Whole Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the only podcast I am currently recording. I tried multitasking this and it turns out I can't, and I'm ashamed of myself, but I'm not ashamed to have as my guest catbou Hi. Hey, Margaret, how are you? Kataboo is known from the Internet. That's what I currently have written down because everything is always in transition.
Yeah, I am known from the Internet. I would say that I have a job, but as of today, I don't.
The streamer should appear behind you on zoom every time you say that.
Just like confetti pops out everywhere. But I'm really you know, it's a great time to hear about cool people who did cool stuff?
Well are you in luck? But partly because our producer is Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi.
It's me Sophie.
And our audio engineers Daniel.
Hi, Daniel Hi, Danel Hi, Danel Our.
Theme musical was written forced by unwoman. Okay, so I just finished more than a month, like five weeks of episodes, ten episodes about the fucking Russian Civil War. And don't worry, this has nothing to do with that, because that one ended really tragically, right, the bad people took over in the end of that one.
And.
Doing all that research like kind of fucked me up. It colored my daily interactions, having spent so long immersed in that particular time and place in history, and I wanted a break. I wanted to do something where people win a little bit, uh or at least hold out a little bit longer, because there's always it's always an ebb and a flow between good guys in back. Obviously, we shouldn't paint the world in blacka white morality, but
we do sometimes on this show. And I thought about two things that have come up recently on this show. At one point, well, Robert was a guest. We were talking about how feeding people is generally speaking like just good. Like if you're like, I don't know what else good to do, you could probably just feed people. Although the more you dig into any particular topic you'll find ways people doing it badly but overall good. I like this because you still have no idea what we're going to
be talking about. The Other thing is I usually like match my I usually like look specifically at my guests interests, and then I'm like pick something that vaguely ties into that. I didn't do that this time. I just really wanted to cover this particular topic. I'm like, let's do it. Yeah, I think I think you'll like it. I think it would take a person with no heart, like the Grinch.
Somebody we wouldn't book as a guest on this podcast.
That's true. Yeah, okay. So the other thing that led me to what this topic is about or whatever. The hero of one of our recent episodes was this anarchist military commander woman named Maria Niki Farova. In the middle of this pitched war, She's waiting to go on trial, and she told a bunch of the other anarchists in Russia basically like, Hey, what we should do is set up a system of community gardens and just feed people, and that's how we'll like defeat authoritarian propaganda. And I'm
going to talk about that. I'm not gonna talk about in Russia much. I'm gonna talk about community gardens.
I love that. I'm so excited.
Hell yeah, I'm gonna talk about the hundreds that still exist in New York City today. I'm gonna talk about where they came from and what people have done to defend them. I have to be clear, I have never community gardened. I've only regularly gardened, and not very well. But I'm wondering if this is a thing you experience or not.
Yeah, Like I grew up, my mom has like the greenest thumb, Like she has this cute little herb garden on her balcony right now. She's always been like so big on sustainable stuff and like local produce. Like I don't know how to use a can opener because she insisted on only fresh produce.
So to be fair, apparently all of us use a can opener. Wrong. I saw some video on TikTok and I was.
Like, oh, well, do you remember being dad. I felt so bad for the little girl because I was like, I am, you know, twenty five, and I'm not to use a can opener.
Well, apparently nobody does.
So nobody does except that one person on TikTok.
Yeah, okay, see, but before we started recording, I was telling a story that involved me being technically a hobo and that I was riding a freight train and there's this style of can opener that hoboes have that no one excepts soldiers and hoboes, and how to use called a P thirty eight. It's the size of like two thumbnails like not like icons, but it's like as big as like it's it's the size of the top joint.
Of my okay, and it can open a can like a penny.
Yeah, a penny and a half's how does it work? It hinges out and there's a tiny little blade on it, and then there's a tiny little notch cut into the metal of the handle, which is like an inch and a half long or something like that. And it weighs nothing, it costs nothing. I put them in all the like first aid kits and emergency kits that they give out to people. But then people have no idea how to use it. But you just put it on the can and then slowly move it around and cut it open.
No, that makes sense.
Yeah, so I probably am using the regular ones wrong.
I'd like to use that one. That sounds more fun. Actually, the can openers were all thinking of they look difficult, like there's nothing intuitive about them.
No, two weird spinny discs and then like three things that spin over there and right, do.
You want me to slice a pizza with this?
Like?
What are you?
What are you doing? Yeah?
It does kind of look like a both a pizza cutter and then also the stuff you use to cut fabric when you do a lot of sewing, the full circle cutters, you know, ye, yeah, I wouldn't want to use a P thirty eight to cut fabric.
I'm actually working on a quilt that relates to community gardening.
Wait, really tell me about that.
I saw at the Union Square farmers Market in New York like two weeks ago, there was this really cool graphic. It was like a banner and it was their harvest calendar and I'd like, you know, January and like all the crops that they bring, And I was like, how fun would that be to do that as a quilt. I've never made a quilt, but I think it would be a very fun quilt to have. But like all of the crops that I like and all of the produce that I like, and then embroider like the different
ones on different squares and cool have that. And so that's my long term project.
Awesome, I love it. This is a combination of many of my interests. I haven't started quil and yet I see it like further down the line of where I'm going. At one point, I got really into. When I first started getting really into crafts, my friend was like, just don't end up candle making. But I'm really oppositional. So I started making candles like a month later.
Well, when you no longer have vands to fix, Magpie, you can move on to quilting.
That's true. I started making the candles as soon as I moved out of my van and was living in a barn. And it was great because I could always tell people I may not have been raised in a barn, but I live in one. And then people were like, why did we invite you? You keep making the same joke.
A barn must have smelled amazing, though it did.
I made many candles there and sold them on Etsy. That was my job for a while. By pad weird anyway. Community gardens yay, community gardens. At that barn, I was by far the worst at growing things. I was like, I'm gonna start growing mushrooms because I don't know how to grow things in the ground. I have to do like darkness farming. I didn't do a very good job of that either, but now I have many buckets of potatoes
growing on my porch. So community gardens the first community gardens, I would argue, were gardening before the state and private properties stuck their fucking nose in our business. We've talked about this a ton on our show. The way that communities all over the world fed themselves was through something
that looks a lot like modern community garden. We've talked about, for example, how across Ireland, folks used to use a land occupation system called rundale, in which land was divided so everyone had equal access to both good and bad land, and so everyone had You didn't split the food at the end, You split access to the land to grow the food across the entire town or community. This system
was destroyed by colonization and by early capitalism. Peasants held onto it for centuries throughout those incursions, often which meant that often they would basically have a little bit of land from the landlord, and then they would still all get together and pull it and run dale it out. People fought like hell to defend this system. In Ireland. They formed secret societies where they threw on dresses and killed landlords and shit. I think that was cool, So
I did a whole episode about that. Is this is gonna be a little bit We're gonna start off with like one of those you know when you watch Saved by the Bell and it's the end of the season and they don't feel like making anything new, so they do the clips episodes. Yeah, this is not a clips episode, but I'm going to go but this is a thing that has come up a lot, and so I'm going
to use my own research's context. The most famous of these groups of cross dressing landlord killers defending primitive communism, which is an economic turn. I'm not trying to actually call them primitive. It's some bullshit marks was on, but whatever. The most famous of these groups is called the Molly Maguires if you want to look them up. We also talked about across Europe you had the common field system
or the open field system. This is the commons that if you ever here people talk about the enclosure of the commons. This is what they're talking about. And this wasn't always people who lived super free. Often these communes were people who lived as first serfs who were owned and attached to the property right, and then later as peasants on land that they still didn't owned by a landlord. The origin of that term is very literal in English,
usually this is royalty to the church amongst themselves. They split the land into strips so everyone had access to different shit like you had a and then a lot of the woods and pastures were the commons that no one had any ownership at all over except the landlords who owned it all. But this was famously enclosed in what's called the enclosure of the commons, where fences and hedges and shit were put up so it couldn't be
used for the common good. I more or less trace the origin of capitalism to the enclosure of the commons in England and the resistance that grew up out of it, as the first anti capitalist like resistance movements. Whole ass peasant wars were fought over this stuff, and it is related to the origin of the labor movement as well. Most famously, this enclosure was fought by a group called the Diggers, who were like, yeah, what if we just
illegally plant food anyway? And they're really fun. They actually if you've ever been part of a squatted garden or a community garden and you actually get any food out of the ground, you have succeeded better than the famous Diggers of history because they they got their asses kicked before they pulled this so much as a single potato
out of the ground. You also have various indigenous groups, and specifically the ones that I've covered on this show is how you have in both Siberia and North America you have different groups who are practicing communal agriculture, who inspired a bunch of different later socialists and things like that. I am sure they have been practiced elsewhere around the world. Those are just the ones that have come up in
my own research for this show. I get really like I started writing it out in the script where I was like, look, this is pretty much what humans evolved to do. But I hate writing that because whenever people say that, they're lying or they're like picking some specific version of humans in order to say, like, you know, whenever like people are like, oh, humans just fight and war and that's all humans do, or the opposite where people are like humans just all get along. I don't
like when people do that. I think that humans are capable of doing a lot of different things.
It feel it's kind of like there are multiple things that humans are capable of doing to each other and thinking of weird, maybe that's a bit small. That's small minded, you.
Know, yeah, no I And that's that's it. That is the like. But among all of the different systems of economy and land use and things like that that people have tried, an awful lot of them were not capitalism, and we're something closer to what it's called primitive communism, the idea that people share things without Mars having told
them how to do it to begin with. But it's not community gardening this stuff because I'm going to argue that community gardening is something that exists in opposition to food and land scarcity put upon us by economic and governmental systems. Because when we try to then like get this stuff back, we are creating something that is like more oppositional. Like you didn't have to be in opposition anything to have a Rundale system because no one was
telling you couldn't. I'm going to compare it to squatting, another thing we've covered a lot on this show. Squatting is when people take on used property and then use it regardless of the property owners wishes. Squatting is an affront to the very foundation of capitalist society, in which property rights trump human rights, and that is why squatting is so cool and you can also see like really easily. And we're gonna get into this later with community gardens.
