Oh What A Time... - #174 Mass Observation and how did Ultimate Warrior eat cookies? (Part 2)

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re looking at attempts through history at mass observation; we have Britain in the late 1930s, American culture after the Great Depression and the Soviet diaspora in Europe in the 1950s.Elsewhere, is looking at a picture of a coffee every bit as good as actually drinking one? If you’ve got anything to add on this or anything else please send us an email: [e-mail] from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You 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 x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else, add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh Watertime Group chat. Plus, if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Watertime. Hello, this is part two of mass observation. Let's get into it. So, it's 1935, it's the United States. We are in the depths of the Great Depression, and obviously the US are facing a crisis on multiple fronts.

The economy has collapsed after the Wall Street crash of 1929, which we have covered before, I believe. Millions were unemployed, but at the same time, something we haven't covered, which I think we should, the dust bowl, this devastating environmental design. in America was turning vast areas of farmland into dust and it's against this backdrop that President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched an ambitious program of recovery known as the...

The Dust Bowl sounds like the big championship game, isn't it, in some kind of American sport. Yeah. Yeah, like the Derby, Texas versus Arkansas. Yes, a sport I don't fully understand. Exactly, yeah, but still there's 140,000 people in the stadium watching the Dust Bowl. completely. I wish I was into NFL

because I get offered so much free NFL. People just assume I'm into NFL. I'm always getting offered. Do you want to come and watch the NFL? No, I don't. I do. I love the NFL.

It's so boring. Well, I'll point them in my direction. I love it. I absolutely love it. Send them my way. Yeah. So, the new deal. Now, most of its initiatives

focus on infrastructure, industry, and employment, but one of them took a very different approach. And this was called Federal Project Number 1, or simply Fed 1. It was established under the Works Progress Administration, WPA, and it aimed to do something unusual

to put artists, writers, musicians and performers back to work. So at its peak, Fed One employed around 40,000 people, making it one of the largest public arts programs ever undertaken. So if you were knocking around, Crayan as a writer in 1930s America, you would have been employed by the WPA. That's amazing. It consisted of... of several branches, the federal art project,

a federal theatre project, the federal music project, the federal writers project, the federal's dance project, and the historical record survey. Imagine a federal dance project, like a federal dance department. That's remarkable really, isn't it, at a point of economic turmoil for that to be considered important because often the arts is one of the things that... Oh, that goes first.

Exactly. It suffers badly. in those situations. It's pretty remarkable just off the Wall Street crash that they're going, we need more artists. What about the writers? So on the surface, this looked like cultural patronage, a government subsidy for the arts. But actually, it's something deeper.

It is a nation studying itself. Certain branches of Fed 1, particularly the Federal Writers Project and the Federal Music Project and the Historical Record Survey became vast exercises in documents. American life. This wasn't just about producing art. It was about capturing, auditing, noting down a nation's memory. What a good, this is incredible, right? So researchers

travelled across the country collecting oral histories, folk songs, regional traditions, local archives, personal testimonies, and the result was something close to a national self-portrait, America studying itself in real time. Have you read any of the Studs Terkel books? No, what are they? He would interview people, so he wrote one about war. Right. And where he was interviewing soldiers in World War II and Vietnam, I think,

and he did one about working life. Okay. Where he just interviews people about their experiences of work and how much they were being paid and what their conditions were like. And it's a similar sort of thing. They're quite famous books, actually. They're really, really interesting. Okay.

I should do one of those for a Patreon. So one of the most powerful outcomes of this work was the slave narrative project. This is incredible. Interviewers sought out formerly enslaved people, many who are now elderly, and recorded their memories of life before and after emancipation.

These were voices that had rarely, if ever, been preserved in written form. One such interviews with Cindy Anderson. She's an elderly woman in Mississippi and an ancestor of the actor, Morgan Freeman. She was then asked about the Civil War and recalled, I can't remember nothing about the war.

We had a mighty bad time. I never thought I'd be asked. And the phrasing captured through dialect, carry something striking. Not just memory, but hesitation. And maybe a sense that these experiences had never been considered worth recording before. That, in many ways, was the point of the project

to preserve the voices of those who had been overlooked by history. It's actually an amazing clip. We may have talked about this before. There's an amazing clip on US television of a man who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who was in Ford Theatre, who lived long enough to be recorded on TV, talking about his experience. And there is, I'm pretty sure, well, there would be survivors of the Civil War soldiers being recorded talking about their experiences.

