Revisionist History - Acting Out

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Malcolm talks with Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, host of The Last Archive, about the forgotten origins of a major social science, the missing chapter in Ella Fitzgerald’s life, and what it all has to do with the prison just down the street from Malcolm’s office. Listen, and check out the brand new season from Pushkin’s The Last Archive.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, Revisionist History listeners, Malcolm here. Before we get started, I wanted to update you on a few things. First thing, this August 24th, the Revisionist History season begins in earnest. Eight old-school episodes in a row. The little narrative jewel boxes you've come to love. We've been feeding you little bits and pieces so far this season, but this is the main event. The heart of it is a six-part series on guns and violence that I think is my favorite thing we've ever done. Weird, moving, funny, heartbreaking. So mark your calendars. August 24th is when it

all happens. And by the way, if you want to get that whole miniseries early and binge it all at once without ads, you can just by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. In fact, just $6.99 a month or $39.99 a year gets you every one of the Pushkin shows early and ad-free. Just go to the Revisionist History show page in Apple Podcasts or pushkin.fm slash plus to sign up. And one last thing, speaking of things you should binge, the latest season of our true crime masterpiece, Lost Hills, has dropped. The new season explores the legacy of Malibu's dark prince, Mickey Dora. Mickey was a surfer known for his style, grace, and aggression, who ruled the Malibu beaches from the 1950s to the 1970s, celebrated for his rebellious spirit. He was also a con man

who led the FBI on a seven-year manhunt around the world. Believe me, this is a show worth a listen. So sign up for Pushkin Plus, and you can binge this one too. A couple weeks ago, one of my producers, Ben Nadef-Haffrey, came by the office because he had a story to tell me. Ben, welcome to Hudson, New York. Thank you for having me in Hudson, New York. Ben just took over writing and hosting a Pushkin show I love called The Last Archive, a show about the history of truth.

Jill Lepore used to host it. Ben's worked on it since the beginning. He's always digging around in the stacks of some old library. And one day last summer, he was in the medical history archives at Harvard, where he found a story that blew his mind. Okay, I want to play you some tape. Okay, go ahead. Ella, welcome back to Dallas.

How marvelous to see you. Oh, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be back here again. Do you recognize that voice? No, tell me. That is the voice of Ella Fitzgerald. And she's being interviewed in the 80s in Dallas. And she's about to tell this big story about how she got famous, which is a story she tells all the time,

like an amateur night at the Apollo Theater when she sings and everyone realizes she's got an amazing voice. But I want to play you this tape because I want to show you what happens when she tells it in this particular instance. Okay. Ella, as you look back on your life, here was a child from an orphanage, and now... No.

No? Somebody wrote that up. Where did that come from? Well, that was a publicity thing a long time ago, but I have family, and I had family then. But my mother had died, and I guess that's why they used that line that I was an orphan, but I had family then, but my mother had died. And I guess that's why they used that line that I was an orphan, but I had family. At what age were you when your mother died?

I was 15, about 15, because from there we went to the amateur contest. I was about 15 because from there we went to the amateur contest. It's not a lie, but she's skipping two years of her life, about two years. And she always skips these two years of her life when she tells this story. And what I want to do today is tell you a story about what happens in those two years. Because it's a story not just about Ella Fitzgerald, but kind of crazily a story about the invention of this whole realm of social science that she is kind of bound up in,

that I think you'll be interested in not just because it's a very you kind of thing, but also because it's a story that takes place half a mile from where we're sitting right now. Oh, wow. Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Today on the show, Ben tells me about the forgotten origins of social network theory and the missing chapter in Ella Fitzgerald's life. It's absolutely a banana story. Just so you know, I'd read a little bit of Ben's research before we had this conversation, so I'm a little ahead

of you. But still, just wait till you see how Ella Fitzgerald fits into this whole thing. Before we get to her, we have to meet the experimenter, a doctor from halfway around the world. Wait, so back up for a second. So we begin with this man, Jacob, what's his middle name? Jacob Levi Moreno. Jacob Levi Moreno, who is, he's Austrian. He always claimed that he was born on a boat in the Black Sea. I was born on a boat in the Black Sea, and I'll be traveling from one part of the world to the other to find myself.

