Montague Summers

Montague Summers wrote numerous books on witches, werewolves, vampires, black magic, and ghosts, and he edited and published numerous works and claimed to be a clergyman. But who was he, really?

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 3:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:04Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  The name Montague Summers has come up in several of our October episodes. Most recently, his work on werewolves was a big part of last October's episode on Peter Stumpf, The Werewolf of Bedberg. That same werewolf work also went into our 2015 episode on Gilles Garnier, The Werewolf of Dole. Summers' work was cited by other people in the research on Matthew Hopkins, who called himself the Witch Finder General, who we covered in 2019. And then there are probably others. Because Montague Summers wrote numerous books on witches, and werewolves, and vampires, and black magic, and ghosts, all things that we've talked

• 3:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  about on the show. And he edited and published works like Malice Malafacarum, or The Hammer of Witches, and Matthew Hopkins' The Discovery of Witches, and Horace Walpole's Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. These are all also things that we have talked about on the show before. And he wrote books on past podcast subjects Anne Radcliffe and Jane Austen. He edited and published the collected works of Afra Ben, yet another past podcast on the show. And he also edited whole collections of other Restoration-era writers like William Congreve and John Dryden, who we have not done episodes on. He was just prolific, writing

• 4:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  at least 16 full-length books, and translating and editing many, many, many others. To add to all that, he was a clergyman, or at least he styled himself that way. And the most widely circulated photos of him, I would describe as very distinctive. After seeing his name again and again, seemingly every year, in October especially, I finally said, what was this guy's deal? Not actually sure I know.

• 4:57Holly Frey?

  Well, we're gonna do our best to figure it out. So Augustus Montague Summers was born at Pembroke Lodge, Clifton, which is an area of Bristol, England, on April 10, 1880. He grew up in Telford House in Clifton Down, which is also in Bristol. Telford House is a 12-bedroom home made of sandstone and limestone in a Jacobean revival style. It has gables and parapets and cornices, and it's a Grade II listed building today. His father, Augustus William Summers, was a wealthy banker, and his mother's name was Ellen Bush. Montague was the youngest of their seven children.

• 5:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Summers home had an extensive library, which played a part in Montague's early education. He also went to a local academy before becoming a day student at Clifton College at the age of 14. He loved literary drama from a very early age, and one of the ways that he and his siblings liked to amuse themselves was playing with a toy theater.

• 5:59Holly Frey?

  In 1899, at the age of 19, Montague Summers started at Trinity College, Oxford. Beginning in the 1830s, Oxford had been home to a movement to revive the Catholic roots of the Church of England. Some of the Oxford movement's leaders and participants ultimately converted to Roman Catholicism, while others were more focused on restoring Catholic elements of worship and theology to Anglicanism. In the wake of this movement, the term Anglo-Catholic started to be used to describe this increased focus on Catholic doctrine and observance within the Church of England. Anglo-Catholics in England are still Anglican, and Anglo-Catholic

• 6:40Holly Frey?

  churches are still part of the Anglican Communion, but there is a bigger incorporation of elements that are more commonly associated with the Catholic Church.

• 6:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Summers had been raised in a devout evangelical Anglican household, and he felt an affinity with the Oxford movement and with Anglo-Catholicism. Apart from any religious and spiritual elements that might have been involved with this, based on the way people described his personality, which could be dramatic and dandyish, some of this affinity might have been connected to all the ritual and pageantry and the aesthetics of the so-called High Church. Now, another possible element is something that we can't conclusively substantiate, which is that Anglo-Catholicism had connections to the subculture of gay men in England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• 7:32Holly Frey?

  This might seem surprising, given that homosexuality was illegal in the UK at this point, and that overwhelmingly, Christian denominations considered it to be sinful and immoral. That was true within the Church of England and Anglo-Catholicism as well, although, over these decades, Anglo-Catholic clergy started to differentiate between feelings, which were not in and of themselves considered sinful, and homosexual actions, which were. In the Anglo-Catholic point of view, there was a growing sense that if someone channeled their attraction to people of the same sex into religious devotion or acts of service, they could still be part of the religious community and not condemned for it.

• 8:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Beyond that, a number of men who were connected to the Oxford movement were kind of ambiguous in their sexuality, or they were described as effeminate. The broader Anglican response to this movement also incorporated the idea that Anglo-Catholicism was unmanly and un-English.

