[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And a lot of people thought I was a little harsh on Scott. I don't think I was harsh, actually. I don't take it back. I don't take anything back. I said I don't think I was harsh at all. But some people in the comments, even of our podcast, like, oh, I think she went a little harsh on...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Scott, and then I put out that tweet and like right away, not right away, the next day, he, the day we went, he,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] First thing is like, apologies do go like such a long way, right? When David Dobrik said in his apology video that he's gonna personally apologize to people that he's hurt or offended.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the way, did you see Tana commented on my TikTok? I made a TikTok saying like, oh, the time David tried to force me and like my 45 year old boyfriend never threesome with 19. And then she commented on that and she goes, tag yourself. She goes, I'm the 19 year old who's in therapy because of this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you see that? So she obviously had some, you know, trauma from that too. So anyways.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, but he said, I apologize for tricking you. Uhm, he goes, I'm ashamed I made the video.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, it was wrong of him. He's like admitting that he's wrong to question Seth Motive. He said he was coming from a biased perspective.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and he says it took some videos and commentary from you and others to realize the magnitude of my fuck up, which I think is a big thing too because when people have called me out, I don't realize it. Sometimes you don't realize like what you're doing. And I believe that was Scott. I really do think he was just trying to give David points. He was an investor in the apps. He's trying to save face for him. It was so stupid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, yeah, so uhm, so he said he's taking time to reflect, uhm, and then he said he wasn't trying to blame his mental health because my other issue is people blaming like mental health and stuff and saying they're depressed or whatever and then


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, you know, he was really nice, and then he goes, uh, I know, blah, blah, blah. He goes, I know sometimes I can still be an asshole. But this is what he wanted to clarify to you. He said, Ethan-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He said also, so he did this whole thing, he said he was an asshole, but you know, I do accept Scott's apology. I was just triggered a little. I still thought it was very insensitive, but hey, if someone apologizes, like you should try and forgive them and give them another chance. I think this was-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you were confused by the line from his song that says, I live a good life and pretend that it blows.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He still thinks David's a good person so that's questionable but we'll say neutral.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like in his videos, so. Hey, that's cool. You know what? David could be a good person to some people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What's your dinosaur IQ? I'm a pterodactyl.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I am, I can fly. There's a new Jurassic World at Universal, did you go on it yet?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's crazy! It's so insane. It's so not that story. I hate that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Also, I mean, I'm just like, why? Like, I don't know, the whole thing is so weird.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but if he has that blood money from like children and stuff, like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I don't want blood money. You are messing with children. Take that money.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He might have been, if that guy was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If it's that- those kind of ties, don't they sacrifice children and stuff? Like-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, I've seen people do it though, they tip with their arm all the way up there and they take it out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or maybe that's how they give birth. Someone casts a stick up there and they take the baby.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can I also say Elon Musk was not the first autistic person to host SNL? We just have to clarify that. It was, it was Dan Akron.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, we needed your brother the other day. I was adding numbers together. I'm like, I really wish I had Ethan's brother here right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, that's some bullshit. I'd be mad too. We're all the same. We're all autistic here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think I have too many things wrong with me. I don't think I have autism. I don't think you have autism.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What is that? What is it? What is it classified as? Like not a mental illness, but what would it be?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Different. No. But it's the same brain imbalance or something?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can I say something, but I don't want it to come across the fence because it doesn't mean it, but I think it's funny.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I thought it was so cute, when we were doing the- I was watching the Disneyland vlog, and like, your Tourette's was making the little porgy kinda like dance a little.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cause sometimes I talk to myself, but that's like my, you know, voices. So that's why I was like, I don't know if that's offensive, but if someone's like, Hey, Trisha's talking to herself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm down to do more vlogs. I just don't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, thank you guys for watching this episode of Fronimies. We will be back next Tuesday with another new episode. Baby in costume, let us know who we should cosplay next. Don't forget to smash that like button, hit subscribe, turn on the bell notifications so you do not miss us and we are not shadowbanned. Shout out to Philip DeFranco who is now friend of the show and check him out too, Philly D.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Every day? Mhm. So I shouldn't even try, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After frustration with the first protector at parliament, led Oliver Cromwell to prematurely dissolve the body in January 1655. Oh wait, what's that Mr. Lord Protector? It wasn't premature, you just have to go by lunar months? Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After frustration with the first protectorate parliament led Oliver Cromwell to totally legitimately dissolve the body in January 1655, he started to fear that God no longer favored his plans.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And his anxiety was not at all soothed when, over the next few months, he dealt with a royalist uprising in his backyard and a military debacle half a world away. Cromwell had always been God's Englishman. But was he still God's Englishman?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After he had cooled his heels in France for a bit, Charles II commissioned a small cabal of six arch-royalist aristocrats, all but one of whom was the son of a major noble, to cook up, organize, and execute a plot, any plot, to put him on the throne.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This group, dubbed the Sealed Knot, was to have the sole and exclusive right to conspire on the would-be king's behalf.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the problem with the sealed knot was that they never thought the time was right, and very quickly a loose-knit group of more impatient royalists started demanding action.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Conveniently, we get to call those guys the Action Party.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] See, the sealed knot was hoping for a pure uprising of British royalists to restore the monarchy, and were willing to bide their time until the right circumstances presented themselves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Meanwhile, the Action Party was willing to cut deals with just about anyone, the Spanish, the French, disaffected Presbyterians, even levelers, to overthrow the Protectorate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The exiled leveler John Lilburn, for example, actually put out feelers to the action party promising to assassinate the Lord Protector in exchange for 10,000 pounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And though nothing came of it, shared hatred of Cromwell certainly was turning out some strange bedfellows.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By late 1654, even Charles was getting impatient with his official conspirators in the sealed knot, and he started giving the go-ahead to men of the Action Party to organize an uprising in England.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On New Year's Day 1655 though, Cromwell's spymaster John Thurlow, who, man, ran one of the best intelligence networks in history, he was always like 15 steps ahead of everybody, broke up part of the action party's looming plot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, the would-be insurgents decided to go ahead with the planned launch date of February the 6th anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as the date neared, they realized they weren't even close to ready. They pushed it back a week and then pushed it back again to March the 8th.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thurlow meanwhile was busy disrupting their communications, reading their mail, and arresting conspirators pretty much at will.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so yeah, maybe this isn't going to go exactly as planned, but we're still gonna go for it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On March the 8th, royalists in England were supposed to rise en masse to overthrow the hated protectorate and restore their beloved king.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Other rendezvous points outside Chester and Newcastle drew, let's see, fifty men each. The rendezvous at Hull? No one showed up. Nobody.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when the various royalist diehards looked around and noticed that, hey, there's only a couple dozen of us, uh, this is madness, let's bolt before anyone realizes we were even here, they bolted.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At only one point did the uprising pick up any steam, and that is where this uprising, called Penn Ruddick's Uprising, gets its name.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Down outside Salisbury, Sir John Penn Ruddock rallied 180 men and on the night of March the 11th, 1655, they burst into Salisbury and took the sheriff and some judges prisoner.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then they opened up the jails to anyone willing to take up arms.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These prisoner recruits push Pen Ruddick's force to 400 men, and in the morning they all took off west through Dorset and Somerset, calling on local royalists to rise with them. But nobody wanted to have anything to do with it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When it became clear that they were on their own, men started deserting in droves. I imagine the recently freed prisoners were chief among the deserters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On March the 14th, Penn Redux Royalist's quote unquote army was defeated by a single cavalry troop at South Moulton.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now obviously, Penn Redux uprising turned out to be little more than a nuisance. So hey, maybe God is still with me after all. But it did have one critical lasting effect.