Futility Closet - 080-'Black Like Me': Race Realities Under Jim Crow

Episode Date: November 2, 2015

In 1959, Texas journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and lived for six weeks as a black man in the segregated South. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe his harrowing experience and what it taught him about the true state of race relations in America. We'll also ponder crescent moons, German submarines, and griffins in India and puzzle over why a man would be arrested for winning a prize at a county fair. Sources for our feature on John Howard Griffin: John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me, 1961. Robert Bonazzi, Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me, 2010. Maurice Dolbier, "Blinding Disguise in South," Miami News, Oct. 15, 1961. Jerome Weeks, "'Black Like Me' Just One of Many Roles for John Howard Griffin," Dallas Morning News, Sept. 19, 1997. H.W. Quick, "He Finds Bias Blighting North, South," Milwaukee Sentinel, Jan. 16, 1964. Karen De Witt, "Oppressor Shown What Being Oppressed Is Like," Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 1, 1977. Ray Sprigle, In the Land of Jim Crow, 1949. Lucile Torkelson, "Writer Crosses the Race Barrier," Milwaukee Sentinel, Oct. 29, 1969. Research questions: Here's the image of the star and crescent: And here are the sources I've found that describe the German submarine rescue: Wolfgang Frank, The Sea Wolves, 1955. Arch Whitehouse, Subs and Submariners, 1961. Jacques Yves Cousteau, Captain Cousteau's Underwater Treasury, 1959. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Lawrence Miller. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. 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 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 80. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1959, Texas journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and traveled for six weeks through the Deep South to experience life as a black man under segregation. In today's show, we'll learn about his eye-opening experiences and what they taught him about the true state of race relations in America. We'll also hear some open questions from Greg's research and puzzle over why a man would be arrested for winning a

prize at a county fair. This podcast is supported primarily by our terrific patrons. This show would definitely not still be going if it weren't for all the support from our fans. If you would like to join them and help ensure that we can keep bringing you regular doses of quirky history and lateral thinking puzzles, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link in our show notes. A quick programming note, Greg and I are finally managing to take off a few days to a bit belatedly celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. Yay for us! So we are going to spend a few days gazing into each other's eyes and not working on a podcast,

which means there won't be a new episode on Monday, November 9th. Look for our next episode on November 16th. John Howard Griffin was born in Dallas in 1920. He's remembered now as a writer mostly about American racism, but he came into that in a very unusual way. He'd originally planned to be a psychiatrist, and he studied music and medicine

in France. But then during World War II, he served three years in the Army Air Corps in the South Pacific, living with native islanders. And during an air raid there, he was blinded when an exploding shell gave him a severe concussion. His eyes weren't injured, but the concussion somehow left him blind. So they sent him home again, and while living blind there in Texas, he converted to Catholicism and had a child. And he figured at that point the way to psychiatry was pretty well closed to him, so he became a novelist and had some success with that. But then, perversely, he contracted spinal malaria after 10 years,

and the doctors, in order to treat that, gave him strychnine, which accidentally cured his blindness. Oh, how very odd. Which surprised and shocked everybody. He called his wife and said, I think I can see. And then saw his wife and his child for the first time, because he'd married her when he was blind. Oh, wow.

It's all very dramatic. Yeah. Anyway, he's remembered for a book about racism called Black Like Me. And that's actually rooted, he said later, during these 10 years of blindness, because he says if you're blind, the absurdity of racism becomes just incredibly clear. Everybody looks the same if you're blind. He wrote in a later book, for the blind man, the whole issue of racism on the basis of inferiority according to color or race is solved axiomatically. He can only see the heart and the intelligence of a man,

and nothing in these things indicates in the slightest whether a man is white or black, but only whether he is wise or foolish. The racists can see, but they have no perception. Is not the gift of sight then being abused, since it leads men to judge an object by the accident of its color rather than by its real substance? So he says racism kind of became a preoccupation for him during these ten blind years, and when he recovered his sight, he considered himself pretty much a specialist in race issues already at that point. specialist in race issues already at that point. He was doing, still writing novels and doing sort of social science, looking into issues of American racism, really. He'd seen a report on the rise in the tendency to suicide among black males in the South. And he was pursuing that sort

