Hearst vs Pulitzer - The Headless Torso, Part 2 | 2
Business Wars
Audible
4.6 • 13.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2018
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1897, America looked very different. Carriages rolled through the streets of New York. Mass media was just growing up, and Hearst was convinced that carrier pigeons - hunted to extinction by 1914 - were what would give his paper the edge during the early days of the Headless Torso case.
This case belonged to the whole city. Everyone - barkeeps in Brooklyn and bankers on the Upper East Side alike are invested in the mystery… and what happened to his head.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, prime members, you can listen to business wars at free on Amazon music. |
| 0:04.8 | Download the app today. |
| 0:08.5 | It's October 7, 1897 in New York, and the headless torso trial has begun. |
| 0:14.9 | A professional artist for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal sketches the scene |
| 0:19.7 | in the courtroom is pan-moving furiously across the page. |
| 0:24.0 | It's his first time working with birds. |
| 0:26.7 | Not as subjects, no birds are on trial here. |
| 0:29.3 | We're talking about carrier pigeons, a world-class breed. |
| 0:33.6 | Hearst has spent thousands to rig up a system of birds to feed his paper the latest trial news. |
| 0:40.2 | The artist draws witnesses testifying, lawyers laying out arguments, spectators fainting |
| 0:45.3 | anything newsworthy. |
| 0:47.0 | Then he rolls the paper up, slips it into a leather-bound tube, and sets it in the claws |
| 0:51.6 | of the pigeon and off-fit flies. |
| 0:55.2 | On the stand this crisp fall day is a gust of knack, or gussy as she's often called. |
| 1:01.2 | The district attorney has been asking her why the day before the murders, she cleaned |
| 1:06.4 | the bathtub in woodside with ammonia. |
| 1:08.7 | Is it also true that you hired an undertaker's carriage to transport several heavy parcels |
| 1:14.8 | you had wrapped up with cheesecloth? |
| 1:17.3 | I just want to make my peace with the people and with God answer the question. |
| 1:24.7 | On the left side of the ferry, or passenger pigeons would be hunted to extinction by 1914, |
| 1:30.3 | but at the end of the 19th century there are common sight around New York. |
| 1:34.6 | The sound of their wings flapping during take-offs and landings has become familiar in the courtroom. |
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