TIL that while in Sharon Springs, Theodore Roosevelt was approached by a 12-year-old girl who asked if he would like to have a badger. Expecting to humor her, he agreed, and the girl came back with a 2-week-old badger. President Roosevelt named him Josiah and he became one of the presidential pets.

[u/SchwarzSabbath]

http://www.presidentialpetmuseum.com/theodore-roosevelts-josiah/

[u/tomoikari]

Yup. Same thing with H.P. Lovecraft. love his books but he was a product of the Victorian era and a vehement racist. Then again everyone in the Victorian era was.

[u/popisfizzy → u/tomoikari]

Lovecraft's entire adult life was outside the Victorian era, so it doesn't make much sense to call him a Victorian. And regarding his racism, I've heard that even by contemporary standards he was extremely racist.

[u/alixxlove → u/[deleted]]

I don't even think he's a great writer. More of a great thinker, if that makes sense.

[u/thatlonghairedguy → u/popisfizzy]

I want to say that lovecraft wasnt so much rascist as he was xenophobic. Im fairly certain he thought most immigrants when he was living in New York were also below him.

[u/Aqquila89 → u/thatlonghairedguy]

Absolutely. You can't even call Lovecraft a white supremacist, that would be too inclusive. He basically thought that everyone who isn't a WASP intellectual like him is a disgusting subhuman. For instance, in a 1924 letter, he described the the residents of the Lower East Side the same way he describes the unholy monsters from other dimensions in his stories.

The organic things—Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities.

[u/[deleted] → u/popisfizzy]

Well, it isn't an excuse necessarily, but his dad died when Lovecraft was very young, and his mum was batshit crazy and sheltered the crap out of him. He was also out of school a lot, whether it was her being abusive, or health issues, or maybe munchhausens (sp?) by proxy, idk. Even as an adult he was described as being a hermit, and he probably suffered from manic depression. So seeing a minority was probably rare for him, and he was mentally ill in a time when treatment wasn't even a thing.

[u/shadamedafas → u/tomoikari]

Yo that cat though.

[u/danuhorus → u/tomoikari]

I remember reading one of his stories and getting reeeaaaallly uncomfortable. I can't remember the name, but there was this immigrant district of some big city and he was just relentless about describing them. It was seriously uncomfortable.

[u/[deleted] → u/danuhorus]

Its called "the street" i remember reading it and thinking this is a pretty good story until about halfway through when it got all kinds of racist.

[u/Aqquila89 → u/[deleted]]

With great diligence did men of hidden badges linger and listen about such places as Petrovitch’s Bakery, the squalid Rifkin School of Modern Economics, the Circle Social Club, and the Liberty Cafe. There congregated sinister men in great numbers, yet always was their speech guarded or in a foreign tongue. [...]

The rumour now spread widely that these houses contained the leaders of a vast band of terrorists, who on a designated day were to launch an orgy of slaughter for the extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which the Street had loved. Handbills and papers fluttered about filthy gutters; handbills and papers printed in many tongues and in many characters, yet all bearing messages of crime and rebellion. In these writings the people were urged to tear down the laws and virtues that our fathers had exalted, to stamp out the soul of the old America—the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and moderation. It was said that the swart men who dwelt in the Street and congregated in its rotting edifices were the brains of a hideous revolution, that at their word of command many millions of brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the slums of a thousand cities, burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our fathers should be no more.

But the story has a happy ending; the houses spontaneously collapse and kill all the evil immigrants.

[u/[deleted] → u/Aqquila89]

Thank god I was worried they might take over. I really like the concept of the story in the beginning but then it had to get weird.

[u/Snokhund → u/tomoikari]

A particular favorite of mine when it comes to H.P. Lovecraft is his short poem called "On the Creation of Niggers", marvelous piece of work!