June 30, 2026 • 52 mins
Robert sits down with the magnanimous Katy Stoll to discuss the predecessor of Phyllis Schlafly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones: Elizabeth Dilling
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is not the
first episode of the podcast we've done this year during
the official summer, but it's basically the official legal Christian summer, right, guys, team,
isn't it? It feels hot as hell outside today.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
It's gonna it's but but but it only for the
next couple of days, and then it's gonna be in
the sixties.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh is it?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
And then and then and then mother Mother Nature will
water my garden and I'm thrilled.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Great, I'm glad that my will burn down yet.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Yes, Oh yeah, Katie Stoles here legend.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hey, everybody, how hot and or on fire? Is it
where you are?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Oh? Yeah, both of those things? I am in the mountains.
But it is an unpleasant Well, it's eighty five. It's
eighty five, not too bad.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
We had some ninety degree days last week. But I
moved to the mountains thinking it would be cooler, and
boy was I wrong.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, it gets hot. It gets hot.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Lots of burnable brush all around me as well, So.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, everything catches on fire out there. That's the beauty
of living out in the country.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
And they defunded one of my They close one of
our fire stations anyway.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Oh that's always oh good.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's not like California needs a lot of those wild
I'm only bringing up the summer because I had my first.
Every every year when it gets hot again, I remember, Okay,
I gotta put out sunscreen before I go run this time.
And then fifteen or so minutes into that first run
of the year with sunscreen, I remember, oh yeah, when
you sweat with sunscreen, it burns your eyes like a
son of a bitch. So if my eyes look like
(01:32):
red and buffy, it's because I just finished a run
in a shower and my entire face was on fire
from sunscreen.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I actually thought it was because you were crying. No, no, like, well,
you've been touched.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I would tell you if I was crying. But this
is simply self inflicted friendly fire.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Self inflicted friendly fire. Another piece of why are you're
wearing a sweater?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Man?
Speaker 4 (01:54):
It's it's cold, yeah, and we're talking about summer and
you're all bundled up.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I am wearing my my hoodie or my sweater.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yes. Meanwhile, Katie and I are Lucy Gucy.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, oh yeah, I got my Laker's Luka Dontrid shirt on.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Shout out to my haters. Okay, anyways, Robert did the job.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Should we do it?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah? Shall we do the job? Katie Stole? How are
you doing today podcasting wise?
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Pretty good. I'm sitting here with my old pals, whom
I've missed. Miss I have.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Missed you too, and I have missed talking to you
about shitty people. So I wanted to give you a
special shitty person today. You know, we talk a lot
about old timey far right influencers on this podcast, you know,
the first the guys around the twenties and thirties and forties,
the og American fascists, but we haven't talked a lot
about like the history of women in the early history
(02:54):
of women in the American fascist movement, and the crucial
role different like female influencers have played aid in the
American far right. And so today we're going to talk
about a woman you could call the first Candace Owens
or the first Laura Lumer. You can make a case
she's got bits of both of those, both Candace and Laura.
Oh a little bit to this lady we're going to
talk about this week, Elizabeth Dilling. Have you heard that name?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Elizabeth Dilling. Do you see why I was like, we
need Katie for this episode. Yeah, okay, I'm excited. I
do not know anything about Elizabeth Dillon.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
She's not super She is the B side who are
more famous fascist and I think you will recognize from
later on. But like again, because I guess of misogyny,
she never quite got as famous as her her male
fascist counterpart.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
It's it's really the patriarchy on Netflix. Yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Know, if you've watched it, they don't give a ship.
They barely know what's on their own network. Thanks Netflix,
thanks for the money. Elizabeth Elois Kirkpatrick was born on
April nineteenth, eighteen ninety four, in Chicago. Now, if eighteen
(04:10):
ninety four in Chicago sound familiar to you, that's because
that is the same year in city as the Pullman Strike,
which is a legendary moment in labor history. Began as
a local Chicago strike that became a national boycott and
changed US labor law forever in the process, and that
strike itself was heavily inspired by the trials of the
eighteen ninety three economic panic that fractured the US economy
(04:33):
and helped fuel Eugene V. Debs's creation of the American
Railway Union. Right, so, Chicago at the time Elizabeth is
born is real hotbed for labor, for this burgeoning and
really exploding American left, which is growing into what some
might argue and probably still to this day, would count
as its most influential period in American histories, kind of
coming up as a result of the things that are
(04:54):
sort of happening right around the time Elizabeth is born.
So it's kind of going to be important a little
that she's she's never going to adopt any of these
kind of politics, but they are happening around her and
very much in the environment that she's growing up in.
Her family is against a lot of these changes, but
she's going to grow up hearing about them because they're
right outside her door.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
You know, sure, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So little Elizabeth comes into the world in a time
and a place that was hugely significant in the history
of American labor and the struggles of the workingman against
his bosses, and so it's appropriate for the person she
would become that even as an infant, she was entirely
separate and protected from the normal world of working class people.
This is happening outside her mansion gates. Basically, her father,
(05:37):
doctor Leete Kirkpatrick, was a famous surgeon and her mother,
Elizabeth Harding, was a homemaker. But both came from very
prominent families, right, so both of their families have some
degree of like financial comfort. And her dad, at least
initially is this like famous doctor the Kirkpatrick's. Her dad's
family had been wealthy landowners in Ireland, but had fled
(05:58):
near the end of the eighteen hundreds and settled in Virginia.
Liz would Laters describe her father as coming from Scott's
Irish stock, and some googling around has given me coust
to think that her her family Basically, if you've ever
heard of like the Irish Land Wars, this period of
time in which like there's a lot of conflict in
Ireland over like who gets to own what land, there's
a lot of conflict as a result of these like
(06:19):
absentee landlords that piss off a lot of people. Well,
her her ancestors are some of the absentee lands. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
because they're like a Scottish family who winds up owning
a lot of land in Ireland, you know, yeah, And
I don't know that the Kirkpatricks had to flee their
family estate because they were brutal landlords, but my research
(06:40):
does make that seem likely, and it's always a good yeah. Yeah.
We don't talk enough about Ireland's land wars.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
It sounds like we're setting up for a family that
does not learn from those lessons. Perhaps perhaps they're here
also resenting.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
The different classes around them. I don't know, and has.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Like a long time grudge against anyone trying to fix
things because they just see that as like you're fucking
with my big you know, like that's the people that
she comes from. So let's talk a little about the
Irish land Wars because people don't often enough, and it's
a fun bit of history. Only about five percent of
the land in Ireland from the late seventeen hundreds to
the end of the eighteen hundreds was owned by Irish Catholics,
(07:23):
despite the fact that Irish Catholics were most of Ireland.
People got very angry about this and it led to
successive waves of protests and even violent insurgent direct action.
It is very possible then, that the Kirkpatricks had to
flee because they wound up on either side of this dispute,
but the fact that they had a family estate and
came to the US with money makes me suspect that
they weren't fighting for the freedom of poor men. Right,
(07:45):
These are probably on one specific side of.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
The land wars pretty solid gas.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Meanwhile, the Harding family, elizabeth'smother's people came from a long
line of Anglican bishops, which also makes it like clear
that her dad's people were foreign landlords at some point. Anyway,
she grows up fairly well off. In a two thousand
and two article for the Journal of American Studies, writer
Christine Erickson describes her family as financially comfortable, upper middle class. Right,
that's that's that's where they're coming from. Her parents have
(08:13):
enough money that, even though these are pretty rough times,
they're able to travel fairly regularly. But they're not able
to send the kids abroad with them. So Liz grows
up not traveling much yourself. But her mom and her
aunts are always visiting Europe spending their inheritance, and so
she grows up hearing about that.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Sure, okay, yeah, I mean for the parents anyway.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Sounds fun. Probably wants to bring your kids.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Sorry, kids, you had to stay mom and tenn are
off for a.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Bit, Mammadet are off for it. But also in this
period of time, mammadett are off for a bit for
like eight months because yeah, yeahs you're going to be
raised by some lady we hired by. See you when you're.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Nine, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Be back in a year, baby, Yeah, be back in
a year. Maybe her fat died when she was relatively young,
and this was he dies a sudden and surprising death,
and this leaves her mother in charge of the family.
But it says a lot about their overall financial state
that even though her father dies pretty early on, this
never affects them financially as far as we can see, right,
they remain comfortable, which means they're very well off. So
(09:20):
she's going to grow up with extremely conservative values and politics.
But she's also going to grow up because her mom
is the only one running things. After a while, she's
going to run up very grow very used to seeing
a woman call the shots right, and this is going
to have a conflicting effect on her, right because she
both comes to believe that like traditional values are best
and also she's used to women being in charge in
(09:42):
her own.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's that kind of tough to square at
that point in time.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
I guess I was gonna say, yeah, I was gonna say,
as are you Robert.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, yeah. My mom reminded, it's very reminiscent of this,
where like she was a very conservative person and also
did not understand why men should be doing anything like
Those were two ideas that co existed within her. As
Amy Dye wrote of Elizabeth in her graduate thesis for
East Tennessee University for East Tennessee State University, quote, if
(10:11):
her father had not died, she would not have been
exposed to such a strong, independent woman as her mother.
Before doctor Lafayette Kirkpatrick's death, he strongly believed the woman
belonged in the home and away from both politics and business.
In contrast, her brother, Lafayette was encouraged to pursue a
business career and at the age of twenty three, had
acquired financial security through land development in Hawaii. He subsequently
traveled around the world for three years with Baron von
(10:33):
Zepplin and continued to lead a privileged life until his
death in nineteen forty eight. Again, for any of the family,
of the money she comes from, her brother is best
friends and traveling buddies with Baron von Zepplin. It doesn't
get much older money than that. Then Baron von Zepplin
having her road trip with the Zeppelin guy. So yeah,
(10:55):
they're doing fine even with dad out of the picture.
Little Elizabeth would be described during her childhood as quote
highly emotional and an eager girl with a dramatically sculptured face,
enormous brown eyes and a quick giddy laugh. Somewhat lonely,
and casting about in search of a career, which is
also interesting. She's a very she will always espouse very
traditional values. She's always looking for a job for herself.
(11:18):
She never is interested in just being a homemade and
not you know, no problem with that, but she is
never interested in just sitting at home and raising kids.
She wants to do something out in the world that
people are aware of.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
It's actually a very fascinating dynamic for somebody. I mean
we're seeing it still to this day. Yes, your mother,
I guess was this way. But this is this big
push in the Conservative party for traditional values, and yet
they're going to be advocating for their own careers. It
seems counterintuitive but interesting for this woman.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, I mean, it's the Philish Loveley thing right of
like I don't think women should be doing any of
this stuff. Also, as a woman, I really like to
have a big career.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
And also like modern times, that's very Erica Kirk. Yeah,
it's very Erica Kirk. That is exactly what I was thinking.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
But yeah, I mean if either of you have seen
any of like the interview clips from tpusa's like first
big like women's event that Erica Kirk led, it's all
when people are interviewed, it's all like this where they're
like all over the map on if they're like, well
women can have it all, but they have to do this,
but women could have it all, but not those women.
(12:25):
It's really interesting coverage just to like get an insight
into that ideological thinking.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
It's fascinating anytime you have to be you have that
much cognitive dissonance in your belief system that always winds
up being fascinating on some level.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
And like in a way that I just there's no
way there would be an Erica Kirk without a Liz Dilling,
without a philistathe without it.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
You know, it's all.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
She had to crawl so that Erica Kirk could.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
I don't know. I don't know who's doing it whatever.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
So Erica Kirk could come out with a fire boom,
yeah behind her.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So Elizabeth attends grammar school in a secondary school. She's
going to nice schools. Her parents pay money to get
her quality education. She studies the concert harp at a
Catholic academy, and she graduates from a girls school and
is noted as having an almost photographic memory. Her early
interests were and this is not a normal like, her
education's weird because I can't graph it directly onto a
(13:21):
normal one. Because she is both doing like normal primary school,
secondary school and also Catholic Academy women's preparatory finishing school.
