Some of history’s worst individuals are well-known, but then there are those whose historical reputations have been so polished that the uglier parts barely get mentioned.
Queen Victoria
Many people remember Queen Victoria as a stern little old lady in black, and it’s true, she did come across that way. But that’s a rather soft image compared to what she was actually like in real life. Poor Jamaicans sent her a petition in 1865, telling her about how awful their lives were.
They described low wages and heavy taxes. They spoke about their difficulty getting land, but her reply was, more or less, to simply work harder. 50,000 copies of her reply were distributed around Jamaica shortly before the British authorities violently put down an uprising in the area.
Wernher von Braun
You might recognize Wernher von Braun as the smiling face of America’s space program. There was a darker side to him, however. He built rockets for Nazi Germany before joining NASA, and he actually worked as an SS officer, while also being a member of the Nazi Party.
He worked on the V-2 program that used prisoners from concentration camps as forced labor, and the conditions inside the underground Mittelwerk factory were deadly. People starved. People were executed. Von Braun pretended he didn’t know much about it, but really, he did.
Charles Lindbergh
The reason why Charles Lindbergh became famous is pretty obvious. He flew alone across the Atlantic in 1927, a pretty huge achievement back in those days. But there was more to the story. He gave a speech in Des Moines in 1941 that was wildly anti-Semitic.
He claimed Jewish Americans were pushing the United States toward war because they controlled the newspapers and media. He also talked about how America desperately needed to protect its European blood from Jewish people. They were much harsher words than what you’d expect from someone with a heroic pilot image.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen
Nutmeg. It’s a spice that’s so common today that we don’t really think about it, yet not for the Dutch East India Company’s leader Jan Pieterszoon Coen. He used it for a brutal colonial campaign. He led forces in 1621 into the Banda Islands after the local people had resisted.
He ordered most of the population to be killed or enslaved. Some of them were deported. Dutch settlers took over the islands shortly after, and slaves were forced to grow nutmeg for company profit. All that bloodshed for a spice that we barely even think about these days.
Walter Freeman
Speed and publicity aren’t exactly two things you’d expect from a brain surgeon. But that’s exactly how Walter Freeman operated, and performed brain surgery across the United States with those ideas in mind. He carried out lobotomies using an instrument similar to an ice pick.
A few of these operations took only minutes, and he would occasionally perform them in front of audiences. Because to him, brain surgery was something like an attraction. He didn’t care about the lives he ruined or the brains he destroyed, he just wanted the fame.
Nobusuke Kishi
Nobusuke Kishi became Japan’s prime minister in 1957, although he didn’t appear out of nowhere. He’d previously helped run the Japanese-controlled state Manchukuo in occupied China. Manchukuo operated on cheap labor and forced recruitment of Chinese workers.
Kishi’s crimes were so horrific that he was jailed as a suspected Class A war criminal after Japan surrendered. But he was never tried. In fact, American authorities had released him by 1948, and he never faced punishment for his war crimes. He got away with it all.
John James Audubon
John James Audubon became famous for his beautiful bird paintings. These paintings, however, came with quite a bit of baggage, including the fact that Audubon enslaved several people. He sold human beings while raising money for his collecting and publishing work.
There was one trip where he came across escaped slaves and returned them to their masters. To nobody’s surprise, he was strongly against freeing the slaves. The beauty of his pictures doesn’t take away any of the ugliness of his character.
Harry Harlow
People often see Harry Harlow’s early monkey experiments as a sweet lesson about babies needing comfort. It was way worse than that. Harlow placed young rhesus monkeys in total isolation, sometimes for months on end. Such isolation left them psychologically scarred.
A few of them stopped eating entirely. Some couldn’t interact normally after being released because they were that badly damaged. But the worst part was a vertical isolation chamber that he built and privately called the ‘pit of despair.’ Harlow knew how evil he was.
Charles Trevelyan
Many people have heard of the Great Irish Famine. Very few people know the truth about it. Newsflash, it was designed by humans. Namely, by Charles Trevelyan, a man with enormous influence over British relief policy.
He remained very suspicious of large-scale government aid because he feared it would encourage the Irish to be dependent. So, he supported reducing food programs while the crisis was still going on. He also saw it in religious terms and saw it as a chance to remove the ‘flaws’ in Irish society. Over a million people died in the famine.
Leland Stanford
The railroad that made Leland Stanford rich ruined the lives of many Chinese people. Yes, Stanford relied heavily on Chinese workers to build the tracks, even though he’d openly argued against Chinese immigration. The former governor said Chinese people were inferior.
In fact, he supported a monthly tax aimed at making life harder for them in California, he hated them that much. He employed thousands of Chinese laborers, yes, but he gave them lower pay than white workers. He also charged them for their own food and housing.
Edward I
Edward I might be famous for his castles, but he should be infamous for some other things. In 1278, he ordered hundreds of Jewish people to be arrested. He accused them of clipping bits from coins, and many of them were later executed.
Jewish families already faced heavy taxes and harsh limits on how they could earn money. Edward passed the Edict of Expulsion in 1290 that forced England’s entire Jewish population to leave, just because of their religion. They weren’t allowed back for over 300 years.
Emily Murphy
It’s true that Emily Murphy helped win a major legal victory for Canadian women. It’s also true that she was a strong supporter of eugenics. Yes, she believed certain ‘unfit’ people should be prevented from having children, and she backed Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act.
This allowed institutionalized people to be sterilized. It later took away their consent in many cases, with Indigenous patients being the most affected. Emily Murphy was all for that, apparently.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
