Part One: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk

Oh goodness, Jiminy gracious Christmas, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history introduced by one of the very worst introducers in all of history. Your host, me, Robert Evans. This week, I have a guest who's better at introducing things. Princess Weeks. Why don't you introduce yourself? Because we've seen how I do it. You're fabulous. I disagree with you. That's a lie. Just with that. My name is Princess Weeks. I'm a writer, YouTuber, shit talker, and I love history, and especially when I get to listen to Robert tell me about bad people. Yeah. And I love bad people, especially when I get to inflict their badness on someone else. Wow. And this week, we've got a guy who kind of made inflicting his opinions on other people, on everyone else, his life mission and used the vast fortune he built to do it. We're covering a fella here. He's the former richest man in the world. This guy was an oil. In his time, he was a millionaire. But if you fix things to modern money, he was a billionaire from a fairly early point in terms of modern money. And he was kind of the first of the right wing, these ultra rich right wing guys to make pushing his own opinion in politics by taking control of like or building media organs deliberately to force his own opinion on public. He was the first of these super rich guys to really do that. Or he was part of the first wave of rich guys that did that. And he was the biggest like of this first wave of generally like post new deal, super rich, you know, multi-millionaire, billionaire oil guys who are funding right wing politics. He was the guy who was kind of best at it. But he was also the guy who was only interested in forcing his own politics on people. Like he didn't want to talk to any other people on the right. He didn't want to make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that would push his politics on other people. He's a very weird dude. And his name was H.L. Hunt. Also, some people think he killed JFK. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Surprise. We're here. Dad, what is that? It's a hungry horse. Dad, wrong hungry horse. This is a horse in a field. I meant the family pub with daily deals like buy one burger, get one for a pound on Fridays, candy, mania and free life sport. Oh, yeah, that does make more sense. Say yes to unbelievable value for the whole family. Hungry horse. Say yes. Search online and book your table. Visit hungryhorse.co.uk for full season seas. So have you heard of this guy? No, I've never heard of him, but he sounds annoying and like the patron said of podcast, bro. So like I'm ready to hear about it. He's got a lot of that energy. He was kind of like the proto Elon Musk. Like what Musk has done with turning X and Grock into this like basically building these companies just to push his own opinions on everyone else. That's what Hunt was trying to do with like the radio in the 50s and 60s and television and stuff. So he's an interesting character and like a freak in his own personal life, which is always fun when one of these guys is just the strangest, weirdest little guy. So what is the HL stand for? Great question, Sophie. That's what we're starting because he has like one of the most racist old white guy names you could possibly have. I'm thrilled. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. Haroldson. That's this fucker's full name. Haroldson. And a Lafayette in there. Lafayette Jr. You know you're in for a good time when you've got all those names together. Hunt. He's really got all those. And central loser. Yeah. All those. That's exactly. Funny you mentioned that. I'm like, wow, would cover my drink. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. was born in Carson Township Fayette County, Illinois on February 17th, 1889. Most of the articles and bios you'll find on him kind of breeze right through his childhood. A bio on the oil industry friendly website, Oklahoma Minerals, which depicts Hunt as a hero. I know kind of ideologically where this bio is coming from. Simply says that he was quote, the youngest of eight children in a farming family. His early years were marked by a lack of formal education as he was homeschooled and never attended public or private schools. So we're off to a good start already, right? Like this is a this is a dude who and that's not a weird upbringing for the time really. But it is kind of weird for him because his other like brothers and sisters aren't all private schooled. So Hunt was a pretty prolific writer of letters to the editor and of ads in the yellow pages. So we do get other bits of his history if you're willing to dig deeper that go a little further than that. In the 1960s, he wrote this in an ad published by the Tennessean. So this is him trying to connect with other members of his family. My grandfather was Wadi Thorp Hunt freeing his slaves long before the war began. migrated to Searchy County, Arkansas, stopping en route to make a crop near Lookout Mountain. He formed a company of Confederates in 1860, which included his son. He was killed in 1864 by Cantrell's guerrillas. So that's him talking about like his grandfather, right? Like that's the family patron. And I'll let you know right now. He's the only one who says this guy freed his slaves long before the war began. I was going to ask. I was like, he made it sound like, yeah, my grandfather freed his slaves. Before it was cool, before everyone had to do it. But then he started a volunteer Confederate militia for love of the game. You know, he's like, I don't even needed it. Now, Wadi may not own slaves, but that wasn't uncommon. Most people who fought in the Confederate army didn't have enough money to like own slaves, right? Like they but that's not entirely the point. Some people were racist without that, right? And that seems to have been his grandfather's deal. Now, what's very funny to me about this ad, which is him like trying to connect with other relatives by talking about his Confederate grandpa, is that right after being like, hey, does anyone know, you know, my grandpa, when anyone else related to whom I want to connect? He goes on to like say, I want to exchange, you know, family history with relatives, quote, and present them with three of the HLH aloe vera cosmetics. That's his private cosmetic company and a list of stores in the area carrying HLH cosmetics. And the remainder of the ad is a plug for his cosmetics business and his right wing radio show, which I find I just found very funny that he's like, I want to connect with my family. But I also want to use this space in the newspaper to get people to buy my cosmetics. I love an MOL. Right wing skincare company. Yeah, right. It's always a grift. You said he's the youngest of eight of eight kids. How much more family connections does he need? I think that that's enough. You got to have, bro. Right. Like, why do you care? It seems like you got your hands full there. Yeah, you don't need any cousins when you have a basketball team. Like it's fine. So that's a good point. That was very funny. I fear it was your target audience. Yeah. Damn, you're too, actually. So the Confederate connection was enough to convince me that like, I needed to look more into this guy's family history, because I was like, well, that probably means there's something else interesting there. And I could only find one biography that was written about him, which was the book Kingdom. And it's actually it was published after he died. And it's actually a biography of his whole family written by this hardcore libertarian author named Jerome Tussil. And I think Tussil was a fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw himself a lot of the time, although he does. He does include more of the warts than I think Hunt would have. But he clearly like has this degree of like all in this man for being such a great businessman. It's hard for me to tell how like real this biography is, because Tussil, again, he's like a guy with an ideological bint that he's trying to get across in his books. And his biography of Hunt includes all of these verbatim conversations about talks, conversations that would have happened in like the 1800s. And this book was written in the like a hundred years later. And I'm like, who did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations? You must have just made that up or you listen to something that like these people's grandchildren said is how the conversation went. So you have to take a lot of this book with a grain of salt, right? It's it's giving like real person fan fiction. Like he is like, yeah, I just put myself into the character. Like, what would what would my goats say? Like, what would my heroes say? And he's just like, all right, I've got it. Nailed it. I I would say think of it that way. This is real person fan fiction. That said, it's the only book we have about this guy's childhood. And it's clearly based on conversations he had with members of this dude's family. So you can't discard it because it's like our only source, right? That said, I wanted we're going to talk a little more about Tussaud in this book, too, because he's kind of a very funny guy. You should know in terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography that he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not entirely the bad kind. He got like politically activated for the first time in his life because he was disgusted by the draft in the Vietnam War. And he staged a walkout protesting the war at the Young Americans for Freedom Convention in 1969, which is like good. Yeah. Yeah. In 1971, he published his first book. It usually begins with Ayn Rand, a libertarian odyssey, which is a book about how he went from an angry lapsed Catholic looking for a new religion to an objectivist libertarian. Although he also kind of makes fun of Ayn Rand in the book, too, because she believed a lot of crazy shit about sex that he does not on board with. Right. So he's like, respect something about her, but like makes fun of her, too. Yeah. Yeah. He wrote of his feelings in the time. For the moment, I considered myself unique, a lone and courageous individual who had found the Holy Grail after years of floundering. That's how he reacts to reading Ayn Rand for the first time. A lot of guys like that, unfortunately. That's like the first time like you talked to a guy who read Dune for the first time. He's like, I just had no idea. All my politics are now Dune. Exactly. Now, that same year, 1971, Tisil wrote an op-ed for the New York Times and begged for conservatives who still care about such things as peace and justice and racial harmony to vote for candidates who really mean peace when they say peace, who understand and intend to promote the politics of decentralization, of pollution control, of economic and judicial reform, and so on all the way down the line. So he's not like entirely bad. This is back when the libertarian movement was a little more complicated than it's going to become in the Trump years. So that's positive. In 1974, Tisil ran for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian Party ticket. He only got like 30,000 votes and he needed 50,000 to get the party a permanent place on the ballot. The Times notes of his election campaign on the campaign trail. He's distributed to sell bills, fake dollar bills that he assured voters would be soon worth more than the real thing, given the country's ruinous economic policies. He arranged for a woman in a beige body stocking to ride through Central Park like Lady Gaddaiva on a horse named taxpayer. So he would have loved crypto. He would have loved crypto. He was like Jerome Tisil, you would have loved Bitcoin. Tisil coin. He's like. And he's giving you naked ladies too. He's like, listen, I'm giving you the taxpayers everything they could want. A horse named tax. A horse named. This man would have had so many NFTs. That's a big country album, though. Can you imagine like the horse? Morgan Wallen, I'm not sure. And I. Sorry, this is in our episodes about HL Hunt. But when I started reading about the guy who wrote his biography, I was like, this man's fascinating. Yeah. So anyway, take quotes that I'm going to read you from the book Kingdom with a grain of salt. So Tisil's books has very doesn't mention Wadi Hunt, Hunt's grandfather freeing his slaves. So I suspect his grandson made all that up. But he does talk about the fact that Wadi created a volunteer cavalry militia to support the Confederate cause, which should tell you all you need to know about the man's politics. However, there is an interesting discrepancy between what HL Hunt came to believe and what Tisil writes in his biography. Tisil claims that Captain Hunt was, quote, shot to death near his farm by northern raiders. But in his letter, Hunt says he was killed by Cantrell's guerrilla fighters and Cantrell's raiders were a pro Confederate partisan group of Bushwhackers that actually this is where Frank and Jesse James get their start in Cantrell's raiders. Now it would they definitely killed a lot of Confederate farmers, too, because kind of by the end of the war, they were just raiding, you know, like. They're like, we just like doing this now. Like this is our new passion. And we got to get a scale out of this. When I got into this, it was for the racism, but now it's just the love of raiding. You know, I just can't get over how much I like to raid. They're tapping into their Viking roots. They're like, this is what I was meant to do. And it's like how the Oakland Raiders are ostensibly at like their fans are ostensibly there to support a football team. But it's really about the raiding for the Oakland Raiders fans, too. You know, that's what makes that a great team. Las Vegas raiders. No, no, no, Sophie, I don't I don't accept that at all. That's like me with the net. It's like, oh, it's the new it's the Brooklyn Nets. I'm like that they're from New Jersey. It's OK. We don't have to make things up. Just because Jay-Z says it doesn't mean it's true. Yeah, no, I refuse to accept that. So when Captain Hunt gets murdered by whether it's by Northern Partisans or Cantrell's Raiders, his son, H. L. Hunt, which is the same name as our H. L. Hunt, right? And it's his dad takes control of the family. Now, H. L. goes by the nickname Hash for reasons lost to history, but are more likely rooted in potatoes than marijuana. He's a fascinating figure because his life and his son's life kind of perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil War up to like the modern era through like the political realignment of the mid 20th century. Because you have like the Republican Party, which is this like radical progressive force in the country that then becomes like the conservative party over a period of time, right? And his family really embodies that very well in 1864 before the war was over. Hash took like after his dad gets killed, he moves up north and he takes an oath of allegiance to the Union per the book kingdom. Up north was where the money was, Hash told his family. The South, as they had known it, all their lives was finished. It would not rise again for 50 years at least. So you see, this is a family that, number one, never gives up on like the racist things that led them to support the Confederacy. But Hash is a very pragmatic guy. He's like the Confederacy is not winning this war and I want to be where the money is. Like I'm not going down with the ship. Fuck that. My dad did. That seems stupid. Exactly. It's like the slaves are gone. Let's go up to the industry and abuse the Irish. Right. Abuse whoever we can because I'm still racist. Don't get me wrong. We can diversify. So the family winds up in Illinois, which is where our HL hunt is going to be born in 1889. They start farming and things are going pretty well for the hunts for a while. Hash is a good businessman and a skilled farmer. In short order, he meets a girl, the daughter of an army union chaplain. And she's named Ella Henderson. This is going to be a shell hunt. Our hunts mom to Sills book claims that she, quote, was descended from an old Huguenot line and she deported herself with a certain aristocratic air, not unworthy of her birth line. Now, that's interesting. Weird use of the word deported by to sell there. I've never heard. I think he meant to write comported. Because I don't think deported actually works that way. But it made its way into the final copy of the book. So they're like, we're just not Huguenot enough to understand how sophisticated that is. You got to be way more Huguenot to get that word, right? Yeah. So I don't know if she was had Huguenot blood in her veins or whatever. But this is very consistent with what HL hunts going to believe about his background and himself, because he thinks he's special and part of why he thinks he's special is because of his blood. From 1873 to 1889, the hunts have eight children, the last of whom is our boy, Haroldson Lafayette. Given that he has the same name as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed junior. And the family soon took to calling him June or Juni. So as a boy, he goes by June or Juni because he's got the same name as his dad, who goes by Hash. Now, the hunts 500 acre farm was productive and supports the family well. But how well it supports them is kind of hard for me to say. To sell rights that they, quote, just managed to scrub out a meager living. But we also know that by the time Hash dies, he gives his all eight of his kids pretty significant inheritances that suggests they're actually doing very well. Now, maybe I don't know how long it takes them to be doing very well. But certainly by later in his life, they're like upper middle class, right? If not rich, it's a little hard for me to tell that. Do you know the breakdown of like the genders of the siblings? Was it like more girls than boys? Because you can outsource the girls. They can get they can go somewhere else. I think it's a pretty a pretty good split. But he's got at least a couple of sisters. OK. That's that I think it's also a hunt kind of talks up his family having a harder time when he was a kid than they really did. Because all conservatives who wind up crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were. Yeah. At any rate, in 1894, when Juni was like five or so, his dad, Hash gets elected sheriff of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first Republican sheriff of Fayette County, although not the last. He settled into a pattern of spending a week or so in Vandalia, the county seat, and then heading home for a few days to tend his farm, which was now primarily maintained by his wife and older sons. If to Sills, book gives an accurate account. H. L. Hunt or Hash was not a pleasant man to have as your dad. Quote, Hash Hunt would storm through the house, sipping a bit of his own homemade corn whiskey from a jar and thundering the anyone with an ear shot. His views on the world, on the hard times that had spread through the nation, like a pestilence on the politicians who had brought these conditions about. And on the bare living, he was able to scratch out from his farm and his share of salary. So they've got kind of right wing talk radio in the form of their dad. He's just like a drunk rush limbaugh, complaining about how hard things are while he makes a lot of money. I'm so glad he has the authority to arrest people. There's nothing. There's nothing about someone just drunk and we like you. You there. Do you know what you're doing to the economy? No law about how drunk you can be as a sheriff in Illinois in the 1800s. I feel confident saying that. Thank God for that. Thank God for that. We used to be a proper country, Princess. We used to be a proper country. Exactly. So as I noted earlier, most casual bios of Hunt will point out that he was homeschooled. Now, depending on the source, I've seen arguments that his education was pretty minimal and lacking and that his mom did a really good job. Whatever the case, he was brilliant from a young age. Hunt purportedly learned to read before he was three years old. And as one writer phrased it, was clever with numbers from a very early age. Now, I suspect these claims are a mix of the truth and some myth making. Hunt is as an adult going to be an almost supernaturally gifted card counter. He is legitimately and there's enough evidence that we know this isn't myth making. When he sits down to play poker, he wins, right? He's got like a superpower, like he's incredible at it. And he's also just his business career shows. He's really good with money. He's good at like counting up sort of risk and analyzing risk versus like the odds of profit and loss in his head and making snap decisions that wind up being very accurate. So I don't doubt that he's a math genius. I kind of doubt he was full on reading before the age of three. But he probably was precocious. His sisters adored him and in general, the women in his family paid close and doting attention to the boy. Hunt would later complain of his family's poverty in those years. But the Hunt family were an objectively better shape than their neighbors. The 1880s played host to one of our nation's many regular back before the Great Depression and then afterwards when they like changed the way the banking system worked in significant ways. We used to have depressions a lot more regularly. Right. It's like it's like a diagnosis of depression. It's like you're going to have it every couple of you're going to have a high low day. Yeah. The national economy was dysthymic. Yeah. Exactly. They didn't have Prozac yet to really regulate the banking system. We had invented money Prozac, which is the the FDIC, I guess. I guess. Yeah. So the 1880s played host to one of our nation or one of these depressions and most of their neighbors lose everything or almost everything during this time. Now the Hunts don't, but Hash is still unhappy. Tussil describes him as a man driven to rage by his failure to make more of a success of himself and one who took his frustrations out on his wife and children. This creates a miserable situation for Ella and she tries to distract herself by obsessively caring for her youngest son, Juni. Per the book Kingdom, Juni was her pet, her baby, and he looked to her for refuge against this strange, violent man who filled him with terror every time he entered the house. He was almost a serial killer. He was almost a serial killer. That was like he's got he gets a few of those vibes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, you know who else is constantly filled with a terrifying violent rage? Robert, no. The sponsors of this podcast. And we're back talking about the uncontrollable anger that drives our beautiful sponsors. That's what makes them great. So things with his dad and the fact that his mom is kind of dealing with being in a terrible marriage by obsessing over her youngest son. This comes to a head when Juni, who again is the future richest man in the world, was seven years old. Hash came back early from a trip out, sheriffing or something, and he stumbles on to what had become something of a secret between Juni, his mother and the world. Quote, standing on a milk box in front of her as she worked the dough, the seven year old Juni had his face upturned as he suckled her naked breast. Now, Hash had heard stories from James, the oldest boy still at home, who was working the family farm that Ella Rose was nursing Juni longer than was natural. Hash dismissed those stories at the time, having preferred abolishing the thought to facing something that seemed shameful and repugnant to him. So that's that's a bit odd. Sevens late. It's giving it's like that kid from Game of Thrones is like, you got to get off the kitty. You got to get off the kitty at that point. Sevens a bit much. I don't want to like shame people for nursing, but sevens a bit late. I think we can we can agree. Sweet Robin, you got to get off your mom's tit. Like at that point, it's diabolical. You got to mess up all that. So to say that Hash doesn't take finding this out well would be putting it mindly, mildly. He starts screaming. He goes into a rage. The book doesn't say he's violent, so I hope he wasn't. But I don't know. But at the very least, he screams at his wife and demands that she explain what the hell is going on. And this is where we get one of the first instances of Tussil's book presenting us with an incredibly detailed conversation from a moment. He absolutely could not know about in any real detail. Yeah, this is his head cannon. He's like, he's like, what if I get put myself into the mind of my of my hero? Yeah, Hash, baby, Judy, what is he thinking? Wiping the milk off his mouth, listening to this conversation. This has to just be based on what Hunt remembered 70 years later and told his sons, maybe about this happening. But yeah, he claims that Ella begs her husband not to don't make more of this than it is Hash and Hash starts yelling even more after this, to which she begs not in front of Junie Hash, please, you'll regret your words later on. I'll regret nothing except not listening to my own instincts. I've been blind for years, too busy to put my foot down when it mattered most. Let this be the end of it, you hear. I'll listen to no pale excuses. This has to end at once. Hash's word was final. Ella Rose never exposed her bosom to her youngest son again, whether out of fear of her husband or out of her own shame was never explained to young Jun. The boy came to hate and resent his father all the more for taking from him what was the most important thing he had known so far, his intimacy with his mother. Hash tried to assume a more active role in family affairs from that day on, but the effort was a hollow one. His heart simply was not in it. So young HL is not going to pick up any good lessons about this. Number one, this is kind of like a weird intimacy that's probably bordering on unhealthy, if not has crossed the line into unhealthy. But the fact that his dad then screams at him and takes it away is even worse and makes like this guy is going to have so much MIDI family related issues. And one thing he's going to learn is that families are better off without husbands. Yeah, he's a Freudian dream. Like it's a full blown edible complex. Like you get he gets caught like almost like cuckolding his own father. You know, I mean, it's that kind of visual. It was like dad. That's obviously not how he sees it as a seven year old, but his dad sure sees it that way. Absolutely. And I just and just the visual of him needing to be on top of a crate to reach the bosom. Yeah, like it's like it's too much. Like I'm not I'm not team hash, but I definitely think you need to put the kibosh on that. Like that is not OK. Yeah. It's it's good stuff. So whenever I'm starting my research into a new bastard, I don't know a lot about going into the project. There's this period of anxiety where I'm like sinking research time into a guy. But I don't know if they're interesting enough to like work as an episode yet. And when I hit this story was the moment I stopped worrying about HL Hunt. I was like, oh, thank God, OK, OK. There's something to sink our teeth into with this motherfucker. Um, you don't tend to see this story mentioned in most other articles on the guy with a notable exception of one of my major sources for this, which was a chapter from Heather Hindershot's great book, What's Fair on the Air, which is about Cold War era right wing broadcasting. She devotes a chapter to Hunt and she writes this that he had nursed in his mother's breast until the age of seven was a point of pride. Further evidence of his innate specialness. Normal rules didn't apply to him. He reasoned. So that's based on he would talk about this moment to like journalists and to his kids and he was proud of it. Because again, he develops pride in being different from everybody else. Right. Not subject to the rules. That's also a very important. Like I'm the eldest boy. Yeah, yeah. I'm a sweet boy. I can suck on my mom's head as long as I want. God damn it. Yeah. God damn you. God. Now. Yeah, we there's a lot to say about like house. Good kids need to feel like they matter and like they're special, but not in certain ways also. Like you need to feel like you matter and you're special because everyone matters and is special, which is like what Mr. Rogers tried to get across as opposed to no, no, I'm special. As opposed to everyone else. And that's why they want to defund PBS, everyone. They want you to be relying on only the breast milk. Only the breast milk, that big breast milk is behind all of this, princess. I've been saying that for years. It's true. My goodness. Yeah, the breast milk industrial complex is what really runs this country. Good Lord. So the feeling of specialness and young HL hunt was stoked by the way his sisters treated him while his older brother, James and his dad both bullied him. His mom and the girl smothered him with attention in his biography. To so rights that June's sisters teased him often enough about being Ella Rose's favorite, but the teasing was good, natured and playful, unlike James's sneering and resentful taunting. The girls regarded Junie as their own special pet, as well as Ella Rose's. Right. So that's probably not bad. You know, your sister's kind of babying the youngest kid. But again, this is all going to sort of feed into his I am a special person complex, which isn't going to be ideal for everyone. Hunt also enjoyed a close relationship with his older brother, Leonard, who he idolized and who loved him back to still is one of the people who will argue that this homes that his homeschooling education was quite good. Ella Rose teaches her youngest son Greek, Latin, French and German. And when he starts reading at age three, it said that she gives him issues of the newspaper so that he could learn what was going on in the world. Now, again, some of this has got to be myth making. But to still claims that Hunt, quote, gained a reputation throughout the region as a child genius, despite the fact that he never attended the local school. Now, what's odd about this to me is the fact that to still then adds his entire education was received from his mother and from his sister's readers, which he devoured when they came home from school. So again, his sisters and brothers get to go to school. Yeah. And it sounds like he doesn't because he's too smart and his mom wants to homeschool him is that which is really weird and different and also is going to make him feel very special. I did look through Hunt's FBI report, which claims that and that there's a reason why he's got an FBI report. I was going to say. It includes claims that Hunt was known in the areas being able to memorize a page of prose in two readings by the time he was in the fifth grade and that that was the end of his schooling. So that kind of suggests he does go to a public school for a while. But everyone else says he didn't. So I don't know what the truth is. Anyway, this is weird is the truth. Weird is the truth. I think there might be because a lot of the people who write about the and he never went to school, he was homeschooled or like weird right wing and libertarian sources because this guy becomes a weird right wing billionaire. That may be the because it's it doesn't sound as good to their kind of narrative of like, well, he went to school until he was in the fifth grade, at which point he was homeschooled the rest of the way. Right. Right. Or adding that he was homeschooled by his mother, who continuously put her breast in his face. Right. Right. That's good. Makes less of a good case for homeschooling. Yeah, not not the tried wife ideal. I'm sure that they want to promote him. Yeah. Homeschooling. So the first way that June exhibited his intellect in a major way to the world was by getting really, really unbeatably good at card games and other games of chance. This is kind of the earliest happiness that he experiences and probably remembers, which is beating the piss out of his sisters and brothers at various card games and being praised for it. So this is going to teach him an important lesson. He's never going to get over loving gambling. However, the fact that he's so smart is not without its downsides. Per the book Kingdom. Hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed with his namesakes, mental agility as others were. And right from the beginning, young June had problems with James. You think you're better than the rest of us, don't you? James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think you're smarter than we are. Now, again, to still relates like a page long argument between him and his brother that sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a real conversation. There's even a part where his big brother says, you're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be. Oh, man. You just write that in if you're if you're a hacked screenwriter and then you transition immediately to him like as a young adult trying to get his foot in the door at his first business or something. Right. Right. It's like he would have loved young Sheldon. Yes, he would have loved young Sheldon. So as he grows up in this account, he does everything he can to be the opposite of a mama's boy. First off, he gets swole. He starts working out. I mean, mainly he's just doing like hard labor outdoors, but he gets really jacked. He's a big guy. He's tall. And he is like a bit large muscular dude. Everyone seems to agree about that. He becomes a skilled horse rider, even bear back and a skilled outdoorsman. He works with his brother and the family business on the farm, and he proves his worth by using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve the family business. After summarizing all this, Tussil gives us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into a handsome young man, the best looking of all of his brothers. And Tussil is going to say a lot of weird stuff about how sexy this guy is. We'll talk about later. That's kind of a through line in his other biographies. I don't know why. He's a stand. He's a stand. He's the ultimate stand. He's like, he's so hot. Look at no one could resist him. Putta fucked. Now, none of this. Do we have photos of this person? Yeah, yeah, we've got some. You can look up some up. So if you want to try to find us a younger one, I only found some. I should have included one. Yeah, let's see this. I've only the photos I've only seen are when he's older. Yeah, I only found older ones, but I didn't look as hard as I should have. I'll try to find some. Yeah, none of this work earns him his father's approval. And his older brother keeps hating him because once Junie proves himself, James resents him for being the better businessman. Eventually, June's constant frustration is alleviated by a miracle. The U.S. declares war on Spain in 1898 and James enlists, which gets his ass out of the home and gives Jun some breathing room for the first time in his young life. Well, the future richest man on earth nears adolescence. His father uses the by now considerable wealth and clout that he'd amassed to start a small local bank, the People's State Bank. Weirdly, his oldest son, Robert, who had moved out of the house by this point, starts a separate bank to compete with his dad's bank, which says a lot about the family dynamics that isn't spelled out in this book. But yeah, you don't do that if you have a good relationship with your dad. Create a spite bank, a spite bank, a bank just despite your father. It's so Kendall Roy coded. It's like, I just think everything is giving a succession. I'm just kind of like, he's like, I'm the eldest boy. I'm going to make my own bank, Dad. It's a really petty succession because the town these banks only serve the town they're in and the town they're in Ramsey has 600 people. And every member counts. And every every member counts in the spite bank. Yeah, it's it's very funny to sell includes this quote. Hash had little appreciated this unique form of incestuous capitalism, but it was a great source of merriment among the neighbors. Everyone's laughing about the spite that is oldest made. Right. They're like, if you have a problem with one bank, just like, and I will go over to your. I'll go over to your brother's or your son's shitty bank. Yeah. So not long after this, his older brothers move out of the house to and favorite brother, Leonard, heads out to the Pacific Northwest to work as a logger. This seems to have ignited a wanderlust in young HL hunt, a desire to go out into the world and make something of himself. Previously, he'd been content living at home and being doted on by his sisters. But at age 12, he runs away from home for the first time. And it doesn't go far. And the way that Tussil describes it, he's motivated less to escape forever than just he wants to get away for a couple of days and see a little bit of the world before he comes back. He just kind of wants to ramble. And you could kind of do that as a 12. There's not like a CPS going around to make sure your everyone's 12 year olds aren't running around right in the rails. Like nobody cares in the government at this point in time. And there's eight of them. So really, you don't even like if you lose one, you got seven out there. You lose one, you got plenty of kids left. Yeah. He's away a couple of nights, but he comes back changed. And from this point on, over the next four years, he's going to leave home regularly every couple of months to explore. And he lives a very Peter Pan style existence in those days. Tussil writes, he had discovered that many other young vagabonds were on the road. Boys and girls alike, whose families were too poor to feed them properly at home. On occasion, he had hooked up with a gang of them and slept in teenage hobo jungles around open campfires. That does sound kind of awesome. I would read about that. That sounds pretty cool and also kind of like a special hell. But, you know, it could be either. I'm imagining it as being exactly like the movie Hook, though. I'll be honest with you. Yeah. Like right down to the brightly colored imaginary food stuff that they throw at each other. I have found a young, a young HL image. Oh, good, good, good. You think about that. I'm going to think about Rufio getting stabbed. Real bummer. I was literally like, what if he looks like young Jacob Elordi? Not as much. What if he looks like lunchie Elordi? Not as much. But yeah, he's a big guy. You could see his very broad shoulders. Yeah. He's a he's an eight. The looks Maxers would approve of him, I think. Yeah, he's a reasonably good looking guy. Yeah, like certainly not a bad looking guy. Nice chin. That huganot. He just kind of looks like a big white guy. Got to be honest. He just looks like a guy. He looks like a big white guy. He's not like a movie star, for sure. But he's real big. Yeah. In those days, if you were huge, it just said like, wow, you're not malnourished and dying. Let's make kids, you know? Right. It's like George Washington. Like, of course, he was going to be president. He was six four. He was six four. Not a lot of people got to be that big back then. He had to be in a lot of milk and meat when you were a kid. Yeah. So when he's 16, June leaves the house for good. He is six feet tall now. And as we just saw in the picture, pretty big. He's big enough. Nobody questions that he's like not old enough to be doing whatever he's doing by the time he's 16. He looks enough like an adult that people treat him like one. He leaves in the spring of 1905 and he first hit St. Louis, where he gets a job on a railroad. He takes odd jobs to get from Kansas to Colorado. And then he heads up towards Utah, where he gets a gig watching a carload of sheep on a train ride to California. As soon as he gets to California, he falls in love with it like all sensible people do. Although being a libertarian, two still has to write this in the grossest way that he can. He found California much to his liking, especially the lust blonde beauties who appeared as plentiful as the succulent fruit that grew in this golden, sun-soaked land. All right. No. I got to tell you, this is based on what too still thought of California in the eighties. In 1905, California isn't like the center of like a massive world renowned entertainment industry. It's like a place some people live in or farming and stuff. Like the weather is famously good. But it's not famous for its blonde beauties. It's just famous as there's when the dust bowl hits in a few decades. It doesn't get hurt as badly as everywhere else. Like people are thinking of California in 1905 in those terms. That's that's that's some shit that too still is thinking about. Also, I got to read these next couple of sentences to you. This is this is too so describing after he gets to California. Spoiler alert. Oh, gosh. All right. With his good height and his hard solid body, his deep set blue eyes and rugged looks, he had little trouble in attracting more than his share of young females. His sexuality was strong and developing, and he exuded an aura of raw animal magnetism. OK, this good height and his hard solid body. Oh, my god. Who told you that, Jerome Tussil? Who told you about his hard, hot body and his animal magnetism? Where'd you get that, Jerome? His raw animal magnetism. Yeah, the homoeroticism is just like just blow him. Just just blow it. It's OK. He was dead by this point. So I mean, don't let that limit you. Clearly don't let the. Wow. Wow. Princess Weeks. Don't let that limit you. That's a quote. I mean, the dream dream big dream big dream big and weird. So I should probably say a little more about Tussil here. In the late 1970s, after writing that book about Ayn Rand and failing to become the mayor or the governor, I forget which, he grew disillusioned with libertarianism as a political tendency. He'd also long since broken with Ayn Rand over a number of things that he disagreed with her about. He gives up political rabble rousing and becomes a stockbroker and eventually a financial writer. In the 1980s, he started writing books on investing and then he launched a series of biographies. Kingdom is one of them. Another written in 1985 was Trump, the saga of America's most powerful real estate baron. This is the first published biography of our current president. That track. I didn't know that. That's that makes sense. Cool. Per the New York, I'm going to quote from The New York Times here. Denied access to his subject, members of his family and most of his associates, Mr. Tussil relied heavily on newspaper and magazine accounts to produce what Michael Stern writing in The New York Times Book Review called a G-wizard of a biography that points a key to Mr. Trump's career, his ability to turn political friendships, tax abatements and government loans into opportunities for profit, which does sound like an accurate description of like kind of how we made his money. But also it shows like that's kind of his sources. He found some newspapers and magazine accounts. Maybe he talked to a couple of guys about Hunt who knew him. But a lot of this is just him kind of filling into blanks to make this exciting. And I know I'm spending way longer in these episodes about Hunt talking about his biographer than I should. But everything I find out about Jerome Tussil kind of drives me crazy. His other I look to do is by bibliography and his other books. He's like most famous book. One of them is he wrote a history of Black soldiers in the Spanish-American War. That's like super anti-Teddy Roosevelt and is apparently a pretty good book. He's not like a crypto fascist or anything. But when I saw that he made a Trump biography, I got this like I decided to look into that a little bit and I just started doing some word searches because I was like, does he is this weird him calling a hunt hot a lot? Is that like a pattern in his books? I was going to ask like. I'm going to read you. Yes, yes, princess. It is. Here's a paragraph from his book on Trump. Fred Trump was still tall and that's our president's dad. Fred Trump was still tall and slim at 67 with a full head of dark graying hair. Handsome in the 1940s movie Starway sporting a swept back pompadour and a dark pencil thin mustache. Indeed, he looked as though he might have stepped out of an old movie starring Barbara Standwick or Joan Crawford, the mysterious charmer, faintly dangerous. Donald as tall as Fred, both men standing a couple of inches over six feet. Handsome, clean shaven with only a hint of a pouty sneer crossing his lips. I've seen what this man looked like in many phases of his life. He is none of that. I know. He is not handsome. I'm going to show you a picture of these two next to each other from this time. He is DTF. He's DTF Trump's dad. And here's Trump's dad in 1969. He does not look like a sexy movie star. But he does want the Eiffel Tower, that Trump Tower, guys. He does. He does. And he kind of he looks sort of like if Walt Disney had Prageria. Like his face is not smooth looking like he's not. Handsome. So much weird way to describe Fred Trump. Yeah, a lot of forehead. So much forehead. A lot of forehead. Very red. Very red. Yeah, he loves. I think he just loves money so much that it makes whatever man around him like the hottest guy I've ever seen. Not that that is not what we call a baby Ham Lincoln. That is I have to read a lot of biographies of very and even autobiographies. You know, for these this the show I do, I've never run into a guy who talks about how hot his subjects are this often. It's really it's really weird. For me. Yeah, it's really. You know what? That's Olivia Newsy's like in Spobore. She's like that's the text. Yeah, she's that. Great reference. Great reference. So I did I kept digging because I wanted to see how far down the rabbit hole this went. I found an archived copy of Tussaud's biography of Rupert Murdoch from 1989 because of course he wrote. Rupert Murdoch's biography. That said, I didn't find any returns for handsome or any related terms. I didn't read through the book. So maybe he just used different words to talk about Murdoch being hot. Anyway, this is a pointless diversion, but I had to do it. Sorry. Thank you. Though it's. What's taking an hour imagining like him doing biographies of like Elizabeth Holmes. There's a lot of a lot of pages talking about how that turtleneck fed her Jerome. We need to do any to edit maybe some of this down. That's what the people want. They're here. They're here for my thirst traps. You know who else has a crush on Elizabeth Holmes? The products and services and services of this podcast. Sorry. That's right. That's right. That's right. So we need a social media wrap up for the work bake off. Any takers? I can design posts on Canva. I can also design posts on Canva. Aha. Well, I can design posts with the jam tart theme on Canva. That's great. I can design posts with the jam tart theme and generate a moving image of a jam rollie pollie rolling on Canva. Well, I can design posts and create a 3D headline that says bake your tarts out on Canva. I can design posts and create a 3D headline and turn your face into a bake well tart on Canva. All right. Calm down. With a huge range of easy to use design AI tools, anyone can with Canva. I can slice a video of a crock and bush. We're back. So let's talk about June slash H. Alhant some more. Right. I got to care for myself for that one. I'm so sorry. Yeah, you should be sorry, Sophie. I'm not happy. No one's happy. I'm sorry. No one's happy except the subject of our episodes, H. Alhant, who is happy because he's he's moved to San Francisco by this point in the story, the early 1900s, and he falls into a happy life gambling with sailors and prostitutes and other assorted people living on the margins of the world. He finds out that he's really good at poker and that he can win money basically every time he plays. DeSault chalks this up to his photographic memory. In essence, Hunt is someone whose brain just automatically starts card counting. Like, he doesn't even know what he's doing, right? But that's just how he his head works. And so he just always wins when he's playing poker. Hunt is able to live comfortably in a fleabag motel as a card shark. And, you know, after some period of months of this, DeSault treats us to another deeply uncomfortable paragraph about Hunt. Like, he invites this prostitute into his room and he's so good at sex that she falls in love with him. Like, he wins the heart of a prostitute for being really good at fucking. And according to fan fiction lore, stop it. Free my queen is great. According to this account, this prostitute that he's with finds out that the hotel he's staying in. He tells her and she's like, oh, no, they drug young men there and like Shanghai them to force them to work on boats somewhere, which is a thing that happened in that period of time. And he's like, and they're about to do it tomorrow night or something like that. It's we has to flee town and he winds up like leaving fucking San Francisco for Reno. And he tries out for a minor league baseball team, but that doesn't pan out. But while he's away, there's a horrible quake in San Francisco and the hotel that he'd been staying in collapses. So June becomes convinced as a result of this, that he's someone special and that the universe has marked him out for a purpose. All of this has just really reinforced that he is the special boy of history. Right. That's how this man grows up feeling. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, like I said, he didn't have the making of a varsity. Yes. Yeah. He does not have the makings of a varsity athlete. No. Princess and I are just referencing every single HBO show. Exactly. Or just like we're just thrown out there. It's good. Also, audience. Robert's never seen the Sopranos and I'm very upset about it. Yeah. That's not my. No. Yeah. I don't. It's anti-Italian discrimination, Sophie. That's my issue with the Sopranos. You know, my people didn't work a very, very hard to become famous for making hand gestures and running Buka de Beppo for you to bring us down by associating us with the mafia. And yes, I did have multiple family members who were involved in organized crime, but that's still a bad stereotype, even though a lot of Italians do have a family history involved. I think you would fucking love of this. It's an amazing show. Like the amount of racism that I have that I'm like, but I love Tony Soprano. I was like, listen, I get it. It's fine. I forgive him because he wants to fight the FBI. Yeah, the FBI. He wants to. Hey, so did so did one of my cousins. It didn't end well for him. The gun that killed him sold at auction a few years ago for like 50 grand or something. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I should own that actually. I kind of bumped me out. You're just like a flip of family. The gun that killed my cousin. Yeah, I do too. But I wouldn't approve of you spending that much on a family heirloom. No, no, no, no. It's that's why I didn't put it on the auction. But I was I was like, it's fucked up for anyone else to own the gun that killed my cousin. It's fucked up to sell a gun and be like, this is the gun that killed this guy. But 50 grand is wild. Yeah, that's all happening at around this time. I forget how exactly how much it sold for. It was a crazy amount. So anyway, I don't know how much credence to give the whole. I was so good at sex that like a magical prostitute saved my life by helping me escape an earthquake thing. That's not real. I can believe I can believe that like he left a hotel in San Francisco and not long after there was an earthquake because that earthquake did happen and a lot of stuff was destroyed by it. And a lot of people had the experience of a week or two earlier. I was in the hotel that collapsed. Tons of people would have had a story like that. So it's very possible. And it's just a thing that happened to hundreds and hundreds of people because that's how hotels work. And he takes from this I am special and marked out for greatness, right? So one of the other things that we see in hunt, you know, in the early days, he has this growing belief that he's special. And he also has a fundamental distrust of his fellow man, not long after all of this brouhaha with San Francisco and trying out for baseball and Reno, he's like goes. He's I think he's in Arizona. He's in the Southwest. He's working like with a bunch of day laborers. And there's like white day laborers and there's a group of Mexican day laborers and they have separate camps because it's the 19 it's like 1906 or something. That's seven. And he goes over along with some of like the other white workers to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night. And Hunt just wins everything. He takes all of these Mexican guys money, which winds up to like four grand everything they have in the world. And so the the white the other white dudes, the longer he wins, they start leaving to go back to their camp because they're like, hey, hey, man, or hey, Hunt, maybe you want to go. You probably want to take all these guys money. This seems like it could get dangerous. So they leave. But Hunt doesn't he's he can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards. So he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money, at which point he realizes all of his friends are gone. And he gets like scared and he basically takes the money and runs off into the bushes because he feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans. Even though as far as we know, they never go after him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence suggests they took their loss fine and they didn't like threaten him. He just is sure that because they're Mexicans, they're going to try to kill him to get their money back. So he like hides in the bushes. And then he he tries to like in the middle of the night, hike back to the camp with his friends. But when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second, how well do I really know these guys? They're definitely going to rob me. They know I have all this money. They might kill me. So he has a panic attack and he like hides and camps out in the woods that night. And then like goes just leaves, quits the job and hikes off into another town, basically, because he he doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's won this money. Quote from Tussil's book. How could he trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a killing that night? What was to stop two or three of them from jumping him in his bunk, leaving him with a knife between his ribs and slipping off with his winnings. So yeah, burden of being the most special boy. Right. There's this deep distrust of other people that, again, at no point and Tussil just writes this like, of course, he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were going to kill him. But at no point is there any evidence that they threaten his life at all. I do want to emphasize that. This is all entirely something he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota, where he meets who Tussil's book describes this as the best friend he's going to have in his entire life, a dude named Steve, no last name provided. Now, Tussil insists that this is the best. No last name provided. We don't need last names. This is the closest home ever is to another man. We don't even need last names. We're that close. That is the cliche of boy friendships of like, what's his last name? I don't know. He's the best friend I have. Steve, one name he thinks he's fucking Zendaya or some shit. What's happening? Right. Fucking Steve. Steve. I kind of think. Hunt probably tells his kids later in life that this guy was his best friend ever because I don't know otherwise why Tussil would insist it, but they only know each other for like a few days, maybe a few weeks. And the main thing, the only story we get about their marvelous friendship is that one night Hunt beat Steve at cards and takes all of his money, which is like 260 bucks and he feels bad about it. So he's like, hey, man, you don't have to pay me back. And Steve is like, no, you know, I made a promise, you know, this is a this is a bond. I owe you and I'm going to pay you, you know, don't think anything about it. And then Steve sits down and has like the fucking Ben Affleck conversation with his friend, where he's like, you need to leave here. You got to go to college. You're too smart to keep, you know, working like this, right? And so Hunt is like, you know what? You're right, Steve, and he leaves off to go to college and they never see each other again. And that is the greatest friendship of his entire life. God, he invented a father figure just so he could go to school. A man who insisted on paying him and then did a good will hunting to him. Yeah, his best friend, Steve. They knew each other for days. That's his best friend ever, Steve. Never met again. Steve Zendaya. Exactly. Steve Zendaya. Yeah. So now age 17, Steve or not Steve, Hunt briefly attends college. 17. Yeah. Yeah, he's 17. He goes to Valparaiso, which is known as the poor man's Harvard. And he robs his fellow students there blind at card games and then dips after like a semester, he never gets a degree. He just kind of takes everyone's money and then leaves. He goes home. He's around 18 now when he finally makes his way back home for the first time since he'd left and he stays at home for a while, but then he sets out again with his brother, Leonard, this time. They go out to like work in the Northwest together and make money. But Leonard gets sick with tuberculosis, you know, and pretty soon. He can't. Friend of the pod tuberculosis and he can't keep up with his brother. And he has another to still has another like heartfelt card. It was, you know, Leonard is like to his brother, look, you got to go on without me. I'm too slow. Don't let me stop you from achieving greatness, basically. And so Hunt goes up to Canada, right? And he's working in Canada in 1910 when he gets a telegram that his his brother is has just died, Leonard has died, you know, of his tuberculosis. So Hunt heads home for the funeral and he stays at home for a few months. And while he's there, his dad dies too. Right. So at this point, H. L. Hunt is like 18, 19, you know, he's no longer going by junior. And after his dad dies, he inherits $5,000. He doesn't get the land. Someone else gets the land because he's not living at home, but he gets like a nest egg of money. And he takes this and he adds it to the money that he's saved up it from working as a card shark. And he decides, I'm going to stop wandering. I'm going to make real money. And in order to do that, I need to like invest in something. And I want to start a farm, right? His dad had always talked about how much better the soil was down in the south and how if only we lived in Arkansas, then we'd really be doing well, you know, as farmers. So Hunt moves down south to Arkansas near the end of 1911. And if he's going to buy a farm and he's going to invest in, you know, the next part of his life, and we will get to that and what happens later and how he becomes the richest man on earth in part two. Princess, how you feel it? I am excited to find out about this man whose family was like, let's move to the north. Oh, wait, actually, I regret that. Let's go back. Yep. Princess, do you have anything you want to plug real quick? Oh, yeah, I have a YouTube channel, Princess Weeks. I talk about pop culture, sci fi, all the good stuff. And yeah, just happy to be here. This is really interesting. I I love this really, really hot millionaire in training. Yeah, sexy millionaire narcissist. Yes. So hot. His brother's like, no, you're just a millionaire. Just keep going. Just keep going. Don't stop. Just keep going. Keep going. You're too hot. Don't be slowed down by my my conveniently, narratively convenient death. Wow. We'll be back with part two. All right, everybody, go to hell. I love you. Bye bye. Hey. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadioApp, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix. You don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel. 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