Uplifting Art

Uniting around peace and love has led many people to do extraordinary things. Some have been very public, and others incredibly private. Enjoy this tour through the Cabinet.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Michael Bowen was a painter, but he saw himself as
a peaceful warrior. He was born to wealthy parents in
Beverly Hills. He grew up in the nineteen forties and fifties,
resenting the conformity of his hometown. His maternal grandmother introduced
him to mysticism at a young age, through which he
could rebel against his upbringing. It was all about trying

(00:56):
to get more in touch with God, to find the
unconscious that connected all people, and how this was done
depended on the person or the group, But for Michael,
it was accomplished through his art. As such, his paintings
are full of color, swirling lines, and evocative uses of
the human eye. He saw these paintings as magic, as
something beyond himself, something he couldn't help but create. He

(01:20):
believed viewers of his work had a magical connection to it,
seeing things that even he couldn't have anticipated. But as
the fifties turned into the sixties, Michael felt dismay at
the state of the country. The Vietnam War was brutal
and pointless, and the government just kept perpetuating the conflict.
He started to feel like his paintings weren't enough to

(01:40):
combat this evil. Michael was introduced to the hallucinogetic drug
LSD through some friends, and it had what he believed
was a mystical effect on him, helping him to move
closer to God and to the consciousness that unites all
human beings. He began to work with a guru in
Mexico who encouraged him to experiment further with drugs, and
at one point Michael consumed so much of the hallucinogenic

(02:03):
flower that he was in a coma for a month,
But to him, this was all part of the process.
He returned to California after his time in Mexico inspired
to create a new type of art, performance art. But again,
to him, art was magic, and this performance art would
be something akin to a ritual, a ritual to unite

(02:24):
human consciousness and move forward toward peace. In other words,
to make love not war. Michael organized a large gathering
in a park in San Francisco called the Human be In.
Tens of thousands of people joined in on the event.
They listened to speeches from psychologists and gurus, listened to
poets recite their poetry, and they listened to now famous

(02:45):
rock bands like Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead, and
of course, they did a lot of LSD. The huge
popularity of the event led it to being seen as
a major success. Michael felt that he was transforming the
consciousness of America, but he also felt like he could
do even more. He returned to Mexico and engaged in
more training with his guru, taking more drugs, and practicing

(03:09):
a variety of mystical techniques, including supposedly telekinesis levitating things
with your mind. With this new power in his arsenal,
he came up with a crazy idea for this next
work of performance art. Michael returned to the US and
told every activist he could about his plan. He wanted
to get a massive group together, march on the Pentagon

(03:31):
and levitate it with their minds, transforming it from a
symbol of war to a symbol of love, and as
it so happened, many more down to earth anti war
activists had also been wanting to organize a march on
the Pentagon. It's the headquarters of the United States Department
of Defense, after all, and as such was the epicenter
from which the US coordinated its war efforts. For months,

(03:53):
many well known activists put together plans for the march,
which was to take place on October twenty first of
nineteen six. In many ways, Michael's previous Human Being was
the blueprint. By this time, even more people showed up.
One hundred thousand protesters joined together at Lincoln Memorial in Washington,
d C. Hearing speeches and listening to music from anti

(04:15):
war figures, and once they were ready, they marched across
the river to the Pentagon. Michael and his fellow activists
led a variety of strange rituals around the building, which
spoke to how diverse the crowd was. Some of the
more religious members led an exorcism of the building, others
chanted mantras or sprinkled magical corn meal, and finally, one

(04:35):
of Michael's closest associates, an activist named Abby Hoffman, led
a chant to levitate the Pentagon and transform it, ending
the war. It's maybe a bit of an anti climax here,
but the building obviously did not levitate and the war
did go on. But the most memorable moment came after
when Michael handed out hundreds of daisies that he had

(04:56):
purchased for the event. Some of the activists began to
place the flo flowers in the barrels of the guns
held by the soldiers surrounding the Pentagon. This moment was
captured in several iconic photographs, providing a symbol across the
nation of resistance to war. Michael may not have ended
the war, but once again he had used his art
to transform human consciousness to guide it toward a better future.

(05:19):
And to be clear, the moral of this story is
not to do a dangerous amount of hallucinogetic drugs. Instead,
it is to have faith in the small, strange and
curious acts of resistance that all work together to change
the world. Many people have secrets that they take to

(05:49):
the grave, only for the truth to come out sometime
after their death. Like romance painter Francisco Goya, he was
famous for vibrant and idyllic portraits of Spanish life. It
wasn't an until after his death that a series of
nightmarish paintings were discovered in his home. They revealed mental
health struggles that he hid from his patrons and his fans.

