July 22, 2024 • 37 mins
Harriet Williams Russell Strong was quite a powerhouse of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only did she manage to dig herself out of an unfortunate situation when her fortunes changed at the age of 39, she was also an inventor, and an early proponent of water conservation.
Research:
- Albertine, Susan. “Self Found in the Breaking: The Life Writings of Harriet Strong.” Biography, vol. 17, no. 2, 1994, pp. 161–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23539669
- Apostol, Jane. “Harriet Russell Strong: Horticulturalist, Conservationist, and Feminist.” California History, vol. 85, no. 2, 2008, pp. 50–65. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25139149
- “City in the Grasp of Swirling Water.” Los Angeles Times. Feb. 19, 1914. https://www.newspapers.com/image/380229853/?match=1&terms=%E2%80%9CCity%20in%20the%20grasp%20of%20swirling%20water%E2%80%9D
- “Flood Subsiding; Near End.” Los Angeles Express. Feb. 21, 1914. https://www.newspapers.com/image/607900618/?terms=flood
- “Harriet Russell Strong.” Lemelson-MIT. https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/harriet-russell-strong
- “Harriet Russell Strong.” Whittier Museum. https://whittiermuseum.org/research/harriet-russell-strong/
- “Harriet W.R. Strong.” National Inventors Hall of Fame. https://www.invent.org/inductees/harriet-w-r-strong
- “Loss to Railroads Over Two Millions.” Los Angeles Times. Feb 22, 1914. https://www.newspapers.com/image/380231660/?terms=flood
- Lund, H.H. “The Successful Ranch Woman of Whittier.” Little Farms Magazine. February 1913.
- “A Strong Will.” U.S.P.T.O. https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innovation/historical-stories/strong-will
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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 welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I don't know how Harriet Russell william Strong got on
my list. She's on there twice, so I've thought of
her a couple times. I love it. But she was
quite a powerhouse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Not only did she manage to dig herself out of
a pretty unfortunate situation when her fortunes changed rather abruptly
at the age of thirty nine, she was also an
(00:39):
inventor and an early proponent of water conservation. She had
a lot of big ideas. Some of those ideas certainly
had repercussions that, once they came to fruition in ways
not directed by her, became other problems in other ways.
But she's a very interesting story. I do have to
(01:00):
do a heads up here because this episode does include
a death by suicide. We're not mentioning any specifics, but
if you just want to skip that entirely, you can.
There will be a point when we say Harriet found
herself Challe in a very challenging position. We get there,
you can jump ahead thirty seconds or a minute and
you'll be past it. But that's a pretty pivotal moment,
(01:23):
and the repercussions of the event that we mentioned are
throughout the episode, again not in detail, but just so
you know as a heads up.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Harriet Russell was born in Buffalo, New York, on July
twenty third, eighteen forty four, to Henry Pierpont Russell and
Marry Guest Russell. In eighteen fifty two, her family made
a cross country moved to northern California, near the town
of Quincy in Plumous County. When she was very young,
Harriet had some kind of a spinal condition and had
(01:52):
to spend almost all of her time in bed, but
the specifics of that are a little bit hazy. She read, though,
learned a lot about history and art and literature. Starting
at the age of fourteen, Harriet attended the Young Ladies
Seminary in Benicia, California, run by Mary Atkins. That school
would later become Mills College. She attended until eighteen sixty.
(02:16):
In eighteen sixty one, the family moved once again, this
time to Carson City, Nevada, hoping to cash in on
the silver rush, and in Nevada, Harriet met a man
named Charles Lyman Strong. Charles was the superintendent of the
Gould and Curry Mining Company, which was experiencing great success
mining the comstock load, and Harriet and Charles married on
(02:38):
February twenty sixth, eighteen sixty three. She was just nineteen,
he was thirty seven at the time, and the following
year they had their first daughter, also named Harriet Russell
Strong after her mother. That year was a difficult one.
Charles had a breakdown brought on by the stress of
his job. He left the mining company and went to
(02:58):
a hot spring to try to wrapt and recuperate. Harriet
was also ill a lot. She was often described through
a lot of her life as being fragile or delicate. Right,
we're going to get to a point where that seems
very much at odds with other things, and we'll talk
about why a little bit. In eighteen sixty five, Charles
(03:20):
went back to work once again in the mining business,
this time assessing mines along the Pacific coast for investors
from the east, primarily from New York. But that was
ultimately unsuccessful, and he really wanted out of mining altogether.
He and Harriet also had another daughter, Mary Lyman Strong.
In eighteen sixty six, the year after Mary was born,
(03:43):
Charles and Harriet became ranchers. They purchased a three hundred
and twenty five acre property with Harriet's brother, William Henry Russell.
This was in an area which was part of modern
day Whittier, California, in Los Angeles County. Today it's roughly
twenty miles east of downtown LA. The property had belonged
to the last governor of Alta, California under Mexican rule, Popico,
(04:07):
before the Strongs purchased it and built a homestead there.
They named it Rancho del Forerte or Ranch of the Strong.
At that time, there wasn't really much of anything on
this ranch. The only crop that had been started there
was oranges, and those orange trees were still very young
when Harriet and her family acquired the property, and soon
(04:29):
they realized why nothing had been grown there. It was
that it was just about impossible to irrigate the land.
After struggling with the ranch for several years, Charles once
again went back to mining, even though he had been
completely burned out on it when he left in eighteen
sixty seven. Different accounts kind of just described this differently.
(04:49):
One is that he was not doing well with the
ranch and he wanted to leave, but others are more
like he kind of just got bored.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
With it, and so I don't. In the time that
he and Harriet had been at Rancho del Ferte, both
of the Strongs had continued to deal with health problems.
They both had complaints of back issues and headaches and
nervous weakness, and they both tried a number of treatments,
everything from iron supplements to water cures, but these just
(05:18):
seemed to be for both of them chronic and lingering problems,
and they never really got better. They would get somewhat better,
but neither of them ever really seemed to feel one
hundred percent or really good. But Charles did need to
bring in some money, and he started chasing mining opportunities
kind of around the western part of the country. He
(05:38):
was in California, Nevada, and Arizona, and this constant hustle
to try to find a promising vain meant that he
was away from home a lot of the time, and
as they were dealing with financial stress and him being gone.
They did also welcome their third daughter, Georgina Pierpont Strong
in eighteen sixty eight, and then their fourth daughter, Nell
de Luce, who was born in eighteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Living apart so much really strained Harriet and Charles's marriage
a lot. They were also having serious financial issues and
that added another layer of strain. Their letters are sort
of fraught. They clearly love one another, but also seem
to feel emotionally disconnected without having regular contact. In one
(06:23):
letter to Charles that Harriet never mailed, she expresses some
sadness and dissatisfaction that she doesn't get to experience love
in her daily life. This was in eighteen seventy six,
and she wrote, quote, it was mine for a few
months only. You have told me too many times you
have no love to give me to think that I,
(06:43):
who have been loved always, should live an unloved wife. Yeah,
It's kind of one of those things where, if I
can read between the lines, it seems like he didn't
not love her, but he was just too depleted to
be as available to her as she needed. And she
was wrestling with this dichotomy of being like, I know
(07:03):
you love me, but I don't feel.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Loved at all, and problems continued for the couple. The
trick here is that we only have Charles's side of
most of this correspondence. We'll talk about why in a minute.
