Publication date:
January 28, 2026
This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tansey, founder and manager of the archival consulting company Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house.
Episode listening links:
Resources mentioned in the episode:
- White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era (University of Tennessee Press)
- White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era (Google eBooks)
- The Journal of East Tennessee History, for which Aaron serves as editor
Transcript:
INTRO:
[Eira]: Welcome to No Time for Fear, the New Deal history podcast where we examine how the United States’ ambitious response to the Great Depression can provide a blueprint for improving Americans’ lives nearly a century later. Today we’re talking with Aaron D. Purcell, who is the Director of Special Collections and University Archives at Virginia Tech and author of the book White Collar Radicals, TVA’s Knoxville 15, The New Deal, and the McCarthy Era. He previously worked at the University of Tennessee, where the White Collar Radicals Project began, first as an editing exercise, then as a dissertation, and finally as a book published in 2009. I’ve known Aaron for a while through archivist circles, and it was fascinating to connect with him about this aspect of New Deal history. On this episode, we talk about:
- the larger political context of 1930s progressive and left-wing politics,
- the idealism of young Tennessee Valley Authority white-collar employees,
- and how Cold War anti-communist hysteria reached all the way back to the New Deal.
INTERVIEW:
[Eira]: Hi, Aaron. Thanks so much for joining us today for the podcast. I’m so excited that you’re here with us. You are the author of White Collar Radicals, TVA’s Knoxville 15, The New Deal, and the McCarthy Era, which came out in 2009 from the University of Tennessee Press. And since this current season of the podcast is dealing with electrification projects, we’ve been looking a lot at the TVA But instead of going deep into the electrification today, we’re looking at some of the political context around the TVA. And that’s much of what your book deals with. So with my first question, I want to ask you if you can share how you first became interested in the New Deal, whether it was through writing this or through any other mechanism.
[Aaron]: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on the program. I’m really excited to talk about this project, which was quite a long time ago now. But I’ve always found that the topic itself is timely. When we talk about current political events, it’s continued to be timely and related to labor, related to government investigations and all sorts of different roles of the government. I became interested in the New Deal, I think, from when I was a kid listening to my grandparents talk about what it was like to grow up in the 1930s and how challenging it was. I grew up in, I guess you’d call it Eastern Kentucky, and it’s still very poverty stricken. And both sides of the family were kind of dirt farmers and didn’t come from much agriculture. The New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt was this light in a really difficult time. They were always very fond of of him. They didn’t have pictures in their house of him. I know some people used to do that, that that was sort of their person that they looked to as they would listen to the fireside chats around the radio. But I was always fascinated by that, of those were the times that they grew up in. And over the years, then I went to graduate school, and I guess it was one of the first classes I took which was a survey class from Civil War to present or whatever the timeframe was. And I took a great interest in TVA. I’m not from Tennessee. I was never involved in any of the displacement or anything, but I became very fascinated by it, I guess, first from the high level of how it was set up, that suddenly there was this dramatic shift of private power companies owning everything to this government agency created out of nothing to rebuild this entire region. I was interested in that and how electricity really changed the landscape for you know, my own parts of my family who didn’t have electricity when they were growing up, especially farmers who needed it to do things like, you know, milk cattle, to electrify their homes, to have these kind of modern conveniences. So I was really drawn to the TVA through that course and ended up doing a lot of research on their first chairman, who was Arthur Morgan. And he was quite an odd fellow, I will say, and I ended up doing a book on him later. But from there, then I took more interest in the people who worked for TVA, not the top level. So once I got that knowledge, then I became more interested in who actually worked there, what drew them to And this concept of government-owned power and completely revitalizing a region through agriculture, through flood control and electrification. And I guess that’s what led me to the people that I found.
[Eira]: Yeah, I learned a lot more about Arthur Morgan from reading this book, and he was quite a colorful character, just as much as David Lilienthal, who I’ve also done an episode about David Lilienthal. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. But yes, that first whole board of directors had a lot of colorful personalities. Yes. So I want to talk about your research method for the book, especially your experience with filing FOIA requests. And this is normally I think a lot of people will write a book and then the research method is sort of almost a secondary part of the story. But it really seemed to me, particularly because, you know, I’m an archivist, you’re an archivist. And so your experience with an archival acquisition, my sense is really ties into the story of how this came to be. And also some of the challenges with writing about this 20, 25 year period of history that’s covered in your book. It’s really shaped by the unique way in which you had to do your research. So if you can talk about that first, because I think that’s really important to understanding the rest of the story.
