Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey Revisions History listeners, Malcolm here. Before we get started,
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Speaker 1: explores a legacy of Malibu's dark prints. Mickey Dora. Mickey
Speaker 1: was a surfer known for his style, grace, and aggression
Speaker 1: who ruled the Malibu Beaches from the nineteen fifties to
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Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus and you can binge this one too. A
Speaker 1: couple weeks ago, one of my producers, Ben at Af Haffrey,
Speaker 1: came by the office because he had a story to
Speaker 1: tell me. Ben, Welcome to Hudson, New York.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me in Hudson, New York.
Speaker 1: Ben just took over writing and hosting a Pushkin show
Speaker 1: I love called The Last Archive, a show about the
Speaker 1: history of truth. Jill Lapour used to host it. Ben's
Speaker 1: worked on it since the beginning. He's always digging around
Speaker 1: in the stacks of some old library, and one day
Speaker 1: last summer he was in the medical history archives at
Speaker 1: Harvard where he found a story that blew his mind.
Speaker 3: Okay, I want to play you some tape.
Speaker 1: Okay, go ahead, Ella, welcome back to Dallas.
Speaker 4: How marvelous. Oh, thank you, and it's a pleasure to
Speaker 4: be back here again.
Speaker 3: Do you recognize that voice?
Speaker 1: I no, tell me.
Speaker 3: That's the voice of Elphantzterle. And she's being interviewed in
Speaker 3: the eighties and Dallas, and she's about to tell this
Speaker 3: big story about how she got famous. It's a story
Speaker 3: she tells all the time, like an amateur knight at
Speaker 3: the Apollo Theater when she sings and everyone realizes she's
Speaker 3: got an amazing voice. But I want to play you
Speaker 3: this tape because I want to show you what happened
Speaker 3: when she tells it in this particular instance.
Speaker 4: Okay, Ella, as you look back on your life, here
Speaker 4: was a child from an orphanage and now, no, no,
Speaker 4: somebody wrote that up. Where did that get come? I
Speaker 4: had well, that was a publicity thing long time ago.
Speaker 4: But I have family, and I had family then, but
Speaker 4: my mother had died, and I guess that's why they
Speaker 4: used that. Mind that I was an awphan, but I
Speaker 4: had family. At what age were you when your mother died?
Speaker 4: I was fifteen, about fifteen, because from there we went
Speaker 4: to the amateur contest.
Speaker 3: I was about fifteen, because from there we went to
Speaker 3: the amateur contest. It's not a lie, but she's skipping
Speaker 3: two years of her life, about two years, and she
Speaker 3: always skips these two years of her life when she
Speaker 3: tells this story. And what I want to do today
Speaker 3: is tell you a story about what happens in those
Speaker 3: two years, because it's a story not just about Elphitzgerald,
Speaker 3: but kind of crazily a story about the invention of
Speaker 3: this whole realm of social science that she is kind
Speaker 3: of bound up in that I think you'll be interested in,
Speaker 3: not just because it's a very you kind of thing,
Speaker 3: but also because it's a story that takes place half
Speaker 3: a mile from where we're sitting right now.
Speaker 1: Wow, welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. Today in the show, Ben tells me about
Speaker 1: the forgotten origins of social network theory and the missing
Speaker 1: chapter in Ella Fitzgerald's life. It's absolutely Banana's story. Just
Speaker 1: so you know, I'd read a little bit of Ben's
Speaker 1: research before we had this conversation, so I'm a little
Speaker 1: ahead of you, but still just wait, do you see
Speaker 1: how Ella Fitzgerald fits into this whole thing. Before we
Speaker 1: get to her, we have to meet the experimenter, a
Speaker 1: doctor from halfway around the world. Wait, so back up
Speaker 1: for a second. So we begin with this man Jacob
Speaker 1: what's his.
Speaker 3: Middle name, Jacob Levy Morino.
Speaker 1: Jacob Levy Marino. Who is He's Austrian.
Speaker 3: He always claimed that he was born on a boat
Speaker 3: in the Black Sea.
Speaker 2: I was born on the boat the Black Sea, and
Speaker 2: I'll be traveling from one part of the world to
Speaker 2: the others and to find myself.
Speaker 3: Actually, he was just born in eighteen eighty nine in
Speaker 3: Bucharest to a fifteen and a half year old mother
Speaker 3: who had married a traveling salesman father and lived in
Speaker 3: Bucharest I think for the first five or six years
Speaker 3: of his life before moving to Austria.
Speaker 1: He's basically lower middle class Jewish immigrant living in Vienna,
Speaker 1: and yet he ends up getting a pretty serious education.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he goes to school at the University of Vienna.