Actually, he was just born in 1889 in Bucharest to a 15-and-a-half-year-old mother who had married a traveling salesman father and lived in Bucharest, I think, for the first five or six years of his life before moving to Austria. He's basically lower middle class, Jewish immigrant living in Vienna, and yet he ends up getting a pretty serious education. Yeah. So he goes to school at the University of Vienna. He's studying to be a physician. He becomes really interested in psychiatry. He was noted on campus for walking around in a long green cloak and letting his beard grow in a way that no one else is letting their beard grow.

And he never wore a hat. So he's just sort of striking larger than life figure on campus, which is kind of like it's always been the thing with him since he was a kid. Like there's this story. His mother always told this story that one day she was holding him on the street and a woman was walking by and pointed at him and said, one day that boy will become a very great man. People will come from all over the world to see him. And so he had this kind of like self-described megalomania and literally would play God as a child,

which is a thing he like continued to do for his whole life. So he's part of the intellectual scene in Vienna. Yeah. And then makes his way to the United States. Yes. So he makes his way to the United States after World War I. And, you know, psychodrama at this point is sort of his big idea. But wait, define psychodrama is... So it's like you have a problem you want to work through. The common way of working through that problem is to go to a psychoanalyst's office and lie down on the couch and just talk about your problem he thought you have a problem you bring it to the

stage and you act out whatever problem you're having and you have this kind of dynamic way of engaging with the issues you were facing and then that would help you either have a catharsis and break through it or just like reimagine your own role within the problems you're having such that you no longer have them. So what he's really interested in is creative spontaneity. He thinks of children as a model. He did a lot of tutoring when he was in medical school and he basically felt like the creative spontaneity kids have is a thing he wanted to give to everybody.

Like you can, when you're like watch a group of kids playing, which he did a lot when he was a tutor, they just kind of like pick up roles immediately. And he'd see these groups of kids, you know, like how does everyone decide all of a sudden they're playing cops and robbers, or just sort of lock into some sort of performance and communicate it in an almost unspoken instantaneous way. That sort of self-creative freedom was the thing that he thought everybody should have. So his therapeutic theater stuff is really an attempt to figure out how does that work? Where does that spark come from? What are the dynamics between these people? What's a systematic way to think about those dynamics that promotes this kind of spontaneous interaction between them. That preoccupation of his is where social network analysis comes from,

is basically like, how can I study a group and figure out how the ideas are moving within the group and make it sort of rigorous in a way? He's really preoccupied with this question. What goes on with a group of people? Because he's stuck between psychoanalysis, which is all about the individual and the self, and a lot of the social sciences in the 1920s, which are these kind of big static numbers like averages or like the sort of information you get from a poll. So his principal objection to psychoanalysis is the fact that it's too focused on the individual and the self. Yeah. Maybe it seems like it would seem decadent to him to lie on a couch and talk about yourself endlessly.

Well, yeah, he used to talk about this all the time. There are still people who go on the couch for six, eight years spending $20,000 and so forth, and then they come to us. And what we do, we let them act out the problem as it is, on the reality level. That tape is from where? Cooper Union. He's giving a talk? Yeah, it's like 1960-something. So it's later in life.

So he never really got over it. Yeah. So let's talk a little about the, how does he, what is this big experiment, and how does he come to conduct it? So basically, he's in new york he's got this improv theater that like the critics all hate at carnegie hall and one day a columbia graduate student in sociology named helen hall jennings comes to the improv theater. And somehow they identify that they're both really interested in this question of rigorously figuring out the way groups work.

And Moreno, as you can tell, is sort of like all over the place and wasn't a super focused or rigorous person, but had just a crazy number of ideas that were really pretty insightful. And what Helen Hall Jennings had was an extremely rigorous math background and also connections. And when they sort of figured out that they had this thing in common,

this interest, they began working with each other. And so they begin to work up a science for mapping the way groups work. So they begin to go to classrooms. There's like a Brooklyn public school they go to where they ask all the kids, like, who do you most want to sit next to? And then they start creating diagrams of like how successfully integrated the classroom is. Like, are people sitting next to the kids they want to sit next to? They go to Sing Sing prison. But the thing is like, they're kind of fiddling around the edges. These are small experiments, and what they need is a really big experiment. And they kind of luck into meeting this woman named Fanny French Morse,

who's the superintendent of the New York State Training School for Girls, which is a women's reformatory located half a mile from here. Go out the door, turn right, walk down the street, and we'd be there. I mean, I go running up to that place all the time. It's a prison now. Yeah, I mean, it's a place that really creeps me out. But the history of reformatories and the juvenile justice system, that's one of the big accomplishments of the progressive era,

