December 21, 2020 • 38 mins
O. Henry’s writing is taught in many schools because of his stories like “Gift of the Magi,” but it’s rarely mentioned that during his life, he fled to Honduras to avoid prosecution for embezzlement.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. When I
was a kid growing up in North Carolina, anytime we
had an Oh Henry short story to read an English class,
(00:24):
which was definitely more than once, the teacher would point
out that he was from Greensboro. I didn't live in Greensboro,
but that was not too too far from where we lived,
so it was just this kind of point of pride.
So I was totally surprised recently when I stumbled over
(00:45):
a passing reference to Oh Henry. I think it might
have been while I was researching the Joshua Slocum episode,
Like it was just something that came about randomly while
researching something else, this passing reference to how Oh Henry
at that time had just gotten back from Honduras, where
(01:06):
he had fled to avoid prosecution for embezzlement, and I
was like, excuse me, what, Oh Henry did? What? Now?
My English teachers never said anything about this. So since
one of Oh Henry's most famous short stories is Gift
of the Magi, which is all about Christmas, and gift
(01:29):
giving during hard times, and he also wrote some other
lesser known Christmas stories as well. I thought that he
might make an interesting addition to our Winter holiday catalog
this year. Oh Henry was born William Sydney Porter on
September sixty two in Greensboro, North Carolina, just a couple
(01:49):
of years before the end of the U. S. Civil War.
His parents, Algernon Sydney and Mary Virginia Swain. Porter spelled
his middle name Sydney s I d N E. Why,
and he changed the eye to a hy later in
his life. In eighteen sixty five, William's mother died of tuberculosis,
and his newborn baby brother also died not long after that.
(02:12):
And this seems to have just really deeply affected Algernon Porter.
I mean, that's not surprising, but this effect on him
was really profound. He was a doctor, but in the
years after this happened, he started to really struggle with
alcohol abuse, and he spent more and more of his
time not practicing medicine but trying to invent things, including
(02:34):
a perpetual motion machine that he seemed absolutely sure that
he could get working. People described this as just a
true fixation as Aldrenon's medical practice crumbled, william and his
older brother were placed in the care of their grandmother,
Ruth Porter and their aunt, Evelina Porter. Evelina was known
as Lena, and she ran a small school called Miss Lena's.
(02:57):
Williams started attending this school in eighteen sixty seven, and
although he was an avid reader, his time at his
aunt's school would be his only formal education. He left
at fifteen to start working so he could help support
the family. In eighteen seventy nine, he got a job
at his uncle's drug store, W. C. Portering Company, and
he started out as a bookkeeper, but over time he
(03:19):
started getting experience in the pharmacy. In eighteen eighty one,
he became part of the first group of druggists to
be licensed by the state of North Carolina after the
state passed its first law requiring licensure. In addition to
his work at the pharmacy, Porter used his time at
the drug store to observe people and to hear and
tell stories, and he developed a reputation as a practical joker.
(03:43):
He also drew cartoons and caricatures and started writing short
vignettes about the people he met at the store. He
also developed a chronic cough, and given that his mother
and brother had both died of tuberculosis, people started to
worry about his health. In eight eight two, Dr James Hall,
one of the regulars at the store, invited Porter to
(04:04):
accompany the Hall family to Texas, where they bought a ranch.
The idea was that the Texas climate might be better
for his lungs. Porter spent the next couple of years
working on a sheep ranch in Catulla, Texas, but ranch
life was a little too remote for him, so in
eighteen eighty four he moved to Austin, where he worked
at a series of assorted jobs, including another stint as
(04:27):
a pharmacist, that time at Morley drug Store. In his
free time, he joined the Hill City Quartet, where he
sang as a tenor and he learned Spanish and reportedly
memorized a dictionary. In eighteen eighty five, then twenty three
year old Porter met seventeen year old athel Sts Roach.
Two years later, in July of eighteen eighty seven, they eloped.
(04:49):
Also in eighteen eighty seven, Porter put his drawing skills
to work as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office.
In eighteen eighty eight, his wife gave birth to a
baby boy, who sadly died as a newborn. The Porters
had a daughter named Margaret about a year later, but
Porter's presence in their lives was a little erratic. He
(05:10):
had spent his first years in Austin as a bachelor,
and after becoming a husband and a father, he still
seemed to want to spend his time carousing and socializing.
He said that this worked as inspiration for his writing.
He also started making his own absinthe uh new time
travel destinations included the absent part for Holly as a
(05:35):
holiday treat, hooray a gift for me. In one Porter
got a job at the first National Bank of Austin
when the family moved into the home that would eventually
become the O. Henry Museum. He had kept writing and
drawing during all of this In he started his own
publication called The Rolling Stone. This paper satirized local people
(05:58):
in events, and it became pretty popular with more than
one thousand subscribers when Austin's population was only about fifteen
thousand people. But Porter could not get it to turn
a profit and it folded within a year. Also in
Federal Bank Examiner B. F. Gray inspected the books at
First National Bank of Austin and found some problems, including
(06:21):
discrepancies totaling more than four thousand, seven hundred dollars. Porter's
work as a teller made him the prime suspect. In general,
the way that the bank was handling money was incredibly sloppy.
Often no one balanced the books at the end of
the day. Bank officers liked to lend themselves money from
(06:41):
the registers, sometimes leaving an IOU but sometimes not, and
random people would fill in for the tellers when they
were at lunch or on another break. So with all
of that in mind, at first a grand jury found
that there just wasn't enough evidence to indict anybody, but
Gray pushed for additional scrutiny at the bank that led
to the discovery of other suspicious transactions and another thousand
(07:05):
or so dollars of missing funds. After that discovery, William
Sidney Porter was indicted for embezzling. By this point, though
he had already resigned from the position at the bank,
he had not been worked in there for several months,
and he had moved to Houston after being offered a
job at the Houston Post. Porter's trial date was set
(07:26):
for July seven, and on July six, he boarded a
train bound for Austin, but he only made about fifty
miles of that journey. In Hampstead, Texas, he left the
train and instead boarded another one bound for New Orleans, Louisiana.
If Porter ever explained to anybody what he was thinking
(07:46):
or why he decided to jump bail, they kept that
information to themselves. Given how haphazard the bank's bookkeeping had been,
There's been some suggestion that he probably would have been
acquitted if he had stood trial in like he was
supposed to. It's possible that he was afraid that the
bank's management was going to make him into a scapegoat,
(08:09):
or that he was just in crisis mode and really
not thinking clearly. Really, though, this whole stretch of his
story gets pretty murky, and we'll talk about that after
we pause for a sponsor break. At some point after
getting to New Orleans, William Sidney Porter boarded a ship
(08:32):
bound for Hunduras, possibly because Honduras had no extradition treaty
with the United States. According to al Jennings, when Porter
got to under US, he stayed in the US consulate
in tru Hillo, which is on the country's northeastern coast.
You can't exactly call Jennings a reliable source, though he
had been an attorney in Oklahoma. Before he and his
(08:55):
brother Frank decided they would become outlaws. They tried to
rob trains, which they were not particularly good at. At
one point, they tried to dynamite open a safe, but
instead blew the baggage car and everything in it to smithereens.
I feel like there are a number of those stories
in the train robbing era of the United States in particular. Yeah,
as I was writing that, I was like, have we
(09:16):
talked about this train robbing on the show? Because it
sounds very familiar. Yes. Eventually they made their way to
Central America, according to the book that Jennings published in
two which was called Through the Shadows with Oh Henry
Porter and the Jennings brothers met in Trhio, and then
they got involved in a Fourth of July shoot out
(09:36):
the next day, and then they had to flee by
boat before taking a wandering trek to San Francisco by
way of Mexico City. At one point in this book,
Jennings describes a plan to rob a bank in San
Antonio so that he can afford to buy a ranch.
