DINOSAURS pt. 2

On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazy. Examine the floor. That shape our culture and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is In hysteria. Dark nights. prehistoric animals at London's Crystal Palace. Proper sphere for subject.

Over the last century and a half, the dusty old bones of prehistoric creatures have been brought back to full-blooded life in the world of entertainment. the natural history stars of a new national obsession. At the time of their introduction, these creatures felt almost paranormal, almost alien when paired with the sudden realization of deep time, of their previously impossibly ancient existence.

But prior to their careers on the stage, on the screen, and in the exciting exhibits of the World's Fair, these long-extinct animals needed to actually be discovered, dug out, studied, and finally displayed. And so, for part two of our series, we're going to look at the quirky, rambunctious, and surprisingly political history of paleontology in England and the United States.

We'll hear stories about a young girl's revolutionary prehistoric discoveries, the Wild West gold rush of fossil hunting, the bone-based competition between two haughty academics. the raucous creation of the first prehistoric park, and the most famous dino skeleton of all time, that became an international symbol of American exceptionalism. It seems inevitable that dinosaurs, these massive, powerful beasts that reigned for 165 million years as tyrant kings of the earth.

would become potent metaphors for so many things uniquely American, and something that somehow the reigning Gilded Age proto-billionaires could use to their own advantage. Because as Dr. Ian Malcolm said in 1993's Jurassic Park, life uh finds a way. And I guess so does capitalism. Details I'm sure for him.

On August nineteenth, During the first year of the new century 1800, a 15 month old baby was in the arms of a helpful neighbor. Along with her two friends, the young woman was watching the tricks of a traveling equestrian show that had landed in the small town of Lime Regis in Dorset, England. As they cheered on the galloping horses and their riders, the sky slowly darkened into a steely gray. the air became humid and heavy, and it looked like the show might be cut short by a brewing storm.

Suddenly, as one onlooker later described, an awful peal of thunder cracked near the audience, and the women sprinted for cover under the branches of a nearby elm. The baby clutched tight to her sitter. Just then another crack struck the tree, electrocuting all of them at once, causing the three women to fall to the ground, dead. The baby appeared to be dead too, but nonetheless she was rushed home and placed in a bath of hot water, and, according to a local doctor, miraculously revived.

This shocking event led to little Mary Anning becoming a kind of local baby celebrity. In addition to her uncanny survival, the strike appeared to heal what was described as the sickly nature she had possessed since birth. As she grew, it became clear that she was. Special. She had a wealth of intelligence, curiosity, and vigor. spending much of her time up in the cliffs of the southern coast of England with her father. An unorthodox activity for a girl in the Georgian era.

A cabinet maker by trade, he supplemented the family's meager income by hunting for what were then referred to as curiosities. It just so happened that the area the family lived in was rich in fossil remains, and for years the locals had collected and sold them to tourists along the seaside. touting their mystical and healing properties, ancient molluscs known as snake stones, and cephalopods, known as devil's fingers.

After her father's sudden death from tuberculosis, Mary's family was in dire straits. So the Miracle Tween and her older brother Joseph started hunting for and selling curiosities themselves. For a while they uncovered many of the typical fossilized trinkets. But then, on one fateful day, her brother stumbled across a half buried skull that looked like it belonged to a massive alligator. The thing was lined with sharp teeth, the holes of the eye sockets as big as dinner plate.

After he dug the skull out the best he could, he encouraged his sister to go out and try to find the rest of the monster. It would be more than a year of obsessive searching, until yet another fateful day when a storm began to brew, the very thing that had, according to town lore, given her the unique powers she possessed. It blasted at the cliffs for hours, and when Mary went up the next day, she saw that the weather had uncovered a small bone embedded in the rock.

She chipped away at it with her hammer and chisel until a large reptilian skeleton started to take shape. She called up a crew of local workers to help her excavate the mysterious creature 15 feet in length. which turned out to be the first complete ichthyosaurus, or fish lizard, something the town initially believed to be a monster.

