, but you'll also hear a whole different version of the story Ben told today coming soon. He won't want to miss it. Ben produced this episode of Revisionist History as well, with help from Jacob Smith and Kiara Powell. We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton, Engineering by Nina Lawrence, Mastering by Sarah Bugaire. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagon Sinfinnat. I'm Malcolm Gladmo