November 7, 2017 • 34 mins
Today Chinese restaurants serve some of the most popular cuisine in the United States, with more than 41,000 restaurants scattered around the country. Yet in the 1900s these restaurants were so controversial that labor unions, hate groups and even politicians joined forces in an attempt to wipe the businesses out. Tune in to hear the whole story (which, luckily, has a delicious and happy ending).
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Ben, I'm no,
and we are as always joined with our super producer
Alex Williams. Have we introduced Alex to the Ridiculous History
crowd yet? Ah? Yes, everyone, Alex Alex. Everyone. He doesn't
really talk. He only talks in our ears and dead
and you know, sometimes we get him to turn up
the high hats and we assure you he's very much real.
(00:47):
It's very much super. Now he's there, we're looking at him,
and he is a handsome toothsome young man. Um. Have
you seen the new Blade Runner movie? At been? I
have not seen the New Blade Runner yet. No. I
saw it last night at like ten o'clock. And I
do really badly with falling asleep at late movies. And
it's quite long, but I will tell you that it
moved along at such a It's a very languid movie,
(01:09):
but it actually has a pretty incredible clip of action
and activity that kind of kept me awake and alert
and I enjoyed every second of it. And it's a
it's somewhat of a slow bird, right if I'm having
a hard time expression because it is a slow burn
and it's a very languid kind of drone e movie.
It's got this amazing score that very much matches what
(01:31):
Van Gellis did on the original one, but this time
they've got Hans Zimmer doing it. He's doing his very
best Vangellis impersonation and it's great. But it's like, you know,
it's the kind of movie that used to maybe would
have put me to sleep watching it at ten o'clock
and it is three hours long. But I'm just I
think that says a lot. I don't want to give
anything away. Everyone should see it. It's really cool. This
has like literally nothing to do with what we're talking
(01:51):
about today. It kind of does, does it, yes, Because
because we're we're currently talking about the seventeen the new
Blea Runner film. In the previous Blade Runner film, one
of my favorite things about it watching watching it as
a wee Tyke was decort right the protagonists he is.
(02:14):
It seems like there are scenes where he is walking
by restaurants and stuff. Man, I totally just pulled this
out of nowhere, but it absolutely does connect because it
was the future depicted in the Blade Runner movies and
in this new one too. There's a definite Chinese influence.
See where I'm going, and you see where you're going,
and there are you know, restaurants on every corner. A
(02:34):
lot of the folks that make the manufacturer the bootleg
um replicant animals and different things like that, they're they're
from China, and everyone kind of also speaks Chinese. Yeah,
it seems like it's a second language. It's very important.
There's this implied subtext that whether economically or culturally, the
(02:55):
Chinese culture is making these in roads right on place
is where it formerly would never have existed. And in
the universe of at least the original Blade Runner, this
is a given. This is after the fact, after the
story begins. This is already happened. And what's strange about it,
(03:16):
you know, there is always the argument that science fiction
is like prescient, right, it's predictive. In this case, what's
fascinating is that in the past we have to wonder
what the directors are drawing from, because in the real
life past and genuine American history, there was a time
where people were very threatened by this notion. Yeah, it's
(03:39):
kind of another really awful, embarrassing thing that we as
a country did. It's it's pretty awful. Um, this is
kind of a bit of a bummer of a topic,
but it's really fascinating and for obvious reasons, completely ridiculous.
But we're gonna be as sensitive as humanly possible about this.
(03:59):
But there are some kind of upsetting racial themes that
we're going to get into in talking about America's war
on Chinese restaurants in the early nineteen hundreds. Now, I know,
I know, I know how this sounds. We know how
this sounds when you're hearing it a war on what.
And of course it's not as if America as a
(04:19):
stranger to waging war on various things, various things that
aren't nations, right. Uh. And it's kind of hard to
believe today because we know that there are over forty
one thousand Chinese restaurants in the US. This is an institution.
You know, we always think of think of about how
(04:42):
ubiquity is some fast food places might be, but Chinese
restaurants are taking the cake. I believe there are about
three times as many Chinese restaurants as the number of
McDonald's and General so Is Chicken. I've always been concerned
about my pronunciation of that as a General so Yeah, Yeah,
like yes that I'm gonna go with general. So it's
(05:02):
uh one of the most ordered dishes online via grub
hub um in the nation. So it's like one of
the most popular takeout foods that we have. Um. So
let's just set the scene a little bit, the creepy
racist scene, if you will. In the early to mid
nineteen hundreds, the um white establishment, which was made up
(05:25):
of like local governments and labor unions, and boy boy,
were the labor unions a big part of this problem,
which we'll get into you later, among other institutions in
the US, basically put out and supported these Jim Crow
laws and other regulations that were incredibly prohibitive specifically to
(05:47):
people of Asian descent. Right. And based on these regulations
and the underlying and open, we should say this, very
open racist ideology, this establishment waged a campaign trying to
drive the Chinese restaurants of the time out of business.
And a lot of the stuff that we're a lot
(06:10):
a lot of the stuff we're taking as inspiration in
this episode comes from a fantastic study written by Gabriel J.
Chin and John Ormand called the War against Chinese Restaurants. Yeah,
the paper goes into every possible angle of this and
it's it's more than we could hope to cover in
(06:31):
a in a thirty minute podcast, but um, it's it's
it's such an interesting microcosm for the history of racism
in America too, because it comes at it from all sides. Basically,
you have, you know, the idea of targeting a specific
race with mistreatment and trying to exclude them from earning
a living wage and being successful entrepreneurs in this country,
(06:54):
to you know, the boycotts and all of the things
that go along with that, and protests, to the whole
idea of the Chinese man being painted and portrayed as
some sort of insidious threat that would potentially woo unsuspecting
white women into their you know, underground opium layers, and
(07:17):
you know, just just the most awful, stereotypical kinds of
things you could think of. Uh, this paper really dissects
all of that and gets to the heart of what's
going on here. Yeah, and the heart of what's going
on is unfortunately all too familiar because it obeys some
of the same patterns we have seen in history before.
(07:38):
And then the strangest and craziest thing about it is.
