Based Camp - September 14, 2023


The True Story O Brother, Where Art Thou Was Based On! (Malcolm's Recent Family History)


Episode Stats

Length

22 minutes

Words per Minute

193.99548

Word Count

4,409

Sentence Count

2

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the true story behind the movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" and discuss its historical connections to the story of the movie and the history of the political fight depicted in the movie.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 hello malcolm hello simone and today is a very interesting episode for me because something very
00:00:07.920 weird happened to me last week there is a movie that i have liked since i was a kid because it
00:00:14.400 came out when i was in middle school i want to say oh brother where art thou and when i first saw it
00:00:19.880 i was like it is very weird how many similarities it has to stories my family told me about my
00:00:28.480 great-grandfather but i discounted these similarities for three reasons one it was very
00:00:38.000 clearly based on the odyssey two it was very clearly based on the bible and themes of biblical
00:00:45.120 redemption so i was like okay there's already so much content in this it couldn't possibly also be
00:00:50.020 based on a true story and three the whole thing takes place in mississippi and all the stories i
00:00:56.800 were told about took place in texas so i ignored it well a few days ago i was googling some of the
00:01:04.400 characters from it and they're like oh yeah papio daniel was based on a real texas politician and i
00:01:10.120 was like like a huge wave hitting me i was like oh all of it was true all of it was based on my
00:01:18.320 great-granddad that is insane and and and what's insane is i actually looked to see if there were
00:01:25.100 youtube videos covering this and there weren't and i assume that part of it is due to how nuanced
00:01:31.900 and niche this history is all about a texas gubernatorial election in the in the 1930s i think
00:01:40.240 but it is it is also like surprisingly accurate to the plot of the movie so i am going to combine
00:01:48.680 both what i was able to find in terms of historical evidence of what went down
00:01:52.660 as well as evidence from family oral tradition into essentially what happened here and what is
00:02:00.700 the true iteration of the story in oh brother where art thou if you were to to take it out
00:02:06.560 would you like to know more so the first thing to note is is just so you know that like i'm not
00:02:11.540 making up that this is actually based on this papio daniel was a real texas politician
00:02:17.380 he was a texas governor and in the movie he is the politician that attempts to use the popularity
00:02:26.560 of this musical group to win office in real life what happened was is is my great-grandfather who was a
00:02:38.400 radio station owner and a business magnate at the time tapped papio daniel who was the star of a musical
00:02:46.000 group to try to defeat a candidate who was supporting the clan's interest in a texas election so the fact
00:02:58.260 that this was a clan group versus an anti-clan group is accurate what is mixed up in the storytelling
00:03:04.360 is the who the different characters are papio daniel while the the politician is named papio daniel
00:03:11.000 he would probably better be named carpy collins who is my ancestor and he was somebody who wanted
00:03:17.940 to have a political fight with a specific other somebody and he tapped a musician to win that
00:03:25.560 political fight so now we're going to go back but first of all you got to understand the origins of
00:03:30.440 this political fight why was he so so so angry at this other candidate why did he need this other
00:03:38.540 candidate to lose and why was he looking for somebody to run against him so we're going to go
00:03:43.760 back three generations through this but first simone you saw the movie recently what'd you think
00:03:47.520 you hadn't seen in a long time it's it's a great movie it's holds up incredibly well and it's one of
00:03:54.520 those movies that's stylized but not in a way that makes it stuck in time or dated which i quite like
00:04:00.780 yeah well and you also didn't think our fans would care about this episode at all i really yeah i i i
00:04:07.480 failed to understand why this is interesting or why this matters i think it's good ever growing
00:04:12.860 content well i mean you have a family history that tells a part of history that other people haven't
00:04:17.420 heard it's interesting to you and nobody else cares everyone nobody else cares apparently was
00:04:23.000 interesting enough to other people that they made a movie about it i don't know there's so many
00:04:29.040 interesting historically accurate elements of the movie i think things that they throw in that they make
00:04:34.200 important that they it's a very nerdy it's a surprisingly nerdy movie where people the people
00:04:40.320 who created it from clothing to products to cars to what people were eating how people spoke i think was
00:04:49.160 very obsessively done it was almost it was like it was made by some obscure man in japan whose one
