EP311: Army Ranger Michael Schlitz Shares His Iraq Story and Harvard's President Believed Books, Not Schooling, Were the Key To Education

Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th.

If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage. It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more.

UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. Dramatic Pause. A Dramatic Pause says something without saying anything at all.

Dramatic Pause is a go-to for podcasters, presidents, and radio voiceovers. It makes you look really smart, even if you're not. Feet deserve a go-to like that. Like Hey Dude Shoes.

Light. Comfy. Good to go to. Vanguard is owned by our investors, so as a plan sponsor, no matter what you or your employees' goals are, they're ours too. That's the value of ownership. Visit vanguard.com and discover ownership. Fund shareholders own the funds that own Vanguard.

Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And if you want to listen to our show, go to the iHeartRadio app or listen to the podcast, well, wherever you pick them up. Up next, a story kindly submitted to us by the Veterans History Project at the Atlanta History Center. We will be hearing from Army Ranger Michael Schlitz, who served in Iraq.

Let's take a listen. I went in the military pretty much right after high school. You know, honestly, I was a little immature. I knew if I went to college, I was probably going to struggle. I'd probably party a little too hard and not really pay enough attention to the classes. And I really didn't want to set myself up for failure. Plus, I was just kind of floating around life at the time.

You know, I didn't really have the direction and really an idea of what I wanted to do. And my father had been a Navy veteran. My brother was already in the Army. And at the time, I didn't know it, but he was about to go to Haiti for Operation Uphold Democracy. So my goal was to come in the military, do a few years, maybe come back out, go to college, and then figure out what I want to do.

I came in the Army in March of 1996, did my training here at Fort Benning, Georgia, basic and AIT. Pretty much right off the get-go of it, I just fell in love with it. I like the discipline. I like the routine. I like the everyday challenges. I mean, you pretty much woke up every day knowing what you're going to do. But at the same time, there's new levels of responsibility and challenges constantly thrown at you to kind of keep you on your toes and make you react.

And to me, there's nothing else like it. We do talk a lot about the teamwork and coming together as a team to accomplish a mission. But, you know, honestly, the military has a lot of eye in there, too. Like, you have to outperform your peers in order to be promoted to be able to go to those schools.

And I always challenge myself to be better than those around me. My first assignment after completing my training was 1-5 Infantry out of Fort Lewis, which was part of the 25th Infantry Division. About a year and a half being at Fort Lewis, I got picked to go to Korea. And then after Korea, I went to 1st of the 502nd at 101st. And right away when I got to 101st, you know, I just started plugging away.

I was a specialist at the time. And I asked them, you know, can I go to a pre-ranger? I want to go to ranger school. What do I need to go? And they're like, well, we've got to send you to the Air Assault School first. The very last thing you do is a 12-mile foot march. And, you know, it's self-release.

You've got 35 pounds on your back. You have three hours. And it's an individual task. You know, it's your own pace.

Yeah, there's other people out there, but it's really on you. And I ended up coming in first place for that. And so I outdid my other classmates. And so the next day was graduation and my first-time platoon sergeant had come to the graduation. And I guess it was pretty normal that when you graduate the course, they'd give you a four-day pass and say, you know, good job.

Then come back to work. And my company, my infantry company, was doing a 10-mile company race the next day. And my platoon sergeant said, you know, first sergeant would like to give you the four-day pass, but we're having this race. We need to introduce you to the rest of the guys in the company. We understand you did 12 miles, but would you come out and do this run tomorrow? And, you know, being a young guy and, you know, wanting to prove myself, I said, of course.

So I showed up the next day and I ended up taking third place. I can remember my platoon sergeant and first sergeant, again, pretty much the only guys who know who I am, pulling me off to the side and said, oh, by the way, on Monday you start pre-Ranger. So I've always been a pretty lean guy. So going into Ranger school, you know, at five, six, I only weighed 155 pounds. I can remember before going to school them saying, hey, you need to put as much fat on your body as you can because, you know, once you're done burning through the fat, you're going to start burning through your muscle. And it sure enough happened to pretty much all of us.

And it has a very distinct ammonia smell. And at the time we had the old BDUs with the brown shirts and everybody's shirts would turn orange. And it was because when you burn the muscle and it puts off the secretion and everything, it would almost bleach out your shirts. And so two months later when I came out of the swamps of Florida and they brief you, and it's the first time I actually had stepped on the scale the entire time, and I weighed 115 pounds. I started at 155 pounds. So in just over two months, you know, I lost 40 pounds. And for being somebody who was lean, that was actually quite a bit. And, you know, leading up to graduation, those four days, you're actually allowed to start putting food in your system. And I can remember eating pints of Ha's and Da's ice cream and, you know, full pizzas. And, I mean, you would just eat and eat and eat.

