7.24.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated July August
twenty twenty five. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading
service intended for people who are blind or have other
disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
join me now for the first article, which is part

(00:23):
two of Go Behind the Scenes of the Running of
the Bulls by Tony Perrette. Part one explored the historical
and cultural significance of the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain,
famously known for the Running of the Bulls. The article
began by recounting Ernest Hemingway's transformative visit to the festival

(00:46):
in nineteen twenty five, which inspired his novel The Sun
Also Rises. Hemingway's vivid descriptions of the festival's electric atmosphere,
including the bull fights, fireworks, and lively street parties, helped
elevate the event's profile on the global stage. The festival,
which was once a local celebration, became internationally renowned, attracting

(01:10):
over a million visitors annually. We delved into the deep
rooted traditions and modern day allure of the festival. Part
one explored the enduring American connection to Pamplona, with many
American runners and spectators participating in the festivities. Part one
also shed light on the lesser known cultural dimensions of

(01:31):
the Sanfermines, such as the lectures at the New York
City Club to Reno and the passionate fans who appreciate
the festival's rich history and pageantry. The festival is portrayed
as an all encompassing social and cultural event, with concerts, dances,
social clubs, and religious processions. Part one also provided a

(01:54):
contemporary perspective on the festival, describing the authour's own experiences
and observation. The author retraced Hemingway's steps, visiting iconic locations
in Pamplona and engaging with local traditions. The running of
the bulls was depicted as a thrilling yet dangerous event,
with medical workers on standby to assist the injured. Here

(02:18):
now is Part two. At six thirty Pamploneses converge on
the central and most controversial ritual of the festival, the
corridas or races, as bull fights are known in Spanish.
Some scholars speculate that bullfighting's origins were in the Roman
Era or the Middle Ages, but the corrida began to

(02:39):
take its modern form in the seventeen hundreds, when Spanish
cattle ranchers vied to breed the most powerful and handsome
bulls like thoroughbred horses. Towns all over Spain developed festival
rights that included different versions of the bull runs, and
often ended with men fighting the finest animals with matadors

(03:00):
and ornate, tightly fitting outfits, taking to plazas on horseback
and on foot. These diverse traditions were codified into a
ritual that has changed little in the centuries since today.
The evening starts with the procession, when three bullfighters, their
teams and stadium workers enter the ring and salute the

(03:22):
president who runs the event. The matadors each fight two
bulls in contests that last for roughly twenty minutes and
end with the animal's death. The only way for a
bull to survive is if the crowd demands that it
is too beautiful and should become a stud, an extremely
rare occurrence in Pamplona. The corridas occur only during San

(03:47):
Varmin and are held in the majestic Plaza de Toros.
The approaching road to the stadium was renamed the Passio
de Hemingway in nineteen sixty seven, and a bronze statue
was erected of him at the arena's entrance in nineteen
sixty eight, glowering at visitors as he once did at
anyone who questioned the value of bullfights. Tastes, of course,

(04:11):
have changed in recent years. Animal rights activists in Europe
and the United States have called for an end to
the contests. There are critics even within Spain, and bullfights
were banned for a time in Catalonia. They have also
been banned in much of Latin America. Many foreign attendees

(04:31):
at San Fermin have no stomach for the spectacle and
spend their early evenings carousing in local bars instead. Hemingway
tried to explain to critics that bullfighting was not a sport,
it was a tragedy, and his obsession with bull fights
had a philosophical side. He was both fascinated and horrified

(04:52):
by the senseless, random violence of modern life, having nearly
been killed by an artillery shell at age eighteen while
volunteering as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian
Front in World War One. In bullfighting, Hemingway discovered violence
that was ritualized and controlled, and which death was openly confronted.