It would take years of study for the ancient animal to be understood, since the theory of evolution was still decades away, and the revelation of the great reptiles of deep time was brand new. After this discovery, Mary was hooked on what would become the field of paleontology and began teaching herself its twin pillars, geology and anatomy. Around 1820, when Mary was just out of her teens, she discovered yet another nearly complete skeleton. The first plesiosaur.

another marine reptile, which one scientist referred to as altogether the most monstrous fossil find up to that point. So baffling was this new skeleton that the Frenchman, known as the father of paleontology, Georges Cuvier, accused the whole thing of being an elaborate hoax by the Anning family. But once he laid eyes on the thing, he relented and called the fish lizard the most monstrous assemblage of characteristics that has been met with among the races of the ancient world.

It was a stunningly strange animal, like, as one observer noted, a serpent threaded through a turtle. It was almost like Frankensteinian, a confused geologist, described the puzzle this way. To the head of a lizard, it united the teeth of a crocodile. a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a serpent, a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of a whale.

Due to the difficulty of transporting the massive skeleton, a drawing made by Mary was presented publicly for the first time at a meeting of the Geological Society. Those in attendance were dumbstruck by the descriptions of the Pleiesiosaur, with one witness noting, They were as alien to the audience as if they had hailed from another planet. Because the Geological Society did not allow women until almost a hundred years later

Mary was never mentioned in the presentation, but she did continue working on the down low with members of the society, and even got a little bit of government funding. And that money would prove well placed. She would also uncover the first ever skeleton of a flying reptile, the pterosaur. Now it's often reported that in honor of her early years selling fossils on the beach.

the tongue twister She Sells Seashells by the Seashore was inspired by Mary Anning, but sadly that has been recently debunked. Nonetheless, her contributions prepared the scientific world for the many dinosaur skeletons that would soon be found in Europe and then the United States. And would inspire the first artistic renderings of a fleshed-out prehistoric world. Renderings that attempted to use science to imagine and then bring back to life the long-dead wonders of the deep past.

Just a few years after Mary Anning passed away, and only 120 miles from her Dorset home, something incredible was happening in London, inspired in large part by her miraculous finds.

An impressive new attraction called Crystal Palace Park was under construction. A place that would include a huge, elegant glass building, several man-made lakes, a concert stadium, a large maze, and most importantly, a replica of an ancient landscape with full sized models of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Known as Dinosaur Court, the thirty-three models were the first of their kind in the entire world.

Created by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of paleontologists. Sir Richard Owen, the man who had actually coined the term dinosauria or terrible lizard just over a decade before. Toward the end of construction in late 1853, an invitation was received by 20 prominent men, scientists, investors, and newspaper editors. Who would help create publicity for the upcoming unveiling of Dinosaur Court.

The location of the esteemed New Year's Eve dinner party? According to the invite, they were all to meet in the mold of the iguanodon at the Crystal Palace. The iguanodon model it was referring to measured 35 feet long and weighed 30 tons, and for the evening a large cavity was created in the back of the dinosaur. A table was prepared inside for eleven of the guests, the other unlucky nine seated at what amounted to a kid's table beside the behemoth.

the statue was encircled in a beautiful pink and white tent, with a crystal chandelier hanging over the diners, and with candelabras lighting the table area. A stage was created with stairs leading up to the guests, Who were served an eight-course meal with dozens of dishes, including mock turtle soup, raised pigeon pie, French pastries, a cornucopia of fruits, and of course fine wines, ports, and sherries.

As these celebrity nerds got wasted on England's finest, the night turned a little fratty as they delivered sloppy, congratulatory speeches and toasts about one another and themselves. After eight hours, when midnight had come and gone, a geologist named Edward Forbes presented a painfully long poem he had written just for the occasion. Here is a small excerpt.

A thousand ages underground his skeleton had lain. But now his body's big and round, and he's himself again, his bones like Adams wrapped in clay, his ribs of iron stout. Where is the brute alive to day that dares with him turn out? Beneath his heart he's got inside the souls of living men, Who dare a sorry and now deride, with life in him again? The men at the party were encouraged to sing along for the drunken chorus.

Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok One reporter said that the voices of the men carried, quote, in a manner so fierce and enthusiastic as almost to lead to the belief that a herd of iguanodons were bellowing. The press, of course, had a field day with this quirky gathering of slurring scientific elites, and the publicity certainly helped get the common man excited about the revolutionary new attraction.