00:04:55.400 obsession was depression era like south middle texas you know like a just a crazy otaku who like
00:05:02.480 nailed it better than how much it's it's localized to texas culture which really shocked me as a kid
00:05:07.880 because people said it was mississippi culture but you know digging into it it's very clearly more
00:05:11.680 modeled on texas culture but anyway which is where it actually you know the historical figures and the
00:05:16.440 historical fight took place so we're going to go three generations earlier than the events of the
00:05:21.520 movie so warren collins was the brother of if you have seen the free state of jones the the second
00:05:30.900 main character to the to newton knight the guy who like wrote the the rules for the free state of jones
00:05:36.460 and 15 of his relatives so either brothers or kids of his his brothers were part of the 50 founding
00:05:42.780 members of the free state of jones so it was basically one family so one of the brothers from
00:05:47.220 this family went to texas and started a different separatist group that was trying to create a different
00:05:53.040 separatist state it was called the texas jayhawkers and this is where the kaiser burnout comes from when
00:05:59.060 they tried to to kill these people and there's many interesting stories that i could go into if
00:06:03.220 this does well about my ancestors so this guy there's this famous story he was he was leading
00:06:07.080 this group of anti-confederates and they had captured a lot of their their people and they
00:06:12.700 were going to execute them and so he pretending to be somebody else comes into the camp and he gets
00:06:18.060 them all drunk and he drinks a lot because you know i guess every one of my family drinks a lot
00:06:21.780 um and he did a jig that it was apparently so captivating that it distracted the confederate
00:06:27.820 guards while they let everyone loose but if you watch the free state of jones because i think a lot
00:06:33.320 of people they see something like the civil war and they don't understand why there could be so much
00:06:37.460 intergenerational hatred between groups and so much intergenerational hatred between the descendants
00:06:43.040 of these people and people like the clan and if you watch that movie i i think by the end of that
00:06:48.480 movie you'll be like oh i can understand why they would really hate the clan for multiple generations
00:06:52.740 you know these people were horrifyingly killing their friends and stuff like that it was really
00:06:57.660 evil and terrible anyway so after him his son and i'm gonna be putting up wikipedia pages for all
00:07:04.420 of these people because they all have wikipedia pages his son ran he was a texas politician
00:07:08.980 specifically like state senator he really focused on issues like anti well he focused on issues like
00:07:15.760 prohibition women's rights trying to get women to vote and trying to get people a five-day work week
00:07:21.540 and other workers rights issues so he won state senate but then he tried to run for governor as an
00:07:27.820 anti-clan candidate and he lost and to understand how much this grudge goes i know there were assassination
00:07:34.720 attempts by the clan on my family i mean certainly both of these people but even even to their kids and
00:07:40.020 we can get to that later in the video so anyway then his son was car p collins car p collins owned
00:07:47.320 a chain of radio stations across texas and he did some pretty shady stuff with his radio stations
00:07:53.260 for example the limit for radio stations at the time was 5 000 hertz and he would broadcast them at
00:07:59.220 50 000 hertz by putting them just south of the border on the texas mexico border and they could
00:08:05.260 apparently be heard as far north as like chicago or la which is absolutely insane so he had a reason
00:08:11.480 to want more like political power he made his money on something called crazy water crystals so he had
00:08:17.540 this idea he saw these water wells in this place called mineral wells texas and he had this idea of
00:08:24.320 okay well these wells are supposed to have healing properties they're like widely known for having
00:08:27.960 healing properties and he saw on the sides of the wells that there was like a powder accumulating and he goes
00:08:33.000 oh i can dehydrate the water in these wells and create a powder that is cheaper to ship than the
00:08:40.180 water itself so he he widely shipped this powder and it was known for having a laxative like effect
00:08:46.780 in the ads that they would say they'd say we could clean you out like a ramrod and so then he used the
00:08:51.400 money he made from this to one by the town and they created that like a resort out of this town
00:08:54.860 which actually sort of fell apart after aspen became popular and planes became popular because then you
00:08:59.920 didn't need to drive to the town before like the dallas elite for a period and they in the austin
00:09:04.540 and houston elite to a lesser extent this was like where they would all go and then it became austin
00:09:09.000 but anyway and you can find some old pictures i might find one for this where you can see just how
00:09:13.420 big this town was compared to what it is now in terms of the people that would go and so anyway then
00:09:17.760 he used that to buy up radio stations that he could use to broadcast this product and within those
00:09:23.200 radio stations one of the people who would broadcast was a guy called papio daniel and papio daniel
00:09:28.960 was doing this broadcasting to promote his flower product and he he owned a flower mill and he really
00:09:37.800 was was just doing his band to promote his flower product and you can actually see this in in in the
00:09:44.920 the name of his band the white crust dough boys so on the in the in the show they were called the
00:09:50.980 soggy bottom boys the real name of the band was the white crust dough boys so this guy he became very
00:09:57.860 popular apparently especially among wives who lived at home and stuff like that he was a very early sort
00:10:03.600 of a populist character but he was actually from ohio and he didn't have any political ambitions
00:10:07.360 but my great granddad he the the guy who was the former railroad commissioner was running for
00:10:15.560 governor and he knew this and he knew this guy had really close ties to the clan i'll put some
00:10:19.620 pictures of evidence up for this on on screen but yeah and he didn't want him to win the election
00:10:25.380 but he also knew from his father that the wrong way to approach this and i really believe in this
00:10:31.060 idea of like intergenerational lessons was to try to run yourself what he should do is he should find
00:10:37.160 somebody who seemed to have popular appeal and run that guy for office so he found papio daniel and
00:10:43.680 right and the light crust dough boys and you'll see this actually in the scene through over the
00:10:48.420 art though the character who is named papio daniel you keep hearing him pushing flower or pushing his
00:10:54.100 flower company at various parts and like ads so they're really tying it back to this like he's very
00:10:58.620 clearly based on the real character but papio daniel had no reason to run he had no interest in running
00:11:04.320 so the the other guy said okay well my my grandfather carpy collins he he had to convince him to run in
00:11:13.480 some way right and he goes well i bet this would be great for flower sales and there's actually
00:11:18.120 historical evidence that this did happen so he convinced him to run to increase flower sales and
00:11:24.960 he was running on this incredibly populous ticket very similar to the proto trump and actually reason
00:11:30.420 magazine did a piece on both carpy collins and papio daniel saying this was like the proto trump
00:11:36.600 this texas governor race and so he got him to run and he would drive around in his car to all these
00:11:41.280 things and all of these towns and promote himself and everything like that and he was doing an okay
00:11:46.640 job but you know it was still a pretty tight election so when he would go around i love this he
00:11:51.540 he wasn't actually interested in any of the issues so whenever anyone would ask him a question and he
00:11:56.440 didn't really want to answer it he'd go strike up the band leroy and leroy was his one of the guys in
00:12:02.680 the band and they'd start they'd start playing and everyone would go wild because they were a really
00:12:06.960 popular hillbilly band at the time the other name for the band was the hillbilly boys and so they they
00:12:12.320 the people would go wild and they'd love it and so this is how he he just did his campaign
00:12:16.260 so heading to the end of the campaign it's right before election day and something you need to know
00:12:20.840 about texas laws at the time there was a poll tax at the time like a two dollar tax you would pay to
00:12:26.600 vote what this also meant is that they had records of who had voted and who had not voted so it turned
00:12:32.380 out his entire life papio daniel had never voted and his wife had never voted they never paid this poll
00:12:40.000 tax and the dallas morning news was going to run this big hit piece on him for this the day before the
00:12:46.580 election or two days before the election but like right before like it would have ended his
00:12:50.560 election and my great-granddad carpy collins he'd been running the campaign and everything like
00:12:55.280 that freaked out and so he drives up to wichita which is where papio daniel was living at the
00:13:01.580 moment and he he he bangs on his door he's oh my god we're dead we've got to do something about this
00:13:06.880 and papio daniel goes no i got this covered you don't need to worry about anything son you know i got
00:13:11.780 this covered and it came in mind you know my granddad had been bankrolling this entire campaign
00:13:16.220 so he and then papio daniel he probably goes what you need to do is you need to talk to everyone
00:13:22.520 you know in the press you need to have them at this concert i'm gonna hold that night so he puts
00:13:26.680 on this big concert okay so you haven't you haven't heard any of this have you no this is totally new to
00:13:33.760 me i mean you knew parts of it i'm sure about it checked i knew about the crazy water crystals this
