The Unsung Bravery of Martha Gellhorn

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer, Mr. Max Williams.

Locked in.

Locked in. Sitting down.

Noel, that's Noel Brown.

I've been bullied. A stand-up guy. There we go.

Noel, you know... I've been trying to convince a number of our colleagues to do improv for a few years now. And I think you raised an excellent point not too long ago where you said, Ben, don't we already kind of do improv?

I was just about to say I improv like forever. seven times a week, baby.

Yes, yes. And we are also, we are also people of varied interest. We do a lot of stuff together and apart outside of this show, but neither of us Or Martha Gellhorn?

No, none of us have been decorated journalists or war correspondents with careers spanning more than 60 years. We're a bit relative babies compared to that. I think we've been in this podcast game for maybe 13. We're getting there. But still, no, not only Martha Gellhorn was Martha Gellhorn, a total badass, the only woman to report from the ground during D-Day after sneaking onto a hospital boat in order to do that thing. Yeah, yeah.

And this is weird. We can't thank our research associate Ames enough for this one. This is weird that Martha Gellhorn, whom we're going to learn a lot about today, is only broadly known for a brief marriage to a writer that I love and think is woefully overrated.

Well, and also he was a bit of a notorious lech. And alcoholic, but a fine writer indeed, but perhaps overrated, Mr. Ernest Hemingway. And he was also, to the point about being a lech and maybe not the best of dudes, he used his considerable influence in the literary world and circles of power to keep Martha down.

Yeah, yeah. Folks, spoiler, Ernest is kind of the bad guy. In this story. So let's learn about Martha Gellhorn. All right. So a lot of people arrive into activism or politics when they get older, when they grow up. But as we learned here, Martha was sort of born into it.

She was nurtured in the bosom of politics from a very young age. Her mother, Edna Fiscal Gellhorn, was a big deal in the world of suffragists. She helped found the League of Women Voters, very important organization, and often brought her daughter along to suffragist events, which included a protest for women's rights called the Golden Lane.

Cool, cool stuff, right? And so young Martha is seven years old when she is positioned in front of a line of women who are wearing yellow sashes, to your point about the Golden Lane, and carrying yellow parasols outside of the Democratic National Convention in 1916 in St. Louis.

Yep. And Washington University has a fantastic page on their site about this exact era where It had this to say, women representing states which had women's suffrage were draped in white. Those from states with partial suffrage were in gray. And those from states with no votes for women, including Missouri, were draped in black. At the top was Mrs. David O'Neill, resplendent as Miss Liberty. In the front row, you would see two young girls, Mary Taussig and Martha Gellhorn. And WUSTL.edu very accurately characterizes them as representing future voters.

Yeah, and this experience of having a mom who is plugged in to social equality and to activism pervades her daughter Martha's writing later in life. And Edna is a highly educated person. She attended Bryn Mawr College, and then later her daughter Martha graduated. also goes to the same institution. But guys, Martha leaves after her first year. She says, the ivory towers of academia may not be for me.

I want to be a journalist.

Yeah. Not only a journalist, the most treacherous of journalistic pursuits, a war correspondent. She was feeling the pull of that career, and she published early work in The New Republic, which is a magazine that was– I didn't realize this– conceived by Theodore Roosevelt in his living room and was known for– and continues to be known to this day for its intellectual rigor and left-leaning political views. Yep. Ben did the whoosh-whoosh quote fingers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Left-leaning.

All right. Fine.

It was at the time, as you said, Noel, a publication that was the new shiny thing, right?

Yeah, and it served as like an incubator for young writers coming up, as well as editors. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It gave a lot of people a shot. And this is the era of what we call the lost generation. Martha Gellhorn is one of those creative forces born and living during that time. She moves to Paris. From earlier, Paris, France.

Excuse me.

We in 1930, she goes there. And like you said, she's she's chasing the smoke, dude. She's becoming a war correspondent. She gets a job at a place called United Press. But pretty soon after she gets hired, she gets fired.

Yeah, for the abominable crime of reporting sexual harassment by a male colleague. Yeah, yeah.

And she takes jobs writing for different newspapers. She travels across Europe. She covers fashion for Vogue magazine. You know, when you're a freelance writer, you get the gigs while you can. But then as now, she is aware of a fell wind. Something is up. In Europe, fascism is rising around her.

Yep, from fashion to fascism. It was coming up in Germany, and as a pacifist and left person of, once again, whoosh, whoosh, quotation fingers, left-leaning political views, she was concerned for the state of her own country and decided to leave Europe and lend her services to the United States.

