November 9, 2015 • 42 mins
In October, we went to New York Super Week for our first live show! Joining us was author Bryan Young, who wrote a book about presidential assassinations (and attempts) ... for children. It's just as delightful as you think it is.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry, Tracy V. Wilson. Hey Tracy, what last
month we had a little podcast adventure together. Did so
(00:23):
on the off chance that you didn't hear about it.
Tracy and I went to New York to be part
of New York super Week and we had a blast
doing our first live show, and now we get to
share that with all of the people who didn't get
to be there in person. So they're going to basically
do this in two parts. Uh. Today's part is the
the live party podcast portion of the live shows. So
(00:45):
you know, our podcast there in the thirty to forty
minute long range most of the time. Our our live
show was an hour and a half. So today's part,
we're gonna talk to Brian Young about presidential assassination. Yeah.
He is a really fabulous gentleman and a writer, and
he wrote this amazing book about presidential assassination and attempts
(01:08):
for children, and we're gonna talk in this first segment
of the podcast about how he came to write this
book for kids and also how his daughter's Scout ended
up illustrating part of it. So let's hop right into
lifetime with Tracy and Holly. You should bring out our
(01:28):
amazing guest, who is Brian Young? I know Brian, have
a seat, young man. Hello, Brian, Hello, Hello, So as
all ours, all our text seeming to work back there. Yes,
(01:50):
it all sounds great. Little did Brian know he would
also get drafted into technical work tonight. This, this is
what it is. Before we start, I have to do
a quick brief announcement. All right, we have a birthday
in the audience, so Ross, we want to say happy
birthday to you. Your girlfriend Joan wrote us to tell
us we needed to say happy birthday. So happy birthday,
wherever you are, raise your hands, Happy Birthday. I'm not
(02:16):
I'm not suggesting we actually do this. Know however, if
we did want to sing happy Birthday, we could legally
you do it now, Yeah, but let's not for copyright.
I honestly don't remember if I mentioned during that podcast
I hate I hate everybody sounds tuneless and horrible singing
(02:39):
that song. My husband will tell you about how I
have shut down restaurant staff and made them very afraid
for starting the song. And then I'm like, I got it,
so I don't. I don't. I don't love it. No shade,
happy birthday if you love it, but it's not for me.
We we don't need to sing, but we could if
we wanted to. We would not have to make Happy
birthday Ross. Thank you for coming. I hope it's grant. Yeah.
(03:01):
So we're gonna talk to it to Brian for a
while about presidential assassinations, and then we are going to
do some Q and A afterward. That's the plan. The plan,
and then time permitting, we could even do a little
meat and greet afterwards if we haven't taken too long
with Q and A. So it's up to you, guys
to balance your questions with your desire for a time
up clothes. I don't know if that's going to start
any fights or fisticuffs, but I would like to witness both. Sure,
(03:27):
Tracy has or whatever. We want to say anything about
yourself before we climb onto the question party train. Do
you want to talk more about how fabulous you are? You?
You're you're too kind to me? No, I seriously adore Brian.
He's like a sibling to me at this point, So
I say I'm glad you're here. I mostly want to
(03:47):
know that I've been on stage for eight minutes and
I've already splashed water on myself street. I think we
should now just all splash water and a family affair. Really,
So to kick off, I will as the question what
on earth prompted you to go? You know what kids
need is a book about presidential as fascination. Well, I
(04:09):
was wandering around Washington, d C. And uh, I had
a writer's group out there and we'd go out every
every year and just kind of visit museums. And I
found myself looking for breakfast, and uh, Google told me
that there was Lincoln's waffle House, and so I go
there and I eat waffles. And I realized as I'm
sitting there eating waffles, that Fords Theaters across the street.
(04:29):
Because where else with Lincoln's waffle House? Right, that's just natural? Um.
So I went over and the museum was amazing, and
you know, you go through this wonderful installation, you go upstairs,
they show you the booth where where Lincoln was was shot,
and it's just sort of crippling almost, like how emotionally
you can get over like this is something that happened here. Um,
(04:53):
and they have like everything. They've got the gun that
that shot him, They've got the clothes the conductor was
wearing when Booth like knife him. And uh. I came
home from this and was telling my kids about it,
and my daughter, Scout was about eight, eight years old
at the time, and she was like, wait a second,
back up here, people have killed presidents, like this is
a thing that happens, Like how why why would you
(05:16):
do this? How would that happen? And uh So we
went around and we were looking for books that would
be able to contextualize it in a way that an
eight year old would care about, and there were none
at all, shocking a huge gap in the market, and
so I was like, well, maybe I'll put something together
(05:38):
so I can kind of really dive into it, because
at that point, like, um, you know, the only thing
were the pictures that I had shown her. And like
three days later I came home and she she had
like on her wall like this series of photographs. There
are a series of drawings she'd made, and she's like,
here's Lincoln, here's Booth, here's the gun that killed Lincoln.
And I'm like, what, let's let's get you some more
(06:00):
context on this. And and because there wasn't anything, um,
I went I found a publisher and came up with
a proposal and they were like, let's illustrate it because
I think kids need some context there. And I got
into researching and I realized this wasn't going to be
about four people. This was going to be about a
lot of people. And uh, and Scout actually got to
(06:22):
do some illustrations in the book, to which I think
are like my favorite thing. They're so charming, they're really
really cute and oddly affecting at times. Yeah, when you
see it sort of through a kid's eyes, you realized
sort of the almost visceral like immediacy of it. And
it's lovely. It is no, because it's very raw. They're
not editing. She's not like, how can I make this pretty?
(06:45):
She's just getting it on the page. I mean, she
read the story, she read the chapter on Kennedy, and
she did this giant, beautiful watercolor painting of it. And
Jackie Kennedy crying over the body of JFK through the
lens of like an eight year old is actually pretty powerful.
(07:06):
It is, it's very affecting. Go scout. Yeah, that's also
a charming game. It is she uh Brian wins in
the children Naming Arenas. So, before I read this book,
sort of in my imagination, most presidential assassinations were probably
for political reasons that would seem pretty logical, and the
(07:28):
ones that we know the most about, especially Lincoln, Okay,
that was obviously for political reasons. But then we read
the book and it turns out that most of them
were for delusional reasons. Did you expect that to be
the case? I didn't. I mean when when you hear
about it, like Lincoln is the one you hear about,
(07:49):
and that's sort of uh yeah. John Wilkes Booth was
not happy with the political situation in the country, and
it was a war, and sort of killing the leader
of the opposit team is something that that goes through
slightly rational people's minds, you know. Um. So in that case,
it was almost like he was from a different country.
(08:10):
He wasn't an American citizen. He was a Confederate and
he was fighting a war. Um. But a lot of
these other guys were just insane. They were crazy people. Um.
And and Lee Harvey Oswald is is interesting because that's
the other one we think about a lot, and it's like,
I don't think anybody has any idea what what was
going through his mind? Was it like, what was going
(08:31):
on with that guy? I'm not sure. So it could
have been delusions, it could have been political reasons, but
there wasn't any immediately apparent reason that we know for sure,
because Jack Ruby kind of eliminated that positive into his
own hands. Yeah, and uh, but most of the others
were Yeah, crazy people. I don't know. We can talk
(08:52):
about any We have some some specific ones that we're
gonna talk about. Um, do you want to do you
want to jump ahead or do you want to sort
of stay in the order that we have however you'd
like okay? Um, So, I think most adults and you
guys correct me if I'm wrong, you can easily name
two assassinated presidents. You might struggle a little with the
other two, but then when you get to the attempts,
(09:13):
it gets super fuzzy. I'm I couldn't just pull them
out of my head for sure. Um. So, I wonder
if as you're writing this for children and you're doing
research and having a lot of discoveries yourself, how much
did you realize, like I also have to make this
palatable for an adult audience. Um a lot. I mean
part of I think history is engaging to everyone if
(09:34):
you present it like it's a story, which is why
I love listening to you guys so much, Like you
contextualize things in a way that's very easy storytelling. And
my kids like listening to it too. Um, they don't
have a choice, but but they listen anyway. Um. And uh.
But you look at history books and this was the
problem when we were trying to find a book for Scout, Like,
(09:56):
it's very dry, it's very methodical, abo out the dates
and the times and and what was going on, and
there's nothing that really kind of gives you this sweeping Um,
this was sort of the essence of this person at
the point where they almost sort did meet their fate.
And I was definitely writing it with that shared audience
(10:18):
in mine. I wanted parents to read this to their
kids and be able to talk to them. You can't
hand a kid a book on presidential assassination and just
say go. You have to you have to talk to
them about it. You have to, uh, you know, you
have to engage with them about it because they're going
to have questions, just like scouted that first time. I
(10:39):
was like, I went to Ford's Theater and she's like,
what's that. It's like, well, that's where President Lincoln was killed.
