Acting Out

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sponsored by Lifelock. Hello, hello Malcolm Gladwell, here I want to tell you about a new series we're launching at Pushkin Industries on the 1936 Olympic Games.

Adolf Hitler's games, fascism, anti-semitism, racism, high Olympic ideals, craven, self-interest, naked ambition, illusion, delusion all collide in the long, contentious lead-up to the most controversial Olympics in history. The Germans put on a propaganda show, and America went along with all of it. Why this season?

On Revisionist History, The story of the games, behind the Games, listen to this season of Revisionist History. Wherever you get your podcasts, if you want to hear episodes before they're released to the public, subscribe to Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin..Fm Slash Plus.

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 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 conman who led the FBI on a seven-year manhunt around the world.

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 Nadaf-Haffrey, came by the office because he had a story to tell me. Ben. Welcome to Hudson, New York.

Okay.

She's being interviewed in the 80s in Dallas, and she's about to tell this big story about how she got famous. It's 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. I want to play you this tape because I want to show you what happens when she tells it in this particular instance.

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?

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 self-described megalomania and literally would play God as a child, which is a thing he continued to do for his whole life.

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. When you watch a group of kids playing, which he did a lot when he was a tutor. They just kind of pick up roles immediately and he'd see these groups of kids. 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 a 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. It's 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?

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 they had this thing in common, this interest, they began working with each other. 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 like these are small experiments, and what they need is a really big experiment.

So they kind of luck into meeting this woman named Fannie 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. Like, go out the door, turn right, walk down the street and we'd be there.

Like, a lot of young girls were sent to reform schools just 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 Fannie French Morris 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, re-educative 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 straight jackets 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 Fannie French Morris invites J..L. 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.

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 like, gather all these questionnaires from the girls about how they feel about each other, and then they begin to calculate from that. You know, where are their mutual attractions, where does everyone hate each other and like? 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 like, shine up antiques. And that becomes data, too. And 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 Marina, 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.

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 Marino's collected a lot of his data.

What is 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?

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?

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.

Hello, hello Malcolm Gladwell, here I want to tell you about a new series we're launching at Pushkin Industries on the 1936 Olympic Games Adolf Hitler's Games.

Fascism, anti-semitism, racism, high Olympic ideals, craven, self-interest, naked ambition, illusion, delusion all collide in the long, contentious lead-up to the most controversial Olympics in history. The Germans put on a propaganda show, and America went along with all of it. Why this season? On revisionist history, the story of the Games behind the Games.

Listen to this season of Revisionist history wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to hear episodes before they're released to the public, subscribe to Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin..Fm Slash Plus.

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?

Sixteen days after he publishes all this stuff on the walls of the Waldorf, Astoria, a new girl is checked into the Hudson Reformatory.

She's then there for 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 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 had sex with this place, but because it belies Moreno's study, it shows what's actually happening there.

That's not captured in his maps and new science.

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 Amateur Talent Night at the Apollo Theater, which is this competition that they 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.

It's called 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.

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?

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 bring every hope of the spring, that's Judy. And everybody says, Oh, that girl can sing, and people thought it 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.

So there's a GA named Ella, who's a Black girl, and we know that Marina was making the study at the time when Ella was also in the school.

L. Moreno.

And it's the highlights of social science. Like George 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.

And the head of the school, Morse, doesn't want to do it. And in his analysis, Moreno is kind of oblivious or disregarding of this issue. Is what you were saying.

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.

He had the tool and went back to doing psychodrama, he had it right.

Does he continue over the rest of his life pursuing social network theory or doing psychodrama?

But I just want to play you this one thing. He's a child, I think. In Bucharest, still.

Well, I said, Now Fred? One of the children said, Who is God? I said, I am God and you are my Angel. And then they all said, Let's build a heaven. And we went into 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 it. Well as it is, I was God there and I stood still. But the angels began to run around and sing, and suddenly one of the angels said, Why don't you fly?

And I fell down and broke my right arm.

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

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Media is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sponsored by Lifelock. Hello, hello Malcolm Gladwell, here I want to tell you about a new series we're launching at Pushkin Industries on the 1936 Olympic Games.

Adolf Hitler's games, fascism, anti-semitism, racism, high Olympic ideals, craven, self-interest, naked ambition, illusion, delusion all collide in the long, contentious lead-up to the most controversial Olympics in history. The Germans put on a propaganda show, and America went along with all of it. Why this season?

On Revisionist History, The story of the games, behind the Games, listen to this season of Revisionist History. Wherever you get your podcasts, and if you want to hear episodes before they're released to the public, subscribe to Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin..FM.