YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexis Coe

lines on the record: 105
first: 2020-05-06
most recent: 2020-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Or the focus on details that don't bring us closer to him. And they also, in an attempt to sort of give this This overview, they give you 20 examples of things when you probably only need two, you need one that is in one direction, one in another, and then my reader is smart. They can figure out which way they want to go. And so that's a big part of it too. There is a bit of an ego to in writing about these men is you want to, it seems, move on them”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, men, but a rotating cast. There's no stability anymore. And these papers are railing against him. They're criticizing him all the time. He makes some missteps again, some early, you know, sort of reminiscent of earlier Washington. And by the time he leaves office, it's, again, he's ready. It's not like the first, he wants nothing to do with the country ever again, really. He just wants to go and be left alone because he's really said, Jefferson says he's never, he's never seen anyone so sensitive to criticism. And that rings true.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fourth trimester is pretty difficult. It becomes so nasty. So, half his cabinet leaves, he had diversity of opinions. He didn't declare a political party, but he knew that people weren't aligned. Jefferson and Hamilton, of course, start their own. And it becomes a partisan nightmare. So his greatest fear, he ends up sort of enabling, as Jefferson would later call it, you know, he would describe these cabinet meetings like cock fights. And Washington is sort of like presiding over them telling them to fight. Their razor beak, they're like bloodied. This fight spills out. The whole country becomes partisan. Lots of things going on. And Jefferson quits. He's Washington the second term, only surrounded by people who agree with him. Hamiltonian. Very, very, and even Hamilton has gone to New York. He's still handling things weirdly. But, you know, he had a lot of energy. But Washington basically is like got second tier in his eyes team of all.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He has everything to lose. He's sort of considered a saint in the world. And he does first term everything is fine, but he's created this cabinet and Hamilton and Jefferson are fighting a lot. Jefferson sort of second Madison, you know, got along with Hamilton during the Federalist papers. But after, you know, it's one thing to fight a war and to try and birth a nation. It's another thing to actually run it.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wants to be home. And so he very happily gives up power. It is an amazing thing because of the era he lived in. Napoleon isn't that far into the future. He lives in an age of monarchs. People don't give up power, especially when you've had the most unlikely of wins against one of the greatest superpower in the world. So he goes back to Mount Vernon. Everyone sort of assumes after he goes to the constitutional convention that he's going to take over, that he will be the president. And they sort of figure out a lot about it, but because they have him in mind and know that he has this self-control, they don't figure everything out. And they basically talk him into it. There's a serious campaign across all the founders to get him to be president. And to a certain extent, it's not quite like him showing up in a uniform. He's not eager to do it. But he is sort of like, I don't know, you know, he's very flattered by them thinking he's the only man for the job. But he's quite right in thinking that he's going to his, he calls it to his execution.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concept of him as a man. People conflate him giving up power at the end of the war as him leaving office after eight years. At the end of the war, he's been away from Mount Vernon for eight years. It's fallen into disrepair, his business, the way he makes money. is tired of being away he's tired of being uncomfortable he's basically you know camping and also taking over other people's houses for a long time”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's changed in him? I mean, what kind of person was he? Because I think one of the things that gets lost in a lot of the, is that he managed to do the right thing at the right moment, I guess, is what like his at a critical moment, such as when he was leaving the farewell to Congress. Yes. Like, so he makes good choices at critical moments.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yeah, he's surrounded by all these men. He likes to surround himself with men who give him good information once in a while a woman like Elizabeth Powell who runs these political salons in Philadelphia. And this is why later on, by the way, he invents the cabinet. The cabinet does not exist in the Constitution. He wants everyone's opinion. The problem is he considers himself sort of a general, and so it doesn't quite work later on with the cabinet, but he has their input and he makes change in him.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, and that's the thing he did keep people from him, but it's there if you're not, you know, if you're only interested in military battles or his letters to Hamilton or whatever, you're only going to see one person. But if you're interested in the whole story, you're going to see a lot of different things.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But at the end of it, he is completely satisfied. He is the biggest celebrity in the world. And that early aggressiveness that we see does somewhat change. He's no longer out to prove things in that way. He's very careful about how what he says in letters, how he conducts himself. You never seen another letter like that Dinwitty letter.