September 22, 2023 • 14 mins
Holly shares how Stewart appealed to women customers in his ads. Tracy shares some inconsistencies in the spelling of Isabel González's name in the official record.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And we talked about Alexander T.
Stewart this week. We did he is. There are so
(00:24):
many details about his life that, of course, in any
given show, like you can't include everything. I have a few, though,
that I will share now. One that I thought was
really really interesting was one biographer pointing out the strategic
use of the word ladies in his ads, particularly in
(00:47):
his early ads, because it made people think, if I
shop there, I will be considered a lady, a lady,
And so allegedly that first customer that walked in when
he opened the first day said I'm a lady interested
in fine fabrics, and that that was part of like
how he immediately won the favor of many of Manhattan's
(01:09):
women shoppers and became, you know, incredibly favored by them
for years and years and years. So it's just kind
of an interesting the psychological things that happened. There is
also an interesting thing that ties into many of our
other shows, which happened fourteen years after his death, which
(01:37):
is that in eighteen ninety, Joseph Pulitzer and several of
his employees were indicted for criminal libel and quote contriving
and intending to injure to fame and vilify, for disgrace
(01:58):
and vilify and disgrace the memory, character, name, and reputation
of Alexander T. Stewart because a series of articles had
come out and there often pointed to as really the
source of the modern interpretation that he was this miserly
mean person instead of as he always purported to be.
(02:18):
I'm just trying to be super fair to everybody and
like make clear rules. So that was interesting that that
happened later. And Hilton, who we mentioned was his right
hand man, Henry Hilton, and his executor was the one
that like really got upset about this and said, like,
I don't care that you said ugly things about me,
(02:39):
but this is a man that I respected and worked
with and who has been dead and please do not
mess with his memory for so long, which is kind
of interesting. Listen, there could be liable against you long
after you're dead. It turns out, Yeah, I think it's
possible that like a lot of these contradictory things were
simultaneously true, like that he could be ruthless in some
(03:03):
contexts and generous in others. Like that seems totally within
the scope of humanity. It does, and it also becomes
that thing. I found myself thinking a lot while I
was working on this, that, like any of those characteristics,
you know, greed, generosity, et cetera, some of that is
in the eye of the beholder, right where like, there
(03:24):
are also the lenses that any given person has on
a situation that will shift the reality. It's kind of
like that thing where people say there are always three truths,
yours mind and the reality. It always makes me think
about that because he is I mean, obviously he was
very hard working and very smart, and we don't know
(03:47):
if any of the stories about him being as ruthless
an employer as some people claimed are true. I mean,
as you said, there are people who love who stay
in a job for a long time, even if it's
not like a job that makes sense to other people,
something about it must appeal to them. You know. Got
me thinking about a lot of things. One of the
(04:10):
things that he would do, and it ties to this,
And I honestly don't know if I think this is
evidence of him being kind or being brutal? Is it?
In instances where smaller merchants were forced to go out
of business because they couldn't compete, he would often offer
(04:33):
them a job. And I'm like, is that really kind?
Like he's like, you will still have a way to
support yourself and your family, or is it like, haha,
you must become part of my enterprise that killed yours.
And I honestly don't know. And because we don't have
a lot of his papers, we don't know. We have
(04:55):
a lot of things written to him. Those we mentioned
in the episode, the letters to him asking for money
and the letters to his wife asking for money. There
is actually a book published that collects a bunch of them.
Oh wow, it's the same thing. You don't know what
to believe, right, Like some of these people obviously are
(05:15):
just like I can probably wrangle some books out of this.
And some people write these plaintive, really sad letters where
they either believe or they have convinced themselves that this
might be the ray of hope that will get them
over a hump or through a difficult time. And it's
it's simultaneously like I can't imagine what it's like to
(05:37):
feel that many letters all the time of people just
asking for things, and it's heartbreaking to know that there
were definitely people who were like, I am desperate. I
think we might be related. I have five kids. Can
you please help me? Yeah, And we don't know necessarily
if if he gave to any of those people are
(05:58):
not there are It's the same thing. There are stories
that say, yes, he absolutely did things like that, and
others that are like, well, there's no proof, so we
don't know. The final thing that I will talk about
is the new grave. So I wasn't able to verify this.