Speaker 3: He's studying to be a physician. He becomes really interested
Speaker 3: in psychiatry. He was noted on campus for walking around
Speaker 3: in a long green cloak and letting his beard grow
Speaker 3: in a way that no one else is letting their
Speaker 3: beard grow and he never wore a hat. So he's
Speaker 3: just sort of striking larger than life figure on campus,
Speaker 3: which is kind of like it's always been the thing
Speaker 3: with him since he was a kid, Like this is
Speaker 3: this story. His mother always told this story that one
Speaker 3: day she was holding him on the street and a
Speaker 3: woman was walking by and pointed at him and said,
Speaker 3: one day that boy will become a very great man.
Speaker 3: People will come from all over the world to see him.
Speaker 3: And so he had this kind of like self described
Speaker 3: megalomania and literally would play god as a child, which
Speaker 3: is a thing he continued to do for his whole life.
Speaker 1: So he's part of the intellectual scene in Vienna. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then makes his way to the United States.
Speaker 3: Yes, So he makes his way to the United States
Speaker 3: after World War One, and you know, psychodrama at this
Speaker 3: point is sort of his big idea.
Speaker 1: Well, wait to find psychodrama is doing.
Speaker 3: So it's like, you have a problem you want to
Speaker 3: work the common way of working through that problem is
Speaker 3: to go to a psychoanalyst office and lie down on
Speaker 3: the couch and just talk about your problem. He thought,
Speaker 3: you have a problem, you bring it to the stage
Speaker 3: and you act out whatever problem you're having, and you
Speaker 3: have this kind of dynamic way of engaging with the
Speaker 3: issues you were facing, and then that would help you
Speaker 3: either have a catharsist and break through it or just
Speaker 3: like reimagine your own role within the problems you were
Speaker 3: having such that you no longer have them. So what
Speaker 3: he's really interested in is creative spontaneity. He thinks of
Speaker 3: children as a model. He did a lot of tutoring
Speaker 3: when he was in medical school, and he basically felt
Speaker 3: like the creative spontaneity kids have is a thing he
Speaker 3: wanted to give to everybody, Like you can when you're
Speaker 3: like watch a group of kids playing, which he did
Speaker 3: a lot when he was a tutor, They just kind
Speaker 3: of like pick up roles immediately. And he'd see these
Speaker 3: groups of kids, you know, like, how does everyone decide
Speaker 3: all of a sudden they're playing cops and robbers or
Speaker 3: just sort of lock into some sort of performance and
Speaker 3: communicate it in an almost unspoken, instantaneous way. That sort
Speaker 3: of self creative freedom was a thing that he thought
Speaker 3: everybody should have. So his therapeutic theater stuff is really
Speaker 3: an attempt to figure out how does that work? Where
Speaker 3: does that spark come from? What are the dynamics between
Speaker 3: these people? What's a systematic way to think about those
Speaker 3: dynamics that promotes this kind of spontaneous interaction between them.
Speaker 3: That preoccupation of his is where social network analysis comes from.
Speaker 3: Is basically like, how can I study a group and
Speaker 3: figure out how the ideas are moving within the group
Speaker 3: and make it sort of rigorous in a way. He's
Speaker 3: really preoccupied with this question what goes on with a
Speaker 3: group of people because he's stuck between psychoanalysis, which is
Speaker 3: all about the individual and the self, and a lot
Speaker 3: of the social sciences in the nineteen twenties, which are
Speaker 3: these kind of big static numbers like averages or like
Speaker 3: the sort of information you get from a poll.
Speaker 1: So his principal objection to psychoanalysis is the fact that
Speaker 1: it's too focused on the individual, on the self. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems must maybe it seems it seems like it
Speaker 1: would seemed decadent to him to lie on a couch
Speaker 1: and talk about yourself endlessly.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, he used to talk about this all the time.
Speaker 2: There's still people who go on the couch for six
Speaker 2: eight years, spending twenty thousand dollars and so for us,
Speaker 2: and then they come to us and what do we do?
Speaker 2: We let him act out the problem that it is
Speaker 2: on the reality lift.
Speaker 1: That tape is from where Cooper Union he's giving a talk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like nineteen sixty something, so it's later in life,
Speaker 3: so he never really got over it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk a little about how does he
Speaker 1: what is this big experiment at how does he come
Speaker 1: to conduct it?
