Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Welcome back to this week's classic episode. We are quickly approaching the moment Noel where our pal Max Williams joins the show.
That's true, and this is a really fun episode to mark the occasion, or you know, at least getting close to the occasion, that time California school children participated in something called the Great Squirrel War.
Oh my gosh, this is crazy. We don't even want to spoil it. Let's just roll the tape.
Let's do it.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio Friends, Neighbors, Farmers, city dwellers, rural and urban residents alike. Have you ever had an infestation of pest, say, roaches or rats or bats and so on? Hi, I'm ben.
No no, but I did once have a pet squirrel named mister Muffin Tops. Was this?
Was it an animal that lived nearby or an animal in a cage?
Yes? Both? Okay, I made that up. I just wanted to say mister muffin Tops and I would honestly be terrified to have a squirrel for a pet. I'm very skittish around creatures that have unpredictable movements and beady eyes, which squirrels definitely do.
I've had in my various stages of life, I've lived in places that were infested with bats, possums, and of course squirrels, which are wily creatures. I have a friend here in Atlanta, where this podcast is based who raised a squirrel in his apartment, and the squirrel was very friendly, very nice. But eventually, you know, being wild animals, when they reach adulthood, it's time to say goodbye.
Right.
It was a rescue squirrel, by the way, he didn't steal it. But how could I mention infestations without talking about one of the number one infestations in my heart and yours? Null super producer Casey Pegram.
It's just an infestation of joy and kindness, I know, and goodwill towards humanity.
Yes, yes, and even squirrels, I would imagine, Casey, did you ever have an infestation in your house or your neighborhood growing up?
Yeah? Actually my parents' house, we had bats in the attic and my room was upstairs, and so I was the only one kind of in close proximity to said bats like throughout the day, and I would just hear these like kind of faint chirping sounds, and I, you know, I reported this to my parents over and over tried to get them to believe me, and they were just like, no, it's just like a fan that's squeaky up there, you know.
And so one day my mom goes into the attic and what does she see but a bat like feet in front of her face, and she screams and freaks out, and then they believe me about the bats after that point. But I had actually gone as far as to like take some of my audio recording gear and put it up to the vent and like record them and then boost it and post and you know, amplify the signal enhanced and sounded like bats to me. But it required a little more proof.
You, really, I think you ended up in the wrong field. You should have become. You should have been like a like a ghostbuster for pasts exactly, forensic tools, meters and all that.
That's right, your Wanda monitor, yeah, exactly, Casey. On the case, I had the same I'm bonding with you here, Casey, because I had the same situation I was in. I lived in a bonus room in our house and we had we had this unfit thing that was pretty much an attic but had a creepy door to it. And I remember vividly those weird chirping noises, but once you
see them in your house, it's surprising. The point of this relatively circuitous introduction is to say that there is one thing that unifies a lot of homeowners across the world, and that is that we like our outside animals to stay outside. And we often, in the course of human civilization, come into conflict with animals. And this is this is something historically happens all the time. You know, there are stories of locusts in ancient text there are stories of
other things. I'm off the top of the dome. Here, frogs, there we go. You know, the plagues, the biblical ones the locusts would eat, would decimate fields of grain and other crops.
And that's the thing. We like animals when they're cute and cuddly, and they keep a healthy distance from us, and they stay in their animal lanes. But as soon as they start eating our lunch, it will not stand. This is this animal aggression will not stand, my friends, and.
We often band together as humans to cooperatively combat the threats posed by wild animals. Today's story takes us all the way back.
To nineteen eighteen.
As American soldiers were battling German forces in France, there was an entirely new war going on in California, and it used child.
Soldiers of all places. Yeah, this is how a fantastic article on Alice Obscura sets up this tale. And little spoilerlerd here in nineteen eighteen, California drafted children into a war on squirrels, is the title of this article by the fantastic Dave Gilson. I had never heard of this and the squirrel war. We know about war as real wars that were started by all kinds of arbitrary things, like there's the stray dog war, there was the one about the camel, there was the one about like a bucket.
This is not a real war, but it involves some anti German propaganda a little down the line. That's why the setup works so well. But here's the thing. In California, they were in the midst of a ground squirrel epidemic. These little buggers were consuming about thirty million dollars worth of crops, which if you enter that into the old inflation calculator, it's approaching five hundred million dollars of food stuffs. Yeah.
Absolutely, I personally think squirrels are cute. I know they're not for everybody, but I've also never been in a situation where they are literally eating eating the food supply on which I would depend. So these squirrels were not loved, not lovable. They were seen as a source of pestilence, you know, and they were thought to be a vector
for the plague. So California addressed the problem. And we've got a great quote from State Horticulture Commissioner George h. Heck, which is a cool name, so old Man Heck says, we have enemies here at home, more destructive perhaps than some of the enemies our boys are fighting and the trenches. He said this as part of an impassioned call up for what he called school soldiers to self organize, you know, within your classroom, your friends, or your overall school to
eradicate these ground squirrels. In California as part of a seven day event they called Squirrel Week. You know, because a week is seven days long, is.
That like Shark Week?
It is a little more agro than Shark Week, but deep cut, nice reference. Do we mention that on air.
Back to the old, the old parent company. Yeah, back several parent companies ago, Shark Week was was a regular occurrence around the office.
People still love Shark Week. That's still a thing, right, Yeah, Shark Week is great. It's it's good stuff to watch. I think what got us is way back in the day when when we worked with Discovery, every podcast was told to come up with something related to Shark Week. And I don't know if I ever mentioned this to you, but this was when Scott, Benjamin and I were still doing car stuff and we see guys car stuff and sharks. How do we make this work? But we did twice.
You can check about They're not They're not the best episodes, but.
There I'm sure there are a lot of fun don I enjoy that entire catalog and I miss it dearly, just just like everyone else. It's true. But you know what, forget move over Shark Week. It's time for Squirrel Week. And what Squirrel Week was was a promotion that the government pumped a pretty penny into to disseminate print and dissemin pamphlets, posters, and all of all kinds of literature. Because that's what you spent money on in those days.
I don't know, maybe some broadcast pieces, what do you think.
Yeah, public speeches. California is set aside forty large from their emergency wartime fund to create this Squirrel Week campaign. And it was a pr blitz, as you said, around thirty four thousand posters popped up around the state, half a million leaflets and the pamphlet which you can see. The pamphlet is not subtle.
You can see.
Victors of this in the article and then in archival reports from papers of the time. It says it's a nice old timey propaganda cartoon kind of approach, and it says in the top left, kill the squirrels, and it shows a mother or a teacher instructing children to scatter poison bar and then it it shows squirrels in the bottom mister and missus squirrel h dining on dining like.
Kings, right, yeah, literally, and they've all got little speech bubbles next to them. And it's like the caption for this particular comic is our star borders as though they're at some sort of bed and breakfast, like we're giving them free you know, free room and board. And one of the missus squirrel. I'm sorry, mister squirrel is saying, wait time today, I'll have my favorite dish, whole wheat cakes. And then missus squirrel replies, and you may save me some nice young body.
Sprouts, and she's holding up glasses like opera glasses, opera glasses. And in the back behind the hapless waiter who has a tag describing him as a farmer, there is a sign that says Hotel California board bill for squirrels in nineteen seventeen thirty million dollars. So that's the amount of damage this ground squirrel infestation was doing to the agriculture of California.
Here's my favorite little detail. I actually didn't notice this until just now. On the bottom outside of the circle that's sort of the cartoon panel that's framing the squirrel scene are two squirrels wearing those Kaiser Wilhelm kind of spiked helmets. Yep. And that's the little touch of anti German propaganda. And we'll hear more about that in some of these other pamphlets.
Right.
So, what they wanted to do in this Squirrel Week campaign was to inspire patriotism in kids who knew that their relatives or maybe even one of their parents was active in the war effort. They wanted these kids to feel like they were doing their part by sprinkling rodent side outside of these various squirrel burrows. The pamphlet even included a recipe for strict nine laced grain, as well as suggestions for other squirrel killing methods shooting, drowning, the
use of poisonous gas. This is heavy, heavy stuff for children, but they knew that money talks, right. The heart may want what it wants, but the pocketbook does too. So just in case doing one's patriotic duty was not inspiration enough, they also sweetened the pot with rewards for the kids who killed the most squirrels.
Yeah, it was a tiered rewards system, fifty bucks for the winner at each elementary school. What the organization behind this must have been pretty decent, right, Yeah, so fifty bucks for the grand prize, and then you got your runners up making thirty and twenty and ben you want to you want to handy dandy inflation calculatron, those bad boys.
Sure, fifty bucks is around eight hundred dollars today, zounds, I know, especially Can you imagine you're in elementary school, you get eight hundred.
What are you gonna do with that? Buy more ammunition for your red ryder bb gun. I imagine.
I don't know, man, they might get in like this feedback loop and just buy more strict nine.
To poison the week. How many full blown psychopaths do you think this program created? Ben?
Probably about three hundred and seventeen.
You put that on the inflation calculator.
So if you got the runner up position and you got thirty dollars, that was still five hundred dollars back then. And then if you got twenty bucks, that was still three hundred and thirty something dollars. So this is this is good cash for psychopaths.
Potential budding psychopaths, aspiring psychopaths, right totally. So the thing that's that's really interesting is this was all happening during World War One and there was always a need for propaganda, and they were certainly able to sneak these messages into this material for for Squirrel Week and start making the squirrels like stand ins for the greater enemy at large, and the language even really started to shift to some slogans like this, he preys on our crops and countless hordes.
He fills the ranks of the killed in true military fashion. You know why hesitate? We can get them, how poison them, gas them, drown them, shoot them, trap them, submarinum. Why do you submarin a squirrel?
It feels like just a different way of saying drown them. They also had neat little catchphrases. Right in one text, it says millions of food must be saved. Slay the mother squirrel during breeding season. March to me, remember a squirrel in time saves killing nine.
That's right, But that's.
The there's a loophole with that. And I don't want to be too cold, but if we are addressing the reward system in play, then you would want to kill nine squirrels. You wouldn't want to kill them early, you know what I mean. They didn't think that all the way through, but they had a lot of money on the line, and with this creeping propaganda, with these squirrels being painted increasingly as German soldiers, if we're being honest, we see the cause move beyond the boundaries of California.
The US Food Administrator at the time, a guy named Herbert Hoover, who would later go on to be President heartily approved of this effort because he said they were saving vast quantities of food which might otherwise be used for support of our armies abroad. So we're not just fighting pests in California, We're helping the war effort in Europe.
Yeah, for sure. I mean it's just empowering. And again, this is kids. This is directed at kids. This is a school like box top program essentially, but instead of box tops, you're bringing in squirrel tales or literally entire dead squirrel carcasses. There's an image from the Internet archive that's posted on this outs Obscure article where it is a barbed wire fence hung with dozens of dead squirrels.
I mean, it is very macab. There's even instructions published for how to hook up a tube to the exhaust pipe of a car and fill squirrel burrows with carbon monoxide to literally gas them out.
And kids loved this exactly, just gleeful murder. Kids loved this. They also, they loved it so much that some kids were impatient. They didn't want to wait for all the tallies,
so they started sending squirrel carcasses directly to Commissioner. Heck, even before squirrel Weeks started, so his office literally began to reek, and he made a special request that children no longer send him any more tales directly, and he told all the county commissioners working for him, like, okay, count the tales, keep the tally, but then please get rid of them, bury them or something. Stop sending squirrel tales to my office. My wife won't touch me, she says.
I wreak of death and rodents. I added that last part. There's a little bit of poetic license.
But it was a smashing success because I think they tallied somewhere, you know, official number. The official number was upwards of one hundred thousand squirrels dead were recorded, but they you know, it's assumed that that it would have exceeded that number by quite a lot, just with the attitude of rampant squirrel murder that was, you know, pervasive in all of California around this time, and that attitude continued into the future even once the program expired. That's right.
We don't know how long it lasted after Squirrel Week. We do know, however, thanks to a report called California Ground Squirrels, a bulletin dealing with life history habits and control of the ground squirrels in California, that this this machine could not switch on and off. This cultural impetus that they had created, continued on and for a quote indefinite period of time. Afterwards, these kids kept killing squirrels.
We do have one example, just to give us a snapshot of the level of squirrel genocide occurring here in lass In County. Later in the year there was another anti squirrel campaign. One girl, one female student brought in three thousand, seven hundred and eighty tails and one boy brought in three thousand, seven hundred and seventy. So now we have to ask ourselves, were these kids very very talented squirrel assassins or were there just that many squirrels.
Were the hills, you know, alive with the chitters of squirrels?
Yeah, the hills have eyes, my friend, tiny beady, fidgety squirrel eyes and tails. Did we talk about the difference between a bushy tailed tree square and a little bit more of a skinny tailed, chipmunk looking ground squirrel?
We have not. That's a that's a good call. Let's get into that. So ground squirrels technically are known as odo spermophyllis Beachi.
Yeah, I was having a hard time with that second part. Two's got the double e and then the why and then the why. The plot twisty is a big plot twist why. But I think maybe any intrepid, ridiculous historians out there that are what do you call that? Squorel squirrel ofphiles?
You know, it's a good question. I don't know whether we have in this language is specific word for squirrels, but I do have good news. We can make one up. The language is flexible enough. Let's see. We could say squirrel ologists, which is which is tough?
That's real?
No? I mean, well it is, okay, got it?
English is a malleable language for sure. Squirrel squirrel that's hard. That's holologists. How about?
Okay, So squirrels are part of the scuri day family, so maybe they could call themselves scuriologists. That sounds a little bit more legitimate. Although wait, now that I think about it, and I've seen this question before somewhere, I think rodentologist is actually a word. Squirrel Ologists might not be, but rodentologists, I'll bet some scratch on that.
Surely that must be a thing.
All right, So rodentologist is probably the closest we'll get until ridiculous historians we hear from you, because, as you said, Noel, English is malleable. It is a living language, and you know this might be interesting. Hey, Casey, what's the French word for squirrel? I'm just curious to see whether that would be easier.
It's not easy. In fact, it's a weird one. The French word for squirrel is rolls off the tongue, right, oh.
Man, Casey, on the case, I think we might have to stick with squirrel guys or rodentologist. Squirrel weekended on May fourth. Children continued hunting and killing squirrels to combat this campaign, and the state considered this a great success. According to reports, the crop yields bounced back in areas where squirrels had been eradicated, so there was a clear correlation.
But here we are a little more than a century later, and ground squirrels are still considered insidious pest, you know what I mean.
Yeah, it's certainly insight that we're used to around here in Georgia, But for me, it's more the tree squirrels that I'm used to seeing and whenever I go somewhere else, and I see a different type of pervasive rodent, like say, chipmunks or whatever that weirds me out, because I totally did not remark upon like squirrels are like pigeons in New York City or something like that. Around here, it's just a very common occurrence and they don't really threaten me.
But have you ever seen like a rogue squirrel that I'll like, it looks a little slack jawed and like like shamble too close to you, like it's got the rabies or something that's no fun.
Yeah, I mean a lot of people here hate squirrels, and Casey, you were mentioning off air that some of your friends from different parts of the world find squirrels a little bit what spooky?
Yeah, I guess. I mean it's hard to imagine as an American who's been seeing them their whole life, but yeah, if you're not used to it, apparently they can be quite upsetting.
I'll tell you know, as I was looking through the differences of ground squirrels and tree squirrels, I feel like I ran into squirrels before what ground squirrels before? Once long ago, and it creeped me out because I saw them crawling on the ground, you know, like belly on the ground, and I thought they had had their I thought they had their backs broken or something, until I realized they were just that's just their method of locomotion. This was in Arizona, So those may not have been
ground squirrels. Oh no, right in and let let us know what those weird little rodents were. We see the prejudice against ground squirrels continuing today. There was a University of California web page about damage caused by ground squirrels, and it featured an image of a squirrel wearing a helmet and aiming at the ground with a bazooka. So there is still a problem, and it is true, as strange as it may sound, California did indeed recruit child soldiers to wage war on ground.
Squirrels, but they weren't the first or the last to launch a tactical strike like this against these pasts. In eighteen ninety seven, according to the same author as the Atlas Obscure piece, in an interview he did with The Washington Post, The Washington Post in fact, published a report citing that thirty US states offered quote unquote bounties for troublesome animals, including like panthers, the sinister ground score of course,
pocket gophers, woodchucks, English sparrows, and wolves. So this was definitely a thing that there was a precedent for, and Pennsylvania paid out around ninety thousand dollars in bounties for
chicken hawks. And this is really interesting because the Post wrote, quote, it appears that Pennsylvania expended ninety thousand dollars in destroying birds worth three million, eight hundred and fifty seven, two hundred and thirty dollars for the sake of saving one thousand, eight hundred and seventy five dollars to the poultry interest.
What they mean by that is that these very same birds were actually killing thousands of mice each hawk one thousand mice in a year's time, and then these were very injurious to crops. So the math wasn't quite working out there.
Right, because it's I think at the time it was easy to forget how complex and interlinked every organism in an ecosystem is. It's sort of tough to figure out who the real hope it may be, and it's even more difficult to figure out what the long term ramifications of an eradication campaign will be in the future. However, today, if you are a school child listening to this and you are anxious to join in a murderous campaign against one type of animal or another, we have some tough
news for you. Nowadays, these sorts of expeditions are left to professional exterminators, and as a matter of fact, in many states, a common pest may be protected under law. So to bring it all back around to the example we had from super producer Casey Pegram Casey, I imagine your family was not allowed to kill the bats.
Is that correct?
That is correct, although maybe I shouldn't tell this part of the story, but said bat in the attic caught my mom off guard and she kind of swung at it and happened to kill the poor thing. So I believe the rest were safely loaded out of the attic. We had pest control person come over, and I think they were able to shepherd them out without costing any more bad lives.
Casey on the Case, Casey on the Case. And this concludes today's episode, but not our show. Tune in for our next episode, when we explore a surprising opinion about Confederate memorials. Is that giving away too much?
No?
Nope, nope.
Okay, there we go, So thanks so much for tuning in. We would love to hear your infestation stories. We would like to hear about the common pest in your neck of the global woods that seem normal to you but amazing to outsiders. For instance, this is true, you guys, a lot of people in Australia hate kangaroos.
Did you know that?
I think they're so cool?
Well, they're probably just tired of them because they're just popping out of the woodwork there and Australia, or maybe not right in, let us let us know. Are they really as prevalent as we've been led to believe from crocodile dun dfilms?
Right? Right? Shall we travel down to Australia to encounter kangaroo's first hand? And you can write to us directly? But wait, dramatic SOUNDQ please, Casey, We have a new email address. Write to us at Ridiculous at iheartpodcastnetwork dot com. You can also find us on social media, right nol.
Yeah, you sure can. We've got a pretty pop in Facebook group called the Ridiculous Historians, where all kinds of fun things are happening every day, and that is at the Ridiculous Historians on Facebook. You can also find us on Instagram, you know if you like, or you can find us personally where I am at Embryonic Insider.
And I am in a burst of creativity at Ben Bolin. Thanks as always to super producer Casey Pegram, Thanks to Alex Williams who composed our track.
Thanks to you, Ben Bolin for being the benniest Bolaniest pal I could ever hope for. We'll see you next time. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.