The Dating Game, Great White Edition

Insurance Introduction

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Lexicon Valley Introduction

0:52From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Mike Volo with Bob Garfield, and today, a brand new version of The Dating Game. This time around, the Great White Edition. Here's how the game is played. I'll give you, Bob, three phrases, all starting with the words, Great White. I'll give them to you in alphabetical order. Your job is to arrange them chronologically from earliest to latest, according to when

1:27they first appear in the written record, as far as we know. All right. I think I can bluff my way through this. Do you have a pencil and paper ready in case you wish to write them down? Yes. Oh. I have it right here. I know that's a little surprise for you, because I never have a pencil and paper nearby when you ask me to have one, but for once, I'm prepared. Okay. Here we go. In alphabetical order, Great White Hope, Great White Shark, and Great White Way.

2:00Those are the three phrases. Now, talk us through your thinking, and if you would, attach a specific year to each of these, because I think you can come close for at least one of these, and if it turns out you're way off, then we can laugh at you. Well, get your giggles ready. I know all three terms. Okay. The Great White Hope refers to a boxer who was wished by great numbers of Americans to

2:32finally regain for whitedom the heavyweight championship of the world. The Great White Shark, most famous for its starring role in Jaws from about 1977, maybe? And then the Great White Way, which is Broadway. It was a way of describing the wholly electrified modern entertainment mecca that was Broadway,

3:03I'm going to guess, in the 20s. In fact, I'm going to take a stab and say Great White Way refers to Broadway in 1927. Okay. And, you know, just to be clear, Jaws, you said, starred a Great White Shark. It was not a real shark. It was some kind of animatronic thing that they made in the studio. It was? Yes. But please. Okay, I'm going to ask a follow-up question, and I'm prepared to have my world shaken for

3:36a second time in about 60 seconds, but Mickey Mouse was a real mouse. Am I correct? Yes, correct, yeah. He's the one and only mouse who had the gift of voice. Oh, thank God. Okay, so the Great White Shark, in terms of Jaws, was about 1977, but I certainly don't believe that's the first time it showed up in the common parlance, because it had been indigenous to a number of coastal areas, notably Australia.

4:11It may have first made the newspapers sometime in the 19th century. So I'm going to guess that that's actually the first of this list of three. Okay. And it probably dates back to, let's say, the 1880s. All right. As for the Great White Hope, you know, I forget his name. Was it Jack Johnson? Was he the... I don't remember, but that would have been in, I would say, the early 50s. So you have Great White Shark, 1880s, Great White Way, 1927, and Great White Hope, early

4:491950s. Yeah. I'm afraid, from your tone of voice, that this has been a total face plant. No, no. So let's begin.

Great White Shark Origins

5:01Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish writer in the 1700s. He's best known, I would say, for The Vicar of Wakefield, which was one of Dickens' favorite novels. It's even alluded to in A Tale of Two Cities. It's also alluded to in Emma by Jane Austen and in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Those are three authors in my personal pantheon, so it's crazy to me that I've never read this book, The Vicar of Wakefield, but I haven't.

5:34Another work that I have not read by Oliver Goldsmith is A History of the Earth and Animated Nature in Eight Volumes. That sounds like a page-turner. If I go to the beach, I'll take six or seven of them. If you're going to be turning pages, you're going to be turning a lot of them. I get that people in the 1700s were not on their phones, but even so, I honestly don't understand how they had the time to write 3,200 pages about animals and nature.

6:10Well, you know, they saved a lot of time by not bathing. Yeah, you have a point. Okay, so apparently Oliver Goldsmith cribbed most of his material from other sources, but still, he put it in his own words, which seems like a lot of work. Volume 6, Chapter 2 begins like this. Of all the inhabitants of the deep, those of the shark kind are the fiercest and the most voracious. Hmm.

6:40So you were right. Well, I mean, off by a century, but nonetheless. You're off, yes, by a century. He goes on to say that, quote, the great white shark, which is the largest of the kind, joins to the most amazing rapidity the strongest appetites for mischief. Mischief had a stronger connotation back then. But that is the first known use of the term great white shark that we know of, and it's from 1774.

