August 5, 2019 • 30 mins
When Robert Owen founded his utopian community, he wanted to have the best minds he could find running the educational system. He recruited William Maclure, who in turn brought many great minds with him. Their boat was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson.
So if you listen to our recent episode on the
New Harmony utopian societies, you may recall that we referenced
(00:23):
a group of scientists and educators that were recruited for
the second of those communities that was nicknamed the Boatload
of Knowledge. And I have not been able to stop
thinking about the Boatload of Knowledge, so much so that
even though I've actually been working on research and writing
for a completely different topic that I was planning to
have us talk about this week, I moved over to
(00:44):
reading about the Boatloaders, and then I was like, oh, so, um,
now it's just an episode about the boatload Uh, we'll go.
I'll get back to that other one and and I'll
have a headstart on it. But I just, you know,
sometimes the brain obsesses over a thing. So for basic framing,
just in case you did not listen to the live
show that I just referenced, um, when Robert Owen founded
(01:07):
his Owen Night community in New Harmony in and that
was in Indiana, he wanted to have the best minds
that he could find running the education system there, and
for that he recruited William McClure, who also gave a
substantial financial contribution to the community and also in turn
brought many great minds with him. And the boat that
(01:29):
brought them to the community was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge.
We'll talk about how it got that nickname, uh, and
its journey to New Harmony was pretty fascinating. So today
we're kind of talking about things and and maybe an
odd order. We're going to talk about the boatload itself
and its journey UM, and then we'll start talking about
individual people, including getting into a little bit of detail
on McClure, and we'll name a few of the other
(01:52):
intellectuals that were involved in this trip and in this project,
although they won't get as much detail. And then finally
we're going to talk a little bit about how school
that they designed worked and what the group's legacy was.
So the keel boat that carried all these lumin areas
of intellect left from the harbor at Pittsburgh at two
pm on December eight. There were just over forty people aboard,
(02:14):
and that included a crew of eleven and the conveyance,
the Philanthropist that was with a T, not a th h,
was eighty five ft long that's about twenty six ms
by fourteen feet wide that's four point two meters, and
the group was supposed to travel by steamer, but the
Ohio River was too low at the time for a
steamer to make the trip. The Philanthropist had four sections.
(02:37):
The front area was for the crew, the next was
to the men, the third was for the women, and
the fourth was for the children. And they were all
kind of set up like dormitory style with a group living.
This was definitely a downgrade from the original plan, and
a lot of the passengers were pretty dismayed by these arrangements.
Robert Dale Owen, the son of the Robert Owen who
had catalyzed this whole project, wrote that quote, some of
(02:59):
the ladies of our party appear already quite impatient and dissatisfied,
the more so since they almost cannot do anything for themselves.
He was worried that there would be an uprising and
the passengers would force the boat to turn around and
go back to Philadelphia. Some were driven to the breaking
point and they just cried openly. And this might sound really,
(03:20):
really silly, but I want you to keep in mind
that these people were expecting to participate in a well
funded utopian experiment, and already at this point their first
interaction with the project was well below expectations based on
what they had been told that they could anticipate. So
this probably shook their confidence in the whole thing. They
(03:40):
were moving away from their homes to this new community
and it was from the onset completely not what they
had been told to expect. But once everyone got used
to these alternate, sort of last minute arrangements on the
keel boat which we're going to be their home for
a month and a half that it took to make
the journeyal that they didn't know be quite that long,
(04:01):
they did settle in, and by most reports they even
managed to have quite a bit of fun just a
few days into the trip, though the philanthropist ran aground.
That happened just sixteen miles down the Ohio. They could
not get the boat free, and coincidentally, this happened just
seven miles away from Economy, Pennsylvania, and that was the
new town that had been established by the Rabbite community
(04:23):
that had built new Harmony. Initially, McClure, Owen's son, and
the two other men made the track on land to
ask if their rat bites could help them. Six men
were sent out from Economy. They managed to get the
boat free. And what's even funnier is that in Robert
Dale Owen's assessment of these rescuers, he didn't find them
(04:44):
to be particularly smart or engaging, which is odd given
their great success at the very type of endeavor that
he and his father were trying to do, although they
were also achieving commercial success. Yeah, he was like, oh,
they were kind of stupid and not very entertaining. But
I just I wanted this is another time where I
(05:04):
want the time travel machines so I can go back
and shake him and go dude, they built a successful
communal living experiment, they just moved on to another place. Case, Um,
you haven't proven yourself yet, champion. Maybe don't be so judgy. Um. So,
the day after the keel boat was shifted into a
better position, the passengers visited Economy. They had been invited
(05:27):
to spend the day there at the invitation of Rappite
leader George Rapp, and they seem to have had a
really lovely time. UH. This was the last time that
Robert Owen Senior, the one who started this whole new
community UH, spent with the boat passengers. He left from
Economy to travel to Pittsburgh on business. He had some
some final arrangements to make in terms of like the
(05:48):
legalities of taking over the land, and he left the
science and educators, along with his son Robert Dale, on
their own for the rest of the journey. They didn't
get very far though, as they reached the station called
Safe Harbor, which is just about eight miles from where
they had run aground, they got iced in. The philanthropists
stayed there, stuck on ice for four full weeks. The
(06:09):
group didn't extricate the boat until January nine, which was
twenty eight days after they had been first iced in,
and during that time there had been just a number
of misfortunes, including people who fell through the ice but
survived one passenger who fell and hit his head on
a log while out hunting, which caused a delirium and fever.
He eventually did recover, though. There were also a number
(06:30):
of people who opted to leave the boat and shelter
elsewhere or travel over land before ultimately regrouping with everyone else. Yeah.
I when I was first researching this and they were saying, like,
some people just left the boat, I was like, oh,
but they all managed to hook back up with everybody.
They didn't just wander out into the snowy wilderness and
parish or meets some bad end. This whole thing comes
(06:51):
off as as kind of comical because this is a
boat full of smart people that keeps running into problems,
But it's more of an indication of how difficult travel was.
I feel like it was like the the micro cosm
version of how their entire commune played out, because it
just wasn't planned as well as it should have been,
(07:14):
and they didn't know enough about traveling by boat down
a river to know. Like there are some of their
writings where they're like, we don't know if the captain
is bad at his job or if it's just really
bad situations, and it's like they just had no idea
what they were doing well, and it's just the wrong
time to be taking a steamer down a river that
(07:35):
freezes over like well, and they didn't even have a steamer.