• 8:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was, of course, meant to be a criticism, but it sort of folded back on itself as gay men embraced that idea and also found some commonality between Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality, with the idea that Anglo-Catholics and gay people were both persecuted minorities within the Church of England and in the greater British culture.

• 8:56Holly Frey?

  Additionally, Anglican clergy were not required to be celibate, but some Anglo-Catholics chose to practice celibacy. For some gay men, a religious vow of celibacy could be an alternative to sex with other men, which was, again, outlawed and seen as immoral. Religious celibacy could also offer a different path for men who were uncomfortable with or upset by their feelings of attraction to other men. Again, we don't know whether any of this applied to Montague Summers, but based on other parts of his life that we'll be talking about, it sure would make sense.

• 9:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Summers earned a degree in theology in 1903 and went on to Lichfield Theological College to study to join the Anglican clergy. This college was described as having high church tendencies. The Reverend Arthur Valentin, who was one of Summers' contemporaries at Lichfield, described him as charming and witty and fastidiously dressed and is wearing purple socks that lent and burning incense in his room. Valentin went on to say, quote, "He was in part an Oscar Wilde, but far more religious." Summers was awarded a master's degree from Lichfield on June 2, 1906.

• 10:11Holly Frey?

  Summers published his first book of poems the following year. That was a self-published collection titled "Antinous and Other Poems." Antinous was one of the lovers of Roman Emperor Hadrian, and the book was dedicated to French novelist and poet Beren Jacques Dalisfard Ferzen, who had been found guilty of indecency with minors in 1903 and had long-term relationships with other men, including art model Nino Cesareini.

• 10:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  This collection is described as controversial, decadent, and homoerotic, with one of its poems to a dead acolyte, sometimes interpreted as referring to a satanic black mass, although that interpretation has been debated. This collection is often categorized as a work of Uranian verse. The Uranians were a loosely connected group of gay poets, primarily in the UK, but also in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Uranians' work incorporated homoerotic themes, including with younger men and adolescents, often filtered through kind of an idealized representation of same-sex relationships between men in ancient Greece.

• 11:23Holly Frey?

  In 1908, when he was 28, Summers was ordained by the Bishop of Bath and Wells and became a deacon in the Anglican Church. He was appointed to a curacy in Bath and then to one in nearby Bitten. But then he and another clergyman were accused of pederasty. Summers was either acquitted or was never prosecuted, and unfortunately, we really don't have any other detail about this. Any official records of it were reportedly destroyed during the Blitz in World War II.

• 11:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  It is absolutely possible that this was a genuine allegation. And while we don't want to minimize that possibility, it could also have been more connected to the pervasive, damaging, and false stereotype of gay men as sexual predators. To my knowledge, this was the only accusation like this that he ever faced during his lifetime.

• 12:16Holly Frey?

  Summers had also become interested in the occult. He had been described as developing a morbid fascination with evil while he was still a student, and there were rumors that he was studying Satanism. That was something that the Church thought he had no reasonable reason to be doing. It seems that this, combined with the accusation of pederasty, put an end to his time in the Anglican clergy.

• 12:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  We'll talk about what happened after Summers lost his position after a sponsor break.

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• 16:09Holly Frey?

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• 17:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Montague Summers converted to Catholicism in 1909, and that's something he probably had multiple reasons for doing. As we already discussed, he had lost his position in the Church of England, and he'd found an affinity for Anglo-Catholicism during his time at Oxford. In addition to that, he's described as interested in Catholicism because he thought the Catholic Church had a stronger focus on Satan as an actual, real entity, rather than as a metaphor. He spent some time at St. John's Seminary in Warrage, which is southwest of London, to study to join the Catholic priesthood.

• 17:55Holly Frey?

  According to Summers entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was, quote, "granted the clerical tonsure on December 28, 1910." So this is a ceremonial cutting or shearing of the hair that's typically done when someone is accepted into a clerical order. It is not the same as being ordained, and whether Summers was ordained as a Catholic priest is unclear. There are multiple completely contradictory accounts of his ordination happening in various places in the UK and continental Europe, but none of them are concretely documented. He was definitely never appointed to a Catholic parish in England and never seemed to be part of the formal hierarchy of the Catholic

• 18:39Holly Frey?

  Church in England. But he took new names, becoming Alphonsus Joseph Mary Augustus Montague Summers. He referred to himself as a reverend, and he started wearing clerical vestments, including a carmelite scapular.

• 18:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Without a formal position in the Catholic Church, Summers became a teacher and schoolmaster starting at Hertford Grammar School in 1911. He worked in schools until 1926, and he was described as a good teacher, if an eccentric one.

• 19:10Holly Frey?

  At some point, Summers became involved in the Order of Carinilla, which had been founded in the 1890s by George Cecil Ives. This was a secret society for gay men, named after the Battle of Carinilla, which was fought between Philip II of Macedonia and a coalition of Greek city-states in the year 338 BCE. The coalition's forces included the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite corps of 300 fighters, described as 150 pairs of male lovers. They were wiped out in the battle.

• 19:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Order of Carinilla had the same sort of focus on secrecy and ritual as Masonic Orders do. Otherwise, there's not a ton of documentation about it. It was a secret society, after all. But Ives had a lifelong devotion to liberation for gay people, and the society seems to have been both a support group and an organization for advocating for reforms to the laws and the social taboos around homosexuality. Members would sometimes add the year 338 to dates in their correspondence.

• 20:18Holly Frey?

  Summers also became a member of the Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, whose founders included George Cecil Ives, as well as Edward Carpenter, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Lawrence Hausmann. Lawrence was the brother of A. E. Hausmann, who may have also been a member. The society's purpose was to advocate for reform of the laws around sexuality, including homosexuality, as well as research into sexuality and information and support for its members. While the society's original founders were men, there were also women involved in this group, and the group tried to give the same weight to issues that were affecting women.

• 20:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I'm also sure that there were people who were involved in the group that, like, today would fall into the category of trans and non-binary people, but that is just not how those ideas were being discussed at the beginning of the 20th century.

• 21:11Holly Frey?

  Yeah, that language did not exist yet.

• 21:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  No, and there was sort of a conflation in a lot of the ways that people talked about it, sort of meshing same-sex relationships with differing gender conformity. Summers served as secretary for the society's Subcommittee on Homosexuality, which had some overlap with the Order of Carinilla. He held this position until 1921, and he hosted the Subcommittee's final meeting of his tenure at his home. In 1920, the society also published an essay that he wrote on the Marquis de Sade called "The Marquis de Sade: A Study in Algalagna." Algalagna is a term for sexual pleasure that comes from physical pain.

• 21:55Holly Frey?

  In addition to his work as a teacher and his involvement in these organizations, Summers was also writing and editing the work of other writers. He became connected to Arthur Henry Bullen, who had established Shakespearehead Press in Stratford-upon-Avon. Bullen was focused on publishing Shakespeare's works, and he encouraged Summers to edit and publish the work of other English playwrights from the past.

• 22:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Summers focused on Restoration-era works. That's literature that followed the Restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660. Restoration-era literature really was not being taken seriously or studied in the early 20th century, and most of it had not been actively in print in decades or even centuries.

• 22:43Holly Frey?

  Summers started in 1914 with a satirical play called "The Rehearsal." That was a piece that was published anonymously in 1672. In 1915, he published a six-volume "Works of Afra Ben." More collections followed, including a four-volume "The Complete Works of William Congreve" in 1923, the four-volume "Complete Works of William Wickerley" in 1924, the three-volume "Complete Works of Thomas Otway," and the three-volume "Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell," both of which were published in 1927, and six volumes of dramatic works by John Dryden, which was published in 1932.

• 23:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  I cannot imagine how much work that all was. Summers also founded the Phoenix Society, which was dedicated to staging old plays, including some of these Restoration-era works. The society staged 18 plays between 1919 and 1925. It was followed by the Renaissance Theater, which sporadically staged plays until 1928.

• 23:50Holly Frey?

  Summers' work with Restoration writers was kind of a mixed bag. He absolutely made these works more accessible to scholars and to interested laypeople. He was the first person to seriously study and annotate a lot of these works. He did a lot of research into how these plays had been staged, and the introductions that he wrote were generally seen as informative and interesting, and they could almost stand as books on their own. His work with this literature was noteworthy and respectable enough that he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.

• 24:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, that was really early in his work, so I think he had already impressed people with what he was doing. But he was not an academic, and his work drew so much criticism from academics and scholars of literature and historical theater. For example, in 1933, Robert Witbette Babcock published his criticisms of Summers' edition of "The Orphan or the Unhappy Marriage" by Thomas Otway. He published that in PMLA, the Journal of the Modern Language Association of America. Babcock had bought an original 1680 printing of this play, and he compared that to Summers' edition. He said that Summers had acknowledged making 11 corrections

• 25:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  to the text, while Babcock counted 419 of them. And Babcock didn't really think that these were all corrections. He found them to be contradictory and often unnecessary, like Summers inconsistently used two Vs rather than the letter W. Like, it would have been two Vs in that original 1680 text, and he updated it to W sometimes not and sometimes did. He changed "ye ought" to "you ought" in some places and not others. This paper reads incredibly nitpicky. But the point he was making is, like, this man put out

• 25:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  this thing that he said was, like, the new edition of this work that was faithful to the original, but look at this mess. It was sort of the vibe of it.

• 26:02Holly Frey?

  We love a little petty scholarship. A New Zealand scholar, Esmond Samuel De Beere, gave a scathing review of Summers' edition of Dryden's "Essay of Dramatic Poetry," saying there was nothing original in it, and that he had, quote, "deliberately depreciated the work of his predecessors in order to conceal his borrowings from them." Summers also faced other allegations of plagiarism in his Dryden work, which led to a huge letter war in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement and other publications. Some of these reviews were really vicious, but Summers could also be vicious in his own reviews of other people's work.

• 26:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, today, I would say, these editions of his are viewed as imperfect at best. And in a lot of cases nowadays, there are newer, less, sometimes shoddy, editions of the same books. As we said earlier, Summers worked as a teacher until 1926. After that, he left teaching to focus just on his writing and literary career. His father had died in 1925, and he inherited some money. While he did still continue to edit and publish the work of Restoration-era writers after this, he also started publishing more work

• 27:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  on the occult. And a lot of those works, unsurprisingly, were making him more money than editions of centuries-old literature.

• 27:31Holly Frey?

  And we're going to get into all of that after we pause for a sponsor break.

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• 28:09Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 28:54Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:04Holly Frey?

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• 32:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  By the time Montague Summers started publishing books on the occult, he was known as a pious and faithful clergyman. But he had also cultivated a public persona that was distinct and recognizable. Here is how Carmelite Friar Brokert Sewell described him in a foreword that he wrote to Summers' book, The Vampire in Europe: True Tales of the Undead. Quote, "During the year 1927, the striking and somber figure of the Reverend Montague Summers, in black sutan and cloak, with buckled shoes à la Louis Couture's, and shovel hat that could often have been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British

• 33:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label showing in blood-red capitals the legend 'vampires.'" This was just part of Summers' habitual panache and sense of fun, those qualities which made him such an admirable entertainer and raconteur. Gerald O'Sullivan, who also wrote forewords to some of Summers' books when they were published later, as well as wrote other essays about him, described him as "stage-managing this public persona," quote, "with great skill and evidently no little glee." Summers' books on the occult started with The History of Witchcraft and Demonology

• 33:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  in 1926. That was followed by The Geography of Witchcraft in 1927, Vampire: Kith and Kin in 1928, and The Vampire in Europe in 1929. That year, he moved to Oxford so he could use the Bodleian Library for research. The Werewolf came out in 1933, and then A Popular History of Witchcraft in 1937. Later works on the occult included Witchcraft and Black Magic in 1946. These books had an impact on how things like witches and vampires were perceived in England, and by extension, elsewhere in Europe and the US in the 20th century.

• 34:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  He also continued editing and publishing historical works, now largely focusing on historical works on the occult. As examples, in 1928, he published the first-ever English-language edition of Malus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, which was originally published in Latin in 1486 and fed into the early-modern era's anti-witchcraft craze. Also in 1928, he published an edition of Matthew Hopkins, 1647, The Discovery of Witches. In 1929, he translated and published the 1608 witch-hunting manual, Compendium Maleficarum. As had been the case with his Restoration dramas, there were critics of Summers' work

• 35:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  on the occult, like a 1929 review of The Vampire: His Kith and Kin in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, described it as showing, quote, "astonishing learning hand in hand with an utter neglect of scientific method or knowledge." Burnt. One of his ongoing critics was Father Herbert Thurston, a Jesuit priest who also wrote on the paranormal and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Summers seemed to sincerely believe that witchcraft was real and that the Catholic Church's historical practice of condemning witches to death had been correct and should be revived, although it is possible that this professed belief was part of his self-promotion.

• 35:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thurston was more of a skeptic, which Summers interpreted as being much too cautious on the subjects he was writing about. Thurston was also one of the people who raised questions about whether Summers had ever actually been ordained in the Catholic Church. This whole bit of conflict blossomed into a literary feud between the two men that went on until Thurston's death in 1939. Summers' 1933 translation of Confessions of Madeleine Beuvin, which was an account of a mass demonic possession at a convent in France in 1647, led to charges of obscenity. In case folks are curious, that is not the case of mass demonic possession at a convent in France that we have covered on the show before.

• 36:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  It was a different one. All of the copies of this book were seized, along with all of the copies of his 1934 translation of Demonality, or Incubi and Succubi, which was originally written in Latin by Ludovico Maria Sinistrari in the 17th century. Summers' publisher was charged with obscenity. One of the more modern criticisms of Summers' work on the occult is that parts of it are rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. There is overlap between accusations of witchcraft in early-modern Europe and false claims that Jewish people were using the blood of Christians in demonic rituals.

• 37:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Summers claimed to have found evidence of Jewish ritual murders, and some of his descriptions of witches incorporated anti-Semitic stereotypes in a way that persists until today. In the 1930s, Summers' focus started to shift again, although into an area that still had some overlap with his work on the supernatural, and that was that he started writing about the Gothic novel. His books, The Gothic Quest and A Gothic Bibliography, came out in 1938 and 1940, and they traced the history of Gothic novels. He also wrote about writers of Gothic novels, including Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley.

• 38:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  He edited anthologies of supernatural fiction, including The Supernatural Omnibus in 1931 and Victorian Ghost Stories in 1933. In 1943, Summers also started publishing articles and stories in a tabloid called Everybody's Weekly. I don't remember which person in the research it was, but they just straightforwardly said these were hack articles and were not good or serious.

• 38:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Summers spent the last eight years of his life living in Richmond, which is a borough of London. Sometime during these years, he became acquainted with Alastair Crowley, who we have covered on the show before and who was also living in Richmond. It seems likely that this was not a very symmetrical relationship. There were rumors that Summers had participated in some kind of black magic early in his life and that a terrifying experience during one of these rituals led to his fixation on the occult and his professed belief that witchcraft was real and should be punishable by death. By the time he would have met with Crowley, he maintained an intense hatred of occult practitioners.

• 39:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Summers described Crowley as, quote, "one quarter conjurer and three quarters charlatan and whole common publicist," but also as one of the few original and really interesting men of the age. For his part, Crowley described a dinner that they had together as, quote, "the most fun I have had in years." Montague Summers died at home on August 10, 1948, at the age of 68. His death is described as sudden, but none of the sources I used in this episode gave a specific cause. He was buried in Richmond Cemetery, wearing his priest's vestments, but there was no

• 39:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  requiem mass for him, apparently because the Catholic Rector would not allow it. This was presumably because of Summers' reputation with the occult. A grave marker placed in 1988 includes the inscription, "Tell me strange things." Summers left most of his property to Hector Stuart Forbes, who all of the sources that were used for this episode describe in terms like companion and personal secretary. He had been living with him in Richmond. That included about 10,000 pounds, a collection of antiquities, and a library full of rare books, along with all of Summers' writing and personal papers.

• 40:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuart Forbes continued to live in the house that they had shared, but he was unwell and the money that he inherited from Summers ran out before he died in 1950, at which point he was buried with Summers. By that point, tea chests full of Summers' papers had apparently been seized by their landlady for non-payment of rent and then sold. Stuart Forbes' executor was his brother, who took possession of what was left of Summers' papers, but then he also died in 1954, and the remaining papers went to his widow. During the settling of all these people's estates, the papers that the landlady had seized or recovered and returned to the collection.

• 41:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then eventually, after being described as lost for decades, they were rediscovered in 2003 at the home of a Forbes' relative in Canada. They are now in the collection of Georgetown University, along with the papers of Stuart Marsh Ellis, whose papers had gone to Summers after he died in 1933. Along the way of all of these things changing hands, someone allegedly found a document in the papers that proved Summers' Catholic ordination was genuine, but that alleged paper has not resurfaced. Summers' autobiography, The Gallant Show, was published posthumously. I was not able to get a copy of it in time for this episode.

• 42:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  It is a book that does exist mostly in university libraries, sometimes in offsite storage. But this book is described as focusing mostly on his work in theater and his career as a man of letters, not really a more personal reflection that could shed light on some of the questions that we've had. Brokert Sewell also published a short biography of him titled, "Montague Summers: A Memoir" in 1965, which I was also not able to get in time for recording. That was my own fault for just assuming that it probably did not exist in libraries in the United States.

• 42:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  There is actually one that I could have, it just didn't work out time-wise, once I realized it too late in the game, but it's only 100 pages long. And I similarly don't think it would have cleared up any of the questions that we have had over the course of the episode. Do you have a listener mail that's 100 pages long? It's not 100 pages long, but it is a few paragraphs, and it is from Gary. And Gary wrote, "Hi, Holly and Tracy. I was just listening to your behind the scenes on the school court cases, as I do Sunday chores, specifically the part about the Pledge of Allegiance. In the 60s, we started every day with the flag salute through grade school, which at the time was 6th grade in rural Oregon where I grew up.

• 43:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  I don't recall if we did it in first period in junior high, maybe. But I was surprised when I was on my first job as a reporter and found that most or all of the government bodies that I covered, school boards, city council, county commissioners, et cetera, started their meetings with the pledge. Weird for adults to be doing this and off-putting. I don't recall what I did, if I just stayed seated or stood or didn't recite it. It's been more than 30 years since I was reporter, but I still find it weird that every sporting event starts with a star-spangled banner. I stand to take off my hat, but I definitely don't put my hand on my heart or sing along, and don't get me started on God Bless America. Fortunately, only the Yankees still do that, as far as I know.

• 44:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  When I was in junior high, many of my classes, usually those taught by the guys who were PE teachers or sports coaches, had wooden paddles hanging on the wall. They were typically made by the woodshop class and had several holes in them and a short length of leather bootlace to hang them up with. The holes reduced air resistance that allowed them to be swung harder. They typically were used as hall passes by those teachers who had them in their rooms. The only time I ever heard of them being used for discipline was in shop class, which I never took. In 1970 to 71, when I started high school, so-called underground newspapers were all the rage nationally. I mean, kids only a couple of years older than us were being tear-gassed and clubbed and even shot on college campuses, so some of their militancy was bound to trickle down.

• 44:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  One time as a sophomore, I put together a draft pledge of my attempt at an underground rag, protesting some school policy that I knew very little about, and passed out a few copies to my friends. One made its way to the principal, who called me in to talk about it. I was told that only authorized publications could be distributed on campus, and I should consider joining the official newspaper class. That ended my underground journalism career, but it was briefly thrilling. Thanks again for all you do. I especially enjoyed the Asher Bonaparte episode. In college, I volunteered on a dig at Telechish, which was sacked by his grandfather, Zanakrib, and I always love learning about that era. For my pet tax, here's our Juno, right with her BFF Abby, left and Emma. Gary.

• 45:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then we have three adorable, kind of curly-furred dogs. I don't know anything about dog breeds. I could not tell you what kind they are, but they're all sitting. They're doing very good sits, all three of these dogs. Thank you so much, Gary, for this. I kind of want to read every email that we get that talks about paddles and the ways they were displayed in the classroom, even though, as I have said more than once, I find that incredibly messed up. I also had teachers who used the paddle as a hall pass. So if you needed the bathroom during the class time, you had to carry a paddle with you to get there and back. Those look like standard poodles to me. Okay.

• 46:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Or maybe a doodle, but they look pretty much like standard poodles that are just in a puppy clip. Yeah. They're very pretty. They're gorgeous. They're doing good sits. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected]. If you would like to read the show notes for this episode or any of our recent episodes, that's at our website, which is at missedinhistory.com. You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

• 47:07Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 47:50Tracy V. Wilson?

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  Uh, your what?

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• 48:53Speaker 07

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• 49:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative? This is a constant worry.

• 49:23Holly Frey?

  And you can actually catch the model thinking, "I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user Y."

• 49:29Speaker 00

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