Watch The Throne

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. The English are throwing Her Majesty the Queen a lavish 90th birthday party this week. But the Brits aren’t the only ones watching, as one Fox Business host points out.

MALE SPEAKER: That birthday event is so big in America, I mean, it headlines virtually every news broadcast in America today.

PETER: Despite all the media coverage, Americans have had a rocky relationship with Royalty. Remember that revolution? Or the time members of Congress panicked after a Baltimore teenager married Napoleon’s brother?

FEMALE SPEAKER: Our will be introduced to gorgeous scenes of Royalty. And soon Americans will become seduced and corrupted.

PETER: After World War II, American leaders brought the Japanese emperor back down to earth.

FEMALE SPEAKER: They arranged for him to go to Disneyland. There was a very famous photograph which showed him standing next to Mickey Mouse.

PETER: America’s Royalty links, today on BackStory. Major funding for BackStory is provided by the [INAUDIBLE], the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory. With the American Backstory hosts.

ED: Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Ed.

ED: And Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey there, Ed.

ED: We’re going to start off today in early 1939, as Great Britain hurtled towards war with Germany. The British King, George VI, realized his country needed a powerful ally, a fact not missed by America’s President, Franklin Roosevelt.

WILL SWIFT: Roosevelt sensed that the war was coming on, and that a strong bond between America and Britain would be essential. So he sent a letter to the King requesting that they come. Made the invitation himself.

ED: This is writer Will Swift. He says in the months before the king and queen arrive in June 1939–

WILL SWIFT: There’s a tremendous uproar in the American press, and tremendous interest about this visit.

ED: Part of the excitement was what swift calls the soap opera factor. King George VI had been all over American newspapers, having recently ascended to the throne after his older brother abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. Americans were curious about the shy new king and his wife, Elizabeth.

WILL SWIFT: So they came to Washington. And they were greeted by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

MALE SPEAKER: In the gala reception room of a magnificent Union Station, the heads of the world’s two greatest democracies shake hands, and history is made, with reigning British sovereigns for the first time in the capital of the United States.

ED: The royal couple drove in a procession to the White House, accompanied by the president and his wife.

MALE SPEAKER: Outside the station, crowds wait to acclaim Roosevelt’s and royalty. Receive a 21 gun salute.

WILL SWIFT: They’re being treated like not only heads of state, but almost conquering heroes.

MALE SPEAKER: Cars and motorcycles proceed at a snail’s pace so that all may see the king and queen. 600,000 persons braved the heat to witness the most impressive welcome ever recorded capitol visit.

ED: Swift says Washington high society was in a tizzy over the royal visitors.

WILL SWIFT: There was a huge question among all the social woman, are you going to curtsy to the queen? And what would that mean? Would that mean deference to our role as former colonists? So there was both the attitude of wanting, on one hand, some people wanted to look good to the royals, as if we were one down. And others who were very upset that we were catering to them as if they were one up.

ED: Well, what’s the answer?

WILL SWIFT: The answer is that some did, yes, sort of a modified curtsy. It was decided that it would not be too humiliating to do a small curtsy.

ED: The curtsies notwithstanding, serious tensions lay just below the surface. In the 1930s, many Americans despised the English. They viewed the monarchy as arrogant. It didn’t help that King George’s father was notoriously anti-American. And there were more practical reasons for skepticism.

WILL SWIFT: During the First World War, Britain had borrowed a tremendous amount of money from us, and had not repaid it’s war debts. And so there was tremendous resentment among many of the American people about the fact that they had not paid their debts, and that so many American men had gone over and been killed fighting a war that was, essentially, seen as a European war.

ED: Americans didn’t want to get pulled into a second European war. And some were suspicious of the pomp of the royal visit.

WILL SWIFT: Was this a way that Roosevelt was going to try to draw the American people into an upcoming war in Europe?

ED: So they knew what Roosevelt was up to?

WILL SWIFT: Well, they suspected. And he denied it completely. But many people still were concerned about that.

ED: In other words, a lot was riding on the royal’s charm, offensive which continued as the king and queen visited FDR’s family home in Hyde Park, New York. There, on the couple’s last day in America, the Roosevelt’s hosted what is now an iconic moment in US/British relations, a picnic.

WILL SWIFT: Eleanor Roosevelt announced before the visit the she would be serving hot dogs at Hyde Park. And there was a huge uproar, people writing in letters, very embarrassed that we would serve hot dogs to the royals.

ED: Yes, the Roosevelts actually fed the British monarchs that most low brow of American foods, hot dogs.

WILL SWIFT: But for Roosevelt, the hot dogs became the great symbol of the equalization of the two countries. And if the King would eat a hot dog, then the two countries were no longer on separate tiers. And so of course, the headline in the next day’s New York Times was, King eats hot dog, asks for more. And there was a lot of report about how he slathered the hot dog with mustard. And that was also a very Americanized thing of him to do.

MALE SPEAKER: A friendly an pleasant finale of an epic making chapter in Anglo American history.

ED: Swift says that the royal’s soft diplomacy paid off. George VI and Elizabeth were hardly the stuffy monarchs Americans expected.

WILL SWIFT: The king and queen actually show themselves to be very friendly and open kind of people, very much like Americans, ironically. And this, I think, helped to shift their attitudes toward Royalty and toward Britain.

BRIAN: When it comes to royalty, American’s attitudes have shifted a lot. So today, we’re going to look at they’re complicated relationship with kings, queens, and courts. We’ll hear how a 19th century America marriage into European aristocracy prompted fears of the downfall of the republic, and how General Douglas MacArthur used emperor Hirohito to turn Japan into one of America’s most dependable allies after World War II.

We’ll also examine the very unaristocratic origins of American beauty pageants.

PETER: But first, we’re going to return to the British and King George III. As reigning monarch at the time of the American Revolution, he doesn’t fare too well in American history books. So it might surprise you to learn that when George III ascended the English throne in 1760, American colonists loved him. They were proud to be his subjects. Historian Barbara Clark Smith says the crown gave the colonists a sense of security and legal protection.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: The law is what people relied on to protect their rights of property, protect their rights to living peaceably day to day without interruption, either from criminals or from enemies, such as the French. And the King was in charge of that.

PETER: King George was in charge, but he was thousands of miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic. He appointed magistrates, or judges, to rule in his absence. But Smith says the royal magistrates had limited power. So colonists could choose to carry out or ignore the King’s law.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: This is what’s exciting to me, is ordinary people in the colonial era, certainly ordinary free white men, participate in their government in some ways that we don’t do today.

BRIAN: Peter, am I hearing this right? Americans had more political rights under the king? That seems to undermine the entire premise of the American Revolution, or actually the American history. What’s going on here?

PETER: Well, that’s exactly what she is saying, Ed. She says all you have to do is look at where colonists actually encountered to king’s rule.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: Probably the most important in some ways was in courts of law, people served on juries. And the jury was recognized as what John Adams called the Democratical aspect of the court. The judge represents the King. And the prosecution represents the King. So Peter, if you committed a crime, it would be King versus Onuf, Rex v. Onuf. In our system, it’s the people v. Onuf.

PETER: Barbara, this is getting to be very personal. What would I be looking for in a jury? I mean, that’s the sole protection I have against the wrath of the King and the prosecution.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: The idea they had was, everyone in the neighborhood will pretty much know whether it’s likely that you did the thing we’re accusing you of doing. Are you that kind of guy, right? And they’ll also know who to believe when they testify, because someone may come testify against you, but if I’m a local farmer, I might know that that person has had a grudge against you for a long time.

So ordinary men would have the local knowledge to judge the likelihood of the case that the King was presenting against you.

PETER: It’s a kind of contest, then, in which the community decides whether to proceed, find me guilty, and make be subject to punishments that are decreed under the law.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: And I think in the ordinary course of a criminal trial, somebody’s accused of theft, or a stranger comes through town and commits some crime, that the jury is going to agree with the judge. But once in awhile there are cases where the jury can disagree. And since the jury can disagree, that means to judge always has to be aware of that possibility.

The people have to consent, as members of the jury, to the application of the law in any particular case.

PETER: And what you’re suggesting, Barbara, is that consent under royal government is actually immediate and real. People feel it. And when they boast about having the rights of Englishmen, they boast of being subjects of King George III.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: They absolutely mean being subjects of King George III, with the right to trial by jury of their peers, to take part as jurors. That could be a real arena for participation. They also participated one other place where the King was symbolically present. And that’s in the public punishment of criminals. It was always possible at the last minute in executions for one of two things to happen.

One was the governor might send a pardon for a felon who is about to be hanged. The other thing that could happen is that the crowd of people watching could interrupt the execution. They don’t have an armed police. They don’t want an armed place. So if there’s a very strong local feeling among a lot of people that this is unfair, then there’s a chance that they will conduct what’s called a rescue.

And rescues are against the law, technically. But if you rescue someone and there’s no one around to recognize you and a rescue and testify against you, it can turn out fine. Now, that doesn’t happen all that often, right? But if it happens just once in a while, everyone knows it’s possible.

PETER: One of the things that’s come across to me, though, and I’m trying to get my mind around this, is you could be a loyal subject of the King but resist the officers of the law. You could, you had a right to participate in the execution of law, and that meant that your voice was not stilled before the majesty of the law. Would you say that’s an accurate statement?

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: That’s accurate so long as we bear in mind that this is not a kind of individual liberal right. So Peter, if you’re the only one who thinks that things are unfair and you shout out in the middle of the courtroom or something, you’re in contempt of court, right?

PETER: Right.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: It’s not you as an individual have this right to dissent. It’s that you, as one of the community, one of this thing, this group they call the people, have the right. It’s not a great situation if you’re in the minority. It’s an OK situation if the whole town, or enough of the town, or enough of the group, the county, the city, agrees, then you and your neighbors, as a group, can exert some power. And you can resist the King’s law.