They're in a keel boat like a steamer may have
wiggled through, but the keel boat was like no, ma'am um.
While they were ice bound, though, some passengers sketched and
played games, and they explored the river banks. They had
assessed their situation and agreed that to make everything work,
(07:56):
they were just going to eat two meals a day,
both to stretch their supply and to prevent uh someone
from having to take on the load of of making
three meals a day while they were in this odd situation. Um.
They also organized themselves to be able to relieve eight
of the crew members on a rotating schedule. They traveled
by land eight miles south to the town of Beaver
(08:17):
from time to time to get some supplies and socialized.
On one of these occasions, Robert Dale Owen got into
a discussion with a Methodist minister, who, he wrote quote
reasoned with quite good temper and some talent, but has
the most incorrect ideas. Robert Dale Owen, like his father,
believed that religion was more of a problem than a
source of good. Yeah. The own Night's whole thing was
(08:41):
that religion was useless and that you just needed to
raise people right to make a better world. Um with
good education. But yeah, it's it's sort of one of
those every time I'm reading anything that Robert Dale Owen writes,
just like he talked about the rabbites being like not
very smart or interesting, and like you are not you
(09:02):
seem like a person whose intentions are good and makes
a lot of foolish judge um. The group also incidentally
took on several additional passengers just a few days before
they were able to move on from the ice, and
when the ice started to break the sound of it
scared them all so much that they were convinced that
the boat was sinking again, kind of evidence that they
(09:22):
maybe weren't fully prepared for this trip. But after they
evacuated and carted all of their trunks and luggage ashore,
they realized things that were okay and even good because
that meant the ice was breaking up, and then they
had to haul everything back onto the boat and make
preparations to get underway. To that end, they also cut
a pathway in the remaining ice to get the keel
boat moving, and they were soon once again headed to
(09:45):
their new utopia. They made a stop that first evening
in Stephenville, Ohio, and took on another passenger, which was
the son of Judge Benjamin Tappan, who wanted to have
his child educated in New Harmony. They stopped in other
towns a along the way, most notably Cincinnati, where several
of the boatloaders toured the Museum of Natural History. When
they got to Louisville, Kentucky, they once again grew in
(10:08):
numbers as Joseph Nif, who was an educational reformer, joined
up with them along with his wife. And after Louisville,
the Philanthropists made its way to Mount Vernon, Indiana, and
there they made land to start the final leg of
the journey. So most of them at that point traveled
the final fifteen miles to New Harmony by wagon, arriving
on January twenty three, and at that point they had
(10:28):
been in transit for forty seven days. A small handful
of them, however, remained on the keel boat, and they
traveled farther south on the Ohio River before linking up
with the Wabash River and turning north into it to
make their way to New Harmony. So the origin for
the nickname Boatload of Knowledge came from a speech by
Robert Owen while the keel boat that the scientists and
(10:49):
educators were on made its way down the Ohio River.
Owen had traveled ahead by land. Then he started telling
the New Harmony residents who were setting up their new
utopia about McClure's really fantastic group. He gave a speech
to this new community in which he commented on the
vast amount of knowledge that was contained in this one
vote continuing quote, not Latin and Greek and other languages,
(11:12):
but real substantial knowledge. From that point, people started calling
the philanthropist the boatload of Knowledge. I love that nickname
so much. O n had called the educators aboard quote
some of the ablest instructors of youth that could be
found in the US or perhaps the world. And all
of that knowledge and ability had been gathered by a
(11:33):
man named William McClure, who is often called Owen's partner
in his utopian enterprise. We'll get into McClure's life after
we pause for a quick sponsor break. William McClure was
born on October seventeen sixty three in Air, Scotland. His
(11:55):
father was a merchant and was successful enough that William
got a private education. William first traveled to the US
at the age of nineteen, and after a brief stay,
he went to London, where he started a job with
Miller Hart and Company, an American commerce firm, and while
working there he was constantly traveling, mostly to France and Ireland,
but also on occasion to the US. In seventeen McClure
(12:17):
moved to the United States, permanently settling in Philadelphia. He
also became a US citizen. He was already wealthy, but
he quickly started adding to his fortune with business interests
in Pennsylvania and Virginia. By eighteen hundred, he was able
to leave work behind and focus on his other interests,
which were science and education reform full time, and he
felt that the way that education had been managed up
(12:40):
to that point was catastrophic, writing quote, I had been
long in the habit of considering education one of the
greatest abuses are species were guilty of, and of course,
one of the reforms most beneficial to humanity. He saw
that society was generally separated in categories of non productive
and productive classes, governor and the governed, and that the
(13:01):
only real thing that kept the system in place was
the education that the upper classes were receiving. So he
wanted to buck against that ages old arrangement and offer
equal knowledge to rich and poor. He believed that when
someone was armed with knowledge, they could rise up, so
the lower classes, if they had education, could meet the
upper class and equality. He also saw that the young
(13:22):
Republic of the United States needed an educated populace if
it was going to survive. He wrote, quote power being
in the hands of the people through the medium of
popular governments renders a diffusion of knowledge necessary to the
support of freedom. He looked to the work of Swiss
education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestelazzi, who had built a curriculum
(13:42):
plan based on the ideas and Jean jacqu Crussoe's emial
which examined the individual in society and the relationship between
the two. McClure visited Pestelazzi's a school several times to
observe and it was that model that he sought to
emulate when he planned out new Harmonies education system. McClure
had tried to convince Pestelazzi to move to the US,
(14:05):
and even offered to bankroll a new school for him,
but Pestelazzi turned that offered down and Even as McClure
was studying and promoting the latest ideas in education reform,
he was also engaged in his own scientific work, specifically
in geology. In eighteen o nine, he offered up a
geological map of the United States to the American Philosophical
(14:26):
Society during a lecture, and this is considered to be
a breakthrough moment in geology. He was had put together
data that no one else had ever assembled, and as
his fame for his scientific work grew, McClure started to
spend his time bouncing from geological tours and surveys to
meeting with education experts and setting up schools. Because he
(14:46):
made a name for himself in the geological sciences, when
the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was formed in
eighteen twelve, McClure was invited to become a member. In
eighteen seventeen, he became the organization's president, which was the
post he would hold for more than two decades right
up till the end of his life. And it was
the connections that he made through that organization that really
enabled him to assemble an academic dream team for New Harmony.