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know how the story ends. He's successful in part because he stayed the course. I have in the book, I wanted to tell the story for people who needed to look at Washington's story in a different way, so who knew the story, but also people who had never read presidential biographies and weren't totally familiar with the founding era. So I have all these charts and graphs that I intersperse to make you feel like the expert, like you know what's going on. And one of the things I point out is that, you know, I go through the years and I say this was the general for America. It's Washington's name over and over again. And then there are so many generals for the British. So part of it was just that he was stable.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he says, you know, he's just going as a delegate. He's tired of writing letters, but he wants to fight, but he's not sure what position he's going to have yet. He shows up in a uniform. So it's pretty clear what position he wants. And he goes to every single church. He goes to every home. He's basically running for general. And there's not a lot of competition. But he's behind. He's reading all these books.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he still thinks of himself as a military man because that is status, and he does still like status. So a couple, you know, before the even before we rebel before the Declaration of Independence, Martha commissions a painting. And instead of wearing the clothes that he wears every day, which is, you know, finery from London, he stuffs himself in his old uniform from his late 20s. You know, he's middle-aged by now. And he poses in it because that's how he thinks of himself. And he even when he retires, he says, I'm very much bent to arms. So he goes to Philadelphia to meet with all these other men, John Adams. It's the first time he's meeting with a lot of these people from New England.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Becomes plantation? Yes, with forced labor camp, and he's good at running it because he, in this marriage, got hundreds of people to work it and then bought more with that capital.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there weren't a ton of people to lead this fight. Washington had become famous from his early endeavors from starting a world war. His journal was published. He was well known in Virginia for marrying Martha Custis.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's connected clearly. I think the problem with the 1619 project is an incredible endeavor. Yes, it's incredible. It's not perfect. It's not perfect. It leaves out the Indian component of the story, which is really important. And I hope that someone else takes that on. There are also some issues, but you cannot deny that that was a part of their thinking. It's absurd to think that it wasn't.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Virginians in particular. You know, that was interesting because a lot of people were the 16-19 project was assuming that, that this was the revolution happened because of slavery, which I think has been a some historians have disagree with that premise. But nonetheless, the irony of this is so it's connected clearly.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The English, of course, are involved in the slave trade, but have outlawed slavery in London. And that is certainly starting to panic. Virginians in particular.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But and he runs for this Virginia Assembly, the British Virginia Assembly, and he finds himself up against all these walls. He can't sell at a decent rate to London. He's being charged, overcharged for shoddy goods. He complains that things are like hose of yore. The stampback passes. If he signs a piece of paper, he's being taxed for it. All these guys, Jefferson Washington, they have plantations. They have some money. They're rich guys. They're not like Thomas Payne sort of in-street protest revolution hopping from all over the world. They are not the people you think will rebel. But over time, they're sort of forced to in their minds because they're ironically complaining about being treated like slaves. Of course, they are enslaving and it's worth noting that at the time”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the frustrations, how it really doesn't, it's not a good look, he can't really give orders if a British soldier knows that he's being paid less. And then he gets to the assassination. It takes pages, and that is really incredible. Like that, he as a young man is quite, he's service oriented, but he's Washington oriented first. That is a struggle he deals with until he basically finds his retirement plan out of the army, which is Martha Custis, who becomes Martha Washington. She's a rich widow. She is not the first rich young woman he wanted. He was basically going for any rich young woman who would give him the time of day. I do really believe that they fell in love, but he marries her again with this idea, okay, the British Army didn't work out. They wouldn't give me equal treatment. So I am going to become a gentleman farmer.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fast forward, he and the Indians who have basically have helped him find the location of the French camp, it all goes awry. They end up attacking in the early morning hours, sort of on bad information, sort of just Washington being trigger happy. And he is in charge of the party that assassinates a diplomat, a French diplomat, and that ends up sparking a world war. The French and Indian War, or as it's known abroad, the Seven Years War. And that is a huge thing because of this international incident we go to war. But he's so mad about not getting paid as much as British soldiers, about being treated like a second-class citizen that when he writes a letter to the Virginia Governor, Dinwitty, he spends three pages complaining about how he barely had his expenses.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is how ridiculous he is. He goes out on a fact-finding mission. This is one of his early jobs for the Virginia governor, the royal governor, placed by the crown, placed by parliament. And he is just supposed to figure out because, of course, America is everyone's after America. You've got the British, the French, the Spanish. He's just trying to figure out if the French have built forts in the forks of the Ohio. So just on land that the English have claimed. So she just has to go out there. She just has to go, just see, just see what's going on.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Washington was frustrated because he was the eldest child of the second marriage, which meant that when his father died, his mother got very little and he got very little. That means that his two older brothers had been educated in London. So they were wealthy, but not mansion wealthy, but up-and-coming planter wealthy. Washington had to drop out of school at 14. He said that he couldn't afford to feed his horse to travel. In Virginia, if you couldn't afford to feed your horse, you were dirt poor and looked down upon. So Washington essentially at this age, he's done with school. He's the head of his household. He's got younger siblings. He's got to basically be his mother's, you know, man.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or wronging someone who might be in a more vulnerable position than him. I'm not quite sure it's that they want him to have been just on his way from the very beginning and they want him to have been aspiring to be better and greater and a way to do that is to take him out of this home with this woman who came from fairly humble circumstances and to have him always trying to get towards his half-brother who got all the advantages he was denied and married well into a loyalist family and to be like trying hard to live that life which he was but he was trying to also just get stability for his entire family as like a 14 year old”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's this belief that they were always destined to be exceptional. And because of that, then we can make them into these perfect people. And instead of treating them like significant individuals in either modern or distant history, we treat them like role models. And that's a personal choice that we should not project onto other people. The other thing is that By doing this, what strikes me as odd is by saying that someone was destined to do something that they were always great, we really deny them the incredible hard work it takes to be successful. And we see so much of that in Washington. We see him, you know, overcome. And everyone does talk about this, to be fair, that he had a bad temper, that he overcame and sort of hit it better, you know, later on. There's certain things they do allow him if, you know, he's not in any way sort of a”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that there is this duality to these kinds of people to speak to the examples that you stated. It's really interesting where they are exceptional, right? They do exceptional things”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here, with Alexis Co, she is a historian and the author of a book about George Washington called You'll Never Forget Your First. Talk about that idea of having to make him uncommon. Even fast forward today, I think people do that with tech leaders, with business leaders. Hung the moon until he didn't. Steve Jobs, you know, or Bill Gates or any of them before that Leia Coca, others this idea of having to make these always men, it's never women because women tend to get the short end like Cleopatra who was a fascinating leader, a short end of the stick. Women tend to be flawed men. You have to sort of make them into these giants. When they're complex people, so talk about that, the idea of the complexity around George Washington. What other things were not quite as easy?”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She never wrote a letter. And not only that, he later, after she dies, this is something they just completely don't include because after Mary's dead, she's dead, right? She has no impact on Washington. It doesn't matter. That's not true. He's still resolving her state and doing things after her death. And one of the things that he realizes is that her state had been totally mismanaged by the person he put in charge and that he regrets, you know, sort of dismissing her claim so easily. Right. They leave that out. Why? I don't know. It's okay to describe Washington as sometimes being negligent, as being too busy fighting the revolution to care necessarily about his mother's difficulty and to feel like, well, my sister lives next door. I have a brother nearby. They should be taken care of it when he was the eldest and he was sort of like.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, so they decide to take it upon themselves to offer her a pension. They write to Washington and they say, you know, we understand your mother is struggling. We're going to give her money. Washington doesn't write to his mother. He writes to them and says, she's fine. You know, I provide for, I bought her house. This is, you know, she's never comfortable because she was raised to be in an uncomfortable situation because of her difficult childhood. She never wrote the letter.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jefferson was sent running back to Monticello from Richmond. The British had invaded. They got closer to Mary Washington than they did George Washington often. And she was struggling. She kept writing these letters to Washington and the manager he'd put in charge. And the thing was they had heard that she was struggling along with all these older people. And of course, they were concerned about her because she would be an advantageous get for the British. There were rumors that the British were going to kidnap Martha Washington, Washington's wife. So it was not, you know, out of the realm of possibility that they would come and get her.