Somebody killed President Lincoln, like like it wasn't settled history
for her yet, and so you can't. You have to.
You have to make it so like I've read a
lot of books to my kids, and not all of
them were fun for me to read, and that was
(10:59):
sort of my goal with this, was to make it
fun for me to read as well as the kids
and get them enough information that everyone might be surprised
that makes sense. It does, and it is a super
good read. I mean, I I'm not joking. I love
this book. Yeah, well, and I have, I think read
it twice preparing for this. I liked it a lot,
(11:22):
and I also completely see how it should be relevant.
Even though my mom did explain to me where babies
came from by handing me a book and saying, there
you go. Really, because my parents were literally like, you've
probably learned this on the street. They didn't. They didn't
want to talk about any of that. This Well my
mom didn't either. Well that's why she was like, book,
(11:43):
there you go. That's why I'm a raven claw. So
I was startled by how many people or how many
presidents have had assassination attempts on them? Yeah, you don't
think about that a lot. There were a couple that
I absolutely had never even heard of. Truman was one
(12:05):
that when I when I was like looking up presidential
assassination attempts, and I was like, who wanted to kill Truman?
Like when when did that happen? And then you read
it and it's just like this bloody action movie. Yeah. Um.
And and so that one surprised me. But the one
that I found that made me knew I had a
book because I think if it was just the four
that had been assassinated, there wouldn't be a book there
(12:26):
because every story ends poorly. But it was getting to
it was getting to Andrew Jackson's attempt um because Andrew
Jackson was the first president who had an attempt on
his life. And it's just a fun story. That's an
action movie I would love to watch. You could even
write it as an action comedy. You really, let's go
ahead and talk about that one. Because I was I
(12:47):
had a note that we needed to talk about that one,
for sure, So let's get rid to it. And here
the rather astounding story of the man who tried to
kill Andrew Jackson, which this story features a pretty interesting
and fun historical cameo. So Andrew Jackson obviously not the
(13:16):
nicest guy in the world, and he did a lot
of horrible things during his presidency, um, like the Trail
of Tears for instance. And uh, there were a lot
of political reasons where someone and this is why I assumed, like, well,
of course somebody tried to kill Andrew Jackson, but that
is not the reason anyone wanted to kill him. So uh,
(13:36):
Andrew Jackson was president and a house painter from Washington,
d c. Named Richard Lawrence went crazy because of all
of the lead he was using in his paint, and
he developed delusions. He he thought he was the King
of England, um, which I have to say, there's an
excellent illustration in the book of him painting a house
(13:57):
and reaching this delusional state where he's like the kind
of good and it's so delightful. And the other, the
other really delightful one is the one that's his thought
process of I'm going to kill the president and then
I'm going to get money, and then I will be
Richard the third. Well, that's like there's sound flow chart
work there there. Well, that's that's the interesting thing about it.
(14:19):
His delusion was that he was the king of England
and that the American government owed him a sum of money,
and that Andrew Jackson was the thing preventing him from
from getting that sum of money. And once he killed
the president and acquired this money, he would be able
to sail to England and regain his throne. And so
he bought a pair of derringer pistols and began to
(14:42):
stalk Andrew Jackson around Washington, d C. And this was
at a time where there wasn't you know, security, You
could just walk into the White House and have a
meeting with the President if you were in Washington, d C.
And he there's a funeral for a congressman, I believe.
And there Andrew Jackson is coming out of the Capital
Rotunda and he's coming out of the East portico and
(15:03):
Richard Lawrence leaps out and goes to fire his first deringer,
but it misfires, and then he pulls out another derringer
and it also misfires, and Andrew Jackson gives him a
piece of old hickory. Uh he he beats him with
his cane until the crowd can subdue him. And and
(15:24):
the person who helps subdue the man is Congressman Davy Crockett,
who hated Andrew Jackson, and uh Like as soon as
I got to like, wait a second, are you saying
Davy Crockett helped foil the first presidential assassination attempt? Like
That's when I was like, there's a book here that
was not on the Disney Show at all, but it
(15:47):
could have been like that so could have been. It
could have That always gives me so many questions. One,
he's clearly deligional, because why would you use derringers, Like
I don't if you guys don't know. Derringers used to
be called garter guns. They were for ladies. They're very small,
they're not very powerful. It was lead paint, I know, right,
But but to you, I also hate Andrew Jackson because
I grew up as a child in Florida and I
(16:08):
had to be in this horrible play about Andrew Jackson
called Andrew Jackson Father of our State, and there was
tremendously bad songs there was tears. It was like an
Irish funeral. There was keening and tearing of hair, and
I just have bad Andrew Jackson flashbacks. The more interesting
thing about the Derringers that that I put in the
book because I thought it was very interesting, is that
the Smithsonian kept the derringers. Like they arrested this guy,
(16:31):
they didn't execute the money. They put him in an
inside like this guy is clearly crazy, We're sorry, and
they just put them away. Um. But the Smithsonian, they
keep everything, and so they had these derringers. So in
the nineteen thirties, they the historians that we're working, they
were like, let's pull those out and see, like why
they misfired. And they both fired on the first shot,
(16:52):
and they're inconsistent. They are inconsistent, but generally um, they
they worked out the odds that they would both miss,
that they would both misfire on that day was like
one in a thousand and so Jackson was very like
the best guests they can come up with is either
like he didn't load them properly, which is possible because
of the lead paint, or or that maybe it was
(17:15):
too humid in Washington, d C. The day the event
happened and it just didn't spark and and maybe they
were too wet or moist or something. I will do it. Yeah,
I think we should. We should start using this story
as an example when when when when people are angry
when you talk about consumer product safety in some way
on the podcast and people are like, there's too much regulation. Well,
(17:37):
once upon a time, because we had lead in paint,
somebody tried to choose the president. Then we'll get like
the lead paint lobbyists really angry. Maybe so well, and
then also there's the whole part that at that time
they were basically just crowdsourcing presidential security like forever was around.
If somebody's trying to kill the president, you tackle that guy.
Where is Davy Crocket when I need him? Um us
(18:01):
talking about his mental illness, which is terribly sad, makes
me wonder, since you really dug into a lot of
these stories and they do reveal themselves to have generally
kind of sad characters that are really dealing with some
mental problems, did you ever find yourself sort of sympathizing
or just like, oh man, if only your life had
gone slightly different. Yeah, No, they're absolutely worth there was
(18:23):
there was the guy that, um, I think it was
Giuseppe Zingara who tried to shoot Franklin Roosevelt, and he
was just like he was poor, he was a worker,
He was an Italian immigrant who had fought in World
War One and he he literally just had like this
pain in his gut and he just kind of went
crazy with it and decided Franklin Roosevelt wasn't helping the um,
(18:45):
you know, the little people, and uh, he he tried
to kill Franklin Roosevelt because of it. And when they
sentence him to death, he was, you know, his only
defense was like, it was this pain in my gut
and the voices were telling me to do it, and
I don't like it, and it was like that guy
just needed a doctor. Yeah. Um. There was some others
(19:06):
to where the guy who killed McKinley um was doing
it for political reasons. But the kicker for me was
that he goes to kill McKinley because he doesn't think
McKinley is a friend to the working man. Because McKinley
was um doing some things with banks that that he
didn't necessarily agree with and thought would would hurt the
(19:28):
working class, and he shoots McKinley in the stomach, and
the crowd just instantly turns on this guy and they
start beating him senselessly, and the only person shouting for
his defense is McKinley, shouting, don't hurt him. Boys, Like
he didn't know what he was doing. Like the one
guy he thought was the enemy of everybody is the
one pleading for his defense shot in the gut. Um. So,
(19:52):
I don't know. There were a lot of heartbreaking stories
like that. Actually, yeah, well, in his attempt, there's another thing.
You keep bringing up the ones that I'm no, don't don't,
don't apologize, you keep bringing up the ones that I'm
I'm going to ask you about. His attempt was so
he had to climb on a chair. Oh, giessepe Zangara, Yeah,
like so, so when he was going to kill Franklin Roosevelt, Um,
(20:14):
giessepe Zangara was he he was like barely five ft tall,
he was just under five ft tall. And Roosevelt had
won the election, but he was still the president elect
and he was kind of touring the country and he's
at this event with the mayor of Chicago and there's
a lot of people around, and if you're just under
four ft, you can't see over a crowd at all
(20:37):
under five ft. It's he was four ft something, so
he's just under five ft, can't he can't see over
the crowd. So he gets a wooden folding chair and
pulls it into the crowd and just starts firing wildly
at Roosevelt's procession, and he proceeds to hit everyone but
Roosevelt um and he hits the mayor of Chicago, Anton
(20:59):
star Mac and Sermach like literally he's hit and he's like,
I'm glad it was me and not you, Mr President,
like those were his words, and uh, Surmak lives for
another like nineteen days, and Zangara's being held for attempted
murder because he hasn't actually killed anyone yet, and so
they're just kind of holding him waiting like is the
(21:20):
mayor going to die? Is he not going to die?
