Ridiculous HistoryCLASSIC: Oregon Was a White Supremacist Paradise
Today Portland, Oregon is often portrayed as a left-leaning haven for hipsters across the country, but the original Oregon was a vastly different place. Listen in to learn more about the ridiculous aims of the white supremacists who sought to found Oregon as a whites-only state. Spoiler alert -- there's a fantastic extra segment at the end of today's episode, wherein the guys join special guest Robert Evans, the creator of Behind The Bastards, in this week's Classic episode.
Fellow ridiculous historians, we are returning to you with a classic episode, This is True Story, one of the one of the first episodes we did when we had decided we were going to do an episode about every state.
It's true and did you know, by sure didn't at the time that Oregon, the very progressive and crunchy state of Oregon, think of places like Portland, of course, was once in fact a completely right leaning white supremacists haven where people of color were not allowed to own property, were kept out. And it's something that very weirdly has affected the legacy of that part of the state in terms of like the makeup of its population to this very day.
I can jump in real quick.
What's kind of sad is there's still a.
Lot of this in organ Well.
Absolutely, we talk about that in the fringes, not certainly in Portland, where it's very liberal and all that, but there are a lot of little pockets of really bad in the Anazi activity in Oregon.
In fact, Oregon is unique in that they never allowed slavery as a state, and the reason they didn't allow slavery is because they were that racist. This is a true story. We couldn't be more happy to welcome you to this classic episode featuring the man the myth legend are Pal Robert Evans, the creator behind The Bastards. Robert just an advanced man. Thanks for hanging out with us. He's always such a gas back in twenty eighteen. Thank you to past Robert. You're a good guy and a great podcaster and researcher and super excited to have this one come out as a classic. Let's roll it. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Ben No.
Wow, this is like a very standard intro. We're trying today.
Yeah, we're going. We're going straight forward. But we are only able to make this show, of course, with the assistance of our esteemed third member friends and neighbors, super producer Casey Pegram.
Sort of a vanilla opening. Would you marry Whitebread?
A little homogeneous? Yes? Yes, today we are. Well, let's start in the modern day, Noel, for a long time, neither of us had ever been to Portland until pretty recently.
It's true I only spent a little bit of time there. I think you had a little bit more of a fully fleshed out Portland experience. But will you tell me then, is the dream of the nineties in fact still alive in Portland.
Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the town. I thought it was surprising. I was diplomatic enough not to directly mention the comedy show Portlandia to anybody that gets really old. I am sure it does. It's like when people visit our city and call it Hotlanta.
Yeah, well I would say this is even more egregious. Probably people running around say, put a bird on it.
Yes, And Portland has this national reputation, at least for being a very progressive city. Right face tattoos are cool, marijuana is decriminalized, the.
Streets are paved in marijuana. In fact, in Portland.
It does have a particular smell, and in general people would see it as sort of a bastion of left leaning culture.
Yeah, super chill. You know, you can buy a sandwich for a song in Portland. Literally, it doesn't have to be a good song.
It's just a song.
A song or you know, a little soft shoe, or maybe you got a one man band. Kind of Dick Van Dyke situation going on that.
I did see a one man band when I was there. Did you see that, guy?
No, I just pulled that out of my ear.
Well, you are correct, and there are one man bands in Portland. There are also numerous amazing things, amazing bits of history. One of our coworkers, a guy named Nathan, is actually from Oregon, and he assured us that Portland is more of a cultural exception to the rule nowadays.
Yeah, I could see that. I'm actually wearing my Timberline Lodge hat right now, are But I bought at the Portland Airport, and, as you might imagine, at the Portland Airport, not a chain restaurant in sight, my friend, all of the shops sell handmade artisanal goods. I bought some really cute little pieces of pottery there for me Mom.
That's sweet of you, man, And that's really dope hat. It is a great hat. So it's safe to say that you and I are fans of Portland and would travel there again in the future. Sure, at least modern Portland, right right.
I don't think I would want to travel there in a time machine to the past.
Yes. Yes, today's episode is about the origins of Oregon Portland in particular, Wow One Take, or.
As it's called here, I'm in some of these articles that we're looking at the Oregon Country.
Yeah, Oregon Country. That might sound weird to some people. What is Oregon Country?
They kept seeing it and it was a little weird sounding and it was confusing, but I figured it out with my internet sleuth skills. What would now be modern day Oregon, Washington State, and Idaho was all kind of clustered together in this one big old chunk of land collectively referred to as the Oregon Country.
