Endless Thread
Madness, Part 5: The Unreachable Summit
Jointly produced by WBUR and Reddit, “Madness: The Secret Mission For Mind Control And The People Who Paid The Price” is a five-part series on the disconcerting history of Dr. Ewen Cameron and his experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. While the previous episodes laid out Cameron’s work on the MKUltra projects and the harrowing experiences of the patients, this last installment makes space for his son, lawyer Duncan Cameron, to share his impressions of the man, the myth, and what happened with all of the destroyed records. Part Brave New World, part Gaslight, the lines between sci-fi fantasy and reality become blurry in this retelling; it’s unclear whether the experiments were intended to heal the human mind or to break it. The story Duncan tells of a father climbing a mountain no one else climbed, and dying before reaching the summit, becomes a complex metaphor for a complex life. This episode does what Reddit does best: asks a lot of questions that maybe no one can answer. [Morgan McNaught]
Lions Led By Donkeys
Robert E. Lee Was A Monster
Lions Led By Donkeys is a military history podcast that focuses on the strategic blunders, incompetent leaders, and bizarre episodes within humanity’s bloodiest conflicts; hosts Joe and Nick cover everything from the Crusades to the matter of why Pepsi-Cola once had the sixth largest navy in the world. In this episode, the duo returns to their favorite historical punching bag: The Confederacy. Specifically, they explore the propaganda campaign that has successfully painted General Robert E. Lee as a principled Southern gentleman who detested the institution of slavery. Joe easily debunks these myths by recounting Lee’s well-documented history as a brutal slave owner. They also read Lee’s personal correspondences in which he revealed that he considered the true victims of slavery to be the white slave owners. Exposing “great men” as irredeemable monsters is a common theme of the podcast, one that Joe and Nick reprise with a dark humor that underlines the cruel absurdity of war. [Anthony D Herrera]
Lore
Stains
Lore has been unearthing dark and unsettling true stories from across history ever since host and creator Aaron Mahnke started the podcast in 2015—and in our current moment of uncertainty and disease, there is something oddly comforting about revisiting the darkness of the past. In “Stains,” Mahnke dives into the underbelly of Paris, and while his writing and narration in this installment are top-notch, props are also due to researcher Marcet Crockett for teasing out this engaging thread. The episode starts off with a 1984 report of a river monster that led authorities to find a crocodile in sewers under Paris, echoing contemporary urban legends of alligators in New York’s own sewer system. Mahnke then takes listeners back to the bloody Roman conquest out of which Paris initially grew and moves across time to cover everything from religious violence to the real life crime that rippled across the channel, influencing British penny dreadfuls and eventually inspiring the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. [Jose Nateras]
Other People’s Problems
Andrew: Opening Up During Lockdown
A shuttered restaurateur longs to restore intimacy with his wife amid the lockdown in the season-three opener of a CBC show composed of live therapy sessions. The walls between “Andrew” and his wife aren’t limited to a dry spell in the bedroom: They are made of unreciprocated hugs and sparse conversation (besides children and pocketbook issues). Andrew fears broaching the subject will only confirm that the marriage is over. Dr. Hillary McBride helps Andrew navigate these feelings, and also leads listeners through her process of understanding and guidance. While it’s not news that men have the same emotional needs as women, Dr. McBride says it’s rare for male patients like Andrew to be the partner more concerned about intimacy issues, especially in a relationship where there doesn’t appear to be a major breach of trust, just the creeping indifference of familiarity. Dr. McBride has earned Andrew’s trust, which allows her to try pushing him out of his comfort zone; the resulting audio is arresting. [Zach Brooke]
34 Comments
“painted General Robert E. Lee as a principled Southern gentleman who detested the institution of slavery.”Wait — who believes this? I’ve always been under the impression that it was common knowledge that Lee was an asshole. Who’s been suggesting that he was a gentleman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_memorials_to_Robert_E._Lee
Based on this list, I think he’s got a lot of apologists and wanna-be historians trying to justify why he’s worth honoring (but at least there’s that list at the end of schools and things that were renamed)
The same people who call it “The War of Northern Aggression” and claim it was not about slavery, but states’ rights.
Soooo… states rights to have slaves I assume? /rolls eyes
Not only that, but the Confederate Constitution said that slavery would always be the law of the land in CSA, and that its member states would never have the right to abolish it.
I was taught this in elementary and middle school as a young person growing up in the American Northeast. The myth of the Lost Cause is pretty strong and prevalent!
Drive south of DC on I-95. The further you get away from the city, the more people believe it.
Or even west on Route 29. AKA Lee Highway.
Eh, I can’t remember anything specific, but as someone outside the US, I rarely hear anything bad about Lee and sometimes hear good things about him. I’ve gotten the impression – and this might be wrong – that he’s overall viewed as a brilliant and honorable general who happened to be fighting on the wrong side.
He was a very effective tactician, but he didn’t have much strategic vision. In his defense, though, he really wasn’t in charge of the Confederacy’s overall strategy until very late in the war, and that was probably by default since he commanded one of the few armies that had not yet completely collapsed. During the war, though, his sense of honor really only extended to those of the same skin color. And his invasion of Pennsylvania wasn’t exactly a model of warrior-gentleman behavior, either.
In “fairness” – the guy wasn’t much more of an asshole than would be expected given how, where, and when he was raised. He was even willing to emancipate black men to fight for the Confederacy, in the waning days of the war (outraging most of the South).But, y’know, even though he was anti-secession, he still ended up being a fucking traitor, when the chips were down.And even a relatively “normal” slaveowner is still a destestable fucking asshole.
It’s a disturbingly common position, even outside the south. I think most people that expend even a token amount of research and critical thought quickly realize its bullshit, but a lot of people don’t really think about the Civil War, and so its a lie that lingers.
Go anywhere south of Ohio and Maryland. You’ll find this belief everywhere.
I-80 is basically Illinois Mason/Dixon line. Go South of that and its a state full of redneck confederate fuckers with a few college towns sprinkled about
they talk about it in the episode. there has been a systeic effort to rewrite and whitewash the history of the traitors since the war ended. history books in southern schools were put full of lies, something that even continues to this day.
Even southerners recognize that he was vastly overrated as a warfighter. Stonewall Jackson was the brains behind his operations. Lee lost every engagement after Jacksons death. In terms of him being a “gentleman”- in my many years living in the deep south, I never once heard him referenced as being a benevolent slave owner. I think the admiration was to the fact that he was the military leader of the rebellion. There is also the fact that one of the coolest cars ever shown on TV carried his name. I don’t think that made Bo and Luke Duke racists.
The version I always heard, as a northern Gen-Xer, was that he was a reluctant rebel who knew the Confederacy was doomed but had to answer when Virginia called. Never heard much about his slaves, even less about how he treated them. He was always described as a military genius who would have whipped the Yankees if he’d half their industrial output. Union generals were always less noble. Grant was a drunk, Sherman was cruel, McClelland was yellow. Historians love blowing up popular myths (and creating new ones) so I wonder if this was a reaction to an earlier version.
Also northern Gen-X and that’s the same story I learned to a T, and repeatedly, through primary and high school. The “reluctant” part is important, I think, because it manages two tricks that help perpetuate some huge myths about the war: it paints his decision to join the Confederacy as noble, adding a sheen of nobility to the whole cause; and it shores up the “states’ rights” narrative with the “I did it for Virginia” schtick.
I grew up in Virginia, and that is exactly what I learned in school and from my parents. And that was in a rich, liberal suburb of DC, not the deep South.
Who? Just some good old boys never meanin’ no harm. Full on slavery flag AND a “Dixie horn.”
The “Lost Cause” mythology is persistent even in parts of the north. I grew up in a fairly well-to-do suburban environment, and while our curriculum didn’t quite go that far, the texts we read definitely glossed over Lee’s lower points. There was a lot of, “He was a loyal Virginian that did what he felt he had to do for his home,” kind of crap.
Even in Ken Burns’ mostly excellent documentary, Lee is treated as a deeply good, even heroic, man, despite fighting for the Confederacy. I watched that documentary many times, and I struggle to think of any negative thing said about him in the whole series. The closest was probably Shelby Foote criticizing his tactics at Gettysburg, and even that is absolved (for the viewer, anyway), by his admission of fault after Pickett’s Charge. They even repeated the myth that he opposed slavery. And this was as recently as 1990!
Is it a bit ironic that a podcast named after a famous world war 1 myth is debunking a famous civil war myth? Eh whatever, debunking Lost Cause myths is something I never tire of.