The question did America wage war on Chinese restaurants sounds ridiculous,
and the answer is yes, absolutely and no. You mentioned
some some of the prongs of their argument here and
there there two sides, right, there's the econom um excite,
(08:00):
as South Park characters would say, they're taking our gerbs, right, Yeah,
I mean there was you know, a lot of Chinese
immigration happened in the early eighteen hundreds as a result
of their willingness to work for less money. And you know,
we built the Transcontinal Railroad and that was a huge
part of that labor force. And you know, of course,
(08:21):
you leave your home and you come to the land
of opportunity and the hopes of making a better life
for yourself, and then surprise, you're treated like utter garbage
and paid nothing and given no protections because the unions
literally would not allow folks of Chinese descent to be
a member, right exactly. And you know, labor unions are
(08:46):
a complex thing in US history, so we're not demigrating
the idea of labor unions. Overall. This is not capital
l capital you labor unions the concept. This is about
the provable, disputable actions of labor unions in this time,
because you see, they thought that these restaurants for for
(09:08):
people who are able to literally through backbreaking work probably
no small amount of luck and endless determination. People who
started their own restaurants were being targeted because they were
seeing this competition for American restaurants and that they were
taking away jobs, right, good American jobs in this case
(09:29):
pretty much white people restaurant jobs. And the idea of
this threat was to them a to these labor unions.
It was not so much an act of aggression as
it was some sort of act of defense or survivalism. No,
you've already already mentioned the fear that these these strange
(09:54):
men would capture the white women and involved them in
slavery essentially for opium. And this also, I think shows
how how much of a dearth of education there was
regarding the history of the West China and opium, because
we we haven't talked about on this show, but in
the Opium Wars, one of the main reasons they occurred
(10:17):
is because the Chinese government said, please stop forcing opium
on our people when it was really happening. So it's
an interesting and heartbreaking switcheroo. As as you said, this
immigration had been in play since the eighteen fifties, and
(10:38):
as these as people who came over from China began
to prosper and save money, they started opening their own businesses.
American Dream right, textbook American Dream, so to quote from
um an email interview conducted with the author of that paper,
Gabriel Jack Chenum non Chinese American cooks and waiters and
(11:02):
restaurant owners really wanted the Chinese restaurants gone. But what
got the labor movement as a whole interested was restricting
immigration in general and keeping Asians out of the workforce entirely. Yeah. Absolutely.
And this this is a strange case because it begins
to enter legislation. This fearmongering and this prejudice led to
(11:27):
Congress passing laws that explicitly stopped, blocked, halted, cut off
Chinese immigration, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen
eighty two. And the thing is, when the earliest Chinese
restaurants started in the US, they were not billing themselves
as quote unquote Chinese restaurants. The restauranteurs were assimilating. They
(11:52):
were including American food, you know, like grilled steak of
roast chicken, you know, whatever is around too. I mean,
we also think about supply chains. In that time, they
were probably making foods that were easily made from surrounding areas,
right and agricultural resources. But this didn't stop the unions
from going after Chinese restaurants, and they use different tactics
(12:16):
to do this. In some communities, the white union members
would do what is almost a mafioso tactic. They would
go into the restaurant and they would say, well, you know,
we're gonna give you just a warning here, be about
time to leave town. Wednesday is a good trip forever. Yeah,
(12:37):
I mean in that paper, there's a whole section on
some of these attempts to literally run these folks out
of town like on a rail. Yes, and this was
not the only arrow in the quiver of these labor unions.
They also organized boycotts, and a boycott would be you've
seen these in the modern day. Boycott in this instance
(12:59):
would be something like a group of people getting together
to maybe protests outside of a restaurant, to pass out
handbills talking about this this menace and to exhort friends, neighbors,
and loved ones not to go to this restaurant to
make it feel that it is somehow a civic responsibility
(13:19):
not to support this establishment. And when you bring it
back to the labor unions, it becomes basically like a
national boycott because they made a huge deal about not
patronizing any businesses that weren't connected to the labor unions,
and they would not allow people of Asian descent um,
whether they are you know, even children of immigrants, to
(13:43):
join the unions um. Therefore, they were essentially telling all
of their members to have nothing to do with any
business that had any connection with you know, these these people. Yes,
so let's let's think about this in the human perspective.
I love that you point this out. So even if
you were born in the US, maybe your parents immigrated
(14:04):
and you were born in California, that law would still
apply to you. It's something more. It's the layer of
race instead of just the layer of citizenship. And let's
imagine for a second the other side of the argument.
Let's say that you are a labor union member and
you don't have a problem with these other restaurants. Heck,
(14:26):
once a week you go out for family dinner at
your favorite place and you order chop suey, which is
a whole different thing, right, but because you're in the Union,
you can. It's you're not only told not to do it,
but there will be consequences if you do, uh, go
to this restaurant. Yeah, And speaking of chop suey, that
(14:47):
was actually a kind of an Americanized Asian dish that became,
you know, a centerpiece for um. These restaurants that were
popping up all over the place, especially in California. They
are called chop suey house is And it was a
dish that was like a stir fried mix of meat
and vegetables and eggs over noodles. And I was looking
it up and apparently the origin of the fridly terms
(15:09):
chop suey comes from the idea of reusing leftovers, so
sort of like you know, whatever you have left in
the frid So it's not a specific set of ingredients,
it's just kind of like whatever's around. Um. But they
were really popular, and these restaurants were popping up all
over the place, and you know, the they were the
target of all kinds of racist animosity, um wherever they
(15:30):
were found, even though they were certainly also pretty popular, right,
people were people were obviously building restaurants to meet demand. Right.
If people didn't like this food, then these would these
restaurants wouldn't exist. That's just how this business would work.
When the boycotts didn't work, though, and when the threats
(15:53):
didn't work both to let's remember the people who owned
the restaurants and the people who already existed in labor unions.
There was another step, and a very serious step. This
is where a story takes an even darker turn. There
was a missionary named el Ci Siegel and she was
found murdered in nineteen o nine in a room above
(16:14):
a Chinese restaurant in New York City. And this, as
Marcavelli in cold and I would say evil as it sounds,
was the opportunity that these anti immigration forces have been
waiting for. Yeah, this became a really huge story, not
just in New York but all across the country. And
(16:36):
there's a really great article on the site of the
Tenement Museum, and it's got some great clips of the headlines.
One of them is fine miss Seagal dead in trunk.
