Pulitzer versus the U.S. Government (Part 2)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this
is part two of our Pulitzer stories. It's not as

(00:22):
necessary to have listened to the first part as it
often is if we're doing a two parter. Uh. In
that first part, we covered his early life, a rather
shocking event that happened in St. Louis that led him
to move to New York, and his rivalry with Hurst.
Uh So those are all important parts of his story,
and I encourage you to hear it. But if you
didn't hear it and you don't want to go back

(00:43):
I actually think you're gonna be fine today. All you
really need to know is that by the time we're
picking up this story, which is in the early nineteen hundreds,
Pulitzer was already a very well established newsman. His papers
were known throughout certainly the US, I would say, other
parts of the world. His rivalry with Hers its kind

(01:05):
of already been established. Uh. And so we're just kind
of picking up with him being probably one of the
most famous people in the news industry. So early twentieth
century where we're picking up. Joseph Pulitzer was advocating for
the US to have a school of journalism. In nineteen
o four, he wrote, quote, our republic and its press

(01:27):
will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public, spirited
press with trained intelligence to know the right and courage
to do it can preserve that public virtue, without which
popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary,
demigogic press will produce in time of people as base

(01:51):
as itself. The power to mold the future of the
republic will be in the hands of the journalists of
future j rations. So it's clear that he had a
strong sense of the influence the press could wield, and
he thought that we needed to ensure journalists were taught
how to hold power to account. But of course he

(02:13):
himself had always used his platform as a publisher to
slant coverage as he saw fit to align with his
own political leanings. Yeah, that whole thing makes it sound
like he's like, I want an unbiased press so that
they can write really good biased articles or not for
my one sure. Yeah, but because of that bias late

(02:35):
in his life, Pulitzer found himself on the receiving end
of an indictment from the federal government. And that's because
The World published what was positioned as an expose of
a payment from the US government to the New Panama
Canal Company, a payment that was problematic according to the report.
So we should also mention as we get into this story,

(02:56):
because it is big that New York World was not
the only paper to cover the story, and it was
not the only one to speculate about the specifics of
this deal. But Pulitzer's staff was relentless, and it once
again all began with politics, specifically, this started with commentary
on the campaign of William Howard Taft to President Theodore

(03:18):
Roosevelt wanted to be his successor to the office. Roosevelt
had campaigned heavily for Taft, and Pulitzer's papers coverage, which
came out a month before the election in October, alleged
that members of both Roosevelt's and Taft's families were making
a large amount of money in the Panama Canal deal.

(03:40):
The story started when William Nelson Cromwell, an attorney who
worked for the president's chief advisor, filed a legal complaint
that he was being blackmailed because of his involvement with
the Panama Canal within the US sale. But when The
New York World found out about the filing, a report
was a signed to find out more. That reporter asked

(04:03):
around and found nothing, and then the matter was dropped
until Cromwell's press agents, Jonas Whitley, showed up in the
World's offices claiming that the article that was about to
go to print was false. What Yeah, there was no
article about to go to print, And the paper staff
told Whitley that they had not been able to verify

(04:23):
anything and they were not running a story. This all
gets a little convoluted, so come with us on this journey. Whitley, unprompted,
then expounded on the nature of Cromwell's complaints to the
World's editor. So that story, which Whitley essentially copy edited
as it was taken down, so he was directly telling

(04:44):
the stenographer taking notes what to put in it ran
in the World on October three, and it read in
part quote that the Democratic National Committee was considering the
advisability of making a public statement that William nell In
Cromwell in connection with Mr Bunal Varia, a French speculator,

(05:05):
had formed a syndicate at the time when it was
quite evident that the United States would take over the
rights of the French bondholders in the Deliceps Canal, and
that this syndicate included, among others, Charles P. Taft, brother
of William H. Taft, and Douglas Robinson, brother in law
of President Roosevelt. Other men more prominent in the New

(05:27):
York world of finance were also mentioned. According to the story,
these financiers invested their money because of a full knowledge
of the intention of the government to acquire the French
property at a price of about forty million dollars, and thus,
because of alleged information from high government sources, were enabled

(05:47):
to reap a rich profit. End quote that whole thing
was a quote in the paper. So this was basically
saying that the French holders of the Panama Canal Company,
which had been struggling financially, had sold it quietly to
a number of American investors, and then those investors sold

