Futility Closet - 013-An Ingenious Escape From Slavery

Episode Date: June 9, 2014

Georgia slaves Ellen and William Craft made a daring bid for freedom in 1848: Ellen dressed as a white man and, attended by William as her servant, undertook a perilous 1,000-mile journey by carriage, train, and steamship to the free state of Pennsylvania in the North. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the couple's harrowing five-day adventure through the slave-owning South. We'll also discover the best place in the United States to commit a crime and sample the aphoristic poetry of Danish mathematician Piet Hein. Our post on Ellen and Willliam Craft appeared on July 19, 2012. Here are the two as they normally appeared: And here's Ellen dressed as a rheumatism-ridden white man: In order to show her likeness clearly, this image omits the poultice that she wore on her chin. Their book Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom appeared in 1860. Here's an excerpt explaining what awaited them if they were confronted at any point on their 1,000-mile journey: If [a] coloured person refuses to answer questions put to him, he may be beaten, and his defending himself against this attack makes him an outlaw, and if he be killed on the spot, the murderer will be exempted from all blame; but after the coloured person has answered the questions put to him, in a most humble and pointed manner, he may then be taken to prison; and should it turn out, after further examination, that he was caught where he had no permission or legal right to be, and that he has not given what they term a satisfactory account of himself, the master will have to pay a fine. On his refusing to do this, the poor slave may be legally and severely flogged by public officers. Should the prisoner prove to be a free man, he is most likely to be both whipped and fined. At several points whites upbraided Ellen for treating William decently. On the steamer to Charleston, a Southern military officer told her: You will excuse me, Sir, for saying I think you are very likely to spoil your boy by saying 'thank you' to him. I assure you, sir, nothing spoils a slave so soon as saying 'thank you' and 'if you please' to him. The only way to make a nigger toe the mark, and to keep him in his place, is to storm at him like thunder, and keep him trembling like a leaf. Don't you see, when I speak to my Ned, he darts like lightning; and if he didn't I'd skin him. Our post about the Woodrow Wilson Bridge appeared on June 4, 2014, and we wrote originally about the Yellowstone loophole on Feb. 3, 2012. Michigan State law professor Brian Kalt's paper about the loophole is titled "The Perfect Crime." He points out that civil actions and lesser criminal charges await anyone who commits a felony in Yellowstone; nonetheless he calls the current state of affairs "a constitutional rusty nail." We've published Piet Hein's poetry previously on Futility Closet, in 2012 and 2013. Wikiquote has the fullest online collection I know of. You can listen using the player above, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. You can support Futility Closet by taking a 5-minute survey. Your answers will help match our show with advertisers that best fit our listeners, like you, and allow us to keep making these podcasts. Listeners who complete the survey will be entered in an ongoing monthly raffle to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card. We promise not to share or sell your email address, and we won't send you email unless you win.Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode 13. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon Ross. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll follow the ingenious escape from slavery of Ellen and William Craft in 1848, discover the best place in the United States to commit a crime,

and sample the aphoristic poetry of Danish mathematician Piet Hein. Last week, we asked listeners to please send in their feedback, comments, and suggestions for our show. We want to thank everyone who did and address some of the comments that we received. Michael Fry wrote in to say, Have read and loved your website for years. My flipboard wouldn't be complete without it. Now, after the podcast about The Great Race, I won't miss a one of the series, and I'll be digging around for past episodes. Thanks for the hours of fun thinking and diversion you've provided me over the years. Thanks, Michael. And your email raises a good point, which is where can people find the past episodes of the show if they're looking for them? Probably one of the easiest places is to go to the

show notes that we keep mentioning, which is at blog.futilitycloset.com. We have all of the past episodes there in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent. And this reminds me of I recently went onto the website of another podcast, and the host of that show said if you go back through his archives and listen to all his old shows, you'll sort of discover him slowly learning how to do a podcast. Yeah, we did the same thing.