7:13I'm curious, did he use a capital G and a capital W before shark to kind of specify it as a separate, I don't know, genus or whatever, compared to just lowercase adjectives that eventually took on more significance as the species became better known? As opposed to like the big pale shark, right? As opposed to the big pale shark, yes. The sizable one shark. You know, I think those probably wouldn't have had legs, but neither does a shark.

7:48That's a good point. And you're right. The first letter of each of those three words, great, white, and shark, are capitalized by Goldsmith. So that suggests that he is using it as the name of the animal, right? As the thing that it's called. Goldsmith goes on for several pages describing just how feared the great white shark is by every creature, including humans, wherever there is a coastline anywhere. He says, Such is the frightful rapacity of this animal.

8:22Nothing that has life is rejected, meaning it will eat anything that's alive. But it seems to have a peculiar enmity to man, when once it has tasted human flesh, it never desists from haunting those places where it expects the return of its prey. Yeah, well, that's bullshit. I don't think that's even remotely true. So it eats protein, and the people don't show up very often. It's the other sea species that it's primary diet, so.

8:54But as you can see, he was a good writer, Oliver Goldsmith, which is why even though he plagiarized all of the scientific information, it's fun to read, and I did read a bunch of it. It seems to me that the term great white shark took a while to catch on this side of the Atlantic, because the earliest mention of it I found here in North America was from a newspaper in Nova Scotia in 1825. Quote, The great white shark, all words capitalized again,

9:24the great white shark is particularly dangerous to swimmers who have often lost one or more of their limbs and not infrequently been devoured entirely. Its flesh, though eaten in Norway and Iceland, is extremely rank and coarse. I don't remember shark being on the menu when I was in Iceland a few years ago, but I could imagine that it is pretty rank. So, good job on great white shark. You were a century off, but that's really hard to pinpoint.

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Great White Way History

10:49In 1901, a writer named Albert Payne published a novel. Payne would later become Mark Twain's official biographer, but before that, Payne wrote this novel called The Great White Way. It had nothing to do with Broadway. It was an adventure slash romance about an expedition to the South Pole. This was, of course, fiction, especially since nobody had yet reached the South Pole.

11:20That wouldn't happen for another decade. But if you're trying to trace the origin of The Great White Way, meaning Broadway, it can be confusing because of this damn book. I will read The Vicar of Wakefield at some point in my life, but I will not be reading The Great White Way. I said it's about an expedition to the South Pole. Let me give you a little more detail. The crew is in search of a race of humans that supposedly live in a utopian society underneath the ice in Antarctica.

11:54I'm not going to read that, Bob. Okay, don't, but I want to tell you, I want to tell you, I happen to be reading a trilogy by the Chinese science fiction writer, I think his name is pronounced, Shijin Liu. In the second volume, you discover that Earth, its inhabitants have escaped underground. It's an almost entirely subterranean society. But it's absolutely remarkable. It's multidimensional, as is this world of the author's creation.

12:28What I'm saying is, don't give up on The Great White Way just yet. You know, it may be a hidden treasure. I'll consider it. I do really like series that take place underground, including Silo, including Paradise, including Fallout. But something about a 1901 novel, which, by the way, was advertised in newspapers at the time with illustrations of penguins. I just don't think I'm going to read it. Now, what's especially confusing is that this book was popular in 1902,

13:02which is precisely the year when mentions of the other Great White Way start appearing in newspapers and magazines. So when you search through databases, you have to separate out this fantastical novel from references to Broadway, which is a pain in my great white ass. Let's back up just a little bit. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, Mark Claw and Abraham Erlanger ran a chain of theaters under the name Claw and Erlanger.