00:13:38.800 just checks out with your family history though um yeah it seems like something they do so put on this
00:13:43.760 big event and then papio daniel he comes out of this event he goes son i actually don't know if
00:13:49.220 this is public that people didn't know that this was all planned and in response to a new story that
00:13:53.220 was going to go live the next day and he goes i'm a man of the people you see his his whole campaign
00:13:59.140 was based on the 10 commandions that's he the one of my campaign promises it's the 10 commandments
00:14:04.600 i'm just going to follow them that's and he ran his campaign on the 10 commandments
00:14:08.520 and he would do crazy stunts like you go out and shoot a bison and then he the bison for everyone
00:14:15.120 who's at the campaign rally but at this particular rally he goes i'm gonna tell you how much i believe
00:14:21.780 in the little man this poll tax it is used so that only rich men can vote so that the elite can control
00:14:29.900 you and i believe that so much that my entire life my wife and i we have never paid this poll tax
00:14:37.200 we have protested this our entire life going into this election and apparently the crowd just went
00:14:43.720 wild for this they loved this assertion because of course it was all his audience all his fans
00:14:49.040 and the press was all there and so instead of being able to run this piece that was papio daniel
00:14:54.860 has never even voted before it's papio daniel spent his entire life protesting the poll tax with his
00:15:02.000 wife and so it went really well and so papio daniel he wins the election he keeps this clan member out
00:15:08.560 of out of the governorship of texas so you got to understand with the clan i mean his dad's generation
00:15:13.720 that was one era of resurgence of the clan but the 1920s that was the second resurgence of the clan and
00:15:18.920 so it made a lot of sense that these guys would be connected it was really important to him that he
00:15:22.920 prevented them from gaining political power because that's been one of my family's goals for a long time
00:15:27.020 is fighting this type of stuff and and he won the election and he was governor i think for two terms
00:15:33.820 and then he actually tried to rerun later but when he tried to rerun later he actually ran on a
00:15:38.980 segregationalist platform like a strict segregationalist platform and my granddad didn't want any part of
00:15:44.060 that so he didn't support him and he just fell flat on his face the moment at the gate because
00:15:48.360 i don't want to say that he had actually been masterminding the whole thing but i think the
00:15:52.080 evidence is pretty clear here that he was the reason that papio daniel was worked and so that
00:15:58.200 is the actual story of the soggy bottom boys or the white crust sourdough boys but there was no then
00:16:07.260 a criminal affiliation with the band that your family's politician of choice used well so both of
00:16:15.380 them were kind of hucksters in their own way i mean the they weren't like they hadn't broken out of jail
00:16:20.300 no they had not broken out of jail no it was that one person tapped them specifically to beat another
00:16:27.720 person specifically due to their clan affiliation and that they were very sort of narcissistic band
00:16:35.940 members who were sort of hucksters and con artists yes but there was nothing more than that
00:16:40.720 okay interesting you find this boring i just i don't think people find other people interesting
00:16:49.560 but i'm not the best at modeling people let's be honest here so i think people find hidden history
00:16:57.360 interesting and an episode we'll do later which is actually really interesting tied to all of this
00:17:03.520 is that these individuals in this story were actually supposed to be in the illuminati
00:17:09.260 so there's this document that was created in the 1980s called the bloodlines of the illuminati
00:17:14.940 you know put a post of this it's even on cia's own website and my dad was supposed to be one of the
00:17:20.260 people who led the illuminati specifically his mom the the grand madame of the collins family
00:17:25.680 and she was supposed to be one of the core 12 leaders of the illuminati and that this family had been
00:17:32.440 tapped for the illuminati and it's it's very interesting to go into the history of how this could
00:17:38.220 have happened like hypothetically if the illuminati actually existed and i just i just love how cinematic
00:17:43.280 my family might have always been the wealthiest family but they were cinematic they lived
00:17:47.240 dramatically from 30 rock right i've checked and there is no oscar for living dramatically
00:17:55.160 i really hope somebody makes a movie about us we've got a lot of movies about our recent family
00:17:59.100 i think they've already made oh you mean this generation yeah no i mean there's a few recent
00:18:04.660 movies about my family yeah i'm talking about our generation you we just need your brother to run
00:18:09.380 for office at the same time that you do so that there's this amazing colorful rivalry i feel like
