Robert Evans and Ty dissect the racist origins of Celestial Seasonings, tracing them to William Samuel Sadler, a Seventh-day Adventist psychiatrist who championed eugenics and Madison Grant's "The Passing of a Great Race." They expose Sadler's pseudoscientific racial hierarchies, his advocacy for WWI intervention, and his debunked theories on head shape, alongside Lothrop Stoddard's endorsed immigration restrictions. The hosts reveal how these white supremacist ideologies, once mainstream in the 1920s, eventually morphed into the commercial herbal tea brand, challenging listeners to recognize the dark cultural roots hidden behind a soothing cup of tea. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:52
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Grego Lesbi and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Woodman.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
What's infected?
Statistically, roughly half of the audience.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards.
It's a podcast.
Bad people tell you all about them.
Our guest today is Ty, better known as Hey Shady Lady from the Boss LVL podcast, a Twitch streamer and a YouTuber.
The Cum Obsession Mystery00:15:50
How are you doing, Ty?
I'm doing absolutely wonderful.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Now, Ty, you're a friend of our head of audio engineering here at CoolZone Media, Daniel Goodman.
Today, before we start the podcast, let's each tell a secret about Daniel.
He is very handsome.
Not many people know this.
That's a very sweet secret.
It's a well-kept secret.
He murdered a man in Barstow in 1998.
I was going to go with a story that our other editor, Ian, told us about Daniel in high school, but then I don't want Daniel to hate me.
So I won't.
So I won't.
But just know, Daniel, if you're listening to this, I fucking know what happened.
Now that I dropped that shit about Barstow, he's going to be on the run from the Marshalls.
So you can say whatever you want.
Oh, my God.
There's a podcast.
Great.
Thanks.
How do you feel about tea?
Just like the drinking tea?
The beverage.
Yeah.
Are you a tea drinker?
I'm quite a fan.
Yes, yes.
I have a feeling here about it.
Do you scar me?
Do you have tea in your house right now?
Yes.
Yes, I have some black tea.
I've got a bunch of a whole whatever the word is I'm looking for of herbal teas.
Okay, I'm a tea fan.
Would you do me a favor?
We can cut some of this for time, but would you go look at the herbal teas and tell me who makes the herbal teas that you have?
Let me grab the box.
Yeah.
I'm an overachiever.
Okay.
Oh my God.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
That's a collection.
All right.
Traditional medicinals.
It's a ginger aid healthy digestive tree.
I got puka, a three-mint organic tea.
And then another traditional medicinals, breathe easy, respiratory health tea.
Now, are any of those...
Okay.
Okay, so none of those...
Ah, darn.
None of those are celestial seasonings.
I have actually deep dived celestial seasonings before, and I always side-eye it because I'm like, isn't this some cult shit?
Oh, you have stumbled upon what we're doing today.
Yes, indeed.
Yes, indeed.
It's some cult shit.
And today we're going to talk about the cult behind Celestial Seasonings tea.
Most of the episode is going to be, most of this is going to be way, way deep background.
We're basically spending two hours talking about the backstory of the most popular herbal tea in the world.
I used to drink Celestial Seasonings like almost religiously because they have a great sleepy time season.
Yeah, their sleepy time tea is the best-selling tea in the world, I think.
Yes.
It's extremely successful, certainly in the U.S.
But we're talking about the backstory to Celestial Seasonings Sleepy Time Tea.
And it starts with a man named William Samuel Sadler.
William Sadler was born on June 24th, 1875 in Spencer, Indiana, or June 14th, 1875.
I found a couple of different claims.
It doesn't really matter which.
His father was named Samuel and his mother was named Isabel.
They were descendants from English and Irish immigrants.
His mother was terrified that he would catch an illness at public school with the other kids, so they simply chose not to enroll him in school, which is, you know, a good call in 1875.
What?
You're not losing anything.
School was a disaster back then.
So he's the oldest of what would eventually be three children.
His two younger siblings were twin sisters, one of whom died basically immediately.
Sadler's father was a music tutor and traveled around different towns.
He also ran a chain of general stores.
So William grew up with money and access to financial resources despite his lack of a formal education.
The family was not initially religious.
Will's father was far too pragmatic for religion.
His mother, though, was a seeker, and she joined a Christian church secretly behind his back.
She worshipped as a stealth Seventh-day Adventist for some time.
We should talk a little bit about the Adventists.
Is that the official title, the stealth?
Yeah, yeah.
She was like secret.
Yeah.
She's like fucking, she's like doing undercover.
This is some ninja Christianity.
Yeah, okay.
Secretly worshiping on Saturdays and all that good shit.
Yeah.
The Seventh-day Adventists are like a weird little Christian cult.
We had a couple of them that come out in the United States.
They start as an apocalypse cult and then the apocalypse doesn't happen, but they just keep right on going.
And yeah, they're still around today.
They, you know, she's a secret Seventh-day Adventist.
And for a while, she's just hiding it.
And then William's younger sister dies.
And once dad and everyone else is really sad, mom's like, it's the time.
I'm going to get everybody fucking pilled on Adventism.
And the whole family converts when they're sad.
So there you go.
It's good.
It's like an opportunistic infection.
So, Samuel gets so taken with the faith that he decides to take up a new job and becomes a Bible salesman, which you used to be able to make money being a Bible salesman.
Now, that actually makes like no sense to me.
I can't imagine in 1875, there's fucking anybody who doesn't have a Bible, but yeah, maybe their old Bibles get eaten by mice or something.
These could be like new fancy ones too with like update.
I'm sure if they've got like nice covers, yeah, 40 pages of extra Jesus.
Um, now I have found very little detail on Sadler's early life.
Uh, most of much of what we have comes in bits and pieces through the dozens of books he would, spoilers, author later in his life.
Um, the excellent book God Talk by spiritual tourist Brad Gooch, which my God, what a title and name.
Yeah, Brad Gooch.
It's a good book, but what a ridiculous name.
Brad Gooch.
Come on, man.
You can't, you don't get to be called Brad Gooch in my home.
No one's ever going to forget it.
The Gooch.
So The Gooch wrote a book about this guy, and he gives a rare detail from his childhood.
Quote: Growing up in Wabash, Illinois, Sadler exhibited an early predilection for learning and a talent for public speaking.
He borrowed history books from his neighbor, General Lou Wallace, who was writing Bin Hur at the time.
All this knowledge came in handy when Sadler's relative, General McNaught, a one-time chief of scouts to General Ulysses S. Grant, asked him in a family reunion to stand on a rain barrel and give a speech on the battles of history.
Sadler claimed that at the age of eight, he had addressed a high school commencement in Indianapolis on the subject, the crucial battles of history.
And at age 16, he was dubbed the boy preacher in a local newspaper for a sermon he delivered at a Fort Wayne church.
So, number one, a couple of things.
This kid is growing up wealthy enough that he has like a neighbor and an uncle who are both like generals.
And they kind of he's like giving speeches and shit at commencements for colleges and shit from the time he's a little kid.
Yeah, so he grows up, he's like a speech and debate boy, you know?
Like that's the energy we've got here.
As a speech and debate boy, I can tell you there's very few things in the world more dangerous.
And he's he's the salesman, right?
The traveling salesman, too.
Well, his dad is.
Okay.
No, no, this is the kid.
So this is the kid.
But he's got his dad's influence in there, so he knows how to convince people to do what he says.
Yeah, his dad's a salesman, and he's got these fucking generals teaching him how to give public speeches.
He's hanging out with the guy who wrote Ben Her.
Yeah.
We got a good recipe going.
Yeah, we got a great recipe going.
This is going to end well.
So William spent his early childhood in the town of Wabash.
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong, but fucking, it's Illinois.
Is there a state that matters less?
No.
Fuck him.
I grew up in Glen Carbon for a while.
Anyway, at age 14, which was generally considered adulthood back then, he left home for Battle Creek, Michigan.
There he got a job as the bellboy and kitchen attendant at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by America's great cum doctor, John Harvey Kellogg.
Now, yeah, Ty, you just listen to these episodes.
What are your big takeaways on Kellogg?
Oh, I just, I've never heard of a man more obsessed with children's masturbation habits.
That is for sure true.
It was very, yeah.
Are you okay, sir?
Yeah, I don't want to, this is probably a bad way to frame it, but there are pedophiles less interested in that.
I, yeah, yeah.
It was, it was a lot.
I was like, oh, Jesus Christ, Rob.
Well, there are.
Sorry, I just crossed.
He built his whole career around it, though, and was like obsessed with studying it.
It was some freaky deeky shit.
Yeah, it's not cool, right?
Like, no.
It's really pretty a real problem, the degree to which this guy was interested in how kids masturbate.
And he also, he loved colonics.
He loved shooting water up people's assholes.
Invented machines to more effectively add to shoot yogurt up assholes and stuff.
We did a couple of episodes on John Harvey Kellogg with the great Miles Gray.
Check them out.
But in brief, Gray was, like, Sadler's mom, a Seventh-day Adventist.
He believed sex was the root of most evil, and the way to keep people pure was to avoid stimulating them.
He also believed in physically assaulting victims of child sex abuse as a way to treat them.
Not a great guy.
He was the most prominent Seventh-day Adventist in the country at the time, possibly ever.
Again, this is the guy Kellogg's comes from.
So he's pretty big name, right?
Yeah.
Most people have a product that came out of his fascination with cum somewhere in their house.
Yeah.
I was like, I'll never be able to look at cornflakes the same again.
No, you shouldn't.
Cornflakes, which, by the way, for listeners of our old podcast, worst year ever, cornflakes are the exact texture of Mitch McConnell's ejaculate, which is like scabs.
He comes scabs.
Mitch McConnell comes scabs.
Sophie, Sophie.
We want Ty to come back and do this podcast and enjoy it.
And enjoy it.
I was about to say, it's time to go to Cocoa Puffs, but I get a feeling that's probably Kellogg's too, so I don't know.
Well, Coco Puffs is kind of what Josh Hawley ejaculates, although they are flavored like Josh Hawley.
What, Sophie?
This is science, okay?
You can't censor science.
No, this is pain.
This is pure pain.
This left-wing cancel culture has gone too far.
All right, Robert, move on.
So, Dr. Kellogg takes Sadler under his wing.
Sadler starts off with young William at age 14 starts off basically doing janitorial stuff, but Kellogg takes a shine to the boy and he gives William a spot in the Adventist's Battle Creek College, where he learned to become a minister at first.
He graduates in 1894 and gets hired by Kellogg as a salesman for the sanitarium's health food line, which was distributed by Kellogg's Cornflake Company.
So this guy starts off as a cornflake salesman.
Now, the late 1800s are a time in which white people absolutely hated cum, and William did very well in selling anti-cum cereal to concerned parents and state institutions.
He persuaded his boss that the best way to sell their anti-cum cereal was to do active demonstrations in grocery stores.
And again, the primary, I'm not just bringing up the cum because it's fun to say cum.
The primary selling point for Kellogg's cornflakes is that they don't stimulate you, so you're not aroused, right?
Like particularly so your kids won't touch themselves.
I don't know how you demonstrate that in a grocery store.
Try this cereal, ma'am.
Do you feel like jacking off?
No, you don't.
It's done it.
Like, I don't actually understand.
It's just so wild to me that I don't know, what a bleak time in it's a horrible time to be alive.
I can't think of many times I would less want to be alive than this period of time in the United States.
Like, what a nightmare.
Go back to the Roman Empire.
Sure, there's less medicine, but at least you're getting drunk on lead wine and fucking, right?
Jesus.
So he started.
And one of the things that this means, because he comes up with this idea of, hey, let's take our cereal to grocery stores.
He's kind of a pioneer in the free sample at grocery store food advertising business.
So there you go.
William Sadler invents, helps invent sample culture.
That's kind of neat.
He must have been some salesman, though, to be like, this is the most bland cereal of your life.
Buy it.
And people bought it.
Like, that's some salesmanship there right there.
I think he's starting from like, you know what?
God hates when you're at all excited ever.
God wants you to be like perpetually in a state of like ennui.
So eat these cornflakes.
You'll feel nothing.
You know, that's not too far removed.
What a sad time to be a kid.
Yeah.
No, this is more or less like where Christian conservatives have always been.
Except for now, they have a real hard-on for guns that they didn't used to have.
Anyway, it was a different time.
So, Sadler was a massive prude.
He formed the Young Men's Intelligence Society while he was working at Battle Creek.
This was a volunteer detective outfit with the aid of working with the U.S. Post Office and the Comstock Society for the Suppression of Vice to arrest printers and retails of pornography.
So he becomes a volunteer anti-porn detective.
Oh my God, I can't imagine a bigger nerd in my life.
I know.
He's the biggest fucking wet blanket.
He's such a good anti-porn detective that he gets part-time detective work at a couple of big government agencies and is offered a job at what would become the FBI.
Or at least he claims that he gets offered a job at what would become the FBI.
There's no evidence of this, but yeah.
He's the OG incel.
He's fucking strong incel energy here.
So in 1895, Dr. Kellogg told Sadler that he had to attend the Moody Bible Institute in Illinois and learn to be an evangelist.
And he eventually becomes, you know, ordained.
He does all the good Adventist Jesus stuff.
He also gets promoted to lead Dr. Kellogg's lifeboat mission in Chicago, which sought to revitalize Skid Row through cornflakes.
Over the next decade, Sadler met and married John Kellogg's niece, Lena, and had a son who died immediately and a second son who did not die.
The dead son seems to have ignited an interest in both Kellogg or in both Lena and in William to study medicine.
And that's interesting.
So both his parents lose a kid and it makes them religious.
And then William and his wife lose a kid and it makes them decide to become doctors.
William is said to have told his wife after their kid died, you can have another baby.
And perhaps in the meantime, since you've always wanted to do it, we can study medicine, which is like an interesting way of comforting her over the death of her child.
Very comforting.
Thank you, William.
Look, you can have another and we'll become doctors.
So they move to San Francisco.
They go to medical school.
They do more missionary shit.
Yada yada yada.
Eventually they get their degrees and they head back to Michigan.
In 1901, Sadler is ordained as an elder in the Adventist church, which is like a minister or a priest, basically.
And yeah, for a while, things are good.
They're happy in the faith.
They're big names at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
He's basically Dr. Kellogg's right-hand man.
But at around 1905, both Dr. Kellogg and Dr. Sadler begin to have issues with perhaps the only member of the Adventist church more prominent than Dr. Kellogg.
Her name was Mrs. Ellen G. White.
She had been born in Maine in 1827.
Big Rock Ad Scandal00:05:17
When she was nine, she was hit on the head with a rock by another student and permanently disfigured.
The rock sent her into a coma that lasted for several months.
And as you might guess, she would later claim that this severe head injury brought her into communion with God.
This is a common story with people who claim to have talked to God as severe head injuries.
So if you want your kid to become, you know, a prophet, hit him in the head with a rock.
That's the official.
That's just how it recommends on the advice of our medical experts.
If you want your kid to talk to God, hit him in the head with a rock.
Sophie, can we play that ad from Big Rock?
We can't, but I was just going to say that from some of the things they put on radio, I wouldn't be that surprised.
Well, it is time for an ad break.
So sponsors both the concert tour and also hitting kids in the head with rocks.
So go do both.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
Power and Pseudoscience00:15:29
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
And I'm just enjoying this free novelty rock that was sent to me from the rock company.
Rocks.
Hit kids with them.
It's good for them.
Sophie's just letting this happen.
Wow.
Really falling down on the job.
I was marking that Chris, who has threatened violence over the amount of times you've made him bleep things is going to have to bleep more.
And I was like, I'll tell him, but that just is going to make him do it more.
It is.
I am like a child.
That was something I was actually inspired by Behind the Bastards when I was listening.
I was like, dang, we're so like over in boss level.
We're like tiptoeing around our ads.
And then you're just like, yeah, go buy this shit.
And I'm like, you know what?
Let's have a little more fun.
Buy this shit.
Hit a kid with a rock.
All right.
So we're back.
So Ellen White gets hit in the head with a fucking rock, talks to God.
And for the next part of this story, I'm going to quote from a write-up by Tim Challies, who's some weird religious guy, I think, but whatever.
Quote, when Ellen was 12, she and her family attended a Methodist camp meeting in Buxton, Maine, and there she had a formative religious experience in which she professed faith in Jesus Christ.
In 1840 and 1842, she and her family attended Adventist meetings and became devotees of William Miller.
Miller had dedicated himself to the study of biblical prophecy and was convinced that Christ would return on October 22nd, 1844.
When Christ did not return, a non-event that would become known as the Great Disappointment, most people abandoned Adventism.
But in the resulting confusion, Ellen claimed to have received visions that were soon accepted as God-given revelation.
The small Adventist movement that remained was split by many rifts and much infighting.
But Ellen was believed to have a gift that could reunite and guide the movement.
Her dreams and visions continued, and she quickly became a leader among them.
So that's how she winds up running, basically running the Adventist faith.
She becomes kind of queen shit of Adventism.
She moves the religion's headquarters to Battle Creek, which is why Dr. Kellogg picks Battle Creek to be the location of his sanitarium.
Ellen continues receiving visions and dreams over the next half century.
They're collected in a book, Testimonies of the Church, which eventually takes up nine volumes.
As time went on, her preaching diverged more and more from Christian orthodoxy.
She began to tell people that God does not torture sinners for all eternity, and instead, souls are just deleted at the last judgment, which I guess is better.
But this makes Christians angry because they want everybody to be tortured for forever, or at least it makes some Christians angry.
So for many years, though, Kellogg and her are thick as thieves.
Kellogg is kind of the primary driver of both good press and money for the Adventist faith.
And as a result, she starts having revelations that support his health food business.
So, you know, as he becomes prominent, she keeps having revelations of, oh, God wants you eating cornflakes.
You know, that good shit.
It's cool.
It's a good grift, to be honest, and it works well for a while.
But over time, Kellogg grows too powerful because Kellogg's not just a religious figure.
He's like, he's like Dr. Oz, except for he doesn't get into politics.
Like, he's beloved.
I can't get over how funny that is that, like, the vision is eat cornflakes.
Like, eat cornflakes, don't come.
Shoot yogurt up your asshole.
The graham crackers and stuff, too, just the blandest food you can imagine.
Yeah.
It's this mix of the blandest food and shooting yogurt up your ass, which I have to think resulted in some weird-ass kinks for a lot of people.
Like, there's a generation of kids who go to the Battle Creek sanitarium as children and become adults who are into the weirdest shit imaginable.
It's just the saddest way to live life.
Like, they don't want any, like, I remember you saying from the other episodes, like, no, no feelings at all.
Just cruise through on absolute.
no emotions.
You don't feel any pleasure.
But it sounds like they're okay with pain.
And it's just so strange.
Well, pain is good because Jesus felt pain, but joy is bad because that part's unclear.
It is weird.
You know what it sounds a lot like, honestly?
It's like fucking George Lucas Jedi, where they're like, you're not supposed to be in love.
You're not supposed to be happy.
Any kind of emotion is bad.
Yeah, they're fucking Jedi.
It's a shit religion.
Anyway, so things are going good for a while, but Kellogg just gets too powerful because not only is he like a popular Adventist figure, every famous person, Henry Ford is going to the sanitarium.
All of the famous people in like the early 1900s, late 1800s wind up at his sanitary, fucking Teddy Roosevelt's there, I think.
And he just gets too powerful.
Ellen White is supposed to be like the prophet of the religion, and this guy's fucking outshining her.
Soon, his sanitarium had more than 2,000 employees, while the entire church only employed 1,500 people.
For an understanding of the riff that followed, I want to quote from Ellen White's Estate, which is very biased and obviously silly, but it gives you a good idea of her side of the dispute.
Ellen White warned him against separating the medical work from the church.
She also was concerned that he had gathered too much power to himself.
Despite Kellogg's attempts to discredit her, she relentlessly tried to save him from apostasy.
She even stayed in his home during the 1901 general conference session while still writing her appeals to him.
But her counsels went largely unheeded.
And when the Battle Creek Sanitarium burned in 1902, she saw it as a judgment against Kellogg's teachings and policies.
Finally, on November 10th, 1907, the Battle Creek Church dropped Kellogg from membership, a tragic ending to more than 30 years of powerful influence in the Seventh-day Adventist church.
Now, there's different versions of this.
Kellogg will claim that he quit, right?
And he left because he realized she was a con woman.
I think they're both right.
But William Sadler follows his mentor into apostasy.
Now, a different write-up from the book Arantia, The Great Cult Mystery by Martin Gardner, gives his side of things.
Quote, both Sadler and Dr. Kellogg became deeply disturbed by flaws in Mrs. White's testimonies, which she insisted were divinely inspired, and by evidence that hundreds of passages in Mrs. White's books were copied from earlier works without giving credit to the real authors.
Now, this happens constantly in like various different spiritualist and religious things where people are like getting visions from God and it'll turn out to be plagiarized from someone else's book.
We just talked about Helena Blavatsky plagiarizing a bunch of shit and claiming that it was the Akashic Records.
It's all good.
Are you pilled on the Akashic records style?
Yeah, like I do a lot of deep diving on like esoterica and occult culture.
So Helena Blavatsky is one that I've wanted to super deep dive, but the whole all of the like early, late 1800s, early 1900s, occult following around these people leading up.
And I also am very like interested in how it intertwines with like World War II, like Nazi things.
This is, I'll tell you right now, I initially was putting together the Helena Blavatsky episode for you, but then Jamie Loftus sent the head of a goat that she had murdered to my house with pictures of my children who have not even been born yet.
Don't know how she did it.
So we had to do those episodes with her, but I put this together because I felt it was still on your occult wavelength.
We're talking about a lot of the same things, right?
It's going to get more a coldy because Blavatsky's kind of beneath the surface of a whole lot of this.
And this is a fun occult story, too.
But Jamie will not murder my future children, which I don't even plan to have.
But anyway, that was part of the threat, I think.
Hi, Jamie.
I love you.
Jamie's a monster.
Someone stop her.
Anyway, so perfect, don't change.
Sadler leaves Battle Creek Sanitarium, leaves the Adventist church, and he moves to Chicago to found the Institute of Psychiologic Therapeutics, where he had a private practice specialized in surgery.
His wife, who was a doctor, and her sister, who is a nurse, both assisted him in carrying out operations.
They do this from like 1906 to 1910, and then they start to get bored of doing surgery and decide to switch practices to become psychiatrists.
Now, psychiatry is not like a, you don't get a degree, right?
You kind of just decide to be a psychiatrist at this period.
People are still inventing psychiatry.
Okay, okay.
It's now to be fair, being a doctor, like being a surgeon is like a two-year degree, right?
Like it's like, it's like learning, it's like going to a trade school to be a welder.
You know, like it doesn't take much time in this period.
So this is, they just kind of decide to pivot.
William would later say, after taking out 10 gallbladders, there wasn't much charm left.
And he decided to become a psychiatrist because minds are all different.
So basically, organs are all the same, and it's boring taking them out, but everybody's brain is different.
So I want to fuck with people's heads.
It doesn't sound like his goals were about helping people at all.
Well, no, of course not.
But it's whatever.
People are sinners.
It doesn't matter.
So he and Lena go abroad and they study with the greats of this new discipline in Leeds and Vienna.
They attend lectures by Sigmund Freud.
And Sadler really likes Freud, except for the fact that Freud, if you're not aware, kind of all about sex, right?
And like the sexual roots of different like Freud is one of these guys who's like, whatever's going on in your head as an adult is the result of like some psychosexual thing that happened when you were a kid.
It's your mommy issues.
It's your mommy issues.
Sadler doesn't agree with that.
He thinks that's maybe a part of it.
But he's also, he's kind of unique among physicians and scientists in the day in that he thinks that religion is the primary driving force for the human psyche.
And not just like, again, there's like a big atheism is starting to come into vogue among intellectuals.
And Sadler is very much the opposite of that.
He believes that like, no, there's psycho-religious elements are like a primary driving force in the human psyche.
So the Sadlers return to the United States, ready to spread the gospel of good mental health.
And they start being psychiatrists and also become in-demand speakers at what's known as the Chautauqua Circuit.
Now, this is a network of speakers and speaking events in New York State that's like hugely popular among influential intellectuals and artists of the day.
It's essentially like a mix between daytime TV and TED Talks.
Like this is what all of the great and good are going to these talks.
And the Sadlers are huge.
They're really good public speakers.
Again, he's been a public speaker since he was like a little boy.
And they become very popular.
Dr. Sadler spent years lecturing about hydrotherapy and primarily drugless remedies for mental health issues.
They don't believe in taking medicine for mental health issues.
And that's like part of their Adventist beliefs.
And even though they've kind of left the church, the things they believed as Adventists become the center of their teachings.
So Lena lectures on child purity, which is heavily about keeping your kids pure.
William had a men's only class on morals that was about how not to touch yourself.
And again, they're very popular doing all this because it's a horrible time to be alive.
Now, as with Dr. Kellogg, their overriding goal was the cause of making people better, of improving their physical state through making changes in their morality and behavior.
It's not surprising then that in 1916, the Sadlers became dedicated fans of an author named Madison Grant and his new best-selling book, The Passing of a Great Race.
Now, you hear race in the title of a book in 1916, and you know this isn't going to go anywhere good, right?
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Marvin Gardner writes, quote, America, Grant claimed, was originally settled by a superior stock of Protestant Nordics, a stock rapidly being debased by interbreeding with inferior immigrant aliens.
Unless we stem this hybridization, America will go the way of ancient Rome.
Blacks, Grant believed, were inferior to all other races.
Their mental abilities, he wrote, are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood a black has.
Even a mulatto with enough white blood to pass still has traits that may insidiously go back to his black ancestry and may be brought into the white race in this way.
How did Grant wish to solve the Negro problem, as he phrased it?
Our nation should enact strict laws against black white marriages and work hard to educate the Negro in birth control techniques that would slow down his rapid breeding.
So Sadler falls in love with this guy.
Oh my God.
If you're following so far, Dr. Sadler's always been kind of a derivative thinker and a trend follower, right?
Dr. Kellogg is the big pop medicine guy in the day.
So he falls in with Dr. Kellogg.
Then he falls in with Dr. Freud when that guy gets popular.
He's also huge into like, you know, this kind of pop speaking circuit at the time.
He's big about like whatever pseudoscience is going to bring him money and prestige.
So this guy goes viral, Dr. or this Grant guy's book goes viral.
And two years later, in 1918, Dr. Sadler figures out how to mix this fervor for eugenics that Grant had ignited in the United States with Germanophobia.
Because obviously, 1918 is right after the U.S. decides to enter World War I.
So we're getting that whole war fever thing started, right?
You can't sell sauerkraut in the United States anymore.
So he decides, Sadler's like, look, I'm going to, you know, what's going to make a fuckload of money is if I take this racism and I wrap it in our hatred of the Germans that we suddenly have now because we're getting into World War I.
And he publishes a book, Long Heads and Round Heads, which is a racial expose of the German people.
And this is some of that good shit.
This is that like anti-German racism.
It's very fun.
So the book reveals Sadler's findings that Germany is dominated by two different races.
The good race are the Nordics or Teutonics.
These are blonde-haired, blue-eyed people with long heads.
They're very intelligent.
And Sadler expounds his theory that all great military leaders in history are Nordics, as are all great explorers and adventors.
Past famous Nordics included Cyrus the Great, who was a Persian emperor, Alexander the Great, a Macedonian, Julius Caesar, an Italian, Charlemagne, who, to be fair, is actually a German, and Napoleon, who is a Corsican, which are basically discount Italians.
So these guys, yeah.
I was going to say, like, when it's bled in with like all of the occult stuff too, they a lot of times like link there's a, there's a big problem like the occult stuff where like Atlanteans and Venusians and stuff, like the Venusians are supposed to be this like higher light alien entity, but they're white-skinned with blonde hair and blue eyes.
Racist Nordic Theories00:06:24
And it's just like You're describing an alien race, but you're still somehow human racist about it.
Okay, cool.
Well done.
So this is good.
So according to Sadler, in 1918, the only prominent German of Nordic stock, or the most prominent German of Nordic stock, was General von Ludendorff, who you might remember from the first Wonder Woman movie or from the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch.
Those are his two great hits.
Meanwhile, most German soldiers, the actual people fighting in the German army, and German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who's running the war effort, are members of the genetically inferior Alpine race, right?
So you've got a few Nordics like Ludendorff, who are the smart Germans, and then you've got the dumb Germans like Hindenburg and all of their soldiers who are Alpines.
Now, the Alpines have short heads and dark eyes.
And Sadler claims that all biologists agree dark eyes are a characteristic of non-human mammals.
Only primitive humans have dark eyes.
So the darker your eyes, the closer you are to primitive humans.
This is wild.
I just can't.
And these people had so much power.
Like when you, it's really weird listening to how intertwined the web is of all of these different individuals and how they created power in that time period and how they still hold power or their lineage, their family lines, their corporations or whatever.
It's, it's honestly, like, makes you want to leave leave the planet.
No, I think everything's fine.
That's my attitude.
That we're good.
Everything's cool as a cucumber.
Anyway, it's fine.
This is all stuff that we're done with now.
I'm going to quote again from are you still in there, Robert?
Robert.
Just because all of like, for example, QAnon and like modern new age fucking theology is based heavily on the shit this guy came up with and he is is so racist that he has to split Germany in half based on race like that's all good.
It's fine.
We're fine.
It sucks like being involved in like a like occult research and stuff and like being because everything I'm getting into, I have to dig into the history and be like, this isn't based in racism, is it?
Like I have to ask that question with everything.
It's so much of it.
Like it's, I don't know, there's a few like it's like with um if you're into like Norse paganism, right?
You quickly come to realize that there's exactly two kinds of Norse pagans.
There's literal Nazis and then there's like the furthest left most anti-racist people in the world.
And there's nothing in between.
There's no citrus Norse pagans.
Like they're either literal Nazis or they're actively planning to murder Nazis.
There are two guys.
And yeah, it's kind of like with occultism, it's either, oh, this is somebody's weird eugenic shit that they threw elves into, or it's not.
But man, there's not a lot of middle ground.
And I'm going to quote again from Martin Gardner here.
Ancient, and this is him talking about Sadler's book about Germany.
Ancient Rome's rulers were all Nordics, Sadler assures us.
But Rome fell because of the decay that followed a rapid increase of inferior stock.
Germany today is suffering from a similar racial degradation.
Its superior Nordic stock began to decline after the shameful 30 years' war.
Since then, Alpines and other inferior strains have become dominant.
Although many military leaders are still Nordics, the majority of soldiers are stupid, round-headed, vicious Alpines.
This explains the brutal German joy of battle, the love of atrocity, and delight in suffering and torture.
I'm just again like baffled at it's it's it's creating this us versus them.
And we've got to make it as superficial as possible so it's easy for dumb people to be like short head, bad, long head, good.
Like it's very cavean.
It's very, it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's stupid, but also this is them, this is the, this is them like trying to add scientific rigor to racism and also trying to like use it.
So they, these people have individually decided, I don't very much like people who don't look exactly like the kind of white person I am.
And so then they're kind of like going back throughout history to find ways in which their specific preferences explain history.
So like what's actually going on here, right?
When he talks about Alpines, he's talking about people from northern Italy and like from the regions of like Austria and shit and Switzerland.
He's talking about the Alps, right?
Like that's what Alpines are.
So in ancient Rome, like the first Gauls were people from the Alpines, right?
The first like the barbarians who would occasionally come and attack Rome.
And then they get conquered and they become like part of the Roman Empire.
And his argument is that like, well, the original Romans were Nordics, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because again, they were extremely Italian.
But he's claiming that like when Rome went wrong is when they didn't genocide all of the people from the mountains and instead incorporated them into the Roman Empire.
It's very, very silly, weird historical beef here.
But Sadler primarily used his book to urge U.S. involvement in World War I, right?
Because we had a duty to protect the rest of the white race from degenerate Alpine dominance.
But he also used it to warn Americans that they were heading in the same cursed direction as Germany, thanks to the Civil War.
See, the original colonists to the Americas had been all been Nordics, right?
Because the only people who explore are Nordics.
And since Nordics are also the best warriors, when we had a civil war, all of the fighting on both sides was done by Nordics who died in huge numbers.
They were replaced by genetically inferior people from depraved chunks of Europe like Ireland and Italy.
And again, this is not true.
For one thing, a huge chunk of the Union war effort were like Irish people, right?
And then the South, like the Confederacy, was heavily colonized by Scots-Irish people.
So like on both sides, hell of a lot of Scottish and Irish people.
In making this argument, Sadler quoted Madison Grant: The result is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of Native Americans.
And he's not talking about Native Americans, right?
He's talking about white people when he says Native Americans.
The Native American Cabal00:05:14
I know.
Yeah.
Because the poorer classes of colonial stock where they exist will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew.
The Native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed.
The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York by the swarms of Polish Jews.
These immigrants adopt the language of the Native American.
They wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals.
And while he is being elbowed out of his own home, the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics, which are exterminating his own race.
So that's good.
It's weird listening to it too, because it just sounds like still what is like pervading like Illuminati, like subtext and all of that, like the where it's just, it's just secretly like anti-Semitic.
Once you start the surface, they all believe in that too, right?
If you talk to any of these guys, I'm sure you were to talk to Sadler about like, hey, man, what caused the French Revolution?
He'd be like, well, there was a cabal of Jewish academics.
It's good stuff.
But you know what is a cabal?
What?
The products and services that support this podcast.
A cabal to make you be entertained.
That's why they're conspiring.
They also want to overthrow the French government.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Stoddard's Grift on Racism00:12:14
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's docks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Oh boy, that convinced me to overthrow the French government.
I don't know about you.
Anyway, in 1920, another racist named Lothrop Stoddard wrote a book titled The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.
Now, that's quite a title.
And it goes on to become like the best-selling eugenics text of the era.
It's like the best-selling book in the country for a while.
And if you find old copies of this book, the cover art is pretty, pretty telling.
It shows a globe with a tiny white man in a tricolor hat waving a sword, chasing a very large black man with a spear who's like running roughshod over the planet.
And again, this is 1920.
So Stoddard in 1920 is like, wow, non-white people are taking over the whole world, which is quite a time to be thinking that.
And it's like the literal opposite.
Yeah, it's so again, the thing that he's really concerned with, one of the things that frightens Stoddard is that like Asians are migrating to Africa in this period, largely because the British Empire is importing Indian workers to southern Africa in order to like help them with labor.
Gandhi is in South Africa at around this point for that for that reason.
So Stoddard is urging, like, urges restricting immigration from non-white countries.
He wants to force an end to Asian migration to Africa because he thinks they'll interbreed and overwhelm white people.
And of course, he wants an end to miscegenation and a separation of what he calls the primary races by law.
The New York Times, huge fan of this guy's book.
New York Times cannot get enough of this shit.
Let's go, New York Times.
Yeah.
Funny how they are always on the wrong side of issues as we look at like a bunch of anti-trans shit they've been publishing today.
Good on you, the New York Times, who told people that this Hitler thing was going to blow over.
So the New York Times loves his book.
They recommend it to readers and write, quote, Lothrop Stoddard evokes a new peril, that of an eventual submersion between vast waves of yellow men, brown men, black men, and red men, whom the Nordics have hitherto dominated, with Bolshevism menacing us on one hand and race extinction through warfare on the other.
Many people are not unlikely to give Stoddard's book respectful consideration.
Respectful.
Let's respectfully consider.
That's what I think when I hear this guy yelling about the colored domination of the white race, the rising tide of color.
Sorry, there you go.
Jesus Christ.
Thanks, New York Times.
So one person who took this guy's Lothrop Stoddard's, which by the way, incredible racist name, right?
You got to give it to him for that.
You hear, like, if I were just to tell you, Ty, there was a guy named Lothrop Stoddard in the 1920s.
What do you think his deal was?
Yeah, I would probably not want to join his organization.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You say like racism.
He had to have been some kind of famous racist.
Again, I'm a big nominative determinist, and that is a racist name, Lothrop Stoddard.
Sorry to the white throats in the audience.
Yeah.
So Warren G. Harding is a big fan of this guy.
He gives a speech in 1921, which is actually the speech he gives is noteworthy historically because it's the first time a U.S. president in the 20th century expresses support for full economic and political rights for black people.
But Harding only does it under the condition that they continue segregation.
So yeah, it's a separate but equal kind of thing, right?
Like that's what that's what Harding is arguing.
And he says, quote, whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard's book on the rising tide of color must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.
So that's good.
Now, if you've read The Great Gatsby in high school, right?
You've probably run across references to Stoddard's work.
Tom Buchanan, the male antagonist in the book and prototypical Chudd, tells the narrator at one point, quote, civilization's going to pieces.
I've got to be a terrible pessimist about things.
Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?
And Goddard in the book is a reference, a thinly veiled reference to Lothrop Stoddard, right?
So it's interesting.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, not the wokest guy in history, but he's definitely anti-eugenics and he recognizes it as like a thing that shitty people advocate.
Because that's how it's portrayed in the book, right?
Yeah, is pop science for like shitty, rich psychopaths?
I was like, oh no, I like gotta walk away from the Great Gatsby.
No, Fitzgerald specifically makes the worst guy in the Great Gatsby be a fan of Lothrop Stoddard.
Okay.
Yeah.
And he's like very much in the book, basically what's happening is like Tom Buchanan, it's like the equivalent of someone today telling you about like Jordan Peterson and what he has to say about trans people.
He'll be like, you've got to read what this Peterson man's writing.
Like that's literally, they're the same guy.
Lothrop Stoddard is the same kind of like public intellectual.
And that's what William Sadler wants to be.
So Sadler is also in that same vein.
He's like this doctor with these fancy academic credentials who's writing, who like pivots from actually practicing medicine to writing books about how awesome racism is because that becomes the way to like make money kind of grifting off of this culture war fear of like non-white people taking over the country.
And, you know, Sadler and his wife Lena kind of fall perfectly into this movement.
They are eugenics opportunists, you might call them.
And after, yeah, you might, you might think of him as like the 20s equivalent of like dudes like Dave Rubin and Matt Walsh.
He's not the original.
He's not like the Jordan Peterson type because, you know, he's kind of following in their footsteps, but he's aping their rhetoric in order to further his own career.
And his first big, you know, he writes that book in 1918 about the Germans.
And then after Lothrop Stoddard's book comes out in 1920 and 1922, he writes another copycat racism book called Racial Decadence, in which he claims America's genetic heritage is at risk due to the rapid birth rate of non-white people.
And racial decadence sounds like It should be a good book.
It does sound like it should be a good book, right?
Double speak coming in.
That's how they get shut.
Yeah.
It's a shame giving decadence a bad name.
Here's an and again, he's so Stoddard writes this book that's like this very excitingly written pop academic piece.
And Sadler kind of rewrites the same book, but makes it really, really boring.
Like he turns it into this kind of turgid piece of academic prose.
I'm going to read an excerpt from the preface here.
And therefore, while not considering these matters in too grave a light, but at the same time, taking the mission which he has endeavored to fulfill in this and subsequent volumes quite seriously, it will be apparent that if but a little bit has been contributed to the clarification of these basic problems which confront the nation, if but a mite has been added to aid in solving the menacing difficulties discussed in this work, if but even a trifle has been added to the final turning of the tide of evil influences which jeopardize the white races in general and the American stock in particular,
then we will have been repaid manifold for the research and other efforts entailed in the writing of this book.
He's a shitwriter, is what I'm saying.
I think that's a lot of words to say next to nothing.
Yeah, to say very little.
We hope this book helps America racism better.
So one of Sadler's few new additions to the growing field of racism studies was his idea of the inverse ratio between the genetic health of people and their race and the amount of time they've been away from the soil, right?
So basically state being separated from the soil makes you like makes your race degrade, right?
Obviously, he's not the only person thinking in these terms.
The Nazis are going to start espousing this belief in like the sacred value of the soil and bringing people back to the land right around the same period.
So he's, you know, in line with top thinkers in racism of his day.
In 1930, Sadler publishes The Truth About Heredity.
Now, this is a book about genetic science.
And I will remind you here, this man never receives a proper education.
Almost all of his schooling is through Seventh-day Adventist facilities and then being trained on how to cut people open and then going to some lectures by Freud.
So he's like, his primary understanding of science is like no-fap ideology, right?
Like it's shit that the Proud Boys believe today.
And then he starts, then he writes a book about heredity, which he does not understand at all.
And in fact, he gets it so wrong that his mentor, Kellogg, like sends a copy of his book to a book reviewer to be like, you have to badly review his book because it's a piece of shit and he doesn't know what he's talking about.
And the reviewer doesn't want to get into it because he doesn't want to piss off Sadler because Sadler's famous.
And Kellogg's bummed about that, but also won't go against his boy.
So it's anyway, whatever.
Fuck you, Kellogg, you coward.
I was like, what a baby.
You can't just say to his face.
Yeah.
So there's a bunch of shit in this book that's pretty fucking racist.
Sadler writes that the Civil War was in his mind worth fighting, quote, either to save the Union or to free the black man, which is an interesting way of phrasing it.
He said that he believed that the black man deserved his freedom, but that this had not made the races fundamentally equal and that the fact that people were now trying to treat them equally was going to destroy the United States.
And in his book, Martin Gardner thinks that a lot of Sadler's racism might be due to the feud that he and Kellogg had with Mrs. White, who was believed at the time to have been mixed race.
I don't know if that's true or not, but it's a thing that Gardner will claim.
Anyway, just as she had been his partner in his medical practice, Lena Sadler also worked alongside her husband to push eugenics.
She wrote a paper in 1932 titled, Is It Abnormal to Become Normal? which was read for the first time at a gathering of the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs and then reprinted in the Illinois Medical Journal.
In it, Lena warns against racial degeneration, like her husband, and advocates a suite of eugenic measures to stop racial degeneration.
Quote: Here we are coddling, feeding, training, and protecting this viper of degeneracy in our midst, all the while laying the flattering unction to our souls that we are a philanthropic, charitable, and thoroughly Christianized people.
We presume to protect the weak and lavish charity with a free hand upon these defectives, all the while seemingly ignorant and unmindful of the fact that ultimately this monster will grow to such hideous proportions that it will strike us down, that the future descendants of the army of the unfit will increase to such numbers that they will overwhelm the posterity of superior humans and eventually wipe out the civilization we bequeath to our descendants.
And all this will certainly come to pass if we do not heed the handwriting on the wall and do something.
Army of the unfit sounds like a sick metal band name.
Debunking Ouija Boards00:09:59
It does.
Yeah.
Very ableist of Lena.
She is a better writer than her husband.
That's just more compelling writing than what you get from William Sadler.
Much more flowery language, but it didn't feel like I was sifting through bullshit to try to get one word that means.
And look, it's important, even when we write about racists, to acknowledge when, you know, girl power got stuff done.
And here, it's really, I think, the girl power that's driving it.
Gaslight, let's go.
She's doing it.
So the Saddlers published their eugenic screeds alongside a dizzying array of self-help books, eventually more than 40 in total.
These included The Elements of Pep, which I didn't find a copy of, but would really like to read, as well as an inspirational collection of Bible quotes for the workplace.
So again, they're trend followers, right?
That's like a big part of what they're doing and getting into eugenics and all of this shit.
And in the wake of World War I, a new trend arises that these guys are going to jump in on.
And this trend is mediums.
Now, if you're not aware, World War I, a lot of people die.
Doesn't not good for people staying alive, World War I.
And after a bunch of fucking dudes die in World War I, there's this horrible influenza pandemic that kills even more people.
So the new world that comes into being after this in the 20s and 30s is filled with grieving people who are looking for meaning and are also like mourning a bunch of people that they lost.
This is when the Ouija board becomes popular.
This is when that's exactly where we're going.
So the Ouija board had been invented in like the 1870s, but it doesn't really, it's like 1915, 1917 that the Ouija board starts to like go super viral for folks.
Spiritualism had obviously started to be a force in the U.S. and European pop culture in the late 1800s, but it kind of like comes to vogue in the 1870s and declines in the 1890s.
But then in the 20s and 30s, it roars back to dominance.
And it gets more complicated in the 20s and 30s because people are more sophisticated.
So in the late 1800s, it had mostly been like table wrapping and like toe-tapping and shit to give you people coded messages from the dead, right?
The medium would like tap out messages and code and shit.
More sophisticated methods like Ouija boards and automatic writing become popular in the 20s and 30s.
In the 1917, W.B. Yeats becomes an evangelist for his wife who claims that she could write automatically directed by some non-human force.
Yeats has like a dead kid or some shit that inspires him to get into this.
In 1918, Arthur Conan Doyle leads a seance with Harry Houdini, wherein his wife wrote 15 pages of messages that she claimed had been written by Houdini's mother.
Now, Houdini does not buy this at all, but obviously that doesn't dampen overall enthusiasm for the trend of automatic writing.
By 1919, as one writer for The Courier noted, quote, mothers and friends of fallen soldiers resorting to table wrapping, creaking, and automatic writing through the medium of the planchette, Ouija, heliograph, et cetera, in the hope of once more communicating with their loved ones.
The heliograph is like this light-based device that you can send messages with over distances.
Again, it was another way people would, people turned it into a tool for talking to the dead.
So a number of folks. are not big fans of the fact that everybody starts to get into spiritualism and talking to the dead in this period.
The author of that courier article noted his belief that spiritualism and medium stuff is a menace and that those who fell for such scams are, quote, gullible imbeciles, quote.
There are many unfortunate beings today in our lunatic asylums driven mad by demonical possession.
They are also directly responsible for many suicides.
In females, it often results in hysterics, chronic insomnia, etc.
And of course, Dr. Sadler is in agreement with this.
So he's not pro-medium.
He feels that mediums are providing false comfort and he rails against clairvoyance and claims of channeling spirits and automatic writing.
He writes a bunch of articles trying to debunk this stuff, talking about how they're not really writing automatically.
You know, it's in the same handwriting as the original person, all that good stuff.
I mean, it's super predatory.
It makes me think of like modern day YouTube videos where people are like, you know, so-and-so, so-and-so YouTuber just died and I'm using a Ouija board to contact them or I'm going to use, I'm going to do a tarot spread and learn about why this true crime case happened.
Like it, it's, it kind of goes after, preys upon people who are grieving and like you're, you're going towards people in their weakest moments and you're giving them information higher that's like also maybe making them feel some comfort.
And so then they feel indebted to you and they, and, and that's exactly how a lot of the cult shit happens.
Like you get people in their weakest moments.
And that's like Sadler recognizes this and he calls this out.
So he is, and he calls this out.
He doesn't do this.
He's not like a lone truth speaker.
He is, he's allegedly friends with Houdini.
He's friends with another, a magician named Howard Thurston, who's like, they're both in, they're all into this like busting mediums thing.
So it's a big business, like these mediums grifting people is a business.
And likewise, it's kind of like how on YouTube, right?
You've got these people who are like doing this fraudulent, you know, talking to the dead shit.
And then you have the people who are like debunk their stuff.
And that's also very profitable.
He's on that end of things.
So he's like a popular debunker of what he calls charlatans and frauds.
But the reality is that Dr. Sadler, his primary issue isn't that these people are actually like taking advantage of folks.
It's that they're making money and getting famous from their con and he's not.
And so as the 1930s dawned, he starts the process of launching what would go on to become the most influential automatic writing con of this post-war spiritualism boom, the book of Arantia.
So that's part one.
We have set things up.
In part two, we're going to talk basically, as we end part one, he is like a prominent eugenicist and a debunker of automatic writing and mediumship frauds.
And in part two, he's going to launch, I don't know, I don't know how to describe this thing without just getting into the whole story.
So we'll leave it off here for now, but this ends with the invention of celestial seasoning sleepy time tea.
To combat all of this.
Yes.
Boy, it's a story.
But first, Ty, you know what else is a story?
What is a story?
Your pluggables.
Oh, hey, what's up?
I am, hey, Shady Lady.
I'm one of the four co-hosts on the Boss Level podcast, which is also produced by iHeartRadio.
We spend a lot of time interviewing really wonderful people from the gaming industry, especially like highlighting the diversity behind the gaming industry and the streaming industry.
So a lot of fun over there.
And then I'm also, I'd also do Twitch and YouTube.
I'm Hey Shady Lady Everywhere.
Well, I am not Hey Shady Lady Anywhere because I am not you, but I am me.
And that's the end of the episode.
Woohoo!
Nailed it.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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