Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the podcast that you already listened to this week. Otherwise it won't make any sense because this is part two. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest, much like my guest in part one, very similar person actually to my guest in part one is Caitlyn Durante.
Hi, Kaitlin, No, I'm Datelin Karante. Ah, similar but different.
Okay, we'll have to go over all of it again. Let me just scroll back up script.
I'm so confused.
Already, just kidding.
It's me, Caitlin.
Did you get did you get goofed? Did I goof you? I was goofed? Yeah, well call me goofy because I ride with the skateboard with the wrong foot in front, because I know about skateboards and Allie's I swear I'm a real punk art producer. Is Sophie Hi, Sophie Hi?
Someone just say me this video of h Hairs and two Balls talking about tacos and I'm not using spices and I can't focus on anything else.
She's like, what do you what do you put in your your taco? And he's like nothing, Wait, who's the who's the heat in this sentence, that is her running mate Tim Walls.
Oh, not tracks.
She's like, you don't season it, and he's like.
No, I'm from the Midwest.
I mean I could have absolutely guessed that.
She said, do you put any flavor in?
He goes, oh, no, he doesn't do his own cooking. I just think that's.
Really funny that he's like, no, It's like it's a shell with unseasoned meat and some cheese, probably the pre shredded kind. I support everyone.
Well, also supported but unknown about what spices they used is Rory, our audio engineer, Hi, Rory, Hi, Riri Hi. And our theme musical was written for us by un woman. And this is part two in a two parter on Francis Perkins, the progressive person who Madam, Oh, I don't know how to talk. I'll just go back to my script, the thing with the reading and the story I'm telling.
Where we last left our hero. She had become the Secretary of the Department of Labor, the first Madam secretary, and she desegregated the Department of Labor, which was shocking that that was a thing that had to be done. And she created the ins which is a thing that is shocking that it made the world better instead of worse, because usually when I think of the I s, I don't have positive connotations. Although now that ice is around,
the ions looks rosy in comparison. But Franklin Desmond, I don't know his middle name, Roosevelt.
Took office or Eleanor Roosevelt.
Right, just named himself after his wife over a D in front of it. Yeah, excellent. There's a joke about the fact that Eleanor Roosevelt was a lesbian in there, but I'll leave it to the audience because he was one. I'm not trying to make a anyway, or at least was queer. FDR took office only about a month after Hitler came to power in Germany. Both happened in early
nineteen thirty three. The biggest issue for most Americans was, of course, the Great Depression, but folks were looking at Germany and a lot of folks were really nervous because Germany wasn't looking so great. Well, some people were very excited because they were fascists also, Yes, but was it you I had on a guest when I talked about Hollywood and the Nazis.
Yeah, yeah, yes, definitely me. It was me.
It's been a while. The podcast has been running for years.
Whenever any of us like, do the amount of podcasts we do, it's like, sure, I maybe I was there.
I remember every way.
Yeah, I remember the type set people who put the people, the letters in the things.
The printers. You were here for hobo printers. Yeah, that was a good episode.
That was a great episode.
Yeah.
I've been on not a brag or anything, but I've been on this show maybe four maybe this is my fifth time.
I don't wow, five timer club. Do you get a do you get a pull blaser? Yeah?
Where's my jacket?
We're going to send you a sword?
Oh well, I would prefer what are they called? What is it a flail?
Yeah? I do have one of those on my wall, but that rocks. My friends were like, actually I won't I'm not going to name them, but two of my friends who've been on this show before found a flame, like a cast bronze flail at a thrift store or something, or an antique store, and we're like, m hmmm, how did Margaret's flail get here? So they got it and brought it to me because they knew it was mine. That's awesome, But the main purpose of that is hitting Nazis,
and don't worry. So Nazis are going to die in this story. And FDR was a Democrat, and the Democrats had not done their full one point eighty were the center left instead of the center right party. Thing yet right, they're not the most progressive party yet, although they're well on their way. And so a ton of his cabinet, because he's trying to hold onto the old Dixiecrat crowd, a ton of his cabinet are like the children of Confederate soldiers and like believers in the Lost Cause and
all kinds of right wing, bigoted bullshit. And America was not exactly devoid of anti Semitism. So there are these immigration quotas per country, like we talked about, but from nineteen thirty three to nineteen thirty the German quota was never filled because it was up to the US consult in any given country to decide who to grant emigration visas to. And in nineteen seventeen, the law had given
the consuls incredibly broadly way to declare someone unfit. If you're going to be a public charge, you can't come and for some weird reason, all of the Jews were bankrupt in Germany. The weird reason is that the Nazis took all their stuff and they had to declare bankruptcy.
Yes.
Yes, so even like ostensibly middle class Jews, right, were no longer middle class and could not prove that they wouldn't be public charges in a successful way. Right. So the consul in Germany is denying Jews the chance to emigrate to the US, determining that they're unfit, and Perkins
is furious. She basically starts a turf war with the State Department over who had it control of immigration, because ostensibly she had the I ins, but the State Department was like controlling all this other stuff, right m And the State Department was all about restrictionism, which means don't let anyone come here, and the labor department is now all about accepting refugees. Sort of. It's a mess. And the first week she's in office or office isn't, I
don't know whatever. First week she's at work, five different men told her that they were in charge of immigration.
Oh okay, so that's like in office space when he has eight different bosses and they're all on his case about TPS reports.
Where he should just burn down the building to get a stapler back.
M hmm.
I know.
Her first plan to get Jewish immigrants in from Germany was to set up a series of charge bonds. And so this is that people don't become public charges. There was a loophole in the nineteen twenty four law that anyone who's you know, it bans anyone who's at risk of becoming a public charge, but it allows the labor secretary to offer that potential immigrants could offer bonds that covered in case they needed assistance. And again they put this in assuming that the labor secretary would always be
right wing, so it wasn't be a problem. And so that like rich people could get in if they can come up with five hundred dollars from this or that source, which is about twelve thousand dollars today, this would be deposited as like assurance against them needing further assistance. And this isn't great, right, we should just let people in so that they don't get murdered. And you know it's okay, My taxes can go to pay for people's not starving to death. My taxes go to a lot worse stuff
than that. You know, tell me about it, but it's something, right. Setting up this charge bond system is something, and it starts immediately getting more people over and a Jewish employee the Labor Department wrote the legal argument for this, and the State Department pushed back with a loophole of its own and saying that she was like threatening national security because if anything threaten national security, then be overridden by
the State Department. Blah blah, blah, blah blah. Another group that fought against these charge bonds and Jewish immigration from Germany was the repeated villain of this pod, the American Federation of Labor the AFL, And it was actually fear of pissing off the AFL because they were an essential ally to this, like because they're pushing for the new Deal, right,
and so they need labor on their side. The bond system gets put into place, but it's not really used because they're afraid of pissing off not just the AFL, but like all the people who are really mad about this,
and so some people are starting to get rescued. Even some Jewish Americans are scared of letting Jewish immigrants in this is not overall the case, but there's this massive unemployment problem, and some folks are like, oh, if more Jewish immigrants come in, there's going to be more anti Semitism here, which is probably true, just not a good reason to not let people in.
Right.
Overall, the arge bond thing was like sort of a success, more folks started being able to come over. This isn't enough for her because it isn't solving the problem, and she is dedicated to social justice, not making sure she looks good. She's not virtue signaling, you know.
Right, So her goal is anyone who is a refugee or just wants to immigrate to the US should be able to Is that her stance?
I am uncertain if she's entirely open door policy, I am uncertain. I get the impression that she probably like wants refugees to be able to come here, and like probably wants the overall quota, like probably doesn't like the quota system. But like, you know, I think she's still not totally open door, but I'm not certain. Actually I don't have any like specific counter evidence that says she
isn't totally open door. Sure, but I feel like it would have come up specifically as like one of the many things that people yelled at her about.
Right, that's true.
So her next plan is she's like, all right, can we at least fucking let German Jewish kids in? Can, like, they can't steal your jobs? Can we just fucking let kids in? Probably she'd said this without the cussing, because she was devoutly Christian. She formed the Children's Bureau of the Ins and partnered with a group called the German Jewish Children's Aid. The situation in Germany was continuing to
get worse. Of course, Jewish parents suddenly didn't have jobs and they couldn't provide for their kids, and basically they were like, well, we all need to get out, but if I can get my kids out, that's something. And you know, they're like, all these Jewish groups are like, well, the US is too xenophobic to take us, but maybe it'll take our kids as a temporary measure. You know, the kids will come home once it's danger is passed, right,
because no one knows exactly what's going to happen in Germany. Sure, and unfortunately this means that all these kids that get fostered through this program, most of them never see their parents again. But Perkins had to go to war with the State Department yet again to get this to happen. But she succeeded, not anywhere near to the degree that she wanted, right, Like, she manages to get an agreement that ten kids a month can come over.
That's so few, but I know, better than nothing but a pitiful number.
That's the thing that I found so fascinating about this because when I first started reading this and thinking about her as a potential topic, she has like access to the you know, she's one of the people running the federal government of the United States, right, so you sort of expect her to be saving like tens of thousands of people's lives, right, right, But in the end, almost everyone who is saving people from the Holocaust is doing it on like an individual level, like at scale, by
continuing to do it over and over and over again. But people are saving like a bus load of people or a train car's worth of people, or ten people here or two people there, you know, and it all adds up. It didn't add but enough, right obviously, because the Holocaust happens. But that was what was so fascinating, is that, Yeah, it's like so few, but like, you know it's something right now?
Is this the case of that five hundred dollars?
No thing?
So it's okay, So they didn't have to provide any kind of like security deposit kind of thing.
So what they're doing instead is that they're placing them with foster families, and the foster families are agreeing to
make sure that the kids don't become public charges. And so there's this huge bureaucracy in order to get I'm pretty sure she would have been okay with like, can we just please bring these kids over and we'll figure it out, But in order to get anyone to go along with it, they have like this whole bureaucracy going around and like inspecting the foster families and like making sure I mean, and you do want to place kids with like safe homes, right, But yeah, five hundred and
ninety seven kids from nineteen thirty four to nineteen forty one, like ten kids or so are coming over a month until the US enters the war, and they're placed with I believe Jewish families. I know the only examples I saw were with Jewish families. So it's also not a like we're going to turn them all Christian or whatever,
you know. And this program was overseen by a working class Jewish woman who is raised by immigrants herself in Saint Louis, And they had to like beg for permission to fundraise to make sure the kids wouldn't become public charges, not beg for the funds. Those were reasonably easy to get, right, Like, people came forward to save kids, you know.
Yeah, a lot of gofundmes back then.
Yeah, it's kind of a depressing, like nothing ever changes when we think about like how much people are specifically fundraising to get families out of Palestine right now?
Yeah, well right when you were saying it's only like ten people a month, I'm like, yeah, like happening on a like pretty individual basis. It reminded me of like how individual families have set up gofundmes to you know, flee from the genocide. But yeah, it's it's really yeah, history repeats itself, doesn't.
It in real nasty ways, and like and the fact that so much of that fundraisiness specifically to cover like visa fees and things, right or should just be which.
Is like can you just I don't know considering their circumstances not have that. Yeah, just like yeah, just say decide, oh, to save these people from death, yeah and genocide, let's waive the fees. Like what is no? I absolutely so depressing.
Yeah, and that's that. I don't know. It really stuck with me as I was reading this as thinking about yeah exactly, that about how individuals and and they had to keep this entire project out of the public eye because they're afraid of stirring a anti Semitic backlash because this like army of children, you know, coming over to grow up and eventually steal American jobs. Like like, I don't want to work. No one wants to worry. Everyone just wants enough money to get But I mean, I, okay,
that's not sure. I liked making stuff. I like being part of a thing that I care about, but.
Like, yeah, I don't know, but I don't like doing labor.
No.
I want my swimming pool for free.
Yeah, exactly. And that's why this podcast is brought to you by by Margaret and Caitlin swimming Pools dot com. We don't live in the same place, so we're going to need more than one. Sophie, do you want in on.
This it might be salt water.
Yeah, it's by regular swimming pools for Margaret and Kaitla. Well, Kaitlin, what kind of swiming pool you want?
I need to give it some thought because I was like, well, yeah, it would just be like there's just that one kind of swimming pool. And then you said saltwater and I didn't even really know that was a thing. No, I didn't either, So I have to do some research. Yeah, are they like better? Are they more sustainable?
I was like allergic to chlorine as a kid, and so I always wanted a saltwater pool. I mean I grew out of the allergy, but as a kid, I like could go into pools at like birthday parties.
Well, I mean you are like just submerging your body into harsh chemicals. Yeah, so makes sense. Yeah, salt water, salt water, that's that's the ocean. The ocean is made of that, that's that's natural.
Okay, saltwater baths are around.
Actually, can you just buy each of us in ocean? Thank you?
Yeah? Yes, please Okay, And then that is our sponsor is the Fund for Buying oceans and or pools For Sophie Caitlin and Margaret, and if you hear any other ads there mistakes and please take it up with management. Here they go and we're back. So a year after they started this whole plan, on November ninth, nineteen thirty four, the first nine Jewish kids made it to New York. They got off the USS New York into New York.
The kids kept up correspondence with their families for about a decade, and then one by one the families were murdered by the Nazis, and the temporary fostering was soon permanent, and many of the kids were adopted into their new families. And then we're going to talk about the pogrammi is pogram of them all, Crystal Knocked, and how it changed immigration and how it should have changed it way more.
There have been all kinds of programs in Nazi Germany between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty eight, But the night of November ninth, nineteen thirty eight, the Nazis through like the mother of all programs, Crystal Knocked, the Night of Broken Glass, the Essay and the SS through like the two pair of military groups of the Nazis alongside the Hitler Youth, which is the third paramilitary group, but of kids alongside enthusiastic German citizens went around and killed
people and rape people and did all kinds of that shit and smashed everything up. And this particular riot I had never heard about what it was. In response to you never heard about the Herschel Greenspan, the Jewish kid who killed a Nazi. No, yes, I'm gonna tell you about him. Sovie has heard about him, but I'm gonna tell you about him.
Please.
I think he was cool, even though, like a lot of things, sometimes you do things and they turn out badly for everyone. But I understand why people did him, because krystal Knock was in response to a rather justifiable assassination done by a seventeen year old Jew named Herschel green Span. He'd been born in Germany, but he was never a German citizen because his parents were Polish Jews
and Germany was racist. He grew up really fighty. He was known to respond to anti Semitic taunts with his fists. He dropped out of school at fourteen because of the discrimination he faced, and so they snuck over to Paris and he kind of lived like kind of bohemian life. He would like recite Yiddish poetry and hang out in the cafe and watch movies and like just be like a cool Paris guy, you know, ohope kid, And soon
enough he was a stateless person. France didn't want him, Germany didn't want him, and Poland did this thing where they were like, everyone who's lived somewhere else for five years is no longer Polish. Fuck you. He stayed with his aunt and uncle, who honestly didn't want him either because they didn't have enough money, and also they were like, what are you doing and you're spend all your time
hanging out cafes, why don't you get a job. So he went underground because he was wanted for deportation, and then things continue to get worse for him. His parents were deported from Germany back to Poland, alongside twelve thousand other fourign born Jews, but Poland wouldn't take them because they had just declared everyone not Polish anymore, right, so twelve thousand people are stranded at the border. Those who
tried to escape back into Germany were shot. Herschel asked his aunt and uncle to send money to his parents, but his aunt and uncle didn't have the money to spare, so Herschel went out. He bought a revolver in twenty five bullets, and he walked to the German embassy in Paris. He went to the front desk and he said, Hey, I'm a German citizen and a spy with an important document, and I need to see the ambassador. So they brought him to a junior ambassador named Ernst vaum Roth, who
was a Nazi. Herschel shot him five times in the stomach and shouted, you're a filthy bouche, which is a slur for a German, kind of like calling someone a krout. In the name of twelve thousand persecuted Jews, here is your document. He didn't try to escape. He let himself be taken into custody, and he confessed, and he carried a postcard in his pocket for his parents. And this part made me tear up when I first read it. It said, with God's help, my dear parents, I could
not do otherwise. May God forgive me the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the twelve thousand Jews, I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest. And that I will do forgive me. And when he was arrested, he told the police being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth. Wherever I
have been, I have been chased like an animal. And so the Nazi died, which is cool, But the rest of the Nazis use as a pretense for the Night of Broken Glass, so that's less cool.
Yeah, they called him the boy Avenger or something like that, if I'm remember incorrectly. Oh shit, in like press the boy Avenger, which is such a funny thing. I don't know, maybe the transition isn't there, but I was like, the boy of Avenger, that's you said his name. That's the first thing that popped in my head.
Yeah, no, And it's like, a it's so funny how in the moment a lot of people are like, WHOA, that's a step too far, and like in retrospect, like, of course, shooting the Nazi officials justified when you've been made stateless by the Nazi government, Like no one reasonable doubts that in retrospect. And then yet when I would
never compare anything to current events. But like say, for example, in current events, when people are deprived of any kind of liberty and forced to be foreigners in their own place that they're from, they sometimes act out violently, and that is obviously justifiable. But like people can't hang with it at the time, you know, Nope, because it whatever. Anyway, people can make their own people can draw their own
comparison here besides the ones that I'm obviously drawing. Yes, during Crystal Knocked, ninety Jews were killed, thirty thousand Jews were arrested, a thousand of those died in concentration camps before the twenty nine thousand were actually released back, which I mean obviously didn't go great for them. More than two hundred synagogues were smashed up. In modern dollars, there was six point seven billion dollars in damages. And you know, morally,
it was not wrong to shoot that Nazi. Strategically, it's a messier question. Crystal Knocked was absolutely a nightmare, but it was also a revelation to the world because the Nazis came out of the gate like super antisemitic in the early nineteen twenties, but by the time they took power in nineteen thirty three. They were a little bit trying to downplay that, right, They were like, oh, we're like trying to win elections and shit, we should focus
on economic issues. And by the time of the nineteen thirty six Olympics they had taken down all the anti SeMet posters and shit to keep the world from hating them.
Crystal Knocked revealed who they were, and it marked the end, or at least the downturn of Western powers seeking to appease Hitler, and the Western world got together to fundraise for Herschel's defense, and in one of the sort of interesting things about it, in the US, folks raised forty thousand dollars in a matter of weeks, which is almost
about a million dollars in modern day money. And this was raised primarily and in name, it was raised entirely by non Jewish organizations, because the non Jewish organizations did it so that it didn't look like a conspiracy by Western Jews and therefore be used as an excuse to persecute Jews in Germany.
Even more so, Herschel wasn't killed, he was arrested, but I just kind of assumed that they would.
Have, Yeah, no, so he like, we don't know when he died. The tail stays interesting. Actually, I'm I'm gonna follow it through because he's like, his legal defense is one Jewish lawyer and one non Jewish anti fascist lawyer, right, and they're gonna you know, Germany wants a big show trial, but it's not a German trial. It's a French trial, right, because this was a shooting at the embassy in Paris. Yeah, German embassy, okay, right, yeah, And so he wanted his
legal defense to be shooting that man was good. And there's actually precedent in France for this about like shooting an anti Semite who is like conspired to kill everyone. Right, it's the Shalamsavartsbard defense, which we did a whole two parter about. But it was this guy who survived a
bunch of programs. It's a Ukrainian anarchist jew who like survived a bunch of programs and then ended up in Paris and shot and killed the Ukrainian nationalist who was responsible for programming his family and then like stood by the corpse and was like, yeah, I shot him. Of course I did. Fuck that guy. And then like the jury was like, yeah, fuck that guy and let him off.
You know, it's very influential trial a lot of people since then to various effects, including actually, we recently covered an Armenian assassin who used the sholum sports part of defense successfully, but he wanted to be like, shooting that guy was good. His defense attorneys were like, uh, what if you don't do that? And they had this defense set up in place for him that he did not like, which was claim that you are gay and so was the Nazi that you shot and it was a lover's
quarrel and had nothing to do with politics. Um, okay, yeah, no, it sounds goofy as hell. It is goofy as hell. And at first I'm just like this is the most a fuck this right when I'm reading about this, Yeah, because it's like the ideas that are like, well, if you say it was a political thing, they're definitely going to hang you. And it's like this kid doesn't care if he hangs, well, guillotine him, but he doesn't care if he gets guillotined, right, he like wrote his goodbyes,
you know. But everyone's afraid that if it's a big political show trial, it'll be used to justify more programs in Germany. And so it's this weird thing where he's like kind of being asked to fall on a sword and like be embarrassed to history in order to save people's lives, and it's weird. Herschel refused to claim that he was homosexual. He was like, I'm a virgin, but I am straight. Prosecution and defense both wanted to delay
the trial, so it was delayed. The defense wanted to delay it so that the public uproar around it would calm down, and I think the prosecution just like kind of didn't give a shit. I'm not sure he never went on trial because in nineteen forty, the Nazis approached Paris,
and this kid's fucking life. The prisoners were all evacuated and the convoy was then like attacked by German aircraft and a whole bunch of prisoners escaped and Herschel made it out on foot, but then he turned himself in the surrendered, and so he was extradited to Germany in
nineteen forty. And it's so funny to me because when I think about like the Nazi government, I don't think about them like bothering to obey international laws and shit, right, because I'm like pretty sure it's like illegal to invade countries. Like I'm not sure, you know, I should talk to my lawyer before I do anything direct with this, hmm. But like I don't imagine Germany is like a big
like international rule of law follower right now. But they extradited him illegally, and that later kind of catches them up, like as if it matters to them, because fucking laws are weird. And he gets extradited to Germany in nineteen forty and he was actually housed reasonably well because the Nazis wanted him healthy enough to put on a big show trial, because they wanted to say this wasn't an angry teenager. This is a conspiracy of the international jewelry.
That's the way they called it in this like this direct quote. And so after years of custody in Germany, Herschel finally he's like, all right, I will fuck the Germans. I am going to say I did it because I was gay. And it's because he like doesn't want them to be able to make the show trial out of him. He does not want to be a pawn for the Nazis, so.
They're trying to make an example out of him, and he's like.
No, yeah. At first, when he's in Paris, it's kind of a like lack of agency for him to claim to be gay, you know, But now it's kind of a way of taking agency where he's like, I'm gonna fuck with you. You all are going to try and make a show trial, and I'm not going to let you because if you if you do it, and I'm like, oh it was a lover's quarrel, then like y'all are going to be idiots and everyone's going to laugh at you, and Nazis hate being laughed at, you know. Yeah, So
this torpedoed the show trial. It didn't happen. It like went up to Hitler and Hitler was like, I don't know about that homosexuality, you know. And after that history loses track of him by far and away. The most likely thing is that he was killed in Nazi custody in nineteen forty two, but his trial wasn't canceled, it was just indefinitely delayed, so they had a reason to keep him alive. And there's a nineteen forty six photo from Paris of a man who looks like an awful
lot like him. Okay, but he probably died. And the main reason I like buy it is that he was totally close to his family and his parents and he loved them dearly, and he like kind of did it for them, right, And his parents survived the war and he didn't reach out to them.
Mm hmmm.
So in nineteen sixty his parents were like, could you please announce him dead? Like, could we stop this? Yeah, but maybe he's somewhere one hundred and three years old thinking to himself like, hell, yeah, at least I shot that fucking Nazi though, right, let's.
Yeah, let's I'm okay with rewriting and revising history if it's a situation like that. Yeah.
Yeah, that's why we're working on our best selling screenplay Green Span the Anti fashion who wasn't gay but pretended to be in order to get away with having killed Nazi and not being used on a show trial. That's a good title for a movie.
Really good title. I would, actually I would. I think we should add a few more words to it. But yeah, you know, it's we're still workshopping.
Well, like when we get to like the third or fourth in the series, you know, we can like really go somewhere with that, you know, like in space. Can we add in space to the end, well yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and then and then another you know entry into the into this franchise could be like a heist movie, and then time travel has to be part of it. The third movie of every trilogy has time travel. Okay, don't don't question me on that. Don't look it up. It's a fact. Every third movie is a time travel movie. So yeah, this will be no different.
He's going to go back in time and save the whales. I think, actually, well a future and time, well, no, in the past anyway. Well, terms of what we said it, we're still workshopping it exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, so don't steal our idea now. Listeners copyrighted. All my ideas are copyrighted me my dog. I don't know if y'all can hear it, but my dog groaned when I said that, because he knows that that's the thing that beginner writer is always obsessed about and it is almost never actually a real worry.
Mm hmm. You know when you like kind of a way to copyright sort of was to like mail yourself something. Yeah, and like there would be like the postmark date. If if you say something on a podcast and then it gets published, is that kind of like copywriting?
I mean I think so. I mean, like the way the copyright as I understand it works, as soon as you publish something, it is copywriten. You don't have to like file a formal blah blah blah at all. Right, Like in the US, copyright law is like fairly extensive.
So yeah, I guess I don't know enough about it, which I should. They skipped over that day in grad school when I it's getting my master's degree in screenwriting something I never mentioned.
Oh interesting, I didn't know that. Well, actually, in a weird way, makes sense for screenwriters to like not get taught that, right, because like you all are usually writing for someone else that's copyright anyway, right.
That, Or I mean, screenplays don't get published. They are just a blueprint for a movie. Yeah, so it's like it's rare that Yeah, you like you don't really I don't. I mean, copyright lize laws still apply, but a screenplay is very different than most other like written pieces of work, where no one's intending to be like, yeah, I wrote the thing, and now I'm going to publish it. It's more like I wrote the thing and hopefully someone wants to make a movie out of it.
Yeah. Well, you know who does want to make movies? Any of our advertisers who happen to be movies.
Yes, we do occasionally get movie sponsors.
Yeah, no, totally. Those ones I actually listen to because I like movies.
Movies Rock.
This a podcast brought to you by watching movies. It's like the fast forward button on your life.
And I just want to say, if you like watching movies and you're like, oh, I wonder if that movie, you know, pass the Bechdel test, and like, what if we talked about it from an intersectional feminist lens? Like where could I hear that? Caitlin, I have no idea.
Yeah, I don't think it could be done.
I don't know. Probably back deel cast you silly, silly, I was goofing again. It was another goof.
By riding backwards on your skateboard.
Wow.
Well here's ads and we're back, and now we're talking about after Crystal Knock. Because of the light hearted nature of our show.
Mm hmm.
After Crystal Knocked, public sentiments started to slowly shift towards helping Jewish refugees. Not enough that, frank and overall, like the US as an institution did embarrassingly good, not embarrassingly like criminally bad.
At this sounds right, but.
There start being a few more levers of power, like it starts, public sentiments are shifting. Usually not enough. And honestly, like our hero who worked tirelessly to save people, isn't going to save that many more people, but we'll talk about it. She is going to save some more people.
In the US, there was a bill called the Wagner Rogers Bill that would have allowed ten thousand German Jewish children a year to come to the US outside of the quota system, right, and it had bipartisan support, including credit where's credit is due because I already talked shit on them twice this episode. The AFL did back it, The American Federation of Labor did back this, so did
the xenophobic former President Hoover. But only twenty six percent of Americans supported the Let's let kids in bill, Oh my god, which is really damning. There's a lot of reasons why the US shouldn't exist, but this is among them. All the usual busy bodies came out against this bill, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, all of the child of Confederate blah blah, you know whatever
those fucking groups are. You know, the American Legion spokesperson said basically like, well, what's next twenty thousand Chinese children, as if that would be like bad.
The moral bankruptcy that just exists at the core of America.
Yeah, it's the I've got mind, fuck you of countries. And of course this entire time, people are like, there's a conspiracy by rich Jews who own all the politicians. That's why all this is happening, because anti Semitism never fucking changes. When destitute Jews are trying desperately to not escape genocide to themselves but get their fucking kids out, people are like, seem suspicious. Yeah, they own all the politicians. And the bill failed and ten thousand extra kids a
year were not saved. Francis Perkins supported that bill, but not with much political weight because she'd already burned all of her political capital because she'd tried to do the right thing for defending a different immigrant in nineteen thirty four.
The longshoremen, which are like the dock workers who load and unload ships staged a massive strike and was organized by the ISLA, the International Longshoremen's Association, which at the time was part of the afl that moderate union that I keep talking about, but this union is more radical roots than that, And this strike is the second I promised you, two strikes that change a lot of things
about American labor. The earliest West Coast longshoreman organizing had been done by friends of the Pod, the Industrial Workers of the World, who I work into every episode, apparently by accident. And after this strike that we're going to
talk about, they form a new union. The strikers form a new union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which is still around and is proudly independent, and they're actually kind of cool, and I just want to shout this out because this is unfortunately a deviation from the norm
and American labor. For about twenty five years they were part of the AFLCIO, but in twenty thirteen they actually quit over a series of issues, including the fact that AFLCIO had a more anti immigrant stance, and the ILWU was like, no, we support all workers everywhere, you know, we're an international union, Like fuck you. So they're cool and their roots are this strike And nineteen thirty four workers went on strike across the entire West coast of
the United States. This started with twelve thousand workers walking out on the jobs. Soon sailors, engineers, firemen, and other folks started joining them in solidarity, and you had thirty five thousand maritime workers across the West coast. The Teamsters refused to handle strike breaking cargo. And it's cool because the head of the Teamster union was like, I don't know, maybe, But then the Teamsters themselves, like the rank and file, were like, we're not fucking touching that.
No.
Six workers were shot dead by cops during this strike. In response to one day where two of the workers were killed, the entirety of San Francisco shut down in a general strike. In response, one hundred and fifty thousand workers walked out for four days, which caused the mayor to declare a state of emergency. This basically just like scares the piss out of capitalists, you know.
Sounds like a successful fucking strike.
Yeah yeah, why.
Don't we do these anymore? Like across industries, you know, like.
There's I would say, there's a couple of different dancers. Margaret might have different opinions than me.
No, I tell you, I'm curious.
I would say the two things are people can't afford to and the second thing is people are cowards and like are afraid.
Yes, I think a lot of that is that. I think that we just like we don't have this like culture of fighting anymore.
No, we're very okay with like this is my life, this is what I get in sative, this is.
What I deserve because like now we get like I don't know, even people who are like struggling to pay rent and can barely afford food have smartphones and can watch TV and listen to podcasts and you know, I don't know, but I think a lot of it is just the culture. And like also a lot of it is just like organizing this hard work.
It is and it's easier to be complacent and so we just do that. Yeah, yeah, damn.
And I think, actually, I mean, labor is coming back, but this is building on decades and decades of work right when this stuff happens. The strike was successful. It reinvigorated West Coast labor and increased it unionized all of the West Coast ports. I believe all of them are still unionized today. But I didn't look that up. And there was a whole mini red scare over this thing, like red Scare one point five, right, because the first one was in nineteen seventeen, and then second one was
like more like nineteen forties or something. Don't fact check me. And this mini red scare had really wild knock on effects, like fucking up the political career of the Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins and diminishing therefore her capacity to save kids from Germany.
That sucks. How did it affect her?
Oh on my tip, oh yay. One of the leaders on this strike was a former wobbly like former IWW guy named Harry Bridges, who was like really briefly in the IWW, and then he was really briefly in this like union that was probably communist and so people don't like when people used to be communists in the nineteen thirties and forties in the United States. His biggest problem, his most immediate problem, was that he was an Australian immigrant.
And for three years after this thing, like no one gives a shit and everyone's like, all right whatever, and then like in nineteen thirty seven. Someone's like, wait a second, he's an immigrant. We can use that against him, we can deport him. And so the US government really really wants to deport him for advocating for the overthrow of
the US government. There's a problem. There's two problems. One is that he didn't advocate for the overthrow of the US government, at least in any way where there was any evidence that he did. So that usually isn't a problem for the US government, especially during the Red Scare. They're like, well, whatever, he's an immigrant, we'll just deport him. But Francis Perkins got in their way because progressives who did not like communism stood up for him and their argument.
I mean, Francis Perkins leaves in democracy and free speech, like just like actually to the core of her being is like, well, you can't deport someone for their ideological position, you know, especially if there's no evidence of them holding that ideological position. But like overall, like.
But even but still you can't do that.
Yeah, And she burned her credibility by standing up for what she believed in. Here she won. Harry Bridges was not deported. He actually led that union that I was talking about for like decades, but people fucking hated her. Now, this is part of why she I think she tried to stay behind the scenes all the time, right, is because like misogyny and shit would go after her in particular, right, and she got just tons of hate mail calling her
a commie jew. She regularly spoke about how both fascism and communism were bad.
You know, Okay one of those is right.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and like Bolshevism is looking so good, right, but like, yeah, but she's not a red you know, like she's a progressive, and people somewhere along the way lost the ability to tell the difference. Right, And she's also one of the most devoutly Christian people in Washington, And so whenever people are like, you're an atheist commie and a Jewish atheist comedy and she's just like.
What the fuck, She's like, No, none of that.
This doesn't stop Congress from trying to impeach her, and impeachment procedures are set into motion against her, and she would I think, have become either the first or second secretary of an apartment to ever be impeached. She is not impeached. She like narrowly avoids it right, Okay, but now she has to tread more carefully. And so even though like she's been not stripped of her title, but she's like kind of lost her access to like leavers
and making alliances and shit like that. Right, she's kind of a pariah. She goes on to save thousands more people, okay, and her political capital is gone, but she's the Secretary of Labor. They hadn't impeached her. She continued to pursue systematic solutions to the problem, which never work, and I'll talk about some of them later, but she also worked on countless individual well not countless, we have account She worked on about three thousand individual immigration and visa cases.
She looked for loopholes to get people visas, like non quota visas, like not immigration visas, but like, hey, come on over, just visit for a little while. Like you know, oh, you're like kind of a professor but not really a professor. Let me let me show you how to point out that you're really a professor, so you can get this visa. Ok And like she does this over and over again. There's this book that comes out in twenty twenty five by Rebecca Brenner Graham comes out from Citadel Press in
twenty twenty five. I have an advanced reader's copy and a lot of my research, not all of it. A lot of it comes from these other articles and things on the other part, but a lot of the stuff, specifically about working to try and get Jews out of Germany, comes from this book. I really highly recommend it. The book is called Dear Miss Perkins because she got thousands of letters. I said, dear Miss Perkins, my husband is trapped in Germany and I would like him not to die. Please,
how do I make that happen? You know? And she answered letters constantly explaining, and it wasn't always like loopholes like some of it was just like explaining to people how to get through these bureaucratic hurdles and things like that. She personally advised the playwright Bertolt Brecht and helped get his Christian but anti Nazi family into the US, where
he arrived in nineteen forty one. Later, of course, since the US is also a nightmare state, he was driven away from the US by the House of un American Activities and he moved back to Berlin. After World War Two,
Congress continued to hate her. And the reason we know how many people she saved through this way is that they financed her report to figure out how many people were coming not as refugees but as like visitors on vi at her visas from various European countries, and the overwhelming majority of these thousands of people were quote visiting from Germany. So this is how they were like, Ah, you're up to no good. You're working behind her back.
Is they like proved as if it's a bad thing that there's like three thousand extra people who aren't dead, you know, right, So she tried to yet another tactic after this, This is her last big legal strategy that she tries. She's like, can we make separate quotas for these people if they're all going to Alaska? And this is complicated because Alaska, Okay, all the US is a colonial project, right, but nineteen thirty nine, Alaska is like
extra colonial project. It is not a state. For another twenty years before that, it was a territory and people
there had fewer rights and shit. Indigenous people had been granted citizenship in the continental US, but had specifically been left out of territories like Alaska, m H and so basically she's like, well, we're trying to do our settler colonial thing up there, because she's this is one of her whatever, she's not on top of being anti colonial, and she's like, well, maybe the xenophobes will let us set up a Jewish colony in Alaska, you know, they
can help do land clearing and civilize the place. And they go through enormous efforts to try and make this project happen. Right, Congress is too xenophobic and anti semitic to even let her continue the American expansion is project by settling Jews in Alaska, even though Jews would not have been allowed to leave Alaska or become US citizens.
And they were still like nope, yeah, oh thank you, that's someone. That's how anti semitic we are. Yep, okay.
One of the things that people kept saying is Alaska's too cold for Jews. And now the Jews in question were like, we don't care. We'd like to not die please, that's fine, we'll figure it out.
We'll build a fire.
Yeah. And it's, of course it's frustrating because it's this anti Semitic trope that Jews are all physically weak, which of course has found its inversion in the Zionist hyper masculinization of the IDF, where it's like we're the strong Jews blah blah blah, like we two can commit a genocide. The government couldn't get Francis Perkins out of the Department of Labor. So you want to know how they finally like kind of got her because they couldn't appeach her. M tell me they got the ions out of the
Department of Labor. Okay, they restructured the government to keep her from being able to continue to be in charge of immigration. They did that specifically for that reason. So it's half and half. It is very very heavily influenced by her and wanting her to not be in charge of this. It is also about they move it to
the Department of Justice. The other reason they do this, because Perkins wouldn't have gone along with this, is that as they're getting ready to enter World War two, they want immigration cracked down on because they're afraid of like Nazi spies everywhere, and they're like, we want to fingerprint and investigate everyone who comes over to the country, and Perkins is like that goes against the idea of like settling refugees here, right, and so it's like it's about her,
but it's not like it's not though we hate Perkins, Bill, you know, Perkins sees immigration as a civic function, not a criminal function, and does not want it in the Justice Department. But increasingly FDR is treating it as a criminal thing, a justice thing. He adds one hundred and fifty new FBI agents looking for suspected Nazi spies. Immigrants
are the top suspects. All the right wing people around the nation are like, well, how do we know that that person who is going to die in Germany isn't a Nazi spy, you know, mm hmm, And like, yes, there were Nazi spies, that's true, Okay, Yeah, like whatever, you know, deal with them. I don't know, right whatever, Anyway.
I feel like most of them probably start of working for the American government.
Yeah. Under Perkins, the i S had not fingerprinted immigrants. Now under the Justice Department, their first project was to track down, identify, and fingerprint four point seven million immigrants living in the country. And so the like militarization of the vorder is a real old concept.
Yeah.
Now she's still getting thousands of letters like dear miss Perkins letters right for people asking for help, and instead she like sadly responds to them all that it's out of her hands, and she fords their request to the ions at the Department of Justice, and so ends her ability to help refugees by and large. In the end, she served as Secretary of Labor for twelve years, holding
that position longer than anyone else ever has. After leaving the government, she went back to teaching, then passed away from a stroke at the age eighty five. At her funeral, she had chosen the following Bible passage to read, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for as much as ye know that your labor is not in vain with the Lord. And this had been one of her favorite passages her entire life, and it just defined how she worked. She would just be steadfast,
she would just do the work. And in twenty twenty three there was a small ceremony placing stones atop her grave in the Jewish tradition to honor her efforts to save so many lives during the Holocaust, and to close it out. We keep saying that progress isn't linear and then we have to keep fighting. We can't rest on our laurels. Israel is in the process of genociding the
Palestinian people. Yet, according to the BBC, of the sixty thousand refugees resettled in the and twenty twenty three, only fifty six of them were Palestinian.
Wow.
In fact, there have been less than six hundred total Palestinian refugees accepted in the US in the past ten years, I believe as of twenty twenty three, when this article came ounta to quote that article, the numbers are so low in large part because Palestinians cannot follow the same
pathway into the US as other nationalities. The nineteen fifty one Refugee Convention that established the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and defined the criteria for refugees around the world explicitly left out Palestinians living in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
And what was their justification for why they did that.
I don't know the answer to that. I assume it is to play cad Israel. Yeah, and there's this thing happening now where Republicans are trying aggressively to prevent Palestinian refugees from coming to the US. But Democrats are not doing Perkins level work to get folks here, and so
the system is entirely rigged against Palestinian refugees. So it's the difference between absolutely no Palestinian refugees because we hate them, and almost no Palestinian refugees because we encoded our legal system to make it so that they can't get here. And I think it also has to do something with,
like I looked a little bit into this more. I think it has something to do with like how the consular system works and things like that, and how Palestine's like now recognized as a state and shit like that. You know, credit where it's due. Biden did announce in February of twenty twenty four the Palestinians who had otherwise face deportation would have that delayed at least eighteen months because it's like not safe to deport them.
Currently eighteen whole month.
The bar is so low, the bare minimum.
The bar is like under the floor, ye, dig up the floor boards, yeah, and hell yeah. Instead just overseeing a system of making it impossible for refugees to get out while funding a genocide.
Directly sending billions of dollars to Israel.
Yeah yeah, like was it twenty billion this week or something like that.
Yeah, So, oh my god.
That's the story of Francis Perkins and the brief moment or someone in the US government try to do something good.
And part of the reason I find the story so fascinating is that what she succeeded at was the individual level of writing letters to explain to people how to work through the visa system, you know, Like, and she did a lot of good work with like you know, those like the hundreds of kids who made it over and stuff like that, right, you know, but the big systematic things weren't able to be changed from within the system.
Bummer but unsurprising, And it is cool that she was able to leverage what power she had to do what she could.
Yeah, And I feel like that's like a lot of the like girl Boss. Modern feminist politicians are like kind of into bringing up her legacy, and I'm like, until you burn your bridges by doing what's right, like I won't hear it. Yeah, you know, but right, they're the ones virtue signaling. Yeah that's true, Yeah, very much so wow. Anyway, that's our episode. Francis Perkins the first, the first liberal I've had on this show, but like, you know, took
it real seriously. Did the work pretty cool? That's what we ask at people. Yeah, And if anyone wants to do the work with you of script writing, or if you want to shout out something else out, here's your plugs. What do you got?
Yes, you can take my screenwriting classes that I teach online and I have a batch coming up in September, so you can go to my website, Caitlyn Toronto dot com slash classes and find out more information about those. And you can always listen to my podcast that I co host with Jamie Loftus and we discuss movies through an intersectional feminist lens. And it's called the Bechdel Cast, and you can listen to that wherever you find.
Podcasts, And if you google Margaret Kiljoy Bechdel Cast, you can hear the three of us talking about one of my favorite punk movies, which is about Swedish punk teenage girls called We Are the Best.
It's so such a good movie, such a good episode. Yeah, if you've never listened to the Bechdel Cast, before start there.
Yeah, and uh plugs, uh Weird Little Guys. You should listen to a podcasts called Weird Little Guys. You should also listen to Hood Politics a prop and you should listen to Better Offline. And that's it. Those are the only Coolzone Media podcasts. Besides, it could happen here and behind the Bastards And wait is that it? I don't know, Oh, sixteenth minute of fame? Oh my god, how about I forget that one?
Hello?
Oh, listen to Saddle Old Girk because you might get a second season next year.
Whoa, I want a second season of that because I want more rich Russia. Well, actually, if they're not really the bad guy, that means in this.
One we'll have another hand or Hand series this year.
Also, that's good.
Yeah, just not it's at all girk.
Okay, all right, I'll see you all next week when I bring you more Cool People Who Did? I can't do a cool voice with it. When I bring you more Cool People did Cool Stuff? Bye bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.