00:18:14.420 that would be uh we're planning it we're planning there's enough there you know and your brother's
00:18:19.780 hilarious and you know wicked smart oh he's an amazing person anyone who likes the show they'd love him
00:18:25.720 if he he'll be a good character he's yeah he's unstoppable you'd have to be played by chris pratt
00:18:31.040 they work together too like us they have a company together they've been successful together i also think
00:18:36.080 it's also interesting with anything like these movies or these shows you know you can see them
00:18:39.760 and you're like what actually happened you know descendant wise you know long story to these
00:18:44.720 characters to their families and i guess we're sort of a in state that's that was what happened
00:18:50.260 so if chris pratt would play your brother who would play you james franco i feel like james franco
00:18:57.540 is weird enough to be able to do a you who's james franco i don't know that he's i don't know he's kind
00:19:03.220 of creepy but i feel like he has the flexibility and he's pale oh yeah he could easily play me
00:19:09.660 but chris pratt is obviously your brother so that's done oh yeah no so people who think that
00:19:15.320 she's joking here my brother looks no he doesn't look like chris pratt your brother looks more like
00:19:20.120 a i don't know a kendall or david like a combination of michelangelo's david and a kendall
00:19:25.220 you know they're they're kind of like you know that's that's that's how it goes you know but
00:19:30.920 but like the the mannerisms are very similar between chris the mannerisms are very chris pratt
00:19:36.900 he's got this sort of adorable doofiness to him no there's well there's a there are things that he
00:19:41.800 does with his eyes that are very subtle but will they remind me much more of chris pratt in what's
00:19:46.360 the show 30 rocks and wreck parks and right parks and wreck yeah chris pratt and parks and wreck
00:19:50.840 it has a very similar mannerism and vibe to my brother but my brother is actually like a very
00:19:55.760 successful business person that's why i said he'd be a great politician he reminds me a lot of
00:20:00.300 you know he has he has to run he has to run and so so yeah it's done it'll happen and then then
00:20:07.700 there will be the story you just have to be very entertaining about it so that's fine oh i gotta
00:20:13.000 tell sorry quick story about no i won't i won't tell this story but my brother has a lot of his
00:20:17.080 heroic stories about him he's put himself in enormous physical danger to protect other people multiple
00:20:23.260 times and i really you know he's he's the golden boy like he is you know like he could be the next
00:20:29.160 kennedy you know like not by like our family standards i mean they always thought i was
00:20:33.200 smarter than him your your families are everyone is a golden boy in your family but anyway yeah okay
00:20:39.460 i mean that stuff's fun i like thinking about who will play you and your brother i know okay well
00:20:46.400 let's let's let's we'll create enough content so that people have something to go on when we compete
00:20:50.900 against each other and they can get all the drama yeah all right well i love you simone and i
00:20:56.120 appreciate you indulging me in this video and we can see if anyone cares about historic events
00:21:01.100 well i look forward to watching whatever movie is based roughly on your existence so i will be very
00:21:07.100 dead but maybe my descendants will have some pointless podcast episode where they discuss it so
00:21:12.460 looking for oh pointless podcast my green granddaddy malcolm collins he did this silly podcast i should also
00:21:22.120 note though that malcolm's family also has a penchant for doing this like one of his his older family
00:21:28.820 members has like murals and portraits all over their house of like family members so i think even you had
00:21:36.700 in one of your childhood houses a mural in your bedroom showing you and your brother in space suits so
00:21:41.860 there was a lot of we did the walls were painted with a space theme and it was me and my brother
00:21:46.540 in space was like i had like a remote device and we had our dog but the dog was a constellation
00:21:51.640 oh that's cute no i i do have to say the the malcolm collins family is very like smug and full
00:21:59.640 of itself but like the frustrating thing is it's rightfully so they're just that good so it's like
00:22:05.280 someone who like walks by a mirror and can't help but seduce themselves in it but you don't blame them
00:22:09.200 because they're that sexy it's that that is malcolm's family very interesting stuff so yeah i guess
00:22:14.280 we'll we'll see who is correct and you will you know you will oh and i should also probably mention
00:22:22.340 here that the the son of the guy who i'm talking about in the story ended up becoming a u.s congressman
00:22:27.580 and there you go um so he went back into politics he then tried to get his son to go into politics he
00:22:32.620 didn't go into politics but he the family really tried to get him into politics and yeah anyway love
00:22:39.300 you love you too fantastic conversation enjoyed it
00:22:43.140 you