And then when you could, you'd try to get some rest too. And so at graduation, I had actually put on, in those four days, had got myself back up to 135 pounds. But it was like all gut. Your eyes are still black. They're sunken in. Your cheeks are sunken in. You're just frail looking. You're very weak looking. But you have this little potbelly thing going on, you know, under the uniform.

But the majority of the people who do go to school within that point will probably lose anywhere from 25 to about 50 pounds, depending on how big you are. I went back to the 101st. I made sergeant shortly after getting back.

I was a team leader. And then the big army decided, well, it's time to go back to Korea. And so I packed my bags, went back to Korea for another year. You're always, within your one year, you're always allowed to take a little vacation time at some point.

They call it mid-tour leave. And so I was married at the time. And so my wife had come over.

And we decided just south of the peninsula, there's a little island. So we had gone down to the island for a few days, flown back into Seoul. We're having dinner.

And the next day we're due to fly to Bali, Indonesia for a few days. And we're sitting there having dinner, watching the football game on the TV. And we saw the first plane hit the tower. And we actually thought they had changed the channel on us, thinking they took the football game off and then put on a movie.

And so we're all kind of yelling, you know, because it was kind of an American bar in Seoul. And we're like, put the game back on. And then we saw the second plane hit. And we realized, okay, something's not right. So, you know, we didn't even finish our dinner. You know, we paid our check, jumped in a cab, went back to our hotel where I had my work cell phone. And it was like, yeah, vacation's over.

Time to come home. The vacation was over indeed and over for so many of us, especially those who serve in uniform. And we're listening to Michael Schlitz tell his story, his service story. By the way, so much of his family, so many members of his family had served.

And that is the case throughout this country that military service runs through the family. When we come back, more of Michael Schlitz's story here on Our American Stories. Give a little.

Give a lot. Help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our American stories dot com. Hey, you guys, this is Tori and Jenny with the 9 0 2 1 OMG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by Nerd Tech ODT. We recorded it at I Heart Radio's 10th poll event, Wango Tango. Did you know that Nerd Tech ODT Remedapants 75 milligrams can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango?

It's true. I had one that night and I took my nerd tech ODT and I was present and had an amazing time. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by Nerd Tech ODT Remedapants 75 milligrams. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family.

But thankfully, Nerd Tech ODT Remedapants 75 milligrams is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year. And UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare annual enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.

It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit UHCmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare.

Helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop. But for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot.

And I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we continue with our American stories. And with Michael Schlitz's story, we just heard about the day that changed America. 9-11, and that's September 11th, 2001.

And let's take it back to Michael. I eventually moved up to a staff position running the resources for all ranger school. Sometimes it was air assets, but all the ranges land.

Pretty much everything except for ammo. We had an ammo guy who did that. When it was time for me to leave, I called up my branch manager and said, hey, you know, what's the next deploying unit? He goes, well, the next guys to leave is 10th Mountain Division. I said, well, that's where I want to go.

And so, I mean, to me, there was no other options. This is what I want to go do. And since I hadn't had the chance to really deploy, I knew I wanted to be on the next chalk going out. So I reported to 10th Mountain Division in March of 06, and we deployed in August of 06. So our sector was the southwest side of Baghdad.

The media at the time called it the Sunni Triangle or the Triangle of Death. When we first invaded, the insurgents really didn't know how to fight us. And as they studied us and found out our operating procedures, then they could figure out how to attack us and our weaknesses, just like we do for them. And then our wounded and our killed inactions had doubled. And so in 06, we have what we call the surge. Basically, the U.S. answer to that was to just triple the number of U.S. forces we had in Iraq at the time and do a big sweep across the country. And obviously, in an area like that that's littered with roadside bombs, IEDs, improvised explosive devices, the more people you put in an area, the more they can actually get injured. So we actually did see our killed inaction and our wounded inaction triple in numbers. But we were making a big push. We were finding those IEDs. We were finding the insurgent cells. So we were making a huge difference.

It just came at a cost. We had huge up-armored vehicles. We had one that was called the Husky. It was like a mine-detecting vehicle. And these vehicles were actually made for Africa, so they could drive over minefields and have the mines explode. And the bottom of the vehicles, instead of being flat like a lot of the U.S. vehicles, they had a V-haul. So they came down into a point, like a boat.

And what would happen is when the rounds would come up, it would shatter away versus coming straight up through the armor. So we had mine-detecting vehicles. We had troop-carrying vehicles that were just a little bit heavy-armored so we could have some firepower on top. And then we had one that had the huge claw.

So if we found wire, we found something that looked kind of suspicious, that claw would go way forward of the vehicle, had a camera on it, and we could interrogate it without ever leaving the security of our vehicle. And there were signs where we would take three hits in a single day, three IEDs. We weren't able to spot them.

They'd detonate on us. And as long as our vehicles would keep rolling, we just kept rolling on with the mission. We didn't stop. Then February 27, 2007 came about, started like any other day, woke up, got the guys ready, got the vehicles prepped, got them prepped, brought them in.

We did our briefings. They knew exactly it was going to take us about 15-hour patrol that day to get through all the routes that we had planned. And then we loaded up, and we had been on the road about three hours, and we came across one of the routes.

I believe it was Rob Primus. It was actually a dead-end road. Typically, when you plan your route, you never cover the same spot more than once, because if you do, you get blown up because they can predict you. Unfortunately, with a dead-end road, there's one way down, one way back.

And we had taken our time. And any time we're looking for the IEDs, you're only going about two miles per hour. So it's a creep crawl. And obviously, why you need that heavy armored vehicle is because you're moving so slow. It's an easy target. And we got down to the end of the road. It's a very rural area.

There's a lot of canals and farmland and not the open desert that people think of when they think of Iraq. Once we started coming back up, we picked up the pace a little bit. I want to say we were probably going about between 5 and 10 miles an hour, so it's not like we were speeding up the road, but we weren't creep crawling along either. And then I heard the blast. I can remember hearing the boom, and before I could even get a choice four-letter word out of my mouth, I was hitting the ground. And when you go through these training and you go through all this stuff, as a leader, you always want to just pause for a second and just get a quick battle damage assessment so you can make a quick decision.

It can't be long. It's just a quick pause. And as I did that, I looked at my vehicle, and I really at the time didn't see anything out of the unusual about it.

I didn't see it was my guys. So I just immediately got up to run back for my vehicle. And as I got closer to the vehicle, that's when I could feel the flames hit me in the face, and I realized I was on fire. And because I felt like it was in the torso area because it was just hitting me in the face so bad, I decided to drop my IBA or my protective vest. And so I kind of just tossed it real quick, got down, and started to roll.

And I only got about a roll and a half in, and the heat was so intense that it basically locked up my muscles. But I definitely was like, okay, this is it for me. This is where my life ends. I'm going to die here, face down on the ground in Iraq.

What am I going to do? I can't move, and I'm on fire. About the time those emotions and those thoughts were coming over my body, I could hear my guys yelling for me. Before I knew it, they were hitting me with that fire extinguisher. And it went from that extreme heat to that extreme cooling.

And I don't think I'll ever probably find the words to describe that feeling of that cooling sensation and the relief it provided me almost instantly. But then it also gave me that emotional aspect where, okay, maybe I'm not going to die here on the ground. If they got to me and I feel like this right now, then maybe I still have a fighting chance to go on. From there, one of my young sergeants, Sergeant Redman, wasn't one of my best sergeants.

I actually had plans on kicking him out of the Army for some other bad decisions he made. But two of the young guys were going to grab me and start dragging me off the road. And he stopped him, and he's like, no, you can't do that.

You have to get the spine board. If you drag him, you'll kill him. And the only analogy I can really use or the way to explain it is if you think about baked chicken, you just pull that baked chicken out of the oven, you know, and how the meat and the skin, everything just kind of scuffs off the bone. Well, I basically had just been burned alive. So had they drug me, everything would have just scuffed off, and they probably would have killed me. The guys were talking to me, you know, reassuring me, and I was getting a little annoyed with it. I can remember telling them, just shut up, I got this, don't worry about it. And before I knew it, I could start to hear the chopper coming in, the helicopter, the medevac was coming in.

You know, all the guys would kind of lightly lay over me, not enough to irritate the burns or anything, but just to protect me from the water rush of the bird landing. And they loaded me up. I remember there was a female flight medic. She asked for my name in social. I know I got my name out, no idea about the social, and the meds just kind of kicked in. Later on, I found out they pretty much had to start working on me right away in Balat.

I laid years, about two years after it happened, I actually got to meet my surgeon who was an Air Force colonel, and he said that, you know, of his two years that he almost spent over there, they had never been attacked, except for the one time I was on the table and they got rocket attacks, so things were shaking and stuff. And he said what he could remember was my legs, is everything above my boot was in really, really bad condition. And I don't remember what the procedure was called, but basically there was a procedure they weren't supposed to do on burns.

Brooke Army Medical Center is like the burn hospital, one of the best hospitals for burns. And there was a procedure that they weren't supposed to do on any burn patients. And he ended up doing it on me, and it was the only way to save my legs.

Because had that happened, they would have had to take my legs too. So here's a guy who not only saved my life, because I was constantly flatlining and having all kinds of issues, and the prognosis that was even going back to the unit was I wasn't going to make it, that I was just too far gone at that point. And then you're listening to Army Ranger Michael Schlitz tell one heck of a story. And he deploys to Iraq. He doesn't get the easy space. And there isn't really much of an easy space or place there, but he gets the SUNY triangle. And then you overlay the surge, and particularly the insurgents' use of mines that actually developed their own name called improvised explosive devices, because that's what they were.

His job was to find them, which meant he and his unit would go out at a crawl and be open targets for not only these devices, but all kinds of, all kinds of attacks, and all to protect fellow soldiers from these IEDs and ultimately to secure the area. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of how Michael Schlitz comes back from a near-death experience here on Our American Stories. Can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango? It's true. I had one that night and I took my NURTEC ODT and I was present and had an amazing time. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NURTEC ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams.

Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family, but thankfully, NURTEC ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So, lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.

It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit UHCMedicareHealthPlans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot, and I stay cool and confident.

See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we continue here with our American stories and the story of Army Ranger Michael Schlitz. Let's pick up where Michael last left off. Luckily, they stabilized me and pretty much sent me to Brooke Army Medical Center. Got there on 2 March of 2007. Immediately put into ICU. Spent six months in ICU, multiple skin grafts. At that point, they had to make the call to go in and take the hands, so I didn't lose the hands from the explosion.

I actually lost the hands, drew the burns. Mentally, I knew how to walk and stuff, but I had so much muscle damage and so much weakness that when I would go to get up to walk, like initially, I would just kind of crumble. I couldn't walk, so they had to build that up. So, you know, sometimes it was just today all we're going to do is stand up out of bed. The next day, you know, we're going to do two steps, and now we're going to walk to the door.

Like one of the ways they motivated me is my brother and my niece were down visiting, and they allowed me to walk to the ICU doors, and my niece was sitting on the ground. It's really the first time she got to see me, too, and she didn't recognize me. Her name's Brina, and I always had a way out.

I'd always say, Brina, Brina, Brina, Brina. So I did that, and she realized it was me. Of course, I had to go back to the room, so they shut the doors, and then she was upset that she didn't get to hang out with me. It wasn't until I went to my welcome home ceremony that I found out the three guys I had in my vehicle all passed away.

You know, they didn't want to tell me when I was in the hospital or going through recovery because they didn't want me to mentally or just have it stress me out to the point where I'd take a change. After about four months of the burn warden still going through it, the only way they let me out of the hospital is if I got a small house, an outpost house close to the hospital. So if anything happened, I was still nearby.

Mom and I moved into a small, small, probably maybe 700 square foot home, two bedrooms right on top of each other. That time frame, I was still probably sleeping 16 hours a day. I'd be up, they'd change my bandages, and I'd eat, and that's pretty much all.

I'd go to sleep, wake up, eat, go to sleep, wake up, eat, and go to sleep. But for Mom, that was probably some of the most horrific time besides learning about the stuff, but she had to take it. She had to do a lot of the wound care. She had to do all the cooking, the cleaning.

I wasn't allowed to sleep on my sheets more than once because of infection, so I just put all that on her. Obviously, she didn't have anybody to help her, so she was doing all that on her own. Eventually, I got my first prosthetic, and that night I can remember going home, and Mom cooked and cut all my food up for me, but that very first night I was able to feed myself. That was huge for me because leading up to that first prosthetic, I couldn't trust myself, couldn't feed myself, couldn't take myself to the bathroom. There was really very little I could do on an average day by myself, and that affects you mentally. Obviously, I contemplated suicide, but I didn't want to let Mom down.

I had my brothers in the Army and a lot of people who visited me. You never want to let anybody down, so ultimately, because of that support system is why I didn't commit suicide. When I had that first prosthetic, it gave me that little bit of hope, that little bit of independence, and then shortly after that, I got the second prosthetic, and I've just kind of been on the go since.

Not that I don't have bad days or take turns here and there still. I can say, man, I never saw my life going in the direction it has. One of the things I battled with is sense of purpose. My entire adult life, I was a soldier. I lived for my career. Pretty much everything in my life took second string to my career. I wanted to be a soldier.

This is what I do. If it meant missing a wedding or missing somebody's birthday or missing a big event, if it was for the military and something I thought I had to do, I would always pick it over everything. Even my marriage, I got divorced well before the injury, but I always fit my career. It's who I was. Now I didn't feel like I could be a soldier anymore.

I felt like my identity had been struck from me. I didn't know what I was going to do. Mom and I would have conversations like, I don't know what I could do. Mom was like, well, maybe you could do some public speaking.

I'm like, I can't do that. She would try to guide me. I couldn't foresee where life would take me at the time or even falling back on my career as an instructor or giving classes to a few hundred kids or soldiers or doing any of those things. But as I started doing more events, they would ask me to come speak, and I told my story more. Then I had the opportunity to go back to Iraq on three different occasions through a thing called Operation Proper Exit. When I came back, I just kind of went full in and motivational speaking and leadership speaking, companies, units, nonprofit events, charity events. So that's what I do now, and it's my purpose.

It's what I like to do. It keeps me around both the veteran community guys who served, whether it was World War II up through the current conflicts or it's the active duty guys, every branch you can think of. It allows me to get around everybody, and I've had a great support network.

Obviously, I didn't do it on my own. The brotherhood has been very, very good to me. Whether it was my guys out at 10th Mount, the Rangers I served with, guys that I was a private with that still keep in touch with me, it's a very, very tight-knit community. I'm a proud Army veteran. I'm glad I got the chance to serve.

I can't picture my life without it. But obviously, veterans, it takes a certain mentality to serve your country, and obviously, after 14 years of war, everybody who goes over there comes home a little different. What really kind of bothers me is when I go in public, I could have three veterans with me. Two might be suffering from post-traumatic stress.

One could have a TBI, a traumatic brain injury, and then there's me, and the only one they'll think is me, and they just forget about these guys. But those guys' service is no different than mine. I have guys that have multiple deployments always coming up to me and saying, my service isn't quite the same. It isn't like yours.

No, your service is the same as mine. I had one bad day which changed this part of me, but the actual service, serving your country, is no different. Anybody on any given day can have a bad day, and I'm what a bad day looks like, but we don't know enough about the brain and the way things function to fix the brain right now. You can throw meds at it, and you can do different things, but ultimately, the brain is going to do what the brain is going to do. But for somebody like me who has a physical injury, the guys that have leg injuries, there's always a way to adapt something.

I can figure out, even before I had prosthetics, I used to take the Gatorade bottles, drill a hole in the cap, put the cap back on and have my drink, and I'd have a straw in there so I could carry it myself. So for me, life is always about adapting and changing and doing stuff, but when you have a TBI or you have PTS, the higher functioning levels, you don't have that option. You can't control it, so they may look what you consider normal, but they're struggling more so than a lot of the people that you consider disabled. So I think it's important to stay in touch with everybody and not fall off the grid. It's going to be harder for those guys who maybe move to those rural communities away from military posts, away from some of the larger organizations. But in today's society, and especially with social media and Facebook, there's so many veteran groups on Facebook that you can reach out to.

Maybe you don't get to go up and have dinner with them once a week or once a month. At least you can communicate, or if you're having some issues, somebody to vent to, and nobody understands a veteran like a veteran. And a terrific job on the production by Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Michael Schlitz for sharing his story about his service and all that happened while he was on duty in Iraq losing three of his pals.

He survived, but he lost three of his pals, lost his hands, and lost so much but gained as much too back learning about the brotherhood, learning about the 10th Mountain Division, and so many others who helped. Michael Schlitz's story, the story of so many of our soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan here on Our American Stories. Hey, you guys. This is Tori and Jenny with the 902.1 OMG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by NerdTECH ODT. We recorded it at iHeartRadio's 10th Poll event, Wango Tango. Did you know that NerdTECH ODT Remedipant 75 mg can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango? It's true! I had one that night, and I took my NerdTECH ODT, and I was present and had an amazing time.

Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NerdTECH ODT Remedipant 75 mg. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family, but thankfully NerdTECH ODT Remedipant 75 mg is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.

It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot, and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we're back with Our American Stories, and now we bring you one of our favorite contributors and producers, John Elfner, to tell us the story of the iconic book collection known as the Harvard Classics, created by a president of Harvard from the 1800s because of his unusual philosophy on education. In the early 1900s, a man named Charles Eliot made this bold claim. One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long. That claim might strike some as surprising, but what is even more surprising is that this man, Charles Eliot, was president of Harvard University, a position he held for nearly 40 years.

It seems odd that the president of America's most prestigious university would say, you don't need a school to become educated. But if you know a little more about Charles Eliot and the United States at the turn of the century, this statement makes more sense. During the early 1900s, the United States was experiencing rapid transformation. The American Industrial Revolution created loads of factory jobs, which were luring farmers from rural America and immigrants from across the ocean to American cities. The population of cities was skyrocketing during this period.

That's Dr. Robert Johnston. He's a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he's an expert on this period. The social changes of the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States were among the most momentous in our nation's history. People came from all over the globe so that they could have better lives for themselves and for their children.

Of course they were drawn to America to improve their economic circumstances, but for many there was more to it than that. We might call these people strivers, people who really sought to improve themselves in what we think of as a classic American way. The desire of these strivers to improve themselves was recognized by members of America's established elite class, and none was more elite than Dr. Charles Elliott, the longest serving president of Harvard University. You heard Elliott's claim at the beginning of the story about the possibility of an education minus a university, and that was no hollow claim from Elliott. He had spent his last four decades as Harvard's president transforming the institution from its original mission as a minister's training school to become a leading liberal arts college. As Elliott was nearing retirement, he began to consider how his transformation of Harvard could be shared more broadly with those who couldn't attend a university. Of course the problem was that still very few people could go to college, not just Harvard, but any college, and so what would you do if you wanted to create an opportunity for everyone?

Elliott saw the nation's emerging striver class and began speaking to them on their terms. What if, he imagined, the classics taught at Harvard could be made more widely available, especially to those who couldn't afford to take four years off of work to attend a university? Central to that vision was his belief in the power of the written word to educate anyone. I'm telling you, this guy loved books, and he believed books, not teachers, were the surest path to becoming educated. Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.

They are the most accessible and wisest of counselors and the most patient of teachers. He even began to share in public addresses his belief that a university may not be necessary to become what he called a cultivated man. A three-foot shelf would hold books enough to afford a good substitute for a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.

Fifteen minutes a day, that's all it would take. And Dr. Elliott's bookshelf was the right idea at the right time. There was a public appetite for something like this.

Here again is Dr. Robert Johnston. Part of thinking of a better life, of capturing the American dream, was not just about making money and buying a better house, but in fact becoming cultured. And to do that, people realized that they wanted to be educated in a very broad and liberal way. Elliott later amended his estimation of the size of the bookshelf to five feet, and his frequent references to this idea earned it the name Dr. Elliott's Five-Foot Bookshelf. But it's not clear that this idea was anything Elliott ever intended to actually create. Sure, it was consistent with his ideas about the value of liberal arts education. But for Elliott, this five-foot bookshelf idea seems to have been more of a rhetorical flourish than an actual intention.

And it was an easy claim to make, since he likely assumed he'd never have to test the ability of his bookshelf to educate. That was until Peter Collier, one of the nation's biggest publishers, heard Elliott make this claim in his speech and said to Elliott, oh yeah, prove it. Peter Collier was the publisher of Collier's Magazine. Collier's billed itself as a weekly collection of fact, fiction, sensation, wit, humor, and news.

The magazine featured prominent writers including Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And the public ate it up. Collier's was first published in 1888, and by 1892, it was going to a quarter of a million homes in America.

By the time Charles Elliott was publicly ruminating about his five-foot bookshelf, that number had grown to half a million. And why was there such a large audience for a magazine like Collier's at this time? It was because the changing nature of work was creating something new in the labor force, leisure time. People were working shifts instead of tending to a farm, which operates essentially 24 hours a day. And because shift work was predictable, so was free time.

As much as people were working and working many hours and working very hard, they did have the means and the hours available to go out and have genuine leisure opportunities in many ways for the first time at a mass level. They were able to read. And read they did. And now, thanks to Peter Collier, they had something to read that could make them what Charles Elliott called a cultivated man, the Harvard classics. Following on the great success of these mass subscription magazines, people like Peter Collier said, why can't we do this for a book series?

It would be the same model, the same demographic, and people would love to grasp the opportunity to get a genuine liberal education. Charles Elliott accepted Collier's challenge, and upon Elliott's retirement, he, along with several professors from Harvard, began selecting works that were worthy of inclusion in the five-foot bookshelf. They agreed that a 50-volume collection would be suitable, and in May of 1909, immediately following Elliott's retirement from Harvard, the work began. The list of works included that covered over 23,000 pages is too long to do justice to, but you can guess some of the authors.

Plato, Cicero, John Milton, St. Augustine, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and so many others. The marketing of the Harvard classics was genius, and Charles Elliott's renown was central to this marketing. He made several public statements like this one to advertise the Harvard classics.

Within the limits of 50 volumes, containing about 23,000 pages, my task was to provide the means of obtaining such knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seemed essential to the 20th-century idea of a cultivated man. And the visual presentation of the Harvard classics was ingenious as well. Upon its release, three distinct bindings were printed. A limited first-edition run of 20,000 copies included Charles Elliott's watermarked signature on every page. The edition was known as the Deluxe Edition. Other limited editions of the Harvard classics were marketed afterwards. There was the Elliott Edition, signed by Charles Elliott and limited to 1,000 sets, and the Alumni Edition Deluxe. For the record, it isn't clear what made this edition Alumni or Deluxe.

But to the buyers, it surely felt like a luxury. Many editions were published in crimson-colored binding, and as everyone knew, the color crimson meant Harvard. And the Harvard seal was printed on the binding, so visitors to the house of an owner of the classics could immediately identify the collection. Most importantly, there was an eager audience for this series.

City dwellers were eager to improve themselves, and the Harvard classics promised the reader entrance into the status of the cultivated man. In the first two decades of the Harvard classics publishing, over 350,000 full sets were sold, and countless more were sold as Collier's continued to publish various editions until 1970. You can still find sets in American households today. I grew up in a house with a full set on display. And where did we display it? Ironically, in a five-foot bookshelf in our bathroom.

I'll let you insert your own joke there. But in the meantime, here again is Dr. Robert Johnston on the significance of the Harvard classics. There's this idea that you can't have democracy without an educated citizenry, and I think there's actually much to that.

To have a functioning, good-working, truly democratic society, you do need to have people who are well-educated at a very mass level. Series like the Harvard classics were crucial to that. My family set of the Harvard classics was recently donated to a local high school. And given the clear educational goals of Dr. Elliott's five-foot bookshelf, this seemed like a pretty appropriate place for the Harvard classics to be displayed.

You can still find complete sets online in pretty good condition. So if you have an empty five-foot shelf and an available 15 minutes a day, maybe you want to get yourself a set of the Harvard classics. And a special thanks to John Elfner for some terrific storytelling. And if you're lucky enough to be in his school, well, John's a history teacher in a public school system in Illinois. And my goodness, if we had more history teachers like this, history would actually be interesting. And what a story to tell about Dr. Charles Elliott and the shift from colleges as theology schools and divinity schools to classic liberal arts schools.

And now, well, whatever your opinion to what they are now. And my goodness, to have read these classics and have them in one space and sell 350,000 of them, complete series showed you the truth of the appetite for these strivers. It wasn't just about money, and it wasn't just about a home. It was about culture, too, and this leisure time to be able to read that the 20th century brought to, well, to everybody. Farmers, well, who had the time? Work, work, work. And the idea that we had this kind of time, one of the great, great advances in world history.

The story of Dr. Charles Elliott, the story of the Harvard classics, and so much more here on Our American Stories. available 24-hour roadside assistance and more, and Geico is an easy choice. Switch today and see all the ways you could save.

It's easy. Simply go to Geico.com or contact your local agent today. Each year, nearly 60,000 women in the U.S. are diagnosed with uterine cancer, the most common type of gynecologic cancer. Talk to a doctor about your risk. Ask your family about their cancer history and learn about uterine cancer symptoms like any vaginal bleeding that is unusual for you because treatment is most effective with an early diagnosis. Stay up to date with appointments and talk to your doctor if you have any concerns. Knowing your body and what's normal is important. Visit cdc.gov and look for the Inside Knowledge campaign to learn more.