890: Maximal Americanness

If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

"When he's done his 20s, New Years ago, the public toy started appearing on TV talking about sports. Talking about something that, now, it's kind of embarrassed about."

“I was a gas bag on Uspn, various people, did not like me, I think.”

I just sort of represented this new young person who was vaguely Asian, but also Mexican. I'm Filipino, but I am just not mystery. But I had this take from the very beginning of my time on TV back in 2012, which was, we debate in sports all of the time. How much did the refs blow this?

Watch the call have been, who's the hero who's the villain, what's right and what's wrong. And I had been arguing for ever that robots can solve this. We have the technology. If you replace the referee or the empire with a robot, we don't need a waste of time arguing about this dumb shit until that became your stance.

It became a thing I was known for, was calling for this robot referee revolution. The guy won't shut up about these robots. It wins his now when he thinks about it. Anyhow, years go on and then finally, in 2021. I see this story break that, at long last, the most traditional sport in all of America,

Major League Baseball, is experimenting with robot empires in the modern leagues. Minor League teams installed with the called the ABS system, the automated ball strike system. These Hawkeye cameras with optical tracking, they look out over home played.

“That's how perfectly, whether every pitch was in the strike zone, and then told the human”

empire who was standing there through an earpiece, whether they'd call it a ball or strike. In the way that worked in the early versions, it set the robots made the call, and the human empire, just what the fans and players know, with the robot said.

Papa got what he always dreamed of, but he always pontificated about.

There's no more need to argue about the empire's calls, never a reason to boo the empire from the stance. And Papa watch those games, it wasn't, it wasn't as good. It wasn't as good, because so much of what going to a baseball game is like, is you sitting in the stands, and effectively using the airspace around you as this sort of pillow you

can scream into, releasing whatever it is pent up over the course of your day in your weekend, frankly, your childhood, and you're getting too unleashed on, and this is I think a really important part of this, on another person. That was as I was watching the minor weight games, knowing that the human empire was just the messenger for the robot empire, and it's perfect calls and balls and strikes.

It felt like the equivalent of talking to a customer service wrap that you know isn't a person. It's like, I get that you're making human noises, but it's, it's eerie, and then realizing, oh no, no, I want, I want a human, because when you're getting mad at an empire in these minor league full ABS system games, you're just yelling at your computer

monitor. Then, this season, I'm guessing a lot of you have heard this, the robot empire has arrived in the major leagues, the ABS system went into every major league baseball park, and every game in those parks has used that technology, and the problem that Pablo had with ABS when he first saw it in the minors, they fixed it, they fixed it completely and fully with

the competence he had never expected from major league baseball.

Now they do it, so explain for people who aren't watching baseball, how the system works now. It's brilliant, the way it works now and I didn't see it coming. The way it works is that it's not a computer telling the empire in their ear. This is a ball and this is a strike.

What's happening instead is the empire, the human being, is going about their job as they have for decades upon decades. So the empire is calling the game, the way they always have. Yes, except now, there is a challenge system in which the better, the picture, the catcher,

“they can basically throw a flag and say in so many words, I think the empire messed up.”

And at that point, the robot, up on the jumbo tron, they show you whether the empire actually got it right or wrong, and what it did was in this brilliant way, once again, we are judging

So to show, just how satisfying that can be for fans.

“This is a game in Cincinnati, in March, it's the Reds vs. the Boston Red Sox.”

This is only three days after they started doing these challenges.

Why and Watson is pitching for Boston, and this is actually his very first game pitching major

week baseball. And then in the sixth inning, Boston is behind five to three. Cincinnati is about bases are loaded. They have two outs. They're red at every base with two down.

The player named Yohenio Suarez is a bat. They're paying him to hit the ball out of the ballpark. This is certainly the moment of the game to this point, it comes the one two and in there, struck him out. Now they're going to challenge this.

Yeah.

“What you see is that the better taps his helmet, which is the signal for I initiate a challenge.”

I'm taking this to the court of appeals, and immediately on the jumbo tron, you see

the strike zone. And you see the electronic depiction of the ball, and we see that in fact, the better was right. This was not a strike, it was a ball, and the umpire in other words, has messed up. I mean, this game becomes like this comedic chapter in the history of baseball, because

the very next pitch, another challenge. The batter says you did it again, it's jukeuse again. Hold strike three, ten, the helmet again, that are challenged in the pitch. Here we go. That side, the loudest chairs of the game, the rest of it, two homers come up back to the challenges.