(15:10):
There was an OA Nite Society in Philadelphia by eighteen
twenty three, a year before Robert Owen bought New Harmony.
He made that purchase at the end of eighteen twenty four,
and members of the Academy of Natural Sciences had read
Owen's essays on communal living as early as the eighteen teens,
and they were pretty enthralled by his ideas because it
was exciting and new, and some, including McClure, had even
(15:33):
visited Owen's community in New Lanark, Scotland, where Owen had
focused on improving the conditions for the poor working class
that kept his textile mills running. And eventually it was
McClure that Robert Owen entrusted to design and established the
education system and for New Harmony Indiana. One of the
people that McClure worked with closely to get New Harmony's
children educated was Maria Duclos Fleteaux and She was born
(15:56):
in France in seventeen eighty three and had married Joseph
Fletegeaux as a young woman, although the exact date of
their marriage is unknown. The couple had a child named Achilles,
a son, but they lived separately, so her husband Joseph
does not seem to have factored very prominently in her
life at all. Marie's first contact with William McClure took
(16:16):
place in eighteen nineteen when he was visiting Paris. Fred
To Joe moved from Paris to Philadelphia in eighteen twenty
one to set up a Pesto Luzian school. She helped
spread Owen's ideas when she came to North America. She
brought some essays that had been published in Europe and
started circulating that and discussing it with other members of
the Philadelphia science and education communities. In a lot of ways,
(16:38):
she really ceded some of these ideas that Owens had
had by just she was very charming and people really
took a shine to her generally, and so when she
was like, I have this exciting essay that I want
you to read, people read it. Uh. It appears that
it was actually Freda Joe that convinced McClure that he
should partner with Owen. Although McClure had written to her
(16:59):
after he first visited New Lanark, and he spoke of
his time there as the most pleasant of his life,
it was her urging that really amplified his interest in
his desire to invest in the New Harmony project and
to recruit like minded intellectuals to their cause. She met
Robert Owen in November of eighteen four when he visited
Philadelphia and specifically her school. She later wrote McClure that
(17:22):
she and Owen had immediately hit it off. They were
like old friends from the moment they met. Owens told
her that if they worked on their education ideas in
a place where the various obstacles to those ideas could
be removed, like a community like the one he was planning,
they could truly see what a proper education could do
for a child's development. She went on to make the
case for the show that she could keep working at
(17:44):
her school in Philadelphia for decades, but she would never
really get to see just how impactful her work could
be there. But if she came to New Harmony, things
would be different because she could work without societal ills
of a large city ruining and countering her efforts. Coming up,
we'll do a Wick rundown a few of the other
people who put so much work into setting up the
education system in New Harmony. But first we'll have a
(18:07):
quick sponsor break. While Marie Fret Joe was a cornerstone
of the education system in New Harmony and one of
the most important members after Robert Owen and William McClure.
There were, of course, plenty of others that came on
that boatload of Knowledge, and here are but a few
(18:28):
of them. Thomas Say was born on June seven. He
was an entomologist and a concologist, and someone who McClure
had befriended early on in his time at the Academy
of Natural Sciences. Say was the librarian there. McClure had
funded some of Say's scientific research trips and then asked
Say to accompany him on several of his geological surveys.
(18:52):
Say is often called the father of American descriptive entomology.
If you google him you can find lots of stuff
from his entomology work. Yeah, and just in case you
don't know what a conchologist is, it's someone who studies
mollusk shells. And he had expertise in this field. Uh.
He was one of the leaders in that area. So
(19:12):
when the boatload of Knowledge was trapped in the ice
and the passengers started covering shifts to relieve the crew,
it was said that everyone elected as captain, and he
was apparently really pretty good at managing the crew. In
seven Say married one of the students that Marie fret
Jeau had brought with her on the trip. Once the
school system of New Harmony was established, it was say
that McClure entrusted with it whenever he was away from
(19:35):
the village. Later on, when the Utopian experiment had ended,
Say stayed at New Harmony, used that as his primary
location from which he conducted his research, and he wrote
for the rest of his life that life, unfortunately was
pretty short. He died in eighteen thirty four. French naturalist
Charles Alexandra Lesieur born in seventeen seventy eight was another
friend from the Academy of Natural Sciences, and in his
(19:58):
work in paleontology, archaeology, g exiology and general zoology, Lessiere
made numerous discoveries of new species while he traveled the world,
particularly Australia, and he served as curator at the Academy.
Like Marie fret To, Joel Sur had been into Owen's
idea of a utopian society even before McClure and was
eager when the chance came along to be part of
(20:20):
New Harmony. During the boat ride down the Ohio River,
he drew a hundred and twenty seven sketches of the
landscapes that they traveled through. Yeah, those are, you know,
kind of the visual record of that entire trip, and
they're really interesting. He was a really, really talented artist.
And while Robert Owen, who founded this second utopia New Harmony,
left feeling as though McClure's curriculum had been part of
(20:43):
its demise, he recognized Lesier's art skills so much that
he still sent one of his sons, Richard, back to
New Harmony to study with Lucier. After Thomas Say died,
Lassour returned to France and he went on to become
the curator at the Music Destoir Too Ill to Have,
although he served in that prestigious position for less than
(21:04):
a year before he also died in December of eighteen
forty six. WILLIAMS pick Wibal de Crusement was like Freda Gaux,
an educator, and when he traveled to New Harmony, he
actually brought ten students with him. They were boys from
a school that he taught at in Philadelphia. That school
had been established by William McClure, and before working there,
Phiquiball had worked in schools in France which had also
(21:27):
been funded and established by McClure. Pick Wipel was the person, incidentally,
who had hit his head on a log during that
ice in on the river and seemed to be in
pretty bad shape for a while. Two of his students
were the first to fall through the ice as well,
so that month they were stuck there was just not
particularly kind to him. Yeah. He also kind of had
a reputation for being a little bit of a grouch
(21:48):
el epithecus, So there were some people that claimed that
he never fully recovered and that was why he was
so grumpy. Um. Once the system and New Harmony was
in place, pick Wiple taught, among other things, printing. He
left the school in eighteen thirty and in eighteen thirty
one he married social reformer Frances Right. That marriage ended
in divorce in eighteen fifty. So that's just a sampling
(22:10):
of these educators and to kind of move on to
the curriculum and the legacy of these schools. Though, Owen's
New Harmony experiment ended just two years after it began.
As we mentioned in our previous episode on the subject.
The educators stayed around. They kept the school system going.