Speaker 3: So basically he's he's in New York. He's got this
Speaker 3: improv theater that like the critics all hate at Carnegie Hall,
Speaker 3: and one day a Columbia graduate student in sociology named
Speaker 3: Helen Hall Jennings come to the improv theater and somehow
Speaker 3: they identify that they're both really interested in this question
Speaker 3: of rigorously figuring out the way groups work. And Moreno,
Speaker 3: as you can tell, is sort of like all over
Speaker 3: the place and wasn't a super focused or rigorous person,
Speaker 3: but had just a crazy number of ideas that were
Speaker 3: really pretty insightful. And what Helen Hall Jennings had was
Speaker 3: an extremely rigorous math background and also connections. And when
Speaker 3: they sort of figured out that they had this thing
Speaker 3: income and this interest, they began working with each other,
Speaker 3: and so they begin to work up a science for
Speaker 3: mapping the way groups work. So they begin to go
Speaker 3: to classrooms. It was like a Brooklyn public school. They
Speaker 3: go to where they ask all the kids, like who
Speaker 3: do you most want to sit next to? And then
Speaker 3: they start creating diagrams of like how successfully integrated the
Speaker 3: classroom is, like are people sitting next to the kids
Speaker 3: they want to sit next to? They go to Sing
Speaker 3: Sing prison, but the thing is like they're kind of
Speaker 3: fiddling around the edges, like these are small experiments and
Speaker 3: what they need is a really big experiment, And they
Speaker 3: kind of luck into meeting this woman named Fanny French Morse,
Speaker 3: who's the superintendent of the New York State Training School
Speaker 3: for Girls, which is women's reformatory located half a mile
Speaker 3: from here. Like, go out the door, turn right, walk
Speaker 3: down the street, and we'd be there.
Speaker 1: I mean I go running up to that place all
Speaker 1: the time. It's a prison, now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's a place that really creeps me out.
Speaker 3: But the history of reformatories and the juvenile justice system,
Speaker 3: that's one of the big accomplishments of the progressive era
Speaker 3: is this idea we should not be treating kids who
Speaker 3: commit crimes the way we treat adults who commit crimes,
Speaker 3: because on some level people thought kids can change more
Speaker 3: than adults can. So rather than like locking them in
Speaker 3: a prison in a city with a bunch of adult criminals,
Speaker 3: they should have a different court system. They could be
Speaker 3: charged for different things. Like a lot of young girls
Speaker 3: were sent to reform schools just for being incorrigible or ungovernable,
Speaker 3: but they were sent to these places that were always
Speaker 3: in bucolic settings that were meant to take them out
Speaker 3: of contaminated cities and put them in places where they
Speaker 3: could become better versions of themselves. And so if Fanny
Speaker 3: Frenchmore surrounds the Hudson One, and it's always on the
Speaker 3: cusp of being a prison or a school, and so
Speaker 3: it's constantly in need of being reformed because it gets
Speaker 3: too strict or it gets too punitive, and they need
Speaker 3: to make it more re educative instead. And she's this
Speaker 3: lifelong progressive reformer who takes over the training school when
Speaker 3: it's become basically a prison, and she's kind of like
Speaker 3: a legend in this field. The first night she takes over,
Speaker 3: she makes a huge pile on the lawn of all
Speaker 3: of the straight jackets and the restraining sheets and the
Speaker 3: prison uniforms, and she lights it on fire. So she's
Speaker 3: this firebrand reformer who's really trying to do something at
Speaker 3: this school. She introduces art, she buys a farm, she
Speaker 3: gets all these antiques that the girls start reworking, trying
Speaker 3: to give them an aesthetic education. But notably, the thing
Speaker 3: that the training school really does is it's a miniature
Speaker 3: version of society. So if any French Mors invites jail
Speaker 3: Moreno and Helen Hall Jennings to the school, which is
Speaker 3: thrilling to them because it's a totally closed environment. That's
Speaker 3: this microcosm of society with five hundred girls who are
Speaker 3: arranged in prick cottages with nice lattice work trim. So
Speaker 3: jail Moreno moves to Hudson with Helen Hall Jennings.
Speaker 1: And he goes for it because he's living. Is he
Speaker 1: at this point well known, what's his level.
Speaker 3: Of He's becoming better known. But he is a person
Speaker 3: who wants to be operating on the biggest scale possible,
Speaker 3: and this scale of experiment is an opportunity for him
Speaker 3: to do that. So I think he sees it as
Speaker 3: a big break.
Speaker 1: So the European genius Meglomaniac and his brilliant data minded
Speaker 1: research partner get on the train from Manhattan, come up
Speaker 1: two hours to Hudson to conduct one of the first
Speaker 1: and most dramatic experiments of its kind ever.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's exactly right, an.
Speaker 1: Attempt to understand the social dynamics of a girl's prison
Speaker 1: reform school. There are five hundred girls into school.