Yeah. And this was, let's see, way back in eighteen eighteen, right, the US and Britain agreed to jointly occupy this.
Yeah, that seems like a like an odd couple in a situation. And then I think the US started getting a little greedy and being like, you know what, we kind of want this for our own. We're going to turn this into some states.
Yeah, because the British wanted to be in the area in Oregon Country mainly to engage in the fur trade.
That's right. And James K. Polk, who was an expansionist president, right, really wanted to make this our own and not share, not go have these with the Brits anymore. So that ultimately happened. They negotiated, They decided it wasn't worth going to war over at the britz In anyway, and there was some back and forth. And there's a really great slogan that the Northerners used. It was fifty four forty or fight, And fifty four forty was talking about the coordinates the latitude that marked the northernmost part of this territory.
And during these negotiations, the US's first proposal was that the territory be cut in half, right with that, with that border at the forty ninth parallel, and the British rejected it. And so the expansionists, many of whom were anti slavery Northerners, which is super important for this part of the story. Yep, they are the ones who called for more American aggression. Get out, there be a big dog. Fifty four to forty or fight.
It's hard to say you did really well with that bet, fifty four forty or fight.
It's tough.
It's fun when you really get it right, though. It gives you a sense of accomplishment, as I'm sure they felt when they finally arrived at a pretty decent deal with the Brits, where they divided the territory along the forty ninth parallel. Yeah, so that's pretty close to fifty four. I guess what's the forty though? A fifty four to forty.
Like minutes divisions of degrees, it's like a decimal kind of right, Yeah, kind of interesting.
So this is where we end up with Oregon needing, you know, to become a state. And when you become a state, what do you do. You have to have a state constitution.
And as we know, constitutions are not generally made overnight. They often reflect common practices, goals, or even existing laws that a community has practiced or written down beforehand. And Oregon had its own pre existing laws. In eighteen forty four, they passed something called the Exclusion Law and this was this was enacted by the provisional government of the region at the time. What did the Exclusion Law do?
Yeah, it was this guy named Peter Burnett who was like a kind of an Oregon Trail kind of blazer. I guess Peter Hardeman Hardiman Burnett. And actually, spoiler alert, we're going to dig into him in a little more detail later in the show. Foreshadowy, big time foreshadowing. But here's what this dude did, just just to give you a taste of what his medicine was like. He was a former slave owner and has a really crazy resume, did all kinds of interesting things in his life, but by all accounts an alarming, dastardly racist, virulent racists big time. So this exclusion law that was enacted sort of pre proper government and constitution basically allowed slaveholders to hold on for dear life to those slaves for a maximum of up to three years. And at first I was like, wait, is this because of emancipation? And then I'm no, that was decades later. This is eighteen forty four. That wasn't until like eighteen sixties, and I realized, oh no, Oregon outlawed slavery in the territory. Right, But here's the key, UK, Then your thing is gonna be like, Oh, that's that's nice.
What a great bunch of people.
Yeah, okay, but there's more. So Yeah, this grace period of three years, but then all of those freed black people work required to leave.
Yeah, that's the thing. The government of Oregon passed this exclusion law of eighteen forty four, and in it they did place a ban on slavery with a requirement that slave owners eventually freed their slaves. But they did this with the understanding that any African American who remained in Oregon after they were freed would be flogged, whiplash and forcibly expelled from the country. If they were caught in the Oregon country again within six months, then the punishment would be repeated. And then eventually the law was amended in another version to substitute forced labor, so essentially slavery instead of flogging, and then it was repealed in eighteen forty five. So this community was so racist that the didn't even condone slavery. They were so such white supremacists.
They just didn't want him around like at all. And there's there's some language we'll get into and in a second, but I do just want to point this out. That law you mentioned about flogging or that penalty was called the Burnett lash law because our buddy Burnett was so into this that he wanted to brand it with his own his name. I was like his signature thing. And it required that or it declared rather that offenders who refused to leave would be punished with quote not less than twenty or more than thirty nine stripes, and that would be a cycle that would recur every six months until they left.
Unfortunately, this lash law did get amended and repealed, so as far as we know today, no people were or lashed as a result of that law. But this was just the first of three different laws like this that all were meant to ban people of color from Oregon Country, which again at that point is like Washington, Oregon and part of Idaho. It's a huge swath of land.