Yeah, I think if you listen to our archives, you'll probably find the same thing, although we sort of feel like we are still learning, still figuring out exactly how we want to be doing it. And that's why we appreciate getting in comments and suggestions from the readers. Brad Williams wrote in to say, I love your podcast and have been listening since it was introduced on the Boing Boing Network. I'm a history buff and devour all the audio courses and books I can get from the library. Thank you. and motivations of individuals in the periods you cover. By focusing so narrowly on these stories, the broad cultural impact of historical events covered in the surveys

can be understood more clearly. Thank you for your work. Hopefully Father's Day brings a copy of your book. Thank you, Brad, and we hope you get your Father's Day wish. Yeah, thanks, Brad. That's very nice of you to say. In doing all these years of research, especially in history for the website, I've come to think that there's two kinds of history. I call them big history and little

history. Big history is what they teach in school, political and military history, which is undeniably important, but it sort of unfolds on such a huge scale that you can't really get any kind of personal relation to it. You can't relate to it, yeah. Little history is just the daily lives of ordinary people. And I think that's just always fascinating. People have always had the same foibles, and it just occurs on a scale that you can understand. I can't imagine what it's like to be Napoleon, but I can imagine what it's like to be a foot soldier in his army,

and so that's just more appealing to me. Alexander Gromnitsky wrote in to say, Greetings from Kiev. Just wanted to thank you for the great show. It not only amuses me with exotic stories, but also helps me to learn English. I have only one complaint. Episodes are too short, and there is only one of them per week. Nevertheless, keep up the good work. advisement, but honestly, a surprising amount of research goes into these shows. And so, unfortunately, the amount that we're doing right now is pretty much the most that we can manage to do in a week. What we found is that if we both work flat out for a week, we can just put together 30 minutes. Right. So we appreciate the suggestion, but I'm afraid this is the best we're going to do

right now. Andy Ryan wrote in to say, one tip or thought is that you should put the show notes in the podcast with links to the site. Most podcatchers, like PocketCast, Downcast, Apple's Own, etc., all will show these and bring more people to the site. That's a good idea. In my very limited testing of podcatcher software, it looks like a lot of them don't render markup well, so what you get, because in our show notes, there are a lot of images and lists and links and stuff. Links, yeah.

And you just get all that code instead of getting readable text in the few that we looked at. But I'll start putting that stuff into the show notes, starting with this episode, episode 13, and you can let me know how it comes across. And lastly, I want to read an email from Seth Harris, who wrote in to say, I can't say enough how much I've enjoyed the entire Futility Closet experience. I've learned so much useless trivia, which is the best kind of trivia, since I started reading the site years ago. Seth explains in his email that he really liked the story we did last week of the tomahawk that got traded back and forth between Alec Guinness and Grace Kelly. And that's because it reminded him of a similar story from his own life.

As a small child, Seth had gotten a Burger King toy while traveling to visit his grandparents, and he hadn't liked the toy he'd gotten at all. Seth goes on to say, When we arrived at my grandparents' house, I told my grandfather that I got the toy for him and gave it to him. He went on about how great it was and how happy he was that I gave it to him. When we got home a week later, as I was unpacking, I found the toy wrapped up in my clothes.

Over the next few years, we passed the toy back and forth, receiving it as a birthday present, Christmas present, or just as a random package that would show up one day. I still have that stupid toy sitting on a shelf in a place of pride in my living room now,

and it's one of my most prized possessions. Oh, good. That is kind of a neat story, very similar to the story last week. Well, thanks to everyone else who also wrote in with their support and encouragement. And if you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com or leave a comment in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. Back in episode five, we told the story of Henry Brown, who was a Virginia slave who escaped to freedom by having himself sealed in a box and mailed to Philadelphia. This week, I've been reading the story of another slave escape that happened several years earlier in 1848,

and this involved a married couple who undertook their escape. It was a much more audacious attempt and undertaken under much more dangerous circumstances. Their names were Ellen and William Craft, and they lived in Macon, Georgia, which is sort of the center of Georgia. Georgia, which is sort of the center of Georgia. And they had lived there all their lives as slaves, but they wanted to start a family and didn't want to face the prospect of losing their child. Because if you were a slave couple and had a kid, white people could just take it from you at any time. That had actually happened to Ellen in her own childhood, and she didn't want to risk having their own family broken up. But the rules in the slave south made it impossible even to consider escaping. First of all, any white person could accost any black person with or without a reason

and ask him to give some accounting of himself, who he was, who his master was, and what he was doing, wherever they found him, and could even assault him physically with impunity if he thought it was warranted. Also, every public conveyance was forbidden from taking black people anywhere without the master's consent. So if you were a slave and considering escaping, you had no way to travel. You couldn't get on a ship or a train or even a coach without your master's permission. So it just seemed impossible even to begin to think of getting out of central Georgia up into the free states. The closest free state would have been Pennsylvania. So they spent literally years thinking about this and trying to come up

with some plan that would enable them to come out. And finally, in December 1848, William hit on what he thought could work. Ellen had very light skin. Her mother had been a mixed race slave and her father was a white plantation owner. So her skin was quite light. So he thought if they could get her to pass as white, he could pose as her slave and they could then, that would permit them to travel together. It would still be incredibly dangerous if they were discovered, but it could work. Right. An added wrinkle there is that it wasn't customary at that time for white women to travel with male servants. So she wouldn't just have to pass as a white person. She'd have to dress up as a white man.

Wow. For that to go by without seeming to raise suspicions. But he thought they could make that work. They came up, I think this is ingenious, the way they made it work was both of them were illiterate, so they'd have to travel. When Henry Brown went from Virginia up to Pennsylvania, he did it in a box. So as long as he kept quiet and avoided bringing any suspicion on his presence, he didn't have to interact with people.

But here they're undertaking a trip from Macon, Georgia, all the way up to Pennsylvania, which is a trip of three or four days. When you't have to interact with people. Right, right. But here they're undertaking a trip from Macon, Georgia, all the way up to Pennsylvania, which is a trip of three or four days. When you're constantly interacting with other people, you'd have to sign hotel registers, buy tickets, dine with people. So they needed some way to prevent her betraying the fact that she couldn't read or write. So what William came up with is they put her right arm in a sling

so that if she were asked to sign her name, for instance, she could just say, well, I can't really do that. Could you help me just sign it for me? Which is still incredibly dangerous even to think of trying that because all it takes is one officious hotel clerk to say no and you're in trouble immediately. But that's what they came up with. They also put a poultice on her chin. The cover story they came up with was that she was a white man who was traveling to Philadelphia to see a doctor about inflammatory rheumatism. So that's why her arm was in a sling. That's why she had a poultice on her neck. The purpose of the poultice on her chin was two reasons. One, to hide the fact that she didn't have a beard, that she was a woman. And also,

hopefully, to just sort of discourage people from engaging her in conversation generally. If she could just sit in the corner and look uncomfortable enough, maybe people would leave her alone as much as possible. So that's what they came up with. And they decided to make a run for it shortly before Christmas in 1848. Ellen got permission from the family she was serving to be away for a few days for the holidays. And William got permission from the cabinetmaker he worked for to do the same. So there's this poignant scene. I'm getting most of this from the book they wrote after this whole adventure called Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. There's a poignant scene where they're leaving the house on the day when they finally decide to do this and just realizing how impossible

it seems. They split up. This is on December 21st, 1848. After they leave the house, they split up and William goes directly to the train station and gets on the car for slaves. Whites and blacks travel in separate cars. And he manages to do that without being recognized. She takes a longer route. She's dressed up as a white man with rheumatism, goes into the train station with other white people, buys two tickets, one for herself and one for her slave, and gets onto a car with other white people. And immediately two things go badly wrong. Just before the train started moving, William, in the slave car, looked out the window

and saw the cabinetmaker that he worked for on the platform apparently looking for him. He talked to the station master and then started looking rapidly through the people. They found out afterwards that he had some suspicion that they were planning to run and had come looking for them. So that man actually looked into the car where Ellen was, but because of her disguise he didn't recognize her. He was headed for the slave car when the train started moving, and the whole game would be up at that point before the first train even left the platform.