Speaker 3: Roughly five hundred girls.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So he descends on the school, he and Helen
Speaker 1: hel Jennings and what do they do.
Speaker 3: So the first thing they do is they hand out
Speaker 3: questionnaires to all the girls that say, you know, choose
Speaker 3: the top five girls in this community that you want
Speaker 3: to live with and now and tell us why, and
Speaker 3: then choose the five girls that you absolutely do not
Speaker 3: want to live with. And so it's kind of reading
Speaker 3: his account of this, it's like really dense. I mean,
Speaker 3: he doesn't really write in English very well at this
Speaker 3: point in his life, and there's a ton of data,
Speaker 3: but you get these kind of reprints of the things
Speaker 3: that the girls say. So we actually had an actress
Speaker 3: read one of them out and this is one of
Speaker 3: the comments in the questionnaire.
Speaker 4: Dee, I want in my cottage because I feel towards
Speaker 4: her like she was my little sister I never had
Speaker 4: any and I like to take care of her.
Speaker 2: Mostly she's just a lonesome little child you just.
Speaker 4: Have to be fond of.
Speaker 3: So they like gather all these questionnaires from the girls
Speaker 3: about how they feel about each other, and then they
Speaker 3: begin to calculate from that, you know, where are their
Speaker 3: mutual attractions, where does everyone hate each other? And like
Speaker 3: to what degree do these cottage groupings even make sense?
Speaker 3: And they want to start putting a number to that.
Speaker 3: But it's not just the questionnaires. They begin to do
Speaker 3: a lot of observing of the girls, like watching them
Speaker 3: work in the steam laundry, watching them make rugs, or
Speaker 3: like shine up antiques, and that becomes data too, And
Speaker 3: all of this is used in service of figuring out
Speaker 3: who's isolated in the community, who's rejected by the community,
Speaker 3: who's beloved by the community. But they're observing everything. They're collecting,
Speaker 3: like Marina at one point says, they collect ten thousand
Speaker 3: pages of data. And one of the things about this
Speaker 3: new science is you have that much data and you
Speaker 3: can't conceive of it all like it's before computers, there's
Speaker 3: no way to really understand what that all means except
Speaker 3: for a map, and that is the critical thing that
Speaker 3: they do is create these really intricate maps of what
Speaker 3: the community looks like. So like this, this map right
Speaker 3: here is the entire community of the school.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it looks like a looks like a giant
Speaker 1: spider's web. Yeah, And he has nodes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve, thirteen.
Speaker 1: Is each one of these nodes a group of girls
Speaker 1: or a single girl?
Speaker 3: Each one of those big circles is a cottage? Oh?
Speaker 1: I see, Oh I see no, but I've been fooling
Speaker 1: any further. Do we believe these maps? AT's say, do
Speaker 1: we think he is actually acting? You're accurately capturing the
Speaker 1: patterns of relationships and influence within the community.
Speaker 3: I think he misses a lot. And also there's this
Speaker 3: kind of forced thing about it, like none of these
Speaker 3: girls are consenting to it, Like who knows about if
Speaker 3: they're telling him the truth? But I think that there
Speaker 3: is genuine insight there. And one of the reasons is
Speaker 3: there's this thing that happens. It starts on Halloween night
Speaker 3: of nineteen thirty two, there's a party in one of
Speaker 3: the cottages and somebody creates a distraction and two of
Speaker 3: the girls, Ruth and Marie, run away from the cottage.
Speaker 3: And then something really weird happens, like, over a total
Speaker 3: of fourteen days, fourteen girls run away. It's kind of
Speaker 3: this chain reaction. Nobody really understands why it's happening, but
Speaker 3: it's like a runaway rate that's thirty times higher than normal.
Speaker 3: And this happens after Marino has collected a lot of
Speaker 3: his data.
Speaker 1: He has an outbreak essentially of girls who are who
Speaker 1: get this idea to flee.
Speaker 3: To run away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's trying to trace was he trying to
Speaker 1: trying to trace the source of the outbreak or to
Speaker 1: see how the idea of running away had traveled through
Speaker 1: the community.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's trying to see how the idea of running
Speaker 3: away travels through the community. Which is this kind of
Speaker 3: you know, you talk about this a lot, this idea
Speaker 3: of an idea of being contagious. He posits that there's
Speaker 3: not some central reason why the girls are running away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so is he saying that his hypothesis would
Speaker 1: be the group who run away are all linked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: are intimately linked according to his network analysis.
Speaker 3: Yes, so that's his explanation, and so he and Jennings
Speaker 3: go to their maps and try and figure out if
Speaker 3: it's true. What his theory is that there's some way
Speaker 3: that this impulse to run away is traveling through the
Speaker 3: network of girls, and he and Jennings trace this in
Speaker 3: the map and then call it proof that networks exist.
Speaker 3: And one of the reason he's confident in it is
Speaker 3: because then based on those same questionnaires about who likes whom,
Speaker 3: who doesn't like whom, he rearranges the cottages and over
Speaker 3: the next some period of months, the number of runaways
Speaker 3: dwindles pretty radically. And so the thought is that's the
Speaker 3: evidence that this is in some way meaningful, is that
Speaker 3: the rearrangement seems to work.
Speaker 1: This whole thing is started by two girls. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: does network theory tell us about those who originate the epidemic?
Speaker 1: Were they socially influential girls?
Speaker 3: So no, they're actually like pretty isolated girls. So this
Speaker 3: is like a map of them. That's one of those
Speaker 3: is Ruth and one of those is Marie. And basically
Speaker 3: like red lines are are lines of attraction, black lines
Speaker 3: are lines of rejection, and so they're really close. They
Speaker 3: dislike the same people, they like the same people. They
Speaker 3: really like each other. But on the broader map, not
Speaker 3: a lot of lines of influence run towards them, except for,
Speaker 3: you know, a couple significant ones that connect them to
Speaker 3: the people who then begin to run away next.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, so they Our first observation is the
Speaker 1: two who begin the epidemic are closely bound to each
Speaker 1: other but isolated from everyone else. So there's a little
Speaker 1: social there's not a lot of glue holding them in place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not like the most popular girls in the
Speaker 3: reformatory runaway and then everyone follows suit. But like with
Speaker 3: all of this stuff, it's there's only so much he's seeing,
Speaker 3: and there's only so much he's allowing himself to say.
Speaker 3: And they also have this agenda of proving that their
Speaker 3: science works. Their account is the only account we have
Speaker 3: of what actually happened and how successful their stuff was.
Speaker 3: So this is his explanation.
Speaker 1: But he's got this big idea, and he and Jennings
Speaker 1: have the evidence he thinks proves it. How does he
Speaker 1: get the word out?
Speaker 3: Actually, the first place he publishes as results is kind
Speaker 3: of like a science fair. Is this big physicians conference
Speaker 3: that happens at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. I think
Speaker 3: it happens on like April second, nineteen thirty three. He
Speaker 3: goes to the waldorface story. He takes the train down
Speaker 3: from Hudson, goes to the water for Astoria. They put
Speaker 3: the maps on the walls and it's kind of a
Speaker 3: big deal. Like The New York Times writes a story
Speaker 3: that says, like emotions mapped by new geography. He calls
Speaker 3: it psychological geography. He's riding high. He says he's going
Speaker 3: to make a map of all the emotions in New
Speaker 3: York City. And that's the first place he publishes it.
Speaker 3: But then he goes back to the school. And it's
Speaker 3: a year after that the book comes out called who
Speaker 3: Shall Service? She's the book you have which is this?
Speaker 3: This is actually one of the original books. This is
Speaker 3: from nineteen thirty four. I took it out from the
Speaker 3: library and it's like a year overdue now. So that's
Speaker 3: if anyone's listening to this, I will be returning it someday.
Speaker 1: That's a push. Can promise we always return our library books.
Speaker 1: And after the break we'll find out what all this
Speaker 1: research has to do with el Fitzgerald. Okay, back did
Speaker 1: the reformatory. The social scientist JAYL. Moreno and his research
Speaker 1: partner Helen Hall Jennings had been making a study of
Speaker 1: a girl's reform school down the street from where we
Speaker 1: are right now in Hudson. It's the nineteen thirties. They've
Speaker 1: just debuted some of their research in Manhattan at the
Speaker 1: Waldorf Astoria. Big deal. And then someone new shows up
Speaker 1: at the school, right Ben.
Speaker 3: Yes, sixteen days after he publishes all this stuff on
Speaker 3: the walls of the Waldorf Astoria, a new girl has
Speaker 3: checked into the Hudson Reformatory. Ella Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the most one of the most famous
Speaker 1: and extraordinary singers of the twentieth century.
Speaker 3: Who, unbeknownst to everyone in her lifetime, was an inmate
Speaker 3: at the school in between the time when her mom
Speaker 3: died and the day that she became famous at the
Speaker 3: Apollo Theater singing in an amateur contest.
Speaker 4: I was fifteen, because from there we went to the
Speaker 4: amateur contest.
