Transcript

3.27.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated March April
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twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio I is a
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reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for the first article, which is
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part two of Rifling through the Archives with legendary historian
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Robert Carrow by Chris Heath. In the first part of
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our story, we delved into the life and work of
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renowned historian Robert Carrow, focusing on his meticulous research process
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and his dedication to documenting political power. Caro, known for
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his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, has
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spent decades gathering extensive material, now housed in an archive
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at the New York Historical Society. Despite his age, Caro
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remains committed to completing the final volume of his Johnson biography,
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emphasizing the importance of understanding the end of a story
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to give meaning to everything that precedes it. Karo's writing
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process is unique and thorough, requiring him to know the
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final line of a book before he begins writing. This
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approach crystallized during the completion of The Power Broker, when
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he found clarity at a ceremony honoring Moses. Karo's dedication
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to his craft is evident in his extensive research, including
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plans to visit Vietnam to better understand the context of
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Johnson's decisions during the war. His work aims to provide
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a deeper understanding of political power and its impact on society.
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Throughout his career, Karo has been driven by a desire
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to uncover the truth about political power and its effects
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on people's lives. His archives, containing around one hundred and
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twenty boxes of material, offer valueable insights into mid twentieth
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century American history. Karo's legacy is not something he contemplates directly. Instead,
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he focuses on the impact his work may have on
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reader's understandings of political power. His commitment to thorough research
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and profound insights into political dynamics continue to shape his
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work as he strives to complete the final volume of
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his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Here now is Part two.
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He sits down to work in front of a lamp,
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on which is pinned an index card bearing the words
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the only thing that matters is on this page. It's
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something I believe, he says. I'm a writer. When you
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get there in the morning, you shouldn't be thinking about
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anything else. Likewise, when he's set on a particular stretch
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of the book, he tries to do this every single day.
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I don't take off days, he says. One of Karo's
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well known habits is to record how many words he
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has written each day. In the Turn Every Page exhibition,
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you can see a marked up calendar from the period
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when he was working on The Power Broker. Here is
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how the first half of April nineteen seventy one went
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twelve hundred, fourteen hundred, two hundred zero, one thousand, eighteen
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hundred zero and prinheses six twelve hundred zero and prientheses
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lazy one thousand, zero, one thousand, four hundred, lazy two hundred,
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lazy fourteen hundred. Researching Karo's earliest journalism, I stumble upon
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a suggestive concordance. On July third, nineteen sixty one, the
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day after Ernest Timingway's death, Kiro wrote a powerful eulogy
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in Newsday that included the following sentence. At the end
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of each morning, he would carefully chalk the number of
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words written that day on a blackboard he kept for
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that purpose. One morning, when I visit Caro in the
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Central Park West apartment, where he and Ana have lived
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since nineteen ninety, I asked Kara whether Hemingway was the
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inspiration for his own work practice. Yes, he says, very consciously.
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There are a lot of other things that I took
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from him daily routines in particular. Probably the most important one,
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and it is most important to my writing, is I
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always leave when I know the next sentence another every day,
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you write first before you do anything else. That was
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a rule, and I followed that. He was my idol.
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Caro says of Hemingway. Still, he didn't remember having written
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anything on that nineteen sixty one day. So I show
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him some of his own article and he reads to
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himself its first paragraph. The ernest Hemingway, who was a
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legend in his own lifetime, was the bearded, barrel chested
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central figure in a boisterous tapestry of gin and bananas
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and giant marlins. But the earnest Hemingway, who created the
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work that will be remembered in centuries to come, was
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the man who for forty years, dragged himself out of
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bed at five a m. To begin long mornings of
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loneliness before unyielding pads of yellow paper. Well, no, that's
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he considers, almost as though he's trying to suppress the
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smile coming to his lips. That's not bad. At Princeton,
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Kara wrote his senior thesis on Hemingway. It was so long,
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two hundred thirty five pages, that after Karo submitted it,
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the school kept the size of future submissions at twenty
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five thousand words. It was informally known as the Karo rule. Recently,
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at a bar Mitzvah, Karo sat next to a Princeton
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student and asked whether he had done his thesis. He said, yeah,
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but I ran a foul of the Karo rule. Karros
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tells me, I don't know that. He wasn't kidding me.