Her body was found in a trunk, um strangled with
a rope around her neck, and she was actually the
granddaughter of a very well known Union general from the
(16:57):
Civil War. So this was a pretty big l One
of the other headlines was Chinese suspected of slaying white
girl is in custody. Yikes. It's like how much more
divisive can you get in the headline. It's like where
they were definitely trying to push an agenda here and
stir up hysteria and kind of like a panic you
know too, We've got to do something about this problem.
(17:19):
This the inherent threat that has now gone beyond. This
is me speaking hypothetically, the voice of these kind of
awful people. Um has gone beyond just threatening us monetarily,
but there is a legitimate threat to our children. Things
insidious menace, think of the children. We have a moral imperative.
(17:40):
And this propagandization, this this smear campaign reached a fever pitch.
It became a media tropes when when Elsie Seaguals death
triggered a new era of this. It came from a
pre existing thing, this white female victimization. In Chin's paper,
(18:05):
they cite an eight film called King of the Opium Ring,
and it features a clown who rescues a young white
woman in dire straits on the balcony of a Chinese restaurant.
This thing played around the country. People loved it. So
(18:25):
it wasn't, you know, tabula raz It wasn't a blank
slate for the labor unions to exploit this stuff emotionally.
And the Seagull murder lad to lobbying for laws that
completely banned white women, exclusively white women, not just from
(18:45):
working at a Chinese restaurant, but from visiting one as
a customer. And now we have the benefit of history
when you think about the murder, Well, it's crazy too,
because I mean, the language and the legislation is just
absurdly Obviously it's racist, but it's really sexist that talks
about how women are somehow weak willed and you know,
appliable and easily you know, led astray, and just very
(19:07):
condescending stuff. But as it turns out, this case had
a pretty interesting conclusion. So it turns out that the
apartment where else where Elsie Siegel's body was discovered, belonged
to a man by the name of Leon Ling, whose
cousin owned the restaurant um underneath the apartment, and they
(19:28):
found a box with a whole lot of love letters
from Um miss Siegel to this man Leon Ling, and
apparently some of them sounded very as though she were
pleading with him to not leave her or you know,
to to stay with her. And it also came out
(19:52):
that there was another player in the story. There was
a man Um who was seen as being a potential
jealous uh spurned lover of mis Seagull. And this man's
name was Chew Gain, and he admitted to Um also
being in a relationship with Elsie Uh, and that he
(20:15):
had received anonymous letters threatening her life. And then eventually
the police discovered another man by the name of Chew
Gain who admitted to of having having had a relationship
with Um Elsie and he received all these anonymous letters
threatening his life and her life if they didn't in
the relationship Um. Ultimately the cops arrested three people, and
(20:40):
um Ling eventually left the country and was never apprehended,
and the murders apparently an open case, you know, more
than a years later. But all of this stuff just
stirred up these wild rumors that things from like Elsie
had killed herself to you know, the Chinese community had
smuggled ling out of the country. So all of this
just served to pour fuel on this you know, racist
(21:03):
fire that was burning already, and because it was such
a sensational story, it kind of spread this, you know,
all over the country, and this this went city to city.
Now that's not to say that some conscientious local politicians
didn't fight against these bills, some airs vetoed them. But
there was a change there was There was this wave
(21:26):
of people who were convinced, convinced that the enemy was
within and the enemy was making delicious food as a
cover for some larger, perfidious motive opponents. Luckily, luckily for me,
the opponents were not successful in ridding cities of Chinese restaurants,
(21:48):
and eventually the good news is that the organized movement
against the restaurants started to fade out. One of the
reasons the Chin sites that have faded out is pretty ugly,
but it makes sense. It's the Immigration Act of nineteen
four which made things worse in terms of immigration because
(22:12):
it took the Chinese Exclusion Act that just banned Chinese laborers,
and then it expanded it to include any immigrant from
the Asian continent, which is insane. These laws, according to Chin,
gave the white power structure that Nolan I mentioned earlier,
a little bit of I guess you'd say reassurance, a
(22:35):
security blanket where they said, well, we don't have to
worry anymore about our jobs and our incomes being taken
quote unquote, and this and the popular mindset meant that
Asian Americans were not going to be a labor threat,
at least not as much as they were seen at
the time. Okay, So you that I felt like there
(22:57):
was a silver lining coming there, Ben, and I just
I just I don't see it. Yeah, he basically you're
saying like it got better because it got worse, you know.
I uh, yeah, I tell you know, I think I
think that might be the case. And I guess what
I'm getting at is it got better in terms of
there weren't there wasn't as much of a problem for
(23:17):
the folks that were doing horrible angry racist stuff. So
therefore some of the horrible angry racist stuff stopped, I guess.
But right, but it didn't. See that's the thing. It
didn't get better for this power structure because it never
got worse, you know what I mean, Like this this threat,
(23:37):
this this perspective of a threat is clearly based on
racist ideology. It's not based, it's it's not a solid
economical argument, you know what I mean. I think it
wasn't until the was it the forties that you that
the US lifted this ban on Chinese immigration or no,
it wasn't on immigration, It was on Chinese people becoming
(23:59):
nash realized US citizens. So as as far as recently
as the forties, this was this was a concern. But
you know what's funny, like what always happens is what
really turned the popular mindset, um, you know in the
favor of some of these business owners, was you know,
celebrities doing stuff and uh, you know we've got like
(24:21):
Bob Hope and and Ronald Reagan were big fans of
a place in San Francisco called Charlie Lowe's Forbidden City,
which is such a cool name place. Um, and it
was like a nightclub and a restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. Um. Yeah.
I was this guy named Larry Ching who was considered, uh,
the Chinese Sinatra, and I was writing this article in
(24:44):
San Francisco Gate. There was also like a Chinese Sophie Tucker,
a Chinese Fred Astaire, probably a Chinese Sammy Davis Jr.
I don't know what have you, but they always had
to be couched, you know, as some American you know,
popular Chinese version of this exist. Um places like this
(25:05):
because of the appearance of acceptance from influencers like you know,
these movie stars and president presidents. Uh it's people started
to kind of like chill out about it a little bit.