is this idea we should not be treating kids who commit crimes the way we treat adults who commit crimes, because on some level people thought kids can change more than adults can. So rather than locking them in a prison in a city with a bunch of adult criminals, they should have a different court system. They could be charged for different things. A lot of young girls were sent to reform schools just for being incorrigible or ungovernable. But they were sent to these places that for being incorrigible or ungovernable. But they

were sent to these places that were always in bucolic settings that were meant to take them out of contaminated cities and put them in places where they could become better versions of themselves. And so Fanny French Morse runs the Hudson one. And it's always on the cusp of being a prison or a school. And so it's constantly in need of being reformed because it gets too strict or it gets too punitive and they need to make it more, you know, reeducative instead. And she's this lifelong progressive reformer who takes over the training school when it's become basically a prison. And she's kind of like a legend in this field. The first night she takes over, she makes a huge pile on the lawn of all of the straitjackets and the restraining sheets and the prison uniforms, and she lights it on fire. So she's this firebrand reformer who's really trying to do something at this school.

She introduces art. She buys a farm. She gets all these antiques that the girls start reworking. She's trying to give them an aesthetic education. But notably, the thing that the training school really does is it's a miniature version of society. So if Andy French Morse invites JL Moreno and Helen Hall Jennings to the school, which is thrilling to them because it's a totally closed environment, that's this microcosm of society with 500 girls who are arranged in brick cottages with nice latticework trim. So J.L. Moreno moves to Hudson with Helen Hall Jennings. And he goes for it because he's living, is he at this point well-known? What's his level of... He's becoming better known.

But he is a person who wants to be operating on the biggest scale possible. And this scale of experiment is an opportunity for him to do that. So I think he sees it as a big break. So the European genius megalomaniac and his brilliant data-minded research partner get on the train from Manhattan, come up two hours to Hudson to conduct one of the first

and most dramatic experiments of its kind ever, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. An attempt to understand the social dynamics of a girl's prison, reform school. There are 500 girls in the school. Roughly 500 girls. Yeah. So he descends on the school, he and Helen Hall Jennings. And what do they do?

So the first thing they do is they hand out questionnaires to all the girls that say, you know, choose the top five girls in this community that you want to live with. And now, and tell us why. And then choose the five girls that you absolutely do not want to live with. And so it's kind of, reading his account of this, it's like really dense. I mean, he doesn't really write in English very well

at this point in his life. And there's a ton of data, but you get these kind of reprints of the things that the girls say. So we actually had an actress read one of them out. And this is one of the comments in the questionnaire. GE I want in my cottage because I feel towards her like she was my little sister. I never had any, and I like to take care of her.

Mostly she's just a lonesome little child. You just have to be fond of. So they gather all these questionnaires from the girls about how they feel about each other. And then they begin to calculate from that, where are their mutual attractions? Where does everyone hate each other? And to what degree do these cottage groupings even make sense? And they want to start putting a number to that. But it's not just the questionnaires.

They begin to do a lot of observing of the girls, like watching them work in the steam laundry, watching them make rugs or shine up antiques. And that becomes data too. And all of this is used in service of figuring out who's isolated in the community, who's rejected by the community, who's beloved by the community, but they're observing everything. They're collecting like Moreno at one point says they collect 10,000 pages of data. And one of the things about this new science is you have that much data, and you can't conceive of it all. It's before computers. There's no way to really understand what that all means, except for a map.

And that is the critical thing that they do, is create these really intricate maps of what the community looks like. So, like, this map right here is the entire community of the school. Oh, wow. It looks like a giant spider's web. Yeah. And he has nodes. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12, 13. Is each one of these nodes a group of girls or a single girl? Each one of those big circles is a cottage. Oh, I see. Oh, I see. Now, but before we go any further,

do we believe these maps? Let's say, do we think he is actually accurately capturing the patterns of relationships and influence within the community? I think he misses a lot. And also there's this kind of forced thing about it. Like none of these girls are consenting to it. Like who knows about if they're telling him the truth. But I think that there is genuine insight there. And one of the reasons is there's this thing that happens. It starts on Halloween night of 1932. There's a party in one of the cottages and somebody creates a distraction and two of the girls, Ruth and Marie, run away from the cottage. And then something really weird happens. Like over a total of 14 days, 14 girls run away. It's kind of this chain reaction. Nobody really understands why it's happening.

