[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":86},["ShallowReactive",2],{"episode-blasts-from-the-past":3},{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":8,"tags":13,"thumb":15,"excerpt":21,"content":22,"transcript":23,"transcript_file":24,"audio":25,"resources":29,"segments":30},42,"blasts-from-the-past","Blasts from the Past","A History of Dynamite in the United States",{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},1572610941,"11.01.19","Nov 1, 2019","November 1, 2019",[14],"explosives",{"src":16,"caption":17,"derivatives":18},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fblasts-from-the-past\u002FHaymarketRiot-Harpers.jpg","The Anarchist Riot in Chicago - A Dynamite Bomb exploding among the police. An illustration in Harper's Weekly, May 15, 1886. Source: Library of Congress",{"square_small":19,"square_medium":20},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fblasts-from-the-past\u002Fsquare_small\u002FHaymarketRiot-Harpers.jpg","https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fblasts-from-the-past\u002Fsquare_medium\u002FHaymarketRiot-Harpers.jpg","On this episode of BackStory, Brian teams up with Lizzie Peabody, host of Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian, to detonate some explosive stories in dynamite’s history.","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the 19th century, dynamite helped transform the nation. It led to the construction of important milestones like the transcontinental railroad and helped create iconic American monuments like Mt. Rushmore. But some people also saw these small explosives as potential weapons and used dynamite to promote violence. In this episode, Brian teams up with Lizzie Peabody, host of \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.si.edu\u002Fsidedoor\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sidedoor\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a podcast from the Smithsonian, to detonate some explosive stories in dynamite’s history.  \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Suggested Reading:\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Timothy Messer-Kruse, \u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.amazon.com\u002FTrial-Haymarket-Anarchists-Terrorism-Justice\u002Fdp\u002F0230116604\">“The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Guilded Age”\u003C\u002Fa> (2011)\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",null,"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Ffiles\u002Fblasts-from-the-past\u002Ftranscript\u002FDynamite-MASTER.pdf",{"url":26,"duration":27,"formatted_duration":28},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fepisodes\u002Fblasts-from-the-past.mp3","2044","00:34:04",[],[31,49,67],{"index":32,"title":33,"description":34,"audio":35,"tags":39,"transcript":43,"episode":44},0,"More Than Little Red Sticks?","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1867, dynamite hit the market with a bang after Alfred Nobel figured out a way to create a powerful, yet stable explosive. Before Nobel came along, the go-to explosive was nitroglycerin. But according to \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Famericanhistory.si.edu\u002Fprofile\u002F446\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Peter Liebhold\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, curator at the National Museum of American History, nitroglycerin’s instability caused more than a few accidents. Brian and Lizzie talk with Liebhold about dynamite’s precarious origins. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":36,"duration":37,"formatted_duration":38},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fblasts-from-the-past\u002Fblasts-from-the-past-01.mp3","258","00:04:18",[40,14,41,42],"accidents","military technology","scientific research","\u003Cp>Announcer: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh. If you’re new to the podcast, each week my colleagues Joanne Freeman, Ed Ayers, Nathan Connolly and I explore a different aspect of American history. Now get ready, because today’s show begins with a bang.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Group: Wow.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Okay. Well, it worked.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Prof. Harkless: So a whole stick of dynamite; imagine multiplying by, like, 30 or 40.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: 30 or 40 from that?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Prof. Harkless: Yeah.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: We’re mixing things up a bit for this show. We’re producing this episode in collaboration with Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian. And I’m joined today by Lizzie Peabody. She’s the host of Sidedoor. Hey, Lizzie.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Hey, Brian.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Lizzie and I recently got to witness a terrific chemistry class at Howard University, and it ended with a big bang.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: That’s right. And of course, we didn’t just go because we’re chemistry super fans; though I don’t know about you, Brian, you might be. We were there because in this show, we’re digging into the history of dynamite. And you know, Brian, before we got into this topic for the episode, I really thought I knew dynamite, but it turns out there’s a lot more to it than I expected.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, most people know dynamite as the little red sticks with fizzing fuses, brought to us by Loony Toons. But I guess not many people know why it was such an important invention.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: And how it shaped the country in pretty unorthodox ways. But first, back to that explosion.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Oh, boy. The explosion. I was really excited to come up to see you recently at Sidedoor headquarters in Washington, D.C., but first we made a stop to see Professor John Harkless, who teaches chemistry at Howard University.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Yeah. He agreed to create an explosion just for us. We met him outside on the quad, which is this beautiful grassy space on campus between the physics, biology, and chemistry buildings.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: It turns out that Howard students call that place Death Valley. And they call it that because that’s where GPAs go to die.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Right. And apparently it’s also where the explosions happen.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: The scene looked like this. A small crowd of students had gathered there to watch Professor Harkless launch one of those standard issue dorm trash cans high up into the air using pressurized liquid nitrogen.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Right. So it wasn’t actual dynamite, but Harkless explained that all explosions basically amount to the same thing, a sudden release of energy.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Prof. Harkless: So what you just heard is one of the ways in which explosive energy gets released. If you release it slowly, then you get something nice and easy, like burning gasoline to make your cars go; or generating electricity that makes all our devices work from our batteries. But if you release it really quickly, then you can get heat, you can get light, you can get pressure; you can get all these different expressions of energy.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: So this time on BackStory, we bring you two tales of dynamite.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: One, the story of how sculptors harnessed its explosive power to create a nuanced work of art.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: And the other, how it was seized by a political movement to send a rather unsubtle message.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: To start, we wanted to get more context on when and why dynamite was invented, and its impact on the United States.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: And what better place to go than the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Peter, it’s so good to finally meet you.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: Nice to meet you.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Hi, Brian Balogh.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: Nice to meet you.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Glad to meet you, Peter. Come on in.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Peter Liebhold is the Smithsonian curator of technology and industrial history, and he says to understand dynamite, you have to understand what came before it; an extremely volatile explosive called nitroglycerin.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: Nitroglycerin is incredibly more powerful than black powder. If you look at the history of nitroglycerin, people are constantly being killed.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Nitroglycerin was invented in 1847, about 20 years before dynamite. At that time, it was the only high-power explosive around. Explosives had been around since 9th century China, but black powder and gun powder didn’t pack nearly the punch that nitroglycerin did.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: That made it incredibly valuable at a time when the country was expanding rapidly. The Transcontinental railroad was under construction, so being able to blast tunnels through rock quickly was incredibly important. But here’s the thing; nitroglycerin was really hard to transport. Liebhold told us about this one time when a shipment of nitroglycerin arrived in a warehouse in San Francisco.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: And it’s just a crate and it’s leaking, so they decided to open it up and see what’s leaking. They were opening the crate with crowbars and it detonated, and it killed about a dozen people. Really very horrific.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: It was pretty gruesome.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: People definitely didn’t understand it. It’s fine when it’s fine, and when it’s not, you’re gone. And so, really it’s not forgiving.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Engineers needed an explosive that was as powerful as nitroglycerin but safer to handle.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Enter Alfred Nobel. Yes, the Nobel Prize guy.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: Alfred Nobel is by anybody’s description a weird dude. He’s incredibly creative, he’s very argumentative, he’s taciturn, he’s morbid. He’s really not who you want as your best friend.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: But he is who you want inventing your explosives.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Yeah. Nobel figures out that he can stabilize nitroglycerin by mixing it with a chalky powder called diotenacios earth. That combination forms a paste that stabilizes the nitroglycerin. It’s way easier to transport without accidentally blowing people up.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Nobel also invented the blasting cap, which attaches to a fuse. And what that means is that people can detonate the dynamite from a safe distance.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: And dynamite is basically just these ingredients packaged into a tiny cylinder wrapped in paper. It’s stable and relatively safe.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: And so in 1867, dynamite hits the market for the first time and it’s a huge success. Here’s Peter Liebhold again.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: In 1867, Nobel produces 11 tons of dynamite, which is a fair amount of dynamite. And by 1874, he’s got 3,120 tons of dynamite that he’s produced.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: So people, the people loved it.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: The people loved it. Dynamite was the boss.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Dynamite became the go-to tool for tunneling and mining. But as Doctor Frankenstein soon found out, once your invention leaves the lab, there’s no controlling where it goes next.