Yeet the Rich
If a billionaire donates money to a good cause, does that make them a good person? Hosts Emily Walsh and Daniel Moss are two married millennials who learned about financial crises by living through them, and now they’re diving into the wild world of the uber rich. They discuss financial crimes, the breakdown of the American dream, and why funding a museum doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. They get into the old timey rich, like the Rockafeller family, and current events, like why you might not want to shop at Walmart. Each week they’ll dive into a new wealthy person, give you the rundown on their lives, whatever “good things” they’ve done in the past, and why they might be a bummer.
Yeet the Rich
The Irish Potato Famine Part One- A Real "Let Them Eat Grass" Situation
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This week we start our series on the potato famine that struck Ireland in 1845. Between 1845-1855 Ireland would lose a third of its population, 1.1 million to death and 2 million leaving the country because of the dire situation.
In this episode we discuss how the Irish had become incredibly dependent on the potato in the years leading up to the famine and the UK's government inability to organize any real strategy to help. Terrible weather, a lack of distribution systems, and a real misunderstanding of what was actually hurting the crop would delay any real help from getting to people for the first year.
We will get into the government commissions, proposed solutions, and the British thinking that the Irish needed to simply work harder and be purer of heart.
Sources: The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly
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Don't be ashamed if you get confused when you talk to your friends or you watch the news. They try to tell you where it all went wrong. Now you don't need to all you just sing this song. Rich people stack in the dick. Rich people with big fat chicks. Rich people to have a bar. Rich people.
SPEAKER_02Hey everybody. And welcome to Yeet the Rich. I am Emily Walsh and I'm here with my co-host and husband, Danny Moss. Waza. Waza. Uh what is up? It is 10 p.m.
SPEAKER_01Post 4th of July.
SPEAKER_02Post 4th of July. Yeah. Getting back into it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's not Monday.
SPEAKER_02It is Thursday.
SPEAKER_01Thursday.
SPEAKER_02Thursday.
SPEAKER_01Thursday.
SPEAKER_02Thursday. Just did a show.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02First time I think we've done this in a long time where I've come home from a show and then we've said, let's make a podcast. Let's go. It was a good show, though. In another state.
SPEAKER_01Whoa.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Coffee talk. Didn't finish my first cup because our children.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I finished it for you, though. Oh. Yeah, so I've had two coffees kind of.
SPEAKER_02Great. Uh, I had half of that first one, and then I went into a scream haze. Sure. Child is getting the biggest tooth anyone's ever had.
SPEAKER_01She's doing like seven teeth.
SPEAKER_02She's literally growing four molars in the moment because she's an overachiever. She is the moment. I uh was in the green room at the show, and I was like, the annoying thing about parenting is that all the cliches about parenting are true. And as a comedian, it's very frustrating. Yeah. But one of them is like, if I could take their pain, I would take their pain. And I was like, I would literally let you shoot me in the leg with a gun if she had all her teeth now. And I stand by that. Like if she could be done teething, you could get one gunshot wound. One gunshot wound.
SPEAKER_01Uh bone?
SPEAKER_02Not kneecap.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Bone, yes, not kneecap. Got it. Okay, great. And I stand by that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Teething is terrible.
SPEAKER_01It's real bad.
SPEAKER_02But so back to coffee talk. Uh, I did not finish that first one. And then I just survived on adrenaline and screams. And then I have this tiny diacope that I stole from the comedy club.
SPEAKER_01You know, as long as our gunshot wounds aren't at the same time, I would take a gunshot wound in the leg if I didn't have to help her take her loose teeth out when she starts getting adult tooth.
SPEAKER_02Oh, why would you bring that up? And also we're gonna drive her to Jim and Sarah's house every time. Sarah, pull this tooth out.
SPEAKER_03Sarah, you like doctor stuff. She's gonna do it. Yeah. She'll know yet. She's gonna be great. She's gonna do it.
SPEAKER_01She might know now. She might. Hey Sarah.
SPEAKER_02Let us know if you listen.
SPEAKER_01Shout out to Sarah.
SPEAKER_02But uh, that is baby beverage talk.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're caught up.
SPEAKER_02Let's do it. We're in a new series. Welcome, new listeners.
SPEAKER_01We are talking about a bummer.
SPEAKER_02These people in this story, not a hot dog to be found.
SPEAKER_01Oh no.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02We're getting into kind of a big one as far as like poor and sad versus rich and mean.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I'm excited to learn about this one because I know some of the things that you talked told me about already. Yeah. And I have general like zeitgeist knowledge. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So if you haven't read the title, if you're one of those people, Goin' In Blind, we're talking Irish potato famine.
SPEAKER_05Potatoes. Potato.
SPEAKER_02The tuber.
SPEAKER_01Are we going to get into like what is a potato? Maybe a little.
SPEAKER_02All right, hell yeah. Spoilies, cash. Um, so the main source for this series is a book called The Graves Are Walking.
SPEAKER_01Ooh, spooky.
SPEAKER_02The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly. And it is a very good book, but I will say the audiobook, for better or for worse, the person reading it has an Irish brogue. And it is very hard to read on a quicker speed. And it is very hard for me personally to listen to if I'm doing anything else. So I've had to read most of it with my eyeballs. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, don't don't get this fact twisted. Emily is a fast reader. But it's a lot of it is nice to listen to a book.
SPEAKER_02It's well, I like to be able to do both for the pot. I like to be able to listen and check back in, whatever. But regardless, just for people, if they were like, wow, this book sounds really good, and this uh sixth graders book report on it is only fine. Just be ready for the accent.
SPEAKER_01Uh sixth graders book report is is a good bar for us, I think. That's where I'm at.
SPEAKER_02I've summarized it, I've added my own little twists, and most of the grammar is okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and we're doing a live presentation on it. And uh, you know, couldn't we?
SPEAKER_02I'll make a trifold poster board. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01For the the other wings of the museum.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, let's let's go. And uh to all of this, I say, what a fucking bummer. This is a bummer. This uh it's just a I don't even know. It's just hard. Potatoes have eyes, and those eyes are weeping. So hungry already. Like this, this is like it's so oh god. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I just again, like my general uh the knowledge that I have, just general knowledge and the the I think probably general opinion on what's you know, you hear about the potato famine and you're like, oh famine's that's tough. Uh that must be really hard that uh there were no potatoes. But from the little talks that we had, like basically it felt like a a like a kind of natural disaster slash like uh agricultural mishap, like oops a daisy. Uh, but it sounds like it's pretty purposeful and uh a little genocide.
SPEAKER_02So it's not purposeful. It is a blight. Okay, but it is managed in a really horrible way, and basically the the the the like punchline and thesis and end note of the English is if we help them, how will they help themselves? But at the point at which the potato fails, there are families subsisting on only their potatoes. Wow. And on a good day they get to butter that potato.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02So not a lot of nutrients going into that damn dire situation, and to lose the one thing that you have, yeah. And then for people to be like, well, if you were really hungry, you'd figure it out. Uh is rough.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's pretty bad.
SPEAKER_02Um we'll get into it. I don't want to do a whole lot of uh proselytizing at the up top, but I am gonna kick us off with one of the worst quotes I've ever read in my life. Because this book starts with maybe one of the most upsetting sentences I've ever read.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02And I can't paraphrase it, so I'm just gonna read it verbatim.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, bring it at me.
SPEAKER_02Here we go. And for context, before we start, the potato famine begins in the year 1845.
SPEAKER_011845. What else was happening in 1845?
SPEAKER_02The Civil War. No, that was 1865. I don't know what was happening.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but still, still closer to the Civil War than I think I realized. Yeah, yeah. It's because it's the parallels into like what's happening over here are uh uh it it's just kind of nuts. It's kind of like the the idea that Abraham Lincoln was alive during a lot of other like famous people's lives that we think of as like way older.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, these things are not that far away. I mean, this is 1845. My grandparents were born in 1917 and 1919, respectively. So they're one generation, two generations away from this. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I should look into the dust bowl at some point.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the dust bowl is rough, but nobody really causes the dust bowl other than like crop not doing crop rotation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but I but that's kind of what I'm wondering is if there is a similar like unseen hand that uh kind to do with the worst hard time is a great book about the dust bowl.
SPEAKER_02I think I've read that book.
SPEAKER_01Is it um Timothy Egan? It is.
unknownHa!
SPEAKER_02I probably recommend it too. You did, absolutely, you did.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Patton my own back. All right. You ready for a variant? Let's do this upsetting quote. Yeah, let me take a little swig here. We should be eating french fries during this. Would that be offensive?
unknownI think it might be.