But it's like a runaway rate that's 30 times higher than normal. And this happens after Moreno's collected a lot of his data. He has an outbreak, essentially, of girls who get this idea to flee, to run away. Yeah. And he's trying to trace, what was he trying to do? Trying to trace the source of the outbreak? Or to see how the idea of running away had traveled through the community? Yeah, he's trying to see how the idea of running away travels through the community.

Which is this kind of, you know, you talk about this a lot, this idea of an idea being contagious. He posits that there's not some central reason why the girls are running away. Yeah. And so is he saying that his hypothesis would be the group who ran away are all linked? Yeah. Are intimately linked according to his network analysis? Yes. So that's his explanation. And so he and Jennings go to their maps and try and figure out if it's true what his theory is, that there's some way that this impulse to run away is traveling through the network of girls. And he and Jennings trace this in the map and then call it proof that networks exist.

And one of the reasons he's confident in it is because then, based on those same questionnaires about who likes whom, who doesn't like whom, he rearranges the cottages. And over the next some period of months, the number of runaways dwindles pretty radically. And so the thought is that's the evidence that this is in some way meaningful, is that the rearrangement seems to work. This whole thing is started by two girls. What does network theory tell us about those who originate the epidemic? Were they socially influential girls? So no, they're actually like pretty isolated girls.

So here's like a map of them. That's one of those is Ruth and one of those is Marie. And basically like red lines are lines of attraction. Black lines are lines of rejection. Black lines are lines of rejection. And so they're really close. They dislike the same people. They like the same people. They really like each other.

But on the broader map, not a lot of lines of influence run towards them, except for, you know, a couple significant ones that connect them to the people who then begin to run away next. Oh, I see. So our first observation is the two who begin the epidemic are closely bound to each other, but isolated from everyone else. So there's little social, there's not a lot of glue holding them in place. Yeah. It's not like the most popular girls in the reformatory run away and then everyone follows suit. Yeah.

But like with all of this stuff, it's, there's only so much he this stuff, there's only so much he's seeing and there's only so much he's allowing himself to say. And they also have this agenda of proving that their science works. Their account is the only account we have of what actually happened and how successful their stuff was. Yeah.

But so this is his explanation. So he's got this big idea and he and Jennings have the evidence he thinks proves it. How does he get the word out? Actually, the first place he publishes his results is kind of like a science fair. It's this big physician's conference that happens at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. I think it happens on like April 2nd, 1933. He goes to the Waldorf Astoria. He takes the train down from Hudson, goes to the Waldorf Astoria. They put the maps on the walls and it's kind of

a big deal. The New York Times writes a story that says like emotions mapped by new geography. He calls it psychological geography. He's riding high. He says he's going to make a map of all the emotions in New York City. And that's the first place he publishes it. But then he goes back to the school. And it's a year after that the book comes out called Who Shall Survive? Which is the book you have in front of you. Which is this. This is actually one of the original books out called Who Shall Survive. Which is the book you have in front of you. Which is this. This is actually one of the original books. This is from 1934.

I took it out from the library and it's like a year overdue now. So if anyone's listening to this, I will be returning it someday. That's a Pushkin promise. We always return our library books. And after the break, we'll find out what all this research has to do with Ella Fitzgerald.

Okay, back to the reformatory. The social scientist J.L. Moreno and his research partner Helen Hall Jennings, have been making a study of a girls' reform school down the street from where we are right now in Hudson. It's the 1930s. They've just debuted some of their research in Manhattan at the Waldorf Astoria. Big deal. And then someone new shows up at the school. Right, Ben? Yes. Sixteen days after he publishes all this stuff on the walls of the Waldorf Astoria, a new girl is checked

into the Hudson Reformatory. Ella Fitzgerald. Yeah. I mean, the most one of the most famous and extraordinary singers of the 20th century. Who, unbeknownst to everyone in her lifetime, was an inmate at this school

in between the time when her mom died and the day that she became famous at the Apollo Theater singing in an amateur contest. I was 15, about 15, because from there we went to the amateur contest. She never talked publicly about this fact, that she was an inmate at the training school for girls. And it wasn't even known publicly until after her death in the 90s when this intrepid investigative reporter Nina Bernstein figured it out. But what we know is she's at the training school starting April 18, 1933. When she's how old?

It's like a week before her 16th birthday. Because her mother has just died. So her mother dies when she's 15. Yeah. And she starts to take odd jobs. So she's running numbers. She's a lookout for a brothel. She gets picked up by the cops, sentenced to the training school.