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Peter Liebhold: One of the things that are really fascinating about innovation is that things don’t necessarily turn out as people expect they will, and that folks are very creative about finding new uses for new ideas. And sometimes they’re positive and sometimes they’re destructive.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Sometimes they’re positive and sometimes they’re destructive. Brian, that seems like a perfect launch point to detonate a couple of explosive stories, don’t you think?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: You bet. We’ve each brought a terrific story that’s surprising in some way. Why don’t you go first, Lizzie?\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":45,"tags":46,"thumb":47},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14],{"src":16,"caption":17,"derivatives":48},{"square_small":19,"square_medium":20},{"index":50,"title":51,"description":52,"audio":53,"tags":57,"transcript":61,"episode":62},1,"Blasting Presidents' Faces Into A Rock","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How do you use sticks of dynamite to make a sculpture– let alone one with the grand scale and intricate detail of Mt. Rushmore? Lizzie learns about the daring men, and precise methods, behind one of America’s most iconic monuments.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Music (first two segments, all \u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">by Breakmaster Cylinder\u003C\u002Fspan>):\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gentle Push 4 – You’ve Got a Pulse and You Are Breathing\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I Can Dig It He Can Dig It She Can Dig It We Can Dig It They Can Dig It You Can Dig It\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hit The Ground Running\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Conversation Shuffle – Past to Present\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cascade Blasters\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">An Egg Shaped Room For Your Thoughts\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just Leave Me Submerged\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dropped Washed\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":54,"duration":55,"formatted_duration":56},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fblasts-from-the-past\u002Fblasts-from-the-past-02.mp3","604","00:10:04",[58,14,59,60],"Mt. Rushmore","monuments","sculpture","\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: All right, here we go. Any third grader who’s had to draw a self portrait can tell you it’s not easy. The subtlest tweak to lips or eyebrows changes a face completely. Creating a portrait requires precision, which is why I am confounded by Mount Rushmore. From the Black Hills of South Dakota, four Presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, gaze out of the mountainside. They are instantly recognizable and they’re big.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: If you want to compare George to a house, his face is as big as a six-story house.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: That’s Maureen McGee Ballinger. She’s the Chief of Interpretation at Mount Rushmore National Memorial. I called her up because I needed help understanding one thing: how do you sculpt a face using dynamite?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: There’s documentation that one of their first blasts, they used too much, the stick was too big, and they blew a boulder off over 186 feet in the air. It flew across, it hit the tramway and snapped one of the cables. So yeah, there was some trial and error.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: And using dynamite wasn’t even the original plan. Mount Rushmore’s designer, an artist named Gutzon Borglum; I’ll say it one more time for you, Gutzon Borglum; he thought he’d sculpt the whole thing using drills and chisels, but he realized very quickly that that wasn’t going to (clears throat) cut it. At the rate they were moving, they’d be lucky to finish George’s nose in Borglum’s lifetime.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: The carving officially started October 1st, 1927. By October 25th, 1927, Borglum had said we need to start using dynamite. This is a quote from Gutzon Borglum, “Blasting won’t be used often, and to avoid cracking portions that would be used on the figures, it’s used with the utmost caution.” Well, it turns out that wasn’t true. It was used a lot. And what they-\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: How much is a lot?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: 90 percent of the sculpture was carved with dynamite.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Wow. Okay, that’s a lot.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: Over 500,000 tons of rock removed with dynamite.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: So they were blasting every day?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: They were blasting every day, twice a day.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: It took a lot of men to make this happen. Gutzon Borglum oversaw 400 workers during the 14 years it took to sculpt Mount Rushmore. They were skilled laborers. They were used to working with dynamite and they could follow directions, but they weren’t artists. That’s why he needed Luigi del Bianco.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: Luigi was named chief carver, and he’s the only person that ever had that title of chief carver.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: He was not only Borglum’s assistant and right-hand man who was charged with carving the refinement of expression in the faces. In other words, when you see the humanity in those faces as if they live and breathe, that is pretty much from the hands of my grandfather.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: This is Lou del Bianco, Luigi’s grandson and namesake.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: What I remember most of all was when he would take me by the shoulders and he would say, “I am Luigi, you are Luigi.” And I just think that that cemented a bond between the two of us.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Lou has spent years documenting his grandfather’s work on Mount Rushmore, and learning exactly how the blasting was done so artfully. First, Borglum made an exact model of the sculpture in his studio; a lot smaller than the mountain, but actually still pretty big. Each face was about five feet tall. Then he carefully measured every dimension of the model, multiplied those measurements by 12, and mapped them onto the mountain.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Help me understand. So they have these points, they have these measurements. They take them up to the mountain face, and then what? Did they plant dynamite like at that very spot?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: Yes, they would drill holes in the area that they wanted to remove and they would cut the dynamite in different lengths. Obviously, the bigger the length, the bigger the blast.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: When you see photos of them doing it, it’s like they’re cutting a carat. And you think, “Wow, I didn’t know you could cut dynamite.”\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: These guys cutting the dynamite were known as powder men.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: And they could cut, like, little half-inch lengths of dynamite and put them in these little detonators with copper caps that would go, it had electrical wires that would go to a detonator.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: And it was detonated so all of them would go off at the same time. You might have 60 to 70 shots going off at the same time.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: And sheets of rock would come off in perfect layers.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Obviously, safety was a concern. So they were using this dynamite; they were using it twice a day. They were setting off these massive coordinated explosions. And I mean over 14 years, or I guess if they started the second year it would have been 13 years of blasting dynamite twice a day, were there ever any casualties? Were there any injuries?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: No casualties. They did have one afternoon when a thunderstorm had rolled through, and they already placed the dynamite on the sculpture, but not all the workers had gotten off the sculpture yet. Thunderstorm hit down below and it hit power lines, and it sent a surge of power all the way up the line into the detonator box. It opened the switch, it set off the blasting caps, which set off the dynamite. And the gentleman who was sitting right over the top of one of them, he was in what they called a Boson’s chair; kind of a piece of leather around the middle and you’re sitting in it like a swing. And it blasted him away from the sculpture and then back into it. And he survived. He got banged up, bumps and bruises, but he recovered. [inaudible 00:14:33] claimed you could never fall out of those Boson’s chairs, and if there was a proof of it, it was that blast.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Let me stop for a moment and point out how insane this is. Close your eyes and imagine dangling off the edge of the 46th floor of a building, 500 feet in the air, holding a giant drill, while sitting in a child’s playground swing. That’s so high, you wouldn’t even be able to make out people on the ground below.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: I mean, they had the sun beating on the back of their head. Their face was white like a ghost from the dust. And if it was a really windy day, mm-hmm (affirmative), you just had to deal with the wind moving you around. And you were doing really precise work, so your body just took a beating.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Measure, drill, blast, repeat. Most of the work on Mount Rushmore combined precise measurements with brute force. But when making a sculpture, engineering only gets you so far. And Lou says the finishing touches to Mount Rushmore were done by feel. When the blasting was done, del Bianco brought a mask of each face he worked on to the mountain so that he could kind of …\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: … move that expression to the larger face. That’s what he was able to do.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Yeah, I’m picturing him reading the two surfaces almost like Braille; like, by feel.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lou del Bianco: Exactly, yeah. No, I think that’s a great analogy.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: And some parts of the sculpture were more detailed than others. For example, how do you make an 11-foot wide eye look human? If you look closely, there’s a secret in the design.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: Usually prior to this, an artist carving an eye would make it concave or convex, one way or the other. Borglum carved the eye but left a stand of granite right in the center, a post. So as the light moves across the sculpture during the day, the shadow of that post changes so it looks as if the Presidents are looking in different directions at different times of the day.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: That’s a stroke of brilliance. That’s like a sundial.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: Yes, very similar. And yes, it was a stroke of brilliance.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Is it fair to say that it would not have been possible to carve Mount Rushmore without dynamite?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Marueen M-B: Yes. It would have just taken too long.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: In 1941, Borglum died, the U.S. entered World War II, and construction on Mount Rushmore halted, as complete as it would ever be. The bodies that Borglum had planned to sculpt never materialized. But if not for dynamite, the statue would look very different than it does today. It’s hard to imagine three million people a year trekking out to visit the Great Nose of South Dakota.