Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracey V. Wilson,
Speaker 1: and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about George Washington Williams
Speaker 1: this week, and I'm going to start with the sad
Speaker 1: part of behind the Scenes, and then we're gonna move
Speaker 1: on to stuff that's much funnier. Alrighty uh. Basically, this
Speaker 1: episode made me sadder than anything I have worked on
Speaker 1: in so long. I was so sad about George Washington
Speaker 1: Williams dying at the age of forty one. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if the trajectory of the Congo Free State
Speaker 1: would have been different if he had lived and had
Speaker 1: been able to bring more attention to it. It could have,
Speaker 1: don't really know, but the fact that he did so
Speaker 1: much and that his life was so short made me
Speaker 1: so sad. And then I was also sad that it
Speaker 1: was really thanks to the work of one other person
Speaker 1: that we know anything about him, that person being John
Speaker 1: Hope Franklin. I'm not sad that he did that work.
Speaker 1: I'm just sad that Williams fell into so much obscurity
Speaker 1: before he did. John Hope Franklin did like literally four
Speaker 1: decades of work, work that went until the end of
Speaker 1: his life. And then I was also sad that he
Speaker 1: died in two thousand and nine, so I couldn't like
Speaker 1: ask him about this or thank him for doing all
Speaker 1: of this words. There's like just layers of sadness. And
Speaker 1: then my absolute total coincidence, I started working on this
Speaker 1: episode on the first anniversary of the death of a
Speaker 1: dear friend who died at forty two of pancreatic cancer,
Speaker 1: so like that added an awful layer. And then the
Speaker 1: next day I said, Hey, you know who I think
Speaker 1: would really be into this episode is my old college
Speaker 1: friend John Mott, who I would characterize as a friend
Speaker 1: of the show. He and I mostly kept up with
Speaker 1: each other on Twitter. A lot of the conversations that
Speaker 1: we had were about the podcast, and he was always
Speaker 1: referring other people to the podcast, and I had not
Speaker 1: kept up with him since I left Twitter, so I
Speaker 1: went to see how he was doing, and I learned
Speaker 1: that he had died in November, and that was just
Speaker 1: two of the deaths that were part of my world
Speaker 1: last week working on this and it all came together
Speaker 1: and just like, man, this is I'm not even going
Speaker 1: to get into the details of the others, but it
Speaker 1: was a rough week and it was a very sad,
Speaker 1: sad topic to be working on that I just sort
Speaker 1: of wanted to acknowledge all of that before moving in
Speaker 1: to the funny part, which is that when I do research,
Speaker 1: I go and I bookmark a whole bunch of stuff,
Speaker 1: meaning to come back to it later. And I bookmarked
Speaker 1: this like a blog post type thing called What Tarzan
Speaker 1: taught Me about Ohio History by someone called Todd Book,
Speaker 1: And I was like, that's weird. I wonder why this
Speaker 1: came up in the search results, And I just bookmarked
Speaker 1: it and came back to it later, and then I
Speaker 1: was reading it and I'm just gonna read a couple
Speaker 1: sentences from it. Quote. That all changed when I was
Speaker 1: thumbing through the movie channels and stumbled on the Legend
Speaker 1: of Tarzan twenty sixteen. As I watched a George Washington
Speaker 1: Williams played by Samuel L. Jackson, introduced himself to Tarzan.
Speaker 1: He informs Tarzan of his desire to expose the evil
Speaker 1: deeds that King Leopold the Second of Belgium is inflicting
Speaker 1: on the Congolese in search of profits. He educates Tarzan
Speaker 1: that the Congo is threatened and that Tarzan must join
Speaker 1: him to expose this injustice to the world. I felt
Speaker 1: like my brain was melting. I was like, is this
Speaker 1: a real movie? Am I dreaming? A's Like what this?