So what changed? You know? We have these celebrity endorsements,
one of which, famously by Man would later go on
(25:27):
to serve as US President. But the wheels of legislation
often grind slow. And as we said, it was until
forty three that the specific ban on Chinese people naturalizing occurred.
But even after that point, immigration laws made it incredibly
difficult for people of Chinese origin to immigrate. And this
(25:47):
was in this lasted up until get this, nineteen sixty eight,
three years after the Immigration and Nationality Act of nineteen
sixty five was an acted into law, So three years
after it was supposed to happen, it happens pretty mind boggling.
And it's in the six takes so long to do
(26:09):
normal stuff in this country. I don't get it, um,
but you know, now here we are as we said
at the top of the show, they're just you know,
thousands and thousands and thousands of Chinese restaurants. It's like
a hugely popular family meal night takeaway, you know thing.
I love it, my kid loves it. It's very delicious,
(26:33):
you know, tasty food, and a lot of it like too.
This is it's such a such an amazing variety of
things too, like in like different styles between Sechuan and
Cantonese and all of the spices, and it's just I mean,
I'm I'm a huge, huge fan of Chinese food. Yeah.
When we were looking at some of the research here,
my my question for some of my friends started becoming,
(26:54):
when's the last time you're eate Chinese food? Everybody, it seems,
had it in like the past month at some point,
you know, people are voting with their taste butts. But
the journey isn't over yet, because the authors say that
they see clear echoes of the early twentieth century today.
We've got a great quote from Chin who says there's
(27:16):
a long tradition in the United States of good things
being reserved for white folks and misguided economic race tinged xenophobia,
the waves of discrimination have always proved to be unnecessary
and counterproductive, and honestly, I agree because when we see
these sort of who wasn't Mark Twain said that history
(27:38):
doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. I'm paraphrasing there, yea.
George Lucas always also said that about them, how brilliant
the Star Wars prequels were, Like it rhymes. I don't
know what he means by that, but the slight Red
Letter media that does these amazing kind of lampoons of
these Star Wars prequels, they're always using this clip of
(27:58):
George Lucas thing about everything rhyming. I am going to
check that out and tell you right now, I am
in the mood for some orange chicken because just doing
this this episode has made me so hungry, and I
feel so fortunate that we're able to go find Chinese restaurants.
I mean, what if this, what if this went the
(28:20):
other way? Man? What if they were non existent? That
would be a shame. That would be a crying shame.
I mean, one thing I really love about living in
Atlanta is that we have this amazing, um just explosion
of fantastic you know, culinary options on We've got a
place called Buford Highway where there are you know, everything
(28:43):
from Korean to Chinese to all kinds of Latin American food,
the Opian, whatever you want. And that's That's one thing
that's cool about living in the United States is that
you have access to all of this great stuff. And
you know, I wouldn't have any other way. I think
that's kind of what makes uh makes this country special.
And this means that we are all fortunate. There's a
(29:06):
happy ending to this story. Of course, no story ever
really ends, so maybe it's better to say, at this
point in time, it feels very fortunate. And for now
that's where our episode ends, but not our show. We
will be back very soon with more ridiculous history. And
(29:27):
in the meantime, we'd like to hear from you, so yeah,
write us your ideas and tell us. You know what
a bummer this episode was. Spoiler alert, we know we're
bummed out too, but you know, you gotta learn from
this stuff and makes you appreciate where we are now.
I guess, oh sorry, I'm just it's a it is
(29:51):
a bummer because I'm starting to think about like we're
not that much better. It's like people are still awful,
and you know, there's just a whole another culture that
people are acting this way towards. You know, there's really
no silver lining at all here. I hate to sound
so depressed about it, but it's just kind of making
me realize, like this notion of like, oh, we've come
(30:12):
so far, and maybe some of us have, but I
don't know, like we've come so far in one regard
and devolved so far in another. You know, I wonder,
I wonder what other cycles like this exists. There's obviously
there's obviously modern day versions of this where maybe some
(30:35):
of the language has changed, but the intent is not.
I know, I guess. I mean, I just saw an
article the other day about like, you know, a Jewish
deli in New York being sent an envelope with like
a swastika on it and saying, you know, Jews get
out and things like that. So, you know, I mean,
this is I think this stuff is is informative and illuminating,
but it's like it's just a bummer to me because
(30:57):
it's like I don't feel like we've fixed it exactly.
You know, I don't know how do you fix something
like this that's so deep seated in certain people. I
guess it's not as widespread hopefully. I don't know. Well,
it's also it may be a downer, but it's very
very important to have knowledge of this out in the world.
And yeah, it's true. I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry. This
(31:17):
is uh, this is so crushing to me. I just
kind of like had a moment where I started to
think about, you know, this is there's so many parallels
with this story. I guess that we're seeing now in particular. Um,
but you know, I think if if we just at
least educate ourselves, then we can speak out when we
see people acting like jerks and speaking and speaking out.
(31:38):
We'd like to hear from you. What do you think
about these sorts of cycles in history? Also, what's your
favorite Chinese food? I think I've thrown that one in
there because I'm hungry. You're into your the orange chicken guy.
I don't know, I don't know, it just came to me,
but it's always a game time decision when I'm in
front of the menu. I mean, when it comes to
like super americanized Chinese food. Huge fan of orange chicken especially.
(32:01):
I like, you know, the crappier, the better. I like
Mall Orange Chicken. There's a particular, you know, flavor that
Mall Orange Chicken has for me and a soft spot
in my heart, very nostalgia because I remember being a
kid and eating orange chicken at the mall. But when
it comes to more traditional stuff, like you've you've done
the dim something, Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've got a
great place on Bover Highway called Canton House. Been there, yeah,
(32:24):
which is Gratwin dim sum, also a lot of regional cuisine.
Big fan of se Juan and I can't wait to
get out there. Actually, I'm I'm gonna head out and
grab something to eat. Yeah. The dim sums so cool
because you literally don't know what you're getting. It's just
a mixed bag. It's like a surprise every and every bite,
and they're all like small bites. But now we're just
(32:46):
talking about delicious Chinese food and we've got to get
out of here, don't we been? Yes, yes, we do,
my friends. So speaking of speaking out and uh, speaking
of surprising things, speak out right to us, surprise us.
