Oh What A Time... - #127 Revolting Peasants (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re discussing some of history’s most revolting peasants! Now no episode like this would be complete without rumoured West Ham fan Wat Tyler, plus we’ll have the New York story of Dr Smith Azer Broughton, and we’ll hear from the Kulaks that riled against Stalin’s rule in the 20th century.And this week we’re talking about historical marketing offers that went wrong. Sunny Delight turning you orange! McDonalds and the olympics in the 80s! What else have we missed? [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Okay, we mentioned him at the start of the show. He's coming up again, a name you definitely wouldn't have heard of if you're Tom Crane. It's Dr Smith Asa Broughton, born in 1810 in Steven Town, New York. Broughton trained as a doctor in Vermont and set up a practice back home, but he wasn't the type to just sit quietly treating a few coughs and a few fevers. He had a taste for trouble. Fast forward to the mid-1830s he's crossed into Canada. Anything from history that is even slightly like the Revenant makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My one-day time machine would never be used to travel to North America before, say, 1900. Especially not the northern outposts that are frozen. I do not fancy sleeping inside a dead horse.

It feels a bit on top, doesn't it? It feels heavy, America before about 1900. In fact, I would say America after 1940, or certainly after 1950, sounds absolutely brilliant. Yeah, fine. But, yeah, they needed to sort it out first, and then I was happy to go. Let's be honest, Chris, you're taking your one day time machine to Ibiza to the year just before you had kids. That's what you're doing. Hell, I'm not.

I'm taking it back to June 2023 for the UEFA Conference League final, West Ham vs. Fiorentina. What about West Ham winning, was it the 1965 Cup winners' cup? Wembley, that is. Yeah, could be good. Do you know what I'd do? Can I go to multiple places with my 24 hours in the one day time?

Oh yeah, go on. I'm going back to 1381. I'm scooping up Watt Tyler before he flogs all over the king and I'm taking him to Prague in 2023. Woof, woof. What if we'll get on? Anyway, in the mid 1830s, back to Dr. Smith, Alzeur Broughton.

He's crossed into Canada now and he's found himself swept up in the rebellions that broke out in Upper and Lower Canada, places we now call Ontario and Quebec. These uprisings were against the British colonial government and they were pushing for democratic reforms. For Broughton, it was his first taste of political revolt and he absolutely loved it. If I do find myself in the mid-1830s in Canada, I'm not causing any trouble. At all. I'm being the greatest peasant in the history of Canada. Yeah, yeah.

Head down, get on with it. That's what I'd be doing. Fair play to Dr Braun. The Canadian rebellion failed. He came back to New York State in 1838. He got married and settled in a little farming community called Alps in Rensselaer County, just east of Albany. He split his time between medicine and farming, but a quiet life wasn't on the cards for him. But by the way, I'll say again, for me, very quiet life. Little farming community sounds lovely.

No trouble for me. Not so for Dr. Broughton. Few hours tending your carrots, feeding the rabbits. Quite nice, isn't it? Lovely. Keep your head down. Watch the sunset, back to bed. Wake up in the morning, repeat. I asked my dad once if he'd ever gone into any scrubs in town. Because when I started going out drinking when I was a teenager,

there was a lot of fighting in pubs. And he said, no. I just went out, had a drink, and for God's sake kept my head down. I must have been a really strange and being. Like a piece of advice, just keep your head down, have a couple of pints and come home. For God's sake.

Avoid eye contact. Do not go messing about. That's a great, you know what? I don't think I've ever asked my dad if he got in fights in pubs back in the day. I know his brother did. Well, it's like, it was the first thing I noticed, because when I started going out, obviously you'd get the odd scuffle at school.

This was like hardcore fighting in the streets. And I just thought, is this what it's always been like? The first time I ever went out in Romford, in Essex, the first time I went there, I walked onto the high street and the Wetherspoons had saloon bar doors on the corner of the pub in Romford. And as I walked onto the high street, me and my friends looked up and saw someone get thrown through the saloon bar doors onto the street. Like in a Westman!

