California Schoolchildren and the Great Squirrel War

In 1918, as the planet was consumed by World War I, the government of California found itself combating an unexpected and catastrophic enemy: Ground squirrels. The rodents were wreaking havoc across the countryside, consuming crops left and right. State horticulture commissioner George H. Hecke proposed an unorthodox solution -- enlist schoolchildren in a statewide massacre of all ground squirrels. Oddly enough, it worked.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Friends, neighbors, farmers, city dwellers, rural and urban residents alike.
Have you ever had an infestation of pest, say, roaches
or rats or bats and so on? Hi, I'm ben
uh no, But I did once have a pet squirrel
named Mr Muffintops. Was this? Was it an animal that

(00:48):
lived nearby or an animal in a cage? Yes? Both? Okay,
I made that up. I just wanted to say Mr Muffintops.
But and I would honestly be terrified to have a
squirrel for a pet. I'm very skittish around creatures that
have unpredictable movements and bad eyes, which squirrels definitely do.
I've had in my various stages of life, I've lived

(01:11):
in places that were infested with bats, possums, and of
course squirrels, which are wily creatures. I have a friend
here in Atlanta, where this podcast is based who raised
the squirrel in his apartment, and the squirrel was very friendly,
very nice. But eventually, you know, being wild animals, when

(01:32):
they reach adulthood, it's time to say goodbye. Right. It
was a rescue squirrel, by the way, he didn't steal it.
But how could I mention infestations without talking about one
of the number one infestations in my heart and yours.
Null super producer Casey Pegram. It's just an infestation of

(01:52):
joy and kindness and goodwill towards humanity. Yes, yes, and
even even squirrels, I would imagine, Casey, did you ever
have an infestation in your house or your neighborhood growing up? Yeah?
Actually my parents house, we had bats in the attic
and my room was upstairs, and so I was the

(02:13):
only one kind of in close proximity to said bats,
like throughout the day, and I would just hear these
like kind of faint chirping sounds, and uh I, you know.
I reported this to my parents over and over tried
to get them to believe me, and they were just like, no,
it's just like a fan that's squeaky up there, you know.
And so one day my mom goes into the attic

(02:34):
and what does she see but a bat like feet
in front of her face, and she screams and freaks out,
and then they believe me about the bats after that point.
But I had actually gone as far as to like
take some of my audio recording gear and put it
up to the vent and like record them and then
boosted and post and you know, amplify the signal enhanced
and uh, it sounded like bats to me, but it

(02:56):
required a little more proof. Really, I think you ended
up in the wrong field. You should have become You
should have been like a like a ghostbuster for past
your guantom monitor. Yeah, exactly, Casey. On the case, I
had the same I'm bonding with you here, Casey, because
I had the same situation I was in. I lived

(03:18):
in a bonus room in our house and we had
we had this unfinished thing that was pretty much an addict,
but had a creepy door to it, and I remember
vividly those weird chirping noises. But once you see them
in your house, it's surprising. The point of this relatively

(03:40):
circuitous introduction is to say that there is one thing
that unifies a lot of home owners across the world,
and that is that we like our outside animals to
stay outside, and we often, in the course of human civilization,
come into conflict with animals. And this is this something

(04:04):
historically happens all the time. You know, there are stories
of locusts in ancient text. There are stories of other
things of off the top of the dome. Here frogs,
there we go. You know the plagues, the biblical ones.
The locusts would eat, would decimate fields of grain and
other crops um. And that's the thing. We like animals

(04:26):
when they're cute and cuddly and they keep a healthy
distance from us, and they stay in their animal lanes.
But as soon as they start eating our lunch, it
will not stand. Just this animal aggression will not stand,
my friends, and we often band together as humans to
cooperatively combat the threats posed by wild animals. Today's story

(04:49):
takes us all the way back to nineteen eighteen. As
American soldiers were battling German forces in France, there was
an entire I really knew war going on in California
and it and it used child soldiers of all places. Yeah,
this is this is how a fantastic article on Atlas

(05:11):
Obscura sets up this tail um and little spoiler alert
here in nineteen eighteen, California drafted children into a war
on squirrels, is the title of this article by the
fantastic Dave Gilson. I had never heard of this bend
the squirrel war. We know about war as real wars
that were started by all kinds of arbitrary things, like
there's the stray dog war, there was the one about

