HBM074: Benedict Arnold Makes People Nervous (Rumble Strip)

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Social Sciences, Science, Documentary, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2017

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There is an unusual piece of carved grey stone in the hills of upstate New York. It depicts the boot of a notorious American villain who was shot in the leg during the Battle of Saratoga. Major General Benedict Arnold’s name is nowhere to be found on the inscription. Instead, it refers only to the "most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army”. The rest is implied.

Steve Sheinkin thinks that we can’t—and don’t—talk about Benedict Arnold’s actual history because it serves Americans an unpalatable contradiction. Benedict Arnold won crucial battles for American independence, but he was also a turncoat.

Steve was often asked to sterilize history during his career as a textbook writer. Certain characters of the American Revolution enjoyed near godlike status. Giving counterevidence to their omniciencense or foresight was practically blasphemy. But that counterevidence exists, found in letters and personal journals of George Washington, Paul Revere and others. And these records paint much more conflicted, funny, perverse and sometimes bumbling portraits of the country’s forefathers.

But Steve’s bosses found it an issue of money. His editors were especially risk-averse for fear of offending a seemingly all-powerful Texas State Board of Education, who, according to Steve, had no patience for course material that questioned manifest destiny, Protestant Christianity, or the free market.

And that, Steve says, is why textbooks are boring.

Steve Sheinkin is now the author of many children’s history books that tell the stories left on the cutting room floor of his former employer. Recent releases are about the history of the atomic bomb, the permanently undefeated Carlisle Indian School football team, and, of course, Benedict Arnold.

We adapted this episode of Here Be Monsters from a brilliant piece by Erica Heilman that she made for her own podcast, Rumble Strip. Rumble Strip is great, listen to it. It’s part of The Heard. Jeff Emtman re-edited this piece with help from Bethany Denton and Nick White.

Music: Swamp Dog, The Black Spot

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters.
0:05.0	All right, we can go up and go through.
0:10.0	It's a beautiful park, actually.
0:14.0	I've never really seen a picture of him that I believe was quite right.
0:22.0	I could quite capture him. I think there was something kind of romantic about his whole look, you know, that he was, if not classically beautiful, then he was striking and very active, very strong and certainly not someone who you can ignore.
0:50.0	That is Steve Schenkin. He used to write history textbooks for kids, but he doesn't anymore.
0:56.0	We went for a walk and I asked him to tell me everything he knows about Benedict Arnold.
1:01.0	The average size, but very muscular.
1:06.0	And he was always jumping over things and lifting things and wonderful ice skater.
1:13.0	It's said that his calf just looked fabulous in a stocking,
1:18.0	the great legs, you know.
1:20.0	All I ever learned about Benedict Arnold is that he was the biggest trader in American history.
1:26.2	He was an American who switched sides and sold out to the British Army.
1:30.6	He betrayed his country, our country. But Steve Shinkin doesn't see it like that, or not
1:37.4	exactly. He told me that back before the betrayal, Benedict Arnold was a decorated major general, and he won us a crucial victory in the Revolutionary War.
1:48.0	It was the Battle of Saratoga, here in upstate New York, where we're walking up this hill. And it was here at this battle
1:55.6	where Benedict Arnold was shot in the leg and it was an injury he'd never fully
2:00.4	recover from. This battlefield from the Revolutionary War is one of Steve Shankin's favorite places and he wants to show me something up
2:15.3	these hills that's hiding in plain sight. What happened here I think it is important because he was
2:26.7	he was still in the army but he was
2:31.1	wounded to the wound in his legs. Even once it healed, he couldn't walk without a cane.
2:38.0	He had to have a special shoe made. And so he couldn't ride a horse very well certainly not well enough to lead men in battle.
	...

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