of scientifically by mailing out questionnaires to try to understand the issue. But he said that brought answers, but not really truths. He wrote in his diary on October 28th, 1959, if a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control? He said he'd come to believe one of the problems was that the whites and blacks had ceased really to talk to each other at all about these issues because of mutual mistrust. And he thought really the only way to fully understand the issue would be to put yourself entirely in the other person's position. I should say this was in 1959, so this was during the era of Jim Crow, which was especially in the American South.

especially in the American South after the Civil War, there was sort of a legal regime set up where blacks were given, quote-unquote, separate but equal facilities with whites. They were, in fact, very much separate and not at all equal. It was just really difficult to live a life at all in the South during those years up until about 1965. So that's the era he's talking about. So he wrote, finally, the only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro. I decided I would do this. So what he did was he went to a dermatologist in New Orleans who prescribed drugs, skin creams, and sun lamps to darken his skin. This took several weeks.

And he also shaved his head to hide his straight hair. And what the end result of this is that he was able to pass, at least in appearance, as a black man. And he planned to travel through the Jim Crow southern states just to see firsthand what life was like to be living as a black man at that time. The first step for him was actually looking in the mirror. He thought after all this preparation that what he would see was just himself with dark skin, but he found, uh, he wrote, the worst of it was that I could feel no companionship with this new person. I did not like the way he looked.

Uh, Robert Bonazzi, who's a, um, scholar who writes about Griffin says at that moment, Griffin realizes that he's encountered his own unconscious racism. In other words, he's prejudiced against himself. Yeah, even as sympathetic as he was, and he sort of made it a major occupation of his life to look into these issues in order to try to ameliorate them. Even so, he was so conditioned to thinking and perceiving things that way that even in himself, he found there was some traces of racism there. I can't imagine what that's like to look in the mirror and see someone that you don't think of as yourself. Anyway, that was the first thing that really shocked him about this whole experiment. What he planned to do, what he actually did do, was travel for six weeks through four

racially segregated states, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, mostly by Greyhound bus in November and December of 1959. Along the way, he kept a diary that grew to 188 pages, and that became the basis for the book. And he adopted the rule that he wouldn't change or hide his identity. If anyone asked him what he was doing or who he was, he would answer, honestly, I'm John Howard Griffin. I'm doing this project. He didn't invent another identity. He just darkened his skin, and that's it. That's all he was even pretending to have done i guess it would be very hard for most people to imagine a white man trying to pass as a black one like it wouldn't occur to people that anybody would be trying to do that yeah because there wouldn't be any obvious reason for doing it yeah but it's he didn't i i think that's the right choice because

he's that that's the this way there's the only variable that's changed is just literally the color of his skin right and everything else he's keeping the same and it's amazing what a difference that made um ostensibly under jim crow uh that the the rules might have made life a bit more inconvenient for blacks but essentially they had the same privileges as everyone else but he found that is not at all the case he wrote my deepest shock came with the gradual realization that this was not a matter of case. He wrote, He wrote in a later book, Surely one of the strangest experiences a person can have is suddenly to step out into the streets and find that the entire white society is convinced that individual possesses qualities and characteristics which that person knows he does not possess. I'm not speaking here only of myself. This is the mind-twisting experience of every black person I know. He found that life in those states at that time was one of just constant poverty, rejection, degradation, anger, and fear. And he describes the trouble

that people had, he had, meeting even the most basic needs, like finding food and shelter and toilet facilities. Just the basic, just even trying to stay alive day to day. He found that under segregation, he wrote, quote, an important part of my daily life was spent searching for the basic things that all whites take for granted, a place to eat or somewhere to find a drink of water, a restroom, somewhere to wash my hands. When I looked in a mirror and saw a man with black skin, it suddenly occurred to me that it was a stranger wearing my clothes. In New Orleans, as a white man, I had eaten in the best restaurants and stayed in the best hotels. I felt the same and I smelled the same. I sat on the bed and realized I was wearing the same clothes, was the same man, had the same wallet, the same money, but I couldn't buy any of these things. And these