But that disaster was followed immediately by another one. Ellen looked around and realized that sitting next to her on the seat in the white car was a man who was a friend of her master, who had known her since she was a child, and who had in fact dined with the family the night before, sitting right next to her, and who turned to her and said, Good morning. Twice. Oh no. If he heard her voice, it would all be up too because he'd recognize her the disguise wasn't was fooling him but once he heard her voice

that would be it so she figured thinking quickly that her only chance was to pretend to be deaf so she just looked out the window and steadfastly ignored him and finally another passenger said it was a very great deprivation to be deaf and this man mr cray said yes and i shall not trouble that fellow anymore so that's two disasters within the first like what 10 minutes right but after that people generally left her alone and they traveled the first 200 miles to savannah georgia which was the first stop safely and from in savannah that the plan worked fairly well they managed to stay at a hotel. She didn't have to sign her name. William would sort of take care of things and pretend to serve her as her

slave, but that enabled them to get meals and just generally pass the night safely there. The next step is to take a steamer for Charleston, South Carolina. Their plan is to basically bounce up the coast on steamships. So that's the next step, is to get from Georgia up to South Carolina. Their plan is to basically bounce up the coast on steamships. So that's the next step is to get from Georgia up to South Carolina. On that ship, the next morning, Ellen was seated at the right hand of the captain who asked after her health because they, again, everybody still thinks she has rheumatism. And William sat next to her because she couldn't cut anything. It was his duty to cut her food. But when he got up and went out,

they warned her that they mustn't take a slave into a free state because he'd run away. And she was told that constantly on this whole trip. You can't do this. She said, well, I've got rheumatism. I have to visit this doctor in Philadelphia. And they said, you can't leave the South. Go to Arkansas.

There's hot springs there. You just don't take a slave out of the South or he'll run away on you. There was actually a slave dealer at the table who offered to buy William from her, but she said, I don't wish to sell, sir. I cannot get on well without him. So anyway, she got through that breakfast. And then at the wharf in Charleston, they went to a hotel just long enough for Ellen to rest, and then they sort of hurriedly had to get onto the next boat. So that was kind of a funny hotel because there was an obsequious owner there who thought that Ellen had money, so they treated her very kindly. But then William had to eat in the kitchen on an old broken plate with a rusty knife and fork.

But they paid for the hotel, got safely out of that, and dashed for the next leg, which was a steamer from Charleston to Philadelphia. That was the plan. That would have been the end of it. They just take one more steamship up to a free state and they're done. Yeah. But they found out that that ship didn't run in the winter, unfortunately, which is a big monkey wrench. So now instead of going by water, they have to take a much more complicated route, the overland mail route up through Virginia and Maryland up overland into Philadelphia, which is not impossible, but means just a lot more time and a lot more interacting with

suspicious white people. And the other thing they're finding is that the further north you get, the more suspicious and mistrustful the white people get that you might be a runaway slave because you're getting closer to the free states now uh so uh they drove to the custom house office when they realized they couldn't get this boat up to philadelphia uh and got tickets for a steamer then we just take them to wilmington north carolina so there's a sort of hopping up state by state now um and ellen asked for two tickets to to Philadelphia, one for herself and one for her slaves. So now they're in Wilmington, North Carolina. They're going to work their way over land up into Philadelphia. But now they meet a mean man at this, the principal officer here in Wilmington, who is described as a very mean looking cheese colored fellow, looked at him