That's right, And we're getting some of this information from a few different places. One of my favorites was a Washington Post article by Daneen L. Brown called when Portland banned Black's Oregon's shameful history as an all white state, or as I've seen it referred to as an all white utopia. Kind of right, Yes, they were after at least.
There's this weird history of intentional communities and utopian thinking in Oregon. So it's not all examples are racist, but this definitely was. The idea for the people who were supporting this concept was that somehow society would be better if they all felt like if they all somehow identify with the same ethnicity. Now, did they have the same sort of racism that would be common in the Northeast at the time, where in for instance, Italian or Irish immigrants or children of those immigrants are still considered not wide enough. I don't know, but what was on the books was specifically targeting people of color. In eighteen forty eight, this provisional or territorial government passed the law making it illegal for any quote negro or mulatto to live in Oregon Country. But they did have a provision for people who had Native American blood.
Which they weirdly referred to as half breeds because they're despicable people. They are despicable people. But it's interesting that all it takes is just to get a little white in you. They really didn't like black people. Yeah, yeah, that's what it boils down to, all right then, Yeah, so it's state time, baby, here we go.
What do you need to make a state, as we established earlier.
Yeah, you need you gotta have some dirt. You gotta have a delineation between your dirt and the other people's dirt.
You have to have some people, yep, in both sides, so that you can differentiate a constitution there we go. Yes. In eighteen fifty seven, the government of what would become Oregon was working on its constitution. They did a couple of things. They grossly plagiarized constitutions from other states at the time.
Well that's the thing, you know, there's going to be some of that, right. A constitution is not exactly a great work of poetry that you know, pilfering from is looked down upon it. So that's almost sort of like stealing a boiler plate release form, right, you know.
Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Being that Oregon was going to be a state in the US and have voters and such. They asked about ten thousand residents to vote on the new state constitution, and they had three questions, burning questions, burning questions. One, do you vote for the constitution? Overwhelmingly voters supported it. Two, do you vote for slavery in Oregon? And the voters of Oregon rejected the institution of slavery by a pretty wide margin.
Yeah, also pretty overwhelmingly.
And then three, this is a quote again, this is problematic language. They say, do you vote for free negroes in Oregon?
Hey?
What?
And the answer was, oh, yeah, it was a no. Yeah, it was a big no. And they explicitly baked in this racist language into their constitution. In fact, we have a quote from the state constitution.
Yes, it goes as such, again quoting some offensive language here quote no free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall ever come reside or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contract, or maintain any suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such free negroes and melattos, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them Therein right, that is bonkers.
It is categorical as well. So pay attention, folks to that very last line where it says that anyone who helps a person of color is also guilty in the eyes of Oregon law. And that's a terrifying thing. But it passed. People were supportive. Oregon became a state in eighteen fifty nine, and it was the only state in history, only state, only state in history so far that entered as a white's only state, so anti slavery, but only because they were such white supremacists, And that's mind boggling. People in Portland are so nice.
Yeah, it really does blow my mind, and it makes me wonder like why, like Mississippi didn't try to do anything like this, Probably because there were just too many black people already living there. It was just it would have been like a massive round up kind of like deportation kind of situation.
And they were economically dependent that controlling the powers of this state were economically dependent on this.
Because it feels like Oregon was probably pretty largely white already, and then the slaves that were there were kind of like imported kind of for that purpose. And then they free them and they give them the boot, and this largely worked. There were a couple of examples though, of folks trying to get around it, not very many though, and one in particular of somebody being kicked out pretty heinously.
Yeah, Vanderpool, Right, that's right. Yeah, in eighteen fifty one, before the Constitution was written and before Oregon became a US state, but after these exclusion laws were in full swing. The owner of a saloon, restaurant and boarding home. A fellow named Jacob Vanderpool was forcibly expelled from the territory, not because he did anything wrong, just because he was not white.
Yep, yeah, that's pretty oh boy, Okay, he.
Was literally according to Salem Public Library records, he was literally quote reported for the crime of being black in Oregon, and Judge Thomas Nelson gave him thirty days to leave the territory.
Yeah. I'm sorry, I keep pausing because this is just like hurting my brain and my heart. In an article from How Stuff Works, we spoke to Walita Imrisha, who's a professor in Black studies at Portland State University, and she actually travels around Oregon kind of working on nurturing some positive connections with the African American community in Oregon because it's still spoiler alert to this day, pretty largely white. But here's how she sums up the whole thing. Quote, Oregon was birthed at this intersection of being anti slavery and anti black. But in no way was Oregon anti slavery because they believed in racial justice. They were anti slavery because they considered this to be white man's land, and they came to build a racist white utopia. Their goal was to keep out or push out all people of color.
Right, and you will see multiple academics who explain that Portland's reputation as a progressive city is, in their opinion, largely a myth. Winston Grady Willis, who's director of Portland State University's School of Gender, Race, and Nations, points out that as of July twenty fifteen, the city had six hundred and twelve two hundred and six people, seventy seven point six percent white, five point eight percent black, and Grady Willis went on further to call it a key site for Clan activity. We know the clan was very active there in the early nineteen hundreds as well.
Yeah, I mean apparently members of the clan were actually cops.
Yeah, they were deputized.
Yeah yeah, yeah, like as though they were sort of a para military organization given the same powers as like law enforcement.
Right.
So not a pretty scene.
But there is good news here. This is a story of oppression, but it is also a story of inspiration and righteous struggle for justice and equality. There was this great documentary called Local Color, which traces the history of racism in Oregon and the actions of people who were working for civil rights in the area. And of course you know this center is often on Portland itself, as it is the capital city of the state. And to be honest, folks, there are some pretty disturbing stories in that documentary, but if you would like to learn more, we highly recommend you check it out. It is available for free online. So thanks again, Public Television.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment happened, and surprise, surprise, Oregon was one of I think only six states in the Union that voted against it. And I had forgotten what the fourteenth Amendment is, but it is really hella important. Is what it says. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No States shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Nor shall any State to any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of law. So this completely neutered these exclusion rules.
Right. So this was passed by Congress in eighteen sixty six, and the explicit intention there is to safeguard the rights of recently manumitted or freed people in the South, where a lot of the white population is working hard to still subjugate them still somehow practice chattel slavery enforced labor. So Oregon actually, because it was a divisive issue, Oregon ratified the Fourteenth Amendment by a very narrow margin in eighteen sixty six, with two legislators protesting that the amendment would quote change, if not entirely destroy, the Republican form of government under which we live and crush American liberty. They also around the same time past law banning misagenation or interracial marriages.
Surely, Ben, there's some sort of fun food fact we can pull out now to lighten the mood a little bit. Wait, where do we go from here?
Well, we've got one more thing I have to add. There's a great paper by Cheryl A. Brooks called Race Politics and Denial. Why Oregon forgot to ratify the fourteenth Amendment? Because you see, although they ratified it in eighteen sixty six, in eighteen sixty eight, the legislature rescinded that ratification, and they did so on a technicality, so they were still in an uncertain situation. In fact, these laws, or some version of these exclusion laws stayed on the books until what nineteen twenties.
Yeah exactly. I think it was like twenty four or something like that.
Wow, it's insane, but we do have, luckily a happy ending progress grinds on.
Yeah, except sorry. In nineteen twenty two, a guy named Walter Pierce, who was a clan member, was elected governor of Oregon. And there's this great quote in this article from the Washington Post as well. It just kind of goes back into the history of this talking about how many of the Jim Crow laws that you'd see in the South were kind of encouraged there and like legal.
Yeah, yeah, they still tried to do de facto acts of oppression and segregation. And again, I can't recommend that documentary enough because it contains interview It's only about an hour long. You can find it through opb dot org. It contains interviews with people who survived these circumstances. I feel like we're almost wrapping up on this, but there are a couple more things that we need to mention.
Yeah, well, just the fact that you know, it's come a long way, obviously, and Portland still does have that reputation as being a pretty culturally interesting dream of the nineties kind of place. But even like in the eighties and nineties, especially in Portland, it was very dangerous to be a person of color. This Washington Post article mentions the fact that it was just a hotbed of skinhead movement and white supremacy. And I'm not sure if you've seen the movie Green Room. Yeah, Patrick Stewart plays the head of this neo Nazi group that has like a punk rock house in the woods and just pretty intense and awful and a really really cool, little slice of life kind of I don't know, it's a horror in that there's a lot of crazy stuff that happens, but it's really just more like a very contained, claustrophobic movie where it all kind of takes place in this one on space.
I feel like it's a more almost more of a thriller.
Yeah, it's so weird to seeing Patrick Stewart play a psychotic neo ntsis.
A very restrained, subtle performance from Patrick as well. I just call him Patrick, but yeah, but it's true. So Oregon in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties became a destination for the largest skinhead movement in the country, according to several scholars. And you can see, unfortunately no shortage of stories of racially motivated hate crimes.
Yeah, there was that guy recently who was arrested for I believe, stabbing some people to death on a light rail train. When he some folks came to the aid of an African American woman and a Muslim woman who he was shouting racial epithets at and then he like stabbed several people. And this happened like last year. And his name is Jeremy Joseph Christian. And yeah, when he goes to this hearing, he walks into the courtroom and immediately starts rambling and saying free speech or die Portland. You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism.
Right, So circumstances of this event were the following he was shouting religious slurs at several people. He fatally stabbed two people and wounded one other. This is indefensible. This is very much not what free speech is. And is it strange how some of the most ardent supporters of so called free speech completely don't understand what it is.
Yeah, no, it really is. And admittedly this guy does seem like he's got some mental illness going on. Sure that's just me speculating, but it's a sad case and a sad example of how these kind of attitudes are around and possibly given a little more fuel on the fire considering some of the you know, nazi Nazi marches we're seeing in Charlottesville, and some of these attitudes that have maybe come a little more into the forefront of not acceptability, but at least just kind of are being a little more mainstream days. So it's interesting to see where it came from in a place like the Pacific Northwest.
Which might surprise a lot of people. The long story short, too late. The exclusion clause that we examined today was ultimately removed from Oregon's constitution in nineteen twenty seven. However, as we I think have pretty clearly established, that did not remove the actual practices of racial segregation and discrimination. But there's one thing, one more thing I think we should add. Because we've been talking about the states, right, we've been talking about the territory We've been talking about the people, but we have yet to talk in detail about the guy who was at the forefront of it all. We have yet to talk in detail about Peter Hardiman Burnett, who some would call a real bastard.
Yeah, and he also managed to make it all the way down the Oregon Trail and not even get dyssentry right or die of exposure. Yeah, he was just a dick.
Well, how about this, This is a surprise that we nol in casing I worked on for you all off air. What if we have a little extra credit?
That's right, folks, extra credit the segment where and we get, you know, some human person that's tangentially familiar with the topic by varying degrees. My favorite of late has been the Colonel Gladwyn Bowlin. Oh boy man, he really set the Internet on fire with that segment. Gladwin.
I led him into the Facebook group folks. So I hope we're all still cool.
Did you create a monster?
I don't know. I don't know.
Well, today we have another quite informed gentleman joining us the host the new House Stuff Work show Behind the Bastards, which does deep dives into horrible people throughout history from Saddam Hussein's hobby writing erotic fiction to Hitler's spanking fetish. I believe Friends and Neighbors, Ben if I may, Robert Evans, Hey, all, how's it cracking, man, It's weird. It's just weird. There's been a lot of like silent headshaking on this episode, which doesn't really translate super well on the podcast. But yeah, who knew.
Yeah, I mean we're talking about Oregon, which is if you like, yeah, if you go to like Portland or whatever, it seems on the up and out. I've spent a lot of the last three years in like rural southern Oregon, and it's it's a pretty racist place. Like Josephine County where I was, is chock full of Nazis. There are quite a lot of them out there, so it's it's a fascinating place even in the modern day. Oh yeah, yeah, tons of them. It's one of the most racist counties and one of the highest density of hate groups anywhere in the United States.
Chock full of Nazis. As it turns out, not a good coffee.
No, no, terrible coffee, terrible craft beer that the Nazis make.
Yeah, So when we when we originally talked off air, Robert. One of the things that we were very interested in, both as colleagues but also as fans of your show was seeing whether there was a specific person associated with the the supremacist origins.
Of Oregon kind of setting the tone that we.
Could we could learn a little bit more about with you. And you found the guy, right, Oh.
My god, I sure did. I think Peter Burnett. I think Peter was his first name. Yeah, just a tremendous piece of crap and maybe, like there's a long list of super racist politicians in American history, but he's in the running for most racist. He's he's he's definitely like in conversation for sure.
Yeah.
We set him up briefly as just having been the one that kind of came up with the idea of these exclusionary laws early on before Oregon became a state, and he loved this idea so much they named it after himself, the Burnett Lash Law, which permitted black people who refused to leave the state to be given lashes like every six months, six months or something like that, and he loved it so much that it was such a genius idea. The Burnett Lash law.
Yeah, he was so proud of his whipping people rule that he stuck his name on it, which is a special kind of terrible. But he was actually like a violent jerk way before he went to Oregon. When he was still living in Clear Creek, Tennessee, he was a shop owner, like a general store owner. He suspected this enslaved black man was every now and then breaking into his store at night to drink from his whiskey barrel, because they stored whiskey and barrels back then. It was a different time. So he, rather than like taking any of the other actions you might take in this situation, he sets a trap using a rifle with like a string tied to the trigger, tied to the window shutter, so that when the guy crawled in in the middle of the night, this rifle shot him dead. And he wasn't charged with the crime because it was an enslaved man, And he said he was sorry. But that's like Peter Burnett before he gets into politics. They must have had like a standiard ground law back in.
Those days too. I guess I just don't think they had laws.
Yeah, you know, you're talking about the eighteen twenties or whatever, like there was no rules and.
That's such a cartoonish sort of Rupe Goldberg esque kind of contraption.
Yeah, he probably got the kit from ACME. That's insane. Okay, go on give us some more.
Yeah.
So one of his early jobs before he gets off to Oregon, I think after he murders this guy with a Looney Tunes trap, is he's a lawyer. And some of his probably the most prominent clients were Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, and all of Joseph Smith's you know, apostles or whatever, all of his friends because they were on trial for kind of sort of fomenting a frontier war that had broken out in and around Misserra. And so he he is these guys lawyer, and his main achievement as a lawyer seems to be getting the venue changed that the court case was being held in. And this venue change allowed Joseph Smith and all of his guys to escape and run away. And yeah, so that's his career as a lawyer before he gets on that first big wagon train to Oregon for the Great Migration and whatnot.
Oh wow, yeah, so y'all already covered.
Yeah, he made the last law he made, the exclusion law, which he was he was an abolitionist, but he's like an interesting we think when you hear about abolitionists in the pre Civil War area, you usually think about just the few people who would have been like on the right side of history. But some of them were just abolitionists because they were that racist. They were so racist. And that was Peter Burnett. He was abolitionist that because he didn't like the idea of there being black people anywhere in his state, and he thought that slave labor was bad for white people. So he was like, he wound up the right conclusion, which is that slavery was a bad thing, but he wound up there through like the most racist chain of logic that he could have possibly gotten to, which is always interesting to me.
That was a sentiment that was big time shared by the majority of people in Oregon because they did incorporate and become a state. The majority of people voted against slavery, but also for ousting all the freed black people.
Yeah, and I did find when I was doing my research that in eighteen forty at least Burnett had two of the slaves of his own. And this is back when he was living in Missouri, and there's some evidence that when he immigrated to Oregon, he tried to bring one slave with him, a young girl who drowned in the Columbia River during the voyage. So not a lot of It's kind of an enticing piece of what was going on there, but that's all the info I found so far on that, right.
Because she was projected to be somewhere between ten to twenty four or something.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, it seems like it be kind of a creepy Thomas Jefferson sort of situation there.
Yeah.
I suspected that as well.
Yeah, So this guy we've talked about, like or y'all talked about what he did in Oregon. But after he got done in Oregon, this dude moved to California and he became in eighteen forty nine the first governor of California, of the state of California. So California's very first leader as a state in the Union was this guy, Peter Burnett, who get a lot of terrible things. Maybe my favorite thing he did that isn't terrible was in eighteen fifty he changed Thanksgiving that year from a Thursday to a Saturday, just because it was better for him personally that year to do it a different day.
I mean, I can get behind that. It's always weird to me that Thanksgivings on a Thursday.
Yeah, that's whimsical and fun. But he also tried to bring racial exclusion to California with the Chinese right well, first with black people. He first tried to in his first message to the California legislature exclusion like the first important, like an issue of the first importance, the most important thing that California could do, because he thought black people are going to take jobs from white people and that they would be unhappy in California and cause disruption because they would be second class citizens, because he wasn't going to let him be anything but second class citizens. So yeah, he tried to. There were like a thousand black people already in California, many of them free, and he tried to have them all kicked out and to stop any more from settling. And that was too racist for eighteen fifties California. So he lost on that, and he wound up actually like in eighteen fifty one, quitting being the governor over this because he tried a couple of times to get California to ban black people, and they just wouldn't do it. And yeah, I mean there's some pretty pretty racist quotes from him that I could read, but that's probably not necessary. But it is fun to note that after he was no longer a governor and after his political career was over, as you know, the world continued to advance and modernize in his old age. Yeah, his crusade, as you mentioned, was trying to stop the Chinese from coming to California. So he was just just comprehensively racist across the board every chance he got, which is impressive in a terrible way.