How do we charge this guy? And uh in the meantime,
he's just sort of rotting in prison with his stomachache,
and uh, it's just fascinating how how all of these
things play out. And you think about, yes, he killed
these people, but in that nineteen days, like he hadn't
killed anybody. How do they deal with that? There was
(21:41):
a few of them, Um, you know McKinley's assassin too.
It was he hadn't killed anybody, you know, And and
they found that, like they could only like his maximum
sentence was like ten years at that point. And it
it's interesting now looking back at it. Yeah, well and
they didn't really have a limit. Fun how long could
just hold someone? Yeah, let's see how into murder instead
(22:06):
of attempted? Yeah? Yeah, Uh, to lighten the room a
little bit. Um. So, one of the things that I
really loved in this book is you really go into
some fun details and side roads and bring up a
lot of interesting things sort of along the way, Like
it's not just about presidential assassination, and you kind of
get these moments of what really Uh. There were some
really great bits of invention that happened when Garfield was
(22:29):
convalescing after he was shot, including even Alexander Graham Bell. Um,
can you talk a little bit about the bullet finder
and the air conditioner that we're both developed to help
treat him. So Alexander Graham Bell was trying to help.
He thought that he'd like develop a system to help
find the bullet in President Garfield, because President Garfield was
(22:50):
shot I think twice in the back and they couldn't
find the bullets. And Alexander Graham Bell developed this system.
It's it's basically what you use in metal metal detectors.
It's the same sort of idea, so you you wave
it over and it will be if it bounces back
against something metal. Um. And it didn't work in this
case because it was reading all of the metal springs
(23:12):
and the mattress beneath Garfield, so it didn't actually help
at all. UM. And then with Garfield, they were just
trying to keep him comfortable and it was oppressively hot
when this happened, and so uh, and I love every
bit of research I tried to do to find the
name of the Navy engineer who was in charge of this,
(23:33):
and another gentleman whose name I don't remember now, but
the other one, his name has lost him to history
as far as I'm aware. Um. In order to keep
him comfortable, they developed one of the first air conditioners.
So they got literally six tons of ice and were
blowing air over it and piping it into where Garfield
was convalescing. Because it was just so oppressively hot, and
(23:55):
he was just so uncomfortable and miserable. Uh, you know,
with these bullets in his back, which we're getting poked
at by people that didn't really know what they were doing. Yeah,
that kind of happened with both of McKinley and Garfield.
They got they got poked out a lot by people
who didn't know what they were doing. There's an unfortunate
amount of and then they couldn't find the bullet because
they didn't really know how to do that yet. They
(24:15):
could have just dialed back that spring finder or just
got rid of the springs or moving onto the floor
temporarily problem solver. Why were you, I'm telling you raping claw.
I don't. I don't believe they realized it was the
mattress coils like immediately, Like it was like years later
they're like, yeah, that probably interfered with it, um because
(24:38):
you're like it's just going off, like we don't know why.
It's it's new technology. I don't know. You know, it
should work, but it doesn't seem to be finding anything.
It seems to be finding everything. And uh, you know,
years later they were like, I got those mattress spings
had something to do with that. Somebody thought of it
while bathing one day. Yeah, that was I think. I
(25:00):
think Holly has another medical question. Oh I'm gonna apologize
in advance, shallum, but it's fabulous. Okay. So, uh, both
Garfield and McKinley had some issues and they were shot right,
but in their recovery they couldn't really eat all the time,
(25:22):
so they were given and you gloss right over this
in your book nutritive enemas um, which is fascinating, right,
I know it's gross, but then you go, huh um,
but he does gloss right over it. He just brings
it up and the I'm like, yeah, they got the
nutritive animals. And then he goes right on and I'm like,
this is a book for kids. You need to get
the poop in there. That's what they want to hear about.
(25:42):
So I was wondering why you just sort of blipped
right through that, because well, I don't usually like that stuff.
Kids love it. It's uh, it's kind of a little
bit of a convoluted answer, but it's a funny one.
I think. Um, when I was a teenager watching the
Running Stimpy show, you remember the commercials for log um.
So yeah, exactly so people. As a teenager, I was
(26:05):
just like, oh, this is a hilarious satire of a
real commercial. But then when my kids were watching it,
when they were like four or five, six, they came
up to me and said, can we have a log?
And I'm like, oh, oh, I get what they were
doing now, Like this was a completely subversive thing to
force my kids to ask me for a log and
then have to explain to them like, um a, just
(26:27):
go in the backyard or be like, you know, that's
not actually a product. And so my thinking was I
thought it would be really funny for a kid to
be reading this at the kitchen table and then peek
their head up and go, mom, what's a nutritive anomo?
And that's why I kind of just glossed over it
(26:48):
like a I just wanted to create that experience for people. Well,
it's good because you know, like the first time they
read it in the first instance, they're probably like what
is that? And the second time they're like, I gotta
figure this out. So that's that. Yeah, it's as simple
as that. It was. It was basically a rent and
stimpy gag that works. I want to talk about that
(27:11):
time that Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech while shot. Yeah. Um,
and this is Teddy Roosevelt was probably one of my
favorite chapters to write, because that guy lived a lot
of life, um, and it was really interesting. He was
one of the few people who wasn't actually president still
when the assassination attampt happ happened. But he was running
(27:34):
for his third term after he'd handed everything over to
Taft and saw that Taft bungled everything and sold out
every ideal he ever had to, um, you know, the trusts,
and so he was campaigning really hard on the campaign
trail and no one to that time had had got
a third term. And there was this bartender named John
(27:57):
Shrank who what his job Mysteriously one day, um got
into the Bible like he was super religious, and then
said that the ghost of William McKinley went to him
and said, you need to avenge me because Roosevelt got
promoted to the presidency in the first place because of
McKinley's assassination. And he started stalking Roosevelt around the country
(28:23):
and got a ticket to mil Milwaukee where Roosevelt was campaigning,
and Um, you go to he's well, there's kind of
two ways to talk about the story. The first is
that everybody kind of tells it wrong, and and we
hear the story where it's just like he was shot
at a speech and he kept giving the speech, and
(28:43):
it's so much more interesting than that, um, which is
what I couldn't figure out because when I started to
research and it was like, oh, he was shot at
a speech, and then I'm like, wait a second, this
is way cooler than this. So he's eating dinner at
the hotel across town before he's giving the speech and
Shrank shoots him between dinner and the car that's going
(29:07):
to take him to the speech, and they take Shrank,
they arrest him, and Roosevelt is in the car arguing
with his people and the bullet has gone through his
glasses case and his fifty page speech and lodged in
his chest where he's bleeding from. And his people are like,
(29:27):
cancel the speech. We're going to the hospital, and he's like,
I'm not coughing blood, what's your problem, Like, let's get
to the speech. And they're like miss you know, like Colonel,
like we're not we're not doing this, Like you've got
a bullet in you, like, you can't go to the speech.
And he's like, listen, I'm not coughing up blood. Let
me do the speech. They'll understand. And he gets to
(29:48):
the speech. He gets to the side of the speech,
which he has to like convince everyone in the car
like and that's how charismatic Teddy Roosevelt must have been.
Like he's bleeding out of his chest because he's been shot,
and he's and he's not driving, he's not at the wheel,
and he's convinced like all of his handlers and the driver, no,
don't go to the hospital, go to go to the speech.
And he gets up and he's like, listen, everybody, I
(30:10):
don't know if you've understood. I don't know if you
can understand this. Everybody, be as quiet as you can.
I've been shocked. You can see here where the bullet
went through my speech. I'm bleeding here. Um. I was
supposed to give a long speech, but I'll try to
make it short well, because the speech also has a
hole in it. He doesn't know what those words were.