suspiciously and he asked William, boy, do you belong to that gentleman? William replied quickly, yes, sir. He gave the tickets mistrustfully to Ellen. She was paying for them and the man asked her to write both their names in a register and to pay a dollar duty on William because he was a slave. She paid the dollar and then pointed to her arm and asked the man to register for her. But he was, for some reason, mistrustful and took offense at this and refused to do it. So now there's a group of passengers sort of forming a knot around them, just watching this argument. And it's looking kind of desperate when a young military officer who Ellen had met on the steamer from Savannah stepped in. Apparently he was, they say, somewhat

the worst for Brandy, but very friendly and pretended to know her better than he did, shook hands with her and pretended to know all about her, which vouched for a bit in this man's eyes. And then another piece of good fortune, the captain of the steamer stepped in and said he would register in the gentleman's name and take responsibility on himself, which is just pure good luck. So Ellen gave her name as William Johnson and the captain put it down and said, it's all right now, Mr. Johnson. And Ellen and William boarded in and departed safely for Wilmington. And William writes in the book, when the gentleman finds out his mistake, he will, I have no doubt, be careful in future not to pretend to have an intimate acquaintance with an entire stranger. I gather there's a whole string of people who, when the book came out, realized they'd been taken, but didn't have any inkling of that until the book came out, and he was one of them. So they get as far as Richmond, Virginia, change trains, go a little past Fredericksburg,

so they're getting closer and closer, and then took a steamer to Washington. From here on, just by the way, this is the same route that Henry Brown had taken in his box. He was going from Virginia up through Washington, Baltimore, Haver to Grayson, up into Pennsylvania. So they're getting closer and closer, but people are getting more and more suspicious. There's one more close call in Richmond when a stout elderly lady got into the train carriage and took a seat near Ellen

and then happened to look out the window and saw William passing by on the platform and mistook him for a runaway slave that she owned. Oh, no. And said, bless my soul, and stood up, stuck her right out the window and said, Ellen tried a runaway slave that she owned. Oh, no. And said, bless my soul, and instead of stuck her right out the window and said, Ellen tried to say, no, that is my boy. But the lady ignored this, put her head out the window and said, you, Ned, come to me, sir, you runaway rascal.

But William looked around and she realized it wasn't the man she thought it was and withdrew her head and apologized to Ellen. But that's another hard-stopping moment. Yeah. So they land at washington and took a conveyance to the train for baltimore and they arrived in baltimore which is the last major stop before freedom on christmas eve and here everything falls apart the authorities in baltimore were the most careful of everyone and suspicious because they're so close to the border with, with the free state of Pennsylvania.

Um, and so William, they thought they were basically done. William handed Ellen into the train carriage and they thought that's the last leg. If they get on that train, uh, they can safely pass up into Pennsylvania and no one can catch them then. Uh,

but then William, after he put her on the train was stopped by an officer who said, where are you going boy to Philadelphia, sir who said, where are you going, boy? To Philadelphia, sir. Well, what are you going there for? I'm traveling with my master, who is in the next carriage, sir. Well, I calculate you'd better get him out and be mighty quick about it, because the train will soon be starting. It is against my rules to let any man take a slave past here unless he can satisfy them in the office that he has a right to take him along.

So there's this really sad scene when William has to go onto the train and Ellen smiles at him because she thinks they're done. And his heart just sinks and he has to hand her back out and take her into the office where they're going to have this confrontation. So she goes into the room. Again, they think she's a white man. And she says, do you wish to see me, sir? And this officer says, yes, it is against our rules, sir, to allow any person to take a slave out of Baltimore into Philadelphia unless he can satisfy us that he has a right to take him along. And Ellen, who's desperate but has to sound firm, says, why is that? And the man basically explains, if you can't prove that the slave belongs to you and you take him up into Pennsylvania and he escapes, then his real master is going to come after us and ask us to pay him that's why they're being

so careful and there's a group of passengers now accumulating around this whole argument some of whom seem to be on Ellen's side because it looks like this man is sort of bullying an invalid right with primitivism so she has some people on her side but the officer doesn't back down he asks whether she knows a gentleman in baltimore who can vouch for her and show that william is her property and she says no i bought tickets in charleston to pass us through to philadelphia and therefore you have no right to detain us here the man says both are right or no right we shan't let you go. And now they're at an impasse. The officer won't back down.