Yeah, or to just get out while you can. Jordan Peele was right.

No, sometimes you just, yeah, you got to get out. In 1934, she moved back to the U.S. and took a job at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration as a field investigator. So she really did put her money where her mouth was. Like she was trying to, you know, help on the ground.

Yeah, a correspondent to another type of war. This one economic, right? She is someone who does the grunt work. She is in the trenches interviewing families. She is reporting on horrendous, horrific working conditions. in the worst parts of the country, and she is not shy about speaking up, or as we say it today, speaking from her chest to the people in power. She says, I'm interviewing five families a day.

I'm growing ever more troubled about the widespread destitution. She calls on Roosevelt himself to do something about things like a lack of birth control and, of course... The syphilis epidemic.

Yeesh. Yeah, indeed.

I'm so happy we avoided that one.

We did. We did dodge a bullet there, Ben. Her vocal criticism of all of this caught the eye of another outspoken lady and the wife of the president, Eleanor Roosevelt. They became friends and actually eventually became roommates. Yeah. Yep.

And Gellhorn was fired from her field investigator position in for being, and this is a quote, a dangerous communist. And that's when she ended up living at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Yeah, roommates.

I know, man. You said it.

Yeah, a couple. For sure. There, Gellhorn began to help Roosevelt with her column, The Women's Home Companion.

Mm-hmm. And During this time, Gellhorn is working on the ideas of her first book. This will ultimately be published as The Trouble I've Seen, Four Stories from the Great Depression, and it is a harrowing read. It's a collection of Martha Gellhorn's firsthand experiences in these just benighted of the United States, right?

Right. She captured the emotional, financial, and spiritual devastation. that was brought on by the collapse of the American economic system in the 1930s. That is a quote from the Literary Lady's Guide. Many versions of her book featured a very well-known photo from the Great Depression, Migrant Mother, by photographer Dorothea Lange, who Gellhorn worked with closely while documenting all of the devastation that was plaguing America.

Yeah, and it was a book that was painful to write, painful to read, but needed to be created. So the world responded. The United States responded. The book is a huge success. And of course, a lot of Europeans are reading it as well. It's in the wake of this book's splash debut that Martha meets a man she will marry for a time. His name is Ernest Hemingway. And again, I think he's an overrated writer.

Ernest Hemingway was in Key West, Florida, which I think was a place he was quite fond of where he enjoyed drinking his daiquiris. And that is where they met on a Christmas trip. So the couple immediately kind of hit it off and traveled together to Spain where Gellhorn had a job covering the Spanish Civil War for a publication called Collier's Weekly. Then they started traveling together and lived all over the place, Barcelona, Germany, Czechoslovakia. In 1940, they got married. She was, at the time, his third wife. Yeah, yeah.

And they had, you know, that new car smell for a moment, but their honeymoon didn't last long. They had this on-again, off-again living situation because Martha Gilhorn would not sacrifice her own career, right? To just follow some guy around. So she is continuing to work as a war correspondent. And our buddy Ernest didn't like it. He would he would write to her really just like pillish things.

Yeah, it wasn't good. Are you a war correspondent, he asked, or wife in my bed? I mean, the in my bed thing is just like adding insult to injury. You know, it's like that's all she's good for is being his like snuggle buddy or, you know, sex object.

And if you're married, isn't it our bed?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Never seen a shorter sentence that expresses one's misogyny quite so clearly. Bernice Kurt, author of The Hemingway Women, had this to say about the relationship. Hemingway would never sustain a long-lived, wholly satisfying relationship with any one of his four wives. Married domesticity may have seemed to him the desirable culmination of romantic love, but sooner or later, he became bored and restless, critical, and bullying. Boo.

And this is very astute from Bernice Kurt, because that is exactly what happened in Martha and Ernest's marriage during World War II. Gellhorn is a journalist. She's working with Collier's at the moment. And she says, look, I will go on the ground in France. I will report from the front lines to you, Collier's. But, Noel, as we learned, there were a couple of problems.

With this plan. A couple of wrinkles. The military at the time did not allow women journalists to cover the Allied landings. And Hemingway... essentially, like, kind of scooped her on the assignment, stole it right out from under her, and then tried to block her from traveling at all. Yeah.

It's a real jerk move. Even to a, like, to a stranger, it's a jerk move to your spouse.

Even for a seasoned jerk. This is, like, extra jerky. So she was not dissuaded, however, and she boarded a Norwegian freighter that was carrying dynamite? For two weeks to get that? That's bold. Yes.

Yes, it is. We also know that on June 7th, which is the day after D-Day, Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway are boarding separate ships heading to Omaha Beach. Martha is not able to just walk aboard like her estranged husband. She has to lie her way onto a hospital ship. And Hemingway is traveling, you know, the wartime version of the red carpet.

I was about to say, yeah, I mean, it's not like it's, you know, super posh, but certainly more posh than her, you know, having to more or less stow away on a hospital ship, not traveling in style at all. He was on this cushy government approved, you know, ride to Normandy, Gellhorn. on the other hand, was slumming it in the hospital ship. On the way, a police officer stopped her, and she had to, you know, spin a yarn, again, think on her feet, Yeah, this.

Is a crazy quotation, and we hope everybody hears it verbatim. When she gets jammed up by the cops, she tells the authorities that she's going to report on the, quote, women's angle for Collier's magazine. In a later interview, she says, quote, no one gave a hoot about the women's angle. It served like the perfect forged passport.

Yeah, allowed her to just kind of drift through without being noticed because people didn't take her or her beat seriously. So Gellhorn, because of her, I don't know, like pluckiness and resourcefulness, actually got to the scene before Hemingway because he's just cruising along, you know? Yeah, yeah. And she was with the front line, you know, what would you call it? First responders. So it would make sense that she would get there first.

And when we said, that she lied her way onto a hospital ship guys. She was pretending to be a nurse, but I love the point you're making there, Noel, because once she gets to the conflict area, she acts as a nurse. She's helping the medical staff. She's bringing food and water to soldiers. And she's a polyglot. She speaks multiple languages that like, Is it lying at that point?

Because she kind of did these amazing things.

She stepped right into the role. Yeah, no question about it.

Oh, she's like a Gary Oldman method actor.

That's very true. Well, I mean, at the very least, it showed that she wasn't just there to get the scoop. She really wanted to help. Like, she was a journalist that was out to do good and not just, like, be first to the scene to get a big story and a big byline. Yeah, yeah.

And lo and behold... Collier's does publish some stuff about the war. If you look at the cover story of one of the Collier's publications, you will see a guy named Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a big piece about it. You will also see his spouse, Martha Gellhorn, whose excellent writing is relegated to the back. There's no fanfare. There's no mention of her doing this awesome Gary Oldman-style method acting.

There's a bit of a conspiracy at play here because a lot of people with knowledge of the situation are telling us that Ernest Hemingway never actually stepped foot on the beach.

He stayed on the cushy boat. He stayed on the boat. No one saw him. No one saw him get off. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, he's like, let me write my thing about the old man.

Whatever. But he did get all the fanfare and, you know, Gellhorn got shorted. Afterwards, Smithsonian Magazine put it this way. Upon her return to London, Gellhorn was arrested by military police for essentially everything that she had done to get to Normandy for traveling without permission. She was sent to a training camp for American nurses and and told that she could go back to France when the nurses did.

That's a very strange punishment. That's very strange and probably illegal.

But she got her story published, and she was the only woman to have been on the ground, actually, at the D-Day landings.

And as you may imagine, folks... Martha and Ernest are no longer in their honeymoon period. Things are getting tense, and anybody who has been in a long-time relationship knows you have these ups and downs. But folks, this couple was no longer friendly.

Right. Well, no, I mean, I can't imagine they would be. I mean, not only was it a contentious relationship and dude kind of trying to lord over her. I mean, he literally tried to screw her career.

Yeah. And steal her story. It was her idea. All to say of Ernest Hemingway's four wives, Martha Gellhorn, is the only one who left him proactively, as far as we can tell. The couple officially gets divorced in 1945. And here's a baller move. One of Martha Gellhorn's stipulations in every interview after that was that you could never say the name Ernest Hemingway around her. She hated the guy.

Yeah, if that came up, she'd probably do a walkout. Gellhorn continued to cover different conflicts and made a name for herself with her particularly human-focused reporting. I mean, it makes sense given the way she covered the Great Depression and her kind of on-the-ground philosophy. It was not, I don't know, style over substance kind of writing. It was really getting to the heart of what was going on with people. Smithsonian puts it, where Gellhorn distinguished herself from other reporters was the focus of her articles rather than writing about generals or details of the fighting. She chronicled the stories of civilians unable to escape the violence of war, children, women, the elderly, and others threatened by flying bullets and exploding shrapnel.