differences were largely invisible to white people. If you were white in the South, you could sort of live your life without ever really encounter these or seeing how much they really were oppressing blacks at that time. There's actually a little remembered precedent for this that it's not clear that Griffin knew about. About 10 years earlier, in May 1948, a journalist named Ray Spragle had taken a 30-day, 4,000-mile trip through the Deep South pretending to be a black man named James Crawford and then wrote a series of newspaper articles under the title, I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days. And Spragle found the same thing 10 years earlier.

He said that becoming a black man in the South, he said it was like being dropped on the moon. He wrote, there are so many things one hadn't thought of. What do you do if your wife needs a cesarean section and no hospital within 80 miles will admit her because she's colored? If you're a Negro parent, at what age do you explain to your wide-eyed children that they must adjust to a life of permanent humiliation? And Griffin found that things hadn't improved at all in the subsequent 10 years. He found it was pretty much exactly the same.

One of the things that shocked him most and most immediately was that whites he hadn't even met seemed to hate him. I mean, people he hadn't even been introduced to, people who knew literally nothing about him except the color of his skin, hated him. Here's one excerpt from Black Like Me, takes place in a bus station in Mississippi. With almost an hour before bus departure, I turned away and looked for a place to sit. The large, handsome room was almost empty. No other Negro was there, and I dared not take a seat unless I saw some other Negro also seated. Once again, a hate stare drew my attention like a magnet. It came from a middle-aged, heavyset, well-dressed white man. He sat a few yards away, fixing his eyes on me. Nothing can describe the withering horror of this.

You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene, the very obscenity of it, rather than its threat, terrifies you. It was so new, I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying, what in God's name are you doing to yourself? So it wasn't even the threat of physical violence, as real as that was. It was just you're seeing what people are capable of. An aspect of humanity that you'd really rather not think about.

And it's so wildly irrational because this man, for example, in the bus station knew nothing whatsoever about him. Right. But was capable of such apparently virulent hatred. Here's one other excerpt from that book. As he went through the South on these six weeks, he would try to do things that if he'd really been black, he'd have to do. One of these was try to find a job. He just to see what that was like. This excerpt takes place in Alabama.

The foreman of one plant in Mobile, a large brute, asked me to tell him what I could do. Allowed me to tell him what I could do. Then he looked me in the face and spoke to me in these words. No, you couldn't get anything like that here. His voice was not unkind. It was the dead voice one often hears. Determined to see if I could break in somehow, I said, but if I could do you a better job and you paid me less than a white man, I'll tell you we don't want you people. Don't you understand that?

I know, I said with real sadness. You can't blame a man for trying, at least. No use trying down here, he said. We're gradually getting you people weeded out from the better jobs at this plant. We're taking it slow, but we're doing it. Pretty soon we'll have it so the only jobs you can get here are the ones no white man would have. How can we live, I asked hopelessly, careful not to give the impression I was arguing. That's the whole point, he said, looking me square in the eyes but with some faint sympathy, as though he regretted the need to say what followed.

We're going to do our damnedest to drive every one of you out of the state. Despite his frankness and the harshness of intentions, I nevertheless had the impression he was telling me, I'm sorry, I've got nothing against you personally, but you're colored, and with all this noise about equality, we just don't want you people around. The only way we can keep you out of our schools and cafes is to make life so hard for you that you'll get the hell out before equality comes. He actually found in the end the best jobs he could get was a shoeshine boy or a bus station porter. And in keeping with this policy of telling the truth about himself, he actually said, look, I have a degree from a French university, which was true, and they would just ignore that. Usually he was told the job he was applying for had already been filled. So anyway, after six weeks of this, he got as far as Georgia and then turned around

and went back home, which was Mansfield, Texas. His mother asked him, was it as horrible as I think it was? And he said, worse than you can possibly imagine. He had written this partly under a deal with Sepia magazine, which published some of his experiences and the rest he wrote up in a book. In the preface of the book, he wrote, this may not be all of it. It may not cover all the questions, but it is what it's like to be a Negro in a land where we keep the Negro down. The Negro, the South, these are details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men and in the process destroy themselves for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared, and the detested.

