Behind the Scenes Minis: It's Not Unprecedented

Tracy shares her desire to see the rest of the letter that was quoted in this week's episodes on Anthony Burns. Talk also turns to the fact that many of the things that are surprising people today are, in fact, precedented.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
And Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We spent all week talking
about Anthony Burns. Yeah, we did, after I saw the
same quote over and over. I feel like a lot
very recently in response to what has been happening in Minnesota.

(00:35):
We're currently about two weeks out between when we were
recording things and when things are publishing, So yeah, world
is moving so fast. Who knows what will happen between
this moment and when the episode comes out. But I
have seen a lot of stark, mad abolitionist quotes recently

(00:56):
in response to things happening in Minnesota, the public response
to things happening in Minnesota. But I actually think the
first time I saw it was months ago when ros Baraka,
mayor of Newark, was arrested, which now feels like that
happened earms a whole the ago it was in. I

(01:21):
feel like May of last year, it was a long
time ago. I don't know if it was actually May.
I did not refresh my memory on when it happened,
but like it was a while ago, and then it
has like I've seen it again and again on my
social I am very curious about what the rest of
the letter says.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
And I could not find a scan of this letter anywhere.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
It is in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
and I thought about going there to try to read it,
and did even take preliminary steps toward that end, but
it was not critical to the content of the episode.

(02:08):
And I also just realized that the episode was going
to be two parts, which means it's going to take
longer to finish the writing on because it's two episodes
worth of writing. And no matter which way I could
have tried to get to the Historical Society from my house,
it would have been probably the whole of a morning

(02:32):
or the whole of an afternoon to get there, look
through boxes of documents, get home again, And that was
just not an amount of time that I had for that. Also,
I overthought it so much that I had a dream
that I went to the Historical Society and got there
and could not remember how to write. Yes sometimes that, yeah,

(02:58):
just think too much about my job. So I stopped trying.
Maybe one day I will go satisfy my own personal
curiosity going to read it one day when the schedule
is not quite as packed as it was.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Jamie warms up a little bit.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah. That was the other thing, because they are open
some hours on Saturdays, and I was like, what if
I went on Saturday morning because I do like to
have a little field trip into Boston proper sometimes for
different reasons.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
And the high that.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Day, I think was going to be ten hard pass
and spending the Saturday morning on work, and also doing
it in a high temperature of ten I was a
little more, little more than I wanted to do. Regarding
the news that has led so many people to share

(03:53):
this particular quote, I saw multiple articles literally this morning
as of or recording this that described the conduct of
ICE and Border Patrol and these other agencies as unprecedented,
And I need to say it is not in any

(04:15):
way unprecedented. We have many episodes of the show that
are about precedents for things like throwing American citizens into detention. Yeah,
such as Executive Order ninety sixty six when along the

(04:37):
West Coast immigrants from Japan and their children who were
citizens were put in literal concentration camps. Like this, this
is not something we need to look to other countries
or the incredibly distant past to find examples of No.
I think what has made some people I'm not gonna

(04:58):
blank a statement, because everybody's got their own biases and whatever.
I think for some people, they're perceiving it that way
because we have so much footage of what's going on. Yeah,
and that's a big part of it. I think that's
also unfortunately, there has been a disparity in outrage over

(05:21):
the killing of two white people versus people of color
that were killed prior to that, Yes, which some of
that is a racism problem, but I do think some
of it is also video footage. Yeah, that is making
people feel more outraged, upset, whatever the right word is.
Everybody's having their own reaction. But I do think that's

(05:42):
part of it. Even though it is incorrect to say
it's unprecedented, like, right, they haven't ever actually witnessed. I
mean we've seen old footage, right, there is footage from
World War II there, but we haven't seen in the
modern era footage of people with our own eyes just
murdering people in the street in this way under the
guise of government. Yeah, we have had many other like

(06:08):
extra judicial killings of people by law enforcement, and in
some cases there was footage like the officer's body camera.
But I think people are not putting those together as
part of the same yeah spectrum necessarily, Yeah, which is
part of the unprecedented. Also, like, we have an episode

(06:34):
about the Brassero program, which was a program to bring
Mexican migrant workers into the United States, and part of
that episode is about the mass deportation effort that was
literally named a racist slur. Yeah, that had a lot
of the same inhumane elements. Also had a lot of
people who were either citizens or legal residents who were deported.

(06:58):
That's just like another press. I don't remember if I
had another thing to say about that besides that fact,
but the unprecedented language made me very frustrated. And then,
as I said at the beginning of the show, like,
you don't have to look outside of this century to
see a lot of other things that are either parallels
or part of the same spectrum in terms of breaking

(07:21):
up families. Yeah, the unprecedented part is my darling's saying this.
It is unprecedented for you to realize it, but it's
not sure unprecedented for this to happen. It does feel
like that some of the things that we are being
confronted with all of the time are on a slightly
different level than before. We have plenty of examples all

(07:42):
throughout history of government officials lying to the public, so
many of them, so many, so many, but the last
couple of weeks, as of when we are recording, have
felt like just a whole new level of absolutely obvious,
easily contradicted by multiple angles of video footage lies in

(08:03):
a way that feels a lot more obvious and a
lot more bald lying. Basically, like just a step up
from the regular lying that has been happening for so long.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Anyway, those are some of the things I just had
noted down to talk about. Regarding the inspiration for this
episode rather than the episode itself. I am glad that

(08:39):
we have some writing of Anthony Burns, Like he said
that he did get some assistance with his response to
the church in Virginia when he asked for his letter
of dismission. Yeah, and like we didn't. We didn't read
all of it. There's more of it there. But I
like that we have that example of him speaking for himself.

(09:03):
And I also like that we have I like that
we have a biography of him that was written with
his involvement at the time. There are always nuances to
biographies like that throughout history. We have a lot of
biographies of people that were prepared with the assistance of
someone else with that biography then helping that person meet

(09:26):
their expenses in whatever way. But the fact that we
have his perspective on more of it.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Rather than just.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
The legal documents having to do with all of it
something that I like. I had a moment where I
was like, I feel like I've been talking about Boston
a lot, not actually sorry about that. A lot of
important things have happened in Boston. Did you have any
other things that you wanted to talk about from these episodes?

(09:57):
The one note I had is tied in way to
his I mean, I wrote the note down earlier as
we were recording, but it's tied to his response to
the church, and it is that whole issue of like him.
It breaks my heart to think of him struggling with
the morality of escaping. Yeah, and I'm glad that he

(10:21):
reaches that point where he's like, oh no, that's this
whole concept is completely jacked. But like, just knowing that
that's the case. The other thing that sort of breaks
my heart is that he was clearly whip smart. Oh yeah,
you know, the way he was constantly thinking about the

(10:43):
logistics of escape and the ways that he had to
move throughout the structure of slavery to minimize the number
of people that could recognize him, to create scenarios where
if he did make a getaway, it wouldn't necessarily be
recognized initially. Like, those are all so smart. And I

(11:04):
think about like if when he was I mean, he
was still very young when he died, so it's a tooosy.
It's one if he was as a young boy and
a young man not having to engage with that. What
are the things that someone that smart could have been doing,
Oh sure, like if he had not been needing to

(11:24):
like fend for his life. Yeah, with every minute like
being thinking about the logistics of survival. And then the
other thing is that it's so unfair that he did
die so early, because again, he was so smart and
also had such an incredible hard to fathom for most
of us story of how many things he had been

(11:47):
through that like the writings he could have done for
years and years would have you know, been deeply informative
to our view of enslavement. Now, not that there aren't
a lot of really great slave narratives, but we need
more always, And you know, he was in a unique

(12:07):
place to have the level I mean, like his again
we know he got help with that response, but like
his writing, the way he thought about things, and again
how clearly brilliant he was. I feel like could have
he could have produced some really incredible commentary on the
whole thing that that we don't get now that would

(12:27):
have been, you know, incredibly important as historical reference points.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
So that's heartbreaking. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
I think he's also a really good example of the
ways that enslaved people could exercise their agency where they
had agency. Yeah, because a lot of times we get
kind of a really limited view that can be misinterpreted

(12:57):
as like people not taking out action for themselves when
they knew that taking action for themselves would be dangerous
and possibly deadly.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
And it seems like he.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Made a lot of decisions that might have seemed minor
at the time, but were steps that he was taking
to take for himself to influence his own future.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Where he was able to take influence on his own.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Future within a society where he didn't have rights as.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
A person in a lot of ways. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
So yeah, one thing that I just copied and put
at the end of my outline here because I liked
it and I thought it tied together this and also
last year's episodes on Charles Sumner, but it didn't really

(13:51):
fit anywhere in the actual episode, so I left it
to read for.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
And so this is from the end of the preface
to Charles Emery Stevens's biography of Anthony Burns. And he wrote,
as I write these lines, the country is passing through
its greatest crisis of peril. On the western frontier. Civil
war is flagrant. At Washington, a senator lies wounded and disabled,

(14:20):
having been stealthily stricken down on the floor of the
Senate for words spoken in debate by a member of
the House from South Carolina. The whole South, with trifling exceptions,
applauds this assault upon the representative of a sovereign state.
A national convention of the party in power has given
its sanction to the policy of which these events, as

(14:41):
well as the extradition of Burns, are the legitimate fruits,
and has nominated for the presidency a person who has
pledged himself fully to enforce that policy. Should that person
be elected and that policy be enforced, the cause of freedom,
whether in Kansas, in Washington, or in Massachusetts, would have
just reason to apprehend a repetition of similar assaults from

(15:04):
the slave power. To avert such a calamity, every good
citizen must labor, and I hope that this history, conceived
and executed for a more general purpose, it contributes somewhat
also to that particular end. And that was like the
end of the preface to the biography. I've tried to

(15:26):
find some more information about Charles Emery Stevens and I
didn't really so I don't really know what his deal was.
Maybe I will return to that at some point in
the future. Yeah, somewhere out there there is a book.
Maybe maybe so maybe maybe so. Well, whatever is happening

(15:49):
in your world, which is in the far away time
of two weeks from now, based on when we're recording,
I hope whatever it is is going as well as possible,
and I hope that you're able to take some time
for yourself help your neighbors. My helping of my neighbors
today was shoveling out the fire, hydrants which in big

(16:13):
rate and snow. So yeah, help one another, be kind
to one another. We will be back with a Saturday
classic tomorrow. We will be back with something brand new
on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the

(16:37):
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