But he seems to waver on how they should live
and figure this out. He sometimes wrote that Harriet and
their children should move to be with him, and that
at other times he would write, no, no, no, that
(07:27):
was wrong. You should just stay put. We should continue
as we are. In eighteen eighty two, Charles bought into
a mine in California that was believed to be an
excellent prospect for gold mining. It was not. The person
who had sold it to Charles and other investors had
salted it, meaning that traces of gold had been added
to the most accessible areas so that when prospective buyers
(07:51):
took samples, it made it look like a much more
promising mind than it actually was. And then, to deal
with his debt and these bad business decisions, Charles had
taken out loans against the ranch, something that Harriet did
not know about.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Then, at the age of thirty nine, Harriet found herself
in a very challenging position. Her husband, Charles burned all
of their letters. That's why we don't have her side
of a lot of correspondents. And then he killed himself.
She had four daughters, and Charles's constant business struggles had
left behind a load of debt to make matters worse.
(08:29):
This all happened and was relayed to her while she
was undergoing medical treatment for her ongoing spinal issues. She
was in Philadelphia at the time, in a clinic run
by Silas Weir Mitchell. Her first instinct was, of course,
to go back home, but her daughters, who ranged in
age from nineteen to ten at the time, insisted that
(08:51):
she stay there and finish her six month treatment. Her
treatment regimen does not sound enjoyable, and included things like
alternating exposure to boiling and then freezing water on her back,
and then only being allowed to sit up for a
few minutes at a time twice a day.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, that sounds tortuous to me.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, and boiling, I'm like, was boiling an exaggeration because
that sounds like third degree burns and death? She wrote
in her account boiling okay, But she also wrote that
only the freezing water really hurt her, okay, So I
don't know if boiling was actual boiling point or just
very very hot, and if it was very very localized,
(09:33):
who knows. But when she returned home to California, she
assumed the position of manager at the Rancho del Ferte,
even though she had no idea how to do that
job at the time. Harriet also had to deal with
a lawsuit in the wake of her husband's death. One
of Charles's business associates had tried to seize the property
to make up for his loss in the salted mind
(09:54):
deal that he had entered.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Was strong. There was a lot of legal stuff going on,
and it took a years for all of the issues
with Charles's property to be settled, and in eighteen ninety one,
the legal battle over her husband's business blenders was finally concluded.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
In eighteen eighty three, Harriet wrote that marriage was fundamentally
limiting for women. Quote not because women of America have
no ambition or mental capacity for progress, but because they
do not have the sympathy and cooperation of their husbands
and efforts to improve their minds. No doubt, she was
grappling with her new reality and the fact that she
(10:32):
had simply not been prepared in any way to handle
the entirety of the family's finances. But there she was
in that position. Interestingly, maybe unsurprisingly given the quote that
we just read, she did not choose to remarry Harriet.
In the meantime, while the legal stuff was all still
getting figured out, started researching agriculture. She made friends with
(10:57):
other ranchers in the area and asked them for their advice,
and she also started reading just about any books she
could get her hands on that offered information about successful
ranching and farming. Rancho Delflerte had attempted to expand its
crops in the time that Harriet had lived there, when
Charles was still alive. In addition to the orange groves,
they had tried various grain crops like rye and wheat,
(11:20):
but those had failed, so she started considering what crops
would work, using the knowledge she had gained from her
self directed studies and her neighbors. We'll talk about how
Harriet strong applied the things that she learned about ranching
and farming and the outcome of what she tried after
we pause for a sponsor break. One of the biggest
(11:49):
problems for any rancher in the arid climate where Harriet
was living, though was water. The topography of Los Angeles
County plays a big part in this story because it
sits in a rainage basin with mountains around it, so
when there's no precipitation, it gets very, very dry, but
when there is a storm, it floods. This is still
a problem today. You hear all the time that when
(12:10):
La has an actual big thunderstorm, the streets get flooded
and everything's a mess. In Harriet's time, which she was
considering crops, any crop needed water, and most options required
more than could be counted on from natural rainfall, which
when it did happen, was often more destructive than life giving.
So Strong started brainstorming how she could get water to
(12:33):
her crops consistently. This actually led her to file a patent,
which she was granted on December sixth, eighteen eighty seven.
It was a dam and water distribution system. She described
her invention as quote, a series of reverse arch dams
built one above the other in an inclined channel, watercourse,
or valley, so that the water in each lower dam
(12:54):
acts as a brace and support for the dam above,
the whole being connected by gates. We're going to backtrack
just a couple of years because that was not Harriet
Strong's first patent, it was her fourth. Her first invention
was a quote device for raising and lowering hard to
reach windows. This is something she came up with while
(13:17):
she was having to stay in bed because of spinal issues.
That patent was granted in October of eighteen eighty four.
The following month, she was granted another patent for an
improved hook and eye closure. Then her third, a window
sash holder, which used a small knob protruding from the
window frame that would catch on a block instead of
(13:39):
allowing the frame to slide all the way closed. She
was granted that patent on November sixteenth, eighteen eighty six.
It seems like she was trying to set up any
possible revenue stream she could as she faced this uncertain
future with Charles. Even before her damning an irrigation patent
was granted, and knowing that she had figured out out
(14:00):
how to control water, Strong decided to plant a crop
that needed a whole lot of water, and that was walnuts.
The reason she went with such a thirsty crop was
because her research had revealed that it was also one
of the most profitable if you could get it up
and running. She planted a reported fifty rows of walnut
trees in a half mile wide layout, totaling one hundred
(14:22):
and fifty acres. Had she not had her irrigation system planned,
this almost certainly would have been a spectacular failure. But
it worked, and it worked really well, and by the
mid eighteen nineties people had started calling her the walnut Queen.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
The Rancho del Ferte. Walnut crop was bringing in and
reported two hundred and ninety five dollars an acre, so
forty four two hundred and fifty dollars annually, which was
a whole lot of money. In the eighteen nineties, she
had turned the mess left behind after Charles died into
a success story, and in the course of just a
few years she had paid off the debts left behind
by her husband, paid off the substantial legal fees related
(15:00):
to settling his chaotic estate, and started to turn a profit.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Harriet also used the income from the walnuts to expand
and diversify the ranch's crops. Soon there were pecans and chestnuts,
and also a lot of fruit orchards with lemons, figs, pomegranates, apples, pears, dates,
and even pineapples. She also planted pampas grass instead of
corn as a support crop for the walnuts, and then
(15:25):
she sold the fronds as a decorative item. These are
really popular as an alternative for ostrich plumes to put
on people's hats. She had managed to develop an impressive
infrastructure for the ranch's water systems, with artesian wells that
were linked to a pumping plant that could carry water
to all of these wading crops. If you're hearing all
(15:47):
of this and thinking, wait, I thought this one was fragile,
that's pretty common. It is really fascinating how much her
well being seemed to suddenly shift once she was left
to figure things out on her own. Us An Albertine,
writing for Biography magazine in nineteen ninety four, noted quote,
once free of marriage, Harriet ceased to be ill. In
(16:08):
the second half of her life, she emerged as a
modern public woman, a nationally known entrepreneur, inventor, agriculturists, civic leader,
and suffragist. And most biographies that you look at note
the death of Charles as a delineator in Harriet's life,
separating the before and the after almost as two different people,
and Harriet herself kind of seemed to want to eradicate
(16:31):
evidence of her earlier life and the physical issues associated
with it, as at one point she asked her oldest
daughter to burn any letters in which she had talked
about her health. She seemed to want to truly reinvent
herself and to create a public persona that supported her ambitions.