And now it's just like, you almost begin to feel bad for C.V. Buckner, the umpire. Almost. Oh. Oh my god, people are standing, they're cheering, people are so excited, so it's so great. Look, it sports, you dream, as a sports fan, you dream of stuff like this.

You have any of Swars, then hit the ball, it was tagged out of first, but the reds won, and most eye opening, the umpire C.V. Buckner had six of his calls overturned by the robot

umpire that game, that he'd never happened before in the major leagues.

I have a point out, Major League Baseball could have gotten rid of the umpidth plate entirely, the way they got rid of blind judges and tennis. They could have chosen perfect robot umpiring, perfect calls, balls and strikes, like a gas bag to about the years ago. Instead, they understood that one of the pleasures of the game is yelling.

The fact is that there are few scenarios in American life or anywhere that I can imagine, where you are, you're empowered, you're legally contractually allowed to go fucking nuts on the authority figure, on a, imagine doing that to a judge. You don't get to do that. Acceptance sports.

Yeah, there's a quote from the guy who was the chairman of the committee that decided how to roll this out, this guy named John Stanton, and he said that the system that they chose to do retains the human side of the game, quote adding a new fan friendly engagement moment. Yeah.

I mean, let's be honest with what that is. A fan friendly engagement moment is, uh, booing the shit out of umpires.

“That's what fan friendly engagement needs.”

It means let's give the Coliseum some blood. Now, you and I are talking about this right now because I reached out to you, and I said, we're going to do an episode to commemorate our country's 200th yearth anniversary, and we thought it would be nice to just celebrate and commemorate things that seem very, very American, like especially American.

How does this ABS challenge system fit the bill? Because America, if you're really cutting to the core of us, we want to be mad as much as we want, just as we want to be able to express what's inside of us that feels like it's trapped there, as much as we want to see each getting their own fair do. And in this ABS system, what our past time, our oldest, stagious, dustyest past time has

given us, is somehow the ability to maybe have both. Both meaning we want justice, we also want to scream at somebody.

Today on our show, for our July 4th, semi-quincentennial, and yes, I had to look that

“word up, which means 250th, according to the internet, actually an alternative word for”

this, is "sister Centennial", but that just sounds like a very old nun. For our semi-quincentennial, commemorating what this country has been for 250 years, we thought that it would be fun to collect a bunch of things that just seem very, particularly American. Like, changing the rules of our national past time to allow for more screaming at figures of authority.

Today on our show, we have the most American question, we have a trip to a Michigan sand dune, with our own question, and we have so much more, the WB EZ Chicago, it's the American life on our grass, stay with us. For this American life comes from Nisha Gulatti, David Vanderpool, and Rebecca Reed. If those unlike people, not companies sponsoring the show, that's because they are,

they are people who support our show monthly or annually as this American life partners. They make it possible for us to continue making this American life. If that's something you support, this show existing, please join them, join us. We have all sorts of goodies for you as thanks, including exclusive episodes. This American life.org/lifepartners.

That link is also in the show notes. Thanks so much. It's American Life, our semi-quincentennial episode where it really does not roll off the tongue. Act 1, a most American question, so there definitely are a bunch of questions that Americans

have asked over our 250 years that seem very characteristically American.

“Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

You are in fries with that, or you from, with this classic companion, where you really from? What if we contribute to this giant fan? Has her pick for the most American question out there?

The first time I heard someone ask the question outside of an ESL class, I was eight years

old. Are you okay? I knew so few English words that part of the reason why it registered so distinctly must have been the shock of understanding. Or are you okay?

A young police officer was asking my mother the question, he had been called as the police were often called in our first days in America to our basement apartment. My mother and I had recently reunited with my father after he'd left studying America six years earlier, and it hadn't gone well. Thor's were slammed, plates shattered, limbs pinned to the ground, ultimatum delivered.

Usually I hid in bed, under the covers, with palms pasted to my ears. But that day, the apartment was quiet. My father had already left for good. Did my mother call because she was being harassed by my father's mistress, or because we were being evicted from our basement studio?

I no longer remember.

