History Unplugged Podcast

When Andrew Mellon arrived in Marion, Ohio, for his interview with President-elect Warren Harding in December 1920, nobody met him at the train station. The third-richest man in America picked up his worn leather valise and his cane and walked a mile down the road to Harding's house, mounted the reinforced front porch where fifty thousand supporters had gathered that summer, and told an aide: "Tell the senator I am here at his bidding. I know he's busy. Whenever he's ready I'm here." Harding appointed him Treasury Secretary. Over the next twelve years, Mellon slashed the top tax rate from 73 percent to 25 percent, balanced the budget, cut the national debt by a third, and was hailed as the greatest treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton. Then the economy crashed, Roosevelt was elected, and everything Mellon had built was turned against him.
Today's guest is Greg Steinmetz, author of The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government. We discuss how Roosevelt ordered his attorney general to find dirt on Mellon and build a tax fraud case even though his own advisers told him it was flimsy, why Mellon's father divided the world into "tax payers and tax eaters" and raised his son to believe that the income tax was un-American and immoral, and how the young Roosevelt was a shallow aristocrat who ignored the Triangle Shirtwaist fire until polio taught him what suffering felt like. We look at how Mellon secretly bought twenty-one masterworks from the Soviet Hermitage for $6.6 million and planned to give them to the nation, how the tax case generated 10,000 pages of testimony and was decided in Mellon's favor after he was already dead, and why Roosevelt attended the dedication of the National Gallery that Mellon built and praised his generosity without acknowledging that he had spent four years trying to put the donor in prison. Steinmetz argues that the Roosevelt-Mellon clash was the last serious fight over whether America would be a big-government or small-government country, and that Roosevelt won so completely that no president since, not even Reagan, has seriously reversed the expansion of federal power that Mellon spent his career trying to prevent.
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Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? 
Kublai Khan is one of history's most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world's largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire.
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In 1784, a young German immigrant named Bernard Quaritch walked into the London office of Henry George Bohn, one of the largest booksellers in England, and told him: "Mr Bohn, you are the first bookseller in England. I mean to become the first bookseller in Europe." Bohn hired him as an assistant. Within a few years, Quaritch had opened his own shop, issued a catalogue called "Quaritch's Cheap Book Circular," and begun bidding at auctions with a ferocity that alarmed every dealer in the room. When a rival complained that Quaritch was watching him at a sale and driving up prices, Quaritch replied: "My opponents I naturally cripple as much as I can at sales." By the time he died, Disraeli and Gladstone were regular customers, his final catalogue ran to 4,066 pages with a 427-page index, and he had fulfilled his promise.
Today's guest is Andrew Pettegree, author of The Bookshop: A History. We discuss how almost nothing about the modern bookshop existed before 1800, from window displays to browsing to dust jackets to paying in cash, why itinerant booksellers were burned alive for smuggling Protestant books while elderly women were arrested in London for selling sedition, and how the railway created an entirely new retail model when W. H. Smith opened the first station bookstall at Euston in 1848. Finally, we see Amazon was not the first great disruptor in the history of bookselling but merely the latest in a series stretching back to the printing press itself.
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On May 29, 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople, bringing an end to over a thousand years of Byzantine rule. The city's formidable walls, which had stood nearly impenetrable for eight centuries, finally fell to hisforces. With its conquest, Constantinople was declared the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Some historians marked this conquest as the end of the Middle Ages.
Built by Theodosius II to safeguard the "New Rome," these walls stretched from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara, marking the borders of ancient Istanbul. Through centuries of earthquakes, sieges, and urban expansion, their gates and fortifications have endured, preserving the legacy of the city's past.
To discuss the world-history importance of this conquest is today’s guest, Alexander Christie-Miller, author of “To The City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul.”
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In the summer of 1849, Edgar Allan Poe knocked on the door of his friend John Sartain's Philadelphia workshop, wild-eyed and without luggage. He had fled a train in New Jersey after overhearing passengers plotting to kill him. His senses had grown so acute, he said, that he could hear whispers from miles away. He asked for a razor to shave off his mustache so his assassins would not recognize him. Sartain, who was not about to hand his friend a blade, cut it off with scissors instead. That night, Sartain followed Poe on a midnight walk to a rickety platform high above the Schuylkill River and stood between him and the drop, hoping the man beside him could pull himself back from the edge. A few weeks later, Poe was found delirious outside a Baltimore polling place wearing clothes that were not his own. He died four days after that. He was forty years old.
Today's guest is Emily Ogden, author of Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe. We discuss how Poe was orphaned at two, raised by a foster father who disinherited him, and married his thirteen-year-old first cousin, whose five-year death from tuberculosis drove the most productive and most desperate period of his career. We look at why Poe’s compulsive self-sabotage, from quitting steady jobs to destroying his chances for a government sinecure by getting drunk and insulting everyone at the party. We see that Poe's genius was to turn toward darkness rather than away from it, and that in doing so he created a space where the rest of us can tolerate ourselves as we actually are: limited, cruel, perverse, and mortal, but still glittering with a heavenly light.
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