Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part One: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk About this episode This week Robert begins the three-part story of the former wealthiest man on earth, H. L. Hunt, who also became the first right wing plutocrat to buy his own shitty media empire, creating a model for Elon Musk to follow today.
(3 Part Series)
https://bluebonnetnews.com/2024/10/11/from-fields-to-fortune-how-h-l-hunt-once-became-richest-man-in-the-world/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbluebonnetnews.com%2F2024%2F10%2F11%2Ffrom-fields-to-fortune-how-h-l-hunt-once-became-richest-man-in-the-world%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128576349%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=MRb5fiIEYgss85EYRg%2FS37HB9z2bWzOza5JY934BRPY%3D&reserved=0
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https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/h-l-hunt https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebsco.com%2Fresearch-starters%2Fhistory%2Fh-l-hunt&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128622405%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=9OErlk3AcW9yeNh5iJ%2FX0wjG4eFT9Sx1yz73PZSdR94%3D&reserved=0
https://www.nbcnews.com/msnbc/msnbc-podcast/archives-ultra-season-two-episode-eight-ncsl1310380 https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fmsnbc%2Fmsnbc-podcast%2Farchives-ultra-season-two-episode-eight-ncsl1310380&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128638190%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=io7pVeO86k8oKqp8e1hosUhXqk%2FTVv%2Fx4fbZPaqH45I%3D&reserved=0
Hendershot, Heather. What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (p. 63). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/hunt-haroldson-lafayette https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tshaonline.org%2Fhandbook%2Fentries%2Fhunt-haroldson-lafayette&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128654228%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=cpHsCXsDNC%2BEEyMoXJOwTz%2BJrww0JxM%2BUrcSFCZd9h0%3D&reserved=0
https://archive.org/details/foia_Hunt_H. L.-HQ-2/page/n39/mode/1up https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2Ffoia_Hunt_H. L.-HQ-2%2Fpage%2Fn39%2Fmode%2F1up&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128669905%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=2joTaEXreXdFId9bHfoUOe7QCZW14RntRbQCe4PM%2BTo%3D&reserved=0
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/new-london-school-explosion https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tshaonline.org%2Fhandbook%2Fentries%2Fnew-london-school-explosion&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128685398%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=IB9jKYJ0PLRp1CtOYnb%2BibQm6qVSv%2F2pYNeINamJHaI%3D&reserved=0
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-tennessean-waddy-thorpe-hunt-request/54655604/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newspapers.com%2Farticle%2Fthe-tennessean-waddy-thorpe-hunt-request%2F54655604%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128700819%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=9sL3iOUFFhqQH4xYVpBGY42h6VXcDorVfwuiqiHFeYQ%3D&reserved=0
https://archive.org/details/kingdomstoryofhu0000tucc/page/49/mode/1up https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2Fkingdomstoryofhu0000tucc%2Fpage%2F49%2Fmode%2F1up&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7C17fde5a578c348baa60808deafbf04ba%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141432128716894%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=5mZqaFg7tNoR%2Fgoi%2Fa28C%2FRx%2Bwj5GUpFASlGqWQZDI4%3D&reserved=0
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Transcript 12,213 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Robert Evans? Oh goodness, Jiminy gracious Christmas. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, introduced by one of the very worst introducers in all of history, your host, me, Robert Evans. This week, I have a guest who's better at introducing things, Princess Weeks. Princess, why don't you introduce yourself? Because we've seen how I do it.
0:32 Speaker 01 You're fabulous. I disagree with you.
0:34 Robert Evans? That's a lie.
0:35 Speaker 01 Just with that.
0:38 Speaker 01 My name is Princess Weeks. I'm a writer, YouTuber, shit talker, and I love history, and especially when I get to listen to Robert tell me about bad people.
0:48 Robert Evans? Yeah, and I love bad people, especially when I get to inflict their badness on someone else.
0:53 Speaker 01 Wow.
0:53 Robert Evans? And this week, we've got a guy who kind of made inflicting his opinions on other people, on everyone else, his like, life mission, and used the vast fortune he built to do it. We're covering a fella here, he's the former richest man in the world. This guy was an oil, in his time, he was a millionaire, but if you, you know, fix things to modern money, he was a billionaire from a fairly early point in like, terms of modern money. And he was kind of the first of the right wing, like, these ultra-rich right-wing guys to make, pushing his own opinion in politics by taking control of like, or building media
1:34 Robert Evans? organs deliberately to force his own opinion on public. He was the first of these super-rich guys to really do that. Or he was part of the first wave of rich guys that did that, and he was the biggest, like, of this first wave of, of generally, like, post-New Deal, super-rich, you know, multimillionaire, billionaire, oil guys, who are funding right-wing politics. He was the guy who was kind of best at it. But he was also the guy who was only interested in forcing his own politics on people. Like, he didn't want to talk to any other people on the right, he didn't want to make friends, he just wanted to, to create media organizations that would push his politics on other people. He's a very weird dude, and his name was
2:17 Robert Evans? H.L. Hunt. Also, some people think he killed JFK.
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3:38 Robert Evans? So, have you heard of this guy?
3:41 Speaker 01 No, I've never heard of him, but he sounds annoying and like the patron saint of podcast bros, so like, I'm ready to hear about it.
3:49 Robert Evans? He's got a lot of that energy. He was kind of like the proto Elon Musk. Like, what Musk has done with turning X and Grok into this, like, basically building these companies just to push his own opinions on everyone else? That's what Hunt was trying to do with, like, the radio in the 50s and 60s and television and stuff. So, he's an interesting character and like a freak in his own personal life, which is always fun when one of these guys is just the strangest, weirdest little guy. So.
4:20 Speaker 01 What does HL stand for?
4:23 Robert Evans? Great question, Sophie. That's what we're starting, because he has, like, one of the most racist old white guy names you could possibly have.
4:30 Speaker 01 I'm thrilled.
4:31 Robert Evans? Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. That's this fucker's full name.
4:36 Speaker 01 Haroldson.
4:38 Robert Evans? And a Lafayette in there, Lafayette Jr. You know you're in for a good time when you've got all those names together.
4:44 Speaker 01 Antendral loser, yeah.
4:46 Robert Evans? All those. Funny you mention that.
4:50 Speaker 01 That guy, I'm like, wow, would cover my drink.
4:53 Robert Evans? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. Was born in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois, on February 17th, 1889. Most of the articles and bios you'll find on him kind of breeze right through his childhood. A bio on the oil industry friendly website, Oklahoma Minerals, which depicts Hunt as a hero, so you know kind of ideologically where this bio is coming from, simply says that he was, quote, "The youngest of eight children in a farming family. His early years were marked by a lack of formal education, as he was homeschooled and never attended public or private schools." So, we're off to a good start already, right?
5:36 Robert Evans? Like, this is a dude who, and that's not a weird upbringing for the time, really, but it is kind of weird for him, because his other, like, brothers and sisters aren't all private schooled.
5:48 Robert Evans? So, Hunt was a pretty prolific writer of letters to the editor and of ads in the Yellow Pages, so we do get other bits of his history, if you're willing to dig deeper, that go a little further than that. In the 1960s, he wrote this in an ad published by The Tennessean, so this is him trying to connect with other members of his family. "My grandfather was Waddy Thorpe Hunt. Freeing his slaves long before the war began, Waddy Thorpe Hunt migrated to Surchi County, Arkansas, stopping en route to make a crop near Lookout Mountain. He formed a company of Confederates in 1860, which included his son. He was killed in 1864 by Cantrils guerrillas." So that's him talking about, like, his grandfather, right? Like, that's the family patron.