“I do remember that it was the first time I dared to look at an American police officer”

up close. Blue uniform, black boots, a belt heavy and crowded. My mother and I did not look to be in the way of bodily harm. There was nothing more for an officer of the law to do. Are you okay, ma'am?

The man asked as he stood in a doorway. The question hung in the air as a procedural formality, as a way of wrapping up the visit. I had been in the country for less than a year, but I knew what the next words should be. Less standard call in response. The same way that, how are you, had only one answer, fine thank you, how are you?

But that day, kneeling on the floor, faced covered in her own tears and snod, my mother responded with something else. "No," she said. The officer lowered himself onto the floor, next to the door jam, then listened and nodded for an hour.

I was astonished. My mother followed rules tirelessly and taught me to do the same, all part of adapting as seamlessly as possible. Why would she embarrass herself like that? I didn't understand enough English to follow the conversation, but as I watched my mother

closely, I was certain I would never write the script like that.

I spent the next several years irritated with, "Are you okay?" Compelled to be okay with it in public while fueling to my diary in private. Here's an entry from when I was 12. October 26, 1996.

Things going okay, right? Is everything okay? Those are the most common questions in America. I don't like them because they don't tell you anything about anything. Yes, of course, great.

Those are the most common answers. Isn't that so cheap? I think so. Those questions are so pointless that it is even a waste of words to me. As I saw it then, the question's holiness had a distinctly American quality.

Here, please, thank you, excuse me, what they always uttered at nauseam from mouths of people

who had already muscled past you? Are you okay with a question, supposedly?

“But how often was it really a mechanical reflex, an American tick announcing itself?”

Someone goes down hard in the cross-practice, and the are you okay, arrives almost simultaneously with the impact? The question is a reflex, not an inquiry. In our 37 years together, my mother and I were often an unmistakably not okay. Still, it was not a question we often asked of each other.

That sort of check-in hit too close to the bone. Not Chinese, my mother would have certainly said, though I never pressed her on it. Also not Chinese. Lately though, I've been thinking about the moment she told the police officer she wasn't okay.

I thought she flubbed the obligatory call and response of the question.

But now I wonder if it was something else. My mother is dead now, but the look on her face as she knelt and cried with the stranger still comes to me sometimes. It arrives most vividly unbidden when I'm with friends or mothers, watching their kids on a neighborhood playground.

“A scrape on the knee or the elbow, the wound still read an angry, and someone, a mother, a friend”

that ministers the question. And there, on the child's open mouth and tears smear face, it's my mother's shocked look. The child hears the question, "It doesn't make the pingo away, but the question stays in the air. It becomes a pause, a door held open."

Giant fan, she's a deaf writer at the New Yorker, that story was produced by Diane Will. Act 2, sitting on a hill of sand. We here in the land of the free do not like to be told what to do, and additionally, and maybe especially, we don't like to be told what not to do.

I've even heard a story about that very American quality, as it plays out in one of our shared public spaces. I went to Sleeping Bear Dunes, National Lakeshore, to see the star attraction, the tallest dune in the park. It's 450 feet high, and slopes down at what looks like a 45-degree angle directly into

Lake Michigan. If you can't picture 450 feet, imagine a 34-story building. The greatest so steep that from the bottom of the dune, you can't even see up to the top. It's just a wall of sand in front of you. Oh my gosh, good luck.

All right, let's get over here. Let's do it. Thank you so much. Take your time. People come from all over the Midwest, to walk down this dune, and then promptly turn around

and try to right back up. There's only a two-foot wide strip of beach at the bottom. So turning around is about all there is to do. This climb is not for everyone. It doesn't need assistance climbing out each summer, and because of that, the park service

tries to discourage people from climbing the dune without prohibiting it outright. They've tried a bunch of different signs. The current one mentions the ecological damage of walking on the dune and says down is optional, which is intentionally soft language, because their previous sign said that there'd be a $3,000 rescue fee, which Americans seem to take as a kind of personal challenge, and even

more people attempted the climb. Park Rangers also patrol the top ridge, asking visitors about their intentions with the dune. Here's Jen. The aggressively mild mannered Ranger on the job today, talking with some perspective

climbers. It's a lot harder than it looks, I will tell you. Oh, yes. And it's all sand. So it is a very challenging climb, usually people on the bottom half are using all fours

basically to get back up.

