Behind the Scenes Minis: Pants and Randolph's Activism

Published Jun 2, 2023, 1:08 PM

Holly and Tracy talk about a critical letter that Mrs. Pat once received from a fan. Then Tracy mentions the way that Randolph's work is sometimes eclipsed by other Civil Rights events.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about missus Patrick Campbell this week, and I have always found her really interesting because she is one of those one of those famous people who because she wrote her own memoir and obviously that's very slanted in her favor and written later in her life, so you have to question some of the recollections. We have so much more insight into really her thinking about celebrity than we do other people. But I really wanted to talk about those George Bernard Shaw letters because I mean, some of them were so ardent and romantic that like he didn't want any of them published, and a lot of them, despite her having included some of them, most of them didn't get published until after they were both dead. But like it's very funny. I'm not laughing at them. I'm just laughing at how intense this relationship was and how unique there dynamic was. Like in one he writes, shut your ears tight against this blarneying, irish liar and actor. Read no more of his letters. He will fill his fountain pen with your heart's blood and sell your most sacred emotions on the stage. He is a massive imagination with no heart. But that's well, okay, it's intense. There are a lot of a lot of intense ones. There is this other thing that I think is interesting where you know, we read that theater review about Lady Churchill writing her play and him being like, oh, yes, all of the all of the lay write Place now. But kind of it seems like everyone wrote a play like everyone thought they had to play in them, right. She encouraged George Cornwallis Wes to write Place after his bankruptcy, which happened shortly after they were married, and she produced one of them in nineteen seventeen. We mentioned her son started writing plays like everybody was writing Place, which is interesting to me, That's all. But I wanted to really really talk about one of her fan letters, okay, because she does include a lot of these in her memoir and this one is one of those ones where it's like two familiar where it's basically like an audience member who feels he needs to write her for not dressing pretty enough. Oh no, oh, no, okay, And this was in a play where she was playing George Sand, who famously warman's clothing. MM and this letter reads, my dear missus Campbell, I am so sorry if I was rude about your trousers, but quite sincerely, they wounded me if only they had been pretty trousers, but they were not. They may be historically correct, but in a play which outrages history on so many vital points, to outrage it further in the stuff and cut of George Sand's trousers would have offended nobody and pleased one person at least. I glared, oh see, who is a woman he was with, glared so formidably at me when you complained of my criticisms that I did not dare to ask her how she'd like to wear trousers like that. I don't think she would look very nice, do you? Affectionately yours, Rudolph Bessie. And then he includes the ps, I hadn't really time to tell you that your performance it was pure genius, like everything you do. So he had gone to the play, had spoken with her after it and said she looked awful, and then wrote this letter to her. But does this not feel like every criticism that women get in media, it's like, you suck and you did this so wrong. By the way, I love your work. Like it's the whole time you were reading it, I was like, in my head, the invention of things like the Internet and email and social media has made it so much easier for people to just directly contact whoever with those kinds of comments, and so the whole time you were reading it, I was like, Oh, he did it on paper too. I knew this in my head, but like everything that, I was just so so like so many emails, et cetera. Right, I mean, everyone that makes stuff online has gotten a letter like this about how terrible they are. But also I love your work, which is hilarious to me. Like I feel like because I have not even related to anything I've done or made, but I have certainly engaged with people who are criticizing others in this weird way. And I'm like, but why is that where you open and it's like they don't see that there's anything wrong with it. Yeah, yeah, where they're like, well, they need to know how people feel. Everybody needs feedback, and it's like, Okay, if you had to say something, you could put it in so much better A way than to be like, those trousers wounded me, right, they wounded him. He introduced himself to someone who's work he reportedly admired by saying, I don't like your pants like they wounded him, Tracy. They hurt him to see pants that he enjoyed on a woman. Yeah, wounded. Yeah. I probably cackled over this letter for twenty twenty five minutes because it was just like, well, there we go. Yeah. I think that was nineteen twenties. One hundred years later, same letter could be written, except it's gonna be about vocal fry. No, no, not even a little. There is a cool thing to jump off of that. Sorry if anyone feels like I'm banging the drum there. If anyone is familiar with the painter Philip Burne Jones, which you may be without knowing his name, he did a lot of really really sort of striking Gothic y paintings and some beautiful portraits in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundred. But one of them is actually a painting of Missus Campbell. Because if I describe this painting to you from eighteen ninety seven, you'll probably have a vague reminiscence of it. It's called the Vamp. It's in eighteen ninety seven painting. As I said, it's in I think it's actually a charcoal piece, and it is a woman with long black hair kind of leaned over a man who is lying apparently like deceased, on the bed, and it's very beautiful. You would see it and be like, oh, yes, I've seen that before, and she was the model for that, which I sort of love because then it's like, oh, we don't maybe always remember her, but she definitely is part of the yeah, the spirit of art. I googled it in our sense of Gothic art in particular, which I really really enjoy, because that's one of those pieces that shows up, like I think it's used his book covers for some Gothic novels. It certainly shows up in a lot of films and in print because it is like a shorthand of like this idea of the woman who is dangerous and going to hurt a man, probably because she wore pants that he didn't like. He just expired. I'm never gonna let that go. But anyway, I love that painting, and so I did not realize until I was doing this research that she had been the model for it. Yeah, that is missus pat and her. I mean, she had such a big life and so much fame for a while that I almost feel guilty that my fixation has become about her pants getting criticized by a dude. But at the same time that cracked me up. Cracked me up the great equalizer. Random people will tell you you dressed wrong, and you hurt them by not being cute enough. We talked about a Philip Randolph on the show this week. Something that struck me while I was working on this was a lot of like basic general audience kind of write ups about a Philip Randolph talk about him primarily in the context of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Borders, which is huge, important part of his whole career and his legacy and all of that. He was also a major major figure in the planning of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and it just you know, my experience going through public school in the United States, the March on Washington is like one of the biggest focus materials in like classes about the Civil Rights movement, or like US history classes when it's Black History Month or whatever, right, Right. So it just just to me that for a Philip Randolph specifically, like the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters, gets like so much of the attention, when this other thing that he was also physically involved in that gets way more attention in just basic conversations. And I think some of that is probably because the Martin Luther King juniors I have a dream speech has become for a lot of people inaccurately emblematic of everything about Martin Luther King Jr. And everything about the civil rights movement, like that has taken an outsized role in people's understanding of things, And I just I don't know. I just kept thinking about that as I was working on this episode, about how, like where so much of the focus has been relative to all of that, Right. I had a chuckle to myself. That was just a nice walk down memory lane while we read this. Okay, because do you know how I learned about Marcus Garvey for the first time? No, the Tender Age of thirteen. No, In William Gibson's Neuromancer. Okay, did you read that book? Yeah? But uh, I would say a lot of it is not retained in my memory. Oh I read it almost once a year. No, you love it. I love it. And I found it by accident when I was looking for work by the other William Gibson who wrote The Miracle Worker. So that was a little bit of a shock to my tiny mind. But there is a space tug in Neuromancer called the Marcus Garvey and they I was like, I don't understand this reference at all, and so I went and looked it up in the library. And I remember my elementary I think I was either I was on that cusp in my school system. I can't remember if I was last year of elementary school or first year of middle school. And I remember the library and though being like, why are you looking this up? And I was like, I don't understand what's going on in this book. We have an episode on Marcus Garvey way back in the in the archive from prior host. I have never listened to it. I cannot tell you anything about like that episode or how comprehensive or whatever it is, but that episode does exist. We also, as we said in this episode, have a two parter on Buyered rest in I wrote that one, but I also wrote it back in something like twenty fourteen or twenty sixteen or something like that. I have not re listened to that episode in recent years, like having buyered Resting come up multiple times in this episode, I'm like, should we use this as a Saturday Classic? I haven't re listened to it, so, I you know, sometimes things don't age as well as we would like them to for whatever reason, So I haven't really listened to it. But then also, it's a little weird to run two parts as Saturday Classics. Yeah, it's always tricky unless we do one big, giant one, which would be we weird. There have been times from when our show tended to be, like when episodes tended to be between twenty and thirty minutes. If we had two episodes that were closer to twenty we might just like run them as one, but those ones are not. Those ones are I think fully half an hour each and then getting into like an hour or more long episode can be a tricky. So anyway, our next open slots for classics are in in June. We'll see, I'll re listen to him, probably make a decision on whether we run that. I do love byed Rest and he's one of my most favorite figures from history. Also, I want to talk somewhere that Byar dressed in quote at a birthday party for a Philip Randolph, when he was talking about how other than his grandparents, nobody but mister Randolph had stood by him in times of trial apparently his whole life. Byed rest in all always thought of a Philip Randolph as mister Randolph, like even when they were like both adult, solidly long foundation in their work and their activism, Like he was always mister Randolph to him. But he also in that quote said he is the only man I know who is who has never said an unkind word about anyone or who refuses to listen