[Aaron]: I always seem to think that because I was an archivist, I was able to do this project because I never would have found this project on my own. I didn’t really know what to look for, but it was an original item, a diary I found on eBay that led me to one of the people who that led me to a whole bunch of other people and a much larger story. And as the book kind of explains in the beginning, it was an acquisition. I was doing this sort of as my job because I was at the University of Tennessee and we collected things related to TVA. We have collections there. And I found this diary. And then it became this quandary that archivists have to deal with. Am I able to get this for myself? Do I buy this for my employer? And because we had no way to buy from eBay, I had to get permission to buy it. And I wasn’t expecting much. Honestly, I just thought it was a great first-person narrative. And then I started reading through it, and it was that aha moment because he kept referring to the CP and the SP in the diary. And it took me a while to realize that was Communist Party and Socialist Party. It was like, oh, of course. And all the other people that he mentioned by first name, I then, knowing how to do research because I went to library school, I went to the serial set and all these congressional hearing databases. And I typed in those names. And guess what? Most of them testified during the HUAC period. So I was able to reconnect them all because of that one spark, which was that diary. And I had no idea that this group even existed. And there is no indication that all 15 people were in the same room at the same time. But that became my focus, was who are these group of friends and associates? And why did they come together? And what drew them to Knoxville? And Because so many of them had testified of the 15 that I ended up choosing, I began doing FOIA requests.
And I think it was further complicated because of September 11th. And that slowed the process because going through a FOIA request, you submit proof of death, which could be Social Security Death Index, which may or may not be free at this point. I’m not sure exactly. It used to be, but it may not be. And then I would send that to this FBI office with my request and who I was and what I was doing. And sometimes they had something for me. Sometimes they didn’t. I quickly learned after talking to people of what I was interested in finding, I had to create a dead pool. And the deadpool, where all of the different people I had already proven were gone. And once I created that and had it on file, then when I would send a new request in, I would say, please refer to the dead pool that I’ve already come up with. And that way, when I got these files back, it wasn’t all blacked out. And there were some where there was hardly anything on the page. They were completely marked out because there’s no way to prove that the people listed were dead unless you had this dead pool. So I honestly think the people at the FBI are who I communicated with, who do this for a living, the declassification experts, they were very helpful in trying to make my responses successful. Because honestly, if I was getting very limited results, they were just going to see more and more and more. And they kind of wanted to give me what I wanted. And there was a subfile on East Tennessee, which specifically related to CP activities. And they recommended it, said you really ought to request this because it’s going to answer, I think, a lot of the questions that you have and cover not just the people you’ve chosen, but others as well. So it’s kind of like a spiderweb. You start in the middle with this diary, this one person whose name was Howard Bridgman, and it just kept expanding and expanding. And that was really the challenge of the research, is trying to keep it from expanding and expanding. to try to understand i need to focus on these 15 people otherwise this would just become so out of control there’s no way that the project would ever you know it would never end and it would not have this meaningful outcome of following these 15 people pretty much uh from the 1930s to the 50s and then having follow-ups of what happened to them afterwards.
[Eira]: Well, that’s a good segue into the next question, which is if you can introduce us to the Knoxville 15. And this really is the nucleus of the book, is kind of following the lives and the backgrounds and the trajectories of these 15 people. So who were they? And how also, because many of them were not from the Tennessee Valley, and so they were part of this kind of cohort of young progressives who found themselves all working for the TVA. So if you can give us some background about them and understand sort of what was this interconnecting tissue between all of them.
[Aaron]: So the criteria that I came up with were people unmarried in their 20s, either college educated or had been in college for some time, Many of them, in fact, most of them had an interest in labor organizing of some sort. There were a couple from Tennessee, but not necessarily all. There were other places represented. The book has sort of a cast of characters in it in the beginning. One of the people that I interviewed, there were two of them because they were still living at the time, was Mabel Abercrombie. She was from Georgia. And like many others, she was an outdoor person. And a lot of them belonged to the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club. And one of the well-known people that all of these young, you know, mailroom workers were friends with was Benton Mackay. And Benton Mackay was the founder of the Appalachian Trail. And he worked for TVA briefly in the 1930s, maybe two, three years. And he was kind of the elder of Mabel and Howard Bridgman and some of these others. And they would go on these trips to Smoky Mountains. And from Knoxville, it’s not very far. And that’s what they would do on the weekends. And he was sort of the ringleader of that. So going down my list here, I don’t know if we have time for all of them. Forrest Benson, he was a writer from Colorado, really into supporting workers’ rights. He worked as a clerk, and he ended up marrying another one of the people, Christine Eversole. So she became Christine Benson. And, you know, it’s hard to follow people when they get married. And she had to quit her position because TVA had this nepotism policy. So she couldn’t remain with the agency. But at the time they got there, they were just friends. And honestly, a lot of them kind of had these romantic connections afterwards. over the time that they were in Knoxville. Buck Borah, he was one of the few people from Tennessee, much more of a labor organizer. He worked as a clerk, and he was married and then later divorced one of the other Knoxville 15, Muriel Speer. And Muriel was from New Jersey, but also a supporter of workers’ rights. She was a stenographer, and she was kind of constantly part of the meetings that they had. And let’s see, on my list here.