They also started publishing a regular journal called The Disseminator
of Useful Knowledge, which continued publication until the eighteen forties. Yeah,
(22:33):
they really felt like they had built something worthwhile and
they weren't willing to just abandon it just because the
the Utopian society wasn't going to work out um, and
they had people that wanted to send their children there.
The curriculum for New Harmony children started when they were
still toddlers. So children enrolled in the first school, called
the Infant School at the age of two, and at
that point it's obviously just about play, and the educators
(22:55):
were kind of noting the development of the children, and
children stayed in Infant School until they were fine years old.
At age five, children moved into the Higher School. They
also boarded away from their families in a large dormitory.
This was intended to keep the educational plan free from
parental influence and also to introduce the children to the
idea of communal living from a very early age. The
(23:16):
Higher school educated children until they were twelve and included
trades training and workshops and textile mills, so that they
were contributing to the good of society. From early on.
Their academic work included courses in mathematics, mechanics, art, music, language, science,
and writing, with gymnastics for physical exercise. Throughout the lessons
of the Higher School, all the scientists that had been
(23:37):
recruited gave lectures. Yeah, it was basically like having teachers
who were the krem de la creme in all of
their fields come and and give talks periodically. That aspect
of it is really unique and quite special. After completing
the Higher School, students would move on to the School
of Industry, and that's where real trade instruction took place,
(23:59):
and their students learned a great deal more than that
early training that they had gotten in the Higher School.
So this training did separate pretty solidly though along gender line.
So the boys learned everything from taxidermy to blacksmith ng
and the girls were taught dress making, millinery, cooking, and
other domestic skills. The School of Industry also ran its
(24:20):
own printing press. That was part of why Fuqua was
teaching how to run the press, and students were taught
to run it so that the scholars of the town
could have their own publishing mechanism for their research, which
I have to say is a pretty ingenious set up.
Although McClure's educational system shuttered after his death, the programs
that he and his colleagues instituted were precursors to the
(24:41):
public school system and paved the way for it, even
though it would be decades before such a system was
actually in place in Indiana. That effort was helped along
in eighteen fifty one by Robert Dale Owen, who became
very active in government and public affairs. That year he
helped get language providing for a tax supported, free public
educa Haitian system written into Indiana's second Constitution. And the
(25:03):
scholars and scientists of New Harmony had assembled a library
that was worthy of any university's and the they had brought,
you know, their book collections with them as they traveled
um and all kind of merge those together into one
library and their collections of specimens in their museum that
they set up. Drew researchers from around the world who
wanted to observe them as well as meet with the
(25:24):
scientists there to discuss their ideas and kind of use
them as like a sounding board for things that they
were working on. In eighteen twenty eight, the year after
Owen's New Harmony experiment was dissolved, William McClure left as well.
He headed to Mexico. Over the next five years, he
and Marie Fretta Joe exchanged almost five hundred letters in
which it became clear that the French teacher had fallen
(25:47):
really in love with the geologist. It didn't appear that
McClure returned her romantic interests, though, but the two of
them did remain close. Fretta Joe traveled to Mexico to
visit McClure in eighteen thirty three and died not long
after driving. McClure stayed in Mexico until the end of
his life in eighteen forty. Throughout all this time in
New Harmony in Mexico, he had remained president of the
(26:08):
Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is one
of those things. McClure constantly on the road from the
time he was young, So he might have just been
good at managing affairs he was not physically involved in,
but he had, you know, kept things going at the
school even though he was in another country. He was
you know, giving his input on curriculum, he was kind
of keeping it running in a lot of ways, and
(26:29):
financially he was still willing to put a lot of
backing into it. When he died, McClure left behind two
different educational funds. One was part of the Academy of
Sciences and that was clearly described as funding that should
go to making sure educational materials went into the hands
of laborers. The other had the same goal, but it
was a general provision in his will that offered five
(26:50):
hundred dollars to any laborers group that established a lecture
and reading room with at least one hundred books in it.
There were a hundred and sixty libraries that were funded
as a result of this provision. That practice of making
knowledge accessible for everyone was something that McClure had put
into practice himself throughout his life, but one of the
most enduring examples of it is the New Harmony working
(27:12):
Men's Institute, which he founded in eighteen thirty eight, which
was two years before he died. The institute moved from
its original location in the church at New Harmony to
a new building in eighteen four and it remains an
operation to this day now it's the oldest continuously operating
public library in Indiana. Yeah, it's also a museum. And
even though it is called the Working Men's Institute, it
(27:32):
was always intended to be something that not just men
can access, but their entire families would have access to
any of the resources there, which is a pretty cool Uh.
He he definitely, I mean he had tons of money
to work with, but he definitely put his money where
his mouth was in terms of saying like, yes, I
want people of all levels of society to have educational materials,
(27:53):
and then he made it happen. It was not just
lip service, which I have to respect. So that is
a little bit more on the Boatload of an knowledge
which just charmed me based just on that nickname. But
also there are a lot of really important and interesting people. Uh,
there's even more and more and more. You can get
very in the weeds on the Boatload of Knowledge. All
of the work that those people did. You could do
(28:13):
an entire podcast series called Boatload of Knowledge and talk
about each person and all of their research projects. And
if somebody does it, I will listen. Uh, do you
have listener mail for us? I do I have a
really lovely postcard that came to us from our listener, Heath,
who writes, Hello, Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Fry. I
(28:33):
have listened to your podcast since I've wanted to write
you for a while when you did your podcast in
seventeen on the calicax and the Eugenicists. I so very
much appreciate the care and consideration you made with a
very sensitive subject. The province I live in began a
eugenics movement in that lasted until nineteen seventy two, and
we have so many people still living from that time
(28:55):
and being part of the disability community, vigilant of how
without constant advocate shin and knowledge of what this history did,
we can easily be doomed to repeat it. I chose
this postcard as we always need to keep that love.
Thank you for your care. Just so sweet um, and
it is a cute postcard of the pop Love Factory.
I love the idea of sharing love via postcards, so
(29:15):
thank you so much, Heath. That's a really beautiful thing.
He also drew an adorable kitty, which I appreciate. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at how stubworks dot com. You
can also find us pretty much everywhere on social media
as Missed in History. Missed in History dot Com is
also the place to go if you would like to
visit us on the web and look at our archive
(29:37):
of every episode that's ever existed, as well as show
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You should also subscribe. Maybe you already have, but if
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(29:59):
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H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson.