They have to make this work. Yeah. There's no alternative. They can't just stay in Maryland. They can't turn around and go all the way back to Georgia. Even if they could make that, by the time they got home, it would be clear that they had run. Yeah, yeah. But they can't get past this man, and they can't make him too angry because of the power to throw them in jail.

And if that happened, they would surely be discovered so they're just looking at each other and just by good luck then the conductor of their last train happened to step in and the officer asked him whether he'd taken them from washington he said he had and stepped out again so he's like this deus ex machina he just this angel steps onto the stage and makes it all better and steps off again uh at that moment the bell rang for the departing train the train was actually leaving now and the officer thrust his fingers through his hair and in a great state of agitation said i really don't know what to do i calculate it is all right so he sent someone to tell the conductor that it was all right to take these two on board he said as he is not well as a pity to stop him here we will

let him go so ellen thanked him and uh will William helped her hobble to the carriage as the train was leaving, got her into her carriage, and had just enough time to leap onto his own car before the train got out of the station. But that's it. Now they're out of Baltimore, and they're headed up into Pennsylvania. And on that train, William got to talking with another colored man who recommended a boarding house that was kept by an abolitionist fortunately so William knew where to go when they actually

reached Philadelphia if he wanted to run away which as it happens he did so I'll give the last word to William this is from their book again as soon as the train had reached the platform before it had fairly stopped I hurried out of my carriage to my master, whom I got at once into a cab, placed the luggage in, jumped in myself, and we drove off to the boarding house, which was so kindly recommended to me. On leaving the station, my master, or rather my wife, as I may now say, who had from the commencement of the journey borne up in a manner that much surprised us both, grasped me by the hand and said, thank God, William, we're safe, that much surprised us both, grasped me by the hand and said, Thank God, William, we're safe,

then burst into tears, leaned upon me, and wept like a child. The reaction was fearful, so when we reached the house, she was in reality so weak and faint that she could scarcely stand alone. However, I got her into the apartments that were pointed out, and there we knelt down on this Sabbath and Christmas Day, a day that will ever be memorable to us, and poured out our heartfelt gratitude to God for his goodness in enabling us to overcome so many perilous difficulties in escaping out of the jaws of the wicked.

It is amazing sometimes how true stories can, I mean, just seem so incredible. Like if you read this as a work of fiction... You'd never believe it. You'd never believe it. All the coincidences and somebody just stepping in to save things at the last minute. And just the bravery it takes even to try something like that. It was practically impossible. And they knew it at the outset.

Right. The chances of something like that succeeding are almost zero. And they tried it anyway. And there were so many points for things to go so badly wrong. And they just had to tough it out. Yeah. And if they'd been caught, it's not just a matter of being sent back to their masters. They could be put to some punishing labor and even tortured to death.

That happened for this transgressions like this. So once they were in Philadelphia, they did largely what Henry Brown wound up doing. They toured the North telling their story to abolitionists. And then when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, which would have enabled their master to come up and reclaim them, they went to England just as he had done. Published a book there explaining the whole adventure and did speaking there too as well. In the end, they actually, after the Civil War, they wound up actually going back to Georgia and worked a farm there and actually started a school for ex-slaves, which is even another brave thing to do. Yeah, wow.

We'll have a link to the original post about Ellen and William Craft, as well as a picture of Ellen's disguise and a link to their book, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, in our show notes. If you enjoy the offbeat topics that we talk about in these podcasts, you'll want to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements, which contains hundreds of assorted curiosities, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums.