And the guy, we couldn't see who threw him out. The guy got up, dusted himself down and went back in. Oh yeah. What's happened there? What's mad though is that I was very tolerant to that stuff when I was like 20. Whereas now if I walked past a pub and I saw that I'd be like, well, we're definitely not going in there. But we've got a dinner reservation. We're never going to get another one now. But it is the best sushi restaurant in town. Anyway let's go back to the 1830s in New York State.

So Dr. Braulton has settled down. Nice little bit of land, right? But his land is owned by one of the biggest landlords in New York, the Van Rasselaar family. This takes us back to something called the Patroon system, which is important to understand. Back in the 1600s when New York was still the Dutch colony of New Netherland, the Dutch West India Company gave huge tracts of land to wealthy Dutch families and these landlords were called Patroons and under this system tenant farmers worked the land and paid rent in crops, livestock or cash but

they didn't own a single acre themselves generation after generation. That's funny, we're kind of looping back to something we said at the start about maybe working for M&S getting paid in ginger shots. That's how it would have worked under the Patroon system. When the British took over New Netherland in 1964 and renamed it New York, the Patroon estate stuck around. So by Broughton's time in the 1800s, most of America had moved on from this old semi-feudal arrangement. But in parts of upstate New York, thousands of tenant farmers were still bound by this colonial leftover.

The biggest Patroon was Stephen Van Rasseler III, and he was, as many describe, quite a nice guy, a benevolent landlord. He'd served in Congress, he'd been Lieutenant Governor of New York, he funded Albany's Public Library, founded its Historical Institute, and in 1824 helped start the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, still the oldest polytechnic university in the English-speaking world. But he dies in 1839 and when he dies he leaves behind massive debts, thanks in part to an economic downturn, but in his will he told his heirs to make good on the debts by collecting unpaid rent from his thousands of tenants, many of whom he hadn't charged rent to in years under the old man's generous watch.

Oh wow. So the original Stephen Van Rensselaar III never really charged these tenants, but built up debts. And when he dies, his son, Stephen Van Ransselaer, the fourth, comes in, takes that order to reclaim the debt very seriously, possibly too seriously. And he starts demanding full back payments and he wouldn't budge, even though the farmers were struggling. Wow.

Guess what? The tenants say, no, your father didn't make us pay. We're not paying you. And neither side would give way. Things come to a head on the 4th of July, 1839, Independence Day, when tenant farmers gathered in the Hildebergh mountains near Albany, they draft their own declaration of independence and it says, we will take up the ball of the revolution where our father stopped it and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence of the masses.

So the farmers launch a rent strike and they say if it comes to it we're prepared to fight and this standoff quickly became known as the anti-rent war. Broughton, back to our man Dr. Braw, and he jumps right in, he becomes one of the rebellion's main leaders. Earning the nickname, what about this, possibly the best nickname in history we've come across thus far, Big Thunder. Oh yeah, sounds like a wrestler. It really does, doesn't it? Like a British wrestler from the 80s as well, yeah. Yeah. Wait a minute, that's Big Thunder's music! Here he comes!

Love that. So he teams up with a guy called Thomas Dever, who's an Irish-born chartist who'd edited The Free Holder, the rebels' newspaper in Albany. The authorities weren't about to let the rebellion spread so by 1839, December of 1839, they sent a 500-man posse. You don't really get posses anymore do you? No you don't, that's a very good point. The posse's died out apart from one sort of breakfast radio. There was a good 300 years where there was no posses until Steve Wright turned up. 500-man posse led by Albany's sheriff Michael Atcher and including John Van Buren, the son

of the soon-to-be US president Martin Van Buren, and they entered rebel territory, but there they were driven back. The governor threatened to send in an even bigger force and the rebels officially surrendered but they didn't give up. This is genius. They switched tactics. They were inspired by movements like the Chartists in Britain, the Luddites in Northern England and the Rebecca rioters in Wales. What did they do boys? What did they do? Have a guess. So they've changed tactics. They've changed tactics. They've basically gone to war a bit and