(06:07):
it to the US government. Those investors or people connected
directly to Roosevelt and Taft, and the whole thing was,
according to the blackmailer orchestrated by William Nelson Cromwell, an
attorney who had worked for the president's chief advisor. So
of course this would have been shady and was reported

(06:28):
to show that Taft was corrupt and unfit to be president. Yeah,
it's a little bit hard to follow, but that that's
the main takeaway that it was trying to kind of
smear Taft. So we also need to note that entire
Panama Canal deal and situation is really complex and it
went through a lot of shifts in negotiations for decades

(06:51):
before this deal actually happened, and issues with its complexities
did not end there. They even reached into the twentieth century,
and we're part of Jimmy Carters campaign and presidency. But
all of that is outside the scope of this episode.
We're really trying to just focus on the press coverage.
What you do need to know is that that initial
company that was working on connecting the Atlantic and Pacific

(07:13):
through Panama was headed by Ferdinand Delis Epps, and when
he was found guilty of misappropriating funds for the project
and his company was having problems, a second company, company,
Nuvel Canal de Panama or New Panama, Canal company was formed,
and that company is the one we're talking about that
made that sale, and it's going to come up more

(07:33):
in a moment. Cromwell's PR agent had also told the paper,
after relaying the details of this blackmail attempt, that Mr
Cromwell would like to make a direct statement. He did
this by phone and approved when the dictated statement was
read back to him. The statement was a denial of
any wrongdoing on his part. The story would have never

(07:57):
made the papers had Cromwell nuts heard all of this up,
and Soudent really spiraled. Even though that initial legal complaint
of blackmail he filed never went anywhere, he also never
seemed to pursue it. There are still some questions about
why Cromwell did any of this. Charles P. Taft was

(08:19):
vehement in his denial that he had anything to do
with the Panama Canal deal. Douglas Robinson refused to speak
to the press. The New York World actually hired a
member of British Parliament who was a lawyer to look
into any details of the sale that they could find.
On the European side of the story. That lawyer went

(08:39):
to Paris, but he found nothing and he wrote a
report back to the world that read quote, I have
never known in my lengthy experience of company matters, any
public corporation, much less one of such vast importance, having
so completely disappeared and removed all traces of its existence
as the New Panama Canal Company, this company, having purchased

(09:02):
the assets of La Company Universal du Canal Interrosia Unique
de Panama, the old or Della Ceps Panama Canal Company,
brought off the deal with the American government. So thorough
has been its obliteration that only the United States Government
can now give information respecting the new company's transactions and

(09:22):
the identity of the individuals who created it to effectuate
this deal, and who, for reasons best known to themselves,
wiped it off the face of the earth. When the
deal was carried through the stock the British lawyer reported
had originally been registered. That would have meant that any
transactions would have had to have been tracked, But then

(09:43):
it was converted to bearer stock, which meant that no
such records had to be maintained. It was like at
that point privately owned, and you can sell anything to
somebody else without having to report it. The company had
been liquidated, but with no names attached to it to
ascertain who had eieved any of the money. In addition
to the monetary benefit from the sale, the World reported

(10:06):
in a follow up article that Cromwell had also managed
to influence the signing of a concession which granted California
based Union Oil a monopoly in the canal zone that
allowed the oil company to build a pipeline that would
connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. That pipeline, per the
World's account, was to run from the city of Panama

(10:29):
to the city of Cologne on the Atlantic side. Union
Oil was a subsidiary of Standard Oil, so the whole
thing meant that Standard would just be unchallenged in the
canal and according to the World Quote, there have been
rumors that at least one member of the Standard Oil
group of capitalists was in the American syndicate, which is

(10:51):
reported to have made a huge sum through the sale
to the United States in nineteen o four for forty
million dollars of the property of the French Panama Canal
Company to William Nelson Cromwell. There were allegations of multiple
wrongdoings that were recounted and reiterated across multiple articles. Yeah,

(11:13):
we have like Americans secretly sold this property to the
US government and made a ton of money on it,
and those same Americans owned a portion of these oil
companies that were also getting deals to have a monopoly
in the area. Other papers picked up these stories that
were running and reported on the reporting of the world,

(11:34):
taking those reports as true, and then other papers picked
those stories up. This became like a weird game of
journalism telephone, as one paper would quote another paper as
a source. They were all hinging on the idea that
the world had reported the story. So, for example, the
Indianapolis News ran a story on October two under the