So Howard Bridgman, he was the author of this diary that I found from Massachusetts, a good friend of Benton Mackay. Very interested in workers’ education. His diary talks a lot about that. And he worked as a messenger for about two or three years. Kip Buckles, also an outdoor person from Colorado, and was interested in workers’ rights, African-American rights, and worked in TVA for about nine months. Some of them were only there for a short period of time and got to Knoxville. And for whatever reason, they didn’t stay with the agency, but they stayed in the city. John France, he actually was a University of Tennessee graduate, and he was with TVA two different times, very active as a political and labor organizer. Howard Fraser from Tennessee supported African-American rights. He was there as a messenger in TVA’s mailroom, but also was involved in the Highlander Folk School, which is in Monagel, Tennessee, which you probably talked about. And in the diary, by the way, Howard Bridgman goes to Highlander and meets with Miles Horton and sees the ground. So, I mean, they’re all in the same little network of people. Yeah. The next person is Henry Hart, and I had the chance to interview him twice. Henry’s story was pretty interesting that after he finished TVA, he ended up being an academic and became a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And here’s sort of the archival part, which may not be in the book. I can’t remember during my first interview with him because he knew I was coming. You know, we finished and very sharp for his age, still very active. We do a lot of skiing to campus because, you know, it’s Wisconsin and everything. He said, oh, well, wait, before you go, I have something for you. And, you know, this 80-ish year old man pulls down the ladder to his attic, climbs up this rickety thing and throws me this box. And he said, I want you to have this. I haven’t looked at it in years. And it was all of his papers that he had collected when he had to go before the Senate when they were doing the confirmation hearings for David Lowenthal, because he was accused of being a communist. And they pulled all these little mailroom people out of nowhere to try to say that Lowenthal was a communist and he’s running our country, et cetera, et cetera. So this was all the stuff that Henry had in his attic. And I had no idea I was even getting it. So then I had to figure out how to get it back. But that’s another story. Let’s see.
So David Stone Martin, he was another member of the Knoxville 15. He was from Chicago, an artist. His brother, Francis Martin, was much more radical than he was and often was… He was going the same places that his brother was going, but he was still very active and worked his rights. And he worked as an artist for TVA for a number of years. And years later, he designed a lot of album covers for jazz LPs. And I found a couple along the way, and he’s actually… kind of collectible in a way. William Remington, probably the most famous of the 15. He was from New Jersey, a little bit younger, had been a student at Dartmouth, and he worked there for about nine months, I guess in between his maybe sophomore and junior year in college. And his first roommate was Henry Hart. And so talking with Henry, he remembers everything about William Remington. And his story in the 1950s, he was allegedly giving information to Elizabeth Bentley, who was known as a spy. And she outed him for that. And he eventually was convicted of perjury and went to prison and was killed in prison. So his story is the most tragic of the 15 people. But his investigation is really what resurfaced. All of what they did in Knoxville in 1936, 37, 38, which is really the window of time that was investigated and, as I found, reinvestigated over and over and over. And the more times it was reprinted, the more credible it became. that this must have happened if five different FBI agents over these decades said the same thing. But all they were doing was repeating it. So then it turned from a report into fact. And that was sort of one of the conclusions that I drew from this whole project.