Yeah, and this kind of reporting is something we need more of in the modern day. Noel, you and I travel pretty widely, and I think we can agree that most people kind of want the same things, right? You want food, shelter, You want your kids to have a better life than you did. You want a day off, that kind of stuff.

Well, I mean, it's so important to look at what's going on with people because they're so easily made into this monolith that's associated with an enemy, you know, or, you know, like some sort of ideological stand-in, you know? I mean, at the end of the day, yeah, you're right. People are people and we are all the same in that respect. And we all deserve to be treated like humans.

And she understood that and knew that that was not happening and wanted to shed light on that fact. It's the only way, you know, I think we can do better. Not that we've figured it out. There we go. Yeah, yeah.

What I think you and I are saying is go team.

Yeah, I just mean figure it out in terms of like as a species. We're still pretty awful to ourselves.

Yeah, that's true. But we're in the early days in the grand scheme of.

Things, right?

I guess so.

That's one way of looking at it.

There's always an opportunity to improve. And Martha Gellhorn saw this. She was present. in the Vietnam War. Reporting from there, she traveled to Panama after the United States invasion. She also wrote more books. She is a better writer than Ernest Hemingway. Fine. Don't email us about it.

It's correct. I mean, Ben, as much as I was down on the lesser... Thomas Carnegie. Carnegie in the last episode. You really got to beef with this Hemingway cat.

I got to stop negative. You're right.

It's deserved. The guy was a bit of a blowhard.

He liked cats. He did like cast.

And I'm really looking forward to whoever I'm going to be super down on in the next episode, because that's just seems like what what we're on. Let's do it.

It's a thing.

Now it's Ben. That's going to be me next. And then I don't know. Yeah, I like it. We love it.

We also are fans of Martha Gellhorn's books. We said her we talked about her first book briefly. She published anthologies, right?

She sure did. A collection of wartime articles that she'd written called The Face of War. And then she wrote a fictional novel, an account of McCarthyism called The Lowest Trees Have Tops, which I think is such an interesting image that I think I fully understand what she means by that.

That is interesting. That's one I haven't read. But McCarthyism was a very odd social phenomenon, right? Would we call it a moral panic?

Oh, big time. Yeah, and it seems like we're seeing it rear its head a bit right now with all of the talk of commies, you know? That language, that rhetoric seems to be back in a big way.

Oh, yeah. How dare people have health care? So anyway, this absolute legend, Martha Gellhorn, has passed away. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her sight was failing her. She was nearly totally blind. When she was 89 years old.

That's a long life for back then, man. Right.

It's a long life. It is 1998. It is February 15th when she passes away.

Oof. And a little trigger warning just about ending one's own life. She did do that. She had ovarian cancer. All of the things that you mentioned, Ben, the maladies that were just making her quality of life very poor. And she took matters into her own hands and swallowed a cyanide pill, passing away, as he said, at the age of 89.

Yet she is not gone. Her legacy remains. We have something. I say we. Civilization has something called the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. And we've got a great quote from The Independent, which we believe sums up this story and this episode perfectly.

Yep they said the award will be for the kind of reporting that distinguished Martha in her own words the view from the ground.

This is essentially a human story that penetrates the established version of events and illuminates an urgent issue buried by prevailing fashions of what makes news.

We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth validated by powerful facts that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda. Or, as Martha put it, official drivel.

Ah, so cool, man. Dude, that's good.

Official drivel. I'm going to use that. That's so good.

Official drivel. We can't thank you enough for joining us today, folks. We hope you ride along with us when we figure out who Max Williams is going to nag in a future episode. And shout out to our super producer.

For sure. And what better way to end the episode than with a quote from Martha herself that I think is pretty, pretty powerful. There has to be a better way to run the world. And we had better see that we get it. There we are. Truth.

Truer words. Big, big thanks, of course, as well to A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, a.k.a. The Puzzler. I was just watching a TED Talk that he did.

What a sharp fella that puzzler is. Ben, didn't you say he invented a new form of crossword?

Yes. Yes. It's one cell.

I don't know how I feel about that. I know.

I think he's trolling us.

We'll have to ask him about it. We should. We should.

Also, the opposite of thanks to Jonathan Strickland, a.k.a. The Quister, who will be returning with us for an episode about the Mechanical Turk.

Oh, the Mechanical Turk. Clockwork man. Indeed. A huge thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Eve Jeffcoats and Christopher Haciotis here in spirit. Research Associate Extraordinaire Ames. And you, Ben.

Ah, and also to you.

We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The Unsung Bravery of Martha Gellhorn

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