(11:55):
headline Panama Secrets that reported quote the Chicago Journal said
us that it is well known that somebody bought the
stock of the defunct French Panama Canal Company for twelve
million dollars or less and sold it to the United
States government for forty million dollars. And the Chicago paper
declares further that it is not known to anybody outside

(12:16):
the gang of speculators that reaped a rich harvest by
playing on the patriotism of the American people. How much
of that twenty eight million dollars went into the pockets
of President Roosevelt's intimate friends who promoted the deal. We
will get into how all this bad press impacted the
election and the people involved right after a quick sponsor break.

(12:47):
So you may or may not be surprised to learn
that Taft won the election despite all of those damning
articles in Pulitzer's papers and those of other publishers. And
while initially Theodore Roosevelt had sort of a nord things
because of the world's known democratic leanings, when Republican aligned
paper started to run the same stories, he got really angry,

(13:08):
and he started speaking out against newspapers that had run
these stories and said that they quote habitually and as
a matter of business practice, every mandacity known to man,
and that they were far more dangerous to the country
than corrupt politicians. He also asserted that the US paid
the French government, and how that money was dispersed after

(13:29):
that was not something that the US government would have
knowledge of. The New York World responded to Roosevelt's statement
that there were discrepancies in the way details of the
sale had been relayed. Cromwell had stated that the money
was paid by the US government to JP Morgan and Company,
not to the French government. There were other details in

(13:51):
Cromwell's account that did not align with Roosevelt's claims as well,
and the world called for quote the Congress of the
United States to make immediately a full and impartial investigation
of the entire Panama Canal scandal. Theodore Roosevelt, who at
this point was still president for a couple more months,
sent his response to the World's claims directly to Congress

(14:14):
on December, and that was published in papers nationwide. And
it read quote in view of the constant reiteration of
the assertion that there was some corrupt action by or
on behalf of the United States Government in connection with
the acquisition of the title of the French company of
the Panama Canal, and of the repetition of the story
that a syndicate of American citizens owned either one or

(14:38):
both of the Panama companies, I deem it wise to
submit to the Congress all the information I have on
the subject. These stories were skurless and libelius, and character
and false in every essential particular. It is idle to
say that the known character of Mr Pulitzer and his
newspaper are such that the statements in the paper will

(14:58):
be believed by no eddy. Unfortunately, thousands of persons are
ill informed in this respect and believe the statements they
see in print, even though they appear in a newspaper
published by Mr Pulitzer. These stories need no investigation whatever
they are in fact holy and inform partly a libel
upon the United States government. The real offender is Mr

(15:22):
Joseph Pulitzer, Editor and proprietor of the World. While the
criminal offense of which Mr Pulitzer has been guilty is
in the form of a libel upon individuals, the great
injury done is in blackening the good name of the
American people. It should not be left to a private
citizen to sue Mr Pulitzer for libel. He should be

(15:42):
prosecuted for libel by the governmental authorities. And that is
exactly what happened. The U. S. Attorney General, Charles J. Bonaparte,
began criminal proceedings against The Indiana News and The New
York World, and the d C Grand Jury handed out
indictments on February sevent nineteen o nine. Pulitzer's Umbrella Company

(16:04):
Press publishing Company, Pulitzer himself and editors Caleb M. Van
Ham and Robert H. Lyman were all named, as well
as staffers from the Indianapolis News and the paper itself.
United States District Judge Anderson ruled against the government, and
he made some interesting remarks in his ruling. He stated that, quote,

(16:25):
the circumstances surrounding the revolution in Panama were unusual and peculiar.
The people were interested in the construction of the canal.
It was a matter of great public concern. It was
much discussed. He mentions that after a route through Nicaragua
had been recommended by an appointed committee, suddenly Panama was favored.