Look for it on Amazon or iTunes, and discover why other readers have called it a great fun read that will never leave you bored and full of wonderful discoveries for the curious mind. Last week on Futility Closet, I published a post about the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which crosses the Potomac River south of Washington, D.C. The interesting thing about that bridge is that it connects Virginia on the west with Maryland on the east, but in the middle of it, Washington, D.C. reaches down and pokes it. So that's the only bridge in the United States that covers three different jurisdictions. In writing the post, I just said breezily at the end,

this sounds like an opportunity for some sort of perfect crime, but I can't quite work it out. And that brought an email from Dan Fingerman, who writes, due to an historical quirk, there is a similar and much better place for a perfect crime in the small sliver of Yellowstone National Park that lies within Idaho. In a nutshell, the U.S. Constitution prohibits the trial of any crime committed there. And he's right, Constitution prohibits the trial of any crime committed there. And he's right, it does. This was pointed out by Michigan State Law Professor Brian Kalt in a paper in 2005 called The Perfect Crime. And basically the thinking goes like this. There are 50 states in the United States, and each one is divided into one or more federal judicial districts. Those just control how the federal government gets its legal business done. So this morning, you and I are sitting in a room in Raleigh, North Carolina,

and that happens to be in the Eastern District of North Carolina. The Constitution says that if you're accused of a crime in this country, you're entitled to a trial by a jury where the jurors are drawn from the state and the district where the crime was committed. So if you commit a crime here this morning, if you kill me, let's say, you're entitled to a jury trial and they have to draw the jurors from the state, North Carolina, and from the district, the Eastern District, where the crime was committed, which is perfectly straightforward. That just means they get jurors from the Eastern part of the state. There's millions of them. This happens every day. It's no problem. What Kalt realized and pointed out was that there's one interesting loophole to this, and that concerns the state of Wyoming.

Wyoming is one big judicial district. It's just one thing. But the district is a little bit bigger than the state itself, and that's because of Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone mostly fits within the state, but it extends out a little bit across the state lines into two other states, Montana and Idaho. But when they were drawing up the boundaries for the judicial district, they thought, well, why don't we just include the whole park within the District of Wyoming? Instead of splitting it up and cross different districts. Exactly. It's just simpler that way. You can just have that way. The whole park is in one piece. You don't have to cut it into pieces. And it does mean that the District of Wyoming extends a little bit across the state lines, but it's just tidier this way. So that's how it's set up.

Montana has a few people living in it. But the part that extends into Idaho doesn't. The census population is zero. So he thought, if you're in Yellowstone and you go in that direction, you cross the Wyoming state line into Idaho, but you're still in Yellowstone, and you commit a crime there, let's say you lure me there and you kill me there, and you're apprehended, here's what you can say. I know my rights. I'm entitled to a jury trial in the state and the

district where the crime took place. In this case, the state is Idaho, right? But the district is Wyoming. And the only way to fulfill both of those conditions is within this little region of Yellowstone that's in Idaho. And nobody lives there. Where no one lives. If no one lives there, you can't assemble a jury. Without a jury, you can't get your trial. And without a trial, they can't detain you indefinitely. They have to let you go. That's the thinking. I'm sure they would actually nab you. I mean, you're not, I'm encouraging

you. Please don't actually try this out. This is somewhat theoretical, yes. But that's the thinking. And this law professor, Brian Kalt, his point wasn't to get people to commit crimes in Yellowstone, but to get us maybe to rethink this notion of letting a state's judicial district extend beyond the boundaries of the state, because it opens up loopholes like this, which just cause other different kinds of trouble. He says, the solution is to fix the statute, not eviscerate the Constitution.

If we do it quickly enough, no one will get hurt. The solution is to fix the statute, not eviscerate the Constitution. If we do it quickly enough, no one will get hurt. Another reader named Ty Sarna had pointed out this paper to me a couple years ago, so I actually did the write-up back in 2012. But I want to thank Dan Fingerman for pointing it out in connection with the Woodrow Wilson Bridge item because I hadn't put the two together again. If anyone else knows any possible conceptions for perfect crimes, I'd be interested to hear from them. I'm always interested in this kind of thing.