Speaker 3: She never talked publicly about this fact that she was
Speaker 3: an inmate at the training school for girls, and it
Speaker 3: wasn't even known publicly until after her death in the nineties,
Speaker 3: when this intrepid investigative reporter Nina Bernstein figured it out.
Speaker 3: But what we know is she's at the training school
Speaker 3: starting April eighteenth, nineteen thirty three. When she's hell, it's
Speaker 3: like a week before her sixteenth birthday because her mother
Speaker 3: has just died. So her mother dies when she's fifteen, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and she starts to take odd jobs, so she's running numbers.
Speaker 3: She's a lookout for a brothel. She gets picked up
Speaker 3: by the cops, sentenced to the training school, and she
Speaker 3: checks in just over two weeks after Moreno's shown his
Speaker 3: first diagrams from the research. She's then there for like
Speaker 3: about a year, and what we know of her time
Speaker 3: there is through Nina Bernstein's reporting talking to people who
Speaker 3: worked at the training school and remembered her. They would
Speaker 3: ask her to come back to be to talk to
Speaker 3: the girls, and she never would, so Bernstein talked to
Speaker 3: them about what's known about her. You know, people remember
Speaker 3: she had amazing penmanship, she was an excellent student. One
Speaker 3: day she was invited to a church nearby with a
Speaker 3: group of the black girls who liked to sing, and
Speaker 3: was said to have sung her heart out, but she
Speaker 3: was there at the time that the study was being made,
Speaker 3: and her experience there's significant to me, not just because
Speaker 3: she's a really famous person who intersects with this place,
Speaker 3: but because it blies Moreno's study, like it shows what's
Speaker 3: actually happening there that's not captured in his maps and
Speaker 3: new science.
Speaker 1: And sure enough she she.
Speaker 3: Is thought to have run away. Yeah, so basically she's
Speaker 3: checked in there. What we know from Nina Bernstein's reporting
Speaker 3: is she wasn't allowed to sing in the all white choir,
Speaker 3: must have stayed one of the two cottages the black
Speaker 3: girls were allowed to live in, probably like all of
Speaker 3: the black girls had to do laundry for the white girls.
Speaker 3: But she was also kept in the basement of one
Speaker 3: of the colleges at the training school and beaten. But
Speaker 3: then there's this vagueness around how she leaves the training school.
Speaker 3: But because of the parole records, it's plausible that she
Speaker 3: ran away and she's living back in New York, I
Speaker 3: think in Yonkers, and she's homeless, like she's wearing ragged clothes,
Speaker 3: and she and a group of her friends decide to
Speaker 3: enter the amateur Talent night at the Apollo Theater, which
Speaker 3: is this competition where if you win, you get to
Speaker 3: play at the Apollo for a week. And she at
Speaker 3: this point thinks she's going to be a dancer, so
Speaker 3: she's playing to enter as a dancer. I mean, do
Speaker 3: you want to hear the tape of her telling the story?
Speaker 3: So this is her towards the end of her career
Speaker 3: talking to Andre Previn.
Speaker 4: When you first started, you had visions of not being
Speaker 4: a singer. You were going to be a dancer.
Speaker 2: Is that right right? Tell me that, Oh you.
Speaker 4: Really want to hear that? Will? She started back in
Speaker 4: my hometown and Yonkers and I was what they call
Speaker 4: the you know, the greatest little dancer in Younkers. And
Speaker 4: we used to go down to the pollow on amateur night,
Speaker 4: my girlfriends and I and you know, like they always
Speaker 4: tell you if you want to be an amateur to
Speaker 4: sign and drop your name in the box. And being
Speaker 4: from young be cause we never thought anybody would send
Speaker 4: a postcard to young Kers and the three of us
Speaker 4: we put our names in and I was the one
Speaker 4: who was chosen and I made up. You know, they say,
Speaker 4: well if you don't go, you're chicken. So we went
Speaker 4: and believe it or not. I was the first amateur
Speaker 4: that they called. And there were two sisters who were
Speaker 4: the dance and the sisters in the world called the
Speaker 4: Edward Sisters, and they were starring at the Pollow and
Speaker 4: they closed the show with up and I when I
Speaker 4: saw those ladies dance, I says, no way, I'm going
Speaker 4: out there and trying to dance, because they stopped the show.
Speaker 4: I was the first one was called. And when I
Speaker 4: got out there, somebody hollered out, no, what is what
Speaker 4: is she gonna do?
Speaker 3: So this is like a story she tells all the time.
Speaker 3: What nobody knew is that when she was on stage
Speaker 3: at the Apollo, she was just out of the training school.
