The Peterloo Massacre

The Peterloo Massacre took place during a peaceful protest for parliamentary reform in Manchester, England. And there was a lot feeding into why people in Britain, and specifically in the region around Manchester, thought that reform was needed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class. The production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly
fry Back. Its seventeen, which was not all that long ago, really.
We did an episode on the Cato Street conspiracy that

(00:23):
happened in eighteen twenty and it was a failed plot
to assassinate the entire British Cabinet. In that episode, we
very briefly mentioned the Peterloo massacre, which had happened in
eighteen nineteen, so the year before that was part of
the context for this whole conspiracy, and several folks back
at that time let us know they were really excited
to hear that. Peter Lou mentioned I've gotten a few

(00:45):
listener requests for the massacre over the years as well,
and this month is it's two anniversary, so it seemed
like a good time to finally move it up to
the top of the list. So the Peterloo Massacre took
place during a peaceful protest for parliamentary reform in Manchester, Lancashire, England,
and there was a lot feeding into why people in
Britain and specifically in the region around Manchester thought that

(01:08):
this reform was needed. The Napoleonic Wars in the War
of eighteen twelve had both ended in eighteen fifteen, and
people had hoped that would mean a period of common prosperity.
But as has happened in so many topics that we've
covered following other wars, it felt like the opposite was happening.
The Napoleonic Wars had disrupted grain imports into Britain from

(01:29):
the European continent, and this had worked out pretty well
for Britain's large grain farmers. Because of the supply shortage,
they could sell their corn and other grains for much
higher prices than normal. But then as these wars were ending,
prices started falling. People were going to have access to
that imported grain again. Prices dropped almost fifty percent between

(01:51):
eighteen thirteen and eighteen fifteen. So in eighteen fifteen Parliament
passed a corn law which prohibited the import of various
grains and held their prices for domestically grown crops rose
up to a specific level, and that exact price depended
on the type of grain that was being sold. This
did contribute to price increases, but not as much as

(02:13):
landowners had been hoping for. Still, the corn Law was
obviously meant to protect the financial interests of wealthy planters
and landowners. Ordinary working people, on the other hand, had
been struggling to pay for grain and had welcomed the
drop in price. In response to the passage of the
corn Law, protests and food riots broke out all over Britain.

(02:33):
Another issue was taxes. The British government had tried to
pay for the wars with an assortment of taxes and duties.
An income tax in particular had been passed in and
it was supposed to be a temporary wartime measure. Annual
incomes over two hundred pounds were taxed at ten percent,
and incomes between sixty and two hundred pounds were taxed
on a sliding scale from one percent to ten percent.

(02:56):
A lot of working class people had an income of
less than sixty pound the years, so they weren't being
taxed at all. The British people thought that once the
wars were over, at least some of these taxes would
be abolished, especially the income tax, but roughly two decades
of warfare had left Britain deeply in debt. So in
the spring of eighteen sixteen, Prime Minister Robert Banks Jenkinson,

(03:17):
second Earl of Liverpool, and Chancellor Nicholas van Sattart announced
a plan to keep the income tax in place. So,
like we just said, there was this whole sliding scale
going on, and that meant the way the income tax
was structured, wealthier people were paying the vast majority of
the tax, and when they found out the tax was
not going away, they naturally were outraged. People protested and

(03:40):
they signed petitions, and on March eighteenth, eighteen sixteen, the
House of Commons voted to abolish the income tax. Allegedly,
then all the tax records were gathered up and burned
in the old Palace yard in Westminster. But that wartime
debt was still there and it was huge. The government
still had to bring in money somehow, and ultimately the

(04:01):
government raised taxes on a variety of consumer goods, including tobacco, tea,
sugar and beer. While the income tax had mainly affected
affluent people, Britain's poorer people were most affected by these
taxes on consumer goods, So people who were already struggling
to pay for necessities were now also paying higher taxes