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: That’s a great story, Lizzie, and I think it’s important to mention that while many Americans appreciate Mount Rushmore for how it portrays beloved Presidents, local Native American tribes have considered these lands sacred for generations. So the faces blasted into the granite don’t mean the same thing to everyone.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Right. Just 40 years before the construction on Rushmore began, the government granted the Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux, but that only lasted as long as it took prospectors to find gold.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: So there’s a complicated history behind Mount Rushmore. But from an engineering perspective, sculpting it with dynamite remains impressive.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: So that’s our dynamite story. Brian, you’re going to share another surprising tale of dynamite.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: You bet.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":63,"tags":64,"thumb":65},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14],{"src":16,"caption":17,"derivatives":66},{"square_small":19,"square_medium":20},{"index":68,"title":69,"description":70,"audio":71,"tags":75,"transcript":80,"episode":81},2,"'The Great Equalizer'","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">After Nobel introduced dynamite to the world, radical revolutionaries harnessed the explosives to foster a social movement that  threatened the government and wealthy elites. In 1880s Chicago, an anarchist named Louis Lingg saw dynamite as a powerful way for the labor movement to fight for their cause. Brian talks with scholar \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.bgsu.edu\u002Farts-and-sciences\u002Fcultural-and-critical-studies\u002Fethnic-studies\u002Ffaculty-and-staff\u002Ffaculty.html\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tim Messer-Kruse\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> about Lingg’s rise, and demise, within the labor movement of the late 19th century.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Music: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Driftwood by Podington Bear\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Refraction by Podington Bear \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Little Black Cloud by Podington Bear \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tarnish by Podington Bear\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Submerging Blue-Black by Podington Bear\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":72,"duration":73,"formatted_duration":74},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fblasts-from-the-past\u002Fblasts-from-the-past-03.mp3","845","00:14:05",[76,77,14,78,79],"Chicago","anarchism","labor movement","revolution","\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: All right, Brian. Your turn. Where does this story start?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, we’ve talked about the way dynamite was used to construct a massive monument in Mount Rushmore. But 50 years before they started blasting Presidents’ faces into rock, dynamite was being used to construct something very different.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: It seemed to be the great equalizer between the people and formal military forces.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: This is historian, Tim Messer-Kruse. He’s researched how anarchists used dynamite to intimidate the government in the late-1800s, and to create a social movement.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: One of the problems that dynamite addressed was the problem that had become evident by the 1870s, that the power of governments was far and away excessive to that of the power of the people. Even in a united working class, even a revolutionary action that was set in motion could easily be defeated by the organized forces of the government. And then comes along dynamite.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Tim says dynamite not only helped level the playing field between radicals and the government, it also allowed individuals to send a bold and sometimes bloody message to the powers that be.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: It seemed to be something that an average person could employ. They required no special training; they could carry it safely on their person; they could conceal it easily; and they could use it to defeat entire regiments of police or the military.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: So it sounds like these anarchists were really into dynamite because it was a do-it-yourself kind of weapon that could deliver a powerful punch. But who were these people? When I think of anarchists, I imagine somebody who wants to undermine all of government and society. Is that the kind of person who’s carrying around this dynamite?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, not exactly. Tim says there’s a modern misunderstanding of who an anarchist was and what they were after during this time period.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: We tend to think of an anarchist as sort of an anti-everything; certainly anti-state, anti-religion. It’s hard to conceive of a group of anti-everything people becoming organized, but in the 19th century people who were described as anarchists described themselves as revolutionary socialists. They earned the moniker anarchist years or decades later.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: So what might drive them to threaten the use of dynamite, and in some cases, use it?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: Well, they were fighting against a whole host of things. They would wrap all of their grievances up into the general category of capitalist exploitation. I mean, some of it was some of the undemocratic nature of governments around the world; some of it was the complete and total control of growing corporations over the individual lives of workers, but also their communities. So they were fighting against all these things that would manifest themselves as common people’s feelings of lack of power and a lack of a future.