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Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Today's podcast is brought to you by Ferguson Home. Whether you're a homeowner working on a remodel or a pro managing multiple projects, Ferguson Home is where great ideas become stunning spaces. My wife and I know firsthand because Ferguson Home was by our side when we built our beautiful house. All of our indoor and outdoor kitchen appliances, most of our kitchen and bathroom hardware came from Ferguson Home. They have the best selection of kitchen, bath, and lighting products, all of which you can find online or you can visit a local Ferguson Home showroom like we did and get one-on-one support from their amazing consultants who are there for us with their expert advice and support. They'll be there for you too.
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Find a shoe for every you from brands you love like Birkenstock, Nike, Adidas and more at your DSW store or DSW.com. And we continue with our American stories. The Hope Diamond is the world's most famous. This blue diamond is widely believed to be cursed with stories of misfortune and tragedy befalling those who own or simply touched it. Here to take a closer look at the legend and the diamond's history is the Smithsonian's Richard Kern, author of Hope Diamond, the legendary history of a cursed gem.
Let's take a listen. It came to the Smithsonian in 1958. A guy who was an ex police officer in New York City, worked for Harry Winston's. He packages up brown paper bag, put the diamond in it, got on the New York subway to go to the Central Post Office, addressed it to Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. That was it.
Two dollars and sixty six cents. Newspapers said, what are you crazy? Art Buchwald wrote a column. Who in Washington is responsible for this? This is a cursed gem. Once we get this and it's acquired by the National Museum of the United States, the U.S. will be cursed. The idea was that the gem was cursed by a Hindu deity and it could harm the curse of the diamond, would harm the United States.
And the Smithsonian had committed a terrible faux pas. The guy that delivered the diamond was James Todd. He actually drove it alone from the post office down here to the museum.
No SWAT team, no guns, nobody riding shotgun. He delivered it. He said it was all hoopla. In February, delivered in November, in February his wife died of a heart attack. His dog got run over.
He got hit by a car and broke both legs and finally his house burnt down. And people in Washington said, well maybe there's something to this curse. Now the curse story was first told in a fancy hotel, Hotel Bristol in Paris in 1910 by Pierre Cartier. Everybody knows Cartier, right? And Cartier came into the suite of an American couple, Evelyn and Ned McClain. You know McClain, Virginia? Named after the McClains.
Riggs Bank, a few other things. Cartier walked into their suite. Ned was a little drunk. Evelyn was always ready for something. She bought other things from Cartier in the past. Cartier took out a package. And he started telling her the story of a blue diamond.
And Evelyn was very intrigued. Basically, Cartier said Jean-Baptiste Tavernet, who had acquired the diamond, stole it from a Hindu idol and he was eaten by dogs. Then it went to the French Louis XIV. By the time it got to Marie Antoinette over there and Louis XVI, they owned the diamond and they were guillotined.
It went to the Hope family later and Hope went bankrupt. It then went to the Turkish Sultan who was undone by the Young Turks in the revolution and it was worn by his concubine who had her throat slit. This is a pretty heavy tale by Cartier. Now Cartier was right about some things. In that time, India was the only known source of diamonds in the world. So all the diamonds known to the Romans, known through antiquity, the Middle Ages, all came from India. Prior to the discovery of diamonds in Brazil in the 1720s and South Africa much later. And there Tavernet visited the mines and he was the first European person to really report on how diamonds were got. A lot of the stories were Marco Polo stories that were traced back to Sinbad stories that were traced back to Alexander the Great's stories of how diamonds were mythically got. Tavernet wrote about the actual diamond techniques and these diamonds are alluvial diamonds. It's not the big pit diamonds that you have in South Africa.
These diamonds are found in alluvial streams. They come up from volcanoes. They're carried by rivers. They end up resting someplace.
They're covered by other sludge and other stuff. And so you only have to dig about 8 to 14 feet to get them. But it takes a lot of labor. In this mine where Tavernet actually acquired the hope, the diamond, the blue diamond that was later, we know to be named the Hope, there were about 100,000 people working to find literally a handful of diamonds a year.
Very hard work. And in the Colore mine in 1653, Tavernet acquired this roughly cut diamond of 112 carats. Just to give you a perspective, usual engagement rings are what?
One carat if the guy really loves you a little more. 112 is a lot of carats. Tavernet sold that 112 carat diamond. It was called the Tavernet violet. Not that it was a different color.
Violet in that time in French meant intense blue. He sold that diamond to Louis XVI. It was recorded in the court sales.
And he got the equivalent of $1.8 million for the diamond. When Tavernet came back and reported on his travels to India, his book was a bestseller. Published in, I think, 1676.
Everybody was reading Tavernet. And in it, six or seven volumes, in one paragraph or two paragraphs, he had this story that he heard. It had nothing to do with the violet or the blue diamond he acquired. It was just a story he heard in passing one night traveling around India about a temple where there was a great idol that had two diamonds for his eyes. There was a 40 carat diamond. A jeweler wanted to steal the diamond, took the diamond, got shut up in the temple at night. They opened the doors of the temple in the morning, and the guy was dead. And it was the wrath of the god. That story, that snippet, became the basis of every cursed diamond story in the West for the next 400 years.
In Tavernet's time, you had these Indian cuts. And again, it was just not really symmetrical to make the diamond shine, but just to get rid of deficiencies. In Europe, you started having, after the Renaissance, the application of geometry, optics, thinking about and theorizing light. You started getting Europeans figuring out how to cut glass, how to make glasses, how to make telescopes, and how to cut diamonds. So you can make stuff sparkle and shine and manipulate light. The secret to cutting diamonds is olive oil.
Who would have known? Only a diamond could cut diamonds. You rub the diamonds together, and if you rub a diamond together with a diamond, you get a lot of heat. And you can't really mold diamonds that way.
The way you do it is you add olive oil to the thing and it lubricates the thing. So that was the great innovation that allowed for diamond cutting in Europe. Here were Europeans, here were Indians so concerned about keeping the power of the gem in as a protective force, and here were Europeans so intent on cutting the diamond to let the stuff out.
That's basically the trope. In 1792, French Revolution, the French crown jewels, which had been taken away by the royal family, were stolen out of the royal warehouse and disappear from history. 1812, a 44-carat blue diamond without provenance is documented in London in the possession of this guy, Daniel Eliasson. George IV purchases that blue diamond from Eliasson, and it looks like he wore it during his coronation. I think it's a trophy against Napoleon. Napoleon, you want it as blank you.
In your eye, it's around my neck. When he died in 1830, his last mistress tried to steal a lot of his treasures. The Duke of Wellington was the executor of the state. He told Lady Cunningham, give me back the diamonds and the gems or off with your head.
She complied. And Wellington was friends with Thomas Hope, a wealthy banker family. The Hopes actually made possible the Louisiana Purchase.
They're the ones that loaned the U.S. the money for the deal. George IV had so many debts, they didn't want to make them public because he would have bankrupted England, and so they tried to sell off the non-family, non-royal property, and Thomas Hope was a good friend of Wellington. They made a secret sale, and so this is why it goes to the Hope family to settle George's debts. He did not call it the Hope Diamond.
He called it number one. His diamond was inherited by Henry Thomas Hope. His nephew was displayed at the Crystal Palace, and it became known as one of the world's great diamonds. And when you read the catalogs, it's Mr. Hope's Blue Diamond, Hope's Blue Diamond, Hope Diamond. You know, it just gets to be the Hope Diamond that way. And you've been listening to Richard Curran, and he's the author of Hope Diamond, the legendary history of a cursed gem. And he gave this talk to the Library of Congress back in 2009, and we love drawing from this remarkable treasure, treasury actually, of American culture, history, and storytelling. And my goodness, the Hope Diamond was shipped to the Smithsonian through the postal service. That just struck me. I love also that the Hope Diamond, of course, wasn't initially named the Hope Diamond.
But Mr. Hope called it number one. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of this cursed gem, the Hope Diamond, here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories, and with Richard Curran, author of Hope Diamond, the legendary history of a cursed gem. Let's pick up where we last left off. Around the same time, 1858, the British government took control of India.
Now, Queen Victoria, Empress of India, becomes Empress of India in the 1860s. And you had, in 1868, a guy named Wilkie Collins wrote the Moonstone. People have read the Moonstone, or enough people.
Okay. It's about a cursed diamond. It's yellow. It's stolen from the eye of an idol. It comes to the British countryside. It wrecks havoc on the family.
And finally, it's returned. And the whole notion was that, basically, that here's a cursed diamond. Now, Wilkie Collins, when you go through his notes on writing the book, he's using what as a source material?
Tavernet and that paragraph. But diamond mining gets started. The first diamonds discovered in 1868. And all of a sudden, in South Africa, you have a great new explosion of the availability of diamonds. If you look at the United States before then, literally a few hundred carats being imported to the United States. After the discovery of diamonds in South Africa, it's huge. The biggest, biggest seller of diamonds in the world, after the discovery in South Africa, is? De Beers.
No. Tiffany. Sears Roebuck.
Sears Roebuck. You want a diamond? One carat diamond? $17.95.
You don't like that? $11. We'll sell you two for $25. You want a three carat diamond? $38. Five carat? $70.
I'm not kidding. The Sears Roebuck catalogs from the 1880s. Diamonds are very cheap, and they're trying to sell it to everybody. And Tiffany invents the solitary setting in, what, 1886. They have to invent uses for the diamond because there's too many diamonds around. And so Tiffany and others start saying, well, if you love somebody, you'll give them a diamond. They try an investment strategy first. Buy a diamond as investment. That doesn't work so well. Buy a diamond as love.
Works real well. And so now they're selling diamond rings, diamond engagement rings, diamond necklaces, diamond watches, diamond and everything. Before that, there was no sustained tradition of diamond engagement rings.
None, zero, none. In the United States, the wealthy use diamonds for big, conspicuous display. I am more powerful than you. My wife will wear more diamonds than yours. And this gets to be a thing. In New York, it's called the diamond circle in the Metropolitan Opera. And the idea is that diamonds start becoming a standard. If everybody can have diamonds, how do you isolate or show your particular power or wealth other than having bigger diamonds? So big diamonds becomes a thing in America in the late 1800s.
Cartier acquires the diamond in 1909, and Cartier applied the Moonstone story to the Hope Diamond. Now, Evelyn didn't mind that because Evelyn Walsh MacLean said what was bad luck for other people was good luck for her. Her dad was a miner, and she was pure at heart and poor at heart.
He struck it rich when she was about 10 years old. She said, all this stuff, Marie Antoinette, these kings won't apply to me. I'm a, you know, I'm salt of the earth gal. I'm not a king or queen. I wasn't born rich.
All this stuff isn't going to get to me. Cartier brought the Hope Diamond to Washington and sold it to them. He came on a boat, a ship called the Lusitania. That's the one.
OK, so he came on that ship. He tracked them down at their Washington home, the old office of Washington Post, and he sold them the diamond for $180,000, which is $3.9 million today, and the curse made front page headlines in the New York Times Post and other places. Florence Harding, at that time the senator's wife, later to become First Lady, was very superstitious. She actually worried about the curse of the Hope Diamond. She said, Evelyn, give it back. It's cursed.
It's not good. Bad stuff is going to happen. Her and Evelyn would go around Washington to astrologers and palm readers.
Some of them would even come into the White House. And so the Hope Diamond was kind of there as like this funny thing that was lurking. In 1919, the McClean's were in Kentucky for the Kentucky Derby. Their son, he was running across the street, a car, a Model T Ford going eight miles an hour, hit him. He was knocked to the ground, suffered a concussion, and died. All of a sudden, Washington Post, other papers, another tragedy in the wake of the Hope Diamond. Who will next own this death gem? The malignant rays, the gem of disaster, right?
Disaster, bad star. Evelyn McClean, great Washington hostess, supported GIs, charities, opened her home to GIs. She actually went to Walter Reed once a week, and she let GIs play with the Hope Diamond. She used it for charity. She even pawned the Hope Diamond. Here's her pawn ticket for ransom in the Lindbergh kidnapping.
Didn't work. Her daughter, Evie, committed suicide, was married to a senator. And so Evelyn was quite ambivalent about the curse. Sometimes she believed it.
Sometimes she was very playful about it. She thought the curse was great wealth, misspent. When she died, the estate didn't have much money in it. Harry Winston acquired the Hope from the estate. And he used the Hope to interest Americans in buying diamonds after World War II. He believed that the U.S. diamond collection down in the Smithsonian was kind of a third-rate collection, putting it somewhere behind, you know, like Bulgaria or Croatia somewhere. And here was the U.S. as a superpower, and it really needed a big, massive national collection to mirror its political and economic and military role after World War II. And so he created something called the Court of Jewels.
Why, we didn't have a court in this country. Harry created his own. And he had women around the U.S. wear the diamonds for fashion shows to raise money for charity. And I've had many people around the country come back to me and say, I wore the diamond at the Pecan Festival or the Texas State Fair in 1954 or whatever, and they have pictures. And the idea was to create interest in gems but also to make them historical and biographical at a time when synthetic diamonds were coming on the market, and Harry wanted to stem that because he was worried that he'd lose business. The Smithsonian used diamonds that had been confiscated by smugglers coming into the U.S. to use those diamonds to acquire the Hope diamond. France requested to get the Hope diamond in 1962. Charles de Gaulle appropriately tried to do what Napoleon could not, bring back the French crown jewels. He said, you guys at the Smithsonian have that blue diamond, that Hope diamond is really our French blue.
We want it back to display temporarily. We said no. We kept saying no. The Secretary of the Smithsonian said no. Finally, he got a call from some lady who lived in a White House down the block by the name of Jackie Kennedy who said, you have to say yes. And so we said yes.
But not being stupid, we're just as good as you all here. Not being stupid, we said at the Smithsonian, okay, if we're going to give up the Hope diamond to the French, we need a hostage, and that hostage was Mona Lisa. It's still an icon, a national treasure, a last credible estimate of its value, $200 million by Ronald Winston. What I did is I said, okay, let me look at all the lifespans of those people who have been associated with the Hope diamond and see what age they live to. My hypothesis being that if you own the Hope diamond or stewarded the Hope diamond or did something with the Hope diamond, you would die younger than normal. It's not true.
The curse doesn't seem to affect that whatsoever. And a special thanks to Richard Curran, author of Hope Diamond, the legendary history of a cursed gem. And it was from a speech, a story he told at the Library of Congress back in 2009.
And what a story he told. We learned that India for many centuries had been the primary source of diamonds until, of course, the discoveries in South Africa. And everything changed. Imports to America exploded. And the very first big seller of diamonds was none other than Sears Roebuck. But soon the marketing kicked in and it was tied to love and scarcity. Prices shot up and the status of diamonds shot up. In came Harry Winston, the great jeweler, to promote his enterprise. Just so smart.
The story of the Hope Diamond here on Our American Stories. Time for a sofa upgrade? Introducing Anibay Sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.
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21 plus terms and conditions apply. We've all done it. You see a headline but don't have time to read the whole story. Or there's so much news, you're not sure what is worth your time. I'm Colby Ekowitz, co-host of Post Reports, the weekday afternoon podcast from The Washington Post. Post Reports brings you what's relevant and revealing. Breaking stories, politics, wellness, culture.
Each episode goes beyond a headline for the context you need. Find Post Reports now, wherever you're listening. Free money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Inc.
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