to an unkind word about anyone, even though it may be true. And I love that quote, but a Philip Randolph could also be really critical of people that he disagreed with. And so you know, Byron Rested is not here for me to ask, like, are you drawing a distinction between criticizing someone and being unkind about that? Right? We're getting into the semantics about what unkind words are. Yeah. Yeah, But I was like, at first I was just going to put that whole quote into the episode, and then I was like, I, uh, I have thoughts about that, because there are definitely other A Philip Randolph quotes about people that you know, a lot of times he had very justifiable criticisms of where I would not necessarily call that a kind comment that he made, right. I don't know if anybody has written a biography of his wife. As we said in the episode, like Lucille was a critical part of his work. He could not have done it all without her. I am intrigued by her and would like to know more about her, and I don't offhand know if there is more publicly documented about her to know you can do an episode that's a two separate stories where you can do one on her and one on Alilia Walker Lily Walker, and then will it'll just be like cool women that seem to keep coming up. So one quote that I found about Lucille, so they they apparently like really loved each other, were really devoted to each other, supported one another's professional and and you know, actism goals all of that. A Philip Randolph was away from home a lot by nature of his job. He was traveling to places to organize and demonstrate. He had international trips that we did not even bring up in this episode, like there was a lot he was off and away, and at one point someone asked Lucille how she felt about like women because like that, you know, he's an attractive man, Like what do you think about like the idea that you're not around and there's you know, there might be women around. And she said, let them try. I said that just as Holly took a swallow of yeah, you just heard me snort diet coke. I love him. I love it. Yeah, so I love that too. Uh So, anyway, anyway, I'm glad we finally got to a Philip Randolph. I'm also glad. Something that people comments about him a lot is the way that he spoke. It was very distinctive, and people described it as oratorial or almost Shakespearean or like terms like that, because like if you if you listen to a recording of him talking, it's very very precise and like a very formal way of talking. And I got to the part about him loving Shakespeare and establishing a Shakespeare Society, and I was like, well, that explains some things about you know, who knows what's the cause and what's the effect. But it seems like most likely his like distinctive manner of speech and love of Shakespeare went hand in hand perfection. Yeah, I love it, I love it. Yeah. I also love train travel. So having recently discovered that there is a train that I can take from back Bay out like Westward, which I think might be a new service on Amtrak, I got the impression while I was on my trip that the stop that I got off at was not a stop that was being served for a long time. So I've taken trains north and south out of Boston a bunch of times. My first time going Westward, had a great time. It's awesome. I haven't done a train trip. Yeah, I might be one of those people that a train trip would make a little bit antsy. Maybe I'm not a journey it's not the destination, it's the journey kind of person. I'm like, get me where I'm going. So my very first Amtrak trip was when I was a kid, and it has to have been on Amtrak because of when I am alive. But my grandmother and I took Amtrak to Raleigh from Greensboro, North Carolina, and I only very vaguely remember this trip, but for many years I could not get on an airplane because of my visceral terror. Oh yeah. Kind of a long story. But we were owned by Discovery Channel and our offices were in Atlanta, and Discovery Channel offices were in Silver Spring, Maryland, and so I took Amtrak from Atlanta to d C multiple times until I started working on my fear of flying. And I would say that was not my favorite, just because that train left Atlanta at eight pm and it arrived in DC at eight am, and when you went home it was the reverse and sleeping and coach on Amtrak, I would say, is just logistically not a very comfortable experience, right, It's sort of like I would say, maybe more comfortable than being on a red eye flight, but still like you're in a you're in a seat overnight trying to sleep is like not, It's not gonna be comfortable for a lot of people. My vacation trip, however, I got myself a little sleeper car, which I had a great time. In my little sleeper car, I had my own little door that closed, my own little window I could look out of. Uh, my own little space was great and I had a pretty view the whole time. It was awesome. So anyway, I love trains overnight on the train not as much, but I've taken a bunch of trips on the down Easter and the Acela Express out of Boston, and now this one, which was on the Lake Shore Limited. Uh, that's now you all know more about the am track trains running out of Boston than maybe you did before. Like the second service, you didn't know you would get out of stuff you missed History Class. Tracy will read you train schedule Tracy's trail train travel. Uh. There is a TikTok figure called Jed who makes recordings of train trips. And I just reminded myself that anyway, Happy Friday. Whatever's coming on your weekend, I hope it is great. If you're gonna take a train trip somewhere, I hope your train is on time and comfortable and clean. If you're not taking a trip anywhere, I hope whatever's on your plate at home is going okay. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with something brand new on Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

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