SPEAKER_02It would be offensive if we didn't finish them.
SPEAKER_01Right. We will finish them.
SPEAKER_02On a January morning in 1847, a carriage halted in front of a cabin outside Skiborine, a market town in Southwest Cork. The driver picked up the box on the carriage seat and handed it to the cabin owner, a small farmer, who had come out to greet him. My dog brought it home last night, the driver said apologetically. After he left, the farmer removed the mutilated head from the box, took it into the cabin, and wrapped it in a cloth. Tomorrow he would return his wife's decapitated head to her grave. The Potato Famine started in 1845, and by 1847, packs of feral dogs were digging up the shallow graves of the dead. Oh, okay. That is the level of hunger we are at. Yeah, yeah. Poor shoeless women were holding their dead babies on street corners begging for food. Men and women were scaling cliffs in order to eat seagull eggs or combing seaweed out of the ocean. The weekly death rate in Ireland was in the thousands, and people were fleeing, fleeing in a way that was beyond reckless, with men abandoning their families. And now all that anyone who had stuck around for could hope for was an undisturbed grave.
SPEAKER_01So that yeah, that's haunting. That's super haunting. It's it's real dark. And uh that guy, the the chagrin on that in that guy is he's like, I'm so sorry that I have this and this is yours.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's the thing, is that he was sorry. Yeah, it just ended up on his property, I guess. I don't really know. But it's like the idea that your loved one was disturbed because of the hunger of a creature and probably died because of the same hunger.
SPEAKER_01Same hunger.
SPEAKER_02It's rough. It's rough. And we're gonna we're gonna light it up, we're gonna we're gonna get into some facts. But we have I had to start haunting to get it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, just get the right page. Sure.
SPEAKER_02Well, I just didn't want you to accidentally be like, well, why didn't they eat grass? Because they tried. Yes. They tried.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So the famine would be called an event with something of the characteristics of a low-level nuclear attack. Whoa. And between the years of 1845, like death rate, like the amount of people that died. In between 1845 and 1855, which is 10 years, sure, the Irish population went from 8.2 million and it dropped by a third.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_021.1 million died of starvation and disease, and another two million just left the country.
SPEAKER_01And we everybody was just like, I guess it sucks to be Irish? Like, what the hell?
SPEAKER_02Kind of. Yeah, there were not as many deaths during this famine as other famines the world has endured. I certainly don't want to paint this a picture that this is the only famine. There have been worse ones in China and the Soviet Union and all over the world. But the unique thing about this one, because of so many people that left, is that in 10 years, one out of every three people in the country was gone.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So that's a real look to your left, look to your right. One of you won't be here in 10 years situation. Part of it was bad luck. Two generations earlier, the country had had a much smaller potato dependency. But by now, almost two-thirds of the country relied on the potato, and there was no real way to deal with the loss. There weren't even enough food stores if people had had the money. They didn't have the mills to process other foods like rice and corn and cheap things, and they didn't have enough infrastructure to deal with the pestilence and not enough administration to do any kind of nationwide relief. So they just were in absolutely no way set up for this.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But British policy was also to blame. Ireland was importing more than it was exporting for most of the time, with the exception of a year or so. They, which used to be the old claim that that was the issue. The real issue was that the British used this moment to overhaul Ireland's agricultural economy and to quote, try to improve the Irish character and reduce its government dependence. They made them surrender their two to three meager acres of land to qualify for any relief. And then Parliament said that this relief would have to make them self-sufficient. So basically, like, here it is, and if you can't do it.
SPEAKER_01But then be self-sufficient. And then be which is impossible. Yeah. Basically, so we're gonna very much smack uh the like you know, the part of eugenics where everybody is like, oh, you're you're poor because of bad genes.
SPEAKER_02Bootstrap, but you need a bootstrap. It's all the same stuff. But we're and we are gonna get into it, but basically, the UK, the f the Irish operated on a barter system, they operated on the um farming their own land and breaking down via like one main farmer and and smaller ones. And the UK wanted them to pay for things with money. They were done, but they didn't want them to have the barter system, so they basically made up made them give up anything they did have in order to get any kind of relief. And if the relief was monetary, there was still no place to buy food because they didn't have grocery stores like other places did, because that's just not how they did things. But they wanted them to be a version of the UK and eliminate any kind of history or system, and because they had an extreme upper hand, that's what they did.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and uh didn't see any of the unseen ramific ramifications ahead of time.
SPEAKER_02They didn't have to use an island, don't go over there. So the Poor Law Extension Act would claim a 222.5% increase in tax revenue, and coffin makers' numbers went up 187.6%. The author of this book also goes far to explain in the that in the past the Brits were depicted as purposeful monsters in this famine, but it seems like they were a lot more like well-intentioned idiots, which is almost more depressing, and that they let their politics and religion and the goal of trying to teach a lesson let them that whole idea got the better of them, and several million people lost out for it.
SPEAKER_01Still uh like that's the thing. It's it seems very much like they could have solved it fairly easily.
SPEAKER_02Oh, and we're gonna that's all we're gonna do is talk about the ways that they maybe could have solved it in the ways that that didn't work out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Maybe try this? Oh, we don't want to. Maybe try this, oh we're bad at it.
SPEAKER_01So do you know when was I Ireland initially independent from the UK and when when did that switch happen? Or like why why this moment did did the UK try to assert more dominance over their culture?
SPEAKER_02J just because they've been waiting to.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02This is just a moment to pounce.
SPEAKER_01Got it.
SPEAKER_02It's kind of hard to sum up in a Yeah, yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_01We'll get into it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So by September of 1845, a mysterious potato disease was in Flanders, and by August the Channel Islands and England had been infected, and now there were rumors that it was spreading to Ireland. And at this moment, two-thirds of the country lives by an arguably unimpressive phrase. Okay. Potatoes in the morning, potatoes at night, and if I got up at midnight, it would still be potatoes.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Sure.
SPEAKER_02So that's that's the vibe.
SPEAKER_01So it does kind of feel like the British might have uh exported the potato famine to them. The blight, at least. It feels like it came from probably the UK.
SPEAKER_02Maybe, but it hits a lot of places. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So that that is nobody I'm assuming I wonder when they I wonder if they always had a monoculture with the potatoes. Because if they were they didn't. Yeah, if they were growing different types of potatoes, it wouldn't have been as dire.
SPEAKER_02This two generations earlier that was not this way.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_02So Mr. Thomas Campbell Foster had gone to Ireland and was sent by the Times of London to try to answer the question of why Ireland was getting poorer and poorer and more disorderly while England was prospering. And they had already had 114 government commissions, 61 special committees, and 50 years of study into this concept.
SPEAKER_01It couldn't it just be that England is a bunch of fucking colonizers and they've been robbing poor cultures all over the world for centuries committees.
SPEAKER_02But so far, Fosser had just ridden his horse around, thinking about how sad the countryside looked. And so far, so many travel writers and other Europeans would visit Ireland and poke around and say that it was pitiful. The spot the Scott Carlisle came home and said, The earth disowns it. Heaven is against it. Ireland should be burnt in a black, unpeopled field rather than it should last. Wow. Yeah, it's rough.
SPEAKER_03I hear Ireland is lovely.
SPEAKER_02That's what I hear. We gotta go.
SPEAKER_01We gotta go.
SPEAKER_02Between 1745 and 1800, before this, they had doubled the population to five million, and again from 1800 to 1845, to 8.2 million. So that's the population at the beginning of the famine.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_02They had made a lot of money during the French wars providing supplies to the British, and in the early 1800s, an Engl an Irish farmer could do about as well as his English counterpart. He could have a two-story stone house, his wife and children could wear imported clothes, they had a cupboard full of tea and tobacco, they could afford to supplement their potato with things like buttermilk, meat, or fish. So a pretty rounded diet. You might say Napoleon was the best friend they had ever had. But by the 1820s, their need for the Irish goods weakened. The French weren't buying them from them anymore. Tariffs also ended so that cheaper goods were coming in and thousands of people lost their jobs. Or if they kept their jobs, their wages fell extremely. A weaver in 1800 could make between 14 and 21 shillings a week, and a generation later, they earned a quarter to a half of what their father had. Wow. By 1821 to 1841, they had also lost of all of other industry, their manufacturing force having gone down from 43% of the workforce to 28%. Rent was rising, and they did stabilize in 1845, but it was kind of too hard. And Irish, it was kind of too hard to like overcome that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And the Irish were having trouble trying to plant on mountainsides in sandy soil because basically, like a lot of them were like, okay, well, I'll just go try to make my own farm, but a lot of the land wasn't hospitable to that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So now it went from all these people being like what they would call four acre farmers. So people had roughly four acres, not a very complicated nickname.