“So it's very challenging, but yeah, I think the views best at the top.”

Approximately eight feet away from Jen, so it's Jen.

My job up here is to try to save them from themselves, let them know.

“Jim's been volunteering for almost a decade.”

He sits on his chair, where he is bright orange, volunteer vest, pimped out with various pins and patches he's earned over the years, including, proudly, a junior Ranger badge. This is my 86 summer up here. Oh my God. Just love it.

Yeah. Wow. Jim's seen all kinds of ill-advised behavior. People heading down without water, without shoes, without their inhaler. And worst of all, as far as Jim is concerned, running down the dune.

We had a girl get badly hurt here. She ran down, she tripped, she bolted out, tried to stop herself. She dislocated both shoulders, broke a collar bone wrench to neck, hurt her back, and cut her head on a rock. Oh my God.

Oh, she got standing on the ridge.

You can see the slope filled with dozens of people. Heads down, slowly, silently, trudging up the hill. Scores of people who were told not to do this and decided to try it anyway. How you feeling down here? I feel good.

This is what we gave for. At the very bottom of the hill, I met Michael and his daughter, Kalea, who drove here from Georgia. The lady at the place that you check in at, she suggested that you not do this. She said, I'd advise y'all to get some all-deport Rangers, say not to do it.

And yet, you guys thought, what? We drove the thousand miles to get here, say yes, we're going to do it. Yeah. And you're not worried about going back up? No.

Keep way softer. Not training with her. So we're ready to go. We're facing a race back up.

“I think that was subject to peer pressure.”

Half an hour later, I found Michael again.

Only about a third of the way up.

How are you feeling? Lower the ugly, I'll make it. Slow and steady. A little further up the hill, I spot another guy named Michael. He's wearing an oversized visor and has blue braces on his teeth.

He was part of a whole crew wearing matching hats, celebrating his 50th birthday. If you could call this celebrating. How are you feeling now? Tire. Yeah.

Humbling. You know, every step you take up you lose at least half of it going backwards. Uh-huh. But yeah. One guy who would take an office sand filled sneakers and slung them over his neck.

Keep muttering to himself like a mantra. I should have listened to my wife. I should have listened to my wife. The reason why you're not hearing that on tape is because it was so hard to move around the doing zigzagging from person to person.

I don't think it's a stretch to say. We are a country of people who have been told over and over that we are the exception. So many of our movies. So many of the stories we tell ourselves are about how the rules, the warnings, the statistics, those are for other people.

When we hear that most people can't do something, we are trained to think. Well, I'm not most people. But really, when we try to live out this pint-sized American exceptionalism, we are just as likely to find ourselves face down in the sand, panteen and humbled. Less city on a hill and more bear crawling up it.

How are you feeling? Like deaf. Um, I noticed that you are on your hands and knees. Yo. Pretty really rethink of life choices right now.

I'm just tired. We have way there yet. Um, I don't think we're halfway there yet. That's a bitch. Um, are you on vacation?

“Why would you spend your vacation doing something so punishing?”

Is your life not hard enough? No. So I don't hurt myself all the time. Yeah. It's just another day in the life.

Goodbye. Kids seem to have a much easier time than adults. The top of the hill was full of children who, because of their tiny body weight, skampered like water beetles on top of the sand up to the ridge. And then had the pleasure of watching the adults who usually boss them around.

Huff and puff. 300 feet below them. I met an 11-year-old and his little brother waiting for their parents. It's like five. Your five and you went all the way to the bottom.

Yeah, into the water.

I mean, you faster than our whole family.

Wow. He doesn't even have cap to me here. So, what is that true?

“I thought you got knees when you were like, could walk.”

Um, no. You know your knee caps? Yeah. Yeah. Can I see your knees?

They look the same. It's the inside knee caps. Huff. I walk over to Jim with my fully-formed knee caps and pick up our conversation. He started expanding on how he counsels people.

Well, if I start to tell people about what it's like and... Eagle! A bald eagle flew overhead. We all turned and looked. And there we stood.

A bunch of Americans on a perfect summer day. On a dune in a park being destroyed by our actions and maintained by our tax dollars. Watching our mask outs sore through the sky. Indifferent to our plate below. Even the coin felt when producers of our program, that story was coproduced.

