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An Alabama Town Built a Statue Honoring the Insect that Almost Destroyed It · Ridiculous History

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Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
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Speaker 1: back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you so much
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Speaker 1: as always for tuning in. That's our one and only
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Speaker 1: super producer, Max Williams over there. I'm ben Uh No,
0:39
Speaker 1: I gotta ask you what's here. When's the last time
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Speaker 1: you went to Alabama? Well? I lived in Alabama for
0:45
Speaker 1: a time, in the iron city of Birmingham, Alabama, known
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Speaker 1: for its historical production of iron. Uh. There's a big
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Speaker 1: statue of Vulcan, the I believe, the Roman god of
0:57
Speaker 1: fire and therefore the forge. Uh. That's a big feature
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Speaker 1: in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. And there's a real cool like
1:05
Speaker 1: disused iron works called Sloss Furnaces where they actually do concerts.
1:11
Speaker 1: I think they still do it. But I went to
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Speaker 1: like a like a metal type festival. They're called Furnace
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Speaker 1: Fest back in the day. So I'm a little bit
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Speaker 1: familiar with Alabama. The main export of Birmingham wasn't really
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Speaker 1: historically cotton, though, which is definitely something that a lot
1:26
Speaker 1: of the other parts of the state relied on heavily historically. Yeah, yeah,
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Speaker 1: and I wasn't where you live there. I'm gonna have
1:33
Speaker 1: to pick your brains about it later. I just I
1:35
Speaker 1: know we got to get on with the show. But
1:37
Speaker 1: what what time period in your life was this? Both
1:39
Speaker 1: of my brains, you're gonna that's very kind of you been.
1:42
Speaker 1: You're really giving me a lot. I think I'm a
1:46
Speaker 1: little on the left side. It was my senior year
1:49
Speaker 1: in high school, so to date myself, that would have
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Speaker 1: been around two thousand and one. Nice. Nice, well, uh,
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Speaker 1: congratulations to you, Birmingham for having one of all our
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Speaker 1: favorite uh favorite folks as a resident of your town.
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Speaker 1: We do expect you to build a memorial or a statue,
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Speaker 1: some sort of aunorary real uh well, a commemorative thing,
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Speaker 1: you know, a little plaque where it's like so and
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Speaker 1: so lived here. Do you know something? I don't know, Ben,
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Speaker 1: your freaking no. No, I've going somewhere with this though,
2:20
Speaker 1: because this is what in the business we call a segue.
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Speaker 1: You see, Alabama, like many of US states, is very
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Speaker 1: pro statue, very pro memorial, very pro honoring important places,
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Speaker 1: things and events, and Enterprise Alabama is no different. If
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Speaker 1: you find yourself in the town of Enterprise, Alabama, you
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Speaker 1: might be surprised to learn that amidst their statuary, you
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Speaker 1: will find a statue erected in nineteen nineteen dedicated to
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Speaker 1: a little bitty beetle known as the bowl Weevil. Yeah,
3:00
Speaker 1: and like when I first heard about this, I was
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Speaker 1: really hoping it was going to be some sort of
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Speaker 1: like you know, monster movie type massive sculpture of a
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Speaker 1: bowl week because you know those things. When you see them,
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Speaker 1: they're tiny and not particularly offensive looking, but if you
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Speaker 1: go in with a microscope, they're terrifying. They have crazy
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Speaker 1: mandibles and you know, really really like some hr Geeger
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Speaker 1: type alien stuff, you know, on their own, not particularly intimidating,
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Speaker 1: but they don't really hang out on their own, do
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Speaker 1: they been They they swarm, They hang out on mass
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Speaker 1: and they literally were responsible for decimating more than twenty
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Speaker 1: three billion dollars of American cotton, at least in terms
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Speaker 1: of how it translated to profits. And I believe that's
3:42
Speaker 1: with with inflation considered US correct. But yeah, it is
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Speaker 1: absolutely wild. They came to this country from Mexico in
3:51
Speaker 1: eighteen two and absolutely um decimated people's livelihoods. So why
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Speaker 1: might you ask did this town that were I'd like,
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Speaker 1: I said, so heavily on exporting and selling cotton. Why
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Speaker 1: would they want to commemorate such a horrible time in
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Speaker 1: their history. Uh, you know, I can understand the statue
4:11
Speaker 1: of vulcan you know, I mean, I un that's their industry.
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Speaker 1: It's something that you want to be proud of and
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Speaker 1: show that it's part of your heritage or whatever. But
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Speaker 1: why the bull weevil, by the way, similar vibes. It
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Speaker 1: is not a massive monster movie bowl weevil. It is
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Speaker 1: a Greek goddess. Yes, that used to be holding a
4:27
Speaker 1: like fountain aloft I believe, but instead they removed the
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Speaker 1: fountain and replaced it with the humble bull weevil. Yep, yep,
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Speaker 1: you will find a statue of this Greek woman with
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Speaker 1: her arms stretched above her head holding a bull, and
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Speaker 1: on top of that is a fifty pounds statue of
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Speaker 1: a bull weevil. I should say she's holding a bowl
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Speaker 1: and a bo l l weevil is on top of that.
