Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Call zone media.
Oh, goodness, Jiminy, gracious Christmas. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, introduced by one of the very worst introducers in all of history, your host, me, Robert Evans. This week, I have a guest who's better at introducing things, Princess Weeks. Princess, why don't you introduce yourself? Because we've seen how I do it.
You're fabulous. I disagree with you.
That's a lie.
Chapter 2: Who was H.L. Hunt and why is he compared to Elon Musk?
Just with that. My name is Princess Weeks. I'm a writer, YouTuber, shit talker, and I love history. And especially when I get to listen to Robert tell me about bad people.
Yeah, and I love bad people, especially when I get to inflict their badness on someone else.
Wow.
And this week, we've got a guy who kind of made inflicting his opinions on other people, on everyone else, his life mission, and used the vast fortune he built to do it. We're covering a fella here. He's the former richest man in the world. This guy was an oil. In his time, he was a millionaire, but if you... fix things to modern money.
He was a billionaire from a fairly early point in like terms of modern money. And he was kind of the first of the right wing, like these ultra rich right wing guys to make pushing his own opinion in politics by taking control of like, or building media organs deliberately to force his own opinion on public. He was the first of these super rich guys to really do that.
Or he was part of the first wave of rich guys that did that. And he was the biggest like of this first wave of generally like post New Deal, super rich, you know, multimillionaire billionaire oil guys who are funding right wing politics. He was the guy who was kind of best at it. But he was also the guy who was only interested in forcing his own politics on people.
Like he didn't want to talk to any other people on the right. He didn't want to make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that would push his politics on other people. He's a very weird dude. And his name was H.L. Hunt. Also, some people think he killed JFK. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.
Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 3: What were H.L. Hunt's early influences and upbringing?
How many men... carry a suit of armor it signals to the world that you not to be played with and just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to listen to learn the hard way on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts
I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud.
But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So have you heard of this guy? No, I've never heard of him, but he sounds annoying and like the patron saint of podcast bros. So like I'm ready to hear about it.
He's got a lot of that energy. He was kind of like the proto Elon Musk, like what Musk has done with turning X and Grok into this, like basically building these companies just to push his own opinions on everyone else. That's what Hunt was trying to do with like the radio in the 50s and 60s and television and stuff.
So he's an interesting character and like a freak in his own personal life, which is always fun when one of these guys is just the strangest, weirdest little guy.
What does HL stand for?
Great question, Sophie. That's what we're starting because he has like one of the most racist old white guy names you could possibly have.
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Chapter 4: How did H.L. Hunt's family background shape his views?
That was very funny. I fear it was your target audience for that one.
Damn near two, actually. So... The Confederate connection was enough to convince me that like I needed to look more into this guy's family history because I was like, well, that probably means there's something else interesting there. And I could only find one biography that was written about him, which was the book Kingdom. And it's actually it was published after he died.
And it's actually a biography of his whole family written by this hardcore libertarian author named Jerome Tussauds. And I think Tussauds was a fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw himself a lot of the time. Although he does include more of the warts than I think Hunt would have.
But he clearly has this degree of awe in this man for being such a great businessman. Yeah. It's hard for me to tell how like real this biography is because to still, again, he's like a guy with an ideological bent that he's trying to get across in his books.
And his biography of Hunt includes all of these verbatim conversations about talks, conversations that would have happened in like the 1800s. And this book was written in the, like a hundred years later. And I'm like, who did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations? You must've just made that up
Or you listen to something that these people's grandchildren said is how the conversation went. So you have to take a lot of this book with a grain of salt, right?
It's giving real person fan fiction. He's like, if I just put myself into the character, what would my goat say? What would my hero say? And he's just like, all right, I've got it. Nailed it.
I would say... Think of it that way. This is real person fan fiction. That said, it's the only book we have about this guy's childhood. And it's clearly based on conversations he had with members of this dude's family. So you can't discard it because it's like our only source, right? That said...
I want to we're going to talk a little more about Tussauds in this book, too, because he's kind of a very funny guy. You should know in terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography that he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not entirely the bad kind.
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Chapter 5: What role did gambling play in H.L. Hunt's early life?
Yeah.
So I don't know if she had Huguenot blood in her veins or whatever, but this is very consistent with what H.L. Hunt's going to believe about his background and himself because he thinks he's special. And part of why he thinks he's special is because of his blood. From 1873 to 1889, the Hunts have eight children, the last of whom is our boy, Haroldson Lafayette.
Given that he has the same name as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed Junior, and the family soon took to calling him June or Junie. So as a boy, he goes by June or Junie because he's got the same name as his dad, who goes by Hash. Now, the Hunt's 500-acre farm was productive and supports the family well, but how well it supports them is kind of hard for me to say.