Yeah, I've seen videos of that. Again, it's really powerful stuff. So jarring, isn't it? It's so jarring. You feel like that is such deep history, yet their lives overlap with technological innovation that you just wouldn't think. So the guy you saw the Lincoln thing, was he saying,

it was quite annoying, it ruined the show. I'd spent 40 quid on tickets. It was supposed to be a nice night for my wife and I, and they just did they think. Yeah, we've got a babysit. Exactly. I actually wanted to see how the play ended. Yeah.

Did John Wilkes Booth know I booked a babysitter? Yeah, exactly. Why didn't he do it at a curtain call? It's just selfish. It's selfish. Classic booth. I'd love to, we need to do an episode on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln because I find John Wilkes Booth as a character.

I don't know anything about him. But I gladly find out that's a good idea. Maybe we'll do this as a patron special. One of my favorite things about it is, you know, he shoots Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head and then leaps from the presidential booth, the Royal Box onto the stage. And he breaks his leg as he does it.

Yeah. and I think there's all the different accounts where some people say he like yelped and other people say he was really brave but I find that felt like he leapt and this is one thing he was I read the book about this one of the things he was really famous for us

an actor was an actor I know he was so little about him he was an actor he was quite big he was a big actor really big yeah maybe like Barry from EastEnders I didn't know that no he was he was big

he was a movie star of the day And he was known for his leaping. Remarkable. When women were watch him leaping, they would like gasp because he was like, that was his special trip. Was that sexy back then? I don't think he was leaping one of the things that got you noticed. I can jump. Yeah, absolutely.

And they're actors, no, I suppose Owen Wilson's known for, what's he, he does that thing. He gets to go, ooh, or something like that. But John Wilkes Booth was known for his leaping. There you go. There you go. John Wilkes Booth ruined many a good night at the theatre. Where were we? Yes, back to Fed 1.

So around the same time that this was being undertaken, the Federal Music Project was uncovering something else. The Sound of America, collectors like John Lomax traveled across the country recording music that had only previously existed within local communities. It seems like a fantastic job, by the way. What a great way to spend your time. Such a good idea. Such a good idea.

My job is to go around America recording the sound. Oh, that would be just brilliant. What a joy, that would be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Appalachian folk songs were being recorded, cowboy ballads, African-American blues, Native American musical traditions. For the first time, this material was recorded using modern equipment and archived, often through the Library of Congress. And one of the musicians that Lomax recorded was Leadbelly, whose songs would go on to influence generations of artists. Now, I love Leadbelly. Yeah, me too.

I was actually introduced to Lead Belly on an episode of Desert Island Disc. Someone picked a lead belly song. I hope it's someone who's not cancelled now. But that introduced me to lead belly, and I went down a big lead belly rabbit hole. He played a 12-string guitar. Amazing. And that guitar that he most famously played

was later bought at auction by, none other than Kurt Cobain. Yeah, because I got introduced to Leadbelly because the final song on Nirvana and plugged is a Leadbelly cover, isn't it? Where did you sleep last night? Oh, that's such a good song, that. Yeah, Kirk Cobain was obsessed with Leadbelly.

and consequently I am as well. So what emerged was a new understanding of American music, not as something imported from Europe, but something rooted in lived experiences. And these recordings didn't just sit in archives. They were actually broadcast. And in 1938, the broadcaster Alistair Cook created a BBC radio series titled,

I Hear America Singing, borrowing the phrase from Walt Whitman. Using Lomax's recordings, the series traced American history through its music. For British audiences, It was often the first time they had heard these sounds. And the influence didn't stop there. In the decades after the war,

this rediscovered musical tradition fed into popular culture. Cowboy songs and folk ballads cross the Atlantic, eventually finding their way into the repertoire of artists such as that great Welshman, Tom Jones, who recorded songs such as Green Green Green Grass of Home. What began as archival work became global culture. Ah, is that an old American song that, is it? Green Green, Green, Green, Glow.

I don't know. I don't know. Well, do you know what? I always thought it was about Wales. Yeah, that's what I'd assumed. Yeah. Well, maybe that's why it works. I think that lead belly song in the Pines was a traditional song

and he was covering the lead belly interpretation of it. Ah, okay. I think it was one of those songs that had been around for decades and decades and decades. Got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the lead belly version is really interesting because it's got a very different vibe to the Nirvana version. Oh, the Nevada version is very dark.

