April 17, 2017 • 33 mins
Whitman is often touted as the best and most important poet in U.S. history, but he also worked as a teacher and a journalist. And his poetry career didn't start out particularly well.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. It would
be really hard to grow up in the United States
and not at least hear of What Whitman. I'm trying
(00:23):
to think of how that would work if you were
in any sort of public school system. M hmm. It's
it's such an alien concept that you would miss it
that I'm trying to figure out if there's any weird
pocket where that could happen. Your biographical summaries of him
kick off with descriptions like arguably the best and most
influential poet to hail from the United States, Like is
(00:46):
some kind of requirement, like that is the first first
sentence every time is glowing praise for what Whitman? And
then poems like beat Beat Drones and I hear America
singing and when Lilacs Last in the dooryard whomed are
staples of English classes. And then some of those same
ones also run alongside history lessons on the Civil War. Uh,
(01:08):
And then of course there's oh Captain, My Captain, which
is deeply rooted in pop culture thanks to dead poets
society well, and I think people even invoke it without
having any idea really what it is or what it's
from sometimes like or who wrote it. So apart from
all of this work that is such a staple in
(01:29):
mainstream English and history classes, Walt Whitman's life ran alongside
and interacted with a lot of US history and a
lot of in a lot of ways. His poetry was
like about America and an attempt to embody the United
States and this really utopia kind of idealistic way. So
we're going to talk about that intersection of history and
(01:51):
his life and work today. And this is also a
listener request from Molly, who sent us an email not
too long ago, uh, just sort of dropping at the
end that she would love to hear podcast about Walt Whitman,
and that kind of tickled in the back of my
brain for a while. And then by total coincidence, he
came up recently on our a couple of different podcasts.
He came up in our live show on HP Lovecraft,
(02:14):
who was similarly self promotional, and then he also came
up in our Prospect Park podcast about Brooklyn because that
is where he lived for much of his life uh
and and Walt Whitman started that life when he was
born on May thirty one, eighteen nineteen. His parents were
Walter Whitman and Luisa van Velsor. Walt was named after
(02:35):
his father. Walter Sr. Made his living as a carpenter
and as a farmer, and young Walt was their second child,
and he would ultimately have eight siblings who survived their infancy.
This family was both proud and patriotic. Walt and his
older siblings were named after parents and grandparents, and three
of his younger brothers were named for Andrew Jackson, George Washington,
(02:58):
and Thomas Jefferson. Kind Of as a side note, uh,
Andrew Jackson Whitman was actually born before Andrew Jackson became
president or was even u elected president. He was at
that point better known as a national hero for his
victory over the British in New Orleans during the War
of eighteen twelve. They're also the details are a little
bit hazy, but but Walt's youngest brother, Edward, was the
(03:21):
only one of the Whitman children who wasn't named after
a family member or a prominent political figure. He was
disabled from birth and required care for the whole of
his life. When Walt was four, the family moved from
their home in West Hills on Long Island to Brooklyn.
And Brooklyn is now one of the boroughs of New
York City, but at the time it was a separate city,
(03:42):
and Walt's father was hopeful that Brooklyn's rapid growth would
bring him work as a carpenter or a prophet as
a land speculator, and neither of those really worked out,
and consequently the family moved around a lot, and they
really struggled to make ends meet. When Walt was about six,
the Marquis to laugh Yet arrived in Brooklyn as part
of his grand tour of the United States. I kind
(04:05):
of want to do an episode on this whole tour.
It was in part for the fiftieth anniversary of the
nation's founding. He was met with huge fanfare and with
enthusiastic receptions all over the country, with Rhodes and squares
being renamed in his honor. In Brooklyn, Lafayette was to
lay the cornerstone of a new free public library, and
(04:28):
while he and other men who were there were basically
picking children up and moving them out of the way
of this hole that hid been zug Lafayette picked up
the young Walt Whitman and gave him a hug and
a kiss before putting him down again. Was something he
would remember for the rest of his life and at
some points kind of add a almost prophetic layer to
(04:48):
how he was being blessed for democracy. Walt's only real
formal education took place in Brooklyn's newly founded public schools,
which he attended for about six years. He also took
steps to educate himself outside of schools, through nearby libraries, theaters,
and museums, as well as by attending lectures. The Whitman
(05:09):
family wasn't a member of any religious denomination, but Elias Hicks,
a Quaker and abolitionist, lived in New York, and Walt
attended his lectures. When the young Walt began his apprenticeship
as a type setter at the Long Island Patriot at
the age of twelve, he left school to do so,
and at that point he had more formal education than
(05:30):
either of his parents. He continued, though, with just voracious
reading and self education, and he started writing as well,
both for the Patriot and for other newspapers. When his
family moved back to Long Island in eighteen thirty three.
He stayed behind in Brooklyn, and he continued to learn
and work. In addition to his journalistic writing for the
(05:51):
newspapers where he was working in other newspapers in the area,
he was also starting to write poetry, although at this
point most of his poem followed the very conventional patterns
of meter and rhyme that were pretty much standard in poetry.
In eighteen thirty five, the Great Fire of New York
derailed Walt's career in printing in journalism. This fire started
(06:14):
in a warehouse, but it spread rapidly due to a
combination of high winds and bitter cold that made it
nearly impossible for firefighters to draw water from the East River.
In addition to engulfing warehouses, newly built shops, and the
Merchant Exchange, the fire gutted the offices of most of
the city's newspapers and journals. New York's printing industry was
(06:36):
virtually destroyed. This is one of a number of fires
that just really gutted the printing industry and other industries
in New York and Brooklyn, and so women had to
find another job. He embarked on a new career as
a teacher at the age of seventeen. Although he did
have an interest in education and in how people learn,
(06:57):
this was not a job he was very enthusiastic about.
It was either that or go back home to work
on his father's farm, which he did not want to do.
At one point he did try to start his own newspaper,
The Long Islander, which ran for about a year beginning
in eighteen thirty eight, but otherwise he spent five fairly
unhappy years after the fires as an itinerant teacher. He
(07:20):
taught in small, generally one room schools on Long Island.
To him, these rural communities paled in comparison to the
bustle and excitement of New York. He wrote of one
of them, quote, Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dullness are
the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair. And
it was all the worse because he felt like he
(07:42):
was spending the best years of his youth in remote,
backwater parts of New York doing work that he didn't like.