She would later say, for example of her success in
(16:51):
her widow years quote, I had the courage of ignorance
and plenty of determination to back it up. She didn't
tend to mention any ailment ever, at least not on
the record once she was the public figure. I just
want to note that there is a widespread, pervasive, and
totally false idea that disabled people can stop being disabled
(17:13):
if they just try harder. Yeah, and so this part
of her story irritates me so much.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Well, it brings up a lot of questions, some of
which we'll talk about it behind us.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah. Yeah, Like, I'm glad she worked her life the
way she could work it. I do not want this
story to reinforce such a false and damaging idea. In
eighteen ninety three, Strong attended the World's Columbian Exposition as
an exhibitor. She designed and oversaw construction of an exhibit
called the Pampa's Plume Palace. In addition to being hawked
(17:46):
as hat accoutrement, these grass plumes were sold to department
stores as decor. They also became popular at political conventions
because they could be dyed any color to match the
decor or the part affiliation. The Pampas Plume Palace, which
was part of the larger California Exhibition, won an award,
and it is no wonder there are photos of the
(18:09):
palace and it is quite a thing to look at.
It shows a pavilion with a hexagonal footprint. The exterior
walls of the structure, which have intricate designs woven into them,
are a little bit fluffy because almost the whole thing
was made of pampas grass, and it used the plumes
as a design feature. The door opening sort of mimics
what you've maybe seen in Moroccan design, and the windows,
(18:32):
which are also shaped in the curved arches, have a
crisscross lattice design within them, all of which is made
of woven together pampas grass. Harriet also showed off her
irrigation system at the expo, which was simply called dam
and reservoir construction, and that one awards. She showed that
(18:52):
alongside another invention that would make use of waste water
and reclaim it for agricultural use, called Method and Means
for Impounding Debris and Storing Water. She was granted a
patent for her wastewater system in November of eighteen ninety four.
Harriet's appearance at the expo was wildly successful, but it
(19:13):
was not limited to inventions and marketing for the ranch's
various crops. She also gave a lecture to the World's
Fair Auxiliary Congress on suffrage. She believed in voting rights
for women strongly, but her talk largely focused on her
own story as a sort of cautionary tale for other women.
She was very frank about how utterly lost she had
(19:35):
been when she found herself facing a life without her
husband and with no training in business or agriculture. She
was adamant that women needed to be educated in the
ways of business. She told the assembled audience that it
had taken her, for example, a long time six years
to learn not to sign contracts without a lawyer's input first.
(19:56):
So it sounds a little bit negative and scary, but
her overall message was very, very poss She was adamant
that women could absolutely learn to run businesses, and moreover,
that they should. She framed this as something that every
woman should do quote to prepare herself for any and
all emergencies. Several years down the line, she was still
advocating for women to have the self assurance to take
(20:18):
on entrepreneurial in business roles, stating in nineteen ten, for example,
quote as for the business of running a farm, any
woman who can think out and plan the affairs of
a large household in all departments can manage a business
as principal. Harriet continued to be an outspoken advocate for
greater agency and independence for women, not just in terms
(20:39):
of bolstering women's confidence, but with ideas about how municipalities
should work to foster more women run businesses. She was
adamant that every city should have a bank owned by
a woman, as well as a drag good store, and
that the proprietors of each should train other women by
employing them there. She put forth the very bold idea
(20:59):
that the board of directors for banks should retire one
man every year and replace him.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
With a woman.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
She also walked the walk in terms of adding to
her own workload by taking on civic issues. So she
became a member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce
in eighteen ninety three held that position for nineteen years.
She used the platform that it gave her to campaign
for suffrage in California. Yeah, she's often cited as the
first woman to be on the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
(21:29):
One source I looked at said that there was actually
another woman that was appointed to it at the same time,
but that she had moved and had to step away
from it. I didn't follow that one down a rabbit
hole to find out if there really were too, but
she's the only one that stayed there for a long time.
Strong was also a member of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association, and she rubbed elbows with a lot of
(21:51):
the most well known names from the suffrage movement, including
people like Susan B. Anthony and Alva Belmont. But when
she first traveled the East Coast as one of these
suffrage events was happening, she was a little bit surprised
at the level of resistance that many people, including women,
had to the idea of political equality for women. She
(22:14):
wrote this off as a problem of the upper class,
where she felt like the women were so accustomed to
having plenty of men in their lives to take care
of them that they also let them quote do everything
for them, even to the expression of opinions in great
and grave matters. She remained adamant on this issue, saying
that a lot of women, most women did not have
(22:35):
the luxury of taking a stance like that. Harriet Strong
continued to innovate in the world of agricultural irrigation. In
nineteen hundred, she bought another property, Rancho San Antonio. Half
of the acreage of this was worked by her own
farm hands and staff, and the other half leased out
to other farmers. To support the whole effort, Harriet founded
(22:56):
her own water company, Paso del Bortolo Water Company. She
dropped wells between the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers
instead of a pumping station that ran on steam to
get that water out to the ranch. She was able
to flip the Rancho san Antonio a few years later
and made a lot of money on the sale. Strong
had figured out ways to manage her own property's water needs,
(23:19):
but she was thinking much much bigger, and we will
get into her efforts to get politicians on board with
her ideas and her frustrations in that effort. After we
hear from stuff you missed in history classes sponsors. In
(23:41):
nineteen oh five, Strong penda paper in which she made
the case for establishing flood management systems both to control
floodwaters and to make use of them, and her plan
required storage reservoirs, which would have been huge and would
have needed to be constructed. She had an entire plan
for water conservation in a way that would actively benefit
(24:01):
a lot of people, but she had a hard time
getting others bought in, and this was in part because
it was such a massive idea. It was just hard
for a lot of people to see how this concept
could possibly be funded for construction. Perpetually advocating and getting
little support was undoubtedly irritating for Strong. She was recognized
(24:23):
for her innovation and her success all over the country,
but she shocked some of the difficulties she had up
to being a woman. In nineteen thirteen, she gave a
quote to Little Farm's magazine and a story about her
that stated quote, a woman needs to have five times
as much ability as a man in order to do
the same thing. She may be permitted to conduct her
(24:44):
own ranch and be a success and a small business enterprise. Yes,
but let her go into the business of incorporating a
large enterprise and bonding it as a man would bond
a land and water project, and then see if the
word does not go forth from mankind. Hold, this woman
is going too far. She must be put down. She also,
(25:06):
we should point out, was not really aware of or
thinking about as many people who were innovating in various
industries throughout human history. What are the repercussions of all?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Sure, but eventually nature gave her a chance to start
really making moves with her reservoir ideas. On February eighteenth,
nineteen fourteen, a huge, four day long series of thunderstorms
hit southern California. The storms caused ten million dollars in
property damage. Trains were shut down, telegraph lines stopped working,
(25:39):
and the entire area was in a panic. On February
twenty first, the Los Angeles Express reported quote at eleven
o'clock today in a final desperate attempt to stop the
great storm damage being done to land and buildings at
the Aliso Street bridge over the Los Angeles River, The
Santa Fe officials shunted six heavily aiden box cars at
(26:01):
a speed of forty miles an hour down the tracks
and hurled them into the river at the foot of
the bridge. This carried away fifty additional feet of land
and a telephone pole, which fell within a few feet
of an immense crowd of bystanders. So they were trying
to use these box cars to slow the progression of
the water because it was carrying away chunks of land,
(26:22):
and in fact they made the situation worse.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
In the wake of this disaster, the Los Angeles Flood
Control Association was formed and Harriet Strong was sent by
Whittier as a delegate. She helped develop the legislation that
would establish a flood control authority, and she worked to
get it done with funding from a district wide tax.
