Charles W. 'Chuck' Bryant
Appearances
Stuff You Should Know
Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, some of the some of the songs that you, you know, even if you're not a fan of this kind of thing, just kind of leaked into the public consciousness, like Give My Regards to Broadway from George Cohen. He also wrote Yankee Doodle Dandy and and over there during World War One. This is when Irving Berlin came around.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I don't know. I was singing that earlier. I was singing Give My Regards to Broadway. Wow.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
One of the, as you'll see, kind of a series of poor Jewish immigrant families that came to New York and the children of those families ended up being like these amazing Broadway writers and composers. He wrote things like Annie Get Your Gun and There's No Business Like Show Business, your old favorite.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And it wasn't just musical theater at the time. This sort of post-World War II era also had some pretty legendary plays, like The Iceman Cometh from Eugene O'Neill and Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun, of course. But it was Times Square after all. So in World War II, that's when you started seeing...
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Some, you know, the usual thing that would happen was like burlesque theater, eventually peep show, maybe regular movie theater and then porn theater.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
That's great. I do not know the Neon Lights one. I should have looked that up, but I do know Give My Regards to Broadway is from Little Johnny Jones from 1904, written by George M. Cohan.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, like if you go to a musical today, you're not assured to, but more than likely you're going to be seeing what's called a book musical. And that is when the musical, when the songs are central to the plot and the storyline and moving things along. It's not just like, and here's a song to add to this musical review kind of thing. Right.
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They still have those sometimes, but it's kind of a throwback. Like these days, the book musical...
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I mean, people were not doing that at the time. They also had blackface in that review because that was something they were also doing at the time, but it was also pretty, you know, progressive in some ways by, like, having an integrated cast.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, and just to be clear, it was truly integrated. I wasn't saying the blackface was integration. It had real integration and also blackface, which I don't quite understand.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I don't know how they were doing things in 1927.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Right, exactly. So Hammerstein is doing his thing, doing pretty well. Jerome Kern's great. But all of a sudden, a dude lopes onto the scene named Richard Rodgers. And Hammerstein said, Rogers and Hammerstein. That sounds, that has a nice ring to it. They're old buddies, old former classmates from Columbia years earlier.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And Rogers approached Hammerstein and said, hey, there's this play, Green Grow the Lilacs from Lynn Riggs. Why don't we turn that into a musical? And why don't we do a little different? Like, why don't you write the words to this thing first? I'll write the music. And I don't know, let's use an exclamation point in the title. Let's just call it Oklahoma.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I mean, giants to this day of the industry, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, The King and I. I mean, their names are basically synonymous with musical theater.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
So there were some like huge, huge shows of the late 20th century that sort of helped redefine Broadway. West Side Story was one. This was what kind of where the idea of the triple threat came along because they didn't have, you know, for a while there, there was like a separate chorus and that like did the dancing and stuff. And
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I didn't know Kraftwerk, they say the neon lights are bright. Is that how theirs goes?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
West Side Story was one of the first ones in 1957 to be like, hey, you're the lead actor. You're also singing. You're also dancing because that's all part of it. And all of a sudden, the triple threat was a thing. And that was the real start of another giant of Broadway, Stephen Sondheim.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
No, he wrote the lyrics. And then another name you might have heard of, Leonard Bernstein, was a composer for West Side Story.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. Yeah. I always wanted to see Cabaret.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, it was good. Hair, we have to talk about Hair from 1968. This is a musical that, and Livia points this out, it wasn't just commenting on what's going on in history at the time. It really helped kind of shape it in real time. It was the first rock musical, something I'm a big, big fan of. Oh, yeah? Yeah, like the jukebox, I have such a hard time with that. Musicals are okay.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Not my favorite, but those 70s, Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Hair, like that stuff is so groovy and so cool because it's like 60s and 70s.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. Or Merkin, because that was an all the whole cast was nude, very famously in one scene. But it did help launch the careers of Diane Keaton was in that original production, as was Meatloaf, a man whose house I have been at.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
