December 20, 2024 • 16 mins
Holly talks about the many, many organizations that Joaquín Torres-García formed. Tracy discusses how there was no plan in place before the SL-1 accident to deal with radioactive bodies.
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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 and Holly Frye and
I'm Tracey B.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about Joaquin Torres Garcia this week.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
This is one of those times where my forgetful brain
takes a minute to put together what a thing is
in terms of references, because I had said at the
top of the episode that I was trying to work
on another Latin American artist, and I kind of sputtered
out because there just was not enough material that I
(00:41):
could get my hands on that was in English. And
so I was like, who are other Latin American artists?
And I had done some searching online and consulting lists,
and I saw his name and I was like, Oh,
that's interesting. And I started reading about him, and then
I started looking through my pictures that I took when
(01:03):
we were in Barcelona in various museums, and I'm like, oh,
there's his work. There's this we're gonna get. I already
had him on my list, I just forgot.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, listen, the brain is what it is.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
But I'm so glad that I came back to him,
because I really enjoyed learning more about him, even with
a Madam Bolovotsky jump Scar. She's everywhere, that woman. I
told you before we started listen she had good marketing
because she literally is everywhere, influencing everybody for a pretty
wide period of time. It's strange but also hilarious. Yeah,
(01:39):
I marvel I said it while we were recording Taurus.
Garcia was the busiest bee in the hive.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
He was always hustling, Like yeah, I don't mean that
in a pejorati of sense, but he was always like teaching,
forming new schools of art, forming new publications of art,
writing his own books about our theory, painting things, finding
new forms of art that he could do. But what
(02:07):
I really marveled at was how much he and many
of the artists in his circle really love to form
societies and orgs. We're just like, I know, let's form
another society. And I found myself sitting there imagining, like
were they just sitting around at like a cafe and
they were like, you know what, we need one more society.
(02:31):
But it makes me chuckle a little bit. And again
I don't mean that in a negative way. I just
there's a lot of groups. It's also really interesting that
like some of those, even as he was very much
rejecting some of the European schools of thought, a lot
of those societies were forming in very Eurocentric places where
(02:54):
a lot of the other artists were like, I'm going
to mimic the Green Masters.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Just interesting.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I didn't mention it in the episode because I have
issues with Picasso, uh huh, as many people do, for
the reasons that he was not a great human being.
But there was a funny story that came up several
times while I was researching where when he was in Paris,
when Torres Garcia was in Paris, where Picasso also was
(03:21):
at the time in the nineteeneens, and he started talking
about I might go to New York. Picasso was like,
New York is a void, don't do it. It's just
tickled me a little bit. Here's my other big thing
from this episode. Max Ernst. He came up a million times. Listen.
(03:41):
Max Ernst has been on my list for a very
long time. I have a Max Ernst inspired tattoo. He
is the artist whose work made me want to get
tattoos in the first place. I love his work and
Samande Bonte is one of my favorite things. I keep
putting it aside for reason since I don't entirely know,
(04:02):
possibly because I don't want to find out something horrible
about him. Sure, but as I was working on this
and he kept coming up in exhibitions with Torres Garcia,
he kept coming up in like other social circles, et cetera.
I'm just like, I see you, Max Ernst, I'm coming
for you. I swear I will do that episode at
(04:23):
some It's almost like he's haunting me. Just fine, Max Ernst,
welcome to the show. At some point in the future,
I'm gonna knock it out just so I will stop.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Being, you know, inundated with it. Right.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Anyways, I think it's interesting that we don't get a
lot of Torres Garcia, and I didn't. I don't remember
talking about him in any of my art history learnings
as a student, and he was super important, so it's
kind of weird. But I'm I'm glad to have the
opportunity to talk about him a little bit. Yeah, a
(05:00):
little bit. His wife founded the museum that is named
for him in Uruguay, and that seems like a very
cool place. Even though a lot of his stuff did
get did get destroyed in that fire elsewhere, but they
do a lot of other artists of course there as well.