First on our list of things to avoid on dark nights or on the mornings after are the stucco-models of prehistoric animals at London's Crystal Palace. These monsters are iguanodons, a species of dinosaur even the wouldn't have wanted for a pet. Not the birdie to watch when someone's taking your picture is the six-foot pterodactyl, but like all of them, just the pet to keep around. Don't like it.

On opening day, more than forty thousand Londoners strolled around the enormous statues in the revolutionary prehistoric facsimile. This meant that people were grasping for the first time the material reality of these mythical creatures that before had only been rendered in rare drawings and paintings. Now, if you take a look at these statues today, and they are still there, you'll have a bit of a chuckle because you'll see how paleontologists conceived of dinosaurs for more than a century.

as these kind of lumbering chubby lizards whose bellies almost dragged on the ground. But no one knew better yet. And people were so enthralled with the park that newspapers reported that some jumped into the water, wading out to the dinosaur statues and yanking out their teeth as souvenirs. Don't do that. At$1 a ticket, which is about$100 in today's money, it was clear that science could be translated into lucrative entertainment. And who loves lucrative entertainment even more than England?

In the late 1860s, New York City was considered gross, mean, corrupt, indulgent, and dirty, and thus was in desperate need of a rebranding. City officials hope to figure out how to achieve some of the cachet and high culture of places like Philadelphia and Boston. One project that aimed to rehab their image was the creation of Central Park, a place where culture could finally join with recreation.

Like usual, we imported some class from Mother England. After all, the dinosaurs of Crystal Palace Park had become a favorite place to visit for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. And so Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was invited by the city comp troller to create something similar for Central Park. After running a studio nearby to begin construction on his sculptures, Hawkins soon discovered that things were a little bit more difficult in the United States. A little more, let's say, uncouth.

Within just a year, Hawkins would not only lose the project, but all of his models would be mysteriously smashed to pieces in the night. and the moulds totally destroyed too, meaning that he could not take his work elsewhere and rebuild. The culprit is still up for debate today. The most popular assumption was that it was the cruel work of New York Senator William Tweed, known as Boss Tweed, maybe the most corrupt politician in New York's history.

the thief of the equivalent of five billion dollars today. The story goes that when it came to the new dinosaur court, he was unable to squeeze his obligatory secret kickbacks from the museum project, telling the public that the whole thing had just turned out to be too expensive to complete. This had, of course, pissed Hawkins off, and in turn he began spreading his side of the story.

That's when Boss Tweed sent his goons to the studio to literally crush the prehistoric sculptures into submission. Another scenario involved the dyno smashing goons of the board treasurer, former Judge Henry Hilton, who had wanted to build his own natural history museum, making Hawkins his direct competition. Haughty and arrogant.

Hilton had recently demanded that a new bronze statue in Central Park be painted white to make it look more Grecian, and that the same thing should be done to the museum's whale skeleton to make it look more sun-bleached. Obviously, this completely ruined both the statue and the bone.

Now, whoever was to blame for the project's destruction, no one knows where Hawkins' prehistoric sculptures and their molds ended up. And to this day, it is rumored they are buried somewhere on the grounds of the park. in some tellings, pushing up the dirt under a pitcher's mound of one of its twenty-six ball fields. But despite many searches over the years, the fragments of what is considered the worst example of vandalism in the history of paleontology have never been found. More after this.

And now back to the show.

The United States had lagged behind Europe when it came to paleontology, but they finally got their first mostly complete dinosaur skeleton in 1858. This creature was quite different from its European counterparts. It walked on two legs, something paleontologists had not yet encountered. The discovery was a complete accident, as so many fossil discoveries were at that time, found when a man named John Hopkins was digging out a marl pit on his land in Haddonfield, New Jersey.

This actually occurred a full 20 years before the whole specimen would be fully excavated and presented to scientific circles. Instead, the few giant bones John was able to break free from the stone were displayed in his home for the curious to come and view for a modest fee. By 1858, the bones were old news to those living around Haddonfield, that is, until lawyer and member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, William Parker Fulk, was vacationing in the town.