(05:15):
As Michael Reynolds in hemingway The Paris Years puts it.
For Hemingway, it was like watching the war from a
ringside seat. Even in nineteen twenty five, not everyone shared
Hemingway's passion for bull fighting. His first wife, Hadley Richardson,
would turn her eyes away and embroidered during the gorreoust parts,

(05:37):
while another in Hemingway's group, Harold Loeb, admitted he was unimpressed,
saying we all have to die, but I don't like
to be reminded of it more than twice a day.
Whatever your opinion, the event's extravagant pageantry makes it a
living relic from the time of Servantes and Valesquez. The
vast open air arena, lit by the Golden Sea and

(06:00):
packed with nineteen thousand, five hundred people in white outfits
and red scarves, roaring and singing. Seats are reserved year
to year by the same families, and everyone knows their
neighbors and brings wine and delicacies like tortilla sandwiches to share.
The stadium seats are divided into soul and sombra, sun

(06:21):
and shade, with the cheap upper tiers of the sun
blasted side taken up by the social clubs, whose bands
play cacophonous music with tubas, trumpets and drums. These range
from traditional romantic tear jerkers to outbursts of jingle bells
and even Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline. The gleeful air of

(06:42):
anarchy and Pamplona is very different from bullfights in Madrid
and Seville, where the ambiance is so reverent that the
expression goes you can hear the bull breathe after a
few days of revelry, going to sleep at three a m.
Waking up at six a m. Bull runs, lunches, apertivos, dances.

(07:03):
My constitution was reeling a hundred years ago. The same
regime made the expat's behavior go from bad to worse.
The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise
went on, Hemingway wrote, And the sun also rises. The
men in Hemingway's group, Patrick Guthrie, Loeb and Hemingway himself

(07:26):
jousted with one another to gain the attentions of Lady
Duff Twisden, who provoked her admirers by flirting with the
young matador Ordunez. One night, she disappeared at a party
and turned up the next morning with an unexplained black eye. Guthrie,
her fiance, took to casually goading Lobe about how Twysden

(07:48):
now spurned him. While Lobe accepted the insults with the
stoic passivity mooning over Twysden, the others felt like a
love sick puppy. Meanwhile, Richardson was a palled to observe
Hemingway's evident infatuation. On the sixth night, tensions came to
a head over after dinner Brandy's in the plaza, beneath

(08:10):
exploding fireworks, Hemingway told Loeb that he should go back
to Paris. You've already done enough to spoil this party.
Loeb declared that he would only depart if Twysden asked
him to. She refused, making Hemingway snarl, you lousy bastard
running to a woman. Lob challenged the much larger Hemingway

(08:32):
to a fight, and the pair went down an alley
to punch it out, But as soon as they got there,
the tensions diffused When Loeb took off his spectacles, Hemingway
joked that he would hold Loeb's jacket. Loeb offered to
hold Hemingway's. They both laughed, duff Loeb wrote later no

(08:53):
longer seemed to matter. Hemingway even left Lob a letter
of apology the next morning, saying that he he was
thoroughly ashamed of his behavior. On the last day of
the vacation, when everyone was preparing to leave Pomplona, Twisden
and Guthrie declared that they had no money to pay
their hotel bill. Another member of their party, Donald Ogden, Stuart,

(09:18):
lent the pair funds that he knew were as good
as gone. The exhausted crew went their separate ways, scattering
around Europe. The fiesta was over, but their literary after
lives were just beginning. Hemingway left Pamplona with a lousy feeling,
he later wrote, but it faded as he and Richardson
took the train south in a compartment with a wine

(09:41):
salesman who shared his samples. The vacation may have been
a fiasco, but it provided him with literary inspiration. In Madrid,
he threw himself into writing in the mornings scribbling furiously
by hand on loose leaves of paper and watching bullfights
with Richardson in in the afternoon. Hemingway's first pages were

(10:03):
a cross between a memoir and a travel book, but
soon he changed his friend's names and fictionalized the situation,
in particular altering the narrator's name from him to Jake Barnes,
a war veteran who was wounded in the groin and
made impotent, adding a hopelessness to his infatuation with Lady

(10:24):
Brett Ashley As Twysden was renamed the free living, hard
drinking Brett uses Wit a jollity to mask her inner desperation.
She also runs off to Madrid with the young bullfighter,
and after refusing to marry him, has to be rescued
broke by Jake along the way. The lovelorn Harold Loeb

(10:46):
became Robert Kohane in a harsh and blatantly antisemitic characterization
that turned Hemingway's once close friend into a figure of derision.
One writer has noted, who was a cross between a
Boosube and a bore. Richardson, meanwhile, was written out of
the story entirely within eight weeks. Hemingway had completed a draft.