Speaker 1: It just seemed so wild to me that like somebody
Speaker 1: had made a Tarzan movie about King Leopold in the
Speaker 1: Congo Free State. So then I went and I read
Speaker 1: the Wikipedia synopsis of the plot of this movie, which
Speaker 1: starts with the Berlin Conference and the scramble for Africa,
Speaker 1: and I was like, my face, I was involuntarily like
Speaker 1: making a face of absolute confounded bafflement that this is
Speaker 1: really a movie that got made. I could feel my
Speaker 1: face kind of contorting itself. Uh. And then I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna have to watch this movie, like, oh,
Speaker 1: did you watch it? I did? I did? Did you
Speaker 1: watch a whole thing? I watched the entire thing? And
Speaker 1: I watched an entire the entire thing, like sort of
Speaker 1: in the midst of a very crappy week, and I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't actually think this movie is gonna
Speaker 1: be good. And I feel like if I watch it now,
Speaker 1: while I'm having a very crappy week, at least I'm
Speaker 1: not spending time that could have been spent on something
Speaker 1: fun on a movie that doesn't turn out to be great,
Speaker 1: and it is a strange film. It's quite a task
Speaker 1: to attempt to make an anti colonial Tarzan movie. There's
Speaker 1: just a lot going on there. It's also kind of
Speaker 1: a choice to cast Samuel L. Jackson, who was almost
Speaker 1: seventy at the time, in the role of somebody who
Speaker 1: died at the age of forty one. And I did
Speaker 1: not appreciate how many times George Washington Williams was made
Speaker 1: the butt of the joke. I did not really like
Speaker 1: that at all. So yeah, I don't think I could
Speaker 1: really wreck amend this movie to anyone, but the fact
Speaker 1: that somebody did make a Tarzan movie involving George Washington Williams,
Speaker 1: I would rather just have a George Washington Williams movie,
Speaker 1: to be honest, you're making a face, well, because yes,
Speaker 1: I get that, but I think probably, like if that
Speaker 1: movie got made, nobody would go see it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think this logic is probably if we put Alexander Scarsguard
Speaker 1: in a loincloth, a lot of people will come and
Speaker 1: then we can be like a hah, it's really a history
Speaker 1: movie about colonization. There is a pretty a scene I appreciate.
Speaker 1: It is a scene where Tarzan gets a herd of
Speaker 1: Wi wildebeasts to just stampede through, you know, a Belgian
Speaker 1: colonial town. It does not make it seem like people
Speaker 1: are injured, but they do cause all the buildings to collapse.
Speaker 1: That was a more fun bit to watch. But I
Speaker 1: still am just like that. What a combination of things
Speaker 1: to put in a movie. That's an interesting and ambitious
Speaker 1: approach to it. Ultimately, you know not Yeah, the person
Speaker 1: who wrote this, I don't know anything about this person,
Speaker 1: Todd Book who wrote a post about this, but apparently
Speaker 1: was doing so from the George Washington Williams Room at
Speaker 1: the Ohio Statehouse, so there is a room named after
Speaker 1: him at the Ohio Statehouse. There was also one quote
Speaker 1: that I really loved from George Washington Williams written in
Speaker 1: History of the Negro Troops in the War of the
Speaker 1: Rebellion eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five that summed
Speaker 1: up why our same reasons for not talking about events
Speaker 1: on the show that are super duper recent in history
Speaker 1: and he was writing that book roughly twenty years after
Speaker 1: the end of the Civil War, and he wrote, quote
Speaker 1: in writing of events within living memory, it requires both
Speaker 1: fortitude and skill to resist the insidious influence of interested
Speaker 1: friends and actors, to separate error from truth with an
Speaker 1: even and steady hand, to master the sources of historical information,
Speaker 1: to know where the material is, to collect and classify it,
Speaker 1: and to avoid partisan feeling and maintain a spirit of
Speaker 1: judicial candor. I was like, man, I've seen so many
Speaker 1: people who work in the field of history make these
Speaker 1: exact same points about how there's sort of a moment
Speaker 1: when you can have enough historical remove from something that
Speaker 1: happened to really look at it in a more analytical way.
Speaker 1: And he was making that point, you know, when history
Speaker 1: as a modern source based field was in its infancy. Yeah. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's complicated, and so much stuff happened in his life,
Speaker 1: which was just so tragically short. He was a very
Speaker 1: busy bee, incredibly busy at so many different things, a
Speaker 1: lot of gear changes, so many gear changes. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: had brunch over at a friend's house and I was
Speaker 1: talking about having watched this movie and one of the
Speaker 1: friends was like, wait, who's George Washington Williams? And as
Speaker 1: I was just kind of reciting all of the things,
Speaker 1: I was like, this is so many different things in
Speaker 1: one lifetime. Oh, John Mitton esquire, I don't think I'd
Speaker 1: ever heard of this person. Well, probably because he would
Speaker 1: make you real mad. Yeah, it's found him frustrating. I mean,
Speaker 1: do you know what I think of when I read
Speaker 1: his entire story? What's that Mama Odie from Princess and
Speaker 1: the Frog Okay, who at one point says, y'all ain't
Speaker 1: got the sense you were born with? Yeah? Kind of
Speaker 1: how I feel about him. I like, so we we
Speaker 1: talked about having an accidental theme. Neither of us remembered
Speaker 1: for sure, like how specifically we became aware of this
Speaker 1: person slash why they wound up on the list to
Speaker 1: do an episode. Both of them had such short lives,
Speaker 1: George Washington, Williams and John Whitton, But like the tenor
Speaker 1: of that lifetime is very different. For yes, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I am very fascinated by the Nimrod biography. And here
Speaker 1: is why if that biography, which is very frank about
Speaker 1: how much he loved this man, but if he has
Speaker 1: pulled out details he seems to have not pulled out
Speaker 1: a lot of details that would that would paint his
Speaker 1: friend in a bad light. He seems to have been
Speaker 1: pretty frank. If he did pull out details that man
Speaker 1: was insufferable. But he's pretty open about how bad things got,
Speaker 1: especially at the end, like it really sounds like Apperly
Speaker 1: and Mitton's mother and some of their other friends, like
Speaker 1: when he describes what he went through, because he was
Speaker 1: kind of like on full time watch with him in France,
Speaker 1: and it was his idea to take him out to
Speaker 1: the country and like sober him up and get him
Speaker 1: eating a good diet and like getting fresh air. And
Speaker 1: how well he started to do. And he's like, that was,
Speaker 1: you know, my idea, and it seemed like it was
Speaker 1: going great until we realized like all he was trying
Speaker 1: to do was get away from us, all right. He's
Speaker 1: pretty frank about how ugly the whole situation was and
Speaker 1: how like you could not talk reason to him because
Speaker 1: he didn't want it. And sometimes he talked about like
Speaker 1: they would say like if you keep living like this,
Speaker 1: you're gonna die, and he'd be like, I don't care.
