"Davy! Davy Crockett."
Hey. Hello hello, what's going on? Do you have the package?
All right, all right, have you opened it yet? No should I do that now? Wait one second.
Dang it, I've been waiting like a week.
Before we open the package, let's introduce who we are. I'm Phil Edwards.
Coleman Lowndes. This is History Club, where 50% of us
know what we're talking about.
Where we roll ideas over in their grave.
You could tell the other guy ain't want no damn catchphrase, lmao.
Yeah I'm a bad liar. OK so thank you first of all to Jose Padrino
Megan Long and Martin from Vegas for these catchphrases, we'll never speak of
this again.
Can I open this? I really wanna open this.
You can't open it yet.
I just want to explain what we do here. On this show each, time one of us tells
the story and the other person has no idea what's gonna happen. And this time
that's you, you're the person who has no idea. And I just want to clarify based on
the comments from last time - got a lot of people saying, "Ah what a fake
conversation all this." No, this is real.
The idea that we could even try to act
is actually a compliment, so thank you.
Go ahead, it is time, open up the package.
Okay. Oh it's a wig? Oh it's a raccoon hat! Are we talking about David Crockett?
Ding Ding Ding. Yes! Wow I'm keeping this by the way, this is a gift.
I love it. Yeah.
Thank you. I feel like that's definitely like just like rat hair and asbestos.
In a lot of ways he was kind of the first celebrity politician, and the way
that he became this legend and politician is really complicated. So
that's what we're gonna talk about today. Fun!
That is from the Disney movie and
television series about Davy Crockett, and he was like a baby boomer phenomenon
in the 1950s. I want to show you one picture too, this is a woman who was just
making all the coonskin caps well over a hundred years after he died. These shows
and movies, they actually changed the price of raccoon pelts like the one that
lady is working on from 25 cents a pound to $6 a pound. Wow. You know, in 1960 John
Wayne played him in the movie "The Alamo" and he was actually a really big
celebrity when he was alive. This play here is reprinted and it's The Lion of
the West. The play was so famous while Davy was alive and in Congress that he
even went on Broadway and saw Nimrod Wildfire playing, basically, Davy Crockett
in this show.
You don't really think of people gaining celebrity in that time period at all.
That kind of opens up this question of like how did he get there,
how did that happen, how did he become this big celebrity?
Is that map on screen now?
Yep. So Tennessee is literally the edge of the map, people did not think of
him as much as a southerner as they thought of him as a westerner.
He's way out there.
I'm gonna read a little from his autobiography. I'll just read you
like a little quote: "At so advanced an age, the age of 15 I did not know the
letter of the book." He didn't know how to read by the time he was 15. He tells a
story in the book of how he ran away from home from 12 to 15 just because it
was like ... super fun. Yeah.
It's these political tall tales
interspersed with how awesome he is at hunting bears.
David Crockett is not just
a hunter and frontiersman, he's this political guy too. In 1825, he runs for
the House of Representatives, but he loses the first time. And then in 1827 he
runs again and he wins. So bear hunting, raccoon-killing David Crockett is in
Congress. Nice.
David's big issue is land rights for the people who he represents.
So a lot of the people that he represents are squatters.
They find a
patch of land that nobody cares about, they develop it, they maybe cut down some
trees or they build a house, and David wants to fight for them to have the
right to either get that land, or purchase it at a reasonable price.
That's his big issue he's in the House of Representatives but we're not at this,
like, legend status yet, and that is where my second prop comes in.
Should I put my
hat back on or wait? Yeah, sure put your hat back on. Great. Ok, now that you have
your hat back on I will reveal prop number 2, which is this guy. See I was
thinking about Andrew Jackson this whole time,
also Tennessee, celebrity politician, folksy man-of-the-people,
big personality. Yeah you're dead-on man, you're dead on. I mean Jackson is like
the Mario to David Crockett's Luigi. David would hate to hear that.
Can you just tell me a little more about like what you know about Andrew Jackson?
The night he got elected, he threw a huge party at the White House, and everyone like
notoriously just got absolutely wasted and people were like falling out of
windows and just like totally trashing the place
Jackson is from Middle Tennessee which is a little bit richer so he's on a
plantation and then Crockett — they're from this frontier — they are poorer. You
know I should mention that throughout his life there were periods when David
Crockett owned slaves too. And so David does end up in the House of
Representatives while Jackson's in the presidency. So
David's big issue is that land bill and Jackson never helps him on it and then
they fall out at some point. A lot of historians point to the Indian Removal
Act, which is the Trail of Tears. So that's the forced removal of Indian
populations. David Crockett actually publicly opposed that. Where's my prop?