But just for the record, I am not planning to kill Greg in Yellowstone or anywhere else at the moment anyway. That's good to hear. We'll have links to the posts about the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and the Yellowstone loophole, as well as a link to Brian Kalt's paper in the show notes. notes. Last week, we asked for our listeners to write in for their ideas about the challenge that we had been running at this point in the show. And thanks to everyone who did write in about that. We still haven't figured out for sure what we want to do in this spot in the show, but we have some different ideas for this segment that we'll be trying out in the coming weeks. This week, we were kicking around ideas and I went down my list and saw Pete Hine's name,

and my eyes bugged out, and I said, oh, Pete Hine, we have to do him. He's well-known in Scandinavia, but I find not very well-known outside of that area. Pete Hine basically wore a lot of hats. He was a mathematician and an engineer and a game designer, but he's probably best known for writing tiny, tiny, miniature, smart, wise poems that he called grux. The first one he wrote way back in 1940 when Germany occupied Denmark.

In a newspaper, he wrote a little poem that read, losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again. What he meant by that was that it's one thing to be occupied by another power, but if you give up even the spirit of resistance, then when you gain your freedom again, the memory will be that much more painful. The Danes understood that, and the Nazis didn't. And in fact, the Danes, that poem started showing up as a graffito around the country to sort of inform the spirit of the Danish resistance.

Anyway, he found he had sort of a talent for these sort of, I spirit of the Danish resistance. Anyway, he found he had sort of a talent for these sort of, I think, wonderfully wise, tiny poems, and published more than 7,000 of them over the ensuing decades for the rest of his life, which were collected into books. I find to my alarm and dismay that the English translations seem to be out of print. I hope I'm wrong about that. That's upsetting upsetting because they're really great. So I thought I could read a few here and I'll just go down the list. The first one is problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back. There is one art, no more, no less to do all things with artlessness. The noble art of losing face may someday save the human race and turn into eternal merit what weaker minds would call disgrace.

If you possess more than just eight things, then you are possessed by them. I think that's true. This one was up over my desk for a number of years at American Scientist magazine. Put up in a place where it's easy to see the cryptic admonishment TTT. magazine. Put up in a place where it's easy to see the cryptic admonishment TTT. When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb, it's well to remember that things take time. That is a good thing to remember. And this last one is also good advice, I think. Whenever you're called on to make up your mind and you're hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma you'll find is simply by flipping a penny. No, not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping,

but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping. I think that is really true in a lot of cases, too. I mean, I think a lot of times when you're trying to make a decision, you may get very weighed down by all these cognitive factors. There's these pluses and these minuses and these factors and these variables. And you get all caught up in all of that and you find yourself just stuck. But you deep down often have a gut feeling of that's what, this is the direction you're really hoping to go in or what you really want.

And you just need a way to access that impulse. Yeah, a lot of times because it's kind of not really verbally accessible. But right, so if you flipped a penny and you suddenly find yourself thinking, oh, I really hope it's heads, which means I do this. Then you'll know that. Then you'll know that. So as I say, the books, he published more than 7,000 of these things, if you can believe that, over his lifetime.

But I can't find a good English translation, so I'll keep looking. If anyone knows where I can find one, please let me know. We'll have a link to our post about Pete Hine and to an online collection of his poems in our show notes. We want to thank everyone who has taken the podcast survey so far. If you haven't yet, then this week will be your last chance to help support the Futility Closet podcast by taking a short anonymous survey.

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to take our survey and get your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Well, that's it for this episode. You can see the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com where you can post comments or questions, listen to past shows, and see the links and images mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com If you enjoy Futility Closet, be sure to look for the book on Amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com

where you can sample over 8,000 thought-provoking tidbits, perfect for filling 5 minutes or 50. If you'd like to support Futility Closet, you can help spread the word about us, take the survey that I just mentioned, leave a review of the book or podcast on Amazon or iTunes, or click the Donate button in the sidebar of the website. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thank you.