Speaker 1: And so they were for a time, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of keeping an eye on him. He was going to
Speaker 1: end his life, but he also seemed so irrational they
Speaker 1: didn't even know if that was really what he wanted
Speaker 1: or if he was just kind of like in a
Speaker 1: state of madness. Right. It's not a pretty picture at all,
Speaker 1: So I it makes me tend to think like he
Speaker 1: probably wasn't whitewashing a lot of the rest of it.
Speaker 1: If anyone is wondering, because I know I did. And
Speaker 1: if you're very worried about hearing animal things, don't listen
Speaker 1: to the next minute and a half. But I will
Speaker 1: account for what happened to the bear and the monkey. Okay,
Speaker 1: because the bear, he did not have the bear put
Speaker 1: down after it bit him through the leg and kind
Speaker 1: of maimed him for life. But sometime down the road,
Speaker 1: the bear went after another person and at that point
Speaker 1: they determined that the bear was not safe to have
Speaker 1: in the house, and so she was euthanized at that point,
Speaker 1: which also sounded like it went horribly the monkey. This
Speaker 1: is really awful. He let the monkey drink. Oh no,
Speaker 1: the monkey was kind of an alcoholic, but that is
Speaker 1: not what killed it. At one point, the monkey drank
Speaker 1: a bottle that looked like alcohol that was poison like.
Speaker 1: It was like a household chemical. It wasn't intended to
Speaker 1: be poisoned, but uhuh it drank something and they died
Speaker 1: from it. So that's a skid. It's uh irresponsible animal care.
Speaker 1: I this is only tangentially related. Sometimes the TikTok algorithm
Speaker 1: will show me a video of someone having an encounter
Speaker 1: with a bear and they dress I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: the hiker sees a bear and does the appropriate things.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about somebody allows the bear to come up
Speaker 1: on their porch with their cubs and starts making friendly
Speaker 1: noises to the bear, and they stress me out so much.
Speaker 1: And this episode is kind of an example of like
Speaker 1: why having wild animals in this way is like not okay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, listen, I understand the impetus to go, oh
Speaker 1: my god, hi, you're so cute. Yeah, but I also
Speaker 1: I've tried to be very very diligent with myself and
Speaker 1: not letting myself behave that way towards wild animals to
Speaker 1: visit our house because also it's you're harming them, but
Speaker 1: they don't need to get used to you. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not just that they are in danger to humans. It's
Speaker 1: that humans are a danger to them, and if you
Speaker 1: accustom them to being around humans, you are probably going
Speaker 1: to put them in a position where later their judgment
Speaker 1: is flawed. Yeah. Have I don't remember if I've talked
Speaker 1: on the show about a book called A Libertarian Walked
Speaker 1: into a Bear. I think that's the name of it.
Speaker 1: Is that what it's called. One of my other friends
Speaker 1: was just discussing this the other day and I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I know this book. Yeah. It's a book about a
Speaker 1: group of libertarians who like try to take over a
Speaker 1: town and make it a libertarian paradise, intertwined with basically
Speaker 1: people habituating bears to human presence and letting feeding the
Speaker 1: bear's donuts on purpose. Things like that. Yeah, don't do that.
Speaker 1: And it's a book that I really liked in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. It does have some stuff about animals
Speaker 1: in it that's really upsetting. But there are two people,
Speaker 1: if I remember in correctly, who are like seriously harmed
Speaker 1: by a bear, and they had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: any of the feeding bear's donuts, right. It was like
Speaker 1: they were the victims of other people's inappropriate treatment of
Speaker 1: these animals. Yeah, it's not good Yeah, there are so
Speaker 1: many more stories about him than we could include where
Speaker 1: you're just like you dang dong. Like at one point,
Speaker 1: as he was having to start selling his stuff off,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was his solicitor or like
Speaker 1: one of his advisors was like, you know, if you
Speaker 1: just cut back and for like the next several years,
Speaker 1: you could live off of six thousand pounds a year,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be fine. You will be able to like
Speaker 1: we can get all your stuff in order, you won't
Speaker 1: have to sell your things. You'll be fine. And he
Speaker 1: was like, I'm not interested in living that way. And
Speaker 1: for clarity, six thousand pounds at this point was like
Speaker 1: several several hundred thousand pounds in today's dollars. Yeah, there are.
Speaker 1: It's very interesting because we talk all the time about
Speaker 1: how it is really hard to convert currency through time.
Speaker 1: But I have noticed we mentioned that the National Archives
Speaker 1: of Britain has a converter in the episode, but also
Speaker 1: is it the Bank of England that does like a
Speaker 1: conversion thing on their site? And I'm like, oh, I
Speaker 1: guess if your country has been around for a long
Speaker 1: time and people have family property that's probably been profsh
Speaker 1: past like you might actually need to be trying to
Speaker 1: do this in a more real way than we would
Speaker 1: ever know. But yeah, I mean it's like basically going,
Speaker 1: I can't live on seven hundred thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 1: That's no life. I would rather lose it all and
Speaker 1: keep living in my incredibly extravagant and weird ways. And
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree that is ding dongri. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also feel like this is a historical person that
Speaker 1: it's tempting to want to armchair diagnose. Oh yeah, but
Speaker 1: beyond just the obvious like excess alcohol consumption, right in
Speaker 1: some other way, and I try to resist doing that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, he definitely had impulse control issues, but that's
Speaker 1: also not a diagnosis. That's just kind of acknowledging what's
Speaker 1: going on there. I mean, it sounds like he would
Speaker 1: be really fun to be around if you were his friend.
Speaker 1: His friends adored him, and the people that lived in
Speaker 1: his area who were not wealthy friends seemed to adore
Speaker 1: him because he was so generous and like they kind
Speaker 1: of knew they could be taken care of if something
Speaker 1: went wrong by his his estate or his you know himself.
Speaker 1: But also like, oh dude, you could have done so
Speaker 1: much more actual good if you could just like focus
Speaker 1: it up and like use rational thought for a minute.
Speaker 1: But if you're not interested in that, you're not interested
Speaker 1: in that. And I know I can't travel back in
Speaker 1: time and fix him. He's another one, though, where I
Speaker 1: feel like, because he had such a gumption and you know,
Speaker 1: such a kind of like iron constitution, and he had
Speaker 1: some impulses that seemed pretty good, I'm just like, man,
Speaker 1: if you could have just been like assisted or molded inside, yeah,
Speaker 1: that you didn't die very young, you could have actually
Speaker 1: been like such a high achiever. You know, he had
Speaker 1: all of the resources on earth and did nothing with them.
Speaker 1: People were like, you should start breeding programs with your
Speaker 1: horses and your dogs. You'd be like, oh no, Like
Speaker 1: he could have sustained himself probably just doing either one
Speaker 1: of those things and not have had it all fall apart.
Speaker 1: But you know, you can't. You can't make a person
Speaker 1: do what they're not going to do. He apparently was
Speaker 1: also really really resistant to advice of any kind, Like
Speaker 1: even if his most trusted friends and or advisors said
Speaker 1: things like, hey, you know, maybe don't do that, and
Speaker 1: he would be like, I'm gonna do it ten times harder.
Speaker 1: Look out for me like he just didn't anyway, Listen,
Speaker 1: I understand I fight these impulses in myself all the time.
Speaker 1: But don't be like Minton. Just just be a little
Speaker 1: more focus. He really is a hogarth engraving even though
Speaker 1: he lived. Maybe he used those as like a roadmap
Speaker 1: instead of the cautionary tale they were intended to be,
Speaker 1: like the Rake's progress. He's like, I could do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: h he wrote a bear into a party. Don't do
Speaker 1: his writing habit. So many reasons you should not do that.
Speaker 1: Don't do that. If this is your weekend coming up,
Speaker 1: don't write a bear. If it's not your weekend coming up,
Speaker 1: don't ride a bear. I hope that if you have
Speaker 1: time to yourself that it is, however, is the most
Speaker 1: productive and restorative for you. Sometimes those things are the same.
Speaker 1: If it's not your time off, I hope you get
Speaker 1: a little time to yourself where you can rest and
Speaker 1: relax and have some joy. We will be right back
Speaker 1: here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday
Speaker 1: with something brand new. Stuff you Missed in History Class
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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