He immediately clocked the curiosities as bona fide dinosaur bones, and along with his crew of workmen, Folk was able to extract an incredible skeleton from Hopkins' Marl Pit. giving it the Latin name Hadrosaurus Folki, which translated to Folk's bulky lizard. Soon after, the specimen would be mounted at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences.

the first skeleton to ever hang in a museum, under the direction of famed anatomist and natural artist doctor Joseph Leedy, as well as our Central Park Dinosaurian Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. After word of the haphazard discovery of a new long-dead celeb got around the country. The search for prehistoric fossils became a kind of new gold rush, and like the gold rush that had happened a couple decades before, it became a hunt that anyone could take part in, not just the professionals.

As we heard about in the last episode around the relationship between the Sinclair Oil Company and the paleontologists they employed as PR boosters and corporate spies. The rise of the US global economy was no longer based around cotton after the Civil War. Instead, it became centered around the extraction of natural resources, petroleum, minerals, coal, and precious metals.

So many dinosaur fossils were discovered by those who cracked into the earth by trade, miners, quarry diggers, oil riggers, and eventually rail workers. So when these working men happened upon big old bones, they were treated as yet another natural resource of the promising West, which was already seen as a kind of mythical place of endless abundance.

But those who lucked upon fossilized bones didn't have the skill set to dig out entire skeletons, instead, selling their prospective fines to early paleontologists or fossil buyers in general. No one could know how complete or important a specimen would be until deep into the extraction process. and the fossil hunters and laypeople who stumbled upon potential fossil deposits would often exaggerate their fines in letters to paleontologists to try to up the value.

In turn, paleontologists would downplay the fines to try to negotiate the price lower, and thus the trust between both parties was tenuous at best. In the world of science, there had been a sense of civility between those working toward a common empirical goal. But now science was officially mixing with burgeoning business practices, which meant that self-interest had to take precedence on both sides.

One of the men who had taken quite an interest in this dinosaur rush was nothing but a boy, the 18-year-old Edward Drinker Koch. Cope was a naturalist child prodigy when it came to lizard and snake anatomy, and spent his days reorganizing fossils in a dusty back room of the Academy of Natural Sciences. until a few years later when he was voted a full member of the organization, leading to a natural history professorship at Haverford College.

Before this, Cope had spent some time studying abroad in Berlin, where he met a scholar nine years his senior. a man who had, as the oldest of the students at his alma mater, once earned the nickname Daddy. He too was a rising star of natural science. And of course, when two nerds of a niche field meet, there are intellectual fireworks. But often those fireworks end up exploding in their hands. And truly, how else could a new academic discipline really take off in the United States?

than with a bitter, bitchy feud between two arrogant intellectuals, accidentally creating the conditions for their own demise. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. When the new Bone Brothers returned to the United States, they had one thing on their mind: Bones.

and with both inheriting a bunch of money from their families, they were able to pursue their dreams with abandon. And with the thrill of the Hadrosaurus find on Cope's mind, He and Marsh became absolutely obsessed with finding, claiming, and naming the most dinosaur fossils ever. And they did. They were responsible for discovering some of the biggest rock stars of the prehistoric world, the Triceratops, the Stegosaurus, and the T-Rex-esque Allosaurus. and one hundred other species as well.

When the boys were still on good terms, they were cute with each other. Cope named a new amphibious fossil, Tyoneus Martii. And then three years later, Marsh named this kind of huge fish alligator-looking thing, Mosasaurus Copianus. It has been floated that this was a veiled insult directed at Cope, but it really has more to do with how you put together a Latin word. But still, things were not as cute as they seemed between our bone boys.

Not long before that discovery, Cope had taken Marsh to the fossil quarry where the fish alligator was found. And in a slimy move, Marsh had made a secret deal with the owner of the quarry, who agreed to send any newly discovered bones straight to him while he was working at Yale. When Cope found out, the first true crack in the stone of their academic friendship began to form.

But the straw that really broke the camel's back, or rather the Elasmosaurus platyurus' back, came soon after. You see, in their fossil-induced mania, the Bone Boys got sloppy, sending hasty telegrams about apparently brand new species. Ones that turned out had already been discovered and named by other paleontologists.

In eighteen sixty eight, Cope made a far worse mistake during a frenzied attempt to publish his analysis of a new type of marine reptile, which included his own skeletal reconstruction. He accidentally reversed the direction of the animal's vertebrae, and instead of placing the skull at the end of its very long neck, he added it to the end of its very long tail. a paleontologist's loss during a game of Pin the Tail on the Reptile.