(04:21):
on those necessities as well. Yes, so they mostly went
from not being taxed at all or or taxed only
a little bit on their incomes too being taxed a
whole lot more on things they needed to buy. And
that was really just the beginning. In eighteen sixteen was
the year without a Summer, which we've talked about on
a previous episode of the show. Crops failed all over
Europe because of unusually wet cold weather, and that made

(04:44):
things even harder for people who were already being affected
by the corn laws and the tax increases. Britain's textile
industries were shifting and becoming more mechanized, with traditional hand
looms being replaced by machines. People were losing their jobs
and wages were falling for people who still had jobs.
We talked about this more in our previous episode on

(05:05):
the Luddite Rising, which took place in the earlier eighteen teams,
so just a little bit before all this was happening,
All of this was disproportionately affecting the people who were
least able to afford it. Many working class families were
affected by all of this at once, with shortages of
food they needed, higher prices on what they could get,
additional taxes and reduced wages, all at the same time

(05:29):
and overwhelmingly. These same people also did not have the
right to vote. In most of Britain, only men who
paid certain taxes or who owned property had the right
to vote, and this meant that less than five percent
of people in England and Wales had the right to vote.
In the rest of Britain, the percentage was even smaller.
Even the people who could vote couldn't necessarily do so freely.

(05:52):
Ballots weren't necessarily kept secret. Some burrows were known as
pocket burrows because one person or family dictated how people
should vote. One example was Boroughbridge, who was electorate was
in the pocket of the Duke of Newcastle. On top
of that, parts of Britain weren't really represented in parliament.
More than half of MP's were elected from southern England,

(06:13):
while other parts of Britain weren't represented by a member
of Parliament at all. As the population of Britain had shifted,
it was common for small boroughs which were controlled by
the gentry, to have representation in Parliament, while growing cities
did not. This was true for Manchester, which had no
MP even though its population had grown to more than

(06:33):
one hundred thousand people by eighteen fifteen. Meanwhile, other areas
known as rotten boroughs sent two MPs to Parliament even
though they only had a handful of voters living there.
Old Saram, for example, had seven voters and two MPs.
So working people and poor people in Britain, some of
whom were both working and poor, understandably felt like they

(06:56):
were not being represented in the government and that the
government didn't understand or care about their interests are well being,
and in places like Manchester, this was heightened by just
not having any representation in Parliament at all. A movement
for parliamentary reform had started to grow in Britain in
the late eighteenth century in response to both the American
and French Revolutions and Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man,

(07:20):
which had also influenced the French Revolution. Reform groups founded
in the late seventeen hundreds in early eighteen hundreds focused
on changing how MPs were elected and on the idea
of universal manhood suffrage, meaning that all men or all
working men would get the right to vote. There were
also female reform societies that were a big part of
this movement, and there were some organizations that included women's

(07:43):
suffrage among their goals. Female reform societies and women's suffragists
were really heavily criticized and their members were satirized in print,
with critics implying that there was something questionable about their virtue.
We are going to get into how this movement developed,
but first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. The

(08:08):
movement for parliamentary reform in Britain was really focused on
the idea of showing the government that massive numbers of
people supported these proposed reforms. This included petitioning and holding
mass meetings, and the first of these mass meetings was
held in November of eighteen sixteen in Spa Fields in London.
It drew a crowd of about ten thousand people along

(08:29):
with a large number of spectators. Another more radical meeting
followed at the same place on December two, eighteen sixteen.
There's more detail about that one in our Cato Street
conspiracy episode, but in brief, some of the leaders of
that meeting used it to try to start a revolution.
One person was killed and it came to be known
as the Spa Fields Riots. The British government began to

(08:52):
find this movement threatening. Some of it was just about
the potential loss of political power if more people had
the right to vote, or seats in Parliament were reapportioned
to try to more consistently represent all of Britain. But
this wasn't just about power. There had been violent incidents
beyond just the Spa Fields riots. Some of the movement's
leaders were radical and used violent rhetoric in their speeches.

