Ike vs. Squirrels (1955) [Archive Episode]

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

**We’ll be back on Sunday with our first new epsiode of 2024. In the meantime, here’s a treat from the archives!**

It’s March 13th. This day in 1955, news breaks that the White House is engaged in a full-on battle against the squirrels that have invaded the grounds.

Jody, NIki, and Kellie discuss why President Eisenhower is so determined to get rid of the squirrels, and how he tried everything from relocating them to shooting them to — really — deploying psychological torture to solve the problem.

Sign up for our newsletter! We’ll be sending out links to all the stuff we recommended later this week.

Find out more at thisdaypod.com

This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories.

If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com

Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Our website is thisdaypod.com Follow us on social @thisdaypod

Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey everyone Jody Avergan here. Happy New Year to you all. We are getting back in the swing of things for 2024 over here at this day headquarters. We'll be back with a brand new episode on Sunday. In the meantime, if you heard our last episode about the Idaho Beaver
0:14.8	parachute drop of 1948, I will never get tired of saying those words. Well if you
0:19.9	heard that episode you heard me make a passing reference to Dwight Eisenhower's very strange
0:24.4	and kind of messed up relationship with the squirrels on the White House lawn.
0:28.4	So I figured we dropped that episode we did about that call it a little rodent mini series here to start the year and in the meantime as you wait for the new episode sign up for our newsletter at this day pod.com grab some
0:40.4	merch to refresh your wardrobe for the new year and yeah we will be back with a new episode real soon.
0:45.6	Happy 2024.
0:49.6	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia my name is Jody
0:54.5	Avrogant. This day March 15th 1955 an article appears on the front page of the Washington Post underneath the headline,
1:05.0	White House Squirrels being deported for taking divots from Pudding Green.
1:11.0	Every single two-word claws in that sentence is quite remarkable.
1:15.9	So this is a story by United Press reporter, Merriman Smith,
1:19.2	who broke this important story.
1:20.9	It was Operation Squirrel. And know mind you March 15th
1:26.0	1955 it wasn't the busiest news day but there were still other important stories I
1:30.6	went and looked at the front page of the papers for that day and like, you know, there
1:35.2	was some Cold War stuff going on and McCarthy was out there doing this thing and you know, but the battle that
1:41.2	President Eisenhower had his sights on, the one he was engaged in,
1:44.5	was against the squirrels that had invaded the White House.
1:47.8	So here to discuss why the President has finally decided to take care of the
1:51.0	squirrel problem and a little bit more in the history of
1:53.5	rodents at the White House are as always Nicole Hemmer of
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.