Listen to the episode here.

It isn’t every week Angie brings the pain, yet here we are. This week Angie shares the Lebensborn program. During this 9-year program, the Third Reich attempted to breed more soldiers. It starts with unwed Aryan mothers going to country estates to give birth and ends with the SS kidnapping children who looked the part.

Theresa offers a palate cleanser by sharing Harvard’s Bad Butter Rebellion. Listen to the pre-Revolutionary War era hysterics over Harvard’s dining hall serving rancid butter and the chaos that ensues.

This episode pairs well with:

The Children’s Crusade of 1212
The Eggnog Riots

Transcript:

Theresa: Hi, and welcome to the Unhinged History Podcast. The podcasts were two complete, absolute crazy heads, are going to compulsively study history and then report to each other the stories we’ve only recently learned and hope the other one has never heard it before. I’m host one, I’m Teresa. And that is host two. I’m Angie. 

Angie: I don’t know, I was going to say something different just then. I don’t mind Angie. 

Theresa: It’s like, who? 

Angie: Yeah. What? Cla? And you are? 

Theresa: I got a… Hold on, I got to go text Angie’s husband. I think she’s having a mental break. It’s Brittany, bitches. First off, really shitty Brittany impression, but that’s also, I think, the first time I’ve got to say that word. 

Angie: Secondly, I just came out of a huge sneezing fit. Okay, so try again. 

Theresa: No, it’s not going to sound any better. See, I just wanted to call out the bullshit 

Theresa: there because it was the solid bullshit. It’s Brittany, bitches. 

Angie: Yeah, I don’t know. I’d have to listen to it more. I’ve only heard a few times. Isn’t it bitch singular? 

Theresa: It’s Brittany, bitch. Yeah, you’re right. At least in the song. I’m sure if she showed up at a party, that would be her entrance. She would do… She’d pluralize. 

Angie: I mean, it would be a very sad party if there was only one other member there. 

Theresa: Hey, don’t make fun of my parties. 

Angie: Hey, listen, if that’s the way you party, live your dream, man. I’m not trying to stop you. My parties are literally… 

Theresa: Oh yeah, no, that would be too low of a bar. She needs more people. Yeah. Yeah. Party for me is literally me on the couch with a glass of wine. 

Angie: That sounds like a great party to me, if I’m honest. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Thank you for the party. Oh. Oh, man, are you ready? Are you ready for me? Oh, yeah, that’s right, because you’re going to go first. I am going to go first. 

There is no way to open this. So I don’t know if I should start with… Yeah, whatever. The Leaving Born program. The Holocaust, the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people. That’s from the Sydney Jewish Museum. The Holocaust Encyclopedia, which is run by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There is a phenomenal resource called German History and Documents and Images, where they have collected the history of their country and have organized it in sections. So you can just, like, your ranges. 

So you can go through and see whatever documents were available to be digitized. So that was actually really phenomenal. The Youth in Asia program and ACON T4 of the Holocaust Encyclopedia. And then a fabulous YouTube video that I watched called Leavens Born the Nazi Nurseries by Best Documentary. You’re doing the Leaving Born? Oh, my. 

Okay. And then there is this archive called the Arlesen Archives. It’s 85 years of Leavens Born. And this archive manages a handful of things, but this is one of their bigger collections, and it was all handed to them. 

They had a lot of stuff to be in with, but one particular author got, like, she’d been studying it for years and years and years, so she turned all of her documents over to them, and they’ve digitized and, you know, done their best to curate this information. So I’ve got a tense one. It’s not super long, but I think it’s an important one nonetheless. And I know that some of our listeners that throws them off when I bring the pain, but I heard about an aspect of my story recently and was like, I thought I’ve heard about this in passing before, but I wasn’t entirely sure. 

Like, it sounded familiar, but it also sounded like something I didn’t know anything about, so I immediately began looking into it. So I’m going to tell you, like you said, I’m going to tell you about the Leavens Born program, and I think the best way to start is a quick recap of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. So back on July 14th of 1933, the Nazi regime enacts a sterilization law. This law is called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Disease. I think we’ve mentioned this particular section before in some of our stories. 

We had to have. But basically, if it’s not out there in the world, here it is. It allows the government to forcibly sterilize Germans with certain diseases. There are nine specific medical conditions that this applies to, and according to the Reich, all our conditions influenced by genetic hereditary factors. These are congenital mental deficiencies, schizophrenia, manic depression, hereditary epilepsy. Epilepsy? Thank you. I can never say that word. Epilepsy. Hereditary St. Vitus Dance, which I was like, what? Oh, 

Theresa: wait a minute. Wait a minute. So they just, first off, I didn’t realize that St. Vitus’ dance, the dancing plague was hereditary. 

