YOU like your TV trashy? You know, a little sex, a little scandal, plenty of gossip and some very famous people in the mix?
Then try C-SPAN. That’s right, C-SPAN, Sunday nights at 11.
Since 1989, C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb has hosted “Booknotes,” a Q & A with authors of mostly historical works that often yields some mind-blowing info. Lamb has compiled nearly 80 such chats in a new book, “Booknotes on American Character” (PublicAffairs press).
In 2001, Lamb spoke with Kirkpatrick Sale, author of “The Fire of His Genius,” a biography of Robert Fulton, inventor, in 1807, of the steamboat. Sale told us that Fulton was exceedingly handsome, ambitious and broke. He financed his work through sexual relationships, including a ménage a trois with a wealthy poet, Joel Barlow, and his wife, Ruth.
Sale cites a letter written to Fulton in which Barlow encourages him to “have a wonderful summer of sexual pleasure with his wife.”
Lamb’s C-SPAN show, in 2002, hosted Univ. of Chicago law professor Dennis J. Hutchinson, who’d just published “The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox.” Knox, in 1936, was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice James C.
McReynolds, perhaps the most cruel and hateful man to rise to that position. McReynolds, a Kentuckian appointed to the Court by Woodrow Wilson in 1914, was such a virulent anti-Semite that, according to Hutchinson, “there’s no photograph of the Court in 1924 because McReynolds would have had to sit next to Justice Louis Brandeis, who was a Jew, and he wouldn’t do it.”
Hutchinson also told us that McReynolds was a racist who, when short on hunting dogs, would assign his aging butler, a black man named Harry Parker, the task of wading in the icy waters of Maryland’s Eastern Shore to retrieve the ducks he downed.
Knox, as McReynolds’ young law clerk, was made an on-the-quiet lunch by McReynolds’ African-American house staff. But when Knox sat down with them, the staff grew uneasy, lest McReynolds appear. They wanted Knox to sit at a different table in the same kitchen.
Historian Lee Edwards appeared with Lamb to discuss “Missionary For Freedom: The Life and Times of Walter Judd,” an obscure but fascinating American character.
Dr. Judd (1898-1994) was a medical missionary and, for 20 years, a Republican congressman from Minnesota. In 1938, while in China, he was held captive for five months by the invading Japanese. His release was quietly facilitated after he treated a Japanese general for venereal disease.
As a congressman, Judd won bipartisan admiration and scorn for his eclectic politics and statesmanship. He was a domestic liberal who supported Social Security (considered by some Republicans to be the work of pinkos), but on international affairs, Judd was an ardent antiCommunist, thus confounding those who sought to pigeonhole him.
And hey, did you know that the 1876 presidential campaign was so loaded with fraud that the winner – by one electoral vote -Rutherford B. Hayes (often called “Rutherfraud”) was secretly sworn in at night to avoid violence? The Army and Navy patrolled Washington to prevent Hayes from being overthrown before he even took office. Hayes’ public inauguration, two days later, was just for show.
Just last year, historian Roy Morris, Jr. told us all about it on C-SPAN. Hot stuff. Sunday nights on C-SPAN. Who’d a thunk it?