(06:09):
On December tenth of nineteen oh eight, a coroner in Manhattan, Montana,
also uncovered a secret after receiving the body of the
town's most mysterious resident. The discovery would launch a decades
long investigation into who this person was and what they
were running from. In the late eighteen fifties, a mysterious
stranger turned up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, looking for work.

(06:32):
He called himself Billy and claimed to be a cook,
and got hired at one of the local timber camps
in the area. Now Billy was small in stature, with
a thin nose and a slight hunchback. He was friendly
but private. He didn't talk about himself very much. In
the mornings, he was out of the bunk house before
his roommates woke up, and he didn't come to bed
until everyone else was asleep. After work, he'd go to

(06:55):
the saloon with the other lumberjacks. He would dance with
all the girls and bought rounds of for the entire bar,
But his colleagues noticed that for all the booze that
he bought for others, Billy would nurse the same single
drink all night long. He never let himself get drunk.
And there were other question marks about Billy as well.
He spoke English, Norwegian, and German, but always said that

(07:17):
he came from Iowa. He also picked up enough of
the local Native American languages to have full conversations with
tribal members. To everyone at camp, it was obvious that
there was more to Billy than he led on, but
he was a nice guy and he seemed harmless, and
so the lumberjacks just let him keep his secrets, especially
because Billy was good at his job. He was a

(07:37):
fantastic cook and was soon in demand at lumber camps
across Wisconsin. He amassed a small fortune over the years too,
and bought several properties in town. And then one day
in the eighteen eighties, a man showed up in Eau
Claire looking for Billy. The two of them had some
kind of an argument, and shortly after Billy left town.
He moved to Manhattan, Montana, and changed his name to

(07:59):
Sammy and Sammy spent the next eighteen years living and
cooking on ranches in the area. He was popular among
the ranch hands and a beloved dance partner at the
local saloons. He also got involved in local town meetings
and voted in several elections. He was generous with his
money and often paid for his friends to receive medical care.
And when he died in nineteen oh eight, the entire

(08:22):
town mourned. Even the coroner was upset to come collect
his body, and that's when he discovered Sammy's deepest secret. Biologically,
Sammy was a woman. Now, as you might imagine, the
coroner was surprised, but the discovery also explained Sammy's behavior.
He never got drunk because he was likely scared of
revealing the truth about his identity. He got up early

(08:44):
and stayed up late so that he could change clothes
in private without being seen by other men at camp.
And this could also be why Sammy bought so much property,
was an avid voter and spent his hard earned money
with abandon These were luxuries that would have been unavailable
to him as a woman. And remember that strange man
who showed up in Eau Claire and argued with Sammy.

(09:05):
Historians now think that it was his brother begging Sammy
to come home. It's now believed that Sammy Williams was
born in Norway, likely in eighteen thirty three, as Ingeborg Weakens.
She and her family emigrated to Iowa when she was
a kid. As a young woman, she was engaged to
a childhood friend named Sven, but Sven's family broke off
the engagement because Ingeborg was too low of status. Shortly after,

(09:28):
she disappeared from history and a man named Billy Williams
arrived in Wisconsin. It's not known whether Billy or Sammy
would have considered themselves trans. It's possible he privately identified
as a woman, but simply wanted the independence of living
as a man. Whatever the case, Sammy's secret was a shock,
but not a scandal that you might imagine it to be,

(09:49):
because at the time, it's estimated that hundreds of people
in the Old West were actually living as the opposite gender.
Some of these individuals would probably consider themselves queer or
trans if they were alive today, but others were simply
chasing freedom. Outlaws would escape the gallows by hiding in
plain sights as women. Plenty of women traveled West and

(10:09):
became men to avoid the confines of marriage. Most of
these gender nonconformists assimilated so seamlessly that they were only
discovered after their deaths. Their history was once considered an
integral part of the Old West. It's only in the
last century that they've been erased or whittled down to
singular characters like Calamity Jane. Now it's hard to say

(10:31):
whether Sammy Williams saw themselves as trans in disguise, or
maybe some mixture of the two. Whatever the case, their
tombstone in Manhattan explains their story succinctly. It reads a
female whose real name is unknown, but who has been
for many years known as Sammy Williams. And that's fitting,
after all, since the Old West was the land of opportunity,

(10:53):
a chance to leave your past behind, strike it rich,
and become whoever you want it to be. I hope
you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show

(11:15):
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
Stuff Works, I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show and
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.