She continued to advocate for measures to manage and use
(26:47):
the flood water, and she expanded beyond the idea of
reusing water to plan out hydroelectric plants that made use
not just of the water as a resource on its own,
but that made use of its canet energy to harness electricity.
One of the interesting aspects of her plan is that
she felt strongly that speculators should not be allowed to
(27:08):
profit from hydroelectricity. She thought any money that such a
system made could be used by the government to benefit
its people through things like tax reduction and veteran services.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Once the Southern Flood Control Association was established in Los
Angeles County, which is something that came out of that
legislation she worked on, it would seem completely natural that
Harriet would be invited as a delegate to their meetings
or even to be on it. She had made studies
of the workings of water and harnessing floods way more
than just about anybody else. But she was not invited
(27:42):
because no women's groups had been consulted or invited to
send delegates. Harriet went anyway, and as the only woman
at the meeting, she spoke out about it. She stated
that she protested the lack of women delegates and pointed
out that women were citizens, noting things were not quote
as they were or twenty years ago. Women's clubs were
(28:03):
invited to send delegates to future gatherings. I haven't looked.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Into this at all, but I would bet money that
indigenous people were also not included in these no way.
Harriet also tried to leverage World War One as an
incentive to get government officials to listen to her idea,
and she took every opportunity to make her case for
water management on a much larger scale. She pitched the
(28:29):
idea of damming the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon.
Strong's concept was that a series of dams could create
storage reservoirs in the Grand Canyon's side canyons, and that
these would fill during floods, preventing the water from reaking
havoc below the Grand Canyon, and also offering an opportunity
(28:49):
to generate electricity through controlled waterfalls.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
But her concept went far beyond this. She truly believed
that if the Grand Canyon were properly damned in managed enough,
nearby land could be converted to farmland through irrigation, that
it could be farmed year round and would insure that
no one was ever without food. She saw all of
this as a way to ensure that the US came
(29:14):
out of World War One victorious, and then that they
would be able to feed the world. She later said
of her ambitious idea quote, the only objection to the
plan is said to be it was thought of by
a woman.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
This idea became something of a crusade for Strong, and
in nineteen eighteen she appeared before the House Committee on
Water Power to share her expertise. Congressman Frederick C. Hicks
of New York was one of her strongest supporters and
was also her son in law. He and Georgina Strong
were married. Before Congress, Harriet laid out her three part
(29:47):
strategy of floodwater control, use of the captured water for agriculture,
and generating electricity with the water. She continued to advocate
that this should be a government run enterprise and not
open it up to private business. In addition to all
that she had outlined, she also made the case that
building a dam of this nature would enable the US
(30:09):
to stop using a canal that was in Mexico. She
also made a statement during her testimony in support of
women's suffrage. Yeah, there's some additional nuance to that canal
in Mexico that was supplying water to some of the
southwest US because it was owned by businessmen from New
(30:30):
York and the US and they didn't want this to
get cut off. But she was very like trying to
make the patriotic play here in her rhetoric. But this
also opens up a part of Harriet's story that is
less delighting if you've been very charmed by this go
getter spirit that we've been talking about up to this point.
(30:51):
She was overall a very progressive woman, but she was
also very much caught up in the politics of the day,
and probably in the fact that she believed just about
all of her ideas were correct. She advocated, for example,
to President Harding himself as he was about to enter office,
that he should be working on agreements with other countries
to ensure prosperity and peace. That was right in line
(31:13):
with so much of what she talked about. But but yeah,
there were other statements too. In nineteen twenty four, when
addressing the Hamilton Club, which was a Republican organization she
founded for women, she stated, quote, we have learned that
the Constitution was suited to the ideals of the people
who settled the Western continent, and also we are learning
(31:34):
that races not kindred to our own threatened to engraft
different ideas, which, if not combated and checked, may engulf
us destroy our government by causing first loss of respect
for the government and then movement toward its overthrow.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So that is awful rhetoric. Aside from the fact that
its xenophobic, it also suggests that there weren't any people
in the West before white people got there, which is
all awful, but for context on it. This was the
same year that President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act
of nineteen twenty four that was an openly racist piece
(32:12):
of legislation that had written this tide of fear that
if US truly became the melting pot it was allegedly
supposed to be, that it would become wild and lawless
because foreigners weren't going to fall in line. So this
is all awful, no sugarcoating that, but it's worth noting
she was not an outlier in that sentiment at the time.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
There are so many achievements in Harriet Russell Strong's life
that we haven't touched on, and many of them relate
to her civic work. She loved music and composed it.
She was a board member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic
and a founder of the Business League of America. She
sat on the board of trustees for the University of
Southern California Law School and was the first woman to
(32:56):
do so. She carefully managed her public inmas but she
also used that image to help other women and her community.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, so it becomes a bit of a mixed bag.
On September seventeenth, nineteen twenty six, Harriet was in a
car headed home to Rancho Delferte when another vehicle hit
the one she was riding in, and Strong was thrown
from the vehicle. When she impacted her head hit the curb.
She was killed almost instantly.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
A piece of legislation called the Boulder Canyon Project Act
was passed by Congress at the end of nineteen twenty eight.
This was the start of the Hoover dam Project. Harriet
didn't live to see this idea realized, but it did happen,
and it incorporated a lot of the things that she
had been describing when she talks about these damn systems.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
This, of course, is.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Its own, complicated, many downstream effects. Not to use a
pun on purpose story.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yes, yes, it's interesting because a lot of her by
biographies they kind of end there. But then with the
coda of She'd be so happy, isn't this all great?
And I'm like, whoa, whoa. I like Harriet in many ways,
but I also feel like she merits a lot of discussion.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah, I of the many people we've talked about, this
is somebody that I just have so many mixed feelings
about and a lot of layers of frustrature.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yes, I can talk more about it on Oh and
We're gonna sou. But I have a listener mail that
is about our MRI episodes of good which delighted me utterly.
This is from Dominique, who writes, Haya, I just wanted
to write that I really enjoyed the MRI episode. I
(34:48):
am a chemist and NMR was foundational learning during my
undergraduate degree. In fact, I totally understand how chemists and
physicists would rebuke the question of medical scans back in
the day. We really only focus on identifying patterns of
small chemical bonds, and expanded theories about organic tissues aren't
in our general purview. In fact, even after a few
(35:10):
years of studying and using NMRS, I still didn't make
the jump in knowing how this applied to the body's tissues.
I just wanted to say that all the jargon about
unpaired spin and time of relaxation was thoroughly enjoyable to me.
Slightly reassuring for me, Holly Fry, because I was very
worried that anyone in the science community would be like, girl,
you don't know what you're doing. It's very hard to
(35:32):
learn things and parse them in a hopefully digestible way
and be confident about it for me anyway. Dominique includes
some pet tacks. I have two cats, Humphrey, a tuxedo cat,
and Edward, an old tabby who is nineteen now. I
caught humph sitting like this during the lockdown. Enjoy the
pof loof love your show, Dominique. Humphrey's super cute. He's
(35:53):
kind of doing one of those things where he's sitting
halfway up with his feet in front of him, looking
like he's just chilling. It's adorable. He is a fluffy baby.