Angie: So there’s another name for it, and it’s called Huntington’s Choria. And I don’t know if it’s the same or just shares the name, but I had the same question was like, put a pin in that because I’m real curious. I’m going to have to Google that later. 

Theresa: Now, in case you’re wondering, I have to derail us for a second. St. Vitus’ dance or the St. Vitus illness, that was covered when I did the dancing plague. And that is a real thing. That is episode 68. 

Angie: Oh, okay. 

Theresa: Yeah, the dancing plague of 1518. And the title is Nothing is More Annoying Than a Dead Wife. Honestly. 

Angie: So yeah, if you haven’t listened to that episode, I regularly go back and listen to that episode because Theresa Docs it out of the park with that story and the best possible. Additionally, you have hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, and then you have like serious hereditary physical deformities. And then anyone suffering from chronic alcohol alcoholism can also be sterilized. Furthermore, section 12 states that once the court has decided on sterilization, the operation must be carried out even against the will of the person to be sterilized. Unless that person applied for it himself, the state physician has to attend to the necessary measures with the police authorities while other measures are insufficient. Direct force may be used. 

And that’s devastating to me. So that law goes into effect on January 1 of 1934. In the timeframe that that law was being used, about 400,000 people are sterilized. So then in 1935, the Nuremberg laws were long story short, as I mentioned. They’re a legislation that shows this rapid growth in anti-Semitism and other targeted groups such as any other like the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and of course, homosexuals. They’re all deemed undesirable and these laws work to protect the racially acceptable German or related blood, the whole Aryan-Masser ace thing. So it also forbids marriage as well as any extramarital relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, which is insane to me, but I guess when you want complete control, there you go, right? 

Right. So from the get-go, this is like a terribly problematic problem, but it gets so much worse. First of all, the Reich citizenship law classified people as Jewish if they were descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. But the criteria that defines a grandparent as Jewish is not really specific and it makes this definition like circular. At this point, whatever remaining civil or political rights the Jewish community have are stripped. And so this is sort of the world that the Levens-born are born into. And I feel like the Levens-born would never have even been a thing if we could have just, I don’t know, left our people alone to do their thing. Like, but here we go. Yeah. 

The Levens-born program was created by the SS in December of 1935 in order to promote the growth of Germany’s healthy Aryan population. I am saying this with such a healthy dose of air quotes. 

Theresa: Himmer. Himmer. Air quotes are the best thing to use in an audio format for a podcast. I know, aren’t they? 

Angie: Himmer personally founded this as his response to what he saw as a drop in the birth rate among germs. Shocking. I know. I mean, when you’re just sterilizing people, it’s weird. 

Theresa: Well, I mean, but you look at, okay, so let’s zoom out a second, right? Let’s push back on that because look at the developed countries we have now. We’ve got drops in birth rates in Japan. We have drops in birth rates in the U.S. 

Angie: I would agree with that except for in our, I don’t, well, I don’t know how it works in Japan, but I’m actually one of my classes talked about this. Birth rates have dropped globally because women have jobs and most women, not all, most women have access to birth control. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s not to say that this isn’t the same thing that’s happening in Germany at the time, right? 

Oh, yeah. Like maybe women are just making choices to have less children. Maybe families aren’t marrying as young. Like there’s so many things added to this on top of this forced sterilization program that they have going on. But he is also seeing that there is an allegedly high number of abortions that are being done by single-arean mothers. So whether that’s true or not, he sees it and that’s what he thinks is going on. Additionally, as the war years progress, this program was radicalized even more to the ideals of Himmler. And he begins to worry about the loss of good, racially elite soldiers because we’re in the war years and we’re losing tons of men. And so we need more men, but we need babies to have more men, right? 

Yeah. Like they have to grow up first. So he sees this program, like it’s designed with the hope that there would, this would be like ground zero for the, for generations of the quote, racially valuable humans. So originally the program focuses on encouraging the men of the SS to have large families. In fact, the documentary I watched, it said that there was like a minimum of four children per family. 

And then the documentary also points out that the men of the SS were given additional orders to seek racially valuable women outside of the marriage to further their procreation. Wives love that. Wives really love that. 

I super love that. Good for them, I guess. Along with these orders, the Levens-Worn program strongly discouraged unmarried pregnant, arraigned women from seeking illegal abortions. In an effort to ensure that this was the case, the first Levens-Worn home was opened in Steinhorn, Bavaria on August 15th in 1936. The word Levens-Worn literally means sound of life. 

And I just, I hate how insidious every bit of this is. So this home was quote, a very well-equipped maternity and children’s home. After this initial home was open, around 30 more would pop up throughout Germany, as well as Austria, and then later into occupied territories like Norway, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. Often, if not always, the homes were on these grand country estates, so they’re private, they’re out. 