(16:45):
And he went on quote, up to the time of
that change, as I gathered from the evidence, the lowest
sum that had been suggested at which the property of
the Panama Canal Company could be procured was something over
one hundred million dollars. Then rather suddenly it became known
that it could be procured for forty million dollars. There
were a number of people who thought there was something

(17:06):
not just exactly right about that transaction, and I will
say for myself that I have a curiosity to know
what the real truth was. But then Judge Anderson quoted
the sixth Amendment quote in all criminal prosecutions, the accused
shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial
by an impartial jury of the state or district wherein

(17:27):
the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have
been previously ascertained by law. Basically, because the World operated
in New York, seeking an indictment in the District of
Columbia had been the wrong move. Roosevelt attorneys had sought
indictments for criminal libel from the federal jury in New
York Southern District against Press Publishing Company in one of

(17:49):
the editors, on the basis that the World had sought
to quote stirrup disorder among the people. Meanwhile, the World's
attorneys sought out records in France and in Panama to
try to show that the reporting that was being done
was based in trying to discern the facts of the
deal and whether corruption was involved, but they largely ran

(18:10):
into the same kind of problems that their British investigator had.
The French government was pretty uncooperative and it could not,
it said, compel anyone to give statements or testimony unless
they actively wanted to. But ultimately none of these problems
of never finding out exactly what happened mattered because it

(18:30):
once again came down to issues of jurisdiction and interpretation
of the law. The judge who ruled on the matter
disposed of the case. That was how he put it.
He stated that territorial jurisdiction was merely a convenience. The
bigger issue is revealed in this section of his statement quote. Now,
it may be, as it has in the past, been

(18:51):
thought that under some circumstances, the crime of libel might
be considered to impair the authority and interfere with the
efficiency of the government of the United States. But so
far as I know or am informed by counsel, this
thought has not found expression in any national statute now
in force. In other words, there's no federal libel law.

(19:14):
So the suit was brought on faulty grounds. This was
a moment that a lot of newspapers celebrated because it
felt like a big freedom of the press thing, But
there was still some fight left on the matter. In October,
the ruling was appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court.
Roosevelt and Taft might have believed that they would finally

(19:35):
get the justice they sought, but the headline on January third,
nineteen eleven, in the New York Times was Supreme Court
ends Panama libel suit. In the opening paragraph stated quote
by unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of the United States
today decided that the federal government could not maintain the
so called Panama Canal libel suit against the Press Publishing

(19:58):
Company of New York in the Federal courts of New York.
In so holding, the Court affirmed the decision of the
Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District
of New York, which had quashed the famous indictment. That
same article included a statement from the World which was quote,
there is no federal libel law to muzzle American newspapers.

(20:20):
Freedom of the press does not exist at the whim
or pleasure of the President of the United States. It
is at the mercy of no steward of the public welfare.
The great constitutional issue involved in the Roosevelt libel proceeding
against the World is settled for all time. And another
statement Pulitzer said, quote the decision of the Supreme Court

(20:42):
is so sweeping that no other president will be tempted
to follow the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt, no matter how
greedy he may be for power, no matter how resentful
of opposition. Here's the thing. While Pulitzer was a central
figure to all of these proceedings, he wasn't present for

(21:02):
any of it, really truly not present. He had not
been in the world building, and he was on his yacht.
He had released a press statement at the start of
all of this hubbub saying exactly that quote. So far
as I am personally concerned, I was at sea during
the whole of October, and in fact, practically for two years,
I have been yachting on account of my health. Mr.

(21:25):
Roosevelt knows this perfectly well. He knows I am a
chronic invalid and mostly abroad yachting on account of my health.
As an aside, the nature of his health issues seems
to be kind of all lumped under the umbrella of
nervous disorders, which was so often invoked in the late
nineteen in early twentieth centuries. Pulitzer was obviously prone to

(21:48):
working to the point of exhaustion, and he was definitely
prone to depression. He did lose his sight, and he
reportedly had developed an extreme sensitivity to sound but specifics
beyond that what made him refer to himself as an
invalid are a little bit tricky to pin down. Doctor
after doctor seemed to just see him and then prescribe

(22:09):
him things like rest, massages, quiet time, et cetera. When
Pulitzer had questioned the editors that the world about the stories,
he had learned that they had run them, making these
claims against Roosevelt and Taft based on no evidence, just
the accounts of people whose stories could not be verified.

(22:31):
He had known the pieces were running, but he didn't
realize they had no authentication. He was mortified privately, but
publicly he stood by his paper and its words and
worked on the ultimately successful defense. That part just kind
of blows my mind, where he's like, you did what well,
I guess we have to defend it now. Uh. We

(22:54):
are going to talk a bit more about Pulitzer's nervous
disorder as it was called, and the way an imp
acted his life. But first we're going to hear from
the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class going.

