August 27, 2021 • 15 mins
Holly and Tracy discuss Jo Nivison Hopper’s complex life story and how frustrating and angering it can be to research biographies like hers. They also talk about the availability of the Kerner Commission report to the public and the reiterative nature of the problems outlined in it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio. Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Tracy, we talked about Joe
Nivison Hopper this week. We did, and uh it sucked. Yeah.
(00:25):
You you worked on this for a while, and you know,
we we talked to each other, um as we're working
on things and seeing the progression of I think I'm
going to do an episode on Edward Hopper and then
kind of shifting to be like, I think what I
actually want to talk about is his wife, and then
(00:45):
increasingly angryous and it's set by the details of their relationship. Yeah,
I mean there were I there have been moments in
the past where I've been researching something that's already very
new and dear to my heart where it's moved me
to tears, Like when we did way Back a Million
years ago our Haunted Mansion episodes and I had to
(01:07):
talk about Whalt dying in the middle of that project.
I'm gonna cry. I cried during the research. I didn't
cry when we recorded that part, surprisingly, but this is
one where it was people that I had not had,
like a long lifetime knowledge of their story, affinity towards, etcetera.
And there were several times where I just had to
like push back from the table in my computer and
I just sat there and wept for her. Yeah yeah,
(01:30):
and got so angry, like crying angry in some cases
where I just wanted to spit bullets through history back
to the time machine and clock Edward Hopper squarely in
the head. Well and by total coincidence. The last episode
that I worked on before recording this one was Bert
Morrisseau and the contrast between how her husband approached her
(01:56):
career as an artist, which to my knowledge, there was
not a sense from him that he was like, well,
I love art, the best thing in the world, but
I guess I'm gonna give it up and focus. Like
I didn't get that sense from them at all. I
got way more of a sense that was he was like,
I love my wife and I love her work, and
I'm gonna support it. Like it was just such the
opposite from what we just talked about. Yeah. Uh. There
(02:20):
was also I mean this this is not surprising, but
I came across one particular article from not too long
ago that discussed some of Joe's journals and this whole thing,
and they interviewed a person who had known the hoppers
and is completely dismissive of the whole thing. And it's
(02:40):
very much like Joe was very dramatic. You know, she
just did this stuff. She just got herself worked into
a tizzy. And I'm like, okay, let's say, for the
sake of argument, she was. She admitted herself she was
very anxious and could be very excitable and quick to anger.
Let's just acknowledge all that and go sure, like, maybe
(03:00):
she was dramatic, but there's no denying that, Like she
was showing with Picasso before they got married and then
her career just went nowhere. And he admitted to her
later in life that was what he always wanted. She
has every right to be dramatic and angry, in my opinion.
And more, these are her journals she was writing for herself,
(03:22):
or letters to close friends. It wasn't like she was
putting him on blast everywhere. She had nothing to gain
from these. So that frustrated me on a whole other
level where I'm like, well, how nice for you that
you defend your friend who was abusive. Um, it's very frustrating.
Maybe it's super duper angry, super sad. Yeah, I mean,
(03:45):
I will say this there is Um there's also in
terms of historical context, right in her writing about their
what sounds like horrible and unpleasant and unhappy sex life,
I don't think that was all that uncommon for the time,
right in that women were sort of expected to not
know anything about sexuality and men just kind of did
(04:11):
whatever they wanted. Um, I don't think that's an uncommon
story for a wife in the early nine twenties at all.
Um and even some of their biographers have mentioned as much,
like that this isn't necessarily an outlier unfortunately of a
relationship for this time. But it's still just so heartbreaking
because she still does want him to love her and
(04:34):
find her physically attractive. That plays into a lot of
her very like fond discussions of when she's modeling for him,
Like she loved to model for him nude because she
felt like that was when he desired her the most,
and like obviously like was that a remove of kindness
because he was painting and not being violent in any way,
(04:56):
And it's just like that just adds this other layer
to the Onion of Misery, where I'm like, oh, I
don't know how we're going to get through this episode,
but we did. Yeah, And I'm sorry if it was
super unpleasant for listeners. But I also think like that
those are important stories to tell. I think there are
probably a lot of people, particularly a lot of women,
who just like shrank into the background so that their
(05:19):
spouse could be the one, particularly in our She mentions
other artists wives that she has a similar story with. UM,
so it is it's the Downer is Downer of Downeytown
I could possibly have put together. Yeah, well, and that's uh. Sometimes,
when when it's been so long since we've done a
(05:41):
live show and people have asked us about working on
difficult episodes, UM, I've sort of felt like a lot
of the episodes that we've worked on can sort of
be roughly categorized as either we knew something was going
to be really difficult and traumatic, but it also seemed
like relevant and important to talk about, or we knew
that it was going to be kind of traumatic and upsetting,
(06:03):
but it turned out to be way worse than we expected.
And then sometimes it's like surprised trauma. And this one,
I think mostly went into the surprise trauma bucket. Yeah.
I mean it was a progression, right, Like, just as
I had adjusted to one level of like, oh, this
is so sad, then I would turn a page and
(06:23):
be like, oh, dear Lord, like it's just got so
much worse so quickly. In some cases, yeah, it's very heartbreaking.
I will say. If you go to the Whitney's website
and you look up particularly that portrait that they have,
the colors in it are so beautiful and bubbly. I
(06:45):
don't know that it's a sav for all of this,
but it is very charming, um, And I hope that
we'll see I mean, like I said, there have been places, um,
including places that focus a lot on Edward hopperd that
have given her exhibits and tried to you know, contextualize
all of this and give her her own moment um.
(07:06):
But I'm hoping we will have more of those, and
that her art will become more easily seen, even if
you are not able to attend such events, because you know,
I think she's earned it. Yeah, because we've got a show.
(07:29):
We talked about the Currenter Commission report. After multiple years
of people suggesting that we do uh an episode on
this the whole four report. Because it's an official publication
of the government, the report itself is not protected by copyright,
so the whole thing is on the internet. Um. You
(07:50):
can read the whole thing, and it is so much
like it's the the descriptions of what had happened in
the cities that they looked at in detail is just
almost overwhelming is not quite the right word, but like,
as you're reading it, you just you are seeing the
same patterns that the commission then pointed out in detail.
(08:12):
As you're reading the accounts of these and then getting
into the individual recommendations that just seventy pages, so many pages.
I mentioned at the top of the episode that there
is a new condensed version of the report. I haven't
specifically read the condensed version because I was looking at
(08:32):
the whole entire thing. Um, but that version is meant
to be more accessible to like undergraduate classrooms that might
want to study this in the context of um, you know,
courses on racism or social justice or government or any
of that. It's um eye opening and frustrating. Yeah, it
(08:58):
had been a really long time since I read visited
anything about it. Um. I mean I remember um studying
it briefly in a class in college, but it was
really like not even the condensed version. It was like
excerpts that had been pulled out for us. So then
when you look at just especially given the place we
(09:18):
are all now, yeah, it's a it makes you want
to shake your fist at the sky a little bit. Yeah.
There is a book about the writing of the report,
which I did not I didn't consult that book as
a source um during the research on this, but that
came out in in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of it,
(09:41):
and I saw some interviews with the author of it,
who I don't I don't want to cast this versions
because I've said so many things on the show that
did not age well. But it was really interesting to
watch and listen to these interviews about the report that
we're done in prior to the all the protests that
(10:03):
started uh last year, UM, primarily after the murder of
George Floyd, but obviously there was a there were a
lot of other incidents that were also going on at
about the same time, and so I would watch this
and then kind of go yikes, like that statement did
not wind up particularly true. So yeah, it was a
lot to go through. UM. There are lots of different
(10:25):
places that have just the summary UM online, and even
if reading just the summary, you get a really good
idea of what all went into this report and what
kinds of things it was recommending. One quote that I
had that did not get into the final episode because
(10:45):
I was really trying to keep it to a a
reasonable length of time. It was a quote from a
Dr Kenneth B. Clark, who was quoted in the summary
of the report UM and and said, I read that
report of the ride in Chicago and it's as if
I were reading the report Invests of the Investigating Committee
(11:08):
of the Harlem Ride of thirty five, the Report of
the Investigating Committee on the Harlem Ride of forty three,
the Report of the Macon Commission on the Watts Riot.
I must again, in candor say to you members of
this commission, it is a kind of Alis in Wonderland,
with the same moving picture reshown over and over again,
the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same in action.
