Heartthrob

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Folks, let's face it, we as a society do love a heartthrob.

We have teen magazines, celebrity fan clubs, even GQ's Sexiest Man Alive.

Back at the turn of the century, though, Americans were just as hungry for tabloid tales about ladies' men.

And in Seattle, one of the last bastions of the Old West, the toast of the town was Harry Allen.

Harry was unique.

He was audacious, unapologetic, and open about who he was.

He lived life exactly on his own terms.

Now, perhaps that doesn't sound that unusual, but for a time, it was, because Harry was someone who, if he lived today, might call himself a trans man.

The Old West was a haven for people who didn't always fit into society back east.

This went across the board, from from rough and tumble mountain men to women who wanted to call their own shots.

The freedom of the Old West was especially attractive to many queer people.

While life on the frontier could be difficult, it was a lot easier to live the way they wanted.

Survival was the most important order of the day, not gender roles, so the Old West was especially perfect for Harry Allen.

Harry was born in 1882 to a family of poor ranchers working in Indiana.

While initially his parents treated him as a girl and gave him a female name, it became pretty pretty clear that Harry saw himself as a boy.

His mother later recounted that from an early age, Harry didn't like to go along with the typical gender roles of the day.

He wanted to wear trousers, not dresses, and he'd much rather ride horses and shoot guns than learn embroidery.

He had no interest in all things that were mostly traditionally part of a woman's realm.

Harry told a newspaper many years later that, I did not like to be a girl.

I did not feel like a girl and never did look like a girl.

To Harry, he was always a boy.

Soon after his family moved to the Seattle area, Harry formally changed his name to Harry Livingston.

And while the name fit him much better, it didn't exactly last long.

You see, Harry quickly became infamous as a pretty tough guy.

He ran with some street gangs and committed petty theft.

So, once the name Harry Livingston had too many arrests attached to it, he changed it once more to Harry Allen.

And while he still hung around the fringes in Seattle, Harry Allen started searching for legitimate work.

He served stints as a bartender, a boxer, a longshoreman, a barber, even a cowboy.

But he was also a fastidious dresser who always wore a silk hat, a tie, and carried a walking stick.

Then as a handsome young man, he quickly attracted a gaggle of female companions.

Harry's background was common knowledge to his friends and his dates.

But once the papers and the police caught wind, he became a target.

He was arrested frequently for wearing quote-unquote male clothes, although there was no law against that.

He was also often picked up for vagrancy, more air quotes there, a vague law that was commonly used to harass people outside the norm, or simply people the police did not like.

That's not to say that he didn't sometimes come by those charges, honestly.

Harry still liked to fight and steal and occasionally bootleg.

But in retrospect, it really feels like the cops and the papers had an agenda with Harry.

Seattle was a boomtown at the time, with plenty of gambling, drinking, and a bustling red light district.

Public reformers were casting the city as a den of sin.

When Harry popped up, living openly as a man, he was everything these crusaders thought was wrong with the world.

So they wanted to make an example of him.

Soon, Harry's escapades became tabloid fodder.

They reported when he drunkenly played the piano at a saloon or when he broke up with his many girlfriends.

More than one newspaper claimed several women ended their lives after he broke their hearts.

Whether this was real or more tabloid sensationalism isn't clear.

But the message was: Harry and everything he represented was dangerous.

From 1900 to his death in 1922, Harry appears in the Seattle papers dozens of times.

In most of those reports, the papers refused to call him by his preferred name, even when the article was about how he didn't want to be referred to as a woman.

In fact, most of these stories weren't particularly newsworthy.

For example, several of them are just the writer speculating why certain women with good parents were dating him.

The true story was Harry Allen was a man who, although troubled, the stealing and fighting are a big hint there, he was mostly just trying to live a normal life, which at the time was a pretty extraordinary thing for him to do.

The real story wasn't who he might have been, but who he was.

And to the ladies of Seattle, well, they liked Harry a heck of a lot.

And that, my friends, is all the news that's fit to print.

This show is sponsored by American Public University.

American Public University is the number one provider of education to our military and veterans in the country.

They offer something truly unique: special rates and grants for the entire family, making education affordable not just for those who serve, but also for their loved ones.

If you have a military or veteran family member and are looking for affordable, high-quality education, APU is the place for you.

Visit apu.apus.edu slash military to learn more.

That's apu.apus.edu slash military.

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The song 16 Tons by country singer Merle Travis is famous for its chorus.

The singer shouts, I owe my soul to the company store.

Now, a modern audience might hear this and have no idea what he is talking about, and that could be by design.

The song refers to a very dark and painful chapter in American history that has never truly been accounted for.

A time that some people would rather we all forget.

A time when coal miners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Colorado were forced into virtual slavery and murdered by their own employers.

Naturally, I want to tell you about it, but to understand it, we need to go back in time and meet a man named Sid.

Sheriff Sid Hatfield couldn't pinpoint when exactly it happened, but somehow slowly, from about 1890 to 1920, the coal companies had come to rule West Virginia.

It was his job to protect these people, and he had failed.

His community consisted mostly of coal miners who were forced to work deep underground in terrible conditions.

If they weren't killed by cave-ins, they died a slow death from black lung.

But it wasn't like they could just quit.

The coal companies, companies like Stone Mountain and Burnwell Coal, kept them in indentured servitude.

In truth, that was the nice name for it, because it was actually just slavery.

The coal miners had to rent their homes and their tools from the coal companies.

They were paid a meager wage, but not in American dollars, in Scripp, a company voucher that was redeemable only at the company store.

The coal companies made sure that workers had just enough vouchers to buy food, but not enough to pay off their mounting debt from renting their homes and their tools.

The workers tried to protest these conditions, of course, forming a union called the United Mine Workers, or UMW.

But as soon as the companies got wind of this, they hired thugs from the Baldwin Feltz Detective Agency.

Those thugs beat and killed several mine workers, driving them from their homes, running over their tents, and firing machine guns at them.

Finally, Sheriff Hatfield had enough.

The detectives claimed that they had the legal authority to protect the coal companies properly.

But Hatfield knew that no one could possibly have the legal authority to do what these people were doing.

So, in May of 1920, Hatfield, who, yes, was a relative of the Hatfields of the Hatfields and McCoy's feud, if you were wondering, gathered a posse, including the mayor of the town of Maitwin in Mingo County, where the coal companies were located.

They confronted a group of detectives from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency as they prepared to leave town via the local train station.

These detectives insisted they had done nothing wrong, but Hatfield wouldn't let them leave town.

Tempers escalated, no one would yield to the other, and suddenly a gun was drawn.

Afterward, no one could tell exactly how it all went down, who fired first, who shot who.

But when the smoke cleared, several Baldwin-Felts agents were dead, as was the mayor and multiple members of Hatfield's posse.

Hatfield spent the next year desperately trying to find evidence to use against the coal companies.

He wouldn't let the death of his allies go unpunished.

But neither would the coal companies let the deaths of their agents go unanswered.

In August of 1921, as Hatfield walked into the local courthouse, another bullet rang out, and he became the latest victim of the conflict.

But his death galvanized the community.

The members of the UMW rose up.

Just a few days later, they marched across the county and assaulted the coal company's stronghold atop the local landmark known as Blair Mountain.

Thousands of workers clashed with thousands of coal representatives.

Both sides had heavy firepower, machine guns and Gatling guns, either smuggled in by train or left over from their service in World War I.

The workers tried to get up the mountain, but the coal companies kept them back with a steady stream of bullets.

It's estimated that 1 million shots were fired during what came to be known as the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Another local sheriff though, Don Chaffin, had always been a coal company crony.

He actually arranged for small aircraft to drop makeshift bombs on the workers.

He and other law enforcement eventually sent word to federal authorities and soon the army arrived, forcing everyone to lay down their arms.

It was a stinging defeat for the union.

Dozens had died and of course the blame fell mostly on them.

Many union members were tried for murder, although they were ultimately acquitted.

However, the union was bankrupted from their legal defense fees and eventually had to disband.

Sadly, workers' rights in America wouldn't improve until President FDR created the Works Progress Administration in 1935.

Even with that in mind, the United States has continued to struggle to enforce labor laws, with many workers still fighting in court for their right to unionize.

No one is selling their soul to the company store these days, but it's a curious world where history often repeats itself.

If workers' rights aren't respected, then the next battle of Blair Mountain could be in our own backyard.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

This show is sponsored by American Public University.

American Public University is the number one provider of education to our military and veterans in the country.

They offer something truly unique, special rates and grants for the entire family, making education affordable not just for those who serve, but also for their loved ones.

If you have a military or veteran family member and are looking for affordable, high-quality education, APU is the place for you.

Visit apu.apus.edu slash military to learn more.

That's apu.apus.edu slash military.

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