7 Great Men in History (And Why You Should Hate Them)
Some historical claims are irrefutable: Hitler was a dick; Einstein was a brilliant sex maniac. A few other claims, however, are not quite as black and white. In honor of Labor Day, the only federal holiday that doesn't pay homage to a historical event or person, we've uncovered some 100-percent true reasons you should probably hate some of history's greatest heroes.
Historical Figure:
Patrick Henry
What He's Remembered For
Most people know Patrick Henry as the radical revolutionary credited for demanding "Give me liberty or give me death," thereby inspiring all of Virginia to take up arms against British tyranny.
Why You Should Hate Him
Few people know that when he wasn't giving moving speeches, he was locking his wife in his basement. In Mindblowers, by Jim Rhine, we learn that for the last four years of her life Henry's wife was chained in her basement, possibly in a straitjacket and forbidden to see her children. It isn't unreasonable to conclude that the following conversation may have, at some point, occurred.
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Alright, honey, I'm going out for some beer and stronger chains. Anything you need? |
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Yes. UNCHAIN ME FROM THE MOTHERFUCKING BASE ... |
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Besides me unchaining you from the basement. Which we've discussed, remember? Remember, hon? How we discussed that? |
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Patrick, I swear to God, either give me liberty or give me death. |
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Ha, ha! Well, no, of course. But ... waiiiittt ... that ... did you come up with that? Is that yours? Can I use that? |
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What? What are you talking about? |
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Honey, I think you just saved America. |
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Awesome. Now, unchain me from the basement. |
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That's just the sort of crazy talk I'd expect from a woman I chained in my basement. |
Historical Figure:
Gandhi
What He's Remembered For
Being a spiritual leader in India who fought for Indian independence without ever resorting to violence. He's primarily known in America as that Macintosh spokesperson who looks sort of like E.T.
Why You Should Hate Him
Here's a quote from Gandhi: "I do not consider [name omitted] to be as bad as depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing, and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed."
Can you guess who's name was omitted? If you guessed Adolf Hitler, you're right and also totally insane for guessing that. You may remember Hitler as the character mentioned in the intro to this piece as an irrefutable dick. Apparently, Gandhi disagreed. We should have known this about Gandhi as soon as he started shaving his head ...
Historical Figure:
Thomas Jefferson
What He's Remembered For
He wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as a governor, a minister to France, a secretary of state and a president of the United States.
Why You Should Hate Him
Jefferson's torrid affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, is already fairly well-publicized. You think that's a scandal? Please. President Sex Machine would be lucky if that was the end of that issue. Instead, he fathered and subsequently denied several of Hemmings' children while giving speeches explaining how a white man marrying a black woman would produce "a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent."
Also, Sally Hemmings was most likely the sister of Jefferson's dead wife, essentially his sister-in-law, so there would be a couple of kids running around the White House that Jefferson was both father and Uncle to. He'd really have his hands full. At least, he would have, had he ever actually acknowledged their existence.
Historical Figure:
Woodrow Wilson
What He's Remembered For
He was the 28th American president, a Nobel Prize winner and the only president in history to have a Ph.D.
Why You Should Hate Him
He was a gigantic racist. This is true. When he wasn't creating the Federal Trade Commission or setting up the League of Nations, Ol' Woody was praising the KKK and laughing at the "darky" stories his wife would tell him nightly. He referred to other ethnic groups, including African-Americans as "hyphenated Americans" and, according to John Richard Stephens' Weird History 101, has gone on record to say, "Any man who carries a hyphen with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready." The man clearly did not care for the hyphen.
With the rise of al-Qaeda, you could almost make the argument that Wilson was ahead of his time in his hyphen-phobia, a word he was probably terrified of. But, then you remember that he would have thought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a bigger threat than al-Zawahiri and you realize Wilson was actually retarded.
Why should we hate people in wheelchairs?
ReplySo Jefferson's wife was white, but her sister is black, and their slave too??? Come on Cracked, do some research.
ReplyI was sure that Thomas Edison would apear here somewhere, Cracked really hates him, because of Tesla. i personally did know want kind of jerk is supposedly is, Thanks Cracked !?
ReplyHow many hyphened people do you work around dob? If your around them enough you tend to notice why stereotypes exist.
ReplyYeah man, like how privileged upper middle class white Americans are all racist and exploit other races while calling them inferior. Cool story bro. Let's get together and bash on some "darkies", maybe that will make us feel better about our small penises.
i thought i was the only one who noticed that FDR was in a wheelchair, thank God someone is finally reporting on this.