Like she spends years in schools that are just to
like teach you how to behave as a woman. Like
that's part of part of her schooling because she's like
an upper class lady. Right. It takes a lot. You
gotta know where all the forks go and stuff. I imagine
(13:43):
there's more to it than forks, but forks seem like
they're pretty key.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Stand up straight? How does smile?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Stand up straight? That's right? How to ride side saddle?
There's I know there's a sadder. There's a ry you're
supposed to write as a lady. That's the polite way,
So there's the rude way. Maybe side saddle is the
rude way. I don't know much about it, hort.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
I really feel like side saddle should be reserved for
men anatomically speaking, but I digress.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Look the horse girls can can correct us, because I
don't know much about riding horses. I know there's a
way you're supposed to write, and there's a way that
you're not supposed to ride as an old timey woman,
but I don't know. I don't know which is which. Anyway,
she goes to all these different weird schools. She learns
how to be a lady and a good Catholic. She's
interested primarily in both classical music and the French language.
(14:27):
I don't actually know if she ever gets what you'd
call a normal college degree, but during her time in
Catholic school, she was made to study the Bible. And
so this is kind of like knowledge and faith are
always weirdly wrapped up with her, but also knowledge and
like the performance of societal roles, are always directly locked together.
She never just gets an education that's an education on
(14:48):
its own. It's always an education, partly in how to
exist in a certain social hierarchy. If that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
It does make sense.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
As Amy Die writes in nineteen seventeen, as the first
US forces are getting their it's dirty in World War One,
Elizabeth meets a man described as a young army officer
from Arizona who quote introduced her to a completely new
way of thinking. This is her first fascist boyfriend. So
she meets this mystery army officer who starts saying, oh,
you got to read these books, right, and so he
starts giving her cocked and Nietzsche and Hegel and next quote,
(15:20):
after introducing Elizabeth to these forward thinkers, he contradicted himself
by saying women did not count as human beings. Oh
so he's like, he's you need to read this Nietzsche.
But you're a woman, so you can't read it. You're
not a person. But here you should have some Hegel.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
But here read it. But you're not really a person
a woman, and you're too dumb. You're not gonna get it.
But here, God is dead.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I get the She doesn't say this, but I get
the feeling. He's like, intermittently flirting with her and yelling
at her like it's one of those kind of weird guys,
and she's totally under it.
Speaker 4 (15:51):
If you had ever been flirted with by a fascist
soldier from Arizona, you would know.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
That the game, that's part of the day, that's that
what works.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, well, she.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Gets that beautiful experience and you can tell it completely
awakens her. Right. This is where she becomes an ideological
thinker for the first time. And the fact that her
ideological awakening comes courtesy of a man who does not
consider her human is very telling and very bleak. But
what else are you gonna say.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
I'm not saying I have empathy because I have a
feeling she's not gonna be someone I like.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
How well, it's just a holy shit, it's pretty fucked up.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, you guys can check out. Just imagine like trying
to tell your like your other lady friends, like, Yeah,
this wonderful guy, he introduced me all these great books.
I'm really thinking in new ways about like what makes
a person a person. I don't think I'm one. According
to him anyway, he's nice, He's.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
At any rate, this does not last. I really wish
I knew what happened with this guy. Maybe he was
just too much finincell, or maybe he goes out and
it dies out in world We hope he guy and
dies in World War One. Yeah, I'm hoping the old
dub dub uno does a solid on that one. At
any rate, not long after whatever happens with this guy
in she continues reading philosophy, and she starts thinking really
(17:14):
hard about the underlying order of society. And as she's
thinking about this, Elizabeth meets her future husband, Albert Walwick Dilling. Now,
I don't think Albert Walwick Dilling is the kind of
guy who's gonna tell her she's not a person. He's
the kind I get the feeling. He's very ideologically malleable.
I think he's naturally more conservative, so he's comfortable with
(17:34):
her ideology. But I also think he goes along with
her a lot, you know, okay, And I think he
gets One of the things he gets from her is
that he gets to pretend and feel like and she
will reinforce that he is in charge while also being
in charge of a lot, and so he doesn't have
to be in charge of as much feeling.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
It's exactly what you mean you've seen these kinds of relationships, right,
one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
She's like, I defer to my man, But she's the
one that's telling him, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Defer to my man. God help him. If he has
an idea of.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
His own, I defer my man as long as it's
he goes with what.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
I said exactly. So at the time he was a lawyer,
he had trained as an engineer. Originally, he had been
born in Salt Lake City back in eighteen ninety two.
By the time he was ready for college, and I
don't think he was Mormon. I think it probably would
have mentioned that she certainly is not, and I don't
think she would have been cool with a practicing Mormon
given her beliefs, but I'm not really sure. By the
(18:30):
time he's ready for college, he migrated to the Chicago
area and he took the Illinois bar in nineteen seventeen. Now,
Elizabeth Harardi refused one marriage proposal by the time she
met Albert, but for some reason, this guy sweeps her
off her feet and after nine months the two are
married and the romantic city of Laporte, Indiana. This would
have been made of nineteen eighteen. Yes, yes, the city
(18:51):
of love itself, the city of unbridled fucking. That's what
we call Laporte Indiana. That's the city motto. Actually, Laporte Indiana.
It's a lee to buy condoms here, you know, Just
so you know, Laporte. Everybody catch the fever and something else,
because again, condoms are illegal. Yeah. After this point, Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, though,
(19:12):
is now Elizabeth Dilling. And this is the name that
she's going to be famous under. Right, everyone knows her
as Elizabeth Dilling. That's how she becomes Elizabeth Dillon. She
marries this Albert Dilling guy. She's twenty four years old
in nineteen eighteen, and after a brief honeymoon, she and
Albert moved to a suburb of Chicago, Wilmot, where they
borrow money and buy a home. Albert claims that when
(19:33):
they got married, he had quote nothing to offer but
a good education, bright prospects, good help, and some sizeable debts,
but Liz had family money of her own. In just
two years, Albert was made chief engineer of the Chicago
Sanitary District, and his career would continue to rise over
the coming years. While he was making a career for
himself as a high level engineer for one of the
largest cities on Earth. He would eventually become the city
(19:55):
engineer for Union Station Development and the Engineer Assistant to
the Commission for Public Works. Liz was inheriting the money
that would ensure she never needed to utilize public works herself.
Her husband helps make sure that like the city's public
like transit works, and Elizabeth inherits enough money that she
doesn't have to use it.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, so only imagine they're the like twenty twenty six
dating profiles.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Oh my god, these two and twenty twenty six are
definitely the weird natalist freaks who wind up on the
news every six months talking about like there're eleven kids
that they're having to change the world with Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah, Liz Dilling definitely like puts her credit scare on
her dating profile.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah. I can see her having an interview with Vanity
Fair where she slaps her child and a fucking diner. Yeah.
So she receives enormous inheritances from two aunts and then
in the mid nineteen thirties from her mother. So she's
very comfortably off even though her husband is not making
a lot of money immediately, but her husband, you know,
(20:54):
is making comfortable middle class incomes. You have inherits a
lot of money and a good income. They're doing quite well,
and they're doing well enough that in short order before
either of them is, you know, particularly old, they're going
to have enough money to do what wealthy people do
in this period of time in particular, which is go
on really long and elaborate vacations all the time. So
(21:14):
from nineteen twenty three to nineteen thirty nine, the Dillings
travel oversea ten times, and these are all multi week
or multi month excursions. We're talking like orient Express type shit,
where you're on trains and in fancy boats, you've got
sleeper car like that. These are not like casual vacations.
You can't just jaunt somewhere quickly, right.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Yeah, no, this is this is yeah, like her mother
months long also famously a bad.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Time for the world financially to not have needs to
just travel like this exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
I mean they're mostly traveling, although they are through all
the thirties too, you know. So yeah, like a lot
of it is during a really rough time.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Yeah, it's not the main takeaway here, but I yeah,
they're doing certainly fine. It says a lot about well,
what they're doing while the rest that the world was burning.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, well while the rest of the world was falling
to fascis, And they're going on like long elaborate vacations, right,
They're doing very they're very comfortable. Their first trip overseas,
they get to tour England, the Low Countries, France, and
then Italy, at which point they enter the Vatican City
and have a private audience with the Pope. So they
have like, oh money, Like that's how comfortable she is.
(22:22):
Amy Die writes that the Dillings had booked this trip
in part to get a first hand account of the
aftermath of the First World War, right, Like that's a
big that's at least what Elizabeth wants her friends to
believe that, Like, we're not just doing this as a vacation.
We're doing this to get an eye on how Europe's handled,
you know, after the war, right, Like that's the way
that she frames this.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
Making my eyes roll back and it is Okay, here's
we're just gonna go study.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
We're gonna go check it out. And I can tell
you from experience, if you're in like an active war zone,
there are often a lot of people who are eager
to talk about what's happening to them right now, in
part because they hope that like maybe international attention will
like help their situation, and like it's happening right now,
and they want people to know about the horrible stuff.
When you go to a place that has just been
at war, like a couple of years ago, they don't
(23:08):
usually want to talk about it. They're kind of trying
to forget it. So this just for a vacation people
like nineteen nineteen, people wandering around like don't want to
want to talk to a bunch of America's big Yeah,
what was the war like here in dun You know,
was it fun? Did you enjoy it? Like people wod
not have a good time and don't want her shit.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
Completely devastated trying to recover from uh yeah no bad
timing bit.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, how did you do you think it was? Liz bad?
And this seems to be what the Dillings encountered. People
are not super eager to talk to them, As Dye's
account says, quote, Dilling became frustrated by the anti American
attitudes that she had encountered amongst the British and the French.
The former Allies often gave the United States no credit
for helping win the First World War and often complained
(23:56):
that the United States had not entered the war sooner. So, yeah,
I think people didn't really want to talk about the war,
and like folks who'd lost all their money and like
their kids didn't want to talk about how great America
was for eventually getting involved, like some fucking British family
who lost everything. This is gonna be like, yeah, thanks guys,
really glad you got here in nineteen seventeen, right on
(24:17):
the dot.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
Hh yeah, yeah, it's not surprising, not surprising.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
She takes this personally. She takes this as an insult
to herself. On the steamship home, an English traveler sees
a member of her party who's wearing like a sailor
outfit with US Navy printed on it, and he just
like starts shit talking like that. But it's like, ah,
your Navy's a joke, you Americans, And Liz responds, I
don't know if it's such a joke. It's been able
to lick Great Britain twice and I think it could
(24:46):
do it again. And first off, Liz, the last time
it beat Gray Britan was nineteen twelve like or eighteen
twelve like, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if
we should be bragging about that in nineteen eighteen. Just
seems a little ahead of the eight ball. It's not
been it's been a while since we fought the British Navy.
I don't know, Liz the And also, it's just like,
(25:08):
what a ridiculous reaction to someone saying that he's clearly
like frustrated that you're walking around talking about what hot
shit your military is when you just kind of sltered
in the last minute of like a devastating war. I
get why the Europeans are pissed at her.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Absolutely. This woman has no self awareness.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
No, and this situation, this whole encounter with his rude
person on the boat, causes her to make a vow
then and there that if another war ever came to Europe,
she will work herself to the bone to keep the
United States out of it because of these ungrateful Europeans.
I'll make sure we never enter another war to support
Europe again. You know, that's Liz's encounter here, or it'll
(25:46):
take it. It's really sad.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
I'm not surprising I mean, no, I'm always whenever I'm here.
It's impossible to not draw parallels to modern day I've
already done it several times.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
But it's like, it's so pathetic.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
How easily some people get offended and vowed to make
that their idea of an entire place for the rest
of their life.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Yeah, yeah, like I think they didn't even have anything
to do with honestly, But anyway, you know what else
is sad? Not listening to ads?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Heartbreak? What You're right, it is such a heartbreak. I
love ads.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
We're back and we're talking about how we never skip
the ads on podcasts. Never. What does that mean? Sometimes
I listen to extra ads, you know. Sometimes I listen
to ads that aren't even for podcasts. Sometimes they just
fall asleep directly in front of a billboard, you know,
so I can worship it.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Do you have an ad playlist too for bedtime?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yes, it's only an ad playlist for bedtime to be fair.
All right, So let's get back to Liz Dilly. So, yeah,
Liz's just had this experience heading home from Europe where
these ungrateful Europeans were not deferent enough to the US
Navy so she decides to stop the US from ever
helping Europe in a war again. I don't know if
(27:13):
I believe that actually happened, in part because Liz is
going to be like anti war during World War Two
because she's a fascist. And I think maybe she invinced
this story because it's like a more palatable truth as
opposed to like, I don't want you used to get
involved in World War two because I like the Nazis.
She could be like, no, they're so ungrateful after all
the rudeness they showed us last time, Why would we
(27:34):
risk our lives again for them? You know. I kind
of think maybe she just makes this up after the fact,
but it's possible that this actually happens. Like, I don't
know one way or the other. Despite their frustrations with Europeans,
the Dillings continue to book regular trips abroad throughout the
twenties and the thirties, and at first this seems to
have been mainly for the sake of hedonism, but I
think Elizabeth's strong Catholic upbringing makes her feel guilty for
(27:57):
just traveling to have fun. I think this is why
for most of these there's always a second purpose like, oh,
we wanted to explore how World War One affected them,
or we want to she's going to explore communist countries
and at a certain point in the future. And I
think part of it is that she feels bad about
just spending her money on vacations because she's she's fundamentally
a Catholic in her soul. I mean, she's an Episcopalian
(28:17):
as an adult, but she was raised Catholic, and you
never get over that shit. I think there's an element
of that of like, this trip has to be more
than just a trip, otherwise I'm not being a good person, right, hmm.
Whatever the reason not being a good person, She's not
being a good person anyway, but she's this is important
to her, so she starts convincing her husband to let
her book trips like their yearly vacations to the communist countries,
(28:41):
which have just started to be a thing. Right. The
communist revolution, you know, has just swept over what had
been Imperial Russia, and it's starting to take other places too,
So this is like the first time in which you
could have gone to a communist country, right, kind of
in the nineteen thirties, nineteen twenties, and thirties, And so
she starts convincing her husband to start booking trips for
these different for like Soviet Russia, right, because she wants
(29:03):
to study the impact of communism and eventually write books
about it. So in the summer of nineteen thirty one,
her husband helps the books trips to Moscow and Leningrad. Now,
Elizabeth is later going to write a book about what
she saw in the Soviet Union, and she will express
her horror at the nightmare she saw there at the
quote atheism, sex, degeneracy, broken homes, and class hatred that
(29:25):
she witnessed in the post revolutionary USSR. And indeed, the
Soviet Union at the start of the thirties was a
nation that had recently endured great horrors, a horrific civil war,
and was currently enduring horrors the horrors of the Stalinis era. Right,
it would very soon endure even worse horrors, the horrors
of the Nazi invasion. So you know, it's a tough
(29:45):
time Russia in the thirties. There are plenty of things
that Dylan could have seen in Russia in nineteen thirty
one that are horrific, right, plenty of things that would
have actually reflected badly on the Soviet government. However, it's
important I let you know that her hatred of the
Soviet Union is not based on any of those things
when you think about the actual bad things that were
occurring in the US. Sorry in nineteen thirty one, Elizabeth
(30:07):
isn't allowed to see any of them. She's on a
vacation that she's booked through the Soviet government. They have minders.
She's not traveling freely, she's only visiting the areas they're
allowed to visit. And so she's not being horrified because
she's like snuck through and seen some evidence of a
fuck up that the government was covering up of Starvey.
(30:27):
She's angry because she's seeing like churches that have been
turned into like art museums, and she's.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Like she's angry at the beautiful, losing.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Her mind, she's losing her mind at it right, and
she's pissed about like, oh, the people here aren't as
well fed as Americans and like where they under the czar?
Is that the Soviet Union's fault or is that just
the fact that like it's Russia in nineteen thirty one, Like, again,
I'm not going to minimize the faults of the Stalinists there,
of the Soviet particularly, But you can't just be like, wow,
(30:59):
people aren't as big in Russia in nineteen thirty one,
that's just communism, Nah, Liz, that goes back further. I'm sorry,
hun like that, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
Like the laziest possible takeaway from what she Yazumov saw,
But okay, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And again, the Soviet Union is very well aware that
Western countries are spying on them constantly. They are looking
for people like Liz Dilling in these trips. So again,
I don't think there's any chance Liz would have seen
any actual, like bad things, right, She's just making this
up based on like shit she sees that's like uncomfortable
to her. And the primary things that she sees over
(31:37):
there that are uncomfortable to her is that she doesn't know.
There aren't rich people in the Soviet Union that she sees, right.
She notices none of the people of my class are here, right,
there's no fancy places to go, there's no high end hotels, right,
and the society is openly atheistic, and that's what she
is reacting to. Christine Eriksson summarizes Dilling how Dilling would
(31:59):
later describe her trip. She noted with concern the idle
crowds and abandoned children roaming the streets, bordered by run
down buildings and desperate need of repair. She described in
vivid detail the poor, miserable workers' stores where the proletariat
was forced to shop. What little food stocked the shelves
was overpriced and fly infested, the site of Christian churches
being converted into anti religious museums, and the shock of
(32:20):
seeing nude bathers swim in a river under the shadow
of one Moscow church, an event Dilan captured on film
clearly signaled to her that communism bred atheism and encouraged immorality.
So whatever bad things are actually happening in the Soviet Union,
remember when Dyling talks about the horrors of communism, She's
talking about nude bathers right near a church. That's what's
scares her.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
That's what scares her, not anything else.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
That's stalin, you.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Know, offended by poverty and atheism. Yeah, abandoned children.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
They're naked.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
She was at London.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
I'm sure there are abandoned children in Moscow in nineteen
thirty one, because they've just had a civil war that
kills millions of people, millions and millions of people, that
was vastly exacerbated by Western involvement. By the way, you know,
like you can't again, you can you can't look at
any of the stuff she's seeing and just be like, well,
(33:21):
this is all the fault of communism. That's just silliness, right,
and so ironically, while Liz is going to spend the
rest of her life talking about the nightmare world that
she saw, the things she's scared about are like any
effort to reduce inequality, in any effort to reduce the
power of the church. That's what actually upsets her. She
would also complain later in her writing that Soviet men
(33:42):
seem to have no interest in her at all. They
didn't find her hot the bedbuts in the Grand Hotel
in Moscow were wild about me, the listless waiters not
at all, which Ericson suggests is Elizabeth trying to display
quote an unsettling image of Communism's power to emasculate. How
could any man ignore dylling these men are even straight
if they don't like me. Like again, her big issues
(34:03):
with Stalinist Russia are nude bathers. I'm not hot.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Just honestly, it just does not sound like the place
for you to vacation.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
You know, I don't think I think you picked the
wrong place to vacation. I don't think we take a
thirty one was for you.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Yeah, again, your timing is all off.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Your timing's really bad. If you've gotten to Moscow in
nineteen seventeen, things might have been a lot more interesting
Liz been, at least from my perspective. So her call
to action came during a tour of the Moscow Museum
of the Revolution, where a party guide told her tour
group that the World Revolution, which had started in Russia,
had now expanded to China and would end in the
United States. He then showed them an exhibit that featured
(34:45):
a fictional map of the future world where a communist
US had renamed all of its cities. And you know
this is obvious propaganda, right, Like, this isn't an evidence
of the actual capabilities, as we all know of the
Soviet Union's ability to infiltrate the United States. But this
works perfectly on Liz. She and this is everything she
(35:05):
needed too in terms of like a useful thing she
could carry home for her propaganda so when she gets home,
she is eager to preach the bad word. Elizabeth claims
that when she tried to tell her friends, her suburbanite
intellectual friends and my own episcopal minister about what she'd
seen over there, they expressed bitter opposition to her telling
the truth about Russia. Now, I don't know how much
(35:26):
I believe that. I can't imagine people who are better
informed in her saying, Hey, Liz, like, there's obvious issues
going on over there and with that government, but it
doesn't seem like you actually know anything about those issues.
It seems like you're just angry that there are any
like luxury stores and they don't believe in God, and
maybe that's dumb. Like I wonder if maybe that's what
(35:47):
her friends were saying. It is like, listen, doesn't seem
like you actually know anything about the problems over there.
It seems like you're angry the hotels weren't nice.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah, are you an elitist snob? But maybe I mean
happening here?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Do you suck?
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yoh? Okay, is it possible you just suck?
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Is it possible that you're kind of an asshole?
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Wow?
Speaker 4 (36:12):
I am imagining her friends always being relieved when she
goes on one of the big journeys and then they're.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Like, oh my god, she's out for a couple months.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
She's gonna bring out the photo albums.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Don't want to tell us about it. I don't know,
Just pretend you're horrified or whatever. Like I do wonder
how much of this is them having an issue just
because they know she's felic. Shit, And I suspect even more.
It's just like, oh shit, I don't want to see
Liz's vacation pictures. You want to see that people swimming
in Moscow. I don't really care, Like, who wants to
watch this shit exact?
Speaker 1 (36:44):
I went swimming, but then they didn't have Cavia for
me afterwards.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
It was a hard hell.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Hell, and Liz sees the fact that her friends do
not find these stories entertaining evidence of their own suicidal,
blinkered blindness, the kind that would lead her class to
march to its own extermination if it wasn't careful. So
she became a woman on a mission to ensure her
fellow citizens understood the extent of the communist menace, and
particularly the infiltration of leftist agents at every level of
(37:13):
American society and government. In one of her early pieces,
Elizabeth expressed her belief that good Christian women did not
have the right to sit at home and avoid conflict
as a fire burns in the nation's basement and radical
political subversives filled the platforms with their dirt and anti
American ideas. So she's very pissed at her fellow rich
(37:34):
friends for not, you know, doing more to stop this,
to stop the spread of communism.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
She sounds like a joy to have it in dinner PRIs.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
It sounds like so much fun just to whot yeah again.
You could if she'd had Twitter, she would be nonstitute
of law, left all of her friends and family behind
to tweet NonStop, like you know this person today. We've
seen her.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
One thousand we know several of them.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
So initially Elizabeth wrote letters to newspapers and spoke up
in local meetings, but she found little purchase for her
ideas until she befriended Iris McCord. Iris is a teacher
at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago now MBI as
it is also known as a private evangelical college that
had been founded by a wealthy businessman turned evangelist named
Dwight Moody in eighteen eighty six. Moody seems to actually
(38:20):
mostly been an okay guy. He was sided with the
Union during the Civil War, which you know, so he
gets some ups there. His whole big thing was that
in the wake of the Civil War he decided that
like evangelical Christianity needed to train what he called gap men, right,
these were men who would stand between the laity and
the ministers. So people who aren't like just normal civilians,
(38:41):
but they aren't like professional men of faith either, who
are trained to do like city mission work, who can
like go and reach people in the cities and stuff.
So that's Moody's idea, And that's where the Bible College
comes from, right, And it's important you know, MBI starts
as a college before Christianity is political in the United States.
That's not entirely accurate. There are left and right wing
(39:02):
politicians who use Christianity, but no one would say Christianity
is definitely more a left wing or a right wing thing. Okay,
this area, you couldn't clearly say that.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
Yet.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
The religious right is not a thing in this point
in time, right, Really.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
That's a more modern thing, right.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
But there aren't religious conservatives and religious hardliners right who
are conservative, and Iris is one of them, and so
is Elizabeth Dilling. And the fact that Iris taught there
and loved Dilling's reactionary rants says something about where many
of Moody's staff sat politically even in those days. So
Iris used her connections to get Elizabeth invited to speak
at numerous local churches about the communist threat to the
(39:39):
American way of life. And this helps put Elizabeth's ideas
in front of a bunch of different women, some of
them are pretty influential who have like spots in the
DAR you know, and these other groups, you know, the
Daughters of the American Revolution and the like. And so
she for the next couple of years, she starts making
an okay sight living, scaring her rich friends right, and
(40:00):
she becomes she really is. She's actually really good. It's
public speaking. She's got the gift of like entertaining and
capturing an audience. She is an electrifying speaker in person.
She's able to get a lot of these people to
be just as scared and crazy about communism as she is,
and her success earns her enough attention that she begins
getting invitations all across the United States, not just from
(40:23):
churches but from civic organizations. Now, and the DAR starts
inviting her to speak at a bunch of its local chapters.
The American Legion starts inviting her to speak at different
local events. And she's soon making enough money doing this
to support her efforts and ensure she doesn't have to
mooch off of her husband or her inheritance to have
a career, a thing she didn't believe good women ought
(40:43):
to have.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
Anyway, must be really hard for her to square those things.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
It's got to be filled with guilt.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Okay, to just to go from dilettant to a professional
like media rabble rouser in a year or so, Yeah,
a shameful must be hard for her. So yeah, they
with which Elizabeth had gone from penning her little essays
to addressing crowds around the country clearly went to her head.
So she decided to write a book, The Red Revolution
Do We Want It? Here? In this book, she railed
(41:12):
against parlor pinks who were broad minded but didn't judge
people based on their political tendency. These weak people, she argued,
let communist agents infiltrate society and corrupt children with their ideals. Right,
it's these broad minded parlor pinks who aren't like hostile
enough to socialism. That's how they sneak in. That's how
they get your society.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Okay, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
And you know who's going to destroy our society?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
I Donald Trump?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Maybe maybe, but perhaps it'll be the products and services
that support this podcast. We can all hope, we can
all hope. You know that's my dream.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
Fingers crossed.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
So we're back. The Daughters of the America Revolution in particular,
loved her work. And if you're not an American or
you just don't know, the dair is like one of
the oldest groups of like rich ladies in America, rich
white ladies.
Speaker 4 (42:08):
Okay, if you've you're not an American, you just have
to watch Gilmore Girls. That's exactly what I was. Gilmore
Girls every time huge plum oils. Emily Gilmore is a
daughter of the American Revolution.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
It means your relatives date back as far as they
can in the history of the United States while not
being like indigenous obviously.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Remember they're that fantastic episode of Gilmore Girls, Katie Well,
it's Rory's twenty first birthday, and she's become friends with
all of her grandmother's friends from the DAR, and uh
Luke goes up to them and they keep saying, oh,
we know Rory from the DR, and he goes, what's
the DAR and they all laugh in his face.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
I remember, it's great, it's great. It's great.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
And for the listeners that also get that, you're really
enjoying the story. If you're Robert and have no idea
what you're talking what I'm talking about, you seem very
baffled and confused.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
I didn't watch The Gilmore Girls, but I you should also. Yeah,
I don't think I will, but I will talk more
about the DR. Robert.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
You will love it. It was written for you, Okay.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
I don't think that's accurate. So the DAR in particular
loved Elizabeth's work, and they purchased ten thousand copies of
The Red Revolution Do we Want It here? And distribute
it to their local chapters. Elizabeth became a major name
in the world of reactionary agitation, and she became increasingly
well known among blue bloods like the Ladies of the DAAR.
This was a scene she considered herself basically part of
(43:32):
because this is these are the ladies she wants to
be friends with. She really wants to be a DAR lady.
But her family, again, they're pretty recent impocrants. I think
on both sides, it's death. It's death to her. She
hates it.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
She'll never be a joy, She'll never be that good.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
They don't. They'll never gonna like you. Your family hasn't
been here that long. And there's snooty assholes who don't
have souls like they're dead already, but so are.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
I'm gonna guess that that doesn't radicalize her to have
empathy with people that have less than her.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
She just desperately wants these rich ladies who are even
richer than her to like her, right because she doesn't
have any famous enough ancestors. For a time, getting asked
to speak at DAR events and having them reprint her
works seem like it was at least her getting her
foot in the door. But Liz is always going to
be an outsider to this crowd. However, she's now an
outsider who's making a full time living trying to scare
(44:26):
people about communists. She started telling anyone who would listen
that her cause kept her working until midnight seven days
a week. She's always talking about how hard she works,
so she's never she's a little bit Alex Jones there
where she's constantly lying about it. I'm up to my
neck and stacks of papers, documents that prove this extent
of the communist menace. I never rest right. And although
(44:46):
with her and might she might be telling the truth,
because I do think she's like a compulsive workaholic.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Or at least obsessed with this, like looking for the
right word, just feeling like she has to do this. Yeah,
she has.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
She's completely empty as a person. There's nothing else to
her besides this. She's given up. She does that.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
She also was bored when she became yes, and you know,
caught up in this like she was.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
She found this and this is the only thing that's
ever made her feel full. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's healthy.
So uh. She starts preparing for an even more influential
book that she wants to publish, and I'm going to
quote from Amy dies thesis again here. Dylan began collecting
over one hundred file cards. Each note card contained the
name of a person with pro communist affiliations. These file
(45:38):
cards sparked her to purchase a large library of books
about politics, history, law, philosophy, Jews, communism, organized labor, economics, revolution,
and foreign policy. Hey it, Liz, I get why you're
interested in books of history and law and about like
organized labor, and why are Jews live? Why are they
in there? It? Li, we know?
Speaker 3 (46:00):
Can you explain that a little bit more?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
We know what Jews are in there? I think we do?
We do?
Speaker 3 (46:05):
We know why? Oh yeah, yeah, hmm okay.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
I googled her and I saw an image that I
won't reference right now because I will you where this
is going.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yeah, oh fun, I'm interested in what that image is.
So Liz also did a lot of gumshoe work infiltrating
local communist organizations in Chicago by convincing them she wanted
to join and asking for exclusive inside information. Now, in reality,
she was just getting essays and notices about upcoming meetings,
but she always treated this as if she was receiving
a highly dangerous military intel, because that makes her sound cooler.
(46:38):
Her inspiration and a lot of this work was a
guy named Harry Young, who was the director of the
American Vigilant Federation. Now there's not a lot that remains
about Harry, but I found an entry for him on Fascippedia,
which describes the Vigilant Intelligence Federation as quote an attempt
to track radicalism among labor union members. After three days
decades of monitoring radicals and their organizations America, it has
(47:01):
been said his files exceeded a million names. Ciang is
keeping track of anyone who's in the labor movement right
He's keeping a death list ready, just in case anyone
wants to go kill these people. Young is also one
of the first Americans to distribute the Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion in the United States, and it's
said that he received his copy from three white Russians
(47:21):
fleeing their failed counter revolutions. So he is one of
the first people to spread anti Semitic propaganda in an
organized way in the United States. That's her direct inspiration.
Perfect Yeah. Young is the guy who turns the Protocols
into a movie for the first time, which helps to
create a groundbreaking work of anti Semitic propaganda that's referenced
by Nazis to this day. Elizabeth knew this about him
(47:42):
when they met. In fact, it's why she was excited
to work with Young. As Amy Die writes, Young agreed
to help Dilling by letting her look at any of
his files that she deemed important to fight the communistic threat. Later,
both Young's films and research came into the hands of
the federal government. The Department of Justice deemed Young's work
is Unamerican as it feature several racial prejudices that offend
most American citizens. So that's her like model, that's the
(48:06):
guy that she loves.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Yeah, yeah, okay, good work, Liz.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Good judgment, Liz, Yeah, you have great judgment in people.
We can certainly say that about you. In the early
nineteen thirties, Stilling also helped to found an organization, the
Paul Revers, which she claimed was a patriotic organization to
uphold Americanism in opposition to all other isms such as
socialism and communism. Interesting, fascism isn't spelled out there. She
(48:33):
lists severalisms, not fascists not Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
She conveniently forgot that ism.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah, I'm sure if you pressed her, she said, oh, yeah,
that too, of course, but she didn't want to bring
it up unless you did. Now, the only restriction the
Paul Revere's had for new members, you want to guess
the only kind of person who couldn't join her organization,
the Paul revers of Patriotic Americans. What kind of person
would she exclude? Do you think Jews or black? It's Jews.
It's Jews. No, it's actually not like black people weren't allowed. Actually,
(49:01):
but that's welcomed. But they weren't explicitly banned the way
Jewish people were. Although we have to assume they weren't welcome, right.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
I do want to. I absolutely assume that.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah, but I can also see them only stating outright
that Jews are not allowed, in part because they maybe
just wouldn't have assumed any black people would ever try
to join. They may have just been like, really like
you might have been joined, Paul as a black person.
Is sort of a like like an air bud situation,
where was like, well, no one put this in the rules,
like we clearly not.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
Even they might not even considered that.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
They did not conceive of this as a possibility.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, two.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Racists to have a race based entry requirement. Yeah. So
in nineteen thirty four, Liz published what would have become
her most influential book, The Red Network, Who's Who and
Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. This beautiful book which you'll
be see on your screen now. It's gorgeous red cover embossed,
you know, nice, very very basic font but effective, the
(50:08):
Red Network of Who's Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots.
This collected all of Elizabeth's research, all of these note
cards about these individual people that she's declared communists. This
is like almost part of it's like a almost like
a like a phone book of leftist radicals. Again, it's
kind of a kill list, right.
Speaker 3 (50:26):
Like McCarthyism pre McCarthyism.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
You've you've anticipated one of this books that yes, tailor
Joe loves this fucking book. This will make it into
the McCarthy hearings as it happens.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Yeah, oh wow.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Stuff. So we'll be hearing a lot more from this
book and hearing a lot more from it about Liz.
But that's all for part one, Katie. You got any
pluggables to plug at the end here?
Speaker 3 (50:50):
Yeah, oh sure, I got pluggables to plug.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
You can find me over at some more News with Codyen.
We got some more news. We've got even more news,
both in the same channel.
Speaker 3 (51:05):
We've got a Patreon excellent.
Speaker 2 (51:08):
All right, everybody check their Patreon out, check their channel out, yeah,
and check us out in like a day or so
when we return with the rest of the story about
Elizabeth Dylly.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
I'll be in this spot for the next two days, right.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Perfect beauty, impatiently glorious.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video
episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Remind me on Netflix you
don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog,
(51:52):
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com
slash at behind the Bastards. We love about forty percent
of you, statistically speaking,
Cool Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is not the
first episode of the podcast we've done this year during
the official summer, but it's basically the official legal Christian summer, right, guys, team,
isn't it? It feels hot as hell outside today.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
It's gonna it's but but but it only for the
next couple of days, and then it's gonna be in
the sixties.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh is it?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
And then and then and then mother Mother Nature will
water my garden and I'm thrilled.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Great, I'm glad that my will burn down yet.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Yes, Oh yeah, Katie Stoles here legend.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hey, everybody, how hot and or on fire? Is it
where you are?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Oh? Yeah, both of those things? I am in the mountains.
But it is an unpleasant Well, it's eighty five. It's
eighty five, not too bad.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
We had some ninety degree days last week. But I
moved to the mountains thinking it would be cooler, and
boy was I wrong.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, it gets hot. It gets hot.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Lots of burnable brush all around me as well, So.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, everything catches on fire out there. That's the beauty
of living out in the country.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
And they defunded one of my They close one of
our fire stations anyway.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Oh that's always oh good.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's not like California needs a lot of those wild
I'm only bringing up the summer because I had my first.
Every every year when it gets hot again, I remember, Okay,
I gotta put out sunscreen before I go run this time.
And then fifteen or so minutes into that first run
of the year with sunscreen, I remember, oh yeah, when
you sweat with sunscreen, it burns your eyes like a
son of a bitch. So if my eyes look like
(01:32):
red and buffy, it's because I just finished a run
in a shower and my entire face was on fire
from sunscreen.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I actually thought it was because you were crying. No, no, like, well,
you've been touched.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I would tell you if I was crying. But this
is simply self inflicted friendly fire.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Self inflicted friendly fire. Another piece of why are you're
wearing a sweater?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Man?
Speaker 4 (01:54):
It's it's cold, yeah, and we're talking about summer and
you're all bundled up.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I am wearing my my hoodie or my sweater.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yes. Meanwhile, Katie and I are Lucy Gucy.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, oh yeah, I got my Laker's Luka Dontrid shirt on.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Shout out to my haters. Okay, anyways, Robert did the job.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Should we do it?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah? Shall we do the job? Katie Stole? How are
you doing today podcasting wise?
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Pretty good. I'm sitting here with my old pals, whom
I've missed. Miss I have.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Missed you too, and I have missed talking to you
about shitty people. So I wanted to give you a
special shitty person today. You know, we talk a lot
about old timey far right influencers on this podcast, you know,
the first the guys around the twenties and thirties and forties,
the og American fascists, but we haven't talked a lot
about like the history of women in the early history
(02:54):
of women in the American fascist movement, and the crucial
role different like female influencers have played aid in the
American far right. And so today we're going to talk
about a woman you could call the first Candace Owens
or the first Laura Lumer. You can make a case
she's got bits of both of those, both Candace and Laura.
Oh a little bit to this lady we're going to
talk about this week, Elizabeth Dilling. Have you heard that name?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Elizabeth Dilling. Do you see why I was like, we
need Katie for this episode. Yeah, okay, I'm excited. I
do not know anything about Elizabeth Dillon.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
She's not super She is the B side who are
more famous fascist and I think you will recognize from
later on. But like again, because I guess of misogyny,
she never quite got as famous as her her male
fascist counterpart.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
It's it's really the patriarchy on Netflix. Yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Know, if you've watched it, they don't give a ship.
They barely know what's on their own network. Thanks Netflix,
thanks for the money. Elizabeth Elois Kirkpatrick was born on
April nineteenth, eighteen ninety four, in Chicago. Now, if eighteen
(04:10):
ninety four in Chicago sound familiar to you, that's because
that is the same year in city as the Pullman Strike,
which is a legendary moment in labor history. Began as
a local Chicago strike that became a national boycott and
changed US labor law forever in the process, and that
strike itself was heavily inspired by the trials of the
eighteen ninety three economic panic that fractured the US economy
(04:33):
and helped fuel Eugene V. Debs's creation of the American
Railway Union. Right, so, Chicago at the time Elizabeth is
born is real hotbed for labor, for this burgeoning and
really exploding American left, which is growing into what some
might argue and probably still to this day, would count
as its most influential period in American histories, kind of
coming up as a result of the things that are
(04:54):
sort of happening right around the time Elizabeth is born.
So it's kind of going to be important a little
that she's she's never going to adopt any of these
kind of politics, but they are happening around her and
very much in the environment that she's growing up in.
Her family is against a lot of these changes, but
she's going to grow up hearing about them because they're
right outside her door.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
You know, sure, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So little Elizabeth comes into the world in a time
and a place that was hugely significant in the history
of American labor and the struggles of the workingman against
his bosses, and so it's appropriate for the person she
would become that even as an infant, she was entirely
separate and protected from the normal world of working class people.
This is happening outside her mansion gates. Basically, her father,
(05:37):
doctor Leete Kirkpatrick, was a famous surgeon and her mother,
Elizabeth Harding, was a homemaker. But both came from very
prominent families, right, so both of their families have some
degree of like financial comfort. And her dad, at least
initially is this like famous doctor the Kirkpatrick's. Her dad's
family had been wealthy landowners in Ireland, but had fled
(05:58):
near the end of the eighteen hundreds and settled in Virginia.
Liz would Laters describe her father as coming from Scott's
Irish stock, and some googling around has given me coust
to think that her her family Basically, if you've ever
heard of like the Irish Land Wars, this period of
time in which like there's a lot of conflict in
Ireland over like who gets to own what land, there's
a lot of conflict as a result of these like
(06:19):
absentee landlords that piss off a lot of people. Well,
her her ancestors are some of the absentee lands. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
because they're like a Scottish family who winds up owning
a lot of land in Ireland, you know, yeah, And
I don't know that the Kirkpatricks had to flee their
family estate because they were brutal landlords, but my research
(06:40):
does make that seem likely, and it's always a good yeah. Yeah.
We don't talk enough about Ireland's land wars.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
It sounds like we're setting up for a family that
does not learn from those lessons. Perhaps perhaps they're here
also resenting.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
The different classes around them. I don't know, and has.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Like a long time grudge against anyone trying to fix
things because they just see that as like you're fucking
with my big you know, like that's the people that
she comes from. So let's talk a little about the
Irish land Wars because people don't often enough, and it's
a fun bit of history. Only about five percent of
the land in Ireland from the late seventeen hundreds to
the end of the eighteen hundreds was owned by Irish Catholics,
(07:23):
despite the fact that Irish Catholics were most of Ireland.
People got very angry about this and it led to
successive waves of protests and even violent insurgent direct action.
It is very possible then, that the Kirkpatricks had to
flee because they wound up on either side of this dispute,
but the fact that they had a family estate and
came to the US with money makes me suspect that
they weren't fighting for the freedom of poor men. Right,
(07:45):
These are probably on one specific side of.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
The land wars pretty solid gas.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Meanwhile, the Harding family, elizabeth'smother's people came from a long
line of Anglican bishops, which also makes it like clear
that her dad's people were foreign landlords at some point. Anyway,
she grows up fairly well off. In a two thousand
and two article for the Journal of American Studies, writer
Christine Erickson describes her family as financially comfortable, upper middle class. Right,
that's that's that's where they're coming from. Her parents have
(08:13):
enough money that, even though these are pretty rough times,
they're able to travel fairly regularly. But they're not able
to send the kids abroad with them. So Liz grows
up not traveling much yourself. But her mom and her
aunts are always visiting Europe spending their inheritance, and so
she grows up hearing about that.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Sure, okay, yeah, I mean for the parents anyway.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Sounds fun. Probably wants to bring your kids.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Sorry, kids, you had to stay mom and tenn are
off for a.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Bit, Mammadet are off for it. But also in this
period of time, mammadett are off for a bit for
like eight months because yeah, yeahs you're going to be
raised by some lady we hired by. See you when you're.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Nine, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Be back in a year, baby, Yeah, be back in
a year. Maybe her fat died when she was relatively young,
and this was he dies a sudden and surprising death,
and this leaves her mother in charge of the family.
But it says a lot about their overall financial state
that even though her father dies pretty early on, this
never affects them financially as far as we can see, right,
they remain comfortable, which means they're very well off. So
(09:20):
she's going to grow up with extremely conservative values and politics.
But she's also going to grow up because her mom
is the only one running things. After a while, she's
going to run up very grow very used to seeing
a woman call the shots right, and this is going
to have a conflicting effect on her, right because she
both comes to believe that like traditional values are best
and also she's used to women being in charge in
(09:42):
her own.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's that kind of tough to square at
that point in time.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
I guess I was gonna say, yeah, I was gonna say,
as are you Robert.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, yeah. My mom reminded, it's very reminiscent of this,
where like she was a very conservative person and also
did not understand why men should be doing anything like
Those were two ideas that co existed within her. As
Amy Dye wrote of Elizabeth in her graduate thesis for
East Tennessee University for East Tennessee State University, quote, if
(10:11):
her father had not died, she would not have been
exposed to such a strong, independent woman as her mother.
Before doctor Lafayette Kirkpatrick's death, he strongly believed the woman
belonged in the home and away from both politics and business.
In contrast, her brother, Lafayette was encouraged to pursue a
business career and at the age of twenty three, had
acquired financial security through land development in Hawaii. He subsequently
traveled around the world for three years with Baron von
(10:33):
Zepplin and continued to lead a privileged life until his
death in nineteen forty eight. Again, for any of the family,
of the money she comes from, her brother is best
friends and traveling buddies with Baron von Zepplin. It doesn't
get much older money than that. Then Baron von Zepplin
having her road trip with the Zeppelin guy. So yeah,
(10:55):
they're doing fine even with dad out of the picture.
Little Elizabeth would be described during her childhood as quote
highly emotional and an eager girl with a dramatically sculptured face,
enormous brown eyes and a quick giddy laugh. Somewhat lonely,
and casting about in search of a career, which is
also interesting. She's a very she will always espouse very
traditional values. She's always looking for a job for herself.
(11:18):
She never is interested in just being a homemade and
not you know, no problem with that, but she is
never interested in just sitting at home and raising kids.
She wants to do something out in the world that
people are aware of.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
It's actually a very fascinating dynamic for somebody. I mean
we're seeing it still to this day. Yes, your mother,
I guess was this way. But this is this big
push in the Conservative party for traditional values, and yet
they're going to be advocating for their own careers. It
seems counterintuitive but interesting for this woman.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, I mean, it's the Philish Loveley thing right of
like I don't think women should be doing any of
this stuff. Also, as a woman, I really like to
have a big career.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
And also like modern times, that's very Erica Kirk. Yeah,
it's very Erica Kirk. That is exactly what I was thinking.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
But yeah, I mean if either of you have seen
any of like the interview clips from tpusa's like first
big like women's event that Erica Kirk led, it's all
when people are interviewed, it's all like this where they're
like all over the map on if they're like, well
women can have it all, but they have to do this,
but women could have it all, but not those women.
(12:25):
It's really interesting coverage just to like get an insight
into that ideological thinking.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
It's fascinating anytime you have to be you have that
much cognitive dissonance in your belief system that always winds
up being fascinating on some level.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
And like in a way that I just there's no
way there would be an Erica Kirk without a Liz Dilling,
without a philistathe without it.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
You know, it's all.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
She had to crawl so that Erica Kirk could.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
I don't know. I don't know who's doing it whatever.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
So Erica Kirk could come out with a fire boom,
yeah behind her.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So Elizabeth attends grammar school in a secondary school. She's
going to nice schools. Her parents pay money to get
her quality education. She studies the concert harp at a
Catholic academy, and she graduates from a girls school and
is noted as having an almost photographic memory. Her early
interests were and this is not a normal like, her
education's weird because I can't graph it directly onto a
(13:21):
normal one. Because she is both doing like normal primary school,
secondary school and also Catholic Academy women's preparatory finishing school.