(30:33):
They're gone. And he proceeds to speak for ninety minutes
and then they take him to the hospital and they're like, sir,
we're gonna try to pull the bullet out, and he's like, nope,
just sew it up. I'm good. And he lived for
the rest of his life with that bullet in the
in his his chest. Which this is an interesting one
(30:53):
to bring up because we do always get the shorthand,
isn't that what you guys heard? Like, No, we got
shot during the speech and totally wrong, And I like,
why do you think we get the shorthand version of
a lot of these and some of them we never
learned when the real deal is so much more compelling
and fascinating. People are lazy? No, I don't know. I
mean it's one of those things where like it took
a lot of digging to actually find that story. So
(31:15):
it was like I was going through a lot of
period newspapers and I was going through accounts in different places,
and it actually took a lot of work to put
those pieces together. And I'm not I can't pinpoint why
the narrative turned that way, because maybe it's just an
easier story to tell, like, oh, Theodore Roosevelt was shot
of a speech and just kept talking um. But yeah, no,
(31:36):
I'm much more fascinated with the real way it went down,
because Theodore Roosevelt's way cooler that way. I feel like
if someone filmed the real version and people went to
it at a movie, they would be like, is this
like a Tarantino retelling version? Like they wouldn't believe that
was the real one. Yeah, So that's Teddy roosevelt shooting
(31:57):
story gives you a really clear picture of what a
charismatic and tough man he must have been. It also,
to me, makes it extra funny to think about how
that same ma'am who you know was insistent that he
should carry on with his speechmaking duties despite his injury,
had such trouble controlling his daughter Alice, who we talked
about in another podcast. So before we conclude our live
(32:20):
episode with Brian Young, let's pause one more time for
another brief word from one of the great sponsors that
keeps this show on the air. Alrighty, So coming up,
we're gonna talk a little bit about whether or not
Scouts vision of the Kennedy assassination actually runs counter to
(32:40):
the warr In commissions findings. So, okay, I'm gonna not.
You probably won't really be able to see this But
so the chapter on the assassination of John F. Kennedy
sticks pretty closely to the warrant commissions of your findings
(33:00):
of what went down, which is that there was a
single shooter and that's it. But when I look, I'm
gonna cover up the bottom part to not spoil the
paint the picture for people who want to see it themselves.
But this looks like a grassy knoll to me. She's
calling your kid on the carpet. Man, I'm putting her
kid on blast. No, I'm not really doing that. I
(33:21):
just dinder. I'm like, is that is this child drawing?
Or is this really a grassy knoll? So it's it's
a child drunk scout. Um. And I did not direct
Scout in doing any of her illustrations at all. Um.
I gave her reference material um for the presidents and
helped her research. And I mean she actually did a
lot of research for this on her own, where I
(33:41):
gave her the chapters I'd written and she read them,
and um, she went through and her and I like
Google image searched and went through a whole bunch of
history websites and and uh the Smithsonian through their photo
archive to get photos and reference for her to use,
and she felt that it was and then she just
(34:02):
went on her own and she worked on it. Um.
The book was late because she kind of started having
trouble at school and it was like, do you do
your homework or work on my book? Why I should
do your homework? But um, yeah, So she felt it
was important, like artistically to make sure that the shooters
were in the frames with the assassination attempts. So that
(34:25):
was her kind of creating like an artistic frame around
where she thought, like imagining it in her head where
he was um. And And that was because I asked
her the same thing. I'm like, that's not the way
it went down in the book, and she's like, well,
they needed to be in the same the same painting together.
And I don't know if it was her like I
don't want to do two paintings or or it was,
(34:50):
but but she played the it was my artistic license
card pretty well for for an eight year old. Maybe
you've raised a conspiracy theorist and now no one will know.
And it's like I don't know, like which which is
the book advocating? And did he tell the daughter this story?
And I don't know that can happen. I picture her
years down the road to being interviewed and having to
(35:11):
explain how she just no. I said it was artistic integrity.
But really, my dad is full of beans. I have
to wonder because this is such a great book and
clearly such a labor of love, and especially considering that
your daughter was involved in the process and your other
illustrator Errand does amazing beautiful work. And I know you
guys did so much work to bring this thing to life.
(35:33):
And I wonder, like, at the end of the day,
as a creator, what do you hope people take away
from it? Both as kids or adults. You can do
that as a two parter um. I think so for kids,
I really I really got into history as a kid,
like I was really interested in it, and it was
because I was able to find little pockets of it
that really interested me. For me, one of my entry
(35:55):
points was old World War two movies with my grandfather, right,
and those were like stories about it where I could
go and find the things behind it. And for me,
storytelling is what connected with history. And so to be
able to get kids interested in it and interested to
marry I mean American history is absolutely fascinating, even when
(36:18):
it's horrible. I mean, it's still, um, completely fascinating. There
are there are lots of great stories, and I think
it's important for kids to have that interest in it.
And it was certainly important for me to provide my
daughter with that ability to learn these stories because she
wanted to. She was asking about it. She wanted to
know why people would want to kill a president because
it was completely beyond her. She wanted to know about
(36:41):
these presidents, and I wanted to package it in a
way that would make her continually interested in it. And
for adults it's I I hope. I mean, I kind
of felt like I was cheating writing this book because
I didn't actually like write these stories. I just sort
of collected them. And so every time I read it,
like I just get drawn back in to like the
(37:02):
stories themselves and try to think about what it would
be like to be there and how how all that
would have worked, or um, you know in the stories
that that we're really really fascinating for me and and
to learn it and know it, because I think it's
important that we know it. There you go. So that's
what you almost take away from this book um, but
(37:24):
it is. It's such a fabulous read and I love it,
and you're so sweet to come and talk to us
so much about presidential assassination. It was god like to
my pleasure. So that is the main portion of our
New York Super Week appearance with Brian Young. But wait,
there's more. Uh. You'll also get a second part to
(37:45):
this event and our next podcast because our our audience
for the show had some really fantastic questions about the assassination,
so much so that we wanted to share that information
with folks as well, So stay tuned on Wednesday for
that and special thanks again to Brian Young for joining
us in New York. His book, again is called A
Children's Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. You can also find
(38:09):
Brian at Brian Young fiction dot com and that's Brian
with a Y, and on Twitter at swank Matron. Brian
actually has a new book out this week which is
called The Aeronaut and it's a work of fiction, but
it's set in an alternate version of World War One,
so it's a speculative history novel and it's just lovely.
His fiction is just as good as his nonfiction, so
I hope you will stretch out and read some of
(38:32):
his stuff because it's absolutely delightful. And now we will
do a bit of listener mail. Sound good. I have
a two piece listener mail situations. The first one kind
of relates to our trip to New York City. Uh
this is from our listener, Kathleen, and she says, hello,
Tracy and Holly, and then she um makes us into
(38:55):
portmanteau of trolley, which is kind of fun and nobody's
done it before. Uh so, she says, the Mr and
I were in New York City last month and we
took the opportunity to take a tour of the Tenement Museum.
Since we are both of Irish descent, we opted for
the Irish Outsiders tour, the granddaughter of an Irish New
York City beat cop on a tour led by the
granddaughter of an Irish New York City fireman. Pretty perfect.
(39:18):
I did not even know the museum existed until you
ladies mentioned it on the podcast. Thank you so much
for that and for all the work you put into
producing your insightful and informative program. Signed Kathleen. Kathleen, thank
you for writing this to us one because I'm always
delighted to hear that people have been to the Tenement
Museum and loved it, and too, because I kind of
feel bad and wanted to publicly apologize to the Tenement
(39:39):
Museum that we did not get over there while we
were in New York City. We didn't. We were so busy.
It was like a crazy, very short, kind of whirlwindy
trip where we were like kind of in and out.
We had a variety of things lined up with panels
in our live show, and it was one of those
things where there was just no elegant way to try
to wedge in anything else. So next time we're there,
(40:01):
which I hope we will be again, we are absolutely
making an effort to go there because I really do
wanna want to go and experience the whole thing for myself,
and especially because uh Annie was so gracious when I
interviewed her and we had such a great time talking
that I would just like to hang out with her.
So everybody should go to the Tenement Museum, and so
should we. Uh and our other piece of listener mail.
(40:23):
I won't read the whole thing because it is lengthy,
but it is lovely and it is very kind, and
it is from our listener Megan uh who. I hope
she pronounces it Megan and not Megan, but those are
the options. She is Australian, but she wrote us while
she was on holiday in Ireland and she sent us
some really delightful treats from Ireland, including some Guinness chocolate,
(40:45):
which we handed off to Tracy because she happened to
be in the office when this packet arrived. We got
some pens, we got some cool seeds to grow our
own lucky plants cam rocks. Yeah, it was a very
very sweet gift and we just wanted to say you
for it because we appreciate it. It's so kind. I
can't believe people take the time to put together parcels
just for us. It's incredibly moving and it always gives
(41:07):
me pause. So thank you, because I can't tell you
how much we appreciate it. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at house tob Works dot com. You can also connect
with us at Facebook dot com, slash misst in history,
at pinterest dot com, slash misst in history, missed in
history dot tumbler dot com, on Instagram at misst in history,
and on Twitter at Misston History UH. If you would
(41:30):
like to also visit our parents site, you can do that.
That's House to Works. You can search for almost anything
your mind can think of, and if you look up
presidential assassinations, guarantee you're going to find a lot of stuff.
So you can also visit us online at Misston History
dot com for all of our back catalog of episodes.