ReplyI actually only started reading this because I expected the comments to have a boatload of angry protests, but what I found was incredible. Almost all of the anger was about the clearly sarcastic Roosevelt entry. It boggles my mind how incredibly stupid people can get. I knew there would be some, but this many? Good lord, I'm surprised you can read. Even if the joke wasn't that great, it's no reason to get a hissyfit.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesHissyfit about a hissyfit = not hissyfit. Rule of double negatives.
Eh. It was a pretty weak joke. If there are any "hissyfits" about it I haven't seen 'em. I don't really care about non-p.c. jokes in any format...since the keyword is joke. But I've been reading this site long enough to know that if you made the same joke replacing "haha FDR should be hated cause he was a cripple" with "haha _____ should be hated cause he was black...he was gay...he was whatever" you would be crucified by this crowd. With that in mind I'm kinda surprised Cracked let that joke run. They're pretty good about keeping the racisit/sexist/whateverist jokes from coming in here. I don't know why mocking handicapped people would be different As I said in genuine true fun among those who know that's all it is I don't even mind the "ist" jokes. But the premise of the joke feels so out of place here. i think that is why it bombed.
@ lb.fulltilt.
Sir: First, to be clear, they weren't mocking handicapped people. I get what you meant by saying that they were, but I think it's interesting that you so easily made that transition from "hey, they're making a joke that mocks an animus against the handicapped" to "hey, they're mocking the handicapped," because that's exactly the kind of thing telajanis was complaining about.
Sure, your criticism was a bit more thoughtful, even well-tempered, but like most who think seriously about comedy, you should have just stopped with your initial reaction, because that's really about as far anyone should go when analyzing comedy, particularly comedy that stands shoulder to shoulder with dick jokes.
That said, let's overthink things anyway. Do you really think that mocking a hatred for handicap people is really the same as mocking a racism or sexism? Even so, do you really think that the joke fell flat because it was an "ist" joke? Does comedy really need to be consistent or complete to be funny?
These are genuine questions. I think they're slightly interesting. My answers: 1) No. If only because the prejudice against the handicapped (at least those with handicaps similar to FDR's—even the term "handicapped" is a little too broad to withstand criticism) doesn't have the same history of hatred and animus that racism and sexism have. Granted, these "isms" generally encompass the banal evil of more subtle, even unintentional, assumptions. Interestingly, anti-handicapped/wheelchair-ism (whatever) is somewhat unique in that it only operates on that more subtle level: no one 'hates' as a result of their assumptions about the handicapped, they pity or exaggerate the perceived inability. That's what makes this joke different—the fact that no one really hates a cripple.
2) Not sure. Maybe. There are any number of reasons why a joke might fall flat—mostly because the joke depended on the reader to pick up the shift to a sarcastic tone. With sarcasm, written sarcasm particularly, the absurd must be immediately apparent. Maybe the problem here was that because the joke had something to do with a "off-limits" topic. If you will, think of a classroom when a student makes an 'edgy' joke—some students laugh immediately, and some look to the teacher for permission to laugh. I think the brain sometimes operates the same way. Here, at first glance the joke had something to do with a class of people who may be ridiculed in poor taste. So there may be a "not-ok/not-funny" reflex competing with the "funny" response in the brain, and by the time your brain sorts it out, the bite of the absurdity is dulled. Maybe that's why it didn't work, or maybe, like you, some people did stop to consider the absence of similar "ist" jokes and then decide that this joke was not consistent with others on this site (again, where dick jokes abound).
3) Never.
I apologize if by overthinking your comment I appear to have been animated by any distaste for you or your thoughts. If anything, I initially adopted a serious tone in order to mock what I considered to be a slightly overwrought retort (yours) to an overly sensitive response (telajanis's) to overly sensitive hissyfits (imagined? I'm also having trouble finding these). But the more I thought about the various responses to this bit of the article, the more interesting I found it, surprisingly.
And it surprised me because I find it's best to just stick with our first response to a joke and move on. Here, "pretty weak joke" pretty much covered it for me. Putting any more thought into it usually won't make it any funnier. But in this case, maybe the next joke will be.
Also some of Jefferson's kids were his own slave who weren't set free until they were 21...pretty fucked up I must say.
ReplyWhat, you think just cause their dad was prez they get to run around all willy-nilly?