Oh, it’s a deep tradition and not an impression. In the South you get a day off for MLK Day, which doubles as . . . Robert E. Lee Day. He is seen as the noble gentleman in gray, and even his f*cking horse is venerated. It’s not wannabe historians that perpetuated this but established mainstream historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and this was what was taught in all major universities in the country until only about 30 to 40 years ago, and by no means has it been completely eradicated. Go find any educated Boomer and ask them about Reconstruction. They’ll tell you the usual stuff about how newly-freed former slaves “weren’t ready” for positions of power or voting rights, and how the early Klan were just trying to protect southern citizens from swindling carpetbaggers. This isn’t just a Southern narrative, either. The romantic lost cause figure of Lee is deep and persistent on all levels of culture, from “The South Will Rise Again” tattooed good ole boys to respected academics.
“Go find any educated Boomer” Yeah, I think that’s mainly the South.and in the same texts that taught that the Civil War was primarily about State’s Rights. I am Gen X, but even in grade school and middle school, we weren’t taught that.
I have to disagree. I have attended middle school in Rhode Island, high school in Hawaii, and went to college in northern Illinois where this construct was taught. That’s just one experience, which is my own, so perhaps I’m a bit over-emphatic in stating my case. But if we recognize that racism is not exclusive to the South, which it certainly is not, then maybe there were threads in your syllabus that you might not have recognized as perpetuating this narrative. I’m not Gen X. I’m a little older. I remember using a landline and not just a landline but a rotary phone. The Lost Cause, the veneration of Robert E. Lee and the myth of a truly invested, committed and unprejudiced Reconstruction is not at all exclusive to the South in all levels of education even until today. Anyway, this was my experience and I’m glad it wasn’t yours. I just know from spending a lot of time in the South that all those “snowbirds” that come down and visit from the Midwest and the Northeast feed on the myth of the noble Confederacy and love the narrative like a Disneyland only thinly denied them back home. The original question was regarding the image of Lee. My contention was that the idea of Lee as a noble man, a soldier’s soldier who defended his home over his personal objections to slavery, is a story that is not at all confined to the South. It may be that the common perception is changing but this picture still exists at all levels of culture and historical narrative in this country. You may be Gen X but that’s old by now and certainly if that narrative never formally intersected with your education then you’re the rare example.
I’m not Gen X. I’m a little older. I remember using a landline and not just a landline but a rotary phone.This is wildly besides the point, but rotary dial phones were still around in the early 90s, so practically all Gen X-ers as well as many of the older Millennial cohorts should remember that as well.
I think it really depended upon whether you use the Texas textbooks or the California textbooks and where you were in Illinois. I will say that Lee was presented as someone loyal top his state and not so much an avid supporter of slavery. We did read about carpetbaggers too. But we also learned about Johnson and the failure of Reconstruction.There also was not generally a huge focus on civil rights issues and modern history (post-WWII) until high school in the mid-80’s.
Also, racism is far from exclusive to the South. However, the rewriting of the Civil War so that it (1) was about anything other than slavery, and (2) that there was anything noble about the cause generally is/was.
When I was younger and didnt know the context of why Grant has gone down (incorrectly) as a drunk and Lee as some military genius i concluded Lee couldnt have been all that good because he got beat by a supposedly incompetent drunkard who could barely get on his horse. You must be an absolutely garbage general if some random hobo level alchy managed to stomp you.Now knowing the context and realizing that Grant was an excellent general and Lee was an overrated hack, i still like my original interpretation
We were never taught anything like that in California, though I was in school in the 90’s-early 2000’s. I only heard those rumors once I started becoming active on forums and sites like these.Although, I was always a bit of a history buff in school and rarely read the textbook, preferring to do my own research. Who knows, it might have been in there somewhere.
Lions Led by Donkeys is one of the best historical military podcast you can listen to. Joe & Nick are both veterans,and know how to cut through the bullshit chest thumping and men of marble personas that happen all to often in this genre. Plus if you have since of humor of a ticklish puppy you will enjoy each and every dig.
non-apple podcast link for Lions Led By Donkeys for those of us who don’t have apple products:
soundcloud.com/user-798629330/episode-105-robert-e-lee-was-a-monster
Lee was a man of his time. Sherman probably would have expressed the same sentiments. Other Northern leaders as well, although Grant was in some ways very evolved. Because Lee died so soon after the war, we don’t know if his beliefs might have changed. Other Confederates did evolve. Longstreet became a champion of the freed slaves. Even Forrest had a religious conversion before his death and disavowed much of his past, offering to lead a campaign against men who had lynched blacks in Tennessee. His evolution could have been because he feared the flames of hell or it could have been genuine. We do not know. The one thing Lee should be respected for today is that he surrendered his army rather than leading a guerilla war campaign, as some of his generals wanted him to do. He convinced them that it was over.