(05:21):
So if we're ever there, guess where I'm going. We
talked about the sl one nuclear reactor incidents on the
show this week. Yeah, not the most peppy story. No
(05:43):
happy holidays everybody.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
One of the things that I think might have been
going on in some of the some of the things
that were like there are giant holes in the safety
plan is the fact that there really had not been
an incident like this in the United States since nuclear
energy had first been developed. There had been other accidents
(06:11):
we have talked about that, we talked about them in
the demon Core episode, but that was not like a
nuclear reactor failing in some way, And there have been
other obviously nuclear reactor accidents since then, but this was
the first one. And if I recall correctly, it had
been something like nineteen years that critical reactor or that
(06:33):
nuclear reactors had existed, and so that might have led
people into a false sense of security slash complacency. But still,
what do we do with radioactive bodies in the event
of an accident? Seems like something that should have been
planned for as a possibility, ye at a site that
(06:59):
was specifically for developing prototypes for nuclear reactors. Yeah, It's
one of those things where I find myself wondering, like,
was this just such an unpleasant possibility to contemplate that
no one brought it up thinking they didn't want to
be the guy that suggested to their superiors that their
system was gonna fail, right, and thus things went horribly awful. Yeah,
(07:26):
but I don't know.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
One of the things that I found alluded to in
some of the things that I read for this episode,
which I didn't put into the core of the episode
because it was something that I felt I felt like
I couldn't really substantiate, was that the Army was more
permissive of the sl one's various problems, and that had
(07:53):
the Navy been making decisions about it in this whole
sort of an her play among the different branches of
the military, that the Navy would have shut it down
way before prior to this incident happening, Like as soon
as the stickiness problem revealed itself, that the Navy would
have been like, I'm out, Tracy Tren to start a
(08:14):
fight on this behind the scenes. Yeah, we're gonna have
it behind the scenes between the army folks and the
Navy folks. But I'm just saying this is And I
was like, is this the truth or is this like
reflective of attitudes about the different branches of the military
among one another. I don't actually know. I watched a
(08:35):
number of videos as well. I was preparing for this,
and the one that was an Atomic Energy Commission kind
of brief on the accident that had had had the
recreation of what they were doing when it happened, had
the weirdest tone to me. It was definitely a product
(08:56):
of its era, that era being the nineteen sixties, and
it really felt like a video that one might find
in a derelict government building in.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
A fallout video game.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And I like there were other other videos that were
also made by the Atomic Energy Commission that I watched
that had a similar vibe to them.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And then there was one.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
As I was trying to confirm whether people said DO
line or whether they spelled it out DW line, and
I watched a video that was on the DO line
that had been made while it was in use, that
had many minutes of like cold war scare mongering before
(09:50):
we got to the first mention of the do line,
and that a little bit reminded me more of my
early childhood and you know, the final stages of the
Cold War and how people would talk about the Soviet
Union and nuclear capabilities and all of that.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
And I got very frustrated with that one in particular,
because I was like, just say do line, Just say it,
say the thing I needed to know how to say. Yeah,
I beg yeah. A couple of random notes that I
also had. We have a history in the United States
of describing areas where nuclear testing or other nuclear work
(10:33):
was going to happen as empty or uninhabited, and that
has been false and really there were indigenous people living
there right Like that happened with the Manhattan Project, and
it happened with various like nuclear weapons tests and has
had devastating effects on those communities. There's also a whole
(10:55):
additional side of this that we talked about in the
demon Core episode about the role of indigenous people and
mining radioactive materials to be used in nuclear fuel, all
of this. So I went down a rabbit hole of
trying to be like, was this surrounding area really empty
or not right? And it was not something that I
found a conclusive answer to. I found some very sort
(11:18):
of couched in what Wikipedia editors call weasel words about
like if there were sheep or cows grazing nearby, they
might have been affected.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
And I'm like, well, but were there.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
It was so tremendously cold that night that I think
it would have been very difficult for any living thing
to just be out exposed in the temperatures, but like,
I don't really know. And then the last thing is
that this incident, tying into how it's really seemed like
there were various safety things that should have been in
place earlier, is now an example that gets used in
(12:02):
basically training about safety and like failure prevention. And I
read a quote that was by Brian O'Connor, chief of
Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA, in a slide deck
about this that was about the.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Cold War era.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Applying today's thing that people say about knowledge workers of
move fast and break things, of having almost that same
mentality during Cold War technological advancements, and the quote was quote,
while the temptation or pressure to implement new technology can
be great, premature use can end in premature failure.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
And I just really liked that quote.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, that's totally true. Premature use can end in premature failure. So, Adrian,
I hope you were happy with the episode that we did.