Actually their wrong about Patrick Henry he was advised to send her to a facility but when he saw the conditions he declined. Instead he prepared a two bedroom apartment in his basement complete with windows, fireplace, bathroom, and a nice comfy bed. He then took care of her feeding her, bathing her, clothing her, and stopping her from harming herself. When she died she was denied a christian funeral because back then people thought those with mental illnesses were obviously possessed by the devil. Henry himself buried her 30 ft from their home and planted a tree not far from the basement where it still stands today. Nice try though cracked.
ReplyI'm sure that the Ghandi quote was from before the Third Reich started spinning out of control. I find it vary hard to believe that he would support the gassing of Jews, plus, if he knew that was going on at the time, I doubt he would have said this bit "he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed." If you're going to use a quote like that, find the date in which it was said, because it vary well could have been before the Holocaust actually started.
ReplyWell ghandi was a racist. Google it. You'll find a lot of quotes he made about how black people were inferior and should be killed.
The holocaust was learned by the world at the end of the war.
Patrick Henry - I like him more now
ReplyGandhi - could quote Churchill, FDR, and a host of other British and American politicans saying similar about Hitler in the early-mid 30s. Could hate Gandhi for the insane amount of violence that resulted from Indian independence, of course
Thomas Jefferson - whatever
Woodrow Wilson - already hate him, for better reasons
J Edgar Hoover - whatever
FDR - see Wilson, but really, who wouldn't have wanted to cheat on Eleanor, whose writing and public life bears all the hallmarks of the most obsessively religious progressive shrike imaginable
Thomas Edison - whatever
Seriously though, FDR isn't universally recognised as anything. Plenty of people hate him, in America and abroad. Plenty of people tore him to pieces in the press and in books at the time, but tended to lose their jobs for it.
Agree with the FDR not universally anything. There is a significant portion of the population that "universally" hates him, because they are for small government and see him as having been the reason government started growing so much bigger. He has also been blamed by many for prolonging the Depression with his policies. Sure your view probably depends on your own political philosophy, but it is kinda hard to claim 'universally loved' status when half the population (at least half of the population of people who have an opinion one way or another about 70 year old politics) hates him.
If people didn't get the joke about FDR, it's because it's a lame joke.
ReplyWhen puns are outlawed, only outlaws will have puns...!
I'm guessing the FDR part is a Cracked inside joke I'm not yet privy to. Otherwise it SUCKS.
Replymost people don't get the FDR part. i thought highly of cracked commenters, at least they're better than f*****g youtube commenters those guys i tell you, f*****g retarded.
ReplyPatrick Henry's wife exhibited some certifiable mental illness. You would have him rather send her to an asylum? He was trying to take care of her, given society's limited understanding of mental illness at the time. At least tell the whole story.
ReplyAll the crap that FDR did that is NOW kicking our butts, and we get the "he's in a wheelchar" crap?!?
ReplyAnd I still like Ghandi. :P
ReplyYes there are still retard Like you.Read Pros and Cons of history about Indian Revolution against British,then come back to me.For now jet off to library.
So anyone who does hate him is a "retard"? I would honestly just call what Ghandi said stupidity and naivety. As for the British occupation, they could go schtup themselves for all I care. They got what they deserved (actually I'd say less), and it's really easy for someone who's never been through such a thing to find fault.
For the record although Hitler was a dick, you can't deny that he pulled his country out of an economic slump. Just sayin'.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesBy building Weapon Factory, recruiting .Yeah we knew that dumbass!
By building weapon factory, recruiting soldiers for his party.
A slump Germany put itself in, due to devaluing its own currency in order to screw over the rest of Europe when being forced to pay for WWI.
And Germany wasn't Hitler's country; he hailed from Austria.
A legitimate reason to hate FDR would be that he ordered the Japanese Internment. P.S. The wheelchair thing is a JOKE, guys! Jeez...
ReplyI guessed Hitler, but only because this is Cracked and they usually say crazy s**t like that here.
ReplyI guessed Hitler. I think it was obvious.
that ableist s**t about FDR, even if it was supposed to be funny, is not funny, nor does it make sense as a joke. It's just ableist. Really f*****g offensive. Now I'll forgive most offensive humour if it's not outright advocating violent action, but it has to be funny! Otherwise it's just ableist bullshit.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesI get the humor but it was lame. Just as is "ableist" is lame as a term.
Yeah, it really wasn't funny.
Do you get paid every time you say the word "ableist"? Because I (ableist) would f*****g love (ableist ableist) to get in (ableist) on that (ableist) ac-ableist-tion! =D