(23:15):
One of the things that came up a lot in
my research on Charles Chapin and pretty much any time
i've read about Pulitzer is that you know any of
the people that worked for for Pulitzer. We're often getting
telegrams from him that came from all over the world,
and this kind of makes it seem like Joseph Pulitzer
might have been enjoying his wealth and doing fabulous things,

(23:36):
but the reality was a lot less glamorous. He was
essentially spending a lot of money traveling from one place
to another in search of anything that could help his
eyesight or his health. After he and Kate had bought
an estate in Bar Harbor, Maine, Pulitzer had a special
addition made to the house, which was heavily sound proofed

(23:56):
so that he could have some sort of relief. That
was a thing. Structure was nicknamed the Tower of Silence,
and he spent so much time on the water because
it was quieter than any place he found on land.
He always had secretaries with him, whether he was at
his New York mansion, in his Bar Harbor summer home,
or on his yacht to take dictation at any hour

(24:17):
of the day or night, as he managed his publishing
empire from afar. But this all mostly seems like a
really anxiety ridden and lonely way to live. On October eleventh,
nineteen eleven, Pulitzer set sail aboard his yacht with his
youngest son, Herbert, and a compliment of staff. They were
headed for Jekyl Island, Georgia, but as the boat approached Charleston,

(24:40):
South Carolina, the captain decided that he had to drop anchor.
There was a hurricane brewing farther south. They were hoping
it would clear quickly so they could continue on the
rest of their journey. On the second day they were
anchored off the South Carolina coast, Pulletzer began to have
sharp stomach pain. He was traveling with a you doctor

(25:00):
who hadn't really gotten to know him all that well yet,
so a doctor from Charleston, doctor Robert Wilson, Jr. Was
contacted and asked to come out to the yacht, and
Wilson determined that the cause of the distress was indigestion,
and he gave Pulitzer a barbiturate to help him rest.
The next several days, Pulitzer felt much better, and he

(25:21):
reportedly seemed happier than anyone had seen him in a
long time. But then he once again started experiencing terrible pain.
Kate was summoned from New York because the staff was
so worried that had happened before, but this time she
became concerned enough that she immediately booked a seat on
a train that was headed south. One of the things

(25:43):
pullets Are often asked if his secretaries and other staff
was that they read to him when he wasn't feeling well.
It was how he often drifted off to sleep, and
after having one of his staff read to him from
a book on constitutional history, Pultzer suddenly found himself in
serious pain again. Or Wilson was once again summoned and
once again gave him a sedative after he had settled in.

(26:05):
After that, another secretary started to read a biography of
King Louis the eleven to him in German. As the
reader got underway, Pulitzer said something he often said to
his readers, Liza gonf Liza, that translates to softly, very softly.
Those were the last words pullets Are spoke. He died

(26:26):
on October twenty, nineteen eleven, at the age of sixty four.
His cause of death was reported as acute angina. While
his papers often ran salacious and sensationalized stories. Pulitzer's name
today is associated with quality and achievement in journalism, and
that's because in his will Pulitzer left a lot of

(26:47):
his fortune to secure his personal legacy. He left an
endowment to found the Columbia University School of Journalism. This
is actually something he had started working on with school
officials years prior. In his will, he wrote, quote, I
am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism,
having spent my life in that profession, Regarding it as

(27:08):
a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its
influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I
desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men
of character and ability, also to help those already engaged
in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training.
There are now special schools for instruction for lawyers, physicians, clergyman,

(27:32):
military and naval officers, engineers, architects, and artists, but none
for the instruction of journalists. That all other professions and
not journalism, should have the advantage of special training seems
to me contrary to reason, and to that end he
had given Columbia one million dollars already, and then he

(27:53):
left an additional one million that his executors would give
the school after it had been up and running successfully
for three years. He also allocated money to be used
to establish the Pulitzer Prizes. These were and still are
tied to Columbia University. The school manages the Pulitzer Prizes
and Pulitzer's will He established the following prize categories quote

(28:16):
first annually for the best and most suggestive paper on
the future development and improvement of the School of Journalism,
or for any one idea that will promise great improvement
in the operation of the school. One thousand dollars. Second
annually for the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered
by any American newspaper during the year. A gold medal