I'd mowing myself home. Coming up, Americans, thousands of miles away. On tiny islands, we're creating some very American things about home. Whether they intend to or not. That's in a minute.

I'm just going to go up a great deal when our program continues. It's a American life from our class today's program. Maximals Americanness. For our nation's 250th birthday, we have stories about things that seem very, especially and particularly American.

We've arrived at Act 3 of our program, Act 3. Cooked Island. For this next act, I'm joined in the studio by our executive editor. I mean, you're very, hello. Hey there.

And you are here because one of very American invention was television. And then we as a nation topped that by creating an even more American thing, which is reality TV. And you are here to tell us about the kind of cherry on top of all of that. Yes. I'm going to present the most American season of reality TV.

And I should say you watch a lot of reality TV. So what season is it? All right. We are talking about season 13 of Survivor. And Survivor is the old school reality show where they stick a bunch of people in an island and divide them into

teams and they compete in challenges and then people get voted off. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's Survivor, classic show.

We all know it. And so the season of Survivor. I want to talk about is what me, other Survivor fans call the race or season. And we call it that because in this season, they divided the tribes up by race. So there's like an African American tribe.

There's a white tribe. There's an Asian American tribe. There's a Latino tribe. I know that's not a race, but that's like having divided the tribes. So that seems like an incredibly loaded and crazy thing to do.

Why did they do this?

So basically Survivor had gotten a lot of criticism because the casting just wasn't very diverse.

And on top of that, a lot of times they would get to the end of the season and it would only be the white players. Oh, the non-white players could we get voted off our way? Yes. So this was their response to that. They were like, "Okay, you guys want more diversity?

Here is more diversity," which is a choice.

“You have to respect them for kind of doubling down.”

How did the contestants on the show feel about it? So the contestants seem kind of confused by it. They're like, "Why did we make this about race?" Different ethnic groups. I mean, is that kosher?

I honestly was stunned. I think this was crazy. I mean, I, you know, in one hand, I think it's a great opportunity because I think it's wonderful that there's more minorities. At the same time, I'm a little bit worried that it might pay out to caricatures and stereotypes.

I remember watching the show and being really shocked when I first started the season

because I was like, "I can't believe that they did this." But honestly, I got over it really quick because basically something happened in the first scene that switched the way I was seeing it. And from there on, it just kept happening. So what happened?

So they started this season in this really dramatic way. They're on a boat in the middle of the self-acific. And the host jet probes is telling all the contestants to gather, supplies, you know, get on a raft, and go to shore with your team. They've been giving two minutes to salvage whatever they can off this boat.

And just like the two minutes, grab as much as you can.

“You need to catch that chicken that is food.”

So they grab as much as they can, get to the island. And then this thing happens that really could happen on any season of survivor, which is someone from one of the tribe steals chickens from the other tribe.

It's like I kind of can't help but notice that it was the white tribe that stole the chicken from the Asian tribe. So I'm watching this and I'm thinking, "That is so white." I see that. But then I'm like, "Oh, why did I even think that?"

“You know, like looking at my own biases and thinking about how I'm thinking about race, right?”

Oh, so you're having this thing where you're finding yourself asking over and over. Is that race or is that me? Yeah.

So all that is happening in the first few episodes.

And then the producers decide, you know what? What's on this segregation thing? They're like mix up the teams, like they completely abandoned this initial premise of the season. And everybody is now on integrated teams basically. But the thing is, because they started out segregated,

the racing is sort of still hanging over the whole thing. And then there's this twist that happens. It's right before a challenge. And the two tribes have gathered. And Jeff says, "We're going to try something different here."

I'm offering each of you the opportunity to mute me. Which essentially means you can abandon your tribe.

And go and join the other tribe.

And does this play out in a racially charged way? Well, the only people who switch are two white players. So they go and join the other white players on the other tribe. And just to say, like, they could have done it because they had close relationships with those people. Or like, lots of reasons that they could have done this.

But it's hard not to think watching them walk across to the other side. White flight. Because what it does is it totally creates these two lopsided tribes. So there's one tribe of four left, the tribe they abandoned, which has four POC. And then the other tribe has now eight people, four white people, two Asian people, one black person, and one Hispanic person.

“And so one tribe is twice as big as the other, so that must give them an advantage, right?”

It doesn't a lot of ways. I think they think like, "Oh, we're about to like sweep this other tribe." There's no way they're going to like win any challenges. And what happens actually is kind of the exact opposite. So the little tribe of four, which is the call them the I-2-4, the POC Coalition,

they basically go on, I would say, one of the greatest runs in survivor history.

So they win every single challenge from then on out. Even though they're outnumbered, you know, two to one. And again, as I'm watching this, it's kind of hard not to think, "Oh, got to be twice as good." Right? It's all these people of color who are having to be smarter, and we're harder,

and do all of these things just to like stay on the even playing field to win, essentially. Yeah. And, you know, each time they win, the other team has to go to Tribal Council, they kick off a person of color. Until finally, it kind of becomes this very stark thing,

“where it's down to four white people versus four people of color, I think.”

Oh, my god, the blue beast is-- Oh my god, the blue beast is got what they wanted. Kind of, yeah, right? And then that tribe that is the POC tribe, they keep winning. And then they vote all the white contestants off one by one.

And so when you see how all of this played up by the end of the season, why do you think of this as the most American season of reality TV? I mean, because in general in this country, we don't want to talk about race, we don't want to have to think about race. No, we do not.

And then we are forced into these situations where we have no choice. We have to talk about that. It's come up again, you guys surprise. Yeah, thanks. And then in this season, we have that experience over and over and over again.

And to me, it is such a quintessential part of the American experience. And it's all playing out in this game on African Island in the middle of the South Pacific. [MUSIC PLAYING] Man, you're very good at it. [MUSIC PLAYING]

At four, the most American schoolbook. So Roman Myers hosts the podcast 99% invisible. And he recently started a new series with the BBC. It's called a history of the United States in 100 objects. And one of the stories on his new show seemed very much in line with what we're talking about here today on our show.

It is about a book that shaped education in this country for years. Here's Roman. The book I'm going to tell you about was written by one very frustrated school teacher.

The revolutionary war is ending.

“The fighting on American soil finally tapering off.”

And in every part of regular life, people are trying to figure out, okay, now that we're not British anymore. What does it actually mean to be an American? This teacher, he's educating anywhere from 50 to 70 students in a one room schoolhouse. And these students range from six to 16 years old. It's the same in a lot of places around the country.

A very small percentage of kids are getting an education. And even if they do get into a classroom, there's no standard curriculum. No shared set of books or processes. The books these students are using are British, teaching British geography, British history, British ways of thinking. People are largely still spelling the word color with a U.

And the school teacher, he looks around at all those and decides this has to change. His name is Noah Webster.

“He's this person who takes on, as an educator, the problem of literacy.”

That's a money pairing, author and professor of African American Studies at Harvard University. And he complains about the classroom to be grounded in noisy and chaotic. And he is also sort of interested in trying to find a way to standardize American learning. So long before his dictionary made him a household name. Webster spends his own money to print a little blue book with an unwieldy title.

It's called the first part of the grammatical institute of the English language. A title so bad that nobody ever used it. They just started calling it the Blueback Speller. So he really creates this book that is built for an auto-diadact. It's a way to self-teach.

It's not an additional, it really is like a guide to learning to read. If it sounds kind of counterintuitive that you'd learn to read from a book that requires you to read, here's how that works. The book contains a bunch of exercises that kind of look like multiplication tables, but with words and letters that you'd memorize.

First, you'd start by learning the alphabet, A, B, C, D, and then you'd move to syllables, like a, ba, ca, and da. Until you finally learn simple words, like bag, big, bog, bug. Eventually you'd form sentences, read paragraphs, and then you'd read these short stories, a collection of tables and moral parables.

Webster uses the book to introduce simpler, more distinctly American spellings. He drops the "you" from humor and labor. He once suggested that we start spelling the word "daughter" as DAW-T-E-R, which would have been nice, though that one didn't stick. But his larger idea does succeed.

This book, The Blue Back Speller, becomes one of the most important books in early America.

Entire generations, go up with it. At one point, The Blue Back Speller was second only to the Bible in copies sold. And it also, it's kind of like a Bible.

“Like, could you describe its size and the relevance of its size?”

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's wonderful to hold one because you realize it's pocket size. I mean, it was small enough to fit into a jacket pocket or pants pocket. It was mobile. Yeah, and it could be hidden. It could easily be hidden, which is really important.

Important because it means the book could be used secretly by people who weren't supposed to have it. And slave people who were legally prohibited from learning to read.

Webster probably never intended this book for black people at all.

Well, he was against slavery. Webster's books were meant for Americans who were defined by Webster in his dictionary as descendants of Europeans, white people. And despite that fact, his Blue Back Speller become something that is fundamental to African American struggles for literacy. The Blue Back Speller was everywhere. So common that some enslaved people managed to get their hands on it anyway, even though teaching an enslaved person to read was actually against the law in much of the South. Having one of these spellers for someone else enslaved could put you at enormous risk of naming a death of being sold black literacy was seen as a threat.

One of the enslaved people who learned to read this way was Frederick Douglass. He go on to become one of the most influential writers and thinkers in American history and advisor to Abraham Lincoln. He and countless other black people take on that Blue Back Speller. An insist upon becoming part of the literate American public.

are they hopeful for land with their freedom but they have to be schools.

The Blue Back Speller found its way from Shipyard to Town Square from the schoolhouses of New England to the plantations of the South. And when I actually got my hands on it, but being honest, the content of the book itself is kind of a joyless slog. If you ask me to teach someone to read using the Blue Back Speller, it would be hard. And it can't imagine starting from place I'm not being able to read it all and using it to navigate my way to literacy. It just throws you right into the deep end of the bull, swimming and pages of hard to navigate tables.

And then there are the moral parables. They're not exactly compelling and more than a little condescending. If you were someone who didn't get a primary school education, this seems like exactly the kind of book that might put you off of reading forever. It takes real conviction to use the book.

It goes from basically, you know, pre-kinda garden to college inside of a few hundred and like maybe a hundred paid new two hundred and fifty pages obviously.

It is not something that you just pick up and all of a sudden you have mastery. No, it's quite a work. And despite that fact, his Blue Back Speller becomes something that is important. The same object, it's Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois for whom the Blue Back Speller matters. There's something quintessentially American about the Blue Back Speller.

It becomes not only a way to learn to read, but actually a tool for entry into all kinds of arenas where they had not been contemplated. The Blue Back Speller wasn't what it was because the genius of Noah Webster.

“It became what it became because of the people who read it. Who made something up it?”

Version of the story originally aired on his new show, a history of the United States and a hundred objects. It was originally produced by Priscilla Alaby, an aired courtesy of BBC Studios Productions Limited, 99% of visible and serious XM. You can find the series in the 99% visible feed wherever you get your podcasts and money. Perry tells the story of the Blue Back Speller in a new book, "Black and Blue's." Which brings us to Act 5. Act 5, Jose, can you see?

So one of the areas where this country can really claim to have invented a lot of things is music. It's jazz, there's R&B, there's rock, there's country, there's hip-hop, all created here, and then exported around the world. But we do have some musical traditions that are very specific to this country and pretty much a state in this country. One of our producers, Emmanuel Jochi, has a story about one like that.

“So when I first moved to the US as a kid, years before I became a citizen, I remember noticing this one very distinct thing.”

Which is that every time I saw someone sing the National Anthem, they put their own little twist on it.

And they always seem to do it in this one spot.

It doesn't matter the genre of a singer's drum. It doesn't matter if they sing the rest of the song fairly straight. People will get to that last part of the song and do something completely different. Sometimes they scatter or add their own words. People are Mariah Carey, because they are Mariah Carey.

“This happens so often, I think most Americans have sort of accepted it as a fact.”

But this sort of thing just doesn't go down like that in other countries. Like, if you take the UK, where I was born, like that National Anthem? I have no earthly idea why I would even begin to put my own spin on it. The adlibbing thing is not really something bridge dude to go say picking, right? Like, you're just kind of risking Charles a happy Victoria's life and you keep it pushing.

But when I told some of my coworkers that the American life about this, they were incredulous.

It's the end of a song, dude. Like, what else are you going to do?

“I heard all that, and I took it personally.”

So I set out to prove them wrong. I spoke to five musicologists about this, and places like Stanford, Berkeley, UNC. And they all agreed with me. What American singers do at the end of a National Anthem is something you really don't see much in other countries. And there are a bunch of reasons for that.

Like, for one, France has got key, who wrote the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner, specifically chose a melody, best designed for showing off. This is very different from other National Anthems, which are often marches or hymns. The tunes got keypicked, came from a musician's club in England,

and was basically the equivalent of one of the songs you use at a talent show to show your incredible range and voice.

“In fact, that's why the song is so hard for most of us to sing.”

Original tune has this kind of, you can't sing with us energy. The other reason other countries don't improvise the way we do on their anthem is they don't have a tradition of improvising music. Like, we have jazz, blues, gospel, black music, where it's built in that you don't always do what's on the page. There's, you know, freedom or ever, individuality. Do you ever think that his own version in the 1940s?

A newly moved to the US Eagles to Vinsky did one too.

And yet, the first major recorded instance of vocalists got up at a sporting event,

and decided they were going to customize the Star Spangled Banner and sing it their own way. It's relatively recent.

“The consensus all points to one particular performance of the anthem in 1968.”

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, please write and join in the singing of our national anthem. It was game five for World Series, and the guy who sang, Jose Feliciano, was a big star. His cover of "Like My Fire" came out that year. And Jose was chosen to do the national anthem that night, specifically because of who he was. A young, Puerto Rican folk singer who could offer something different.

Feliciano doesn't just alter that one line of the song. His version is a whole rethinking of it. It's almost like it's trying to do away with the grandeur of the song and do the opposite. Make it intimate. A recording Feliciano did of this version was super successful.

He opened his concerts with it. And then a year later, Jimmy Hendrix goes even further at Woodstock. And a whole raft of people take these big swings. There's Marvin Gaze, 1983 version at the NBA All Star Game, which sounds like it should come with a free water bed. The inspiration for how everybody sings it now, better lives in 1991.

Whitney Houston at the Super Bowl. She slows the song down, changes it from 3/4 time to 4/4 time, which gives her more space. And she sings it mostly straight, until the end, and that last line. She's going to sing the song. God, I miss Whitney Houston.

But yeah, that's how we get to today. A ritual where you use a vocalist, no matter what your race, what your genre of music. You clock in, do the job you're hired for, sing the song through like they wrote it. And you get two phrases at the end for some real personality. Well, I just want to play you one last version, because this weekend, the 250th anniversary of this country.

It's probably one of your only appropriate settings for it. This one is the most on the nose, general pattern in front of the American flag.

These colors don't run a you ain't first your last.

You can take this ant from me out of my cold dead bingers rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

Because the occasion, I guess, called for it.

It was the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty, 1986. And the singer was Sandy Patty. But National Anthem normally runs about two minutes. But Sandy, she makes it last for almost six. She adds all these extra verses that were written for the occasion.

And every time you think the song is about to end, there is more.

“I love about this version in high school in a music fairy class, because our teacher used it as the greatest example of key changes.”

We were still six months away from Beyonce's love on top. But anyways, Sandy Patty, she takes it higher and higher. Again. And again. And again.

It is totally ridiculous.

And yet kind of incredible.

Emmanuel Jochi. (Music) (Music)

“Well, a program is produced today by Emmanuel Jochi.”

(Music) Special thanks to the Sean Collins, and a great falster Steven Hinton. Nate Sloan, Nicholas Matthew, Mark Clayke, J. Allison, the drumming sage Miller. And Jessica Bastion, Sierra Crain, Murdock, Ashley C. Ford, and he Brown. Charlie Lannin, Bonnie Bastion, Gora, and Johnson.

Scott Tucker, Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan Public, Salasero, and Clotilde, Johnson Beal. Thanks all of you today to this American life partners, Jonathan Teller and Becky Leidman. Who are these life partners I speak of? They are people who are excited to be able to have money to help us do something very basic, which is to continue making our show.

If that is a goal you support, I hope you'll consider joining them. Join us. You get all kinds of perks. As a thanks, most notably, I think just the show continuing to exist. But also, we've been experimenting with ourselves stuff.

I've been writing a weekly newsletter for two weeks now. We'll see how long it goes. Go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes.

“This American Life is a little bit of public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.”

Thanks as always, Dr. Abracom's co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatea, recently his learned what being "ashe" is.

And I don't know, it's embarrassing. He keeps going up to strangers and asking. Can I see your knees? I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. Got to make the world more round.

Back to make the world more round.