They are all archived show notes if they are episodes
at Tracy and I worked on UH, and we encourage
(41:51):
you to do that. Come and visit us at Misston
History dot com and how Stale Works dot com for
more illness and thousands of other topics. Visit how Stuff
workstaff home e e In
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry, Tracy V. Wilson. Hey Tracy, what last
month we had a little podcast adventure together. Did so
(00:23):
on the off chance that you didn't hear about it.
Tracy and I went to New York to be part
of New York super Week and we had a blast
doing our first live show, and now we get to
share that with all of the people who didn't get
to be there in person. So they're going to basically
do this in two parts. Uh. Today's part is the
the live party podcast portion of the live shows. So
(00:45):
you know, our podcast there in the thirty to forty
minute long range most of the time. Our our live
show was an hour and a half. So today's part,
we're gonna talk to Brian Young about presidential assassination. Yeah.
He is a really fabulous gentleman and a writer, and
he wrote this amazing book about presidential assassination and attempts
(01:08):
for children, and we're gonna talk in this first segment
of the podcast about how he came to write this
book for kids and also how his daughter's Scout ended
up illustrating part of it. So let's hop right into
lifetime with Tracy and Holly. You should bring out our
(01:28):
amazing guest, who is Brian Young? I know Brian, have
a seat, young man. Hello, Brian, Hello, Hello, So as
all ours, all our text seeming to work back there. Yes,
(01:50):
it all sounds great. Little did Brian know he would
also get drafted into technical work tonight. This, this is
what it is. Before we start, I have to do
a quick brief announcement. All right, we have a birthday
in the audience, so Ross, we want to say happy
birthday to you. Your girlfriend Joan wrote us to tell
us we needed to say happy birthday. So happy birthday,
wherever you are, raise your hands, Happy Birthday. I'm not
(02:16):
I'm not suggesting we actually do this. Know however, if
we did want to sing happy Birthday, we could legally
you do it now, Yeah, but let's not for copyright.
I honestly don't remember if I mentioned during that podcast
I hate I hate everybody sounds tuneless and horrible singing
(02:39):
that song. My husband will tell you about how I
have shut down restaurant staff and made them very afraid
for starting the song. And then I'm like, I got it,
so I don't. I don't. I don't love it. No shade,
happy birthday if you love it, but it's not for me.
We we don't need to sing, but we could if
we wanted to. We would not have to make Happy
birthday Ross. Thank you for coming. I hope it's grant. Yeah.
(03:01):
So we're gonna talk to it to Brian for a
while about presidential assassinations, and then we are going to
do some Q and A afterward. That's the plan. The plan,
and then time permitting, we could even do a little
meat and greet afterwards if we haven't taken too long
with Q and A. So it's up to you, guys
to balance your questions with your desire for a time
up clothes. I don't know if that's going to start
any fights or fisticuffs, but I would like to witness both. Sure,
(03:27):
Tracy has or whatever. We want to say anything about
yourself before we climb onto the question party train. Do
you want to talk more about how fabulous you are? You?
You're you're too kind to me? No, I seriously adore Brian.
He's like a sibling to me at this point, So
I say I'm glad you're here. I mostly want to
(03:47):
know that I've been on stage for eight minutes and
I've already splashed water on myself street. I think we
should now just all splash water and a family affair. Really,
So to kick off, I will as the question what
on earth prompted you to go? You know what kids
need is a book about presidential as fascination. Well, I
(04:09):
was wandering around Washington, d C. And uh, I had
a writer's group out there and we'd go out every
every year and just kind of visit museums. And I
found myself looking for breakfast, and uh, Google told me
that there was Lincoln's waffle House, and so I go
there and I eat waffles. And I realized as I'm
sitting there eating waffles, that Fords Theaters across the street.
(04:29):
Because where else with Lincoln's waffle House? Right, that's just natural? Um.
So I went over and the museum was amazing, and
you know, you go through this wonderful installation, you go upstairs,
they show you the booth where where Lincoln was was shot,
and it's just sort of crippling almost, like how emotionally
you can get over like this is something that happened here. Um,
(04:53):
and they have like everything. They've got the gun that
that shot him, They've got the clothes the conductor was
wearing when Booth like knife him. And uh. I came
home from this and was telling my kids about it,
and my daughter, Scout was about eight, eight years old
at the time, and she was like, wait a second,
back up here, people have killed presidents, like this is
a thing that happens, Like how why why would you
(05:16):
do this? How would that happen? And uh So we
went around and we were looking for books that would
be able to contextualize it in a way that an
eight year old would care about, and there were none
at all, shocking a huge gap in the market, and
so I was like, well, maybe I'll put something together
(05:38):
so I can kind of really dive into it, because
at that point, like, um, you know, the only thing
were the pictures that I had shown her. And like
three days later I came home and she she had
like on her wall like this series of photographs. There
are a series of drawings she'd made, and she's like,
here's Lincoln, here's Booth, here's the gun that killed Lincoln.
And I'm like, what, let's let's get you some more
(06:00):
context on this. And and because there wasn't anything, um,
I went I found a publisher and came up with
a proposal and they were like, let's illustrate it because
I think kids need some context there. And I got
into researching and I realized this wasn't going to be
about four people. This was going to be about a
lot of people. And uh, and Scout actually got to
(06:22):
do some illustrations in the book, to which I think
are like my favorite thing. They're so charming, they're really
really cute and oddly affecting at times. Yeah, when you
see it sort of through a kid's eyes, you realized
sort of the almost visceral like immediacy of it. And
it's lovely. It is no, because it's very raw. They're
not editing. She's not like, how can I make this pretty?
(06:45):
She's just getting it on the page. I mean, she
read the story, she read the chapter on Kennedy, and
she did this giant, beautiful watercolor painting of it. And
Jackie Kennedy crying over the body of JFK through the
lens of like an eight year old is actually pretty powerful.
(07:06):
It is, it's very affecting. Go scout. Yeah, that's also
a charming game. It is she uh Brian wins in
the children Naming Arenas. So, before I read this book,
sort of in my imagination, most presidential assassinations were probably
for political reasons that would seem pretty logical, and the
(07:28):
ones that we know the most about, especially Lincoln, Okay,
that was obviously for political reasons. But then we read
the book and it turns out that most of them
were for delusional reasons. Did you expect that to be
the case? I didn't. I mean when when you hear
about it, like Lincoln is the one you hear about,
(07:49):
and that's sort of uh yeah. John Wilkes Booth was
not happy with the political situation in the country, and
it was a war, and sort of killing the leader
of the opposit team is something that that goes through
slightly rational people's minds, you know. Um. So in that case,
it was almost like he was from a different country.
(08:10):
He wasn't an American citizen. He was a Confederate and
he was fighting a war. Um. But a lot of
these other guys were just insane. They were crazy people. Um.
And and Lee Harvey Oswald is is interesting because that's
the other one we think about a lot, and it's like,
I don't think anybody has any idea what what was
going through his mind? Was it like, what was going
(08:31):
on with that guy? I'm not sure. So it could
have been delusions, it could have been political reasons, but
there wasn't any immediately apparent reason that we know for sure,
because Jack Ruby kind of eliminated that positive into his
own hands. Yeah, and uh, but most of the others
were Yeah, crazy people. I don't know. We can talk
(08:52):
about any We have some some specific ones that we're
gonna talk about. Um, do you want to do you
want to jump ahead or do you want to sort
of stay in the order that we have however you'd
like okay? Um, So, I think most adults and you
guys correct me if I'm wrong, you can easily name
two assassinated presidents. You might struggle a little with the
other two, but then when you get to the attempts,
(09:13):
it gets super fuzzy. I'm I couldn't just pull them
out of my head for sure. Um. So, I wonder
if as you're writing this for children and you're doing
research and having a lot of discoveries yourself, how much
did you realize, like I also have to make this
palatable for an adult audience. Um a lot. I mean
part of I think history is engaging to everyone if
(09:34):
you present it like it's a story, which is why
I love listening to you guys so much, Like you
contextualize things in a way that's very easy storytelling. And
my kids like listening to it too. Um, they don't
have a choice, but but they listen anyway. Um. And uh.
But you look at history books and this was the
problem when we were trying to find a book for Scout, Like,
(09:56):
it's very dry, it's very methodical, abo out the dates
and the times and and what was going on, and
there's nothing that really kind of gives you this sweeping Um,
this was sort of the essence of this person at
the point where they almost sort did meet their fate.
And I was definitely writing it with that shared audience
(10:18):
in mine. I wanted parents to read this to their
kids and be able to talk to them. You can't
hand a kid a book on presidential assassination and just
say go. You have to you have to talk to
them about it. You have to, uh, you know, you
have to engage with them about it because they're going
to have questions, just like scouted that first time. I
(10:39):
was like, I went to Ford's Theater and she's like,
what's that. It's like, well, that's where President Lincoln was killed.
Somebody killed President Lincoln, like like it wasn't settled history
for her yet, and so you can't. You have to.
You have to make it so like I've read a
lot of books to my kids, and not all of
them were fun for me to read, and that was
(10:59):
sort of my goal with this, was to make it
fun for me to read as well as the kids
and get them enough information that everyone might be surprised
that makes sense. It does, and it is a super
good read. I mean, I I'm not joking. I love
this book. Yeah, well, and I have, I think read
it twice preparing for this. I liked it a lot,
(11:22):
and I also completely see how it should be relevant.
Even though my mom did explain to me where babies
came from by handing me a book and saying, there
you go. Really, because my parents were literally like, you've
probably learned this on the street. They didn't. They didn't
want to talk about any of that. This Well my
mom didn't either. Well that's why she was like, book,
(11:43):
there you go. That's why I'm a raven claw. So
I was startled by how many people or how many
presidents have had assassination attempts on them? Yeah, you don't
think about that a lot. There were a couple that
I absolutely had never even heard of. Truman was one
(12:05):
that when I when I was like looking up presidential
assassination attempts, and I was like, who wanted to kill Truman?
Like when when did that happen? And then you read
it and it's just like this bloody action movie. Yeah. Um.
And and so that one surprised me. But the one
that I found that made me knew I had a
book because I think if it was just the four
that had been assassinated, there wouldn't be a book there
(12:26):
because every story ends poorly. But it was getting to
it was getting to Andrew Jackson's attempt um because Andrew
Jackson was the first president who had an attempt on
his life. And it's just a fun story. That's an
action movie I would love to watch. You could even
write it as an action comedy. You really, let's go
ahead and talk about that one. Because I was I
(12:47):
had a note that we needed to talk about that one,
for sure, So let's get rid to it. And here
the rather astounding story of the man who tried to
kill Andrew Jackson, which this story features a pretty interesting
and fun historical cameo. So Andrew Jackson obviously not the
(13:16):
nicest guy in the world, and he did a lot
of horrible things during his presidency, um, like the Trail
of Tears for instance. And uh, there were a lot
of political reasons where someone and this is why I assumed, like, well,
of course somebody tried to kill Andrew Jackson, but that
is not the reason anyone wanted to kill him. So uh,
(13:36):
Andrew Jackson was president and a house painter from Washington,
d c. Named Richard Lawrence went crazy because of all
of the lead he was using in his paint, and
he developed delusions. He he thought he was the King
of England, um, which I have to say, there's an
excellent illustration in the book of him painting a house
(13:57):
and reaching this delusional state where he's like the kind
of good and it's so delightful. And the other, the
other really delightful one is the one that's his thought
process of I'm going to kill the president and then
I'm going to get money, and then I will be
Richard the third. Well, that's like there's sound flow chart
work there there. Well, that's that's the interesting thing about it.
(14:19):
His delusion was that he was the king of England
and that the American government owed him a sum of money,
and that Andrew Jackson was the thing preventing him from
from getting that sum of money. And once he killed
the president and acquired this money, he would be able
to sail to England and regain his throne. And so
he bought a pair of derringer pistols and began to
(14:42):
stalk Andrew Jackson around Washington, d C. And this was
at a time where there wasn't you know, security, You
could just walk into the White House and have a
meeting with the President if you were in Washington, d C.
And he there's a funeral for a congressman, I believe.
And there Andrew Jackson is coming out of the Capital
Rotunda and he's coming out of the East portico and
(15:03):
Richard Lawrence leaps out and goes to fire his first deringer,
but it misfires, and then he pulls out another derringer
and it also misfires, and Andrew Jackson gives him a
piece of old hickory. Uh he he beats him with
his cane until the crowd can subdue him. And and
(15:24):
the person who helps subdue the man is Congressman Davy Crockett,
who hated Andrew Jackson, and uh Like as soon as
I got to like, wait a second, are you saying
Davy Crockett helped foil the first presidential assassination attempt? Like
That's when I was like, there's a book here that
was not on the Disney Show at all, but it
(15:47):
could have been like that so could have been. It
could have That always gives me so many questions. One,
he's clearly deligional, because why would you use derringers, Like
I don't if you guys don't know. Derringers used to
be called garter guns. They were for ladies. They're very small,
they're not very powerful. It was lead paint, I know, right,
But but to you, I also hate Andrew Jackson because
I grew up as a child in Florida and I
(16:08):
had to be in this horrible play about Andrew Jackson
called Andrew Jackson Father of our State, and there was
tremendously bad songs there was tears. It was like an
Irish funeral. There was keening and tearing of hair, and
I just have bad Andrew Jackson flashbacks. The more interesting
thing about the Derringers that that I put in the
book because I thought it was very interesting, is that
the Smithsonian kept the derringers. Like they arrested this guy,
(16:31):
they didn't execute the money. They put him in an
inside like this guy is clearly crazy, We're sorry, and
they just put them away. Um. But the Smithsonian, they
keep everything, and so they had these derringers. So in
the nineteen thirties, they the historians that we're working, they
were like, let's pull those out and see, like why
they misfired. And they both fired on the first shot,
(16:52):
and they're inconsistent. They are inconsistent, but generally um, they
they worked out the odds that they would both miss,
that they would both misfire on that day was like
one in a thousand and so Jackson was very like
the best guests they can come up with is either
like he didn't load them properly, which is possible because
of the lead paint, or or that maybe it was
(17:15):
too humid in Washington, d C. The day the event
happened and it just didn't spark and and maybe they
were too wet or moist or something. I will do it. Yeah,
I think we should. We should start using this story
as an example when when when when people are angry
when you talk about consumer product safety in some way
on the podcast and people are like, there's too much regulation. Well,
(17:37):
once upon a time, because we had lead in paint,
somebody tried to choose the president. Then we'll get like
the lead paint lobbyists really angry. Maybe so well, and
then also there's the whole part that at that time
they were basically just crowdsourcing presidential security like forever was around.
If somebody's trying to kill the president, you tackle that guy.
Where is Davy Crocket when I need him? Um us
(18:01):
talking about his mental illness, which is terribly sad, makes
me wonder, since you really dug into a lot of
these stories and they do reveal themselves to have generally
kind of sad characters that are really dealing with some
mental problems, did you ever find yourself sort of sympathizing
or just like, oh man, if only your life had
gone slightly different. Yeah, No, they're absolutely worth there was
(18:23):
there was the guy that, um, I think it was
Giuseppe Zingara who tried to shoot Franklin Roosevelt, and he
was just like he was poor, he was a worker,
He was an Italian immigrant who had fought in World
War One and he he literally just had like this
pain in his gut and he just kind of went
crazy with it and decided Franklin Roosevelt wasn't helping the um,
(18:45):
you know, the little people, and uh, he he tried
to kill Franklin Roosevelt because of it. And when they
sentence him to death, he was, you know, his only
defense was like, it was this pain in my gut
and the voices were telling me to do it, and
I don't like it, and it was like that guy
just needed a doctor. Yeah. Um. There was some others
(19:06):
to where the guy who killed McKinley um was doing
it for political reasons. But the kicker for me was
that he goes to kill McKinley because he doesn't think
McKinley is a friend to the working man. Because McKinley
was um doing some things with banks that that he
didn't necessarily agree with and thought would would hurt the
(19:28):
working class, and he shoots McKinley in the stomach, and
the crowd just instantly turns on this guy and they
start beating him senselessly, and the only person shouting for
his defense is McKinley, shouting, don't hurt him. Boys, Like
he didn't know what he was doing. Like the one
guy he thought was the enemy of everybody is the
one pleading for his defense shot in the gut. Um. So,
(19:52):
I don't know. There were a lot of heartbreaking stories
like that. Actually, yeah, well, in his attempt, there's another thing.
You keep bringing up the ones that I'm no, don't don't,
don't apologize, you keep bringing up the ones that I'm
I'm going to ask you about. His attempt was so
he had to climb on a chair. Oh, giessepe Zangara, Yeah,
like so, so when he was going to kill Franklin Roosevelt, Um,
(20:14):
giessepe Zangara was he he was like barely five ft tall,
he was just under five ft tall. And Roosevelt had
won the election, but he was still the president elect
and he was kind of touring the country and he's
at this event with the mayor of Chicago and there's
a lot of people around, and if you're just under
four ft, you can't see over a crowd at all
(20:37):
under five ft. It's he was four ft something, so
he's just under five ft, can't he can't see over
the crowd. So he gets a wooden folding chair and
pulls it into the crowd and just starts firing wildly
at Roosevelt's procession, and he proceeds to hit everyone but
Roosevelt um and he hits the mayor of Chicago, Anton
(20:59):
star Mac and Sermach like literally he's hit and he's like,
I'm glad it was me and not you, Mr President,
like those were his words, and uh, Surmak lives for
another like nineteen days, and Zangara's being held for attempted
murder because he hasn't actually killed anyone yet, and so
they're just kind of holding him waiting like is the
(21:20):
mayor going to die? Is he not going to die?