By the way, this is a listener suggestion. So big thanks to Sarah Nagy for sending this in.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Super cool. Have not seen it either. Sondheim also very well known for Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. I have seen that. I have not seen that. But friend of the show, Scott Aukerman, highly recommends it, said it's like one of the best shows he's ever seen. It's great. Yeah, I got to check it out.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, and that began a run in 1975 of like a dozen years where some of the giants of all time were launched. Chorus Line, Chicago in 1975. Les Mis in 1987. Cats in 1982, which we'll talk about that a little more in a sec, and then Phantom in 88.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
But Cats very famously was a very, very long running show that like some people love, some people hate, some people think it's brilliant, some people make fun of it. But lyricist Tim Rice got together with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Webber Rice team. They did the amazing technical Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita. And then they said, hey, let's turn this T.S.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats into a musical and have real people dressed up as cats.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I've never seen any iteration of cats. I want to see something.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Oh, no. You couldn't go, like, fake sick or anything?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Your dad would have been, throw up in this bag. You'll be fine. Right. And then Phantom. Phantom was 88. And I think that's another Andrew Lloyd Webber show. But I think that was one of the first ones to really ramp up, got real designy and included some special effects. And I think that kind of started that trend of making things a little bigger.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
We tried to see Phantom at the Fox Theater here in Atlanta. And I actually just joined the Broadway season for next season. The season's run from May to May, I think, on regular Broadway. I'm not sure about the Fox, though. I think it may be about the same. But we tried to go see Phantom years ago, but we're both so distracted. It was when we were trying to buy our first house.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And we were obsessed with this house we were trying to get a bid on. And it was just one of those deals where we were not there. Our head was elsewhere. And we finally just looked at each other and we were like, we need to get out of here.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Oh, yeah. That's, I mean, impressive at the time. But yeah, that's 35 years is impressive.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
That's right. And non-musical theater.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
So we got to talk a little bit about Times Square. Even before the 70s came along, it was a pretty rowdy place. In the early teens, there was a 1 a.m. curfew because it was such a rowdy place. There were speakeasies there during Prohibition, burlesque in the 30s.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And then from the 60s and into the 90s, I think I mentioned this before, when I first started going to New York in the mid-90s, there were still peep shows there. It was right before the final cleanup happened, thanks to a few different mayors, but Mayor Ed Koch, certainly David Dinkins, and then eventually Giuliani would finish up the work of cleaning up Times Square.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
So they started – they dipped their toe in the pond with renovating and renting out the new Amsterdam Theater, which at that point New York City had acquired in 1992 as part of the 42nd Street Development Program because it was one of those that followed the – for less theater than movie theater than porn theater model. I don't know if that was an official model.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And then as they were remodeling that in 94, before they were finished, Disney opened Beauty and the Beast at the Palace Theater. Of course, the adaptation of the 91 animated film. And it was almost a $12 million budget, the most expensive musical ever at the time, and ended up running for about 13 years to total grosses of about 430 mil.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. I mean, the returns on Broadway, if you can get a smash hit going, you know, it's not like you have to sink $200 million into it like you do a big budget movie.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
For sure. Should we take our second break?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
All right, we'll be right back and finish up on Broadway right after this.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
All right. So Broadway, you can go for escape a spare. You always have been able to. You still can. But starting in the mid-90s with Rent, people really started tackling some heavier topics. Jonathan Larson's rock musical talked about addiction and suicide and poverty and AIDS. Rent was another one I left. It was fine, but it was another situation where I was with friends and everyone was
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I can't remember. There was some weird distraction where everyone was like, do you want to leave? I think our seats were bad or something. And it just wasn't happening. But I want to see Rent again. Larson very tragically died at 35 years old of an aortic aneurysm the night before it premiered off Broadway.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I think I've detailed this a little bit, but I've gotten more into musicals, and I enjoy musical theater and Broadway, and we try to go to a show when we're in New York. And now we're doing an annual Broadway-only trip, like where we go see a few of them.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. And, you know, I haven't seen many of those, but they did one of like the 80s rock. The Billy Joel's had one. Bob Dylan had one.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, that's what I meant. The 80s rock one. That was Rock of Ages, right? But, you know, it's a thing. I prefer something with. I mean, they have stories built around the songs, like you said, so they can be okay. But I prefer something a little more straight ahead, not based, like original music, I guess, is what I'm trying to clumsily get out.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Big fan of Wicked. Still recommend it. Finally saw it last year on Broadway. Unfortunately, it was not the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem. But that's where she made her name, along with, who was the original? Was it Kristen Chenoweth, I believe?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
We should call this episode Josh and Chuck Haven't Seen This.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Hamilton is one I did not see, but we would be remiss if we did not mention it because it was such a landmark play. Lin-Manuel Miranda.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
hip hop into historical context on Broadway, which is a huge smash hit. And I saw it on the, you know, the TV version of the film, the musical. So and listen to it quite a bit. But I never saw it live.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Well, and it was all sold out. So the only way to get tickets was to pay like $1,200 at the time. It would probably be even more now. But now you can go see it, and I bet you can get tickets for a regular price. Sure.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I need to. That's on my list. A couple of good friends have seen it and said it's great. So I'm going to go see that soon, I hope. These these make a lot of money. Like I said, Wicked set a weekly record in December of this past year, obviously buoyed by the popularity of the movie. But the first ever show to have a five million dollar week.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, pilgrimage. But I do love the plays, and we are, in fact, going to see Gary Glenn Ross in May. Haven't you seen the movie? I have, but this has got that killer cast on Broadway. I don't know if you heard about it or not.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And last season, the 23-24 season, again, ran from May to May. Total grosses of $1.54 billion, more than 12 million attendees, over 71 productions, with an average occupancy of 89.9. So the average Broadway show isn't even sold out. It's close to 90%.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I'm going to pick out a couple of these. I'm going to pick out Moose Murders from 1983. It is a farce, obviously, but it was bankrolled by an oil heiress named Lily Robertson and directed by her husband and starring... The oil heiress, Lily Robertson, who bankrolled it, which should tell you it's not headed toward a great thing also because it's called Moose Murders.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And it closed after one single performance. And New Yorker art critic Brendan Gill said that it would insult the intelligence of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I mean, there's different ways to qualify it. Like, is it just bad, bad? Or is it notoriously a flop because of how much money it cost and it flopped? That was the case with a couple of them. But Carrie, an adaptation of the Stephen King horror novel... As a musical, in 1988, closed after 16 previews and five regular performances at an $8 million budget.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
So it's widely considered one of the biggest sort of just expensive flops of all time.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, this has got Glenn Ross with Kieran Culkin and Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk and others.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. And believe it or not, that was it wasn't like an amateurish production. It was directed by Terry Hands, who ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for 13 years and was choreographed by Debbie Allen. So it was it was a big money thing that just was sounds like not a very good idea.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Well, it has been revived with cult status off-Broadway in the 2010s, so it's one of those.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. I mean, that had all the right ingredients to Broadway legend and film director Julie Taymor, who directed The Lion King on Broadway. They got Bono and the Edge to write the music. It was huge special effects and it was just problem after problem after problem. All like, you know, kind of front page or at least front page of the arts headline kind of problems.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
So I grabbed tickets for that right when they went on sale and I'm going and my friends are like, how'd you get tickets, man? You're so lucky. I'm like, I just logged on and got them when they went on sale.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. And I've been to some previews. I saw Sarah Jessica Parker and Broderick do the which one was it? The Neil Simon one a couple of years ago. And that was in previews. Don't let like the idea of a preview turn you off because like usually they just go straight through and it's just like a regular performance. Like I've never seen a preview that where anyone stopped and did anything weird.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And critics do actually see those because they will review the show before opening night because they have seen the preview.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, that would be my guess. I'm not sure how that works. But I know it's always I'm not sure if it's like movies. I know movies sometimes they won't let the critics see it before it's released. And that always means it stinks. Yeah. So I'm not sure if Broadway does that or not, actually.