6:31 Robert Evans? And I'll let you know right now, he's the only one who says this guy freed his slaves long before the war began.
6:38 Speaker 01 I was gonna ask, I was like, he made it sound like, yeah, my grandfather freed his slaves before it was cool, before everyone had to do it.
6:44 Robert Evans? But then he started... A volunteer Confederate militia.
6:48 Speaker 01 For love of the game, you know?
6:50 Robert Evans? For love of the game. Now, Wadi may not have owned slaves, but that wasn't uncommon. Most people who fought in the Confederate Army didn't have enough money to like own slaves, right? Like, they, but that's not entirely the point. Some people were racist without that, right? And that seems to have been his grandfather's deal. Now, what's very funny to me about this ad, which is him like trying to connect with other relatives by talking about his Confederate grandpa, is that right after being like, "Hey, does anyone know, you know, my grandpa, anyone else related to whom I want to connect?" He goes on to like, "Say, I want to exchange, you know, family history with relatives," quote, "and present them with three of the HLH Aloe Vera Cosmetics." That's his private cosmetic company. "And a list of stores in the area carrying HLH cosmetics."
7:33 Robert Evans? And the remainder of the ad is a plug for his cosmetics business and his right-wing radio show, which I find, I just found very funny that he's like, "I want to connect with my family, but I also want to use this space in the newspaper to get people to buy my cosmetics."
7:46 Speaker 01 I love an MLM.
7:47 Robert Evans? My weird right-wing skincare company. Yeah.
7:48 Speaker 01 Right. It's good.
7:49 Robert Evans? It's always a grift.
7:51 Speaker 01 You said he's the youngest of eight, of eight kids. How much more family connections does he need? I think that that's enough.
7:58 Robert Evans? How much more family you gotta have, bro? Right? Like, why do you care? It seems like you got your hands full there.
8:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, you don't need any cousins when you have a basketball team. Like, it's fine.
8:07 Robert Evans? So, that's a good point.
8:10 Speaker 01 That was very funny.
8:13 Speaker 01 I fear I was your target audience for that.
8:18 Robert Evans? Damn near two, actually. So, the Confederate connection was enough to convince me that like I needed to look more into this guy's family history, because I was like, "Well, that probably means there's something else interesting there." And I could only find one biography that was written about him, which was the book Kingdom. And it's actually, it was published after he died, and it's actually a biography of his whole family, written by this hardcore libertarian author named Jerome Tussill. And I think Tussill was a fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw himself a lot of the time, although he does, he does include more of the warts than I think Hunt would have. But he clearly like has this degree of like awe in this man for being such a great businessman.
9:03 Robert Evans? It's hard for me to tell how like real this biography is because to sell again, he's like a guy with an ideological bent that he's trying to get across in his books. And his biography of Hunt includes all of these verbatim conversations about talks, conversations that would have happened in like the 1800s. And this book was written in the like 100 years later. And I'm like, who did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations? You must have just made that up. Or you listened to something that like these people's grandchildren said is how the conversation went. So you have to take a lot of this book with a grain of salt, right?
9:40 Speaker 01 It's it's giving like real person fanfiction. Like he is like, if I just put myself into the character, like what would my, what would my goat say? Like, what would my heroes say? And he's just like, all right, I've got it. Nailed it.
9:52 Robert Evans? I, I would say, think of it that way. This is real person fanfiction. That said, it's the only book we have about this guy's childhood. And it's clearly based on conversations he had with members of this dude's family. So you can't discard it because it's like our only source, right? Um, that said, I wanted, we're going to talk a little more about to sell in this book too. Cause it's, he's kind of a very funny guy. You should know in terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography? That he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not entirely the bad kind. He got like politically activated for the first time in his life because he was disgusted by the draft in the Vietnam War.
10:33 Robert Evans? And he staged a walkout protesting the war at the Young Americans for Freedom Convention in 1969, which is like good.
10:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:41 Robert Evans? Yeah. In 1971, he published his first book. It usually begins with Ayn Rand, A Libertarian Odyssey, which is a book about how he went from an angry lapsed Catholic looking for a new religion to an objectivist libertarian. Although he also kind of makes fun of Ayn Rand in the book too, because she believed a lot of crazy shit about sex that he does not onboard with, right? So he's like, respect some things about her, but like makes fun of her too.
11:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:07 Robert Evans? He wrote of his feelings in the time, "For the moment, I considered myself unique, a lone and courageous individual who had found the holy grail after years of floundering." That's how he reacts to reading Ayn Rand for the first time. A lot of guys like that, unfortunately.
11:21 Speaker 01 I was just like, that's like the first time, like, you talk to a guy who read Dune for the first time, he's like, I just had no idea.
11:26 Robert Evans? All my politics are now Dune.
11:28 Speaker 01 Exactly.
11:31 Robert Evans? Now, that same year, 1971, Tussill wrote an op-ed for the New York Times and begged for conservatives who still care about such things as peace and justice and racial harmony to vote for candidates who really mean peace when they say peace, who understand and intend to promote the politics of decentralization, of pollution control, of economic and judicial reform, and so on, all the way down the line. So he's not, like, entirely bad. This is back when the libertarian movement was a little more complicated than it's going to become in the Trump years, so that's positive. In 1974, Tussill ran for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian Party ticket. He only got, like, 30,000 votes, and he needed 50,000 to get the party a permanent place on the ballot. The Times notes of his election
12:12 Robert Evans? campaign, "On the campaign trail, he's distributed Tussill bills, fake dollar bills that he assured voters would be soon worth more than the real thing, given the country's ruinous economic policies. He arranged for a woman in a beige body stocking to ride through Central Park like Lady Godiva on a horse named Taxpayer." So, pretty frustrating guy, too.
12:32 Speaker 01 He would have loved crypto.
12:33 Robert Evans? He would have loved crypto. Jerome Tussill, you would have loved Bitcoin?
12:37 Speaker 01 To sell coins. And he's giving you naked ladies, too. He's like, "Listen, I'm giving you, the taxpayers, everything they could want."
12:44 Speaker 04 A horse named Taxpayer.
12:48 Robert Evans? A horse named. This man would have had so many NFTs.
12:52 Speaker 01 That's a great country album, though. Can you imagine, like, the Morgan Wallen and Taxpayer?
12:58 Robert Evans? And I, sorry, this isn't our episodes about H.L. Hunt, but when I started reading about the guy who wrote his biography, I was like, "This man's fascinating."
13:08 Robert Evans? So, anyway, take quotes that I'm gonna read you from the book Kingdom with a Grain of Salt. So, Tussill's book says very, doesn't mention Wadi Hunt, Hunt's grandfather freeing his slaves, so I suspect his grandson made all that up. But he does talk about the fact that Wadi created a volunteer cavalry militia to support the Confederate- ...cause, which should tell you all you need to know about the man's politics. However, there is an interesting discrepancy between what H.L. Hunt came to believe and what Tussil writes in his biography. Tussil claims that Captain Hunt was, quote, "shot to death near his farm by northern raiders." But in his letter, Hunt says he was killed by Cantrell's guerrilla fighters, and Cantrell's raiders were a pro-Confederate partisan group of bushwhackers.
13:53 Robert Evans? But actually, this is where Frank and Jesse James get their start, in Cantrell's raiders. Now, it would, they definitely killed a lot of Confederate farmers, too, because kind of by the end of the war, they were just raiding, you know?
14:05 Speaker 01 They're like, "We just like doing this now. Like, this is our new passion. Like, we gotta get a scale out of this."
14:11 Robert Evans? When I got into this, it was for the racism, but now it's just the love of raiding. You know, I just can't get over how much I like to raid.
14:17 Speaker 01 They're tapping into their Viking roots. They're like, "This is what I was meant to do ancestrally."
14:23 Robert Evans? It's like how the Oakland Raiders are ostensibly, like, their fans are ostensibly there to support a football team, but it's really about the raiding for the Oakland Raiders fans, too. You know, that's what makes that a great team.
14:33 Speaker 01 Las Vegas Raiders.
14:35 Robert Evans? No, no, no, Sophie, I don't, I don't accept that at all.
14:38 Speaker 01 That's like me with the Nets. It's like, "Oh, it's the Brooklyn Nets." I'm like, "They're from New Jersey. It's okay. We don't have to make things up." Just because Jay-Z says it doesn't mean it's true.
14:48 Robert Evans? That's not right. Yeah, no, I refuse to accept that. So, when Captain Hunt gets murdered by, whether it's by northern partisans or Cantrell's raiders, his son, H.L. Hunt, which is the same name as our H.L. Hunt, right? And it's his dad, takes control of the family. Now, H.L. goes by the nickname Hash for reasons lost to history but are more likely rooted in potatoes than marijuana.
15:13 Speaker 01 Too bad.
15:14 Robert Evans? He's a fascinating figure because his life and his son's life kind of perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil War up to, like, the modern era through, like, the political realignment of the mid-20th century. Because you have, like, the Republican Party, which is this, like, radical progressive force in the country that then becomes like the Conservative Party over a period of time, right? And his family- Really embodies that very well. In 1864, before the war was over, Hash took, like, after his dad gets killed, he moves up north and he takes an oath of allegiance to the Union. Per the book Kingdom, "Up north was where the money was," Hash told his family. "The South, as they had known it all their lives, was finished. It would not rise again for 50 years at least."
16:00 Robert Evans? So you see, this is a family that, number one, never gives up on like the racist things that led them to support the Confederacy, but Hash is a very pragmatic guy. He's like, "The Confederacy's not winning this war, and I want to be where the money is. Like, I'm not going down with the ship. Fuck that. My dad did. That seems stupid."
16:18 Speaker 01 Exactly. It's like, "The slaves are gone. Let's go up to the industry and abuse the Irish."
16:23 Robert Evans? Right. Abuse whoever we can. Because I'm still racist. Don't get me wrong.
16:27 Speaker 01 We can diversify.
16:29 Robert Evans? So the family winds up in Illinois, uh, which is where R. H. L. Hunt is going to be born, uh, in 1889. They start farming, and things are going pretty well for the Hunts for a while. Hash is a good businessman and a skilled farmer. In short order, he meets a girl, the daughter of an Army Union chaplain, uh, and she's named Ella Henderson. This is going to be H. L. Hunt, Ar Hunt's mom. Tussil's book claims that she, quote, "was descended from an old Huguenot line, and she deported herself with a certain aristocratic air not unworthy of her birth line." Now, that's an interesting weird use of the word deported by Tussil there. I've never heard, I think he meant to write comported? Because I don't think deported actually works that way. But it made its way into the final copy of the book, so.
17:12 Speaker 01 They're like, "We're just not Huguenot enough to understand how sophisticated that is."
17:16 Robert Evans? You gotta be way more Huguenot to get that word, right? Yeah.
17:21 Robert Evans? So I don't know if she was, had Huguenot blood in her veins or whatever, uh, but this is very consistent with what H. L. Hunt's going to believe about his background and himself, because he thinks he's special. And part of why he thinks he's special is because of his blood. From 1873 to 1889, the Hunts have eight children, the last of whom is our boy Haroldson Lafayette. Given that he has the same name as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed Junior, and the family soon took to calling him June or Junie. So as a boy, he goes by June or Junie because he's got the same name as his dad, who goes by Hash. Now, the Hunt's 500 acre farm was productive and supports the family well. But how well it supports them is kind of hard for me to say. Tussil
18:05 Robert Evans? writes that they, quote, "just managed to scrub out a meager living." But we also know that by the time Hash dies, he gives his, all eight of his kids, pretty significant inheritances that suggests they're actually doing very well. Now, maybe, I don't know how long it takes them to be doing very well, but certainly by later in his life, they're like, upper middle class, right? If not rich. It's a little hard for me to tell that.
18:28 Speaker 01 Do we know the breakdown of, like, the genders of the siblings? Was it, like, more girls than boys? Because you can outsource the girls. They can go somewhere else.
18:37 Robert Evans? I think it's a pretty, a pretty good split. But he's got at least a couple of sisters.
18:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
18:41 Robert Evans? That said, I think it's also Hunt kind of talks up his family having a harder time when he was a kid than they really did, because all conservatives who wind up crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were.
18:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:54 Robert Evans? At any rate, in 1894, when Junie was like, five or so, his dad Hash gets elected sheriff of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first Republican sheriff of Fayette County, although not the last. He settled into a pattern of spending a week or so in Vandalia, the county seat, and then heading home for a few days to tend his farm, which was now primarily maintained by his wife and older sons. If Tussil's book gives an accurate account, H.L. Hunt, or Hash, was not a pleasant man to have as your dad. Quote, "Hash Hunt would storm through the house, sipping a bit of his own homemade corn whiskey from a jar, and thundering to anyone within earshot his views on the world,
19:38 Robert Evans? on the hard times that had spread through the nation like a pestilence, on the politicians who had brought these conditions about, and on the bare living he was able to scratch out from his farm and his share of salary." So they've got kind of right wing talk radio in the form of their dad.
19:51 Speaker 01 Right.
19:51 Robert Evans? He's just like a drunk Rush Limbaugh complaining about how hard things are while he makes a lot of money.
19:57 Speaker 01 I'm so glad he has the authority to arrest people. There's nothing, there's nothing about someone just drunk and be like you. You there. Do you know what you're doing to the economy?
20:06 Robert Evans? No law about how drunk you can be as a sheriff in Illinois in the 1800s. I feel confident saying that.
20:13 Speaker 01 Thank God for that.
20:14 Robert Evans? Thank God for that. We used to be a proper country, princess. We used to be a proper country.
20:19 Speaker 01 Exactly.
20:21 Robert Evans? So as I noted earlier, most casual bias of Hunt will point out that he was homeschooled. Now, depending on the source, I've seen arguments that his education was pretty minimal and lacking, and that his mom did a really good job. Whatever the case, he was brilliant from a young age. Hunt purportedly learned to read before he was three years old, and as one writer phrased it, was clever with numbers from a very early age. Now, I suspect these claims are a mix of the truth and some myth making. Hunt is, as an adult, going to be an almost supernaturally gifted card counter. He is legitimately, and there's enough evidence that we know this isn't myth making. When he sits down to play poker, he wins, right? He's got like a superpower. Like, he's incredible at it.
21:01 Robert Evans? And he's also, just his business career shows, he's really good with money. He's good at like counting up sort of risk, analyzing risk versus like the odds of profit and loss in his head and making snap decisions that wind up being very accurate. So I don't doubt that he's a math genius. I kind of doubt he was full on reading before the age of three, uh, but he probably was precocious. His sisters adored him, and in general, the women in his family paid close and doting attention to the boy. Hunt would later complain of his family's poverty in those years, but the Hunt family were in objectively better shape than their neighbors. The 1880s played host to one of our nation's many regular, back before the Great Depression and then afterwards when they like changed the way
21:42 Robert Evans? the banking system worked in significant ways. We used to have depressions a lot more regularly, right?