Tussauds writes that they, quote, just managed to scrub out a meager living. But we also know that by the time Hash dies, he gives his all eight of his kids pretty significant inheritances that suggests they're actually doing very well. Now, maybe I don't know how long it takes them to be doing very well, but certainly by later in his life, they're like upper middle class. Right. If not rich.
It's a little hard for me to tell that.
Do we know the breakdown of the genders of the siblings? Was it more girls than boys? Because you can outsource the girls. I think it's close to half. They can go somewhere else.
I think it's a pretty good split. But he's got at least a couple of sisters. Okay. That said, I think it's also Hunt kind of talks up his family having a harder time when he was a kid than they really did. Because all conservatives who wind up crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were. Yeah.
Yeah.
At any rate, in 1894, when Junie was like five or so, his dad, Hash, gets elected sheriff of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first Republican sheriff of Fayette County, although not the last.
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Chapter 6: How did H.L. Hunt's education impact his later success?
Right, right. That's good. Makes less of a good case for homeschooling.
Yeah, not the trad wife ideal. I'm sure that they want to promote him.
Yeah.
So the first way that June exhibited his intellect in a major way to the world was by getting really, really unbeatably good at card games and other games of chance. This is kind of the earliest happiness that he experiences and probably remembers, which is beating the piss out of his sisters and brothers at various card games and being praised for it.
So this is going to teach him an important lesson. He's never going to get over loving gambling. However, the fact that he's so smart is not without its downsides. Per the book Kingdom, Hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed with his namesake's mental agility as others were. And right from the beginning, young June had problems with James. You think you're better than the rest of us, don't you?
James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think you're smarter than we are. Now, again, to still relates like a page long argument between him and his brother. That sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a real conversation. There's even a part where his big brother says, you're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be. Oh, just like you just write that in.
If you're if you're a hack screenwriter and then you transition immediately to him, like as a young adult trying to get his foot in the door at his first business or something. Right. Right. It's like he would have loved a young Sheldon. He would have loved young Sheldon. So as he grows up in this account, he does everything he can to be the opposite of a mama's boy. First off, he gets swole.
He starts working out. I mean, mainly he's just doing like hard labor outdoors, but he gets really jacked. He's a big guy. He's tall. And he is like a bit large, muscular dude. Everyone seems to agree about that. He becomes a skilled horse rider, even bareback, and a skilled outdoorsman.
He works with his brother in the family business on the farm, and he proves his worth by using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve the family business. After summarizing all this, Tussauds gives us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into a handsome young man, the best looking of all of his brothers.
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Chapter 7: What were the key events leading to H.L. Hunt's rise in the oil industry?
And he also has a fundamental distrust of his fellow man. Not long after all of this brouhaha with San Francisco and trying out for baseball in Reno, he's like goes, he's, I think he's in Arizona. He's in the Southwest. He's working.
He's like with a bunch of day laborers and there's like white day laborers and there's a group of Mexican day laborers and they have separate camps because it's the 19, it's like 1906 or something. That's either seven. Sure. And he goes over, along with some of the other white workers, to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night. And Hunt just wins everything.
He takes all of these Mexican guys' money, which winds up to like four grand, everything they have in the world. That's a lot back then. So the other white dudes, the longer he wins, they start leaving to go back to their camp because they're like, hey, man, or hey, Hunt, maybe you want to go? You probably don't want to take all these guys' money. This seems like it could get dangerous.
So they leave. But Hunt, he can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards. So he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money, at which point he realizes all of his friends are gone.
And he gets like scared and he basically takes the money and runs off into the bushes because he feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans, even though as far as we know, they never go after him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence suggests they took their loss fine and they didn't like threaten him.
He just is sure that because they're Mexicans, they're going to try to kill him to get their money back. So he like hides in the bushes. And then he, he tries to like in the middle of the night, hike back to the camp with his friends. But when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second. How well do I really know these guys? They're definitely going to rob me. They know I have all this money.
They might kill me. So he has a panic attack and he like hides and camps out in the woods that night. And then like goes, just leaves, quits the job and hikes off into another town basically. Cause he, he doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's won this money. Um,
quote from Tussauds book how could he trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a killing that night what was to stop two or three of them from jumping him in his bunk leaving him with a knife between his ribs and slipping off with his winnings so yeah burden of being the most special boy right there's this deep distrust of other people that again at no point and Tussauds just writes this like of course he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were going to kill him but at no point is there any evidence that they threatened his life at all
I do want to emphasize that this is all entirely something he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota where he meets who to Sills book describes this as the best friend he's going to have in his entire life. A dude named Steve. No last name provided. Now, to still insist that this is the best... No last name provided. We don't need last names. We don't even need last names.
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