Like she spends years in schools that are just to
like teach you how to behave as a woman. Like
that's part of part of her schooling because she's like
an upper class lady. Right. It takes a lot. You
gotta know where all the forks go and stuff. I imagine
(13:43):
there's more to it than forks, but forks seem like
they're pretty key.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Stand up straight? How does smile?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Stand up straight? That's right? How to ride side saddle?
There's I know there's a sadder. There's a ry you're
supposed to write as a lady. That's the polite way,
So there's the rude way. Maybe side saddle is the
rude way. I don't know much about it, hort.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
I really feel like side saddle should be reserved for
men anatomically speaking, but I digress.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Look the horse girls can can correct us, because I
don't know much about riding horses. I know there's a
way you're supposed to write, and there's a way that
you're not supposed to ride as an old timey woman,
but I don't know. I don't know which is which. Anyway,
she goes to all these different weird schools. She learns
how to be a lady and a good Catholic. She's
interested primarily in both classical music and the French language.
(14:27):
I don't actually know if she ever gets what you'd
call a normal college degree, but during her time in
Catholic school, she was made to study the Bible. And
so this is kind of like knowledge and faith are
always weirdly wrapped up with her, but also knowledge and
like the performance of societal roles, are always directly locked together.
She never just gets an education that's an education on
(14:48):
its own. It's always an education, partly in how to
exist in a certain social hierarchy. If that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
It does make sense.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
As Amy Die writes in nineteen seventeen, as the first
US forces are getting their it's dirty in World War One,
Elizabeth meets a man described as a young army officer
from Arizona who quote introduced her to a completely new
way of thinking. This is her first fascist boyfriend. So
she meets this mystery army officer who starts saying, oh,
you got to read these books, right, and so he
starts giving her cocked and Nietzsche and Hegel and next quote,
(15:20):
after introducing Elizabeth to these forward thinkers, he contradicted himself
by saying women did not count as human beings. Oh
so he's like, he's you need to read this Nietzsche.
But you're a woman, so you can't read it. You're
not a person. But here you should have some Hegel.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
But here read it. But you're not really a person
a woman, and you're too dumb. You're not gonna get it.
But here, God is dead.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I get the She doesn't say this, but I get
the feeling. He's like, intermittently flirting with her and yelling
at her like it's one of those kind of weird guys,
and she's totally under it.
Speaker 4 (15:51):
If you had ever been flirted with by a fascist
soldier from Arizona, you would know.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
That the game, that's part of the day, that's that
what works.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, well, she.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Gets that beautiful experience and you can tell it completely
awakens her. Right. This is where she becomes an ideological
thinker for the first time. And the fact that her
ideological awakening comes courtesy of a man who does not
consider her human is very telling and very bleak. But
what else are you gonna say.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
I'm not saying I have empathy because I have a
feeling she's not gonna be someone I like.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
How well, it's just a holy shit, it's pretty fucked up.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, you guys can check out. Just imagine like trying
to tell your like your other lady friends, like, Yeah,
this wonderful guy, he introduced me all these great books.
I'm really thinking in new ways about like what makes
a person a person. I don't think I'm one. According
to him anyway, he's nice, He's.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
At any rate, this does not last. I really wish
I knew what happened with this guy. Maybe he was
just too much finincell, or maybe he goes out and
it dies out in world We hope he guy and
dies in World War One. Yeah, I'm hoping the old
dub dub uno does a solid on that one. At
any rate, not long after whatever happens with this guy
in she continues reading philosophy, and she starts thinking really
(17:14):
hard about the underlying order of society. And as she's
thinking about this, Elizabeth meets her future husband, Albert Walwick Dilling. Now,
I don't think Albert Walwick Dilling is the kind of
guy who's gonna tell her she's not a person. He's
the kind I get the feeling. He's very ideologically malleable.
I think he's naturally more conservative, so he's comfortable with
(17:34):
her ideology. But I also think he goes along with
her a lot, you know, okay, And I think he
gets One of the things he gets from her is
that he gets to pretend and feel like and she
will reinforce that he is in charge while also being
in charge of a lot, and so he doesn't have
to be in charge of as much feeling.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
It's exactly what you mean you've seen these kinds of relationships, right,
one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
She's like, I defer to my man, But she's the
one that's telling him, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Defer to my man. God help him. If he has
an idea of.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
His own, I defer my man as long as it's
he goes with what.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
I said exactly. So at the time he was a lawyer,
he had trained as an engineer. Originally, he had been
born in Salt Lake City back in eighteen ninety two.
By the time he was ready for college, and I
don't think he was Mormon. I think it probably would
have mentioned that she certainly is not, and I don't
think she would have been cool with a practicing Mormon
given her beliefs, but I'm not really sure. By the
(18:30):
time he's ready for college, he migrated to the Chicago
area and he took the Illinois bar in nineteen seventeen. Now,
Elizabeth Harardi refused one marriage proposal by the time she
met Albert, but for some reason, this guy sweeps her
off her feet and after nine months the two are
married and the romantic city of Laporte, Indiana. This would
have been made of nineteen eighteen. Yes, yes, the city
(18:51):
of love itself, the city of unbridled fucking. That's what
we call Laporte Indiana. That's the city motto. Actually, Laporte Indiana.
It's a lee to buy condoms here, you know, Just
so you know, Laporte. Everybody catch the fever and something else,
because again, condoms are illegal. Yeah. After this point, Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, though,
(19:12):
is now Elizabeth Dilling. And this is the name that
she's going to be famous under. Right, everyone knows her
as Elizabeth Dilling. That's how she becomes Elizabeth Dillon. She
marries this Albert Dilling guy. She's twenty four years old
in nineteen eighteen, and after a brief honeymoon, she and
Albert moved to a suburb of Chicago, Wilmot, where they
borrow money and buy a home. Albert claims that when
(19:33):
they got married, he had quote nothing to offer but
a good education, bright prospects, good help, and some sizeable debts,
but Liz had family money of her own. In just
two years, Albert was made chief engineer of the Chicago
Sanitary District, and his career would continue to rise over
the coming years. While he was making a career for
himself as a high level engineer for one of the
largest cities on Earth. He would eventually become the city
(19:55):
engineer for Union Station Development and the Engineer Assistant to
the Commission for Public Works. Liz was inheriting the money
that would ensure she never needed to utilize public works herself.
Her husband helps make sure that like the city's public
like transit works, and Elizabeth inherits enough money that she
doesn't have to use it.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, so only imagine they're the like twenty twenty six
dating profiles.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Oh my god, these two and twenty twenty six are
definitely the weird natalist freaks who wind up on the
news every six months talking about like there're eleven kids
that they're having to change the world with Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah, Liz Dilling definitely like puts her credit scare on
her dating profile.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah. I can see her having an interview with Vanity
Fair where she slaps her child and a fucking diner. Yeah.
So she receives enormous inheritances from two aunts and then
in the mid nineteen thirties from her mother. So she's
very comfortably off even though her husband is not making
a lot of money immediately, but her husband, you know,
(20:54):
is making comfortable middle class incomes. You have inherits a
lot of money and a good income. They're doing quite well,
and they're doing well enough that in short order before
either of them is, you know, particularly old, they're going
to have enough money to do what wealthy people do
in this period of time in particular, which is go
on really long and elaborate vacations all the time. So
(21:14):
from nineteen twenty three to nineteen thirty nine, the Dillings
travel oversea ten times, and these are all multi week
or multi month excursions. We're talking like orient Express type shit,
where you're on trains and in fancy boats, you've got
sleeper car like that. These are not like casual vacations.
You can't just jaunt somewhere quickly, right.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Yeah, no, this is this is yeah, like her mother
months long also famously a bad.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Time for the world financially to not have needs to
just travel like this exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
I mean they're mostly traveling, although they are through all
the thirties too, you know. So yeah, like a lot
of it is during a really rough time.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Yeah, it's not the main takeaway here, but I yeah,
they're doing certainly fine. It says a lot about well,
what they're doing while the rest that the world was burning.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, well while the rest of the world was falling
to fascis, And they're going on like long elaborate vacations, right,
They're doing very they're very comfortable. Their first trip overseas,
they get to tour England, the Low Countries, France, and
then Italy, at which point they enter the Vatican City
and have a private audience with the Pope. So they
have like, oh money, Like that's how comfortable she is.
(22:22):
Amy Die writes that the Dillings had booked this trip
in part to get a first hand account of the
aftermath of the First World War, right, Like that's a
big that's at least what Elizabeth wants her friends to
believe that, Like, we're not just doing this as a vacation.
We're doing this to get an eye on how Europe's handled,
you know, after the war, right, Like that's the way
that she frames this.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
Making my eyes roll back and it is Okay, here's
we're just gonna go study.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
We're gonna go check it out. And I can tell
you from experience, if you're in like an active war zone,
there are often a lot of people who are eager
to talk about what's happening to them right now, in
part because they hope that like maybe international attention will
like help their situation, and like it's happening right now,
and they want people to know about the horrible stuff.
When you go to a place that has just been
at war, like a couple of years ago, they don't
(23:08):
usually want to talk about it. They're kind of trying
to forget it. So this just for a vacation people
like nineteen nineteen, people wandering around like don't want to
want to talk to a bunch of America's big Yeah,
what was the war like here in dun You know,
was it fun? Did you enjoy it? Like people wod
not have a good time and don't want her shit.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
Completely devastated trying to recover from uh yeah no bad
timing bit.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, how did you do you think it was? Liz bad?
And this seems to be what the Dillings encountered. People
are not super eager to talk to them, As Dye's
account says, quote, Dilling became frustrated by the anti American
attitudes that she had encountered amongst the British and the French.
The former Allies often gave the United States no credit
for helping win the First World War and often complained
(23:56):
that the United States had not entered the war sooner. So, yeah,
I think people didn't really want to talk about the war,
and like folks who'd lost all their money and like
their kids didn't want to talk about how great America
was for eventually getting involved, like some fucking British family
who lost everything. This is gonna be like, yeah, thanks guys,
really glad you got here in nineteen seventeen, right on
(24:17):
the dot.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
Hh yeah, yeah, it's not surprising, not surprising.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
She takes this personally. She takes this as an insult
to herself. On the steamship home, an English traveler sees
a member of her party who's wearing like a sailor
outfit with US Navy printed on it, and he just
like starts shit talking like that. But it's like, ah,
your Navy's a joke, you Americans, And Liz responds, I
don't know if it's such a joke. It's been able
to lick Great Britain twice and I think it could
(24:46):
do it again. And first off, Liz, the last time
it beat Gray Britan was nineteen twelve like or eighteen
twelve like, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if
we should be bragging about that in nineteen eighteen. Just
seems a little ahead of the eight ball. It's not
been it's been a while since we fought the British Navy.
I don't know, Liz the And also, it's just like,
(25:08):
what a ridiculous reaction to someone saying that he's clearly
like frustrated that you're walking around talking about what hot
shit your military is when you just kind of sltered
in the last minute of like a devastating war. I
get why the Europeans are pissed at her.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Absolutely. This woman has no self awareness.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
No, and this situation, this whole encounter with his rude
person on the boat, causes her to make a vow
then and there that if another war ever came to Europe,
she will work herself to the bone to keep the
United States out of it because of these ungrateful Europeans.