I already mentioned Muriel Speer. I think two more. Merwin Papp Todd from Connecticut. He was a labor organizer. He was for two years with TVA, and he was married to Elizabeth Winston. And she was a labor activist from North Carolina, had previously been married to a guy named Kenneth McConnell, who was a well-known Communist Party organizer in North Carolina. But they ended up meeting in Knoxville and marrying. She went on to become a pretty successful television producer. I think it was CBS that she was with. But she ended up losing her job because of the William Remington trial and the fact that She was connected to him and Knoxville during that time. And then the final one was Bert Zion. I did manage to talk to him on the phone before he passed away and was planning an interview, but time caught up and I was unable to do so. He was a labor organizer and worked for TVA for about a year. And I think in his later years, he had a plumbing business, but was very much haunted by this accusation of being a member of the Communist Party for a variety of reasons. And the book gets into much more details about the 15. And honestly, I haven’t said all their names out loud in a long time. So it really takes me back to all the stories and all the connections. And there’s so many things that didn’t really fit in the book. But to understand the perspectives of these 15, I don’t want to say little people, but they were at the very bottom of the rung of this large community. organization in Knoxville that was the major employer at that time. And most of them all drifted away. But Muriel and Henry and some of these other people, they continued to send Christmas cards, and some of them would get together and go hiking in the Smokies. So they did have this ongoing connection. And I think the experiences of the McCarthy era really tied them closer together.
[Eira]: Yeah, we’re going to talk about the McCarthy period in a moment. But one of the things that I think your book did a great job of articulating and that I think is really important for people today to understand about the political context of the 1930s is that it was… So some of the people in this Knoxville 15, you know, were Communist Party members, but a lot of them were what we would call adjacent or fellow travelers. Right. And that was a very, you know, compared with the sort of allegations that came out in the 1950s with the we mentioned HUAC already. So for our listeners who don’t. Don’t know their leftist history. That stands for the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is really the sort of what we often associate with the McCarthyist period in American politics. But this is when, in sort of the foments of the Cold War, there was sort of these… prosecutions of people for their political inclinations that were coded as communist. And of course, when we’re sort of looking retrospectively at the 1930s, the 1930s was this period of intense political sort of mixing, right? And so we had people who were anti-fascist because they were in sympathy with the anti-fascist forces of the Spanish Civil War. And so they were part of that. And they would often be, even if they weren’t Communist Party members, they were going to events sponsored by the Communist Party. And so I think your book really digs into the fact that all of this is so intertwined that this is also how all of these people got, many of them pulled into this huge dragnet.
And of course, the other thing that I don’t, that I think we briefly touched on, but that was really a revelation for me in your book is how many links there were between the Highlander Folk School and many of the people who were sort of that first generation of TVA’s progressive young workers. And a lot of people know about the Highlander Folk School because we think that’s the place where some of the most iconic people from the civil rights movement trained, like Martin Luther King. But we we often don’t always know about how much further back its history goes as this place for labor education of which many of the people in the Knoxville 15 were connected to it through that. So anyway, that’s just sort of really important context that I think people should know about the 1930s. It was very, it would have been very difficult to say, okay, this person is a communist. This person is another thing because they, The sort of boundaries and edges between that were very blurry in a way that in some ways, you know, really came back to bite some people during the later political prosecutions. So that’s a good segue to our next question, which is you mentioned when you were going through some of these people, how many of them did get sort of investigated, often repeatedly, right? And really campaigns of targeted harassment from the government. And so there were political persecutions of some of the Knoxville 15. William Remington in particular was probably the one who got it the most because he was actually sent to prison for it. But if you could take us through the ways in which those political persecutions impacted the Knoxville 15 personally, and then also kind of what that meant for the TVA as an agency as well
[Aaron]: Well, I’m not sure I can remember what happened to each individual person and all the consequences. I think I mentioned, you know, Winston and Todd. She lost her job immediately when William Remington kind of named her. And they ended up getting divorced. And Todd, I think, was really one of those people. I think he was a genius, really. But he was unable to handle the consequences of this harassment. And I think his later life just wasn’t very good. And he had a lot of substance issues after. And I think it was that he was haunted by a lot of those questions of the number of FBI people showing up over and over to kind of ask kind of the same thing. In talking with Henry Hart, I mean, He very distinctly said that he wished he had had the courage to tell the truth, to say exactly his role. And I think… Many of the people, as you mentioned, saw what they were doing with workers’ rights and getting rid of the poll tax and equal pay and that sort of thing as very progressive politics. But it was connected to the Communist Party and already groups talking against the idea of the Reds invading and being involved in these different New Deal agencies. Yeah. So he definitely regretted that he couldn’t really be honest when he was being asked these kinds of questions because he feared for his own family, his own reputation. And at that point, he was an academic, right? And yes, in higher ed, there are places for people of different kinds of political persuasions. That’s true. But you’re still in the 1950s time period, and it is not necessarily a haven. Not everyone’s a Marxist, and I read. And so he had a card. He had it filled out. He joined because he believed in it. And he told me that he remembers telling his parents that he did it and how disappointed they were. But he said, this is what I believe in. And at this point, we’re talking 19…37, 38, he believed in fighting Franco in Spain. He thought that was the right thing to do. And that was part of his connection to this.