How do we charge this guy? And uh in the meantime,
he's just sort of rotting in prison with his stomachache,
and uh, it's just fascinating how how all of these
things play out. And you think about, yes, he killed
these people, but in that nineteen days, like he hadn't
killed anybody. How do they deal with that? There was
(21:41):
a few of them, Um, you know McKinley's assassin too.
It was he hadn't killed anybody, you know, And and
they found that, like they could only like his maximum
sentence was like ten years at that point. And it
it's interesting now looking back at it. Yeah, well and
they didn't really have a limit. Fun how long could
just hold someone? Yeah, let's see how into murder instead
(22:06):
of attempted? Yeah? Yeah, Uh, to lighten the room a
little bit. Um. So, one of the things that I
really loved in this book is you really go into
some fun details and side roads and bring up a
lot of interesting things sort of along the way, Like
it's not just about presidential assassination, and you kind of
get these moments of what really Uh. There were some
really great bits of invention that happened when Garfield was
(22:29):
convalescing after he was shot, including even Alexander Graham Bell. Um,
can you talk a little bit about the bullet finder
and the air conditioner that we're both developed to help
treat him. So Alexander Graham Bell was trying to help.
He thought that he'd like develop a system to help
find the bullet in President Garfield, because President Garfield was
(22:50):
shot I think twice in the back and they couldn't
find the bullets. And Alexander Graham Bell developed this system.
It's it's basically what you use in metal metal detectors.
It's the same sort of idea, so you you wave
it over and it will be if it bounces back
against something metal. Um. And it didn't work in this
case because it was reading all of the metal springs
(23:12):
and the mattress beneath Garfield, so it didn't actually help
at all. UM. And then with Garfield, they were just
trying to keep him comfortable and it was oppressively hot
when this happened, and so uh, and I love every
bit of research I tried to do to find the
name of the Navy engineer who was in charge of this,
(23:33):
and another gentleman whose name I don't remember now, but
the other one, his name has lost him to history
as far as I'm aware. Um. In order to keep
him comfortable, they developed one of the first air conditioners.
So they got literally six tons of ice and were
blowing air over it and piping it into where Garfield
was convalescing. Because it was just so oppressively hot, and
(23:55):
he was just so uncomfortable and miserable. Uh, you know,
with these bullets in his back, which we're getting poked
at by people that didn't really know what they were doing. Yeah,
that kind of happened with both of McKinley and Garfield.
They got they got poked out a lot by people
who didn't know what they were doing. There's an unfortunate
amount of and then they couldn't find the bullet because
they didn't really know how to do that yet. They
(24:15):
could have just dialed back that spring finder or just
got rid of the springs or moving onto the floor
temporarily problem solver. Why were you, I'm telling you raping claw.
I don't. I don't believe they realized it was the
mattress coils like immediately, Like it was like years later
they're like, yeah, that probably interfered with it, um because
(24:38):
you're like it's just going off, like we don't know why.
It's it's new technology. I don't know. You know, it
should work, but it doesn't seem to be finding anything.
It seems to be finding everything. And uh, you know,
years later they were like, I got those mattress spings
had something to do with that. Somebody thought of it
while bathing one day. Yeah, that was I think. I
(25:00):
think Holly has another medical question. Oh I'm gonna apologize
in advance, shallum, but it's fabulous. Okay. So, uh, both
Garfield and McKinley had some issues and they were shot right,
but in their recovery they couldn't really eat all the time,
(25:22):
so they were given and you gloss right over this
in your book nutritive enemas um, which is fascinating, right,
I know it's gross, but then you go, huh um,
but he does gloss right over it. He just brings
it up and the I'm like, yeah, they got the
nutritive animals. And then he goes right on and I'm like,
this is a book for kids. You need to get
the poop in there. That's what they want to hear about.
(25:42):
So I was wondering why you just sort of blipped
right through that, because well, I don't usually like that stuff.
Kids love it. It's uh, it's kind of a little
bit of a convoluted answer, but it's a funny one.
I think. Um, when I was a teenager watching the
Running Stimpy show, you remember the commercials for log um.
So yeah, exactly so people. As a teenager, I was
(26:05):
just like, oh, this is a hilarious satire of a
real commercial. But then when my kids were watching it,
when they were like four or five, six, they came
up to me and said, can we have a log?
And I'm like, oh, oh, I get what they were
doing now, Like this was a completely subversive thing to
force my kids to ask me for a log and
then have to explain to them like, um a, just
(26:27):
go in the backyard or be like, you know, that's
not actually a product. And so my thinking was I
thought it would be really funny for a kid to
be reading this at the kitchen table and then peek
their head up and go, mom, what's a nutritive anomo?
And that's why I kind of just glossed over it
(26:48):
like a I just wanted to create that experience for people. Well,
it's good because you know, like the first time they
read it in the first instance, they're probably like what
is that? And the second time they're like, I gotta
figure this out. So that's that. Yeah, it's as simple
as that. It was. It was basically a rent and
stimpy gag that works. I want to talk about that
(27:11):
time that Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech while shot. Yeah. Um,
and this is Teddy Roosevelt was probably one of my
favorite chapters to write, because that guy lived a lot
of life, um, and it was really interesting. He was
one of the few people who wasn't actually president still
when the assassination attampt happ happened. But he was running
(27:34):
for his third term after he'd handed everything over to
Taft and saw that Taft bungled everything and sold out
every ideal he ever had to, um, you know, the trusts,
and so he was campaigning really hard on the campaign
trail and no one to that time had had got
a third term. And there was this bartender named John
(27:57):
Shrank who what his job Mysteriously one day, um got
into the Bible like he was super religious, and then
said that the ghost of William McKinley went to him
and said, you need to avenge me because Roosevelt got
promoted to the presidency in the first place because of
McKinley's assassination. And he started stalking Roosevelt around the country
(28:23):
and got a ticket to mil Milwaukee where Roosevelt was campaigning,
and Um, you go to he's well, there's kind of
two ways to talk about the story. The first is
that everybody kind of tells it wrong, and and we
hear the story where it's just like he was shot
at a speech and he kept giving the speech, and
(28:43):
it's so much more interesting than that, um, which is
what I couldn't figure out because when I started to
research and it was like, oh, he was shot at
a speech, and then I'm like, wait a second, this
is way cooler than this. So he's eating dinner at
the hotel across town before he's giving the speech and
Shrank shoots him between dinner and the car that's going
(29:07):
to take him to the speech, and they take Shrank,
they arrest him, and Roosevelt is in the car arguing
with his people and the bullet has gone through his
glasses case and his fifty page speech and lodged in
his chest where he's bleeding from. And his people are like,
(29:27):
cancel the speech. We're going to the hospital, and he's like,
I'm not coughing blood, what's your problem, Like, let's get
to the speech. And they're like miss you know, like Colonel,
like we're not we're not doing this, Like you've got
a bullet in you, like, you can't go to the speech.
And he's like, listen, I'm not coughing up blood. Let
me do the speech. They'll understand. And he gets to
(29:48):
the speech. He gets to the side of the speech,
which he has to like convince everyone in the car
like and that's how charismatic Teddy Roosevelt must have been.
Like he's bleeding out of his chest because he's been shot,
and he's and he's not driving, he's not at the wheel,
and he's convinced like all of his handlers and the driver, no,
don't go to the hospital, go to go to the speech.
And he gets up and he's like, listen, everybody, I
(30:10):
don't know if you've understood. I don't know if you
can understand this. Everybody, be as quiet as you can.
I've been shocked. You can see here where the bullet
went through my speech. I'm bleeding here. Um. I was
supposed to give a long speech, but I'll try to
make it short well, because the speech also has a
hole in it. He doesn't know what those words were.