Often explaining that you are loyal to the King, right? Because the King wants the law executed. That’s his job. And he loves his subjects. And if this doesn’t seem to be justice, must be a problem. Must be the sheriff is wrong. Must be the judge is corrupt. Must be the governor has gone amuck. And they need us to bring them back to what the King really wants, which is justice. So there were ways of participating in politics, or ways of making your idea of what’s right and fair felt in your society that were available to subjects of King George III that would not be available to citizens of the United States after the revolution.

PETER: This is getting very disturbing. I thought we had a revolution to get rid of the despotic King and to govern ourselves. And now you’ve planted this little bomb that says maybe there was more participation, more self government before the revolution? What do you lose when you go off on your own and say, hey, we don’t need the King. We can be our own King.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: Well, I’m not arguing that there was a net loss of freedom. I mean, obviously there’s freedom gained in the revolution. What happens is we give up the right to consent or not consent to the execution of the law. You see that in the 1780s, in Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts. You see it with the whiskey rebels in 1790s in Pennsylvania. These are groups that are acting in pretty traditional ways for subjects of the King.

But they end up being told, no, you can’t do that anymore. You can’t withhold consent. You can’t control courtrooms. The thing you have to do is go and vote. And they’re told that by people like Samuel Adams, who’s a big Revolutionary, or George Washington for that matter, who’s president, say, you don’t get to take part in adjudicating things after the law is passed.

If you don’t like the law, change who you vote for at the next election. What people then began to work for was to make the vote enough, as they realized that it’s now all about voting. Then you need something in place to make sure that that really counts. We’re still working on that. We’re still struggling with that question of whether the vote is enough.

PETER: Barbara Clark Smith is a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, an author of The Freedoms We Lost, Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America. Earlier we heard from Will Swift, author of The Roosevelts and the Royals, Franklin and Eleanor, the King and Queen of England, and the Friendship That Changed History.

PETER: Of course, the United States has never had a monarch. But that doesn’t mean Americans are immune to the charms of aristocracy. Take the story of Elizabeth Patterson, a wealthy Americans socialite. In 1803 she met Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome Bonaparte, at a ball in Baltimore. It was reportedly love at first sight for both of the two teenagers. He was 19, she was 18. After a whirlwind courtship, Elizabeth and Jerome tied the knot.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Oh, they were the talk of the town when they got married. Everyone invited them to dinners, to parties, to suppers, to dances.

PETER: This is historian Charlene Boyer Lewis. She says Patterson hoped that her marriage would transform her into something distinctly un-American, an aristocratic, and perhaps even someday, a queen.

BRIAN: But Napoleon was furious when he found out that his younger brother had married an untitled American. When the love birds arrived in Europe in 1805, Napoleon banished the pregnant Elizabeth from his empire, and married Jerome off to a German princes. Despite her very public humiliation at the hands of France’s imperial family, Patterson Bonaparte had no intention of relinquishing her new aristocratic ties.

She returned to the US with their infant son, and a plan to work her way into Napoleon’s good graces.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She knows she has a male Bonaparte. So she knows she has something incredibly valuable, because this is the time period when Napoleon cannot have any children. There’s only one nephew, and he’s kind of sickly. And so Elizabeth calculates, as long as I have a male Bonaparte, they’re going to still want me. So she does not at all act like a rejected woman who had this scandalous past.

Instead, she decks herself out in all of the European clothing she bought while she was in Lisbon, which includes jeweled tiaras, and diamond and ruby perfume cases. And she goes to every single party that she gets invited to. So she flaunts her status, flaunts her connection to the emperor. And Americans love it.

BRIAN: And everybody knows the full deal.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Everybody knows the full story. It was written up in all the newspapers. I found a copy of a Russellville, Kentucky newspaper who had written up the whole story. So everybody in the United States, even in the most remote corners, knew this whole story.

BRIAN: So she’s married. Doesn’t this sort of make her less charming and interesting in the American scene, which is basically a huge marriage market?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: It is a huge marriage market. But no, she’s incredibly alluring because of that Bonaparte cachet. She does seek a divorce from the Maryland legislature once Napoleon’s empire is starting to crumble. But even before she gets the divorce, because Napoleon had divorced her, she is considered available. And so she’s courted by many men. She gets five or six marriage proposals. She rejects every single one of them.

She seriously, however, considers one from a secretary to the British ligation, Sir Oakley. And that’s what galvanizes Napoleon to start a correspondence between the two of them, because Napoleon doesn’t want his potential heir, her son, to have a stepfather who’s British. So she writes Napoleon, takes advantage of that, and says well, if you offer me an annuity, which would be like a pension, and you pay for my son’s schooling, and you give me a title, then I won’t accept any marriage proposals.

And Napoleon agrees. And he gives her $12,000 a year. He’s going to pay for her son’s education. And he says I’m thinking about making you the Duchess of Oldenburg.

BRIAN: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah, she was very savvy.

BRIAN: She has some nerve, doesn’t she?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She sure does.

BRIAN: Eye to eye with Napoleon. Well, she’s probably above eye to eye with Napoleon.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yes– well, she was very short, too. She was very short, too. She was very petite. She was very petite.

BRIAN: But anyway, I’m sure the Americans go, hey, good for you, girl. We’re all set, now, right?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, it’s not exactly hey, good for you, girl. There are many, many, many Americans who are incredibly attracted by her– and a lot of it is because she wears these very thin dresses where you can see her body through them. So that’s part of the reason why she gets invited to parties, and why swarms of boys follow her carriage around because they want to see her and see what she’s dressed in.

But the other part is the are captivated by her because they don’t know what her future will be. But in 1809, the end of 1809 and beginning of 1810, rumors start to swirl round about this $12,000 annuity, about this potential title. And so it was one thing to have this captivating woman who’s a cosmopolitan linked to Bonaparte in their midst. It was another thing to think about having somebody with a title, she being a Duchess and her son being a prince, living in their midst.

And that kind of changes the way Americans start to think about her.

BRIAN: So what could they do about that? I mean–

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, they’re concerned– right, Napoleon is conquering Europe. Napoleon is establishing his siblings taking over kingdoms and putting in his siblings.

BRIAN: I see. So this is not as crazy as it seems.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: This is not crazy at all. So once the rumors go around that Napoleon’s really connecting with Elizabeth and his potential heir, the concern is that Napoleon’s going to use Elizabeth’s son to establish an empire in the United States, that Elizabeth’s son, who’s only four years old at the time, will potentially become, as one congressman called him, the emperor of the West.

Other congressman, Timothy Pickering, a Federalist of Massachusetts, believes that what Napoleon’s going to do is set up a court, a palace, right there in the United States, perhaps in Baltimore. And Elizabeth and her princely son will live in it. And so Pickering writes, there’s going to be this palace whose in splendor and opulence is going to make the president’s mansion look like nothing. And then he says our eyes will be introduced to gorgeous scenes of Royalty. And soon, Americans will become seduced and corrupted by these charms and will choose a king over a President, a monarchy over a public. So we have to do something.

BRIAN: That’s very strange language. Watch out, we’re going to like this too much.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. That’s right.

BRIAN: It’s going to be too beautiful. We’re not going to be able to the control ourselves.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: And they’re still not sure this republic is going to work because people can be seduced by gorgeous scenes of Royalty.

BRIAN: Yeah, we’re still in the first 20 years of the country, right?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Exactly.

BRIAN: So what do they propose to do about this?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: So they propose, several members of Congress, they propose the title of nobility amendment, which would have become the 13th Amendment that no citizen of the United States can receive a title or an annuity from an emperor, or a King, or a prince. And so you would have to give up your US Citizenship and you could never hold office. So here, they’re clearly thinking about her son, right?

BRIAN: Yeah. What’s his name, by the way?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Of course it’s Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte.

BRIAN: OK. That’s subtle.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. His nickname is Bo. His nickname is Bo. And so they the plan is that they will have this amendment that will neutralize the threat of Elizabeth and her son Bo. And it sweeps through the Senate. It sweeps through the house. And is sent out to the states for ratification. And everyone thinks it’s going to become the 13th Amendment. But then it falls two states short, and it never becomes the 13th Amendment.

BRIAN: So this is a lot for a young woman still in her 20s, not to mention a young boy who’s four, to go through all this. So what’s he think about all this? As the sort of comes aware of what’s going on in the world, he says, give me my kingdom?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: No. Her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, much to his mother’s dismay, loves the United States. Loves being a small R republican. And doesn’t want really anything to do with the whole aristocracy, nobility stuff. He’s sent over to visit his father when he’s 14, 15 years old. And he hates every moment of it. He just thinks it’s a vapid, kind of too luxurious lifestyle. And he wants nothing to do with it.

So he tells his mother this. And he says, no, I’m going back to the United States. He takes a pledge of American citizenship. And he says, I want nothing to do with this. I don’t want to be an aristocratic. And she is so infuriated with him, and she thinks the work of her life has just come to naught because he’s decided to be a patriotic American instead of an aristocrat.

BRIAN: She never becomes titled right?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She never gets the title, even though she was offered several marriage proposals by titled men, she never wants to give up being independent. She wants to remain an independent woman. I argue in my book that she wants to keep the name Bonaparte, that the name Bonaparte was her key, right, her way in, her value, her cachet. And so she never wanted remarry, never wanted to have more children. And wanted to stay in the spotlight, which she pretty much does until she’s about 50.

BRIAN: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah.

BRIAN: So when you add it all up, Charlene, what lessons do we draw from this story?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think there are several lessons here. One, that Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude about Royalty, about aristocracy from the very beginning. Yes, they threw off a monarchy. Yes, they thought Republican simplicity was the way to go. But aristocratic luxury was still seductive to them. It still had a place. Another lesson I think we learned is Americans have loved celebrities from the beginning of this country, too.

So even in an era without mass media, without mass culture, the celebrity who has that cachet, and much of it is being an aristocrat or the trappings of aristocracy, the trappings of Royalty and nobility, Americans like that. I think it gets at these paradoxes of this Republican nation struggling with they’re monarchical past, with their love of luxury. And she’s kind of a lightning rod for all of that.

BRIAN: Well, bless her heart. But I’m glad she failed. It sounds like it’s a good trial for early America to look this in the face and decide, you know, I think we like our own way better. But I do believe that celebrities today are the Elizabeth Patterson Bonapartes of 1803. I mean, all the trappings of aristocracy without the threat of Napoleon taking over the country.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think celebrities today wish they were as good as Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, because she had it all. She totally had it all.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Charlene Boyer Lewis is a historian Kalamazoo College. She’s the author Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, an American Aristocrats in the Early Republic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So Elizabeth’s Bonaparte’s infatuation with Napoleon, sort of the biggest guy in the world, it’s a fascinating story. But a couple things, one, he wasn’t really Royalty. And of course, we have high standards here on BackStory. We only talk about real royalty. And it was also a long time ago. And yet we still seem fascinated with Royalty. I just wonder what’s changed and what’s remained constant over that period between then.

ED: Well, Ed, you may be looking at me, but I want you to shift your gaze to Emily Charnock. Emily is a research fellow at Selwyn College Cambridge University. But Emily’s also an astute scholar on American political history.

PETER: And she is a subject of the queen, isn’t she?

ED: That’s right. I Emily, welcome to BackStory.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

ED: So what do you think, Emily? How would you explain the continuity and change of our fascination with Royals.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, I think Royalty is always fascinating on some level, for glamor, for celebrity, and so forth. I would say, in the British case, you have on the one hand the threat of British monarchy sort of goes down over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time that the Royals themselves become a little more exciting and scandalous. Queen Victoria, who’s monarch in the 19th century, for most of the 19th century, is widowed pretty early in her life. She wears black. She’s not exactly great copy for a newspaper editor.

But you know, flash forward to the 20th century and you’ve got some incredible scandals, some incredibly glamorous figures. And you know, this is a sort of newspaper dream.

PETER: What are some of the stories that generate so much excitement in the former colonies?

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, probably the biggest one is the affair between King Edward VIII And Wallis Simpson, who just happens to be an American–

BRIAN: And a woman, too, right? Wallis is not to be taken for granted.

EMILY CHARNOCK: And a woman. But yeah, just generating so much interest and excitement on the American side of the pond. A young King, a bachelor, comes to the throne in 1936. He wants to marry this American woman who happens to be divorced. And this is a huge scandal. And the British establishment just really doesn’t want to let it happen. And ultimately he abdicates the throne for the woman he loves. And this is so romantic and like a Hollywood movie. So there’s a huge amount of attention in the US press on that story.

And it continues. And they are a very famous couple for the rest of their lives.

PETER: Now, we share scandals across the Atlantic in the popular press. That didn’t really happen at this point, did it, Emily? I mean, Americans were obsessed with the story. How about the Brits?

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, you know, there was sort of a gentleman’s agreement in the British media at that time that there were certain things about the royals that one did not report on. And the British press aren’t allowed to cover it at all. They’re gagged. So the Americans are in on the secret and the British public isn’t.

BRIAN: Boy, how things have changed.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Yeah. So the British public were in the dark.

ED: Emily, how did the Wallis Simpson affair, the abdication, how did that change American attitudes about British Royalty up till now? Or did it?

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, I think it expanded a sort of more mass obsession. So that story shows that British royals can sell newspapers. And you subsequently have Princess Diana, who really fuels the modern American obsession with British Royalty.

PETER: I want to go back to 1953, back when I was pretty young and you hardly existed, guys, and that was when Queen Elizabeth was crowned queen, the coronation. And there was an American obsession with this. So it’s not just scandal. It’s the pageantry. It’s just reveling in royalty. And as a thing in itself, there’s no threat. It’s just wonderful.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, In some ways. I mean, the current queen is this incredible of endurance, of history. I mean, she comes to the throne when Harry Truman is president. I think what she reflects is the changing nature of the British monarchy in the 20th century. The idea that to stay on top when other monarchies have been toppled, you have to be popular. And one of the ways to do that is to create a sort of media apparatus around the royal family to show them, at least in their best moments, as an ideal family. And Queen Elizabeth has been that.

She’s this great figurehead for the nation.

ED: Well, Emily, I’m glad that you’re still wearing one of those really, really fancy hats to talk to us on BackStory today.

EMILY CHARNOCK: It was that or a tiara, I couldn’t decide.

ED: Emily Charnock is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

PETER: Emily Charnock has a lot more to say about the Wallis Simpson affair. For an extended version of our conversation, visit our website at backstoryradio.org. In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a highly publicized World’s Fair commemorating the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. The six month event was designed to showcase Chicago as a cosmopolitan city.

The affair also put the spotlight on Spain’s colonial history, especially when the country’s glamorous princess, the Infanta Eulalia, showed up.

ED: In his book about the 1893 World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City, writer Eric Larson dedicates a few lively pages to this royal visit. We asked actor Adam Brock to read from it. As you’ll hear, Eulalia’s trip is a case study in mixed signals between an aristocrat hungry for some no frills, American fun, and city leaders, determined to give her the royal treatment.

ADAM BROCK: The inventor was 29. And in the words of a State Department official, rather handsome, graceful, and bright. She had arrived two days earlier by train from New York, been transported immediately to the Palmer house, and lodged there in its most lavish suite. Chicago’s boosters saw her visit as the first real opportunity to demonstrate the city’s new refinement, and to prove to the world, or at least to New York, that Chicago was as adept at receiving Royalty as it was a turning pig bristles into paintbrushes.

The first warning that things might not go as planned should perhaps have been evident in a wire service report people from New York, alerting the nation to the scandalous news, that the young woman smoked cigarettes. In the afternoon of her first in Chicago, Tuesday June 6, the Infanta had slipped out of her hotel incognito, accompanied by her lady in waiting and an aide appointed by President Cleveland.

She delighted in moving about the city, unrecognized by Chicago’s residents. Nothing could be more entertaining, in fact, than to walk among the moving crowds of people who were engaged in reading about me in the newspapers, looking at a picture which looked, more or less, like me, she wrote. She visited Jackson park for the first time on Thursday, June 8. Mayor Harrison was her escort.

Crowds of strangers applauded as she passed for no other reason than her royal heritage. Newspapers called her the Queen of the fair, and put her visit on the front page. To her, however, it was all very tiresome. She envied the freedom she saw exhibited by Chicago’s women. I realize with some bitterness, she wrote to her mother, that if progress ever reaches Spain, it will be too late for me to enjoy it.

By the next morning, Friday, she felt she had completed her official duties and was ready to begin enjoying herself. Chicago society, however, was just getting warmed up. The Infanta was Royalty, and by God, she would get the royal treatment. That night the Infanta was scheduled to attend a reception hosted by Bertha Palmer at the Palmer Mansion on Lake Shore Drive. In preparation, Mrs. Palmer had ordered a throne built on a raised platform.

Struck by the similarity between her hostess’ name, and the name of the hotel in which he was staying, the Infanta made inquiries. Upon discovering that Bertha Palmer was the wife of the hotel’s owner, she inflicted a social laceration that Chicago would never forget, or forgive. She declared that under no circumstances would she be received by an innkeeper’s wife. Diplomacy prevailed, however, and she agreed to attend.

She stayed at the function for all of one hour, then bolted. The next day she skipped an official lunch at the administration building. That night she arrived one hour late for a concert at the Fair’s Festival Hall that had been arranged solely in her honor. The hall was filled to capacity with members of Chicago’s leading families. She stayed five minutes.

Resentment began to stain the continuing news coverage of her visit. On Saturday, June 10, the Tribune sniffed, her highness has a way of discarding programs and following independently the bent of her inclination. The city’s papers made repeated reference to her penchant for acting in accord with her own sweet will. In fact, the Infanta was coming to like Chicago.

Shortly before her departure, set for Wednesday, June 14, she wrote her mother, I’m going to leave Chicago with real regret. Chicago did not regret her leaving. If she happened to pick up a copy of the Chicago Tribune that Wednesday morning, she would have found an embittered editorial that stated, in part, Royalty at best is a troublesome custom for Republicans to deal with. It was their custom to come late and go away early, leaving behind them the general regret that they had not come still later, and gone away still earlier, or better still perhaps, that they had not come at all.

BRIAN: That’s actor Adam Brock, reading from Eric Larson’s, The Devil in the White City, a saga of magic and murder at the fair that changed America. Larson’s latest book is Dead Wake, The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. Hi, podcast listeners. Hamilton the musical just nabbed a record 16 Tony nominations. This is great news for us since we’re working on an episode about the life and legacy of Broadway’s most popular historic figure.

And this is where you come in. We want to hear from teachers across the country about how Hamilton is changing the way you teach history, for better or for worse. Do your students work Hamilton references into conversations, or sing the lyrics in class discussion? Do you spend time in class defending Thomas Jefferson or even Aaron Burr? Head to our website, backstoryradio.org, to share your stories. We’re looking forward hearing from you.

PETER: Listeners have been leaving lots of great questions on our website and Facebook page. And we’ve invited Stephanie from Houston, Texas to ask her’s. Stephanie, welcome to BackStory.

STEPHANIE: Thanks.

PETER: So what to got for us?

STEPHANIE: Well, I’m curious. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, my mom wanted me to be Miss America. And so I’m wondering about pageants. Are pageants a mashup of our fascination with Royalty and our All-American desire for competition?

PETER: So the question is, are beauty pageants mashups of our obsession with court life, with Royalty. And our answer is, in just a moment it will be announced.

[LAUGHTER]

Envelope please.

ED: On the surface, clearly there are some similarities, Stephanie. I mean, we do crown queens, homecoming queens, beauty queens. So one resources is very high class, if you will. It’s debutantes and what were known as promenades. And these were generally upper middle class, or even elites that would get together and have dances. And those dances would kind of show case the good breeding and training of, largely, these women.

But a very different source is just what we might call the state fair, the county fair, I mean, Miss Potato, Miss Pork, they are literally identified with commodities. And of course, you know the criticism of pageants in the 1960s and 1970s was treating women and though they were commodities. So the history here is not exactly royal, but it is definitely one of ranking, and coming up with the queen, the best, the highest, which of course, denotes Royalty.

PETER: Yeah, and I think you’re right about the commodity, because the commodity needs that kind of aura of class.

ED: That’s right.

PETER: That is the aura of the court.

ED: And even a genealogy there, right? Just as those cows and those pigs, they’re bred to be the best, right?

BRIAN: Yeah, I’m uncomfortable with this.

ED: I’m uncomfortable, too. I warned you, this is how the sausage is made.

BRIAN: I’m even more uncomfortable with it now.

ED: Stephanie, if you haven’t figured it out, Ed’s the nice one among the three of us.

BRIAN: And I’m so nice that I’d be curious to hear Stephanie’s story before I weigh in. Were you a participant in beauty contests or anything?

STEPHANIE: Well, I was major county Oklahoma fair queen, 1975.

BRIAN: Queen, queen. I think I read about that. So what did that involve?

STEPHANIE: We went to the city auditorium. This was in small town Fairview, Oklahoma, population about 2,000.

BRIAN: I’m sure the competition was still tough, Stephanie.

STEPHANIE: It was fierce. And my claim to fame was that at the time I was 14 years old and I beat out all of the seniors in high.

BRIAN: What was your secret?

STEPHANIE: Well, it was, I think, mostly the talent portion. And I could play the piano pretty well back then.

ED: And what did the term queen mean to you as a 14-year-old in Oklahoma?

PETER: What did it feel like being a queen, Stephanie.

STEPHANIE: Well, I got my picture in the paper, not only in the Fairview paper, but in the Enid paper, which was the big town next door.

BRIAN: That’s where I saw that.

ED: And you know, Stephanie, you just underscored another connection between these beauty pageants and Royalty, and that’s celebrity.

BRIAN: So you’re in the newspaper in both Fairview and Enid.

PETER: Enid.

BRIAN: Yeah, and then what happened?

STEPHANIE: Well, during the fair I got to skip school for four days, I think. But I got to hand out ribbons to all the owners of the pigs and cows that you were talking about.

BRIAN: There you go.

ED: I think the connection’s pretty clear.

BRIAN: Yeah, I think so.

PETER: So seriously, Stephanie, this raises profound questions. You were a queen for four days, is that right?

STEPHANIE: Well, actually for a whole year until the next year. But yeah, four days when I had to do anything.

BRIAN: Don’t diminish her accomplishments.

PETER: OK, for a whole year.

STEPHANIE: I was actually Miss Fairview 1978.

ED: I’m sorry, now you’re just bragging. I’m sorry.

STEPHANIE: Wait till you hear the end of this story. So being Miss Fairview meant that all the other little towns in Northwest Oklahoma met together to have the Miss Cinderella pageant. And I made it into the top eight finalists of the Miss Cinderella pageant. And on finalists night, when we all had to do our talent again, I forgot my song in the middle of it.

ED: Oh my goodness.

STEPHANIE: That was the worst.

BRIAN: But you know, I think it takes a big heart, almost like a queen, to share your story with America this way. And we appreciate you sharing it with us.

STEPHANIE: Sure.

PETER: Thanks, Stephanie. It’s been great talking to you.

STEPHANIE: It was nice to talk to you all. Love your show. Bye.

BRIAN: We want to take a moment to apologize for a mis-statement on last week’s episode about gambling in America.

ED: It ends up we know our history, but sometimes we stumble with current events. On some stations you may have heard us incorrectly state that the Kentucky Derby was held on Sunday, May 8. In fact, it was held on the first Saturday in May. We had a few too many mint juleps last week, and we regret the error.

We’re going to end the show today where we started, in the World War II era. If you were an American at that time, you would have seen a lot of propaganda about the country’s three grade enemies, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Each man was portrayed as menacing, especially Hirohito.

CAROL GLUCK: Because he had this complete and absolute control over his people.

ED: This is historian Carol Gluck. She says that Hirohito was presented as something more. Americans were told that the Japanese believed he was descended from the gods.

CAROL GLUCK: For whom everyone would sacrifice his or her life, in whose name Japanese soldiers would rather die than surrender, and a divine power of powers. They didn’t make that up, because that’s the way the Japanese government portrayed him to the Japanese people.

ED: Gluck says most prominent example is a propaganda film, produced by famed director Frank Capra called, Know Your Enemy, Japan. Hirohito is portrayed as an amalgamation of political figures.

MALE SPEAKER: Impressed to one man the powers of the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Premier of Soviet Russia.

ED: And religious leaders.

MALE SPEAKER: Add to them the powers of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Then top it all with the divine authority of our own Son of God. And you would begin to understand what Hirohito means to the Japanese, why they call him the God Emperor.

ED: This film was never shown. By the time Capra finished it, the war was over. But Gluck says the movie gives a clear picture of how America’s perceived Hirohito.

MALE SPEAKER: Whatever takes place in Japan, it is he, the God Emperor that causes it. He makes Japanese soldiers conquer the world.

CAROL GLUCK: And that is the image that Americans came away with at the end of the war, that he had led the Japanese into war and they followed him without a thought.

ED: In reality, Hirohito’s monarchical power wasn’t so absolute, says historian Noriko Kawamura.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: I wouldn’t call him a puppet, because he had some ways to influence top decisions. But the political leaders and military leaders made him to be the divine ruler.

ED: His real role, Kawamura says, was to legitimize military orders.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: Once he sanctioned the decision, that decision would become almost sacred.

ED: Kawamura says his true power is still a matter of historical debate. But Hirohito wasn’t technically calling the shots, even if he was officially commander in chief. But all that changed in September of 1945.

MALE SPEAKER: The battleship Missouri becomes the scene of an unforgettable ceremony, marking the complete and formal surrender of Japan.

ED: After the war, the victorious allied powers drew up a list of Japanese military leaders to be tried for war crimes. As commander in chief, many allied leaders believed that Hirohito should have been one of them. But even before the war had ended, officials in Washington had recommended that the Japanese emperor continue on the throne.

It was one man’s job to carry out that recommendation.

CAROL GLUCK: The fate of Hirohito was determined by General Douglas MacArthur, who led the Allied occupation of Japan, which was, for all intents and purposes, an American occupation.

ED: In a controversial move, MacArthur took Hirohito off the list of war criminals. MacArthur agreed with planners in Washington, who thought that keeping the emperor on his throne would be more useful.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: I think General MacArthur was using the existing system in Japan. Was the empire supported the general’s decisions, then that could be accepted by the Japanese people without serious resistance.

CAROL GLUCK: And MacArthur was a man with a mission. He was going to democratize Japan. He was going to Christianize Japan. He was going to make Japan a beacon for peace in the post-war world. And MacArthur felt that the occupation would be more effective if the emperor was in place, if he were democratized and transformed.

ED: So it was pragmatic.

CAROL GLUCK: It was pragmatic.

ED: MacArthur’s occupying forces gave Hirohito a makeover, with the help of an American PR campaign. And it began almost immediately. They had him interact with his subjects, which he had never done when he was a god-like figure.

CAROL GLUCK: And he was very ill at ease. He had nothing to say. And so he kept saying the same thing over and over again. Someone would say something to him and he would say, [NON-ENGLISH], which means, is that so? And after a while, there were jokes about his being Mr. [NON-ENGLISH], because that’s all he could say.

ED: Can I stop you right there, Carol? How did the emperor feel about all of this?

CAROL GLUCK: Good question. We don’t really know. But from the sources that we have, it seems that the thing he most didn’t want to happen at the end of the war was for the imperial institution to disappear.

ED: In the new Japanese constitution, which the Americans wrote, he did keep his throne. But Hirohito became a constitutional monarch in a new democracy.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: Emperor became, quote unquote, “the symbol of the state, and the unity of the people.”

CAROL GLUCK: He was no longer divine. He was no longer the head of state. He was no longer commander in chief. He was the symbol of the people.

ED: So Americans were literally transforming the nature of the monarchy in the new constitution?

CAROL GLUCK: The Americans transformed the nature of the imperial institution, absolutely.

ED: American occupying forces also played up the fact that Hirohito was a marine biologist. They wanted him to appear more peaceful, a far cry from the tyrant he had been in the American imagination. By the time of his first State visit to the United States in 1975, most Americans, or at least those born after the war, knew very little about him.

CAROL GLUCK: There was this very famous photograph, which was all over the Japanese papers. And actually, the American papers too, which showed him standing next to Mickey Mouse. And a lot of young people at that time didn’t even know who the emperor was. They only recognized Mickey Mouse.

ED: I think that says more about the American educational system than attitudes towards Royalty, Carol.

CAROL GLUCK: Well, I don’t think so. I think it says something more about how the image of Japan had been changing.

ED: By then, the democratic country had become one of America’s most stalwart allies. But the choice to keep Hirohito on the throne wasn’t without consequence. Millions of Japanese soldiers went to war and died in his name. The Allied powers, including China, and even some Japanese, wanted him held accountable. Hirohito, who died in 1989, never acknowledged his own role in the conflict.

Just as he was guided by his military advisers before the war, and by General MacArthur after the war, Hirohito’s hands were tied. Kawamura says his later attempts to apologize we’re stymied by the Japanese government.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: And he never did. And I think he lived with that heavy feeling until he passed away. That shows the nature of his throne. He could not speak his own mind publicly, as he wanted. And I think it stayed that way until the end of his reign.

ED: Noriko Kawamura helped us tell that story. She’s a historian at Washington State University, and the author of Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War. We also it helps from Columbia University historian Carol Gluck. Her book on the emperor is called Showa, the Japan of Hirohito.

PETER: That’s going to do it for today. But tell us what you thought of the show. And send us your questions for our upcoming episodes on the history of political incorrectness and the Alexander Hamilton phenomenon. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

ED: BackStory is produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Melissa Gismondi helps with research. Special thanks this week to Eric Larson, Adam Brock, and Bob Parsons. BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the [INAUDIBLE] Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onuf is professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

MALE SPEAKER: Backstory is distributed by PRX, a Public Radio Exchange.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. The English are throwing Her Majesty the Queen a lavish 90th birthday party this week. But the Brits aren’t the only ones watching, as one Fox Business host points out.

MALE SPEAKER: That birthday event is so big in America, I mean, it headlines virtually every news broadcast in America today.

PETER: Despite all the media coverage, Americans have had a rocky relationship with Royalty. Remember that revolution? Or the time members of Congress panicked after a Baltimore teenager married Napoleon’s brother?

FEMALE SPEAKER: Our will be introduced to gorgeous scenes of Royalty. And soon Americans will become seduced and corrupted.

PETER: After World War II, American leaders brought the Japanese emperor back down to earth.

FEMALE SPEAKER: They arranged for him to go to Disneyland. There was a very famous photograph which showed him standing next to Mickey Mouse.

PETER: America’s Royalty links, today on BackStory. Major funding for BackStory is provided by the [INAUDIBLE], the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory. With the American Backstory hosts.

ED: Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Ed.

ED: And Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey there, Ed.

ED: We’re going to start off today in early 1939, as Great Britain hurtled towards war with Germany. The British King, George VI, realized his country needed a powerful ally, a fact not missed by America’s President, Franklin Roosevelt.

WILL SWIFT: Roosevelt sensed that the war was coming on, and that a strong bond between America and Britain would be essential. So he sent a letter to the King requesting that they come. Made the invitation himself.

ED: This is writer Will Swift. He says in the months before the king and queen arrive in June 1939–

WILL SWIFT: There’s a tremendous uproar in the American press, and tremendous interest about this visit.

ED: Part of the excitement was what swift calls the soap opera factor. King George VI had been all over American newspapers, having recently ascended to the throne after his older brother abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. Americans were curious about the shy new king and his wife, Elizabeth.

WILL SWIFT: So they came to Washington. And they were greeted by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

MALE SPEAKER: In the gala reception room of a magnificent Union Station, the heads of the world’s two greatest democracies shake hands, and history is made, with reigning British sovereigns for the first time in the capital of the United States.

ED: The royal couple drove in a procession to the White House, accompanied by the president and his wife.

MALE SPEAKER: Outside the station, crowds wait to acclaim Roosevelt’s and royalty. Receive a 21 gun salute.

WILL SWIFT: They’re being treated like not only heads of state, but almost conquering heroes.

MALE SPEAKER: Cars and motorcycles proceed at a snail’s pace so that all may see the king and queen. 600,000 persons braved the heat to witness the most impressive welcome ever recorded capitol visit.

ED: Swift says Washington high society was in a tizzy over the royal visitors.

WILL SWIFT: There was a huge question among all the social woman, are you going to curtsy to the queen? And what would that mean? Would that mean deference to our role as former colonists? So there was both the attitude of wanting, on one hand, some people wanted to look good to the royals, as if we were one down. And others who were very upset that we were catering to them as if they were one up.

ED: Well, what’s the answer?

WILL SWIFT: The answer is that some did, yes, sort of a modified curtsy. It was decided that it would not be too humiliating to do a small curtsy.

ED: The curtsies notwithstanding, serious tensions lay just below the surface. In the 1930s, many Americans despised the English. They viewed the monarchy as arrogant. It didn’t help that King George’s father was notoriously anti-American. And there were more practical reasons for skepticism.

WILL SWIFT: During the First World War, Britain had borrowed a tremendous amount of money from us, and had not repaid it’s war debts. And so there was tremendous resentment among many of the American people about the fact that they had not paid their debts, and that so many American men had gone over and been killed fighting a war that was, essentially, seen as a European war.

ED: Americans didn’t want to get pulled into a second European war. And some were suspicious of the pomp of the royal visit.

WILL SWIFT: Was this a way that Roosevelt was going to try to draw the American people into an upcoming war in Europe?

ED: So they knew what Roosevelt was up to?

WILL SWIFT: Well, they suspected. And he denied it completely. But many people still were concerned about that.

ED: In other words, a lot was riding on the royal’s charm, offensive which continued as the king and queen visited FDR’s family home in Hyde Park, New York. There, on the couple’s last day in America, the Roosevelt’s hosted what is now an iconic moment in US/British relations, a picnic.

WILL SWIFT: Eleanor Roosevelt announced before the visit the she would be serving hot dogs at Hyde Park. And there was a huge uproar, people writing in letters, very embarrassed that we would serve hot dogs to the royals.

ED: Yes, the Roosevelts actually fed the British monarchs that most low brow of American foods, hot dogs.

WILL SWIFT: But for Roosevelt, the hot dogs became the great symbol of the equalization of the two countries. And if the King would eat a hot dog, then the two countries were no longer on separate tiers. And so of course, the headline in the next day’s New York Times was, King eats hot dog, asks for more. And there was a lot of report about how he slathered the hot dog with mustard. And that was also a very Americanized thing of him to do.

MALE SPEAKER: A friendly an pleasant finale of an epic making chapter in Anglo American history.

ED: Swift says that the royal’s soft diplomacy paid off. George VI and Elizabeth were hardly the stuffy monarchs Americans expected.

WILL SWIFT: The king and queen actually show themselves to be very friendly and open kind of people, very much like Americans, ironically. And this, I think, helped to shift their attitudes toward Royalty and toward Britain.

BRIAN: When it comes to royalty, American’s attitudes have shifted a lot. So today, we’re going to look at they’re complicated relationship with kings, queens, and courts. We’ll hear how a 19th century America marriage into European aristocracy prompted fears of the downfall of the republic, and how General Douglas MacArthur used emperor Hirohito to turn Japan into one of America’s most dependable allies after World War II.

We’ll also examine the very unaristocratic origins of American beauty pageants.

PETER: But first, we’re going to return to the British and King George III. As reigning monarch at the time of the American Revolution, he doesn’t fare too well in American history books. So it might surprise you to learn that when George III ascended the English throne in 1760, American colonists loved him. They were proud to be his subjects. Historian Barbara Clark Smith says the crown gave the colonists a sense of security and legal protection.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: The law is what people relied on to protect their rights of property, protect their rights to living peaceably day to day without interruption, either from criminals or from enemies, such as the French. And the King was in charge of that.

PETER: King George was in charge, but he was thousands of miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic. He appointed magistrates, or judges, to rule in his absence. But Smith says the royal magistrates had limited power. So colonists could choose to carry out or ignore the King’s law.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: This is what’s exciting to me, is ordinary people in the colonial era, certainly ordinary free white men, participate in their government in some ways that we don’t do today.

BRIAN: Peter, am I hearing this right? Americans had more political rights under the king? That seems to undermine the entire premise of the American Revolution, or actually the American history. What’s going on here?

PETER: Well, that’s exactly what she is saying, Ed. She says all you have to do is look at where colonists actually encountered to king’s rule.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: Probably the most important in some ways was in courts of law, people served on juries. And the jury was recognized as what John Adams called the Democratical aspect of the court. The judge represents the King. And the prosecution represents the King. So Peter, if you committed a crime, it would be King versus Onuf, Rex v. Onuf. In our system, it’s the people v. Onuf.

PETER: Barbara, this is getting to be very personal. What would I be looking for in a jury? I mean, that’s the sole protection I have against the wrath of the King and the prosecution.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: The idea they had was, everyone in the neighborhood will pretty much know whether it’s likely that you did the thing we’re accusing you of doing. Are you that kind of guy, right? And they’ll also know who to believe when they testify, because someone may come testify against you, but if I’m a local farmer, I might know that that person has had a grudge against you for a long time.

So ordinary men would have the local knowledge to judge the likelihood of the case that the King was presenting against you.

PETER: It’s a kind of contest, then, in which the community decides whether to proceed, find me guilty, and make be subject to punishments that are decreed under the law.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: And I think in the ordinary course of a criminal trial, somebody’s accused of theft, or a stranger comes through town and commits some crime, that the jury is going to agree with the judge. But once in awhile there are cases where the jury can disagree. And since the jury can disagree, that means to judge always has to be aware of that possibility.

The people have to consent, as members of the jury, to the application of the law in any particular case.

PETER: And what you’re suggesting, Barbara, is that consent under royal government is actually immediate and real. People feel it. And when they boast about having the rights of Englishmen, they boast of being subjects of King George III.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: They absolutely mean being subjects of King George III, with the right to trial by jury of their peers, to take part as jurors. That could be a real arena for participation. They also participated one other place where the King was symbolically present. And that’s in the public punishment of criminals. It was always possible at the last minute in executions for one of two things to happen.

One was the governor might send a pardon for a felon who is about to be hanged. The other thing that could happen is that the crowd of people watching could interrupt the execution. They don’t have an armed police. They don’t want an armed place. So if there’s a very strong local feeling among a lot of people that this is unfair, then there’s a chance that they will conduct what’s called a rescue.

And rescues are against the law, technically. But if you rescue someone and there’s no one around to recognize you and a rescue and testify against you, it can turn out fine. Now, that doesn’t happen all that often, right? But if it happens just once in a while, everyone knows it’s possible.

PETER: One of the things that’s come across to me, though, and I’m trying to get my mind around this, is you could be a loyal subject of the King but resist the officers of the law. You could, you had a right to participate in the execution of law, and that meant that your voice was not stilled before the majesty of the law. Would you say that’s an accurate statement?

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: That’s accurate so long as we bear in mind that this is not a kind of individual liberal right. So Peter, if you’re the only one who thinks that things are unfair and you shout out in the middle of the courtroom or something, you’re in contempt of court, right?

PETER: Right.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: It’s not you as an individual have this right to dissent. It’s that you, as one of the community, one of this thing, this group they call the people, have the right. It’s not a great situation if you’re in the minority. It’s an OK situation if the whole town, or enough of the town, or enough of the group, the county, the city, agrees, then you and your neighbors, as a group, can exert some power. And you can resist the King’s law.

Often explaining that you are loyal to the King, right? Because the King wants the law executed. That’s his job. And he loves his subjects. And if this doesn’t seem to be justice, must be a problem. Must be the sheriff is wrong. Must be the judge is corrupt. Must be the governor has gone amuck. And they need us to bring them back to what the King really wants, which is justice. So there were ways of participating in politics, or ways of making your idea of what’s right and fair felt in your society that were available to subjects of King George III that would not be available to citizens of the United States after the revolution.

PETER: This is getting very disturbing. I thought we had a revolution to get rid of the despotic King and to govern ourselves. And now you’ve planted this little bomb that says maybe there was more participation, more self government before the revolution? What do you lose when you go off on your own and say, hey, we don’t need the King. We can be our own King.

BARBARA CLARK SMITH: Well, I’m not arguing that there was a net loss of freedom. I mean, obviously there’s freedom gained in the revolution. What happens is we give up the right to consent or not consent to the execution of the law. You see that in the 1780s, in Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts. You see it with the whiskey rebels in 1790s in Pennsylvania. These are groups that are acting in pretty traditional ways for subjects of the King.

But they end up being told, no, you can’t do that anymore. You can’t withhold consent. You can’t control courtrooms. The thing you have to do is go and vote. And they’re told that by people like Samuel Adams, who’s a big Revolutionary, or George Washington for that matter, who’s president, say, you don’t get to take part in adjudicating things after the law is passed.

If you don’t like the law, change who you vote for at the next election. What people then began to work for was to make the vote enough, as they realized that it’s now all about voting. Then you need something in place to make sure that that really counts. We’re still working on that. We’re still struggling with that question of whether the vote is enough.

PETER: Barbara Clark Smith is a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, an author of The Freedoms We Lost, Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America. Earlier we heard from Will Swift, author of The Roosevelts and the Royals, Franklin and Eleanor, the King and Queen of England, and the Friendship That Changed History.

Of course, the United States has never had a monarch. But that doesn’t mean Americans are immune to the charms of aristocracy. Take the story of Elizabeth Patterson, a wealthy Americans socialite. In 1803 she met Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome Bonaparte, at a ball in Baltimore. It was reportedly love at first sight for both of the two teenagers. He was 19, she was 18. After a whirlwind courtship, Elizabeth and Jerome tied the knot.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Oh, they were the talk of the town when they got married. Everyone invited them to dinners, to parties, to suppers, to dances.

PETER: This is historian Charlene Boyer Lewis. She says Patterson hoped that her marriage would transform her into something distinctly un-American, an aristocratic, and perhaps even someday, a queen.

BRIAN: But Napoleon was furious when he found out that his younger brother had married an untitled American. When the love birds arrived in Europe in 1805, Napoleon banished the pregnant Elizabeth from his empire, and married Jerome off to a German princes. Despite her very public humiliation at the hands of France’s imperial family, Patterson Bonaparte had no intention of relinquishing her new aristocratic ties.

She returned to the US with their infant son, and a plan to work her way into Napoleon’s good graces.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She knows she has a male Bonaparte. So she knows she has something incredibly valuable, because this is the time period when Napoleon cannot have any children. There’s only one nephew, and he’s kind of sickly. And so Elizabeth calculates, as long as I have a male Bonaparte, they’re going to still want me. So she does not at all act like a rejected woman who had this scandalous past.

Instead, she decks herself out in all of the European clothing she bought while she was in Lisbon, which includes jeweled tiaras, and diamond and ruby perfume cases. And she goes to every single party that she gets invited to. So she flaunts her status, flaunts her connection to the emperor. And Americans love it.

BRIAN: And everybody knows the full deal.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Everybody knows the full story. It was written up in all the newspapers. I found a copy of a Russellville, Kentucky newspaper who had written up the whole story. So everybody in the United States, even in the most remote corners, knew this whole story.

BRIAN: So she’s married. Doesn’t this sort of make her less charming and interesting in the American scene, which is basically a huge marriage market?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: It is a huge marriage market. But no, she’s incredibly alluring because of that Bonaparte cachet. She does seek a divorce from the Maryland legislature once Napoleon’s empire is starting to crumble. But even before she gets the divorce, because Napoleon had divorced her, she is considered available. And so she’s courted by many men. She gets five or six marriage proposals. She rejects every single one of them.

She seriously, however, considers one from a secretary to the British ligation, Sir Oakley. And that’s what galvanizes Napoleon to start a correspondence between the two of them, because Napoleon doesn’t want his potential heir, her son, to have a stepfather who’s British. So she writes Napoleon, takes advantage of that, and says well, if you offer me an annuity, which would be like a pension, and you pay for my son’s schooling, and you give me a title, then I won’t accept any marriage proposals.

And Napoleon agrees. And he gives her $12,000 a year. He’s going to pay for her son’s education. And he says I’m thinking about making you the Duchess of Oldenburg.

BRIAN: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah, she was very savvy.

BRIAN: She has some nerve, doesn’t she?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She sure does.

BRIAN: Eye to eye with Napoleon. Well, she’s probably above eye to eye with Napoleon.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yes– well, she was very short, too. She was very short, too. She was very petite. She was very petite.

BRIAN: But anyway, I’m sure the Americans go, hey, good for you, girl. We’re all set, now, right?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, it’s not exactly hey, good for you, girl. There are many, many, many Americans who are incredibly attracted by her– and a lot of it is because she wears these very thin dresses where you can see her body through them. So that’s part of the reason why she gets invited to parties, and why swarms of boys follow her carriage around because they want to see her and see what she’s dressed in.

But the other part is the are captivated by her because they don’t know what her future will be. But in 1809, the end of 1809 and beginning of 1810, rumors start to swirl round about this $12,000 annuity, about this potential title. And so it was one thing to have this captivating woman who’s a cosmopolitan linked to Bonaparte in their midst. It was another thing to think about having somebody with a title, she being a Duchess and her son being a prince, living in their midst.

And that kind of changes the way Americans start to think about her.

BRIAN: So what could they do about that? I mean–

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, they’re concerned– right, Napoleon is conquering Europe. Napoleon is establishing his siblings taking over kingdoms and putting in his siblings.

BRIAN: I see. So this is not as crazy as it seems.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: This is not crazy at all. So once the rumors go around that Napoleon’s really connecting with Elizabeth and his potential heir, the concern is that Napoleon’s going to use Elizabeth’s son to establish an empire in the United States, that Elizabeth’s son, who’s only four years old at the time, will potentially become, as one congressman called him, the emperor of the West.

Other congressman, Timothy Pickering, a Federalist of Massachusetts, believes that what Napoleon’s going to do is set up a court, a palace, right there in the United States, perhaps in Baltimore. And Elizabeth and her princely son will live in it. And so Pickering writes, there’s going to be this palace whose in splendor and opulence is going to make the president’s mansion look like nothing. And then he says our eyes will be introduced to gorgeous scenes of Royalty. And soon, Americans will become seduced and corrupted by these charms and will choose a king over a President, a monarchy over a public. So we have to do something.

BRIAN: That’s very strange language. Watch out, we’re going to like this too much.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. That’s right.

BRIAN: It’s going to be too beautiful. We’re not going to be able to the control ourselves.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: And they’re still not sure this republic is going to work because people can be seduced by gorgeous scenes of Royalty.

BRIAN: Yeah, we’re still in the first 20 years of the country, right?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Exactly.

BRIAN: So what do they propose to do about this?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: So they propose, several members of Congress, they propose the title of nobility amendment, which would have become the 13th Amendment that no citizen of the United States can receive a title or an annuity from an emperor, or a King, or a prince. And so you would have to give up your US Citizenship and you could never hold office. So here, they’re clearly thinking about her son, right?

BRIAN: Yeah. What’s his name, by the way?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Of course it’s Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte.

BRIAN: OK. That’s subtle.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. His nickname is Bo. His nickname is Bo. And so they the plan is that they will have this amendment that will neutralize the threat of Elizabeth and her son Bo. And it sweeps through the Senate. It sweeps through the house. And is sent out to the states for ratification. And everyone thinks it’s going to become the 13th Amendment. But then it falls two states short, and it never becomes the 13th Amendment.

BRIAN: So this is a lot for a young woman still in her 20s, not to mention a young boy who’s four, to go through all this. So what’s he think about all this? As the sort of comes aware of what’s going on in the world, he says, give me my kingdom?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: No. Her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, much to his mother’s dismay, loves the United States. Loves being a small R republican. And doesn’t want really anything to do with the whole aristocracy, nobility stuff. He’s sent over to visit his father when he’s 14, 15 years old. And he hates every moment of it. He just thinks it’s a vapid, kind of too luxurious lifestyle. And he wants nothing to do with it.

So he tells his mother this. And he says, no, I’m going back to the United States. He takes a pledge of American citizenship. And he says, I want nothing to do with this. I don’t want to be an aristocratic. And she is so infuriated with him, and she thinks the work of her life has just come to naught because he’s decided to be a patriotic American instead of an aristocrat.

BRIAN: She never becomes titled right?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She never gets the title, even though she was offered several marriage proposals by titled men, she never wants to give up being independent. She wants to remain an independent woman. I argue in my book that she wants to keep the name Bonaparte, that the name Bonaparte was her key, right, her way in, her value, her cachet. And so she never wanted remarry, never wanted to have more children. And wanted to stay in the spotlight, which she pretty much does until she’s about 50.

BRIAN: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah.

BRIAN: So when you add it all up, Charlene, what lessons do we draw from this story?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think there are several lessons here. One, that Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude about Royalty, about aristocracy from the very beginning. Yes, they threw off a monarchy. Yes, they thought Republican simplicity was the way to go. But aristocratic luxury was still seductive to them. It still had a place. Another lesson I think we learned is Americans have loved celebrities from the beginning of this country, too.

So even in an era without mass media, without mass culture, the celebrity who has that cachet, and much of it is being an aristocrat or the trappings of aristocracy, the trappings of Royalty and nobility, Americans like that. I think it gets at these paradoxes of this Republican nation struggling with they’re monarchical past, with their love of luxury. And she’s kind of a lightning rod for all of that.

BRIAN: Well, bless her heart. But I’m glad she failed. It sounds like it’s a good trial for early America to look this in the face and decide, you know, I think we like our own way better. But I do believe that celebrities today are the Elizabeth Patterson Bonapartes of 1803. I mean, all the trappings of aristocracy without the threat of Napoleon taking over the country.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think celebrities today wish they were as good as Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, because she had it all. She totally had it all.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Charlene Boyer Lewis is a historian Kalamazoo College. She’s the author Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, an American Aristocrats in the Early Republic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So Elizabeth’s Bonaparte’s infatuation with Napoleon, sort of the biggest guy in the world, it’s a fascinating story. But a couple things, one, he wasn’t really Royalty. And of course, we have high standards here on BackStory. We only talk about real royalty. And it was also a long time ago. And yet we still seem fascinated with Royalty. I just wonder what’s changed and what’s remained constant over that period between then.

ED: Well, Ed, you may be looking at me, but I want you to shift your gaze to Emily Charnock. Emily is a research fellow at Selwyn College Cambridge University. But Emily’s also an astute scholar on American political history.

PETER: And she is a subject of the queen, isn’t she?

ED: That’s right. I Emily, welcome to BackStory.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

ED: So what do you think, Emily? How would you explain the continuity and change of our fascination with Royals.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, I think Royalty is always fascinating on some level, for glamor, for celebrity, and so forth. I would say, in the British case, you have on the one hand the threat of British monarchy sort of goes down over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time that the Royals themselves become a little more exciting and scandalous. Queen Victoria, who’s monarch in the 19th century, for most of the 19th century, is widowed pretty early in her life. She wears black. She’s not exactly great copy for a newspaper editor.

But you know, flash forward to the 20th century and you’ve got some incredible scandals, some incredibly glamorous figures. And you know, this is a sort of newspaper dream.

PETER: What are some of the stories that generate so much excitement in the former colonies?

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, probably the biggest one is the affair between King Edward VIII And Wallis Simpson, who just happens to be an American–

BRIAN: And a woman, too, right? Wallis is not to be taken for granted.

EMILY CHARNOCK: And a woman. But yeah, just generating so much interest and excitement on the American side of the pond. A young King, a bachelor, comes to the throne in 1936. He wants to marry this American woman who happens to be divorced. And this is a huge scandal. And the British establishment just really doesn’t want to let it happen. And ultimately he abdicates the throne for the woman he loves. And this is so romantic and like a Hollywood movie. So there’s a huge amount of attention in the US press on that story.

And it continues. And they are a very famous couple for the rest of their lives.

PETER: Now, we share scandals across the Atlantic in the popular press. That didn’t really happen at this point, did it, Emily? I mean, Americans were obsessed with the story. How about the Brits?

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, you know, there was sort of a gentleman’s agreement in the British media at that time that there were certain things about the royals that one did not report on. And the British press aren’t allowed to cover it at all. They’re gagged. So the Americans are in on the secret and the British public isn’t.

BRIAN: Boy, how things have changed.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Yeah. So the British public were in the dark.

ED: Emily, how did the Wallis Simpson affair, the abdication, how did that change American attitudes about British Royalty up till now? Or did it?

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, I think it expanded a sort of more mass obsession. So that story shows that British royals can sell newspapers. And you subsequently have Princess Diana, who really fuels the modern American obsession with British Royalty.

PETER: I want to go back to 1953, back when I was pretty young and you hardly existed, guys, and that was when Queen Elizabeth was crowned queen, the coronation. And there was an American obsession with this. So it’s not just scandal. It’s the pageantry. It’s just reveling in royalty. And as a thing in itself, there’s no threat. It’s just wonderful.

EMILY CHARNOCK: Well, In some ways. I mean, the current queen is this incredible of endurance, of history. I mean, she comes to the throne when Harry Truman is president. I think what she reflects is the changing nature of the British monarchy in the 20th century. The idea that to stay on top when other monarchies have been toppled, you have to be popular. And one of the ways to do that is to create a sort of media apparatus around the royal family to show them, at least in their best moments, as an ideal family. And Queen Elizabeth has been that.

She’s this great figurehead for the nation.

ED: Well, Emily, I’m glad that you’re still wearing one of those really, really fancy hats to talk to us on BackStory today.

EMILY CHARNOCK: It was that or a tiara, I couldn’t decide.

ED: Emily Charnock is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

PETER: Emily Charnock has a lot more to say about the Wallis Simpson affair. For an extended version of our conversation, visit our website at backstoryradio.org. In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a highly publicized World’s Fair commemorating the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. The six month event was designed to showcase Chicago as a cosmopolitan city.

The affair also put the spotlight on Spain’s colonial history, especially when the country’s glamorous princess, the Infanta Eulalia, showed up.

ED: In his book about the 1893 World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City, writer Eric Larson dedicates a few lively pages to this royal visit. We asked actor Adam Brock to read from it. As you’ll hear, Eulalia’s trip is a case study in mixed signals between an aristocrat hungry for some no frills, American fun, and city leaders, determined to give her the royal treatment.

ADAM BROCK: The inventor was 29. And in the words of a State Department official, rather handsome, graceful, and bright. She had arrived two days earlier by train from New York, been transported immediately to the Palmer house, and lodged there in its most lavish suite. Chicago’s boosters saw her visit as the first real opportunity to demonstrate the city’s new refinement, and to prove to the world, or at least to New York, that Chicago was as adept at receiving Royalty as it was a turning pig bristles into paintbrushes.

The first warning that things might not go as planned should perhaps have been evident in a wire service report people from New York, alerting the nation to the scandalous news, that the young woman smoked cigarettes. In the afternoon of her first in Chicago, Tuesday June 6, the Infanta had slipped out of her hotel incognito, accompanied by her lady in waiting and an aide appointed by President Cleveland.

She delighted in moving about the city, unrecognized by Chicago’s residents. Nothing could be more entertaining, in fact, than to walk among the moving crowds of people who were engaged in reading about me in the newspapers, looking at a picture which looked, more or less, like me, she wrote. She visited Jackson park for the first time on Thursday, June 8. Mayor Harrison was her escort.

Crowds of strangers applauded as she passed for no other reason than her royal heritage. Newspapers called her the Queen of the fair, and put her visit on the front page. To her, however, it was all very tiresome. She envied the freedom she saw exhibited by Chicago’s women. I realize with some bitterness, she wrote to her mother, that if progress ever reaches Spain, it will be too late for me to enjoy it.

By the next morning, Friday, she felt she had completed her official duties and was ready to begin enjoying herself. Chicago society, however, was just getting warmed up. The Infanta was Royalty, and by God, she would get the royal treatment. That night the Infanta was scheduled to attend a reception hosted by Bertha Palmer at the Palmer Mansion on Lake Shore Drive. In preparation, Mrs. Palmer had ordered a throne built on a raised platform.

Struck by the similarity between her hostess’ name, and the name of the hotel in which he was staying, the Infanta made inquiries. Upon discovering that Bertha Palmer was the wife of the hotel’s owner, she inflicted a social laceration that Chicago would never forget, or forgive. She declared that under no circumstances would she be received by an innkeeper’s wife. Diplomacy prevailed, however, and she agreed to attend.

She stayed at the function for all of one hour, then bolted. The next day she skipped an official lunch at the administration building. That night she arrived one hour late for a concert at the Fair’s Festival Hall that had been arranged solely in her honor. The hall was filled to capacity with members of Chicago’s leading families. She stayed five minutes.

Resentment began to stain the continuing news coverage of her visit. On Saturday, June 10, the Tribune sniffed, her highness has a way of discarding programs and following independently the bent of her inclination. The city’s papers made repeated reference to her penchant for acting in accord with her own sweet will. In fact, the Infanta was coming to like Chicago.

Shortly before her departure, set for Wednesday, June 14, she wrote her mother, I’m going to leave Chicago with real regret. Chicago did not regret her leaving. If she happened to pick up a copy of the Chicago Tribune that Wednesday morning, she would have found an embittered editorial that stated, in part, Royalty at best is a troublesome custom for Republicans to deal with. It was their custom to come late and go away early, leaving behind them the general regret that they had not come still later, and gone away still earlier, or better still perhaps, that they had not come at all.

BRIAN: That’s actor Adam Brock, reading from Eric Larson’s, The Devil in the White City, a saga of magic and murder at the fair that changed America. Larson’s latest book is Dead Wake, The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. Hi, podcast listeners. Hamilton the musical just nabbed a record 16 Tony nominations. This is great news for us since we’re working on an episode about the life and legacy of Broadway’s most popular historic figure.

And this is where you come in. We want to hear from teachers across the country about how Hamilton is changing the way you teach history, for better or for worse. Do your students work Hamilton references into conversations, or sing the lyrics in class discussion? Do you spend time in class defending Thomas Jefferson or even Aaron Burr? Head to our website, backstoryradio.org, to share your stories. We’re looking forward hearing from you.

PETER: Listeners have been leaving lots of great questions on our website and Facebook page. And we’ve invited Stephanie from Houston, Texas to ask her’s. Stephanie, welcome to BackStory.

STEPHANIE: Thanks.

PETER: So what to got for us?

STEPHANIE: Well, I’m curious. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, my mom wanted me to be Miss America. And so I’m wondering about pageants. Are pageants a mashup of our fascination with Royalty and our All-American desire for competition?

PETER: So the question is, are beauty pageants mashups of our obsession with court life, with Royalty. And our answer is, in just a moment it will be announced.

[LAUGHTER]

Envelope please.

ED: On the surface, clearly there are some similarities, Stephanie. I mean, we do crown queens, homecoming queens, beauty queens. So one resources is very high class, if you will. It’s debutantes and what were known as promenades. And these were generally upper middle class, or even elites that would get together and have dances. And those dances would kind of show case the good breeding and training of, largely, these women.

But a very different source is just what we might call the state fair, the county fair, I mean, Miss Potato, Miss Pork, they are literally identified with commodities. And of course, you know the criticism of pageants in the 1960s and 1970s was treating women and though they were commodities. So the history here is not exactly royal, but it is definitely one of ranking, and coming up with the queen, the best, the highest, which of course, denotes Royalty.

PETER: Yeah, and I think you’re right about the commodity, because the commodity needs that kind of aura of class.

ED: That’s right.

PETER: That is the aura of the court.

ED: And even a genealogy there, right? Just as those cows and those pigs, they’re bred to be the best, right?

BRIAN: Yeah, I’m uncomfortable with this.

ED: I’m uncomfortable, too. I warned you, this is how the sausage is made.

BRIAN: I’m even more uncomfortable with it now.

ED: Stephanie, if you haven’t figured it out, Ed’s the nice one among the three of us.

BRIAN: And I’m so nice that I’d be curious to hear Stephanie’s story before I weigh in. Were you a participant in beauty contests or anything?

STEPHANIE: Well, I was major county Oklahoma fair queen, 1975.

BRIAN: Queen, queen. I think I read about that. So what did that involve?

STEPHANIE: We went to the city auditorium. This was in small town Fairview, Oklahoma, population about 2,000.

BRIAN: I’m sure the competition was still tough, Stephanie.

STEPHANIE: It was fierce. And my claim to fame was that at the time I was 14 years old and I beat out all of the seniors in high.

BRIAN: What was your secret?

STEPHANIE: Well, it was, I think, mostly the talent portion. And I could play the piano pretty well back then.

ED: And what did the term queen mean to you as a 14-year-old in Oklahoma?

PETER: What did it feel like being a queen, Stephanie.

STEPHANIE: Well, I got my picture in the paper, not only in the Fairview paper, but in the Enid paper, which was the big town next door.

BRIAN: That’s where I saw that.

ED: And you know, Stephanie, you just underscored another connection between these beauty pageants and Royalty, and that’s celebrity.

BRIAN: So you’re in the newspaper in both Fairview and Enid.

PETER: Enid.

BRIAN: Yeah, and then what happened?

STEPHANIE: Well, during the fair I got to skip school for four days, I think. But I got to hand out ribbons to all the owners of the pigs and cows that you were talking about.

BRIAN: There you go.

ED: I think the connection’s pretty clear.

BRIAN: Yeah, I think so.

PETER: So seriously, Stephanie, this raises profound questions. You were a queen for four days, is that right?

STEPHANIE: Well, actually for a whole year until the next year. But yeah, four days when I had to do anything.

BRIAN: Don’t diminish her accomplishments.

PETER: OK, for a whole year.

STEPHANIE: I was actually Miss Fairview 1978.

ED: I’m sorry, now you’re just bragging. I’m sorry.

STEPHANIE: Wait till you hear the end of this story. So being Miss Fairview meant that all the other little towns in Northwest Oklahoma met together to have the Miss Cinderella pageant. And I made it into the top eight finalists of the Miss Cinderella pageant. And on finalists night, when we all had to do our talent again, I forgot my song in the middle of it.

ED: Oh my goodness.

STEPHANIE: That was the worst.

BRIAN: But you know, I think it takes a big heart, almost like a queen, to share your story with America this way. And we appreciate you sharing it with us.

STEPHANIE: Sure.

PETER: Thanks, Stephanie. It’s been great talking to you.

STEPHANIE: It was nice to talk to you all. Love your show. Bye.

BRIAN: We want to take a moment to apologize for a mis-statement on last week’s episode about gambling in America.

ED: It ends up we know our history, but sometimes we stumble with current events. On some stations you may have heard us incorrectly state that the Kentucky Derby was held on Sunday, May 8. In fact, it was held on the first Saturday in May. We had a few too many mint juleps last week, and we regret the error.

We’re going to end the show today where we started, in the World War II era. If you were an American at that time, you would have seen a lot of propaganda about the country’s three grade enemies, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Each man was portrayed as menacing, especially Hirohito.

CAROL GLUCK: Because he had this complete and absolute control over his people.

ED: This is historian Carol Gluck. She says that Hirohito was presented as something more. Americans were told that the Japanese believed he was descended from the gods.

CAROL GLUCK: For whom everyone would sacrifice his or her life, in whose name Japanese soldiers would rather die than surrender, and a divine power of powers. They didn’t make that up, because that’s the way the Japanese government portrayed him to the Japanese people.

ED: Gluck says most prominent example is a propaganda film, produced by famed director Frank Capra called, Know Your Enemy, Japan. Hirohito is portrayed as an amalgamation of political figures.

MALE SPEAKER: Impressed to one man the powers of the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Premier of Soviet Russia.

ED: And religious leaders.

MALE SPEAKER: Add to them the powers of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Then top it all with the divine authority of our own Son of God. And you would begin to understand what Hirohito means to the Japanese, why they call him the God Emperor.

ED: This film was never shown. By the time Capra finished it, the war was over. But Gluck says the movie gives a clear picture of how America’s perceived Hirohito.

MALE SPEAKER: Whatever takes place in Japan, it is he, the God Emperor that causes it. He makes Japanese soldiers conquer the world.

CAROL GLUCK: And that is the image that Americans came away with at the end of the war, that he had led the Japanese into war and they followed him without a thought.

ED: In reality, Hirohito’s monarchical power wasn’t so absolute, says historian Noriko Kawamura.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: I wouldn’t call him a puppet, because he had some ways to influence top decisions. But the political leaders and military leaders made him to be the divine ruler.

ED: His real role, Kawamura says, was to legitimize military orders.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: Once he sanctioned the decision, that decision would become almost sacred.

ED: Kawamura says his true power is still a matter of historical debate. But Hirohito wasn’t technically calling the shots, even if he was officially commander in chief. But all that changed in September of 1945.

MALE SPEAKER: The battleship Missouri becomes the scene of an unforgettable ceremony, marking the complete and formal surrender of Japan.

ED: After the war, the victorious allied powers drew up a list of Japanese military leaders to be tried for war crimes. As commander in chief, many allied leaders believed that Hirohito should have been one of them. But even before the war had ended, officials in Washington had recommended that the Japanese emperor continue on the throne.

It was one man’s job to carry out that recommendation.

CAROL GLUCK: The fate of Hirohito was determined by General Douglas MacArthur, who led the Allied occupation of Japan, which was, for all intents and purposes, an American occupation.

ED: In a controversial move, MacArthur took Hirohito off the list of war criminals. MacArthur agreed with planners in Washington, who thought that keeping the emperor on his throne would be more useful.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: I think General MacArthur was using the existing system in Japan. Was the empire supported the general’s decisions, then that could be accepted by the Japanese people without serious resistance.

CAROL GLUCK: And MacArthur was a man with a mission. He was going to democratize Japan. He was going to Christianize Japan. He was going to make Japan a beacon for peace in the post-war world. And MacArthur felt that the occupation would be more effective if the emperor was in place, if he were democratized and transformed.

ED: So it was pragmatic.

CAROL GLUCK: It was pragmatic.

ED: MacArthur’s occupying forces gave Hirohito a makeover, with the help of an American PR campaign. And it began almost immediately. They had him interact with his subjects, which he had never done when he was a god-like figure.

CAROL GLUCK: And he was very ill at ease. He had nothing to say. And so he kept saying the same thing over and over again. Someone would say something to him and he would say, [NON-ENGLISH], which means, is that so? And after a while, there were jokes about his being Mr. [NON-ENGLISH], because that’s all he could say.

ED: Can I stop you right there, Carol? How did the emperor feel about all of this?

CAROL GLUCK: Good question. We don’t really know. But from the sources that we have, it seems that the thing he most didn’t want to happen at the end of the war was for the imperial institution to disappear.

ED: In the new Japanese constitution, which the Americans wrote, he did keep his throne. But Hirohito became a constitutional monarch in a new democracy.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: Emperor became, quote unquote, “the symbol of the state, and the unity of the people.”

CAROL GLUCK: He was no longer divine. He was no longer the head of state. He was no longer commander in chief. He was the symbol of the people.

ED: So Americans were literally transforming the nature of the monarchy in the new constitution?

CAROL GLUCK: The Americans transformed the nature of the imperial institution, absolutely.

ED: American occupying forces also played up the fact that Hirohito was a marine biologist. They wanted him to appear more peaceful, a far cry from the tyrant he had been in the American imagination. By the time of his first State visit to the United States in 1975, most Americans, or at least those born after the war, knew very little about him.

CAROL GLUCK: There was this very famous photograph, which was all over the Japanese papers. And actually, the American papers too, which showed him standing next to Mickey Mouse. And a lot of young people at that time didn’t even know who the emperor was. They only recognized Mickey Mouse.

ED: I think that says more about the American educational system than attitudes towards Royalty, Carol.

CAROL GLUCK: Well, I don’t think so. I think it says something more about how the image of Japan had been changing.

ED: By then, the democratic country had become one of America’s most stalwart allies. But the choice to keep Hirohito on the throne wasn’t without consequence. Millions of Japanese soldiers went to war and died in his name. The Allied powers, including China, and even some Japanese, wanted him held accountable. Hirohito, who died in 1989, never acknowledged his own role in the conflict.

Just as he was guided by his military advisers before the war, and by General MacArthur after the war, Hirohito’s hands were tied. Kawamura says his later attempts to apologize we’re stymied by the Japanese government.

NURIKO KAWAMURA: And he never did. And I think he lived with that heavy feeling until he passed away. That shows the nature of his throne. He could not speak his own mind publicly, as he wanted. And I think it stayed that way until the end of his reign.

ED: Noriko Kawamura helped us tell that story. She’s a historian at Washington State University, and the author of Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War. We also it helps from Columbia University historian Carol Gluck. Her book on the emperor is called Showa, the Japan of Hirohito.

PETER: That’s going to do it for today. But tell us what you thought of the show. And send us your questions for our upcoming episodes on the history of political incorrectness and the Alexander Hamilton phenomenon. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

ED: BackStory is produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Melissa Gismondi helps with research. Special thanks this week to Eric Larson, Adam Brock, and Bob Parsons. BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the [INAUDIBLE] Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onuf is professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

MALE SPEAKER: Backstory is distributed by PRX, a Public Radio Exchange.