They give this idea of luxury and just peace. Like that’s the whole point. In fact, one of my sources, you can actually go and look at the entire pamphlet that they created about it. 

Whoa. Which is, it’s all in German, but it’s still fascinating to see, even if you don’t speak German, like what was going on there. And because this isn’t insidious enough, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says, quote, The Levenson-Worn Program was heavily influenced by Nazi racial ideology and theories of eugenics. It only accepted healthy applicants who could establish their area of ancestry. The SS screened individuals’ personal medical histories as well as their family records. Applicants could be denied on the basis of their alleged racial impurity or health issues. Now, based on what I said earlier about the individuals who were sterilized, applicants could be denied if their family history had any issues. 

They could be denied any of the same physical, mental or psychiatric disabilities that were listed earlier. I hate it, but that makes sense. Right. They seem to go hand in hand. Right. Awful, but yeah, okay, if you’re not going to roll out in one place, why would you allow it in the other? 

Theresa: If my sister’s deaf, you think I’d probably carry those genes, which checks. 

Angie: Right. Himmler was so into this idea of the men of the SS belonging to this group of the biological and racial elite that made up Nazi Germany. So the members of the SS, as well as their future brides, had to pass medical examinations to establish their anarianism before they could even vary. I think every bit of this is so disgusting, but I think it’s so important to share because we don’t, at least for me, when you think about, you think about the battles and the big plot, right? But to me, you never see the back end of things, and this feels like the back end of things, like the backstage. Yeah, how the sausage is made. Exactly. 

And it’s just so heartbreaking to me. So that said, women who found themselves to be both Aryan and unwed would be welcome into these leaving-born homes because at the time, as always, there was strong pressure against single motherhood in society. Now, they were frowned upon. 

Theresa: You said encouraged. I’m assuming later on encouragement becomes much more animated, a little bit more intense, and you’re more than encouraged. 

Angie: So here’s the thing. I would love to tell you yes on that, but, and I’ll get into this a little bit more later. They didn’t do great at advertising these homes, and so encouraged in that sense is really the only words that could be used because they didn’t want it to be something that was out in the mass public knowledge, but they also wanted as many unwed single Aryan mothers as they could get. So it was this very weird line of like how to keep it under wraps, but how to kind of recruit more ladies at the same time, and they never really figured it out. But I’ll get into that in just a minute. 

Okay. So these women, they find themselves with this pressure of society, right, to be, if they’re unwed, it’s just so unfortunate that you would be found pregnant. But these programs, they offered mothers both financial support and adoption services. So if you’re young and you’re looking at this situation and you’re thinking, oh my God, I can’t even, like, what am I going to start showing? My mom’s going to know, or society is going to know, these are homes that are offering you a way out, basically. 

As I mentioned earlier, these are private homes away from judging eyes. Himmler himself hoped that this alone would discourage the idea of abortion. And I hate that it’s not because he values human life, but because he values the Nazi ideals. Like, I want to encourage you to continue having children, but not because I believe in children. It’s his motivation. 

Absolutely. But because, like, while the Nazi regime is strengthening preexisting laws that prohibit most abortions, they’re also operating this hereditary health court that orders abortions and sterilizations that, like I mentioned earlier. And despite the Reich’s increased penalties for seeking abortions, Himmler estimates that there’s at least 100,000 biologically valuable pregnancies terminated in Germany every year. I don’t know how he’s coming up with these numbers. I feel like that’s really sort of kind of plucked out of the thin air, but because none of Himmler’s statistics in this are, like, confirmed. They’re just supposed to expect it. 

Theresa: Honestly, I think if I were divorced from my current timeline, I would probably go, okay, he probably has a study for this, and I might blindly believe it. Being alive now in his current timeline, I kind of go, I feel like a lot of these numbers are made up 

Angie: a little bit just like he sounds like a good round number. We’ll go with 100,000. 

Theresa: That’s okay. We’ve seen the meme of, like, 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Yeah. That feels like this. 

Angie: I would have to agree with you. Now, I mentioned these homes. They’re country estates. They’re designed to be pleasant spaces where the women can live comfortably as they receive care, both prenatal care, all the way through labor and delivery, as well as recovery. Now, because the program sought out women who would want to avoid public scandal, the homes prioritize anonymity and the staff is incredibly discreet. This obviously leads to the problem of not having a ton of women show up. 

So there’s that. The program also states that single women would have to obtain permission from the Leavens-born central office before they could take their newborns home. Meanwhile, the program would assume guardianship of the children and determined where they would be raised. And in everything that I read and everything that I watched, it seemed more often than not the mother didn’t get to keep their child. And I don’t entirely know the, like, because you have the homes and then you have these SS officers that are told to make all the babies with their wives. 

So I’m assuming if you are an SS officer and you have a wife and your wife is pregnant with baby number five, baby number five gets to come home with you. But I’m not really clear on that. And none of my sources had anything to say about it. And so it makes me think it was a case-by-case situation and there’s no numbers to determine how many children actually got to stay with their mothers. And that breaks my heart. 

Theresa: Well, and I think if we probably, like, went to a country estate that was a spot where the Leavens-born program occurred, I think that information would probably be easier to have. 

Angie: But if the information is still available, right? Right. Anyway, as the Warriors are raging, Himmler notes that these homes are not bringing forth enough babies. So he branches out to other countries. And the women who are perceived to hold the qualities the Reich loved, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed. So they set their eyes on the rest of the occupied regions and fell in love with Norway. 

Theresa: You got to say, Scandanavia, here we come. Mm-hmm. 

Angie: The Leavens-born program took control of these foreign mothers, especially. So basically they, like, they send their troops out and they’re like, go, make babies, find the tall blonde women, do the thing, right? And then they would take control of the children, especially if the health, family history, and, quote, area and ancestry could be established with these foreign women. And if that wasn’t enough, the Leavens-born program also became involved in the kidnapping of thousands of foreign children that met the standards by the act of repatriation. There we go. 

Thousands of children, mostly from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, were kidnapped and brought to these homes because they either had German ancestry or simply looked the part. I cannot. My brain cannot. Like, excuse me. My youngest son was a blue-eyed blonde. 

I cannot imagine just walking down the street one day and the rite being like, we’ll take that one. Yeah, he looks the part. Come with me. 

No, thank you. The program would then help place these children with German families, telling the adopting families that the children had been orphaned by war. So these adopting families had no clue. Probably until after the war when it all came to light. And even then they may not have ever known. 

Maybe they would have suspected, but now you would think that this would be successful, right? We are birthing babies and we’re still in children, but nope. The program’s homes claim to uphold the highest standards of modern medicine, but there were serious complaints about the quality of medical care and the staff. 

They start to emerge fairly quickly. And, you know, the whole basis of the program being like anonymous and relying on its privacy, it had trouble attracting the eligible women. So, Himmler had estimated that, like I said earlier, 100,000 biologically valuable German women had obtained abortions illegally each year despite the increased penalties, but only 7,000 children were born until the Levensborn home during the entire program’s nine-year run. 

In fact, the homes would foster more kidnapped foreign children than they would natural born children. I hate this. Right? As always, the precise numbers are difficult to fully know how many they sold and how many they birthed. And the legacy of the Levensborn program includes both broken homes and deved state of parents, but it also left an entire generation of children unknown participants in one of the world’s worst ideas. This pretty much abandons them to their problems and their labels as Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, whether they were or not. And it’s no shocker, but these children had no desire to be associated with any of it. In the documentary I watched, it includes interviews with several children of the program who now are, of course, adults, right? 

I would highly recommend it. It’s so enlightening. Like, enlightening the news that you hear in here and the stories they tell are heartbreaking. Like, one man talks about how he made it out of the home with his mother, and they went, they escaped Germany at kind of one of the real pivotal moments. And left, I think they fled north, and when they finally made it back to Germany, her husband found a man and, or her mom, his mom found a man desperately wanted to marry him, and the man just adored her. And his mother said, you can’t marry that woman because of that little Nazi sausage to his face. So she abandons him. 

She abandoned the boys. And that happened a lot. There are stories of children who were born in these homes, and for the most part, their early years are spent in these homes. So they’re raised around SS soldiers who were good to them. They were kind to them. They gave them candy and trinkets, and they played with them to find out when the allies invaded that they’re the bad guy. So now they’re having to deal with this, like, emotional roller coaster of, but he was good to me. 

He was kind to me. And you’re supposed to be the bad guy. Yeah. Like, so there’s a lot of emotional turmoil that comes out of it. There’s a whole generation of kids who may or may not have ever met their birth parents, who may or may not have ever even known that they were part of this program. Obviously against their will, like they were born into it, or they were stolen from their families. 

And I’m so curious to know, because obviously this information is coming to light now, and it’s been available for a while, but I’m curious to know how many people actually were able to reunite, or if they even wanted to. Because that doesn’t seem to be the case with a lot of the interviewees. This is their life, and they were raised by someone who cared for them, and that’s the end of it. Now what? And it just, it’s heartbreaking to me. 

But that’s my story of how the third right thought babies and kidnapping was going to be the future of their mass race. Joy. I know. And there’s pictures. 

I just want to show you one, because it’s insane to me, and I cannot imagine they’re just so insidious. Okay, here’s the picture. This is them, the children eating their meal, right? It just looks like a kindergarten class having lunch. Yeah, it’s… 

Theresa: And not even all the kids are blot. There are some burnets up in that photo. Mm-hmm, yep. 

Angie: There are burnets up in that photo. There is… Let’s see if I can find it fairly quickly. There is a… Okay. This is what the homes were described as in the pamphlets. 

Theresa: So it looks like a country club. It is a giant estate. We’re talking four or five stories tall, massive. Massive. One to two blocks big. This thing is a castle in the middle of the country. Mm-hmm. 

Angie: And you’ve got dining rooms that are staffed and a full nursing staff. Unfortunately, and I didn’t know this, and I mean, it makes sense, but I didn’t know this until reading about them. A lot of the nurses were part of like the Socialist… Like the Nazi party. They had a whole wing of nurses that believed in their eugenics program. 

Of course they did. Right? So a lot of the nurses were from that operating in these things that are meant to look and and feel like retreats to these people who are literally in a pickle, it’s nothing else. Like I just… I can’t stop thinking about these poor kids. 

Like it’s heartbreaking to me. So there you go. But you can go and you can see the documents and you can look at the pamphlet and you can learn all about the leave and spawn yourself. Well, okay. If you want something to cry over. 

Theresa: I will do a sharp pivot to… Oh, thank you. So a very different topic. Okay. Okay. At the beginning of like the week, Andrea told me that she needed a palate cleanser. I was deep in my field because I had already done a ton of notes. So I adjusted sharply. But here we go. So I’m going to tell you the story of the Bad Butter Rebellion. Bad Butter? Bad Butter. 

I am so excited. My sources, Emerging Revolutionary War Era, they have an article by Phil Greenwald called The Great Butter Rebellion. The Harvard Crimson, Riot and Rebellion. 

Oh! The Harvard Crimson, Bad Butter and University Commons, caused the Great Rebellion of 1776. The Harvard Independent, Sour Butter 300 Years Later by Katie Lynn. And Grub Street, Harvard’s first rebellion involved butter by Kara Baskin. 

Angie: I am so happy you’re doing the story. It has been on my list literally since the beginning. 

Theresa: Really? Yes. I knew nothing about it, but it was volunt told to me by a viewer on TikTok. And I had it on my list, didn’t even record the person’s name, and was just like, I’ll get to it. And then I was just like, what is this Bad Butter Rebellion? And I was excited. I think part of it was, you know, I recently covered the founding of the FDA and how that really soured you. 

Theresa: Like it was grocery food. And I was like, you know, this feels adjacent. I feel like it’s time. 

Angie: Love this for me. I still haven’t had milk, just so you know. 

Theresa: Well, let me remove butter from your menu. 

Angie: I love butter. Let’s not ruin butter for me. 

Theresa: I’m imagining a trash bag of Keri Gold. But here we go. In the middle of the 1700s, the food served in college dining rooms produced notable discontent among its undergraduates. At the time, colleges are full of the gentleman, emphasis on the men. 

They’re also, you know, because they’re the aristocrats and their children, it’s a very tasteful group. So it’s 1766. There is a bunch of people up in arms and deep in their fields over what they consider poor quality in food. And this ends up being Harvard’s first real insurrection. And this was the Great Butter Rebellion prompted by the serving of sour butter, which President Edward Holyoke, he first declines to replace it. He’s like, you know what, the butter sucks, but eat up. So good. Yeah, like get over yourself. You’re just the children of the elite. What are you going to do to me? 

Angie: My dad will be hearing about this. Let him. 

Theresa: We play golf on Tuesdays. I’ll tell him. It’s fine. Yeah, he thinks he or she does not know his brat anyhow. The disturbances that this butter created settled, like it got a little bit out of hand. And so it was taken to the board of overseers, which feels like the board of trustees. 

I’m going to assume that’s yeah. And the faculty is certain that their defense of the president and his rotten butter is well taken by the undergraduate party. They’re like, you know what, the faculty, we’ve all come together. We’re like, get over yourself. Just not nose punks. And the undergraduate body, they become a little bit indignant, a little self-righteous. Shocking. 

Angie: Considering this is probably the same age, like the same timeframe as the, oh my gosh, the egg nog riots, 

Theresa: I think the egg nog riots were in the 1800s because you have many of those people who end up being a part of the Civil War. 

Angie: Oh, that’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Okay. That’s right. I’m just totally imagining the burrito scene, like paying the guard, you have burrito money. 

Theresa: Anyway, sorry guys. And the egg nog riots that Angie is going back to, now I get to look that up. That is the episode title wasn’t worth the burrito. And that was episode 52. It’s a good one. Yeah. In case you’re wondering, egg nog riots, school and the overlap of all of those. 

Okay. So back to Harvard. There’s three students that are all seniors that are deep in their fields. We have Aisa Dunbar, Daniel Johnson, and Thomas Hodgson, or Hodgson. 

They’d had enough of the lack of fresh food. Now Dunbar, he’s apparently best known for being grandpa to Henry David Thoreau. Oh, okay. So Aisa Dunbar, he led the protest stating that the butter served by the college was, quote, stinketh. And he incited the student body to reject the rancid fair by jumping on his chair and shouting the phrase, quote, behold our butter stinketh. Therefore give us butter that stinketh not. 

Angie: My God, what a man. 

Theresa: This is so full of drama. I hear for it. So unsurprisingly, Dunbar faces disciplinary action. He’s being punished for insubordination, instigating a potential riot, and he receives his punishment. And the student body enacted another protest by walking out of the hall, cheering loudly in the Harvard yard, and then continuing all the way to Cambridge to dine there instead. 

Theresa: This is so stupid. 

Theresa: I mean, but this feels like college behavior. It is perfect. 

Angie: I’m just imagining like a troop of them from one campus to the next to decide that we will die here this evening. 

Theresa: And you know, okay, so think about it, right? Because this is a cafeteria. It’s an old-timey cafeteria. It’s a cafeteria. You know? We’re not, yeah. They make food for the number of students they have. Now imagine the entire student body. I mean, because if you see all of your classmates stand up and be like, screw this, we’re going to Cambridge, and they start walking out, you’re like, well, I guess I’m going to go on a chowder run. You walk out with everybody that you’re with because they’re, you know, peer pressure. You just become a liming. 

You know, that mob mentality kicks in. And then you go to Cambridge, and Cambridge is like, we only made food for the 150 students we had. Share and share alike. You know, like they can’t have dined heartily. But it makes a point, Dammit. 

Angie: It does make a point. Now, we’re going to go from- I want to read the letter home to Dad. Father, this school has terrible butter. You told me you were sending me the best school in the country. It’s got bad butter. It’s stinketh. 

Theresa: It’s stinketh. Asa Dunbar said, butter’s stinketh. And I, Father, quite well agree with him. It’s indeed. So we’re going to give the college some credit. The administration acknowledges, hey, you know what? We do admit butter’s rancid. 

But hey, you know what? There’s some economic difficulties. We don’t have access to all the fresh food that we want. So it is what it is. 

Okay. Now, Massachusetts has moved closer to open rebellion against the British Parliament and the Crown. And this example gets mirrored by the student body of Harvard, because this is British rule that we’re under. We’re not Americans yet. Okay. So there is a month of impasse, a month of discontent between students and dining staff. Oh, my God. Okay. 

Love this. And this includes, quote, insulting proceedings of the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Sir Francis Bernard, who personally addressed the student body in the chapel on campus and the protest and subordinations of the student body continued. So you get, imagine, the governor of your state, Newsom, comes to your college to talk to your student body about their actions in the dining hall. About bad butter. About bad butter. 

Angie: Well, listen, if Newsom does anything right, I know he would fix the butter situation, because he too doesn’t want to eat bad butter. 

Theresa: But in this, I can’t imagine that he’s on the student side. Probably not. Now, the students end up writing what is called the Book of Harvard. Love this. And it is a account in biblical language documenting the disorders of the college, and that publishes in September of 1776. 

Angie: I like the air quotes there, because air quotes are the most feeble thing on a podcast you record. 

Theresa: You know what? Your butter stick is. 

Angie: That’s my new favorite insult. Now, okay. 

Theresa: Okay. So the Book of Harvard is the document that is produced by the students in that biblical language. I’ll give you a quote later on. It’s a bit outrageous. This is all happening as the stewards are continuing to serve bad butter in the commons. They’re not backing down. And then we have the faculty who they begin to refuse to accept the customary and time honored, but very elastic excuses for absence from college exercises. So they’re used to like being like, well, I was dead at the time. I was on the moon with Steve and they decide, you know what, we’ll let it go. But they start. 

Angie: Don Barr and I were, it was weird. We were asleep and our door was locked and we couldn’t get out. We were stuck in our room. Yeah. 

Theresa: And it’s like we called first you were doping it, but they didn’t hear us. They couldn’t hear us. Yeah. So there ends up being this other thing written called the arguments for the defense. And this gives the student side of the question, well, the faculty prepares what they call this long list of representations and the faculty, the representations gives their side to the overseers. 

So both sides are preparing their documents. Now there’s, there’s trouble in the air when the authorities insisted that the student body should eat only in the commons and that scholars should be restrained from dieting in private family. You must eat here. We made food for all of you. We’re not throwing it all out. We don’t have refrigeration. So you need to come here and eat it. 

When it’s cooked right now, whether it’s stinketh or not, because it’s going to stink it’s more tomorrow. Ew. So 1776, the faculty, they draw this harsh law there. They end up kicking off the trouble here. Because part of the text that follows is article one and all scholars while at their meals shall sit in their places and behave with decency and who so ever shall be rude or clamorous at such time shall be punished by one of the tutors, not exceeding five shellings. So it sounds like for every time you’re loud and obnoxious and trained at the butters stinketh, that’s a five shilling fine. 

Oh my God, I love this so much. Now hold on to that number five shillings because article 10 states that every scholar shall for the present pay seven shillings and four pence a week for his whole diet. So if it’s $7 or seven shillings, I don’t know what a shilling trade likes to do. Seven shillings for a week’s worth of food. Five shillings for one instance of disobedience is quite substantial. Yeah. But Dunbar can afford it. You would think. Article 13 states no scholar shall be allowed to go into debt to the butler above $5 and shall have no more credit till that is paid. 

Okay. So basically you need to pay your fines. You need to pay your fees. The book of Harvard account of the rebellion. Here’s a chunk of it. 

Chapter one or chapter first one. And it came to pass in the ninth month on the 23rd day of the month, the sons of Harvard murmured and said, behold, bad and unwholesome butter is served at unto us daily. Now let us therefore dispute. Asa described go on to our ruler and seek redress. 

Now the whole account. Go ahead. I just love them. They have like the full on account and it goes on and on and on and it drills like the King Testament. 

Angie: Good for them. You don’t attend Harvard for nothing. 

Theresa: I’m not a person. I’m the King Testament, the King James version of I knew what she meant. Okay. Thank you for translating because I would have listened to this later gone. 

Theresa Marie, you know better. Now according to the Harvard Gazette, this is even a decade before the American Revolution. Harvard’s great butter rebellion of 1766 was perhaps the first sign of America’s spirit as United in civil disobedience. And it started in Harvard’s dining hall. Which I don’t think we give Harvard enough credit for. 

Honestly. Now, despite the strangest of this origin story, the student and I the student alliance from bad food is a trend that’s continuously found throughout the university’s long history. Since the 18th century, students have continued to form new communities to escape Harvard’s dining offerings. 

Angie: Harvard needs to step up its cafeteria game. 

Theresa: You know what can’t stop won’t stop. We have some street cred we need to keep because if it works for your great, great, great, great grandfathers, it works for you. Honestly. 

Angie: They could play on that now and their cafe could be called stinketh. Right. People would be down like I’d go. 

Theresa: Are you going to stinketh or are you going to rotted butter? I’m going to stinketh today. Exactly. During the country’s downturn in economic stability to access the fresh goods in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. An act of activism led to half of the student body getting suspended. And this is reported in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. So Harvard students grew increasingly dissatisfied with the decline in the quality of food and Holyoke’s failure to satisfy those demands. The colony or the Colonial Society described that for Asa Dunbar class of 1767, the meal presented with particularly soured butter was the final straw. As the first student to raise conflict Dunbar is rumored to have brought evidence of the inedible food to his senior tutor, decrying behold our butter stinketh. Therefore give us butter that stinketh not. So it could be that he brought the butter to the tutor. It could be these stippling the chair and shouted. 

We get some conflicting reports. Maybe both could be a little bit of both. I mean, I have a feeling that if you’re emboldened by the man around you shouting, you’re here. You’re probably going to continue on with your bullshit. Honestly. 

Yeah, because at this point you’re just one of those obnoxious teenage punks who’s just going to double down. I mean, good for him. So the the stinketh not that catching his phrase. It’s stuck and soon enough his fellow students join in the model yelling and protesting the tensions between the Hottie administration and the motivated cramp is grew and became violent and illegal. Now President Holyoke is fed up and eventually demands that the students return. Nope. The students turn in the leaders of this rebellion. There’s no names that are offered. So this is when Holyoke suspends half the student body. My God, I love this. This is just. 

Angie: There’s no greater force than a shared idea here. 

Theresa: The students though have suspended remain silent. And this is at the United States dawn of its birth as an independent country and argumentally this is one of the most political turbulent moments in American history, which is a wild concept to know that. We were protesting butter. 

And Harvard undergraduates united under a common goal refused to turn in one another despite the academic threats from the university. Eventually the colonial society explains that the board of overseers reinstated the status of all the suspended students and replace the butter. So if you keep up with your bullshit long enough, you get your demands met. 

Angie: Squeaky will gets the grease. Exactly. 

Theresa: And so just like that, one of harvest. Harvard’s greatest showings of student solidarity supported some of the humblest beginnings. The fight for unsour butter. The notoriety of Harvard as a campus for famously bad food has become an escapeable reputation. One aided by the college’s own students and continuing to lament and violently protest its offerings. 

Angie: Hey, man, when you want the burrito, you want the burrito. You do. They’re in bad butter. 

Theresa: So despite all of this butter protesting, the peace and quiet that comes afterwards that only last two years. Of course. There’s the great rebellion of 1768 and it’s like the first in a direction. It was incited by the college food and it lasted for a month. 

I love this. The riots are now more violent, but even more unsuccessful. I’m never going to get good butter. No, this is what happens when you give into the demands of terrorists. That’s basically what the college is saying. 

And so we just are not going to negotiate with terrorists anymore. So the penalties are severe and the feeling of that the punished were still martyred lingers. So they’re making martyrs out of everybody they’re punishing and everyone’s like, yeah, stand up for ASA. Yeah, justice. 1778. 

So we’re now Americans. The undergraduates are continued to be dissatisfied with their offerings and they form plans for weekly group dinners where members would rotate hosting dinner parties. When the turn came to Joseph the clean class of 1794, he presented whole roast pork. Which makes me wonder about these doors. Yeah, okay, fair. 

Angie: Yeah, now the students can take me and brought it from home. Yeah. 

Theresa: So there’s these dinner plans that are forming and they’re enjoying each other’s company just as much as the lavish food on their plates. And apparently these meetings never fully ceased over the last two centuries. The accurately named pork club or Priscilla in has evolved into this ever prestigious and notorious final club. Originating as an escape from Harvard University dining service or HUDs for simple meal times. Their story is rooted in the same motivations as Harvard’s great butter rebellion. A group of students tied to the quality. Tied to eating the tire. 

I cannot read out loud. A group of students tired of eating the poor quality tasteless food offered by the university came up with their own crafty solutions. And so this gives birth to the final clubs where some of the most notable examples of status divisions on campus exist. 

That’s awesome. If you’ve got the in crowd on the poor mouth, I’ve never gotten into the final clubs. Let’s be honest. Oh, my God, you’ve come to my final meeting and it would be like, well, ketchup cracker sandwiches because that’s what I was eating during college. 

Oh, I mean, it wasn’t that bad, but there were some nights where I did get a little creative. The final clubs themselves there. Are you going to say something? I interrupted. 

No, no, I just was agreeing. Yeah. They’re shrouded in a cloak of mystery, intrigue and critique from the outside. Yeah, if you can’t get in, of course, you’re going to critique it. Yeah. 

Final clubs are now considered notoriously exclusive and elitist parts of Harvard social scene. Fair. Okay. Now, as all this dinner drama is evolving, I’m going to take us back to the Revolutionary War era because I feel like this is important. So the Revolutionary Wars approaching the groans of hunger are drawn out by the patriotic spirit, which has completely captured the undergraduates of Harvard, Harvard College. Writing breaks out only once during the days surrounding the Revolutionary or the Revolution. And that’s when two Tory students brought tea into the college room, the college dining room in 1775. 1780, there was another successful student revolt in the history of the college, and it was the mildest, reportedly. There’s a large student body that forms in the yard one evening past resolutions against President Samuel Langdon, and they are demanding his dismissal. 

So they are deep in their fields. And this is after reading charges against him. Langdon submitted his resignation without objection. He’s like, you know what? Screw you, kids. I’m going home. 

Angie: Fair. Didn’t like you anyway. 

Theresa: 1807, there’s the Rotted Cabbage Rebellion. And this is another protest against college food. Love this. So the students assemble first at the tree at the end of Hallis Hall, which had become the rebellion Elm, or which was to become the rebellion Elm. Okay. And they beg for the food to be improved, especially the cabbage. 

Angie: Well, at least the butter’s not the problem this time. 

Theresa: They march out of the dining hall in a group and 17 of them are eventually dismissed. The food remained largely the same. Devastating. 1818, a wild food fight broke out and is chronicled in a rhyme by the clever scholar, Augustus Pierce. And he said, and thus arose a fearful battle, the coffee cups and saucer’s rattle, the bread bulls fly at a row full weight and break many in a learned fate. I should also mention that earlier that year there was a violent brawl involving crockery that also occurred. Of course. Because why wouldn’t there be? And that is the drama of eating at Harvard. 

Angie: You know, I’m so glad you shared the story. My whole day has been made. 

Theresa: I mean, I had to do something to frame us up, get us ready for the weekend and take us out of the bad taste of the leap and sporn. Bad butter. That’ll do it. 

Angie: Sour butter. Yeah, it’s stinking. I do it again. So gross. 

Theresa: You know, I mean, look. When I do offer palate cleansers, palate cleansers, they are not. 

Angie: Yeah, they definitely don’t inspire you to eat anything. That’s for sure. 

Theresa: So there you go. Enjoy brunch this weekend and share this with your favorite person who also hates butter that stinketh. You know, I, I. And on that note, goodbye. Bye. 

Theresa: You