I love a fluffy kitty and I love tuxedos, and
then her beautiful tabby Edward. I also have a nineteen
year old cat listen, I Love I Love old kitties.
(36:15):
Is very cute and has one of those tabby faces
that looks like it might perpetually confer the idea that
it is worried. I need to have a cat that
always similarly looked worried. She was a cute little tabby
que Dominique. Thank you so much both for beautiful kitty
pictures and for reassuring me a little bit about science.
(36:37):
I love it, I love all of it, and I
love hearing from scientists always. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to
the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen
to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Stuff you Missed in History Class 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 welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I don't know how Harriet Russell william Strong got on
my list. She's on there twice, so I've thought of
her a couple times. I love it. But she was
quite a powerhouse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Not only did she manage to dig herself out of
a pretty unfortunate situation when her fortunes changed rather abruptly
at the age of thirty nine, she was also an
(00:39):
inventor and an early proponent of water conservation. She had
a lot of big ideas. Some of those ideas certainly
had repercussions that, once they came to fruition in ways
not directed by her, became other problems in other ways.
But she's a very interesting story. I do have to
(01:00):
do a heads up here because this episode does include
a death by suicide. We're not mentioning any specifics, but
if you just want to skip that entirely, you can.
There will be a point when we say Harriet found
herself Challe in a very challenging position. We get there,
you can jump ahead thirty seconds or a minute and
you'll be past it. But that's a pretty pivotal moment,
(01:23):
and the repercussions of the event that we mentioned are
throughout the episode, again not in detail, but just so
you know as a heads up.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Harriet Russell was born in Buffalo, New York, on July
twenty third, eighteen forty four, to Henry Pierpont Russell and
Marry Guest Russell. In eighteen fifty two, her family made
a cross country moved to northern California, near the town
of Quincy in Plumous County. When she was very young,
Harriet had some kind of a spinal condition and had
(01:52):
to spend almost all of her time in bed, but
the specifics of that are a little bit hazy. She read, though,
learned a lot about history and art and literature. Starting
at the age of fourteen, Harriet attended the Young Ladies
Seminary in Benicia, California, run by Mary Atkins. That school
would later become Mills College. She attended until eighteen sixty.
(02:16):
In eighteen sixty one, the family moved once again, this
time to Carson City, Nevada, hoping to cash in on
the silver rush, and in Nevada, Harriet met a man
named Charles Lyman Strong. Charles was the superintendent of the
Gould and Curry Mining Company, which was experiencing great success
mining the comstock load, and Harriet and Charles married on
(02:38):
February twenty sixth, eighteen sixty three. She was just nineteen,
he was thirty seven at the time, and the following
year they had their first daughter, also named Harriet Russell
Strong after her mother. That year was a difficult one.
Charles had a breakdown brought on by the stress of
his job. He left the mining company and went to
(02:58):
a hot spring to try to wrapt and recuperate. Harriet
was also ill a lot. She was often described through
a lot of her life as being fragile or delicate. Right,
we're going to get to a point where that seems
very much at odds with other things, and we'll talk
about why a little bit. In eighteen sixty five, Charles
(03:20):
went back to work once again in the mining business,
this time assessing mines along the Pacific coast for investors
from the east, primarily from New York. But that was
ultimately unsuccessful, and he really wanted out of mining altogether.
He and Harriet also had another daughter, Mary Lyman Strong.
In eighteen sixty six, the year after Mary was born,
(03:43):
Charles and Harriet became ranchers. They purchased a three hundred
and twenty five acre property with Harriet's brother, William Henry Russell.
This was in an area which was part of modern
day Whittier, California, in Los Angeles County. Today it's roughly
twenty miles east of downtown LA. The property had belonged
to the last governor of Alta, California under Mexican rule, Popico,
(04:07):
before the Strongs purchased it and built a homestead there.
They named it Rancho del Forerte or Ranch of the Strong.
At that time, there wasn't really much of anything on
this ranch. The only crop that had been started there
was oranges, and those orange trees were still very young
when Harriet and her family acquired the property, and soon
(04:29):
they realized why nothing had been grown there. It was
that it was just about impossible to irrigate the land.
After struggling with the ranch for several years, Charles once
again went back to mining, even though he had been
completely burned out on it when he left in eighteen
sixty seven. Different accounts kind of just described this differently.
(04:49):
One is that he was not doing well with the
ranch and he wanted to leave, but others are more
like he kind of just got bored.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
With it, and so I don't. In the time that
he and Harriet had been at Rancho del Ferte, both
of the Strongs had continued to deal with health problems.
They both had complaints of back issues and headaches and
nervous weakness, and they both tried a number of treatments,
everything from iron supplements to water cures, but these just
(05:18):
seemed to be for both of them chronic and lingering problems,
and they never really got better. They would get somewhat better,
but neither of them ever really seemed to feel one
hundred percent or really good. But Charles did need to
bring in some money, and he started chasing mining opportunities
kind of around the western part of the country. He
(05:38):
was in California, Nevada, and Arizona, and this constant hustle
to try to find a promising vain meant that he
was away from home a lot of the time, and
as they were dealing with financial stress and him being gone.
They did also welcome their third daughter, Georgina Pierpont Strong
in eighteen sixty eight, and then their fourth daughter, Nell
de Luce, who was born in eighteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Living apart so much really strained Harriet and Charles's marriage
a lot. They were also having serious financial issues and
that added another layer of strain. Their letters are sort
of fraught. They clearly love one another, but also seem
to feel emotionally disconnected without having regular contact. In one
(06:23):
letter to Charles that Harriet never mailed, she expresses some
sadness and dissatisfaction that she doesn't get to experience love
in her daily life. This was in eighteen seventy six,
and she wrote, quote, it was mine for a few
months only. You have told me too many times you
have no love to give me to think that I,
(06:43):
who have been loved always, should live an unloved wife. Yeah,
It's kind of one of those things where, if I
can read between the lines, it seems like he didn't
not love her, but he was just too depleted to
be as available to her as she needed. And she
was wrestling with this dichotomy of being like, I know
(07:03):
you love me, but I don't feel.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Loved at all, and problems continued for the couple. The
trick here is that we only have Charles's side of
most of this correspondence. We'll talk about why in a minute.
But he seems to waver on how they should live
and figure this out. He sometimes wrote that Harriet and
their children should move to be with him, and that
at other times he would write, no, no, no, that
(07:27):
was wrong. You should just stay put. We should continue
as we are. In eighteen eighty two, Charles bought into
a mine in California that was believed to be an
excellent prospect for gold mining. It was not. The person
who had sold it to Charles and other investors had
salted it, meaning that traces of gold had been added
to the most accessible areas so that when prospective buyers
(07:51):
took samples, it made it look like a much more
promising mind than it actually was. And then, to deal
with his debt and these bad business decisions, Charles had
taken out loans against the ranch, something that Harriet did
not know about.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Then, at the age of thirty nine, Harriet found herself
in a very challenging position. Her husband, Charles burned all
of their letters. That's why we don't have her side
of a lot of correspondents. And then he killed himself.