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I ask whether he remembers what he wrote about Hemingway
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back then. Yeah, he replies, but I'm ashamed of it
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because it stinks. In the nineteen seventies, during renegotiation with
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his editor and publisher, Gottlieb learned of this thesis and
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asked to see it. Karo never even handed anything over
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because the night before he was going to do so,
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he dug out the heat thesis and began to read.
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It's stunk, he repeats, It was so bad. The word
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sophomoric comes to mind. I was so ashamed of it.
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There and then he started making corrections and improvements by
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hand on the manuscript, but after a few pages he
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gave up and put it away. It was stupid, he says.
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That's where Karo and I leave this subject until some
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time later, when as I begin to prepare for my departure,
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he surprises me with the question, you want to see
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my senior thesis? Of course I do. Behind him in
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the room where we've been talking is a wall wide
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bookcase packed with the kind of smart mix of history
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and biography you might expect. He now fiddles with an
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inner edge of the bookcase until it swings open, revealing
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a secret second bookcase hidden behind it. This contrivance was
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designed by Aina, he tells me, based on something she
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saw at the historical English house of the architect John Sone.
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Past Caro's body, I see various editions of his own books.
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He rummages a little and pulls out a thick manuscript,
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heading out a study of the development of Ernest Hemingway's thought.
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Putting it down on a desk, he goes from page
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to page, pointing out his abortive corrections. I'm looking to
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see what grade I got, he mutters, although the answer
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is an evident. I ask him to indulge me and
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let me see the final sentences. With slight reluctance, he
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does so They read Ernest Hemingway is a great literary
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craftsman and stylistic innovator, but he is also much more.
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His thoughtful handling of his mighty theme makes him a
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thinker who must be reckoned with in any consideration of
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the freedom of man. Kara sighs. The whole idea of
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the thesis is wrong, he says. As he picks up
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the manuscript again, a thought strikes him. So this has
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to go in the archives, he says. I haven't gotten
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my mind around everything has to go yet. But everything
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has to go. There is another hidden space in the apartment,
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one I already know about from the turn every page documentary.
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As I'm finally leaving, I ask whether he'll show me.
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We walk to a corridor just outside the kitchen, where
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hi on a wall are two small wooden doors behind
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them is what Karo calls the cubby hole. He asks
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me to stretch up, you're taller than me and open
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the doors. Just inside, there's a messy mass of papers.
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Each day, when Karo returns from the office, where he
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still writes on an electric typewriter, a Smith Corona Electra
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two ten to be precise, he brings home the carbon
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copies from the day's work, and they're placed up here.
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Every so often, the mass of paper is pushed back
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to make space for newer work. The space goes back
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six feet and he hasn't filled it yet. He's been
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doing this since shortly after they moved here, and nothing
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has ever been removed. So in this crawl space there
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is an incremental sedimentary record laid down over nearly thirty
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five years of what Karroo has been doing. I ask
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him whether this, too will end up in the art.
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You know, I hadn't thought. He says, they didn't ask
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for it, and I hadn't thought. I mean, yeah, they're
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entitled to everything. Sitting in the reading room of the
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New York Historical, eventually I feel obliged to point out
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the name on the wall over a locked door Robert A.
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Carrow's study area. The man so commemorated visibly winces. I
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ask him what he thinks when he sees his name
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up there, like there must be some other Robert Carrow,
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he replies. We talk some more about perhaps his most
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enduring theme, power. He's all too aware of the truisms.
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I don't believe that power always corrupts, he says, power reveals.
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His work has shown over and over that as people
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fight their way to power, they often hide what they
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really think, who they really are. But once they have power,
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the truth, good or ugly or admirable, inevitably reveals itself.
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It seems to me like it's an idea that people
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don't understand, he says, another thing people don't understand. It
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frustrates Caro that people might think he has devoted most
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of his life to writing about two men. He was
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never just writing about those men, so he says, of
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the ongoing series. Each book is about Lyndon Johnson, but
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also about something else. These books are about a concantonation
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of people and events and the times in which they existed.
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They are about how things actually came to be. My
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life has been a straight line, he says the article
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with the deaf guy. You're sent out just to do
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a straight thing, but you start talking to the guy
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and you get caught up in his story, and you
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want to tell people that you think that's important that
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they understand him. This through line, I suggest, has continued
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ever since. The story of the people displaced by Moses Freeways,
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the story of the women of the Texas Hill Country
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during Johnson's childhood. It comes from the same impulse, right exactly,
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he says, the same impulse. That's the right way to
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say it. I always am drawn to tell the story
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of the human being. A few weeks after this last meeting,
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I call Caro to check a few details. He's working,
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of course. In fact, he mentions, it's been one of
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those mornings. I'm right in the process of throwing out
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what I wrote in the last couple of days to
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day's glitch aside. I inquire, how is the book proceeding.
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That's a good question, he says, Well, I've written a lot.
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You want me to tell you what page I would
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nine hundred and eighty, he says. The trouble is it's
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going to be too long. It's going to be very,
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very long. That's about all I can say. Reading through
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what he's written so far, he then tells me he
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found himself sort of thrilled by the parts covering Johnson's
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legislative achievements in nineteen sixty five. He now explains one
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very specific reason why writing about Johnson's life as president
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has taken so much longer than he ever imagined back
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when he started the project. Back then, he didn't know
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that he would eventually be able to listen to Johnson's
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telephone tapes. These days, there is a whole chasm of
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new material that a man like Robert Carrow could never
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possibly find a short cut around. You are hearing Lyndon
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Johnson be president, he says, because sometimes he would forget
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to turn off the taping, and you hear four or
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five hours of Lyndon, And he did so much of
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his business on the telephone. You hear him being president.
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One minute, it's Vietnam. The next minute the British Prime
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Minister wants to shore up the pound. Then Israel crosses
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the Siouez Canal, then it's Vietnam again. I said, well,
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I'm not going to use this if I did it right,
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and I'm not saying that I did but if I
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did it right, people will get a view of what
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it's like inside the Oval Office, of what it's like
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to be president of the United States. He takes a breath,
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so he concludes before resuming work on page nine eighty one,
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it took so much longer than I thought it was
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going to take. Next how Alice Hamilton waged a one
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woman campaign to get the lead out of everything. At
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first a crusader for workplace safety, the trained physician railed
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against the use of the toxic and ubiquitous material by
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Daniel Stone. One day in March of nineteen eleven, the
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same month as the infamous Triangle shirt waist factory fire
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in New York City that trapped and killed one hundred
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forty six workers, a woman named Alice Hamilton arrived at
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the Sangamonn Street Works, a lead smelting plant on Chicago's
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West Side, and asked to take a look around. The
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owner welcomed her in. She was a small woman, unassuming
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what harm could she bring to a powerful boss. She
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walked by the kettles and furnaces. She observed the sweating
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men holding shovels and prods. The air was stifling full
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of humidity, and several times she covered her nose and
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mouth to dampen the scent of industrial chemicals wafting through
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the unventilated rooms. On the floor were pieces of scrap
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metal and a film of metallic dust, some of which
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also floated visibly in the air. A few men wore
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dirty uniforms, but most donned the same stained overalls they
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wore at home each night. There was a pile in
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one corner of large rubber respirators, but none of the
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men was using them. A few of them had tied
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dirty handkerchiefs around their mouths. Hamilton walked around with a
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pen and pad in hand, listening. One man told her
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about a young emigrant from Bulgaria who had been working
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here but had seemed to go crazy a few weeks earlier.
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The worker was removed from the plant in a strait
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jacket and later died. She heard of another man, also
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an emigrant, who was put to work making paste for
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batteries and had a habit of moistening his fingers on
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his tongue. He lasted ten days before he went home ill.
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One foreman told Hamilton that few of his men could
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work for more than a few weeks before they called
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in sick. Almost all had suffered the same symptoms, starting
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with hallucinations. The boss offered no payment for sick workers,
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and he didn't appear to be making much effort to
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prevent them from getting sick. Many times I met men
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who employed foreign born labor because it was cheap and submissive,
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and then washed their hands of all responsibility, she wrote.
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They deliberately chose such men because it meant a surplus
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of eager, undemanding labor in a time of booming production
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and thousands of new factories buzzing across America. Hamilton was
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arguably the first American physician to take a professional interest
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in the health and safety of workers, and one of
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the first to try to make American industries safer. She
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came to the dangerous trades, as she called them, in
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an indirect way. Born in eighteen sixty nine into a
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wealthy family, Hamilton grew up on a sprawling estate that
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covered three city blocks in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Educated at
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Miss Porter's, an elite boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut, she
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went to medical school in Michigan, graduating in eighteen ninety three.
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A century later, Alice Hamilton's work reaches deep into every
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aspect of modern life. She laid the foundation for occupational
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health and safety standards that protect millions of workers world wide.
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She broke gender barriers in the broader sciences that opened stodgy,
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male dominated fields to women, and her approach to social justice,
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combining evidence based research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community engagement, remains
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the blueprint for nearly all public health and policy fights
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to day, from the smallest neighborhood disputes to global battles
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over pollution, natural resources, and climate change. But her battles
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were never easy, nor did vindication come quickly, and one
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battle stood high above the rest because it would pit
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her against a deadly poison that would go on to
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sicken millions around the world. Lead number eighty two on
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the periodic table was a miracle metal. For thousands of years,
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the Roman Empire considered lad the everything element the plastic
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Fitz era. It made pots last longer, it helped wine
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making urns resist bacteria, and it made pigments in make
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up brighter on people's faces. Its resistance to corrosion, meanwhile,
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made it the perfect material for water pipes and homes.
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Which Romans called plumbing from the Latin word for lead, plumbum.
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In medical school, Hamilton learned that lead was poisonous. The
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element had been known for millennia to bring out a
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person's insanity, and historians had even debated whether Roman's ubiquitous
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use of lead had hastened the collapse of their empire.
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By nineteen hundred, America was the top miner of lead
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in the world. The country's appetite was endless for its
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industrial and cosmetic uses, and even as a miracle health cure.
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Marketers spun led as the key to a more prosperous
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life and promoted using it in cosmetics, medicines, and children's toys.
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But lead also had a dark side. The element had
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become so ubiquitous that in nineteen ten, the governor of
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Illinois asked Hamilton to investigate the conditions in factories that
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made lead and other chemicals, where men were getting sick
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and often dying in numbers too high to ignore. In
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nineteen twenty one, an engineer at General Motors found another
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use for lead. He put a few drops into gasoline
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and found it reduced a phenomenon of incomplete fuel combustion
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known as engine knock. In the nineteen twenties, a decade
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of robust American growth in every direct. This new substance,
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known as tetra ethyl lead gasoline, quite literally fueled more
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powerful cars, more prosperous cities, and a country on the rise.
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But Hamilton saw a distinct threat. The first female professor
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at Harvard, she was acutely familiar with lead's toxicity from
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her research among workers in Illinois, and she sought to
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convince the public that chronic, low level LED exposure from
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trace amounts in leaded gasoline was just as dangerous as
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lead poisoning, such as when a soldier suffered from a
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lead bullet wound in nineteen twenty two, the year after
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tetra ethyl lead gasoline was invented. Hamilton became certain that
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it was a terrible idea, a historic blunder. She would
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spend much of the nineteen twenties on an almost religious
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crusade against leaded gasoline. This is a very dangerous form
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of lead, later wrote, based on her experience as a
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doctor and investigator, she believed tetra ethyl led would cause insomnia, excitement,
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twitching muscles, hallucinations like those of delirium tremens, even maniacal
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attacks and convulsions and death. She wrote letters to the
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Surgeon General and contributed to a series of Harvard studies
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into lead poisoning that showed that lad ingested in almost
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any quantity corrupted almost every organ She wrote a nearly
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six hundred page book about industrial poisons in the United
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States that devoted fourteen of its thirty eight chapters to lead.
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She also leaned heavily on her friend Walter Lippmann, the
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famed progressive journalist for the powerful New York World newspaper,
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to launch a forceful campaign against tetra ethyl lead and
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the lead industry. Publicity is a wonderful thing, she remarked.
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It may be the pebble with which David will kill Goliath.
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Hamilton did not mince words even when dealing with the
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most powerful men in high positions of America's industrial companies.
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When the U. S. Public Health Service was debating the
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pros and cons of led gasoline in May nineteen twenty five,
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she walked right up to Charles Kettering, head of research
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for General Motors, and declared, you're nothing but a murderer.
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Kattering laughed off the insult. He was a powerful man
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with the backing of a friendly government. He had reason
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to think that Americans everywhere, happy in their powerful cars
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transforming American life, were rooting for him to succeed. Hamilton
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eventually lost the fight. Leaded gasolene went on to flood
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the country in the nineteen thirties and forties. Once the U. S.
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Government helped export it overseas, it was everywhere letted gasoline
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simply became gasoline. Hamilton's vindication would eventually come. She spent
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the next forty years warning about the dangers of dozens
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of hazardous chemicals, including mercury, radium, asbestos, and carbon monoxide.
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She wrote two more books, including her nineteen thirty four
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ton Industrial Toxicology, which became an authoritative reference guide for
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workplace inspectors and industrial safety experts. By the time Hamilton
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died in nineteen seventy at the age of one hundred
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and one, she had done an enormous amount of work
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and seen a remarkable amount of change in her lifetime,
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from reconstruction to men landing on the moon, but her
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legacy would be comparatively small. She was not prone to
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command attention, seek out fame, or try to enlarge her profile.
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She did not make large endowments that would adorn buildings
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with her name or fund future students with scholarships. She
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never married and did not have children who might have
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promoted her legacy or safeguarded her records. But in the
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nineteen seventies, the burgeoning environmental movement and advancing medical research
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caught up to Hamilton, and the country began to see
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dynamic leaps of progress that would long outlive her. Three
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months after Hamilton died in September nineteen seventy, a year
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marked by major expansions of environmental policy, Richard Nixon signed
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the Occupational Safety and Help Act, a landmark law that
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had long last established a baseline for many of the
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healthy working conditions that Hamilton had spent a lifetime advocating for.
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A new government agency known as OSHA would set and
25:55
enforce standards for job training and safety, and the law
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provided an avenue for the first time for workers to
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confidentially ask the government to inspect their workplaces for toxic
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and unsafe conditions. In the years that followed, a sprawling
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set of federal and state laws expanded protections for clean
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air and drinking water, combining human health into the broader
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ethos of environmentalism. Meanwhile, the US began a mandated phase
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down of leaded gasoline in nineteen seventy five, and other
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countries followed until Algeria became the last country to phase
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out the fuel in twenty twenty one, almost a century
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since Hamilton first warned about its hazards. On Hamilton's one
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hundredth birthday, Nixon wrote to Hamilton, then practically on her deathbed,
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to thank her for her century of work to improve
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people's lives. Finally, ask Smithsonian, you've got questions, We've got
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answers from Bruce W. DTCH Bradenton, Florida. Which time zone
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do astronauts use on the International Space Station? The answer
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is from Jennifer Lavassur, Museum Curator, National Air and Space Museum.
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Astronauts on the ISS orbit the Earth sixteen times each day,
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which could really confuse their body's rhythms. As you can imagine,
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they also have very busy agendas. For both of these reasons,
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having a set schedule is important to the work they do.
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The Apollo and Space celemissions used two different time systems,
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Local time in Houston, where mission control still resides and
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mission elapse time, the time since lift off of the spacecraft,
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but before the first ISS occupants arrived at the station
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in November two thousand, the fifteen member countries agreed that
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they would use Coordinated Universal Time, which is the same
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as Greenwich meantime. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian magazine
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for today. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
28:08
for listening, and have a great day.