Speaker 4: And my m my mother had a uh record of
Speaker 4: Miss Connie Boswell, who I think was one of the
Speaker 4: greatest singers that ever lived, and uh she used to
Speaker 4: play uh objec of my Affection and Judy and I
Speaker 4: got so I had, you know, used to sing it.
Speaker 4: So the man said, sing something. Well, I tried to
Speaker 4: sing Judy and I think miss Connie Bosa cause then
Speaker 4: I tried to sing like her and I sang if
Speaker 4: a volage ben break it a whole bull.
Speaker 2: The sproom, that's.
Speaker 4: Judy, and everybody says all that girl can see and
Speaker 4: the people caught it so much. I sang object of
Speaker 4: my affection. That was the other side of the record,
Speaker 4: and I won first prize. So then that made me
Speaker 4: feel like, you know, well, I want to try to
Speaker 4: be a singer.
Speaker 3: I just I love it so much. And I think
Speaker 3: it's the You know, it's obvious, but if she's a
Speaker 3: note in these maps, we know her so well as
Speaker 3: a person. But obviously, like every single person in the
Speaker 3: maps had a full life too.
Speaker 1: And you actually think.
Speaker 3: You found Yeah, I think I found a notation.
Speaker 1: You found her place in the social diagma.
Speaker 3: Yes, I found a girl who's plausibly Elephantzgerald, but I
Speaker 3: can't know for sure.
Speaker 1: It's a black girl named Ella.
Speaker 3: In this book, there's a mention of a girl named Ella.
Speaker 3: All the girls on the maps are given initials, like
Speaker 3: two letter initials that don't correspond with their names, and
Speaker 3: there's mention of a girl named Ella. She's given the
Speaker 3: two letter initial GA, and then like one hundred pages
Speaker 3: later there's a map with the GA on it that
Speaker 3: specifies the Gas is a black girl. So there's a
Speaker 3: Ga named Ella, who's a black girl, and we know
Speaker 3: that Marina was making the study at the time when
Speaker 3: Ellen was also in the school.
Speaker 1: Do you make this discovery or did.
Speaker 3: I'm in this discovery because I read this, You've contributed.
Speaker 1: To the legend of both Elafazgerald and Jail Marina.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, Yes, this is correct.
Speaker 1: And what happens when Moreno and Jennings's research comes out.
Speaker 3: It has a pretty significant reception. Moreno's gotten involved in
Speaker 3: the new Deal, but like the most significant thing that
Speaker 3: comes out of the ground swell of support is he
Speaker 3: launches a journal called Sociometry. But it's this really influential
Speaker 3: journal and you know, like six degrees of separation is
Speaker 3: tested there. All of these leading lights of social science
Speaker 3: like George Gallup, Margaret Mead, John Dewey, they're like involved
Speaker 3: in the editorial board or publishing in the journal. It's
Speaker 3: finally like a platform for him to share these ideas
Speaker 3: about social networks basically with a broader public. And that
Speaker 3: field social network analysis doesn't really take off until the
Speaker 3: seventies or eighties, but he's credited with being a major
Speaker 3: forerunner of it and doing it in this experiment. This
Speaker 3: story is significant to me in part because it's sort
Speaker 3: of the story of science in the twentieth century, or
Speaker 3: like one kind of science in the twentieth century, which
Speaker 3: is I think in the quest to institutionalize his ideas
Speaker 3: and to be as big a player as he could be.
Speaker 3: I feel like Jael Moreno kind of pulled his punches,
Speaker 3: like he had ten thousand pages of data. I don't
Speaker 3: believe that he didn't know what was actually going on
Speaker 3: at the school, and specifically what was happening to the
Speaker 3: black girls at the school. And it's not that that
Speaker 3: kind of thing wasn't sayable in the nineteen thirties, because
Speaker 3: the Attorney General had already said that the school should
Speaker 3: be desegregated.
Speaker 1: So the school is segregated, and then New York State
Speaker 1: turn General has asked that it be desegregated, and uh
Speaker 1: of the school Morse doesn't want to do it. And
Speaker 1: in his analysis Moreno is kind of oblivious or or
Speaker 1: disregarding of this issue, is what you were saying.
Speaker 3: He covers the fact that it's segregated. It's just not
Speaker 3: like the sort of like beating of the girls in
Speaker 3: the basement, but more like the corporal punishment stuff. The
Speaker 3: other reasons why girls might be running away. These sorts
Speaker 3: of issues aren't in the text, and like the degree
Speaker 3: to which the segregation is institutionalized isn't really covered either.
Speaker 1: But I'm you know, it's ninety we're talking about the
Speaker 1: early thirties. Nothing's integrated in the early thirties.