13:38Theaters in New York and other cities around the country. This was before movies, so these were live stage theaters that put on a variety of entertainment, right? Burlesque. Vaudeville. Vaudeville, exactly. Operas, plays. They had several theaters in New Orleans that were managed by a local guy there who was known as Colonel W.H. Rolls. R-O-W-L-E-S. Now, I'm not sure if Mr. Rolls was actually a colonel.

14:10Like, I'm pretty sure that Colonel Sanders was not an actual colonel in the military. Yeah, I think probably not. And nor do I suppose that Colonel, whatever his name was, who discovered Elvis Presley. Tom Parker. Tom Parker had a kind of military background. So Colonel Rolls, let's give him the benefit of the doubt, went to New York City in 1902 to visit with some of his colleagues, and his trip was chronicled in a newspaper back home in New Orleans. Now, why should we pity the poor colonel?

14:58Well, because his friends in New York took him out on the town and kept him up literally all night, despite him repeatedly protesting that he needed to go back to his hotel and get some sleep. They then made him stay up all the next day, breakfast at the Claremont, then over to the river, then to lunch, then to the horse races up in Westchester at Morris Park, where he reportedly kept dozing off in the grandstand. All of these festivities began the previous night in the theater district on the Rialto, as the newspaper put it,

15:34where his friends, quote, proposed to show him the great white way. And to that end, they took him to supper. Then they introduced him to the theatrical business men's club on 41st Street. And then, as I mentioned, they were out all night and the next day from there. Like with Great White Shark, Great White Way is in all caps. It is clearly referring to Broadway, the street, the theater district. And it's from June 1902.

16:08So I'm only off by 25 years on that one. And that's if you entirely discount the Penguin Safari that you described earlier. Well, I should say the first known example of the term is from February 1902, a few months earlier, in a headline in the New York Evening Telegram. But this Rolls example, which I didn't find in any of the reference books, I found it searching through the databases, I think is much better because it's the first where you see the phrase within a broader, more fleshed-out context.

16:43Got it. By the way, the last sentence of that newspaper piece about the adventures of W.H. Rolls notes that the colonel, quote, is convinced that life in New York is too wakeful for a gentleman from the South. I've had some similar experiences in New York City, but they never went into a third day. I'm surprised that he even survived this trip. Now, Mike, before we get to the third one, and it does look as though I've managed to clock the sequence.

17:18You have. It occurs to me, and if I might revise and amend, there was a stage play called The Great White Hope. I believe it may have been loosely based on the reality that I described about a white prize fighter who was going to take on the reigning black champion, or it may have been about something else altogether. I don't know. Yeah. We talked a lot about boxing in our recent episode about GOAT, G-O-A-T, the acronym that stands for greatest of all time.

17:52Which was attached to Muhammad Ali. Yes, and this phrase, Great White Hope, also has its origins in boxing as well as in racism, as you alluded to.

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Great White Hope Origins

19:33Let's start in the 1890s, when the so-called World Heavyweight Championship began. A heavyweight at that time was typically a minimum of 170, 175 pounds. That number has since gone up considerably. I think it's around 200 at this point. But for the first 15 or so years, white men would only fight other white men.

20:03Which means that through the 1890s and into the first decade of the 1900s, the succession of five or six heavyweight champions were all white. Including a Canadian named Tommy Burns, who became the heavyweight champion in February of 1906. Burns ended up actually traveling the world, giving some truth to the title world heavyweight champion. He beat Englishmen, he beat Irishmen, he beat Australians, Americans.

20:36He defended the heavyweight title 11 times before finally agreeing in late 1908 to fight a black boxer named Jack Johnson, who was from Texas. You don't have to know a lot about boxing history to have heard the name Jack Johnson, or to even know that Jack Johnson won that fight in December of 1908, becoming the first black heavyweight champion. Now, throughout 1909, you start seeing the phrase, white man's hope, popping up in the sports pages to refer to white boxers who maybe, possibly, are good enough to beat Jack Johnson.

21:22As it turns out, none of them are. Johnson defended his title four times over the course of that year, 1909, each time against a white man, and each time successfully. Yeah, I can see what's happened here. You've caught me remembering certain things and conflating certain things. I think in the quiz shows, those British quiz shows, where the scoring seems to be absolutely random, the host would say, yeah, it's about very well. You've got some names correct, and you seem to have the right century, so let's give you one mock.

21:53I'm willing to go with that. So by 1910, that phrase, white man's hope, gets shortened to just white hope, and you see it over and over again. A new white hope, reads one headline. College athlete, latest white hope. Chicago has white hope. There's a hundred of them, and it's jarring every time, frankly, to read sports writers cheering on the possibility of some new white prospect who might beat the black champion, Jack Johnson.

22:31Yeah, it seems almost unbelievable, except we are heading very rapidly back to the future. So it's especially nauseating to remember that this was considered some sort of, oh, I don't know, patriotic desire to have the master race have all of the right accolades. Yeah, one of the former heavyweight champions, a white guy named James Jeffries, he even came out of retirement in 1910 to try to beat Johnson unsuccessfully.

23:05So the question is, when do we first see great white hope, which is arguably the phrase that we most closely associate with that frenzy to find a white man who could beat Jack Johnson. I found an article in a newspaper from Alberta, Canada, about how Tommy Burns, remember, he's the white man who lost the heavyweight championship to Jack Johnson, about how he had a fighter under his wing that he thought could be the next white hope.

23:39The headline says, Tommy Burns tells of his great white hope. Now, this supposed great white hope, his name was Jack Lester, like so many of the hopefuls, never made a name for himself in boxing, let alone challenged Jack Johnson. A little side note here, promoters were so fed up that no white boxer could beat Jack Johnson that they created, and yes, this is real, the World White Heavyweight Championship.

24:14Yeah, there were four champions from 1913 to 1915. They ended it in April of 1915, when a white man named Jess Willard did, in fact, beat Jack Johnson. Of course, for the next 20 plus years, no one would give another black man a shot at the title again until Joe Louis in the late 1930s. I know, exactly.

24:46But, you know, once again, we are systematically marginalizing blacks and other minorities. We are giving immigration privilege to white South Africans on the most dubious grounds of racial oppression in their home countries. So it's doubly disturbing to go backwards as we simultaneously look forward. Yeah. So just to recap, the earliest example of great white hope that I could find was from January 1911 in that Canadian newspaper referring to a boxer named Jack Lester who nobody but the boxing encyclopedias know about anymore.

25:27I said earlier that he never made a name for himself. That's because he died tragically at the age of 26, reportedly a cocaine addict. But great white hope as a moniker, as a nickname, was later given to James Jeffries, the former champion who came out of retirement and lost to Jack Johnson. In fact, there's that play you were referring to and a movie about that fight and episode called The Great White Hope starring James Earl Jones.

25:57The moniker Great White Hope was also given to Jess Willard, the guy who actually beat Jack Johnson. And it was given to Jack Johnson and it was given to Jack Johnson and it was given to several other white fighters around that time, but not before, as far as I know, that Canadian headline in January 1911. To pick up on what you have said now a couple of times, Bob, intellectually, we all know that overt racism penetrated and infected every aspect of life in America post-slavery and beyond.

26:28But when you dig into just one narrow byway of the culture, in this case, heavyweight boxing, you understand just how pervasive it was. There's really no way to capture or even overstate it. No. So, the rapacious Great White Shark, 1774, the resplendent Great White Way, 1902, and the really racist Great White Hope, 1911.

27:03You did a great job, Bob. You got them in order. You're off with the years and some of the details, especially in The Great White Hope. But I think overall, like those British quiz shows, you kind of get full credit for this one. Well, you're very kind. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Who recommends the wonderful Ken Burns documentary from 2004 called Unforgivable Blackness, The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. Yeah, I've seen that. It's three and a half hours long.

27:34So, make yourself some popcorn, get into your pajamas, and settle in for the night because it is really worth watching. All right, Mikey. We done here? We are done. Later, Gator.

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