SPEAKER_05Sure.
SPEAKER_02Having to sublet two of their acres, and then the person subletting the two acres would rent half an acre to somebody else.
SPEAKER_03Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02And that person, uh, the half acre person was called it a a substance substance. Subsistence farming. Subsistence. I'm having a short subtenance farming. Subsistence? Uh sustenance farming. There we go. Sustenance farming. It's 10 o'clock. I've been awake for a long time. I've got it. If it's wrong, it's wrong.
SPEAKER_01No, it doesn't matter. Substance subsistence.
SPEAKER_02No, I can't. I lost it. You took it. I'm sorry. I didn't I didn't even spell it right in the document. Substance. Subsistence. Subsistence. Yeah. That's what I said. Subsistence farming. Farming enough to stay alive. Yeah. Grew. And 45% of holdings were under five acres. I don't really understand this, but the basically they were like, people used to have a car, cow now had a pig, which I understand that that's a downgrade in size. But one man said his pig slept in his cabin because it's him that pays the rent, ain't it? The pigs don't give milk. Like you either have a pig or you don't have a pig.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, eventually the pig turns into bacon.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but yeah. It's not breaking home bacon, it's already there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And then there are some pigs that find truffles. Yeah. That's a thing.
SPEAKER_02But I don't think that's what's happening. I don't really understand it. But um also milk was kind of gone from the region, and some people would drink bull's milk, which was oats fermented in water. So they were ahead of their time on that, I guess.
SPEAKER_01That's bull's milk.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's what they called it. I won't be calling it that.
SPEAKER_01No, I don't think so either.
SPEAKER_02So agricultural workers, people who worked farming for a wage, were unemployed half the year, and subsistence farmers were growing. And so on an acre of potato ground, you could produce six tons of food. Six tons of potatoes, which could feed a family of six for a year. So if you had one acre of successfully growing potatoes, you could keep a family of six alive.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_02And the potato had good enough attrition nutrition that they had good enough health. Like they're hardy.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02They were robust. People who visited would comment on their poor clothing, but also the strength of the people. And people kind of thought that the potato had made them stronger.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_02So at this time, the Irish were literally an inch taller than Belgians. They were half an inch taller than the English. And on a Dynamo meter dynamo meter I which I think is that grip strength thing.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The Irish could lift 432 pounds compared to 403 in London and 339 in Belgium. So they are stronger.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Physically. And it's either the the b the bull water. What was it? Bull's milk. Bull's milk. Uh or the potatoes. One of the two. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And by the 1830s, the potato already had some issues, unfortunately. Uh-oh. Regionally, a crop would fail every year, and up to five million people would be sent into starvation around that time. And by 1841, the census showed that the UK birth rate was falling, but the Irish, of which 70% were substance farmers or landless laborers, were still having six or seven children.
SPEAKER_01Got it.
SPEAKER_02So that's tough financially.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, especially if you need an entire acre for the speed six, so four kids. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, by 1837, parts of Ireland were so poor already that people couldn't afford a second dress, family couldn't afford a second bed, babies were fainting from hunger. Which that's that is tough. Yeah, it's haunting. The West is where the worst of it was. Places like Donegal, Kerry. I'm assuming it's not pronounced Mayo. I'm sorry for not looking it up. It is spelled Mayo. Uh I'm as Irish as I'm anything other than American, and I I'm sorry. Yeah. Uh and Galway. That's the worst. Those are the worst areas for the famine and the poverty. And by 1845, poverty was high enough that everywhere in England or in Ireland that people were sneaking into the national cattle show to get the half-eaten turnips discarded by the animals.
SPEAKER_05Oh boy.
SPEAKER_02Some people would pawn their Sunday best on Mondays and get them back on Saturday night. Like they would pawn their nice clothing, not have it all week, get it back for church, pawn it again. Wow. An American visitor described the Irish poor poor as a hunger armed assassin. Wow. So they're just scared of them and nothing.
SPEAKER_01And they were armed with hunger, you say. Yeah, basically. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I mean, desperation is a scary thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And it seems like uh over two generations, they slowly but surely made them more and more desperate.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and more and more people.
SPEAKER_01And more and more people.
SPEAKER_02So there were now something called midnight legislators, people, groups like the Molly Maguire, the White Boys, and other societies that defended the interests of the farmer and the laborer. So I've actually really wanted to talk about the Molly Maguire's because they move into America as well, but that is a whole other episode. But basically they're like labor unions. Got it. Um, and farmers with 50 to 100 acres who were either charging crazy rents or evicting their tenants could find their cattle cliffed, which means driven over the edge, his hunting dogs killed, or his horses burned in a fire.
SPEAKER_01Ooh, boy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they're not being casual about this.
SPEAKER_01You know, no need to be subtle.
SPEAKER_02Subtlety is not not in this story. No, not in this story. In Galway, they dug up the body of a landlord that had evicted 108 families, and they put a gallows over his dead body.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Okay.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. There was also major conflict between the 80% Catholic population and the Protestant ruling class. The majority not really wanting to recognize the legitimacy of the legal system. Yes. There's no separation between church and state. The Irish are Catholic, the English are Protestant. It is not going to be good. And in 1843, the Devon Commission determined that the landholding system was the cause of the problems. So we're going to bounce back to Mr. Thomas Campbell Foster real quick. Okay. Who went there to figure out what's up?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_02He was only 32 and he was really not qualified and had no special uh knowledge of Ireland. And some people called it just volunteer. He was like, I'll do it, boss. Kind of. People called it a publicity stunt. And compared to Edmund Spencer, who was an aspiring poet who visited in the 1580s, a lot of people compared him because he was a writer that went over. And in the 1580s, Edmund Spencer went over. He would write The Fairy Queen and the Book of Irish History. And those were very popular reads, and people, a lot of people got their knowledge about Ireland from those books. And he was unimpressed.
SPEAKER_05Got it.
SPEAKER_02He said there were not many towns, not many maps, not many fences. And if somebody asked an Irish farmer how much land he had, he would say a cow's grass, because that's how much a cow would need in one day. Which I think is fine.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Fine way to communicate. And he said that the problem was that England hadn't Anglicized, so English, not Americanized, but Englishized, UKized the natives. And the natives had Celticized the conquerors. So basically, we didn't take over. We took over, but they're making us more Irish rather than us making them more English. Yeah. Except for a small settlement around Dublin, nothing really resembled the English. He thought the solution was a reconquering, getting rid of all the bards and the storytellers, because that's how tradition is passed.
SPEAKER_01Getting rid of history. Love that.
SPEAKER_02Seizing the land and transferring it to Protestant settlers. When an uprising was put down, Ulster, the county that had once been the most Celtic, became the most English. And in 1649, Oliver Cromwell showed up in Ireland with 8,000 soldiers on foot, 4,000 on horses.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And three years later, 400,000 out of a million were dead. And the British planters, they called them, the the new Protestants that were gonna change the ways were coming in.
SPEAKER_01That's some real evil shit right there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So in 1600, the population was 2% British, and by 1690, in less than 100 years, it was 27% British.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I, you know, because America, we've done we've had so many less years to do it, but we've done a lot of like atrocities and things. Uh but I it I tend to forget that the Brits uh pretty rough history in terms of they started it. They taught us how.
SPEAKER_02They came over and they said, Hey, new country, sure. We're gonna name you America. Here's how to be shitty. Yeah, and we said, Thank you for that information.
SPEAKER_03Now get out of here, you guys, dad.
SPEAKER_02Go home. I'm gonna do it my own way, Dad. Yeah, but they're both white men, so yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01But I just forget, you know, I just at this point it's just like ah, the accents are fun.
SPEAKER_02Well, because they have fun accents and it and they're smarter than us.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02Not I mean, not like colonizing saying like watching the two of us. If you watch Love Island UK, if you watch Love Island US, they're smarter than us. Yep, they're not that smart, yeah. But they're smarter than us on the uh UK or Love Island USA, somebody pronounced compromise, compromise. Yeah, they're smarter than us.
SPEAKER_03So a community promise, a compromise.