She had four daughters, and Charles's constant business struggles had
left behind a load of debt to make matters worse.
(08:29):
This all happened and was relayed to her while she
was undergoing medical treatment for her ongoing spinal issues. She
was in Philadelphia at the time, in a clinic run
by Silas Weir Mitchell. Her first instinct was, of course,
to go back home, but her daughters, who ranged in
age from nineteen to ten at the time, insisted that
(08:51):
she stay there and finish her six month treatment. Her
treatment regimen does not sound enjoyable, and included things like
alternating exposure to boiling and then freezing water on her back,
and then only being allowed to sit up for a
few minutes at a time twice a day.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, that sounds tortuous to me.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, and boiling, I'm like, was boiling an exaggeration because
that sounds like third degree burns and death? She wrote
in her account boiling okay, But she also wrote that
only the freezing water really hurt her, okay, So I
don't know if boiling was actual boiling point or just
very very hot, and if it was very very localized,
(09:33):
who knows. But when she returned home to California, she
assumed the position of manager at the Rancho del Ferte,
even though she had no idea how to do that
job at the time. Harriet also had to deal with
a lawsuit in the wake of her husband's death. One
of Charles's business associates had tried to seize the property
to make up for his loss in the salted mind
(09:54):
deal that he had entered.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Was strong. There was a lot of legal stuff going on,
and it took a years for all of the issues
with Charles's property to be settled, and in eighteen ninety one,
the legal battle over her husband's business blenders was finally concluded.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
In eighteen eighty three, Harriet wrote that marriage was fundamentally
limiting for women. Quote not because women of America have
no ambition or mental capacity for progress, but because they
do not have the sympathy and cooperation of their husbands
and efforts to improve their minds. No doubt, she was
grappling with her new reality and the fact that she
(10:32):
had simply not been prepared in any way to handle
the entirety of the family's finances. But there she was
in that position. Interestingly, maybe unsurprisingly given the quote that
we just read, she did not choose to remarry Harriet.
In the meantime, while the legal stuff was all still
getting figured out, started researching agriculture. She made friends with
(10:57):
other ranchers in the area and asked them for their advice,
and she also started reading just about any books she
could get her hands on that offered information about successful
ranching and farming. Rancho Delflerte had attempted to expand its
crops in the time that Harriet had lived there, when
Charles was still alive. In addition to the orange groves,
they had tried various grain crops like rye and wheat,
(11:20):
but those had failed, so she started considering what crops
would work, using the knowledge she had gained from her
self directed studies and her neighbors. We'll talk about how
Harriet strong applied the things that she learned about ranching
and farming and the outcome of what she tried after
we pause for a sponsor break. One of the biggest
(11:49):
problems for any rancher in the arid climate where Harriet
was living, though was water. The topography of Los Angeles
County plays a big part in this story because it
sits in a rainage basin with mountains around it, so
when there's no precipitation, it gets very, very dry, but
when there is a storm, it floods. This is still
a problem today. You hear all the time that when
(12:10):
La has an actual big thunderstorm, the streets get flooded
and everything's a mess. In Harriet's time, which she was
considering crops, any crop needed water, and most options required
more than could be counted on from natural rainfall, which
when it did happen, was often more destructive than life giving.
So Strong started brainstorming how she could get water to
(12:33):
her crops consistently. This actually led her to file a patent,
which she was granted on December sixth, eighteen eighty seven.
It was a dam and water distribution system. She described
her invention as quote, a series of reverse arch dams
built one above the other in an inclined channel, watercourse,
or valley, so that the water in each lower dam
(12:54):
acts as a brace and support for the dam above,
the whole being connected by gates. We're going to backtrack
just a couple of years because that was not Harriet
Strong's first patent, it was her fourth. Her first invention
was a quote device for raising and lowering hard to
reach windows. This is something she came up with while
(13:17):
she was having to stay in bed because of spinal issues.
That patent was granted in October of eighteen eighty four.
The following month, she was granted another patent for an
improved hook and eye closure. Then her third, a window
sash holder, which used a small knob protruding from the
window frame that would catch on a block instead of
(13:39):
allowing the frame to slide all the way closed. She
was granted that patent on November sixteenth, eighteen eighty six.
It seems like she was trying to set up any
possible revenue stream she could as she faced this uncertain
future with Charles. Even before her damning an irrigation patent
was granted, and knowing that she had figured out out
(14:00):
how to control water, Strong decided to plant a crop
that needed a whole lot of water, and that was walnuts.
The reason she went with such a thirsty crop was
because her research had revealed that it was also one
of the most profitable if you could get it up
and running. She planted a reported fifty rows of walnut
trees in a half mile wide layout, totaling one hundred
(14:22):
and fifty acres. Had she not had her irrigation system planned,
this almost certainly would have been a spectacular failure. But
it worked, and it worked really well, and by the
mid eighteen nineties people had started calling her the walnut Queen.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
The Rancho del Ferte. Walnut crop was bringing in and
reported two hundred and ninety five dollars an acre, so
forty four two hundred and fifty dollars annually, which was
a whole lot of money. In the eighteen nineties, she
had turned the mess left behind after Charles died into
a success story, and in the course of just a
few years she had paid off the debts left behind
by her husband, paid off the substantial legal fees related
(15:00):
to settling his chaotic estate, and started to turn a profit.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Harriet also used the income from the walnuts to expand
and diversify the ranch's crops. Soon there were pecans and chestnuts,
and also a lot of fruit orchards with lemons, figs, pomegranates, apples, pears, dates,
and even pineapples. She also planted pampas grass instead of
corn as a support crop for the walnuts, and then
(15:25):
she sold the fronds as a decorative item. These are
really popular as an alternative for ostrich plumes to put
on people's hats. She had managed to develop an impressive
infrastructure for the ranch's water systems, with artesian wells that
were linked to a pumping plant that could carry water
to all of these wading crops. If you're hearing all
(15:47):
of this and thinking, wait, I thought this one was fragile,
that's pretty common. It is really fascinating how much her
well being seemed to suddenly shift once she was left
to figure things out on her own. Us An Albertine,
writing for Biography magazine in nineteen ninety four, noted quote,
once free of marriage, Harriet ceased to be ill. In
(16:08):
the second half of her life, she emerged as a
modern public woman, a nationally known entrepreneur, inventor, agriculturists, civic leader,
and suffragist. And most biographies that you look at note
the death of Charles as a delineator in Harriet's life,
separating the before and the after almost as two different people,
and Harriet herself kind of seemed to want to eradicate
(16:31):
evidence of her earlier life and the physical issues associated
with it, as at one point she asked her oldest
daughter to burn any letters in which she had talked
about her health. She seemed to want to truly reinvent
herself and to create a public persona that supported her ambitions.
She would later say, for example of her success in
(16:51):
her widow years quote, I had the courage of ignorance
and plenty of determination to back it up. She didn't
tend to mention any ailment ever, at least not on
the record once she was the public figure. I just
want to note that there is a widespread, pervasive, and
totally false idea that disabled people can stop being disabled
(17:13):
if they just try harder. Yeah, and so this part
of her story irritates me so much.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Well, it brings up a lot of questions, some of
which we'll talk about it behind us.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah. Yeah, Like, I'm glad she worked her life the
way she could work it. I do not want this
story to reinforce such a false and damaging idea. In
eighteen ninety three, Strong attended the World's Columbian Exposition as
an exhibitor. She designed and oversaw construction of an exhibit
called the Pampa's Plume Palace. In addition to being hawked
(17:46):
as hat accoutrement, these grass plumes were sold to department
stores as decor. They also became popular at political conventions
because they could be dyed any color to match the
decor or the part affiliation. The Pampas Plume Palace, which
was part of the larger California Exhibition, won an award,
and it is no wonder there are photos of the
(18:09):
palace and it is quite a thing to look at.