So if you listen to our recent episode on the
New Harmony utopian societies, you may recall that we referenced
(00:23):
a group of scientists and educators that were recruited for
the second of those communities that was nicknamed the Boatload
of Knowledge. And I have not been able to stop
thinking about the Boatload of Knowledge, so much so that
even though I've actually been working on research and writing
for a completely different topic that I was planning to
have us talk about this week, I moved over to
(00:44):
reading about the Boatloaders, and then I was like, oh, so, um,
now it's just an episode about the boatload Uh, we'll go.
I'll get back to that other one and and I'll
have a headstart on it. But I just, you know,
sometimes the brain obsesses over a thing. So for basic framing,
just in case you did not listen to the live
show that I just referenced, um, when Robert Owen founded
(01:07):
his Owen Night community in New Harmony in and that
was in Indiana, he wanted to have the best minds
that he could find running the education system there, and
for that he recruited William McClure, who also gave a
substantial financial contribution to the community and also in turn
brought many great minds with him. And the boat that
(01:29):
brought them to the community was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge.
We'll talk about how it got that nickname, uh, and
its journey to New Harmony was pretty fascinating. So today
we're kind of talking about things and and maybe an
odd order. We're going to talk about the boatload itself
and its journey UM, and then we'll start talking about
individual people, including getting into a little bit of detail
on McClure, and we'll name a few of the other
(01:52):
intellectuals that were involved in this trip and in this project,
although they won't get as much detail. And then finally
we're going to talk a little bit about how school
that they designed worked and what the group's legacy was.
So the keel boat that carried all these lumin areas
of intellect left from the harbor at Pittsburgh at two
pm on December eight. There were just over forty people aboard,
(02:14):
and that included a crew of eleven and the conveyance,
the Philanthropist that was with a T, not a th h,
was eighty five ft long that's about twenty six ms
by fourteen feet wide that's four point two meters, and
the group was supposed to travel by steamer, but the
Ohio River was too low at the time for a
steamer to make the trip. The Philanthropist had four sections.
(02:37):
The front area was for the crew, the next was
to the men, the third was for the women, and
the fourth was for the children. And they were all
kind of set up like dormitory style with a group living.
This was definitely a downgrade from the original plan, and
a lot of the passengers were pretty dismayed by these arrangements.
Robert Dale Owen, the son of the Robert Owen who
had catalyzed this whole project, wrote that quote, some of
(02:59):
the ladies of our party appear already quite impatient and dissatisfied,
the more so since they almost cannot do anything for themselves.
He was worried that there would be an uprising and
the passengers would force the boat to turn around and
go back to Philadelphia. Some were driven to the breaking
point and they just cried openly. And this might sound really,
(03:20):
really silly, but I want you to keep in mind
that these people were expecting to participate in a well
funded utopian experiment, and already at this point their first
interaction with the project was well below expectations based on
what they had been told that they could anticipate. So
this probably shook their confidence in the whole thing. They
(03:40):
were moving away from their homes to this new community
and it was from the onset completely not what they
had been told to expect. But once everyone got used
to these alternate, sort of last minute arrangements on the
keel boat which we're going to be their home for
a month and a half that it took to make
the journeyal that they didn't know be quite that long,
(04:01):
they did settle in, and by most reports they even
managed to have quite a bit of fun just a
few days into the trip, though the philanthropist ran aground.
That happened just sixteen miles down the Ohio. They could
not get the boat free, and coincidentally, this happened just
seven miles away from Economy, Pennsylvania, and that was the
new town that had been established by the Rabbite community
(04:23):
that had built new Harmony. Initially, McClure, Owen's son, and
the two other men made the track on land to
ask if their rat bites could help them. Six men
were sent out from Economy. They managed to get the
boat free. And what's even funnier is that in Robert
Dale Owen's assessment of these rescuers, he didn't find them
(04:44):
to be particularly smart or engaging, which is odd given
their great success at the very type of endeavor that
he and his father were trying to do, although they
were also achieving commercial success. Yeah, he was like, oh,
they were kind of stupid and not very entertaining. But
I just I wanted this is another time where I
(05:04):
want the time travel machines so I can go back
and shake him and go dude, they built a successful
communal living experiment, they just moved on to another place. Case, Um,
you haven't proven yourself yet, champion. Maybe don't be so judgy. Um. So,
the day after the keel boat was shifted into a
better position, the passengers visited Economy. They had been invited
(05:27):
to spend the day there at the invitation of Rappite
leader George Rapp, and they seem to have had a
really lovely time. UH. This was the last time that
Robert Owen Senior, the one who started this whole new
community UH, spent with the boat passengers. He left from
Economy to travel to Pittsburgh on business. He had some
some final arrangements to make in terms of like the
(05:48):
legalities of taking over the land, and he left the
science and educators, along with his son Robert Dale, on
their own for the rest of the journey. They didn't
get very far though, as they reached the station called
Safe Harbor, which is just about eight miles from where
they had run aground, they got iced in. The philanthropists
stayed there, stuck on ice for four full weeks. The
(06:09):
group didn't extricate the boat until January nine, which was
twenty eight days after they had been first iced in,
and during that time there had been just a number
of misfortunes, including people who fell through the ice but
survived one passenger who fell and hit his head on
a log while out hunting, which caused a delirium and fever.
He eventually did recover, though. There were also a number
(06:30):
of people who opted to leave the boat and shelter
elsewhere or travel over land before ultimately regrouping with everyone else. Yeah.
I when I was first researching this and they were saying, like,
some people just left the boat, I was like, oh,
but they all managed to hook back up with everybody.
They didn't just wander out into the snowy wilderness and
parish or meets some bad end. This whole thing comes
(06:51):
off as as kind of comical because this is a
boat full of smart people that keeps running into problems,
But it's more of an indication of how difficult travel was.
I feel like it was like the the micro cosm
version of how their entire commune played out, because it
just wasn't planned as well as it should have been,
(07:14):
and they didn't know enough about traveling by boat down
a river to know. Like there are some of their
writings where they're like, we don't know if the captain
is bad at his job or if it's just really
bad situations, and it's like they just had no idea
what they were doing well, and it's just the wrong
time to be taking a steamer down a river that
(07:35):
freezes over like well, and they didn't even have a steamer.
They're in a keel boat like a steamer may have
wiggled through, but the keel boat was like no, ma'am um.
While they were ice bound, though, some passengers sketched and
played games, and they explored the river banks. They had
assessed their situation and agreed that to make everything work,
(07:56):
they were just going to eat two meals a day,
both to stretch their supply and to prevent uh someone
from having to take on the load of of making
three meals a day while they were in this odd situation. Um.
They also organized themselves to be able to relieve eight
of the crew members on a rotating schedule. They traveled
by land eight miles south to the town of Beaver
(08:17):
from time to time to get some supplies and socialized.
On one of these occasions, Robert Dale Owen got into
a discussion with a Methodist minister, who, he wrote quote
reasoned with quite good temper and some talent, but has
the most incorrect ideas. Robert Dale Owen, like his father,
believed that religion was more of a problem than a
source of good. Yeah. The own Night's whole thing was
(08:41):
that religion was useless and that you just needed to
raise people right to make a better world. Um with
good education. But yeah, it's it's sort of one of
those every time I'm reading anything that Robert Dale Owen writes,
just like he talked about the rabbites being like not
very smart or interesting, and like you are not you
(09:02):
seem like a person whose intentions are good and makes
a lot of foolish judge um. The group also incidentally
took on several additional passengers just a few days before
they were able to move on from the ice, and
when the ice started to break the sound of it
scared them all so much that they were convinced that
the boat was sinking again, kind of evidence that they
(09:22):
maybe weren't fully prepared for this trip. But after they
evacuated and carted all of their trunks and luggage ashore,
they realized things that were okay and even good because
that meant the ice was breaking up, and then they
had to haul everything back onto the boat and make
preparations to get underway. To that end, they also cut
a pathway in the remaining ice to get the keel
boat moving, and they were soon once again headed to
(09:45):
their new utopia. They made a stop that first evening
in Stephenville, Ohio, and took on another passenger, which was
the son of Judge Benjamin Tappan, who wanted to have
his child educated in New Harmony. They stopped in other
towns a along the way, most notably Cincinnati, where several
of the boatloaders toured the Museum of Natural History. When
they got to Louisville, Kentucky, they once again grew in
(10:08):
numbers as Joseph Nif, who was an educational reformer, joined
up with them along with his wife. And after Louisville,
the Philanthropists made its way to Mount Vernon, Indiana, and
there they made land to start the final leg of
the journey. So most of them at that point traveled
the final fifteen miles to New Harmony by wagon, arriving
on January twenty three, and at that point they had
(10:28):
been in transit for forty seven days. A small handful
of them, however, remained on the keel boat, and they
traveled farther south on the Ohio River before linking up
with the Wabash River and turning north into it to
make their way to New Harmony. So the origin for
the nickname Boatload of Knowledge came from a speech by
Robert Owen while the keel boat that the scientists and
(10:49):
educators were on made its way down the Ohio River.
Owen had traveled ahead by land. Then he started telling
the New Harmony residents who were setting up their new
utopia about McClure's really fantastic group. He gave a speech
to this new community in which he commented on the
vast amount of knowledge that was contained in this one
vote continuing quote, not Latin and Greek and other languages,
(11:12):
but real substantial knowledge. From that point, people started calling
the philanthropist the boatload of Knowledge. I love that nickname
so much. O n had called the educators aboard quote
some of the ablest instructors of youth that could be
found in the US or perhaps the world. And all
of that knowledge and ability had been gathered by a
(11:33):
man named William McClure, who is often called Owen's partner
in his utopian enterprise. We'll get into McClure's life after
we pause for a quick sponsor break. William McClure was
born on October seventeen sixty three in Air, Scotland. His
(11:55):
father was a merchant and was successful enough that William
got a private education. William first traveled to the US
at the age of nineteen, and after a brief stay,
he went to London, where he started a job with
Miller Hart and Company, an American commerce firm, and while
working there he was constantly traveling, mostly to France and Ireland,
but also on occasion to the US. In seventeen McClure
(12:17):
moved to the United States, permanently settling in Philadelphia. He
also became a US citizen. He was already wealthy, but
he quickly started adding to his fortune with business interests
in Pennsylvania and Virginia. By eighteen hundred, he was able
to leave work behind and focus on his other interests,
which were science and education reform full time, and he
felt that the way that education had been managed up
(12:40):
to that point was catastrophic, writing quote, I had been
long in the habit of considering education one of the
greatest abuses are species were guilty of, and of course,
one of the reforms most beneficial to humanity. He saw
that society was generally separated in categories of non productive
and productive classes, governor and the governed, and that the
(13:01):
only real thing that kept the system in place was
the education that the upper classes were receiving. So he
wanted to buck against that ages old arrangement and offer
equal knowledge to rich and poor. He believed that when
someone was armed with knowledge, they could rise up, so
the lower classes, if they had education, could meet the
upper class and equality. He also saw that the young
(13:22):
Republic of the United States needed an educated populace if
it was going to survive. He wrote, quote power being
in the hands of the people through the medium of
popular governments renders a diffusion of knowledge necessary to the
support of freedom. He looked to the work of Swiss
education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestelazzi, who had built a curriculum
(13:42):
plan based on the ideas and Jean jacqu Crussoe's emial
which examined the individual in society and the relationship between
the two. McClure visited Pestelazzi's a school several times to
observe and it was that model that he sought to
emulate when he planned out new Harmonies education system. McClure
had tried to convince Pestelazzi to move to the US,
(14:05):
and even offered to bankroll a new school for him,
but Pestelazzi turned that offered down and Even as McClure
was studying and promoting the latest ideas in education reform,
he was also engaged in his own scientific work, specifically
in geology. In eighteen o nine, he offered up a
geological map of the United States to the American Philosophical
(14:26):
Society during a lecture, and this is considered to be
a breakthrough moment in geology. He was had put together
data that no one else had ever assembled, and as
his fame for his scientific work grew, McClure started to
spend his time bouncing from geological tours and surveys to
meeting with education experts and setting up schools. Because he
(14:46):
made a name for himself in the geological sciences, when
the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was formed in
eighteen twelve, McClure was invited to become a member. In
eighteen seventeen, he became the organization's president, which was the
post he would hold for more than two decades right
up till the end of his life. And it was
the connections that he made through that organization that really
enabled him to assemble an academic dream team for New Harmony.
(15:10):
There was an OA Nite Society in Philadelphia by eighteen
twenty three, a year before Robert Owen bought New Harmony.
