Behind the Scenes Minis: Unpacking Harriet and Watching Olympics

Holly and Tracy talk through the problematic aspects of Harriet Strong's life. and share their thoughts about the Olympics as spectators. They also talk about art as an Olympic competition.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday, Am Holly Frye, And
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh Harriet. Yeah. I confess to
Tracy before we started talking about Harriet that every time

(00:24):
I hear that name, I think of so I married
an ex murderer. So if you like me, think she's
going to be a hard hearted harbinger of Haggitts, she's not. OK.
There's so much to unpack with her. And I know
you got real irritated about this sort of flip that
she did where it made it seem like she was
saying like I was disabled and now I'm not right.

(00:46):
There's a whole other read on her illness though. Okay,
go we didn't you go first that we didn't mention
in the episode. That may or may not shift how
you think about it, but I couldn't. I only found
one person really writing at it in this way, so
I didn't want to put it in the episode as
though it was factual. But it's an interesting take. So,

(01:08):
and it's that that biography that we mentioned in the
magazine biography, that writer looked at all of Harriet's personal
writings and kind of came to the conclusion that she
wasn't sure she had actually had a spinal injury so

(01:29):
much as she may have fallen into that thing that
happened to a lot of women during the time, where
if you exhibited any kind of you know, sign of
not feeling great, they kind of lumped you under like hysterical, right, right,
and that you were just a frail woman who had

(01:50):
problems because you were inherently nervous due to being a woman,
and that that would have even impacted you know, kids
at that point. So it's unclear. Yeah, well, and it's
like that's one of the things that can be so
challenging to talk about things like chronic illnesses and disability

(02:11):
with people who were living you know, I mean even
more recently, but like so often the terms that were
used to describe what was going on with people were
really vague, and they could encapsulate a lot of things,
and like somebody who really was just like bored and
stifled in an unhappy marriage might be described as being

(02:34):
mentally ill or disabled or whatever, and like that might
not at all be what was going on. That can
make it really hard to talk about it uh, but
I just as I was reading it, I was like,
I want to say really clearly that this does not
mean that somebody who is disabled or has a chronic

(02:57):
illness just isn't trying hard enough and they put their
mind to it. If they put their mind to it,
they could get better. Because man, not only is that false,
it harms so many people so much. Yeah, I mean,
that's why I wanted to read that quote. That's like,
it seems like when she was no longer married, she
was no longer ill. It was fine then because it
was that, it didn't seem like it was so much.

(03:18):
And that same writer even kind of makes the case
that Harriet and Charles may have had some interlocking just
unhappiness that they manifested. Like instead of saying I'm actually
unfulfilled and not happy in marriage, it was like I
must be sick. Yeah, because you know, I mean that happens, right.

(03:39):
Two people can love each other and that doesn't mean
their marriage is healthier, good, right, And I think that
feels like the case here again were it's retroactive and
we only have some of the letters because he burned them.
He also burned all of his letters and wrote a
note about it that was like, I don't want any
of my life on record, but it does, as you said,

(04:02):
it becomes very hard to unpick it all, and it's
very very weird, and it is you know, I mean,
none of that comes up at all in her later
life except that, like the only time she ever mentioned
it in interviews was to say, like, oh, well, when
I was a kid, I had spinal problems and that's
how I learned so much stuff. I was an autodidact.
I was reading all the time, which is kind of

(04:24):
a cool thing. We don't know if that's even true, right,
And I will say, the same problem comes up. I
only saw it fleetingly because she was not the focus
of a lot of discussion related to her mother, where
you know, when the family moved from Buffalo to California
pretty abruptly. Most biographies about Harriet suggests that her father

(04:48):
was you know, seeking financial benefit or like a business opportunity.
But there was at least one I saw that was like, well,
you know, her mother was delicate and needed Western air.
And I'm like, huh, yeah, we don't know. It makes
it so so hard. The other thing that may or

(05:10):
may not mitigate your feelings of frustration with her over
it is the fact that I think part of the
impetus for her to hide that kind of ties back
to everything she said constantly about how like, no, if
I'm going to do business with men, I have to
be ten times better than them at everything. I think
she actually says four times. But I think she probably

(05:32):
held some concern that if she let any kind of
information that she may have had any kind of weakness
leak out, that it would give people that wanted to
maybe downplay her business acumen ammunition to be sure. Sure,

(05:53):
I think that's really the big the probably the biggest reason. Yes,
it still has the unfortunate repercussion of like, yeah, I'm
no longer ill, I just decided to not be ill.
But well, they're just there are also things that we
can't really know conclusively, Like, right, you know, did she