(30:33):
They're gone. And he proceeds to speak for ninety minutes
and then they take him to the hospital and they're like, sir,
we're gonna try to pull the bullet out, and he's like, nope,
just sew it up. I'm good. And he lived for
the rest of his life with that bullet in the
in his his chest. Which this is an interesting one
(30:53):
to bring up because we do always get the shorthand,
isn't that what you guys heard? Like, No, we got
shot during the speech and totally wrong, And I like,
why do you think we get the shorthand version of
a lot of these and some of them we never
learned when the real deal is so much more compelling
and fascinating. People are lazy? No, I don't know. I
mean it's one of those things where like it took
a lot of digging to actually find that story. So
(31:15):
it was like I was going through a lot of
period newspapers and I was going through accounts in different places,
and it actually took a lot of work to put
those pieces together. And I'm not I can't pinpoint why
the narrative turned that way, because maybe it's just an
easier story to tell, like, oh, Theodore Roosevelt was shot
of a speech and just kept talking um. But yeah, no,
(31:36):
I'm much more fascinated with the real way it went down,
because Theodore Roosevelt's way cooler that way. I feel like
if someone filmed the real version and people went to
it at a movie, they would be like, is this
like a Tarantino retelling version? Like they wouldn't believe that
was the real one. Yeah, So that's Teddy roosevelt shooting
(31:57):
story gives you a really clear picture of what a
charismatic and tough man he must have been. It also,
to me, makes it extra funny to think about how
that same ma'am who you know was insistent that he
should carry on with his speechmaking duties despite his injury,
had such trouble controlling his daughter Alice, who we talked
about in another podcast. So before we conclude our live
(32:20):
episode with Brian Young, let's pause one more time for
another brief word from one of the great sponsors that
keeps this show on the air. Alrighty, So coming up,
we're gonna talk a little bit about whether or not
Scouts vision of the Kennedy assassination actually runs counter to
(32:40):
the warr In commissions findings. So, okay, I'm gonna not.
You probably won't really be able to see this But
so the chapter on the assassination of John F. Kennedy
sticks pretty closely to the warrant commissions of your findings
(33:00):
of what went down, which is that there was a
single shooter and that's it. But when I look, I'm
gonna cover up the bottom part to not spoil the
paint the picture for people who want to see it themselves.
But this looks like a grassy knoll to me. She's
calling your kid on the carpet. Man, I'm putting her
kid on blast. No, I'm not really doing that. I
(33:21):
just dinder. I'm like, is that is this child drawing?
Or is this really a grassy knoll? So it's it's
a child drunk scout. Um. And I did not direct
Scout in doing any of her illustrations at all. Um.
I gave her reference material um for the presidents and
helped her research. And I mean she actually did a
lot of research for this on her own, where I
(33:41):
gave her the chapters I'd written and she read them,
and um, she went through and her and I like
Google image searched and went through a whole bunch of
history websites and and uh the Smithsonian through their photo
archive to get photos and reference for her to use,
and she felt that it was and then she just
(34:02):
went on her own and she worked on it. Um.
The book was late because she kind of started having
trouble at school and it was like, do you do
your homework or work on my book? Why I should
do your homework? But um, yeah, So she felt it
was important, like artistically to make sure that the shooters
were in the frames with the assassination attempts. So that
(34:25):
was her kind of creating like an artistic frame around
where she thought, like imagining it in her head where
he was um. And And that was because I asked
her the same thing. I'm like, that's not the way
it went down in the book, and she's like, well,
they needed to be in the same the same painting together.
And I don't know if it was her like I
don't want to do two paintings or or it was,
(34:50):
but but she played the it was my artistic license
card pretty well for for an eight year old. Maybe
you've raised a conspiracy theorist and now no one will know.
And it's like I don't know, like which which is
the book advocating? And did he tell the daughter this story?
And I don't know that can happen. I picture her
years down the road to being interviewed and having to
(35:11):
explain how she just no. I said it was artistic integrity.
But really, my dad is full of beans. I have
to wonder because this is such a great book and
clearly such a labor of love, and especially considering that
your daughter was involved in the process and your other
illustrator Errand does amazing beautiful work. And I know you
guys did so much work to bring this thing to life.
(35:33):
And I wonder, like, at the end of the day,
as a creator, what do you hope people take away
from it? Both as kids or adults. You can do
that as a two parter um. I think so for kids,
I really I really got into history as a kid,
like I was really interested in it, and it was
because I was able to find little pockets of it
that really interested me. For me, one of my entry
(35:55):
points was old World War two movies with my grandfather, right,
and those were like stories about it where I could
go and find the things behind it. And for me,
storytelling is what connected with history. And so to be
able to get kids interested in it and interested to
marry I mean American history is absolutely fascinating, even when
(36:18):
it's horrible. I mean, it's still, um, completely fascinating. There
are there are lots of great stories, and I think
it's important for kids to have that interest in it.
And it was certainly important for me to provide my
daughter with that ability to learn these stories because she
wanted to. She was asking about it. She wanted to
know why people would want to kill a president because
it was completely beyond her. She wanted to know about
(36:41):
these presidents, and I wanted to package it in a
way that would make her continually interested in it. And
for adults it's I I hope. I mean, I kind
of felt like I was cheating writing this book because
I didn't actually like write these stories. I just sort
of collected them. And so every time I read it,
like I just get drawn back in to like the
(37:02):
stories themselves and try to think about what it would
be like to be there and how how all that
would have worked, or um, you know in the stories
that that we're really really fascinating for me and and
to learn it and know it, because I think it's
important that we know it. There you go. So that's
what you almost take away from this book um, but
(37:24):
it is. It's such a fabulous read and I love it,
and you're so sweet to come and talk to us
so much about presidential assassination. It was god like to
my pleasure. So that is the main portion of our
New York Super Week appearance with Brian Young. But wait,
there's more. Uh. You'll also get a second part to
(37:45):
this event and our next podcast because our our audience
for the show had some really fantastic questions about the assassination,
so much so that we wanted to share that information
with folks as well, So stay tuned on Wednesday for
that and special thanks again to Brian Young for joining
us in New York. His book, again is called A
Children's Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. You can also find
(38:09):
Brian at Brian Young fiction dot com and that's Brian
with a Y, and on Twitter at swank Matron. Brian
actually has a new book out this week which is
called The Aeronaut and it's a work of fiction, but
it's set in an alternate version of World War One,
so it's a speculative history novel and it's just lovely.
His fiction is just as good as his nonfiction, so
I hope you will stretch out and read some of
(38:32):
his stuff because it's absolutely delightful. And now we will
do a bit of listener mail. Sound good. I have
a two piece listener mail situations. The first one kind
of relates to our trip to New York City. Uh
this is from our listener, Kathleen, and she says, hello,
Tracy and Holly, and then she um makes us into
(38:55):
portmanteau of trolley, which is kind of fun and nobody's
done it before. Uh so, she says, the Mr and
I were in New York City last month and we
took the opportunity to take a tour of the Tenement Museum.
Since we are both of Irish descent, we opted for
the Irish Outsiders tour, the granddaughter of an Irish New
York City beat cop on a tour led by the
granddaughter of an Irish New York City fireman. Pretty perfect.
(39:18):
I did not even know the museum existed until you
ladies mentioned it on the podcast. Thank you so much
for that and for all the work you put into
producing your insightful and informative program. Signed Kathleen. Kathleen, thank
you for writing this to us one because I'm always
delighted to hear that people have been to the Tenement
Museum and loved it, and too, because I kind of
feel bad and wanted to publicly apologize to the Tenement
(39:39):
Museum that we did not get over there while we
were in New York City. We didn't. We were so busy.
It was like a crazy, very short, kind of whirlwindy
trip where we were like kind of in and out.
We had a variety of things lined up with panels
in our live show, and it was one of those
things where there was just no elegant way to try
to wedge in anything else. So next time we're there,
(40:01):
which I hope we will be again, we are absolutely
making an effort to go there because I really do
wanna want to go and experience the whole thing for myself,
and especially because uh Annie was so gracious when I
interviewed her and we had such a great time talking
that I would just like to hang out with her.
So everybody should go to the Tenement Museum, and so
should we. Uh and our other piece of listener mail.
(40:23):
I won't read the whole thing because it is lengthy,
but it is lovely and it is very kind, and
it is from our listener Megan uh who. I hope
she pronounces it Megan and not Megan, but those are
the options. She is Australian, but she wrote us while
she was on holiday in Ireland and she sent us
some really delightful treats from Ireland, including some Guinness chocolate,
(40:45):
which we handed off to Tracy because she happened to
be in the office when this packet arrived. We got
some pens, we got some cool seeds to grow our
own lucky plants cam rocks. Yeah, it was a very
very sweet gift and we just wanted to say you
for it because we appreciate it. It's so kind. I
can't believe people take the time to put together parcels
just for us. It's incredibly moving and it always gives
(41:07):
me pause. So thank you, because I can't tell you
how much we appreciate it. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at house tob Works dot com. You can also connect
with us at Facebook dot com, slash misst in history,
at pinterest dot com, slash misst in history, missed in
history dot tumbler dot com, on Instagram at misst in history,
and on Twitter at Misston History UH. If you would
(41:30):
like to also visit our parents site, you can do that.
That's House to Works. You can search for almost anything
your mind can think of, and if you look up
presidential assassinations, guarantee you're going to find a lot of stuff.
So you can also visit us online at Misston History
dot com for all of our back catalog of episodes.
They are all archived show notes if they are episodes
at Tracy and I worked on UH, and we encourage
(41:51):
you to do that. Come and visit us at Misston
History dot com and how Stale Works dot com for
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