He made that purchase at the end of eighteen twenty four,
and members of the Academy of Natural Sciences had read
Owen's essays on communal living as early as the eighteen teens,
and they were pretty enthralled by his ideas because it
was exciting and new, and some, including McClure, had even
(15:33):
visited Owen's community in New Lanark, Scotland, where Owen had
focused on improving the conditions for the poor working class
that kept his textile mills running. And eventually it was
McClure that Robert Owen entrusted to design and established the
education system and for New Harmony Indiana. One of the
people that McClure worked with closely to get New Harmony's
children educated was Maria Duclos Fleteaux and She was born
(15:56):
in France in seventeen eighty three and had married Joseph
Fletegeaux as a young woman, although the exact date of
their marriage is unknown. The couple had a child named Achilles,
a son, but they lived separately, so her husband Joseph
does not seem to have factored very prominently in her
life at all. Marie's first contact with William McClure took
(16:16):
place in eighteen nineteen when he was visiting Paris. Fred
To Joe moved from Paris to Philadelphia in eighteen twenty
one to set up a Pesto Luzian school. She helped
spread Owen's ideas when she came to North America. She
brought some essays that had been published in Europe and
started circulating that and discussing it with other members of
the Philadelphia science and education communities. In a lot of ways,
(16:38):
she really ceded some of these ideas that Owens had
had by just she was very charming and people really
took a shine to her generally, and so when she
was like, I have this exciting essay that I want
you to read, people read it. Uh. It appears that
it was actually Freda Joe that convinced McClure that he
should partner with Owen. Although McClure had written to her
(16:59):
after he first visited New Lanark, and he spoke of
his time there as the most pleasant of his life,
it was her urging that really amplified his interest in
his desire to invest in the New Harmony project and
to recruit like minded intellectuals to their cause. She met
Robert Owen in November of eighteen four when he visited
Philadelphia and specifically her school. She later wrote McClure that
(17:22):
she and Owen had immediately hit it off. They were
like old friends from the moment they met. Owens told
her that if they worked on their education ideas in
a place where the various obstacles to those ideas could
be removed, like a community like the one he was planning,
they could truly see what a proper education could do
for a child's development. She went on to make the
case for the show that she could keep working at
(17:44):
her school in Philadelphia for decades, but she would never
really get to see just how impactful her work could
be there. But if she came to New Harmony, things
would be different because she could work without societal ills
of a large city ruining and countering her efforts. Coming up,
we'll do a Wick rundown a few of the other
people who put so much work into setting up the
education system in New Harmony. But first we'll have a
(18:07):
quick sponsor break. While Marie Fret Joe was a cornerstone
of the education system in New Harmony and one of
the most important members after Robert Owen and William McClure.
There were, of course, plenty of others that came on
that boatload of Knowledge, and here are but a few
(18:28):
of them. Thomas Say was born on June seven. He
was an entomologist and a concologist, and someone who McClure
had befriended early on in his time at the Academy
of Natural Sciences. Say was the librarian there. McClure had
funded some of Say's scientific research trips and then asked
Say to accompany him on several of his geological surveys.
(18:52):
Say is often called the father of American descriptive entomology.
If you google him you can find lots of stuff
from his entomology work. Yeah, and just in case you
don't know what a conchologist is, it's someone who studies
mollusk shells. And he had expertise in this field. Uh.
He was one of the leaders in that area. So
(19:12):
when the boatload of Knowledge was trapped in the ice
and the passengers started covering shifts to relieve the crew,
it was said that everyone elected as captain, and he
was apparently really pretty good at managing the crew. In
seven Say married one of the students that Marie fret
Jeau had brought with her on the trip. Once the
school system of New Harmony was established, it was say
that McClure entrusted with it whenever he was away from
(19:35):
the village. Later on, when the Utopian experiment had ended,
Say stayed at New Harmony, used that as his primary
location from which he conducted his research, and he wrote
for the rest of his life that life, unfortunately was
pretty short. He died in eighteen thirty four. French naturalist
Charles Alexandra Lesieur born in seventeen seventy eight was another
friend from the Academy of Natural Sciences, and in his
(19:58):
work in paleontology, archaeology, g exiology and general zoology, Lessiere
made numerous discoveries of new species while he traveled the world,
particularly Australia, and he served as curator at the Academy.
Like Marie fret To, Joel Sur had been into Owen's
idea of a utopian society even before McClure and was
eager when the chance came along to be part of
(20:20):
New Harmony. During the boat ride down the Ohio River,
he drew a hundred and twenty seven sketches of the
landscapes that they traveled through. Yeah, those are, you know,
kind of the visual record of that entire trip, and
they're really interesting. He was a really, really talented artist.
And while Robert Owen, who founded this second utopia New Harmony,
left feeling as though McClure's curriculum had been part of
(20:43):
its demise, he recognized Lesier's art skills so much that
he still sent one of his sons, Richard, back to
New Harmony to study with Lucier. After Thomas Say died,
Lassour returned to France and he went on to become
the curator at the Music Destoir Too Ill to Have,
although he served in that prestigious position for less than
(21:04):
a year before he also died in December of eighteen
forty six. WILLIAMS pick Wibal de Crusement was like Freda Gaux,
an educator, and when he traveled to New Harmony, he
actually brought ten students with him. They were boys from
a school that he taught at in Philadelphia. That school
had been established by William McClure, and before working there,
Phiquiball had worked in schools in France which had also
(21:27):
been funded and established by McClure. Pick Wipel was the person, incidentally,
who had hit his head on a log during that
ice in on the river and seemed to be in
pretty bad shape for a while. Two of his students
were the first to fall through the ice as well,
so that month they were stuck there was just not
particularly kind to him. Yeah. He also kind of had
a reputation for being a little bit of a grouch
(21:48):
el epithecus, So there were some people that claimed that
he never fully recovered and that was why he was
so grumpy. Um. Once the system and New Harmony was
in place, pick Wiple taught, among other things, printing. He
left the school in eighteen thirty and in eighteen thirty
one he married social reformer Frances Right. That marriage ended
in divorce in eighteen fifty. So that's just a sampling
(22:10):
of these educators and to kind of move on to
the curriculum and the legacy of these schools. Though, Owen's
New Harmony experiment ended just two years after it began.
As we mentioned in our previous episode on the subject.
The educators stayed around. They kept the school system going.
They also started publishing a regular journal called The Disseminator
of Useful Knowledge, which continued publication until the eighteen forties. Yeah,
(22:33):
they really felt like they had built something worthwhile and
they weren't willing to just abandon it just because the
the Utopian society wasn't going to work out um, and
they had people that wanted to send their children there.
The curriculum for New Harmony children started when they were
still toddlers. So children enrolled in the first school, called
the Infant School at the age of two, and at
that point it's obviously just about play, and the educators
(22:55):
were kind of noting the development of the children, and
children stayed in Infant School until they were fine years old.
At age five, children moved into the Higher School. They
also boarded away from their families in a large dormitory.
This was intended to keep the educational plan free from
parental influence and also to introduce the children to the
idea of communal living from a very early age. The
(23:16):
Higher school educated children until they were twelve and included
trades training and workshops and textile mills, so that they
were contributing to the good of society. From early on.
Their academic work included courses in mathematics, mechanics, art, music, language, science,
and writing, with gymnastics for physical exercise. Throughout the lessons
of the Higher School, all the scientists that had been
(23:37):
recruited gave lectures. Yeah, it was basically like having teachers
who were the krem de la creme in all of
their fields come and and give talks periodically. That aspect
of it is really unique and quite special. After completing
the Higher School, students would move on to the School
of Industry, and that's where real trade instruction took place,
(23:59):
and their students learned a great deal more than that
early training that they had gotten in the Higher School.
So this training did separate pretty solidly though along gender line.
So the boys learned everything from taxidermy to blacksmith ng
and the girls were taught dress making, millinery, cooking, and
other domestic skills. The School of Industry also ran its
(24:20):
own printing press. That was part of why Fuqua was
teaching how to run the press, and students were taught
to run it so that the scholars of the town
could have their own publishing mechanism for their research, which
I have to say is a pretty ingenious set up.
Although McClure's educational system shuttered after his death, the programs
that he and his colleagues instituted were precursors to the
(24:41):
public school system and paved the way for it, even
though it would be decades before such a system was
actually in place in Indiana. That effort was helped along
in eighteen fifty one by Robert Dale Owen, who became
very active in government and public affairs. That year he
helped get language providing for a tax supported, free public
educa Haitian system written into Indiana's second Constitution. And the
(25:03):
scholars and scientists of New Harmony had assembled a library
that was worthy of any university's and the they had brought,
you know, their book collections with them as they traveled
um and all kind of merge those together into one
library and their collections of specimens in their museum that
they set up. Drew researchers from around the world who
wanted to observe them as well as meet with the
(25:24):
scientists there to discuss their ideas and kind of use
them as like a sounding board for things that they
were working on. In eighteen twenty eight, the year after
Owen's New Harmony experiment was dissolved, William McClure left as well.
He headed to Mexico. Over the next five years, he
and Marie Fretta Joe exchanged almost five hundred letters in
which it became clear that the French teacher had fallen
(25:47):
really in love with the geologist. It didn't appear that
McClure returned her romantic interests, though, but the two of
them did remain close. Fretta Joe traveled to Mexico to
visit McClure in eighteen thirty three and died not long
after driving. McClure stayed in Mexico until the end of
his life in eighteen forty. Throughout all this time in
New Harmony in Mexico, he had remained president of the
(26:08):
Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is one
of those things. McClure constantly on the road from the
time he was young, So he might have just been
good at managing affairs he was not physically involved in,
but he had, you know, kept things going at the
school even though he was in another country. He was
you know, giving his input on curriculum, he was kind
of keeping it running in a lot of ways, and
(26:29):
financially he was still willing to put a lot of
backing into it. When he died, McClure left behind two
different educational funds. One was part of the Academy of
Sciences and that was clearly described as funding that should
go to making sure educational materials went into the hands
of laborers. The other had the same goal, but it
was a general provision in his will that offered five
(26:50):
hundred dollars to any laborers group that established a lecture
and reading room with at least one hundred books in it.
There were a hundred and sixty libraries that were funded
as a result of this provision. That practice of making
knowledge accessible for everyone was something that McClure had put
into practice himself throughout his life, but one of the
most enduring examples of it is the New Harmony working
(27:12):
Men's Institute, which he founded in eighteen thirty eight, which
was two years before he died. The institute moved from
its original location in the church at New Harmony to
a new building in eighteen four and it remains an
operation to this day now it's the oldest continuously operating
public library in Indiana. Yeah, it's also a museum. And
even though it is called the Working Men's Institute, it
(27:32):
was always intended to be something that not just men
can access, but their entire families would have access to
any of the resources there, which is a pretty cool Uh.
He he definitely, I mean he had tons of money
to work with, but he definitely put his money where
his mouth was in terms of saying like, yes, I
want people of all levels of society to have educational materials,
(27:53):
and then he made it happen. It was not just
lip service, which I have to respect. So that is
a little bit more on the Boatload of an knowledge
which just charmed me based just on that nickname. But
also there are a lot of really important and interesting people. Uh,
there's even more and more and more. You can get
very in the weeds on the Boatload of Knowledge. All
of the work that those people did. You could do
(28:13):
an entire podcast series called Boatload of Knowledge and talk
about each person and all of their research projects. And
if somebody does it, I will listen. Uh, do you
have listener mail for us? I do I have a
really lovely postcard that came to us from our listener, Heath,
who writes, Hello, Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Fry. I
(28:33):
have listened to your podcast since I've wanted to write
you for a while when you did your podcast in
seventeen on the calicax and the Eugenicists. I so very
much appreciate the care and consideration you made with a
very sensitive subject. The province I live in began a
eugenics movement in that lasted until nineteen seventy two, and
we have so many people still living from that time
(28:55):
and being part of the disability community, vigilant of how
without constant advocate shin and knowledge of what this history did,
we can easily be doomed to repeat it. I chose
this postcard as we always need to keep that love.
Thank you for your care. Just so sweet um, and
it is a cute postcard of the pop Love Factory.
I love the idea of sharing love via postcards, so
(29:15):
thank you so much, Heath. That's a really beautiful thing.
He also drew an adorable kitty, which I appreciate. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at how stubworks dot com. You
can also find us pretty much everywhere on social media
as Missed in History. Missed in History dot Com is
also the place to go if you would like to
visit us on the web and look at our archive
(29:37):
of every episode that's ever existed, as well as show
notes for any of the episodes Tracy and I have
worked on together in our years on the show. Uh.
You should also subscribe. Maybe you already have, but if
you haven't, you can do that on the I heart
Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is that
you listen Stuffy. Missed in History Class is a production
(29:59):
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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