Well, the lead belly was like, My girl, my girl. Girl don't lie to me. Tell me where to Steve, bless me. Oh, yeah, that's actually an unbelievable oppression because I realize now I've heard the lead belly. I've got the graininess of 1930s recording in your voice. I've never listened to Leadbelly, but I now know that I like lead belly, Elle.

My girl, my girl don't lie to me. Tell me where do you sleep, bless night? Elle, would you be interested in touring doing covers of leadbelly songs? It's the closest we're going to ever get to reanimating him. Yeah, so hang on, green green grass is a country song made popular by Porter Wagner. It reached number four in the country chart in 1965.

And it was later recorded by Bobby Bear and Jerry Lee Lewis and then subsequently by Tom Jones. Oh, I didn't know. I assumed it was original. Yeah. And then Elvis Presley did it in 1975. and Ted Hawkins in 1986. So, yeah.

It drops off a bit with Ted Hawkins, isn't it? A real run of who's who and then who's that. With every name I read, I knew them less and less. Yeah, so that's music. And then the project also looked at literature. So among those employed by the Federal Writers Project was a young writer named Ralph Ellison. And in 1938, Ellison was working in Harlem,

conducting interviews and collecting stories. One of the people he spoke to was a man named Leo Gurley who described someone back home in South Carolina who could somehow make himself invisible slipping through the oppressive structures of the Jim Crow South. And this idea stayed with Ellison and years later after serving in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War,

including time spent in Swansea, he began working on a novel. And that novel published in 1952 was called The Invisible Man. Oh, oh, yes. It would go on to become one of the defining works of 20th century American literature. So Fed One is a remarkable project.

At a moment of economic collapse, it gave people not just employment, but purpose. Writers wrote, musicians recorded, researchers listened, and in doing so, the United States began to answer some fundamental questions about itself, who are we, what is our history, what does our culture sound like? And in many ways, Fed One was a kind of American equivalent to Britain's mass observation project,

but with a twist, it wasn't about observing society, It was about employing society to document itself. So out of this crisis of the Great Depression came creativity and out of unemployment came a cultural archive. And out of that archive came a deeper understanding of what it meant to be America. And who knew that in 100 years it would lead directly to Ellis' new career

as a Led Belly Tribute Act? My girl, my girl don't lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night? It's so good. It's really good. It's frightening. even heard Leadbelly but I know it's good. I've never heard an impression that's so accurate it scares me. So to finish this episode on mass observation, I'm going to tell you lovely boys. There you go, Alice,

I've done it again, all about the Harvard project on the Soviet social system, which was a pioneering study that looked at life under the USSR and under Stalin. Now, there's some remarkable stuff in this. When you think about the idea of life under the the USSR and Life Under Stalin. What's your immediate reaction to that? Are you kind of? Fear, unease and hard work. The big three. 100%. Ding, ding, ding. That's exactly how I feel. It generally makes me feel panicked the thought of having to live through that and under that sort of regime. It's just how people suffered and managed that. It's remarkable. And I'm afraid this study reflects a lot of that.

This study is a study that archivists and researchers described as truly unique in scale and scope. It provided the only available data on ordinary Soviet life during that period. Because, of course, a lot of that information was closed. It wasn't getting out. Stalin wasn't keen on reflecting the real life of those underneath him. And to talk you through this, I need to take you back to 1950. There's a team of researchers, okay, from Harvard University. They arrive in Europe to begin the task of interviewing hundreds upon hundreds of

displaced persons, former prisoner of wars, and also labourers who are now living in West Germany, who had fled the Soviet Union during World War II. There's a further hundred or so interviews carried out later in New York, but most are in Europe. And the themes studied include the availability of bread, housing conditions, religion, cultural and social life, attitudes to sex and sexuality, work, politics, nationalism, and even figures from the revolution such as Trotsky. As you say, Elle, this is, once again, it's about reflecting the day-to-day experiences of people. This is what this mass observation does, the things that people are actually feeling. Yeah, I will never not find that fascinating. Completely. And this project brings out so much interesting stuff. First, they attempted, though. There's a very crucial thing. First, they attempted to establish a very clear set of rules about how these interviews should be conducted. Any guess is why they were so keen to get this. right for this particular. Well, you have to say the right thing. Well, it's basically so that any echo of Soviet secret police interrogations could be avoided. They didn't want to have a situation

where they were interviewing in the same way. I think that's fair enough. You want to distance yourself from probably the Stalinist way of doing this. Yeah. And so therefore, an official guide is made. And in that guide, they decide that cigarettes are a necessity during his interviews, as was tea. But this is an amazing bit. But the, you know, use of vodka should be limited given the Russian reputation. So they're saying basically when they're interviewing these subjects, it's give them cigarettes, give them tea, do not give them vodka because the Russians love it. This was the main fear from the Harvard researchers. If you give them vodka during the chats, things are going to get spicy.

They also endeavored to be neutral, although this is going to be tricky because, firstly, they were in the early years of the Cold War. And secondly, funding was coming from the United States Air Force. and the Central Intelligence Agency via the CIA-funded Munich Institute for the study of the USSR. So it wasn't completely without bias, but nonetheless, it was as close to mass observation of the Soviet Union as could

and would be achieved by the West in that period. And indeed, despite a lack of neutrality, the results are fascinating. Partly because the research team led by left-leaning sociologist Alex Inkels and the equally left-leaning psychologist Raymond Bauer were determined to hold onto the principles of scholarship in the face of other pressures,

you know, military and intelligence gathering, etc. And so their work gave insights into all sorts of things, such as whether anyone in the Soviet Union owned a bathing costume, the presence of Gallo's humour under Stalin, despite the risks. Here's a couple of popular Soviet jokes I found from the time, both of which may be laugh. One is we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, like that.

It's a good bit of business. The next one is, is there a freedom of speech? Yes. Is there freedom after speech? No. Lovely. That is one of the best Soviet jokes I've ever heard.

Yeah, it's fantastic. Katiahoya has got East German jokes. Oh, really? Beyond the Wall Book. Yeah. And Kachahoya, I can announce, is coming on as a guest on this show. Yes.

We have that coming up in the coming weeks. Very exciting. I can't wait. I'll be star-struck. I can't wait for my voice to go really high. Like when I met Johnny Marr made a complete fool of myself. A little impression, please, if you're meeting Johnny Mar? So do play guitar every day, Johnny.

You thought you were lead-belly to begin with, didn't he? Do you think you're risking jokes under Stalin? Or you just sort of keeping that out there? Keep your nose out of trouble. Yeah, I think once, I think a few years off the gags, probably. But the thing is, you're addicted, Tom. Yeah. I don't want to pun my way to the work camp, Ellis.

Is it worth it? Pund your way to the gulag. Exactly, yeah. It didn't stop there. They also looked into the nature of football fandom in pre-war Soviet Georgia. Also, the huge benefits of being a team captain in sports, especially football. As 139-year-old Ukrainian pointed out, during the weekends, I had to train my soccer team of which I was the captain.

It was because of my sports activities that I received stipends plus five roubles a week. So it turns out at that time, if you were leading a sports outfit, that was something that Stalin was very keen on. So you could get benefits for that. Oh. I'm leaning into that. I think I'm coaching about six different football teams in Moscow at that time.

If it's getting me five extra roubles per week, that's where I'm going. The under fives, the under sixes, the under sevens, the under eights. Exactly. Interestingly, as with mass observation, we also get a sense of reading habits, of musical taste, in cinema, same with your project

that you've taken us through, Chris. Another Ukrainian interviewe pointed out that we had no literature or anything from the outside except what they found was all right for us to read. For example, Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, or the old classical works from American literature.

So basically, they could read things. There was literature available, but it was highly governed by those in power as to what was an acceptable voice. Charles Dickens weirdly was another acceptable voice, as was the French writer Emil Zola. Isn't that crazy that basically the literature you could enjoy at that time was so heavily.

Well, I suppose it's completely to be expected under Stalin, isn't it? But it's just interesting that what you had access to was entirely decided on by the state and by those in power. It's just interesting the idea of someone in office reading Dickens and then the final line of the final page of the final book going, yeah, he seems all right. Yeah, we can let him read. We can let him read that. And Elle, if your interests differed from the prescribed norm, let's say you weren't really into Dickens, you thought I want to read something different,

life could be difficult. A young Georgian woman remarked on how she'd been ostracized by her co-workers because I didn't behave as they did. I manicured my nails and I used to dance to jazz music. She was then pulled in by local party officials and grilled for having a bourgeois manner. I mean, once again, it comes back to this question. The same with gags.

Are you being yourself? Are you being open about your love of jazz? Or are you keeping it on the down? No. How brave are you feeling do you think? What's your feelings? I reckon I would be able to quell my interests. But doing that would make me extremely damaged and depressed.

And then I would be very grumpy. And my grandchildren wouldn't like it. Okay, fine. What about you, Chris? That's what I think I would do. I think as we've established on this podcast. I mean, the least brave option. The party line and whatever music started, didn't see?

Now, we can also be certain that this lady was gossiped about two as the Harvard researchers discovered that gossip was an essential part of Soviet life. This is one of the things that keeps coming up to this study. A Belarusian housewife told her interviewer that I would get information from gossip. I would sooner get true information this way than from a newspaper. So basically, obviously, the press couldn't be trusted in any way. It was so utterly part of keeping the ruling power in power and selling their story,

that basically nothing could be trusted. So gossip was the way that people felt they found out the truth, or at least closer to the truth. A school teacher added that only the secret police do not chatter or gossip for they are the true believers. But aside from these fascinating insights, the Harvard Project also reveals one of the underlying challenges

of mass social research, which is how to navigate your own preconceptions and avoid presenting a skewed set of conclusions. And in that regard, I'm afraid the project sort of fails to evade any of that. It leaves the readers of the final report in no doubt that to Americans, the Soviets, were different,

that they were strange, alien, deceptive, and on the whole, brainwashed by a system that was wrong. It seemed to confirm everything about the enemy and why they had to be defeated for sense to prevail in the world. But certain things we know to be reliable, this was a population living in constant fear of arrest and imprisonment. It's just awful, isn't it? People consider the law and its punishments like a Damocles sword, said one man who was interviewed during this project. They always had anxiety. They always had fear. That's another quote. It was not a free society. It was a society full of contradictions. Here's what one 30-something Russian had to say.

I think this is almost what I find most scary. I'll read the quote and I'll tell you why. I tried to find the magic formula that would make me an ideal communist, an ideal that might remove me from anxiety and fear about arrest. I looked and I looked and could not find this ideal since some of those who'd been arrested were just as devoted to the party as I was and they could have been taken as models for the ideal party man. Now, 1984, as we've talked about before,

is one of my favourite books and I think the scariest part of that is the knowledge that even towing the line, even doing exactly what you feel you should, does not protect you. And as this man is saying here, he looks at all these people that were devoted party followers

and even then they were arrested and found themselves. That's what's most scary. It's always like there is nothing you can do to protect yourself, the utter lottery of it. I've obviously read a lot about the survey union. One of the things that always struck me is that people didn't believe that Stalin knew what was happening. They think, because they loved him so much. They were like, if only he knew what was being done in his name, the people used to like petition Stalin to go, you're not going to believe this.

Yeah, yeah. It's a bloody nightmare. Yeah, it was under his hat that a lot of this was happening. Essentially, it was a game that could not be won. what it was. Plenty of those interviewed reported internal spying or the general risk of anyone you met being a spy or passer of information to the regime, whether they wore a uniform or not, and regardless of personal relationship. That must affect your friendships, must affect everything. It's so, what a poison that is on sort of deep level. And as for how the project

is viewed now, the Harvard project remains a one-of-a-kind attempt to understand a different way of life, a different system of government from the perspective of ordinary people that is outside of the bureaucratic and political institutions of the state. And yet it produced an image, historical image over which historians continue to debate today, what the bias was, how much it can be taken from it as truth. But there are these central truths, the fear, the anxiety, the lack of trust in your fellow man that absolutely were true of life under Stalin. And it's just so scary. What a time. to live through and what a project this was to find out the real voices of the real people.

That was a topic idea that I think I came up with, but if you've got a topic idea, you'd love us to discuss, send an email to hello at owatite.com, please. And if you want more ohwater time, check out the history of trousers. Our brand new bonus episode available patreon.com for us slash owatertime. That was my idea. That was my idea. So Ellis suggests things like mass observation, and I suggest a history of trousers. But a variety is a spice of life, isn't it? But I'm interested in what moves ordinary people. And ordinary people wear trousers.

There we go. My daughter is wearing trousers right now. I don't know, but I do you can't remember what she wore today? It's almost certainly trousers. I've got shorts and I'll be wearing trousers later. It's a great unifier, isn't it? A great leveller. It's the great unifier.

of our reach. Exactly. To find out all about the history of trails on our Patreon right now. As Elle says, if you have any great ideas for future episodes, do send them in.

We love to receive them and we will see you guys for more history. Very, very soon. Bye-bye. Bye. Oh, Water Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes

before everyone else. Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the Oh, What a Time group chat.

Plus if you become an Oh Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh what a time.