March 21, 2025 • 23 mins
Holly and Tracy discuss the creepy nature of the Children's Morality Code project. Tracy covers the varied conflicts that Mary Hunter Austin had with numerous people.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh Man, Yeah, Children's Morality Code. Yeah, yuck. Yeah,
(00:21):
I had never heard of this. You sent me that line.
I read the words National Institution for Moral Instruction and
I was like, Hey, this sounds like Nazis. It's pretty awful.
Not quite time for, like the Nazi Party had not
developed yet, but something about it. Immediately I was like, mmmm, no,
(00:45):
this seems like something bad. The hardest of passes. Man,
this one is so yucky in so many ways. I
mean it starts with the camera hidden in a briefcase.
That's creeper. Banvier extremely creepy. The way he became super
(01:06):
ablest and into eugenics super creepy. It's really really uh,
it's just troubling, and it is one of those things
we didn't go into it, but that when the Inquiry
(01:26):
started being published in nineteen twenty eight, it got a
lot of coverage in the paper and like one newspaper
there's this huge with a graphic article about it about
like the findings of kids and how often kids lie
and how you know kids. There's a quote from the
researchers that like they in one of their experiments, they
(01:52):
had this setup where kids were supposed to write down
in a journal like the various good acts they did,
I think, And it was a voluntary thing. Students didn't
have to do it. But the kids that volunteered turned
out to kind of be the biggest liars in the
class based on their other studies, like that they were
(02:13):
just lying in their journals about the good things they
had done. And this, of course became very newsworthy because
in the nineteen twenties, before the depression, people really had
time to discuss whether or not kids were worthy of
being human beings. It's so weird. It's all so weird.
(02:33):
I can't I mean, you know, Dewey had it right, right,
He's like, this is just social intelligence, you guys, because
people will learned these things. That's part of growing up.
Just to be super clear in case people have forgotten
since the episode, the Dowe we were talking about there
is not Melville Dewey, creator of the Dewey decimal system. No,
(02:55):
we're not saying that guy was right about anything. It's
a different do we have issue. So the Dewey decimal
system I have, how horrible Melvil Dewey was on like
my short list for an episode, but I just can't
deal with him in this moment. Yeah. Yeah, the whole
idea that like kids needed these very like like you
(03:17):
said it, it vibes very you know, Nazish, the use
of the future must be perfect kind of ideology. I
will say this, A broken clock is right twice a day, okay.
And I did find it is listed in that PhD
(03:37):
paper that we read as like a footnote that she
found in something else. So I didn't include in the
episode because at that point it's many times removed from
anything I can look up and verify. But she noted
that she found in a thing someone mentioning fair Child's
list of immoral behaviors. And there are a couple of
(04:00):
things in this that I was like, well, yeah, that's right. Yeah.
So one of them is opposition to proof of another's
theories because of jealousy, Oh sure, degenerating into a propagandist
of an unproved hypothesis instead of being true to the
research purpose of discovering truth. Okay, that sounds great. We
(04:21):
all need to learn that all the time, and then
cowardice in supporting a verified generalization because it is unpopular
and conflicts with selfish interests. I'm like, yeah, that's all true. Yeah,
why are you so messed up? I also think, like,
(04:42):
you know, teaching kids about things like honesty, uh great,
Like fine, fine, I'm not saying that that shouldn't happen,
but like that. The list of laws really exemplifies the
(05:02):
way that a lot of thinking in our culture and
history has been like, if you're able bodied, you're good. Yeah,
but if you're not able bodied, obviously you're bad and
it's your own fault somehow, and you should have not
done that. And a boy, did I hate reading that.
(05:26):
It's awful. It's awful. The whole idea that kids were
basically going to be put in camps if they weren't moral. Yep,
I hate it is so horrified, can you. I mean,
I'm I of course, because I'm a self centered person,
because I'm a human. You know, you always project yourself
(05:47):
into these scenarios. And I would be like, listen, I
was the kid that always had Holly lack self control
written on every one of my report cards because I
wanted to chitter chatter with everybody in class. I would
be a kid that sat in incarceration in his world
because I never learned that lesson. I never learned not
to say bad words or yell when people made me angry.