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think there isn't a lot of curiosity outside of this sort of obsession with masculinity or military battles or these other things. They sort of make things up. Like they repeat the stories. And if you look at their endnotes, if they're not citing a letter, which they've just barely read or they're citing someone else or in Ron Chernel's case, he cites himself a lot. And so they're not even going to the primary source of the grain in a second. So, like, one thing that's often repeated is that she really embarrassed Washington during the war by writing to the Virginia Assembly and asking for a pension. What they leave out is that the Virginia Assembly was giving out pensions to old people, older people who were suffering. There was real deprivation. The war went on for eight years.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their relationship was like any other parent and child. Sometimes he seems really annoyed with her, and other times he's not. Sometimes he's a good son, and other times he's really negligent. It just seems like any if you took five different exchanges that I had with my mother, it would look pretty similar.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was a tough woman. She was born to an indentured servant. It's a great American story. Born to an indentured servant, she was orphaned around 12 or 13. She very quickly esued by her late family's overseer. She has to give money that she'll never make back because she's a young girl in early America. She ends up marrying an older man who already has children, Augustine Washington, Washington's father.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same way I wanted us to think about Washington in this way that we think about Obama, Clinton, Ford, Andrew Jackson, Jefferson even. They were raised by single mothers. And I don't know why we don't say that about Washington.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He overcomes her. And it also denied her this, so I found her to be at odds in a lot of way with their, you know, deductions of her, but it also seemed odd to me then that they inflate. He has a half-brother named Lawrence, and they make it seem like he was always going to his house and always like trying to escape. And that wasn't really true. And as if Mary didn't struggle for her children and work really hard to provide and protect them and keep them safe and actually helped Washington get ahead. And so I really wanted to recast this story.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And here's how dramatic it was. They call her all kinds of names crusty. You know, things that like I would never call a subject at all. But they also call her illiterate pretty consistently. And what is really odd about that is we have in the archives, in these research libraries that we need to preserve letters written in her hand. We have her family talking about when she reads the Bible out loud, what she does on a Sunday when she tells them stories. Sometimes she reads from, you know, these books. So that seemed to me pretty consistent. She could read. She was literate. And when someone calls someone illiterate, it's not always literal in that way. It is meant to degrade and denigrate someone. It's just uneducated. Yeah, she was uneducated. She was lesser than, and it fit into this theme of oppression, like a woman oppresses him.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started with his early life and the presentation, one of the first things I realized was they all had this terrible perspective about his mother. She seemed just awful. So as a historian, I looked at there and notes and I went into the archives and I checked what they said about her versus what I found. And it was so, here's how dramatic it was. Say her name, please. Mary Washington.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tear down everything that I dislike about presidential biographies, which is that they don't appeal to a lot of people. They are really big. They do have to go with this lofty language and this idealization of the man. And I just sort of decided to.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't get the full story because you don't, especially when everyone is going in the same direction all the time. It's really obvious we don't see things. And whenever women or people of color do enter a presidential genre because this has happened most famously and recently with Annette Gordon Reed and Thomas Jefferson. They very quickly show us we don't know what we think we know And I realized that that had happened here. But I wanted, when I went into the archives and I sort of checked these repetitive themes and perspectives, they didn't check out. And so I basically decided, okay, I'm going to enter this crowded bookshelf. I'm going to be one of the first women to do so. And I also am going to sort of.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so the thing was, I knew there was a male skew, but I didn't quite realize until years into the project. I moved on my books around. It has been completely male-dominated. Biographers have been not only men but white men. And white men of a certain background, East Coast, mostly Virginia, the South. They have worked on founding era. They have all these stories about visiting these sites when they were younger and they really impacted them and influenced them. And there I am the third woman in 100 years, if you want to specify an historian, I'm the only woman. And the problem with that is when you exclude women and people of color.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why is that? Why is it? It seems to me a pretty fantastic person of his era, for one. And secondly, he's the first president of the United States. And there's all these mythologies that have grown up around him, most of them not true.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, but his body was amazing, but like they for what it could do, but they would spend pages and pages of these. Door stops, these books that were so huge, like basically just genuflecting in his direction. And that seemed to me odd because it didn't get us any closer to him. It didn't tell you really much about it. And it just seems so reverent. Like it was really worship there.