(09:15):
The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror were also
still in the recent past, and it happened just on
the other side of the Channel, so there were fears
that something similar could happen in Britain. So the government
started taking steps to try to discourage this reform movement
and the math meetings that were associated with it. Parliament
renewed wartime laws that banned seditious speech, and in March

(09:37):
of eighteen seventeen they suspended the Habeas Corpus Act. I'm
putting in this definition of habeas corpus here because I
feel like it's a term people are familiar with but
might not actually understand what it means. It's a Latin
term that has a slightly different legal nuance depending on
the jurisdiction, but it roughly translates to you may have
the body, meaning that if you satisfy the right legal procedures,

(10:00):
Authorities have to produce a person that's being detained or incarcerated,
usually to bring them to a court appearance, and that
court appearance is often meant to determine whether the person
is being held justly or unjustly. So the concept of
Habeas corpus is meant to protect people from being unlawfully imprisoned.
The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act meant that people

(10:22):
lost that protection and could be arrested and held indefinitely
without being charged with anything. This didn't stop the protests though.
In March of eighteen seventeen, a group called the Manchester
Radicals gathered in St Peter's Field planning to march to London.
They wanted to protest the suspension of Habeas Corpus and
draw attention to the issues facing textile workers in Lancashire.

(10:45):
These marchers carried blankets and reform petitions with them, so
this demonstration was nicknamed the March of the Blanketeers. When
authorities tried to disperse these marchers. Hundreds of people were arrested.
Nearly thirty were imprisoned for random peeriods of time, most
of them never being charged with anything or brought to trial.
A volunteer force called the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry was

(11:08):
also formed in response to the March of the Blanketeers,
another unrest that happened the same year. Parliament repealed the
Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in January of eighteen eighteen, but
the government was still focused on trying to break up
the reform movement. By March of eighteen eighteen, Home Secretary
Lord Sidmuth had said quote, the country will not be

(11:29):
tranquilized until blood shall have been shed, either by the
law or the sword. As a summer approached in eighteen eighteen,
reformers started planning a mass meeting in Manchester. One of
the speakers was to be Henry Hunt, who had been
a speaker at those previous meetings that spa Fields that
we mentioned a few moments ago. He had become one
of the most visible people within this movement. He was

(11:51):
a flamboyant speaker who usually wore a very recognizable white hat.
He was able to draw and motivate large crowds. A
lot of articles about him today are extremely critical, but
they also draw a lot of sources for people who
hated him, so it's not totally clear how much of
that is accurate. He was widely satirized in cartoons and articles,

(12:12):
and the anti reform side gave him the nickname Oorritor,
which was meant to be disparaging, but today people pretty
much always just call him or Itt or Hunt. The
idea was that on August eighteen nineteen, people would march
from towns all around Manchester, gathering together at St. Peter's Fields.
Some were coming from as far as thirty miles or

(12:32):
forty eight kilometers away, and some of these groups were
going to be very large, numbering hundreds or thousands of people.
Organizers wanted to make sure they arrived in an orderly
organized way, so many practiced their marching in the moors
around their towns and villages in the weeks leading up
to August sixteen. A lot of people also made banners

(12:53):
to carry on the day, which were decorated with the
name of the society that was carrying the banner, or
a slogan like you Night and be Free or liberty
and fraternity, or taxation without representation is unjust and tyrannical.
So a lot of people were carrying banners while they
were practicing as well, since they were going to have
to carry them all that way on the sixteenth. This

(13:13):
was also at the same time of year that many
of these communities carried out a tradition of rush bearing.
This came from the practice of annually replacing the layer
of rushes that covered the church's stone floor, and had
gradually become more of a parade in which participants carried
rushes to the church, wearing their Sunday best, carrying banners,
and pulling elaborately decorated rush carts. So people had logical

(13:37):
reasons for practicing their marching before this event, and it
was all going on at a time when it was
pretty normal in these communities for people to parade from
one place to another. But authorities worried that there was
some kind of military purpose behind the drilling, and that
organizers were really conspiring to pull off something more violent
than a march to a meeting. By August twelve, local

(13:59):
magistrates were writing to each other with their concerns that
all of this might really be a pretext to some
kind of armed revolution. As people living in and around
Manchester prepared to march to the meeting and spend the
day listening to speeches and rallying for reform, the magistrates
prepared to make them disperse. Chief Magistrate William Holton instructed

(14:20):
the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry and the neighboring Cheshire Yeomanry
to remain at the ready, although many of them reportedly
did so by spending the morning at Manchester's taverns. The
magistrates recruited three hundred people for the Manchester Special Constabulary
and armed them with truncheons. British Army regulars from the
Regiment of Foot and the fifteen King's Hussars were called

(14:44):
in as well. The magistrates had rocks and stones removed
from the ground so they could not be used as weapons,
and planned to arrest Henry Hunt as soon as he
began speaking. We'll talk about how this all played out
on the day after one more quick sponsor break. The

(15:07):
crowd that arrived at St Peter's Fields in Manchester on
August nineteen was festive and excited. Sixteenth was a Monday,
so people who worked in the region's textile factories would
have been at work for the day, but while power
loom factories were growing in Lancashire, the majority of textile
workers in that area we're still working at home on
hand looms, and they typically worked on Saturdays and took

(15:30):
Monday off. Many communities female reformer societies were marching together,
all dressed in white on the sixteenth, although there were
also lots of women there who weren't specifically associated with
the society. Children were in attendance with their families, and
sources vary on the estimates of how many total people
were there. Most say at least sixty thousand, Some go

(15:53):
as high as a hundred and fifty thousand or more.
It's really kind of all over the place. It was
illegal gathering, and although there may have been some people
who brought a stick or some of their weapon, they
had been told to bring quote no other weapon but
that of a self approving conscience. Bishop Edward Stanley later
said of the gathering, quote, I saw no symptoms of

(16:13):
riot or disturbances before the meeting. The impression on my
mind was that the people were sullenly peaceful. I don't
know why. He says sullenly peaceful, when many of the
other accounts say it was more festive, kind of like
a fun, excited party. The Manchester Courier described it this way,
quote at half past eleven, My attention was first particularly

(16:33):
attracted by a crowd of people advancing to the ground
with flags and music. They came in a sort of
marching order, and were covered with dust, having, as I learned,
come from some town at a distance. A number of women,
boys and even children were in the procession, which had
from this circumstance more the appearance of a large village
party going to a merrymaking than that of a body

(16:54):
of people advancing to overthrow the government of their country.
John Benjamin Smith later became a liberal politician and part
of the Anti Corn Law League, but at the time
he was twenty five and he had not planned to
go to the meeting. His aunt asked him to accompany
her to a friend's house nearby so that she could watch,
and he wrote of it quote, there were crowds of

(17:15):
people in all directions, full of good humor, laughing and
shouting and making fun. It seemed to be a gala
day with the country people, who were mostly dressed in
their best and brought with them their wives. And when
I saw boys and girls taking their father's hand in
the procession, I observed to my aunt, these are the
guarantees of their peaceable intentions. We need have no fears.

(17:36):
Magistrates met at a home that was adjacent to the
meeting at about eleven in the morning, and sources differ
about what happened there when Hunt started speaking and authorities
moved into arrest him. Officials maintained that Chief Magistrate William
Holton read the Riot Act before ordering the Yeomanry to
make the crowd disperse. So here in the US, most

(17:58):
people know the phrase read the Riot Act as a
figure of speech, basically meaning giving someone a very stern
lecture for some sort of misbehavior. But the Riot Act
is a real act, first passed by Parliament in seventeen
fourteen after a series of riots had swept through Britain,
and its full title was an Act for preventing tumults

(18:18):
and riotous assemblies and for the more speedy and effectual
punishing of the rioters. The Act made it illegal for
twelve or more people to quote unlawfully assemble and disturb
the public peace. Local authorities had the right to approach
such a group and order them to disperse, and failure
to do so was a felony. The Act remained on

(18:39):
the books until the mid to late twentieth century, so
under the terms of the Riot Act, someone who was
authorized to do so had to approach the unlawful assembly
as closely as they safely could, call for silence or
otherwise quote cause to be commanded silence, and then an
allowed voice they had to read this statement and its

(18:59):
entirety quote, our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth
all persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves and peaceably,
to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business,
upon the pains contained in the Act made in the
first year of King George, for preventing tumult and riotous assemblies.
God save the King. Once that statement was read, then

(19:22):
the crowd had an hour to disperse. Accounts differ in
whether authorities in Manchester that day read the Riot Act,
with the reports that it was read mostly coming from
magistrates and members of the military, but if it was read,
it probably was not heard by the vast majority of
the people there. They definitely were not given a one
hour window to disperse. The Yeomanry came down on the

(19:44):
crowd within minutes of Hunt's beginning to speak. The British
Army later blamed the Yeomanry for what happened next. The
crowd was very tightly packed into St. Peter's fields, and
the yeoman Red quickly broke form as they charged in,
leaving the members of the Womanry in very small groups
surrounded by marchers who were packed in too tightly to disperse.

(20:05):
The yeoman Read didn't have much training, and a lot
of them were reportedly intoxicated, and when they found themselves
trapped and kind of cut off from each other by
this crowd, they started knocking people away with the flats
of their sabers. In some accounts, things escalated when demonstrators
started throwing rocks, although some eyewitnesses said they did not
see any evidence of rock throwing or any other retaliation

(20:27):
from the Crown. The Yeomanry sabers were also freshly sharpened,
something that many sources conclude is evidence that they had
intended to use them, or to at least do as
much harm as they could if they accidentally or intentionally
struck someone with the edge. Rather than the flat Yeah.
This has been described as one of the most documented
events of the nineteenth century. There's something like three hundred

(20:51):
and fifty different eyewitness accounts, and a lot of them
contradict each other in details like this. The Army regulars
arrived at the field at about two pm, fired down
streets to encourage people to disperse, and the fifteen hussars
charged into the crowd. But Lieutenant Colonel Guiless Strange realized
that the crowd had formed kind of a bottleneck and

(21:12):
it was partly blocked in by the infantry. They couldn't disperse,
they had nowhere to go, so he pulled his force back.
Here's how John Benjamin Smith described the scene at that
point quote it was a hot, dusty day. Clouds of
dust arose which obscured the view. When it had subsided,
a startling scene was presented. Numbers of men, women and

(21:33):
children were lying on the ground who had been knocked
down and run over by the soldiers. I noticed one
woman lying face downwards, apparently lifeless. A man went up
to her and lifted one of her legs. It fell
as if she were lifeless. Another man lifted both her
legs and let them fall. I saw her sometime after,
carried off by the legs and arms as if she

(21:55):
were dead, and the end eleven people were killed there
on the day, five of them from saber wounds and
the rest from being trampled or crushed by people or horses.
The day's first fatality is usually cited as William Fields,
who was a baby knocked out of the arms of
his twenty three year old mother and then trampled. At
least seven more people died of their injuries. Later, two

(22:18):
constables were killed, likely by soldiers and probably by accident.
This took about twenty minutes between when the yeoman recharged
in and when the field was cleared. It seems as
though the yeomanry and soldiers focused on people with banners
and on women. Of the six d fifty four recorded injuries,
at least one hundred sixty eight were women. Four of

(22:39):
those women died of their injuries. Roughly half of those
reported injuries came from sabers or other weapons, as opposed
to being crushed or trampled. Based on the recorded numbers,
about one eighth of the marchers were women, but women
made up about one third of the injuries. There were
also probably a lot more injuries that went unreported. People

(23:00):
were really afraid to seek medical care out of fear
that they would be arrested or faced some kind of
other consequences for having been at the meeting. Twenty five
year old James Lees, who was a veteran of the
Battle of Waterloo, died of injuries after being turned away
from the Manchester infirmary. He was reportedly turned away because
he refused to agree not to participate in such meetings

(23:21):
in the future. He was quoted as saying, quote, at
Waterloo there was man to man, but here it was
downright murder. Henry Hunt was arrested and tried for seditious
assembly and was sentenced to thirty months in prison. Three
other speakers and organizers were sentenced to twelve months each.
Although people tried to raise funds to help the injured

(23:42):
and the families of the killed, most of this money
wound up going to Hunt's legal defense. Local journalist James
Rowe coined the term Peterloo massacre, combining St. Peter's Fields
where it happened with the Battle of Waterloo, which the
fifteenth Thustards had fought at four years before. Rose newspaper,
The Manchester Observer, was shut down in the wake of

(24:03):
his reporting on the incident, and he was charged and
convicted with seditious libel. Afterwards, John Edward Taylor started the
Manchester Guardian and that's just the Guardian today. The massacre
temporarily united reformers across the political spectrum, with the more
radical and more moderate wings of the movement coming together
in outrage over what had happened, but this didn't help

(24:26):
propel the movement forward. The magistrates and other officials sided
with the Yeomanry and the regulars, including holding a meeting
in secret to thank the Yeomanry for their work. There
was no investigation into the behavior of the Yeomanry, the
Special Constables, or the military units involved. In response to
the massacre, Parliament also passed legislation known as the Six

(24:47):
Acts in November of eighteen nineteen. These were the Training
Prevention Act, the Seizure of Arms Act, the Seditious Meetings
Prevention Act, the Misdemeanors Act, the Blasphemous and Seditious Libel Act,
and the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act. Together, these acts
restricted the freedoms of assembly, speech, and the press. They
specifically outlawed the kind of drilling people had been doing

(25:10):
in the moors leading up to the meeting. Meanwhile, nearly
five thousand people signed a petition denouncing the meeting that
had been held, to thank the Yeomanry and condemning the violence,
and that read, in part quote, we are fully satisfied
by personal observation on undoubted information, that the meeting was
perfectly peaceable, that no seditious or intemperate harangues were made there,

(25:31):
that the riot Act, if read at all, was read
privately or without the knowledge of a great body of
the meeting. And we feel it are bound in duty
to protest against and to express our uttered disapprobation of
the unexpected and unnecessary violence by which the assembly was dispersed.
Many of the Special Constables and members of the Yeomanry
were shopkeepers, and people boycotted those shops afterward. The massacre

(25:55):
and the government and other official response to it were
widely criticized and satur rised in print. An anonymous writer
created a pamphlet based on the children's rhyme who Killed
Cock Robin, with the robin being the people who were
hurt and killed. Somewhat similar political pamphlet was called The
Political House that Jack Built and was written by William
Hone and illustrated with political cartoons like the Children's rhyme.

(26:19):
Every line builds on the one before. So this is
the house that Jack built. This is the wealth that
lay in the house that Jack built. These are the
vermin that plunder the wealth that lay in the house
that Jack built. This is the thing that, in spite
of new acts and attempts to restrain it by soldiers
and tax will poison the vermin that plunder the wealth
that lay in the house that Jack built. The thing

(26:39):
that's going to poison these vermin is a printing press,
and the vermin are an assortment of bishops, court officials,
the army, tax collectors, and the like. Percy bish Shelley
also wrote a lengthy poem called The Mask of Anarchy,
although it was not published until after his death, and
he sent that poem to Lee Hunt, who withheld its
publication for fear of political or legal consequence. Is and