(06:11):
And it's like, it's something that simple that literally would
make you considered not worthy of being in society. And
I'm like, this also reaches a tipping point. Pretend none
of it is even about the incarceration of people that
don't pass the morality code. At what point is a
(06:32):
code like this invoked to keep people down? Do you
know what I mean? Like, if you have this and
kids are doing this every day and they're reciting all
of the ways that they're going to adhere to these
laws of morality, what happens when that kid comes into
a situation that they have not been prepared for where
(06:52):
a person in power is doing something wrong because they
have been taught to be loyal and to not complain
right and to like right, Nope, that's a big noplelope.
It made me so angry. It made me so angry
(07:14):
that I was like, we have to talk about this. Yeah,
it's gonna suck, but we have to talk about it. Yeah, man, yuck. Also,
on the like you know, Bravo TV edition of this
whole thing, we never found out, to the best of
my knowledge, who the person was that put up that money. Yeah.
(07:35):
I So, in addition to being like, hey man, this
sounds like nazis what's happening, I went to try to
figure out what this organization was because that was not
a name I recognized from you know, the list of
historical organizations in my head. And I found this one
one thing that like listed all all the members and
(07:57):
advisors and stuff like that, And I was like, who
oh was this businessman that paid for this though? And
that was not in there, no, by no anywhere, never
found it. It's interesting, I know the work of the
researchers that did the inquiry that oversaw it, Edward Thorndyke,
(08:24):
he had been funded in his work, which was similarly
trying to like dismantle these ideas or like show that
they're not effective, was funded both by Rockefeller and Carnegie. Yeah.
So I was like, well, those are the two people
I would have suspected of putting up the money. So
if they were working against it, who is this mystery person?
(08:49):
I mean, will never know, maybe it was one of them.
I don't know. Maybe we will know at some point
when somebody's writing a dissertation on some businessmen and find
the transaction and they're led somewhere right the nineteen sixteen
five thousand dollars, or it might have been earlier, right,
because it might have been oh sure allocated before when
(09:12):
the thing was announced. Yeah, and the twenty thousand dollars
like that. I mean that was a lot of money
at the time, so that is a significant transaction. Yeah. Oh,
I ache to know who it was. I ache who
would have had a vested interest anyway. I could think
and theorize for a very long time, but I don't.
(09:34):
We may not ever know, or we may find out.
I don't know. I'm sure glad that they stopped doing that.
One of this week's episodes was on Mary Hunter Austin. Yeah. Who,
(09:59):
I really thought that I was going to be writing
an episode that was about walking in the desert and
reading lots of quotes about her beautiful descriptions of the
desert landscapes and the desert peoples that she was so
in love with, And that was not the episode that
we got. No, I did not intend this episode as
(10:21):
like a counterpoint to Harriet Russell Williams Strong, who we
talked about last year. I was gonna ask if I
came up in the the friction stories about the irrigation issues.
Yeah I did not. Yeah, I did not see Harriet
Russell Williams Strong's name mentioned in any of it. But
(10:41):
as I was doing the research on Mary Austin, I
was like, what, why does this sound so familiar? We've
talked about this on the show. When did we talk
about it? H And just enough time had passed that
I had to go digging to bring to mind what
episode that was. In In addition to that dispute, it
(11:02):
seems like Mary Austin had some conflicts with people. We
mentioned John Muir at the beginning of the episode. I
don't know what their disagreements were, but one of the
sources that I used mentioned that there were disagreements that
(11:24):
they butted heads in some way, and I was like,
I wish I could find the details about that. Right
we talked? We talked, Yeah, we talked about like being
threatened with a lawsuit by HG. Wells and having a
heart attack in the stress of all that. There was
also apparently a falling out with Willa Cather. She just
(11:47):
had all the greatest hits of arguments. Yeah, and I
don't think I don't think we mentioned Willa Cather at
all in the in the episode. But she met Willa
Cather probably sometime in like the nineteen teens. They became friends.
