We return, fellow ridiculous historians with a classic episode for this week, and this is one for all the baseball fans in the crowd. Looking at our super producer, mister Max Williams, No, what do we know about Alfred Lawson.
Well, he was the father of the modern airline, of a modern flight as we know it, at least in a commercial sense. Well, he had nothing to do with the invention of it. He was early to the game in terms of his awareness of the Wright Brothers, which gave him one of those quintessential light bulb over the head animation moments.
Yeah. And the reason we're saying this is good for the baseball heads in the body shaitemy, but fans of baseball in the audience is that Alfred Lawson starts out as sort of a middle of the road baseball player, and as you said, he gets this light bulb moment when he realizes that aviation may be the next big thing, and so he leads the charge to popularize this in
the zeitgeist of the day. We're talking publishing trade magazines, getting ads out to the public, even designing the first modern airline.
Oh but he did more than that, Ben, He was a bit of a renaissance man and pivoted into economic theory after revolutionizing Yes, yes, after revolutionizing the world of travel, and eventually took those theories and fashioned them into something.
Of a religion. Yes, his own religion. This is the story of los Auonomy. Get it because his last name is laws It clever, ridiculous. History is a production of iheartradiore oh man, this is okay. This is going to be a weird one. And I think I have I think I have an interesting way for us to begin today's show.
Hi everyone, I'm Ben, hey Ben, and everyone I'm knowing, and I cannot wait to hear what you've got up your sleeve.
Well, let's see, let's see if this impresses you. Super producer Casey Pegram canys plain.
Out re quickly. We're in a different studio today and we keep banging our knees on the on the table. Yes, what's happening?
How other people do this? We are so spoiled because we endeavor to book a lot of our time in the newer studio. And this I like it. It's smaller, It's it's got a cozy little closet, like little clauset it's got a cozy vibe because we have this paper lamp on the table. You know.
It's a little yeah, but it's it's the trade off of the ambiance to the knee banging. Not not worth it. But Ben hit us with her. Yea fascinating intro.
Check this out. I don't know, fascinating, but it's weird to me. So you remember Terrence Howard, the actor who has played a number of commended roles Empire, Hustle, and flows so on. Sure, Yeah, he has invented a philosophy or science that helped that he believes explains the universe and fundamentally changes the way that we understand reality.
Terrence Howard did this.
Yeah, it's called Terryology. Wow and that Okay, this is a true story. This is great, Ben, I've gotta I've got to send you this. So Terrence Howard, again lauded actor, believes that he has created a secret system called Terryology, inspired by his realization in his mind that one times one equals two instead of one times one equally one.
And you can read explanations of this. He's had an interview with Rolling Stone wherein he talked about this and says that lately he's been spending up to seventeen hours a day working on this system of logic, oddly enough, what he calls it. And he believes that his discovery, which is what he calls it, will change the way that mathematics is taught for generations to come, and that we're Pythagoras around to see this discovery. Who lose his mind?
Yeah, he says, this is the last century that our children will have to be taught that one times one is one. Finally, for the first time ever, you heard Harris Howard has solved it. Man Ben, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a fan of the subject of today's episode, mister Alfred Lawson.
Yes, oh boy, that's what I so. I was looking up other luminaries, right, and I was trying to find people who had insisted on creating their own understanding of the world or their own I guess we'll call it philosophical entrepreneurship. I don't know, well, Will Smith's kids did it? That's true that this true nold they did. Alfred Lawson perhaps is an inspiration to some of these people in the more modern age. He was born way back in eighteen sixty nine on March twenty fourth. And he's a man
of many interests, you know what I mean. Love him or hate him, he's definitely a renaissance dude.
Oh he did some stuff. Yeah, yeah, he started off as one of the first professional baseball players when that was very, very, very much in his early days. I believe he played for the Boston bean Eaters. Yes, did I make that up? No, he's correct, And I think that that actual team went on to become the Atlanta Braves, and in some form or fashion.
Yes they did. You're absolutely right.
And by all accounts, Lawson wasn't particularly great at baseball, but somehow, maybe in those early days you didn't have to be because it was so new. Not quite sure how he inched his way into that world, but apparently it turned him off because there was too much tobacco, alcohol, and just you know, womanizing. He was a little bit more of a measured kind of intellectual type, and he didn't like, you know, consorting with all these ruffians.
Yeah, it was immoral to him. His minor league career, I think went from eighteen eighty eight to around nineteen oh seven, and he was playing in the minor leagues. He also played for the Pittsburgh Alleghanies, and he went on after that career to start his own baseball league.
It had a pretty pretty clunky name that we learned from an article from our buddies at Mental Floss eleven notes on Alfred W. Lawson, founder of the weirdest university ever, which, mind you, we're going to get to. But yeah, he founded this league called the Union Leagues of Professional bas space Ball Clubs of America. So at this point baseball wasn't even a single word yet. It was a brave new world of this crazy sport.
Imaginea ball and also a base.
Yeah, from the combination of the two, what should we call it? He moved on pretty quickly after that did not work out. He then decided he wanted to be a part of what he saw as a pretty important technological movement innovation, which was aviation.
It is true he was inspired. This comes from mentals article, but also from a couple of excellent documentaries we saw. He was inspired by the story of the Right Brothers. He recognized, to his credit, you recognize the profound change that aviation would mean for human civilization at large, and he wanted to be part of it. More and more. As we explore this guy's life, we'll see one phrase that I think applies to him directly, and that his
early adopter. He had no experience in publishing, He had no experience in aviation, so he decided to publish a magazine about aviation.
Yeah, but it was all based on just like his gut is gut instinct that this was going to be a big deal. And he even had notions of a future society where everyone lived on aircraft of some kind.
Right as superior people, which I feel like we have to hold odds that we let lets let's get there. We'll get there, we'll get there. Well, we're going to earn this one, folks. So Lawson starts an aviation magazine. He starts two one is called fly and one is called Aircraft. And when he starts these, very few people have actually flown, like you could count them on one hand.
And these weren't meant to be like trade papers because there really was no industry to speak of this point. It was more for like novice enthusiasts that might want to find out more about this new, brave, new world of flight. Right.
It was almost like science fiction or cutting edge tech mature. Yeah, exactly like Wired, which made a really great article about this. Actually, Matt Simon of Wired called fantastically wrong. I'm not going to do the whole subtype because it might spoil a little bit of where we're heading. But this is a story of innovation.
This guy is very much an early adopter, like you said, but it all kind of goes off the rails pretty quickly. But before that happens, he does a little thing where he kind of invents basically the modern passenger plane.
Yeah. Yeah, he invented the airliner, or to be more specific, the idea of it. He also did not have technical knowledge, so he thought he thought planes are amazing. What's the next step. Let's make them like buses for the sky. Let me hire some people who can build this in a way that will actually work. We should also say one thing this guy never suffered from was a lack of confidence. One of my favorite quotes from him comes
from his own description of his birth. He saw that right where he describes his birth in eighteen sixty nine as quote, the most momentous occurrence since the birth of mankind, and he is able to apply this confidence in a contagious way, people buy into his idea. He convinced these designers and these engineers to build this aircraft and it actually works. Low and behold him, We'll walk. In nineteen twenty,
he unveils the airliner to the world. At this time, it's the largest non military plane in the entirety of the US, and it seats about sixteen to twenty six people, depending on how you position the seats, and he launches Lost in Airlines.
Yeah, and there was a European company that successfully flew what you could kind of lump into this as an airliner, but I think it only held four, which to me just sounds more like a plane, like a small plane, you know, because I guess typically in those days a plane would hold two. So it's just you had two more passers. Not really a commercially you know, lucrative proposition there.
Yeah, and for a time, Lost in Airlines was doing okay for a short time because they were bringing newer and more impressive innovations to this concept of commercial flight, which, folks, we cannot emphasize enough. We cannot exaggerate this enough. Commercial flight is a brand new idea. It's wild It's like if somebody said, let's build pet shops on the moon, you know, so that moon dogs and cats can have their supplies of toys. People really didn't know whether this
would work. And Lawson, despite premiering this, what I think Noel, you and I would both agree is the first real airliner. Lawson becomes a cautionary tale in nineteen twenty one.
Yeah, but just before that, in nineteen nineteen, he did actually create an airliner that could see eighteen people, like we said, and had a system in place where he could successfully fly people from New York to San Francisco in I believe thirty six hours.
He was also getting some lucrative contracts from the government. He was in the running, rather he was the clear front runner to get some postal delivery contracts. So things are going well as we said. But what happens in the eighteen twenty.
One Well, a problem that he had was he instead of making more of the I learned this from a documentary called Man Life, which is really really great. I
recommend it's on Amazon. You can stream that, and it's about it's about lost in in his life and his legacy, but also like his like kind of lone follower that still you know, in Merle Hayden, it's really really kind of touching, beautiful filmy, very sad, but also fascinating, and in it the filmmaker makes a point that or one of the historians of the interview that he should have just built more of the one that seated eighteen or like improved upon that, but instead he kept wanting to
go bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually, yeah, nineteen twenty one, he made one that was I think supposed to see like one hundred, and it did. It crashed and burned. It was it was you know, too unwieldy, and it just didn't work. And his backers were like, Okay, we're done, because they were already kind of like he had been taking too long to come out with this new aircraft and they were losing confidence in him, and this was it. This was they were done.
It kept becoming more extravagant, so this was the loss in L four. It was the last in his series of airliners that he had designed and built. It was completely in nineteen twenty but when it flew, it crashed on its initial takeoff. And there's a similar risk whenever we're talking about transit technology to put on my car stuff hat for a second. We're in a similar situation
with autonomous vehicles right now. If there is a particularly tragic accident or event that occurs within autonomous vehicle, it may well change the laws and we might not be able to have them. It's a very sensitive time and technological history. However, this guy is nothing if not determined and tenacious. So when he has these government contracts and despite the L four crashing, he says he's gonna keep
carrying on. But unfortunately in nineteen twenty there was a recession, so he could not secure the cash reserves he needed for those US contracts. And despite some of his commercial failures, he was widely considered to be one of the leading thinkers in the world of commercial aviation.
Yeah, he actually won the Winged America Award and a magazine called Scientific Age in nineteen twenty seven called him the world's leading passenger airplane builder. And this is coming from a great article in on Milwaukee dot Com. We should also mention there was a strong Wisconsin connection here because his airline was actually headquartered in Milwaukee, and he had designs to turn this city into the Detroit of the aeronautics industry.
He wanted Milwaukee to be the aviation's Detroit once was for automobiles. And when the company collapses, laws in soldiers on and he his area of focus. At first, he starts promoting various health practices that he had always himself engaged in, such as vegetarianism and abstaining from tobacco and alcohol and so on. He also around this time claimed that he had discovered a surefire way for people to live to the age of two hundred, which as far as we know, no one has ever done. And he
starts rethinking a childhood experiment. I guess a better way to say it is a childhood moment and observation, an observation perfect that stayed with him into his adulthood, and he contemplates it in increasingly intense ways. And the observation is this, as a child, he sees dust in the air, and he realizes that he can move the dust toward him by in air and move it away from him by expelling air. Suction and pressure.
That's right, Ben, suction and pressure. We're just going to leave that there for right now, but we will return my words.
Yes, but first we have to go back to the time period. You see, the recession in the US that occurred in nineteen twenties was seen as a correction of market forces. Unfortunately, it turns out that this correction was either wrong or not enough to repair the situation, because then we lead into nineteen twenty nine, a very bleak period in US history.
Yeah, the aforementioned Great Depression, the big one where you know, so many Americans lost their jobs and couldn't afford to feed their families. And I think there was just a real need, a desperation to find answers and to find some kind of relief. And one source of that could be in say, some kind of ideology that is pushed forward by a certain eccentric former aviation.
Entrepreneur, Award winning Noel aviation entrepreneur. Yeah, yeah, is Bona Fides, And he developed his own philosophy that originally started as an economic theory, just a straight economic theory. And what he told larger, larger crowds at various conferences, functions, and rallies was that the Great Depression had a single discernible cause.
And this single discernible cause was the role of international financias banks essentially privately owned banks, and he said that they were creating the economic crisis which had engulfed the
US and the world by this point. And he said that these are the oppressors of the working force, they're the oppressors of the capital in a country's economy, and that there was, thank god, a way that he had come up with to fix it, to get rid of money and replace it with something else called direct credit.
Yeah, direct credit. And it's it's not entirely clear, uh what he meant by that, based on the things that I've read, like is it I think it's sort of like the idea that money only has value based on the goods and services themselves, and like and and the idea that you could get a loan directly from the government or with the government acting as like a steward of the loan, but that he wanted to abolish interest
because in his mind interest. We've talked about this before on other shows, the idea that it was very unpopular and considered it's usurists, you know, like with the Kchlaie ghost story or whatever. Right, Yeah, you know, there's a little truth to that. It's interesting. The idea of you know, selling people money. It's a little bit of a weird one, but we've kind of come to accept it, and it's like sort of the basis of our economy.
And so weird how quickly things become normal. His idea to replace money in the economic system was summed up by the issuance of direct credit. Direct credit for everybody was one of the slogans they caught on with the Direct Credit Society, and Noel, you nailed it. I was looking for the primary differences, and there are three differences I could find between direct credit and the economic system
we have today. The first, the most important, is the abolition of interest clear and in other societies, interests in the way we understand it isn't really a thing either, especially in some Muslim countries. So it's possible to have an alternative system. He was not speaking of religion at this point. Very important to say. So those three differences abolished interest, remove control of money from private banking systems, you know, as he saw them, and put it in
the hands of the government. This is after nineteen thirteen in the establishment of the federal reserve system, by the way, So the third difference is more of a consequence of this. It centralizes control of the economy instead of agglomeration of different banks with different interests on multiple levels. There's this single source Uncle Sam who's giving people interest free money. It's just called direct credit for land ownership, for goods,
and services for various things. To a lot of people during the depression, this seems like a great idea.
Well yeah, I mean, thousands of people got behind it, and he actually had kind of codified all this in a I guess, I mean it was a book, you could call it a manifesto. Really is when you really start to getting into these kind of more high minded philosophical ideas. Because the thing about Direct Credits for Everybody, which was the name of his book, is that it
wasn't only about economics. It incorporated his particular flavor and understanding of physics and the way the universe works, and those ideas of suction and pressure that we talked about earlier. These are key points to this direct credit idea. So not only is it some kind of you know, treat us on how we can improve the economy and save us from you know, the depression and make things more fair.
Built into that is kind of a philosophy of life that incorporates everything from personal health and wellness to money and equates the two, right.
Right, Yeah, So the book Direct Credits for Everybody is sort of this utopian manifesto. I think manifesto is the correct word. And it just describes not only direct credits, but it describes, as you said, his other concepts and to loss in these concepts are chained together. You can't understand his economic claim unless you understand his claims about physics to laws in these are inseparable. And so imagine that you are a new member of the Direct Credit Society,
the depression is in full swing. You like this idea of getting the bankers out. To Lawson's defense, he was never, at least as far as we can find, he was never openly like an anti semit.
No, no, it wasn't. And there was another guy, Toglin, Yeah, that's right, who was much more of a big, blustery speaker who kind of like had some of these same ideas. Because it was you know, people were in revolt. I mean basically they'd been screwed over by the economy and people were mad as hell, right, and so this was a popular movement or type of movement, the idea of get rid of like the money lenders or the bankers.
You know that they were like the same with like our recession that we had where all of a sudden, you know, you've got these like bear Stearns in your Goldman Sachs, you know, getting these golden parachutes and stuff, and your average working you know, folks who lost their houses are not happy about it at all. And yeah, we see that same pattern happening today that we saw back then. But this guy, Charles Coglin, or Father Coglin, he had some of these same ideas. He was a
Roman Catholic priest from Canada. Actually I think he immigrated from Canada, but he used much more charged language that was much more on the anti Semitic side and equating the money lenders and the idea of people of the Jewish faith being the ones that directly caused the depression.
Yeah, with what we would call now a lot of dog whistles, dog whistle stuff.
But whereas Lawson was much more like he didn't necessarily blame people. He blamed the system.
Right, He blamed the system in and you couldn't understand his perspective. Again, this is something a lot of self appointed gurus do unless you read his understanding of other things. Let's get into his own version of physics, which he called This is why we talked about Terrence Howard at the beginning. He called his greater understanding losnomy losnomy like loss in Onymy.
Yeah, and a lot of this was already in that first book the direct credit for everyone, right, but he took it even further. And let's do a little reading from chapter one of Losonymy, Volume one, just to give you a sense of where we're coming from here. Chapter one, Losonymy. This is what losonomy is and what it isn't. Lousnomy is the knowledge of life and everything pertaining there too. Losonomy is based upon life as it is, and not
upon a theory of what it ought to be. Theory as espoused by so called wise men or self styled scholars, has no place in losonomy. Everything must be provable or reasonable or it is not Losonymy. Losonomy treats of things as they are, not as they are pretended to be. Facts not fancies, truth not falsity, knowledge not notions is the foundation of losonomy. So to me, I'm reading this as truth good false bad.
Because notice he doesn't ever actually explain that. Now that is the introduction. He goes on for quite some time about falsity versus truth. I believe you can, by the way, read Lossonomy for free online if you.
Want Atlasonomy dot org. It's the whole thing, every chapter.
And I'm glad to post it. He's a prolific author. He goes into his own version of physics. We mentioned suction and pressure, right. He believes that these are the two prime movers of the world, the universe, reality and everything, and that substances are things affected by suction pressure. This includes solids, its gases. Mentality is also susceptible.
He's kind of got his zone vernacular there. And he also is big beef with science. Yes, was that he doesn't believe in energy.
Yes, we have the quote there is no greater load of misconception that science has ever had to shoulder than the unprovable theory that's somewhere, somehow and in some shape, there exists a substance called energy that causes movements. No such thing exists anywhere, and science should expunge the fallacy without delay.
Yeah, and The funny thing is he refers to constantly in this work about how he can't stand it when things are unprovable, and yet continuously puts forth all of these absurdly unprovable and just flying in the face of much more provable scientific research. Yeah, so what are some of those ben.
Some of his I guess we say lars andomic beliefs. Well, Lasonomy argues for a couple of different substances or states that do not exist in other forms of accepted science. There's something called less ether less ether l E S E T H E R.
Is that the stuff that's in space. No, that's the stuff that's on the Earth.
It's from the Sun, but it's on Earth.
It's the stuff that the Earth is made of because it's less dense than ether, which is what space is made of, right, less ether less ether.
Yeah, and then there's there's something interesting here. His father had attempted for some time to build a perpetual motion machine. That's right, right, and we mentioned, which is what a machine that is able to, once started, function without losing energy. It's able to perform work without losing energy and without taking in new energy.
Like a more extreme version of that thing you'd have on your desk with the balls where they hit each other and go click click click click. Eventually those do run themselves out.
Something like that that just goes on for a wheel that always spins, and many many people have claimed to invent pret.
That's a fallacy, though it's not. It's sort of like cold fusion or something right right.
Now, as far as we know, it is not possible. It violates the laws of known physics. But he has lost and has his own kind of perpetual motion machine. It's a state. He calls, help me out with pronouncing this.
Exuavar pois exit equaverois, quaver poise, equaver poisse, equaver poise. Yeah, And so he says, there are four separate forces that have to equalize in order that a formation can balance and live, and these are them in order. Internal section that draws in from without, internal pressure that pushes out from within, external section that draws out from within, external pressure that pushes in from without, and x squavar poise is a level that's sought by substances of varying density
that causes perpetual movement of matter. So that's like the stuff of the universe, right, It's like what causes the universe to be in harmony?
Yep, suction and pressure. Don't buy all those lies about energy, folks. And as people are breeding this material, encountering Lawson's beliefs and hearing him speak, most of the large crowds are people in the Upper Midwest who want to hear about direct credit. When the Great Depression draws to a close later in the thirties, a lot of these people who are part of this big direct credit society movement leave.
They no longer need this alternative economic perspective, and they never really cared too much about his concepts of losonomy and pressure and section and lesse there and all that stuff. So the crowds start to dwindle, and what he has left is a group of followers who are hook line and sinker into the concepts the philosophy that he has espoused.
Beyond just the idea of direct credit. They want to study his concepts of the brain of the universe, the idea of the male and female dichotomy of suction and pressure, the concept of men orgs. We didn't even talk about men orgs.
Too much. Man too much.
Men orgs short for mental organizers a portmanteau if you will, and or a portmanteau if you wish.
No, we do not wish anymore.
And mental organizers are these tiny, tiny creatures that are inside your brain, the cells of your mental system, and help your body function in a focused way, help your cognition. And then there are the disorgs. They're the bad guys, the disorganizers, michroscopic vermin that attempt to destroy for some reason, the mental instruments constructed and operated by the menorcs. So his actual followers post direct credit society like this. They want to learn more, right.
Yeah, they do. So, Yeah, he actually starts at college and he's able to purchase an abandoned university campus in des Moines, isn't that right?
Yeah? In des Moines.
And he I'm sorry des Moines. I said des Moines, and I got roasted for that before. Let me make sure I say right, des Moines.
So he, yeah, he buys this university and wants it to become a center of learning, the University of Lisonomy and his followers join him. But the rules of this university differ from those of other universities. Cough cough, hint, hint accredited cough cough hinted.
University cough cough hinted scientology cough cough you really you need a cough then, Even of those off buttons, you only have those in real, real radio setups.
Yeah, we used to have peak behind the scenes here, Casey, you remember this too. We used to have a sound maker. There's one, but it doesn't have any batteries, does it.
No, I mean a button that you push so that it mutes your mic so that you can't Oh yeah, yeah, that's pro stuff, right.
Our friends who work for MPR, they have those exactly. I checked out their setup. I just wanted to use it just to feel power. Yeah. Oh, it does have batteries. That's a good one. And it's appropriate because Lawson thought he was dropping a bomb on the scientific consensus of the time, and students at the University of Lausonomy, although they were not getting an Orthodox education, they were getting a rigorous one.
Yeah. And the thing too, is like he outlawed or I don't know if that's the right word, but definitely forbade any books to be on campus that were not written by he himself. And I mean he kept writing these things so that library probably wasn't massive, but you know, there was definitely enough material to go around. And a big part of like testing in this university system was just wrote memorization of Lawson's own texts, which is terrible.
You would have these different exams and you had to recite, as you said, Noel, you had to recite from the books verbatim. And in man Life with Merle Hayden you can see that he actually experienced this because he is verbatim quoting from these different books and they had to
do this for a cartoonishly long amount of time. After about ten to what twenty years of memorization, you would have an interim exam, and then after thirty years you have a comprehensive exam and if you passed, if you memorized enough of this guy's work, I would receive the degree of knowledge.
In Yeah, I'm gonna say nollegian.
Nolegian sounds classier.
Yeah, but I think until he passed away, no one held that distinction except laws in himself.
Yeah, which is a little culty obviously.
Oh, and not to mention that this was also a communal living situation on a kind of a compound type situation. So you know it was it definitely had that culty vibe to it.
The people of Des Moines were getting creeped out for sure. And the big catch here is that only knowledge ins could bestow the degree of knowledge and to another person. So if Lawson is the only one who has this ability and he passes away or something, then there are technically no more people with this degree. But the university bends the rules a little bit to get some people
appointed were to you know, have acquired this degree. At this time, this thing that started as an economic theory and later became a kind of philosophy is getting closer and closer to something that we might call like mysticism or spirituality. But it's also garnering attention from the federal government.
That's right, because it had been around for about ten years before there were there were some issues in the Senate Small Business Committee caught wind of the fact that they had bought these machine tools from like war surplus, and they actually resold them or at least a large number of them, and made a decent amount of money
doing that. And this is coming from that Wired article that we talked about earlier, and he appeared before this committee and tried to explain to them what loaust nomy was fact, the fact that it was based on physics, and then they needed the machine to help, you know, ply their their craft or whatever, or like, you know, follow their religion or their philosophy. And he was very upset when they kind of, you know, didn't understand what
he was getting at. And Lawson commented that this whole thing was quote, the damnst thing I've ever heard of in all my life. And then one of the senators said, quote, I don't know whether we're talking about the same thing, but I'm inclined to agree with you.
Yeah. They seemed mutually befuddled and irritated at their inability to communicate. And there's a great Times article about it called zigzag and swirl, which is another principle. Yeah, loss to which loss in the hears And I'm sure he tried to explain that to the senators, Yes.
Talking about some zigzag and swirl.
And I don't that's a very lighthearted moment because I love the idea of both of these guys ardently trying to explain this stuff. And investigations continue, but for the time being, the University of Lausonomy soldiers on. After people graduate the university, their story or their journey with Lausonomy doesn't end. They are offered option for postgraduate work. It's called Lisonian religion and it is made to provide students
with the highest quote grade of consciousness. Remember when we talked about the people who would be different and superior to us land lubbers and they would live in the sky. This is the way to become that person, according to Lawson.
Yeah, and you know, we shouldn't forget too that this was all happening while Lawson was still alive during kind of the rise of Nazism and laws and spoke out against it pretty regularly. But because of the kind of militaristic esque qualities of his organization, much like the kind of things we see with like the sea org in scientology,
right it people it was not a good look. People were kind of like a little bit alienated by them, you know, and it was just kind of like a little bit weirded people out.
Where they felt maybe it was somewhat hypocritical because these people at the time also would have been familiar with Lawson's earlier work. The Direct Credit Society was a very populist movement, you know, when they did have uniforms and dress codes, and the university was not so different. Also, Lawson was seen as somewhat of a I don't want to say a Tony Stark figure, but it was an aviation expert. We didn't even talk about the circulation numbers
of his paper The Benefactor. Under his time with the Direct Credit Society, people were aware of who this guy is, and they saw how his positions evolved would be the nice way to say it changed, would be another way to say it. Over time, they saw how they evolved
and changed over time. Increasingly his beliefs were becoming difficult to parse or obtuse, such that in the modern day now Casey and Nola and I are not psychologists or therapist, but in the modern day the kind of language he's using seems to be increasingly what we would call like word salad or disassociative yep. And there's a marked acceleration
in this tendency as he ages. There were hints of this all along in his concepts with the Direct Credit Society and the layer of astronomy, but as he goes into out and out religion, as it goes from an economic theory to a philosophy to a religion. Is all the stops are gone. He's just saying insane stuff.
Yeah, like what go to you? Gouts should launch your list a few, We can.
Launch your list a few. Yeah, yeah, you went around Robinett.
Let's do it, okay.
God wanted a supervising agent to manage the earth and all that it contains therein, and so he directed the men Orgs remember them, to design and build a super conscious being upon humane principles that would be capable of executing such orders and performing such duties as he would from time to time prescribe. It was a very crude thing that the Menorgs first produced, which was designated as Man.
But they continue to improve him with the view of constantly increasing his intelligence and enlarging his consciousness until eventually he will become acceptable in the sight of God.
I like, how I even heard you get bored with reading that? Right, It's just like what what?
Well? I tone it down there toward the end, because I feel like that's how a lot of people took it when they were reading something that ostensibly was going to be about physics or science or economic theory.
That's the thing, Like all of his stuff is this weird, garbled mishmash of different ideas with no real substance there and nothing that's it's all just a kind of agglomeration
of like pseudoscientific ideas and kind of like bluster. And Hey, if there's any Lossonians out there that are offended by this, I'm more than happy to hear your side of the you know, but I don't know that there are any that remain because that film we talked about man Life, which by the way, was the name of a magazine that lost and published, not Man's Life, Man Life, one word.
The guy that was the subject of that film is like ninety three years old during the making of the film, and he kind of like sticks around as an archivist and he goes to this like air shows in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he tries to recruit young people into the Blasonian
faith with very little success, it seems like. But his story is beautiful and he's you know, he he does live to be you know, close to one hundred, and he follows all of the tenants of loss and he eats raw food and you know, he's got like he really you know, lives his life by this code, which is really interesting to see. But there's there's a little bit more of the story. Lawson's legal troubles do not end at the whole affair with the you know, the
machines or whatever. He actually they get their nonprofit status revoked and I think he owes in the neighborhood of a decade's worth of back taxes because it was retroactive, right right, So that pretty much bankrupted the organization or they had to sell off the university campus they had and they moved to another kind of farm type campus in Where was it ben It was somewhere in Minnesota in Racine County, Racine County, which is on Interstate ninety four,
a very very well traveled stretch of interstate between like Chicago and Milwaukee. Yeah, you can read, uh, you can read a chool article about it on Milwaukee dot com, which is where we bye by Greg Hoffman, which is where we found uh the description of the university after it moved. And one of the features of one of those buildings was a big gray barn that says study natural law on the outside of it. And I believe
the campus is still there today. You can. There's a video on this Wired article where a guy just kind of wanders around and it looks like everything's locked and I think it's owned by a trust that still is tied to the idea of Blossonians. But it. Yeah, and he himself lost in passed away two years after they got this new campus, and after he kind of was shamed, you know, for being a bit of a tax fraud. And you know, over after his def to repassed, the
numbers just dwindled. They were never like that massive. To begin with, the direct credit movement was much more successful than the Lawsonian movement because of its tie to the Great Depression, and then you know, it sort of dwindled from thousands of members to maybe just a couple hundred, and then you know.
Eventually eventually to Now there are some other people involved. We'll get to them in just a second, But yes, it is true. Alfred Lawson died on November twenty ninth, nineteen fifty four, meaning that one reason or another, he did die before he was two hundred years old. And you're right that it did quickly diminish. The following that was already much smaller than Direct Credit However, there are reports of one last Lasonomic institution out in Kansas. Did you read about now?
I did not so.
In the Journal Times there is a report from two thousand and one of a church of Austonomy, and this church still remains there in Kansas and Mount Pleasant. The officiator and one of the Lowsonians who still live in the area say that they find this personally meaningful. It has five buildings, including a church, a farmhouse, and a dormitory, but only the two story dormitory is used today. Only one guy lives on campus, is the caretaker. His name's
Gary Turner. All these people are pretty elderly at this point, and they have a dilapidated headquarters with tons of books and collections of literature. And one of the big things is that people the remaining Lawsonians want younger people to join the movement or religion, but just like Merle Hayden, they are not reaching many people. They're not convincing anyone.
So if this religion dies, and I tried to find more about this, if this religion does die, then unless some company buys the property, it is going to be the property of Kansas. The very last update I found was also by The Journal Times. Ricardo Torres rights that Fox Cohn just bought an unusual piece of Wisconsin history. So as far as we could see, the company, Fox con Technology Group bought the land the Mount Pleasant owned
for over nine hundred thousand dollars. So these people may be aging, the group may be aging, but financially they're not hurting anymore.
Interesting. Yeah, I didn't hear about that. That's cool.
So we don't know what happens the story continues.
Maybe this is a weird one man, and this is a tough one to get through. And then there's a lot of stuff we've had to leave out. But I can't recommend highly enough this documentary. It's called Man Life The Last of the Losonians.
You can also find some cool audio stuff on YouTube about this. But again i'll post this on our page Ridiculous Historians. You can read these books, a lot of them in full online as far as I can find.
Most of them are out of print in a physical edition, so it might be tougher to get there, but you can read PDFs and I don't know, I encourage check it out and if you if you have an understanding of what exactly they're talking about, especially when it gets the physics and the nature of interaction of elements and substances. Feel free to write us an email and break it down, because I'm gonna be honest. I read it. I don't get it, don't They don't quite understand.
Yeah, No, it's it's it's a tough one. It's a bit of a it's been hard to swallow.
A bit of terriology precursor. Maybe we should do that. Maybe we should make up our you, me and everybody listening. Maybe we should make up our own personal philosophies. Why not, and we name them after themselves.
Just call it, you know, a code that you live by yourself. We don't have to make other people do it.
Yeah, that's the thing that seems a little bit imperial stick about it, you know what I mean. And also I believe that people should have self confidence. But it feels weird to name things like that after yourself. You know what I mean?
Oh, I do know what you mean. And I do want to end with with one last quote from laws in himself that sums this whole thing up. Go for it to try to write a sketch of the life and works of Alfred W. Lawson in a few pages is like trying to restrict space itself.
Oh my god, we didn't even talk about how he writes the third person under assumed names yeah.
Zy q fonts. All right, well again, maybe we'll have to revisit this one. This I've had a good time.
I did too. This also reminds me a little bit of time cube, of a less angry version of time cube. You know what that is?
Right? I do not?
Are you serious, man? Okay, time cube? This? I know this. We're being such a one more thing is a guy who believes that the Earth encounters You will hear me turning my computer around to show this to knowl who believes that the Earth encounters for simultaneous and that it's moving through a cube of space and time. And his entire website is just this. I can post it. He made an appearance at Georgia Tech, one of our local learning centers, a while back, and I felt really bad.
I think he's unwell. He has a very unique and distinct understanding of the nature of reality. And there are more and more people like this, and you ay, sometimes we call them eccentric, sometimes we call them visionaries. Don't know what the difference is, but we would like to hear from you. Thank you so much for checking out the show. Thanks to Casey Pegram, our super producer, and Noel. Thanks to you.
Welcome then thanks also to Alex Williams, who composed our theme, and to our amazing researcher, Eve's Jeffcoats, who worked on this episode.
Be sure to join us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter you can see all sorts of shenaniganry. There cannot highly enough recommend our community page, Ridiculous Historians. If you want to read about hosotomy, then I've got you. I'll post up some PDFs on the page and I would love to hear what you think. If this somehow makes sense
to someone, let us know. Because we were adrift and some very high minded concepts today, but luckily we made it back to Earth and that is the strange story of the inventor of the airline.
We'll see you next time.
Books.
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