I think I think, uh, Adrian would like a multi
part Netflix special or something. Also, there is a whole
(13:10):
book about it. I just closed my outline. What is
the name of the book. The book was one of
the last things that I read in the uh in
the research of doing all this, having already read and
made tons of notes that was based off of government reports.
And so the name of the book was Idaho Falls,
(13:31):
The Untold Story of America's new first nuclear accident, and
it has more of a you know, human account of
it rather than the many military reports which read like
military reports. Uh So, Yeah, that's probably the last nuclear
(13:55):
accident we'll talk about for a while, because a lot
of the nuclear accidents are a lot more recent.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Let me talk about on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Also, as a personal favor to me, something horrible happens
in someone's life and there are rumors about the nature
of what was going on in their lives before it happened.
Please don't hound them and bug them about it for
years afterwards, because that's definitely disgusting. Yeah, Hi, I know
you're grieving your husband, but was one of you cheating?
Is there something going on? Yeah, No, it doesn't matter.
(14:26):
You don't need to know that information. It was an
intentional decision on my part not to include the names
of any of the wives. All three of the men
were married, two of them had children, one's wife was pregnant,
and I don't think any of the people involved are
living at this point, although their children maybe, And uh,
the fact that people were like they did kind of
(14:50):
become this focus on something they really didn't have anything
to do with.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
I was like, I'm not going to name them specifically
because I don't I feel like I don't want to
add even though they are at this point probably deceased,
add to the spectacle of people hounding them for many years.
In one case, one of them had gotten married and
was sort of trying to move on with her life
and it kept being.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Brought back up. Rude and rot rude again.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Lot of documentation of this reactor having issues before any
of it happened.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Yeah. Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
If you'd like to send us a note about this,
there's in some way we're a history podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com. Whatever is happening over the course of your weekend.
I know a lot of people are moving into hardcore
getting ready for Christmas holiday mode. Not everyone, but you know,
if that's what's coming up in your world, I hope
that all goes really smoothly. And if you've got travel
(15:55):
coming that goes well. We'll be back with a 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,
(16:15):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and
I'm Tracey B.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about Joaquin Torres Garcia this week.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
This is one of those times where my forgetful brain
takes a minute to put together what a thing is
in terms of references, because I had said at the
top of the episode that I was trying to work
on another Latin American artist, and I kind of sputtered
out because there just was not enough material that I
(00:41):
could get my hands on that was in English. And
so I was like, who are other Latin American artists?
And I had done some searching online and consulting lists,
and I saw his name and I was like, Oh,
that's interesting. And I started reading about him, and then
I started looking through my pictures that I took when
(01:03):
we were in Barcelona in various museums, and I'm like, oh,
there's his work. There's this we're gonna get. I already
had him on my list, I just forgot.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, listen, the brain is what it is.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
But I'm so glad that I came back to him,
because I really enjoyed learning more about him, even with
a Madam Bolovotsky jump Scar. She's everywhere, that woman. I
told you before we started listen she had good marketing
because she literally is everywhere, influencing everybody for a pretty
wide period of time. It's strange but also hilarious. Yeah,
(01:39):
I marvel I said it while we were recording Taurus.
Garcia was the busiest bee in the hive.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
He was always hustling, Like yeah, I don't mean that
in a pejorati of sense, but he was always like teaching,
forming new schools of art, forming new publications of art,
writing his own books about our theory, painting things, finding
new forms of art that he could do. But what
(02:07):
I really marveled at was how much he and many
of the artists in his circle really love to form
societies and orgs. We're just like, I know, let's form
another society. And I found myself sitting there imagining, like
were they just sitting around at like a cafe and
they were like, you know what, we need one more society.
(02:31):
But it makes me chuckle a little bit. And again
I don't mean that in a negative way. I just
there's a lot of groups. It's also really interesting that
like some of those, even as he was very much
rejecting some of the European schools of thought, a lot
of those societies were forming in very Eurocentric places where
(02:54):
a lot of the other artists were like, I'm going
to mimic the Green Masters.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Just interesting.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I didn't mention it in the episode because I have
issues with Picasso, uh huh, as many people do, for
the reasons that he was not a great human being.
But there was a funny story that came up several
times while I was researching where when he was in Paris,
when Torres Garcia was in Paris, where Picasso also was
(03:21):
at the time in the nineteeneens, and he started talking
about I might go to New York. Picasso was like,
New York is a void, don't do it. It's just
tickled me a little bit. Here's my other big thing
from this episode. Max Ernst. He came up a million times. Listen.
(03:41):
Max Ernst has been on my list for a very
long time. I have a Max Ernst inspired tattoo. He
is the artist whose work made me want to get
tattoos in the first place. I love his work and
Samande Bonte is one of my favorite things. I keep
putting it aside for reason since I don't entirely know,
(04:02):
possibly because I don't want to find out something horrible
about him. Sure, but as I was working on this
and he kept coming up in exhibitions with Torres Garcia,
he kept coming up in like other social circles, et cetera.
I'm just like, I see you, Max Ernst, I'm coming
for you. I swear I will do that episode at
(04:23):
some It's almost like he's haunting me. Just fine, Max Ernst,
welcome to the show. At some point in the future,
I'm gonna knock it out just so I will stop.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Being, you know, inundated with it. Right.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Anyways, I think it's interesting that we don't get a
lot of Torres Garcia, and I didn't. I don't remember
talking about him in any of my art history learnings
as a student, and he was super important, so it's
kind of weird. But I'm I'm glad to have the
opportunity to talk about him a little bit. Yeah, a
(05:00):
little bit. His wife founded the museum that is named
for him in Uruguay, and that seems like a very
cool place. Even though a lot of his stuff did
get did get destroyed in that fire elsewhere, but they
do a lot of other artists of course there as well.
(05:21):
So if we're ever there, guess where I'm going. We
talked about the sl one nuclear reactor incidents on the
show this week. Yeah, not the most peppy story. No
(05:43):
happy holidays everybody.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
One of the things that I think might have been
going on in some of the some of the things
that were like there are giant holes in the safety
plan is the fact that there really had not been
an incident like this in the United States since nuclear
energy had first been developed. There had been other accidents
(06:11):
we have talked about that, we talked about them in
the demon Core episode, but that was not like a
nuclear reactor failing in some way, And there have been
other obviously nuclear reactor accidents since then, but this was
the first one. And if I recall correctly, it had
been something like nineteen years that critical reactor or that
(06:33):
nuclear reactors had existed, and so that might have led
people into a false sense of security slash complacency. But still,
what do we do with radioactive bodies in the event
of an accident? Seems like something that should have been
planned for as a possibility, ye at a site that
(06:59):
was specifically for developing prototypes for nuclear reactors. Yeah, It's
one of those things where I find myself wondering, like,
was this just such an unpleasant possibility to contemplate that
no one brought it up thinking they didn't want to
be the guy that suggested to their superiors that their
system was gonna fail, right, and thus things went horribly awful. Yeah,
(07:26):
but I don't know.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
One of the things that I found alluded to in
some of the things that I read for this episode,
which I didn't put into the core of the episode
because it was something that I felt I felt like
I couldn't really substantiate, was that the Army was more
permissive of the sl one's various problems, and that had
(07:53):
the Navy been making decisions about it in this whole
sort of an her play among the different branches of
the military, that the Navy would have shut it down
way before prior to this incident happening, Like as soon
as the stickiness problem revealed itself, that the Navy would
have been like, I'm out, Tracy Tren to start a
(08:14):
fight on this behind the scenes. Yeah, we're gonna have
it behind the scenes between the army folks and the
Navy folks. But I'm just saying this is And I
was like, is this the truth or is this like
reflective of attitudes about the different branches of the military
among one another. I don't actually know. I watched a
(08:35):
number of videos as well. I was preparing for this,
and the one that was an Atomic Energy Commission kind
of brief on the accident that had had had the
recreation of what they were doing when it happened, had
the weirdest tone to me. It was definitely a product
(08:56):
of its era, that era being the nineteen sixties, and
it really felt like a video that one might find
in a derelict government building in.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
A fallout video game.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And I like there were other other videos that were
also made by the Atomic Energy Commission that I watched
that had a similar vibe to them.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And then there was one.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
As I was trying to confirm whether people said DO
line or whether they spelled it out DW line, and
I watched a video that was on the DO line
that had been made while it was in use, that
had many minutes of like cold war scare mongering before
(09:50):
we got to the first mention of the do line,
and that a little bit reminded me more of my
early childhood and you know, the final stages of the
Cold War and how people would talk about the Soviet
Union and nuclear capabilities and all of that.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
And I got very frustrated with that one in particular,
because I was like, just say do line, Just say it,
say the thing I needed to know how to say. Yeah,
I beg yeah. A couple of random notes that I
also had. We have a history in the United States
of describing areas where nuclear testing or other nuclear work
(10:33):
was going to happen as empty or uninhabited, and that
has been false and really there were indigenous people living