How there's this tension, like squatters in the US are largely presented as people who show up like vermin and destroy things. You know, that is the like, and so it is like cleaning out a homeless encampment is like seen as this like cleaning this like improvement. I'm totally off script. I'm just really angry when I think about that.
After months of listening to Fox talk about this, that's like one of their favorite issues for twenty twenty four is not even like discussing why squatting is happening, but also pretending that it's people coming into your apartment that you rent and staying there and there's now an epidemic.
This is happening all the time. Everyone knows about how you know, people are coming into your apartment and saying that you know they're going to vote for Joe Biden and they're going to make you do it too, And it's like, wow, you're just sick words so you can just say things now, that's that's crazy.
I think that would be called house piracy. I love that and I'm not sure I'm opposed to it. I probably am opposed to it.
I mean, like the way I say it is like you know, Jesse water is his favorite thing, and he's said this not once but twice several years apart, is that if there is a squatter in your house, you should just set the house on fire and burn them alive and then get the insurance money and blame the fire on the squatter.
Oh my god.
And you know my position is, you know, even if you own the place, don't burn people alive, like for any reason.
That's a bold take.
I know, I know I'm really brave for saying that. But second, I don't think this situation it's like, you know, these conservative men that dream about like being able to shoot an intruder, It's just not happening that much.
Sorry.
I've had to hear a lot about squatting through my job that I you know, no, no, don't have to hear about it as much.
It makes sense to me because it's like overall, where squatting is a little bit more legalized and protected, where the like private property rights don't trump the human rights or whatever, squatting often has a very different vibe where like you know, squatting in the Netherlands, like no matter how short a time we were there, there was a lot of pride taken in, like we will improve the spaces that we're in.
You know, correct me if I'm wrong. A lot of times they're like vacant, like it's not going into Yeah, it's not to be an piracy like you said.
Yeah, no it is. I have never in my life, and I spend a lot of time squatting in my younger life. I've never in my life like seen someone try to live in a place that someone already lives. You know, it is absolutely about unused space, and often it is a space where like people don't even know who owns it. Because that's the sweet spot of squatting is you find the thing where like they can't kick you out because no one knows who's supposed to kick you out, because no one knows who building it is.
Because the actual thing that causes urban decay is not squatters, it's real estate prospecting and people leaving properties vacant and then preventing people from making use of the property. I'm
getting ahead of myself. This is what we're going to talk about today, and when we talk about it for housing, people like, no, it's bad, Like squatting's bad when you want to live somewhere, when you want to sleep somewhere, right, when you do it for food and like growing food and gardens and flowers and trees and things, people have a much harder time demonizing you. And plenty of societies, even capitalist societies, have realized that overall squatting is a
social good. We've talked extensively on the show before about squatters in the Netherlands who righte revitalized city centers because squatters kept property owners from leaving places vacant. Because once squatting was legalized, if you left your place empty for a year, someone could move in. And we actually had like we had moments. I think I can tell the story, like at one point the squatters moved in. We people were trying to get into a building that they were
convinced was vacant. They would do a lot of work to try and figure out if spaces were vacant. You do like you'd put like a toothpick in the door, and then you'd come back a week later and see if the toothpick is still in the door, because if it isn't, then it's fallen out because someone's opened the door. And you spent a lot of time in the in
city hall looking at property records and things. At one point, some squatters a long time ago broke into a building and there was like an apartment and there was just like a couple watching TV, and they were like, oh sorry, and then they all ran away. And then the next day a lot of these squatters are like locksmiths and things, right because there's a synchronicity of interests. And so then they showed back up and like we're like, I have no idea why your door's broken. I'm just here to
fix your door. I have no relationship to anyone who has committed a crime. And the squatters like came back and cleaned up their mess, which is still like, look, don't break into people's houses while they're there. I get it, But like if you do, come back the next day and clean up the.
Door, you know this is the future the left wants.
Yeah, exactly. And so the community garden, i would argue, is fundamentally a pro social squatting of vacant land, generally in city centers. It's lineage I would argue has far more to do with the diggers or even the molly maguires than it does like suburban fake homesteading or whatever, which is how it gets spun a lot. Now, at the very end we'll talk about some of them ways in which tech millionaires get to exploit all of this.
But in the US, it is easier for us to imagine that people have a right to grow food on vacant and unimproved land than it is for us to imagine that people have a right to sleep there. So vacant lot gardening is generally smiled upon, while squatting and
homeless encampments are generally frowned upon. I'm actually curious in all of their stuff, watching all this stuff about s squatting, do they ever do a thing where they're like good homeless encampment, bad homeless encampment, or like these people tried to build a garden and so they're good or anything like that.
So that's really interesting that you ask that, because, like, you know, Tucker when he was on the air, he you know, hates homeless people, not as much as Jesse. Jesse was like deep Jesse Waters the most aggressive person on Fox about that, like I could, there's probably over ten hours of just like quotes like that. But like the amount of work that goes into demonizing encampments is like fucking nuts. You would have cameramen go in and
like no one's doing anything. I mean even like not in terms of squatting bl Like even like the you know GW encampment down here in DC, you had like cameramen all over and it's like you know, college kids being like do you need any sunscreen? Like, you know, here's some food if you need it, Take whatever you need. And so that's what they'd that's what they always do.
There's never really any they don't even try to be like in some cases and then like show I don't know, like some white homeless person and then compare it to like, you know, a migrant, right. Yeah, it's the effort that goes into it is honestly astonishing.
They need to do a lot of work to try and convince us to forget our class interests and like side with the billionaires. But you know what is in your class interest is being advertised to buy goods and services.
I've heard the class interests of that.
Yeah, here's dad's and we're back. Hopefully you just press the forward fifteen seconds button until you heard the bumper music again. So many many modern societies have access to land for people and cities as part of their social structure, where people don't even have to squat land in order to grow food. Around Europe, for example, with the UK being the example that I've run across the most, I'm going to focus on it, you've got what's called the
allotments system. It's this little scrap of freedom that's left over from the enclosure of the commons. And it started in eighteen forty five with the General Enclosure Act, which was like, look, we've enclosed almost everything, but here's a little crumb for the pores. I guess. Even then, it wasn't too much of anything until at the end of World War One, when returning soldiers were given allotments and
the laws were solidified to protect the allotment system. And basically what this is is like you're like, if you enter a waiting list and you get chosen by the allotment lottery or whatever, you get to go pay a small amount of rent to a different landlord, but a small amount of rent, and you get access to a community garden, basically a little plot of land that you can grow some vegetables in, which it turns out that
they can do in the UK. So I'm not I always assume that they left their country to invade everywhere because there was no sun there and so they had to invade other places for food. But it turns out you can grow food there, So I'm not sure why they invented colonization.
I mean, I really like how they were like, Wow, this one thing, this potato, so amazing. We're gonna build our entire culture about that and other cultures around that, and then pretend we invented it.
I know.
I it's really fun to imagine Europe before the discovery of like the New World and potatoes and tomatoes.
You know.
I constantly think about like the indigenous like scientists who created all like crossbread, all of these different types of you know, fruits and vegetables and you know shit like that that like we're just claimed and no one ever gives them credit. I mean I saw something a couple of weeks ago that was like you don't see any Michelin star you know, tribal restaurants.
Yeah, and then you're like and I would love to see that, which is interesting correct because they probably mean it as like, oh, there's no indigenous food culture. They probably mean it as like a these people.
So it was like it was an Indo person saying, like, you know, we provided all this food and we have all these cultures and like you know, every food that you love or like, you know, ninety percent of them at least in America, like come from here, and yet you have no idea how they were originally treated.
Yeah you know, Okay, I see. I thought you were doing the like because there's that thing where right wing people are Zionist or whatever, will be like Palestinians never invented anything or whatever, which is another incorrect statement that people can make.
No way, it's nuts.
You haven't seen that one.
No, I've seen that. Oh okay, I'm just shocked that Palestinians are.
People, yeah, and never invented anything actually, which is also how you judge people's access to life. And also it's just wrong on every level. It's like turtles all the way down, but it's wrong anyway.
Yeahstly, No, it's just I love like the amount of assumptions that people have about Palestinians, and I see a lot like, yeah, yeah, they're dirty, blah blah blah. And then someone was like, they can't have blue eyes. But I literally just was like, I I have blue eyes.
Yeah.
There are literally so many.
Yeah, Like they.
Can't invent anything, they don't have blue eyes, they can't look at a Jew without killing them. That's These are all things that we all know about Palestinians.
In the USSR and other Soviet Bloc countries, there was also something comparable in pre Soviet times, like with tzars and shit. Nobles were given datchas, basically little country homes just outside the city with like a cottage and a place to garden, and so in the us ARE you'd think they'd be like, oh, now they've all been communized and everyone gets access to them. No, they went to the new nobles, the Bolshevik party members. They got the dachas.
But in some of them, like every now and then, some of them are given to some regular workers or whatever, but an awful lot of them were left more or less unused, and so squatters in the USSR just started taking them over. And I think this was less like people came out and lived in them, although I think that happened a little bit too, and it was more like people who lived in the city just started coming out and using them and growing vegetables because this was
the only way that you could eat vegetables. Because this one isn't the Bolshevik's fault. World War II was a fuck, and people didn't have any vegetables, and so they were like, we want to not die, so they went out and squatted the dachas. In a pattern we see over and over again, the people rushed to do something, and the government had to rush to keep up once it realized it wasn't able to stop people from doing the thing. By nineteen fifty five, the USSR legalized what people were
already doing. Soon datches were all the rage, and modern Russia apparently has the largest percentage of people who own a summer home of anywhere in the world. The US, of course, doesn't like giving people things for free, unless, of course, you're a rich farmer or another capitalist who's entitled to privatize public property. So we tend not to have a system by which city dwellers can access land to grow food, So people tend to do it anyway.
Community gardens EBB and flow. War or recession will drive everyone to organize them. Then basically waves of gentrification will shut them down. And I'm going to run through their history in the US. This took a different turn than I expected it to, not like a wild turn, but like there's a politician who's a Republican who I like. Now I know that republican meant the opposite thing in the nineteen hundreds, eighteen hundreds, whatever, nineteenth century. I still was kind of surprised by this.
Sophia, have you read the script? Like do you know what's happening?
Okay?
Because I was like, I think it'd be fun to have, you know, establish our thoughts on community gardens ahead of time. But I'm the only one that's out of it, out of the loop, and I don't want to sound dumb when my assumptions are wrong.
Well, what's your something now? And you could do it?
I mean, I just I'm really interested to see like where this started and now this started. And I think personally, like I've heard the argument that like, you know, gentrified community gardens are like a bad thing and you know, none of us. But also I think that having access to produce in anywhere is a good thing, and so I'm really interested for that notion specifically to see if that will be a thing that I am wrong about, which I am about many things.
I think that overall we're going to talk about a little bit later about how but gentrification is the death of community gardens over and over again, and in some ways they are creating their own death right because they improve an area and then people want to move in and live there. But they are not started by gentrifying forces. Again and again, they are started by people who want decent standards of living, who want to beautify the areas
that they live in. And it is complicated, but that the thing that gentrifies the neighborhood is not people wanting to grow food. It is the landlords who come up and buy property and raise rents.
See.
I was thinking of like after the fact, like especially during COVID, where it was kind of trendy to like start apply or like grow a bunch of herbs. And then like I know so many buildings in like DC where like here's some dirt, everyone can be a part of it. And then everyone was like doing Instagram picture and planting and stuff like that, and then everyone just kind of forgot and there were a bunch of like
un harvested crops. But at the same time, some people came in and just took even if they weren't theirs, and net good, I guess. But now it's just concept dirt.
Yeah.
No, it's it's this thing where like some of the stuff that rich people like is like nice stuff that we should all get to have, you know. So I'm going to start this story in Detroit. There's a city. It's called Detroit. It's in Michigan. It's most famous for being pretty abandoned.
It's most famous for being the homeland of my parents.
Oh well that too.
It's up for were you born in Detroit?
No?
Born in la Oh yeah, like an American superstar story. One of the few people actually born and raised in Los Angeles.
Yeah, so my parents are from the d.
It is the city that is most interesting to me too. In North America or in the US.
It's really cool now.
The only one I know it is like when I was Ye, I've been to all fifty of the states. No, sorry, I haven't been to all forty of the forty eight of the lower States, And I've been to every city that interests me back when I was like a full time traveler except Detroit.
Have you never been to Michigan? Where'd you go?
Yeah? Yeah? I spent a month living in the bushes outside of college and Lansing, Michigan, while waiting for my friend to get out of jail and trying to organize with activisty people to go to some demonstrations in DC.
And then I left to go hop freight trains to get to the West coast, got my heartbroken and turned around and drove to DC and then got mass arrested the IMF demonstrations in two thousand and two or three, So I spent I spent a while in Lansing, and then I have like memories of getting yelled at by cops in Battle Creek, Michigan, appropriately named I know.
I love how everything you say it's like a person's entire lifetime, but it's like a new one every time you open your mouth, and it's aletely different person that's had like a completely different path. Yeah, but they're all you. Margaret.
Margaret's every character in a TV show.
It's amazing. She is fifty pulp novels in one person.
Thanks. I think yeah, yeah, no, I I yeah, I have enjoyed my life and I am glad to.
Continue to a're you gonna tell me something good or about it happened in Michigan.
Good, this is a good story about Detroit.
We love that.
So Detroit was founded by French colonists in seventeen oh one on hodnah Land, sometimes called the Iroquois Federation.
I'll tell you something good starts off bad, She's like, yeah.
The ended up being a major inspiration for Western democratic practices and also heavily influenced a bunch of communists thought. But Detroit started off as a fort actually to drive out the British colonists. The Americans eventually stole it or conquered it or whatever, and it became one of the more important Western cities. It was the Paris of the West for a little while. This is even before the
auto industry kicks in. Later, the auto industry is going to make it this huge thing, and it's going to be one of the biggest industrial centers in the country. But we're going to start this garden story before it.
Very excited to go see my relatives who are still met, going to go, you know, Detroit used to be the Paris of the West. You know, yeah, it still is, baby, and then they'll be like, oh geez, yeah, and then they offer you.
Yogurt and jello. I don't know anything about Midwest culture anymore, especially because also Destroit it's like different from the rest of Midwest culture. There's food cheese that's Wisconsin. Okay. So the eighteen seventies and the eighteen eighties were like the Gilded Age in America, which is important for people to wrap their heads around because we're basically in another one
right now. The Gilded Age was when you had a booming economy that only helps the rich and you've got big materialistic and also, okay, to be fair, the eighteen seventies also helped some of the middle class workers. It kind of created the American middle class. And you've got big materialistic excesses. People are like run around and they're I was gonna say Rolls Royces, but we're fifty years too early for that. It's a time of political corruption
and rich assholes. Basically, it's the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Period. Westward expansion and immigration are fueling the whole thing, with like access to land and then also access to cheap labor, exploitable labor. People start getting mad about that and they start doing stuff about it, and we've covered that a lot on this show. By
the eighteen nineties, a bunch of things are happening. First of all, the labor movement is kicking some ass, and both major parties are now seen as pretty boring and conservative. Totally no reflection to the modern era is happening right now. And so you've got what's called the People's Party or sometimes it's called the Populist Party, and it was formed in eighteen ninety two. These are the populists. They wanted
some basic progressive shit. They wanted workers' rights to collective bargaining, they wanted federal regulation of capitalism. They wanted a shorter work week. They also wanted something I didn't realize we didn't already have back then. Did you know that until nineteen thirteen, people who lived in a state didn't vote in their senators in DC. Were they like appointed, They were elected by the state legislature instead. Oh, so it's like how Donald Trump tried to overthrow the election.
Yeah, kind of probably because it's like you have like this, they can technically just ignore everything in a point whoever.
Yeah, yeah, And so that's how those state senators were decided. And the Populist Party was like, we don't like that. We prefer democracy. And it wasn't until the Seventeenth Amendment in nineteen thirty that people started voting for their senators. The Populist Party did not win any major elections, but they were popular enough. Get it, They're popular because they're populists. Thank you, I appreciate it. Forced the Republican Party, which was the vaguely left of the two parties at the time,
the modern the equivalent of the modern Democrats. It forced them to shift further to the left in order to keep up because the Populist Party was doing really well and they were like, fuck, we want some of that good old fashioned votes. One of these progressive Republicans was a man named Hazen Pingree, and he was the mayor of Detroit. Later he becomes Michigan's mayor. I thought I was gonna hate him. When you read a like one, I just hate politicians. I'm an asshole and an anarchist.
When you read like a one sentence version of the history of community gardens they were like, and then they were invented by this Republican named Hazen Pingree, who was the mayor of Detroit. And I'm like, the fuck he did. He probably just was mayor while some other people did some shit, because that's almost always how it goes. This
guy seems legit until I find other evidence. He was a businessman whose political life was spent trying to stop monopolies and increase public ownership of utilities and railroads and shit. He was also self made. He grew up a worker, like he started at fourteen in a cotton factory, I think in Maine, and he worked for years as a cutter in the shoe factory. Then when the Civil War broke out, he fought on the front lines of the Civil War. He got captured, taken prisoner by the Confederates,
so he broke out. And how to be clear, when I imagined me being like, I'm a good noble fighting against slavery. Once I've broken out of prison, I could kind of see myself being like, I have done my work here, I'm going to go home.
No.
He he broke out of prison, rejoined his redgment, and fought in even more battles. He then started a shoe business. He moved to Detroit because heard it was a good place to go booming. And he starts just as like a shoe guy and a factory. And then the shoe guy factory that was like shoe guy guy, Yeah, it goes out of business, and so him and his friend pull up their money and buy the machinery and start their own shoe business and it becomes the second biggest
shoe business in the country. He becomes the mayor. He takes the city from the right leaning Democrats, and he gets into fights with all the other businessmen, including all of the other Republicans, because he wants to keep street car fares accessible in shit and like forces like fair hikes to not go up.
Is this eighteen seventies, Jesse Ventura.
I know more about eighteen nineties. Is we're in the eighteen nineties now.
But ohey, no, no, it's okay.
I know more about the eighteen nineties in the modern era.
You're spot on, kat you thank you.
Here we go. Yeah, I'm here to translate.
I'm here to translate.
No, I appreciate it. No, I live in history books right now. This is the very end of my life where I know only the things that happened hundred years so.
The parallels are like incredible.
One of my favorite.
Things to do is to tell both you and Sarah Marshall things that are happening in real time, because both of your historians, and then I get to tell you things and then you're like whow and sometimes you have the exact same reaction, and it's beautiful. It's very beautiful to me.
Hell yeah. And so he fought corruption, He fought his own political party. He wrote a book in eighteen ninety five about how people suffer under monopoly and corruption. And now, like, the one thing he's not a radical, right his book about like people suffering is like, but don't go and do anything violent or destructive. That's bad and it makes
us look bad. Right, But he took his His eighteen ninety five book is dedicated to the people of Detroit, and the dedication is like handwritten on a photo of a potato or like an it's a weird image.
That's how we should do every dedication.
Now I agree, Otherwise you got one upped by a Republican in eighteen ninety five. Is that really what you want to go down being remembered as he tried to unify urban workers and farmers. His book had like political cartoons showing them in the same boat rowing against monopoly. If there is a nineteenth century rich asshole politician who I don't hate, it's this guy Pingree. When he dies at sixty, the Detroit News wrote about him. Other men had opinions, He had convictions.
That's a good way to be remembered.
Holy shit, right. He was in charge of Detroit when the Panic of eighteen ninety three hit. It is never a good time to live through a year that is remembered as the Panic of Basically, this was yet again a great depression. Before the Great Depression, a bunch of complicated economic stuff happened where the rich assholes created a bubble, and then the bubble burst. People ran on the banks. Five hundred banks closed. Michigan had a forty three percent
unemployment rate at this time. Everyone is starving and out of work, and they wanted to grow their own food, and they wanted potatoes. The sponsor of today's show the concept of the potato.
Oh we're back, baby, I love this.
If any other ads sneak in, they are a mistake.
Hahaha.
Potatoes for everyone unless you're allergic than I'm so sorry.
Yeah, no, can you potatoes?
You can. And it's one of the common things on like a like an hour and like a food HOLLURGI just test someone try and you know, take this with a grit salt. But one time I tested positive for a potato allergy and I was like, I'm irish as fuck and no I'm not, and then they like readid it three times? And I was like total, told you, I.
Mean, look at your face. Com on, I know.
You're absolutely correct, like really really.
Like I don't know how to describe Sophie's face except like irish yeaeah, not allergic to potatoes.
Not allergic potatoes, and we're back.
People wanted their potatoes, and Pingree wanted to give them potatoes, or rather, he wanted to help them grow their own potatoes because he's a potato guy. Panic kits and he starts I love an alliteration. Ping Gree's potato patch plan.
That's a whimsical.
I know. Four hundred and thirty three acres of vacant city land were set aside for people to grow food as part of funding it. He sold his favorite horse, and.
We know the horses name.
I don't. I don't. I read a fair amount about this man, but not as much as there could be known about him. I think I saw a photo of it, though, but he was like, I mean, he's still a politician, right, so he's like posing. I saw a lot of photos of him like posing with Like here I am at the plow and he's like pushing the plow. That's following ping Grea's Potato patch plan or whatever. I would totally watch a movie about this man. And there's not a
lot of elected officials. I always say that about instructions for gardening were printed up in three languages my guess is English, Polish, and German. Based on the immigrant makeup of the city at the time. People were given lots seeds and tools and basically helped to feed themselves. This which was called Pingrea's Potato patch Plan, but it was also called the Detroit Plan by people who hate fun
a sorry, yeah, thank you. It's spread around the country. Boston, San Francisco, and Philly started similar pro probably more places than that, but those are the ones that I found specifically named. The depression was over by the turn of the twentieth century, and for the most part, the gardens stopped. It's kind of like what you're saying about the COVID gardens. Everyone ran out and COVID gardened, and then they were like, just kidding, I can go to the store. Fuck that,
you know, fuck my tomato plant. Philly's Vacant Lots Cultivation Association the fun named PVLCA. It kept going until the nineteen twenties. At the turn of the twentieth century, social reformers started pushing for school gardens, especially in schools for working class and immigrant kids. A social reformer named Fanny Parsons was a big part of this in New York City. And so these are the first New York City gardens that I read about. I'm sure there was more, but
you know, whatever the ones I read about. She worked with the National Plant, Flower and Fruit Guild, which I hope was Venture Brothers themed, and they all were just weird villains dressed as tomatoes. In nineteen oh two, she founded the Children's School Farm in Hell's Kitchen in New York. They converted a trashed lot into four hundred and fifty plots that three thousand different kids ended up like using in proper social reformer style. It was all very like,
I'm not doing this so kids have food. I'm doing it so kids can be good and regimented and disciplined, because like in the country kids are naturally good, and the cities they're like sketchy and bad because they'd not in touch with nature or whatever.
We all know that this is true. It's like real America, real children. They're fake children in the same.
Yeah, exactly. And she wanted to help the fake children become real children like Pinocchio.
Oh, Pinocchio.
Yeah. She said that she didn't do it so kids could grow some veggies, but instead that the garden could be quote used as a means to show how willing and anxious children are to work, and to teach them in their work some necessary civic virtues, private care of public, proper economy, honesty, application, concentration, self government, civic pride, justice, the dignity of labor, and the love of nature. By opening to their minds, the little we know of her
mysteries more wonderful than any fairy tale. So the kids long for work. I like, don't hate everything in that, but it's just so fucking Protestant.
My god, it's the most Protestant thing I've ever heard.
Yeah, the dignity of labor. This idea spread and by nineteen oh six there were seven five hundred school farms across the country. Hers lasted until nineteen thirty one. US interesting gardening kept on the up and up for the
next several decades. First, because of World War One, Europe was for some weird reason not exporting much food, and by the time the US got involved in nineteen seventeen, there was a campaign to recruit soldiers of the soil and planned liberty gardens, which were also called patriotic gardens and war gardens. Victory gardens comes later World War Two.
I immediately when he said soldiers of the soil, I went earthworms.
When you said soldiers of the soil, I thought it was like a Nazi group. For like a second, because my brain is just soup and I like Sophie's way better.
I was like, either way, worms, you know, I would I would love.
Don't insult earthworms like that.
Holy shit.
Sorry, I like earthworms as the real soldiers of the soil, and they will eventually eat all of the dead Nazis. So this is true, they're anti fascist. Three point five million gardens produced three hundred and fifty million pounds of crops during World War One. After the war, black folks kept the garden movement going as a way to beautify parts of the city that the government was neglecting because of racism. And I want to find out more about this part of history, but I wasn't able to yet,
and I'm annoyed. Then you've got another big old oppression, the the Great one. I think that each time. It's like when World War one hit comes, they didn't call it World War One, it was the Great War, and then World War two is like, yeah, fuck you.
It's like one of my favorite like historical sketch bits is like people in World War One say in world War one, and then I wait, what do you mean, Like I never get sick of that joke.
Yeah, no, I mean too honestly. So then you have a big old depression. And these subsistence gardens, which were called thrift gardens, were created in partnership between local governments and community organizations. And the thrift gardens were like a highly planned for efficiency and maximum yield. There's all these like charts that they would hand out about like exactly, plant three of this at such and such date and whatever. World War two, you've got victory gardens. And actually, at
first the US government didn't want to do it. They were like, no, we're going to centralize all food production and highly regimen it. Fuck all this decentralization shit. This is like the period of you know, how how efficient can we fucking be? And then they realized that the like I'm doing my part vibe was really good for the overall morale of the country during a time in which Americans were being drafted to go die overseas. To be clear, one of the only good things that US
has ever done, despite the Nazis. But I see why it was. They had to work to make it popular. Eighteen to twenty million families with victory gardens produced forty percent of the US vegetables in nineteen forty four. Wow,
I know, but hear me out. I love vegetables. But the thing that's worth understanding about all these gardens, Americans don't get their caloric needs from gardens, and we get our caloric needs from grain or for the meat eaters, grain that's fed to livestock and an environmentally expensive and inefficient transfer. I remember once I asked a friend of mine who's environmental land use engineer who specializes in the embedded goological impact of various methods of feeding populations. I
asked her story to write. This is like post apocalypse books. Post apocalypse books at New York City is a long time ago. I was like, how much land for gardens would you need to feed all of New York City? And she gave me an answer with like spreadsheets and shit, and the answer was if you gardened basically every rooftop and then turned the entire bronx into fields of grain, and then expanded it north of the bronx, you might
have a chance. Look, I love urban gardening and vertical farming and all that shit as much as the next weird eco person. It is not how people feed themselves currently, and we would have to change the American diet dramatically to accommodate a different way of living. So Victory Gardens produced forty percent of yous vegetables in nineteen forty four. That is not forty percent of the food needs. It
is way way less than that. Still cool, it's still impressive thing for people to do, and diet variety is good and I am very pro garden. There's this whole thing where people are like, oh, I'm just going to homestead and then I'll meet all of my needs in my homestead. And it's just like, honey, that is not I hate. I hate the like how humans evolved is not how humans involved. We we like complex societies. They don't have to be centralized. They can be weird as shit,
they can be all kinds of different things. But we like aren't going to homestead or a way out of any particular problem.
And I mean, like it's you know, it's just there are a lot of things that people don't want to give up, or if they do, they pretend that they I'm thinking of a lot of like these fucking Republicans that or conservatives that act like they live off the land and it's their wife doing all the work and then actually they're buying all their mrs online.
Yeah, totally no it. And then like, eating meat is a ridiculously complicated endeavor in the United States. If you like hunt, it's a completely different thing. But we cannot sustain anything anywhere close to the population that we have through hunting. But yeah, no, it one day, Oh, I do a podcast about good people. I was like, one day, I'll do a whole thing about how and agriculture is
a trap. But on the other hand, one of the things that I would have to give up if I wanted to homesteads, I probably have to give a veganism. Like if I wanted to meet all my caloric needs where I live, I would be keeping chickens and eating their eggs, you know, and like because whatever, okay, anyway, in Britain, now I'm gonna have a whole bunch of omnivores and vegans mad at me, and I'm really excited about that.
So weird, reality is more complicated than you would think.
Who I know who. I always wanted to get a little pin that said I don't care your opinions about veganism, and it was like just as much to the v
bigans as the non vegans. I was like, no, I just don't want to So anyhow, in Britain they had dig for Victory, which is a very It's the British way of saying victory gardens and I like it, in which people use the allotment system to grow one point three million tons of food which is even more tons there than it is here because their tons has more letters in it and is bigger.
Wait how much bigger are their tons?
American ton I think is two thousand pounds and a British ton is like twenty two It's like twenty two hundred something pounds.
Look, I know I need like metric is obviously more efficient, but like, come on.
British ton is forty pounds.
Yeah.
Cool.
After the war, all the middle class white people were like, man, fuck gardening anyhow, and they all moved to the suburbs and started growing the truly decentralized crop that defines America. The manicured lawn and commune gardening. Seem to have disappeared for a while, but it will come back and be even cooler on Wednesday or in the nineteen seventies, one or the other.
Yay.
But before we go to break, do you have anything that you want to tell people about you and the things that you do and where people can see like your YouTube video? Well, I guess people YouTube would be the place to see YouTube videos, but you any clucks?
Yeah, I have a YouTube channel and a TikTok account. They're both kat and a boo. I have all the other social accounts because there are way too many now you can just look me up my link trees on all of them. I do long form videos and short form about conservative media. I was recently laid off, so I'm working on getting my resources together to be able to continue that. Yeah, and follow me and stay in the loop.
And not just you, but a bunch of your colleagues will also let go from recently. Is there a way that people can see how to support them? Is there anything that you can direct people to.
Yeah, So a bunch of my other media matters colleagues were laid off today as well. I have a running thread that's continually updated, especially if there are any more layoffs on Twitter or x. It's unfortunate that we have to use that, but you know, that's where a lot of job offers will be. If we come up with a fund or anything, I will absolutely advertise that on there.
Awesome, awesome, All right, Well, we will see you all Wednesday when we talk more about community gardens and people are going to start stealing stuff from the government. But it's good, well, it's usually a good way unless it's whatever. Wait till Wednesday. I'll tell you about it.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. More podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.