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Speaker 1: This is I'm so glad you asked, because this is
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Speaker 1: the point of today's episode, right. So we were looking
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Speaker 1: into this with some fantastic help from Lorraine Balsagnew over
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Speaker 1: at Smithsonian, from the good folks at Wall Street Journal,
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Speaker 1: and of course our pals over at mental Floss fun Fact.
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Speaker 1: Our research associate Gabe used to work for Mental Floss himself,
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Speaker 1: and here's here's what we found. Like you said, Noel,
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Speaker 1: this statue appears to be celebrating a tremendous economic disaster.
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Speaker 1: The habit, the chaos that this creature wrought not just
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Speaker 1: on enterprise Alabama, but a large swath of the Southern
5:36
Speaker 1: economy was so profound that even today some scholars will argue,
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Speaker 1: you can't just measure the cost in terms of finance
5:46
Speaker 1: adjusted for inflation. They say that the bull Weevil disaster
5:51
Speaker 1: was one of these sparks that led to what we
5:54
Speaker 1: know is the Great Migration, the movement of six million
5:57
Speaker 1: African Americans from the US South to urban areas in
6:01
Speaker 1: the US North. And that makes sense because people have
6:04
Speaker 1: to move where their jobs are, and there tend to
6:06
Speaker 1: be more jobs in cities. Yeah, it certainly made the
6:10
Speaker 1: folks that you know came up with the Industrial Revolution
6:13
Speaker 1: feel like they were pretty smart, because it was just
6:14
Speaker 1: a couple of folks that came up with that whole thing.
6:16
Speaker 1: It was to everybody knows that. Uh, but yeah, totally
6:20
Speaker 1: backchecking really quickly, I said, they removed the fountain, but
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Speaker 1: in fact, then the fountain was that bowl you speak up, um,
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Speaker 1: So they literally just perched the bulweevil add on on
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Speaker 1: top of that of that pre existing bow bull. So
6:34
Speaker 1: so why why is the bull weevil so interested in cottonal?
6:40
Speaker 1: I mean like to And I think that's part of
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Speaker 1: our that's part of what we have to answer when
6:45
Speaker 1: we're answering how the statue came to be. Right, the
6:49
Speaker 1: reason the bull weevil is uh such a character in
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Speaker 1: American history is for its insatiable appetite for and very specialized.
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Speaker 1: It's a real key eater. It only likes the very
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Speaker 1: silky fibrous bits inside of the bowl of the cotton,
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Speaker 1: which is that seed pot that everything you know kind
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Speaker 1: of springs from. Um. It is officially scientifically known as
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Speaker 1: autonomous grandest and as I said earlier, came from Mexico,
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Speaker 1: and it lives pretty much exclusively on cotton plants um
7:24
Speaker 1: and every planting season or every cotton season, Uh, the
7:27
Speaker 1: adults feed on the leaves and then they eat into
7:31
Speaker 1: the cotton. It's called the cotton square, which is the bud.
7:35
Speaker 1: When they say nipping in the bud, that's what they're
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Speaker 1: talking about. But you know, you don't want to nip
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Speaker 1: the cotton in the bugs. If you nip that budge,
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Speaker 1: you get no cotton. So it's the part that happens
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Speaker 1: before the plant flowers and they lay their eggs, and
7:47
Speaker 1: then those eggs hatch, and it's the little babies, the
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Speaker 1: grubs that like eat their way out of the cotton
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Speaker 1: bowl from the inside like alien style, like literally like
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Speaker 1: face hugger style. They plant the seed inside of the
8:00
Speaker 1: thing and then it eats its way out, killing the
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Speaker 1: thing and in the process. And if you're cotton, no
8:05
Speaker 1: one can hear you scream to paraphrase, uh some horrid
8:09
Speaker 1: You're welcome, Max, You're welcome. I saw that. I don't
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Speaker 1: think I'm not watching you or recording. Cotton screams are
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Speaker 1: very muffled. They are so uh nailed it. So we know,
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Speaker 1: we know, like you said, no, that the bullweevil originated
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Speaker 1: in Mexico, but we don't really know when and how
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Speaker 1: it got to the US because these little guys can't
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Speaker 1: fly very long distances. They were first they were first
8:39
Speaker 1: spotted in Texas, like you said back in two they
8:43
Speaker 1: saw have a mysterious origin story in Texas. But we
8:47
Speaker 1: know despite their lack of long distance transportation. They were
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Speaker 1: incredibly effective. According to Fabian Lang, Alan Olmstead, and Paul W. Rowe,
9:00
Speaker 1: three economists who sort of vultron up together for this.
9:03
Speaker 1: They they say that within five years of the bull
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Speaker 1: weavil landing state side, total cotton production, all of the
9:12
Speaker 1: cotton production in the US declined by at least or
9:16
Speaker 1: around totally and so consequently land values took a dive
9:22
Speaker 1: and the U. S d. A chief in the Bureau
9:24
Speaker 1: of Plant Industry, called them a wave of evil. Um,
9:29
Speaker 1: which is not I mean, it's not terribly hyperbolic. I mean,
9:32
Speaker 1: this really was doing great evil to people's lives and
9:35
Speaker 1: their ability to earn for their families. Um. This is
9:38
Speaker 1: a nineteen o three, by the way, and it just
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Speaker 1: got worse. By nineteen twenty or the early nineteen twenties,
9:43
Speaker 1: bullweevils were absolutely wrecking shop in the South. This is
9:48
Speaker 1: really interesting. I didn't know this, but in the Smithsonian
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Speaker 1: mag article we reference, uh, they talk about the kind
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Speaker 1: of life cycle of the bowlweevil, and you know, in
9:55
Speaker 1: the cold season they're actually able to hibernate and kind
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Speaker 1: of go dormant in woods wooded areas nearby. They like
10:03
Speaker 1: to live in things like Spanish moss and even debris
10:06
Speaker 1: I guess, sort of like dead leaves and such um.
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Speaker 1: And then they you know, wake up and find their
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Speaker 1: way back to the fields and just you know, have
10:15
Speaker 1: a have a real go of it. I'm laughing because
10:19
Speaker 1: I think the specific phrase the Smithsonian uses is field
10:23
Speaker 1: trash and uh, that's what That's what Max, who is
10:26
Speaker 1: a big sports fan, uh calls it when fans of
10:30
Speaker 1: opposing sports teams make it onto the field, right Max.
10:35
Speaker 1: And the what you call them called field trashs absolutely not.
10:38
Speaker 1: I don't know where you get that from. Okay, I
10:41
Speaker 1: mean when I when I was in little league baseball,
10:43
Speaker 1: I was field trash. I was like the you know
10:45
Speaker 1: outfielder that just was a total turd and just didn't
10:48
Speaker 1: really do anything, just kind of stood there. I would
10:50
Speaker 1: say that would be a good example of a field trash.
10:53
Speaker 1: I was, you know, I was in little league and uh,
10:57
Speaker 1: I caught a fly ball once that was my own. Wait,
11:00
Speaker 1: and I hit I did hit one home run, so
11:02
Speaker 1: I got one for one and then I was out
11:04
Speaker 1: of the game. You're welcome, other athletes. Is that the
11:08
Speaker 1: one where you just kind of stuck your mitt out
11:10
Speaker 1: and it just sort of found its way to you.
11:12
Speaker 1: It's always a beautiful moment in the game and the
11:14
Speaker 1: in the movies or whatever where the kind of ineffectual
11:16
Speaker 1: outfielder gets his moment of glory literally just by shoving
11:19
Speaker 1: his fist out into the air and it just kind
11:20
Speaker 1: of finds its right right into that mip. I was
11:22
Speaker 1: so out of it. I was so unexpected for me
11:24
Speaker 1: to actually catch a ball, because you know, they stick
11:26
Speaker 1: kids like us in the outfield for a reason. When
11:29
Speaker 1: I caught the ball, I wasn't sure what to do.
11:31
Speaker 1: I was like, it was like when you get to
11:32
Speaker 1: a new level of a video, just one catching the ball.
11:35
Speaker 1: Just what it's like. It's like if you only knew
11:40
Speaker 1: the first part of CPR, you know what I mean,
11:43
Speaker 1: You're not getting the job done. But the bullweevils certainly were.
11:47
Speaker 1: And at this point there was path dependency for the farmers.
11:51
Speaker 1: They literally could not afford to move to a different crop,
11:55
Speaker 1: so they tried increasingly desperate solutions to get rid of
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Speaker 1: these weavils. This is happening across the cotton growing area
12:03
Speaker 1: of the US, so they said, okay, maybe we can
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Speaker 1: get uh cotton that grows up more quickly. Maybe we
12:11
Speaker 1: can spray some kinds of early pesticides on this, Maybe
12:15
Speaker 1: we can burn the cotton at the right time. Theodore
12:17
Speaker 1: Roosevelt was even like, I know, these pretty nasty ants
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Speaker 1: from Guatemala, but probably we evils. It sounds like a
12:25
Speaker 1: great idea, Theodore Roosevelt. Let's just introduce like the murder
12:29
Speaker 1: ants into the equation. That'll totally give the It's one
12:31
Speaker 1: of those things where it's like the solution ends up
12:33
Speaker 1: being worse than the problem. Um. But here's the thing.
12:36
Speaker 1: You know, it seems as though enterprise kind of got
12:40
Speaker 1: wise to this because again, we knew about this, or
12:42
Speaker 1: at least, you know, American farmers knew about this for
12:44
Speaker 1: going on twenty years, or at this point it was
12:46
Speaker 1: almost ten years. So by nineteen o nine, Mobile Alabama,
12:50
Speaker 1: Mobile County, Alabama rather had started to really feel the
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Speaker 1: sting of the dreaded bowl weevil, and like many other
12:58
Speaker 1: places in the rural South, cotton was their main export,
13:01
Speaker 1: their main cash crop, and now that they had the
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Speaker 1: weevils in the mix, these yields were getting smaller and
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Speaker 1: smaller and smaller. The numbers nationally really do match up
13:17
Speaker 1: on what was going on more granularly in all these
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Speaker 1: individual areas. For sure. In nineteen fourteen, the Cotton gin
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Speaker 1: At Enterprise, Alabama processed around fifteen thousand bales of cotton,
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Speaker 1: and just the next year nine that number plummeted down
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Speaker 1: to five thousand bales. This comes to us from Doug Bradley,
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Speaker 1: president of the p River Historical and Genealogical Society. It's
13:44
Speaker 1: p P e A. Just so you're not thinking, this
13:46
Speaker 1: is like a river that everyone PE's in, right, right,
13:48
Speaker 1: good note, good note. And so this this is strange
13:53
Speaker 1: because according to Wall Street Journal, there was one guy
13:56
Speaker 1: who lived in town named h Alm Sessions. I can't
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Speaker 1: say it with out really leaning into the southern accent.
14:02
Speaker 1: He was, and he was a seed broker who you know,
14:08
Speaker 1: sold sold seats to farmers. And he said, well, something
14:13
Speaker 1: must be done. And uh he thought he realized the problem.
14:18
Speaker 1: You know, Let's see, you're a farmer, you got cotton.
14:20
Speaker 1: You can switch to another crop because the bowl weevil
14:24
Speaker 1: has a very specific diet. It's a chooesy eater. But
14:27
Speaker 1: the problem is cotton didn't just generate the highest profits.
14:31
Speaker 1: It also grew on land that was unsuitable for a
14:35
Speaker 1: lot of other crops, right, I mean that was the
14:38
Speaker 1: thing that was done anyway, I think like crop rotation,
14:41
Speaker 1: where you would like rotate out crops so that the
14:43
Speaker 1: soil wouldn't get like totally decimated by one particular crop,
14:47
Speaker 1: because I think things require different types of I'm not,
14:50
Speaker 1: obviously not a farmer, but I know crop rotation was
14:53
Speaker 1: already a popular method for making sure that you kept
14:56
Speaker 1: your soil in good shape. Um, so this was more
14:59
Speaker 1: of a move of death biration to be like, Okay,
15:01
Speaker 1: we really need to up the anti on this rotation significantly.
15:04
Speaker 1: But you're right. Then, the soil they were dealing with
15:07
Speaker 1: was sandy and particularly dry soil, so there weren't a
15:12
Speaker 1: ton of other crops that could handle that not incredibly
15:17
Speaker 1: fertile soil. And one of them, the coold was peanuts. Yeah, exactly.
15:21
Speaker 1: So picture agricultural crops as tenants in a neighborhood. Cotton
15:26
Speaker 1: and peanuts are two of the tenants that can live
15:29
Speaker 1: in a rough neighborhood and still be fine. So our
15:33
Speaker 1: guy Sessions goes to visit North Carolina and Virginia and
15:38
Speaker 1: then he sees peanuts being grown. This is largely, to
15:41
Speaker 1: be sure, due to the efforts of George Washington Carver.
15:45
Speaker 1: Sessions is on board. He gets sold and he comes back,
15:48
Speaker 1: rememberies of seed broker. He comes back with peanuts seeds,
15:51
Speaker 1: and that's when he sells them to a farmer in
15:53
Speaker 1: the area named C. W. Boston. I can't believe we
15:57
Speaker 1: didn't make this parallel. We just did the episode about
15:59
Speaker 1: the uh potato evangelist in France. His name is already
16:04
Speaker 1: giving me but he kind of was the like potato
16:06
Speaker 1: equivalent of George Washington Carver Parmentier, I believe that's the man.
16:11
Speaker 1: But sure, right, so we know George Washington Carver was
16:13
Speaker 1: all about how diverse and useful and um versatile the
16:18
Speaker 1: peanut was. So it was already starting to be on
16:20
Speaker 1: the radars of a lot of farmers around the time.
16:23
Speaker 1: And this guy Baston is willing to take a gamble
16:28
Speaker 1: on peanuts. He doesn't. He doesn't just doubled out. He
16:32
Speaker 1: turns his entire crop toward peanuts. He's not he's out
16:36
Speaker 1: of the cotton game. He's spending the whole year of
16:39
Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen just growing peanuts. And in the end, no,
16:45
Speaker 1: he ends up walking away with eight thousand dollars in profit,
16:51
Speaker 1: he could still pay off the debt he had racked
16:54
Speaker 1: up during this ongoing bullweevil disaster and have money left over.
16:59
Speaker 1: If we could inflation calculate, we'll see, we'll see some
17:04
Speaker 1: interesting numbers here. So what do you say we we
17:07
Speaker 1: fire up, fire up the old inflation calculator. Here, can
17:10
Speaker 1: I get a boot? There we go. And so if
17:19
Speaker 1: we calculate this, now, what we see is that eight
17:23
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in nineteen sixteen had the purchasing power of
17:27
Speaker 1: get this on four hundred and nine dollars and cents.
17:33
Speaker 1: Can you believe it? Almost two hundred thousand dollars. Basically
17:38
Speaker 1: imagine being someone else who's a farmer in enterprise at
17:42
Speaker 1: that area. Like that is the talk of the town.
17:45
Speaker 1: People who once said, you know, cotton is the way
17:48
Speaker 1: to go are immediately a hundred percent on board with peanuts. Right, Yeah,
17:52
Speaker 1: it's true. And by nineteen seventeen, farmers in the area
17:56
Speaker 1: produced over a million bushels of peanuts that's sold for
18:01
Speaker 1: more than five million dollars. And our boy Bradley from
18:05
Speaker 1: the Pee River Society, UM, he has memories actually of
18:10
Speaker 1: working in the cotton fields when he was a young boy,
18:12
Speaker 1: in the forties and fifties, because I mean, it wasn't
18:14
Speaker 1: like things completely pivoted away from cotton. There was still
18:18
Speaker 1: a huge thing, and the bullw weevils were absolutely still
18:21
Speaker 1: a scourge that late in the game in the nineties
18:23
Speaker 1: and fifties, but he remembers seeing how awful it was,
18:28
Speaker 1: and he said, by that point, Enterprise uniquely had diversified
18:33
Speaker 1: even beyond peanuts into potatoes, sugarcane, tobacco, and sorghum. I
18:38
Speaker 1: always forget exactly what sorghum is. You can use it
18:41
Speaker 1: to make bread, uh, you can use it in couscous. Uh.
18:46
Speaker 1: You can also make some different kinds of beverages with it,
18:49
Speaker 1: and some people eat it as a fresh vegetable. Yeah,
18:52
Speaker 1: it looks kind of like a grain, and I guess
18:54
Speaker 1: it comes off the buds in these tiny little pods
18:57
Speaker 1: that almost looked like couscous already or like uh, risotto
19:01
Speaker 1: or something right exactly, So people were people were into
19:04
Speaker 1: this and they had experienced of financial rebound. Folks looked
19:09
Speaker 1: around and said, you know, we wouldn't have reached this
19:13
Speaker 1: level of success or diversity if we hadn't been forced
19:16
Speaker 1: to change our tune due to the bull weevil. So
19:19
Speaker 1: as peanuts become you know, number one with a bang
19:23
Speaker 1: in Coffee County, where Enterprise Alabama is located. There's a
19:27
Speaker 1: guy who comes to the picture named Roscoe Owen Fleming,
19:31
Speaker 1: and he says, and we think he was joking at first,
19:34
Speaker 1: by the way he says, you know what we should do.
19:37
Speaker 1: We should really just own up to it, the bull.
19:40
Speaker 1: We will save the town, right, folks, Let's make a
19:43
Speaker 1: statue about it. And and uh, he's even though he
19:47
Speaker 1: said this is a joke, it caught on, and you know,
19:51
Speaker 1: all those conversations go Eventually. Fleming is like doubling down.
19:55
Speaker 1: He's the guy who buys that original statue of the
19:58
Speaker 1: Grecian woman and he gets it from Italy. And I
20:01
Speaker 1: think originally she was holding something else over her head,
20:05
Speaker 1: right Aha, Ben see, I I shouldn't have corrected myself
20:08
Speaker 1: in the first place. So there was something else in
20:10
Speaker 1: the bowl before the weevil made its appearance, and it
20:14
Speaker 1: was like a trophy. And so the trophy is what
20:16
Speaker 1: the fountain was, and the bowl just caught the excess
20:19
Speaker 1: overflow water. Um, so okay, I was I was right
20:22
Speaker 1: in the first place. Sorry about that, but Yeah, that's
20:25
Speaker 1: exactly right. It was this kind of flowing classic Greek
20:29
Speaker 1: goddess type figure holding this trophy over over her head,
20:32
Speaker 1: and there were two street lights next to it, and
20:35
Speaker 1: kind of an array that lit up this you know,
20:37
Speaker 1: column um that she was standing on. It was around
20:41
Speaker 1: thirteen feet tall, and it was three thousand dollars to
20:44
Speaker 1: erect at the time, including materials today that'd be roughly
20:51
Speaker 1: a forty grand, and it was personally paid out of
20:53
Speaker 1: Fleming's own pocket for the most part. Yeah, talk about
20:56
Speaker 1: committing to the bit. Huh. Now, we've had we've had
20:59
Speaker 1: our kind of in jokes that we go with, but
21:02
Speaker 1: I don't think any of us has ever put forty
21:04
Speaker 1: grand down on it yet. We'll see, so you're absolutely right.
21:08
Speaker 1: December eleventh, nineteen nineteen, there's a dedication ceremony. A ton
21:13
Speaker 1: of people show up, five thousand people. George Washington Carver
21:17
Speaker 1: was scheduled to speak at it about the you know,
21:20
Speaker 1: thanking the bullweevil, extolling the glory of the peanut, but
21:24
Speaker 1: unfortunately floods complicated his transit and he wasn't unable to
21:29
Speaker 1: make it, but they still partied. It wasn't until thirty
21:33
Speaker 1: years after this dedication ceremony that someone said, Hey, you know,
21:40
Speaker 1: it's weird. We got a statue that's all about the
21:42
Speaker 1: Bowl Weevil, but we don't have a Bowl Weevil on
21:45
Speaker 1: our Bowl Weevil Appreciation statue. Yeah, so they popped one
21:49
Speaker 1: up there, um and uh, it kind of made it
21:53
Speaker 1: a bit of a target for vandals and you know,
21:55
Speaker 1: people wanted to pull pranks and all that. So it
21:58
Speaker 1: was something that was on occasion damaged and it actually
22:02
Speaker 1: has been stolen, which is interesting. I wonder how they
22:05
Speaker 1: have just like pride it off or whatever. That seems
22:07
Speaker 1: like a lot of effort. It does, it does, and
22:10
Speaker 1: it's weird what what people will do to vandalize statues.
22:14
Speaker 1: You know, my grandfather's region was a regional sculptor and
22:18
Speaker 1: he had a statue in a bank where somebody stole
22:21
Speaker 1: the head and he suspected frat rose. But yeah, so
22:24
Speaker 1: this was this was stolen and the the original one
22:28
Speaker 1: was first stole in the nineteen fifties. It was never found,
22:31
Speaker 1: which means the odds are that there is someone, maybe
22:35
Speaker 1: even in Enterprise, Alabama, who has a fifty pound statue
22:40
Speaker 1: of a bull weevil. Today. It reminds me of isn't
22:49
Speaker 1: there a plot in The Simpsons where the statue of
22:53
Speaker 1: Jebediah Springfield's head is removed? Yes, yes, your spot odd,
22:57
Speaker 1: which just shows us that this is a not uncommon practice.
23:02
Speaker 1: And so what what the city did when the original
23:05
Speaker 1: guy was stolen is they said, all right, we're gonna
23:08
Speaker 1: replace this bullweevil. We're gonna make it larger, we're gonna
23:12
Speaker 1: make it more anatomically correct, and uh several you know,
23:16
Speaker 1: a couple of decades past, nineteen four, thieves strike again,
23:21
Speaker 1: but this time they don't steal just the bull weevil.
23:24
Speaker 1: Do they know it's true? Yeah, we're talking the seventies now.
23:27
Speaker 1: It seems like they had a good little period of
23:29
Speaker 1: of peace towards the statue. But in nineteen seventy four,
23:35
Speaker 1: you know, in the same way they needed a double
23:37
Speaker 1: down by making a bigger and better bulwevil. The thieves
23:40
Speaker 1: had to double down to you know, they had to
23:43
Speaker 1: one up their their predecessors. And they didn't just steal
23:46
Speaker 1: the weevil. They stole the whole damn thing, the whole statue,
23:50
Speaker 1: which is imp you know, just logistically, it's it's it
23:54
Speaker 1: would be a real feat to pull off and not
23:56
Speaker 1: to get caught in the act, right, that's you have
23:59
Speaker 1: to get a jack m are something to get that
24:00
Speaker 1: thing out of the ground. It is much more difficult
24:02
Speaker 1: than that heist of potatoes that we talked about in
24:06
Speaker 1: our partimentier episode, you know where we where we got
24:09
Speaker 1: together and the guards let us get away. These guys
24:11
Speaker 1: made off with a whole statue anyhow, and they get it.
24:16
Speaker 1: The town gets it back, but it's badly damaged because
24:19
Speaker 1: it turns out, you know, stealing a statue under cover
24:22
Speaker 1: of night is kind of tough and you have to
24:25
Speaker 1: move quickly. Just the bug gets stolen, they just take
24:30
Speaker 1: the evil again again and it also disappears, which means
24:34
Speaker 1: I pause it that it is possible someone maybe in
24:38
Speaker 1: the area of Enterprise, Alabama, has not one, but two
24:42
Speaker 1: ginormous statues of a bowl weevil. At this point, it's
24:45
Speaker 1: probably getting weird when you have to explain that to
24:48
Speaker 1: your friends as they come over. No joke or it's
24:51
Speaker 1: a point of pride, and you have it like prominently
24:53
Speaker 1: featured in your living room. Exactly is that? Well, do
24:59
Speaker 1: come into the hall. I believe a Ganda will explain
25:03
Speaker 1: it all because they still talked like that. Sure which
25:08
Speaker 1: is where we are now, because they finally were like,
25:13
Speaker 1: you know, the people that have to deal with this
25:14
Speaker 1: stuff understandably, we're a little bit fed up. So they
25:18
Speaker 1: moved it to a museum, you know, so it could
25:21
Speaker 1: be like guarded um. And in its place, they created
25:24
Speaker 1: a resin replica that was made from a cast that
25:28
Speaker 1: was used to make another replica as they submission to
25:32
Speaker 1: the Southern History Exhibit at the nineteen ninety Summer Olympics
25:35
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah, and b oh and by
25:39
Speaker 1: the way, was also stolen again in nineteen two. Like
25:42
Speaker 1: this went on for a while, but the resident, the
25:45
Speaker 1: resident replica seems to be the solution here. And if
25:49
Speaker 1: you are planning to make your own Bullweevil heist, do
25:54
Speaker 1: be warned. The Bullweevil Statue and Enterprise, Alabama is now
25:59
Speaker 1: monitored twenty four seven by security cameras, which I think
26:04
Speaker 1: means there just might be a real Mexican get a
26:08
Speaker 1: dumb sound crime movie sound cube Bull Weevil Force law.
26:16
Speaker 1: And it's very specific. It's very specific. You wouldn't it
26:22
Speaker 1: went to seven seas now, you would? Uh, it didn't
26:25
Speaker 1: seem like it jumped the shark though. Around season three
26:28
Speaker 1: that's gonna lie. It seems like they were coasting a
26:30
Speaker 1: little bit, but it's it's a really interesting story. And
26:33
Speaker 1: today the bull weevil is still a thing. Like, we
26:36
Speaker 1: didn't completely eradicate this, Uh, the species of insect that
26:40
Speaker 1: you know feeds exclusively on the cotton, the copious amounts
26:43
Speaker 1: of cotton that are still planted and harvested in the
26:46
Speaker 1: South today. Right, Yeah, that's absolutely right. This this is
26:50
Speaker 1: a serious issue and it's gone on for decades and
26:54
Speaker 1: eventually scientists realized that they could influence insects behaviors by
26:58
Speaker 1: exposing them to send athetic pheromones. These pheromones were used
27:03
Speaker 1: to lure the weevils into traps and then from there
27:06
Speaker 1: they were sprayed with pesticides. Thankfully, the weevil has been
27:10
Speaker 1: eradicated from nine percent of the what's called the cotton
27:15
Speaker 1: land where they grow cotton in the US and in
27:17
Speaker 1: parts of northern Mexico. Yeah, but that two percent still
27:20
Speaker 1: like there's the most hardcore of the weevils because they're
27:23
Speaker 1: obviously what resistant or they just you know, you can't
27:26
Speaker 1: lure me with those fake you know la la scents. No, no,
27:29
Speaker 1: thank you. I will eat your cotton if you please,
27:32
Speaker 1: it's funny. There's I mean, that's practically but I still
27:36
Speaker 1: gotta wonder about the last remaining three percent, the last
27:39
Speaker 1: stand of the bull Weevil. You know, it's funny. Been
27:42
Speaker 1: in my hometown in Augusta, Georgia, which I don't believe
27:45
Speaker 1: was necessarily a huge cotton producing town. But there's a
27:49
Speaker 1: little cafe called the Bullweevil and they have a really
27:52
Speaker 1: lovely selection of cakes and pies. Um. And then they're
27:56
Speaker 1: shaped shaped like bowl weevils. Not the pies or the cakes. No,
28:00
Speaker 1: they have a little cartoon bowlweevil mascot that I always
28:02
Speaker 1: thought was very uh, let's just say hideous. Um. But
28:07
Speaker 1: it's something I remember growing up, and I was like, oh, okay,
28:09
Speaker 1: I guess this is like a tongue in cheek way
28:10
Speaker 1: of acknowledging something that was, you know, ultimately very disastrous.
28:15
Speaker 1: But it seems like Enterprise Alabama with a name like enterprise,
28:18
Speaker 1: you've gotta be enterprising. It seems like they made a
28:21
Speaker 1: they turned lemons into lemonade or bowlweevils into weavenade. Yeah,
28:24
Speaker 1: that's that's a thing. Oh no, I agree, I thought
28:27
Speaker 1: you landed that one. The also, uh, a lot of
28:30
Speaker 1: this is coming from a professor of entomology at North
28:33
Speaker 1: Carolina State University named Dominic re Sick, who is a
28:38
Speaker 1: go to authority on this, and you can find him
28:41
Speaker 1: interviewed in the Smithsonian that we mentioned earlier, as well
28:44
Speaker 1: as the several other places for him. For re Sich,
28:47
Speaker 1: this is a story of a town beating the odds,
28:51
Speaker 1: beating enormous odds, and also getting assistance from government, from scientists.
28:58
Speaker 1: Everybody was on ward with fixing this problem, which doesn't
29:02
Speaker 1: always happen. So there's a lot of fortune in here
29:06
Speaker 1: wrapped up in this misfortune. And if you ask Bradley
29:10
Speaker 1: the p River story we mentioned earlier, we asked, if
29:13
Speaker 1: you ask him what the lesson is, what the takeaway is,
29:16
Speaker 1: he would say, so many people think, why did you
29:19
Speaker 1: build a statue to honor something that did so much destruction?
29:22
Speaker 1: It was more to recognize the fact that the bullweevil
29:25
Speaker 1: cause farmers to seek a better cash crop to replace cotton. Yeah,
29:29
Speaker 1: and to this day, enterprise is really leaning into that history.
29:32
Speaker 1: And it's also kind of lucky because you know how
29:34
Speaker 1: a lot of statues and monuments that were so fond
29:37
Speaker 1: of here in the South again pulled down because it
29:39
Speaker 1: turns out there a little more than a little racist
29:41
Speaker 1: uh not a racist bone in the stone body. That
29:45
Speaker 1: is the Bowl Weevil statue. Yeah yea. And Alabama is
29:49
Speaker 1: still a big producer of peanuts. And if you go
29:54
Speaker 1: to Enterprise right now, Enterprise Alabama, not the rental car place,
29:58
Speaker 1: then you can they'll see this statue. And uh, you
30:03
Speaker 1: can find pictures of it online. It's uh, it's it's
30:07
Speaker 1: an interesting reason to build a statue, and honestly, I
30:12
Speaker 1: think it's a pretty cool reason. I think Roscoe would
30:14
Speaker 1: be impressed that his joke had expanded so well over
30:19
Speaker 1: the decades. And you know another thing we love in
30:21
Speaker 1: the South is a good summer festival, uh, and they
30:24
Speaker 1: have one there in Enterprise, the annual Bowl Weevil Fall Festival,
30:29
Speaker 1: where a fall a follow or a summer festival, whatever,
30:31
Speaker 1: they're both equally good. Prefer a fall festival personally because
30:34
Speaker 1: the weather is nicer. But that is on October of
30:38
Speaker 1: this year, so if you want to, you can go
30:40
Speaker 1: on over to visit Enterprise dot com and look up
30:44
Speaker 1: vendors and all that good stuff will be at the
30:46
Speaker 1: two thousand twenty one Bowl Weevil Festival, So mark your
30:50
Speaker 1: calendars folks, and let us and let us know if
30:54
Speaker 1: you have any stories that are similar to this from
30:58
Speaker 1: your neck of the Globe woods. What a ride? No,
31:02
Speaker 1: I I don't know if I've ever seen a Bowlweevil
31:05
Speaker 1: in person? Have you know? But you say what a ride?
31:07
Speaker 1: And I immediately picture like a Bowlweevil themed you know,
31:11
Speaker 1: Tilt a Whirl at the Bowlwevil Festival. That'd be fun.
31:15
Speaker 1: It's funny you say that. I've been trying to figure
31:17
Speaker 1: out a place to pitch this, so I'll just do
31:19
Speaker 1: it now. Is we're wrapping up, you know, they are
31:21
Speaker 1: all these amusement parks, right, I was thinking, what do
31:24
Speaker 1: you what do you guys think of? Like a confusedment park?
31:28
Speaker 1: Go on? So, so like tell me that ends. There's
31:34
Speaker 1: there's bigger stuff next, put your hand down. There's uh,
31:38
Speaker 1: there's more to it than that. I am just still
31:40
Speaker 1: working out some of the details. You know, what are
31:43
Speaker 1: the rides? Like? What? Like? You you could go a
31:45
Speaker 1: million directions. Well, it reminds me of this really cool
31:48
Speaker 1: art collective called Me a Wolf that started out just
31:51
Speaker 1: doing like this one particular installation in San Antonio, Texas
31:55
Speaker 1: or Santa Fe. Rather, excuse me, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
31:58
Speaker 1: and they did this like basically weird artsy psychedelic haunted house.
32:03
Speaker 1: They got so popular that George RR. Martin caught wind
32:06
Speaker 1: of it and like bought them a bowling alley. So
32:08
Speaker 1: they did essentially what you're describing, sort of an indoor
32:11
Speaker 1: weird Alice in Wonderland type art slash amusement situation. And
32:16
Speaker 1: they got so popular, especially a documentary about this collective,
32:19
Speaker 1: that they have gone completely corporate and they have like
32:22
Speaker 1: a fake grocery store in Vegas that's like I forget
32:26
Speaker 1: what it's called, but it's like got all the products
32:28
Speaker 1: are weird and psychedelic and strange and very like that. Um,
32:32
Speaker 1: what's that thing they used to do the deep dream,
32:34
Speaker 1: you know, like the weird filtered googly I like psychedelic
32:38
Speaker 1: dogs on everything. Not quite like that, but it's got
32:42
Speaker 1: definitely like it's like an Alice in Wonderland grocery store.
32:45
Speaker 1: And then they have ones in Dubai and there's ones
32:47
Speaker 1: and I believe l A anyway, it's a massive undertaking.
32:51
Speaker 1: So they might have beaten you to the punch on
32:52
Speaker 1: the confusement park, Ben, but I'm sure that you can
32:54
Speaker 1: come up with something to make it stand alone. Right,
32:57
Speaker 1: we got, we got Today, We're gonna we're gonna ask
33:00
Speaker 1: you for help. Ridiculous Histories as always, thank you for
33:03
Speaker 1: tuning in. Uh, if you're with meal Wolf, you know,
33:05
Speaker 1: let's have a conversation. If you're George rr Martin, or
33:08
Speaker 1: if you're just a fan of a show, let us
33:10
Speaker 1: know what should be in a confusement park. Very interested
33:16
Speaker 1: to hear the very interested to hear the answers, and nol.
33:19
Speaker 1: I hope that Neal Wolf builds a builds a little
33:22
Speaker 1: pop up over here at our fairte Metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia.
33:25
Speaker 1: These are really high production value and like you know,
33:28
Speaker 1: permanent installations, but they do do little one off events
33:30
Speaker 1: here and there, so that would be super cool. But yeah,
33:32
Speaker 1: let us know what are your confusement park ideas. What
33:35
Speaker 1: are your experiences with the Bowlweevil or like farming or whatever?
33:38
Speaker 1: You can write us. It's true. We've confirmed this at
33:41
Speaker 1: Ridiculous at I heart media dot com. Uh, swear to
33:45
Speaker 1: god it works. Give it a try, test us put
33:47
Speaker 1: us to the test. You can also find us on
33:48
Speaker 1: the internet. We've got the Ridiculous Historians Facebook group. It's
33:52
Speaker 1: a lot of fun meme sharing and his conversations around
33:54
Speaker 1: new episodes and all of that. And you can also
33:56
Speaker 1: find Ben and I individually as human people on the Internet.
33:59
Speaker 1: I am how now Noel Brown on Instagram and you
34:02
Speaker 1: can find me on Instagram as well, getting into all
34:05
Speaker 1: kinds of misadventures at my handle at Ben bullan bow
34:10
Speaker 1: l I n Thanks as always to Casey Pagraham, Thanks
34:14
Speaker 1: as always to Max Williams uh and I got I
34:19
Speaker 1: gotta say it, thanks her own old people who made
34:23
Speaker 1: the town of our show a little bit better. Yep.
34:26
Speaker 1: Jonathan Stricklin, Yeah, that's what. That's what I always Where
34:29
Speaker 1: were you going eats? Because he eats us alive from
34:31
Speaker 1: the inside. Yes, we're overdue to hang out with him again. Yep,
34:38
Speaker 1: overdu Indeed, we'll see you next time. Books For more
34:47
Speaker 1: podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
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Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.