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thus far, he had been extremely lenient towards them, and had been very sympathetic when his officers complained about the rumps seizing royalist property.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had subsequently gone out of his way to invite as many of them as he could back into society.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But after Penn Ruddock's uprising, he appears to have felt not a little bit betrayed by the extent of its support, even as his spymaster, Thurlow, exposed and arrested most everyone before they became a problem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the uprising set the stage not for a restoration of the monarchy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But for the rule of the major generals and the soon to be despised decimation tax.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But before we get into that, we have to turn our attention briefly to the other side of the world, for one of the few out-and-out boondoggles of Cromwell's career, the so-called Western Design.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After the conclusion of the Anglo-Dutch War, England suddenly found itself, for the first time in a long time, not at war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the years of near constant military conflicts in 1637 had obviously left England with a way bigger and better trained army and a way bigger and better trained navy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which meant that it now had to be reckoned with in the endless power jockeying of the continental powers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cromwell was still ticked off at the French for basically running an undeclared naval war for the last few years and for offering sanctuary to the exiled royal family, and it looked like he was going to sign an agreement with the Spanish. But then the Lord Protector had a change of heart.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most of his advisors favored a French alliance, and at this point in English history it was still the Spanish rather than the French who were considered the great boogeyman of England.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Cromwell elected to turn on Spain and launch a surprise attack on their colonial holdings in the New World.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In early 1655, a plan was put into motion to send the English navy off across the Atlantic to seize the great Spanish colony of Hispaniola, the big island in the Caribbean now split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] John Lambert was vehemently opposed to the plan, and argued that look, this is going to be expensive, there are going to be a ton of casualties, it will distract us from the work we have to do at home, and oh yeah, there is no guarantee it's even going to work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Cromwell, uncharacteristically sinking into a sort of naive sentimentality, shot down Lambert by saying, no, no, it's gonna be great. It'll be just like the good old Elizabethan days when we whip those Spanish dogs but good. It'll be cheap, it'll be easy, and when we take Hispaniola, it'll bring in a ton of cash. But right away, the operation looked doomed to failure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The men selected to go on the expedition were drawn from regiments across England and officers saw it as a good opportunity to get rid of their worst or most obnoxious soldiers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then, when it was time for the fleet to set sail, only about 2500 men had actually been mustered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it'll be fine, we'll pick up reinforcements and Barbados.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But when the fleet got to Barbados, they discovered that the English colonists there were utterly opposed to attacking Espanola because it would disrupt the local Caribbean trade networks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But still, a collection of sullen recruits were pressed into service, bringing the total strength of the army up to about 9,000.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we are now maybe approaching a force large enough to take the island, but by the time they got there everyone had come down with dysentery, and they had to withdraw without so much as firing a shot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By now, the commanders of the expedition were ready to call it a day, and unilaterally decided to abandon the attempt to take Hispaniola and instead sailed off to take Jamaica.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which was only garrisoned by about 500 Spaniards, which is how Jamaica wound up in the British colonial orbit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When the fleet circled back around and came home, though, they were greeted to a severe tongue-lashing by Cromwell for failing to perform their duty, no one yet knowing that Jamaica would turn out to actually be a pretty good get.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Though his public posture was one of anger, privately Cromwell was depressed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was a guy who was a devout believer in a providential god who extended and withdrew his favor as men followed or strayed from the true path.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Since the day he had first mounted a horse, Cromwell's career had been one of unqualified success. He won every battle, he won every war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now he was tasting failure for the first time, and he was not a little bit dismayed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because for him, military failure wasn't just a sign of poor planning or bad tactics. It was a sign of God's disapproval.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So though his next move wasn't solely about trying to get back into God's favor, nor would his next move appear to get him back into God's favor,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it did play a role, because Cromwell did earnestly believe that the moral regeneration of Britain that was supposed to have accompanied Parliament's victory in the Civil Wars was not actually coming to fruition, and maybe needed a firmer hand to see God's will done.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The main thing Cromwell was hoping to accomplish with his next move, though, had less to do with morality and much more to do with security.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in August 1655, he started working up a plan to coordinate local militias with the regular army to strengthen the web of security.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This led him to divide England up into ten, later eleven, military districts, each of which was to be administered directly by one of Cromwell's major generals.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Their orders were to disarm royalists and Catholics, and then force them to produce a 5,000 pound bond to guarantee good behavior.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But though this was the main point, the major generals were given a great deal of latitude over local affairs, especially when it came to the kind of puritanical moral policy, literally puritanical, not just figuratively, that Cromwell hoped would realign the country with God.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Among those policies were bans on horse racing, stage plays, public drunkenness, swearing, and Sabbath breaking.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Basically all the things that make life worth living, and as you can imagine, it did not endear the major generals to anyone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That said, what has become known as the rule of the major generals was never as invasive or tyrannical as later critics charged, especially since they never had the resources to run the kind of oppressive military dictatorship they were allegedly running.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At its height, the administrative arm of the regime only employed about a thousand commissioners, in a country of three million.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On top of that, the major generals themselves were pretty young, most of them were under forty, and relatively low born.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, when it came time to deal with the local lords and sheriffs and justices of the peace, there wasn't a lot of natural deference going around.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Apathetic obstruction seems to have been the order of the day out in the counties.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So though the major generals had no qualms about doing what they could when they could, there was not a lot of opportunity for them to do much beyond keeping the royalists under heel, which they did a pretty good job of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To fund the major general's administrative apparatus, Cromwell devised a tax that was partly punitive, partly preventative, and almost universally unpopular. The so-called decimation tax.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The decimation tax specifically targeted former royalists and said you owe 10 pounds for every 100 pounds of land you own, hence decimation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And a hundred pounds for every fifteen hundred pounds of real property you own.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So first of all, yes, we've done a 180 since the Rump Parliament was dissolved in part because they wouldn't stop confiscating royalist property.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what made the tax really unpopular, even among non-royalists who didn't have to pay for it, was how indiscriminate it was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, if you had been a Cavalier Lieutenant in the first Civil War, but hadn't raised your hand in anger since, you were still targeted for decimation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even the commissioners who were supposed to be collecting the tax hated what they were doing, and exemptions both official and unofficial continually undermined the system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By October 1655, the rule of the major generals was established across England, but it would never be firmly established.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sure, any attempted royalist conspiracies were sniffed out well in advance. This is right around the time when spymaster Thurlow peeled off one of the members of the Sealed Knot to spy for him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But at the end of the day, the major generals had too much to do and too little support to do it, both in terms of their own bureaucracy and cooperation from local leaders.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Plus, they were getting very little support from Cromwell personally, who was absorbed with foreign policy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because the other thing that happened in October 1655 was that England and France signed a treaty.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the war with the Spanish that had been unofficially declared at Hispaniola was now officially declared.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As with the treaty he had negotiated with the Dutch, Cromwell got a secret clause inserted into the treaty with the French wherein they agreed not to offer further asylum to Charles II, his brother James, and 17 others specifically named royalists.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The House of Stuart had to move their exile down to Spain, and if this kept up, they'd soon be holding court in Tangier.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By early 1656 though, it was becoming clear that Cromwell's central government did not have the resources it needed to support the domestic regime of the major generals, nor to prosecute the war with Spain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as we all know, there is only one thing that can legitimately raise the kind of cash Cromwell needed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which put the Lord Protector in exactly the same spot King Charles had been in way back in 1637.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because even though Parliament was the only thing that could get him the kind of money he needed, Oliver Cromwell really, really didn't want to call another Parliament. Oh, the more things change.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even his rationale for not wanting to call a parliament was the same as the King's, because Cromwell at this point had no real fear of crypto-royalists restoring the House of Steward by majority vote.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nah, he was worried about extremists like Arthur Hasselrig going right back to work trying to assert unilateral parliamentary authority over everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cromwell tried to get by as best he could, but by the spring his position was untenable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A meeting of the major generals in May produced uniform complaints about lack of resources, and they advised Cromwell to call another parliament.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Also filed under the More Things Change, they basically offered the same assurances the Earl of Stratford had on the eve of the short parliament.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But don't worry, we'll be able to manipulate and control them into doing what we want.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cromwell considered his options and in late June, finally recognizing that he had to bow to reality, it was announced that elections would be held in August for a new parliament that would meet in September.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Those elections turned out to be pretty heated affairs, with very strong and very clearly unmanipulated attacks being leveled on Cromwell, his government, and most especially the now thoroughly despised major generals.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Though said major generals all managed to secure election to the new parliament, as did all but one of Cromwell's executive councillors,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The returns made it clear that this parliament was going to have a thing or two to say about the direction Cromwell had taken the country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sensing this, the major generals decided to step in, and forget manipulation, let's just blatantly rig the thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Under the terms of the instrument of government, the Executive Council had the right to prevent undesirables from taking their seats in Parliament. And I was supposed to mean Royalists and Catholics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the major general-dominated council decided to stretch that definition to include anyone they happened to deem a threat to the state.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So they took a look at the list of newly elected MPs and went, okay, well, he doesn't like us, and he doesn't like us, and ooh, he really doesn't like us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And by the time they were done they had crossed out just over a hundred names.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then, in a weird bit of I don't even know what, the council didn't tell any of the excluded members they were going to be excluded.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cromwell greeted everyone at Whitehall on September the 17th, 1656, and gave a speech justifying all of his actions, the War with Spain, the rule of the major generals, the decimation tax,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But when the new MPs headed over to Westminster to get down to business,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They found three colonels standing at the door checking to make sure everyone had their pass to enter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, you don't have a pass? Well then I guess you can't come in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's how the 100 excluded members discovered they were going to be excluded.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This little piece of political theater, reminiscent as it was of Pride's Purge, obviously infuriated not just the excluded members, but almost all the MPs, who quite rightly took it as an assault on their sovereignty.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Another 50 odd non-excluded members refuse to take their seats in protest.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So right off the bat, the second protectorate parliament had already lost more than a quarter of its members.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Those who remain decided that they had better just go ahead and conduct the business of state anyway and left it to the excluded members themselves to deal with appealing to the council. Appeals, by the way, that pretty much went nowhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The second protectorate parliament, cleansed as it was now of the most implacable opponents of Cromwell and the major generals, began to ratify the regime's conduct over the past year and nine months.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But when they got to the hated decimation tax in January 1657, things ran off the rails.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because the decimation tax was emphatically rejected.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That left the rule of the major generals without attack space, and the whole apparatus teetering on the brink of collapse.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it was clear to everyone that it needed to be revised and maybe even replaced.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there were a number of people who thought that it needed to be revised in one very specific way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You see, the entire socio-political structure of England was built around this one thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And without that one thing in place, no system of government, no matter how creative, no matter how brilliant, no matter how wise, was ever going to last. There was no getting around it. England needed a king.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On February 23rd, 1657, a bill was introduced into the House called the Humble Petition and Advice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was designed to supersede both the rule of the major generals, which was now fatally discredited, and the instrument of government.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It did things to reform the constitution, like create an upper legislative house, modeled on the House of Lords, who would have 40 to 70 members who would act as a check on the passions of the Commons,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It also took another stab at deciding how executive counselors would be chosen. Make it easier to dump these counselors if they proved obnoxious.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the really big thing, the really controversial thing was Clause 1.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A king would be put back at the centre of England's constitutional system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The humble petition and advice was nothing less than a deadly earnest attempt to turn Oliver Cromwell into King Oliver I.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A few days after the humble petition was read into parliament, John Lambert, his fellow major generals, and about a hundred other officers met with Cromwell and implored him to reject the crown.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lambert was ticked off enough that his beloved instrument was being superseded, but do we really want to go back to monarchy after all we've been through?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Cromwell took their hectoring tone rather badly, and he got mad at them for trying to pressure him into doing what they wanted him to do, not necessarily what he wanted to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He apparently now blamed them for forcing him to dissolve the rump and the first protector at parliament, even though yea, that's not really how it went.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But he was right in taking them to the mat for excluding so many elected members of the second protectorate parliament, which only fed the perception that the army was running amok. He dismissed them all, curtly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From then on, the role of the army as a political power unto itself went into permanent eclipse.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And was probably also the moment John Lambert started down the road to his sad and tragic end.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lambert tried to orchestrate an opposition, but the majority was against him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the humble petition started getting passed, clause by clause.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The explosive question of crowning Oliver Cromwell was left until last, but even then over Lambert's furious objections, it too passed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On March 31st, the package was presented to Cromwell as one single bill.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cromwell accepting the crown was the linchpin of the whole project, and the one thing he was most likely to reject.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By tying it to all the other reforms, reforms that Cromwell himself now believed necessary,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The help that is practical measure, he would acquiesce and become their king.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cromwell received their work with thanks and said, let me think about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Three days later, he called representatives of parliament over to meet with him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And said, look, I've been thinking about it and praying about it, and I love what you've done here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's one or two small things I think you can change, and I will sign it in a heartbeat, but we're gonna have to take out the bit about me becoming king. I'm just not going to do it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The problem was that the two sides were looking at it from completely different perspectives.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Parliament was talking about practical politics, constitutional legality, but Cromwell never even got that far. He couldn't get past his own personal conscience.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He refused the crown not because he thought it was the wrong thing to do for England, but because it was the wrong thing for him to do on a strictly personal level.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The disappointed members return to Westminster with the ball back in their court.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now it was their turn to decide whether or not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After parliament debated for a few more weeks, Cromwell came down and delivered a long speech, the gist of which was that we shouldn't let one or two trifling matters get in the way of accepting the reforms we all agree are necessary.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is hard to tell exactly where Cromwell is mentally at this point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did this speech mean parliament needed to drop the business about making him king?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or was he signaling that he himself was wavering, and that he was starting to consider accepting the crown?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The leaders of the king party in the house certainly became convinced that it was the latter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Parliament had made the few small changes he had requested, but Clause 1 was still sitting there, big as life. The ball was now back in Cromwell's court.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Lord Protector said okay, well let me think about it and I'll get back to you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Interpreting where Cromwell's head was during the next week will probably be debated by historians into eternity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Had he already decided to say no, and was just stalling for political reasons,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Had he decided to say yes, but was about to have his mind changed at the last minute.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lambert said that if Cromwell did so, he wouldn't make a move against his new king, but he would also resign from service.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] God, meanwhile, told Cromwell. Well, that's between God and Cromwell.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On May the 8th, Oliver Cromwell came back and said no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I will gladly support and defend the humble petition and advice, but not as king. I'm not going to do it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So now the ball was back in Parliament's court. But this time, they did not return the volley.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After debating for two weeks, they took a vote and decided that they would accept the humble petition without the cause making Cromwell king.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which means that far from galvanizing record turnout in the House, the crucial debate over whether to make Cromwell King was actually driving members away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Out of a body that was supposed to be 460 strong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If anyone really wanted to take the mood of the public on the issue,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It seems that exhaustion, just exhaustion, was the prevailing emotion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] John Lambert, at this point, could only take small comfort in this victory over monarchy, and he refused to swear an oath to defend the new constitution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The second and last written constitution in English history. Cromwell soon demanded his resignation and got it. But Lambert will be back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The whole drama blessedly closed on March the 25th, 1657, when Cromwell accepted the humble petition and advice as the new governing constitution of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He would remain Lord Protector. There would be no King Oliver I.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Next week is of course Christmas, so we will not be back with a full episode.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, I will hopefully have a stocking stuffer waiting for you on Christmas morning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just a little thing to celebrate the day that if the Puritans had had their way, no one would have ever celebrated ever again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we come back, there will be two more episodes before we close the books on the English Revolution. Then I'm going to take some time to gather up my notes before we zoom forward a hundred years to pick up with the American Revolution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if you want to come see where the Civil War started at Poeck Bridge, and where they ended at Worcester, and where the Putney debates happened and where Rupert got whipped at Marsden Moor, and of course Westminster, where men with guns kept chucking obnoxious MPs out of, go to RevolutionsPodcast.com and click the Tours tab.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, I think that's everything. Happy Saturnalia to you all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As you know, the triumph of parliament over the king in the first civil war put a bunch of Puritans in power.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This bunch of Puritans wasted no time trying to implement a whole series of religious reforms designed to roll back not only Archbishop Laud's recent innovations to the Church of England, but also anything that struck them as an ungodly relic of Catholicism.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And one ungodly relic of Catholicism that had been bugging them for a long time were the big holidays on the religious calendar. Easter, Whitsun, and of course, Christmas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now that they were in a position to do something about it, the Puritans got together in the mid-1640s and decided to try and abolish Christmas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] During the 17th century, Christmas was observed by having everyone take a day off, close up their shops, and head down to church to hear a nice sermon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But beyond that, the people of England also enjoyed the full 12 days of Christmas, an extended period of midwinter festivities celebrated by drinking and dancing and eating delicious pies and more drinking and gift giving and gambling and more drinking.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as much as Puritans didn't like things that smacked of potpourri, they really didn't like things that smacked of a good time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is when I break out H.L. Mencken's famous definition of Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you combine fun and potpourri, well then you've got something that the Puritans would very much like to kill stone dead.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As soon as the king was driven out of London at the start of the first civil war, calls immediately started going out for parliament to stop observing Christmas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But even in London, the heart of the Puritan parliamentary cause, the attempt to abolish this very popular holiday met with open resistance.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 1643, which would be just after the Solemn League and Covenant was signed, some Puritan shopkeepers in the city tried to stay open on Christmas Day, but they were met by a mob of angry apprentices who tried to rabble-rabble them back into closing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Life as an apprentice was hard enough without a bunch of joyless zealots trying to steal one of their few bits of fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the alliance with the Scots meant that the push against Christmas only picked up steam from there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The next year, Christmas coincidentally fell on the same day as a regular monthly fast, and parliament announced that people ought to observe the latter rather than the former.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shortly thereafter, a new directory of worship was published that struck Christmas from the calendar. Not that anyone actually read the new directory of worship.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After the defeat of Charles at Naseby in 1646, the attacks on Christmas intensified further. But again, popular pushback led to confrontations in the street. And again, not from Puritan mobs trying to force merchants to stay open, but from commoner mobs trying to force Puritan shopkeepers to stay closed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it's safe to say that the attempt to abolish Christmas was not exactly the most popular thing parliament ever tried to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The fight over Christmas was actually a big enough deal that there was a running battle in the popular media all through the 1640s about it. By popular media, I mean not just the presses, but also in plays and songs designed to rally commoners to one side or the other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The arguments in favor were about maintaining old traditions and celebrating the birthday of the savior, I mean, what's so bad about that? And noting the good charity work done during the Christmas season.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The arguments against Christmas were that there was no basis for it in scripture, we don't even know if it was Jesus' birthday, and it's rank potpourri.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Opponents of Christmas also started noticing the eerie alignment of Christmas with the Romans' old celebration of Saturnalia.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if you will recall, the second civil war in England was defined by what? A series of popular uprisings scattered across the country, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I didn't talk about this at the time, but the Puritan War on Christmas played a role in sparking those uprisings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With parliament now in control, and the natives getting restless, the attempt to suppress Christmas exacerbated existing tensions and there were riots in Norwich and Ipswich where, and I'm just gonna pass this along since it was reported at the time, though who knows if it was actually true, a guy named Christmas was actually killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In London, the Lord Mayor and his deputies attempted to remove some public decorations and they were met by an angry mob.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But by far the biggest uprising was down in Canterbury, ancient home of England's senior archbishop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Puritans on the county council outlawed any celebration of quote, that darling of rude and licentious behavior called Christmas, unquote.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the locals were really not on board with this, and they gathered for their Christmas sermon anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Things quickly got out of hand, no doubt partly due to the fact that someone started giving away free beer to anyone who set up a holly bush outside their front door.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The mayor's house was attacked, the crowd started chanting pro-royalist slogans, and by the end of the day the rioters actually controlled the city government.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Troops had to be called in to reassert parliamentary command of the city.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this was, of course, all a prelude to the uprisings that were about to sweep England, especially in the eastern counties, and sparked the Second Civil War.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So obviously there is more going on here than just a deeply felt attachment to Christmas. But parliament was not doing itself any favors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Christmas Riots of 1647 turned out to be the most vocal and violent pushback.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And during the Commonwealth era, both sides settled into a kind of stalemate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 1650, the Council of State recommended increasing penalties for those who observed Christmas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 1652, the Rump ordered shops to stay open and businesses to be protected from street mobs. In 1656, the second protectorate parliament met on Christmas Day to debate a bill on how to stop celebrations in London. And the next year, they recommended to the mayor of London that he do a better job policing the holiday. All of which tells us two things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] First, there was an active group in government who really, really wanted to do away with Christmas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] An ironic result of this stalemate was that it wound up promoting exactly the kind of drunken merrymaking that the Puritans were so fundamentally opposed to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You see, it was a pretty simple thing to make sure that the churches were closed so no one could go down and hear a Christmas sermon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the churches would be locked up, and all the shops would be locked up. So what were you supposed to do? Well, I can tell you, the taverns are open.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Come the restoration, Christmas was restored to its place along with the monarchy, and it has stayed there ever since.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People can adapt to all kinds of change, big and small, temporary and permanent, but just seriously, don't mess with the holidays unless you want a riot on your hands.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Martin London was an attorney at a prestigious white shoe New York City law firm called Paul Weiss. London had recently wrapped up a high profile case representing Jackie Kennedy, a former first lady at the United States.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But in the summer of 1973, along with the rest of the country, Marty London was busy following every development of the rapidly unfolding Watergate saga.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One afternoon that frantic summer of Watergate, Marty London's law partner got a phone call from an unknown number in Washington D.C.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That caller presented Marty London and his law partner, Jay Topkis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With a cryptic offer about a mystery client who needed representation fast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was early August. Marty London and his law partner hopped on a flight from New York City down to Washington DC to sit down with their new client, the vice president.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The reason Vice President Spiro Agnew needed to beef up his legal team and on very short notice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And now the vice president was the subject of a criminal bribery and extortion investigation of his own.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Agnew's own staff, including top aides like David Keene, they had no idea it had been going on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The press, which had been working the Watergate story all summer long.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They now had this giant news scandal and they were instantly all over it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's Ron Liebman, one of the prosecutors who had been quietly pursuing the case.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All of this press attention that was now being paid to this team of Baltimore investigators.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was partly because this was a giant case. They had broken open a bribery scandal involving the sitting vice president.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the other reason they were the focus of so much attention at the time is because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The target of that investigation, the Vice President, had decided that his defense would be about them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His defense would be that there was this biased and partisan group of investigators who were unfairly persecuting him from inside his own justice department for their own treacherous reasons.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Spiro Agnew, with his back against the wall, with the investigation of him now public.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He started attacking that investigation as a witch hunt.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As a witch hunt led by politically motivated, biased, bad actors inside the Justice Department.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was something new in American politics, a sitting occupant of the White House under criminal investigation, trying to save himself by declaring war on his own justice department. You're listening to Batman. I'm your host, Rachel Maddow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The 1970s Republican Party was a big tent political party. It was the Barry Goldwater libertarian Republicans of the 60s. It was right-wing conservatives who would later make up the Reagan Revolution. There were moderate and liberal Republicans.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But none of those ideological slivers of the party had a monopoly on the energy and the legwork that it takes to really get stuff done in politics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Inside the Republican party, everybody knew who the real activists were, the real soldiers who really got stuff done. Republican women.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's David Keene again. He was the top political aide for Vice President Agnew in 1973.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that fall, when Agni was looking for a place to mount his big public defense against the investigation into him, when he was looking for friendly territory,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] David Keene knew there was no better place than an event that was about to pop up on the political calendar.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The annual convention of the National Federation of Republican Women.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The National Federation of Republican Women held their convention in Los Angeles that fall of 1973.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the fall of 73, Spiro Agnew was fighting for his political life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Agnew now had lawyers like Marty London who were fighting his battles in court. But Agnew himself had devised a very specific PR strategy for his own survival.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A full frontal assault on the Justice Department that was investigating him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Attack the investigators in order to discredit the investigation. And that gathering of Republican women in Los Angeles


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That would be his venue for launching that public attack.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you want to get a sense for how the hardcore Republican base felt about Spiro Agnew, even when he was in the worst legal trouble of his life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These Republican women activists were holding homemade signs that said, Spiro is my hero.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some women approached newsmen ready for a fight. Several women took notes or tape recorded Agnew's speech themselves so they could report on it when they returned home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A precaution they said in case the papers did not tell the entire story.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was a crowd that was angry at the press and they had full faith in the man they were there to see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And what Spiro Agnew unleashed in that packed convention hall was an all out attack on the justice department.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The likes of which nobody had really seen before in US politics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The vice president there was calling his own justice department malicious and out of control.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And with that crowd of Republican women hanging on his every word.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He then started targeting specific officials inside the justice department, including the head of the criminal division who was directly involved in his case.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, keep in mind, Richard Nixon, who at this point was neck deep in Watergate trouble, he had not even taken the pretty extraordinary step of attacking his Justice Department. At least, not in public, not like this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But here was the vice president at a Republican rally, accusing officials in the justice department of professional misconduct, accusing the investigators of leaking information about him to the press, pledging to seek out bad actors participating in the investigation to have them purged from the department.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The strategy here wasn't to challenge the specific and credible allegations of wrongdoing that were now public.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was a strategy to smear the investigators who were looking into him, to smear them as biased and corrupt, to accuse them of leading a witch hunt against him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was a strategy specifically to convince the Republican base, the party activists in that crowd, and Republicans watching at home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After that speech, Agnew started receiving hundreds of letters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From supporters all across the country. There are boxes and boxes of these letters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dear Mr. Vice President, we believe in your innocence. Give him hell. The press and the liberals are out to get you and all conservatives.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One school teacher from Colorado wrote to him, quote, I'm sick of what the media and the Democrats are doing. They lost and they can't take it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who actually responded to that one? He wrote back, Dear Mr. Taylor, thank you for your very kind letter and for your excellent advice. Warm regards.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Again, the allegations that were public at that point were that Agnew had been illegally extorting people throughout his time in public office, up to and including accepting cash payoffs throughout his time in the White House.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they didn't just write letters to Spiro Agnew about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, also started getting these letters. But his were just bins and bins and bins full of hate mail.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Quote, I hope you and all your smart justice department lawyers are pleased, one woman wrote to him. I feel you have done a great wrong to this nation and one day you are going to have to pay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I believe there is deliberate malice from the liberal news media and also from politicians who fear Mr. Agnew's appeal to the average American.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Agnew was defending himself, not by attacking the actual case against him, but by attacking the institution of the Department of Justice and the specific people bringing the case against him. These three young prosecutors who had led the case against Agnew, Tim Baker, Ron Liebman, Barney Skolnick, they were all now fair game. Here's Tim Baker.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By going after the investigators. That was the first part of Agnew's strategy. Agnew's legal team had something else up their sleeves. That's next.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Once the investigation of Spiro Agnew went public in the summer of 1973, something started happening in the coverage of the scandal that the Vice President's lawyers quickly tried to turn to their advantage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They noticed that some articles about the investigation seem to contain lots and lots of very specific details about the case. Details that were supplied to reporters by anonymous sources. Here's Agnew's defense lawyer, Marty London.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Agnew's public defense at that point was to portray the Justice Department as corrupt, portray the media as out to get him,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All of these leaks to the press? This was a golden opportunity for Agnew's lawyers to nail both of those targets at once. The Justice Department for leaking, and the horrible press for publishing those leaks without named sources.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With that two birds, one stone idea as their basic strategy, Agni's legal team decided they would pursue the leaks about the case in court. They came up with a fairly radical plan to try to prove that the Justice Department was the source of those leaks to the press.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Their plan was to put individual news reporters under oath.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And try to force them to testify about their sources.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Agnew already had a well-earned reputation for being hostile to the press.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well now his lawyers would try to turn that into legal strategy too. Question was, would the court go along with it?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Marty London's request to the judge, his demand to the judge was pretty extraordinary.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Agnew's legal team was trying to change the story, so it was no longer about the alleged criminal activity of the vice president.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was instead about criminal misconduct on the part of these investigators.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Marty London got that judge to sign off on this order, to haul in news reporters and put them under oath.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then he sent out a raft of subpoenas to reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, nine reporters in all from the biggest news outlets in the country demanding their testimony.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This strategy from the Agnew legal team turned into a bit of a circus, but that was by design.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It put all sorts of pressure on the Justice Department about these supposed leaks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They got completely sideways defending themselves over these subpoenas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the American press corps was now under attack by the vice president and his lawyers. Rather gleefully.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was a maximum pressure campaign that Agnew's lawyers launched against the Justice Department and these individual prosecutors, all to try to put them on the defensive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And to this day, Agnew's lawyers believe, Marty London believes, that this pressure worked.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Prosecutors themselves, like Tim Baker, they still bristle at that idea. The first voice you'll hear is producer Mike Jarvitz.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Whether they had leaked anything or not, this was a strategy. The vice president was trying to save himself by targeting the press and by targeting these prosecutors and dragging them through the mud. And the prosecutors couldn't publicly defend themselves. Instead, they reacted to that strategy from Agnew.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By doubling down on what they could do. By doubling down on their case.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For all of that noise and distraction that Agnew brought to bear on this investigation and against the prosecutors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It didn't just come from him and his lawyers. He had political backup.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A whole army of Republicans in Congress who are about to rush to his defense.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Republicans in Congress knew in 1973, when their own vice president got in serious trouble, that it was in their own best interest to try to save him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they also knew that Spiro Agnew still had the Republican base wrapped around his finger, regardless of the allegations against him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was David Keene's job to rally Republican support for Agnew in Congress.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rather than turning against him or waiting for the investigation to play out, Republicans in Congress rushed to give him as much cover as they could. They adopted his line that he was the victim of a witch hunt.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even the discussion that Agnew might need to go, even talking about that possibility.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the words of that Republican Senator, that was damaging to the country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Republicans in Congress went after alleged leaks in the case. They went after the news media for reporting the leaks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona talking about a lesser member of the Attorney General's office.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He'd later say, I don't give a damn if Agnew is as guilty as John Dillinger.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In his view, Agnew was getting railroaded, railroaded by the press and by the Justice Department.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was the way Republicans talked about this case. This was Republican Senator Carl Curtis from Nebraska.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Spiro Agnew and his public campaign to beat back the allegations against him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had backup. Elected Republicans coming to his defense, publicly casting doubt on the investigation, attacking and disparaging the investigators.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Two House Republicans even traveled over to the White House one afternoon that fall to personally deliver to Agnew.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A giant physical display of support from his fellow Republicans. It was a larger than life card signed by 100 Republicans in Congress.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The image on the front of the card was a cat, barely clinging to a tree branch by its claws.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Republicans in Congress had taken sides. They were firmly behind their vice president, even though he was under criminal investigation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What those Republicans didn't know at the time, though, what only a handful of people inside the White House knew.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was that Spiro Agni wasn't just counting on vocal support from the Republican base and vocal support from Republicans in Congress. He also had a private plan. He was undertaking an elaborate behind the scenes effort.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To obstruct the investigation. To try to shut the investigation down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was an effort to use his political power from his position inside the White House to make the investigation go away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It involved enlisting the help of Richard Nixon's inner circle. People like White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It also included the assistance of President Richard Nixon himself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The investigators themselves had no idea that any of this was going on at the time. They're about to hear it here for the first time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That part of the story is next time. I'm Rachel Maddow, and this is Bagman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bagman is a production of MSNBC and NBCUniversal. This series is executive produced by Mike Jarvitz. It was written by myself and Mike Jarvitz. Editorial and production support from Jonathan Hirsch and Marissa Schneiderman from Neon Hum Media.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you can find much more about this story on our website, which is msnbc.com slash bagman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The pressure was get the guy out of the vice presidency. That was always the pressure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Next up to bat is Dominic D'Angeles. He had to come at me on Twitter, said that I was the, uh, worst person he's ever met in LA. So let me tell you about the day I met him. So, before I met him, he played a game of Smash or Pass publicly on YouTube.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when my picture came up, he dehumanized me and demeaned me. You know, like a misogynistic, disgusting piece of shit who acts as if he could have a chance with me anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because you didn't know me, right? Despite the fact that I have years of text messages saved between us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've come across in some stories that we came across, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're all these personal piccadellas, you know, they have money and power and they do stupid things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we came across financial evidence of that and we heard some stories about that. One of them quite bizarre, but we, that wasn't part of the case.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What we were concerned was, he, you know, he gets into court and he says, wait a minute, I've changed my mind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Attorney General of the United States, and Henry Peterson, I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Drive to Baltimore in the middle of the night, early in the morning, and sit in George Bell's office as we start feeding him these papers, which was extraordinary. This is the Attorney General of the United States at two in the morning in Baltimore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was a big issue for all of us, all of us, because what we certainly couldn't allow to happen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] would be for the vice president to plead nuller to a tax count and then to walk out and say


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is absolutely, these guys are liars, I made a little mistake on my tax returns, I have made amends, I'm going to pay back the money that I should have paid, and I'm going back to work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The bailiff makes an announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, proceedings about ready to begin.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This courtroom is going to be locked, so if you can't stay, you have to get out, you have to leave now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What we were concerned was he, you know, he gets into court and he says, wait a minute, I changed my mind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are bogus charges. I don't know why I'm here. I'm the Vice President of the United States. I'm immune from prosecution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Marshall, could you unlock that door, please? I gotta go. You know, we're dealing with the Vice President of the United States. We are being as careful as we can be. We're on tenterhooks, right? We want this done just so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everybody rises, everybody sits down, and there's, you know, Spiro Agno, in his well-tailored suit, and his nice haircut, about to plead no-look contendry to a felony.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That if I attempted to say anything, if I stood up, if I did anything at all,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There were two big marshals behind me, and they would immediately take me out of the courtroom. And I was told in very strong language, don't stand, don't say anything, don't try to have any role.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, they said to me, Professor Banceff, if somebody robs a bank...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he's given a plea deal, he's at least required to give back the money.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Agnew, as a governor and vice president, should be held to an even higher standard. They were outraged that he was allowed to get off on a minor plea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we left, we were literally bewildered. I recall riding back in the car and the students are saying, why didn't they bring it? We don't understand, what's going on? And I'm their professor who's supposed to know these things and of course I had no answer for them. I could not figure out


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we learned that, uh, Governor Marvin Mandel was likewise on the take, and was probably on the take literally while he was deciding not to bring this action.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Harry's. As you know, Harry's founders were fed up with overpaying for expensive razors with unnecessary features. They knew a great shave comes down to great blades, made with sharp, durable steel that lasts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's why they bought a factory that's been making some of the highest quality blades in the world for over 95 years. And by selling directly to you over the internet, Harry's can offer their blades at a price much lower than the leading brand, just $2 a blade compared to $4 or more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I miss his revolutions and I both continue to use our Harry's razors. We love the closeness of the shave and the look and feel of the handles. And for me, the precision trim blade is great for cleaning up my hairline every time I shave my head.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now Harry stands behind the quality of their blades, but they know that switching razors isn't an easy decision. So they created a trial offer. You get a $13 value trial set that comes with everything you need for a close, comfortable shave. Weighted ergonomic handle, 5 blade razor with lubricating strip and a trimmer blade,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lathering shave gel and a travel blade cover. If you don't love your shave, let Harry's know within 30 days and they'll give you a full refund.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Porfirio Diaz was born in Oaxaca on September the 15th, 1830. He was of Mestizo descent, because though his father was a white Spaniard, his maternal grandmother was an indigenous woman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dias made no secret of his mestizo heritage, and occasionally used it to his political advantage, though later in life there were plenty of rumors that he used various powders to whiten his skin. Because remember, even though the caste system is officially abolished, the unofficial caste system remained.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Díaz went off to school at the age of 15 in 1846 with the intention of joining the priesthood. But the arrival of the Mexican-American War led him to join a local militia unit composed of fellow students, and from that point on, he aimed himself towards war and politics, not religion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After the Mexican-American War, Díaz entered law school at the Secular Institute of Arts and Sciences, and he joined the ranks of the Oaxaca liberals, currently led by Benito Juárez.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When Santa Anna staged his latest dictatorial coup in 1853, a coup that, as we saw last week, sent Benito Juarez into exile, the 23-year-old Porfirio Díaz took to the mountains.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When the revolutionary plan of Ayutla was declared, Dias joined the army of Juan Alvarez and fought in the guerrilla campaigns that ultimately ousted Santa Ana from power a few years later.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After that liberal victory, Dias temporarily enjoyed political posts in Oaxaca, before heading back out into the field to help fight in the Reform War, which lasted from 1858 to 1860.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then of course right on the heels of that liberal victory comes the French invasion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it was in the war against the French that Dias catapulted into the national spotlight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was the hero of the famous Battle of Puebla on May the 5th, 1863. He personally led the cavalry charge that broke the French and sent them back down to the coast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But of course that battle did not end the war, and so Dias spent the next four years fighting the French and their conservative allies, and in so doing became something of a folk hero. He won tons of battles and was twice captured in the field, only to twice stage a daring escape.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the end of the war, he was a general leading the liberal army of the East, and when the liberals finally captured Mexico City, Porfirio Diaz was a national hero.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Always politically ambitious, Díaz tested the waters of his fame by entering into the subsequent presidential election of 1867. But Benito Juárez was easily elected after having spent the past five years as head of the patriotic government in exile.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, Dias retired to Oaxaca to tend to the great big oceanda he had been given as a reward for his service.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the election of 1871 stirred Diaz back to politics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] President Juarez announced that he would be seeking reelection, which did not sit well with many of his liberal comrades and allies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After all, Juarez had basically been president since the beginning of the reform war, way back in 1858. And liberal ideology was opposed to men just holding executive power indefinitely, especially now that there was no wartime emergency to keep him in power. But Juarez showed no interest in giving up his power.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, Porfirio Díaz rechristened himself the champion of the cause of no re-election. And he stood for the presidency in 1871. But Juárez defeated him again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This time though, there was a flurry of charges of electoral fraud.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Diaz challenged the results. But when Juarez's victory was confirmed by the National Congress in October of 1871, Diaz and his allies declared themselves in rebellion. They declared the plan of La Noria. The rallying cry was no re-election.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the revolt did not really ever get off the ground.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dias' forces did not fare well in skirmishes with the army in the spring of 1872.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the whole thing became moot on July the 9th, 1872 when Benito Juarez died in office.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With Juarez dead, the president of the Supreme Court, guy named Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, succeeded to the presidency and offered amnesty to all the rebels. Juarez was dead. The threat of perpetual tyranny was over.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, Diaz took Lerto up on the amnesty offer and went home again to Oaxaca.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This retirement lasted until the election of 1876, when President Lerdo announced that he would now be seeking re-election. So this re-activated the slogan of no re-election and reactivated its most famous standard-bearer, the now 46-year-old Porfirio Diaz.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Having learned from the failure of his Noria rebellion, Dias this time made sure his rebellion was better armed and better financed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in late 1875, Dias first went to New Orleans, then New York, then Brownsville, Texas, to line up foreign support for his revolution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Specifically, Diaz presented his case to a clique of American bankers and landowners who had a great deal of interest in expanding their businesses into Mexico.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Diaz's pitch was that President Lerto's economic worldview was far more protectionist and nationalist, especially with regard to the expansionist threat posed by the United States.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lerdo said, for example, that it was wise to keep a desert between the strong and the weak. And he meant that literally. He had recently cancelled a bunch of railroad contracts with American businessmen that would have connected Mexico City to Texas through the vast empty desert lands of northern Mexico.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Diaz not only promised to reinstate those railroad contracts, he also made it clear that he believed American investment in Mexico should not just be allowed, but encouraged.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With the American financiers sensing a golden opportunity to tap into Mexico, they provided Diaz hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, as well as rifles, bullets, mules, and other supplies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In January of 1876, the rebellious Plan of Tuxtepec was proclaimed. It denounced President Lerto and affirmed the rebels' commitment to the principle of no re-election.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now despite this rebellion, the election of 1876 proceeded and Lerdo won. But he was already isolated and unable to obtain any foreign assistance. All of that assistance was now going to Dias.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On November the 16th, 1876, Dias' rebel forces won a small but decisive battle when Dias' trusty comrade, Manuel Gonzalez, arrived with reinforcements in the nick of time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lerto was forced to go into exile, and Diaz marched into Mexico City.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He briefly assumed the presidency before handing it off to a provisional successor in preparation for new elections that would be held in 1877.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When those elections were held, Diaz won in a landslide.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now the ascension of Porfirio Díaz to the presidency, achieved by way of an armed rebellion, was merely another in a long line of caudillos ascending to the presidency after an armed rebellion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But unbeknownst to anyone at the time, this was going to be the last time that that happened for 35 years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now there was no real reason to think in 1877 that this guy Díaz is actually going to rule Mexico for an entire generation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nothing in Mexican history or Díaz's biography so much as hinted at that possibility. But it happened.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, ironically enough, one of the first things he did was insert an amendment into the Constitution of 1877 that forbid re-election to the presidency.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this seemed to confirm that he had in fact been fighting for that liberal abstract principle rather than his own personal aggrandizement.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this bought Dias some time and some goodwill, as it convinced potentially rebellious rivals that in a couple years Dias would be gone and they would have their chance to rule.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Potential rivals thus lulled into a false sense of security. Dias then revealed himself to be an incredibly adept politician.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Though he had emerged onto the scene as a liberal partisan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] President Diaz did not seem to have any real partisan edge at all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rare among political leaders, he was absolutely eager to bury as many hatchets as he could find.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you had once been his rival or his enemy and were now willing to listen to reason, Dias could be extremely accommodating.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As most Caudillo challenges to a central government come from a regional base of power, Díaz went out of his way to confirm and back up those existing regional power structures. So rather than try to supplant your family with somebody more overtly loyal, Díaz would let you be governor and keep control of patronage inside your state. He much preferred compromise to confrontation,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this non-ideological cultivation of former rivals and potential enemies not only blurred the lines between liberal and conservative, but it also ended the long conflict between federalists and centralists that had helped define Mexican politics for the last 50 years. The victory was for the centralists.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From this point on, Mexico would always have a strong central government run by a strong executive branch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But this triumph of centralism was secured because Dias intentionally did not antagonize local leaders.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As I just said, he basically arranged a deal that said, I won't challenge you if you don't challenge me. And he did that with many powerful families in many of the several states.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what developed initially here was a hybrid of centralism and federalism, a kind of feudal power structure, where the local powerful families pledged personal loyalty to Dias, right, fealty to the king, as long as the king did not presume too much. And Dias never did presume too much.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Candidate lists and political appointments for the national legislature or local office or state office were always drawn up in collaboration with state leaders. And of course it went without saying that Dias never interfered with a family's economic activity. Your profits were your business. But there was another side to this equation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the enduring quips during the Porfiriato was that Don Porfirio offered you pan o palo.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, he was willing to give you what you wanted. A plum job, control of the state house, fat salary. He'd look the other way when you skimmed money. He would give you lots of latitude in your conduct, of your own affairs. He would make sure that your local rivals stayed in their place. You could have all that. That was the bread.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But if you refuse the bread, you got the stick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as the years went on and the regime became ever more permanent and entrenched, sedition was dealt with swiftly and harshly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] An attempt at rebellion did pop up over the years. Sometimes an ambitious general, more often rebellions of indigenous tribes, particularly up in Sonora.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The stick was deployed up to and including arbitrary arrest and summary execution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, Díaz was never quite as bloody-minded as other Spanish-American dictators, but when Díaz indicated that he wanted some particular bunch of troublemakers dealt with quote-unquote severely, everybody knew what that meant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So given the choice between the bread or the stick, between getting fat and rich or poor and dead, most chose fat and rich.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But this piece was about much more than just securing his own power.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It also allowed him to begin an aggressive courtship of American capital


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As soon as he took over the presidency in 1877, he went about trying to fulfill the promises he had made in Brownsville, so that his American backers would turn around and report to Washington DC that this new Dias regime, illegitimate in its birth, ought to be recognized in its infancy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he prioritized both securing peace on the border of the southern Rio Grande River and paying off a $300,000 debt to the Americans that had been lingering since the post-Mexican-American war settlements.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After a tense period where the New Hays administration was making noise about possible intervention south of the border,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] American business interests prevailed, and in 1878 the Americans formally recognized Dias' government.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, the easiest way to sum up Diaz's policy here in the early going is that he is about to sell Mexico out to the Americans. And it's true that when Diaz came to power, foreigners, especially Americans, came flooding into Mexico.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that doesn't really capture the complexity of the situation, nor the delicate balancing act that Díaz was trying to pull off. He really did believe that Mexican prosperity tomorrow could only be achieved through American investment today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He and his inner circle believed that they were about to oversee a necessary transition period. That foreign capital and technology and expertise were going to be required to modernize Mexico.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, when the time was ripe, Mexico would move out of this transitional phase and start to promote local priorities and national sovereignty.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dias was also kind of a cynical realist, and he believed that the Americans would be coming no matter what, so may as well welcome them with open arms, rather than try to defy them, and invite also the American army.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, Dias is not just some American dupe here. He's also the guy who's famous for saying, Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So with its eyes mostly wide open, the Porfirian government actively promoted Mexico as a land of golden opportunity. Natural resources everywhere, and a government that would do anything to protect businesses that chose to invest their money.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Indeed, far from some laissez-faire free for all, one of the ways Diaz was able to promote foreign investment


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was often by promising to make the investors into whatever sector of the economy we're talking about de facto monopolists. They would be protected from competition both international and domestic with various taxes and tariffs that would be imposed on their rivals.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dias was also happy to use the army or law enforcement to prioritize the protection of some company. He would appoint judges to man the courts who were almost uniformly pro-business.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Diaz made protecting foreign investors and their profits a top priority. They got low taxes, they got all kinds of concessions, they got ready access to cheap labor, police protection for work sites and their headquarters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there was a line, not entirely undeserved, that Porfirio Diaz was the mother of foreigners, but only the stepmother of Mexicans.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This aggressive cultivation of foreign investment during the Porfiriato led to an economic boom.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the most visible symbol of that boom, so much of a visible symbol that it's all but synonymous with the Porfiriato, was railroads.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Crummy lines of transportation and communication had been the bane of both the viceroyalty of New Spain and independent Mexico. Inattention to infrastructure and the perils of Mexican geography meant that when Díaz first took office, most people still traveled long distances on foot or by donkey.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But with the railroads taking off in Europe and the United States, Díaz and his inner circle believed that Mexico could vault into the modern world and conquer its own internal infrastructure failings by building railroads to and from everywhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So President Diaz quickly approved concessions to American companies to start building north-south railroads that would link the United States to central Mexico. And then also, hopefully require them to build east-west lines that would link key cities and ports to each other. Soon, railroads were crisscrossing the country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when he came into office, there was one single line that had recently been completed linking Vera Cruz to Mexico City. That was it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And on the eve of the revolution in 1910, nearly 20,000 kilometers of railroad had been laid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But controversially, these lines were laid by foreign companies who were in this for their own personal profit, not the profit or advancement of Mexico.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as we'll discuss at the end of today's episode, even Dias was aware of how dangerous that was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The other huge explosion in foreign investment was in the mines.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As we discussed last week, silver production had cratered after independence, but it was now going to make a comeback.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was thanks in part to the development of a new extraction process that used cyanide rather than mercury. But it was also because foreign companies were able to make large capital investments that the Mexicans themselves had never been able to make. So silver was once again, soon, one of Mexico's principal exports.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But with the second industrial revolution taking off in Europe and in the United States, it now wasn't just silver that was being mined. There was a variety of industrial metals that were now in demand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Copper, top that list, but also base metals like lead and zinc.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The possibility of making a fortune extracting Mexican minerals attracted lots of American and also British investment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this was helped along by laws passed in the 1880s that for the first time allowed for direct foreign ownership of land, eliminating the trouble of having to start up a front company with Mexican partners.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was followed up a few years later by what became an incredibly controversial and widely despised law.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Previously, the ownership of land had never technically extended to subsurface resources which were always owned by the nation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But in 1892, the Congress passed a law allowing for direct ownership of those subsurface resources, meaning that foreign owners could now technically own outright Mexico's mineral wealth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So yeaah, the mines were booming and cranking out more metal than ever, but to whose benefit?