It shows a pavilion with a hexagonal footprint. The exterior
walls of the structure, which have intricate designs woven into them,
are a little bit fluffy because almost the whole thing
was made of pampas grass, and it used the plumes
as a design feature. The door opening sort of mimics
what you've maybe seen in Moroccan design, and the windows,
(18:32):
which are also shaped in the curved arches, have a
crisscross lattice design within them, all of which is made
of woven together pampas grass. Harriet also showed off her
irrigation system at the expo, which was simply called dam
and reservoir construction, and that one awards. She showed that
(18:52):
alongside another invention that would make use of waste water
and reclaim it for agricultural use, called Method and Means
for Impounding Debris and Storing Water. She was granted a
patent for her wastewater system in November of eighteen ninety four.
Harriet's appearance at the expo was wildly successful, but it
(19:13):
was not limited to inventions and marketing for the ranch's
various crops. She also gave a lecture to the World's
Fair Auxiliary Congress on suffrage. She believed in voting rights
for women strongly, but her talk largely focused on her
own story as a sort of cautionary tale for other women.
She was very frank about how utterly lost she had
(19:35):
been when she found herself facing a life without her
husband and with no training in business or agriculture. She
was adamant that women needed to be educated in the
ways of business. She told the assembled audience that it
had taken her, for example, a long time six years
to learn not to sign contracts without a lawyer's input first.
(19:56):
So it sounds a little bit negative and scary, but
her overall message was very, very poss She was adamant
that women could absolutely learn to run businesses, and moreover,
that they should. She framed this as something that every
woman should do quote to prepare herself for any and
all emergencies. Several years down the line, she was still
advocating for women to have the self assurance to take
(20:18):
on entrepreneurial in business roles, stating in nineteen ten, for example,
quote as for the business of running a farm, any
woman who can think out and plan the affairs of
a large household in all departments can manage a business
as principal. Harriet continued to be an outspoken advocate for
greater agency and independence for women, not just in terms
(20:39):
of bolstering women's confidence, but with ideas about how municipalities
should work to foster more women run businesses. She was
adamant that every city should have a bank owned by
a woman, as well as a drag good store, and
that the proprietors of each should train other women by
employing them there. She put forth the very bold idea
(20:59):
that the board of directors for banks should retire one
man every year and replace him.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
With a woman.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
She also walked the walk in terms of adding to
her own workload by taking on civic issues. So she
became a member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce
in eighteen ninety three held that position for nineteen years.
She used the platform that it gave her to campaign
for suffrage in California. Yeah, she's often cited as the
first woman to be on the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
(21:29):
One source I looked at said that there was actually
another woman that was appointed to it at the same time,
but that she had moved and had to step away
from it. I didn't follow that one down a rabbit
hole to find out if there really were too, but
she's the only one that stayed there for a long time.
Strong was also a member of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association, and she rubbed elbows with a lot of
(21:51):
the most well known names from the suffrage movement, including
people like Susan B. Anthony and Alva Belmont. But when
she first traveled the East Coast as one of these
suffrage events was happening, she was a little bit surprised
at the level of resistance that many people, including women,
had to the idea of political equality for women. She
(22:14):
wrote this off as a problem of the upper class,
where she felt like the women were so accustomed to
having plenty of men in their lives to take care
of them that they also let them quote do everything
for them, even to the expression of opinions in great
and grave matters. She remained adamant on this issue, saying
that a lot of women, most women did not have
(22:35):
the luxury of taking a stance like that. Harriet Strong
continued to innovate in the world of agricultural irrigation. In
nineteen hundred, she bought another property, Rancho San Antonio. Half
of the acreage of this was worked by her own
farm hands and staff, and the other half leased out
to other farmers. To support the whole effort, Harriet founded
(22:56):
her own water company, Paso del Bortolo Water Company. She
dropped wells between the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers
instead of a pumping station that ran on steam to
get that water out to the ranch. She was able
to flip the Rancho san Antonio a few years later
and made a lot of money on the sale. Strong
had figured out ways to manage her own property's water needs,
(23:19):
but she was thinking much much bigger, and we will
get into her efforts to get politicians on board with
her ideas and her frustrations in that effort. After we
hear from stuff you missed in history classes sponsors. In
(23:41):
nineteen oh five, Strong penda paper in which she made
the case for establishing flood management systems both to control
floodwaters and to make use of them, and her plan
required storage reservoirs, which would have been huge and would
have needed to be constructed. She had an entire plan
for water conservation in a way that would actively benefit
(24:01):
a lot of people, but she had a hard time
getting others bought in, and this was in part because
it was such a massive idea. It was just hard
for a lot of people to see how this concept
could possibly be funded for construction. Perpetually advocating and getting
little support was undoubtedly irritating for Strong. She was recognized
(24:23):
for her innovation and her success all over the country,
but she shocked some of the difficulties she had up
to being a woman. In nineteen thirteen, she gave a
quote to Little Farm's magazine and a story about her
that stated quote, a woman needs to have five times
as much ability as a man in order to do
the same thing. She may be permitted to conduct her
(24:44):
own ranch and be a success and a small business enterprise. Yes,
but let her go into the business of incorporating a
large enterprise and bonding it as a man would bond
a land and water project, and then see if the
word does not go forth from mankind. Hold, this woman
is going too far. She must be put down. She also,
(25:06):
we should point out, was not really aware of or
thinking about as many people who were innovating in various
industries throughout human history. What are the repercussions of all?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Sure, but eventually nature gave her a chance to start
really making moves with her reservoir ideas. On February eighteenth,
nineteen fourteen, a huge, four day long series of thunderstorms
hit southern California. The storms caused ten million dollars in
property damage. Trains were shut down, telegraph lines stopped working,
(25:39):
and the entire area was in a panic. On February
twenty first, the Los Angeles Express reported quote at eleven
o'clock today in a final desperate attempt to stop the
great storm damage being done to land and buildings at
the Aliso Street bridge over the Los Angeles River, The
Santa Fe officials shunted six heavily aiden box cars at
(26:01):
a speed of forty miles an hour down the tracks
and hurled them into the river at the foot of
the bridge. This carried away fifty additional feet of land
and a telephone pole, which fell within a few feet
of an immense crowd of bystanders. So they were trying
to use these box cars to slow the progression of
the water because it was carrying away chunks of land,
(26:22):
and in fact they made the situation worse.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
In the wake of this disaster, the Los Angeles Flood
Control Association was formed and Harriet Strong was sent by
Whittier as a delegate. She helped develop the legislation that
would establish a flood control authority, and she worked to
get it done with funding from a district wide tax.
She continued to advocate for measures to manage and use
(26:47):
the flood water, and she expanded beyond the idea of
reusing water to plan out hydroelectric plants that made use
not just of the water as a resource on its own,
but that made use of its canet energy to harness electricity.