In nineteen twenty six, Mary was going to be a
way to have an abdominal surgery, unrelated I think to
(12:10):
the breast cancer diagnosis, which I have various questions about
me doing us with that, which they are unresolved. I
have no answers to the questions about her breast cancer diagnosis.
But she was going to be in Saint Louis having
an abdominal surgery, and Willa Cather was going to be
passing through her neighborhood, and she was like, Hey, you
can stay at my house while I'm away, and Willa
(12:35):
Cather said great, And she wrote part of Death Comes
for the Archbishop staying there at Mary Austin's house, and
she acknowledged like she acknowledged this, I think in an
inscribed book that she gave to Mary later on. But
in Earth Horizon, Mary Hunter called Willa Cather's praise of
(12:59):
French missionary priests a calamity and Willa Cather like publicly
denied having written any part of any book at Mary
Austin's home, and I was like everywhere. I think she
may have met Willa Cather at Mabel Dodge Leuhan's house.
(13:25):
That was the wife of Tony Luhan, who was the
person that they had worked with to get permission to
take pictures at taus Peblo. Mary Dodge Luhan seems like
an incredibly fascinating person to maybe possibly do an episode
about one day. She was an heiress and a promoter
of the arts, and her home became kind of a
gathering place or their home they were married. They became
(13:46):
a gathering place and a retreat for writers and artists,
and that included people like Georgia O'Keefe and Willa Cather.
So she was sort of a central figure in the
literature and arts and culture of this part of the US. Yeah,
I'm I'm, I don't I know, you have no answers,
(14:06):
but I'm like, oh, she lived way past the nineteen
oh nine huh, I guess I'm not dying of breast
cancer moments. So I think, yeah, like a long time
after that. Yeah, I have absolutely no detail on like
what kind of examination she was given when she was
(14:30):
told that she had breast cancer. I have no idea
what diagnostic tools went into that, really no sense of
what her symptoms were besides this arm pain that had
led her to go to the doctor. I just have
a lot of questions about all of that too. Also,
(14:52):
I have a lot of feelings about her daughter, Ruth, Yeah,
because part of like the time when Mary was trying
to parent Ruth with no resources, Some of that sounds
(15:14):
offul really awful. I'm not really completely clear on how
old Ruth was when Mary would go to work as
a teacher and leave her by herself at home, like
whether she was of an age that people might think
that was okay. It seems like she was. She did
not have the ability that she would needed that she
would have needed to do that safely. So some of
(15:37):
this just sounds really terrible. But the judgment that people
passed on her for finding other arrangements was also really awful. Yeah,
I felt like, personally, I had personal feelings about that
because my mom her entire career was working with disabled people.
(16:01):
She started working with disabled adults in a day program
teaching things like literacy and math and life skills and
things like that in a day program, and most of
the adults that she worked with might be able to
live in a group home setting or with family some
kind of situation where they had additional help and additional support.
(16:24):
But then she started working with children in a long
term care facility, and the children that she worked with
a lot of them had multiple disabilities. A lot of
them had, I mean all of them. All of them
had multiple disabilities. All of them had very high support needs,
and a lot of them also had medical needs where
they really needed like twenty four hour medical care on site.
(16:46):
So like kids that needed breathing support, that needed to
be suctioned on a regular basis, or had feeding tubes
or some kind of stoma on their body, like all
kinds of things like that. And sure there were parents
that probably seemed inattentive or callous in that whole situation.
There are also a lot of parents where it was like,
what was the other option? Right, Like, this child needs
(17:10):
care all the time, this child needs a lot of
support all the time. The whole family also needs to
have a home and eat and have electricity and all
of that, and so like, it may not be possible
for this child to be cared for at home. There
are some ways for people to be cared for at home,
(17:32):
but a lot of times those are extraordinarily expensive, they
can be really hard to arrange. And sometimes there are
just ways to have subsidized care in a residential facility
that doesn't exist for somebody trying to stay at home.
But people spoke about the parents whose children were living
(17:54):
at this facility with a very broad brush and spoke
as though everyone was just awful for having to place
their child. And sometimes I'm just like, there, what would
the other option be though? Right, take the fact that
(18:18):
Ruth was disabled out of it, which is, you know,
not to erase her or anything. But like, even if
Mary had what would be called an easy baby, right,
a kid that like hits all of their developmental marks,
isn't especially fussy, seems well adjusted, she did not have
(18:41):
a good model of parenthood to work from to begin with.
Oh sure, yea. So even if she had a child
with no disabilities, perfectly you know, healthy, and had had
just an easy time in the world, I don't know
that she would have been equipped with the tools to
know how to be a great mom. Yeah, which, like, yes,
(19:02):
especially at this time when it's not like there were
a kajillion parenting books. Yeah, particularly not for parenting kids
with disabilities. Right, Where was she gonna learn any of that? Yeah? Well,
and also with her husband not really involved, right, but
she's essentially a single parent. Yeah, she still would have
needed to work to earn enough money to keep them
(19:26):
housed and fed. So yeah, it's it's Uh. There are
times in the accounts of that where I was like, wow,
this sounds awful, and in this, you know, in this
part of the situation, it seems like she did something
really messed up. Uh. But there are also a lot
of times where it seems like she was doing her
best with no resources in a society that had no resources,
(19:48):
that didn't even consider that there needed to be resources
right for disabled children and their families, none of which
I was prepared to be writing an episode about out
surprise when I thought we were going to have an
episode about walking in the desert, Uh surprise. So yeah. Yeah.
(20:10):
A lot of Mary Hunter Austen's work is in the
public domain, not all of it, Some of it is
a little bit too recent to have come into the
public domain yet, so there is a lot of it
that you can read, uh on places like you know,
Archive dot organ Project, Gutenberg. In places like that, I
(20:32):
feel like her assertion that she could figure out English
and writing on her own and she wanted to spend
her college education on something else, that there was some
hubris there, because it does seem like she struggled to
work out things like, you know, craft and style and
all of that. One of the reasons it took her
(20:54):
for a really long time to get longer work published.
It wasn't in addition, in addition to the fact that
she was trying to care for a child, she was
having to kind of learn as she went things like
structure and form and and all of that. I also
have only read some of some of her works. By
(21:16):
no means have I tried to do a thorough survey
of all of it in the time we have to
prepare a podcast her almost one book a year for
thirty two years. What you didn't buzz through thirty books?
Real quick? Well? Difficult? Difficult? What are you a quitter?
(21:39):
I am working on an episode upcoming about a writer
that I love and even revisiting all of their works
is like, yeah, taking some effort and time. Yeah, a
lot of audiobook action going on. Yeah, if you want
to send us a note about this or any other
podcast or history podcast atiheartradio dot com, whatever is coming
(22:03):
up for you on your weekend, I hope it is
as good and smooth as possible. If you've got stuff
in your life happening right now, I know a lot
of us do stuff that's not great. I hope you're
able to take some moments for yourself to take some
deep breaths, Maybe get yourself a little treat of some sort.
(22:24):
Maybe just sit under a tree where things are starting
to turn green and bloom here in the Northern Hemisphere.
If you're in the Southern Hemisphere getting ready to look
at the oncoming of winter, I hope it's going to
be a great winter. I guess autumn is closer because
we're getting just about to spring. We're not exactly this
(22:45):
summer yet. I just visited my parents and was able
to cut some of the earliest blooming flowers in the
yard to bring into my mom So, yeah, nice. We
will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with
something brand new on stuff you missed in history. Class
(23:07):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh Man, Yeah, Children's Morality Code. Yeah, yuck. Yeah,
(00:21):
I had never heard of this. You sent me that line.
I read the words National Institution for Moral Instruction and
I was like, Hey, this sounds like Nazis. It's pretty awful.
Not quite time for, like the Nazi Party had not
developed yet, but something about it. Immediately I was like, mmmm, no,
(00:45):
this seems like something bad. The hardest of passes. Man,
this one is so yucky in so many ways. I
mean it starts with the camera hidden in a briefcase.
That's creeper. Banvier extremely creepy. The way he became super
(01:06):
ablest and into eugenics super creepy. It's really really uh,
it's just troubling, and it is one of those things
we didn't go into it, but that when the Inquiry
(01:26):
started being published in nineteen twenty eight, it got a
lot of coverage in the paper and like one newspaper
there's this huge with a graphic article about it about
like the findings of kids and how often kids lie
and how you know kids. There's a quote from the
researchers that like they in one of their experiments, they
(01:52):
had this setup where kids were supposed to write down
in a journal like the various good acts they did,
I think, And it was a voluntary thing. Students didn't
have to do it. But the kids that volunteered turned
out to kind of be the biggest liars in the
class based on their other studies, like that they were
(02:13):
just lying in their journals about the good things they
had done. And this, of course became very newsworthy because
in the nineteen twenties, before the depression, people really had
time to discuss whether or not kids were worthy of
being human beings. It's so weird. It's all so weird.
(02:33):
I can't I mean, you know, Dewey had it right, right,
He's like, this is just social intelligence, you guys, because
people will learned these things. That's part of growing up.
Just to be super clear in case people have forgotten
since the episode, the Dowe we were talking about there
is not Melville Dewey, creator of the Dewey decimal system. No,
(02:55):
we're not saying that guy was right about anything. It's
a different do we have issue. So the Dewey decimal
system I have, how horrible Melvil Dewey was on like
my short list for an episode, but I just can't
deal with him in this moment. Yeah. Yeah, the whole
idea that like kids needed these very like like you
(03:17):
said it, it vibes very you know, Nazish, the use
of the future must be perfect kind of ideology. I
will say this, A broken clock is right twice a day, okay.
And I did find it is listed in that PhD
(03:37):
paper that we read as like a footnote that she
found in something else. So I didn't include in the
episode because at that point it's many times removed from
anything I can look up and verify. But she noted
that she found in a thing someone mentioning fair Child's
list of immoral behaviors. And there are a couple of
(04:00):
things in this that I was like, well, yeah, that's right. Yeah.
So one of them is opposition to proof of another's
theories because of jealousy, Oh sure, degenerating into a propagandist
of an unproved hypothesis instead of being true to the
research purpose of discovering truth. Okay, that sounds great. We
(04:21):
all need to learn that all the time, and then
cowardice in supporting a verified generalization because it is unpopular
and conflicts with selfish interests. I'm like, yeah, that's all true. Yeah,
why are you so messed up? I also think, like,
(04:42):
you know, teaching kids about things like honesty, uh great,
Like fine, fine, I'm not saying that that shouldn't happen,
but like that. The list of laws really exemplifies the
(05:02):
way that a lot of thinking in our culture and
history has been like, if you're able bodied, you're good. Yeah,
but if you're not able bodied, obviously you're bad and
it's your own fault somehow, and you should have not
done that. And a boy, did I hate reading that.
(05:26):
It's awful. It's awful. The whole idea that kids were
basically going to be put in camps if they weren't moral. Yep,
I hate it is so horrified, can you. I mean,
I'm I of course, because I'm a self centered person,
because I'm a human. You know, you always project yourself
(05:47):
into these scenarios. And I would be like, listen, I
was the kid that always had Holly lack self control
written on every one of my report cards because I
wanted to chitter chatter with everybody in class. I would
be a kid that sat in incarceration in his world
because I never learned that lesson. I never learned not
to say bad words or yell when people made me angry.
(06:11):
And it's like, it's something that simple that literally would
make you considered not worthy of being in society. And
I'm like, this also reaches a tipping point. Pretend none
of it is even about the incarceration of people that
don't pass the morality code. At what point is a
(06:32):
code like this invoked to keep people down? Do you
know what I mean? Like, if you have this and
kids are doing this every day and they're reciting all
of the ways that they're going to adhere to these
laws of morality, what happens when that kid comes into
a situation that they have not been prepared for where
(06:52):
a person in power is doing something wrong because they
have been taught to be loyal and to not complain
right and to like right, Nope, that's a big noplelope.
It made me so angry. It made me so angry
(07:14):
that I was like, we have to talk about this. Yeah,
it's gonna suck, but we have to talk about it. Yeah, man, yuck. Also,
on the like you know, Bravo TV edition of this
whole thing, we never found out, to the best of
my knowledge, who the person was that put up that money. Yeah.
(07:35):
I So, in addition to being like, hey man, this
sounds like nazis what's happening, I went to try to
figure out what this organization was because that was not
a name I recognized from you know, the list of
historical organizations in my head. And I found this one
one thing that like listed all all the members and
(07:57):
advisors and stuff like that, And I was like, who
oh was this businessman that paid for this though? And
that was not in there, no, by no anywhere, never
found it. It's interesting, I know the work of the
researchers that did the inquiry that oversaw it, Edward Thorndyke,
(08:24):
he had been funded in his work, which was similarly
trying to like dismantle these ideas or like show that
they're not effective, was funded both by Rockefeller and Carnegie. Yeah.
So I was like, well, those are the two people
I would have suspected of putting up the money. So
if they were working against it, who is this mystery person?
(08:49):
I mean, will never know, maybe it was one of them.
I don't know. Maybe we will know at some point
when somebody's writing a dissertation on some businessmen and find
the transaction and they're led somewhere right the nineteen sixteen
five thousand dollars, or it might have been earlier, right,
because it might have been oh sure allocated before when
(09:12):
the thing was announced. Yeah, and the twenty thousand dollars
like that. I mean that was a lot of money
at the time, so that is a significant transaction. Yeah. Oh,
I ache to know who it was. I ache who
would have had a vested interest anyway. I could think
and theorize for a very long time, but I don't.
(09:34):
We may not ever know, or we may find out.
I don't know. I'm sure glad that they stopped doing that.
One of this week's episodes was on Mary Hunter Austin. Yeah. Who,
(09:59):
I really thought that I was going to be writing
an episode that was about walking in the desert and
reading lots of quotes about her beautiful descriptions of the
desert landscapes and the desert peoples that she was so
in love with, And that was not the episode that
we got. No, I did not intend this episode as
(10:21):
like a counterpoint to Harriet Russell Williams Strong, who we
talked about last year. I was gonna ask if I
came up in the the friction stories about the irrigation issues.
Yeah I did not. Yeah, I did not see Harriet
Russell Williams Strong's name mentioned in any of it. But
(10:41):
as I was doing the research on Mary Austin, I
was like, what, why does this sound so familiar? We've
talked about this on the show. When did we talk
about it? H And just enough time had passed that
I had to go digging to bring to mind what
episode that was. In In addition to that dispute, it
(11:02):
seems like Mary Austin had some conflicts with people. We
mentioned John Muir at the beginning of the episode. I
don't know what their disagreements were, but one of the
sources that I used mentioned that there were disagreements that
(11:24):
they butted heads in some way, and I was like,
I wish I could find the details about that. Right
we talked? We talked, Yeah, we talked about like being
threatened with a lawsuit by HG. Wells and having a
heart attack in the stress of all that. There was
also apparently a falling out with Willa Cather. She just
(11:47):
had all the greatest hits of arguments. Yeah, and I
don't think I don't think we mentioned Willa Cather at
all in the in the episode. But she met Willa
Cather probably sometime in like the nineteen teens. They became friends.
In nineteen twenty six, Mary was going to be a
way to have an abdominal surgery, unrelated I think to
(12:10):
the breast cancer diagnosis, which I have various questions about
me doing us with that, which they are unresolved. I
have no answers to the questions about her breast cancer diagnosis.
But she was going to be in Saint Louis having
an abdominal surgery, and Willa Cather was going to be
passing through her neighborhood, and she was like, Hey, you
can stay at my house while I'm away, and Willa
(12:35):
Cather said great, And she wrote part of Death Comes
for the Archbishop staying there at Mary Austin's house, and
she acknowledged like she acknowledged this, I think in an
inscribed book that she gave to Mary later on. But
in Earth Horizon, Mary Hunter called Willa Cather's praise of
(12:59):
French missionary priests a calamity and Willa Cather like publicly
denied having written any part of any book at Mary
Austin's home, and I was like everywhere. I think she
may have met Willa Cather at Mabel Dodge Leuhan's house.
(13:25):
That was the wife of Tony Luhan, who was the
person that they had worked with to get permission to
take pictures at taus Peblo. Mary Dodge Luhan seems like
an incredibly fascinating person to maybe possibly do an episode
about one day. She was an heiress and a promoter
of the arts, and her home became kind of a
gathering place or their home they were married. They became
(13:46):
a gathering place and a retreat for writers and artists,
and that included people like Georgia O'Keefe and Willa Cather.
So she was sort of a central figure in the
literature and arts and culture of this part of the US. Yeah,
I'm I'm, I don't I know, you have no answers,
(14:06):
but I'm like, oh, she lived way past the nineteen
oh nine huh, I guess I'm not dying of breast
cancer moments. So I think, yeah, like a long time
after that. Yeah, I have absolutely no detail on like
what kind of examination she was given when she was
(14:30):
told that she had breast cancer. I have no idea
what diagnostic tools went into that, really no sense of
what her symptoms were besides this arm pain that had
led her to go to the doctor. I just have
a lot of questions about all of that too. Also,
(14:52):
I have a lot of feelings about her daughter, Ruth, Yeah,
because part of like the time when Mary was trying
to parent Ruth with no resources, Some of that sounds
(15:14):
offul really awful. I'm not really completely clear on how
old Ruth was when Mary would go to work as
a teacher and leave her by herself at home, like
whether she was of an age that people might think
that was okay. It seems like she was. She did
not have the ability that she would needed that she
would have needed to do that safely. So some of
(15:37):
this just sounds really terrible. But the judgment that people
passed on her for finding other arrangements was also really awful. Yeah,
I felt like, personally, I had personal feelings about that
because my mom her entire career was working with disabled people.
(16:01):
She started working with disabled adults in a day program
teaching things like literacy and math and life skills and
things like that in a day program, and most of
the adults that she worked with might be able to
live in a group home setting or with family some
kind of situation where they had additional help and additional support.
(16:24):
But then she started working with children in a long
term care facility, and the children that she worked with
a lot of them had multiple disabilities. A lot of
them had, I mean all of them. All of them
had multiple disabilities. All of them had very high support needs,
and a lot of them also had medical needs where
they really needed like twenty four hour medical care on site.
(16:46):
So like kids that needed breathing support, that needed to
be suctioned on a regular basis, or had feeding tubes
or some kind of stoma on their body, like all
kinds of things like that. And sure there were parents
that probably seemed inattentive or callous in that whole situation.
There are also a lot of parents where it was like,
what was the other option? Right, Like, this child needs
(17:10):
care all the time, this child needs a lot of
support all the time. The whole family also needs to
have a home and eat and have electricity and all
of that, and so like, it may not be possible
for this child to be cared for at home. There
are some ways for people to be cared for at home,
(17:32):
but a lot of times those are extraordinarily expensive, they
can be really hard to arrange. And sometimes there are
just ways to have subsidized care in a residential facility
that doesn't exist for somebody trying to stay at home.
But people spoke about the parents whose children were living
(17:54):
at this facility with a very broad brush and spoke
as though everyone was just awful for having to place
their child. And sometimes I'm just like, there, what would
the other option be though? Right, take the fact that
(18:18):
Ruth was disabled out of it, which is, you know,
not to erase her or anything. But like, even if
Mary had what would be called an easy baby, right,
a kid that like hits all of their developmental marks,
isn't especially fussy, seems well adjusted, she did not have
(18:41):
a good model of parenthood to work from to begin with.
Oh sure, yea. So even if she had a child
with no disabilities, perfectly you know, healthy, and had had
just an easy time in the world, I don't know
that she would have been equipped with the tools to
know how to be a great mom. Yeah, which, like, yes,
(19:02):
especially at this time when it's not like there were
a kajillion parenting books. Yeah, particularly not for parenting kids
with disabilities. Right, Where was she gonna learn any of that? Yeah? Well,
and also with her husband not really involved, right, but
she's essentially a single parent. Yeah, she still would have
needed to work to earn enough money to keep them
(19:26):
housed and fed. So yeah, it's it's Uh. There are
times in the accounts of that where I was like, wow,
this sounds awful, and in this, you know, in this
part of the situation, it seems like she did something
really messed up. Uh. But there are also a lot
of times where it seems like she was doing her
best with no resources in a society that had no resources,
(19:48):
that didn't even consider that there needed to be resources
right for disabled children and their families, none of which
I was prepared to be writing an episode about out
surprise when I thought we were going to have an
episode about walking in the desert, Uh surprise. So yeah. Yeah.
(20:10):
A lot of Mary Hunter Austen's work is in the
public domain, not all of it, Some of it is
a little bit too recent to have come into the
public domain yet, so there is a lot of it
that you can read, uh on places like you know,
Archive dot organ Project, Gutenberg. In places like that, I
(20:32):
feel like her assertion that she could figure out English
and writing on her own and she wanted to spend
her college education on something else, that there was some
hubris there, because it does seem like she struggled to
work out things like, you know, craft and style and
all of that. One of the reasons it took her
(20:54):
for a really long time to get longer work published.
It wasn't in addition, in addition to the fact that
she was trying to care for a child, she was
having to kind of learn as she went things like
structure and form and and all of that. I also
have only read some of some of her works. By
(21:16):
no means have I tried to do a thorough survey
of all of it in the time we have to
prepare a podcast her almost one book a year for
thirty two years. What you didn't buzz through thirty books?
Real quick? Well? Difficult? Difficult? What are you a quitter?
(21:39):
I am working on an episode upcoming about a writer
that I love and even revisiting all of their works
is like, yeah, taking some effort and time. Yeah, a
lot of audiobook action going on. Yeah, if you want
to send us a note about this or any other
podcast or history podcast atiheartradio dot com, whatever is coming
(22:03):
up for you on your weekend, I hope it is
as good and smooth as possible. If you've got stuff
in your life happening right now, I know a lot
of us do stuff that's not great. I hope you're
able to take some moments for yourself to take some
deep breaths, Maybe get yourself a little treat of some sort.
(22:24):
Maybe just sit under a tree where things are starting
to turn green and bloom here in the Northern Hemisphere.
If you're in the Southern Hemisphere getting ready to look
at the oncoming of winter, I hope it's going to
be a great winter. I guess autumn is closer because
we're getting just about to spring. We're not exactly this
(22:45):
summer yet. I just visited my parents and was able
to cut some of the earliest blooming flowers in the
yard to bring into my mom So, yeah, nice. We
will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with
something brand new on stuff you missed in history. Class
(23:07):
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