He insists that Porter has quote neither recklessness nor the
(09:57):
sang fuad of a lawbreaker, but tries to get him
involved anyway. After firing jennings gun into the ground by accident,
Porter says, quote, I think I would be a hindrance
on this financial undertaking. When Jennings suggests that Porter might
just hold the horses while everyone else robs the bank,
(10:18):
Porter says he doesn't think that he could even do that,
and soon the men part ways. That's all a little
far fetched, especially since Porter headed for New Orleans on
July six, meaning that he could not have already been
in Honduras for that July fourth gunfight. Porter had been
on the run for about six months when he got
word that his wife was seriously ill. She had started
(10:39):
business school with the hope of being able to support
herself and their daughter, but she had tuberculosis like so
many other people in the story, and it suddenly got
much worse. Porter decided to return to the United States,
knowing that when he did, he would have to stand trial.
Federal Prosecutor R. U. Culberson seems to have viewed Porter
with some sympathy. Initially, Culburson hadn't thought the case against
(11:03):
him was even worth pursuing, but Gray had been insistent
about it. Culberson allowed the court proceedings to be postponed
until after Ethel Porter's death on July seven, at the
age of twenty nine. Porter's trial started on February. The
original charges had been narrowed down to three. They covered
(11:25):
an amount of money just shy of six hundred dollars.
On February seventeenth, the jury found Porter guilty on all
three counts. There is still some debate about all of this, though,
as we said earlier, the bank's bookkeeping was frankly a mess.
One of the charges was related to a transaction that
had happened on November twelve, which was months after Porter
(11:48):
left the bank and moved to Houston. Documentation of the
trial itself is also sketchy, but Porter reportedly seemed detached
from the whole thing and barely even participated in his
own defense. Yeah, in this place in time, it was
not common to just fully transcribe the entire trial, so
there's no transcript of it. But that's how he's been described.
(12:09):
So interpretations of all this run along kind of a
big spectrum. At one end, Porter embezzled from the bank,
possibly to try to get money to fund the Rolling Stone,
and then his trial was handled fairly. Then at the
other end, either he took the blame for other bank
employees actions, or he was doing the same things that
(12:31):
they were doing, but it was the only one who
got charged with a crime because of it. One of
his friends, John Maxie, later said he thought that Porter
did take the money but intended to pay it back,
just like everybody else at the bank who kept helping
themselves to unofficial loans. I just can't even imagine. Yeah,
(12:52):
if you work at a bank today, you definitely cannot
just take some money over the out of the till
and leave a little note there. I just need this overnight.
I swear I'm gonna bring it back tomorrow outside of court.
Porter maintained his innocence in a letter to his mother.
He wrote, quote, I am absolutely innocent of wrongdoing in
that bank matter. I care not so much for the
(13:13):
opinion of the general public, but I would have a
few of my friends still believe there is good in me.
In a letter to J. L. Watson, business manager at
the Houston Post, he said, quote, I want to state
to you that the charges against me are not only unfounded,
but are I think the work of spite as well.
Porter was sentenced to five years in prison, and he
(13:35):
started his incarceration at Ohio State Penitentiary on. He was
profoundly ashamed about this. He desperately wanted to shield his daughter, Margaret,
who at the time was eight years old, from the
truth about what had happened. He got his mother in
law to agree to send Margaret to live on a
(13:55):
relative's farm in Tennessee, to like just keep her out
of the public eye and away from gossip. He was
nearly despondent when his sentence started, and he used his
letters to Margaret as a way to try to keep
himself going. Also incarcerated with him was Dunt Dun dune
Al Jennings, who had been sentenced to life in prison
(14:17):
in conjunction with the train robbery that we talked about earlier.
Later on, he would be pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Whether jennings account of their earlier time together is true,
it does seem that they were friends while incarcerated. Theo
Henry story holding up a train starts with a note
that it's the words of an outlaw in the Southwest,
(14:39):
which was probably Al Jennings. Both Porter and Jennings described
conditions at the prison as deeply inhumane, and letters to
his in laws, Porter wrote about outbreaks of typhus, measles,
and tuberculosis, as well as frequent suicides among the incarcerated men.
He also described overcrowding, frequent beatings, and rancid and rotten food.
(15:03):
At the same time, Porter was treated relatively leniently, becoming
the overnight pharmacist at the prisons hospital. He was also
credited with saving the warden's life after he was given
an accidental overdose of Fowler Solution, which was an arsenic
compound that was used as a general tonic. Porter reportedly
mixed something in the pharmacy that acted as an antidote.
(15:25):
If I had to guess, I would say it was charcoal. Eventually,
Porter was given a clerical position working for the prison steward,
which allowed him to leave the prison unaccompanied and to
be housed outside of it. He and other men in
similar situations formed what they called the Recluse Club. I
should have just asked you about the arsenic antidote, because
(15:48):
I forgot that You've just been working on an entire
podcast about poisoners, which is like arsenic poison so gradual.
While he was incarcerated, Porter got onto a better emotional
footing and he started to write more. He always used
a pen name, and then he passed his stories through
(16:10):
a series of intermediaries before they were sent into publishers
to try to conceal his identity and his connection to
the prison. This was when he published under the name
oh Henry for the first time. That was Whistling Dick's
Christmas Stocking, which appeared under that byline in McClure's. At first,
(16:32):
Porter was using several pen names, and it's not clear
why he eventually stuck with Oh Henry, or even where
that name came from. Biographers cite all kinds of possibilities.
Maybe it came from the United States Dispensary, which listed
a French pharmacist named Etienne Ossian Henry Are. Or maybe
the family had a cat named Henry and they would
(16:54):
call it by saying, oh Henry. Yeah. You can find
many biographers authoritatively and confidently saying completely different contradictory stories.
I feel like that cat one, and I want to
be like, I hope you're wearing comfortable shoes, because that
seems like a long walk. Porter was released from prison
(17:14):
with time off for good behavior on July nine, o one.
He was too ashamed to go back to Texas, so
he went to Pittsburgh. That's where his mother in law
had moved with his daughter. He stayed with them for
a while and he got a job at a newspaper,
but eventually he moved into a boarding house. Although he
said this was because he had to keep erratic hours
(17:36):
for his job and he didn't want to disturb everybody,
it also just seems like he wanted some space. He
impresses me as a man that just like just didn't
really want to be tied down. Ever, I think family
life probably did not agree with his disposition. Uh. In
the spring of nineteen o two, Porter moved to New
York City, and when he got there, he started going
(17:56):
by Oh Henry all the time, not just as a byeline.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more after
we have a sponsor break. Oh Henry loved New York City.
He seemed endlessly curious about its neighborhoods and the people
(18:17):
who lived in them. He loved to talk to people
about their lives, with those conversations informing his short stories,
and as has always been the case, he loved to socialize,
especially with women. One of his favorite pastimes was to
meet a young women working in a shop somewhere, treat
her to dinner, and then find out all about her life,
(18:39):
with tidbits of those lives making their way into his writing.
For his first couple of years in New York, most
of oh Henry's stories were mostly set in the Southwest
and Central America. His novel Cabbages and Kings came out
in nineteen o four, although he described it not as
a novel but as quote a few of my South
American stories strung on a read. Cabbages and Kings is
(19:02):
set in a fictitious country called the Republic of Anchuria,
but it is very clearly based on his time in Honduras.
Before long, though New York City became a major focus
of oh Henry's writing. In nineteen o five and nineteen
o six, he wrote more than a hundred and ten
news stories and about nine percent of them were set
in New York. That is more than two stories a week,
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and at some points, Oh, Henry's output went even beyond that.
In nineteen o three, he signed a contract with The
New York World to write a story every week for
one hundred dollars each. This contract was not exclusive, though,
and he wrote for other publications, including Harper's, Ainslie's, and McClure's.
At some points he was writing a short story every
(19:44):
single day, and these were not necessarily all day projects.
The Gift of the Magi, which is probably his most
famous work today, reportedly went from idea to finished work
in about two hours because he forgot that he hit
a need to write a Christmas story for the New
York Sunday World. Yeah. I love it that speed, though,
(20:09):
I mean, that's a lot of writing. It's so much.
I mean, short stories are not easy necessarily to write.
They were for him. Uh. That speed that he put
to great use for a long time started to decline
by seven though, as he developed serrhosis and diabetes. On
(20:30):
November twenty of that year, at the age of forty five.
He also got married again to thirty nine year old
Sarah Lindsay Coleman, They had known each other in North Carolina,
and Sarah's mother had written to tell her that her
old friend will had been making a living as a
writer in New York. They reconnected through letters, and after
they married, Sarah moved to New York to be with him.
(20:51):
He had really tried to keep anyone from finding out
that short story writer oh Henry and Convicted and besler
William Sidney Porter were the same person, including his daughter Margaret,
who apparently only found out about all of this after
his death, But he told Sarah the entire story before
they got married. Was marriage had some ups and downs,
though Sarah kept trying to get him to give up
(21:14):
some of his drinking and carousing so that he could
she hoped, live a longer and healthier life. Eventually, though,
she became disillusioned enough with this that she went back
to western North Carolina. As his health deteriorated, she convinced
him to travel there for several months in nineteen ten,
and while he spent some time in a sanitarium, he
(21:36):
just found like the Asheville and surrounding area atmosphere to
be way too quiet. He missed the bustle of New York,
and he did not stay in North Carolina for long.
Oh Henry died of cirrhosis complicated by diabetes and an
enlarged heart on June five, nineteen ten, at the age
of forty seven. Sarah had heard that he was seriously
(21:58):
ill and had been on her way to New York
when he died. His last words were reportedly said to
the night nurse after she turned off the lights in
his room. Turn on the light, I'm afraid to go
home in the dark. Sarah brought his body back to
North Carolina, where he was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville.
When his daughter, Margaret died of tuberculosis in she was
(22:22):
cremated and her ashes were buried at his feet. Oh
Henry had been prolific and widely read, but it was
really after his death at his popularity skyrocketed. His fame
spread internationally during World War One as American soldiers took
his work to Europe. As one reviewer described it, quote,
oh Henry was our greatest literary discovery during the war.
(22:44):
He was medicinal. He distracted us from intolerable things. His
name is as familiar as Kipling, Conan Doyle, or Jacobs.
That's just in case she did not know W. W. Jacob's,
author of the short story The Monkey's Paw. Yeah, I
felt like Kipling and Conan Doyle are still well known
(23:04):
enough to not need to clarify, but not necessarily Jacob's
Jacob's merits and merits in a side. Oh Henry's stories
were published as collections, and one soldier described how anytime
someone got one in a package from home, it would
be torn into its component story so that several people
could read at once. Porter's skill was also recognized by
(23:25):
other writers. J. M. Barry wrote a letter to Sarah
Coleman Porter that read, in part quote, I have just
been reading some of your late husband's books and I'm captivated.
If I had discovered him before his death, I should
have considered a trip to the United States well worthwhile
to make his acquaintance. As for why his works were
(23:45):
so popular, Oh Henry playbood language, writing short stories that
packed in a lot of irony, dark humor, wit, and
word play. Most of the time, all of this came
together in some kind of twist ending brought about by
a coincidence or crossed wires or a missed connection. This
kind of ending became synonymous with oh Henry. Often, the
(24:07):
main characters were working people, poor people, vagabonds, people down
on their luck, people that readers, especially white readers, often
identified with His entry in the Dictionary of American Biography
dating back to the thirties describes it this way, quote
His stories do not indicate a preference for great virtues
or high intelligence or distinguished persons. They do not show
(24:31):
him preferring wit to dulness, beauty to plainness, industry to idleness,
intensity to casual nous. Anybody can be the hero of
a no Henry episode, provided the right events happened to him.
Nobody reading the stories ever felt shut out from the
world in which they happen. Though the plots may be fantastic,
(24:51):
they are no more so than the little miracles which
most men and women hope or fear will occur to them.
The characters are familiar and simple. They live, love, work, play,
and die with nothing demanded of them except to be
decent and kind. The rest is accident, so it's not
entirely accurate to say that nobody has ever felt shut
(25:14):
out from oh Henry's stories, Though some of those stories
hold up today and those that don't probably would not
have raised eyebrows among most white readers when they were written.
But many oh Henry stories uncritically incorporate racist characters, language,
or stereotypes, and some of it's just casually thrown in
in a way that doesn't have any bearing on the
(25:35):
actual story. One of his most well known stories today
is Ransom of Red Chief, which among other things, uses
the N word as part of the description for a rock.
The Red Chief reference to the title is a little
boy whose behavior is like a truly extreme version of
Dennis the Menace, whose manner of quote playing Indian is
(25:55):
also heavily stereotyped. Yeah, we definitely read Ransom of Red
Chief in school, and when I reread it working on
this episode, I was like, WHOA, I did not remember
the in word being in this in school, which might
have been expurgated from what we read. But anyway, Oh
Henry's depiction of women could also be troubling at best.
(26:18):
For example, the story a Harlem Tragedy, which was written
to be comedic romanticized, is a physically abusive marriage, with
one of the characters forlornly wondering why her husband does
not love her enough to beat her. And this is
also a case where the setting of this story has
different connotations now than it would have back when he
wrote it. When oh Henry died in only about ten
(26:42):
percent of Harlem's population was black, but within a decade
that was shifting dramatically with the Harlem Renaissance, which was
also known as the New Negro movement, stretching through the
nineteen twenties and thirties. By the nineteen forties, oh henry
short stories were really starting to fall out of favor.
This wasn't so much about changing attitudes related to the
(27:03):
issues we just discussed, though, It was really more about
changing literary conventions and tastes. Critics started describing his writing
as formulaic and overly discursive and embellished, writing him off
as only inconsequential works of light humor ment for popular appeal.
Oh Henry's legacy has continued though. In ninety two, five
(27:26):
of his short stories were filmed and released as a
film called Oh Henry's Full House. The stories were The
Cop and the Anthem, The Clarion Call, The Last Leaf,
The Ransom of Red Chief, and The Gift of the Magi.
The Cisco Kid who is a character created by oh
Henry also made his way into a number of television
shows and movies. There are also schools named after him
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and several of the places where he lived, as well
as the oh Henry Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina, and
oh Henry's in Asheville, which is North Carolina's oldest gay bar.
The pen O Henry Prize as an annual award for
the best English language short stories published in the US
or Canada. The Oh Henry Candy Bar, if you're wondering,
(28:09):
is apparently not related to the writer Oh Henry at all,
and has similarly incredibly mysterious name origins about who decided
to name it that and why. There have also been
various attempts to have oh Henry posthumously pardoned. None of
those have been granted. So I picked this topic for December,
(28:29):
like I said up at the top of the show,
because of Oh Henry's Christmas stories, and we have not
really talked about them. So heads up, we're about to
spoil the endings of some hundred plus year old short stories.
Spoiler alert. I think the window is closed at that point.
You don't have to worry. But as we mentioned earlier.
(28:50):
Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking was the first story published under
the name Oh Henry, and in it professional tramp and
expert whistler with sling. Dick is trying to make his
way through a town that arrests vagrance on site, and
after a stern warning from a police officer whose German
accent rendered as text is very hard to reach, Dick
(29:12):
picks up a stocking that falls from a parcel in
a passing wagon. Yeah, and the story Oh Henry does
the same thing that I talked about not enjoying bram
Stoker doing right, I think in our Dracula or our
bram Stoker behind the scenes. So then Dick happens upon
some other itinerant people that he knows they are planning
to rob a house. Dick refuses to get involved with
(29:35):
this plan and tries to leave, but they are afraid
he is going to blow their cover, so they force
him to stay there at their camp until the job
is done. Inside the house, a young girl is sad
that one of her newly bought stockings has gone missing.
She needed to hang to by the fire, one for
Santa and one from Monsieur Bombay. Who she describes as
(29:57):
a witch gentleman who will give you a Christmas payment
for all the words you've said good or ill. I
think I like Monsieur Pombay very much, Yes, um I.
As far as I know, Monsieur Pombay is not an
actual piece of Cajun folklore, but is someone made up
for this story, at least based on what I was
able to track down. So just then she is expressing
(30:21):
her sadness about all this, there is a crash and
it is her missing stocking with a rock stuffed down
in the toe, and the rock has a note of
warning wrapped around it written by Whistling Dick, and then
hurled through the window from out in the field. The
would be thieves are arrested and Whistling Dick is thanked
with a hot Christmas Eve meal and a night in
(30:42):
a warm bed, before slipping out the window the next morning,
just in time to hop on the next train in
a chaparral Christmas gift, which is the grittiest of these stories.
Rosie McMullen had courted two men, Madison Lane and Johnny McRoy.
She chose Madison and they married on Christmas Day, but
Johnny showed up at the wedding and tried to shoot
(31:03):
up the place, yelling a number of threats, including quote,
I'll give you a Christmas present. Years later, Johnny mccroy
has become known as the Freeo Kid, and he is
the region's most feared outlaw. It is Christmas time and
Rosita is worried, as she is every year, that he
is coming for revenge, but everything goes okay. Her husband
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surprises her dressed up as Santa. The next morning, everyone
learned that a local sheep herder shot the free O
Kid dead in the night, and that at the time
he was running through the field dressed as Santa Christmas
by Injunction is about a prospector named Cherokee. There's really
nothing in the story to indicate whether he is indigenous
(31:44):
or whether that is just his name or his nickname.
Cherokee had struck gold near the mining town of Yellowhammer.
When that pocket was mined out, he moved north and
he struck a vein so rich that he was able
to buy toys for all of the children of yellow
Hammer for Christmas, except there aren't any children in yellow Hammer.
After hearing about this play him, Yellowhammer's residents go all
(32:07):
over the surrounding area trying to find some kids. Of course,
parents are not really inclined to send their kids away
with strange miners for Christmas, so the townspeople wind up
with just Bobby, a cigarette smoking, skeptical ten year old
from Granite Junction whose mother seems flat out exhausted. Cherokee
gets to yellow Hammer with all these presents and is
(32:27):
disappointed to find only this one sullen boy, and also
kind of embarrassed that it hadn't occurred to him that
the town did not have any children. But during his
conversation with Bobby, it becomes clear that Cherokee, by surprise
to everyone involved, is Bobby's father. The story ends with
the two of them riding off together, with Cherokee saying, quote,
(32:50):
half past nine, we'll hit the junction plumb on time
with Christmas day? Are you cold? Sit closer? Son? And then,
of course there is the most famous the Gift of
the Magi. Della has only a dollar and eighty seven
cents to buy her husband Jim at Christmas present, so
she decides to sell her most prized possession, her beautiful
long hair, and this earns her enough money to buy
(33:13):
a simple but elegant chain to go a Jim's prized possession,
a gold watch that has been passed down through his family.
When she opens her gift from him, it is a
set of jeweled hair combs, which she had been admiring
in a shop window for so long but just couldn't afford.
Jim got the money to buy the combs, of course,
by selling his gold watch. Oh Henry ends this story
(33:36):
this way. Quote The Magi, as you know, were wise men,
wonderfully wise men who brought gifts to the newborn christ child.
They were the first to give Christmas gifts. Being wise,
their gifts were doubtless wise ones. And here I've told
you the story of two children who were not wise.
Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order
(33:57):
to buy a gift for the other. But let me
speak a last word to the wise of these days.
Of all who give gifts, these two were the most
wise of all who give and receive gifts, such as
they are the most wise everywhere. They are the wise ones.
They are the Magi, that is, Oh Henry, do you
(34:18):
also have a little bit of listener mail, hi do?
This is from Vaughn. This is about quite a quite
an older episode. Vaughn says, Hi, Tracy and Holly. First,
I want to thank you for being an amazing resource
for those history lovers like myself. Your podcast has been
a lifesaver, not only during the last eight months, but
during the many years before, on commutes, workouts, and the
(34:40):
regular three mile walk between my place and my partner's apartment.
Note I got him into the podcast. I wanted to
let you know that over the last few months, inspired
by the podcast, I have tried to trace the travels
of iban Batuta with food. After we realized travel was
out of the question this year, I thought, well, there
is one way to see and experience the world. So
(35:03):
after some digging, I found several maps that seemed to
trace his journey and cobbled together a list of countries
or regions because as we know, the current borders are
sometimes not accurate from the time of his travel. And
for the last four months or so, I have made
dishes from about twenty seven countries for my boyfriend and me.
I even did a little game on Instagram, posting photos
(35:25):
of the dish and where it was from, and asked
people to guess what historical figures we were trying to
travel with only one person figured it out. It has
been a joy, though not for our waistelines. Thank you
so much for this inspiration slash coping mechanism. If you
would like, I do have a spreadsheet with each country
dish and recipe, along with notes, because even living in
(35:47):
a pretty diverse city like San Francisco, it was hard
to find everything needed and I had to improvise a
few times. Lastly attached as a pick of my boyfriend
and I on our first big trip together to Athens
last year. It was so cool to get back and
within a few months here your series on the Elgin Marvel's.
Thanks again, and I hope you both are staying safe
and well. Vaughn, Thank you so much, Vaughn. Um. We've
(36:11):
gotten a lot of lovely emails lately, and I found
the whole idea of making a like a food tour
for yourself while also not traveling because of the ongoing pandemic.
I found that to be quite lovely. Alley like, yes,
please do send us all of those marvelous notes. Um Oh,
(36:34):
and this picture of them is wonderful. Thank you so much.
This is great. It warmed my Heart. Thank you again
Vaughn for sending this note. Um It, it reminds me
Holly you you recently did a whole endeavor to cook
every recipe in the Star Wars Galaxy's Age cookbook, which
(36:55):
I followed along. So delicious. So yeah, I I love
a little cooking challenge anyway. So that's um yeah. When
I say it's right up my alley, I mean it.
So thank you again, Von. Thank you to everyone who
has sent to so many lovely emails lately. If you
(37:15):
would like to email us about this or anither podcasts
were at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. We're
all over social media app Missed in History. That's where
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, interest in Instagram. To be honest,
we haven't been great about updating any of these things lately,
but they're there. You can also subscribe to our show
(37:37):
on I heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere
else to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. When I
was a kid growing up in North Carolina, anytime we
had an Oh Henry short story to read an English class,
(00:24):
which was definitely more than once, the teacher would point
out that he was from Greensboro. I didn't live in Greensboro,
but that was not too too far from where we lived,
so it was just this kind of point of pride.
So I was totally surprised recently when I stumbled over
(00:45):
a passing reference to Oh Henry. I think it might
have been while I was researching the Joshua Slocum episode,
Like it was just something that came about randomly while
researching something else, this passing reference to how Oh Henry
at that time had just gotten back from Honduras, where
(01:06):
he had fled to avoid prosecution for embezzlement, and I
was like, excuse me, what, Oh Henry did? What? Now?
My English teachers never said anything about this. So since
one of Oh Henry's most famous short stories is Gift
of the Magi, which is all about Christmas, and gift
(01:29):
giving during hard times, and he also wrote some other
lesser known Christmas stories as well. I thought that he
might make an interesting addition to our Winter holiday catalog
this year. Oh Henry was born William Sydney Porter on
September sixty two in Greensboro, North Carolina, just a couple
(01:49):
of years before the end of the U. S. Civil War.
His parents, Algernon Sydney and Mary Virginia Swain. Porter spelled
his middle name Sydney s I d N E. Why,
and he changed the eye to a hy later in
his life. In eighteen sixty five, William's mother died of tuberculosis,
and his newborn baby brother also died not long after that.
(02:12):
And this seems to have just really deeply affected Algernon Porter.
I mean, that's not surprising, but this effect on him
was really profound. He was a doctor, but in the
years after this happened, he started to really struggle with
alcohol abuse, and he spent more and more of his
time not practicing medicine but trying to invent things, including
(02:34):
a perpetual motion machine that he seemed absolutely sure that
he could get working. People described this as just a
true fixation as Aldrenon's medical practice crumbled, william and his
older brother were placed in the care of their grandmother,
Ruth Porter and their aunt, Evelina Porter. Evelina was known
as Lena, and she ran a small school called Miss Lena's.
(02:57):
Williams started attending this school in eighteen sixty seven, and
although he was an avid reader, his time at his
aunt's school would be his only formal education. He left
at fifteen to start working so he could help support
the family. In eighteen seventy nine, he got a job
at his uncle's drug store, W. C. Portering Company, and
he started out as a bookkeeper, but over time he
(03:19):
started getting experience in the pharmacy. In eighteen eighty one,
he became part of the first group of druggists to
be licensed by the state of North Carolina after the
state passed its first law requiring licensure. In addition to
his work at the pharmacy, Porter used his time at
the drug store to observe people and to hear and
tell stories, and he developed a reputation as a practical joker.
(03:43):
He also drew cartoons and caricatures and started writing short
vignettes about the people he met at the store. He
also developed a chronic cough, and given that his mother
and brother had both died of tuberculosis, people started to
worry about his health. In eight eight two, Dr James Hall,
one of the regulars at the store, invited Porter to
(04:04):
accompany the Hall family to Texas, where they bought a ranch.
The idea was that the Texas climate might be better
for his lungs. Porter spent the next couple of years
working on a sheep ranch in Catulla, Texas, but ranch
life was a little too remote for him, so in
eighteen eighty four he moved to Austin, where he worked
at a series of assorted jobs, including another stint as
(04:27):
a pharmacist, that time at Morley drug Store. In his
free time, he joined the Hill City Quartet, where he
sang as a tenor and he learned Spanish and reportedly
memorized a dictionary. In eighteen eighty five, then twenty three
year old Porter met seventeen year old athel Sts Roach.
Two years later, in July of eighteen eighty seven, they eloped.
(04:49):
Also in eighteen eighty seven, Porter put his drawing skills
to work as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office.
In eighteen eighty eight, his wife gave birth to a
baby boy, who sadly died as a newborn. The Porters
had a daughter named Margaret about a year later, but
Porter's presence in their lives was a little erratic. He
(05:10):
had spent his first years in Austin as a bachelor,
and after becoming a husband and a father, he still
seemed to want to spend his time carousing and socializing.
He said that this worked as inspiration for his writing.
He also started making his own absinthe uh new time
travel destinations included the absent part for Holly as a
(05:35):
holiday treat, hooray a gift for me. In one Porter
got a job at the first National Bank of Austin
when the family moved into the home that would eventually
become the O. Henry Museum. He had kept writing and
drawing during all of this In he started his own
publication called The Rolling Stone. This paper satirized local people
(05:58):
in events, and it became pretty popular with more than
one thousand subscribers when Austin's population was only about fifteen
thousand people. But Porter could not get it to turn
a profit and it folded within a year. Also in
Federal Bank Examiner B. F. Gray inspected the books at
First National Bank of Austin and found some problems, including
(06:21):
discrepancies totaling more than four thousand, seven hundred dollars. Porter's
work as a teller made him the prime suspect. In general,
the way that the bank was handling money was incredibly sloppy.
Often no one balanced the books at the end of
the day. Bank officers liked to lend themselves money from
(06:41):
the registers, sometimes leaving an IOU but sometimes not, and
random people would fill in for the tellers when they
were at lunch or on another break. So with all
of that in mind, at first a grand jury found
that there just wasn't enough evidence to indict anybody, but
Gray pushed for additional scrutiny at the bank that led
to the discovery of other suspicious transactions and another thousand
(07:05):
or so dollars of missing funds. After that discovery, William
Sidney Porter was indicted for embezzling. By this point, though
he had already resigned from the position at the bank,
he had not been worked in there for several months,
and he had moved to Houston after being offered a
job at the Houston Post. Porter's trial date was set
(07:26):
for July seven, and on July six, he boarded a
train bound for Austin, but he only made about fifty
miles of that journey. In Hampstead, Texas, he left the
train and instead boarded another one bound for New Orleans, Louisiana.
If Porter ever explained to anybody what he was thinking
(07:46):
or why he decided to jump bail, they kept that
information to themselves. Given how haphazard the bank's bookkeeping had been,
There's been some suggestion that he probably would have been
acquitted if he had stood trial in like he was
supposed to. It's possible that he was afraid that the
bank's management was going to make him into a scapegoat,
(08:09):
or that he was just in crisis mode and really
not thinking clearly. Really, though, this whole stretch of his
story gets pretty murky, and we'll talk about that after
we pause for a sponsor break. At some point after
getting to New Orleans, William Sidney Porter boarded a ship
(08:32):
bound for Hunduras, possibly because Honduras had no extradition treaty
with the United States. According to al Jennings, when Porter
got to under US, he stayed in the US consulate
in tru Hillo, which is on the country's northeastern coast.
You can't exactly call Jennings a reliable source, though he
had been an attorney in Oklahoma. Before he and his
(08:55):
brother Frank decided they would become outlaws. They tried to
rob trains, which they were not particularly good at. At
one point, they tried to dynamite open a safe, but
instead blew the baggage car and everything in it to smithereens.
I feel like there are a number of those stories
in the train robbing era of the United States in particular. Yeah,
as I was writing that, I was like, have we
(09:16):
talked about this train robbing on the show? Because it
sounds very familiar. Yes. Eventually they made their way to
Central America, according to the book that Jennings published in
two which was called Through the Shadows with Oh Henry
Porter and the Jennings brothers met in Trhio, and then
they got involved in a Fourth of July shoot out
(09:36):
the next day, and then they had to flee by
boat before taking a wandering trek to San Francisco by
way of Mexico City. At one point in this book,
Jennings describes a plan to rob a bank in San
Antonio so that he can afford to buy a ranch.
He insists that Porter has quote neither recklessness nor the
(09:57):
sang fuad of a lawbreaker, but tries to get him
involved anyway. After firing jennings gun into the ground by accident,
Porter says, quote, I think I would be a hindrance
on this financial undertaking. When Jennings suggests that Porter might
just hold the horses while everyone else robs the bank,
(10:18):
Porter says he doesn't think that he could even do that,
and soon the men part ways. That's all a little
far fetched, especially since Porter headed for New Orleans on
July six, meaning that he could not have already been
in Honduras for that July fourth gunfight. Porter had been
on the run for about six months when he got
word that his wife was seriously ill. She had started
(10:39):
business school with the hope of being able to support
herself and their daughter, but she had tuberculosis like so
many other people in the story, and it suddenly got
much worse. Porter decided to return to the United States,
knowing that when he did, he would have to stand trial.
Federal Prosecutor R. U. Culberson seems to have viewed Porter
with some sympathy. Initially, Culburson hadn't thought the case against
(11:03):
him was even worth pursuing, but Gray had been insistent
about it. Culberson allowed the court proceedings to be postponed
until after Ethel Porter's death on July seven, at the
age of twenty nine. Porter's trial started on February. The
original charges had been narrowed down to three. They covered
(11:25):
an amount of money just shy of six hundred dollars.
On February seventeenth, the jury found Porter guilty on all
three counts. There is still some debate about all of this, though,
as we said earlier, the bank's bookkeeping was frankly a mess.
One of the charges was related to a transaction that
had happened on November twelve, which was months after Porter
(11:48):
left the bank and moved to Houston. Documentation of the
trial itself is also sketchy, but Porter reportedly seemed detached
from the whole thing and barely even participated in his
own defense. Yeah, in this place in time, it was
not common to just fully transcribe the entire trial, so
there's no transcript of it. But that's how he's been described.
(12:09):
So interpretations of all this run along kind of a
big spectrum. At one end, Porter embezzled from the bank,
possibly to try to get money to fund the Rolling Stone,
and then his trial was handled fairly. Then at the
other end, either he took the blame for other bank
employees actions, or he was doing the same things that
(12:31):
they were doing, but it was the only one who
got charged with a crime because of it. One of
his friends, John Maxie, later said he thought that Porter
did take the money but intended to pay it back,
just like everybody else at the bank who kept helping
themselves to unofficial loans. I just can't even imagine. Yeah,
(12:52):
if you work at a bank today, you definitely cannot
just take some money over the out of the till
and leave a little note there. I just need this overnight.
I swear I'm gonna bring it back tomorrow outside of court.
Porter maintained his innocence in a letter to his mother.
He wrote, quote, I am absolutely innocent of wrongdoing in
that bank matter. I care not so much for the
(13:13):
opinion of the general public, but I would have a
few of my friends still believe there is good in me.
In a letter to J. L. Watson, business manager at
the Houston Post, he said, quote, I want to state
to you that the charges against me are not only unfounded,
but are I think the work of spite as well.
Porter was sentenced to five years in prison, and he
(13:35):
started his incarceration at Ohio State Penitentiary on. He was
profoundly ashamed about this. He desperately wanted to shield his daughter, Margaret,
who at the time was eight years old, from the
truth about what had happened. He got his mother in
law to agree to send Margaret to live on a
(13:55):
relative's farm in Tennessee, to like just keep her out
of the public eye and away from gossip. He was
nearly despondent when his sentence started, and he used his
letters to Margaret as a way to try to keep
himself going. Also incarcerated with him was Dunt Dun dune
Al Jennings, who had been sentenced to life in prison
(14:17):
in conjunction with the train robbery that we talked about earlier.
Later on, he would be pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Whether jennings account of their earlier time together is true,
it does seem that they were friends while incarcerated. Theo
Henry story holding up a train starts with a note
that it's the words of an outlaw in the Southwest,
(14:39):
which was probably Al Jennings. Both Porter and Jennings described
conditions at the prison as deeply inhumane, and letters to
his in laws, Porter wrote about outbreaks of typhus, measles,
and tuberculosis, as well as frequent suicides among the incarcerated men.
He also described overcrowding, frequent beatings, and rancid and rotten food.
(15:03):
At the same time, Porter was treated relatively leniently, becoming
the overnight pharmacist at the prisons hospital. He was also
credited with saving the warden's life after he was given
an accidental overdose of Fowler Solution, which was an arsenic
compound that was used as a general tonic. Porter reportedly
mixed something in the pharmacy that acted as an antidote.
(15:25):
If I had to guess, I would say it was charcoal. Eventually,
Porter was given a clerical position working for the prison steward,
which allowed him to leave the prison unaccompanied and to
be housed outside of it. He and other men in
similar situations formed what they called the Recluse Club. I
should have just asked you about the arsenic antidote, because
(15:48):
I forgot that You've just been working on an entire
podcast about poisoners, which is like arsenic poison so gradual.
While he was incarcerated, Porter got onto a better emotional
footing and he started to write more. He always used
a pen name, and then he passed his stories through
(16:10):
a series of intermediaries before they were sent into publishers
to try to conceal his identity and his connection to
the prison. This was when he published under the name
oh Henry for the first time. That was Whistling Dick's
Christmas Stocking, which appeared under that byline in McClure's. At first,
(16:32):
Porter was using several pen names, and it's not clear
why he eventually stuck with Oh Henry, or even where
that name came from. Biographers cite all kinds of possibilities.
Maybe it came from the United States Dispensary, which listed
a French pharmacist named Etienne Ossian Henry Are. Or maybe
the family had a cat named Henry and they would
(16:54):
call it by saying, oh Henry. Yeah. You can find
many biographers authoritatively and confidently saying completely different contradictory stories.
I feel like that cat one, and I want to
be like, I hope you're wearing comfortable shoes, because that
seems like a long walk. Porter was released from prison
(17:14):
with time off for good behavior on July nine, o one.
He was too ashamed to go back to Texas, so
he went to Pittsburgh. That's where his mother in law
had moved with his daughter. He stayed with them for
a while and he got a job at a newspaper,
but eventually he moved into a boarding house. Although he
said this was because he had to keep erratic hours
(17:36):
for his job and he didn't want to disturb everybody,
it also just seems like he wanted some space. He
impresses me as a man that just like just didn't
really want to be tied down. Ever, I think family
life probably did not agree with his disposition. Uh. In
the spring of nineteen o two, Porter moved to New
York City, and when he got there, he started going
(17:56):
by Oh Henry all the time, not just as a byeline.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more after
we have a sponsor break. Oh Henry loved New York City.
He seemed endlessly curious about its neighborhoods and the people
(18:17):
who lived in them. He loved to talk to people
about their lives, with those conversations informing his short stories,
and as has always been the case, he loved to socialize,
especially with women. One of his favorite pastimes was to
meet a young women working in a shop somewhere, treat
her to dinner, and then find out all about her life,
(18:39):
with tidbits of those lives making their way into his writing.
For his first couple of years in New York, most
of oh Henry's stories were mostly set in the Southwest
and Central America. His novel Cabbages and Kings came out
in nineteen o four, although he described it not as
a novel but as quote a few of my South
American stories strung on a read. Cabbages and Kings is
(19:02):
set in a fictitious country called the Republic of Anchuria,
but it is very clearly based on his time in Honduras.
Before long, though New York City became a major focus
of oh Henry's writing. In nineteen o five and nineteen
o six, he wrote more than a hundred and ten
news stories and about nine percent of them were set
in New York. That is more than two stories a week,
(19:24):
and at some points, Oh, Henry's output went even beyond that.
In nineteen o three, he signed a contract with The
New York World to write a story every week for
one hundred dollars each. This contract was not exclusive, though,
and he wrote for other publications, including Harper's, Ainslie's, and McClure's.
At some points he was writing a short story every
(19:44):
single day, and these were not necessarily all day projects.
The Gift of the Magi, which is probably his most
famous work today, reportedly went from idea to finished work
in about two hours because he forgot that he hit
a need to write a Christmas story for the New
York Sunday World. Yeah. I love it that speed, though,
(20:09):
I mean, that's a lot of writing. It's so much.
I mean, short stories are not easy necessarily to write.
They were for him. Uh. That speed that he put
to great use for a long time started to decline
by seven though, as he developed serrhosis and diabetes. On
(20:30):
November twenty of that year, at the age of forty five.
He also got married again to thirty nine year old
Sarah Lindsay Coleman, They had known each other in North Carolina,
and Sarah's mother had written to tell her that her
old friend will had been making a living as a
writer in New York. They reconnected through letters, and after
they married, Sarah moved to New York to be with him.
(20:51):
He had really tried to keep anyone from finding out
that short story writer oh Henry and Convicted and besler
William Sidney Porter were the same person, including his daughter Margaret,
who apparently only found out about all of this after
his death, But he told Sarah the entire story before
they got married. Was marriage had some ups and downs,
though Sarah kept trying to get him to give up
(21:14):
some of his drinking and carousing so that he could
she hoped, live a longer and healthier life. Eventually, though,
she became disillusioned enough with this that she went back
to western North Carolina. As his health deteriorated, she convinced
him to travel there for several months in nineteen ten,
and while he spent some time in a sanitarium, he
(21:36):
just found like the Asheville and surrounding area atmosphere to
be way too quiet. He missed the bustle of New York,
and he did not stay in North Carolina for long.
Oh Henry died of cirrhosis complicated by diabetes and an
enlarged heart on June five, nineteen ten, at the age
of forty seven. Sarah had heard that he was seriously
(21:58):
ill and had been on her way to New York
when he died. His last words were reportedly said to
the night nurse after she turned off the lights in
his room. Turn on the light, I'm afraid to go
home in the dark. Sarah brought his body back to
North Carolina, where he was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville.
When his daughter, Margaret died of tuberculosis in she was
(22:22):
cremated and her ashes were buried at his feet. Oh
Henry had been prolific and widely read, but it was
really after his death at his popularity skyrocketed. His fame
spread internationally during World War One as American soldiers took
his work to Europe. As one reviewer described it, quote,
oh Henry was our greatest literary discovery during the war.
(22:44):
He was medicinal. He distracted us from intolerable things. His
name is as familiar as Kipling, Conan Doyle, or Jacobs.
That's just in case she did not know W. W. Jacob's,
author of the short story The Monkey's Paw. Yeah, I
felt like Kipling and Conan Doyle are still well known
(23:04):
enough to not need to clarify, but not necessarily Jacob's
Jacob's merits and merits in a side. Oh Henry's stories
were published as collections, and one soldier described how anytime
someone got one in a package from home, it would
be torn into its component story so that several people
could read at once. Porter's skill was also recognized by
(23:25):
other writers. J. M. Barry wrote a letter to Sarah
Coleman Porter that read, in part quote, I have just
been reading some of your late husband's books and I'm captivated.
If I had discovered him before his death, I should
have considered a trip to the United States well worthwhile
to make his acquaintance. As for why his works were
(23:45):
so popular, Oh Henry playbood language, writing short stories that
packed in a lot of irony, dark humor, wit, and
word play. Most of the time, all of this came
together in some kind of twist ending brought about by
a coincidence or crossed wires or a missed connection. This
kind of ending became synonymous with oh Henry. Often, the
(24:07):
main characters were working people, poor people, vagabonds, people down
on their luck, people that readers, especially white readers, often
identified with His entry in the Dictionary of American Biography
dating back to the thirties describes it this way, quote
His stories do not indicate a preference for great virtues
or high intelligence or distinguished persons. They do not show
(24:31):
him preferring wit to dulness, beauty to plainness, industry to idleness,
intensity to casual nous. Anybody can be the hero of
a no Henry episode, provided the right events happened to him.
Nobody reading the stories ever felt shut out from the
world in which they happen. Though the plots may be fantastic,
(24:51):
they are no more so than the little miracles which
most men and women hope or fear will occur to them.
The characters are familiar and simple. They live, love, work, play,
and die with nothing demanded of them except to be
decent and kind. The rest is accident, so it's not
entirely accurate to say that nobody has ever felt shut
(25:14):
out from oh Henry's stories, Though some of those stories
hold up today and those that don't probably would not
have raised eyebrows among most white readers when they were written.
But many oh Henry stories uncritically incorporate racist characters, language,
or stereotypes, and some of it's just casually thrown in
in a way that doesn't have any bearing on the
(25:35):
actual story. One of his most well known stories today
is Ransom of Red Chief, which among other things, uses
the N word as part of the description for a rock.
The Red Chief reference to the title is a little
boy whose behavior is like a truly extreme version of
Dennis the Menace, whose manner of quote playing Indian is
(25:55):
also heavily stereotyped. Yeah, we definitely read Ransom of Red
Chief in school, and when I reread it working on
this episode, I was like, WHOA, I did not remember
the in word being in this in school, which might
have been expurgated from what we read. But anyway, Oh
Henry's depiction of women could also be troubling at best.
(26:18):
For example, the story a Harlem Tragedy, which was written
to be comedic romanticized, is a physically abusive marriage, with
one of the characters forlornly wondering why her husband does
not love her enough to beat her. And this is
also a case where the setting of this story has
different connotations now than it would have back when he
wrote it. When oh Henry died in only about ten
(26:42):
percent of Harlem's population was black, but within a decade
that was shifting dramatically with the Harlem Renaissance, which was
also known as the New Negro movement, stretching through the
nineteen twenties and thirties. By the nineteen forties, oh henry
short stories were really starting to fall out of favor.
This wasn't so much about changing attitudes related to the
(27:03):
issues we just discussed, though, It was really more about
changing literary conventions and tastes. Critics started describing his writing
as formulaic and overly discursive and embellished, writing him off
as only inconsequential works of light humor ment for popular appeal.
Oh Henry's legacy has continued though. In ninety two, five
(27:26):
of his short stories were filmed and released as a
film called Oh Henry's Full House. The stories were The
Cop and the Anthem, The Clarion Call, The Last Leaf,
The Ransom of Red Chief, and The Gift of the Magi.
The Cisco Kid who is a character created by oh
Henry also made his way into a number of television
shows and movies. There are also schools named after him
(27:47):
and several of the places where he lived, as well
as the oh Henry Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina, and
oh Henry's in Asheville, which is North Carolina's oldest gay bar.
The pen O Henry Prize as an annual award for
the best English language short stories published in the US
or Canada. The Oh Henry Candy Bar, if you're wondering,
(28:09):
is apparently not related to the writer Oh Henry at all,
and has similarly incredibly mysterious name origins about who decided
to name it that and why. There have also been
various attempts to have oh Henry posthumously pardoned. None of
those have been granted. So I picked this topic for December,
(28:29):
like I said up at the top of the show,
because of Oh Henry's Christmas stories, and we have not
really talked about them. So heads up, we're about to
spoil the endings of some hundred plus year old short stories.