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I've seen quite a few in recent years, and I'll be going to more and more. So maybe we'll revisit this in 10 years, and I'll be more up to speed.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I hope so. And before we end, I think we would be remiss if we didn't mention that we recently learned that we have, like, for sure, literally inspired not one but two Broadway shows from this show, right?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. You know, just get on a, if you're into that kind of thing, you just jump on a little, like a Broadway direct email list and then you'll get the haps on all the haps.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, that's amazing. And the other one we we found out from the producers of the show, they emailed us the one I think is it off Broadway on Sacco and Vincetti, right?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I'm gonna call this Rare Shoutout. We don't do shoutouts much just because we get a lot of requests to and it would just be shoutouts every week, but this one touched me. And this is from Cody in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hey guys, in 2018, my dad passed away leaving behind my mom. who, after 54 years of marriage, had never lived alone.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
She struggles with grief and anxiety-induced insomnia as a result, so I suggested she listen to Stuff You Should Know for middle-of-the-night companionship to help her get her mind off her troubles. She did, and she's been a huge fan ever since. She calls you my guys, and this parasocial relationship has been a true lifesaver for her.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
When I call her up day or night, the podcast is off and on in the background, keeping her company while she does dishes or rests. Y'all are about the same age as me and my brother, so she feels an auntie-like affection for you. Her 80th birthday is in April, and I believe we've already missed it by the time this would come out.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
But I've been struggling with what to do for her as a fun surprise outside the party she's having this week. And Cody asked for us to send a video or something, but I said, how about this? We'll do a rare shout-out. and say hello to your wonderful mother on her 80th birthday, Bonnie Nichols. Bonnie, we love you, and we feel like you're our Auntie Bonnie as well.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And it makes me feel really happy to know that you're out there with us listening to us. So that parasocial relationship goes both ways. So happy birthday, Auntie.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, that is the ticket service run for the not-for-profit theater development fund. And that is if you're in New York and you're like, man, I wish I could go to a show, but I don't want to jump on a resale website and pay a ton of money. There are booths in Times Square and satellite booths at South Street, Seaport, and Lincoln Center where you can get tickets.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Day of you can go get day of tickets for people that are like, I can't go Broadway. Can you help me sell these?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. And I got to say, and, you know, we'll get to this or I might as well say it now. The the largest Broadway theater, if you've never been, you might be used to like Broadway in your hometown at like the 5000 seat theater or something like they have here at the Performing Arts Center. Yeah. Or the Performing Arts Center. But in New York, they're they're pretty small.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
The largest one is the Gershwin Theater at nineteen hundred thirty three seats. The smallest of the how many theaters is it total? Forty two.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Forty one theaters. Forty one. The smallest is the haze at five ninety seven. So, you know, if you're in town, you want to check out a show in most of those theaters. Most of the seats are pretty great and it's fairly intimate.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I mean, from my experience stuff, you know, if you go to see some of the classics there, you know, they're big productions, but they're not maybe not as like special effects heavy productions. They definitely, I feel like, have jazzed them up a lot more in more recent years with more sort of jaw dropping moments of like kind of I can't believe they did that live kind of stuff.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
But like, for instance, last time we went, we saw the... This is my death. We saw one of the ones we saw was the new-ish Death Becomes Her, which is I can't recommend enough. It is one of the funniest musicals you will ever see. But it wasn't some lavish production, but they had a couple of very well-placed sort of special effects that were very fun.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And so I think you need to sort of wow the crowd a little bit more these days.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
No, I mean, but maybe not special effects, but the sets are still very big and there's a lot of money poured into it. Your plays are going to be a little more like stripped down.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, I think Wicked was the most expensive. It was 290 average price.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the average ticket price. So the cheaper seats for like a show like Wicked or I don't know, probably in the in the hundreds and something, which is still I mean, that's a lot of money. But I don't know that you can go like if your question is, can you go see a Broadway show for like forty five bucks?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
That's my question. I don't know. And I doubt it.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Although I'll have to look at my Glenn Gary tickets. I don't know that those were like crazy expensive, but I'll check while you talk.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah. So that's the street. Broadway, the theater district, is between Times Square to 53rd Street and then the side streets from 6th to 8th Avenues. And like I said, it's 41 theaters. And with that smallest one, the Hayes being 597, they're all at least 500, almost 600 theaters.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And like I said, the Gershwin is the largest at 1933. And, you know, that's where theater happens. And we're going to talk a little bit about sort of the early theater days, because if you're talking New York theater, you're going to have to go back to 1732 to see the first – or at least the first record of a performance of a play there. It was called The Recruiting Officer.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And that was some Londoners traveling through town. And it was the new theater on Nassau Street. But that was near Broadway, but not anywhere close to the theater district. It was way, way downtown in what would now be the financial district.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, that's good. Included, just with the governor?
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, and we'll get to that. That was sort of the way it went for a while. It was sort of like songs and sketches and stuff like that. That was what a musical was. But we wouldn't have any of this stuff. It hadn't been for some pretty notable people. The first one, well, he's actually the first Oscar Hammerstein of what would be two notable Oscar Hammersteins.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
yeah this is oscar hammerstein i that's right uh he moved from germany of course to new york city in 1864 and was a cigar factory floor sweeper until he invented a cigar machine and made quite a bit of money doing so such that he could start funding the opening of uh his passion which was opera so he opened the harlem opera house first in 1889
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
And then that very first one in Longacre Square, which will be notable in about a minute and a half because you will learn what that became. Hammerstein's Olympia Theater at Broadway and 43rd and 44th. And then after that, the Republic Theater was in 1899, which is still there, but is now the new Victory Theater.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
Yeah, for sure. So the writing was on the wall. He opened those theaters. Other people were like, hey, we can invest money in this now that it's becoming a thing. The New Amsterdam Theater and the Lyceum Theater were both built around the same time in the early 1900s. And then, oh boy, we're probably more than a minute and a half after I promised it.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I cannot stop singing. They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
But in 1905, Longacre Square was renamed for the newly relocated New York Times offices, and thus it became Times Square.
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Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode!
I was like, was it New York Times Square? And I was like, no, dummy. Just Times Square. Just Times Square. And it was around the same time that these three brothers, Lee Samuel and Jacob Schubert, a very popular theater name to this day, they opened up a bunch of theaters in New York and elsewhere. And the Schubert organization still owns and operates 17 of those 41 theaters.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And 62 of those people jumped to their death in front of full view of New York City, including Frances Perkins.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I don't know. But I tell you what, if you want to take a vote on maybe one of the most undersung while at the same time being most influential Americans to ever live, Neil Diamond. Oh, he was very sung.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, I mean, she was already kind of headed down this road anyway. She was already part of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission. And because of this fire, which she – I don't think we said she was just having tea across the park there, ran over and saw this.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
One of the things she saw at one point, there were 20 people that had managed to get out a window onto a fire escape, one of those tiny little flimsy New York fire escapes. And all 20 of those people, the thing collapsed and they all fell to their 100 feet to their death right in front of her face.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, absolutely. But this was sort of just the way it was. I mean, not absolving them, but she saw this as part of the bigger problem. Not like these two owners are responsible, but she was like it was an indictment of the system.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
No, but what was average was the fact that they didn't have fire codes. And she's the person that brought that in. By the time she was in her early 30s, she had called for and successfully called for exit signs, occupancy limits, sprinklers, fire escapes, unlocked doors and stairwells, how wide the doorways had to be depending on your factory floor, like all these sort of common sense things.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Like a lot of people saw this stuff happen. and saw this incident that day and were horrified. But Frances Perkins said, nope, I'm going to change it. I'm a woman in 1911 and I'm in my early 30s, but I'm going to make this happen. And she did.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
You would be hard-pressed to overlook Ms. Perkins.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, and she ingratiated herself to these male politicians a couple of different important times in her life. And the first one was Alfred E. Smith, like you were saying. So she rose along with him because he knew. He was like, man, I don't care if she's a woman or not. She works harder than anyone I know. And she gets the job done. So I'm just going to bring her along with me.
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Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, yeah. I mean, I talked about her very large brain. And her higher education, she was super, super smart. Like I said, she majored in chemistry and physics, even though her real love was econ. So it's like, are you kidding me?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, and if you are... One of those people who was unfortunate to not be able to work right now during quarantine and the effects of COVID-19. And you are not lucky enough, but, you know, deservedly enough receiving unemployment insurance. You can thank Francis Perkins for that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah. So when he came into his governorship, she had already been named and was the chairperson, called it a chairman back then, in 1926 of the State Industrial Board. She was doing a great job there. And then in 1929, FDR appointed her as the industrial commissioner of the state of New York. And what happens? The stock market crashes. The Great Depression hits America like a punch in the face.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And she was the one who stepped in and got in his ear and said, you know what? Like, I know that we have to feed people right now. We have really immediate needs. But like you mentioned earlier in the episode, she thought about the big picture and long-term goals. She said, we need to really take swift action here. So with her help, they created a Committee on Employment.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
He appointed her the head of that. And then when he was elected president in 1933, he said, you know what? I'm going to appoint you to be my secretary of labor. That was huge. I've been working with you for 20 years. I trust you, and you're going to do a great job. And the public roundly said, what? A woman in the cabinet?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Dude, she couldn't vote until she was 40.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
But wasn't allowed to vote for her boss, essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Oh, yeah, that scared them to death.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, and pre the union stuff, like kind of right after the Great Depression hit, one of the first things they did together was created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, which was a really big success, one of the big early successes of the New Deal in that they said, you know what? We have all this – we have this workforce of these unskilled, unmarried men.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And let's get these guys working in conservation. We have this vast areas of rural land and natural resources. And let's send these guys out there to work on this stuff. And they did. And it provided a ton of jobs to the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Oh, I think you mean the Wagner Act. Yes.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
That's amazing. I feel like we had to have talked about her in our unions episode, and if we didn't— Shame on us, but also shame on the fact that she probably didn't pop up in our research, which is one of the problems.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
All right, so I'm going to pass that buck.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
The buck stops over there. Well, we're making up for it now either way.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, and boy, we should do one on Social Security at some point.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Go ahead. I'm looking at it. Well, no, I'm going to have our little assistant over here check that. Can you go and check on that? Okay. They're on it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Like we've ever had anyone that worked for us. That's the funny thing is when we get emails over the years, they're like, well, to Josh and Chuck and Jerry or whoever on your staff is reading this. It's like, yeah, it's pretty much us.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, I want to be fair. To be fair, we work for a big podcasting network, and there are a lot of people that help us get stuff out in the world, but we have never had, like, a Stuff You Should Know staff of eight people who only work for us and research for us and all that stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I feel like—I'm glad you said that because it felt like I was patting ourselves on the back for a second there. No, the opposite. You dashed that very fast. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So Social Security, what we're talking about in general, everyone knows what this is, is basically a system where younger, hardy people working hard in this country help out older people, retired people, perhaps disabled people, people that have had work-related accidents. People who wear funny hats. People who wear funny hats. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And pay into this system that ideally – and we're not going to get into the weeds here. That would come on our social security podcast. But ideally then when you are old or in need, then you have that same money waiting for you because of the younger generation and the younger workforce.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah. And it's not like, I mean, he didn't run for office with Social Security on his list of things to do.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, and it's not like I was saying at all that FDR was like not a champion of it or was just lazy. He had a bunch of stuff going on, and he had a bunch of irons in the fire. So he needed her to come in and say, hey, listen, this is all great because we're in a – tragic situation right now, like we're trying to put out a fire.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
But what I want to do is make sure another fire doesn't happen in the future.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, it would be dark ages stuff in this country.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, and she also, you know, we talked about some of the things she did earlier in terms of her career, in terms of fair labor practices. But when she was secretary of labor, she had real teeth to make real change. And during her tenure, she helped craft the Fair Labor Standards Act. She helped establish minimum wage laws, maximum work hours laws. And she finally said, you know what?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Maybe we shouldn't make labor for children better. Maybe we should not bring our children to work and make them work. So let's just get rid of child labor altogether.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, and we want to thank HowStuffWorks. That's where part of this research came from and some other places. But notably, and I want to shout this out because this is a library intern at the FDR Library who wrote a paper called Honoring the Achievements of FDR Secretary of Labor, Jessica Brightman.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Is that our cherry on top at the end?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Oh, man. And not the drunk guy. I hate that guy. Okay. So when FDR passed away in 1945, she was the longest serving labor secretary and one of only two cabinet members to serve the entire length of his super, super long presidency. And she held over into Truman as well. He was like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So you're welcome to stay, which you don't see a lot of that anymore. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
She published a biography, a bestseller about FDR called The Roosevelt I Knew. And here are a few other just sort of career feathers in her cap. She was the head of the American delegation to the International Labor Organization in Paris. Truman appointed her to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which was a position she held until 1953 –
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And she basically accomplished every single one of her goals while she was Secretary of Labor except for one thing she went in there wanting to do, which was universal access to health care.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
That's right. And then after that, she did what a lot of people in public policy do. She went on to teach and lecture at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She did that until she was 85 years old when she passed away in 1965.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
This is really good stuff, and she's a library intern, and we want to shout her out. Yeah, she did great. Or she was at the time. I imagine she's moved on from that internship.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, and, you know, we mentioned why she's undersung there. You know, history is written by men. We all know this. And a lot of those New Deal histories in the 70s and 80s didn't even mention her, which is just staggering that you can write a history of the New Deal and not mention Francis Perkins. It's just like a black eye on any author that did something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So the cherry on top here at the end is World War II. World War II was not a cherry on top. But she was watching Hitler do his thing in Germany and got really worried. She's like, man, that guy's cranked up. She read about anti-Semitism and everything that was going on with the violence there, and she wanted to help German refugees escape.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And at the time, the Coolidge administration, the immigration laws that came through his administration were really tough. And Americans were very fearful that relaxing these laws would increase the job competition and that Americans weren't going to have these jobs. And she said, you know what? I don't agree. The immigration service is under the Department of Labor.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So Frances Perkins was born Fanny Coralai Perkins in Boston in 1880, but her relatives and her ancestors came from Maine. And it's kind of funny here at the beginning of this How Stuff Works thing, it says, she so undersung that even residents of her hometown of Damaris, Scotta, Maine didn't seem familiar with her legacy. I think that says more about Maine.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And so I am going to put some quotas down to get some of these refugees here and to aid them. And she did that to great success.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I'm going to call this Helping a Helper. And this is from Tawny. Tawny says this. Hey, guys, I've been sewing face masks for almost a month now, and I'm close to my 1,000th mask.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
That's a lot. I have given and donated to friends, family, coworkers. I'm a 911 dispatcher, by the way. Healthcare workers, retail workers, delivery people, postal workers, and other essential workers. People wearing funny hats. People wearing funny hats and complete strangers. Now that face masks have become mandatory here in San Diego...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
The need has grown substantially, and through all of this, you three have been with me and keeping me company. I should talk about Jerry, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Old episodes and new have entertained me through the tedious hours of cutting fabric, ironing, pinning, and sewing. I started listening to your podcast while I was in the Navy and soon introduced you guys to my husband, who is still in the military. We have both listened and learned through the years together. Thank you for continuing your show and helping the helpers of the world.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Side note, love the 911 dispatcher episode, and thank you for clearing up the pizza order myth. Second side note... I wrote my master's thesis on the use of body-worn cameras by law enforcement, and I decided to focus on that topic after listening to that awesome episode. Oh, neat. Yeah, it's pretty cool. All three of you were thanked and mentioned in the thesis, even.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