I'll make sure we never enter another war to support
Europe again. You know, that's Liz's encounter here, or it'll
(25:46):
take it. It's really sad.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
I'm not surprising I mean, no, I'm always whenever I'm here.
It's impossible to not draw parallels to modern day I've
already done it several times.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
But it's like, it's so pathetic.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
How easily some people get offended and vowed to make
that their idea of an entire place for the rest
of their life.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Yeah, yeah, like I think they didn't even have anything
to do with honestly, But anyway, you know what else
is sad? Not listening to ads?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Heartbreak? What You're right, it is such a heartbreak. I
love ads.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
We're back and we're talking about how we never skip
the ads on podcasts. Never. What does that mean? Sometimes
I listen to extra ads, you know. Sometimes I listen
to ads that aren't even for podcasts. Sometimes they just
fall asleep directly in front of a billboard, you know,
so I can worship it.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Do you have an ad playlist too for bedtime?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yes, it's only an ad playlist for bedtime to be fair.
All right, So let's get back to Liz Dilly. So, yeah,
Liz's just had this experience heading home from Europe where
these ungrateful Europeans were not deferent enough to the US
Navy so she decides to stop the US from ever
helping Europe in a war again. I don't know if
(27:13):
I believe that actually happened, in part because Liz is
going to be like anti war during World War Two
because she's a fascist. And I think maybe she invinced
this story because it's like a more palatable truth as
opposed to like, I don't want you used to get
involved in World War two because I like the Nazis.
She could be like, no, they're so ungrateful after all
the rudeness they showed us last time, Why would we
(27:34):
risk our lives again for them? You know. I kind
of think maybe she just makes this up after the fact,
but it's possible that this actually happens. Like, I don't
know one way or the other. Despite their frustrations with Europeans,
the Dillings continue to book regular trips abroad throughout the
twenties and the thirties, and at first this seems to
have been mainly for the sake of hedonism, but I
think Elizabeth's strong Catholic upbringing makes her feel guilty for
(27:57):
just traveling to have fun. I think this is why
for most of these there's always a second purpose like, oh,
we wanted to explore how World War One affected them,
or we want to she's going to explore communist countries
and at a certain point in the future. And I
think part of it is that she feels bad about
just spending her money on vacations because she's she's fundamentally
a Catholic in her soul. I mean, she's an Episcopalian
(28:17):
as an adult, but she was raised Catholic, and you
never get over that shit. I think there's an element
of that of like, this trip has to be more
than just a trip, otherwise I'm not being a good person, right, hmm.
Whatever the reason not being a good person, She's not
being a good person anyway, but she's this is important
to her, so she starts convincing her husband to let
her book trips like their yearly vacations to the communist countries,
(28:41):
which have just started to be a thing. Right. The
communist revolution, you know, has just swept over what had
been Imperial Russia, and it's starting to take other places too,
So this is like the first time in which you
could have gone to a communist country, right, kind of
in the nineteen thirties, nineteen twenties, and thirties, And so
she starts convincing her husband to start booking trips for
these different for like Soviet Russia, right, because she wants
(29:03):
to study the impact of communism and eventually write books
about it. So in the summer of nineteen thirty one,
her husband helps the books trips to Moscow and Leningrad. Now,
Elizabeth is later going to write a book about what
she saw in the Soviet Union, and she will express
her horror at the nightmare she saw there at the
quote atheism, sex, degeneracy, broken homes, and class hatred that
(29:25):
she witnessed in the post revolutionary USSR. And indeed, the
Soviet Union at the start of the thirties was a
nation that had recently endured great horrors, a horrific civil war,
and was currently enduring horrors the horrors of the Stalinis era. Right,
it would very soon endure even worse horrors, the horrors
of the Nazi invasion. So you know, it's a tough
(29:45):
time Russia in the thirties. There are plenty of things
that Dylan could have seen in Russia in nineteen thirty
one that are horrific, right, plenty of things that would
have actually reflected badly on the Soviet government. However, it's
important I let you know that her hatred of the
Soviet Union is not based on any of those things
when you think about the actual bad things that were
occurring in the US. Sorry in nineteen thirty one, Elizabeth
(30:07):
isn't allowed to see any of them. She's on a
vacation that she's booked through the Soviet government. They have minders.
She's not traveling freely, she's only visiting the areas they're
allowed to visit. And so she's not being horrified because
she's like snuck through and seen some evidence of a
fuck up that the government was covering up of Starvey.
(30:27):
She's angry because she's seeing like churches that have been
turned into like art museums, and she's.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Like she's angry at the beautiful, losing.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Her mind, she's losing her mind at it right, and
she's pissed about like, oh, the people here aren't as
well fed as Americans and like where they under the czar?
Is that the Soviet Union's fault or is that just
the fact that like it's Russia in nineteen thirty one, Like, again,
I'm not going to minimize the faults of the Stalinists there,
of the Soviet particularly, But you can't just be like, wow,
(30:59):
people aren't as big in Russia in nineteen thirty one,
that's just communism, Nah, Liz, that goes back further. I'm sorry,
hun like that, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
Like the laziest possible takeaway from what she Yazumov saw,
But okay, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And again, the Soviet Union is very well aware that
Western countries are spying on them constantly. They are looking
for people like Liz Dilling in these trips. So again,
I don't think there's any chance Liz would have seen
any actual, like bad things, right, She's just making this
up based on like shit she sees that's like uncomfortable
to her. And the primary things that she sees over
(31:37):
there that are uncomfortable to her is that she doesn't know.
There aren't rich people in the Soviet Union that she sees, right.
She notices none of the people of my class are here, right,
there's no fancy places to go, there's no high end hotels, right,
and the society is openly atheistic, and that's what she
is reacting to. Christine Eriksson summarizes Dilling how Dilling would
(31:59):
later describe her trip. She noted with concern the idle
crowds and abandoned children roaming the streets, bordered by run
down buildings and desperate need of repair. She described in
vivid detail the poor, miserable workers' stores where the proletariat
was forced to shop. What little food stocked the shelves
was overpriced and fly infested, the site of Christian churches
being converted into anti religious museums, and the shock of
(32:20):
seeing nude bathers swim in a river under the shadow
of one Moscow church, an event Dilan captured on film
clearly signaled to her that communism bred atheism and encouraged immorality.
So whatever bad things are actually happening in the Soviet Union,
remember when Dyling talks about the horrors of communism, She's
talking about nude bathers right near a church. That's what's
scares her.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
That's what scares her, not anything else.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
That's stalin, you.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Know, offended by poverty and atheism. Yeah, abandoned children.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
They're naked.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
She was at London.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
I'm sure there are abandoned children in Moscow in nineteen
thirty one, because they've just had a civil war that
kills millions of people, millions and millions of people, that
was vastly exacerbated by Western involvement. By the way, you know,
like you can't again, you can you can't look at
any of the stuff she's seeing and just be like, well,
(33:21):
this is all the fault of communism. That's just silliness, right,
and so ironically, while Liz is going to spend the
rest of her life talking about the nightmare world that
she saw, the things she's scared about are like any
effort to reduce inequality, in any effort to reduce the
power of the church. That's what actually upsets her. She
would also complain later in her writing that Soviet men
(33:42):
seem to have no interest in her at all. They
didn't find her hot the bedbuts in the Grand Hotel
in Moscow were wild about me, the listless waiters not
at all, which Ericson suggests is Elizabeth trying to display
quote an unsettling image of Communism's power to emasculate. How
could any man ignore dylling these men are even straight
if they don't like me. Like again, her big issues
(34:03):
with Stalinist Russia are nude bathers. I'm not hot.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Just honestly, it just does not sound like the place
for you to vacation.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
You know, I don't think I think you picked the
wrong place to vacation. I don't think we take a
thirty one was for you.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Yeah, again, your timing is all off.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Your timing's really bad. If you've gotten to Moscow in
nineteen seventeen, things might have been a lot more interesting
Liz been, at least from my perspective. So her call
to action came during a tour of the Moscow Museum
of the Revolution, where a party guide told her tour
group that the World Revolution, which had started in Russia,
had now expanded to China and would end in the
United States. He then showed them an exhibit that featured
(34:45):
a fictional map of the future world where a communist
US had renamed all of its cities. And you know
this is obvious propaganda, right, Like, this isn't an evidence
of the actual capabilities, as we all know of the
Soviet Union's ability to infiltrate the United States. But this
works perfectly on Liz. She and this is everything she
(35:05):
needed too in terms of like a useful thing she
could carry home for her propaganda so when she gets home,
she is eager to preach the bad word. Elizabeth claims
that when she tried to tell her friends, her suburbanite
intellectual friends and my own episcopal minister about what she'd
seen over there, they expressed bitter opposition to her telling
the truth about Russia. Now, I don't know how much
(35:26):
I believe that. I can't imagine people who are better
informed in her saying, Hey, Liz, like, there's obvious issues
going on over there and with that government, but it
doesn't seem like you actually know anything about those issues.
It seems like you're just angry that there are any
like luxury stores and they don't believe in God, and
maybe that's dumb. Like I wonder if maybe that's what
(35:47):
her friends were saying. It is like, listen, doesn't seem
like you actually know anything about the problems over there.
It seems like you're angry the hotels weren't nice.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah, are you an elitist snob? But maybe I mean
happening here?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Do you suck?
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yoh? Okay, is it possible you just suck?
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Is it possible that you're kind of an asshole?
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Wow?
Speaker 4 (36:12):
I am imagining her friends always being relieved when she
goes on one of the big journeys and then they're.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Like, oh my god, she's out for a couple months.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
She's gonna bring out the photo albums.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Don't want to tell us about it. I don't know,
Just pretend you're horrified or whatever. Like I do wonder
how much of this is them having an issue just
because they know she's felic. Shit, And I suspect even more.
It's just like, oh shit, I don't want to see
Liz's vacation pictures. You want to see that people swimming
in Moscow. I don't really care, Like, who wants to
watch this shit exact?
Speaker 1 (36:44):
I went swimming, but then they didn't have Cavia for
me afterwards.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
It was a hard hell.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Hell, and Liz sees the fact that her friends do
not find these stories entertaining evidence of their own suicidal,
blinkered blindness, the kind that would lead her class to
march to its own extermination if it wasn't careful. So
she became a woman on a mission to ensure her
fellow citizens understood the extent of the communist menace, and
particularly the infiltration of leftist agents at every level of
(37:13):
American society and government. In one of her early pieces,
Elizabeth expressed her belief that good Christian women did not
have the right to sit at home and avoid conflict
as a fire burns in the nation's basement and radical
political subversives filled the platforms with their dirt and anti
American ideas. So she's very pissed at her fellow rich
(37:34):
friends for not, you know, doing more to stop this,
to stop the spread of communism.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
She sounds like a joy to have it in dinner PRIs.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
It sounds like so much fun just to whot yeah again.
You could if she'd had Twitter, she would be nonstitute
of law, left all of her friends and family behind
to tweet NonStop, like you know this person today. We've
seen her.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
One thousand we know several of them.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
So initially Elizabeth wrote letters to newspapers and spoke up
in local meetings, but she found little purchase for her
ideas until she befriended Iris McCord. Iris is a teacher
at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago now MBI as
it is also known as a private evangelical college that
had been founded by a wealthy businessman turned evangelist named
Dwight Moody in eighteen eighty six. Moody seems to actually
(38:20):
mostly been an okay guy. He was sided with the
Union during the Civil War, which you know, so he
gets some ups there. His whole big thing was that
in the wake of the Civil War he decided that
like evangelical Christianity needed to train what he called gap men, right,
these were men who would stand between the laity and
the ministers. So people who aren't like just normal civilians,
(38:41):
but they aren't like professional men of faith either, who
are trained to do like city mission work, who can
like go and reach people in the cities and stuff.
So that's Moody's idea, And that's where the Bible College
comes from, right, And it's important you know, MBI starts
as a college before Christianity is political in the United States.
That's not entirely accurate. There are left and right wing
(39:02):
politicians who use Christianity, but no one would say Christianity
is definitely more a left wing or a right wing thing. Okay,
this area, you couldn't clearly say that.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
Yet.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
The religious right is not a thing in this point
in time, right, Really.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
That's a more modern thing, right.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
But there aren't religious conservatives and religious hardliners right who
are conservative, and Iris is one of them, and so
is Elizabeth Dilling. And the fact that Iris taught there
and loved Dilling's reactionary rants says something about where many
of Moody's staff sat politically even in those days. So
Iris used her connections to get Elizabeth invited to speak
at numerous local churches about the communist threat to the
(39:39):
American way of life. And this helps put Elizabeth's ideas
in front of a bunch of different women, some of
them are pretty influential who have like spots in the
DAR you know, and these other groups, you know, the
Daughters of the American Revolution and the like. And so
she for the next couple of years, she starts making
an okay sight living, scaring her rich friends right, and
(40:00):
she becomes she really is. She's actually really good. It's
public speaking. She's got the gift of like entertaining and
capturing an audience. She is an electrifying speaker in person.
She's able to get a lot of these people to
be just as scared and crazy about communism as she is,
and her success earns her enough attention that she begins
getting invitations all across the United States, not just from
(40:23):
churches but from civic organizations. Now, and the DAR starts
inviting her to speak at a bunch of its local chapters.
The American Legion starts inviting her to speak at different
local events. And she's soon making enough money doing this
to support her efforts and ensure she doesn't have to
mooch off of her husband or her inheritance to have
a career, a thing she didn't believe good women ought
(40:43):
to have.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
Anyway, must be really hard for her to square those things.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
It's got to be filled with guilt.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Okay, to just to go from dilettant to a professional
like media rabble rouser in a year or so, Yeah,
a shameful must be hard for her. So yeah, they
with which Elizabeth had gone from penning her little essays
to addressing crowds around the country clearly went to her head.
So she decided to write a book, The Red Revolution
Do We Want It? Here? In this book, she railed
(41:12):
against parlor pinks who were broad minded but didn't judge
people based on their political tendency. These weak people, she argued,
let communist agents infiltrate society and corrupt children with their ideals. Right,
it's these broad minded parlor pinks who aren't like hostile
enough to socialism. That's how they sneak in. That's how
they get your society.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Okay, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
And you know who's going to destroy our society?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
I Donald Trump?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Maybe maybe, but perhaps it'll be the products and services
that support this podcast. We can all hope, we can
all hope. You know that's my dream.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
Fingers crossed.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
So we're back. The Daughters of the America Revolution in particular,
loved her work. And if you're not an American or
you just don't know, the dair is like one of
the oldest groups of like rich ladies in America, rich
white ladies.
Speaker 4 (42:08):
Okay, if you've you're not an American, you just have
to watch Gilmore Girls. That's exactly what I was. Gilmore
Girls every time huge plum oils. Emily Gilmore is a
daughter of the American Revolution.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
It means your relatives date back as far as they
can in the history of the United States while not
being like indigenous obviously.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Remember they're that fantastic episode of Gilmore Girls, Katie Well,
it's Rory's twenty first birthday, and she's become friends with
all of her grandmother's friends from the DAR, and uh
Luke goes up to them and they keep saying, oh,
we know Rory from the DR, and he goes, what's
the DAR and they all laugh in his face.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
I remember, it's great, it's great. It's great.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
And for the listeners that also get that, you're really
enjoying the story. If you're Robert and have no idea
what you're talking what I'm talking about, you seem very
baffled and confused.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
I didn't watch The Gilmore Girls, but I you should also. Yeah,
I don't think I will, but I will talk more
about the DR. Robert.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
You will love it. It was written for you, Okay.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
I don't think that's accurate. So the DAR in particular
loved Elizabeth's work, and they purchased ten thousand copies of
The Red Revolution Do we Want It here? And distribute
it to their local chapters. Elizabeth became a major name
in the world of reactionary agitation, and she became increasingly
well known among blue bloods like the Ladies of the DAAR.
This was a scene she considered herself basically part of
(43:32):
because this is these are the ladies she wants to
be friends with. She really wants to be a DAR lady.
But her family, again, they're pretty recent impocrants. I think
on both sides, it's death. It's death to her. She
hates it.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
She'll never be a joy, She'll never be that good.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
They don't. They'll never gonna like you. Your family hasn't
been here that long. And there's snooty assholes who don't
have souls like they're dead already, but so are.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
I'm gonna guess that that doesn't radicalize her to have
empathy with people that have less than her.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
She just desperately wants these rich ladies who are even
richer than her to like her, right because she doesn't
have any famous enough ancestors. For a time, getting asked
to speak at DAR events and having them reprint her
works seem like it was at least her getting her
foot in the door. But Liz is always going to
be an outsider to this crowd. However, she's now an
outsider who's making a full time living trying to scare
(44:26):
people about communists. She started telling anyone who would listen
that her cause kept her working until midnight seven days
a week. She's always talking about how hard she works,
so she's never she's a little bit Alex Jones there
where she's constantly lying about it. I'm up to my
neck and stacks of papers, documents that prove this extent
of the communist menace. I never rest right. And although
(44:46):
with her and might she might be telling the truth,
because I do think she's like a compulsive workaholic.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Or at least obsessed with this, like looking for the
right word, just feeling like she has to do this. Yeah,
she has.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
She's completely empty as a person. There's nothing else to
her besides this. She's given up. She does that.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
She also was bored when she became yes, and you know,
caught up in this like she was.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
She found this and this is the only thing that's
ever made her feel full. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's healthy.
So uh. She starts preparing for an even more influential
book that she wants to publish, and I'm going to
quote from Amy dies thesis again here. Dylan began collecting
over one hundred file cards. Each note card contained the
name of a person with pro communist affiliations. These file
(45:38):
cards sparked her to purchase a large library of books
about politics, history, law, philosophy, Jews, communism, organized labor, economics, revolution,
and foreign policy. Hey it, Liz, I get why you're
interested in books of history and law and about like
organized labor, and why are Jews live? Why are they
in there? It? Li, we know?
Speaker 3 (46:00):
Can you explain that a little bit more?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
We know what Jews are in there? I think we do?
We do?
Speaker 3 (46:05):
We know why? Oh yeah, yeah, hmm okay.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
I googled her and I saw an image that I
won't reference right now because I will you where this
is going.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yeah, oh fun, I'm interested in what that image is.
So Liz also did a lot of gumshoe work infiltrating
local communist organizations in Chicago by convincing them she wanted
to join and asking for exclusive inside information. Now, in reality,
she was just getting essays and notices about upcoming meetings,
but she always treated this as if she was receiving
a highly dangerous military intel, because that makes her sound cooler.
(46:38):
Her inspiration and a lot of this work was a
guy named Harry Young, who was the director of the
American Vigilant Federation. Now there's not a lot that remains
about Harry, but I found an entry for him on Fascippedia,
which describes the Vigilant Intelligence Federation as quote an attempt
to track radicalism among labor union members. After three days
decades of monitoring radicals and their organizations America, it has
(47:01):
been said his files exceeded a million names. Ciang is
keeping track of anyone who's in the labor movement right
He's keeping a death list ready, just in case anyone
wants to go kill these people. Young is also one
of the first Americans to distribute the Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion in the United States, and it's
said that he received his copy from three white Russians
(47:21):
fleeing their failed counter revolutions. So he is one of
the first people to spread anti Semitic propaganda in an
organized way in the United States. That's her direct inspiration.
Perfect Yeah. Young is the guy who turns the Protocols
into a movie for the first time, which helps to
create a groundbreaking work of anti Semitic propaganda that's referenced
by Nazis to this day. Elizabeth knew this about him
(47:42):
when they met. In fact, it's why she was excited
to work with Young. As Amy Die writes, Young agreed
to help Dilling by letting her look at any of
his files that she deemed important to fight the communistic threat. Later,
both Young's films and research came into the hands of
the federal government. The Department of Justice deemed Young's work
is Unamerican as it feature several racial prejudices that offend
most American citizens. So that's her like model, that's the
(48:06):
guy that she loves.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Yeah, yeah, okay, good work, Liz.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Good judgment, Liz, Yeah, you have great judgment in people.
We can certainly say that about you. In the early
nineteen thirties, Stilling also helped to found an organization, the
Paul Revers, which she claimed was a patriotic organization to
uphold Americanism in opposition to all other isms such as
socialism and communism. Interesting, fascism isn't spelled out there. She
(48:33):
lists severalisms, not fascists not Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
She conveniently forgot that ism.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah, I'm sure if you pressed her, she said, oh, yeah,
that too, of course, but she didn't want to bring
it up unless you did. Now, the only restriction the
Paul Revere's had for new members, you want to guess
the only kind of person who couldn't join her organization,
the Paul revers of Patriotic Americans. What kind of person
would she exclude? Do you think Jews or black? It's Jews.
It's Jews. No, it's actually not like black people weren't allowed. Actually,
(49:01):
but that's welcomed. But they weren't explicitly banned the way
Jewish people were. Although we have to assume they weren't welcome, right.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
I do want to. I absolutely assume that.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah, but I can also see them only stating outright
that Jews are not allowed, in part because they maybe
just wouldn't have assumed any black people would ever try
to join. They may have just been like, really like
you might have been joined, Paul as a black person.
Is sort of a like like an air bud situation,
where was like, well, no one put this in the rules,
like we clearly not.
Speaker 3 (49:34):
Even they might not even considered that.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
They did not conceive of this as a possibility.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, two.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Racists to have a race based entry requirement. Yeah. So
in nineteen thirty four, Liz published what would have become
her most influential book, The Red Network, Who's Who and
Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. This beautiful book which you'll
be see on your screen now. It's gorgeous red cover embossed,
you know, nice, very very basic font but effective, the
(50:08):
Red Network of Who's Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots.
This collected all of Elizabeth's research, all of these note
cards about these individual people that she's declared communists. This
is like almost part of it's like a almost like
a like a phone book of leftist radicals. Again, it's
kind of a kill list, right.
Speaker 3 (50:26):
Like McCarthyism pre McCarthyism.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
You've you've anticipated one of this books that yes, tailor
Joe loves this fucking book. This will make it into
the McCarthy hearings as it happens.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Yeah, oh wow.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Stuff. So we'll be hearing a lot more from this
book and hearing a lot more from it about Liz.
But that's all for part one, Katie. You got any
pluggables to plug at the end here?
Speaker 3 (50:50):
Yeah, oh sure, I got pluggables to plug.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
You can find me over at some more News with Codyen.
We got some more news. We've got even more news,
both in the same channel.
Speaker 3 (51:05):
We've got a Patreon excellent.
Speaker 2 (51:08):
All right, everybody check their Patreon out, check their channel out, yeah,
and check us out in like a day or so
when we return with the rest of the story about
Elizabeth Dylly.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
I'll be in this spot for the next two days, right.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Perfect beauty, impatiently glorious.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video
episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Remind me on Netflix you
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(51:52):
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Behind the Bastards News
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