(11:32):
And I was like, what that that? Sure to sum
it up? UM. We mentioned this in the in the episode,
but one of the criticisms of it is definitely like
this report is looking at violence within black communities as
the problem while essentially ignoring the hundreds and hundreds of
(11:53):
years of violence enacted against black communities by white mobs,
many of which we have talked about on the show before,
Like we have spent a lot more time on the
show because frankly, there's a much longer history of that. Uh,
And the report mentions that kind of stuff in sort
of the three year historical overview. But it's just like
it doesn't even think that maybe there needs to be
(12:14):
a question of that. Yeah, there's like a miss dot
that didn't get connected in the drawing. No, that's part
of the arc. Oh well, I guess we skipped that
archic a little hard on one. Yeah. It also doesn't
really thoroughly interrogate why police killed so many people during
a lot of these uprisings, beyond making recommendations that police
(12:36):
have access to two weapons other than batons and firearms, which,
like that has its own complicated history that we've talked
about more in our episode on tear gas. So, yeah,
there was so much going on that like somebody could
do a whole podcast series. Maybe somebody did. When it
(12:57):
was the anniversary to really go through every single chapter
of this and talk about, you know, which of these
things that had happened which didn't work for like, what
was the outcome on all of this? Because there's just
a son of it. I'm I'm trying to figure out
any kind of um not do me takeaway and I can't. Yes, frustrating. Uh,
(13:17):
frustrating is not even an adequate word for that, um
at all. It's like it did. As I was reading it,
I kept this thinking, Okay, this particular thing seems to
be better than it was fifty years ago, but this
particular thing feels like it could have been written yesterday.
Um yeah. Yeah. It's like I want to be an
(13:39):
optimistic and hopeful person and say we're making incremental steps forward,
but the increments are so tiny in some cases that
like that's not an acceptable degree. Yeah. Well, and that
was really like one of the Even though the report
did not um specifically discuss a lot of the reforms
and things that had happened the previous few years, uh, Like,
(14:02):
the report's existence made it clear that things like the
Civil Rights Act and all of the other acts that
were part of the Great Society programs, like all of
those things that made it clear like this is not enough.
It's not it's just not not enough. Um. And that
was one of the things that made the president's so
angry about this report. UM. There are some reports that
(14:23):
Johnson tried to like secretly make some of these things
like into part of his agenda and the remainder of
his presidency. But there are also recorded phone conversations that
he had with people where he was like, if I
had known that that guy was gonna just take it
over and turn it into this whole thing, I wouldn't
have even done it. Like. He was clearly angry and
petulant about the direction the commission went over, the the
(14:48):
direction that he thought it was going to go. It's
kind of like that age old thing I UH tell people,
which is like, don't ask me the question if you
don't actually want the answer. Maybe that can be the
key takeaway too for today. Uh, don't have a presidential
commission examining the causes of violence unless you are prepared
(15:12):
to get the actual answer. So happy Friday again. If
it's your weekend coming up, have a great time. Not
I hope your your days go smoothly. We'll be back
with a classic on Saturday in a brand new episode
on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
(15:35):
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio. Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Tracy, we talked about Joe
Nivison Hopper this week. We did, and uh it sucked. Yeah.
(00:25):
You you worked on this for a while, and you know,
we we talked to each other, um as we're working
on things and seeing the progression of I think I'm
going to do an episode on Edward Hopper and then
kind of shifting to be like, I think what I
actually want to talk about is his wife, and then
(00:45):
increasingly angryous and it's set by the details of their relationship. Yeah,
I mean there were I there have been moments in
the past where I've been researching something that's already very
new and dear to my heart where it's moved me
to tears, Like when we did way Back a Million
years ago our Haunted Mansion episodes and I had to
(01:07):
talk about Whalt dying in the middle of that project.
I'm gonna cry. I cried during the research. I didn't
cry when we recorded that part, surprisingly, but this is
one where it was people that I had not had,
like a long lifetime knowledge of their story, affinity towards, etcetera.
And there were several times where I just had to
like push back from the table in my computer and
I just sat there and wept for her. Yeah yeah,
(01:30):
and got so angry, like crying angry in some cases
where I just wanted to spit bullets through history back
to the time machine and clock Edward Hopper squarely in
the head. Well and by total coincidence. The last episode
that I worked on before recording this one was Bert
Morrisseau and the contrast between how her husband approached her
(01:56):
career as an artist, which to my knowledge, there was
not a sense from him that he was like, well,
I love art, the best thing in the world, but
I guess I'm gonna give it up and focus. Like
I didn't get that sense from them at all. I
got way more of a sense that was he was like,
I love my wife and I love her work, and
I'm gonna support it. Like it was just such the
opposite from what we just talked about. Yeah. Uh. There
(02:20):
was also I mean this this is not surprising, but
I came across one particular article from not too long
ago that discussed some of Joe's journals and this whole thing,
and they interviewed a person who had known the hoppers
and is completely dismissive of the whole thing. And it's
(02:40):
very much like Joe was very dramatic. You know, she
just did this stuff. She just got herself worked into
a tizzy. And I'm like, okay, let's say, for the
sake of argument, she was. She admitted herself she was
very anxious and could be very excitable and quick to anger.
Let's just acknowledge all that and go sure, like, maybe
(03:00):
she was dramatic, but there's no denying that, Like she
was showing with Picasso before they got married and then
her career just went nowhere. And he admitted to her
later in life that was what he always wanted. She
has every right to be dramatic and angry, in my opinion.
And more, these are her journals she was writing for herself,
(03:22):
or letters to close friends. It wasn't like she was
putting him on blast everywhere. She had nothing to gain
from these. So that frustrated me on a whole other
level where I'm like, well, how nice for you that
you defend your friend who was abusive. Um, it's very frustrating.
Maybe it's super duper angry, super sad. Yeah, I mean,
(03:45):
I will say this there is Um there's also in
terms of historical context, right in her writing about their
what sounds like horrible and unpleasant and unhappy sex life,
I don't think that was all that uncommon for the time,
right in that women were sort of expected to not
know anything about sexuality and men just kind of did
(04:11):
whatever they wanted. Um, I don't think that's an uncommon
story for a wife in the early nine twenties at all.
Um and even some of their biographers have mentioned as much,
like that this isn't necessarily an outlier unfortunately of a
relationship for this time. But it's still just so heartbreaking
because she still does want him to love her and
(04:34):
find her physically attractive. That plays into a lot of
her very like fond discussions of when she's modeling for him,
Like she loved to model for him nude because she
felt like that was when he desired her the most,
and like obviously like was that a remove of kindness
because he was painting and not being violent in any way,
(04:56):
And it's just like that just adds this other layer
to the Onion of Misery, where I'm like, oh, I
don't know how we're going to get through this episode,
but we did. Yeah, And I'm sorry if it was
super unpleasant for listeners. But I also think like that
those are important stories to tell. I think there are
probably a lot of people, particularly a lot of women,
who just like shrank into the background so that their
(05:19):
spouse could be the one, particularly in our She mentions
other artists wives that she has a similar story with. UM,
so it is it's the Downer is Downer of Downeytown
I could possibly have put together. Yeah, well, and that's uh. Sometimes,
when when it's been so long since we've done a
(05:41):
live show and people have asked us about working on
difficult episodes, UM, I've sort of felt like a lot
of the episodes that we've worked on can sort of
be roughly categorized as either we knew something was going
to be really difficult and traumatic, but it also seemed
like relevant and important to talk about, or we knew
that it was going to be kind of traumatic and upsetting,
(06:03):
but it turned out to be way worse than we expected.
And then sometimes it's like surprised trauma. And this one,
I think mostly went into the surprise trauma bucket. Yeah.
I mean it was a progression, right, Like, just as
I had adjusted to one level of like, oh, this
is so sad, then I would turn a page and
(06:23):
be like, oh, dear Lord, like it's just got so
much worse so quickly. In some cases, yeah, it's very heartbreaking.
I will say. If you go to the Whitney's website
and you look up particularly that portrait that they have,
the colors in it are so beautiful and bubbly. I
(06:45):
don't know that it's a sav for all of this,
but it is very charming, um, And I hope that
we'll see I mean, like I said, there have been places, um,
including places that focus a lot on Edward hopperd that
have given her exhibits and tried to you know, contextualize
all of this and give her her own moment um.
(07:06):
But I'm hoping we will have more of those, and
that her art will become more easily seen, even if
you are not able to attend such events, because you know,
I think she's earned it. Yeah, because we've got a show.
(07:29):
We talked about the Currenter Commission report. After multiple years
of people suggesting that we do uh an episode on
this the whole four report. Because it's an official publication
of the government, the report itself is not protected by copyright,
so the whole thing is on the internet. Um. You
(07:50):
can read the whole thing, and it is so much
like it's the the descriptions of what had happened in
the cities that they looked at in detail is just
almost overwhelming is not quite the right word, but like,
as you're reading it, you just you are seeing the
same patterns that the commission then pointed out in detail.
(08:12):
As you're reading the accounts of these and then getting
into the individual recommendations that just seventy pages, so many pages.
I mentioned at the top of the episode that there
is a new condensed version of the report. I haven't
specifically read the condensed version because I was looking at
(08:32):
the whole entire thing. Um, but that version is meant
to be more accessible to like undergraduate classrooms that might
want to study this in the context of um, you know,
courses on racism or social justice or government or any
of that. It's um eye opening and frustrating. Yeah, it
(08:58):
had been a really long time since I read visited
anything about it. Um. I mean I remember um studying
it briefly in a class in college, but it was
really like not even the condensed version. It was like
excerpts that had been pulled out for us. So then
when you look at just especially given the place we
(09:18):
are all now, yeah, it's a it makes you want
to shake your fist at the sky a little bit. Yeah.
There is a book about the writing of the report,
which I did not I didn't consult that book as
a source um during the research on this, but that
came out in in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of it,
(09:41):
and I saw some interviews with the author of it,
who I don't I don't want to cast this versions
because I've said so many things on the show that
did not age well. But it was really interesting to
watch and listen to these interviews about the report that
we're done in prior to the all the protests that
(10:03):
started uh last year, UM, primarily after the murder of
George Floyd, but obviously there was a there were a
lot of other incidents that were also going on at
about the same time, and so I would watch this
and then kind of go yikes, like that statement did
not wind up particularly true. So yeah, it was a
lot to go through. UM. There are lots of different
(10:25):
places that have just the summary UM online, and even
if reading just the summary, you get a really good
idea of what all went into this report and what
kinds of things it was recommending. One quote that I
had that did not get into the final episode because
(10:45):
I was really trying to keep it to a a
reasonable length of time. It was a quote from a
Dr Kenneth B. Clark, who was quoted in the summary
of the report UM and and said, I read that
report of the ride in Chicago and it's as if
I were reading the report Invests of the Investigating Committee
(11:08):
of the Harlem Ride of thirty five, the Report of
the Investigating Committee on the Harlem Ride of forty three,
the Report of the Macon Commission on the Watts Riot.
I must again, in candor say to you members of
this commission, it is a kind of Alis in Wonderland,
with the same moving picture reshown over and over again,
the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same in action.
(11:32):
And I was like, what that that? Sure to sum
it up? UM. We mentioned this in the in the episode,
but one of the criticisms of it is definitely like
this report is looking at violence within black communities as
the problem while essentially ignoring the hundreds and hundreds of
(11:53):
years of violence enacted against black communities by white mobs,
many of which we have talked about on the show before,
Like we have spent a lot more time on the
show because frankly, there's a much longer history of that. Uh,
And the report mentions that kind of stuff in sort
of the three year historical overview. But it's just like
it doesn't even think that maybe there needs to be
(12:14):
a question of that. Yeah, there's like a miss dot
that didn't get connected in the drawing. No, that's part
of the arc. Oh well, I guess we skipped that
archic a little hard on one. Yeah. It also doesn't
really thoroughly interrogate why police killed so many people during
a lot of these uprisings, beyond making recommendations that police
(12:36):
have access to two weapons other than batons and firearms, which,
like that has its own complicated history that we've talked
about more in our episode on tear gas. So, yeah,
there was so much going on that like somebody could
do a whole podcast series. Maybe somebody did. When it
(12:57):
was the anniversary to really go through every single chapter
of this and talk about, you know, which of these
things that had happened which didn't work for like, what
was the outcome on all of this? Because there's just
a son of it. I'm I'm trying to figure out
any kind of um not do me takeaway and I can't. Yes, frustrating. Uh,
(13:17):
frustrating is not even an adequate word for that, um
at all. It's like it did. As I was reading it,
I kept this thinking, Okay, this particular thing seems to
be better than it was fifty years ago, but this
particular thing feels like it could have been written yesterday.
Um yeah. Yeah. It's like I want to be an
(13:39):
optimistic and hopeful person and say we're making incremental steps forward,
but the increments are so tiny in some cases that
like that's not an acceptable degree. Yeah. Well, and that
was really like one of the Even though the report
did not um specifically discuss a lot of the reforms
and things that had happened the previous few years, uh, Like,
(14:02):
the report's existence made it clear that things like the
Civil Rights Act and all of the other acts that
were part of the Great Society programs, like all of
those things that made it clear like this is not enough.
It's not it's just not not enough. Um. And that
was one of the things that made the president's so
angry about this report. UM. There are some reports that
(14:23):
Johnson tried to like secretly make some of these things
like into part of his agenda and the remainder of
his presidency. But there are also recorded phone conversations that
he had with people where he was like, if I
had known that that guy was gonna just take it
over and turn it into this whole thing, I wouldn't
have even done it. Like. He was clearly angry and
petulant about the direction the commission went over, the the
(14:48):
direction that he thought it was going to go. It's
kind of like that age old thing I UH tell people,
which is like, don't ask me the question if you
don't actually want the answer. Maybe that can be the
key takeaway too for today. Uh, don't have a presidential
commission examining the causes of violence unless you are prepared
(15:12):
to get the actual answer. So happy Friday again. If
it's your weekend coming up, have a great time. Not
I hope your your days go smoothly. We'll be back
with a classic on Saturday in a brand new episode
on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
(15:35):
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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