(27:00):
there were also lots of household goods like cups and
tea towels that were made to commemorate the massacre. But
in spite of all this criticism and publicity. It was
a really long time before any of the reforms that
this movement had been looking for came into being. The
Representation of the People Act of eighteen thirty two was
the first act to include some of these reforms, and
it was past thirteen years later. It gave more men

(27:24):
the right to vote and redistributed some seats in Parliament,
which reduced the number of rotten boroughs and gave some
places some representation that they had not previously had. Although
it was nicknamed the Great Reform Act, these changes were
far more moderate than what reformers had been working toward.
Additional reform acts followed in eighteen sixty seven and eighteen

(27:44):
eighty four, which continued to refine who could vote and
how communities were represented in Parliament. But it wasn't until
nineteen eighteen, almost a century after the Peterloo Massacre, that
the Representation of the People Act granted universal suffrage to men.
All men over the age of twenty one could vote,
as could women over the age of thirty who owned property. Yeah.

(28:06):
By that point there had been entire other movements that
had come and gone in Britain, including like the Chartist movement,
was in that whole window, the whole lot. Ah, do
you have listener mail that's maybe not quite so sad.
I mean I do in a way, and it's it's
kind of connects to this because because like a lot

(28:27):
of the investigation into what happened at the time was
really focused on these martyrs and what they were up
to and whether they were up to something nefarious, and
not on the people who carried out the actual killing.
This email is from you on I hope I am
saying your name correctly and Yuan Rights, Holly and Tracy.
What a timely piece. Just last week, the Mercury News

(28:47):
printed a report on US Representative Mark to Sanier's amendment
to exonerate the Port Chicago fifty that passed the House.
While I barely skim newspaper headlines these days, I devoured
the because I thought I had heard about the incident
from your show. That must be the Halifax explosion. Your
latest show added so much depth to my understanding about

(29:08):
the Port Chicago fifty. While listening, I can't help but
wondering where's the intellect of those Navy officers who looked
down on the quote lowest intellectual strata given the court
finding quote that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally
nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives. These officers who
ordered such personnel back to handling high explosives must be

(29:29):
there lacked the intellect to understand that conclusion, lacked the
intellect to integrate that conclusion into their decisions. Should they
pass the previous test or should they have possessed the intellected?
You both must have committed treason by attempting to further
sabotage the Navy port during the active war. This is
a good point, so um, thank you you on for

(29:49):
writing two things. Number one, A couple of people have
gotten in touch with us about this. On July twelve,
the National Defense Authors Asian Act was passed by the House.
There was a concurrent resolution the day before, and there
is an amendment that's part of the authorization that would
um require the Secretary of the Navy to either exonerate

(30:13):
the Port Chicago fifty or to look into exonerating the
Port Chicago fifty. I could not find the text of
the actual amendment on the Congress website. That there are
a lot of amendments to this particular bill, and I
could not find it among them. So that currently has
passed the House. Um, there is not a similar bill

(30:36):
that has passed the Senate. It's not signed into law,
so like nothing is a sure thing yet. But this representative,
who I think represents the part of California that Port
Chicago is in, has been trying to get the Port
Chicago fifty exonerated. It's not the first time that there's
been an attempt to get them exonerated, but is ongoing.
We recorded that episode on July nights, so we recorded
the episode before any of those things had happened. And

(30:58):
regards in regards to a question at the end, yeah,
that's just not a question that anybody was exploring at all,
and any of the hearings that happened at the time,
there were just a lot of examinations of the men
who were loading the munitions in Port Chicago and really
no examination of the decisions that led them to be
doing that. So, um, that was one of the very

(31:18):
frustrating things, and that was a very uh astute way
of laying out the questions involved. So thank you you
want for this email and for the link to the
article about this defense bill amendment that may lead to
an exhoneration if it all continues on UH If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast or a history podcast at how stuff Works

(31:41):
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(32:06):
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