And she checks in, you know, just over two weeks after Moreno's shown his first diagrams from the research. She's then there for like about a year. And what we know of her time there is through Nina Bernstein's reporting, talking to people who worked at the training school and remembered her. They would ask her to come back to be, to talk to the girls and she never would. So Bernstein talked to them about what's known about her. People remembered she had amazing penmanship. She was an excellent student. One day, she was invited to a church nearby with a group of the black girls who liked to sing and was said to have sung her heart out.

But she was there at the time that the study was being made. And her experience there is significant to me not just because she's a really famous person who intersects with this place, but because it belies Moreno's study. Like, it shows what's actually happening there that's not captured in his maps and new science. And sure enough, she... She is thought to have run away.

So basically, she's checked in there. What we know from Nina Bernstein's reporting is she wasn't allowed to sing in the all-white choir, must have stayed in one of the two cottages the black girls were allowed to live in, probably like all the black girls had to do laundry for the white girls, but she was also kept in the basement of one of the cottages at the training school in Beaton. But then there's this vagueness around howages at the training school in Beaton. But then there's this vagueness around how she leaves the training school.

But because of the parole records, it's plausible that she ran away. And she's living back in New York, I think in Yonkers, and she's homeless. Like, she's wearing ragged clothes. And she and a group of her friends decide to enter the Am talent night at the Apollo

Theater, which is this competition where if you win, you get to play at the Apollo for a week. And she at this point thinks she's going to be a dancer. So she's planning to enter as a dancer. Do you want to hear the tape of her telling the story? So this is her towards the end of her career talking to Andre Previn. When you first started, you had visions of not being a singer. You were going to be a dancer. Is that right? Right. Tell me about that.

Oh, you really want to hear that? Well, it started back in my hometown in Yonkers. And I was what they call the, you know, the greatest little dancer in Yonkers. And we used to go down to the Apollo on amateur night, my girlfriends and I, and you know, like they always tell you, if you want to be an amateur, to sign and drop your name in the box. And being from Yonkers, we never thought anybody

would send a postcard to Yonkers. And the three of us, we put our names in. And I was the one who was chosen. And I made up my mind. You know, they say, well, if you don't go, you're chicken. Right. So we went. And believe it or not, I was the first amateur that they called.

And there were two sisters who were the dancing sisters in the world called the Edward Sisters. And they were starring at the Apollo. sisters who were the dancing sisters in the world called the Edward sisters. And they were starring at the Apollo and they closed the show. And I, when I saw those ladies dance, I says, no way I'm going out there and try to dance because they stopped the show. I was the first one was called. And when I got out there, somebody hollered out in the audience, what is she going to do?

So this is like a story she tells all the time. What nobody knew is that when she was on stage at the Apollo, she was just out of the training school. My mother had a record of Miss Connie Boswell, who I think was one of the greatest singers that ever lived. And she used to play Object of My Affection and Judy. And I got so I had, you know, used to sing it. So when a man said, sing something, well, I tried to sing Judy.

And I think Miss Connie Boswell, because then I tried to sing like her and I sang if a voice can breathe every hope of the spring that's Judy and everybody says oh that girl can sing and the people applauded so much I sang object of my affection that was the other side of the record and I won first prize so then that made me feel like, you know, well, I want to try to be a singer. I just, I love it so much, and I think it's the, you know, it's obvious, but if she's a node in these maps, we know her so well as a person,

but obviously, like, every single person in the maps had a full life too and you actually think you found yeah i think i found a notation you found her place in the social diagram yes i found a a girl who's plausibly ella fitzgerald but i can't know for sure it's a black girl named ella in this book there's a mention of a girl named Ella. All the girls on the maps are given initials, like two-letter initials that don't correspond with their names. And there's mention of a girl named Ella. She's given the two-letter initial GA.

And then like 100 pages later, there's a map with a GA on it that specifies the GA is a black girl. So there is a GA named Ella who's a black girl, and we know that Moreno was making this study at the time when Ella was also in the school. Did you make this discovery or did... I made this discovery because I read this whole damn book. You have contributed to the legend of both Ella Fitzgerald and J.L. Moreno. Unfortunately, yes. This is correct.