21:49 Speaker 01 It's like, it's like diagnosing depression. It's like you're gonna have it every couple. You're gonna have a high-low day.
21:54 Robert Evans? Yeah, the national economy was dysthymic. Yeah.
21:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. They didn't have Prozac yet to really regulate the banking system.
22:01 Robert Evans? We hadn't invented money Prozac. Which is the FDIC, I guess.
22:06 Speaker 01 I guess.
22:07 Robert Evans? Yeah. So, the 1880s played host to one of our nations, one of these depressions, and most of their neighbors lose everything or almost everything during this time. Now, the Hunts don't, but Hash is still unhappy. Tussil describes him as a man driven to rage by his failure to make more of a success of himself, and one who took his frustrations out on his wife and children. This creates a miserable situation for Ella, and she tries to distract herself by obsessively caring for her youngest son, Junie. Per the book Kingdom, Junie was her pet, her baby, and he looked to her for refuge against this strange, violent man who filled him with terror every time he entered the house.
22:46 Speaker 01 He was almost a serial killer. He was almost a serial killer. That was like-
22:50 Robert Evans? He's got, he gets a few of those vibes. Yeah.
22:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:53 Robert Evans? Yeah. Now, you know who else is constantly filled with a terrifying violent rage?
22:58 Speaker 01 Robert Downe.
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24:42 Robert Evans? And we're back. Talking about the uncontrollable anger that drives our beautiful sponsors. That's what makes them great. So, uh, things with his dad and the fact that his mom is kind of dealing with being in a terrible marriage by obsessing over her youngest son. This comes to a head with Junie, who, again, is the future richest man in the world, was seven years old. Hash came back early from a trip out sheriffing or something, and he stumbles onto what had become something of a secret between Junie, his mother, and the world. Quote, "Standing on a milk box in front of her as she worked the dough, the seven-year-old Junie had his face upturned as he suckled her naked breast." Now, Hash had heard stories from James, the oldest boy still at home, who was working the family farm,
25:26 Robert Evans? that Ella Rose was nursing Junie longer than was natural. Hash dismissed those stories at the time, having preferred abolishing the thought to facing something that seemed shameful and repugnant to him. So, that's a, that's a bit odd. Seven's late?
25:40 Speaker 01 It's giving, it's like that kid from Game of Thrones. It's like, you gotta get off the kitty. You gotta get off the kitty at that point.
25:46 Robert Evans? Seven's a bit much?
25:50 Robert Evans? I don't want to like shame people for nursing, but seven's a bit late. I think we can, we can agree.
25:56 Speaker 01 Sweet Robin, you gotta get off your mom's tit. Like, at that point, it's diabolical.
26:00 Robert Evans? You gotta back up off that. Yeah.
26:04 Robert Evans? So to say that Hash doesn't take finding this out well would be putting it mildly. Mildly. He starts screaming. He goes into a rage. The book doesn't say he's violent, so I hope he wasn't, but I don't know. But at the very least, he screams at his wife and demands that she explain what the hell is going on. And this is where we get one of the first instances of Tussil's book presenting us with an incredibly detailed conversation from a moment he absolutely could not know about in any real detail.
26:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is his headcanon. He's like, if I could put myself into the mind of my of my hero, baby Hash, baby Judy, what is he thinking, wiping the milk off his mouth, listening to this conversation?
26:44 Robert Evans? This has to just be based on what Hunt remembered 70 years later and told his sons, maybe, about this happening. But yeah, he claims that Ella begs her husband not to, "Don't make more of this than it is, Hash." And Hash starts yelling even more after this, to which she begs, "Not in front of Junie, Hash. Please. You'll regret your words later on." "I'll regret nothing, except not listening to my own instincts. I've been blind for years, too busy to put my foot down when it mattered most. Let this be the end of it, you hear? I'll listen to no pale excuses. This has to end at once." Hash's word was final. Ella Rose never exposed her bosom to her youngest son again, whether out of fear of her husband or out of her own shame, was never explained to young June. The boy came to hate and resent his father all the more for taking from him what was
27:28 Robert Evans? the most important thing he had known so far, his intimacy with his mother. Hash tried to assume a more active role in family affairs from that day on, but the effort was a hollow one. His heart simply was not in it. So, young HL is not going to pick up any good lessons about this. Number one, this is kind of like a weird intimacy that's probably bordering on unhealthy, if not has crossed the line into unhealthy. But the fact that his dad then screams at him and takes it away is even worse and makes, like, this guy is gonna have so much, many family-related issues. And one thing he's going to learn is that families are better off without husbands.
28:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's a Freudian dream. Like, it's a full-blown Oedipal complex. Like, you get, he gets caught, like, almost like cuckolding his own father. You know what I mean? It's like that kind of visual.
28:15 Robert Evans? That's how his dad, that's obviously not how he sees it as a seven-year-old, but his dad sure sees it that way.
28:21 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And I just, and just the visual of him needing to be on top of a crate to reach the bosom, it's just like, it's too much. Like, I'm not, I'm not Team Hash, but I definitely think he need to put the kibosh on that. Like, that is not okay.
28:35 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's, it's good stuff. Um, so whenever I'm starting my research into a new bastard I don't know a lot about going into the project, there's this period of anxiety where I'm like sinking research time into a guy, but I don't know if they're interesting enough to like work as an episode yet. And when I hit this story was the moment I stopped worrying about H.L. Hunt. I was like, oh, thank God. Okay, okay. There's something to sink our teeth into with this motherfucker.
28:59 Speaker 01 We're gonna get it.
29:01 Robert Evans? You don't tend to see this story mentioned in most other articles on the guy, with the notable exception of one of my major sources for this, which was a chapter from Heather Hendershot's great book, What's Fair on the Air, which is about Cold War-era right-wing broadcasting. She devotes a chapter to Hunt, and she writes this: "That he had nursed at his mother's breast until the age of seven was a point of pride, further evidence of his innate specialness. Normal rules didn't apply to him," he reasoned. So that's based on he would talk about this moment to like journalists and to his kids, and he was proud of it. Because again, he develops pride in being different from everybody else, right? Not subject to the rules. That's also very important.
29:42 Speaker 01 Like, I'm the eldest boy!
29:44 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah.
29:45 Speaker 01 I'm a sweet boy. I can suck on my mom's tit as long as I want, goddammit.
29:49 Robert Evans? Yeah, goddamn you.
29:51 Speaker 01 God.
29:52 Robert Evans? Now, yeah, uh, we, there's a lot to say about like... How good, because kids need to feel like they matter and like they're special, but not in certain ways also. Like, you need to feel like you matter and you're special because everyone matters and is special, which is like what Mr. Rogers tried to get across, as opposed to, no, no, I'm special, as opposed to everyone else.
30:16 Speaker 01 And that's why they want to defund PBS, everyone. They want you to be relying on only... The breast milk.
30:22 Robert Evans? Only the breast milk. That's big breast milk is behind all of this, Princess. I've been saying that for years.
30:28 Speaker 01 It's true. My goodness.
30:29 Robert Evans? Yeah, the breast milk industrial complex is what really runs this country.
30:33 Speaker 01 Good lord.
30:35 Robert Evans? So, the feeling of specialness in young H.L. Hunt was stoked by the way his sisters treated him. While his older brother James and his dad both bullied him, his mom and the girls smothered him with attention. In his biography, Tussil writes that June's sisters teased him often enough about being Ella Rose's favorite, but the teasing was good-natured and playful, unlike James's sneering and resentful taunting. The girls regarded Junie as their own special pet, as well as Ella Rose's, right? So, that's probably not bad. You know, your sister's kind of babying the youngest kid. But again, this is all gonna sort of feed into his "I am a special person" complex, which isn't gonna be ideal for everyone. Hunt also enjoyed a close relationship with his older brother Leonard, who he idolized and who loved him back.
31:19 Robert Evans? Tussil is one of the people who will argue that this homes, that his homeschooling education was quite good. Ella Rose teaches her youngest son Greek, Latin, French, and German. And when he starts reading at age three, it's said that she gives him issues of the newspaper so that he could learn what was going on in the world. Now, again, some of this has got to be myth-making, but Tussil claims that Hunt, quote, "gained a reputation throughout the region as a child genius, despite the fact that he never attended the local school." Now, what's odd about this to me is the fact that Tussil then adds, "His entire education was received from his mother and from his sister's readers, which he devoured when they came home from school." So, again, his sisters and brothers get to go to school.
31:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:59 Robert Evans? And it sounds like he doesn't because he's too smart and his mom wants to homeschool him, is that? Which is really weird and different, and also is gonna make him... Feel very special. I did look through Hunt's FBI report, which claims that, and that, there's a reason why he's got an FBI report. It includes claims that Hunt was known in the areas being able to memorize a page of prose in two readings by the time he was in the fifth grade. And that that was the end of his schooling. So that kind of suggests he does go to a public school for a while, but everyone else says he didn't. So I don't know what the truth is. Anyway, this is
32:34 Speaker 01 Weird is the truth.
32:36 Robert Evans? Weird is the truth. I think there might be, because a lot of the people who write about the, and he never went to school, he was homeschooled. Are like weird right wing and libertarian sources, because this guy becomes a weird right wing billionaire. That may be the, because it doesn't sound as good to their kind of narrative of like, well, he went to school until he was in the fifth grade. At which point he was homeschooled the rest of the way, right?
32:57 Speaker 01 Right. Or adding that he was homeschooled by his mother who continuously put her breast in his face.
33:03 Robert Evans? Right, right. Less good. Makes less of a good case for homeschooling.
33:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, not, not the trad wife ideal. I'm sure that they want to promote.
33:11 Robert Evans? Yeah.
33:12 Speaker 01 Homeschooling.
33:13 Robert Evans? So, "The first way that June exhibited his intellect in a major way to the world was by getting really, really unbeatably good at card games and other games of chance." "This is kind of the earliest happiness that he experiences and probably remembers, which is beating the piss out of his sisters and brothers at various card games and being praised for it." "So, this is going to teach him an important lesson. He's never going to get over loving gambling." "However, the fact that he's so smart is not without its downsides." "Per the book Kingdom, Hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed with his namesake's mental agility as others were, and right from the beginning, young June had problems with James." "You think you're better than the rest of us, don't you? James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think you're smarter than we are."
33:55 Robert Evans? "Now again, to still relate to like a page long argument between him and his brother that sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a real conversation." "There's even a part where his big brother says, 'You're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be.'" "Which is like, you just write that in if you're, if you're a hack screenwriter and then you transition immediately to him like as a young adult trying to get his foot in the door at his first business or something, right?"
34:18 Speaker 01 Right. It's like, he would have loved, uh, young Sheldon.
34:21 Robert Evans? Yes, he would have loved young Sheldon.
34:25 Robert Evans? So, as he grows up, in this account, he does everything he can to be the opposite of a mama's boy. First off, he gets swole. He starts working out. I mean, mainly, he's just doing like, hard labor outdoors, but he gets really jacked. He's a big guy. He's tall. Um, and he is like a bit large, muscular dude. Everyone seems to agree about that. He becomes a skilled horse rider, even bareback, uh, and a, a skilled outdoorsman. He works with his brother in the family business on the farm, and he proves his worth by using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve the family business. After summarizing all this, Tussil gives us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into a handsome young man, the best looking of all of his brothers. And Tussil's gonna say a lot of weird stuff about how sexy this guy is. As we'll talk about
35:09 Robert Evans? later, that's kind of a through line in his other biographies. I don't know why. It's peculiar to me. He's a stan. He's the ultimate stan.
35:17 Speaker 01 He's like, he's so hot. Look at, no one could resist him.
35:21 Robert Evans? This dude could have fucked.
35:23 Robert Evans? Now, none of this-
35:24 Speaker 01 Do we have photos of this person?
35:27 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah. We, we've got some. You can look at some up. So, if, why don't you try to find us a younger one? I only found, I, I should have included one.
35:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's see this hottie.
35:35 Speaker 04 I've only, uh, the photos I've only seen are, are of him when he's older.
35:39 Robert Evans? Yeah. I only found older ones, but I didn't look as hard as I should have.
35:43 Speaker 04 I'll, I'll try to find some.
35:45 Robert Evans? Yeah. None of this work earns him his father's approval. And his older brother keeps hating him because, once Junie proves himself, James resents him for being the better businessman. Eventually, June's constant frustration is alleviated by a miracle. The US declares war on Spain in 1898, and James enlists, which gets his ass out of the home and gives June some breathing room for the first time in his young life. While the future richest man on earth nears adolescence, his father uses the by now considerable wealth and clout that he'd amassed to start a small local bank, the People's State Bank. Weirdly, his oldest son, Robert, who had moved out of the house by this point, starts a separate bank to compete with his dad's bank, which says a lot-
36:27 Robert Evans? About the family dynamics that isn't spelled out in this book.
36:31 Speaker 01 But yeah.
36:32 Robert Evans? You don't do that if you have a good relationship with your dad. Create a spite bank, a spite bank, a bank just to spite your father.
36:41 Speaker 01 It's so Kendall Roy coded. It's like, I just think everything is giving a succession. I'm just kind of like, he's like, I'm the eldest boy. I'm gonna make my own bank, Dad.
36:50 Robert Evans? It's a really petty succession because the town, these banks only serve the town they're in. And the town they're in, Ramsey, has 600 people.
36:59 Speaker 01 And every member counts.
37:01 Robert Evans? And every, yeah, every member counts in the spite bank.
37:06 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's, it's very funny. Tussil includes this quote. "Hash had little appreciated this unique form of incestuous capitalism, but it was a great source of merriment among the neighbors." Everyone's laughing about the spite bank that his oldest made.
37:20 Speaker 01 Right. They're like, if you have a problem with one bank, just like, and I'll go over to your stuff.
37:23 Robert Evans? I'll go over to your brother's, your son's shitty bank. Yeah. So not long after this, his older brothers move out of the house too. And favorite brother Leonard heads out to the Pacific Northwest to work as a logger. This seems to have ignited a wanderlust in young H.L. Hunt, a desire to go out into the world and make something of himself. Previously, he'd been content living at home and being doted on by his sisters. But at age 12, he runs away from home for the first time. And he doesn't go far. And the way that Tussil describes it, he's motivated less to escape forever than just, he wants to get away for a couple of days and see a little bit of the world before he comes back. He just kind of wants to ramble. And you could kind of do that as a 12. There's not like a CPS going around to make sure everyone's 12-year-olds
38:05 Robert Evans? aren't running around riding the rails. Like, nobody cares in the government at this point in time.
38:12 Speaker 01 And there's eight of them. So really, you don't even, like, if you lose one, you got seven others.
38:16 Robert Evans? If you lose one, you got plenty of kids left. He's away a couple of nights, but he comes back changed. And from this point on, over the next four years, he's going to leave home regularly every couple of months to explore. And he lives a very Peter Pan-style existence in those days. Tussil writes, "He had discovered that many other young vagabonds were on the road, boys and girls alike, whose families were too poor to feed them properly at home. On occasion, he had hooked up with a gang of them and slept in teenage hobo jungles around open campfires."
38:45 Speaker 01 That does sound kinda awesome. I would reabout that.
38:47 Robert Evans? That sounds pretty cool and also kinda like a special hell, but you know, it could be either. I'm imagining it as being exactly like the movie Hook, though. I'll be honest with you.
38:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:57 Robert Evans? Like, right down to the brightly colored imaginary food stuffs that they throw at each other.
39:02 Speaker 04 I have found a young, a young HL image.
39:05 Robert Evans? Oh, good, good, good. You think about that, I'm gonna think about Rufio getting stabbed. Real bummer.
39:10 Speaker 01 I was literally like, what if he looks like young Jacob Elordi? Not as much.
39:14 Robert Evans? Looks like Longeville. Not, not as much, but yeah, he's a big guy. You can see, he's like very broad shoulders. Yeah.
39:20 Speaker 01 He's a, you know, he's a, he's an eight. The looks Maxers would approve of him, I think.
39:24 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, he's, he's a reasonably good-looking guy. Yeah.
39:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:27 Robert Evans? Like, certainly not a bad-looking guy. Nice chin.
39:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, that, that Huguenot.
39:30 Robert Evans? He just kinda looks like a big white guy.
39:32 Speaker 04 Gotta be honest. He just looks like a guy.
39:35 Robert Evans? He looks like a big white guy. He's not like a movie star, for sure, but he's real big.
39:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:41 Robert Evans? In those days, if you were huge, it just said like, wow, you're not malnourished and dying. Let's make kids, you know?
39:48 Speaker 01 Right. It's like George Washington. Like, of course, he was gonna be president. He was 6'4".
39:53 Robert Evans? He was 6'4". Not a lot of people got to be that big back then. You had to be eating a lot of milk and meat when you were a kid.
40:02 Robert Evans? Yeah. So, when he's 16, June leaves the house for good. He is six feet tall now, and as we just saw in the picture, pretty big, he's big enough, nobody questions that he's like, not old enough to be doing whatever he's doing by the time he's 16. He, he looks enough like an adult that people treat him like one. He leaves in the spring of 1905, and he first hits St. Louis, where he gets a job on a railroad. He takes odd jobs to get from Kansas to Colorado, and then he heads up to, towards Utah, where he gets a gig watching a carload of sheep on a train ride to California. As soon as he gets to California, he falls in love with it, like all sensible people do. Although, being a libertarian, Tussil has to write this in the grossest way that he can. "He found California much to his liking, especially the lust blonde beauties,
40:47 Robert Evans? who appeared as plentiful as the succulent fruit that grew in this golden, sun-soaked land."
40:52 Speaker 01 Alright, no.
40:54 Robert Evans? I gotta tell you, this is based on what Tussil thought of California in the 80s. In 1905, California isn't like the center of like a massive world renowned entertainment industry.
41:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:07 Robert Evans? It's like a place some people live in or farming and stuff. Like, the weather's famously good, but it's not famous for its blonde beauties. It's just famous as there's, when the Dust Bowl hits in a few decades, it doesn't get hurt as badly as everywhere else. Like, people are thinking of California in 1905 in those terms. That's, that's, that's some shit that Tussil is thinking about.
41:31 Robert Evans? Also, I gotta read these next couple of sentences to you. This is, this is Tussil describing Hunt after he gets to California.
41:38 Speaker 04 Spoiler alert. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, gosh. All right.
41:41 Robert Evans? "With his good height and his hard, solid body, his deep-set blue eyes and rugged looks, he had little trouble in attracting more than his share of young females. His sexuality was strong and developing, and he exuded an aura of raw animal magnetism."
41:57 Speaker 04 Who gets his good height and his hard, solid body?
42:02 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
42:03 Robert Evans? Who told you that, Jerome Tussil? Who told you about his hard, hot body and his animal magnetism? Where'd you get that, Jerome?
42:11 Speaker 04 His raw animal magnetism.
42:14 Robert Evans? Yeah.
42:15 Speaker 01 The homoeroticism is just like, just blow him, dude. Just, just blow him. It's okay.
42:19 Robert Evans? He was dead by this point, so.
42:22 Speaker 01 But, I mean, don't let that limit you, clearly.
42:24 Robert Evans? Don't let, wow, wow. Princess Weeks, "Don't let that limit you." That's a quote.
42:29 Speaker 01 Don't let that limit you. Dream, dream, dream big.
42:30 Robert Evans? Dream big. Dream big and weird. So, I should probably say a little more about Tussil here. "In the late 1970s, after writing that book about Ayn Rand and failing to become the mayor or the governor, I forget which, he grew disillusioned with libertarianism as a political tendency. He'd also long since broken with Ayn Rand over a number of things that he disagreed with her about. He gives up political rabble-rousing and becomes a stockbroker and eventually a financial writer. In the 1980s, he started writing books on investing, and then he launched a series of biographies. Kingdom is one of them. Another, written in 1985, was Trump: The Saga of America's Most Powerful Real Estate Baron." This is the first published biography of our current president.
43:13 Speaker 01 That tracks.
43:14 Robert Evans? I didn't know that. That's, that's, that makes sense.
43:17 Speaker 01 Cool.
43:18 Robert Evans? Per the New York, I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here. Denied access to his subject, members of his family and most of his associates, Mr. Tussill relied heavily on newspaper and magazine accounts to produce what Michael Stern, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called "a gee whizzer of a biography that points a key to Mr. Trump's career: his ability to turn political friendships, tax abatements, and government loans into opportunities for profit." Which does sound like an accurate description of like, kinda how he made his money.
43:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was gonna say.
43:45 Robert Evans? But also, it shows like, that's kinda his sources. He found some newspapers and magazine accounts. Maybe he talked to a couple guys about Hunt who knew him. But a lot of this is just him kinda filling in the blanks to make this exciting. Um, and I know I'm spending way longer in these episodes about Hunt, talking about his biographer than I should, but everything I find out about Jerome Tussill kinda drives me crazy. His other, I look to do his bibliography, and his other books, his like, most famous book, one of them is he wrote a history of black soldiers in the Spanish-American War, that's like, super anti Teddy Roosevelt, and it's apparently a pretty good book. He's not like a crypto-fascist or anything. But when I saw that he'd made a Trump biography, I got this, like, I decided to look into that a little bit, and I just started doing some word searches, cuz I was
44:29 Robert Evans? like, does he, is this weird, him calling Hunt hot a lot? Is that like, a pattern in his books?
44:35 Speaker 01 I was gonna ask, like-
44:36 Robert Evans? And I'm gonna read you. Yes, yes, princess, it is. Here's a paragraph from his book on Trump. Fred Trump was still tall, and that's our president's dad, Fred Trump was still tall and slim at 67, with a full head of dark graying hair, handsome, in a 1940's movie star way, sporting a swept-back pompadour and a dark pencil-thin mustache. Indeed, he looked as though he might have stepped out of an old movie starring Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford, the mysterious charmer, faintly dangerous. Donald, as tall as Fred, both men standing a couple of inches over six feet, handsome, clean-shaven, with only a hint of a pouty sneer crossing his lips.
45:14 Speaker 01 I I I've seen what this man looked like in many phases of his life. He is none of that.
45:19 Robert Evans? I know.
45:20 Speaker 01 He is not handsome.
45:21 Robert Evans? I'm gonna show you a picture of these two next to each other from this time.
45:24 Speaker 01 He is DTF.
45:27 Robert Evans? He's DTF, DTF Trump's dad? And here's Trump's dad in 1969. He does not look like a sexy movie star.
45:35 Speaker 01 No, but he wants the Eiffel Tower, that Trump Tower, guys.
45:38 Robert Evans? He does, he does. And it, he kind of, he looks sort of like if Walt Disney had Progeria. Like, his face is not smooth looking. Like, he's not, handsome is a weird way to describe Fred Trump. Yeah, a lot of forehead.
45:56 Speaker 01 So much forehead, my god.
45:57 Robert Evans? A lot of forehead, very red.
46:00 Speaker 01 Very red, yeah. He loves, I think he just loves money so much that it makes whatever man around him like the hottest guy I've ever seen. That is not, that, that is not what we call a Abraham Lincoln. That is, whoa.
46:12 Robert Evans? I have to read a lot of biographies, of very, and even autobiographies, you know, for these, this, this show I do. I've never run into a guy who talks about how hot his subjects are this often. It's really, it's really weird.
46:25 Speaker 01 He's horny. Yeah.
46:27 Robert Evans? It's really weird.
46:28 Speaker 01 You know what? That's Olivia Newsy's, like, inspo board. She's like, that's, that's.
46:32 Robert Evans? Yeah, she's got him on there.
46:34 Speaker 01 Great reference.
46:36 Robert Evans? So, I, I, I did, I kept digging, because I wanted to see how far down the rabbit hole this went. I found an archived copy of Tussell's biography of Rupert Murdoch from 1989, because of course he wrote Rupert Murdoch's biography.
46:46 Speaker 01 This is great.
46:47 Robert Evans? That said, I didn't find any returns for handsome or any related terms.
46:51 Speaker 01 Ah, darn.
46:52 Robert Evans? I didn't read through the book, so maybe he just used different words to talk about Murdoch being hot. Anyway, this is a pointless diversion, but I had to do it, sorry.
46:59 Speaker 01 Thank you. No, it's perfect. Now I'm imagining, like, him doing biographies of, like, Elizabeth Holmes.
47:09 Robert Evans? There's a lot of, a lot of pages talking about how that turtleneck fed her, Jerome. Do we need to, do we need to edit maybe some of this down?
47:16 Speaker 01 That's what the people want. They're here, they're here for my thirst traps.
47:20 Robert Evans? You know who else has a crush on Elizabeth Holmes?
47:23 Speaker 01 Those sponsors and services of this podcast? Sorry.
47:26 Robert Evans? That's right, that's right, that's right.
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49:08 Robert Evans? We're back.
49:08 Speaker 04 I'm so sorry.
49:09 Robert Evans? So let's talk about June/HL Hunt some more, right?
49:13 Speaker 04 I gotta cancel myself for that one. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
49:16 Robert Evans? Yeah, you should be sorry, Sophie. I'm not happy. No one's happy.
49:21 Speaker 04 I'm sorry.
49:22 Robert Evans? No one's happy, except the subject of our episodes, H.L. Hunt, who is happy because he's moved to San Francisco by this point in the story, the early 1900s. And he falls into a happy life gambling with sailors and prostitutes and other assorted people living on the margins of the world. He finds- That he's really good at poker and that he can win money basically every time he plays. DeSille chalks this up to his photographic memory. In essence, Hunt is someone whose brain just automatically starts card counting. Like, he doesn't even know what he's doing, right? But that's just how he, his head works. And so he just always wins when he's playing poker. Hunt is able to live comfortably in a fleabag motel as a card shark.
50:03 Robert Evans? And, you know, after some period of months of this, DeSille treats us to another deeply uncomfortable paragraph about Hunt. Like, he invites this prostitute into his room and he's so good at sex that she falls in love with him. Like, he wins the heart of a prostitute for being really good at fucking.
50:21 Speaker 04 Fan fiction lore. Stop it. Free my queens.
50:25 Robert Evans? It's great. According to this account, this prostitute that he's with finds out that the hotel he's staying in, he tells her and she's like, oh no, they drug young men there and like Shanghai them to force them to work on boats somewhere, which is a thing that happened in that period of time. And he's like, and they're about to do it tomorrow night or something like that. And so he has to flee town and he winds up like leaving fucking San Francisco for Reno. And he tries out for a minor league baseball team, but that doesn't pan out. But while he's away, there's a horrible quake in San Francisco and the hotel that he'd been staying in collapses. So June becomes convinced as a result of this that he's someone special and that the universe has marked him out for a purpose. All of this has just really reinforced that he is the special boy of history, right?
51:09 Robert Evans? That's how this man grows up feeling.
51:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, and, and, and, you know, like I said, he didn't have the making of a varsity athlete. Yeah.
51:17 Robert Evans? He does not have the makings of a varsity athlete. No.
51:21 Speaker 04 Princess and I are just referencing every single HBO show. HBO show, exactly. We're just like, we're just throwing it out there.
51:29 Robert Evans? It's good.
51:29 Speaker 04 Also, audience, Robert's never seen The Sopranos and I'm very upset about it.
51:34 Robert Evans? Yeah, that's not my, yeah, I don't know. It's anti-Italian discrimination, Sophie. That's my issue with The Sopranos. You know, my people didn't work very, very hard to become famous for making hand gestures and running buca di beppo for you to bring us down by associating us with the mafia. And yes, I did have multiple family members who were involved in organized crime, but that's still a bad stereotype, even though a lot of Italians do have a family history involved in the mafia.
52:03 Speaker 04 I think you would fucking love The Sopranos.
52:06 Speaker 01 It's an amazing show. Like, the amount of racism that I have, that I'm like, but I love Tony Soprano. I was like, listen, I get it. It's fine. I forgive him because he wants to fight the FBI.
52:17 Robert Evans? He wants to fight the FBI. He wants to, hey, so did, so did one of my cousins. It didn't end well for him.
52:27 Robert Evans? The gun that killed him sold at auction a few years ago for like 50 grand or something.
52:31 Speaker 01 Nice.
52:32 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I should own that, actually.
52:35 Speaker 01 I do.
52:36 Robert Evans? It kind of bumps me out.
52:38 Speaker 01 You're just like, that's like a family.
52:40 Robert Evans? Collector has the gun that killed my cousin?
52:41 Speaker 04 I do too, but I wouldn't approve of you spending that much on a family heirloom.
52:46 Robert Evans? No, no, no, no. It's, that's why I didn't put it on the auction. But I was, I was like, it's fucked up for anyone else to own the gun that killed my cousin. It's fucked up to sell a gun and be like, this is the gun that killed this guy.
52:59 Robert Evans? But I don't know.
53:00 Speaker 04 50 grand is wild.
53:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:02 Robert Evans? That's all happening at around this time. I forget how, exactly how much it sold for. It was a crazy amount.
53:08 Robert Evans? So anyway, I don't know how much credence to give the whole, I was so good at sex that like a magical prostitute saved my life by helping me escape an earthquake thing?
53:17 Speaker 01 That's not real.