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: As tension bubbled between the working class and those in power, there was one guy who quickly created a spark, pun intended, within anarchist circles of the labor movement. His name was Louis Lingg.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: He was clearly a very bold person of action, and he was someone I think who just was a natural leader.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Lingg was born in Germany into an extremely poor family. And when he was just five-years old, he was sent off to be a carpenter’s apprentice.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: That was just so they could be one less mouth to feed. And he completed his apprenticeship and then he set off on his own, as was the custom among tradesmen in the 19th century. He wandered from place to place, picking up odd jobs around Europe. He finally found his way to Switzerland, where he met his first group of socialists. And eventually, he moved from group to group; each group being progressively more radical than the previous group.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Lingg came to the U.S. in the summer of 1885 when he was in his early 20s. First he went to New York, but he soon hopped over to the city that was the capital for the labor movement in the United States, Chicago.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: This is the amazing thing. He arrives in Chicago in late July of 1885. He was 22-years old at the time. And by the winter of that same year, he has been elected to the highest office in the carpenters union in Chicago.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Wow. It sounds like he really rose up the ranks quickly. So does Lingg start handing out sticks of dynamite to anarchists in Chicago?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, he wasn’t bringing bombs to meetings as party favors, but a stash of explosives did get him into some serious trouble. A few months after Lingg started working with the carpenters union, buzz grew around the city about a big labor demonstration.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: The Haymarket meeting as it was organized was part protest, and it was intended to be part provocation. It was quite consciously intended to try and provoke the police into taking some kind of an unwise action so as to justify even greater levels of violence and street fighting.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: And did that happen?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: It absolutely did happen.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: On May 4th, 1886 a crowd of people gathered in Haymarket Square in Chicago. They were there to protest the dismal labor conditions in the city. Things were tense because just a few days earlier, police had shot and killed a couple of workers at another rally. So everybody was on edge when the police showed up at Haymarket.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: It was raining and windy and blustery. A few thousand people were milling around listening to the speeches when the police unwisely led their regiments out of the nearby police station; marched down shoulder-to-shoulder, gutter-to-gutter through the streets; clearing the street ahead of them as they moved on the speakers’ wagon. The police ordered them to disperse under the Riot Act of Illinois. Someone threw a bomb from a nearby alleyway.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: The concussion pretty much stunned everybody. All observers say there was a moment of eerie silence after the explosion, thereupon gunfire erupted. It’s pretty much certain that this was gunplay in both directions. At least four of the anarchist participants in the protest were shot and killed, and most likely dozens of others were wounded.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: So where was Louis Lingg during all of this?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, he actually wasn’t in Haymarket Square, but that didn’t mean he was off the hook.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: So Louis Lingg was connected to the plot to hold this meeting and to have a violent protest against police, because police were tipped off and they discovered in his apartment a number of unexploded bombs and bomb-making equipment, and shells that hadn’t been filled, and bomb-making tools.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Yeah. An apartment full of bombs is not a great look for Lingg’s defense.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Nope. And sure enough, Lingg and seven others were charged with murder in the first degree.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: In Illinois, you can be charged with murder and found guilty of murder if you’re not responsible directly for the murder; if you’re responsible for the plan that sets in motion the murder.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: And even though he was charged with a very serious crime, Tim says Lingg never took the stand to testify in his defense.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: Probably the most sound thing the defense did was not put him on the stand. He was the most defiant and unrepentant of all of the men who were on trial for that crime. He never denied making bombs that day. In fact, his lawyers tried to make part of his defense the idea that he had the right to make bombs, just not to use them.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: I think that was probably a flawed defense argument.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: He had the right to make bombs, just not to use them.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Yeah, sounds fishy to me. And the court didn’t buy it, either. Lingg was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. But before he went to jail to await his fate, he issued a statement to the court.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: His statement came very, very close to something of a confession. He said, “Anarchy is called disorder. Anarchy is in opposition against the order of things, which does not allow a man to live a life that is worth living. I declare here, once more, openly, with all my powers, with all my mind, I must combat such disorder. Even if this praiseworthy object should be defeated with canon, I shall use dynamite. You smile. You perhaps think I will not use bombs anymore, but I tell you I die gladly upon the gallows in the sure hope that hundreds and thousands of people to whom I have spoken will now recognize and make use of dynamite. In this hope, I despise you and I despise your laws. Hang me for it.”\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Well, it certainly sounds like Lingg stuck to his guns to the very end. So was he hanged?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: That was the plan. But even though Lingg was sent to jail, he wasn’t quite done with dynamite.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: He was all set to be executed, and apparently a friend smuggled some small dynamite charges into his jail cell. The police actually discovered four small dynamite charges that were hidden in his jail cell and confiscated them. Apparently, they didn’t find the fifth, however, and Lingg simply reclined on his bed, gripped the dynamite charge in his lips, and lit the fuse. And it didn’t lead to the instantaneous death that he expected. He lingered in agony through most of the night.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: That sounds like a terrible way to go. Why would he do that?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Tim says that Lingg would have rather died by his own hand in a blaze of glory than to be executed by the state. But after his agonizing death, the memory of Lingg started to fade within the labor movement.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: His memory was in many ways suppressed. He was an unrepentant and he was a vocal advocate of individual acts of violence against the state. And this idea, although it was popular in radical circles leading up to the Haymarket riot, the denial that that was ever actually meant seriously became an important part of the Haymarket martyrs’ defense, which was largely based upon the idea that, well, they might have said some things such as bombs are good and you should throw bombs, but they really just meant that to scare the capitalists. They weren’t really serious about that.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: And especially after that bomb went off, it was not so good for business to be talking that way.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: Absolutely not. So, Lingg’s legacy gets suppressed. He is the one who in many ways can’t be remembered, because if he’s remembered, then that sort of tells the lie of the idea that all the Haymarket defendants were simply pacifists and Democrats and liberals.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Even though Lingg faded into the margins of history, Tim says dynamite remains a potent symbol for upending the status quo by either literally or metaphorically blowing things up.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: That symbolism was both extremely strong in the 1880s, and I think that still lingers today because of its durability. I’m always amused by a few episodes in the 1880s that illustrate peoples’ faith in this object. In New York City, there was a figure; he called himself Professor [Mesiroth 00:30:17], and he gave speeches, and he advocated that everybody carry a dynamite bomb in their pocket. And to illustrate that, he went around the streets of New York and rode on the streetcars, always armed with a dynamite bomb in his pocket.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Tim Messer-Kruse: Also about the same time, we get the first publishing industry around dynamite. A radical revolutionary by the name of Johann Most in New York published a book called Revolutionary War Science; was reprinted a number of times, and interestingly it serves as the kernel to a 1970s publication known as The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which is still in circulation and still reprinted quite often. These sort of things, I think, indicate that the symbolism of dynamite serves a purpose apart from dynamite itself. It is a symbol of the ability of people who are organized and committed to make social change, and I think that that symbolism will not go away because that idea will not go away.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, Lizzie, how’s that for different use of dynamite from the story you just told?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: That’s a pretty emotionally heavy story, and I think it really illustrates how the same technology can be used for completely different purposes.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Yeah. And I’m sure at the Smithsonian you come across this all the time. And you know, we find so often in history that the same tool, the same idea is just repurposed by people completely differently.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Right.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: You know, we don’t often work with other podcasts, and I just want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed working with Sidedoor, Lizzie. Thanks so much.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Lizzie Peabody: Thanks, Brian. This was a lot of fun for us, too. We have joined forces like nitroglycerin and tenacious earth to create an explosive yet stable episode.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at Backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Special thanks this week to the people whose voices and insights you heard on the show: Lizzie Peabody, John Harkless, Peter Liebhold, Maureen McGee Ballinger, Lou del Bianco, and Tim Messer-Kruse. Thanks also to Justin O’Neil and Michelle Hartman. BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support was provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Announcer 2: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":82,"tags":83,"thumb":84},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14],{"src":16,"caption":17,"derivatives":85},{"square_small":19,"square_medium":20},1790963931239]