We'd love to hear from you. Yeah, we're on this
social media. Just search for us on Facebook, um and
Instagram and you'll find us. You can also send us
(33:06):
an email at ridiculous at how stuff works dot com,
and we will be back with you very soon for
more ridiculous history, depending on how long it takes for
the Orange chickens
Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Ben, I'm no,
and we are as always joined with our super producer
Alex Williams. Have we introduced Alex to the Ridiculous History
crowd yet? Ah? Yes, everyone, Alex Alex. Everyone. He doesn't
really talk. He only talks in our ears and dead
and you know, sometimes we get him to turn up
the high hats and we assure you he's very much real.
(00:47):
It's very much super. Now he's there, we're looking at him,
and he is a handsome toothsome young man. Um. Have
you seen the new Blade Runner movie? At been? I
have not seen the New Blade Runner yet. No. I
saw it last night at like ten o'clock. And I
do really badly with falling asleep at late movies. And
it's quite long, but I will tell you that it
moved along at such a It's a very languid movie,
(01:09):
but it actually has a pretty incredible clip of action
and activity that kind of kept me awake and alert
and I enjoyed every second of it. And it's a
it's somewhat of a slow bird, right if I'm having
a hard time expression because it is a slow burn
and it's a very languid kind of drone e movie.
It's got this amazing score that very much matches what
(01:31):
Van Gellis did on the original one, but this time
they've got Hans Zimmer doing it. He's doing his very
best Vangellis impersonation and it's great. But it's like, you know,
it's the kind of movie that used to maybe would
have put me to sleep watching it at ten o'clock
and it is three hours long. But I'm just I
think that says a lot. I don't want to give
anything away. Everyone should see it. It's really cool. This
has like literally nothing to do with what we're talking
(01:51):
about today. It kind of does, does it, yes, Because
because we're we're currently talking about the seventeen the new
Blea Runner film. In the previous Blade Runner film, one
of my favorite things about it watching watching it as
a wee Tyke was decort right the protagonists he is.
(02:14):
It seems like there are scenes where he is walking
by restaurants and stuff. Man, I totally just pulled this
out of nowhere, but it absolutely does connect because it
was the future depicted in the Blade Runner movies and
in this new one too. There's a definite Chinese influence.
See where I'm going, and you see where you're going,
and there are you know, restaurants on every corner. A
(02:34):
lot of the folks that make the manufacturer the bootleg
um replicant animals and different things like that, they're they're
from China, and everyone kind of also speaks Chinese. Yeah,
it seems like it's a second language. It's very important.
There's this implied subtext that whether economically or culturally, the
(02:55):
Chinese culture is making these in roads right on place
is where it formerly would never have existed. And in
the universe of at least the original Blade Runner, this
is a given. This is after the fact, after the
story begins. This is already happened. And what's strange about it,
(03:16):
you know, there is always the argument that science fiction
is like prescient, right, it's predictive. In this case, what's
fascinating is that in the past we have to wonder
what the directors are drawing from, because in the real
life past and genuine American history, there was a time
where people were very threatened by this notion. Yeah, it's
(03:39):
kind of another really awful, embarrassing thing that we as
a country did. It's it's pretty awful. Um, this is
kind of a bit of a bummer of a topic,
but it's really fascinating and for obvious reasons, completely ridiculous.
But we're gonna be as sensitive as humanly possible about this.
(03:59):
But there are some kind of upsetting racial themes that
we're going to get into in talking about America's war
on Chinese restaurants in the early nineteen hundreds. Now, I know,
I know, I know how this sounds. We know how
this sounds when you're hearing it a war on what.
And of course it's not as if America as a
(04:19):
stranger to waging war on various things, various things that
aren't nations, right. Uh. And it's kind of hard to
believe today because we know that there are over forty
one thousand Chinese restaurants in the US. This is an institution.
You know, we always think of think of about how
(04:42):
ubiquity is some fast food places might be, but Chinese
restaurants are taking the cake. I believe there are about
three times as many Chinese restaurants as the number of
McDonald's and General so Is Chicken. I've always been concerned
about my pronunciation of that as a General so Yeah, Yeah,
like yes that I'm gonna go with general. So it's
(05:02):
uh one of the most ordered dishes online via grub
hub um in the nation. So it's like one of
the most popular takeout foods that we have. Um. So
let's just set the scene a little bit, the creepy
racist scene, if you will. In the early to mid
nineteen hundreds, the um white establishment, which was made up
(05:25):
of like local governments and labor unions, and boy boy,
were the labor unions a big part of this problem,
which we'll get into you later, among other institutions in
the US, basically put out and supported these Jim Crow
laws and other regulations that were incredibly prohibitive specifically to
(05:47):
people of Asian descent. Right. And based on these regulations
and the underlying and open, we should say this, very
open racist ideology, this establishment waged a campaign trying to
drive the Chinese restaurants of the time out of business.
And a lot of the stuff that we're a lot
(06:10):
a lot of the stuff we're taking as inspiration in
this episode comes from a fantastic study written by Gabriel J.
Chin and John Ormand called the War against Chinese Restaurants. Yeah,
the paper goes into every possible angle of this and
it's it's more than we could hope to cover in
(06:31):
a in a thirty minute podcast, but um, it's it's
it's such an interesting microcosm for the history of racism
in America too, because it comes at it from all sides. Basically,
you have, you know, the idea of targeting a specific
race with mistreatment and trying to exclude them from earning
a living wage and being successful entrepreneurs in this country,
(06:54):
to you know, the boycotts and all of the things
that go along with that, and protests, to the whole
idea of the Chinese man being painted and portrayed as
some sort of insidious threat that would potentially woo unsuspecting
white women into their you know, underground opium layers, and
(07:17):
you know, just just the most awful, stereotypical kinds of
things you could think of. Uh, this paper really dissects
all of that and gets to the heart of what's
going on here. Yeah, and the heart of what's going
on is unfortunately all too familiar because it obeys some
of the same patterns we have seen in history before.
(07:38):
And then the strangest and craziest thing about it is.
The question did America wage war on Chinese restaurants sounds ridiculous,
and the answer is yes, absolutely and no. You mentioned
some some of the prongs of their argument here and
there there two sides, right, there's the econom um excite,
(08:00):
as South Park characters would say, they're taking our gerbs, right, Yeah,
I mean there was you know, a lot of Chinese
immigration happened in the early eighteen hundreds as a result
of their willingness to work for less money. And you know,
we built the Transcontinal Railroad and that was a huge
part of that labor force. And you know, of course,
(08:21):
you leave your home and you come to the land
of opportunity and the hopes of making a better life
for yourself, and then surprise, you're treated like utter garbage
and paid nothing and given no protections because the unions
literally would not allow folks of Chinese descent to be
a member, right exactly. And you know, labor unions are
(08:46):
a complex thing in US history, so we're not demigrating
the idea of labor unions. Overall. This is not capital
l capital you labor unions the concept. This is about
the provable, disputable actions of labor unions in this time,
because you see, they thought that these restaurants for for
(09:08):
people who are able to literally through backbreaking work probably
no small amount of luck and endless determination. People who
started their own restaurants were being targeted because they were
seeing this competition for American restaurants and that they were
taking away jobs, right, good American jobs in this case
(09:29):
pretty much white people restaurant jobs. And the idea of
this threat was to them a to these labor unions.
It was not so much an act of aggression as
it was some sort of act of defense or survivalism. No,
you've already already mentioned the fear that these these strange
(09:54):
men would capture the white women and involved them in
slavery essentially for opium. And this also, I think shows
how how much of a dearth of education there was
regarding the history of the West China and opium, because
we we haven't talked about on this show, but in
the Opium Wars, one of the main reasons they occurred
(10:17):
is because the Chinese government said, please stop forcing opium
on our people when it was really happening. So it's
an interesting and heartbreaking switcheroo. As as you said, this
immigration had been in play since the eighteen fifties, and
(10:38):
as these as people who came over from China began
to prosper and save money, they started opening their own businesses.
American Dream right, textbook American Dream, so to quote from
um an email interview conducted with the author of that paper,
Gabriel Jack Chenum non Chinese American cooks and waiters and
(11:02):
restaurant owners really wanted the Chinese restaurants gone. But what
got the labor movement as a whole interested was restricting
immigration in general and keeping Asians out of the workforce entirely. Yeah. Absolutely.
And this this is a strange case because it begins
to enter legislation. This fearmongering and this prejudice led to
(11:27):
Congress passing laws that explicitly stopped, blocked, halted, cut off
Chinese immigration, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen
eighty two. And the thing is, when the earliest Chinese
restaurants started in the US, they were not billing themselves
as quote unquote Chinese restaurants. The restauranteurs were assimilating. They
(11:52):
were including American food, you know, like grilled steak of
roast chicken, you know, whatever is around too. I mean,
we also think about supply chains. In that time, they
were probably making foods that were easily made from surrounding areas,
right and agricultural resources. But this didn't stop the unions
from going after Chinese restaurants, and they use different tactics
(12:16):
to do this. In some communities, the white union members
would do what is almost a mafioso tactic. They would
go into the restaurant and they would say, well, you know,
we're gonna give you just a warning here, be about
time to leave town. Wednesday is a good trip forever. Yeah,
(12:37):
I mean in that paper, there's a whole section on
some of these attempts to literally run these folks out
of town like on a rail. Yes, and this was
not the only arrow in the quiver of these labor unions.
They also organized boycotts, and a boycott would be you've
seen these in the modern day. Boycott in this instance
(12:59):
would be something like a group of people getting together
to maybe protests outside of a restaurant, to pass out
handbills talking about this this menace and to exhort friends, neighbors,
and loved ones not to go to this restaurant to
make it feel that it is somehow a civic responsibility
(13:19):
not to support this establishment. And when you bring it
back to the labor unions, it becomes basically like a
national boycott because they made a huge deal about not
patronizing any businesses that weren't connected to the labor unions,
and they would not allow people of Asian descent um,
whether they are you know, even children of immigrants, to
(13:43):
join the unions um. Therefore, they were essentially telling all
of their members to have nothing to do with any
business that had any connection with you know, these these people. Yes,
so let's let's think about this in the human perspective.
I love that you point this out. So even if
you were born in the US, maybe your parents immigrated
(14:04):
and you were born in California, that law would still
apply to you. It's something more. It's the layer of
race instead of just the layer of citizenship. And let's
imagine for a second the other side of the argument.
Let's say that you are a labor union member and
you don't have a problem with these other restaurants. Heck,
(14:26):
once a week you go out for family dinner at
your favorite place and you order chop suey, which is
a whole different thing, right, but because you're in the Union,
you can. It's you're not only told not to do it,
but there will be consequences if you do, uh, go
to this restaurant. Yeah, And speaking of chop suey, that
(14:47):
was actually a kind of an Americanized Asian dish that became,
you know, a centerpiece for um. These restaurants that were
popping up all over the place, especially in California. They
are called chop suey house is And it was a
dish that was like a stir fried mix of meat
and vegetables and eggs over noodles. And I was looking
it up and apparently the origin of the fridly terms
(15:09):
chop suey comes from the idea of reusing leftovers, so
sort of like you know, whatever you have left in
the frid So it's not a specific set of ingredients,
it's just kind of like whatever's around. Um. But they
were really popular, and these restaurants were popping up all
over the place, and you know, the they were the
target of all kinds of racist animosity, um wherever they
(15:30):
were found, even though they were certainly also pretty popular, right,
people were people were obviously building restaurants to meet demand. Right.
If people didn't like this food, then these would these
restaurants wouldn't exist. That's just how this business would work.
When the boycotts didn't work, though, and when the threats
(15:53):
didn't work both to let's remember the people who owned
the restaurants and the people who already existed in labor unions.
There was another step, and a very serious step. This
is where a story takes an even darker turn. There
was a missionary named el Ci Siegel and she was
found murdered in nineteen o nine in a room above
(16:14):
a Chinese restaurant in New York City. And this, as
Marcavelli in cold and I would say evil as it sounds,
was the opportunity that these anti immigration forces have been
waiting for. Yeah, this became a really huge story, not
just in New York but all across the country. And
(16:36):
there's a really great article on the site of the
Tenement Museum, and it's got some great clips of the headlines.
One of them is fine miss Seagal dead in trunk.
Her body was found in a trunk, um strangled with
a rope around her neck, and she was actually the
granddaughter of a very well known Union general from the
(16:57):
Civil War. So this was a pretty big l One
of the other headlines was Chinese suspected of slaying white
girl is in custody. Yikes. It's like how much more
divisive can you get in the headline. It's like where
they were definitely trying to push an agenda here and
stir up hysteria and kind of like a panic you
know too, We've got to do something about this problem.
(17:19):
This the inherent threat that has now gone beyond. This
is me speaking hypothetically, the voice of these kind of
awful people. Um has gone beyond just threatening us monetarily,
but there is a legitimate threat to our children. Things
insidious menace, think of the children. We have a moral imperative.
(17:40):
And this propagandization, this this smear campaign reached a fever pitch.
It became a media tropes when when Elsie Seaguals death
triggered a new era of this. It came from a
pre existing thing, this white female victimization. In Chin's paper,
(18:05):
they cite an eight film called King of the Opium Ring,
and it features a clown who rescues a young white
woman in dire straits on the balcony of a Chinese restaurant.
This thing played around the country. People loved it. So
(18:25):
it wasn't, you know, tabula raz It wasn't a blank
slate for the labor unions to exploit this stuff emotionally.
And the Seagull murder lad to lobbying for laws that
completely banned white women, exclusively white women, not just from
(18:45):
working at a Chinese restaurant, but from visiting one as
a customer. And now we have the benefit of history
when you think about the murder, Well, it's crazy too,
because I mean, the language and the legislation is just
absurdly Obviously it's racist, but it's really sexist that talks
about how women are somehow weak willed and you know,
appliable and easily you know, led astray, and just very
(19:07):
condescending stuff. But as it turns out, this case had
a pretty interesting conclusion. So it turns out that the
apartment where else where Elsie Siegel's body was discovered, belonged
to a man by the name of Leon Ling, whose
cousin owned the restaurant um underneath the apartment, and they
(19:28):
found a box with a whole lot of love letters
from Um miss Siegel to this man Leon Ling, and
apparently some of them sounded very as though she were
pleading with him to not leave her or you know,
to to stay with her. And it also came out
(19:52):
that there was another player in the story. There was
a man Um who was seen as being a potential
jealous uh spurned lover of mis Seagull. And this man's
name was Chew Gain, and he admitted to Um also
being in a relationship with Elsie Uh, and that he
(20:15):
had received anonymous letters threatening her life. And then eventually
the police discovered another man by the name of Chew
Gain who admitted to of having having had a relationship
with Um Elsie and he received all these anonymous letters
threatening his life and her life if they didn't in
the relationship Um. Ultimately the cops arrested three people, and
(20:40):
um Ling eventually left the country and was never apprehended,
and the murders apparently an open case, you know, more
than a years later. But all of this stuff just
stirred up these wild rumors that things from like Elsie
had killed herself to you know, the Chinese community had
smuggled ling out of the country. So all of this
just served to pour fuel on this you know, racist
(21:03):
fire that was burning already, and because it was such
a sensational story, it kind of spread this, you know,
all over the country, and this this went city to city.
Now that's not to say that some conscientious local politicians
didn't fight against these bills, some airs vetoed them. But
there was a change there was There was this wave
(21:26):
of people who were convinced, convinced that the enemy was
within and the enemy was making delicious food as a
cover for some larger, perfidious motive opponents. Luckily, luckily for me,
the opponents were not successful in ridding cities of Chinese restaurants,
(21:48):
and eventually the good news is that the organized movement
against the restaurants started to fade out. One of the
reasons the Chin sites that have faded out is pretty ugly,
but it makes sense. It's the Immigration Act of nineteen
four which made things worse in terms of immigration because
(22:12):
it took the Chinese Exclusion Act that just banned Chinese laborers,
and then it expanded it to include any immigrant from
the Asian continent, which is insane. These laws, according to Chin,
gave the white power structure that Nolan I mentioned earlier,
a little bit of I guess you'd say reassurance, a
(22:35):
security blanket where they said, well, we don't have to
worry anymore about our jobs and our incomes being taken
quote unquote, and this and the popular mindset meant that
Asian Americans were not going to be a labor threat,
at least not as much as they were seen at
the time. Okay, So you that I felt like there
(22:57):
was a silver lining coming there, Ben, and I just
I just I don't see it. Yeah, he basically you're
saying like it got better because it got worse, you know.
I uh, yeah, I tell you know, I think I
think that might be the case. And I guess what
I'm getting at is it got better in terms of
there weren't there wasn't as much of a problem for
(23:17):
the folks that were doing horrible angry racist stuff. So
therefore some of the horrible angry racist stuff stopped, I guess.
But right, but it didn't. See that's the thing. It
didn't get better for this power structure because it never
got worse, you know what I mean, Like this this threat,
(23:37):
this this perspective of a threat is clearly based on
racist ideology. It's not based, it's it's not a solid
economical argument, you know what I mean. I think it
wasn't until the was it the forties that you that
the US lifted this ban on Chinese immigration or no,
it wasn't on immigration, It was on Chinese people becoming
(23:59):
nash realized US citizens. So as as far as recently
as the forties, this was this was a concern. But
you know what's funny, like what always happens is what
really turned the popular mindset, um, you know in the
favor of some of these business owners, was you know,
celebrities doing stuff and uh, you know we've got like
(24:21):
Bob Hope and and Ronald Reagan were big fans of
a place in San Francisco called Charlie Lowe's Forbidden City,
which is such a cool name place. Um, and it
was like a nightclub and a restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. Um. Yeah.
I was this guy named Larry Ching who was considered, uh,
the Chinese Sinatra, and I was writing this article in
(24:44):
San Francisco Gate. There was also like a Chinese Sophie Tucker,
a Chinese Fred Astaire, probably a Chinese Sammy Davis Jr.
I don't know what have you, but they always had
to be couched, you know, as some American you know,
popular Chinese version of this exist. Um places like this
(25:05):
because of the appearance of acceptance from influencers like you know,
these movie stars and president presidents. Uh it's people started
to kind of like chill out about it a little bit.
So what changed? You know? We have these celebrity endorsements,
one of which, famously by Man would later go on
(25:27):
to serve as US President. But the wheels of legislation
often grind slow. And as we said, it was until
forty three that the specific ban on Chinese people naturalizing occurred.
But even after that point, immigration laws made it incredibly
difficult for people of Chinese origin to immigrate. And this
(25:47):
was in this lasted up until get this, nineteen sixty eight,
three years after the Immigration and Nationality Act of nineteen
sixty five was an acted into law, So three years
after it was supposed to happen, it happens pretty mind boggling.
And it's in the six takes so long to do
(26:09):
normal stuff in this country. I don't get it, um,
but you know, now here we are as we said
at the top of the show, they're just you know,
thousands and thousands and thousands of Chinese restaurants. It's like
a hugely popular family meal night takeaway, you know thing.
I love it, my kid loves it. It's very delicious,
(26:33):
you know, tasty food, and a lot of it like too.
This is it's such a such an amazing variety of
things too, like in like different styles between Sechuan and
Cantonese and all of the spices, and it's just I mean,
I'm I'm a huge, huge fan of Chinese food. Yeah.
When we were looking at some of the research here,
my my question for some of my friends started becoming,
(26:54):
when's the last time you're eate Chinese food? Everybody, it seems,
had it in like the past month at some point,
you know, people are voting with their taste butts. But
the journey isn't over yet, because the authors say that
they see clear echoes of the early twentieth century today.
We've got a great quote from Chin who says there's
(27:16):
a long tradition in the United States of good things
being reserved for white folks and misguided economic race tinged xenophobia,
the waves of discrimination have always proved to be unnecessary
and counterproductive, and honestly, I agree because when we see
these sort of who wasn't Mark Twain said that history
(27:38):
doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. I'm paraphrasing there, yea.
George Lucas always also said that about them, how brilliant
the Star Wars prequels were, Like it rhymes. I don't
know what he means by that, but the slight Red
Letter media that does these amazing kind of lampoons of
these Star Wars prequels, they're always using this clip of
(27:58):
George Lucas thing about everything rhyming. I am going to
check that out and tell you right now, I am
in the mood for some orange chicken because just doing
this this episode has made me so hungry, and I
feel so fortunate that we're able to go find Chinese restaurants.
I mean, what if this, what if this went the
(28:20):
other way? Man? What if they were non existent? That
would be a shame. That would be a crying shame.
I mean, one thing I really love about living in
Atlanta is that we have this amazing, um just explosion
of fantastic you know, culinary options on We've got a
place called Buford Highway where there are you know, everything
(28:43):
from Korean to Chinese to all kinds of Latin American food,
the Opian, whatever you want. And that's That's one thing
that's cool about living in the United States is that
you have access to all of this great stuff. And
you know, I wouldn't have any other way. I think
that's kind of what makes uh makes this country special.
And this means that we are all fortunate. There's a
(29:06):
happy ending to this story. Of course, no story ever
really ends, so maybe it's better to say, at this
point in time, it feels very fortunate. And for now
that's where our episode ends, but not our show. We
will be back very soon with more ridiculous history. And
(29:27):
in the meantime, we'd like to hear from you, so yeah,
write us your ideas and tell us. You know what
a bummer this episode was. Spoiler alert, we know we're
bummed out too, but you know, you gotta learn from
this stuff and makes you appreciate where we are now.
I guess, oh sorry, I'm just it's a it is
(29:51):
a bummer because I'm starting to think about like we're
not that much better. It's like people are still awful,
and you know, there's just a whole another culture that
people are acting this way towards. You know, there's really
no silver lining at all here. I hate to sound
so depressed about it, but it's just kind of making
me realize, like this notion of like, oh, we've come
(30:12):
so far, and maybe some of us have, but I
don't know, like we've come so far in one regard
and devolved so far in another. You know, I wonder,
I wonder what other cycles like this exists. There's obviously
there's obviously modern day versions of this where maybe some
(30:35):
of the language has changed, but the intent is not.
I know, I guess. I mean, I just saw an
article the other day about like, you know, a Jewish
deli in New York being sent an envelope with like
a swastika on it and saying, you know, Jews get
out and things like that. So, you know, I mean,
this is I think this stuff is is informative and illuminating,
but it's like it's just a bummer to me because
(30:57):
it's like I don't feel like we've fixed it exactly.
You know, I don't know how do you fix something
like this that's so deep seated in certain people. I
guess it's not as widespread hopefully. I don't know. Well,
it's also it may be a downer, but it's very
very important to have knowledge of this out in the world.
And yeah, it's true. I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry. This
(31:17):
is uh, this is so crushing to me. I just
kind of like had a moment where I started to
think about, you know, this is there's so many parallels
with this story. I guess that we're seeing now in particular. Um,
but you know, I think if if we just at
least educate ourselves, then we can speak out when we
see people acting like jerks and speaking and speaking out.
(31:38):
We'd like to hear from you. What do you think
about these sorts of cycles in history? Also, what's your
favorite Chinese food? I think I've thrown that one in
there because I'm hungry. You're into your the orange chicken guy.
I don't know, I don't know, it just came to me,
but it's always a game time decision when I'm in
front of the menu. I mean, when it comes to
like super americanized Chinese food. Huge fan of orange chicken especially.
(32:01):
I like, you know, the crappier, the better. I like
Mall Orange Chicken. There's a particular, you know, flavor that
Mall Orange Chicken has for me and a soft spot
in my heart, very nostalgia because I remember being a
kid and eating orange chicken at the mall. But when
it comes to more traditional stuff, like you've you've done
the dim something, Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've got a
great place on Bover Highway called Canton House. Been there, yeah,
(32:24):
which is Gratwin dim sum, also a lot of regional cuisine.
Big fan of se Juan and I can't wait to
get out there. Actually, I'm I'm gonna head out and
grab something to eat. Yeah. The dim sums so cool
because you literally don't know what you're getting. It's just
a mixed bag. It's like a surprise every and every bite,
and they're all like small bites. But now we're just
(32:46):
talking about delicious Chinese food and we've got to get
out of here, don't we been? Yes, yes, we do,
my friends. So speaking of speaking out and uh, speaking
of surprising things, speak out right to us, surprise us.
We'd love to hear from you. Yeah, we're on this
social media. Just search for us on Facebook, um and
Instagram and you'll find us. You can also send us
(33:06):
an email at ridiculous at how stuff works dot com,
and we will be back with you very soon for
more ridiculous history, depending on how long it takes for
the Orange chickens
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.