When I'm tired and don't want to sew anymore, I think of this quote from Mr. Rogers. Head down. When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And that is from Tawny, and that's a great quote, Tawny. I'm going to use that in my own house.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Is it Tony? Tony, T-A-W-N-Y.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
She lived here, great, good for her.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So is this like an Adidas Puma thing?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Which one was that? Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode? I can't. Oh, baby. Hey, that's Emily's jam. I mean, she probably has that...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
tattooed on her body somewhere uh and in fact we're both doing that none of my business we're both doing that that uh silly and i never do these things on facebook but i have time now the top 10 most influential albums and uh i was like which one are you gonna pick new order or depeche mode for her because that's a that's a tough one well i mean can't she's got 10 to choose from right yeah but i think for her those two are so inextricably tied that it was one or the other
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And she went with Depeche Mode because they were first and thus probably more influential.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, who can blame her because we'll see later on about her. It's no accident that she's lost a history in many ways.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
But what she was also was highly educated. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1902 where she majored in chemistry and physics even though she made her name in economics, which means she was a very well-rounded human and had a very large brain.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, big time. This is post-college. She went to Philly. and she became general secretary of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, she was in charge of investigating – employment agencies that were fake and that preyed on women, immigrant women specifically. And she had to sort of deal with the dregs of society in that job and did so very successfully and then decided she wanted to keep her education going.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So while she was in Philly, she went to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania because that's super easy and light learning. And then after that, She went to Columbia where she earned a M.A. in social economics in 1910.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
That's right. And after Columbia, after she got that master's, for two years she served as executive secretary of the Consumers League of New York. And this is where she really – felt her life calling to improve wages, improve working conditions, because this was 1910 through 1912, and things weren't great in factories at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
We could do a podcast on – I don't know what the focus would be necessarily – Because we've done labor unions, but— Just labor conditions would be eye-opening.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, she wouldn't stand around and wait for the statue to be built in her honor.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Should we take a break? Yes. All right. We're going to take a break and talk about a pretty devastating fire in New York City that changed the course of her life right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
What fire, Chuck? I'm talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Manhattan, sort of near Washington Square Park in Greenwich, right next to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
It is, and I tried to pinpoint if that was the building where I actually had my film classes. Was it? I don't know. I can't quite tell. We got to know, Chuck. I'll see if I can find out. But a shirtwaist was a woman's blouse is what they called it at the time. And this was a factory that made women's blouses. If you worked there, you were probably a young woman. You might be an immigrant.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
You would work about 52 hours a week. Oh, I saw 12 hours a day, seven days a week. What does that math turn out to?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, let's say between 52 and 80 hours a week.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Right. So I saw 52. Either way, they made between $7 and $12 a week making these blouses for women.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, it wasn't good. And because this was a factory in New York in 1911, they had the doors locked. They had the staircases locked. They thought it prevented theft.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
If you remember what happened to locked doors and stairwells in our hotel fire episode, the same thing happened here on March 25th, 1911, when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire started because they think of a match or a cigarette butt thrown into a waste bin. And it just, you know, everything in there was flammable practically that wasn't metal. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
because of all these fabrics, like highly flammable. It went up really quick. It's one of the deadliest U.S. workplace disasters of all time to this day. 146 workers died, 123 of which were women and girls between the ages of generally between 14 and 23. The oldest was 43, but that was kind of an outlier. Mm-hmm.