(05:31):
the camel, there was the one about like a bucket.
This is not a real war, but it involves some
anti German propaganda a little down the line. That's why
the setup works so well. But here's the thing. In California,
they were in the midst of a ground squirrel epidemic.
These little buggers were consuming about thirty million dollars worth

(05:55):
of crops, which if you enter that into the old
inflation calculator, it's approaching five hundred million dollars of of
food stuffs. Yeah. Absolutely, I personally think squirrels are cute.
I know they're not for everybody, but I've also never
been in a situation where they are literally eating eating

(06:19):
the food supply on which I would depend. So these
squirrels were not loved. They were not lovable. They were
seen as, uh a source of pestilence, you know, and
they were thought to be a vector for the plague.
So California addressed the problem. And we've got a great
quote from State Horticulture Commissioner George h. Heck, which is

(06:42):
a cool name. Uh So old man heck says, we
have enemies here at home, more destructive perhaps than some
of the animates. Our boys are fighting in the trenches.
He said. This is part of an impassioned call up
for what he called school soldiers to sell for Gonnize,
you know, within your classroom, your friends, or your overall school,

(07:04):
to eradicate these ground squirrels in California as part of
a seven day event they called Squirrel Week. You know,
because a week is seven days long, is that like
Shark Week? It is a little more aggrowth than Shark Week.
But but deep cut nice reference. Can we mention that

(07:25):
on air? Back to the old the old parent company, Yeah,
back several parent companies ago, Shark Week was was a
regular occurrence around the office. People still love Shark Week.
That's still a thing, right, Yeah, Shark Week is great.
It's it's good stuff to watch. I think what got
us is um way back in the day when when
we worked with Discovery, every podcast was told to come

(07:46):
up with something related to Shark Week. And I don't
know if I ever mentioned this to you, but this
was when Scott, Benjamin and I were still doing car
stuff and we see guys car stuff and and sharks.
How do we make this work? But we did twice.
You can check about they're not They're not the best episodes,
but I'm sure there are a lot of fun And
I enjoy that entire catalog and I miss it dearly,

(08:08):
just just like everyone else. It's true. But you know what,
forget move over Shark Week. It's time for Squirrel Week.
And what Squirrel Week was was a promotion that the
government pumped a pretty penny into to dissemmin print and
disseminate um pamphlets, posters, and all of all kinds of literature,

(08:28):
because that's what you spent money on in those days. Um,
I don't know, maybe some broadcast pieces, what do you think, Yeah,
public speeches. California set aside forty large from their emergency
wartime funds to create this Squirrel Week campaign. And it
was a pr blitz. As you said, Noll, Around thirty

(08:48):
four thousand posters popped up around the state, half a
million leaflets, and the pamphlet which you can see. The
pamphlet is not subtle. You can see victors of this
uh and in the article and then in archival reports
from papers of the time, it says it's a nice

(09:11):
old timey propaganda cartoon kind of approach. And it says
in the top left, kill the squirrels, and it shows
a mother or a teacher instructing children to scatter poison barley.
And then it uh, it shows squirrels in the bottom
Mr and Mrs Squirrel uh dining on dining like kings

(09:34):
right yeah, literally, and they've all got a little speech
bubbles next to them. Um. And it's like the caption
for this particular comic is our star boarders as though
they're at some sort of bed and breakfast, like we're
giving them free you know, free room and board. Um.
And one of the Mrs Squirrel, I'm sorry, Mr Squirrel
is saying, uh, WAITI today I'll have my favorite dish,

(09:56):
whole wheat cakes. And then Mrs Squirrel replies, and you
may save me some nice young body sprouts and she's
holding up glasses like opera glasses, opera glasses. And in
the back, behind the hapless waiter who has a tag
describing him as a farmer, there is a side that
says Hotel California board bill for Squirrels. In nineteen seventeen,

(10:20):
thirty million dollars so that's the amount of damage uh,
this ground squirrel infestation was doing to the agriculture of California.
Here's my favorite little detail. I actually noticed this until
just now. On the bottom outside of the circle that's
sort of the you know the cartoon panel that's UM

(10:40):
framing the squirrel scene, are two squirrels wearing those Kaiser
Wilhelm kind of spiked helmets. And that's the little touch
of anti German propaganda. And we'll hear more about that
in some of these other UM pamphlets. Right. So, what

(11:01):
they wanted to do in this World Week campaign was
to inspire patriotism in kids who knew that their relatives
or maybe even one of their parents was active in
the war effort. They wanted these kids to feel like
they were doing their part by sprinkling rodent side outside
of these various squirrel burrows. The pamphlet even included a

(11:25):
recipe for stryct nine laced grain, as well as suggestions
for other squirrel killing methods shooting, drowning, the use of
poisonous gas. This is heavy, heavy stuff for children, but
they knew that money talks, right. The heart may want
what it wants, but the pocketbook does too, So just

(11:47):
in case doing one's patriotic duty was not inspiration enough,
they also sweetened the pot with rewards for the kids
who killed the most squirrels. Yeah, it was a tiered
rewards system. Fifty bucks for the winner at each elementary school.
That what The organization behind this must have been pretty decent, right,
So fifty bucks for the grand prize, and then you

(12:08):
got your runners up making thirty and twenty, and then
you want to you want a handy dandy inflation calculatron,
those bad boys. Sure, fifty bucks is around eight hundred
dollars today, I know especially. Can you imagine you're an
elementary school. You get eight hundred dollars, What are you
even gonna do with that? Buy more ammunition for your
red rider BB gun? I imagine. I don't know, man,

(12:30):
they might get in like this feedback loop and just
buy more strict nine two poison the wheat. How many
full blown psychopaths do you think this program created? Ben
probably about three hundred and seventeen with that in the
inflation calculator. So if you got the runner up position
and you've got thirty dollars, that was still five hundred

(12:54):
dollars back then, and then if you got twenty bucks,
that was still three hundred thirty something dollars. So this
is this is good cash for psychopaths, potential budding psychopaths,
aspiring psychopaths, right totally. So the thing that's that's really
interesting is this was all happening during World War One,
and there was always a need for propaganda, and they

(13:18):
were certainly able to sneak these messages into this material
for for Squirrel Week and start making the squirrels like
stand ins for the greater enemy at large. And the
language even really started to shift to some slogans like this, Uh,
he preys on our crops and countless hordes. He fills
the ranks of the killed in true military fashion. You

(13:43):
know why why hesitate? We can get them? How poison them,
gas them, drown them, shoot him, trap them? Submarine um,
Why do you submarine a squirrel? It feels like just
a different way of saying drowned them. They also had
neat little catchphrases. Right in one text it says millions
of food must be saved slay the mother squirrel during

(14:05):
breeding season. Much to me, remember a squirrel in time
saves killing nine. But that see, there's a loophole with that.
And I don't want to be too cold, but if
we are addressing the reward system in play, then you
would want to kill nine squirrels. You wouldn't want to
kill them early, you know what I mean. They're not
They didn't think that all the way through, but they

(14:27):
had a lot of money on the line, and with
this creeping propaganda, with the squirrels being painted increasingly as
German soldiers, if we're being honest, we see the cause
move beyond the boundaries of California. The US Food Administrator

(14:49):
at the time, a guy named Herbert Hoover, who would
later go on to be president, heartily approved of this
effort because he said they were saving vast quantities of
food which might otherwise be used for support of our
armies abroad. So we're we're not just fighting pest in California,
We're helping the war effort in Europe. Yeah, for sure.

(15:12):
I mean it's just empowering. And again, this is kids.
This is directed at kids. This is a school like
box top program essentially, but instead of box tops, you're
bringing in squirrel tales or literally entire dead squirrel carcasses.
There's an image from the Internet archive that's posted on
this aboutice Obscure article where it is a barbed wire

(15:33):
fence hung with dozens of dead squirrels. I mean, it
is very macab. There's even instructions published for how to
hook up a tube to the exhaust pipe of a
car and fill squirrel burrows with carbon monoxide to literally
gas them out. And kids loved this exactly, just gleeful murder.

(15:54):
Kids loved this. They also, they loved it so much
that some kids were in patient. They don't want to
wait for all the tallies, so they started sending squirrel
carcasses directly to Commissioner heck, even before squirrel Weeks started.
So his office literally began to wreak, and he made
a special request that children no longer send him any

(16:17):
more tales directly, and he told all the county commissioners
working form like okay, count the tails, keep the tally,
but then please get rid of them, bury them or something.
Stop sending squirrel tales to my office. My wife won't
touch me, she says, I wreak of death and rodents.

(16:37):
I added that last part. There's a little bit of
poetic license, but it was a smashing success because I
think they tallied somewhere, you know, official number. The official
number was upwards of a hundred thousand squirrels dead were recorded,
but they you know, it's assumed that that it would
have exceeded that number by quite a lot, just just

(16:59):
with the the atitude of rampant squirrel murder that was,
you know, pervasive in all of California around this time,
and that attitude continued into the future even once the
program expired. That's right. We don't know how long it
lasted after Squirrel Week. We do know, however, thanks to
a report called California Ground Squirrels of bulletin dealing with

(17:19):
life history, habits and Control of the ground Squirrels in California,
that this machine could not switch on and off. This
cultural impetus that they had created continued on and for
an a quote indefinite period of time. Afterwards, these kids
kept killing squirrels. We do have one example just to

(17:41):
give us a snapshot of the level of squirrel genocide
occurring here in Lassin County. Later in the year, there
was another anti squirrel campaign one girl when female student
brought in three thousand seven hundred and eighty tales and
one boy brought in three thousand, seven hundred and Evan d.

(18:01):
So now we have to ask ourselves, were these kids
very very talented squirrel assassins or were there just that
many squirrels? Were the hills, you know, alive with the
chitters of squirrels? The hills have eyes, my friend, tiny beady,
fidgety squirrel eyes and tails. Did we talk about the

(18:21):
difference between a bushy tailed tree squirrel and a little
bit more of a skinny tailed, chipmunk looking ground squirrel.
We have not. That's a that's a good call. Let's
get into that. So ground squirrels technically are known as
otto sperm of Phyllis beechy. Yeah. I was having a
hard time with that second part two because it's got
the double e and then the y and then they

(18:43):
the plot twist. It's a big plot twist. Why But
I think maybe any intrepid, ridiculous historians out there that
are what do you call that squirrel squirrel of files?
You know, it's a good question or I don't know
whether we have in this langu which is specific word
for squirrels, but I do have news we can make
one up. The language is flexible enough. Let's see, Um,

(19:06):
we could say squirrel oologists, which is which is tough?
That's no? I mean well it is now. English is
a malleable language for sure. Squirrel squirrel, that's hard. Sculologists,
how about? Okay, so squirrels are part of the secura
day family, so maybe they could call themselves scuriologists. That

(19:27):
sounds a little bit more legitimate. Although wait, now that
I think about it, when I've seen this question before somewhere,
I think rodentologist is actually a word. Squirrel oologists might
not be, but rodentologists, I'll I'll bet some scratch on that.
Surely that must be a thing. All right, So rodentologist
is probably the closest will get until ridiculous historians we

(19:51):
hear from you, because as as you said, Noel, English
is malleable. It is a living language. And you know
this might be interesting. Hey, Casey, what's the what's the
French word for squirrel? I'm just curious to see whether
that would be easier. It's not easy. In fact, it's
it's a weird one. The French word for squirrel is
rolls off the tongue, right, Oh man, casey on the case,

(20:16):
I think we might have to stick with squirrel guys
or roadentologists. Squirrel weekended on May four. Children continued hunting
and killing squirrels to combat this campaign, and the state
considered this a great success. According to reports, the crop

(20:39):
yields bounced back in areas where squirrels had been eradicated,
so there was a clear correlation. But here we are
a little more than a century later, and ground squirrels
are still considered insidious pest, you know what I mean? Yeah,
certainly inside that we're used to around here in Georgia's

(20:59):
But for me, it's more the tree squirrels that I'm
used to seeing, and whenever I go somewhere else and
I see a different type of pervasive rodent like say,
chipmunks or whatever, that weirds me out. Because I I
totally did not remark upon like squirrels are like pigeons
in New York City or something like that. Around here,
it's just a very common occurrence and they don't really
threaten me. But have you ever seen like a rogue

(21:19):
squirrel that I'll like, It looks a little slack jawn
and like mat like shamble too close to you, like
it's got the rabies or something that's no fun. Yeah,
I mean a lot of people here hate squirrels, and Casey,
you were mentioning off air that some of your friends
from different parts of the world find squirrels a little
bit what spooky. Yeah, I guess um. I mean it's

(21:42):
hard to imagine as an American who has been seeing
them their whole life. But yeah, if you're not used
to it, apparently they can be quite upsetting. I'll tell you.
You know, as I was looking through the differences of
ground squirrels and tree squirrels, I feel like I ran
into squirrels before, ground square rolls before once long ago,
and it creaked me out because I saw them crawling