SPEAKER_02Compromise. Uh so in 1600, I already said that. In 1750, the English and the Scottish held 95% of the land and all of the power. So penal laws stopped Catholics from being able to publicly practice their religion, buy or inherit estates, own a horse, and lease land above a certain value. So some people left, some converted, and some became tenant farmers. And the language and the culture had to go into the peasants' homes, which were now in the Protestant which were now in the Protestant ascendancy. So basically they had to go in hiding.
SPEAKER_01Uh-huh. And yeah, do religion, but sneaky. Sneaky stuff. When uh during the like exodus caused by the potato famine, did the did a lot of them move to the United States? Yeah. I was just uh I don't know. Have you ever read Angela's Ashes and Tiz?
SPEAKER_02It's been a I've I think I've read Angela's Ashes. If I did, it was in high school. It's been a very long time ago.
SPEAKER_01It was a very long time ago. But I was just wondering where that fit in the timeline because it's I don't know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But I'm pretty sure that's why my mom's side is here. Oh, yeah. I'm not 100%.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. But it was only a couple of generations ago, too.
SPEAKER_02So uh yeah. Um by 1776, Jonathan Swift, the Irish cleric, was on his way, and Dublin was now a stone-built capital city built by the Protestants. From 1720 to 1770, the Irish per capita income had doubled. So they were both kind of good things were happening.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_02And at this point, they were now discussing instead of a reconquering, they hoped for a semi-autonomous Anglo-Irish state, together under the crown, but with their own legislature.
SPEAKER_01Do you think that the increase in income was because they forced uh a monetary system on them as opposed to a bartering system? They haven't done that yet. Okay. Okay. I was just wondering. Because that would be that'd be a really PR way of being like look what we did.
SPEAKER_02We created money. No. Right. That's not what happened.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So the Irish landowning system was a lot like the English landowning system at first glance. There were eight to ten thousand landowning families. Most were Protestant, and then there was a large group of tenant farmers, and then the landless laborers, the people who worked the farms but owned nothing themselves. But the Irish had their own peculiar parts of the system. Experts who would visit would say that it was due to the unproductive use of the land and the character of the landowning class. So again, we go back to that. 20 to 30 percent of the land was owned by absentee owners. So that is just true. They're just not there. It's a New York City apartment situation where that's where they keep their motorcycles or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So they're profiting while uh a lot of people are starving to death eventually.
SPEAKER_02Resident landowners also like to show off their money rather than invest in agriculture. So there was almost a million acres of deer parks and gardens. And by the 1800s, the deforestation was so extreme that people didn't replant. So they're losing plant life, they're losing trees, which trees are good for everything.
SPEAKER_05Right.
SPEAKER_02Um, and the power the Irish landover held over their tenants was only rivaled by slave owners in the American South. People were whipped, caned, some demanded the wives and daughters of their laborers be sent to their bed. Whoa. It was bad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's real bad.
SPEAKER_02Real bad and the middlemen, people who subleased the land, were often known as the hardest drinkers in Ireland and spent all of their money on booze and hunting dogs. The bottom of the ladder was known as the cottier, who worked in exchange for a cabin and a potato plot, and the spallpine who survived on day work and rented a con acre, which was an even smaller plot of potato ground. And these were the people who kept the Irish heritage alive. So a few years later, with the French wars, there was an uprising and upwards of 30,000 rebels and loyalists died. And London concluded that a semi-autonomous state was dangerous. So in 1801, Great Britain and Ireland joined. They raised the Union flag at the market house, and the Irish Parliament building was turned into a bank. So in the 1830s and 40s, people would start arguing for commercial farming and thought that it might help control the population if people earned wages on a commercial farm and had to buy their food. So it wasn't as simple as just having a few hundred more potatoes if they had to say it costs this much money to keep a person alive.
SPEAKER_01So they're they're turning an entire country into a company town.
SPEAKER_02Basically, that was the idea. Um, there was about 15 to 25,000 uh people garrisoning there, and they thought that it might reduce the Irish poverty and violence as well. So Daniel O'Connell from Kerry would become a Catholic leader, and in the 1820s, in a campaign for Catholic emancipation, Catholics were finally won the right to sit in parliament and to serve in the military, which had been promised to them 30 years earlier, and people started calling him the liberator. People were very happy about Daniel O'Connell. So London tried to weaken his position, and they started the Education Act and a poor law. And at first, these sounded good. They were going to create schools and a welfare system of workhouses. Workhouses are not great, but we'll get into that a lot later. But in the decade before this, the potato was getting smaller and weaker, and the phrase was worse than we are, we cannot be. So that is the vibe before the blight. And I think that is something I didn't understand at all.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's in 1843. That's two years before. Worse than we are, we cannot be.
SPEAKER_01Turns out, hold my beer. It's getting worse.
SPEAKER_02Potato? What's smaller than a potato? Most things.
SPEAKER_01Most things.
SPEAKER_02Not most things. Most fruits. I don't know what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01That's alright. But there are little potatoes.
SPEAKER_02Just tomatoes.
SPEAKER_01Tomatoes?
SPEAKER_04If I had to live on tomatoes, I'd die of heartburn.
SPEAKER_01I'd just be dead. Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_02If there was a tomato famine, we'd be fine.
SPEAKER_01Yes. But uh potatoes.
SPEAKER_02I guess famine I'd never be fine.
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_02Like a potato.
SPEAKER_01Like a potato. That's good. In your heritage, apparently.
SPEAKER_02Oh, we ate a lot of potatoes. Yeah. I r growing up, it was like, how what form will our potatoes come in today? Like it was a lot of potatoes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Do um the You were talking about how they were losing trees. Because like my in my brain, pictures of Ireland, a lot of rolling grassy hills. Yes. Um, is that because they like turned it all into farmland and stuff and killed off all the trees?
SPEAKER_02Uh it's not because they turned it into farmland. It's because a lot of them turned it into these weird hunting gardens. Uh and then a lot of people, um, absentee landlords and such just didn't replant.
SPEAKER_01I see.
SPEAKER_02So I'm sure there's a lot more information for that, but it's not because of farming. It's because of like negligence and uh aesthetics.
SPEAKER_01And when did we get golf?
SPEAKER_02I have no idea.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I have no idea.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I wonder if it was, you know.
SPEAKER_02Do you want to blame golf for this? Because I'm on board. I'm on board!
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, I just I was wondering whether it's it's these uh this like ruling class of Protestants that was like, we need more leisure time, and I have all of these vast tracts of land.
SPEAKER_02I think they were still fox hunting then. I uh found out how much water it takes to have golf, and I said golf's not that fun.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a lot of water.
SPEAKER_02No one's ever had fun golfing. You've had fun on a golf cart.
SPEAKER_01Sure. You've had fun outside with your friends. Yeah, you could do is just go for a walk golf cart too. Go for a golf cart track. Yeah, just have a little you don't have to like keep the grass grass pristine for a golf chart track. You just literally no one's had fun golfing. No. It's never happened. Prove me wrong.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, make me have fun golfing. Not on the cart.
SPEAKER_01It'd be fun if next week somebody lines up outside of our house and starts hitting golf balls at us to protest us because they love golf. I would take that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Criticism.
SPEAKER_01I haven't ever had fun golfing, but I'm terrible at it.
SPEAKER_04That's true.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I don't know. We can cut this part. I don't know how I am a golfer.
SPEAKER_01It's okay.
SPEAKER_04Done mini golf.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, miniature golf. Miniature golf. Great. And that grass doesn't take a lot of water. It's fake. You do have to make the uh like power the windmills. The blue, yeah, you gotta power the windmills, you gotta make the weird blue soup water. Oh yeah. Yeah, which is uh still it feels like they're just reusing that water.
SPEAKER_02It's not fresh water.
SPEAKER_01No, it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_02These bros with their golf and their AI.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because then they also need server farms for their AI, which also takes a lot of water.
SPEAKER_02That's what I'm saying. It's a lot of water.
SPEAKER_01The bros are using a lot of water.
SPEAKER_02We're gonna have a water famine. Anyway.
SPEAKER_01When in drought. You know what I'm saying? Love you.
SPEAKER_02Love you. When in dro Oh wow. That one's bold. Okay. So O'Connell blamed the union between the UK and Ireland for all of this sadness. And in 1843, his organization, the Liberators Repeal Association, was the most powerful political organization in Ireland.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_02He was regularly turning out crowds of 100,000 or more. He was he's he is a he is a charismatic fella. People are into it. Dublin Castle actually issued a ban on a rally of theirs that was upcoming because they were so popular. And he observed the ban because he wanted to avoid violence. And a few days later, the British took back their warships, uh, sent them back from the castle. So then the Devon Commission was created, and they decided that the Irish landowning system would need to be reconstructed. A lot of people in power, again, felt like the answer was the modern English commercial farm structured around a owner, a few large tenant farmers, and a proletariat of wage-earning laborers, and that would create more money from the soil than absentee farmers or farmers only owning three or four acres. Some people also would blame the lack of ambition or the fact that potatoes were easy to grow on the situation and the fact that there weren't enough crops. But in reality, they just needed the potatoes to stay alive.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So in the 1830s, a Scottish textile magnate came up with a new method, uh, basically child abduction.
SPEAKER_05Oh.
SPEAKER_02Where he would hire children, quote, almost naked off the streets and put them into a factory to be taught discipline and work ethic. Uh-huh. Leaders believed that this new system would cause bad farmers to fall to the wayside and that there would be commercial development if people had to buy their own food. But again, they weren't sure how to do it. And Irish landowners had old land deeds and were not going to give up their few acres for a vague promise of the future.
SPEAKER_01So they were just like scooping up children and putting them into factories. Oh, use those nimble little fingers to do our factories.
SPEAKER_02Basically, and they were homeless orphans, so they were like, Yeah, I guess, and like this is like kind of a long, depressing part of the book, and it's not really about the famine, so I didn't include more of it, but they had to work till they were like 28 to be free. It was bad. Yeah, it's that's real bad. It's real bad. So all of this is happening, and then on September 9th, in 1845, a guy named David Moore, the chief curator at the National Botanical Gardens in Dublin, said that the potato samples he examined from the new crop had, quote, only two convincing proof of the rapid progress this alarming disease is making.
SPEAKER_01So the the potatoes getting smaller, they discovered at that point that it was a blight.
SPEAKER_02Called uh Phyto Photora Infestants. I hope. Phytophotera Phytophotera infestance. I'm never gonna say that again because I'm not good at it.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I think you did a great job.
SPEAKER_04Google it if you want to.
SPEAKER_01The other thing is bad at taking in sunlight on a photovoltaic vodkaic level.
SPEAKER_04I don't know the etymology of the word. I did not study science. I don't know no science. I didn't study with books. I just did finger painting in a basement. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Now look at us sixth grade book reports right here. Ready for you.
SPEAKER_02So the summer of 1845 leading up to the harvest was also very cold and very wet. And in 1816, that same thing had happened, and it would end in a lot of crop failure and starvation then. So they already know this weather's bad, and some people will continue to blame the weather, not the blight. They'll say the the weather is making this worse. It's the weather's for it.
SPEAKER_01So we're we're finding new new we're finding reasons to to not do anything about the blight every year up to this. So like it's a big thing. Well, this is the first year of the blight.
SPEAKER_02I'm saying in 1816 the weather was also bad.
SPEAKER_01Got it. So it but it is like uh slowing down any possible response to the the bigger issue.
SPEAKER_02Um maybe, but i uh not really. Okay. It's just it's compounding the problem. Yeah. And some people at first think it is the whole problem, but for like a week. It's not it's yeah. Um so in June of that summer, they would notice the smell and then fresh white spots on the leaves. The next day the potatoes, their leaves would be black, and on the third day, the leaves would wilt, and on the fourth day the tubers would be dead in the ground. It's fast. It's very fast. It's very fast. Cutting them open would come result in this red brown mucusy to come out. And the smell was the smell of decay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I don't know if you have you ever smelled decomposing potatoes before it is so bad. It's it's like dead.
SPEAKER_02Very bad I've ever come up with. Have you ever forgotten about potatoes in a cabinet and then you've seen them grow the roots?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they're very resilient.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Those taters. Yeah, but when they start rotting,
SPEAKER_02So this happened. People obviously panicked. Yeah. Women and children are spending their days trying to cut away the poisonous leaves and potatoes, but it did absolutely nothing. And some of the potatoes even turned bad in storage already, not in the ground.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's yikes.
SPEAKER_02And no one had really seen anything like this. Some guessed that it was essentially inbreeding, like they had crossbred the same strand too many times. And some people thought maybe it was this intense rain because it had been 30 years since they had had such bad rain.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So in 1843, the provincial court of council of Flanders had tried to strengthen their potato crop by crossbreeding with a strain of American potato. But unfortunately, that was the same year that a new disease had appeared in the United States. In 1843, it took out taters from Maryland to Massachusetts. And the next year it spread to Canada. And by 1845, it moved through the European plains, and farmers in Holland, France, and Germany were affected. And if you had taken a drone in 1845 above Europe, you would see large black fields across the entire continent from the west to Normandy. So it's all over the place. And by August.
SPEAKER_01That was probably pretty haunting. Especially, you know.
SPEAKER_02All those drones just.
SPEAKER_01I meant the big black fields. You know, you just look at it and you'd be like, that's not good. It's not great. That's not that is a de blight.
SPEAKER_02It's but there's no planes yet, so yeah. They can't see it from that high.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Just the planes.
SPEAKER_02But it is a de blight.
SPEAKER_01It is a blight. Real de blightful.
SPEAKER_02That uh what was the drought thing you said?
SPEAKER_01Oh, uh when in drought. When in drought. When drought. Be de blightful. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02This is my episode.
SPEAKER_01I love you. We should get more sleep. We should.
SPEAKER_02What about you said it like it was under our control?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Like you said it like we should run when we next time we go to the store. Yeah, we're just thinking pick up more sleep.
SPEAKER_03What if we got more sleep?
SPEAKER_02Just two to four hours more a night. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03No big deal. It'd be great. You know what's gonna be fun? What's that? When we finish recording this episode, our daughter wakes up. Immediately. Immediately. It's gonna happen immediately.
SPEAKER_02Actually, it'll happen five minutes before it's over. Yeah. So that we can't finish. Yeah. That's gonna be great. Yeah. In 1843. Oh, I already said that part. Um so by August, it is spreading everywhere. The rainy weather is making it worse. By early September, major newspapers are publishing articles about it, and the papers started to worry about grain prices, and they were talking about possibly some charity from the government to prevent famine, maybe. So for over a hundred years, the potato had kept up with European growth. And the population in Europe had gone from 140 million in 1750 to 266 million in 1850. And the potato had been a big part of that, and it had helped with the industrialization of Europe because it made two to four times the amount of calories, then the same amount of grain, and it was eper and easier and cheaper to make than bread. So it is it is very valuable to them.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But by August of 1845, some countries in Europe had lost up to 87% of the crop. Wow. Those that could aff afford it would import grain that summer, but those that could afford importing grain that summer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's not gonna do anything.
SPEAKER_01Not enough grain to make up for uh something that was providing like 90% of the sustenance.
SPEAKER_02And at two to four the rate of the grain. Also, we're gonna get into it later, but they don't know how to process grain.
SPEAKER_01Right, because it just was not part of their agriculture rule system.
SPEAKER_02They're not set up for it. Got it. So at first, what was being published is gonna confuse people in the papers. A prominent professor published a letter in Brussels about how the true cause was a fungus of the Botarus genus. But then two weeks later, another letter from someone who lived near a smelting factory thought that he had made a connection that the closer the potato was to a chimney with copper smoke, the less likely the potato would be to destroyed.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so so they're like, actually, pollution's the answer.
SPEAKER_02One of them says fungus is the problem, and one of them says pollution could help.
SPEAKER_01I see.
SPEAKER_02Neither of these men had the details correct, but a month before the disruption, a month before the destruction of the main Irish crop, they had found the cause and the cure. But because of vanity and ambition, jealousy and stubbornness, this information would not come out properly and not get to the right people with nearly enough time.
SPEAKER_01So wait, they knew how to deal with the the blight.
SPEAKER_02Only so this guy writes about the copper smoke.
SPEAKER_01Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_02That's gonna come in to play. Oh, okay. But it's interesting. It wasn't like he was like a leading scientist or anything.
SPEAKER_01Are we the type of potato that they were growing, do they are we still growing that potato?
SPEAKER_02I don't know, actually. I might know by the end. Yeah. I don't know now. Yeah. Probably not.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, probably not. But it does seem I wonder whether um you know how with the bananas it was like clipping on the phone, clipping like they're all clones of each other. Yeah. I wonder how because the way you often will grow multiple potatoes is you cut a potato into like quarters and then let it let the eyes grow, and then you plant those, and then it makes more potatoes. So it is kind of like a clony process.