Yeah, at least you can say he was consistent. But honestly, good on you, California. For anyone listening who is in the state right now, I think that speaks very highly to the character of the state. Even as far back as the eighteen fifties. He also published an autobiography, right at some.
Point, Yeah, that's where he started ranting about Chinese immigration.
Yeah, but Robert, surely he got some sort of amazing come upance, right, like burned to death and a fire, you know, drowned under suspicious circumstances.
Give me something in a fight with a locomotive.
No, I mean I think he died rich and old. He was in his eighties or something.
Oh man, that's a bummer.
I know.
It's just that's what always happens with these bastards, right, I mean, I bet you're seeing that a lot. Accept you did the Cosby episode. He kind of got his come up as But even that's sort of like a pyrrhic victory where it's like too little, too late for a guy that's been screwing people over for years on, you know, unchecked.
Yeah, every now and then you get a Mussolini or a Kadafi where they get dragged down into the street and punished by the people that they spent decades screwing with. But that's almost that almost never happens. Usually they die rich in a villa somewhere.
I'm really glad that you said this, Robert, because I was listening to the Goadaffi episode, which I thought was fantastic. Uh, And I'm still preparing myself to check out the Weinstein episode, which is a two parter. Correct.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one's a big one.
What we'd like to do is, again, thank you for giving us some more insight on the life of Peter Hardiman Burnett. Screw that, Yeah, I know, right, the mate. But well, yeah, we were wondering if you could tell our h if you could tell our fellow listeners here a little bit more about behind the Bastards and what they can expect when they tune into your show.
Well, I mean, our goal is to tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. So you know, you've probably sat you know, stoned or whatever in your underpants and watched a lot of documentaries about Hitler on the History Channel over the years, but you probably don't know that he based a lot of his military strategies and his like attitudes on existence in life on a series of young adult novels that were basically like the German equivalent of Harry Potter back in the eighteen hundreds.
Oh wow, you know. And for that matter, while we're on the.
Subject of novelists, You've probably haven't read Saddam Hussein's romance novels, but I have. And that's one of the things we get into in this podcast.
I referred to it as erotic fiction. Was that was that a bridge too far?
No, no, it is very erotic. In fact, there's a long passage where an elderly woman yells at children about how sexy ma is olds are.
So that's it's fun. Yeah.
Aren't those novels in particular largely considered these meglomaniacal analogies about his relationship with the country.
Yes, and they're there. It's one of those weird things. There's a lot of cases, like with the Kims in North Korea, of art being credited to dictators who didn't actually make it. Saddam definitely wrote these books, and we get into that to an extent, but they're like they're a mix of rants about modern politics and like utopian fiction, and so it's like a mix of Saddam screaming at the people he hates and trying to set up the ideal government that he never quite got to make in Iraq. It's it's a really strange insight into what was going on in the man's head.
That's fascinating. I want to I want to tune in and no spoilers, but could you tell us a little bit about some episodes that are coming up soon?
Yeah?
Today, right now, there is a new episode on Paul Mannifort, part one of which just dropped in part two of which will be up Thursday, So that's a big one.
I check that out.
And we've been doing an ongoing series about King Leopold of Belgium and the Congo and we're recording an episode today about what happened after Leopold, who is one of the worst people in all of history and doesn't get enough acknowledgment for just how terrible he was. Agreed, And we're also recording an episode about the serial killer Albert Fish with his one of his descendants who is all comedian in LA today.
So that's going to be fun.
Oh man, that's fascinating.
Yeah, we've got a good, good slate.
Well, we are going to wrap it up today. We want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Robert Evans, friends and neighbors, the mastermind behind one of How Stuff Works newest podcasts, Behind the Bastards. If you like our show, you will love this one. In the meantime, you can find Noel Casey and I Robert as well on social media. In twenty eighteen, right, it's everywhere.
Were all over the place with Facebook and Instagram. We're still working on the pinterest page. We haven't fun, we haven't committed yet, but we'll get there. Creative differences, Yeah, that's true. And you can join our Facebook community at Ridiculous Historians, where there's all kinds of memory and fun chats going on all the time. Or if you don't want to do any of that, right, it's an email at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks dot com and we'll see you soon. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