One of the interesting aspects of her plan is that
she felt strongly that speculators should not be allowed to
(27:08):
profit from hydroelectricity. She thought any money that such a
system made could be used by the government to benefit
its people through things like tax reduction and veteran services.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Once the Southern Flood Control Association was established in Los
Angeles County, which is something that came out of that
legislation she worked on, it would seem completely natural that
Harriet would be invited as a delegate to their meetings
or even to be on it. She had made studies
of the workings of water and harnessing floods way more
than just about anybody else. But she was not invited
(27:42):
because no women's groups had been consulted or invited to
send delegates. Harriet went anyway, and as the only woman
at the meeting, she spoke out about it. She stated
that she protested the lack of women delegates and pointed
out that women were citizens, noting things were not quote
as they were or twenty years ago. Women's clubs were
(28:03):
invited to send delegates to future gatherings. I haven't looked.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Into this at all, but I would bet money that
indigenous people were also not included in these no way.
Harriet also tried to leverage World War One as an
incentive to get government officials to listen to her idea,
and she took every opportunity to make her case for
water management on a much larger scale. She pitched the
(28:29):
idea of damming the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon.
Strong's concept was that a series of dams could create
storage reservoirs in the Grand Canyon's side canyons, and that
these would fill during floods, preventing the water from reaking
havoc below the Grand Canyon, and also offering an opportunity
(28:49):
to generate electricity through controlled waterfalls.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
But her concept went far beyond this. She truly believed
that if the Grand Canyon were properly damned in managed enough,
nearby land could be converted to farmland through irrigation, that
it could be farmed year round and would insure that
no one was ever without food. She saw all of
this as a way to ensure that the US came
(29:14):
out of World War One victorious, and then that they
would be able to feed the world. She later said
of her ambitious idea quote, the only objection to the
plan is said to be it was thought of by
a woman.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
This idea became something of a crusade for Strong, and
in nineteen eighteen she appeared before the House Committee on
Water Power to share her expertise. Congressman Frederick C. Hicks
of New York was one of her strongest supporters and
was also her son in law. He and Georgina Strong
were married. Before Congress, Harriet laid out her three part
(29:47):
strategy of floodwater control, use of the captured water for agriculture,
and generating electricity with the water. She continued to advocate
that this should be a government run enterprise and not
open it up to private business. In addition to all
that she had outlined, she also made the case that
building a dam of this nature would enable the US
(30:09):
to stop using a canal that was in Mexico. She
also made a statement during her testimony in support of
women's suffrage. Yeah, there's some additional nuance to that canal
in Mexico that was supplying water to some of the
southwest US because it was owned by businessmen from New
(30:30):
York and the US and they didn't want this to
get cut off. But she was very like trying to
make the patriotic play here in her rhetoric. But this
also opens up a part of Harriet's story that is
less delighting if you've been very charmed by this go
getter spirit that we've been talking about up to this point.
(30:51):
She was overall a very progressive woman, but she was
also very much caught up in the politics of the day,
and probably in the fact that she believed just about
all of her ideas were correct. She advocated, for example,
to President Harding himself as he was about to enter office,
that he should be working on agreements with other countries
to ensure prosperity and peace. That was right in line
(31:13):
with so much of what she talked about. But but yeah,
there were other statements too. In nineteen twenty four, when
addressing the Hamilton Club, which was a Republican organization she
founded for women, she stated, quote, we have learned that
the Constitution was suited to the ideals of the people
who settled the Western continent, and also we are learning
(31:34):
that races not kindred to our own threatened to engraft
different ideas, which, if not combated and checked, may engulf
us destroy our government by causing first loss of respect
for the government and then movement toward its overthrow.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So that is awful rhetoric. Aside from the fact that
its xenophobic, it also suggests that there weren't any people
in the West before white people got there, which is
all awful, but for context on it. This was the
same year that President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act
of nineteen twenty four that was an openly racist piece
(32:12):
of legislation that had written this tide of fear that
if US truly became the melting pot it was allegedly
supposed to be, that it would become wild and lawless
because foreigners weren't going to fall in line. So this
is all awful, no sugarcoating that, but it's worth noting
she was not an outlier in that sentiment at the time.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
There are so many achievements in Harriet Russell Strong's life
that we haven't touched on, and many of them relate
to her civic work. She loved music and composed it.
She was a board member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic
and a founder of the Business League of America. She
sat on the board of trustees for the University of
Southern California Law School and was the first woman to
(32:56):
do so. She carefully managed her public inmas but she
also used that image to help other women and her community.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, so it becomes a bit of a mixed bag.
On September seventeenth, nineteen twenty six, Harriet was in a
car headed home to Rancho Delferte when another vehicle hit
the one she was riding in, and Strong was thrown
from the vehicle. When she impacted her head hit the curb.
She was killed almost instantly.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
A piece of legislation called the Boulder Canyon Project Act
was passed by Congress at the end of nineteen twenty eight.
This was the start of the Hoover dam Project. Harriet
didn't live to see this idea realized, but it did happen,
and it incorporated a lot of the things that she
had been describing when she talks about these damn systems.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
This, of course, is.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Its own, complicated, many downstream effects. Not to use a
pun on purpose story.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yes, yes, it's interesting because a lot of her by
biographies they kind of end there. But then with the
coda of She'd be so happy, isn't this all great?
And I'm like, whoa, whoa. I like Harriet in many ways,
but I also feel like she merits a lot of discussion.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah, I of the many people we've talked about, this
is somebody that I just have so many mixed feelings
about and a lot of layers of frustrature.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yes, I can talk more about it on Oh and
We're gonna sou. But I have a listener mail that
is about our MRI episodes of good which delighted me utterly.
This is from Dominique, who writes, Haya, I just wanted
to write that I really enjoyed the MRI episode. I
(34:48):
am a chemist and NMR was foundational learning during my
undergraduate degree. In fact, I totally understand how chemists and
physicists would rebuke the question of medical scans back in
the day. We really only focus on identifying patterns of
small chemical bonds, and expanded theories about organic tissues aren't
in our general purview. In fact, even after a few
(35:10):
years of studying and using NMRS, I still didn't make
the jump in knowing how this applied to the body's tissues.
I just wanted to say that all the jargon about
unpaired spin and time of relaxation was thoroughly enjoyable to me.
Slightly reassuring for me, Holly Fry, because I was very
worried that anyone in the science community would be like, girl,
you don't know what you're doing. It's very hard to
(35:32):
learn things and parse them in a hopefully digestible way
and be confident about it for me anyway. Dominique includes
some pet tacks. I have two cats, Humphrey, a tuxedo cat,
and Edward, an old tabby who is nineteen now. I
caught humph sitting like this during the lockdown. Enjoy the
pof loof love your show, Dominique. Humphrey's super cute. He's
(35:53):
kind of doing one of those things where he's sitting
halfway up with his feet in front of him, looking
like he's just chilling. It's adorable. He is a fluffy baby.
I love a fluffy kitty and I love tuxedos, and
then her beautiful tabby Edward. I also have a nineteen
year old cat listen, I Love I Love old kitties.
(36:15):
Is very cute and has one of those tabby faces
that looks like it might perpetually confer the idea that
it is worried. I need to have a cat that
always similarly looked worried. She was a cute little tabby
que Dominique. Thank you so much both for beautiful kitty
pictures and for reassuring me a little bit about science.
(36:37):
I love it, I love all of it, and I
love hearing from scientists always. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to
the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen
to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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