I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any inferior quote-unquote group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same. He published all of this in a book in 1961 called Black Like Me that became a bestseller, and he became a celebrity as a result at the time. And that wasn't the end of it. He was living in Texas at the time, where he was burned in effigy for this, and his parents and his family were the victims of threatening anonymous telephone calls.

Why were people upset with him? Well, he said, the quote is, They didn't question my proof of these things, they just didn't like the findings and branded me an integrationist. They're just white racists who were apparently offended or upset that he was bringing these issues to light. Even if they were true. Wow. And even if they acknowledged that they were true, they just didn't want them being discussed, apparently. It got so bad that he had to move his family briefly to Mexico to escape these, you know, phone calls and implicit threats. Griffin traveled for the next 12 years talking

about this. About once a month, he'd go out and talk somewhere about what he'd gone through and about the book. He said, I do not represent myself as a spokesman for black people or anyone else. He said, interestingly, these talks, always he was asked why he had changed his skin color, and he said he considered that the most irrelevant question and one that black people never asked. He grew, it seems to me, reading between the lines, gradually, I don't know what the word is, more bitter or discouraged about all this.

After a dozen years of traveling and lecturing, he said, I have had a life that I loathe these past years, but I have had to go in conscience, and also because I I'm under spiritual direction because he was a convert to Catholicism. In other words, this was after even 20 years afterward in 1977, he said he didn't see a true bettering of relations, but rather what he called the illusion of a lot more progress. And this was after the civil rights victories of the 1960s that he lived through. So ostensibly things were better, but he didn't see any real progress. And I think gradually got more and more discouraged. He said he always thought of himself as a novelist. He didn't think of himself as an activist or someone who was making it the goal of his life's work to try to improve race relations in America. But

that's mostly what he's remembered for now. He died finally in Fort Worth in 1980 at age 60, and by 2010, the book had sold more than 12 million copies in 16 languages, which is a huge number of sales. So it looks, unfortunately, like he was really onto something that his original conviction in 1959, that it's going to take more than talk, was correct, that it really, it's quite another, it's one thing to talk about these issues,

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Harry's will give you $5 off your first order with the code CLOSET. That's H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com and enter coupon code CLOSET. This is just a little group of research questions that have piled up that I haven't been able to get answers to. So as I do, I guess from time to time, I'm just throwing them out there to see if anyone among the listeners might be able to shed any light on them. There's three of them and they're not related. The first one concerns the star and crescent, which I think is most familiar to people now as a symbol of Islam in Islamic countries, mostly in the Mideast and in North Africa today. But that symbol apparently goes way back into the ancient Near East. I'm not sure anyone knows quite exactly when it even appeared first. A reader named Carlos Vega wrote in concerning the crescent symbol,

which I'll put a picture of this in the show notes. It's basically a crescent moon standing up on one end. And his question concerned the orientation of the moon. Basically, the phase of the moon is determined by the relative positions of the sun, the earth, and the moon. And everyone on earth sees the same phase of the moon, but it takes different orientations based on where you are standing, because we're standing on a spherical planet. So if there's, say, a waning crescent moon, you and I are in North America in the Northern Hemisphere, so when we look at a waning crescent moon,

it looks to us as though the left side of the moon is what's illuminated. Okay. But if you go to the Southern Hemisphere, say you're in South America or Australia, to them it looks like the right side of the moon is illuminated. We're looking at the same object, but their heads are turned in a different direction, if you see what I mean. If you're standing on the equator, the waning crescent moon actually looks like a boat or a smile or a lemon peel.