they've gone, you know what, we're officially surrender, but they've actually got a plan. Well, if it's the Rebecca rioters, do they wear a disguise? Ten history points to Ellis. They disguise themselves. This is incredible. They called themselves the Calico Indians. Anti-rent rebels would put on homemade Native American costumes, Calico gowns, face paint, masks to hide their identities and terrify rent collectors. In one incident a landlord's wife was stopped in her carriage by Indians who unharnessed the horses and debated taking her away. They let her go, but they had made their point. At another property sale, 63 armed Indians turned up in full disguise and blocked the proceedings.

By 1844, these groups were formally organised with written constitutions and oaths, pledging loyalty to the anti-rent cause and to protect each other as long as life lasts. Well, usually people on the left are very, very hot and energized by identity politics. Cultural appropriation, yeah. Did they discuss cultural appropriation at any point? Because nowadays they would discuss that for days before working out which disguise they were going to. I can only imagine it was extremely politically incorrect, this disguise. Yeah, but it is 1840, so I don't think identity politics is some way off. As far off as Steve Wright's Breakfast Show. I'm Saruti, one of the hosts of Red Handed, a multi-award winning weekly

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all the lies. Only on Red Handed. Listen to Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts or listen early and ad free on Amazon Music or Wondry Plus. Resistance took many forms, secret meetings, open rallies, sabotage, more direct acts like tarring and feathering. Some even travelled to New York City to buy guns and supplies for the fight. At its peak, the anti-rent war drew in around 60,000 people.

An enormous number considering about 300,000 people were stuck in the old Patroon system at the time. Eventually the authorities cracked down. In 1845, Roughton was found guilty of robbery and other charges and sentenced to life imprisonment at Sing Sing Prison. Just like Chartist leaders in Britain, he was made an example of. But the rebellion didn't fade away. In 1846, New York elected a new governor, John Young, who opposed the landlord's power. He commuted Broughton's sentence. And after two years behind bars, Broughton returned home to Alps, where he lived out the rest of his life, always pushing for reform, including the abolition of slavery until his death in 1888. I mean, to be fair, he is pushing for it,

but it does sound like largely he kept his head down high. Do all that proves to me as well, if your dad was a benevolent landlord, you really have got to be a benevolent landlord as well. You've got to keep that going. And also, where has that spirit come from? If you've been brought up by parents who are fueled by benevolence and kindness?

Why are you suddenly coming in and going, no, I want all the money now? It's not a nice thought, is it? You watch your dad paying for local libraries and techniques and things, and then you think to yourself, yeah, but if he charged us market rates of rent, I mean we'd be absolutely rolling in it. I actually think Dad's a bit of a dick actually, I think he's a bit, he's horribly naive. Crucially his mum was a hedge fund manager with a ruthless appetite for cash. So Dr. Broughton dies in 1888. The anti-rent cause doesn't die with him, it evolved into

the Anti-Rent Party with local branches all over the state, like the Anti-Rent Mutual Protection Association in Grafton and the Equal Rights Anti-Rent Association in Delaware County. They even had more newspapers like the Delhi Freeman Advocate. Meanwhile, the landlords had their defenders too, most famously the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans. Toward the end of his life, Cooper wrote novels defending landlords' property rights. I mean, that's not the sexiest subject to write about, is it? It's definitely not. I'm not going to watch Daniel Day Lewis in that one on the big screen. And he was arguing that the constitution protected them, the rights, their property rights, that is. His books didn't exactly change hearts and minds though. protected them, the rights, their property rights, that is.

His books didn't exactly change hearts and minds though. By then, the rebels had already shown what ordinary tenants could do when they decided enough was enough. There you go. That's the story of Dr. Broughton. I've never heard of that. I'm imagining that being your landlord. I'm talking about the father.

The first day you move in, you go to pay the rent. He goes, no, there's no rent. It's fine. What that must feel like. You would have to pay the rent. He goes, no, there's no rent. It's fine. What that must feel like. You would think to yourself, there has to be a horrible catch somewhere. What does this guy want out of me? So, to finish today's show on revolting peasants, I'm going to be talking to you about a brave group, a great portion of society that stood up against Joseph Stalin. So, in 1928, Stalin

begins the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, the sort of fun stuff that he was involved in, which included the collectivisation of agriculture. Now I don't know if you know about this, are you aware of this process that happened under Stalin? Yeah, yeah I do know a bit. I've read a Stalin biography which we should cover in a monthly bonus episode for our subscribers. I do know a Stalin biography which we should cover in a monthly bonus episode for our subscribers. Yeah, do know a little bit about this. Well, for those who do not, basically what it was, it meant getting rid of small individually owned farms and instead forming large collective farms,

the kolkhoz or state farms, the sovkhoz, which was in essence destroying a peasant way of life that had been a staple for Russian and Ukrainian society for centuries. I find that remarkable, the idea of living in a time where the state just takes what you own from you and goes, no, that's ours now. It's just crazy, isn't it? How disempowering that must be. How frightening. I studied Stalin at university. I remember reading about this. But this this stuff to be said about I do it with podcasts, just state collectivized podcasts where we're all podcasting for the for the good of the country actually. Yeah. So would you want

what you're doing? Would be would we have like 200 podcasters doing one podcast together? One long, yeah, yeah, mega pod. Consolidate all these thousands of podcasts down into maybe four national podcasts around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sport, podcast, parenting, history and music and they're all connected together. And everyone has to listen. Yeah. Hundreds of podcasters ploughing the podcasting fields together arm in arm.

Well if you were to do that, El, you shouldn't make the mistake that Stalin did, which is to give the podcasters a choice whether they want to join these podcasts or not. Because initially that is what Stalin did. To begin with, peasants were given the choice as to whether their farms became part of this collective effort and unsurprisingly, they weren't that keen. Yeah that's what Chris and Rosie Rumsey said when I asked to take over Shag's Married Annoied for the good of the state. They said no, they said no.

I said come on. I really need this guys, for the good of the state. Only 7.5% by the end of the first year had joined this collective farm. So it was a disaster to begin with. Do you want to guess whether Stalin was really chilled about this disaster, whether he just let the whole idea go? Was he like, yeah, that's fine, let's just let it go. I don't think he was delighted by it.

He was not delighted. He unfortunately reacted in the way that you'd assume Stalin would, and started to implement incredibly repressive methods to drive up the percentage. So first, there was the denunciation of farm owners who refused as a kulak, that's what he called them, which would lead to or could lead to imprisonment, exile to Siberia, or more simply just death at the hands of the anti-kulak brigades or the secret police who are known as the NKVD. So that was option one?

Yeah, and that's what Marina and Richard have been told on the rest is entertainment. It's this... We're coming for you. Is this all Siberia? Okay. The secret podcast police? At least here you get to podcast from your comfortable warm houses. If you refuse to join the movement, you will be podcasting from Siberia.

One of the things that the secret podcasting police are going to have to do is podcasters who have very little banter left, who really need the last little bit of banter, the secret podcasting police are going to come in and steal all the banter from them, leaving them off with very little banter at all behind. Little banter for their families. Is that a risk worth taking? The next option was neighbours and family members, this is classic Stalinist approach, were encouraged to snitch on those who were not backing the cause

in an attempt to preserve the integrity of the system, so people were encouraged to dob on those around them that they felt weren't backing Stalin's idea. And then finally, he introduced a system of quotas with impossible to meet targets. So as petants starved, they tried desperately to hold on to what flower root vegetables they might have, even going as far to hide it in baby's cribs

or in prams or under their beds, all this sort of stuff. And in response to this, and this is just like sums up the society, that these farms were then ransacked by government agents who were sent from Moscow to try and find anything that might have been stashed away, anything that people were keeping to try and keep themselves alive. Government officials would turn up and uproot everything, flip your tables over and see if you were hiding flour somewhere. It's just a crazy time to be alive. Your mind boggles at the fear of living in that society.

Now, unsurprisingly, that tactic was more successful. So within a year, and by the early months of around 1930, almost 60% have now joined the corps. So we've jumped from, I think, it was six and a half percent up to 60% within a year, the equivalent to 11 million households. The society of Russia is just crazy, isn't it? 11 million households have now joined this cause that have thrown their farms into the lot. However, in the face of this horrific repression, there was still resistance. Do you want to guess where that resistance came from? The countryside. No, more specifically, what portion of society

in the countryside did this reaction come from? Rob and Josh from Parenting Hell? Rob and Josh from Parenting Hell, exactly. And when they were exhausted, it was women who were the ones who took up this cause. Now there's a really interesting reason for this. As what Astana's closest associates said in 1930, women in the countryside played the most advanced role in the reaction against the collective farm. The methods of protest were familiar ones. They used to sit in front of carts of grain and flour, they'd lie in front of tractors. Real sort of just-stop-oil vibes, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. It's like lying down. At least now that you get to – I was thinking about this – at least now you get to lie on tarmac, then you would just be lying literally in the mud. Or you get to watch a football match at Goodison Park if you play your cards. Exactly, yeah. Chain yourself to the corner flag, exactly. They also block doorways, they created gossip and rumour, played dumb to questioning or made meetings impossible to conduct. A large part of this, and this is what's so fascinating about this, is it because peasant women were so rarely punished for rebelling and almost never sanctioned under those parts of the criminal code

that related to counter-revolutionary activity, they were able to do it for far less fear of repercussion. As an American journalist noted at the time, men dared not to speak at meetings. If they said anything that organisers didn't like, they abused them, called them cool acts, even threatened to put them in prison. So the men let the women do the talking. If the organiser tried to stop them, they made such a din that you had to call off the meeting. And what's even more interesting is that the authorities had such a sort of scant view on the power of women that they failed to recognise that these actions were even counter-revolutionary. So, for example, when the Soviets tried to introduce day nurseries and creches into rural areas associated with these collective farms,

peasant women refused to allow their children to attend. Stalin and the authorities just thought this was backward, thought they just had no idea that what they were being offered was a good thing when actually it was a choice, a conscious choice to rebel. It was standing apart from the collectivisation of childcare. Instead women were often just regarded by Stalin and his top brass as superstitious or incapable of understanding what was good for them and therefore not charged. So a lot of these reactions were genuine process reactions

but the authorities refused to see them as such because of the sexism of the time because of the fact that women were They would the power they had was not regarded by the authorities. Yeah. Wow It's really really interesting. So peasant men meanwhile were far more likely to be carted off by the secret police, subject to violence, where counter-revolution was the charging court, the prisoner was almost always a man, which meant that the Babba, as they were often known, which is the female protesters, would often start a protest, develop it to the point of an official reaction, and then at the point when violence was threatened, the men could then step in and act as defendants in their honour. And what was interesting is the fact that that defence would then be seen not as rebellious, anti-Stalinist action, but just simply men doing the right thing, you know, protecting. Exactly, that's what it was. So in that case, the men would not be charged as rebellious protesters.

And so it was in the Ukrainian countryside in the 1920s and 1930s that the figure of rebellion was not your standard revolutionary, but often it was... Often old women as well who reserved the right to say no. These incredibly brave people who realised that they could make their voice heard and often saved their partners, their loved ones, their male family members from being tugged away and chucked to Siberia because of the way they were viewed. Fascinating, isn't it really? Yeah, yeah.

Amazing. Yeah, what a time to be alive. I mean, no. Oh, if you are going back there in the one day time machine, you need to set different coordinates because you are absolutely bonkers if you fancy a bit of that. Well that's it for this week. Hope you enjoyed Revolting Peasants. If you want more What Tyler, and why wouldn't you, he's west down through and through, you can go and examine our bonus episodes that we do, two every month, and there is a peasants episode.

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