(11:09):
His friend F. Scott Fitzgerald helped him edit the manuscript,
convincing him that the rambling first two chapters should be cut.
The finished novel was published by Scribner's in October nineteen
twenty six to strong reviews and sales, with Hemingway's terse
style appearing to both high brow literary circles and mainstream readers.

(11:32):
The novel was elevated from a gossipy romanoclef to a
literary event by an epigraph from Gertrude Stein, who proclaimed
that the poorly behaved characters were in fact part of
a lost generation, the first usage in print of this
now famous term. It's difficult to imagine the book's impact today,

(11:53):
when every generation from the Beats to Gen Z has
itself felt lost, but it gave expression to the existential
malaise left by the First World War, which shattered traditional
values and left its survivors purposeless. The novel was, biographer
Mary Dearborn writes, perhaps the first great novel of disaffected youth.

(12:17):
For the real life characters, it meant the end of friendships.
For the rest of his life. Loeb was puzzled as
to why his friend Hemingway had betrayed him. Loeb had
even helped get some of his early writings in print
and tried to set the record straight in a nineteen
fifty nine memoir The Way It Was and nineteen sixty

(12:37):
seven essay Hemingway's Bitterness. Although Lady Twysden has been reduced
to the promiscuous Lady Ashley, an alcoholic nymphi maniac Hemingway
later called her character, she appears to have been more philosophical.
Telling one mutual friend in Paris. Of course, Hemingway said
nasty things, but after all he was writing a novel.

(13:00):
Who cares not me? Still, they soon fell out of touch.
In Paris, Hemingway's marriage to Richardson had also been damaged.
His wandering eye soon focused on a mutual friend, the
American heiress Pauline Pfeiffer, and the two began an affair.
When Hemingway invited both his wife and lover to Pomplona

(13:22):
in nineteen twenty six. The trip was predictably strained, and
when he and Richardson returned to Paris by train, they
left via different station exits to separate homes. When he
returned to the Festival in nineteen twenty seven, Hemingway was
accompanied by Pfeifer as his new wife. By then, The

(13:42):
Sun Also Rises had put Hemingway on track to become
one of the most celebrated American writers of the twentieth century,
establishing the macho persona he would build on for the
rest of his life. Zelda Fitzgerald, for one, thought his
perfua a fraud, sniffing that nobody could be as male
as all that her verdict on The Sun Also Rises

(14:06):
was just as caustic. It was all about bull fighting,
bull slinging, and bullshit. Even so, it consistently appears to
day on lists of great American novels. Hemingway continued to
visit San Fermin throughout his life, although with a long
interruption of twenty two years thanks to the Spanish Civil War,

(14:28):
which he reported on and made the subject of his
novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, and the subsequent military
dictatorship of Francisco Franco. When he returned in nineteen fifty
three with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, he was still
not well known among the Spanish public. The Sun Also
Rises had filtered into the country only through stray copies

(14:52):
printed in Argentina, and many regarded it with amusement. The
following year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. By
his next visit to the festival in nineteen fifty nine,
Hemingway was at the height of his fame, now the
bearded bear like Papa and mobbed by well wishers, autograph
hunters and journalists from Spain and beyond. As for the

(15:16):
San Fermin festival, it ends as it has for centuries,
with thousands of townsfolk gathering before the town hall to
sing Popre demi poor me, a lament that the nine
days of madness are over. As people leave their bandanas
by candles at the near by church door, the mayor
exhorts them to start their countdown for the next year's party.

(15:40):
I don't know how you're going to write a story
about San Fermen Club Terino president lore Monegue said when
we met for one last drink on the way to
the train station. It has no beginning and no end.
You think it's over, but it's not. Once you've been here,
you'll never really leave. Next. With their bravery during World

(16:02):
War One, these daring American women doctors proved their might
to Folks back Home by Amy Zohone. In late March
nineteen eighteen, the German Army began pursuing the Spring Offensive
in France, its most ambitious advance since the First World
War began four years earlier. Back in the United States,

(16:24):
an enterprising group of suffragists was mounting an ambitious advance
of its own. The National American Woman's Suffrage Association NASA
was lobbying to get women doctors into the trenches. Though
their own government tried to deter them, NASA succeeded sending
a pioneering group of seventy four doctors and support staff

(16:47):
to some of the most dangerous areas of wartime France.
The heroic service of this group, known as the Women's
Overseas Hospitals, wh would be the most professionally demanding undertaking
in the lives of these doctors, who had proved to
the world the competency and courage of women's physicians. Archives,

(17:08):
memoirs and personal letters passed down to the doctor's descendants
reveal a thrilling, politically relevant chapter in women's medical and
World War One history that has been largely unknown until now.
By the spring of nineteen eighteen, New York and eleven
other states had given women the right to vote. The

(17:29):
House had passed a federal suffrage amendment, and voting rights
advocates were lobbying the Senate to do the same. Many
members of NASA hoped that President Woodrow Wilson would be
more likely to support women's right to vote if they
contributed to the war effort in visible dramatic ways, as
Carrie Chapman Catt, the group's president, wrote in a letter

(17:51):
to several of the w o H doctors that spring,
we have staked our reputation on the maintenance of a
hospital unit which will win laurels for womankind. In nineteen ten,
women made up only six percent of all American doctors,
many of them practicing in traditionally feminine fields like obstetrics

(18:11):
and public health, while facing limited opportunities for faculty appointments.
Surgery in Battle, on the other hand, was of the
greatest educational value and an opportunity all surgeons must covet,
in the words of Mabel Segrave, a w H doctor
from Seattle. In April nineteen seventeen, when the US entered

(18:32):
the war, Caroline Finley was forty two and director of
Obstetrics at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.
The Infirmaries Women's Medical College, founded in eighteen sixty eight
by doctors and sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, had been
the first American medical institution run by and for women. Now,

(18:54):
in addition to their patriotic feelings, Benley and a group
of her colleagues were concerned about the suffering of women
and children in war torn regions of Europe, and particularly
about rape, neglected prenatal care, and malnutrition, and they wanted
to help first hand. Seeking an official sponsor, the doctors

(19:14):
went to the Red Cross and then to the U. S. Army,
both of which promptly rejected them. Secretary of War Newton
Baker declared that he did not believe commissioning women would
help win the war. With their own country turning its back,
the infirmary group applied to the French at the outset
of the war in nineteen fourteen. The French government had

(19:37):
not allowed women physicians to serve in any capacity, including
as nurses, by now, though they were desperate. After a
meeting in the fall of nineteen seventeen with the French
High Commissioner in Washington, Finley received a cable from Premier
Alexandre Ribaut send Doctress Finley and her associates at once.

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The French decree allowed WOH doctors to provide civilian care,
but stipulated that those services could only extend to the
wounded in the French military upon request if the need arose.
In November nineteen seventeen, days after New York became the
first Eastern state to grant women the right to vote,

(20:19):
Finley went to Paris to place the first unit. Thirty
one other WOH medical and support staff, including plumbers and chauffeurs,
all women, arrived in Bordeaux in February nineteen eighteen on
the ocean liner Espagne, docking at six in the morning.
The group looked as Anna von Schally of Queens, an

(20:40):
infirmary doctor and WOH treasurer, wrote to the NASA headquarters
like a traveling circus. After several delays, one hospital site
was destroyed in a bombing raid and another was deemed
too dangerous. About half the group, led by Finley, was
indeed called to a military hospital in us Vuoisa, north

(21:01):
of Paris. Finlay's group, known as unit one traveled by
truck to Chateau Oyon, a stately home that a week
before had been turned into an evacuation hospital, a few
miles north of Senley's on the road to Campegna, the
eventual site of the armistice. The group emerged into the
courtyard of the beautiful bazard chateau. The salon where the

(21:25):
women slept rivaled the splendor of the palace at Versailles,
with sealing cupids and velvet tapestries. Finley marveled at her
surroundings in a letter to her mother, rhapsodizing about the
old statues, with wonderful walks bordered by old trees, and
the flowers violets, narcissi, and little pink and white ones.

(21:47):
But there wasn't much time to smell the flowers. In
the central portion of the chateau, beneath the stately portraits
hung on the walls, mostly empty hospital cots filled the hallways.
The only medical staff were two French military doctors and
a few nurses. The men initially refused to give orders
to the domes Americanes, soon though they had no choice.

(22:10):
Following a major offensive nearby. Ambulances rushed in bringing three
hundred patients in twenty hours. At first, Finley and the
other w H doctors served as nurses, assisting the men
with life saving amputations, while French priests serving as orderlies,
held lanterns. When morphine and anesthetics ran out, the French

(22:32):
doctors operated on conscious patients. The soldiers, Finley wrote to
her mother, have arms and legs hanging by a shred.
Many have horrible chest and head wounds. The limited medical
supplies included a pot bellied stove, a pail of water
for sterilization, sheets torn into strips to be boiled in
the pail, anti tetanus serum, and bandages. At daybreak, chloroform

(22:58):
and ether arrived from pairs, along with further staff, including
the male chief surgeon, doctor Covalaire. The women worked sixteen
hour days, gaining confidence. By early May, the chateau was
home to five hundred beds. The women's friendships quickly deepened.
The French doctors were not so kind. When Finley asked

(23:20):
Covalaier for permission to treat septic shock cases, he said no,
but loud that perhaps the Unit one doctors could be
given more important work once they proved themselves. A week
after Finley's request, Covalier got too desperate to be sexist,
and he gave her control of an entire septic shock ward.

(23:41):
I think to have been given the only thing I
have asked for. After week's proof of the kind of
work we do is a very good augury for the future,
she reported in a letter to Nausea. Soon she was
performing major operations such as amputations and deep dissections, assisted
by a French doctor. She had never done an amputation

(24:02):
until she went to France, but quickly became an expert.
The w O h T found that the work took
a toll. The other day, I was terribly depressed, Finley
wrote in a letter. It was necessary to hurt the
men so in dressing their wounds that sometimes I can
hardly stand it. One soldier had been groaning and crying.

(24:22):
When she finished operating, he patted my arm and said, pover, madame.
As debilitating as war surgery could be. Finley took pride
in her new skills. Lately, I have been operating a
good deal and have had very interesting work, she wrote
her mother. I did eight secondary operations without a doctor
to assist me. My arms ached when finished. To the

(24:46):
chateau's misfortune, it sat along the course that German warplanes
followed on their nightly raids to Paris. The evening of
June seventeenth was calm and clear, but close to daybreak
a German warplane bombed the chateau, so leaving a crater
in the earth and a trail of carnage. By the
time Finley, Fellow, w h Doctor Mary Lee, Edward and

(25:08):
the rest had picked through the debris, they tallied eighteen
orderlies and stretcher bearers killed and twelve wounded, all men
they had come to know. The house was bombed two
more times, but perhaps remarkably, no women from Unit one died.
Among the most prolific healers. According to French military record

(25:29):
at the time, the women never seemed to slow for anything.
During the final German offensive of the war in July
nineteen eighteen, Chateau Agnon's medical staff performed three thousand operations
in eighteen days. On September third, officers from the French
government honored Finley, Edward and von Shaley with the prestigious

(25:50):
Qua deguiere. There One time adversary, Couvalaire, wrote a commendation
that sighted their bravery under fire. The women were commissioned
as lieutenants in the French army, complete with insignias for
their uniforms. There was clear evidence that the w H
was swaying hearts and minds back home too. The same

(26:11):
month that the women received the quadiguerre, President Wilson gave
a speech to the Senate calling for the passage of
suffrage nationwide. We have made partners of the women in
this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership
of suffering and sacrifice and toil, not to a partnership
of privilege and right. On November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, the

(26:34):
women celebrated the armistice at at Ougnon, but their work
was nowhere near done. They moved around France treating German
prisoners of war and British soldiers alike who had pneumonia
and flu, which would go on to kill more than
fifty million people worldwide that year, more than three times
all the death in World War One. In mobile hospitals

(26:57):
in various French villages, more than one thousand refugees and
repatriots were arriving each day. Though the w o H
women had won the right to vote. Their fight for
equality was hardly over by the time of Pearl Harbor.
Two decades later, the Army was still denying commissions to

(27:18):
women doctors. It wasn't until April nineteen forty three that
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Sparkman Johnson Act into law,
allowing the first women doctor, an O. B. G. Y
N named Margaret D. Craighill, to be commissioned into the
Army Medical Reserve Corps. Reflecting on her wartime experiences in

(27:42):
nineteen thirty seven, Von Shahey told a reporter that World
War One had changed attitudes about women, both in medicine
and in society. Overall, women seized the opportunities, showed what
they could do, and have continued to do it ever since.
This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your

(28:06):
reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and
have a great day.