It's sort of lying down on its back. Oh, interesting. And Carlos's question was, given that we think that the star and crescent symbol was created by people who were living at relatively low latitudes, in other words, relatively close to the equator. When these people looked at the moon in the sky, what they saw was it mostly lying down like that. So this question is, why then did they represent it on the flag as standing up on one end? He wrote to me asking that question. I said, I don't know. So I'm throwing it out there to anyone who may know more about that. I'm not suggesting necessarily that the flag was created at a higher latitude or that there's necessarily anything

profound about why this decision was made. It just struck me as an interesting question. If you asked me to design a flag with a crescent moon on it, I think I would just draw the moon as I saw it in my sky. It wouldn't occur to me to put it into an orientation that I had never seen it take. Yeah. As I say, this symbol today shows up on a lot of flags in the Middle East and North Africa. And in most of them, it seems to be standing up. But some of them, like Mauritania in North Africa, there's a crescent moon on their flag, but it's lying down, which is the way they'd mostly see it in that region, which just to me seems more natural.

Anyway, see what people think about that. That's one question. The second one concerns German submarines in World War II. In 1959, Jacques Cousteau published a treasury of writings about the sea, and one story in there that caught my eye concerns two men aboard a submarine, a German submarine that was attacking an Allied fleet in fog somewhere off the Azores. I don't know when. It was just sometime during World War II. And what happened was an Allied destroyer came heaving out of the fog quite unexpectedly

while the submarine was on the surface, and these two men were taken so by surprise, a petty officer and a seaman, that they just jumped off the submarine into the sea and were just treading water there in the Atlantic, watching what transpired, and saw that even though their sub had been rammed, apparently it appeared to be seaworthy because it eventually just submerged and went underwater, which just left them treading water there, which they did for some time. And then out of nowhere came a raft, which apparently had been just left over from some ship that had been sunk somewhere.

It was mostly submerged and it was covered with barnacles, but they managed to climb aboard it. Unfortunately, the seas were heavy and kept sweeping them back off again. The stronger of the two men kept pulling his companion back aboard the raft, but eventually he lost his strength. The raft kept turning over, and finally he just had to let him go, and then he was alone. He passed the whole night that way aboard this barnacle-covered raft, but the sea kept pushing him off, and finally in the morning he just couldn't do it anymore and was just resigning himself to drowning when, according to this account, I'm just reading this now, but what in heaven's name was this?

Barely a stone's throw away, the seas parted, and a U-boat came to the surface. The unique, the utterly improbable thing had happened. In all the vast spaces of the Atlantic, a U-boat had chosen to surface precisely The unique, the utterly improbable thing had happened. In all the vast spaces of the Atlantic, a U-boat had chosen to surface precisely where one man was about to drown. Which makes a great story. The problem is, in this account, there aren't enough specifics to check any of this.

We know there was somewhere near the Azores, according to this, but we don't know precisely when it happened and they don't give the names of any of the ships or the men involved. So there's just nothing to get your hands on to try to confirm it, which is what I wanted to do. So you can't verify it, yeah. So I'll tell you the farthest I've gotten. I found this first, and I'll give all these references in the show notes. I found it first in Cousteau's book.

He got it apparently from a German writer named Wolfgang Frank, who published a book called The Sea Wolves in 1955, which is basically about the exploits of the German sub-fleet in the war. So I tracked that down, and that is basically the same account, with no more particulars, unfortunately. But from what I understand, Franck and his book are well regarded. The only other source I found that mentions this is a book by Arch Whitehouse called Subs and Submariners

that he published in 1961, which gives the same tale, but again doesn't give any specifics. And he introduces it by saying, he calls it another U-boat incident that is still related when old German submariners meet, which is an interestingly neutral introduction. He's not vouching for the truth of it. He's just saying this is a story that people tell. So for all I know, the whole thing is just a tale. But I just wonder if anyone out there knows any more than I do about this.

than I do about this. If it's true, it's a nice story because according to Frank's account, not only was this man picked up, but they actually managed to put him back aboard his own sub. So he went from resigning to drown in the Atlantic to actually being among his friends on his own boat going back home. So if it's true, it'd be a great story.

That's the second question I had. And then the third, it concerns a word. If you read the Futility Closet website, you know occasionally I'll just post odd and obscure words. And one of them that's been in my notes forever is griffinage. G-R-I-F-F-I-N-A-G-E, which is defined as one's first year in India, which struck me as a curious definition. I looked this up, and it appears to be a genuine word. It's listed in the Oxford English Dictionary with that definition,

and they give usage examples going back to 1829. So I sort of surmise that this was used in the British colonial days. If you went to India on your first year there, you were a griffin. You were a griffin. And that period was your griffinage. Okay. But it just seems like there's got to be some story behind life. Like, why do they need...

Why is it a griffin? Yeah. Yeah. Why do they need a word for that need... Why is it a griffin? Yeah. Yeah. Why do they need a word for that at all? And why choose griffin? There's a mythological creature called a griffin, but it doesn't have any connection to India that I've been able to learn or any characteristics that are related to the traits or experiences you might have on your first year in India. I thought maybe there was a person named Griffin who had some really noteworthy experience

on his first year there. It just seems like there's got to be a story or an anecdote or something behind that, but I haven't been able to learn what it is. So if you can shed any light on that or on submarines or on crescent moons, please write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Greg's going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg's going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to present him an odd-sounding situation, and he has to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. Okay, we always feel like we're taking an oral exam here.

A fun one, though. Hopefully. This week's puzzle was sent in by Lawrence Miller. Okay. And here's the whole puzzle. A man wins a prize at the county fair. The next day, he is arrested. What happened? Oh, wait.

Nobody dies. Good. Nobody died. I thought you were going to say... Okay. Well, actually, I won't say. Maybe he's arrested because somebody died. A man wins a prize at the county fair the next day he is arrested.

Yes. Why? That's the whole puzzle. That's the whole puzzle. Okay. Did this really happen? Lawrence isn't sure. Oh, really?

This might have happened. This might have happened. Is the time period important? Yes. Oh. Is it in the present day? No. No.

Is it in the 20th century? Yes. In the first half of the 20th century? Yes. Man wins a prize at the county fair in the first half of the 20th century? Yes. Man wins a prize at the county fair in the first half of the 20th century. Was this during some geopolitical event like a war? Yes.

I'll say yes. Is the location important? That'll help. Yes. Do you know the country this happened in? Yes. Is it the United States? Yes.

Okay. It happened in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Yes. In like the Depression? Do you what what decade it occurred in uh roughly the was it earlier than the 30s yes 1930 probably um earlier than 20s no so in the 1920s in the united states a man went to a state fair and won a prize yes and it was arrested the next day. Yes.

Oh, is this connected to Prohibition? Yes. Very good. Okay. Okay. Is the location beyond the fact that it's the United States? That's not important. Yeah.

It just had to be the United States because we had Prohibition. Is the man's occupation important? It's relevant, but it's not wildly important. I mean... Was the nature of the prize he won important? Do I need to work out exactly what that was? Obviously. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do I need to know how he won the prize? How he won the prize? Well, like, was it in some carnival game or something, I guess? Oh, no, no, no. No, county fair. Prizes at a county fair. Not like a carnival game or something, I guess? Oh, no, no, no, no. County fair, prizes at a county fair. Not like a carnival game.

Okay. Unless you win prizes for. For some contest? Yeah. Like livestock judging, something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that what this was? Yes.

That type of thing. So he won a prize, was it specifically livestock judging? I mean, like he brought some livestock to the fair. Yes, yes. And one of livestock to the fair. Yes. And one of them won some prize. Yes. Do I need to know more than that? Do I need to know what kind of livestock it was?

Well, Lauren specifies, but I don't know if it would help you or not to know. All right. But I can solve it without that. Sure. All right. So. As long as you understand that he brought some livestock to the fair and won a prize for it. Okay.

It's got something to do with prohibition. All right. Okay. So he was, was he arrested on some charges having to do with alcohol? Yes. That violated prohibition. Yes. That's what the charge was.

Yes. So presumably then the prize he won somehow betrayed the fact that he was doing that, whatever it was. Yes. Yes. And he wouldn't otherwise have been found out. Right. All right.