there right Like that happened with the Manhattan Project, and
it happened with various like nuclear weapons tests and has
had devastating effects on those communities. There's also a whole
(10:55):
additional side of this that we talked about in the
demon Core episode about the role of indigenous people and
mining radioactive materials to be used in nuclear fuel, all
of this. So I went down a rabbit hole of
trying to be like, was this surrounding area really empty
or not right? And it was not something that I
found a conclusive answer to. I found some very sort
(11:18):
of couched in what Wikipedia editors call weasel words about
like if there were sheep or cows grazing nearby, they
might have been affected.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
And I'm like, well, but were there.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
It was so tremendously cold that night that I think
it would have been very difficult for any living thing
to just be out exposed in the temperatures, but like,
I don't really know. And then the last thing is
that this incident, tying into how it's really seemed like
there were various safety things that should have been in
place earlier, is now an example that gets used in
(12:02):
basically training about safety and like failure prevention. And I
read a quote that was by Brian O'Connor, chief of
Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA, in a slide deck
about this that was about the.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Cold War era.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Applying today's thing that people say about knowledge workers of
move fast and break things, of having almost that same
mentality during Cold War technological advancements, and the quote was quote,
while the temptation or pressure to implement new technology can
be great, premature use can end in premature failure.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
And I just really liked that quote.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, that's totally true. Premature use can end in premature failure. So, Adrian,
I hope you were happy with the episode that we did.
I think I think, uh, Adrian would like a multi
part Netflix special or something. Also, there is a whole
(13:10):
book about it. I just closed my outline. What is
the name of the book. The book was one of
the last things that I read in the uh in
the research of doing all this, having already read and
made tons of notes that was based off of government reports.
And so the name of the book was Idaho Falls,
(13:31):
The Untold Story of America's new first nuclear accident, and
it has more of a you know, human account of
it rather than the many military reports which read like
military reports. Uh So, Yeah, that's probably the last nuclear
(13:55):
accident we'll talk about for a while, because a lot
of the nuclear accidents are a lot more recent.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Let me talk about on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Also, as a personal favor to me, something horrible happens
in someone's life and there are rumors about the nature
of what was going on in their lives before it happened.
Please don't hound them and bug them about it for
years afterwards, because that's definitely disgusting. Yeah, Hi, I know
you're grieving your husband, but was one of you cheating?
Is there something going on? Yeah, No, it doesn't matter.
(14:26):
You don't need to know that information. It was an
intentional decision on my part not to include the names
of any of the wives. All three of the men
were married, two of them had children, one's wife was pregnant,
and I don't think any of the people involved are
living at this point, although their children maybe, And uh,
the fact that people were like they did kind of
(14:50):
become this focus on something they really didn't have anything
to do with.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
I was like, I'm not going to name them specifically
because I don't I feel like I don't want to
add even though they are at this point probably deceased,
add to the spectacle of people hounding them for many years.
In one case, one of them had gotten married and
was sort of trying to move on with her life
and it kept being.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Brought back up. Rude and rot rude again.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Lot of documentation of this reactor having issues before any
of it happened.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Yeah. Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
If you'd like to send us a note about this,
there's in some way we're a history podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com. Whatever is happening over the course of your weekend.
I know a lot of people are moving into hardcore
getting ready for Christmas holiday mode. Not everyone, but you know,
if that's what's coming up in your world, I hope
that all goes really smoothly. And if you've got travel
(15:55):
coming that goes well. We'll be back with a 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,
(16:15):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Popular Podcasts
Monster: BTK
'Monster: BTK', the newest installment in the 'Monster' franchise, reveals the true story of the Wichita, Kansas serial killer who murdered at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991. Known by the moniker, BTK – Bind Torture Kill, his notoriety was bolstered by the taunting letters he sent to police, and the chilling phone calls he made to media outlets. BTK's identity was finally revealed in 2005 to the shock of his family, his community, and the world. He was the serial killer next door. From Tenderfoot TV & iHeartPodcasts, this is 'Monster: BTK'.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.