(28:40):
costing five hundred dollars. Third annually for the best history
of the services rendered to the public by the American
press during the preceding year, one thousand dollars. Fourth, five
annual traveling scholarships of fifteen hundred dollars each. For clarity,
just in case you had not already figured it out,

(29:01):
in this instance, he's using disinterested to mean unbiased. Today
we think of it in a very different way, but
that was the intent. Three of those UH scholarships he
mentioned in point four were to go to journalism school
graduates determined to be the most deserving, with the intention
that they would use that money to go to Europe

(29:21):
and study quote, the social, political, and moral conditions of
the people and the character and principles of the European press.
One of the remaining annual scholarships was to go to
a music student to study in Europe, and the other
to an art student to study in Europe. There were
additional annual awards guidelines in the will for six more categories.

(29:42):
Five hundred dollars quote for the best editorial article written
during the year, the test of excellence being clearness of style,
moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion
in the right direction. One thousand quote for the American
novel published during the year, which shall best present the
whole atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of

(30:06):
American manners and manhood. There was another thousand quote for
the original American play performed in New York, which shall
best represent the educational value and power of the stage
and raising the standard of good morals, good taste, and
good manners. There was two thousand dollars for the best
book on US history, and one thousand for quote the

(30:28):
best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people,
illustrated by an eminent example, excluding as too obvious the
names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I love that.
He was like, we don't need any more Washington or
Lincoln biographies, guys, and yet we still get them, still
get them. The list of Pulitzer prices that exist now

(30:51):
is quite different. Current journalism categories include public service, breaking
news reporting, investigative reporting, explanatory boarding, local reporting, national reporting,
international reporting, feature writing, commentary, criticism, editorial writing, illustrated reporting
and commentary, breaking news, photography, feature photography, and audio reporting.

(31:16):
And under the umbrella of letters, drama, and music. There
are Pulitzers for fiction, drama, history, biography, poetry, general nonfiction,
and music, as well as a provision for special citations
and awards. Over the years, other categories have come and gone,
like telegraphic reporting and explanatory journalism, which now is explanatory reporting.

(31:40):
Pulitz are also set up a scholarship fund in memory
of his daughter, Lucille for the women at Barnard College.
The Columbia School of Journalism was founded in nineteen twelve,
the year after Pulitzer's death, and the Pulitzer Prizes awarded
their first set of honors in nineteen seventeen. Do you
also have some listener mail? Yes, this is from a

(32:01):
listener who I'm not going to name. They have an
unusual spelling of their name, and it's so unusual that
they're easy to find, and they would like to maintain anonymity.
But their name in itself is unusual enough in the
U S that I worry that people would try to
do subouts of letters and figure it out. Uh. So
we are not naming this person, but just know who

(32:22):
you are. Uh. They write, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I
have listened to your podcast for years and it has
kept me company early mornings while I have been alone
working as a baker. It's nice to have other people
around it four am, even if you are not really there.
The company is wonderful. I am emailing finally, have been
meaning to for a while because I was listening to
an older episode about the Great Vowel shift in the

(32:44):
history of English. My name came up again. Not going
to say the name, so we're skipping this next portion.
They write, I'm also a quilter who loves cats and
nature's also clearly a baker. So I have delighted in
all your podcasts on these wonderful subjects and cannot get
enough of your history of flowers as well. I have
also failed to mention that my father was a history teacher,

(33:04):
and now I am able to one up him with
certain facts and anecdotes I have learned from your podcast.
I cannot express enough how much your podcast means to me.
It's been wonderful learning more and more about history, not
just to one up my father, but because I truly
love how much there is and always will be to learn.
Thank you for all the wonderful episodes. Can't wait to
listen to all there are to come. I wanted to

(33:26):
read this specifically because it captures the thing that I
have come to love so much doing this this show,
which is that there are moments, I think where both
of us have had that thing of like I don't
know what I'm going to talk about next, but then
the second you start paging through a book, you suddenly go, oh,
here are ten ideas, because there is so much history

(33:49):
to talk about forever. We will never run out because
we're always making more. So thank you. That's always also
a good reminder to me personally, Thank you so much
our baking friend. I love anybody who bakes, so I
really was excited about this one. If you would like
to write to us, you can do that a history
podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also
find us on social media as Missed in History, and

(34:12):
if you haven't subscribed and would like to, you can
do that in the I heart radio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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