So I've got this set up. You're doing great. So the prize was for an animal. Mm-hmm. You kind of hit a brick wall. Well, what do you win prizes for about animals in the county fair? Largest. Yes.

Yes, that's right. I still don't see it. I don't see the end of the tunnel. I'm making good headway through the tunnel. You're doing terrific. Well, it's right. I still don't see it. I don't see the end of the tunnel. I'm making good headway through the tunnel. You're doing terrific. Well, it's kind of an odd little fact that you might have to try to work out. But you're doing great. You've got the whole context.

Had the animal been consuming alcohol in some way? No. No. Had, okay, let me ask explicitly. Was the animal size some indicator that this man was involved in the illegal use of alcohol? Yes. Yes. But it's not the animal itself was consuming alcohol.

The animal was not consuming alcohol. Or providing alcohol. No. Or concealing alcohol in some way. It's just an animal. It's just a pig or something. Yes. Yes, and actually it is pig. Right. It's just an animal. It's just a pig or something. Yes. Yes, and actually it is pig.

All right. It's a big pig. And the next day the man gets arrested for possessing alcohol? No. Consuming alcohol? No. Smuggling alcohol? No.

Making alcohol? Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. So the fact of the pig's size indicated that the man owned some necessary ingredients for making alcohol? Is that close? Yes.

Yes. That's on the right track. Yes. Do you need to know specifically what the ingredients were? Not necessarily. And at some point I might just give this to you because it's kind of, might be hard to work out. Okay. So let me just put this together. Sure.

A man, he's a farmer let's say sure yes brings a big pig to a state fair yep in the united states somewhere in the 1920s during prohibition yep and the pig wins a prize yes which attracts attention right and something else happens or there's some more information and the prohibition authorities come to the next day and say we now have reason to believe because your pig won a prize. Because your pig was so big. That you are breaking the rules about prohibition. Yeah. But it's not because he's consuming, smuggling.

What you said is because the farmer is making alcohol. Making alcohol. All right. I can't get quite past that. Can you think of any way that that would involve getting big pigs? All right, I can't get quite past that. Can you think of any way that that would involve getting big pigs? Well, what I'm stuck on is it sounds like he had... Do I need to know what he was feeding the pig?

That's it, yes. Well, it seems like that's it, unless I guess specifically what the ingredient is. The fact that he had a giant pig means that he had unusual quantities of whatever this was, and that made the authorities think, well, then it's very possible that he was using this big quantity to make alcohol. Right. Is there more to it than that? Yeah, I mean, that's close enough. Apparently, the farmer had been feeding his pig with spent grains, which is a byproduct from brewing that is a highly effective animal feed.

Oh, I see. Okay, I was going the other direction. Yeah, I didn't think you were going to kind of make that one little last, you got all the rest of it. So Lauren says, I don't know whether or not this is true. I first learned about spent grain as an animal feed in an environmental context. Someone was claiming that ethanol would drive food costs up because the corn that would otherwise go to feeding animals would have to go to producing ethanol instead. But that was countered that making ethanol from corn doesn't destroy the corn and the byproduct is actually an effective animal feed. In fact, the argument went during prohibition, federal agents

would go to county fairs and look for the fattest pigs. In the era before antibiotics and lysine, spent grains were the most potent animal feed available. Unfortunately, I can't find any evidence one way or another if law enforcement ever actually did this. That's a good story, though. He actually says he spent some time trying to discover if this was really true or not. But I mean, so theoretically, it could be true, but we don't know if it ever actually did happen. That's how it works.

That actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, that's kind of smarter than prohibition authorities to think of going that way. Yeah. So anyway, thank you so much, Lawrence, for sending in your puzzle. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. Remember that our next episode will be out in two weeks on November 16th. And in the meantime, if you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com

where you can sample more than 8,000 Selkuth ephemera. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar. If you'd like to support Futility Closet, please consider becoming a patron to help keep us going. You can find more information at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by clicking on the donate button on the sidebar of the website. If you have any questions or

comments about the show, please reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening. comments about the show, please reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening.