Pushkin the Last Archive A History of Truth?
Are you going to answer that? I don't want to tell you what to do, but you're listening to this on your phone and your phone is ringing. Fine, I'll answer it.
Oh.
It's a character from a movie made in the nineteen fifties, Wiretapper.
Could you develop equipment to listen in on a telephone? That is, record a conversation without the owner knowing anything about it?
Wiretapper tells the story of Big Jim Voss, an electronics guy in Los Angeles who gets work bugging and slowly but surely gets sucked into a criminal underworld and winds up becoming a pretty big deal. There's this scene that shows the moment he becomes a wire tapper. You can tell he's hanging out with the mob because they're sitting around smoking, listening to jazz.
Wiretapping is illegal, mister Remstey, just that the question, I could put the equipment together.
The movie hit theaters early in nineteen fifty five. That same year, a best selling book called Wiretap was in stores. Columbia Pictures was said to be working on a movie called The wire Tappers. The stuff was all over the place. It was still a new thing for some people to have a phone in their house, and people were a little itchy about it. The newspapers kept writing stories about the dangers of wire tapping. Someone was listening in wiretapper
of the movie was tapping straight into that fear. The ads for the film read, if you're on the phone, you're not safe.
Even the police aren't a lot of tap private wires. Here's five hundred, there'll be another five. I have you do a good job.
I guess if it's for the police, eh, it'll be all right.
So this movie at first seemed to me like pretty straightforward in noir stuff. But it wasn't made by a major studio like Warner Bruthers or MGM or Columbia. It was made by the most famous evangelical Christian in the country, the Minister Billy Graham, which maybe I should have suspected from all the church scenes.
The Bible says, what shall it properer man? He be gained the whole world and lose his home soul.
So this put a pretty big question in my mind. Why was the most famous evangelist in America making a movie in the nineteen fifties about how if you're on the phone, you're not safe. Pulling on this thread. It turned out to be like yanking on a telephone gable and discovering that it's wired up to everything in the United States. Welcome to Season four of The Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes
lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Ben Matta Haffrey. Today's episode, We're Tapping the Phones. I was watching that movie Wiretapper, because I've gotten curious about the history of a feeling. I think a lot of people have. Now we're all on our phones all the time, and I at least have pretty much accepted that I'm constantly being surveiled, if not by wiretappers and cops, then
by companies and bots. But this weird intersection of phone anxieties in American religion in the fifties caught me off guard. I wanted to understand how those things fit together, So I dug into the absolutely unhinged story behind that film, a story about the telephone, American spirituality, and most of all, that wiretapper, Big Jim Voss. Because it turns out He's a real guy.
Yarn and raised in the city of Los Angeles, the son of a preacher.
Jim Voss, son of a preacher, grew up in Los Angeles. His first phone number was Broadway sixteen zero seven. That was more important than the son of a preacher thing, because Big Jim wasn't on track to become a preacher like his father. He was on track to become a telephone criminal.
His father was definitely, you know, on the fundamentalist side. He had two sisters, but being the only boy, I think there were a lot of expectations that he would go into the ministry himself.
Will Voss one of Big Jim's kids, who wrote a book about his father's life. Like his grandfather, Will is a minister. I called him up to talk about his dad and just to say if the interviews in this episode sound different than usual, it's because I recorded them by tapping my phone.
You know, he really struggled with the level of expectation that was there, and in his younger life really rebelled against just the whole upbringing.
This is a kind way of saying that from childhood on, Big Jim Voss was always in.
Trouble thata guy would sell them out of it.
Voss grew up during the Great Depression, but he decided the reason his family was poor was because his parents were Christians. He wanted to get rich. When he was little, his parents took in borders to earn a little bit of extra cash, and there was one man who was always building radios. Voss would sit in the border's room and watch. Eventually, the man taught Kid Jim had to tinker himself, and he fell in love with sound machines, radios,
microphones phones. Pretty quickly. He realized that one of the best parts about this gear was that he'll let you hear things you weren't supposed to.
His first wired top experience is that he wired his sister's date in the family home.
He was about twelve. His sister's boyfriend was coming over. Kid Jim dug around his electronics stash, snuck into the living room and hit a microphone behind the couch. He ran a wire from it out a window to a speaker in the backyard, and then.
Sold tickets to kids in the neighborhood to come listen to his sister's conversation with her boyfriend.
This is like his origin story that combination spying, recording devices, money betrayal. That was the story of Big Jim Voss' life in college at Bible School, he claimed he'd set up a fundraiser for the yearbook where people paid to watch a long distance call from Los Angeles to Africa. Then, according to his son Will, he embezzled the money and he flew to Florida. He got away with that, But it was mugging an old man at gunpoint that supposedly
finally landed him in prison. He left his driver's license at the scene. But Big is like a cat with nine lives. World War II was for most people not a good thing. For Jim Voss, it was great because, he says, he left prison, got drafted, and was put to work using his electronic skills.
The army was good to me, wiped out the record of conviction, detailed me to duty on the West Coast.
This tape, by the way, is from a speech Foss gave a couple of years before that Wire Tapper movie came out. This is his version of his life story. The story that movie is based on, the story whose significance I'm trying to understand a lot of It is probably fluff, but there's important truths there if you sift for them. First truth, this is a story about how Big Jim Voss was bad news.
Finally was court marshaled again, this time for misuse of priorities, misappropriation of government's property. I was sent in ten years hard.
Labor misappropriation of government property, basically stealing equipment from the army, as he tells it. When the war ended he got out. He moved back home to Los Angeles in his parents' house to set up an electronics business. Now we're going to leave Big Jim there for a moment, just a moment, so I can tell you that that decade, the nineteen forties, Americans were spending a lot of time on the phone.
The telephone had been around since eighteen seventy six, so to me, the phone seems practically ancient compared to say, the radio. But it was especially after the Second World War that the telephone system really exploded for the first time. More than half of Americans had phones in their homes. You can hear the thrill of it in those post war telephone ad campaigns.
Lift a telephone receiver and the world is at your fingertaips speed and your voice spans oceans and continents with the speed of light.
Everyone was getting a phone. There were ten thousand new hookups a day. More people got telephones right after the war ended than any other time in history up till them. In the four years after the war, the system grew by half, and in the sprawling, booming city of Los Angeles, everyone was patching in. It had always been a big
phone city. As a historian Emily Bills points out, everyone thinks cars la, but before there were cars, trolleys, or even paved streets in downtown Los Angeles, there were telephone lines criss crossing all over the place, and over time it became a catch all technology. People used the phone for everything, the means.
Were transacting business, the means for communicating information, for seeking help, for keeping all friends in touch.
But people swiftly realized that the phone didn't just connect you to everything, It connected everything to your living room. That was a little anxiety inducing. Maybe all this connection wasn't such a good thing after all. There was a lot of concern about who might call, and the fact
that they might call at any hour. But even more upsetting was the concern about who might be listening, which was on a lot of people's minds because they were all on something called a party line, which phone companies spend a lot of time and money getting people used to.
You and the other fellow on your line can help each other to better telephone service by simply being good party line neighbors.
Party lines were shared lines that connected a few houses to the network. Most phone users had them, so picking up the phone and overhearing someone else's conversation was a regular thing. I find that tension really interesting. Here was a device that lets you speak one on one to someone far away from the privacy of your own home. It invited secrets, but it also gave you the constant awareness that someone might be able to hear them at
any time. I feel that now when I Google something and then the next day see ads for it all
over the place. This moment the nineteen forties, when a lot of people were getting their phones and Big Jim was in La setting up his electronics business, I think that feeling began to go mainstream by the way people called him Big Jim Voss, because what else do you call a guy who's six foot four weighs three hundred and twenty four pounds and is pursuing his passion for electronics in his parents' basement.
Believe me, that's lige. Don't look so startled you've been wondering anyway.
Imagine a guy that size, with slicked hair and big v neck lapels like a linebacker, who kind of looks like Elvis if you squint. He stood a head taller than pretty much anyone else. With his life of crime behind him, Big Jim went straight with his electronics business at his parents' house for like two seconds.
One day, we were approached by the Los Angeles Police Department. They wanted us to aid them in the development of some equipment they thought would could have curbed crying.
The LAPD had found Big Jim kind of by accident. A cop on their vice squad, Officer Charles Stoker, was investigating a tip about an alleged prostitute living in an apartment building. The other tenants had been complaining. When Stoker arrived, he checked in with the manager, who happened to be
Big Jim Voss, helping out a friend. Luckily for us, Stoker was very much the hero of his own story and later wrote about this fateful encounter in a memoir called Thicker in Thieves, the nineteen fifty factual expose of police payoffs, graft, political corruption, and prostitution in Los Angeles and Hollywood. Stoker needed proof that the suspect was engaging in prostitution, but it was going to be hard to get the kind of evidence he needed, at least if he was going to do it legally.
One glance at the apartment, and I knew that the arrest was going to be difficult, since defendans must be caught in the act of sexual intercourse. The apartment had a long hallway and the rooms were so far from the outer door it would be virtually impossible to detect incriminating conversation.
Big Jim was there observing all of this. Truthfully, he didn't really care if one of the tenants was in aging and prostitution. He later wrote, I was keeper of no man's morals. But having watched the cops haplessly climb a tree in an attempt to catch the woman in the act, Big Jim sensed an opportunity. He revealed to officer Stoker that his real job was electronics microphones. He told them that he could bug the room and get
them the proof they needed. The cops were thrilled. This plan wasn't exactly legal, but it probably seemed better than the climbing trees thing. So Big Jim Voss got to work. He hit a microphone in the room, and then they listened.
To say that I was amazed what I heard would be an understate.
Big Jim had struck gold. The vice squad cops loved him. He began making them all kinds of wire tapping gizmos.
We had one gadget that made it possible for us who listen into telephone conversation, so that we didn't have to go anywhere near the telephone in question, but we could sit back on the other side of town and hear all what was being said on that telephone.
Big Jim was kind of like Queue in James Bond. He kept coming up with new ways for the cops to spy on people. Mostly his innovations came from hiding miniaturized microphones in places and recording what he heard on a wire, an old recording format. He was especially proud of something he called a talking cane, which allowed cops
to hear things through walls. It looked like a walking stick, except it probably had a tiny microphone hidden in the end and a wire running up the cane through the cops sleeves to an amplifier and then to an earbud. It also sent a signal wirelessly to a recording device hidden in a car outside, so they could tape everything. And then there were the wire taps that became Big Jim's signature.
Tectologically speaking, in the days of the Copper eelephone system, the electro mechanical switching system, it was really quite easy to tap a line.
That's Brian Hawkman, director of American Studies at Georgetown University, an author of the book The Listeners, a History of wiretapping in the United States, And.
It's Big Jim Voss who was a true pioneer in the postwar electronic eavesdropping field and made an extraordinary name for himself on both sides.
Of the law.
Big Jim didn't make much money off the LAPD, but as his reputation grew, he started getting more work around town. He claimed to do a lot of work for movie stars. Specifically, he said he'd tapped Mickey Rooney's phone so he could prove his wife was having an affair.
It's always interesting what goes on when people don't know they're being listened to by so many people.
I think this line of business is basically the same as broadcasting his sister's date to the neighborhood kids, exposing women by means of technology. The history of the telephone and wiretapping is a history of privacy and concerns about privacy which have always been gendered. We made a whole episode about this a couple of years ago, The Invisible Lady. You can listen to it on your phone on Apple
Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. Anyway, the idea of an electronic ear sitting in your living room was worrisome to the broader public, in part because it violated the sanctity of the home, and also because nobody particularly seemed interested in cracking down on it. Exhibit A. The cops were hiring Big Jim to do more of it.
One thing that's extraordinary to note, Despite the fact that wire tapping was illegal in the state of California, private eavesdroppers for hire advertised their services openly in the LA Yellow Pages. And this was a business that was out in the olden It was illegal, but it was never prosecuted, and Boss emerges as a leader in this very strange gray area industry.
Big Jim Voss, son of a preacher, two time convict cat on his third life, was now simultaneously working for a bunch of movie stars who wanted to expose There soon to be ex spouses, rich men who wanted radar guard at homes, and self righteous cops who wanted to wire tap call girls phones.
I don't think at the time he thought much at all about the morality of the things he was doing. I think he thought it was great fun.
It probably was fun until Big Jim got in over his head. We'll be right back. In nineteen forty eight, Big Jim Voss was wire tapping all over Los Angeles. He was basically a character in a film noir movie. Already that same year, an actual film noir movie came out that opened with an epigraph which reads to me like a mission statement for Big Jim.
And the tangled networks of a great city. The telephone is the unseen link between a million lives. It is a servant of our common needs, the confidant of our inmost secrets.
Big Jim Voss was wired tapping all over those networks, and he was about to get tangled up in something pretty serious. Among the many clients he claimed cops, movie stars, businesses. Big Jim had been working with a private detective who turned out to have a connection to the mob. The Mob realized he could use a guy like Big Jim, so they called him up.
One day, we were called after a little habitashery on the Sunset Drip in Hollywood.
Big Jim drove out to the Habitashery, a little hat shop on the Sunset Strip, and he made his way to the back.
I was quite well impressed, first of all with the steel doors that I passed through to get into it. Secondly with its exquisite furnishing, walnut panels that ran from ceiling to floor, suspended television set in the corner, red leathered upholstered furniture in a semi circular death behind which SATIS famed man Mickey Cohen.
Mickey Cohen was the head of the Los Angeles Underworld. Short, bald guy with a pretty odd personality, a cold blooded killer who loved eating ice cream and washed his hands fifty times a day. In the back of that hat shop, he explained the situation to Big Jim. The LAPD had bugged Cohen's house. Cohen wanted Big Jim to find the bug.
He came by the next day piece of cake. Cohen was impressed, and pretty quickly he hired Big Jim to listen in on all of his enemies for him, including the LAPD, for whom Big Jim had also been wired tapping. He was a double agent, worked for the good guys and the bad guys, except as I came to realize, those were the same guys. In Los Angeles, there used to be something known as the combination, the alliance between
city government, law enforcement, and the mob. Something like that still existed in Big Jim's day, so he didn't have to pick sides because there weren't really sides. He worked for the LAPD and he worked for the Mob. He got pretty cozy with them. Eventually he moved his electronics shop onto the Strip, right alongside the mobbed up Habitashery. The strip was outside city jurisdiction for quite some time.
After engaging in this activity with mister Cohen, I found it convenience to work for him on the one side, and for law enforcement agencies.
On the other Voss was still working with the LAPD. Tapping the phones was amazingly useful for those guys, because the phone has always been a kind of refuge for the things people can't do in public. That's one way to think about the telephone network as a kind of shadow of public life, the place where secret lives and longings go, things like prostitution. In the late nineteen forties, Voss's main gig with the police had been helping Stoker
investigate probably the biggest prostitution ring in the city. It was headed up by a woman named Brenda Allen. She was a hard nosed businesswoman, glamorous, always in sunglasses. As Time magazine put it, somewhat absurdly, she had a mind like a cash register, and she hadn't been in love since she was twenty one. Like Big Jim, She'd found a good use for Los Angeles' vast telephone network. Brothels were risky, they could be raided, all the foot traffic
would draw attention. But if you had a web of employees, each with their own phone, the modern adam could function like a telephone exchange. This is where the term call girl comes from. Brenda Allen had one hundred and fourteen of them all over town. She was always on the phone setting up secret rendezvous, and Officer Stoker wanted Big Jim to listen in. He wrote about the plan in his.
Memoir We went to Brendan entered through the basement through a rear door, and in short order Voss had tapped rendered Lyne. There were more calls than she could possibly hand them. As soon as she received one call and dispatched a girl or girls, she would dial the telephone, exchange them and contact. The operator would give her the names of waiting customs.
The scene was recreated in that movie Wiretapper, in loving detail. You can see the real equipment, and the conversation is straight from an account. Big Jim wrote of the night.
Cord, who gave you this number? Why, mister Fielding, our sales manager. Oh, yes, Well, we have some very nice books the heroine and one is especially attractive, A brunette about five for three ads like very interesting reading. How about ten o'clock at the corner of Sunset and Lbrea. There'll be a picture on the front cover, a girl in a mink coat. That'll be fine. Goodbye.
Stoker in real life was thrilled. Now he wanted to find out who the call girls were, so a day later, Big Jim came by with a device that could record all the numbers. Brenda Allen was dialing an impulse indicator, jammed in that basement, probably sweating, breathing as quietly as possible. Big Jim and Stoker gathered twenty nine numbers in one night, most of them for girls working for Alan. It was
a huge coup. Stoker was greedy for more numbers, so he came back the next night with Big Jim's device, hooked it up to the wire, and began writing down all the numbers. And then he saw a number that he recognized, the number of the La Vice Squad his own department.
My ears twitching, my nostrils flared as I listened. When someone answered Brenda's ring, she inquired if Sergeant Jackson.
Was in Moments later, according to Stoker's account, Stoker and Big Jim were listening to one of the top aids to the head of the vice squad as he talked with the Cities number one madam about how much they loved each other. The call also confirmed that the vice squad was being paid off by Allan. The self righteous stoker was aghast crooked cops in Los Angeles.
At the time. I had high ideals concerning the Los Angeles Police Department.
Big Jim suffered from no such idealism, and when he teamed up with Mickey Cohen, he told the mob all about the recordings. It was too good not to share leverage on the cops. But when word got out about Big Jim's recordings of Brenda Allen and the LAPD, the situation spiraled why out of control. Here's how bad corruption was in Los Angeles in the nineteen forties. There was a grand jury that met every year to investigate corruption in government. When they caught wind of Big Jim's blockbuster
Brenda Allen recordings, they launched an investigation. It exposed corruption all over the place, mobbed up cops, Brenda Allen paying people off. It was so bad that the chief of the LAPD even stepped down. Everyone was turning on everyone else, and somehow Big Jim Voss and his wiretap recordings were right at the center of it all.
The police was looking for these tapes that my father had related to Brenda Allen. Then he wasn't giving them up.
Will Voss, Big Jim's son, the pastor.
Again he was leading them on a wild goose chase. You're sure these tapes agrees, yes. And then in the midst of all grand jury trial, you know he committed perjury implicating a police officer that you know that Cohen wanted to go down the whole thing.
It was the fall of nineteen forty nine and Big Jim was in a tight spot. Everything was splintering. He couldn't wire tap and bug for everyone anymore. The LAPD and Cohen weren't on good terms. There was a gang war, and Big Jim was involved in this whole other scheme that was jeopardizing his relationship with Cohen. Big Jim had been one step ahead of everyone the whole time, but now it was all catching up to him. He had
nowhere to turn. In that exact moment, the modern evangelical movement came crashing into Big Jim's life.
From Minneapolis comes a young evangelist, Billy Graham, to cooperate with Christ for Great Heir Los Angeles in a Great Revival campaign.
You probably know the name Billy Graham. He brought the evangelical movement to political power in this country. His Los Angeles crusade was what would make him famous nationwide. Graham set up in a huge revival tent at the corner of Washington and Hill Streets. It was big news.
There are sixty five hundred people seated here in this canvas cathedral, and several thousands more stand around the sides of the tent, approximately three hundred and fifty thousand total attendants in two months.
Big Jim's preacher father was worried about him started trying to get him to check out Graham. In a town that loved celebrities, suddenly a preacher was one of the most famous guys around. Down on his luck, Big Jim decided to go.
I thought to myself, well, I'll just drive by and see what's packed. I saw some fifteen thousand people trying to jam their way in. I drove on by. Then I thought, well, i'll park walk back.
Big Jim was at this point a recognizable face from all the press coverage of the grand jury investigation. Someone saw him. He was hard to miss and went to tell Graham that a hardened criminal was in the audience.
And I muscled my way to the front of the standing crowd. Some old lady got up and left her seat, and I grabbed it and I sat down and listened to the program, not enjoying it one bit.
Big Jim was uncomfortable. And then Graham came on stage and began to preach this it's the climactic moment of the movie Wiretapper.
As I've stood here this evening, I felt all evening that there's a man somewhere in this audience. He's heard this message many times before, and the Spirit of God is striving mightily with him at this moment, and if he doesn't come to Christ now, he may never come. We're going to wait a moment. There's still time for you to come and give your life to Christ.
Big Jim said he felt like Graham was speaking straight to him. He stood up, he walked to the front of the Canvas Cathedral. He fell to his knees, and he gave himself to God. That speech you've been hearing, we.
Had one gadget that made it possible for us to listen in the telephone conversation.
It's a sermon. Big Jim Voss cat on his fourth life. After that night, he quit the mob joined up with Billy Graham and helped to make him one of the most famous religious figures of all time by preaching about the telephone. We'll be right back. Some people were a little suspicious of Big Jim Voss's conveniently timed conversion. Among them Officer Charles Stoker.
Voss got himself a new code of celestial varnish. He said that he was tired of being a sinner and wanted to return to God.
Now Stoker might have been a little too hard bitten there. Voss did ultimately set up a much acclaimed ministry called Youth Development Incorporated, tending the gangs in Harlem. But look, this episode is not about the ultimate state of Big Jim Voss's soul. It's about the telephone. Remember, and Big Jim was literally standing at the source of the twentieth century evangelical movement in America with his ear to the country's phones. Brian Hawkman, wiretapping historian on the line once again.
And Graham used Vassa's conversion as one of his great kind of advertisements for his teachings.
Big Jim started spreading the Gospel of the reformed Wiretapper. He even published a book with the help of Graham's network. It's called Why I Quit Syndicated Crime, and it was a hit. Then Graham's ministry made that movie in nineteen fifty five, another success, albeit a really weird one. And then Voss started touring the country trying to save souls, and what he talked about all the time was his career wire tapping. He even brought wiretapping gear on stage with him.
He was God's wiretap. Where God had been calling, he had never picked up the phone, and finally he tapped in at just the right moment.
This was the early nineteen fifties. There was talk of a bugging epidemic in America, but also a sense of just how miraculous this technology was. Bill Labs, the famed research arm of the telephone company AT and T, had just invented the transistor, the electrical device that made possible the miniaturization of everything, including the phone in your pocket.
So the story that Boss tells his congregation, illustrated through the eavesdropping devices, is that no man can hide from God. If man can't hide from man, if all conversations can be recorded, everything hidden can be known, how can man hope to hide from God?
Here?
Were man made miracles, evidence of the almost divine power of technology to change the world.
And there's also, I guess, the sort of the way in which your secret in our life is a saying no normly to God that is now possibly also known to man, and this is through things like the wire tapping devices.
Absolutely he titled his sermon no Place to Hide.
This story has it all crime, corruption, electronics, evangelicals, but I think the phone is the thing that brings it all together. In Big Jim sermons and Billy Graham's wiretapper, electronics are miracles to be wondered at. But they also threatened to expose you to men like the old big Gym, to take the secret things that once only God or your priest and a confessional could have known, and broadcast them to everyone. And it's kind of a classically American story.
No other country took to the phone as quickly or as thoroughly as we did. People fretted about how the suburban sprawl was telephone aided in a country this big, the phone holds it all together. There's something really American about that idea of this one vast, fragile system connecting all these crazy disparate lives together, wiretappers to preachers, call girls to cops. It's like democracy as a technology, but
again like a shadow democracy. The phone is what you use for the things you don't want to be seen in public, the place you lead your secret life, whatever that consists of. It reminds me of those nine hundred numbers that became a big deal in the nineteen eighties, which were famously used for phone sex and also for spiritualists. That's kind of always been the thing with the phone,
secret longings and spiritualism. A lot of people thought maybe you could reach the spirit world through the telephone lines. All this to say, the experience of hearing a voice from miles away almost instantaneously, it collapsed time and space in a completely unreal, visceral way. And because it lets you share things privately without showing your face, it invited confessions. It's always created this kind of otherworldly private feeling that
religion deals with. That's part of why I think Big Jim's wiretapping was such a rich vehicle for any evangelical message. But that message, as Graham used it, was a little Old Testament. The phone's like a God who hears all and spares no one. It's a connection to all the sin coursing through the country. Like that poster for Wiretapper of the movie said, if you're on the phone, you're
not safe. But there was another side to it. As Big Jim was touring the country talking about the phone and wiretapping and the state of his audience's soul, another religious movement was beginning in Ocean Away that was also
all about the phone. So let's leave Big Jim Voss for a minute and make a long distance call from the northeast under the sea on the cable that stretches from North America along the ocean floor and up the craggy Rocks to England, down the winding streets of London to a church Saint Stephen Wahlberg, a church that had been bombed out during the Blitz. It's nineteen fifty three and an Anglican vicar named Chad Vera is starting the very first suicide hotline.
Vera had for a long time been really aware of suicide and suicidality and been very preoccupied by the pain that suicidality and suicide brought into communities, alongside, of course the loss of individuals.
Hannah's Even is a historian of science who wrote a book called The Distance Cure, A History of Teletherapy. Most people think suicide hotlines are a secular kind of therapy, but they came from the Church at a post war moment when the suicide rate was rising in the US and the UK. Chad Vera that Anglican vicar was trying to figure out how to address it, and so.
Vera in the early nineteen fifties had become not only really preoccupied with the fact that there was this increase in suicidality in this society, but also that there weren't social mechanisms for intervening and helping those in crisis, not only because it's unspeakable and all of the things that might trouble someone so greatly or unspeakable, but also because it was a felony.
To the cops. Suicide was a crime. To the church, it was a sin. So who could hear suicidal people talk about it? They were totally isolated.
Well, he really understood was that in a urgencies, right, we are conditioned to reach for the telephone then as now it's a different form of telephone, no doubt, but that that was already a kind of habitast of your any given individual. Nine one one as a formulation didn't exist for some time in the US. In the UK, that history is a little bit different, right, They did have a unified number already, So it makes sense in terms of telephone history, right that British folks were already
conditioned to call nine nine nine. So instead of putting fire and police, and also while not making it, a psychiatrist, Vera knew that we needed some kind of his society needed some kind of thing.
Vera decided to make a kind of telephone church. No physical congregation, just phones and Vera with a secretary, Vivian Prosser, offering counseling to people contemplating suicide twenty four hours a day.
Then Vera got to work.
He writ he offered this kind of serracutic confessional remediated. And it was so popular because immediately it became a feel good story in the popular person.
On the radio.
Vera was offering a kind of half psychoanalysis, half pastoral counseling. But the key thing was the telephone, the privacy of that conversation, the anonymity had offered, and the connection to someone when you needed them most. It was a brilliant idea and immediately it was extremely popular, and.
So Vera and Prosser couldn't handle the urgency of the calls on their own, and it couldn't be truly twenty four hours a day. That was another problem. So in order to meet the demand for help over the phone in its earliest moment, Vera trained fifty volunteers.
It kind of reminded me of Brenda Allen's call Girl Network, the private thing that someone wouldn't seek out in public but could ask for on the phone. It's like a system of tunnels under polite society, connecting someone filled with despair and bedroom to a kindly ear in a blitz bam church in London.
And I just love this. The term of art is befriending, which is this kind of ancient Christian term remade as this new person to person, that mediated form of care. And this is a Samaritans, which is the world's oldest and also most used suicide hotline, and it's still active today.
Various ideas spread all over the world. The hotline went on to take a lot of different forms, but it was right there in the nineteen fifties a big news story right alongside Big Jim's conversion narrative, two stories about invisible listeners, overhearing you at your lowest point, and understanding
who you really are. Since the nineteen fifties, there have been hotlines and dial of something services for pretty much everything you can imagine, from the serious like nine to eight eight today's National Suicide Hotline in the US, or hotlines Fraid's Information in the nineteen eighties, to the less serious nine five one two, six ' two three zero six two Santa's Hotline six ' four to one seven nine three eight one two two dial a pone. Even Big Jim Voss started one one eight hundred hit Home,
a hot line for runaway kids looking for shelter. Will Voss, big Jim's son, remembers working for it when he was in college.
I did do a lot of listening to kids, and you know, I didn't I didn't have to prompt them very much, you know, to pour their hearts out. It to stappen naturally.
It would have happened in the same way if you'd been face to face with them.
Probably not. Yeah, I think the anonymity really helped.
The anonymity helps the phones a tool of alienation, the phones a vehicle for connection. It turns out both things are true. And what's amazing to me about these big stories that people were using to understand the phone in the fifties wiretaps and hotlines, is they've got these shadows, spiritual messages. I think the phone still has those vestiges baked into it. It's like a tiny god in your pocket,
wire tapping everything you say, surveilling and sometimes saving. The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Ben Natapaffrey. It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on this episode by Arthur Gombert's sound design by Jake Gorsky and Lucy solib Our. Executive producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton Pushkin's executive editor. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell
Wagon Symphonet. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jannette Junior in the Stargenette Foundation Special. Thanks to Gary Goff, Emily Bills, Emily Bannis, and Lydia Jencott. Archival audio courtesy of Buswell Library and Archives and Special Collections, Wheaton College, Illinois. For a bibliography, further reading, and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head to the Last Archive dot com.
The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm slash Newsletter. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Nanna Faffrey.