(06:14):
have conditions that as she grew older she found better
ways to deal with or was it just like was
she concealing information or like there are a lot or
was she one of the seventy five percent of women
who were deemed ill through hysteria? Right? It really were
just being human, yeah with something, Yeah, something else was

(06:37):
going on, or maybe nothing was going on and she
was just branded that way. Yeah, because she had all
of those letters burnt right, that like would have been
a really handy resource to piece things together. Yeah, we'll
never know. I do love that she figured out the

(07:00):
grass thing, Yeah, because the reason people like, normally people
will grow if they're growing a walnut orchard, they'll grow
something like corn in between the trees. And the reason is,
like when we say it's a support crop, what it
really is is that those things grow much faster and
can be turned into a sellable good. Okay, much faster

(07:23):
than like a walnut tree from a seedling can actually
produce anything viable. And so while you're waiting on the
bigger and potentially more profitable walnut crop to come to
maturity and fruition, you can be planting things in the
interim that are like a few months flip over. And

(07:44):
so it was unusual that she went with pampas grass
instead of corn, because that's what most people would have done.
But she was like, nah, I got another idea, which
I think is very interesting. Like I love that part
of her story where she's like, I'm going to crack
the coat on this whole farming and ranching thing, and
I'm going to figure out how to do it and
make this work, even on this property that seems to
have problems. And she did, and that I love about her,

(08:08):
and of course it's to me super admirable. But then
it gets that thing where I do feel like she
started to reach that point where she thought her every
idea was really good and why aren't people listening to me? Yeah?
I I like the idea of being like, all right,
can we figure out a way to control these floodwaters? Yes?

(08:30):
Can we figure out a way to reuse the wastewater?
Not as much of a fan of let's build a dam, right,
I mean, there are so many repercussions, and part of
the reason we don't get into them is they're huge, right, Like,
there are wildlife repercussions, There are repercussions to the indigenous
people that live in those places that in many cases

(08:50):
are not being consulted about whether or damn should go there. Yeah,
the United States went through kind of a heyday of
damn building, not necessarily stuff as big as Hoover Dam,
which is that's its whole own other story. But like,
there are a lot of much smaller dams. A lot
of them at this point are aging and unsafe, and

(09:12):
a lot of them to a greater or lesser extent,
like flooded land that was supposed to be the land
that indigenous people were still allowed to use. And in
more recent years there has been an effort to like
safely dismantle a lot of these dams and sort of
like do it in a way that's not going to

(09:32):
just cause a massive flood downstream. Yeah, And so like,
I don't know, this is like adds to the many
things with her that I'm like, Man, I have thoughts,
and then I have other thoughts. Yeah. I mean, it's
really interesting because she did in many ways make that
area of California livable. Like her ideas led to a

(09:55):
lot of livability there in terms of you know, just
a crops even like being able to figure out how
to do that. And I feel like if she had
focused more on teaching other ranchers how to like put
together their own water pumps and stuff instead of being like,

(10:16):
let's build a massive thing, it's right, I would be like, yeah, okay,
But as she said, it's it gets into a whole
other ball of wax. Yeah, Yeah, Harriet. Yeah, I feel
like we're going to get emails who are mad that
I am sort of judging somebody by modern standards, and

(10:37):
I'm like this, it's more like thinking about the legacy
and impact of decisions that people have made in the
past that we're still living with today. Yeah, And I
mean I will say, right, she ultimately was not the
one who made those decisions. Sure she advocated for it,
but was it. And I know a lot of people
really love Harriet and I think she is completely fascinating

(11:01):
as a really ingenious person. Like I love that she
came up with a way to open and close windows
from bed. I'm like, that's pretty cool. It's really you know,
like a telescoping stick. I like the idea that she
was so driven in those early years of being a widow,

(11:21):
where she was like, how am I going to make money?
And she kind of was like doing the I have
a million good ideas. I'm very smart, like a scattershot
approach of like I will innovate in the following four things,
Like I see why people love her, But then there's
like that thing of like, oh, and oh, she hates

(11:42):
she hates people that aren't white settlers. Okay, that's a problem.
Uh yeah, I don't. I don't know. If she had
continued to age, who knows how she would have, you know,
potentially shifted again in her her most mature years. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Harriet,

(12:18):
Are you an Olympics watcher? Tracy? Not really? No, Like,
there are some events that I really do enjoy watching.
I in the winter, I enjoy the figure skating. In
the summer, I enjoy the gymnastics. There's a lot of
other stuff happening at the Olympics that I don't really