When Daddy Marsh showed up to take a peek at the new skeleton, the future frenemy called out the mistake, with some measure of elation, I imagine. Cope was Horrified. He had already published his findings with the sketches of the Elasmosaurus platyurus, and so was forced to do what every academic dreads the most. Ісю а корекція. AHHHHH Since he was not a podcaster, he couldn't just make something embarrassing disappear forever without a trace.

So he literally tried to buy every copy of the American Philosophical Society Journal, where he made his error. But alas. Apparently, once something is on the 1800s internet, it's there forever. Years later, Marsh told a reporter, when I informed Professor Cope of it, Wounded vanity took a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy. As their friendship soured, they spent a great deal of time fighting over bone turf.

Marsh was worried that Cope might be raking in as many or even more bones than him, so he hired a spy to follow Cope around, codenaming their target Jones, or as I like to call him, Bones Jones. After years of pedantic prehistoric bickering in the scientific journal The American Naturalist, the periodical actually decided to place a ban on Cope and Marsh, criticizing each other in its pages. a notice was placed in the journal to notify readers of the restriction.

We regret that Professors Marsh and Cope have considered it necessary to carry their controversy to the extent that they have. Wishing to maintain the perfect independence of the naturalist in all matters involving scientific criticism, we have allowed both parties to have their full say. but feeling that now the controversy between the authors in question has come to be a personal one, and that the naturalist is not called upon to devote further space to its consideration.

It went on to say that now, the only way they could bitch out each other's bones was to pay the journal a fee, at which point the naturalist would publish their criticisms in the journal's appendix. Shh, don't threaten these two independently wealthy egomaniacs with a good time. They will definitely pay up.

When Marsh was appointed the chief paleontologist of the United States Geological Survey, Cope was in big trouble, and he knew it. Marsh wanted to destroy Cope, and he did so by officially cutting his work off from any government funding. Desperate to find new financing, Cope tried to invest in a silver mine in New Mexico, a terrible choice that cost him his fortune. But soon Cope would have his long-calculated revenge. For years he had been cataloguing all the scientific misdeeds of his rival.

and he handed over all the receipts to a journalist at the gossipy New York Herald, the story becoming a devastating blow to Marsh's career. After an investigation, the government actually eliminated their paleontology department altogether. At that point, both of the Bone Brothers' reputations were damaged beyond repair, and everyone was sick of their bullshit. Both men died with almost nothing to their names.

but it was their very American cutthroat competition that turned their viciously ambitious nation into the true dinosaur kingdom of the world. After their fruitful feud ended, Europe couldn't even touch us.

When Orenthal Marsh first described one of the impressive new finds out of Wyoming in eighteen ninety-eight, the New York Journal announced it this way. Most colossal animal ever on Earth just found out west. When it walked, the earth trembled under its weight. The article described the Diplodocus in the hyperbole the paper was known for. When it ate, it filled a stomach large enough to hold three elephants.

When it was angry, its terrible roar could be heard for ten miles. When it stood up, its height was equal to eleven stories of a skyscraper. When a steel magnate, proto-billionaire, Dino fanboy heard about the mysterious new discovery of this creature similar to a Bronosaurus, he decided to fund his own dig in the area.

Andrew Carnegie, whose Scottish name was originally pronounced Carnegie, hope to acquire a similarly impressive specimen to display at his illustrious new Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His institution was part of what became known as the New Museum Idea, a movement toward turning natural history museums from boring, dusty, academic storehouses. into entertaining teaching tools for the general public, with dinosaurs as the main attraction.

Much to Carnegie's delight, his team uncovered another skeleton of the same species, and then another. meaning that they would be able to combine the two and reconstruct an almost complete version of what would officially come to be known as Diplodocus Carnegiae.

Luxuriating in the exciting new find now bearing his name, Carnegie retired for the summer to his Scottish mansion, Skebo Castle. One day, totally out of the blue, he received a telegram that King Edward VII just wanted to stop by real quick. The message got there a little late. Carnegie had been in the middle of a nap. When he jumped out of his bed in a panic, he saw that the king's carriage and his entourage were already rolling up the long driveway.