SPEAKER_02So people in the beginning did uh theorize that it was too they were all too closely bred. Yeah. But I'm about to tell you the three different camps of people that have theories. So there's three camps, there's the botanists who felt that the cold, wet summer was the problem, that the potatoes had absorbed extra water, and that the cold water had stopped the plants from digesting it. The second camp, the degenerists, which was some bot some botanists, some pamphleteers, and some gison-bitten boys. Don't really know what those are. Meant to Google it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, not good.
SPEAKER_02And some uh, which were chemists apparently. I don't know why they were called that, but they were chemists.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02They thought that the blight was biological corruption due to the repeated cultivation of the same sock.
SPEAKER_07Okay.
SPEAKER_02The third group, the fungalists, were the misfits for sure, and included a flamboyant Belgian botanist named Charles Morin, who dominated a lot of the conversation through September. So the very beginning.
SPEAKER_01Sounds like a real fun guy. He's out-oh my god, I'm gonna kill you. You're doing great.
SPEAKER_02All you've done this episode is try to say the thing I'm about to say right before I say it. No, or one of the most basic puns on the planet. And I might just go to sleep.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'll I'll cut I'll I'll uh rein it back up.
SPEAKER_02Oh my god. Gene Montagna. Uh Gene Montagna, an army surgeon, left the fungalus to avoid public judgment. He was on Team Fungalus for a minute and then he said, This is embarrassing.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So Reverend Miles Berkeley took over for the fungalist because Morin had a big temper tantrum and embarrassed the whole group.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And so a lot of people too Belgian, too sassy. Get him out of there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, get him out of there. A lot of people thought that the fungus was a byproduct of the actual cause. But it would take 16 years before the fungus origins were recognized. The name was created by a Frenchman, Anton de Bar, and the name Phytophythoria infestius literally means plant destroyer. These spores settle on a plant, generate tubular filaments, those tubes penetrate the tightly packed palisade cells near the surface of the leaf and invade the interior where the business of plant life is conducted, where nutrients and gases are processed into food and from where waste, like even water vapors, leave. So fungus is doing it, but weather does play a fart a that a fart. Weather plays a fart because wind spreads the spores and moisture foster fosters spore reproduction and helps the ability to move across the leaf and get into the surface. Moisture is also needed for the second mode because some are infected from spores washed off the leaves by rain and penetrate the soil to reach the tubers in the ground. So basically, the wind and the rain are making this a thousand times worse.
SPEAKER_01Got it. And if it's fungal-based, it kind of makes it makes sense that some of the crops that were stored could have been infected as well.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So the copper, the guy who brought up the copper smoke, the copper was not a bad idea, but it would take two generations for the botanist to learn that the copper solution would need to be applied directly to the leaves, not to bathe the potato in it.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02So we're gonna continue to talk about it.
SPEAKER_01They were putting it on the potato, like they would harvest the potato and then cover it in this copper stuck.
SPEAKER_02And it was too late. So over the summer, the focus would stay on the weather because it was very cold and wet. It was very easy to see and recognize. And occasionally there would be a report from Europe about their blights, but then they would kind of focus back again on this weather. But by early September, accounts of the disease were appearing in the news, but included reasons why readers shouldn't worry. And there was a lot of other news that was overshadowing it in Ireland. There had been a murder of a magistrate, and O'Connell and a paper newspaper commissioner were having a loud public fight about beauty.
SPEAKER_01A fight about beauty, you say.
SPEAKER_02It was very important to them at the time. People were starting to get anxious, and the home security Sir James Graham was hopeful, but not concerned. But on September 25th, an official at the provincial bank said the failure was greatly exaggerated. And on the 28th, the consabulary told the government an even larger potato plot was about to be planted. Some officials at the end of September were hoping it wouldn't be that big of a dip. The Catholic newspaper, the Freeman's Journal, was pessimistic, publishing that reports are discouraging, but still other papers said Ireland was better off than most of Europe, and that they were having a wet harvest season, but Ireland would have a dry, sunny September. But by October, there were more heavy rains, and the main potato crop was about to be taken out of the ground. So they're about to harvest the big hall, the hall that keeps them alive for the year. Fifty years from now, people would talk about October 1845 across Europe and continue to discuss it in places like Boston and San Francisco, like they knew about October 1845. There was a dense fog, the odor of decay, the terrible stillness, the shock and terror. Irish men, in my opinion, some people who are the most emotionally repressed on the planet, stoic, were weeping openly as half-ruined potatoes were dug from the ground. Some men got in fist fights, others sprinkled holy water on them or buried religious medallions in the ground, but God was not listening. Within a few days, even potatoes that looked healthy when they initially were harvested were rotting, and stored potatoes were affected as well, and famine felt imminent. This whole thing would cause a big wrinkle in a 30 years-long argument over what was called the corn laws in 1815, when they passed tariffs on foreign grains, so wheat and oats. The tariffs were good for landowners, but bad for workers who couldn't afford the grain. In 1842, the laws had been amended because the British labor force needed to have access to cheap food. And in 1845, the Anti-Corn Law League demanded full repeal of the law. All of this led to political unrest. The Protestant blamed the Catholics, vice versa, and Daniel O'Connell, aka the Liberator, blamed the Anglo-Irish Union and had a rally with a banner that said, England has given us ignorance and bigotry, starvation and rags. At that rally, some well-off farmers were dragged from bed and attacked by armed banditi in Limerick, Ireland. So they're mad. Yeah. The laborers are mad.
SPEAKER_01They're pretty mad.
SPEAKER_02They're mad, they're hungry, they're mad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Things are things are only going to get worse from here, it seems. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02At this time, the Prime Minister of England was a guy named Robert Peel. He was a well-off son of a textile industrialist. He had gone to Oxford. He had organized a model relief program during a crop failure in 1816, and he had created the Bobbies. The Bobbies, the Metropolitan Police. The first modern police force in the world. He dressed like a dapper shopkeeper, and people often accused him of stealing ideas and changing his mind about big things like the gold standard and the Catholic emancipation.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Kind of big things for the Prime Minister to be flipped about.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. At first he had been a supporter of Anglo-Ireland. People called him the Orange Peel because Orange was the color of Protestant Ireland. So in October, he met with three prominent scientists.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_02So one thought a chemical treatment could solve it, and Peel felt pretty optimistic about that, and that doctor started experimenting the very next day.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_02But things were worsening, and Peel was really trying to find spots to be optimistic. So these three scientists, this three-member commission, was called the Potato Triumvirant. Oh, the Potato Triumvirant.
SPEAKER_01The Potato Triumvirant.
SPEAKER_02At first, the Times would speak very highly of the triumvirant, but they would live to regret that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_02Dr. Lindley, one of the scientists, was a leading scientist of meterologies. Meteorological theory. Oh. I literally can't say words anymore.
SPEAKER_01No, it's okay. These are some tough words.
SPEAKER_02I just feel, oh God. Should we get more sleep?
SPEAKER_01We should ah, we gotta remember to pick up some more sleep when we go to the store.
SPEAKER_02So he was a meteorology guy. Sure. Not a potato guy.
SPEAKER_07No.
SPEAKER_02And then the Irish member of the committee, Dr. Robert Cain, was uh he was a diversity hire because he was the Irish one.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_02They're all still white, don't worry. He was uh apparently the quote token Irish on many committees with the English. So I don't know if he can be trusted. So the crop had actually started out bigger in 1845, but they were dying so quickly. One man had buried 60 barrels in the ground, thinking he was ready for the year, and thought he had five, or thought he had five months' supply, rather, 60 barrels. And in a few weeks, the edible potatoes he had left could fill one barrel.
SPEAKER_01Oh no.
SPEAKER_02So it is bad.
SPEAKER_01That's dire.
SPEAKER_02So the trimvirant, they they went out on tour, baby. They went uh they went to six counties, and things are bad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02They they had to travel around to find out.
SPEAKER_01But they're just walking around and being like, we're gonna sort this out, everybody. We're doing great.
SPEAKER_02We got it. Mission accomplished. So, in a low estimate, half of the crop was going to be lost. And that didn't account for the one eighth of the crop that you needed to seed for the following year.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_02So even worse. Three eighths are gonna be lost.
SPEAKER_01How much were they exporting potatoes? Like before?
SPEAKER_02So I don't it don't think it was their one of their big exports. Yeah. They were mostly the export that is the bigger issue is the beef. They're exporting the beef.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I see. Okay. I was just kind of wondering like uh how how much of it was actually the like direct food supply for the entire I think it's mostly food supply.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It's not really being exported. That's not the issue.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, but then it means that like because they can't make up for the the the losses by like just not exporting as much because it's all kind of gone. Right.
SPEAKER_02It doesn't it's not doing that's and all the subsistence farmers and three-acre and four-acre farmers aren't exporting it anyway.
SPEAKER_05Right.
SPEAKER_02So people were suggesting things like paying the Irish for every fish they caught, or maybe giving them curry powder to warm up their tummies and make the hunger more tolerable. Oh, sure. And by the end of October, Playfair, one of the chemists, urged the UK to look for experts in the areas of Spain, Portugal, and Italy because they didn't have any issues yet. But at the same time, a significant portion of the grain in Ireland was going to London. So the commission ordered new potato storage guidelines. But these guidelines, they're like they're dropping pamphlets saying if you start storing your potatoes this way, you're gonna be fine. Yeah. But the method that they suggested was incredibly labor intensive. It was like digging and then you put it there, and then you spray them and then you cover them with this special dirt, and then you dig again. Like it was really crazy. Um, it was very labor-intensive. They're only telling people via pamphlet, and a lot of the labors were illiterate.
SPEAKER_01Oh, sure. And also it doesn't wasn't the thing that fixed this.
SPEAKER_02Also, it didn't work.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Didn't work. It was very labor intensive. It didn't work. It involved a lot of trenches and sod and spreading, and it just simply did not work.
SPEAKER_01Triumvirant, more like wyumvirant.
SPEAKER_02That one's the episode title, and I hate it. Potato Yumvirant. Yeah. Another pamphlet suggested grating the potatoes with either a grater, a potato grater, that would cost a few weeks' wages to buy, or by making your own grater by punching tin. And so grating the potato.
SPEAKER_01Making them not mashed potatoes, but like shaved potatoes.
SPEAKER_02Basically. So you shave it, then you wash the pulp, strain it, dry it fully, grate that again. Oh. And then use that pulp to griddle for uh like make griddle cakes or starch it for use the starch for soups.
SPEAKER_01And were they trying to get people to use the like clearly rotting potatoes for this?
SPEAKER_02This was supposed to be, I believe, the ones that were instead of storing, because they're still good right now, but they could go bad. Right, right, right. Um, this method was an incredible amount of labor for very little turnout. So basically, all this committee did was create an agreement between the UK and Ireland that they didn't know what they were talking about and to cover the country in pamphlets.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they whoever the pamphlet printer was did rather well.
SPEAKER_02They did great. They're the only people who prospered. So on November 3rd, there was a meeting in Dublin with Daniel O'Connor, the labor guy, Lord Cloncurry, John O'Neill, and John Arabin, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, and some other dignitaries.
SPEAKER_01I hate dignitaries in this story because they sound like the worst.
SPEAKER_02So the mayor read the relief plan that had been prepared by the government at the Capitol, and there were six main points: a ban on food exports, a ban on grain used for alcohol, a suspension of food tariffs, the establishment of a network of government food depots, and a national program of public works to put food money to the peasantry. So so, like the um DWA.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the works progress in the uh WPA.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so Peel had turned down closing the ports to food exports for a few weeks, but he would come up with his own intense plan, including abolishing the corn laws, the tariffs on grain completely. He was tying the Irish need to the politics of the corn laws, which repealing those laws would help the UK. So he's trying to get something by giving something.
SPEAKER_01I see.
SPEAKER_02So officials in the UK are going to create the Irish Relief Commission. One of the first members of the Irish Relief Commission was a guy named Sir Randolph Isham Roof, who was born in Dorset, raised in Newfoundland, and had fought at Waterloo. He was a British senior officer, and he had wrote written the book, Observations on the Commiserate Field Service and Home Defense, and was known as a great thinker and kept track of many minute details.
SPEAKER_07Okay.
SPEAKER_02Um his one fault was sometimes costing the government cash, which sometimes which almost stopped him from being chosen for the relief committee. But they were hoping that he could make relief look a little better to the rest of the government because he was a good talker and they liked him. They also appointed a guy named Edward Lucas, a prominent Irish landlord, but Fe Peel, the Prime Minister, felt that, quote, the Irish landlords and other ratepayers are the parties both legally and morally responsible for affording the relief to the destitute poor. So a big part of this is that the English believe that the uh like the moneyed class, the wealthy, are responsible for their poor.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02And that's gonna be really just an important part of this. Okay. Because the Irish. Wealthy don't believe that.
SPEAKER_01Ah.
SPEAKER_02And that's that's gonna Yeah, that's gonna be a problem.
SPEAKER_01Because then who's gonna help out the poor?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So part of the reason they appointed Lucas was they wanted him there to tell his peers that they had to help pay for this. Also, they appointed Colonel Harry Jones, who was an engineer and the chairman of the Irish Board of Works, Colonel Duncan McGregor, who is the inspector general of the Irish Constabulary, Sir James Dombryn, which was the investigative general, inspector general of the Coast Guard, John Pitt Kennedy, which was an author of a very popular pamphlet, and Dr. Robert Kane, who had been in the triumvirant formerly known as Potato. Mainly added, again for diversity, because he was Catholic. And Edward Twistleton was the director of the Irish poor law system. Twistleton. Which was surprising because the poor law workhouses hadn't paid in during the last crop failures. So he runs the workhouses. They had not helped the last time this had happened. Okay. Twistleton sucks. Okay. He's not going to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01He's got a stupid name and I hate him. Ever. Okay.
SPEAKER_02The Brits were not super into the concept of public relief in general, if that surprises you or not.
SPEAKER_01Not particularly, but it is a bummer.
SPEAKER_02And so it was very slow coming to Ireland. 2.3 of the 8.1 million in Ireland were chronically poor. And the same amount of roughly 2.3 more million people would would be broke for part of a year.
SPEAKER_01So there's a lot of poor people in Ireland. Well, you build your whole system on this feels like a factory for creating poor people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, if you eat one thing and the thing goes away, it's bad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But the whole like the subsistence farming underneath tenant farming underneath all of this other stuff is like it the only reason it is able to exist is by having a massive pile of poor people.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Um and the English also hated that the need for relief was matched with a very high birth rate of the poor. And that also happened in the UK. But they claimed that Irish poverty was so bad that it was draining the Irish morally as well, and that they had no pride. George Nichols had worked with the poor in the UK, but it was never as bad as Ireland. But he was brought over to create a small, inexpensive, easily abused aid system when a Protestant Archbishop, Richard Watley, had come up with a plan that was far too expensive. So the Irish poor law system had enough workhouses for a hundred thousand beds across the country for 8.2, 8.1 million people.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And unlike England, there was no quote right to relief. So in England, you have a right to help by being a person. That does not exist in Ireland. And they had the poor law union, so every landowner with property over four acres had to contribute to the poor rate to feed and clothe the inmates of the workhouses. It was like the English model in that it cared less about caring for people and more about shaming them into changing their behavior. So you could go to a workhouse, but it was essentially like enrolling yourself into prison because you would you would get, you know, three hots and a bed or whatever it is. Yeah. Um, but three hots and a cot.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But it was awful, and it was admitting failure.
SPEAKER_01The entire time there was probably somebody there like just yelling insults at you.
SPEAKER_02You stink.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You smell like potatoes.
unknownOh.
SPEAKER_02Rotten potatoes.
SPEAKER_01Oh no, that is not a good smell.
SPEAKER_02No. At some point in the 18th century, poverty had gone from a thing that happened to people to a thing that made the person morally void. Quote, the relief applicant who managed to remain unintimidated by the forbidding architecture of the workhouse, the high walls, the bleak, grassless courtyard, the narrow windows like gunslits, had to endure an admission process that included procedures disgusting to the Celtic mind, including a fearful ordeal by water. What? Not sure what that is. I'm assuming. I have no idea. I don't know how they would create that much water pressure then.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02He was also required to bring his family into the workhouse with him to dress in penal-like garb, so in prison clothes, to wear shoes that pointed straight ahead rather than left and right, and to engage in heavy manual labor. By September of 1845, the frightful reputation of the Irish workhouse was having the desired effect. The occupancy rate in the 118 completed workhouses that were being built was under 50%. Also, the more people the landowner evicted, the higher his poor tax. But that part didn't work out because the army and the constabulary had to basically invade some counties to make these people pay their poor tax. So they're not paying that at all.
SPEAKER_05Got it.
SPEAKER_02They didn't feel like they needed to change them to rehabilitate the crop failure because they never had before. And they didn't give outside help, like handing out food, because that job was for the soup kitchen. So a big part of this is that the workhouses existed already and could have been an arm in the system of relief. But Twistleton's like, we don't do that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And they're like, but what if you made the workhouses really suck?
SPEAKER_02Do that. And he's like, we don't do that.
SPEAKER_01We don't do that.
SPEAKER_02We just let you enroll in prison and and there's no, I can't possibly ask the people that work here to hand out soup instead. That's right. It's ridiculous.
SPEAKER_01Couldn't do that.
SPEAKER_02So the relief commission met for the first time in late November, and they had very little data at that point, but they felt like the that they could run out of food in January or as late as April. So that's pretty insanely different. And they knew that they would have to create a network of local relief because the workhouses weren't going to. Without the data, it was incredibly hard to create a plan and also hard to figure out who needed help the most. In Ireland, they would also have several fever epidemics following the crop failure.
SPEAKER_05No.
SPEAKER_02They didn't feel like they were going to be able to mount this by 1846 because of what they needed to import and organize. So they're like, we're not even going to be able to help people in the spring. Got it. The basic plan was going to be to import food, have local committees purchase the imports and sell them at cost, and then have a public works project to create a system for peasants to earn a cash wage. Peel then had a large London financial house buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of American maize corn, which should feed a million people for 40 days. But he wanted to use it more as a price control on the market. So if food got too expensive, they could throw that in and bring prices back down.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Which we know all about that from J. Cool.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But it also like meant that again they had the opportunity to put food in that would save people's lives, and they were like, well, just in case we'll slow down.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Maize was a good choice to not affect the market because the Irish usually didn't eat it. So it wasn't going to hurt the private market. It also had a short grow time and a high yield. And for some reason, Victorian people felt that cornwood helped character development and that lower foods like potato had slowed character development. Some people hire the hair closer to God. I guess. Some people even thought the potato hurt the Irish character. The economists called it, quote, food for the contented slave, not the hardy and the brave. That's messed up.
SPEAKER_01Just because you rhymed doesn't mean it's good.
SPEAKER_02You should take your own advice. The English also liked corn because it was something that could grow in their wet climate, and so and that they would have to buy it, so it would encourage peasant farmers to get salaried work on a commercial farm, which would help create a consumer society, which is what they wanted, and a money economy. Stop with the potatoes.
SPEAKER_01So they're using they're using this crisis to like just rambling.
SPEAKER_02Completely change the system of the country. The downside of Peel's plan, besides the fact that it's not really going to work, is that it was relying on the Irish landed classes, so the Irish middle class, wealthy, whatever you want to call them at the time. Because in the UK, the gentry in a district, the wealthy people in a district, would fund jobs and food plans for the local poor. But that was not how it worked in Ireland. They felt that the quote indifference and coldness of any, many of the Irish landlords was going to be the problem. But some could blame the plantation system because the landlords didn't believe they owned their country. Basically, they had already scraped it back from the Protestants.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02None of like most of them, a lot of them are subleasing, and they're like, why is it my problem? I don't actually even own this. It's bad. It's all bad. His plan also required commercial infrastructure to buy the food, ship it, and they would need a milling industry to process it. You can't just eat corn off the hardened cob. Like it's not how it works. Yeah. So they didn't have a commercial village. They did not have a commercial village provision shop distribution system. So there was not already government or privately owned shops that had this clear cut start from the top delivery system. Got it. So they couldn't just be like, oh, we're gonna add this on.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So it just wasn't as it wasn't as easy as just bringing over grains and corn.
SPEAKER_02No, you can just show up at the dock and throw the bags out and say, here you go. They the more Roth thought about it, the more he wanted to involve the poor houses for distribution. So he went back to Twistleton.
SPEAKER_01Oh Twistleton.
SPEAKER_02Ruth had supported an idea that the workhouses could establish poor rate-funded soup kitchens with outdoor relief. But Graham and Twistleton thought it was absurd if there were too many chronic poor in Ireland and that they would never come back from that. They were like, we can't do this now. We'll never be able to stop. Essentially.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but that's that's uh constantly a uh refrain about when talking about like welfare and stuff like that, where they're just like, Oh, we couldn't possibly help these these people that need help.
SPEAKER_02It's the whole getty, if I get my one grandkid back, you're gonna kidnap my other grandkids.
SPEAKER_01When like I feel like none of it actually is proved out in like no what actually happened.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's like how Musk uh Elon Musk was like, I'll I'll fix poverty if you show me how I could fix it. And everyone's like, here's how you do it. And he's like, No, I'm good.
SPEAKER_01No, thanks.
SPEAKER_02I'll have to do it again. Yeah, just have to be a trillionaire again. So on November 22nd, in the Morning Chronicle, Lord Russell, George John Russell, who was a prominent member of a British family, wrote that he didn't believe in any interference with food, not even corn. It was a political ploy because he had hoped to become Prime Minister someday. And people called it to the Edinburgh Letter. This letter did not help Peel at all because they were already having a pretty hard time. The group that called themselves the protectionists were claiming that the crop failure was fake news. And they had down that this was out there because they wanted to repeal the tariffs on food. The Duke of Cambridge, Queen Victoria's uncle, had said that the famine was silly, that Ireland was a comfortable situation compared to what the papers were saying, and that, quote, seaweed, grass, seaweed and grass could be a very wholesome and nutritious food. That's not true. Irishmen can live on anything. It's a real let them eat grass situation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Some Protestants thought that free trade was a law of God and a visitation on Providence. So on December 5th, the Peel government fell, and on the 18th, Lord John agreed to form a government. He had to withdraw the offer on the 19th because of divisions in the Whig Party, and Peel became the Prime Minister once again on the 20th. So within two weeks, not the Prime Minister, back Prime Minister. It's all very silly. People are dying. Yeah. This farce ended with Russell embarrassed, feel vindicated, the British public in a state of vertigo, and the Irish crisis all but forgotten, except in the speeches of the protectionist and evangelical free traders. Reading the skimpy press coverage from Ireland, the average British would not have guessed that she was sliding towards the abyss.
SPEAKER_01Ooh, spooky. She was she was on her way. She slid. Yeah, she's ready. She gone, girl. One boat trip right to the abyss, please.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Check, please. To the abyss. Um, I think that's where we're gonna end it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, at the abyss.
SPEAKER_02At the abyss. Sure. Um apologies that this was not sillier.
SPEAKER_01Uh, you know, I did my I I did it, I threw a lot of puns in there.
SPEAKER_02Let us know. What do you think?
SPEAKER_01Absion accomplished.
SPEAKER_02Abystion accomplished. I'm gonna demorse you. I don't know what I'm saying. Please don't demorate. I'm not gonna do either. Um, yeah. So this is a saga. Yeah. We're gonna stick to it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Next week I'm gonna get more sleep somehow.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02Gonna be sillier.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Gonna hit you with these potato facts.
SPEAKER_01Sure. I mean, we did start this whole thing with uh a digital decapitated word. I knew that was, but that's just what it is. That's just what it is.
SPEAKER_02I think it's at the tone.
SPEAKER_05Just what it is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Just what it is. So uh yeah, thank you guys for listening. This will probably be a four-parter. Um, if you ever have a topic you want us to cover, hit us up, eat the rich pod. If you have any feedback, we love that too. If you have a friend you want to tell about the podcasts, that'd be great. Welcome, new listeners. We've got a few more new listeners. If all the listeners that we acquired in the past like two months would leave a review, it would literally change our lives forever. So think about that. What if you did?
SPEAKER_01Just something to think about.
SPEAKER_02Just something to think about. Uh yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's all I got.
SPEAKER_02I'm excited for our daughter to wake up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna go to sleep because she'll be up in five minutes.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04Probably just once, you know, in that like a moment where you like hit the pillow and you're like, finally.
SPEAKER_01That's when she's gonna be like, That's when she's gonna be like, hey, drive. Come hang out and drive.
SPEAKER_02Drive. Uh yeah. So, um talk to you next. I don't know how to end this. Can you wrap this one up?
SPEAKER_01Uh we'll we'll catch you guys on the flippity floppity. And uh next time we'll be on toppity.
SPEAKER_02I regret asking you to do that. That's the end.
SPEAKER_01Goodbye.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for listening, and a big thanks to Carcy Bland for the theme music. You can follow the podcast everywhere at Eathe Rich Pod. You can email us your suggestions for future episodes at eatherichpod at gmail. You can follow me at thefunnywalsh, and you can follow Danny at DMoss315. See you next week.