And what happens when Moreno and Jennings' research comes out? It has a pretty significant reception. Moreno's gotten involved in the New Deal. But like the most significant thing that comes out of the groundswell of support is he launches a journal called Sociometry. But it's this really influential journal. And, you know, like six degrees of separation is tested there. All of these leading lights of social science like George Gall gallup margaret mead john dewey they're like involved in the editorial

board or publishing in the journal it's finally like a platform for him to share these ideas about social networks basically with a broader public and that field social network analysis doesn't really take off until the 70s or 80s, but he's credited with being a major forerunner of it and doing it in this experiment. This story is significant to me in part because it's sort of the story of science in the 20th century, or like one kind of science in the 20th century, which is, I think, in the quest to institutionalize his ideas and to be as big a player as he could be, I feel like J.L. Moreno kind of pulled his punches. He had 10,000 pages of data. I don't believe that he didn't know what was actually going on at the

school and specifically what was happening to the black girls at the school. And it's not that that kind of thing wasn't sayable in the 1930s because the attorney general had already said that the school should be desegregated. So the school is segregated. The New York State attorney general has asked that it be desegregated. And the head of the school, Morse, doesn't want to do it yeah and in his analysis uh moreno is kind of oblivious or or or disregarding of this issue is what you were saying he covers the fact that

it's segregated it's just not like the sort of like beating of the girls in the basement but more like the corporal punishment stuff the other reasons why girls might be running away. These sorts of issues aren't in the text. And like the degree to which the segregation is institutionalized isn't really covered either. But I'm, you know, it's 90, we're talking about the early 30s. Yeah. Nothing's integrated in the early 30s.

But there was an expectation that this place would be. I mean, this is, and it's also like Harlem Renaissance is going on. There's a lot of black power in New York City as of the 1920s. And when there's an investigation into the school after Moreno's study, not because of it, there is it's led by a black doctor in partnership with the governor. There's a level of state support for the idea that this is this shouldn't't be happening that suggests that it's not really so beyond the realm of possibility. The person who I would fault is not Morse so much as Moreno. He's the outsider. He's the one who sees himself as a revolutionary, who doesn't at least profess to be held by the standards of the rest of society, who is, as you say, coming up with

a new idea that professes to paint a picture of the whole community. And you can easily see that someone who was, if he was as revolutionary as he claimed to be, you could easily see a version of this where he would have said, look, this is what segregation does. Like, he came with a tool to see what was wrong with segregation and turned a blind eye to it. I mean, interestingly, of course,

social science becomes hugely important in the strategy of the civil rights movement and the legal strategy of the civil rights movement. Brown versus Board and the Dolls. And on, yeah, in the 50s and 60s. So like, there's an opening. This is what's so fascinating about this story is that here's this brilliant man who he's blind

in so many ways to the possibilities of his own fame and greatness right he had the tool that everybody would end up using 20 years later to break down the door of prejudice and he didn't understand he had the tool and went back to doing psychodrama like you had it right does he continue over the rest of his life pursuing social network theory or doing psychodrama i mean he stays involved with sociometry i think he just wanted to be a director like there's a story he tells about when he was a kid that That to me is kind of structured the way I think about him. And I think he's sharing it because he thinks it has some fundamental truth about himself contained in it.

But I just want to play you this one thing. This is about when he's a child, I think in Bucharest still. One Saturday, my parents were away. A crowd of children gathered in our house in the basement. And I still remember that they came to me and said now you Jack that was my first name what are you going to do today I said let's play God well I said now one of the children said who is God I said I am God and you are my angels and then they all said let's have a let's build a heaven and we went to the basement

and we took all the chairs in the house and they built the various heavens up to the top and on top they had a chair for god himself and i was then helped by all the children to sit there on well as it is i was god there and i still. The angels began to run around and sing. And suddenly one of the angels said, why don't you fly? And I stretched my arm and I fell down and broke my right arm. It's just like, I just love the story. But like, that's kind of his whole thing. It's like, he tries to play God.

He falls down, he breaks his arm. Like, he always wants to be the guy who sits above and looks down. And that's a fatal flaw of his. We think that's, I think that's a nice, I think that's a nice, I think it's a nice way to end. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. For more psychodrama, go subscribe to The Last Archive to hear six episodes of gripping intellectual history. Ben's got stories on mid-century songwriting machines, invasive species panics, freelance wiretappers turned evangelists, and time travel. Subscribe and you'll also hear a whole different version of the story Ben told today, coming soon. You won't want to miss it. Ben produced this episode of Revisionist History as well, with help from Jacob Smith and Chiara Powell.

We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton, engineering by Nina Lawrence, mastering by Sarah Bruguere, original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stale Wagon Symphonette. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.