Okay. So, right here: paper money that Andrew Jackson is on. He hated paper money.
He wanted people to be carrying around gold and silver. The Second Bank of the
United States issued the paper money and so they were gearing up to renew their
charter. Jackson did anything that he could to take out the bank, including
using the veto power more aggressively than anybody else. I'll show you a
classically awful political cartoon. I was gonna ask if it has a ton of very
tiny illegible scribbling. All those people on the hydra, they are part of the
coalition that forms a party in the 1830s, which is the Whigs.
And so Jackson
starts making this his signature issue, and that's where we come back to Davy
Crockett. At this point he hates Andrew Jackson,
he's like, "Andrew Jackson is a tyrant, he's a bad guy."
Suddenly Andrew Jackson has these enemies in the Whigs. So they are not the
most obvious allies to David Crockett. At the same time they are the enemies of
his enemy, and so he becomes their friend.
The whigs had this like superstar brand to work with. I don't know if you
remember that play that I brought up in the beginning. Who does this look like to
you? Davy Crockett. This is actually James Hackett, who is the actor who
played Nimrod Wildfire in the play "The Lion of the West." As far as we know like
patient zero for the coonskin cap is this actor playing David Crockett in a
play. Crockett ends up making this alliance. He ends up turning into a pawn
in this central banking war over the Second Bank of the United States. They
might have wanted him to run for president,
possibly they wanted David Crockett to just be an attack dog. I think he totally
just got suckered, he got sweet-talked by some guys. That's what it sounds like to me. They were like, here have
some whiskey Dave. Yeah Dave. Let me tell you what man, you could be President.
AJ sucks, Dave. We can take him down together my guy. I mean we
don't know that, that's what I believe, I mean. I think that
sounds right, I think that's the simplest explanation.
David's biography comes out in 1834. He starts leaning into the myth. This is a
portrait in 1834 of David Crockett that he was able to kind of art direct.
He's wearing a buckskin outfit. His hat is meant to be a more man-of-the-people
type hat. He even chose the types of dogs because they were more homely hunting
dogs rather than the kind of stately dogs that were typically in portraits at
the time. Totally. By all reports like the Whigs are the ones who push him to write
his own biography and then after that they go even further. They actually sponsor a book tour all around the Northeast to give speeches
against Andrew Jackson. There are other books that come out and they actually ghost
write some of those books. Davey's rising up with the Whigs in tandem
and then they lose.
Andrew Jackson wins and when the bank gets squashed, David Crockett gets
squashed too. David Crockett loses his congressional seat. After that, he runs
away. He goes out to Texas and just a year after he's out of Congress, in 1836 he's
dead at the Alamo, executed after being captured.
Oh good, you're wearing the cap. Oh yeah, no 100 percent. It's really itchy.
In 1956, those Coonskin caps were selling at 5,000 a day. Actually yeah.
Why do you think he became so famous like a century after he died?
A lot of the pictures I'm gonna show in this video come from Davy Crockett Almanacs. In the
1870s there was a play by a guy named Frank Mayo that was all about Davy
Crockett. The myth trickled along a little bit longer, and then Walt Disney
is trying to figure out themes for this new park that he's building that's
called Disneyland. He has different worlds that he wants to include in it —
he's got Tomorrowland and he also has Frontierland and reportedly he just
sends people to the archives and they come back with Davy Crockett.
Growing up, I don't really know much about Davy Crockett other than the coonskin cap and
he's like an American frontiersman and a cartoonishly American icon. I think it's
so interesting that we'll never know what really motivated him, you know,
whether it was such purity that made him cross over the Whigs because he really
believed that Andrew Jackson was doing the wrong thing, or if he was just
playing this game to try to get ahead and then why was he trying to get ahead
maybe it was to help his constituents, but maybe it was still like have the sweet
life of being president, and we just don't know what's true about his heroism.
There is more to David Crockett's legacy than just a hat. In 1841, David Crockett's
son went to Congress, he got elected, and he went to Congress on behalf of his
late father and a version of the land bill finally got passed. So he did
accomplish something in the legislature in addition to making this permanent
imprint on our culture.
I was trying to think of how we can involve the
commenters on the next episode and I have, I've made the decision that on the
next episode where I am the person researching and writing it, I'm gonna ask
the people in the comments to choose the next continent that I will pick a story
from. That is my challenge to you, pick the continent that I'll draw the next
story from for my end of History Club.