(06:20):
So if anybody knows that lives in Garden City, he
and Cornelia were apparently buried in secret places so that
there could not be another grave robber or grave robbing
of them. Yes, and that some are like, well, he's
(06:43):
they're in the church proper in part of it, and
others are like, no, probably elsewhere. But the other thing
is that allegedly it's a rumor, it's not substantiated anywhere
I could find. Is that Cornelia was so worried about
there too being desecrated that she had an elaborate alarm
(07:04):
system included so that if something happened and someone broached
the threshold, everyone would know. Wow, this reminds me of
that whole live show that we did on Safety Coffins. Yeah,
that was a fun one. It was I love a
Halloween live show. Anyway, I clearly find him very, very interesting,
and he, obviously for anybody that's connecting dots, came up
(07:28):
in the research but did not become an episode when
we were doing our Resurrection Men season on Criminalia, and
it was like he didn't quite fit the bill of
any of the stuff we were talking about because we
didn't know who did it, So most of the we
were talking about the people who did the robbing, not
necessarily the odd things that happened, although we did do
some of those. But he just didn't quite fit in
(07:50):
that season, and I thought he would be great to
talk about because then every time I looked up stuff
about him, I was like, what do you mean he
built his own city? What? But what do you mean
he he made a living out of nothing? Yeah, he's
really interesting. Still considered one of the richest men in
American history. Yeah, that that fortune's gone. We talked about
(08:25):
Gonzales versus Williams this week on the show and I
just I want to take a moment and talk about spellings,
because Isabel Gonzalez's name is not spelled the same in
court documents in the name of that court case as
like she spelled it both in terms of accent marks
(08:48):
and letters. So like the court case is Gonzales versus
Williams g O N Z A L E S. But
her name was Gonzales with a Z on the end
of it and also with the accent mark over the A.
And I could not tell you whether this was like carelessness,
(09:17):
whether it was kind of an evolution and how we
write words just from having had a job working on
the internet with content management systems and style guides for however,
how long have we been here, Like I don't know,
two years, yeah, two thousand and five is when I
(09:39):
started first working for a website. Like I know, there
were like ap style guide standards and just the limitations
of our content management system where things like diacritical marks
would just ruin everything. I have an old export of
our of like all the episodes of our show from
like very long time ago before we were using our
(10:01):
current content management system. And there are a number of
things that are like people's names that had an accent
mark of some sort gobbledegook, just include garbage characters. Yes,
so yeah, I don't, I don't. I don't know if
that if this was just carelessness, not paying attention, racism,
evolution of spelling, lots of potential, some poor overworked court clerk, like, yeah,
(10:24):
like a lot of reasons that some of them more
valid than others. But also the way that Puerto Rico
was spelled in the United States legally officially changed at
two different points during the I think, I think both
of them were in the twentieth century. It went from
being Puerto Rico p u e r t o, like
(10:47):
that word is pronounced or that like that word is
spelled in Spanish, to Porto po rto like officially US
changed that spelling and then changed it back. So a
lot of the things that we read today have this
spelling of po rt yeah, which I feel like the
way a lot of us say Puerto Rico sounds a
(11:10):
little more like Puerto than Puerto, but seeing it spelled
po rt o is just like a lot harder in
terms of all of those letters. Well, it is because
it feels like you're reading something fictional. I don't know,
it's like a weird My brain is like, that's not real, No,
it is, it is. Yeah, I I am hopeful. I've
(11:35):
said this about so many people on the show recently,
especially women, that that I'm hopeful that there will be
like a more personal biography of her at some point.
I do have the impression from the research that I
did that there are family papers and family family documents
and family histories that could contribute to all of that.
So maybe it is something that will happen at some point.
(11:58):
It's there are lots of things about this that I'm
curious about. Like I said in the episode that I
really think that when she was being detained at Ellis Island,
that her family was just desperate to get her out,
Like she was pregnant, real close to her due you know,
when she was expected to give birth. Also just being
detained at immigration that's on its own a whole dehumanizing,
(12:22):
uh insulting process, and so like I think they were
just trying to make the arguments that they thought would work.
But like that's just my interpretation. I don't I don't
know if these you know, there's there's a letter written
from one family member to another that was sort of like, Okay,
(12:43):
this is what we're gonna try, and this is why,
so you gotta we have to kind of fill in
the blanks on some of it. Yeah, it's one of
those uh things. I Stories like this always bring out
the most simplistic hippie part of my soul where I
want to just be like why borders though, man, Like
(13:04):
why can't we all be cool? Real valid question, And
for a long time in the United States, like if
you could get here, you could stay here, right, And
it was really into It was really when the US
started like excluding Chinese laborers that really started to shift
a whole lot. We've talked about the Chinese Exclusion Act
(13:25):
in a number of prior episodes, and it came up today,
so we did not not today. It came up this
week and we talked about this uh this episode, so
we didn't get into it and a lot more detail,
but like that, Yeah, there was a big shift between
the attitude of come on and the attitude of well
not if you're any of these people, yea, with lots
(13:48):
of different definitions of who all was these people? Yep. Yeah,
So anyway, I'm glad we finally got to do This
episode follow on a few weeks later to the insular cases.
Whatever's going on on your weekend, I hope it's great.
Whether it's fun stuff or less fun stuff, it's less
(14:11):
fun stuff, I hope it's as great as they can
possibly be in that circumstance. We'll be back to the
Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(14:34):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And we talked about Alexander T.
Stewart this week. We did he is. There are so
(00:24):
many details about his life that, of course, in any
given show, like you can't include everything. I have a few, though,
that I will share now. One that I thought was
really really interesting was one biographer pointing out the strategic
use of the word ladies in his ads, particularly in
(00:47):
his early ads, because it made people think, if I
shop there, I will be considered a lady, a lady,
And so allegedly that first customer that walked in when
he opened the first day said I'm a lady interested
in fine fabrics, and that that was part of like
how he immediately won the favor of many of Manhattan's
(01:09):
women shoppers and became, you know, incredibly favored by them
for years and years and years. So it's just kind
of an interesting the psychological things that happened. There is
also an interesting thing that ties into many of our
other shows, which happened fourteen years after his death, which
(01:37):
is that in eighteen ninety, Joseph Pulitzer and several of
his employees were indicted for criminal libel and quote contriving
and intending to injure to fame and vilify, for disgrace
(01:58):
and vilify and disgrace the memory, character, name, and reputation
of Alexander T. Stewart because a series of articles had
come out and there often pointed to as really the
source of the modern interpretation that he was this miserly
mean person instead of as he always purported to be.
(02:18):
I'm just trying to be super fair to everybody and
like make clear rules. So that was interesting that that
happened later. And Hilton, who we mentioned was his right
hand man, Henry Hilton, and his executor was the one
that like really got upset about this and said, like,
I don't care that you said ugly things about me,
(02:39):
but this is a man that I respected and worked
with and who has been dead and please do not
mess with his memory for so long, which is kind
of interesting. Listen, there could be liable against you long
after you're dead. It turns out, Yeah, I think it's
possible that like a lot of these contradictory things were
simultaneously true, like that he could be ruthless in some
(03:03):
contexts and generous in others. Like that seems totally within
the scope of humanity. It does, and it also becomes
that thing. I found myself thinking a lot while I
was working on this, that, like any of those characteristics,
you know, greed, generosity, et cetera, some of that is
in the eye of the beholder, right where like, there
(03:24):
are also the lenses that any given person has on
a situation that will shift the reality. It's kind of
like that thing where people say there are always three truths,
yours mind and the reality. It always makes me think
about that because he is I mean, obviously he was
very hard working and very smart, and we don't know
(03:47):
if any of the stories about him being as ruthless
an employer as some people claimed are true. I mean,
as you said, there are people who love who stay
in a job for a long time, even if it's
not like a job that makes sense to other people,
something about it must appeal to them. You know. Got
me thinking about a lot of things. One of the
(04:10):
things that he would do, and it ties to this,
And I honestly don't know if I think this is
evidence of him being kind or being brutal? Is it?
In instances where smaller merchants were forced to go out
of business because they couldn't compete, he would often offer
(04:33):
them a job. And I'm like, is that really kind?
Like he's like, you will still have a way to
support yourself and your family, or is it like, haha,
you must become part of my enterprise that killed yours.
And I honestly don't know. And because we don't have
a lot of his papers, we don't know. We have
(04:55):
a lot of things written to him. Those we mentioned
in the episode, the letters to him asking for money
and the letters to his wife asking for money. There
is actually a book published that collects a bunch of them.
Oh wow, it's the same thing. You don't know what
to believe, right, Like some of these people obviously are
(05:15):
just like I can probably wrangle some books out of this.
And some people write these plaintive, really sad letters where
they either believe or they have convinced themselves that this
might be the ray of hope that will get them
over a hump or through a difficult time. And it's
it's simultaneously like I can't imagine what it's like to
(05:37):
feel that many letters all the time of people just
asking for things, and it's heartbreaking to know that there
were definitely people who were like, I am desperate. I
think we might be related. I have five kids. Can
you please help me? Yeah, And we don't know necessarily
if if he gave to any of those people are
(05:58):
not there are It's the same thing. There are stories
that say, yes, he absolutely did things like that, and
others that are like, well, there's no proof, so we
don't know. The final thing that I will talk about
is the new grave. So I wasn't able to verify this.
(06:20):
So if anybody knows that lives in Garden City, he
and Cornelia were apparently buried in secret places so that
there could not be another grave robber or grave robbing
of them. Yes, and that some are like, well, he's
(06:43):
they're in the church proper in part of it, and
others are like, no, probably elsewhere. But the other thing
is that allegedly it's a rumor, it's not substantiated anywhere
I could find. Is that Cornelia was so worried about
there too being desecrated that she had an elaborate alarm
(07:04):
system included so that if something happened and someone broached
the threshold, everyone would know. Wow, this reminds me of
that whole live show that we did on Safety Coffins. Yeah,
that was a fun one. It was I love a
Halloween live show. Anyway, I clearly find him very, very interesting,
and he, obviously for anybody that's connecting dots, came up
(07:28):
in the research but did not become an episode when
we were doing our Resurrection Men season on Criminalia, and
it was like he didn't quite fit the bill of
any of the stuff we were talking about because we
didn't know who did it, So most of the we
were talking about the people who did the robbing, not
necessarily the odd things that happened, although we did do
some of those. But he just didn't quite fit in
(07:50):
that season, and I thought he would be great to
talk about because then every time I looked up stuff
about him, I was like, what do you mean he
built his own city? What? But what do you mean
he he made a living out of nothing? Yeah, he's
really interesting. Still considered one of the richest men in
American history. Yeah, that that fortune's gone. We talked about
(08:25):
Gonzales versus Williams this week on the show and I
just I want to take a moment and talk about spellings,
because Isabel Gonzalez's name is not spelled the same in
court documents in the name of that court case as
like she spelled it both in terms of accent marks
(08:48):
and letters. So like the court case is Gonzales versus
Williams g O N Z A L E S. But
her name was Gonzales with a Z on the end
of it and also with the accent mark over the A.
And I could not tell you whether this was like carelessness,
(09:17):
whether it was kind of an evolution and how we
write words just from having had a job working on
the internet with content management systems and style guides for however,
how long have we been here, Like I don't know,
two years, yeah, two thousand and five is when I
(09:39):
started first working for a website. Like I know, there
were like ap style guide standards and just the limitations
of our content management system where things like diacritical marks
would just ruin everything. I have an old export of
our of like all the episodes of our show from
like very long time ago before we were using our
(10:01):
current content management system. And there are a number of
things that are like people's names that had an accent
mark of some sort gobbledegook, just include garbage characters. Yes,
so yeah, I don't, I don't. I don't know if
that if this was just carelessness, not paying attention, racism,
evolution of spelling, lots of potential, some poor overworked court clerk, like, yeah,
(10:24):
like a lot of reasons that some of them more
valid than others. But also the way that Puerto Rico
was spelled in the United States legally officially changed at
two different points during the I think, I think both
of them were in the twentieth century. It went from
being Puerto Rico p u e r t o, like
(10:47):
that word is pronounced or that like that word is
spelled in Spanish, to Porto po rto like officially US
changed that spelling and then changed it back. So a
lot of the things that we read today have this
spelling of po rt yeah, which I feel like the
way a lot of us say Puerto Rico sounds a
(11:10):
little more like Puerto than Puerto, but seeing it spelled
po rt o is just like a lot harder in
terms of all of those letters. Well, it is because
it feels like you're reading something fictional. I don't know,
it's like a weird My brain is like, that's not real, No,
it is, it is. Yeah, I I am hopeful. I've
(11:35):
said this about so many people on the show recently,
especially women, that that I'm hopeful that there will be
like a more personal biography of her at some point.
I do have the impression from the research that I
did that there are family papers and family family documents
and family histories that could contribute to all of that.
So maybe it is something that will happen at some point.
(11:58):
It's there are lots of things about this that I'm
curious about. Like I said in the episode that I
really think that when she was being detained at Ellis Island,
that her family was just desperate to get her out,
Like she was pregnant, real close to her due you know,
when she was expected to give birth. Also just being
detained at immigration that's on its own a whole dehumanizing,
(12:22):
uh insulting process, and so like I think they were
just trying to make the arguments that they thought would work.
But like that's just my interpretation. I don't I don't
know if these you know, there's there's a letter written
from one family member to another that was sort of like, Okay,
(12:43):
this is what we're gonna try, and this is why,
so you gotta we have to kind of fill in
the blanks on some of it. Yeah, it's one of
those uh things. I Stories like this always bring out
the most simplistic hippie part of my soul where I
want to just be like why borders though, man, Like
(13:04):
why can't we all be cool? Real valid question, And
for a long time in the United States, like if
you could get here, you could stay here, right, And
it was really into It was really when the US
started like excluding Chinese laborers that really started to shift
a whole lot. We've talked about the Chinese Exclusion Act
(13:25):
in a number of prior episodes, and it came up today,
so we did not not today. It came up this
week and we talked about this uh this episode, so
we didn't get into it and a lot more detail,
but like that, Yeah, there was a big shift between
the attitude of come on and the attitude of well
not if you're any of these people, yea, with lots
(13:48):
of different definitions of who all was these people? Yep. Yeah,
So anyway, I'm glad we finally got to do This
episode follow on a few weeks later to the insular cases.
Whatever's going on on your weekend, I hope it's great.
Whether it's fun stuff or less fun stuff, it's less
(14:11):
fun stuff, I hope it's as great as they can
possibly be in that circumstance. We'll be back to the
Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(14:34):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!