(22:06):
on the ground, you know, like belly on the ground,
and I thought they had had their I thought they
had their backs broken or something, until I realized they
were just that's just their method of locomotion. This was
in Arizona, so those may not have been ground squirrels.
Oh no, right in and let let us know what
those weird little rodents were. We see the prejudice against

(22:28):
ground squirrels continuing today. There was a University of California
web page about damage caused by ground squirrels, and it
featured an image of a squirrel wearing a helmet and
aiming at the ground with a bazooka. So there is
still a problem, and it is true, as strange as

(22:49):
it may sound, California did indeed recruit child soldiers to
wage war on ground squirrels, but they weren't the first
or the last to launch a tactical st like this
against these these bests UM in eighteen seven, according to
the same author as the Atlas obscured a piece in
an interview he did with The Washington Post. The Washington

(23:11):
Post in fact, published a report citing that thirty u
s States um have offered quote unquote bounties for troublesome animals,
including like panthers, the sinister ground squirrel, of course, pocket gophers, woodchucks,
English sparrows, and wolves. So this was definitely a thing
that there was a precedent for. And Pennsylvania paid out

(23:37):
around ninety thousand dollars in bounties for uh chicken hawks.
And this is really interesting because the Post wrote quote
it appears that Pennsylvania expended ninety thousand dollars in destroying
birds worth three million, eight hundred and fifty seven thousand,
two hundred and thirty dollars for the sake of saving
one thousand, eight hundred seventy five dollars to the poultry interest.

(23:58):
What they mean by that is that these very same
birds were actually killing thousands of mice each hawk one
thousand mice in a year's time, and they then these
were very injurious to crops. So the math wasn't quite
working out there right, because it's I think at the time,
it was easy to forget how complex and interlinked every

(24:19):
organism in an ecosystem is. It's sort of tough to
figure out who the real culprit maybe, and it's even
more difficult to figure out what the long term ramifications
of an eradication campaign will be in the future. However, today,
if you are a school child listening to this and
you are anxious to join in a murderous campaign against

(24:43):
one type of animal or another, uh, we have some
tough news for you. Nowadays, these sorts of expeditions are
left to professional exterminators, and as a matter of fact,
in many states, common pest maybe p acted under law.
So to bring it all back around to the example

(25:04):
we had from super producer Casey Pegrum. Casey, I imagine
your family was not allowed to kill the bats. Is
that correct? That is correct? Although maybe I shouldn't tell
this part of the story, but said bad in the
attic caught my mom off guard and she kind of
swung at it and happened to kill the poor thing.
So I believe the rest were safely loaded out of

(25:28):
the attic. We had pest control person come over and
I think they were able to shepherd them out without
costing any more bad lives. Casey on the Case, Casey
on the Case. And this concludes today's episode, but not
our show. Tune in for our next episode when we

(25:49):
explore a surprising opinion about Confederate memorials. Is that giving
away too much? No? Nope, nope, Okay, there we go,
So thanks so much for tuning in. We would love
to hear your infestation stories. We would like to hear
about the common pest in your neck of the Global
Woods that seem normal to you but amazing too outsiders.

(26:11):
For instance, this is true, you guys, a lot of
people in Australia hate kangaroos. Did you know that? I
think they're so cool. Well, they're probably just tired of
them because they're they're just hopping out of the woodwork
there and in Australia, or maybe not right in, let
us let us know, are they really as prevalent as
we've been led to believe from Crocodile Dundee Films? Right right?

(26:33):
Shall we travel down to Australia to encounter Kangaroo's first
hand and you can write to us directly. But wait,
dramatic sound queue please, Casey, we have a new email
address right to us at Ridiculous at I Heart podcast

(26:54):
network dot com. You can also find us on social
media right now, yeah, be sure. Can We've got a
pretty popping Facebook group called the Ridiculous Historians where all
kinds of fun things are happening every day, and that
is at the Ridiculous Historians on Facebook. You can also
find us on Instagram, um, you know if you like,
or you can find us personally where I am at
Embryonic Insider and I am in a burst of creativity

(27:17):
at Ben Boland. Thanks as always the super producer, Casey Pegram,
thanks to Alex Williams who composed our track, and thanks
to you Ben Boland for being the bunniest Bolandiest pal
I could ever hope for. We'll see you next time.