Spoiler alert. I think the window is closed at that point.
You don't have to worry. But as we mentioned earlier.
(28:50):
Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking was the first story published under
the name Oh Henry, and in it professional tramp and
expert whistler with sling. Dick is trying to make his
way through a town that arrests vagrance on site, and
after a stern warning from a police officer whose German
accent rendered as text is very hard to reach, Dick
(29:12):
picks up a stocking that falls from a parcel in
a passing wagon. Yeah, and the story Oh Henry does
the same thing that I talked about not enjoying bram
Stoker doing right, I think in our Dracula or our
bram Stoker behind the scenes. So then Dick happens upon
some other itinerant people that he knows they are planning
to rob a house. Dick refuses to get involved with
(29:35):
this plan and tries to leave, but they are afraid
he is going to blow their cover, so they force
him to stay there at their camp until the job
is done. Inside the house, a young girl is sad
that one of her newly bought stockings has gone missing.
She needed to hang to by the fire, one for
Santa and one from Monsieur Bombay. Who she describes as
(29:57):
a witch gentleman who will give you a Christmas payment
for all the words you've said good or ill. I
think I like Monsieur Pombay very much, Yes, um I.
As far as I know, Monsieur Pombay is not an
actual piece of Cajun folklore, but is someone made up
for this story, at least based on what I was
able to track down. So just then she is expressing
(30:21):
her sadness about all this, there is a crash and
it is her missing stocking with a rock stuffed down
in the toe, and the rock has a note of
warning wrapped around it written by Whistling Dick, and then
hurled through the window from out in the field. The
would be thieves are arrested and Whistling Dick is thanked
with a hot Christmas Eve meal and a night in
(30:42):
a warm bed, before slipping out the window the next morning,
just in time to hop on the next train in
a chaparral Christmas gift, which is the grittiest of these stories.
Rosie McMullen had courted two men, Madison Lane and Johnny McRoy.
She chose Madison and they married on Christmas Day, but
Johnny showed up at the wedding and tried to shoot
(31:03):
up the place, yelling a number of threats, including quote,
I'll give you a Christmas present. Years later, Johnny mccroy
has become known as the Freeo Kid, and he is
the region's most feared outlaw. It is Christmas time and
Rosita is worried, as she is every year, that he
is coming for revenge, but everything goes okay. Her husband
(31:23):
surprises her dressed up as Santa. The next morning, everyone
learned that a local sheep herder shot the free O
Kid dead in the night, and that at the time
he was running through the field dressed as Santa Christmas
by Injunction is about a prospector named Cherokee. There's really
nothing in the story to indicate whether he is indigenous
(31:44):
or whether that is just his name or his nickname.
Cherokee had struck gold near the mining town of Yellowhammer.
When that pocket was mined out, he moved north and
he struck a vein so rich that he was able
to buy toys for all of the children of yellow
Hammer for Christmas, except there aren't any children in yellow Hammer.
After hearing about this play him, Yellowhammer's residents go all
(32:07):
over the surrounding area trying to find some kids. Of course,
parents are not really inclined to send their kids away
with strange miners for Christmas, so the townspeople wind up
with just Bobby, a cigarette smoking, skeptical ten year old
from Granite Junction whose mother seems flat out exhausted. Cherokee
gets to yellow Hammer with all these presents and is
(32:27):
disappointed to find only this one sullen boy, and also
kind of embarrassed that it hadn't occurred to him that
the town did not have any children. But during his
conversation with Bobby, it becomes clear that Cherokee, by surprise
to everyone involved, is Bobby's father. The story ends with
the two of them riding off together, with Cherokee saying, quote,
(32:50):
half past nine, we'll hit the junction plumb on time
with Christmas day? Are you cold? Sit closer? Son? And then,
of course there is the most famous the Gift of
the Magi. Della has only a dollar and eighty seven
cents to buy her husband Jim at Christmas present, so
she decides to sell her most prized possession, her beautiful
long hair, and this earns her enough money to buy
(33:13):
a simple but elegant chain to go a Jim's prized possession,
a gold watch that has been passed down through his family.
When she opens her gift from him, it is a
set of jeweled hair combs, which she had been admiring
in a shop window for so long but just couldn't afford.
Jim got the money to buy the combs, of course,
by selling his gold watch. Oh Henry ends this story
(33:36):
this way. Quote The Magi, as you know, were wise men,
wonderfully wise men who brought gifts to the newborn christ child.
They were the first to give Christmas gifts. Being wise,
their gifts were doubtless wise ones. And here I've told
you the story of two children who were not wise.
Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order
(33:57):
to buy a gift for the other. But let me
speak a last word to the wise of these days.
Of all who give gifts, these two were the most
wise of all who give and receive gifts, such as
they are the most wise everywhere. They are the wise ones.
They are the Magi, that is, Oh Henry, do you
(34:18):
also have a little bit of listener mail, hi do?
This is from Vaughn. This is about quite a quite
an older episode. Vaughn says, Hi, Tracy and Holly. First,
I want to thank you for being an amazing resource
for those history lovers like myself. Your podcast has been
a lifesaver, not only during the last eight months, but
during the many years before, on commutes, workouts, and the
(34:40):
regular three mile walk between my place and my partner's apartment.
Note I got him into the podcast. I wanted to
let you know that over the last few months, inspired
by the podcast, I have tried to trace the travels
of iban Batuta with food. After we realized travel was
out of the question this year, I thought, well, there
is one way to see and experience the world. So
(35:03):
after some digging, I found several maps that seemed to
trace his journey and cobbled together a list of countries
or regions because as we know, the current borders are
sometimes not accurate from the time of his travel. And
for the last four months or so, I have made
dishes from about twenty seven countries for my boyfriend and me.
I even did a little game on Instagram, posting photos
(35:25):
of the dish and where it was from, and asked
people to guess what historical figures we were trying to
travel with only one person figured it out. It has
been a joy, though not for our waistelines. Thank you
so much for this inspiration slash coping mechanism. If you
would like, I do have a spreadsheet with each country
dish and recipe, along with notes, because even living in
(35:47):
a pretty diverse city like San Francisco, it was hard
to find everything needed and I had to improvise a
few times. Lastly attached as a pick of my boyfriend
and I on our first big trip together to Athens
last year. It was so cool to get back and
within a few months here your series on the Elgin Marvel's.
Thanks again, and I hope you both are staying safe
and well. Vaughn, Thank you so much, Vaughn. Um. We've
(36:11):
gotten a lot of lovely emails lately, and I found
the whole idea of making a like a food tour
for yourself while also not traveling because of the ongoing pandemic.
I found that to be quite lovely. Alley like, yes,
please do send us all of those marvelous notes. Um Oh,
(36:34):
and this picture of them is wonderful. Thank you so much.
This is great. It warmed my Heart. Thank you again
Vaughn for sending this note. Um It, it reminds me
Holly you you recently did a whole endeavor to cook
every recipe in the Star Wars Galaxy's Age cookbook, which
(36:55):
I followed along. So delicious. So yeah, I I love
a little cooking challenge anyway. So that's um yeah. When
I say it's right up my alley, I mean it.
So thank you again, Von. Thank you to everyone who
has sent to so many lovely emails lately. If you
(37:15):
would like to email us about this or anither podcasts
were at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. We're
all over social media app Missed in History. That's where
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, interest in Instagram. To be honest,
we haven't been great about updating any of these things lately,
but they're there. You can also subscribe to our show
(37:37):
on I heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere
else to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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