(12:40):
care about. And there's just there's been so many changes
over the years to how one watches the Olympics. Yes,
going from you turned the television on and they're on there,
to like figuring out where do I watch the Olympics now? Yes,

(13:04):
And it's not something I love enough to put that
effort into it. But often I will hear about some
amazing performance somebody did and I'll go watch, you know,
the like official video on YouTube or whatever, if that exists.
How about you? I love the Olympics. Yeah, And the

(13:27):
thing is I'm the opposite of you. I will figure
out how to watch it, and it doesn't matter if
it's a sport that I'm into or not, I will
watch it. I have such a great memory of the
olden times of our working together when we first started
as employees of Discovery, when our company was part of that,

(13:48):
having three days a week where we could telework. Oh yeah,
because that meant that I could watch the Olympics the
whole time I was working during the day, like I
was working, but I had the on in the background constantly,
And to me, that was the most fun. And I
don't know why I get so into it, because I'm
not into a lot of the sports, but I get

(14:09):
completely fished into the whole thing. I want to watch
all of the interviews with athletes, I want all of
the human interest stories. I want all of the things.
And I feel like we've talked. I don't remember if
it was on this show or if it was on
the other podcast we used to be on, which I'm
not even going to name, because I just I don't
encourage anybody to go listen to that at this point.

(14:31):
I don't even know if you can find it anywhere. Yeah,
I feel like things said extemporaneously well over a decade ago.
We just don't need to go back to that, but
we did have a conversation about how there was a
time it might have been on this show, it might
have been on that one. There was a time when
the Olympics were really struggling in terms of getting anybody
to watch them. Yeah, and adding in that focus on

(14:56):
the athletes and the human interest stories around the athletes,
like really brought a lot of renewed attention to it
in a time when a lot of people just does
not really care that much, yeah, because they couldn't connect
to it right, Like, Yeah, I feel like for a
lot of people, when you're watching, if you're not into
a specific sport anyway, the idea of watching someone whose

(15:21):
entire life is about very high level performance, it's just
hard to like get into from a viewer's perspective right
where it's like, I don't know curling. I don't know
about that curling which has vanished for a bit. I
don't know if it's coming. I haven't I don't see it,
don't even know. Yeah, I mean it's it's fascinating to

(15:43):
me and smart that someone on the broadcast side was like,
you know what we need to do starting interviewing athletes,
because you do realize like, yes, these are people that
are very driven and they work very, very hard, But
there are also people and I that is always helpful
to remember They're not just machines that go fast or

(16:05):
jump high or whatnot. They also have thoughts and feelings
and are completely fully rounded individuals that might that have
lives that expand far beyond their Olympic careers. Love it, man,
I will watch gymnastics all day every day. I do
like to watch gymnastics, and I do like to watch
figure skating. I have a gymnastics thing that I'm scared

(16:29):
make people angry with me. There is an aspect to
gymnastics that I struggle with, aside from the scandals of
it completely obviously, there have been some horrible scandals and
that we should all be struggling with, just from an
aesthetic point of view. Because I grew up a bun
head taking ballet. It breaks my brain to watch gymnasts

(16:51):
point their toes, yeah, because they don't do it the
way you would in ballet, and to me they're doing great.
I'm not actually criticiz, Yeah, I'm saying to me, like
the aesthetic of it, I'm like, that is not how
a foot should look when it is pointed that is
not nearly pretty enough, and it is, it's perfectly fine,
but I just am like, Eh, don't do that, Just
don't do that. It's totally my hang up. Yeah, that

(17:15):
is actually a segue to talking about when I was
heavily in my ballet zone when I was much younger,
and they introduced I think it was eighty four rhythmic gymnastics. Oh.
I remember the rhythmic gymnastics because I remember a lot
of people in the dance community being like, I think
I could do that, yeah, and it being sort of
a really exciting idea and it is very pretty. Yeah,

(17:40):
I have a whole other thing that it might be
its own episode one day. Okay, did you know you
probably knew that for a while you could do art
and get an Olympic medal. I do remember we had
a talk about this at one point. Yeah. I love
that idea in some ways and in others I hate it.

(18:03):
So I've never really gotten deep into the thing because
I'm like, art is subjective. There's no such thing yes
objectively good art in my opinion, or objectively bad art
unless I hurt someone. But I'm fascinated by the idea.
I love it, Like I said, I love it in
some ways, and we've certainly talked about many other instances

(18:25):
of like art competitions, but I get really hung up
about it. Yeah. Have I ever told you about my
extremely brief time taking gymnastics? No? Okay, I would have
been maybe five or six, like I was elementary school
age for sure, and I don't remember exactly what led

(18:48):
to me taking gymnastics, but as a child, I was
very very scared of heights, okay, and this included being
on the balance beam that was not on the floor.
The balance beam terrified me as a kid and still
would also for all of my life, I have had

(19:10):
very very tight hamstrings And the only time I have
had like a reasonable level of flexibility in my hamstrings
was when I was in a drum and bugle corps
in high school, and that involved like just relentless daily
stretching and effort. Yeah, and so like as a kid,

(19:32):
I'm trying to take gymnastics classes and I literally can't
touch my toes, And then think number three is I
just could never manage to do a cartwheel or any
other cartwheel like things. I just couldn't. I couldn't do it.
Part of like throwing my head at the ground from

(19:55):
I just I couldn't. I couldn't get over the I
couldn't get over that. And like there were people that
like compassionate and thoughtful gymnastics instructors who worked with me
a whole lot to try to like get me to
be able to do this, and I never could do it.
And I have never done a cartwheel or a round
off or whatever in my whole life. See, that is

(20:17):
one of the few things I've retained. Yeah, I can
still bust out a cartwheel. Yeah, now, if I overthink it,
I'll mess it up. But right not me. I can
still do a cartwheel. Similarly, you took me an incredibly
long time to dive into a swimming pool. I can
I do that. I don't think I ever managed to
like dive into the swimming pool in a leaping kind

(20:39):
of way. But I could kneel on the diving board
and get into the water headburst that way. Oh yeah,
I can't dive. I sort of feel like if I
tried to do any of this now, at the age
of forty nine, with no preparation, it would not go
well for me. But can you hurtle yourself into the

(21:01):
water and just go for a minute and see how
far you go? Maybe we didn't read those press accounts
of the plunge for distance because they are very unkind

(21:22):
to the athletes, right, and like a lot of body
shaming involved. Yeah, that's part of what I struggle with
about sports like gymnastics and figure skating and stuff. There's
just there's so much body stuff involved in all of that.
Oh yeah, having been in a drum and bule corps,
which is way less intensive than doing like gymnastics at

(21:45):
a competitive level for your whole life. Like, I still
have a lot of mixed feelings about my time in
drum Corps and continuing to march and practice while injured
and stuff like that, And a lot of that applies
to various Olympic sports also, especially sports that like really
young people are the ones competing. Yeah, I feel like,

(22:09):
I mean, I'm no expert, but I do feel like
that has changed in some ways in a lot of
sports where people will kind of there is less of
an impetus and a drive to like, no, you push
through injury and you keep going. Like I think sports
medicine has advanced so much in our lifetimes that there's
just a realization of like, hey, don't do that, Like

(22:33):
you gotta think longer term than this. So'm I know
there are still athletes that compete well injured. I'm not
trying to say that doesn't happen anymore, but I do
think fewer athletes maybe are pressured to do so. It
probably depends on their team and their coach and their
sports and their parents. In some cases yes, and then

(22:58):
you know, yeah, but I like the Olympic. It's just fine.
Were you and you weren't in the in Atlanta when
the Olympics were here? What year was that, nineteen ninety No,
I was not. I was in college. That was wild. Yeah,
that is the one and only time I have lived
in an Olympic city, and it was bananas because there

(23:18):
was a proposal to have the Olympics in Boston a
few years ago and Boston said no, thank you. Yeah,
I mean it's very expensive. It's often my understanding is
it's a net loss fiscally for the city. It's kind
of a thing you do for clout, not a whole

(23:39):
lot else, and then you're often left with an aftermath
that is really rough. Yeah, I don't know how much
truth there is to this, but I do know the
Atlanta Olympics a lot of people pinpoint as like a
moment when Atlanta got a lot sprawlier and a lot

(24:00):
busier in a way that seemed accelerated by like I
don't know that I would say it got sprawly or
it's always been real sprawly, but I do mark it
as a like a moment of like sea change for
the city because I remember when I came to Atlanta
for college in the very end of the eighties, it

(24:22):
was a city of like a million people. It was great.
I mean, you know, and this isn't isn't like a
negative on population density, but in terms of what the
city could support in terms of infrastructure, housing, et cetera.
That was a good number at the time. And then
after the Olympics it was four million, and like a

(24:43):
lot of that happened very quickly, and there wasn't like,
even though they had done a lot of infrastructure work
to be ready for the Olympics, it wasn't enough for
a fourfold increase in right population. And it's not like
those people all moved in on one day. It's you know,
it took some time, but still it was it was
very quick and I just feel like that is really

(25:03):
when Atlanta traffic got its reputation of craziness. Just yeah,
so jam packed all the time. Yeah, if I'm remembering rightly,
I moved there in two thousand and three, so right,
I only saw post Olympics Atlanta. Yeah, yeah, So it's
it was an interesting thing to watch it change. I mean,

(25:25):
that's also a year that's meaningful to me just in
general because I met my husband that year and we
got married that year, and like, we went to a
couple of Olympic events, We went to a baseball game,
to baseball games, and it was in some ways really fun.
Like there were some interesting choices that I feel like
we're smart in terms of preparation, right, Like we worked

(25:46):
with some univer we like I had anything to do
with it. The city worked with some universities where they
basically like subsidized the building out of modern dormitories that
were used for athletes and then and then became part
of the university campus. And some of those schools really
needed that kind of upgrade and that was great for them.

(26:06):
But it did I mean that that corridor right through it.
Downtown Atlanta just got clogged at a level that has
never not been that again. Yeah. Yeah. The last time
I was there was for when we uh, when we
closed our union bargaining, got our contract. I don't know

(26:27):
if we've said that specifically on the podcast, but I
was having to take a lift to the airport to
go back home, and I had kind of forgotten what
a bad traffic day can be, like, oh yeah, and
this was, you know, not a time that I would

(26:48):
I know, the span of time you would describe as
rush hour in Atlanta is very broad, but this was
not a time of day that I would have expected
to be particularly about in terms of traffic. And it
was like we got onto the highway and then we
just stopped, and I was like, I'm so glad I
left with lots of extra time to get to the airport. Yeah.

(27:11):
I always do. I mean, we have, like we have
a route that doesn't go through downtown if downtown is clogged,
and we can usually get to the airport fast. But
it's like if we can't, we really can't. Yeah, And
so I always leave super early and if I get
to the airport early, great. I have my favorite restaurant,
I go get a meal, and if we don't, we're
usually still fine on time. Yeah. Yeah, I had come

(27:34):
from from the airport on Marta because the hotel that
we were staying at was at Peachtree Center. Yeah, but
then like that's not where I was leaving from to
get back to the airport, and I was not near
Marta anymore. Well, and the rail to the airport, like
those stations have been weird and getting I don't know

(27:58):
if you walked by them while you were there, but
the stations at the airport, one of them was shut
one part of it was shut down completely for a while.
Like that's been all a little bit trickier. Then it
was not a problem getting to the hotel, so that
part worked out great. It might have been back up
and running by then, but I remember there was some

(28:19):
time earlier this year where I was like, can the
train come into the airport, And I'm not sure that
it could all the time, which I'm sure was very
problematic for a lot of people. But yeah, yeah, Atlanta
was definitely very changed by the Olympic Games. Yeah, and
I have I remember having a friend who lived in
la when the Games were there, and him being like, oh,

(28:41):
it was disastrous afterwards, because then it was just like
a mess. And I I don't remember feeling quite like
that about Atlanta. I'm sure some people do have stories
like that, but I do remember just noting how different
it was, Yeah, because I had lived there, like, I
had lived here like seven years at that point, so
I had a pretty good Anyway, Olympics, I'll be watching. Okay,

(29:05):
we we didn't mention it in the episode, but of
course the Olympics we were talking about, which were in
the early phase of the modern Olympic Games. There weren't
separate winter in summers yet, right, I remember when that
change happen twenties. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember when that
change happened in it being very controversial and there were
well no, I mean, they didn't split winter and summer

(29:27):
at all. There was only summer. Oh yes, until I
think nineteen twenty eight. I'm going by memory, so if
I'm wrong, apologies. But then when they split years, Yeah,
that was a different thing that we were around for. Yeah. Yeah,
and yes it was very controversial, but now here we are,
we're all used to it. If you have a weekend

(29:49):
coming up, I hope it's delightful. And if you can
do a cartwheel and it's fun, do some If you
can't find something else to do that's fun, play mind
games like chess that can't be part of the If
you don't have time off, I still hope that you
have fun and do something delightful and that everyone is
super cool to you. We will be right back here

(30:10):
tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday with
a brand new one. Stuff you Missed in History Class
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