November 15, 2023 • 11 mins
The story of the Liberty Bell is far more confusing than we imagined.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh and
Chucks here too, and so's Jerry sitting in for Dave,
which makes this short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Yeah. I've been singing Ween all day because of this one.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Oh yeah, are we talking about molluscs?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
No, from the song Freedom of seventy six when they
sing about the liberty bell.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I don't know that one liberty bell cracked in half
is mine?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
So it's that's been on a loop in my head. Okay,
I'll bet bake a bacon steak a perfect match.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
You know, it's been on a loop in my head.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Either the final countdown or that one you were whistling
the other day that drove it. Yep in Vega, you
can gear worm it with the best of them. Yes,
you know.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I was thinking about Ween the other day. I was like,
I need to find something new to like get into,
and I was like, you know, Ween's got a pretty
extensive collection, and I never really got into him. Not
because I don't like him, I just never got into him.
I'm sure think I'll go see if I can get
into Wien a little bit.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, I continue the book on how to do that.
In the order of operation okay, please do yeah, please do.
I need to send you a canister of nitrius too, though,
that's fine. I'm not sure if you can do that
through the mail.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Please do. So we're talking liberty bell, that's right. And
the reason why we're talking liberty bell is because well
there's no good reason, but let's talk about the liberty
bell anyway, because it's actually pretty interesting. The liberty bell,
we think of today as the liberty Bell, is a fraud.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, let's let's go back in time a little bit
to seventeen fifty one. Let's hop in the old wayback machine.
This is, oh boy, dusty as can be.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Don't get too close to this fide.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, this is very dusty, but it still fires up.
Look at that the flex capacitor is flexing. And off
we go to seventeen fifty one to the State House
of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania State House, where they have just
brought in the bell. And even though it's not named
the liberty Bell at this point, that would come along well,
(02:15):
as we see much later, it's a bell and it
was used, although it had very a lot of causes
and purposes through the years. Sure, at first it was
just a bell. We ring it when someone important dies,
or we need to call the government together, like the
reasons you ring a town bell.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Someone won at Bingo.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yeah, ring that bell.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
They called it initially the State House Bell, which is
on the nose but appropriate because it was originally commissioned
by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly to be the bell in
the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. They didn't even call
that Independence Hall. It was the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.
Everything was very business like, bureaucratically named, and it told
(02:58):
you what it did and what it was, and that's
how they liked it.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
That's right. The bell itself was cast by Lester and
Pack Company out of London with the words proclaim liberty,
throw out all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof
which is apparently referenced a reference to Leviticus in the
Old Bible. Duh. And it was about three feet high,
(03:23):
a circumference of twelve feet late, about twenty one one
hundred pounds twenty one hundred pounds. And like I said,
it was just a bell. And here's the thing about
the Liberty bell on that crack is no one really
agrees on exactly how that happened.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
No, but some historians think that it cracked the first
time it was used in seventeen fifty two, after it
was installed, like the first time.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, and Lester and Pack were like, I don't know
what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
All right, Actually it's pretty cool. They made good on replacement.
So the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly said Pack, Lester fellaws, we
need a replacement bell, and we're not going to pay
for it, okay, And they said that's fine, we'll send
you another bell. And the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly was like,
well do you I mean, you want the correct one back?
(04:09):
Do you want us to send a picture of it
or something. They're like, you just keep it. Do whatever
you want with it. Make belt buckles out of it, munitions,
hat buckles, if you're still into the pilgrim thing, shoe buckles,
shoe buckles, all the any kind of buckle you want
to make. You go ahead and use that belt. And
they said, you know what, we're going to actually use
this bell to make a replacement bell while we wait
(04:31):
for the real replacement bell. And this is where it
gets confusing, unnecessarily, and I say we take a break.
Just let all that sink in.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
All right, let's do it st ja all right, So
(05:13):
if I am understanding this correctly, you now have two bells.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Technically three eventually, but one doesn't exist any longer. But
it does because it's now been melted into the second bell.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Okay. But you also have the replacement bell, right.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, right, and they were both apparently in the Pennsylvania Statehouse.
They're both used. But who knows what happened to the
replacement bell that pack and lester scent.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Oh okay, so that's the one that wasn't officially hung
or hanged. I'm not sure what you would say there.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I would say hung, but then you would correct me.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Okay. So it was the one that they melted down
and fixed the and redid the original that is the
official one.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Then that's what we call liberty bell, yes, okay, all right,
But they didn't call it the liberty bell back then again,
they called the Statehouse bell. And then they were like
which one. They're like, the original one. They're like, I
thought that one was melted down. They're like, yes, this
is the one that we melted down from the original. Yeah.
It went on a lot every time somebody asked about it.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
So they're belling this thing up. They're using it as
you would use a bell. In seventeen seventy seven, when
the British were encroaching, they removed the bell because they
didn't want it captured and melted down into bullets basically
or buckles. They hit it again later on in a church.
I'm sorry, they hit it in the church, then in Allentown,
(06:39):
and then seventeen eighty five they raised it again, and
it was really just a bell until eighteen twenty four
are when Marquis de Lafayette was the last general of
the Revolution that survived, when on a tour of the
United States and America, that's when America was like, hey,
let's rename this place Independence Hall, and let's call this thing. Well, actually,
(07:02):
it took another eleven years to call it the Liberty Bell.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Even Yeah, it was some abolitionists who were like, oh,
you got a liberty bell. Huh, you know who? The
liberty bell isn't ring for enslaved people, So let's do
away with slavery. And they actually used the liberty bell
and the new National pride around it and really kind
of point out just how slavery is a terrible thing.
And we need to do away with it.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, so here's where it gets really interesting. That first
bell is damaged and cracked, so they melt it down
make this new one. The new bell cracks as well.
And they're not exactly sure how this happened either, but
they think it was in eighteen thirty five when it
was rung to mark the death of John Marshall, chief
Justice of the United States, to mark his passing, and
(07:49):
other people say, you know, now, it was really the
eighteen forties during the Fourth of July when things got
really rowdy, or other people said, no, it was on
February twenty third, when we were getting hammered celebrating George
Washington's birthday. Like people are just ringing the heck out
of this thing, and no one's really sure. The National
Park Service, for their point of view, just says, you know,
(08:11):
it just cracked after ninety years of use, like quit asking, just.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Be quiet, just take the templeate and be quiet exactly.
But apparently there's some researchers who in nineteen seventy five
were like, actually, it wasn't just like hard use. This
bell was destined to crack. And the reason why is
because they're high tink content. It's like a quarter ten
(08:35):
almost that you don't want to use that in a
bell that peals maybe a decorative bell something you find
it like kirk Clans or something that it's not meant
to ring. Sure, make that out of tent, but you're
using like a functional workhorse bell. Do not put twenty
in that thing.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
No, you've been telling me that for years.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
The bell they tried to fix in eighteen forty six
because Washington's birthday was rolling around again, and they're like, listen,
you know what we do here in Philly. We get drunk,
We ring this bell. We act incredibly inhospitable for our
professional sports teams and the teams that play them.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Don't get us started on Santa Claus.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And they use something called stop drilling, which in which
they actually widened the crack. The crack now is twenty
one inches long and about an inch a couple of
centimeters wide, and they would widen it so basically when
it was wrong that the two sides would not touch
each other at all and create this awful buzz. Yeah exactly,
(09:43):
So they widened it so they it wouldn't touch. But
another crack developed and they were like, we got to
find a better way to celebrate Washington's birthday. We can't
ring this thing anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
They forget it. Forget it. I'm done with this stupid bell,
That's what they said. Yeah, so it became a true
symbol after that point. They just stopped ringing it. And
apparently over the years people have been like, we got
to fix that thing, we got to ring that thing again.
It's a big deal, and other people are like, don't
even bother. It's like better as a symbol, And in fact,
it proved it's worth pretty quickly on as a symbol.
(10:15):
During World War One, I guess it went on a
whistle stop tour of the United States on the back
of a train and drummed up enthusiasm and support for
liberty bonds, like they were called liberty bonds because the
liberty bell was basically the mascot of this bond drive
to raise money for the US to fight World War One,
(10:38):
and they ended up raising in today's dollars, billions of
dollars from liberty bonds thanks to that cute little bell
with the crack in it.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, pretty good earned it's worth.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, they think a quarter of the United States saw
the Liberty Bell during that tour. That's how popular it was.
People just thronged to see it.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, that's right, pretty neatre, do you neat? But if
anyone is emailing me right now, oh yeah, well the
Phillies own the braves the past two years. That's exactly
what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah, get out of sports radio. It's toxic. You got
anything else?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Okay, Well, since checks of that short stuff's out.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh and
Chucks here too, and so's Jerry sitting in for Dave,
which makes this short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Yeah. I've been singing Ween all day because of this one.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Oh yeah, are we talking about molluscs?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
No, from the song Freedom of seventy six when they
sing about the liberty bell.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I don't know that one liberty bell cracked in half
is mine?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
So it's that's been on a loop in my head. Okay,
I'll bet bake a bacon steak a perfect match.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
You know, it's been on a loop in my head.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Either the final countdown or that one you were whistling
the other day that drove it. Yep in Vega, you
can gear worm it with the best of them. Yes,
you know.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I was thinking about Ween the other day. I was like,
I need to find something new to like get into,
and I was like, you know, Ween's got a pretty
extensive collection, and I never really got into him. Not
because I don't like him, I just never got into him.
I'm sure think I'll go see if I can get
into Wien a little bit.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, I continue the book on how to do that.
In the order of operation okay, please do yeah, please do.
I need to send you a canister of nitrius too, though,
that's fine. I'm not sure if you can do that
through the mail.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Please do. So we're talking liberty bell, that's right. And
the reason why we're talking liberty bell is because well
there's no good reason, but let's talk about the liberty
bell anyway, because it's actually pretty interesting. The liberty bell,
we think of today as the liberty Bell, is a fraud.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, let's let's go back in time a little bit
to seventeen fifty one. Let's hop in the old wayback machine.
This is, oh boy, dusty as can be.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Don't get too close to this fide.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, this is very dusty, but it still fires up.
Look at that the flex capacitor is flexing. And off
we go to seventeen fifty one to the State House
of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania State House, where they have just
brought in the bell. And even though it's not named
the liberty Bell at this point, that would come along well,
(02:15):
as we see much later, it's a bell and it
was used, although it had very a lot of causes
and purposes through the years. Sure, at first it was
just a bell. We ring it when someone important dies,
or we need to call the government together, like the
reasons you ring a town bell.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Someone won at Bingo.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yeah, ring that bell.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
They called it initially the State House Bell, which is
on the nose but appropriate because it was originally commissioned
by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly to be the bell in
the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. They didn't even call
that Independence Hall. It was the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.
Everything was very business like, bureaucratically named, and it told
(02:58):
you what it did and what it was, and that's
how they liked it.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
That's right. The bell itself was cast by Lester and
Pack Company out of London with the words proclaim liberty,
throw out all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof
which is apparently referenced a reference to Leviticus in the
Old Bible. Duh. And it was about three feet high,
(03:23):
a circumference of twelve feet late, about twenty one one
hundred pounds twenty one hundred pounds. And like I said,
it was just a bell. And here's the thing about
the Liberty bell on that crack is no one really
agrees on exactly how that happened.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
No, but some historians think that it cracked the first
time it was used in seventeen fifty two, after it
was installed, like the first time.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, and Lester and Pack were like, I don't know
what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
All right, Actually it's pretty cool. They made good on replacement.
So the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly said Pack, Lester fellaws, we
need a replacement bell, and we're not going to pay
for it, okay, And they said that's fine, we'll send
you another bell. And the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly was like,
well do you I mean, you want the correct one back?
(04:09):
Do you want us to send a picture of it
or something. They're like, you just keep it. Do whatever
you want with it. Make belt buckles out of it, munitions,
hat buckles, if you're still into the pilgrim thing, shoe buckles,
shoe buckles, all the any kind of buckle you want
to make. You go ahead and use that belt. And
they said, you know what, we're going to actually use
this bell to make a replacement bell while we wait
(04:31):
for the real replacement bell. And this is where it
gets confusing, unnecessarily, and I say we take a break.
Just let all that sink in.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
All right, let's do it st ja all right, So
(05:13):
if I am understanding this correctly, you now have two bells.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Technically three eventually, but one doesn't exist any longer. But
it does because it's now been melted into the second bell.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Okay. But you also have the replacement bell, right.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, right, and they were both apparently in the Pennsylvania Statehouse.
They're both used. But who knows what happened to the
replacement bell that pack and lester scent.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Oh okay, so that's the one that wasn't officially hung
or hanged. I'm not sure what you would say there.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I would say hung, but then you would correct me.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Okay. So it was the one that they melted down
and fixed the and redid the original that is the
official one.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Then that's what we call liberty bell, yes, okay, all right,
But they didn't call it the liberty bell back then again,
they called the Statehouse bell. And then they were like
which one. They're like, the original one. They're like, I
thought that one was melted down. They're like, yes, this
is the one that we melted down from the original. Yeah.