He immediately had a servant alert the organist who was busy swimming in the pool at the time, and he sprinted wet haired to his place to play a rushed version of God Save the King. When his decorum hysterics subsided, Carnegie was told by the king that he was renovating some of his royal properties, and simply wanted to have a look at how the plumbing worked at Skibo Castle.

After a tour of the pipe, the boys sipped port and smoked cigars in Carnegie's study, where the king glimpsed a framed sketch of the Diplodocus Carnegia, to which he said I say, Carnegie, What in the world is this? Bursting with pride, Carnegie explained that this namesake of mine is the hugest quadruped that ever walked the earth. The king was totally enamoured by the illustration and asked if a similar monster skeleton might be given to London's Natural History Museum for display.

At that point, there was only one such specimen on Earth. but the director of Carnegie's Museum offered to create a cast of the bones. A cast he told Carnegie could be used again and again in a de facto factory line of diplodicus carnegia replicas. In this way, it could become a kind of branded product for Carnegie. One that when exported out could elevate his reputation as well as America's reputation all across the world.

Soon, the dinosaur would become widely recognizable by name in Europe and America, known colloquially as Old Dip and eventually Dippy.

As a relatively young nation at the turn of the 20th century, Americans still constantly consumed the cultural artifacts of Europe. Museums were filled with European artists, libraries were full of European books, and even the contents of our natural history museums were bestowed upon us by the very continent we left. But soon Americans would stock their museums with dinosaur skeletons far bigger and far more impressive than those discovered in Europe, and far larger in number as well.

The narrative of these numerous, huge, powerful dinosaurs matched the narrative of the new economic, industrial, and political power that the young nation was flexing on the world stage. Now, Dippy's eventual introduction into England was certainly well received by much of the population, but there was also a strong sense of competition with a scrappy young country.

At the illustrious London unveiling gala of the King's prized dinosaur cast, There was an air of defensiveness in the speech of the British Museum director E. Ray Lancaster. He made sure to mention that English paleontologists had recently found a massive dinosaur that almost matched the size of old Dib. and that Dippy was nothing more than an improved and enlarged form of an English creature.

Without subtlety, he continued. All the great progress that has been made in the American Republic has been founded upon ideas which have germinated, and inventions which have been really conceived in England. The British press also came down hard on the dinosaur skeleton and the American population it represented. They admitted that yes, it was huge and powerful, but also slow and dumb.

It was an aimless, stupid sort of reptile. With an enormous mouth that, even in the bone, is suggestive of an expansive and inane smile. And that it Brain cavity was no bigger than a walnut. They said that they were Sure Mr. Carnegie means well, but that old Dip should have stayed put as America is the proper sphere for such unreasonably developed monsters. In many ways, the creature came to represent the vulgarity of Carnegie's rising nation and its now totally unchecked capitalism.

For both England and America, dinosaurs became a sore spot, symbols of national pride, and they were locked in a battle for prehistoric supremacy. The discovery of dinosaurs and other ancient animals in the United States also meant that the New World was not as new as previously thought. The general belief had been that America was the last nation to surface after the Great Flood.

This was a common diss at the country to demonstrate that everything in Europe was superior, their climate, their land, their animals, and their peoples, because their continent itself was older. But after the fossil discoveries, Americans triumphantly claimed an age even older than Europe's, while at the same time boasting about their fresh young new democracy and innovative economy.

Eventually, Carnegie had casts of Dippy delivered to museums in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, Madrid, and Munich. as well as La Plata and Mexico City, and thus became the most famous dinosaur the world had ever known. Carnegie, for his part, was said that the reason for the dinosaur exports was to create a kind of worldwide cooperation that he believed could lead to an end of all wars and usher in an era of world peace.

Ironic, perhaps, since Carnegie had gotten rich through wartime steel profiteering. But yeah, what's new? More after this.

And now back to the show. The man of wealth, thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren. bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer. Those who would administer wisely For one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity. It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea, and so spent as to encourage the thoughtful, the darkened, the unworthy.

He is the only true reformer. who is careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy. But the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor. Entrusted for a season with a part of the peace wealth of the community, but administering it for the community. For a time, Andrew Carnegie was the wealthiest man in the entire world, but after he retired officially, selling his business for the equivalent of eighteen billion dollars today, He took on the role of philanthropist.

Donating the vast majority of his fortune before he died by building public libraries and what he referred to as his monument. the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, where the original Dippy is still housed today. In the years leading up to his dinosaur discovery, American robber barons had been consolidating industries across the country. Swallowing up smaller family owned businesses and changing everything about the way the United States economy works.

Men like Oil Tycoon, John D. Rockefeller, Railroad Baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, and finance mogul J.P. Morgan essentially owned the nation itself, and certainly all the natural resources it produced. The American dream of economic mobility that had allowed someone like Carnegie to go from the poverty he had been born into in Scotland to the kind of prosperity he had built in the US was disappearing rapidly.

And, as is still true today, the Titans of industry were very worried about unrest among their workers. who were angry over their low wages, long hours, poor working conditions, and the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. This frustration led to a new wave of attempted unionization, to labor revolts, and to the rising popularity of alternative systems like socialism and anarchism. And that was simply out of the question for those at the very top.

Carnegie's relationship to the men he employed and to the working class in general was complicated. He wrote about his respect for the working man and his hope to uplift those at the bottom. But when he was still the owner of his steel company, he bulk when those that did the hard, poorly paid labor that had created his fortune tried to unionize.

In fact, Carnegie presided over one of the worst tragedies in labor movement history. During a strike at one of his steel mills, he put his deputy in charge, who created a private security force. a group of armed men that ended up shooting and killing several of the strikers. He certainly felt shame over this for the remainder of his life, but he still sought to justify the bigger picture of the American economic hierarchy.

Carnegie's favorite philosopher was Herbert Spencer, the man who actually coined the term survival of the fittest. his philosophy came to be known as social Darwinism, and he basically believed that the fittest among the population should see their wealth and power increase exponentially. while the weakest should see their wealth and power decrease.

Obviously, the doctrine wasn't talking about brute biological strength, but rather intelligence and business acumen. Social Darwinism surmised that the unprecedented wealth of these corporate moguls was deserved. It was like a scientific fact.

in his own book, The Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie stated that although Darwin's law of competition might hurt the worker through growing inequality, the contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer was should be a source of pride for the working class. He believed that though this was hard for the individual, it was necessary to accept and welcome the great inequality of the environment.

As well as the concentration of business, as it was essential to the future progress of the race. And that it measured the change which has come with civilization. Bone-Daddy Orenthal Charles Marsh said it this way: the Big Brains won, then as now.

By this time, paleontologists absolutely relied on the funding bestowed on them by the mega-rich. But were also concerned that becoming too intertwined with them could take scientific legitimacy away from their projects, so they demanded total freedom from any strings that might corrupt their research. This actually worked great for the barons of industry. In this way, their donations could be seen instead as a selfless act.

For Carnegie and for other rich industrialists of the time, establishing universities, building art galleries, creating public libraries, and most especially opening natural history museums. was an attempt to hoard social capital, valuable institutions bearing their name that would give them a kind of cultural immortality beyond the riches they acquired in their lifetimes.

In addition, these gifts were a way to ingratiate themselves to a public that kind of hated them, to flamboyantly demonstrate their benevolence to working people. Thanks to these industrial barons, they could now enjoy entertaining, educational, renowned institutions. Most especially the brand new natural history museums with their immensely popular dinosaur displays.

As explained in one of the sources for this episode, Assembling the Dinosaur by Lucas Rappel, an underlying narrative of these philanthropic endeavors was that the extreme wealth of a handful of responsible Americans was actually a good thing. America needed its Uber rich, as they were the ones who could be trusted to do good things for the people with their unimaginable fortunes. And even when it came to dinosaurs, give them awe inspiring wonders that would otherwise be impossible.

Because of these elite. The working class too got to experience the peaks of man's intellectual and cultural achievements, and even got to walk beside the fantastical specter of the great dinosaur. But the positive public profile created by philanthropy was also a convenient sleight of hand to deflect away from the reality of rising wealth inequality and labor exploitation. while also allegedly proving the superiority of hierarchical American capitalism.

and though I love museums and libraries and other public institutions. I'm also going to venture a guess here that better working conditions for laborers and their families might have held a little more value. And though I do think that Carnegie certainly had better intentions than the other wealthy elite. who I cannot imagine would ever give away the vast majority of their money, the idea that public acts of philanthropy could make up for the lack of workers' rights persists into this very day.

In addition to the terrible working conditions industrial workers were experiencing, it also became abundantly clear that this new system of mass capitalism was extremely precarious. with its panics and depressions, its booms and busts, and when times got tough, it was the working class that took the brunt of the financial chaos.

But in another commonly cited dinosaurian deep time metaphor, just as prehistory was a series of evolutionary booms and busts, The challenges brought on by the economic system in America were just following the same natural waves that animals had experienced for millions of years.

At the time it was also believed that as the earth progressed, The dumb, brutish, primitive, cruel reptilian beasts whose struggle for survival gave way to much smarter, less violent, and more, well, humane mammals and early humans. translated into the Gilded Era, the old vicious competition between an infinitude of small solitary local businesses was mercifully evolving into one massive system that was smarter, gentler, and more humane than what came before.

A great cooperation between the classes, led by the refined sensibilities of the kind-hearted elite. Or so the story went. Again, all of this was just science, a continuation of the natural rules bestowed on us by deep time.

When prehistoric animals were discovered in the United States. their skeletons were reanimated with the values of American exceptionalism, capitalism, and colonialism. It was claimed that the fossils of long extinct creatures proved that indigenous peoples were not the first inhabitants of the land. that everything in evolutionary history was just a battle for power where the losers lost and the winners won. And it was America's time to reign.

we absorbed from Mother England the fact that Mary Anning's groundbreaking contributions were buried because she was not the right kind of person who deserved recognition. Neither, to us, did the enslaved people who correctly identified fossils that Europeans believed to be the teeth of biblical giants. and neither did the native peoples who had understood evolution and extinction through their myths for centuries, if not longer. Those scientific theories now belonged to the new Americans.

We learned through the Crystal Palace Park's dinosaur court that prehistoric replicas could become lucrative entertainment for the masses, falling in love with these unbelievable beasts. But in New York City, the art of the Central Park dinosaurs was destroyed on a greedy whim by a corrupt politician. The smoldering hunger to win at all costs, shown by elite fossil hunters Cope and Marsh, mirrored the rise of the vicious industrial economy of the United States.

Proto billionaires sent dinosaurs abroad to prove the superiority of their country. and bought Dinosaur Museum legacies as a way to dodge extinction, to live forever. And to justify the exploitative labor system that made them rich using manipulative prehistoric metaphors. Through the story of dinosaurs in America, we can see how predatory capitalism has long been pressing down on everything we do and everything we love. covering the fossils of our humanity with layers and layers of stone.

But no matter what, dinosaurs belong to the people. The wonder that the prehistoric has given us transcends all the ways the American story corrupted deep time. deep time that is the distant relative of right now. Dinosaurs have given us the gift of a new old world, a past far more ancient than God, far more ancient than capitalism. As if by magic, we can still see the footprints left in stone from millions and millions of years ago.

And though we never walked beside the wonderful, terrible wizards, we have honored in every kind of art. We walk beside them now in all the preciously strange ways that humans try to touch what we can never truly know. Dinosaurs have taught us that maybe there is something right now deep underneath the dirt. That will show us the long-buried truth of who we really are, where we really come from, and how we can make sure that this life continues to find a way. American hysteria.

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or stories that we just know that you'll love. If you subscribe right now, you will have plenty of episodes to listen to. That's patreon.com slash American hysteria or subscribe on Apple Plus. If you want to see some of the visuals from both parts of this series, you can follow us on Instagram at American Hysteria Podcast. If you go to AmericanHysteria.com, you can pick up some of our merch. All of the profits go to the Samir Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group in Gaza.

You could also leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline about a tale that you remember from growing up or one you've heard recently, and we might do an entire investigation about it. American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by me, Chelsea Weber Smith. Our producer and editor is Miranda Zickler. Our associate producer and sound designer is Riley Swadellius Smith. And our voice actor is Will Rogers. And Riley as well for this one.

Thanks as always for listening. And don't let the bastards get your bones.