Speaker 3: But there was an expectation that this place would be
Speaker 3: I mean, this is. And it's also like Harlem Renaissance
Speaker 3: is going on. There's a lot of black power in
Speaker 3: New York City as of the nineteen twenties. And when
Speaker 3: there's an investigation into the school after Moreno's study, not
Speaker 3: because of it, there is it's led by a black
Speaker 3: doctor in partnership up with the governor. There's a level
Speaker 3: of state support for the idea that this is, this
Speaker 3: shouldn't be happening that suggests that it's not really so
Speaker 3: beyond the realm of possibility.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. The person I'm I the person who I
Speaker 1: would fault is not Morse so much as Moreno. He's
Speaker 1: the outsider. He's the one who's who sees himself as
Speaker 1: a revolutionary, who's not who doesn't at least profess to
Speaker 1: be held by the you know, the standards of the
Speaker 1: rest of society. Who is, as you say, coming up
Speaker 1: with a new idea that professes to paint a picture
Speaker 1: of the whole community. And you could easily see that
Speaker 1: someone who was if he was as revolutionary as he
Speaker 1: claimed be, you can easily see a version of this
Speaker 1: where he would have said, look, this is what segregation does.
Speaker 1: Like he came with a tool to see what was
Speaker 1: wrong with segregation and turned a blind eye to it.
Speaker 1: I mean interestingly, of course, social science becomes hugely important
Speaker 1: in the strategy of the civil rights movement and the
Speaker 1: legal strategy of.
Speaker 3: The Brown versus border at alls and on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the fifteen sixties, So like there's an opening.
Speaker 1: This is what's so fascinating about this story is that
Speaker 1: this here is this brilliant man who he's blind in
Speaker 1: so many ways to the possibilities of his own fame
Speaker 1: and greatness. Right, he had the tool that everybody would
Speaker 1: end up using twenty years later to break down the
Speaker 1: door of prejudice, and he didn't understand he had the
Speaker 1: tool and went back to doing psychodrama like he had it. Right,
Speaker 1: does he continue over the rest of his life pursuing
Speaker 1: social network theory or doing psychodrama.
Speaker 3: I mean, he stays involved with sociometry. I think he
Speaker 3: just wanted to be a direct there. Like there's a
Speaker 3: story he tells about when he was a kid that
Speaker 3: to me is kind of structured the way I think
Speaker 3: about him. And I think he's sharing it because he
Speaker 3: thinks it has some fundamental truths about himself contained in it.
Speaker 3: But I just want to play you this one thing,
Speaker 3: this is about when he's a child. I think in
Speaker 3: Bucharest still.
Speaker 2: One saturday my parents got away, A cloud of children
Speaker 2: gathered in our house in the basement, and I still
Speaker 2: remember that. They came to me and said, now you Jack, this.
Speaker 3: Was my first name.
Speaker 2: What are you going to do today? I said, let's
Speaker 2: play God?
Speaker 3: Well, I said nought.
Speaker 2: One of the children said, and.
Speaker 3: Who is God?
Speaker 2: I said, I am God, and you are my angels.
Speaker 2: And then they all said, let's have a b's good heaven.
Speaker 2: And we went with the basement and we took all
Speaker 2: the chairs in the house and they built the various
Speaker 2: heavens up to the top, and on top they had
Speaker 2: a chair for God himself. And I was in help
Speaker 2: for all the children to sit there on well as
Speaker 2: it is, I was gone the hell, and I stood still.
Speaker 2: The dangers began to run around to sing, and suddenly
Speaker 2: while the angels said, why don't you fly? And I
Speaker 2: stretched my arms and I fed down and my right out.
Speaker 3: It's just like I just loved the story, but like
Speaker 3: that's kind of his whole thing. It's like he tries
Speaker 3: to play god. He falls down, he breaks his arm,
Speaker 3: like he always wants to be the guy who sits
Speaker 3: above and looks down, and that's a fatal flaw of is.
Speaker 1: We think that's I think that's a nice I think
Speaker 1: that's a nice I think it's a nice way to end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: Yeah. For more psychodrama, go subscribe to the Last Archive
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Speaker 1: wiretappers turned evangelists, and time travel. Subscribe, but you'll also
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Speaker 1: to Day, coming soon. You won't want to miss it.
Speaker 1: Ben produced this episode of Revisionist History as well, with
Speaker 1: help from Jacob Smith and Kiara Powell. We were edited
Speaker 1: by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Engineering by Nina Lawrence,
Speaker 1: Mastering by Sarah Bugaire. Original music by Matthias Bossi and
Speaker 1: John Evans of Stellwagon Symfinnat I'm Malcolm Gladmo