It went on a lot every time somebody asked about it.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
So they're belling this thing up. They're using it as
you would use a bell. In seventeen seventy seven, when
the British were encroaching, they removed the bell because they
didn't want it captured and melted down into bullets basically
or buckles. They hit it again later on in a church.
I'm sorry, they hit it in the church, then in Allentown,
(06:39):
and then seventeen eighty five they raised it again, and
it was really just a bell until eighteen twenty four
are when Marquis de Lafayette was the last general of
the Revolution that survived, when on a tour of the
United States and America, that's when America was like, hey,
let's rename this place Independence Hall, and let's call this thing. Well, actually,
(07:02):
it took another eleven years to call it the Liberty Bell.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Even Yeah, it was some abolitionists who were like, oh,
you got a liberty bell. Huh, you know who? The
liberty bell isn't ring for enslaved people, So let's do
away with slavery. And they actually used the liberty bell
and the new National pride around it and really kind
of point out just how slavery is a terrible thing.
And we need to do away with it.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, so here's where it gets really interesting. That first
bell is damaged and cracked, so they melt it down
make this new one. The new bell cracks as well.
And they're not exactly sure how this happened either, but
they think it was in eighteen thirty five when it
was rung to mark the death of John Marshall, chief
Justice of the United States, to mark his passing, and
(07:49):
other people say, you know, now, it was really the
eighteen forties during the Fourth of July when things got
really rowdy, or other people said, no, it was on
February twenty third, when we were getting hammered celebrating George
Washington's birthday. Like people are just ringing the heck out
of this thing, and no one's really sure. The National
Park Service, for their point of view, just says, you know,
(08:11):
it just cracked after ninety years of use, like quit asking, just.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Be quiet, just take the templeate and be quiet exactly.
But apparently there's some researchers who in nineteen seventy five
were like, actually, it wasn't just like hard use. This
bell was destined to crack. And the reason why is
because they're high tink content. It's like a quarter ten
(08:35):
almost that you don't want to use that in a
bell that peals maybe a decorative bell something you find
it like kirk Clans or something that it's not meant
to ring. Sure, make that out of tent, but you're
using like a functional workhorse bell. Do not put twenty
in that thing.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
No, you've been telling me that for years.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
The bell they tried to fix in eighteen forty six
because Washington's birthday was rolling around again, and they're like, listen,
you know what we do here in Philly. We get drunk,
We ring this bell. We act incredibly inhospitable for our
professional sports teams and the teams that play them.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Don't get us started on Santa Claus.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And they use something called stop drilling, which in which
they actually widened the crack. The crack now is twenty
one inches long and about an inch a couple of
centimeters wide, and they would widen it so basically when
it was wrong that the two sides would not touch
each other at all and create this awful buzz. Yeah exactly,
(09:43):
So they widened it so they it wouldn't touch. But
another crack developed and they were like, we got to
find a better way to celebrate Washington's birthday. We can't
ring this thing anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
They forget it. Forget it. I'm done with this stupid bell,
That's what they said. Yeah, so it became a true
symbol after that point. They just stopped ringing it. And
apparently over the years people have been like, we got
to fix that thing, we got to ring that thing again.
It's a big deal, and other people are like, don't
even bother. It's like better as a symbol, And in fact,
it proved it's worth pretty quickly on as a symbol.
(10:15):
During World War One, I guess it went on a
whistle stop tour of the United States on the back
of a train and drummed up enthusiasm and support for
liberty bonds, like they were called liberty bonds because the
liberty bell was basically the mascot of this bond drive
to raise money for the US to fight World War One,
(10:38):
and they ended up raising in today's dollars, billions of
dollars from liberty bonds thanks to that cute little bell
with the crack in it.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, pretty good earned it's worth.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, they think a quarter of the United States saw
the Liberty Bell during that tour. That's how popular it was.
People just thronged to see it.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, that's right, pretty neatre, do you neat? But if
anyone is emailing me right now, oh yeah, well the
Phillies own the braves the past two years. That's exactly
what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah, get out of sports radio. It's toxic. You got
anything else?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Okay, Well, since checks of that short stuff's out.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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