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And along the way, he overcame this shrewish mother to seize his destiny. I mean, it was almost as if they had taken this pact like we would proceed in the exact same manner. And what... It just seemed off to me. I'd never seen anything like that. I'd never seen all historians basically agree on something. It seemed to me there was a male skew. This obsession with masculinity was odd to me”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go into Not that many documentaries, there are hundreds of books. Yeah, I made that documentary. Yeah, this was yours? Yeah, I produced it and I was in it. So I'm a political historian. I love presidential history. And I used to have a podcast called Presidents are People To at Audible. When I read presidential biographies, I usually read two, three, four in conversation because at the end, I have a really well-rounded view of, right, because people have different approaches. Not with Washington. They always approach it the same way. They would at the beginning declare him too marveled to be real. And then they would humbly endeavor to break him out of it. He would have one black man by his side, even though he owned hundreds of people. And then at the end, he would have this beautiful redemption story where he would emancipate his enslaved community.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. But this idea that stuff gets lost, history gets lost. And that's why I want to go into this were massive stories at the time. And again, there'll be stories today that we will not, you know, maybe OJ will survive, but not all the other murders we've been captivated by or political things or whatever. So talk about this, George Washington. Now, talk about someone who's been written about a lot. This is written about documentaries. There's like dozens and dozens and dozens of things about George Washington.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She did not admit to being guilty. She was a well-to-do young woman who had no sexual relationship or romantic relationship with anyone, let alone that we know of. It's been sort of made into something lately, which historians think is not true. Yeah. And that, well, they're also implicating a maid that seems to be quite innocent. So it's really about respecting these people's lives after. And so that's what happens. So they are connected. Yeah.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had and they hadn't, right? And certainly not in the south. And it was not. No, but she wasn't. So this murder Alice killed Frederica in broad daylight. It was an agreed upon, you know, they had a pact. There were letters confirming it. She confessed there were witnesses and she wasn't tried. They had a pact. The girls had a pact that if they weren't able to get married, that they would commit suicide. It was sort of a Romeo and Juliet thing. But Frederica ended up moving on very quickly and Alice slowly, she definitely had some sort of major depressive episode. But despite all of this, despite admitting it, she wasn't tried for murder. She was tried for insanity because she said that the reason she did this, her motivation was because she loved”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could really find besides sort of like general talk about identity politics at the turn of the century, things that you can't really connect with as someone outside of academia and even inside. But the thing was when I read about the case, the medical literature blew my mind because it seemed to me that this was the origin case for the idea that same-sex love is perverse because these were the first people who wrote about it. These were the first doctors in America who dealt with it, sexologists, as they were called at the time. And then it seemed very clear that, yes, this was in fact this story. And it dominated the front page of every newspaper for six months. And the reason was no one had ever heard of anything like this.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With Alice and Frida, it was interesting. I found their names in an academic text when I was in graduate school. But at the time, I really thought I wanted to stay in academia. You can't study love, anything that can be interpreted as love and be taken seriously as a woman in this profession. And so I sort of put it to the side. And then I tried to talk everyone I knew into writing a book on it. I proposed an exhibition at the library. It didn't work. But the reason it was so important to me was that When I read about the case in 1892, Alice Mitchell, who was 19, murdered her same-sex fianc ⁇, Frederica Ward, who was 17. And they had a plan to get married. And this is 40 years before the word lesbian even emerges. And so they didn't have words for what they felt. They exchanged love letters. It was incredible. But when I read the medical literature on it, which was the only...”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So great, good. I'm so glad you did that because I had all these library papers. I will get someone to talk about libraries and why they're important. So, talk a little bit about how you decided to do this book. You know, I love, I do love, I'm going to read Alice and Frida Freire because I love old murders that everyone in the United States talked about that are totally forgotten. And the only one that sort of survived is Lizzie Borden. There's a new book on that. And there's a movie coming out. That one seems to have lasted over time. But there were so many incidents of scandal, and it will happen to our current scandals, whatever they are. It will be forgotten. But I love the idea of reviving something that captivated the country for a long time and is totally forgotten.”
2020-05-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexis Coe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT