Share This Episode
CBS Sunday Morning Jane Pauley Logo

CBS Sunday Morning

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley
The Truth Network Radio
October 27, 2019 10:50 am

CBS Sunday Morning

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

On-Demand Podcasts NEW!

This broadcaster has 330 podcast archives available on-demand.


October 27, 2019 10:50 am

Former President Herbert Hoover died 55 years ago this week. His name forever linked to the stock market crash of 1929, and the Great Depression that followed. As Mo Rocca found out, there's a case to be made that THE REAL HERBERT HOOVER was a far better man than the caricature. In an interview with Lee Cowan, Hollywood legends Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro talk about their new film, "The Irishman," about a hit man for a Philadelphia crime family and the fate of Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa. Martha Teichner maps the remarkable life path of Harriet Tubman.



See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Brian Kilmeade Show
Brian Kilmeade
Our American Stories
Lee Habeeb
CBS Sunday Morning
Jane Pauley

Our CBS Sunday morning podcast is sponsored by Edward Jones. College tours with your oldest daughter. Updating the kitchen to the appropriate decade.

Retiring on the coast. Life is full of moments that matter, and Edward Jones helps you make the most of them. That's why every Edward Jones financial advisor works with you to build personalized strategies for now and down the road. So when your next moment arrives, big or small, you're ready for it. Life is for living. Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning.

I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday Morning. This coming week marks the 90th anniversary of the start of the 1929 stock market crash. The crash that led to the Great Depression. The name of then President Herbert Hoover often comes to mind when the big crash is the subject. But do we have that right? Is that much derided figure the real Herbert Hoover?

Mo Rocca takes a look in our Sunday morning cover story. Herbert Hoover's name usually appears near the bottom of presidential rankings as the guy who gave us the Great Depression. This man lived 90 years and he is judged for four of them. Which is a shame because Hoover's life leading up to the presidency was quite simply remarkable. How many people did Hoover and the commission end up feeding?

Between seven and eight million. The real Herbert Hoover ahead on Sunday morning. Lee Cowan is in conversation this morning with three wise guys collaborating on a movie for the very first time. Well here we are. It's a trio of talent hard to top. Scorsese, Pacino, De Niro. No first names needed. Frank Sheeran. Am I saying that right? Yeah you said it right. Who've created a film that has the Oscar world buzzing. Hi Frank would you like to be a part of history?

Yes I would. It's about love, it's about betrayal ultimately, and it's about you know what a human being is. Ahead on Sunday morning a master class in film.

The threat of no exit is no problem for the thrill seekers our David Pogue has joined up with. All over the country friends, colleagues, and even CBS Sunday morning correspondents are paying to be locked up in a room together. What do you got? A bloody finger.

Oh fingerprint. They have one hour to escape. Then for the rest of the day they'll be talking about the fun they had in the latest entertainment craze, escape rooms. All right. We'll tell you all about them later on Sunday morning.

Oh my gosh everything's lighting up. Half century after her death Janis Joplin still reigns as one of the most intriguing names in pop music. A new book reveals some unknown details of her life and Anthony Mason will give us a read. She was the queen of the counterculture who aspired to be the idol of her generation. She didn't believe in boundaries did she?

She did not ever see a boundary that she did not try to jump over or kick down. Later on Sunday morning a new biography shines a new light on the cosmic blues of Janis Joplin. With Martha Teichner we'll follow Harriet Tubman's Road to Freedom. We'll watch Luke Burbank risking life and limb skateboarding and more.

All coming up when our Sunday morning podcast continues. Former president Herbert Hoover died 55 years ago today. His name forever linked to the stock market crash of 1929 and the great depression that followed. But as Mo Rocca will tell us there's a case to be made that the real Herbert Hoover was a far better man than the caricature.

In late October 1929 after years of rising to dizzying heights the stock market collapsed ushering in one of the longest and most painful chapters in American history. Herbert Hoover had been president for less than a year. Who decides to call it a depression? Hoover actually. Kenneth White is the author of a biography of Hoover. Before that they always called them panics. He liked the word depression. I don't think he anticipated that it would be one that would be stuck to him for the rest of his life.

And that's no exaggeration. Consider the 1977 Broadway musical Annie where this correspondent first heard the name Herbert Hoover. A chorus of slum dwellers mockingly thanks the president. Did the musical Annie annoy you?

What it did is it stoked in me this like burning dissent like these people don't know the whole story. Margaret Hoover is the host of PBS's firing line. Who do you think would play him in the movie? And the great-granddaughter of the 31st president. Leonardo DiCaprio.

Okay. This man lived 90 years and he is judged for four of them. And that's a shame since Hoover's life before entering the White House was quite simply remarkable. He lived here with his older brother younger sister and both his parents. Oh boy what a little house.

Yeah it's two rooms. Talk about a modest background. Hoover a Quaker was born in 1874 in the village of West Branch, Iowa. His father died when Herbert was about six and then his mother died a few years later when he was nine. The orphaned Burt as he was known was put on a train and sent 2,000 miles west to live with his uncle's family in Newberg, Oregon. Their only son was killed in a very tragic hay wagon accident. So Herbert was essentially sent to Oregon to kind of replace the son that his uncle and aunt had lost. In some ways yes but he definitely had to earn his board here.

You think you would have been happy if you were weeding onions all day? Sarah Monroe is the director of the Hoover Minthorn House in Newberg. Was it an affectionate home?

Not particularly I think it was very strict. Absent the unconditional love of his birth family Burt threw himself into work determined to win respect and reward. He had a deep deep need to prove himself and he also had an abundance of physical energy and intellectual energy and it needed outlets. He was accepted into the very first class of Stanford University where he studied geology preparation for a career as a mining engineer. Hoover's talent for turning around unproductive mines made him very much in demand the world over. In his early 20s he's running gold mines in Australia.

In his mid-20s he's off in China. His relentless drive and his willingness to do whatever was necessary paid off. He made several fortunes as early as his 20s and retired at the start of the first world war with about three or four million dollars in assets. Now if Hoover's obit had been written in 1914 he would have been remembered as a talented engineer turned business magnate but his response to World War I turned him into something far greater. When the war broke out 120,000 Americans were stranded in Europe. Herbert Hoover a private citizen living in London assembled the ships to get the Americans home.

Hoover followed this feat with an even more stunning one. Germany invaded Belgium and cut off its food supply. The U.S. still neutral was reluctant to get involved. Everyone was arguing they didn't have responsibility to feed the Belgians. Hoover said I'll feed them let me through and pretty much bullied his way through both lines. Hoover himself convinced both the British and Germans to allow delivery of millions of tons of food to the starving Belgians. He was dealing as though he were his own state department.

As he put it the feeding must go on. Tom Schwartz's director of the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. How many people did Hoover and the commission end up feeding?

Between seven eight million. And he became known as the great humanitarian. I still get emails and letters of people Hoover fed. After the war Hoover went from saving European lives to modernizing American lives. As secretary of commerce under presidents Harding and Coolidge Hoover set standards for everything from electric light sockets to milk bottles. Get this the dairy industry had previously had 42 different sized containers for milk. Hoover is the one who got them to do it by pint, quart, half gallon, and gallon.

But they didn't have the milk, half gallon, and gallon. And he brought order and safety to traffic lights. He standardized it so red men stop, green men go. He did that. He did that.

But wait there's more. Hoover more or less laid the groundwork for the commercial aviation industry. He oversaw the development of what became the Hoover Dam. And as the country's unofficial innovator in chief Hoover was the first person to appear on a live television broadcast. He's a very modern man. He is yes yes. And in his spare time Hoover and his wife Lou, one of the first women in America to earn a degree in geology, translated an ancient mining text from the original Latin.

I mean they're real mining geeks. This was published in 1912. It remains in print today. When the great Mississippi flood of 1927 displaced hundreds of thousands it was a foregone conclusion that Hoover would lead the relief effort. And he rode the resulting wave of adulation to the Republican nomination for president in 1928 and a landslide victory. I have no fears for the future of our country.

It is bright with hope. Only eight months later came Black Tuesday. Franklin Delano Roosevelt would sweep Hoover out of office after a single term. The Great Depression lasted twice as long under FDR than it did under Hoover. So why does Hoover get stuck owning the depression? Because when Roosevelt came in he labeled it the Hoover Depression and he never stopped calling it the Hoover Depression throughout the whole of his presidency. It was FDR's successor Harry Truman who welcomed Hoover back into public life. And Hoover is enormously grateful for that gesture. In 1962 on Hoover's 88th birthday his presidential library was dedicated. Only feet from the humble dwelling he'd been born in.

What more can a man do? Former president Truman delivered remarks. His record and his career it is unequaled in the history of this country. By the end of his life he was rather proud of the fact that he was the only living American in the United States. The only living American with a depression named after him.

Are you serious? Yes he could joke about it but it took him a long time to get there before he could own it. A long time. And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac, October 20th 1882, 137 years ago today. The day the future actress known as Margaret Dumont was born in Brooklyn. A Broadway regular by the 1920s Dumont found lasting fame once she started appearing with the Marx Brothers. Hugo I'm disappointed in you but think of your dancing with that strange woman.

Well don't think of it think of me dancing with you. Tall and regal in bearing her character provided the perfect foil to the wisecracking Groucho in a series of films including the 1933 classic Duck Soup set in the mythical land of Fredonia. I've sponsored your appointment because I feel you are the most able statesman in all Fredonia. Well that covers a lot of ground. Say you cover a lot of ground yourself you better beat it I hear they're going to tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing. Her character's seeming obliviousness to insult led to the widespread belief encouraged by Groucho himself that Dumont was a humorless person who never got the joke. Everything about you reminds me of you except you.

How do you account for that? A belief she contradicted in a 1942 interview. I'm not a stude she said. I'm a straight lady. There's an art to playing straight. You must build up your man but never top him. Never steal the laughs from him. Did anyone ever tell you you look like the Prince of Wales? I don't mean the present Prince of Wales one of the old whales and believe me when I say whales I mean whales.

Margaret Dumont died in 1965 but for Marx Brothers fans her exchanges with Groucho never grow old. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out.

What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts. No Exit is more than the title of the play by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Here's David Pogue and Company. Five not six. Okay this is unlocked. What do you got? A bloody finger. Oh fingerprint. The fingerprint.

Ordinarily it takes only one Sunday morning correspondent to report a story. I want number to be dialed. Number.

He dialed number. But today we're working as a team. Hoover. Jake or Hoover. Let's see.

Martha Teichner, Nancy Giles and me plus Sunday morning intern Corey Peeler. Apparently we're locked in a CIA office with one hour to escape before a bomb goes off. Oh my gosh I found the bomb. And here's the crazy part. Oh cassette tape.

Yes. We've paid for this. Nine minutes 55 seconds. We're playing an escape room. This one's called Clue Chase in New York City.

You pay 25 or 30 bucks. You have one hour to hunt for clues and unravel a mystery. Oh snap. What's it like? Is it like a video game? Is it like a board game? Is it like a movie? Is it like a play?

Yes. That doesn't help me. Husband and wife David and Lisa Spira have played over 700 escape rooms. This says the clocks hold the key. Out of the estimated 8,000 around the world. We need to figure out who we're seeking out. They write reviews at their website roomescapeartist.com. An escape room is an immersive adventure for a group of people.

Your family, your friends, whomever you want to play with. Maybe you're stopping the missiles from launching or you're in search of the holy grail. Why would anyone want to be shut into a room for an hour? It is bizarrely revolutionary in 2019 to go and do something in real life with the people that you care about and to not have a screen in front of you. And doing something tangible. You get to pick up things and manipulate them and see if you can figure out what it does or where to put it or what it might be used for. That looks like it might go.

Oh yeah, that goes on here for sure. All right, let's try it out. Looks like a wrench. Oh hey, look. That's pretty neat. By the way, you're not actually locked in and there's not an actual bomb.

It needs my fingerprint. Oh my gosh, everything's lighting up. Whoa. Oh my god, it's so cool.

You're never alone either. Behind the scenes, a staff member is always watching and listening. Escape rooms started in Japan in the early 90s. Escape rooms started in Japan in 2007. Since they started opening in the US in 2012, they've been growing fast. They've been showing up on TV shows. This is cool.

So how do we start? We have to look for the clues hidden around the room. Wasn't this supposed to be a zombie? And there was even a hit horror movie about an escape room with no escape. Escape rooms have also been getting more elaborate. If you want proof, check out 13th Gate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It's like being inside a movie. Oh my god. My teammates this time included Tim Nicholas Tang. Beer barrels have a number from 007.

He's an escape room superfan who traveled all the way from Las Vegas to play 13th Gate. So remember your piece and put it on the wheel. Of course, we wouldn't want to give away any of the surprises on national television, so we're going to take some precautionary measures. What'd you think? I really enjoyed it. I thought that the s*** was really nice. We had to do the s***. It was very physical.

I don't expect that. That's right. And then we had to go in the s*** with the s***. That's right. And ending with the animatronic s***.

That was really cool. I mean, the guy spent some real money on that. That would be this guy, 13th Gate creator and owner Dwayne Sandburn.

So there was an entire shipwreck. So who built that? My crew.

They're just amazing, talented guys. A lot of them came out of the movie industry, and it takes a year to build one. A lot of work, a lot of research. On a typical day, how many people come through? We run about 50 to 60 games a day.

Wow. So it's, in general, it's a profitable enterprise. It's a tremendous amount of work, but it can certainly be profitable. It does seem like this is a business where you can't really have repeat customers much. That is probably the only downside to escape room is that after you play it, there's no replayability really. Yeah. So you have to continue building new games to keep audience coming back.

Oh yeah, these change when you tap them. It's hard to explain the rush you get from an escape room until you've played yourself. The danger feels real.

Your heart races. Where's the great monkey? And as for our crack team of Sunday morning correspondence.

You are. Well, we didn't win. The time ran out and the bomb went off. Oh, we lost.

Oh my gosh. We just blew up. World destruction. But you know what? We didn't care. For one hour, we'd been working our wits, having fun with friends, transported to a different time and place.

That's what I call escapism. What's in a name? That's Shakespeare from Romeo and Juliet, of course. And our Steve Hartman has the answer. A lot. At a small university near Birmingham, Alabama, we found a big guy. Six foot eight, 310 pound senior offensive lineman, George Grimwade is a dominating force on the Samford Bulldog football team.

Over the last four years, the name Grimwade has become synonymous with muscle and might. But this story will surely change that. George is a kind person and he's proven that through life many, many times.

That's what this is all about. Michael Musto is George's stepdad. He married George's mom, Michelle, when George was in fifth grade and the two have gotten along famously ever since. He was just a sweet young man. Until Michael Musto came along, George never had a regular male presence in his life.

George never had a regular male presence in his life. I was trying to win. So they bonded over football especially.

You didn't get to see the game last night. It's just how we've always communicated, you know, through sports. Is it more I love you? It's definitely neither of those, I'll be honest with you.

I think we just talk football. I don't think there's any grunting or it's safe to say you've never said it as well. No, that's, yeah, that's the ultimate way to show him how much I love him was to do this. Earlier this month, George pulled off one of the most memorable moments in Samford football history, a sneak play that his stepdad especially never saw coming. It's official.

The play was certified by a judge, designed by seam ripper, needle and thread, and executed by number 76 himself. I jogged over to my dad and my dad goes, what are you doing? He's got some papers in his hand.

I don't know what he's doing. You know how much I love you, right? Yeah. And how I always treasure the time I have with you.

Yeah. Now you're my world. I got my last name changed. Look at my jersey.

I saw my name on that jersey. He was like, wow, this kid really loves me. I couldn't get the words out of my mouth. I love you so much, dad.

Took my voice away. He's just the best. For a stepdad, it's hard to imagine a higher honor. For a football player, hard to imagine a greater show of strength. Because George didn't just change the letters on his jersey that day. He put his heart on his sleeve.

And the name for that is hero. Reliving your long lost youth is futile, right? Not for our Luke Burbank. For the last couple of years, I was a frequent visitor to a magical place. A place where honestly, I had no real business being at age 42. A skateboard shop. I was instantly a kid again.

Trying to figure out how many lawns I'd need to mow to buy the latest Tony Hawk skateboard. But it turns out I didn't have to, because my wife surprised me by buying me one for my birthday. Without a doubt, it was the best present I'd ever gotten.

And also the one that most necessitated me updating my will. Because you see, while inside I felt like a kid again, outside I remained very much a middle-aged man. With a sense of balance that could only be described as intermittent. I didn't let that stop me though. And despite more than a few falls, I felt like it was coming back to me. Heck, I even skateboarded past a bunch of teenagers one time, and I swear I heard one of them say, that guy is cool. I was on top of the world. And then I saw the meme. You know, one of those funny pictures that lives online.

It's called, how do you do fellow kids? And it shows actor Steve Buscemi trying to seem youthful, carrying a skateboard. In an instant, I realized that was me. A silly looking 42 year old with a mortgage and high cholesterol, who thought he could reconnect with his youth. I knew it was time to hang up my board.

The dream was over. And then something interesting happened. At a radio show taping I was part of, I met the actual Tony Hawk, skateboard legend, who it turns out is eight years older than me, and still skateboarding every day. I told him about my doubts, and he confided in me that he still gets nervous before jumping his board 30 feet in the air and completely rotating it two and a half times. I told him I knew how he felt because sometimes I just fall off the board for no reason. For a brief moment, he wasn't Tony Hawk and I wasn't Luke Burbank. We were just two dudes talking about skateboarding. Will I ever be as good as him? Probably not, but am I giving up?

Not a chance. I've just got one question I need answered. How do you do fellow kids? Almost all of us know the name Harriet Tubman, but how much do we know about her remarkable road to freedom? Martha Teichner maps it out for us. Harriet Tubman proposed but now on hold as Andrew Jackson's replacement for the $20 bill. What did you learn about her in school? That she ran away from slavery, then risked her own freedom to free others?

One sentence, two if that. Harriet. Playing her was tough and exhilarating.

I'm sorry I'm going to leave you. A new film starring Cynthia Erivo is meant to flesh out the Wikipedia entry. When trouble comes, you'll be ready. I saw her as a young woman who had a force of will that was almost unbreakable and she was a superhero because of that. The more you discover about Harriet Tubman, the more you realize she had to be a superhero.

To pull off exploits, it would be an understatement to say we're daring. These are the only known representations in a photograph that we have. Kate Clifford Larson is Tubman's biographer.

This is five feet tall. This is a representation of Tubman as a life-size person. On the eastern shore of Maryland where she was born, the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad visitor center opened in 2017. This tiny woman who could neither read nor write now has not one but two national parks dedicated to her story. Would this have looked the way it did when Harriet Tubman was around here?

Yes, it would have looked exactly like this. She was born here, Araminta Ross, Minty for short, around 1822. Her parents were enslaved on different plantations and that far farm on the other side of the river hours apart. Minty's life as a slave was horrific. It was brutal.

It was cruel. She and her mother were owned by Edward Brodess who made $60 a year renting her out starting when she was six. She talked about how lonely and sad she was when she was separated from her mother and how she would cry herself to sleep at night. And then came the day when she was about 13 that she walked into the Bucktown Village store just as an overseer was trying to catch a runaway. When the overseer picked up one of these store weights, a two-pound weight, yes, and he threw it intending to hit the young man who was fleeing but Tubman had stepped back into the doorway and it slammed right into her skull. For the rest of her life Harriet Tubman had sudden epileptic seizures and visions she said were from God. Harriet was her mother's name.

Minty began calling herself that when she married John Tubman. In 1849 she escaped from this place. Right here.

Right here. A place called Poplar Neck in Caroline County Maryland. When word reached her that she was going to be sold south.

Just look at a map. Imagine Harriet Tubman in her 20s running away alone on foot. So she would have come to this home. She managed with the help of the Underground Railroad to make it a hundred miles to the Pennsylvania border and freedom.

But then Tubman went back 13 times over 10 years. Leading more than 70 people to freedom. This scene in the film, it really happened. And get this, during the Civil War she became the first American woman ever to lead troops into battle near Beaufort, South Carolina.

They blew up the bridge. They liberated 750 enslaved people off the plantations along that river and the newspapers at the time wrote about this raid and they credited the raid to the Black Shemoses. Harriet Tubman had an amazing Forrest Gump like ability to be at the center of history. Her friends among its key figures abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Tubman was a passionate campaigner for women's suffrage alongside Susan B. Anthony. She spent the last 50 years of her remarkable life here in Auburn New York where William Henry Seward, President Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State and his wife Frances offered their friendship and support. She was a regular guest here, social visitor welcomed here. So we're running the old house kitchen.

Jeff Ludwig is Education Director at the Seward House Museum in Auburn. It was known that Harriet Tubman was looking to place her family somewhere and to plant roots somewhere to build a home for herself and so they offer her a piece of land. Seven acres, a black woman technically a fugitive slave buying a farm unheard of. In 1869 she got married again to Nelson Davis more than 20 years her junior.

This is an amazing house it was one of nine cottages. In her 70s she opened an old age home for formerly enslaved people and an infirmary providing free health care to anyone black or white. She was a lightning rod for change. Karen Vivian Hill heads the Harriet Tubman home. She was the Serena Williams of her time okay bold, bad, black, beautiful.

We know she was deeply religious and that she had secret pleasures. Strawberries were her favorite dessert so we found strawberry seeds all over the property and blue white china which is so unlike Harriet for her to have this affection for these very fine things. So who was Harriet Tubman really?

This is just the Tubman scrapbook that my as my mother called it. To Judith Bryant she was Aunt Harriet. I'm a great great grand niece. Descended from Harriet's brother William Henry Stewart. He and two other brothers she rescued from Maryland in 1854.

She's got bragging rights but chooses not to brag. It's my family. People always say oh I didn't know you were related to Harriet Tubman. Of course you didn't but I did.

We did. She invokes her famous relative when things go right. We have this expression I drew that it's Harriet's work and over time she's sort of my guardian angel. Tough and resolute to the very end this was Harriet Tubman the year before she died in Auburn on March 10th 1913.

She was 91 or thereabouts. Her funeral was a major event. When you come here how do you feel? Um proud. Proud. Harriet Tubman's grave has become a destination. A shrine for visitors in need of a hero. But her epitaph reads simply servant of God well done.

I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening and please join us again next Sunday morning. Paramount Plus original series The Good Fight returns for its final season. The point isn't the end. The point is winning. There are bad people in the world. The best way to protect the good people is to convict the bad. So here's to us. The Good Fight the final season now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-01-28 00:03:05 / 2023-01-28 00:15:25 / 12

Get The Truth Mobile App and Listen to your Favorite Station Anytime