53:18 Robert Evans? I can believe, I can believe that like he left a hotel in San Francisco and not long after there was an earthquake, because that earthquake did happen and a lot of stuff was destroyed by it. And a lot of people had the experience of a week or two earlier, I was in the hotel that collapsed. Tons of people would have had a story like that. So it's very possible. And it's just a thing that happened to hundreds and hundreds of people because that's how hotels work. And he takes from this, I am special and marked out for greatness, right?
53:47 Robert Evans? So one of the other things that we see in Hunt, you know, in the early days, he has this growing belief that he's special, and he also has a fundamental distrust of his fellow man. Not long after all of this brouhaha with San Francisco and trying out for baseball in Reno, he's like, goes, I think he's in Arizona, he's in the southwest, he's working, he's like with a bunch of day laborers, and there's like white day laborers, and there's a group of Mexican day laborers, and they have separate camps, because it's the 19, it's like 1906 or something, that's 1907. And he goes over, along with some of like the other white workers, to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night. And Hunt just wins everything. He takes all of these Mexican guys' money, which winds up to like
54:28 Robert Evans? four grand, everything they have in the world. And so the other white dudes, the longer he wins, they start leaving to go back to their camp, because they're like, hey, hey, man, or hey, Hunt, maybe you want to go? You probably don't want to take all these guys' money. This seems like it could get dangerous. So they leave. But Hunt doesn't, he can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards. So he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money, at which point he realizes all of his friends are gone, and he gets like scared, and he basically takes the money and runs off into the bushes, because he feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans, even though, as far as we know, they never go after him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence suggests they took their loss fine, and they didn't like threaten him. He just is sure that because they're Mexicans, they're
55:11 Robert Evans? going to try to kill him to get their money back. So he like hides in the bushes. And then he tries to, like, in the middle of the night, hike back to the camp with his friends. But when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second, how well do I really know these guys? They're definitely going to rob me. They know I have all this money. They might kill me. So he has a panic attack, and he like hides and camps out in the woods that night, and then like goes, just leaves, quits the job, and hikes off into another town, basically, because he doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's won this money. Quote from Tussil's book, "How could he trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a killing that night, what was to stop two or three of them from jumping him in his bunk, leaving him with a knife between his ribs, and slipping off with his winnings?" So yeah.
55:54 Speaker 01 The burden of being the most special boy.
55:56 Robert Evans? Right. There's this deep distrust of other people that again, at no point, and Tussil just writes this like, of course, he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were going to kill him. But at no point is there any evidence that they threatened his life at all. I do want to emphasize that. This is all entirely something he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota, where he meets, who Tussil's book describes this as the best friend he's going to have in his entire life, a dude named Steve, no last name provided. Now, to still insist that this is the best.
56:31 Speaker 01 No last name provided.
56:33 Robert Evans? This is the closest home ever is to another man. We don't even need last names. We're that close.
56:37 Speaker 01 That is such a cliche of like boy friendships of like, what's his last name? I don't know. He's the best.
56:42 Speaker 04 Steve, one name. He thinks he's fucking Zendaya or some shit. What's happening?
56:47 Robert Evans? Fucking Steve?
56:48 Speaker 01 Steve, no Steve.
56:50 Robert Evans? Hunt probably tells his kids later in life that this guy was his best friend ever. Cause I don't know otherwise why Tussil would insist it, but they only know each other for like a few days, maybe a few weeks. And the main thing, the only story we get about their marvelous friendship is that one night Hunt beat Steve at cards and takes all of his money, which is like 260 bucks. And he feels bad about it. So he's like, hey, man, you don't have to pay me back. And Steve is like, no, you know, I made a promise, you know, this is a, this is a bond I owe you and I'm gonna pay you, you know, don't think anything about it. And then Steve sits down and has like the fucking Ben Affleck conversation with his friend where he's like, you need to leave here. You gotta go to college. You're too smart to keep, you know, working like this, right? And so Hunt is like, you know what? You're right, Steve. And he leaves off to go to college and they
57:35 Robert Evans? never see each other again. And that is the greatest friendship of his entire life.
57:40 Speaker 01 God, he invented a father figure just so he could go to school.
57:43 Robert Evans? A man who insisted on paying him and then did a goodwill hunting to him. Yeah. His best friend, Steve.
57:52 Robert Evans? They knew each other for days. That's his best friend ever, Steve. Never met again. Steve Zendaya.
57:57 Speaker 01 Exactly.
57:58 Robert Evans? Steve Zendaya.
57:58 Speaker 01 Is me chi.
57:59 Robert Evans? Yeah, so now aged 17, Steve, or not Steve, Hunt briefly attends college. 17? He, yeah, yeah, he's 17. He goes to Valparaiso, which is known as the poor man's Harvard. And he robs his fellow students there blind at card games and then dips after like a semester. He never gets a degree. He just kind of takes everyone's money and then leaves. He goes home. He's around 18 now when he finally makes his way back home for the first time since he'd left. And he stays at home for a while, but then he sets out again with his brother Leonard this time. They go out to like work in the Northwest together and make money. But Leonard gets sick with tuberculosis, you know? And pretty soon he can't.
58:43 Robert Evans? Friend of the pod tuberculosis and he can't keep up with his brother. And he has another, Tussil has another like heartfelt, you know, Leonard is like to his brother, look, you gotta go on without me. I'm too slow. Don't let me stop you from achieving greatness, basically. And so Hunt goes up to Canada, right? And he's working in Canada in 1910 when he gets a telegram that his, his brother is, has just died. Leonard has died, you know, of his tuberculosis. So Hunt heads home for the funeral and he stays at home for a few months. And while he's there, his dad dies too, right? So at this point, HL Hunt is like 18, 19, you know, he's no longer going by junior. And after his dad dies, he inherits $5,000.
59:26 Robert Evans? He doesn't get the land. Someone else gets the land because he's not living at home. But he gets like a, a nest egg of money. And he takes this and he adds it to the money that he's saved up from working as a card shark. And he decides, I'm going to stop wandering. I'm going to make real money. And in order to do that, I need to like invest in something. And I want to start a farm, right? His dad had always talked about how much better the soil was down in the South and how, oh, if only we lived in Arkansas, then we'd really be doing well, you know, as farmers. Right. So Hunt moves down south to Arkansas near the end of 1911. And he's gonna buy a farm and he's going to invest in, you know, the set next part of his life. And we will get to that and what happens later and how he becomes the richest man on earth in part two. Princess, how you feeling?
1:00:12 Speaker 01 I am excited to find out about this man whose family was like, let's move to the north. Oh, wait, actually, I regret that. Let's go back.
1:00:20 Robert Evans? Yep.
1:00:21 Speaker 04 Princess, do you have anything you want to plug real quick?
1:00:25 Speaker 01 Oh, um, yeah, I have a YouTube channel, Princess Weeks. I talk about pop culture, sci-fi, all the good stuff. And yeah, just happy to be here. This is really interesting. I, I love this really, really hot millionaire in training.
1:00:42 Robert Evans? Yes, sexy millionaire narcissist, yes.
1:00:46 Speaker 01 So hot, his brother's like, no, you're just too handsome. Just keep going. Just keep going. Don't stop.
1:00:51 Robert Evans? Keep going, keep going. You're too hot. Don't, don't be slowed down by my, my conveniently, narratively convenient death.
1:01:01 Speaker 01 We'll be back with part two.
1:01:07 Robert Evans? All right, everybody. Go to hell. I love you.
1:01:10 Speaker 01 Bye bye.
1:01:14 Speaker 04 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.
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Previous It Could Happen Here Weekly 231 Next Part Two: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