He also really wasn't what these communities expected in a
country teacher, rather than the memorization and repetition, and wrote
recitations that were common in the classroom. He favored the
techniques that were advocated by the educational reformers of the day,
(08:05):
including a more holistic approach to the classroom, open ended
discussions and games. It was a lot more like the
classroom under past podcast subject Bronson Alcott, who Whitman did
meet later on in his life. And there are rumors
that Whitman's career as an educator came to a scandalous
end that at the age of twenty one or twenty two,
(08:26):
he was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on
a rail after being sexually involved with a male student.
But while this story has become a persistent part of
the oral history of the coastal town of south Old,
Long Island, there's actually no documentation that it ever happened,
or of woman ever having been a teacher there. There is,
(08:47):
on the other hand, documentation that Whitman's time as a teacher,
including during the winters of eighteen forty or eighteen forty
one when the incident allegedly took place, was spent on
the other end of Long Island, fifty miles or more
a way He also vacationed in Southhold after that point, which, uh,
as we said earlier, is on the coast, and he
did that in later years, which would have been kind
(09:08):
of an odd choice if he had previously been tarred
and feathered there. Regardless, in the early eighteen forties, Whitman
did give up teaching, and he moved to New York City,
this time to try to pay his bills through a
combination of journalism and fiction writing. And we're going to
talk about his return to journalism. After we first paused
for a little sponsor break in the first half of
(09:35):
the eighteen forties, Walt Whitman kept up a steady stream
of short stories, published in more than twenty magazines, journals,
and newspapers. He published longer works as well. His first novel,
Franklin Evans The Inebriate, came out in eighteen forty two.
This was written both to try to earn money from
having written a novel and also to support the temperance movement.
(09:57):
Walt Whitman was not in favor of drunkenness or abuses
stemming from drunkenness. Although he was able to publish regularly,
his income from doing so was not particularly regular. In
eighteen forty five, he moved back to Brooklyn, where he
could live a little more frugally and have less competition
for writing jobs. By eighteen forty six, he had taken
(10:19):
over as chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a position
he was ultimately fired from over the issue of slavery.
He was opposed to it, but the papers publisher Isaac
van Anden backed pro slavery political candidates. At this point
in his life, Walt Whitman's opposition to slavery was a
lot more pragmatic than humanitarian. He wasn't at all an abolitionist.
(10:43):
He was actually pretty sure abolitionists were going to destroy
the country by forcing the issue of ending slavery. But
a lot of his work in journalism was geared towards
educating and improving the lives and communities of working class
white people through his daily reporting, his human interest stories,
and other tidbits this uh. For this reason, he was
(11:05):
against the expansion of slavery into the western territories, and
he was against the idea of slavery being allowed in
states that were newly admitted into the Union, largely because
of what the presence of slavery would do to the jobs,
job prospects, pay, and working conditions of white citizens. So
he was against the expansion of slavery, but not for
(11:26):
reasons that one might consider to be particularly humanitarian at
this point, at least not when it came to the
lives of the people who were enslaved. In eighty eight,
a couple of weeks after having been fired from the
Brooklyn Eagle, a chance meeting connected Whitman to J. E. McClure,
(11:48):
who hoped to start a newspaper in New Orleans. For
the first time in his life, Whitman left the state
of New York to edit the New Orleans Crescent. He
quickly discovered that he loved New Orleans, particularly the melding
of French, English, and Spanish languages and the multiple cultures
in one place. However, it was also there that he
(12:08):
really first witnessed the institution to which he had previously
been so pragmatically opposed. Slavery did still exist in New
York when Walt Whitman was born, but thanks to a
gradual emancipation Act that had been passed in seventeen ninety nine,
his experience with it had been pretty limited. But in
New Orleans in eighteen forty eight, slavery was flourishing, and
(12:30):
there was a functioning auction site just down the road
from where Whitman and his younger brother were staying. So
while the idea of slavery he had been sort of
something he was opposed to in theory because of how
it affected white working class citizens, he now witnessed some
of its horrors firsthand. Although Walt Whitman was very fond
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of New Orleans, his time at the Crescent didn't really
work out for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's possible
that the point of contention was once again slavery, with
the Crescent's owners afraid of what Whitman's clearly anti slavery
viewpoint would do to their paper. When Whitman returned to
New York that same fall, he established the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman,
(13:16):
a free soil newspaper which primarily works to support politicians
who were running on anti slavery platforms. He did most
of the writing and editing himself, and he may have
even done all of the type setting. He was really
into setting type and thought it was really important that
things be set in a way that contributed to the
overall quality of the publication, but his goal at expanding
(13:40):
the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman to a daily paper was once
again thwarted by a fire, which destroyed his office the
day after the paper's first issue came out. He was
able to start over that November, although he could only
keep the paper going for about a year. There's a
bit of a gap in Walt Whitman's life after his
return from New Orleans in eighteen forty eight. We do
(14:02):
know that he published the novel Life and Adventures of
Jack Angle and Autobiography, in which the reader will find
some familiar characters. That whole thing is the title. He
published that in eighteen fifty two. That manuscript was rediscovered
in but otherwise there's a lot less documentation about where
he was or what he was doing during that time.
(14:24):
But somewhere in there he shifted. When he reappears in
eighteen fifty five, it's with his first manuscript of Leaves
of Grass. Written in that seemingly reclusive interim, Leaves of
Grass abandoned all the formal conventional systems of meter and
rhyme that had been part of his earlier work and
(14:44):
part of pretty much the English language poetic tradition at
that point. Instead, the twelve untitled poems that were included
in the first edition were all over the place in
terms of length. The lines themselves were often so long
that Whitman actually had the book printed on oversized paper.
These poems took on a lot of the same subject
(15:07):
matter that he had been writing about as a journalist,
but they did so in a way that was meant
to be all enveloping and all encompassing. And their voice
was not that of a writer who was cerebrally against
slavery because of its effects on the white working class.
It was a voice that embraced and welcomed all people
of all races into one relentlessly optimistic vision. At this point,
(15:30):
the United States was increasingly divided over the issue of slavery,
and Leaves of Grass seemed to be an attempt to
unite the whole nation in a poetic democracy. He published
it himself, having seven nine copies printed, which was all
he could afford, but his budget hadn't actually included binding
those seven copies, so he did that piece meal as
(15:53):
he had the money to do it. He sent copies
to other writers and poets but the only one who
responded it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sent him a
letter that began quote, I greet you at the beginning
of a great career. Emerson's praise of Whitman is completely unsurprising.
In eighteen forty four, he had published an essay called
(16:14):
The Poet, in which he called for the United States
to have its own poet to record and reflect upon
and shape the young nation's consciousness. Emerson's description of what
this poet's work would be like is uncannily like Leaves
of Grass, to the point that some critics suggest that
Whitman read this essay and then decided to go do
(16:36):
that thing, which would be really astute uh For the
rest of his life. One of Whitman's major ongoing endeavors
would be rewriting and revising Leaves of Grass. The second edition,
which came out in eighteen fifty six, had that line
from Emerson's letter about the beginning of a great career
printed on the spine with Emerson's name, but without his permission.
(17:00):
He printed the whole letter at the back of the volume,
also without permission. Whitman also included a collection of reviews
of the first edition. In the second edition, most of
them negative, but the three he wrote himself were full
of phrase. Uh. He also insisted that the first edition
had sold out, even though its sales had been quite poor.
(17:22):
He promoted himself a lot. One of my literature professors
in college said that he would basically go out in
the streets of New York and sort of announce America's
great poet has arrived. Like I didn't. I didn't find
that confirmed in my research for this, but I would
not put it past him. He talked himself up a
(17:43):
lot and wrote positive reviews of his own work. Uh It.
It didn't work out all that well in the short
term for making his work more popular, though. The eighteen
fifty six edition, which had twenty more poems than eighteen
fifty five edition, was printed on much smaller paper, his
(18:04):
idea being that you could put it in your pocket
and read it out in the world. He added titles
to the poems from the first edition. Many of these
titles would change in future editions, and he also put
the word poem in all the titles, apparently in response
to the many critics who had basically said they weren't
sure what that was In the eighteen fifty five edition,
(18:24):
but it was definitely not poetry, and now he could
say yes, huh it says so in the title. Uh.
This time he had a thousand copies printed. Those also
sold terribly. Yeah. He was not not doing well, and
around this time Whitmen became part of New York City's
(18:46):
bohemian crowd, frequenting Five Saloon and becoming connected with other
writers and artists, as well as abolitionists and women's rights workers.
Even though his own work wasn't selling well or being
reviewed very well out in the rest of the world,
he became something of a celebrity within the New York
bohemian scene, in part because of his work sexual overtones,
(19:09):
especially since sometimes these overtones were somewhat homo erotic. Whitman's
plan for his next edition of Leaves of Grass was
to once again publish it himself, but in eighteen sixty
he was contacted by William Thayer and Charles Eldridge, who
were abolitionist publishers. They offered him a book deal, and
(19:29):
Walt Whitman immediately took them up on it, and he
traveled to Boston to oversee the type setting himself, something
that he had done for all his prior books, and which,
as Tracy mentioned earlier, he thought was critical to the
work as a whole. The eighteen sixty edition of Leaves
of Grass, against the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, went
even further than the first two had uh and those
(19:52):
have been labeled as a scene in some circles, and
its inclusion of sexuality that included Children of Adam, which
was all about the physical body and a celebration of
sex between men and women, and the Calamus Cluster, which
was a celebration of love between men. Because it was
more sexually explicit, Children of Adam got way more criticism,
(20:14):
and the eighteen sixty edition of Leaves of Grass stoked
a lot more controversy than the previous two had. And finally,
the eighteen sixty edition of Leaves of Grass both sold
well and garnered praise, even as people who objected to
its sexual content called for it to be banned and
sometimes successfully. The first printing of a thousand copies sold
(20:35):
out and the publisher ordered another run. Although it seemed
like women's literary star was finally rising, this didn't last long.
His publisher went bankrupt and they sold the plates for
Leaves of Grass to another publisher who kept using them
to print more copies. Even as Whitman was trying to
work on new editions of the book, his family also
(20:57):
started to have a lot of problems there had This
was not completely new. There had been problems within the
family before, but it seems to start to come to
a head. His sister was in an abusive marriage, and
his brother had increasingly violent tendencies and seemed to have
some kind of mental illness happening. But these problems went
(21:18):
beyond his personal concerns. The Civil War began in eighteen
sixty one, and this would radically change Whitman's life and work,
and we're going to talk about that after we have
a little sponsor break. Prior to the Civil War, Whitman's
poetry was full of themes of union and connection. It
(21:41):
was like a love song to a nation that was
full of diverse people's and perspectives and promise, but everyone's
still remaining united. A nation at war with itself was
the antithesis of what he had been celebrating and praising
and sort of optimistically believing that the nation could achieve
eve As a writer, compounding the actual horrors of war,
(22:05):
which were awful, was a sense that the nation he
had been crafting through poetry had literally torn itself into
In December of eighteen sixty two, Whitman saw the name G. W.
Whitmore on a newspaper list of men who had been
wounded at Fredericksburg. He was afraid that it was a
misspelling of his younger brother's name, George Washington. Whitman had
(22:28):
enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the war,
and Walt Whitman went to Washington, d c. Personally to
see if he could find his brother. His brother, as
it turned out, had indeed been wounded, but his condition
was not serious. But soon after that Whitman saw a
pile of amputated limbs outside of a mansion that was
being used as a field hospital. He was sickened by
(22:52):
this site, and he decided to stay in Washington and
do something that had already been part of his typical
routine for years, which was sitting sick and injured people
at the hospital. There are accounts that describe Whitman as
a nurse, but for the most part, he really wasn't
doing that sort of hands on medical care that you
would think of with the word nurse. He was visiting
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and talking to people and offering comfort and bringing gifts.
His work was tireless necessary, and garnered praise, but he
was more of a companion rather than a caregiver. He
also ran errands and wrote letters on behalf of the
sick and injured, and he also assisted in burying the dead.
His original plan had been to go to Washington confirm
(23:36):
whether his brother was okay, and then go back to
New York. Instead, he stayed in the capital for eleven
years until long after the war was over. While he
still made trips home to New York and also to Boston,
he started to think of Washington and not New York,
as his home. During this time, he also developed close,
loving relationships with several of the men he visited, including
(23:58):
Confederate soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war.
Although he'd let his family know that he would be
staying in Washington for a while, he didn't really have
the funds to support himself while working in the hospitals,
so he worked a variety of jobs, including at the
Paymaster's office and at the Indian Bureau of the Department
of the interior. He was eventually fired from that when
(24:20):
his boss realized that he was the guy who wrote
Leaves of Grass. There's some accounts that say it was
because that he found a copy of Leaves of Grass
on his desk. Either way, he got fired because of
Leaves of Grass. Women's Civil War experiences would lead to
one of his few, originally not Leaves of Grass, publications
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of poetry, and that was Drum Taps. He signed a
contract for its publication near the end of the war,
and it was already ready to go to print when
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, although he was able to write
and add Hushed be the Camps Today, which was dedicated
to Lincoln before the book went to the type setter
bike a incidence. Whitman was at his mother's house in
(25:02):
April of eighteen sixty five when Lincoln was assassinated. He
had also been away from Washington, d c. When it
was attacked by the Confederate army, and when the war
officially ended, it was his mother's door and Lilacs that
featured in his elegiate poem When Lilacs Last in the
dooryard bloomed that poem and Oh Captain, My Captain were
(25:23):
later published in a volume called Sequel to Drum Taps.
Around the end of the war, Whitman met Peter Doyle,
a former Confederate soldier originally from Ireland. He was working
as a street car driver. Doyle would later describe it,
we fell to each other at once. Women and Doyle
never lived together, although Whitman often wrote of wanting to,
(25:44):
and their relationship continued for most of the rest of
Whitman's life, although it did cool after he left Washington
After the war, Whitman had to figure out what to
do with his poetry. Leaves of Grass had been a
celebration of a grand, chaotic, all welcoming spirit of democracy
and of a young nation growing up into a country
(26:04):
that was dynamic and energetic and free. The post Civil
War nation didn't feel like that at all. The eighteen
sixty seven edition of Leaves of Grass that followed was
full of errors and assembled in multiple configurations. Some versions
included Drum Taps and Sequel to Drum Taps, but others
did not, and their ordering changed from one to another.
(26:27):
It was as though the book had been torn up
and then haphazardly put back together. Whitman seemed to approach
Leaves of Grass as though the book of poems was
the United States, and in future editions he would continue
to try to figure out how to unite all of
his work from both before and after the war into
one unified whole that still made sense. He wrote other
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work as well, including Democratic Vistas and Passage to India,
which came out each of them in eighteen seventy. On
January eighteen seventy three, waltwit And had a serious stroke.
That may his mother's health began to fail, and he
managed to make it to Camden, New Jersey to see her,
just three days before she died. After trying to go
(27:11):
back to Washington, he soon wound up in Camden again
to live with his brother George and George's wife, lou
The Whitman's health continued to decline, he kept publishing both
poetry and prose, including a revised Memoranda during the War,
which came out as part of American Centennial celebrations, along
with a slightly revised centennial version of Leaves of Grass.
(27:34):
His health did eventually start to improve, and he was
able to have a pretty active life for a while.
In Camden. By the eighteen eighties, Whitman's work had gained
international attention, and ardent admirers from Europe came to the
United States to visit him. One was Anne Gilchrist, who
published an essay called a Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman,
which included the line quote for me the reading of
(27:58):
his poems as truly a new birth of the soul.
Gil Christ and Whitman maintained a multi year correspondence before
he sent her a ring as a symbol of friendship,
and she came to the United States with her children
and stayed for eighteen months. Another visitor was Oscar Wilde,
who made not one, but two stops in Camden, saying quote,
(28:18):
before I leave America, I must see you again. There
is no one in this wide, great world of America
whom I love and honor so much. The gay rights
movement did not yet exist, and the word homosexual would
not even be coined until eight the year that Walt
Whitman died, but there were laws in place already that
(28:39):
criminalized same sex behavior and people fighting against those laws.
Whitman's visitors from England included Edward Carpenter, who was living
openly with another man, and who credited Leaves of Grass
with having inspired him to leave university, give away his money,
and work toward the betterment of mankind, and today Carpenter
is considered one of the first gay rights activists. In
(29:03):
eighteen eighty one, Boston publisher James R. Osgood and Company
decided to publish a new edition of Leaves of Grass,
but Boston District Attorney Oliver Stevens wrote to Osgod saying
that the book was obscene. Whitman, thinking that they were
asking for minor alterations, suggested that he might be willing
to make changes to get the book in print, but
(29:23):
when he saw this lengthy list of poems that would
have to be removed entirely, he replied, quote the list
whole and several is rejected by me and will not
be thought of under any circumstances. Leaves of Grass then
became one of the books infamously banned in Boston and
wal Whitman lived in Camden for the rest of his life,
(29:45):
eventually moving into a house of his own after his
brother moved into the country. He died on March two,
at the age of seventy two. You can read basically
every walp Woman poem there is on the internet for free,
because it's all in the public domain now. But I
wanted to end with one, so I have a short one,
(30:09):
because today's episode is a little on a longish side,
and this is long too long America, long too long, America,
traveling roads all even and peaceful. You learned from joys
and prosperity only, but now now to learn from crises
of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not
(30:32):
and now to conceive and show to the world what
your children on Mass really are. For who except myself
has yet conceived what your children on Mass really are?
That is what Whitman? Do you also have listener mail?
Sure do? Uh? This quick from Lydia. It's on a
(30:55):
New London school. When we talked about the New London
school explosion, we later had an email about whether the
school had a basement. We've received several messages about whether
the school has a basement. They are somewhat contradictory with
one another, but this one from Lydia. Uh included a
link to a source, and Lydia says, hello ladies. First
of all, thank you for saving my sanity during my
(31:16):
long commute. I absolutely love listening to your podcast. You
even make the advertisements fun. I wish I had a
really cool letter or parcel to send maybe one day.
I work for a local law enforcement in the evidence
room and communications. I was doing some research and came
across this article about the New London School and immediately thought, of, y'all,
(31:36):
I am sending you more information on previously aired subject. Sorry,
I am sure you get em parted. Because this has
a photo diagram of the New London School floor plan.
It appears there is no basement but a crawl space.
Hope this clears some things up, and she sent a
link to the Texas Department of Public Safety website, which
does have an illustration of the New London School that
(31:57):
suggests that it was a crawl space and not a basement.
I also heard from a different person that like, because
the school was built on a hill, um that it
was like a crawl space at one portion, but if
you got further back into the hill, it was more
like a basement. Yeah, that makes sense. Still little not
(32:19):
completely clear the status of the New London School basement.
But that's actually a really good diagram and we will
put the link to that in the show notes. If
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(32:39):
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(33:02):
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on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how
stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. It would
be really hard to grow up in the United States
and not at least hear of What Whitman. I'm trying
(00:23):
to think of how that would work if you were
in any sort of public school system. M hmm. It's
it's such an alien concept that you would miss it
that I'm trying to figure out if there's any weird
pocket where that could happen. Your biographical summaries of him
kick off with descriptions like arguably the best and most
influential poet to hail from the United States, Like is
(00:46):
some kind of requirement, like that is the first first
sentence every time is glowing praise for what Whitman? And
then poems like beat Beat Drones and I hear America
singing and when Lilacs Last in the dooryard whomed are
staples of English classes. And then some of those same
ones also run alongside history lessons on the Civil War. Uh,
(01:08):
And then of course there's oh Captain, My Captain, which
is deeply rooted in pop culture thanks to dead poets
society well, and I think people even invoke it without
having any idea really what it is or what it's
from sometimes like or who wrote it. So apart from
all of this work that is such a staple in
(01:29):
mainstream English and history classes, Walt Whitman's life ran alongside
and interacted with a lot of US history and a
lot of in a lot of ways. His poetry was
like about America and an attempt to embody the United
States and this really utopia kind of idealistic way. So
we're going to talk about that intersection of history and
(01:51):
his life and work today. And this is also a
listener request from Molly, who sent us an email not
too long ago, uh, just sort of dropping at the
end that she would love to hear podcast about Walt Whitman,
and that kind of tickled in the back of my
brain for a while. And then by total coincidence, he
came up recently on our a couple of different podcasts.
He came up in our live show on HP Lovecraft,
(02:14):
who was similarly self promotional, and then he also came
up in our Prospect Park podcast about Brooklyn because that
is where he lived for much of his life uh
and and Walt Whitman started that life when he was
born on May thirty one, eighteen nineteen. His parents were
Walter Whitman and Luisa van Velsor. Walt was named after
(02:35):
his father. Walter Sr. Made his living as a carpenter
and as a farmer, and young Walt was their second child,
and he would ultimately have eight siblings who survived their infancy.
This family was both proud and patriotic. Walt and his
older siblings were named after parents and grandparents, and three
of his younger brothers were named for Andrew Jackson, George Washington,
(02:58):
and Thomas Jefferson. Kind Of as a side note, uh,
Andrew Jackson Whitman was actually born before Andrew Jackson became
president or was even u elected president. He was at
that point better known as a national hero for his
victory over the British in New Orleans during the War
of eighteen twelve. They're also the details are a little
bit hazy, but but Walt's youngest brother, Edward, was the
(03:21):
only one of the Whitman children who wasn't named after
a family member or a prominent political figure. He was
disabled from birth and required care for the whole of
his life. When Walt was four, the family moved from
their home in West Hills on Long Island to Brooklyn.
And Brooklyn is now one of the boroughs of New
York City, but at the time it was a separate city,
(03:42):
and Walt's father was hopeful that Brooklyn's rapid growth would
bring him work as a carpenter or a prophet as
a land speculator, and neither of those really worked out,
and consequently the family moved around a lot, and they
really struggled to make ends meet. When Walt was about six,
the Marquis to laugh Yet arrived in Brooklyn as part
of his grand tour of the United States. I kind
(04:05):
of want to do an episode on this whole tour.
It was in part for the fiftieth anniversary of the
nation's founding. He was met with huge fanfare and with
enthusiastic receptions all over the country, with Rhodes and squares
being renamed in his honor. In Brooklyn, Lafayette was to
lay the cornerstone of a new free public library, and
(04:28):
while he and other men who were there were basically
picking children up and moving them out of the way
of this hole that hid been zug Lafayette picked up
the young Walt Whitman and gave him a hug and
a kiss before putting him down again. Was something he
would remember for the rest of his life and at
some points kind of add a almost prophetic layer to
(04:48):
how he was being blessed for democracy. Walt's only real
formal education took place in Brooklyn's newly founded public schools,
which he attended for about six years. He also took
steps to educate himself outside of schools, through nearby libraries, theaters,
and museums, as well as by attending lectures. The Whitman
(05:09):
family wasn't a member of any religious denomination, but Elias Hicks,
a Quaker and abolitionist, lived in New York, and Walt
attended his lectures. When the young Walt began his apprenticeship
as a type setter at the Long Island Patriot at
the age of twelve, he left school to do so,
and at that point he had more formal education than
(05:30):
either of his parents. He continued, though, with just voracious
reading and self education, and he started writing as well,
both for the Patriot and for other newspapers. When his
family moved back to Long Island in eighteen thirty three.
He stayed behind in Brooklyn, and he continued to learn
and work. In addition to his journalistic writing for the
(05:51):
newspapers where he was working in other newspapers in the area,
he was also starting to write poetry, although at this
point most of his poem followed the very conventional patterns
of meter and rhyme that were pretty much standard in poetry.
In eighteen thirty five, the Great Fire of New York
derailed Walt's career in printing in journalism. This fire started
(06:14):
in a warehouse, but it spread rapidly due to a
combination of high winds and bitter cold that made it
nearly impossible for firefighters to draw water from the East River.
In addition to engulfing warehouses, newly built shops, and the
Merchant Exchange, the fire gutted the offices of most of
the city's newspapers and journals. New York's printing industry was
(06:36):
virtually destroyed. This is one of a number of fires
that just really gutted the printing industry and other industries
in New York and Brooklyn, and so women had to
find another job. He embarked on a new career as
a teacher at the age of seventeen. Although he did
have an interest in education and in how people learn,
(06:57):
this was not a job he was very enthusiastic about.
It was either that or go back home to work
on his father's farm, which he did not want to do.
At one point he did try to start his own newspaper,
The Long Islander, which ran for about a year beginning
in eighteen thirty eight, but otherwise he spent five fairly
unhappy years after the fires as an itinerant teacher. He
(07:20):
taught in small, generally one room schools on Long Island.
To him, these rural communities paled in comparison to the
bustle and excitement of New York. He wrote of one
of them, quote, Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dullness are
the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair. And
it was all the worse because he felt like he
(07:42):
was spending the best years of his youth in remote,
backwater parts of New York doing work that he didn't like.
He also really wasn't what these communities expected in a
country teacher, rather than the memorization and repetition, and wrote
recitations that were common in the classroom. He favored the
techniques that were advocated by the educational reformers of the day,
(08:05):
including a more holistic approach to the classroom, open ended
discussions and games. It was a lot more like the
classroom under past podcast subject Bronson Alcott, who Whitman did
meet later on in his life. And there are rumors
that Whitman's career as an educator came to a scandalous
end that at the age of twenty one or twenty two,
(08:26):
he was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on
a rail after being sexually involved with a male student.
But while this story has become a persistent part of
the oral history of the coastal town of south Old,
Long Island, there's actually no documentation that it ever happened,
or of woman ever having been a teacher there. There is,
(08:47):
on the other hand, documentation that Whitman's time as a teacher,
including during the winters of eighteen forty or eighteen forty
one when the incident allegedly took place, was spent on
the other end of Long Island, fifty miles or more
a way He also vacationed in Southhold after that point, which, uh,
as we said earlier, is on the coast, and he
did that in later years, which would have been kind
(09:08):
of an odd choice if he had previously been tarred
and feathered there. Regardless, in the early eighteen forties, Whitman
did give up teaching, and he moved to New York City,
this time to try to pay his bills through a
combination of journalism and fiction writing. And we're going to
talk about his return to journalism. After we first paused
for a little sponsor break in the first half of
(09:35):
the eighteen forties, Walt Whitman kept up a steady stream
of short stories, published in more than twenty magazines, journals,
and newspapers. He published longer works as well. His first novel,
Franklin Evans The Inebriate, came out in eighteen forty two.
This was written both to try to earn money from
having written a novel and also to support the temperance movement.
(09:57):
Walt Whitman was not in favor of drunkenness or abuses
stemming from drunkenness. Although he was able to publish regularly,
his income from doing so was not particularly regular. In
eighteen forty five, he moved back to Brooklyn, where he
could live a little more frugally and have less competition
for writing jobs. By eighteen forty six, he had taken
(10:19):
over as chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a position
he was ultimately fired from over the issue of slavery.
He was opposed to it, but the papers publisher Isaac
van Anden backed pro slavery political candidates. At this point
in his life, Walt Whitman's opposition to slavery was a
lot more pragmatic than humanitarian. He wasn't at all an abolitionist.
(10:43):
He was actually pretty sure abolitionists were going to destroy
the country by forcing the issue of ending slavery. But
a lot of his work in journalism was geared towards
educating and improving the lives and communities of working class
white people through his daily reporting, his human interest stories,
and other tidbits this uh. For this reason, he was
(11:05):
against the expansion of slavery into the western territories, and
he was against the idea of slavery being allowed in
states that were newly admitted into the Union, largely because
of what the presence of slavery would do to the jobs,
job prospects, pay, and working conditions of white citizens. So
he was against the expansion of slavery, but not for
(11:26):
reasons that one might consider to be particularly humanitarian at
this point, at least not when it came to the
lives of the people who were enslaved. In eighty eight,
a couple of weeks after having been fired from the
Brooklyn Eagle, a chance meeting connected Whitman to J. E. McClure,
(11:48):
who hoped to start a newspaper in New Orleans. For
the first time in his life, Whitman left the state
of New York to edit the New Orleans Crescent. He
quickly discovered that he loved New Orleans, particularly the melding
of French, English, and Spanish languages and the multiple cultures
in one place. However, it was also there that he
(12:08):
really first witnessed the institution to which he had previously
been so pragmatically opposed. Slavery did still exist in New
York when Walt Whitman was born, but thanks to a
gradual emancipation Act that had been passed in seventeen ninety nine,
his experience with it had been pretty limited. But in
New Orleans in eighteen forty eight, slavery was flourishing, and
(12:30):
there was a functioning auction site just down the road
from where Whitman and his younger brother were staying. So
while the idea of slavery he had been sort of
something he was opposed to in theory because of how
it affected white working class citizens, he now witnessed some
of its horrors firsthand. Although Walt Whitman was very fond
(12:54):
of New Orleans, his time at the Crescent didn't really
work out for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's possible
that the point of contention was once again slavery, with
the Crescent's owners afraid of what Whitman's clearly anti slavery
viewpoint would do to their paper. When Whitman returned to
New York that same fall, he established the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman,
(13:16):
a free soil newspaper which primarily works to support politicians
who were running on anti slavery platforms. He did most
of the writing and editing himself, and he may have
even done all of the type setting. He was really
into setting type and thought it was really important that
things be set in a way that contributed to the
overall quality of the publication, but his goal at expanding
(13:40):
the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman to a daily paper was once
again thwarted by a fire, which destroyed his office the
day after the paper's first issue came out. He was
able to start over that November, although he could only
keep the paper going for about a year. There's a
bit of a gap in Walt Whitman's life after his
return from New Orleans in eighteen forty eight. We do
(14:02):
know that he published the novel Life and Adventures of
Jack Angle and Autobiography, in which the reader will find
some familiar characters. That whole thing is the title. He
published that in eighteen fifty two. That manuscript was rediscovered
in but otherwise there's a lot less documentation about where
he was or what he was doing during that time.
(14:24):
But somewhere in there he shifted. When he reappears in
eighteen fifty five, it's with his first manuscript of Leaves
of Grass. Written in that seemingly reclusive interim, Leaves of
Grass abandoned all the formal conventional systems of meter and
rhyme that had been part of his earlier work and
(14:44):
part of pretty much the English language poetic tradition at
that point. Instead, the twelve untitled poems that were included
in the first edition were all over the place in
terms of length. The lines themselves were often so long
that Whitman actually had the book printed on oversized paper.
These poems took on a lot of the same subject
(15:07):
matter that he had been writing about as a journalist,
but they did so in a way that was meant
to be all enveloping and all encompassing. And their voice
was not that of a writer who was cerebrally against
slavery because of its effects on the white working class.
It was a voice that embraced and welcomed all people
of all races into one relentlessly optimistic vision. At this point,
(15:30):
the United States was increasingly divided over the issue of slavery,
and Leaves of Grass seemed to be an attempt to
unite the whole nation in a poetic democracy. He published
it himself, having seven nine copies printed, which was all
he could afford, but his budget hadn't actually included binding
those seven copies, so he did that piece meal as
(15:53):
he had the money to do it. He sent copies
to other writers and poets but the only one who
responded it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sent him a
letter that began quote, I greet you at the beginning
of a great career. Emerson's praise of Whitman is completely unsurprising.
In eighteen forty four, he had published an essay called
(16:14):
The Poet, in which he called for the United States
to have its own poet to record and reflect upon
and shape the young nation's consciousness. Emerson's description of what
this poet's work would be like is uncannily like Leaves
of Grass, to the point that some critics suggest that
Whitman read this essay and then decided to go do
(16:36):
that thing, which would be really astute uh For the
rest of his life. One of Whitman's major ongoing endeavors
would be rewriting and revising Leaves of Grass. The second edition,
which came out in eighteen fifty six, had that line
from Emerson's letter about the beginning of a great career
printed on the spine with Emerson's name, but without his permission.
(17:00):
He printed the whole letter at the back of the volume,
also without permission. Whitman also included a collection of reviews
of the first edition. In the second edition, most of
them negative, but the three he wrote himself were full
of phrase. Uh. He also insisted that the first edition
had sold out, even though its sales had been quite poor.
(17:22):
He promoted himself a lot. One of my literature professors
in college said that he would basically go out in
the streets of New York and sort of announce America's
great poet has arrived. Like I didn't. I didn't find
that confirmed in my research for this, but I would
not put it past him. He talked himself up a
(17:43):
lot and wrote positive reviews of his own work. Uh It.
It didn't work out all that well in the short
term for making his work more popular, though. The eighteen
fifty six edition, which had twenty more poems than eighteen
fifty five edition, was printed on much smaller paper, his
(18:04):
idea being that you could put it in your pocket
and read it out in the world. He added titles
to the poems from the first edition. Many of these
titles would change in future editions, and he also put
the word poem in all the titles, apparently in response
to the many critics who had basically said they weren't
sure what that was In the eighteen fifty five edition,
(18:24):
but it was definitely not poetry, and now he could
say yes, huh it says so in the title. Uh.
This time he had a thousand copies printed. Those also
sold terribly. Yeah. He was not not doing well, and
around this time Whitmen became part of New York City's
(18:46):
bohemian crowd, frequenting Five Saloon and becoming connected with other
writers and artists, as well as abolitionists and women's rights workers.
Even though his own work wasn't selling well or being
reviewed very well out in the rest of the world,
he became something of a celebrity within the New York
bohemian scene, in part because of his work sexual overtones,
(19:09):
especially since sometimes these overtones were somewhat homo erotic. Whitman's
plan for his next edition of Leaves of Grass was
to once again publish it himself, but in eighteen sixty
he was contacted by William Thayer and Charles Eldridge, who
were abolitionist publishers. They offered him a book deal, and
(19:29):
Walt Whitman immediately took them up on it, and he
traveled to Boston to oversee the type setting himself, something
that he had done for all his prior books, and which,
as Tracy mentioned earlier, he thought was critical to the
work as a whole. The eighteen sixty edition of Leaves
of Grass, against the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, went
even further than the first two had uh and those
(19:52):
have been labeled as a scene in some circles, and
its inclusion of sexuality that included Children of Adam, which
was all about the physical body and a celebration of
sex between men and women, and the Calamus Cluster, which
was a celebration of love between men. Because it was
more sexually explicit, Children of Adam got way more criticism,
(20:14):
and the eighteen sixty edition of Leaves of Grass stoked
a lot more controversy than the previous two had. And finally,
the eighteen sixty edition of Leaves of Grass both sold
well and garnered praise, even as people who objected to
its sexual content called for it to be banned and
sometimes successfully. The first printing of a thousand copies sold
(20:35):
out and the publisher ordered another run. Although it seemed
like women's literary star was finally rising, this didn't last long.
His publisher went bankrupt and they sold the plates for
Leaves of Grass to another publisher who kept using them
to print more copies. Even as Whitman was trying to
work on new editions of the book, his family also
(20:57):
started to have a lot of problems there had This
was not completely new. There had been problems within the
family before, but it seems to start to come to
a head. His sister was in an abusive marriage, and
his brother had increasingly violent tendencies and seemed to have
some kind of mental illness happening. But these problems went
(21:18):
beyond his personal concerns. The Civil War began in eighteen
sixty one, and this would radically change Whitman's life and work,
and we're going to talk about that after we have
a little sponsor break. Prior to the Civil War, Whitman's
poetry was full of themes of union and connection. It
(21:41):
was like a love song to a nation that was
full of diverse people's and perspectives and promise, but everyone's
still remaining united. A nation at war with itself was
the antithesis of what he had been celebrating and praising
and sort of optimistically believing that the nation could achieve
eve As a writer, compounding the actual horrors of war,
(22:05):
which were awful, was a sense that the nation he
had been crafting through poetry had literally torn itself into
In December of eighteen sixty two, Whitman saw the name G. W.
Whitmore on a newspaper list of men who had been
wounded at Fredericksburg. He was afraid that it was a
misspelling of his younger brother's name, George Washington. Whitman had
(22:28):
enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the war,
and Walt Whitman went to Washington, d c. Personally to
see if he could find his brother. His brother, as
it turned out, had indeed been wounded, but his condition
was not serious. But soon after that Whitman saw a
pile of amputated limbs outside of a mansion that was
being used as a field hospital. He was sickened by
(22:52):
this site, and he decided to stay in Washington and
do something that had already been part of his typical
routine for years, which was sitting sick and injured people
at the hospital. There are accounts that describe Whitman as
a nurse, but for the most part, he really wasn't
doing that sort of hands on medical care that you
would think of with the word nurse. He was visiting
(23:15):
and talking to people and offering comfort and bringing gifts.
His work was tireless necessary, and garnered praise, but he
was more of a companion rather than a caregiver. He
also ran errands and wrote letters on behalf of the
sick and injured, and he also assisted in burying the dead.
His original plan had been to go to Washington confirm
(23:36):
whether his brother was okay, and then go back to
New York. Instead, he stayed in the capital for eleven
years until long after the war was over. While he
still made trips home to New York and also to Boston,
he started to think of Washington and not New York,
as his home. During this time, he also developed close,
loving relationships with several of the men he visited, including
(23:58):
Confederate soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war.
Although he'd let his family know that he would be
staying in Washington for a while, he didn't really have
the funds to support himself while working in the hospitals,
so he worked a variety of jobs, including at the
Paymaster's office and at the Indian Bureau of the Department
of the interior. He was eventually fired from that when
(24:20):
his boss realized that he was the guy who wrote
Leaves of Grass. There's some accounts that say it was
because that he found a copy of Leaves of Grass
on his desk. Either way, he got fired because of
Leaves of Grass. Women's Civil War experiences would lead to
one of his few, originally not Leaves of Grass, publications
(24:41):
of poetry, and that was Drum Taps. He signed a
contract for its publication near the end of the war,
and it was already ready to go to print when
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, although he was able to write
and add Hushed be the Camps Today, which was dedicated
to Lincoln before the book went to the type setter
bike a incidence. Whitman was at his mother's house in
(25:02):
April of eighteen sixty five when Lincoln was assassinated. He
had also been away from Washington, d c. When it
was attacked by the Confederate army, and when the war
officially ended, it was his mother's door and Lilacs that
featured in his elegiate poem When Lilacs Last in the
dooryard bloomed that poem and Oh Captain, My Captain were
(25:23):
later published in a volume called Sequel to Drum Taps.
Around the end of the war, Whitman met Peter Doyle,
a former Confederate soldier originally from Ireland. He was working
as a street car driver. Doyle would later describe it,
we fell to each other at once. Women and Doyle
never lived together, although Whitman often wrote of wanting to,
(25:44):
and their relationship continued for most of the rest of
Whitman's life, although it did cool after he left Washington
After the war, Whitman had to figure out what to
do with his poetry. Leaves of Grass had been a
celebration of a grand, chaotic, all welcoming spirit of democracy
and of a young nation growing up into a country
(26:04):
that was dynamic and energetic and free. The post Civil
War nation didn't feel like that at all. The eighteen
sixty seven edition of Leaves of Grass that followed was
full of errors and assembled in multiple configurations. Some versions
included Drum Taps and Sequel to Drum Taps, but others
did not, and their ordering changed from one to another.
(26:27):
It was as though the book had been torn up
and then haphazardly put back together. Whitman seemed to approach
Leaves of Grass as though the book of poems was
the United States, and in future editions he would continue
to try to figure out how to unite all of
his work from both before and after the war into
one unified whole that still made sense. He wrote other
(26:48):
work as well, including Democratic Vistas and Passage to India,
which came out each of them in eighteen seventy. On
January eighteen seventy three, waltwit And had a serious stroke.
That may his mother's health began to fail, and he
managed to make it to Camden, New Jersey to see her,
just three days before she died. After trying to go
(27:11):
back to Washington, he soon wound up in Camden again
to live with his brother George and George's wife, lou
The Whitman's health continued to decline, he kept publishing both
poetry and prose, including a revised Memoranda during the War,
which came out as part of American Centennial celebrations, along
with a slightly revised centennial version of Leaves of Grass.
(27:34):
His health did eventually start to improve, and he was
able to have a pretty active life for a while.
In Camden. By the eighteen eighties, Whitman's work had gained
international attention, and ardent admirers from Europe came to the
United States to visit him. One was Anne Gilchrist, who
published an essay called a Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman,
which included the line quote for me the reading of
(27:58):
his poems as truly a new birth of the soul.
Gil Christ and Whitman maintained a multi year correspondence before
he sent her a ring as a symbol of friendship,
and she came to the United States with her children
and stayed for eighteen months. Another visitor was Oscar Wilde,
who made not one, but two stops in Camden, saying quote,
(28:18):
before I leave America, I must see you again. There
is no one in this wide, great world of America
whom I love and honor so much. The gay rights
movement did not yet exist, and the word homosexual would
not even be coined until eight the year that Walt
Whitman died, but there were laws in place already that
(28:39):
criminalized same sex behavior and people fighting against those laws.
Whitman's visitors from England included Edward Carpenter, who was living
openly with another man, and who credited Leaves of Grass
with having inspired him to leave university, give away his money,
and work toward the betterment of mankind, and today Carpenter
is considered one of the first gay rights activists. In
(29:03):
eighteen eighty one, Boston publisher James R. Osgood and Company
decided to publish a new edition of Leaves of Grass,
but Boston District Attorney Oliver Stevens wrote to Osgod saying
that the book was obscene. Whitman, thinking that they were
asking for minor alterations, suggested that he might be willing
to make changes to get the book in print, but
(29:23):
when he saw this lengthy list of poems that would
have to be removed entirely, he replied, quote the list
whole and several is rejected by me and will not
be thought of under any circumstances. Leaves of Grass then
became one of the books infamously banned in Boston and
wal Whitman lived in Camden for the rest of his life,
(29:45):
eventually moving into a house of his own after his
brother moved into the country. He died on March two,
at the age of seventy two. You can read basically
every walp Woman poem there is on the internet for free,
because it's all in the public domain now. But I
wanted to end with one, so I have a short one,
(30:09):
because today's episode is a little on a longish side,
and this is long too long America, long too long, America,
traveling roads all even and peaceful. You learned from joys
and prosperity only, but now now to learn from crises
of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not
(30:32):
and now to conceive and show to the world what
your children on Mass really are. For who except myself
has yet conceived what your children on Mass really are?
That is what Whitman? Do you also have listener mail?
Sure do? Uh? This quick from Lydia. It's on a
(30:55):
New London school. When we talked about the New London
school explosion, we later had an email about whether the
school had a basement. We've received several messages about whether
the school has a basement. They are somewhat contradictory with
one another, but this one from Lydia. Uh included a
link to a source, and Lydia says, hello ladies. First
of all, thank you for saving my sanity during my
(31:16):
long commute. I absolutely love listening to your podcast. You
even make the advertisements fun. I wish I had a
really cool letter or parcel to send maybe one day.
I work for a local law enforcement in the evidence
room and communications. I was doing some research and came
across this article about the New London School and immediately thought, of, y'all,
(31:36):
I am sending you more information on previously aired subject. Sorry,
I am sure you get em parted. Because this has
a photo diagram of the New London School floor plan.
It appears there is no basement but a crawl space.
Hope this clears some things up, and she sent a
link to the Texas Department of Public Safety website, which
does have an illustration of the New London School that
(31:57):
suggests that it was a crawl space and not a basement.
I also heard from a different person that like, because
the school was built on a hill, um that it
was like a crawl space at one portion, but if
you got further back into the hill, it was more
like a basement. Yeah, that makes sense. Still little not
(32:19):
completely clear the status of the New London School basement.
But that's actually a really good diagram and we will
put the link to that in the show notes. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast where history podcasts at how stuffworks dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss
in History and on Twitter at missed in History. Are
(32:39):
Tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com. We're
also on Pinterest at pentrist dot com slash missed in
History and their instagram is missed in History. You can
come to our parent companies website, which is how stuff
works dot com and find all kinds of information about
or whatever your heart desires, including about poetry. And you
can come to our website which is missed in History
dot com or an archive of all the episodes ever
(33:02):
and show notes on the episodes. Holly and I have
worked on lots of cool stuff. You can do all
that and a whole lot more. Like how stuff works
dot com or myth and history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how
stuff works dot com
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Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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