But then once the Soviet Union and Germany agreed to let’s get together, that’s when all of the people who had direct or indirect connections renounced it completely and said, I’m not any part of this. This is no longer for me. And several of them had very successful military careers and served their country. But they continue to be hounded by this. And I think the William Remington example, because he was the most famous of the 15, because it was in headlines. And that’s when things were dredged up sort of over and over and over. And surprisingly, a couple of the people There was almost nothing on them. And it became very just, I don’t know, scattershot. Why did Mabel Abercrombie have 50 pages and her FBI file and some of these other people have thousands? Just these mailroom workers. Kit Buckles was another one. She was very active. After the war, she retired, she married, and she went to New Mexico, to Taos, where she was. And I spoke with her husband, because she had passed, and he did not really want to say much. But somehow she was able to stay out of the record, even though her name had come up over and over and over. So it very much surprised me of how random it all was. And Howard Bridgman, too. I’m sort of have a theory about this because he was he became sympathetic. He became willing to testify and talk about William Remington and all these other people. So he did agree to tell names. And a lot of people did for their own variety of reasons. But his FBI file had almost nothing in it. And so there’s always that theory that by naming and being more a useful witness for the government, less is collected on you. That isn’t always the case. But I think that’s what happened for him because… That’s what shocked me of how much he was in the official record in any library that you go into. How in the world did he not have a CD-ROM? That’s what they were sending me at some point, CD-ROMs. Do you remember this?
[Eira]: Oh, I do. Yeah.
[Aaron]: And just thousands and thousands of pages on William Remington. And I went to the FBI’s—they had a reading room at the J. Edgar Hoover building— which I guess they don’t anymore because they’ve moved most of that. This is before, I guess this was maybe 10 years ago. They moved operations out to Winchester, Virginia. And I think that has continued, and they must have closed the reading room. But you could go in and look at photocopies of the most frequently requested items. And guess who was most frequently requested? William Remington. His was there because so many people had used it. And within those pages are these little mailroom workers that were doing their thing in Knoxville in the 1930s.
[Eira]: Yeah, and to talk about briefly the sort of impact on TVA, I think what I recall from the book was that there was, because this really turned into hysteria, and so some of the leading sort of CUAC and other anti-communist personalities, when David Lilienthal was going to be named as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission Committee, the AEC, there was sort of this whole maybe conspiracy-esque the right thing to say of basically framing him as being kind of fomenting communism in the TVA when he was chair of TVA. So it really, I don’t think we can overstate the extent to really the way in which this sort of anti-communist persecution really gripped every aspect of the political establishment back then.
[Aaron]: Yeah. And to the second part of your question, which I guess I didn’t didn’t address well enough, TVA was seen as a very liberal organization when it started. And I think that’s what drew a lot of these people there. Like, here’s our chance to redo this region. The challenge with that, though, is so many people were from outside the region coming to this poverty-stricken area telling them what to do. And Arthur Morgan was the leader of that because he very much shows up and says, I know how to fix this region because you can’t fix yourselves. And that became very much discussed. confrontation between this agency and these communities. So trying to reach within them was always tough. But over the course of even the 1930s, TBA became much more conservative, I guess you would call it, that it was much more about electricity. Lilienthal just wanted to sell electric. He did not want to rebuild communities the way that Arthur Morgan wanted to. He wanted economic stability and appliances and modern conveniences. It’s like all the ships are going to rise if you add these things to these communities. You don’t need to build cooperatives and all these different things that Morgan had come up with. So many of the Knoxville 15 became disillusioned with TVA because it wasn’t progressive enough. And over time, TVA, especially by the 70s and 80s, became this big bureaucratic thing that nobody knew what to do with. So as an agency, it evolved in a different way than you might expect. that it started out as trying to solve these problems, social problems, and became just a big power company.
[Eira]: Well, that trajectory of these New Deal era agencies and plans and how they’ve changed over time, that feels like a great setup for my final question, which I always like to ask all of my guests. So imagine we are in a different political reality and And if New Deal era policies were once again politically viable, which program or initiative would you most want to see revived? Or what brand new policy in the spirit of the New Deal would you propose?
[Aaron]: I thought about this quite a bit. And I think one of the things you’ve consistently seen in the past decade or two is this interest in infrastructure and bridges are falling apart and roads and all. And there have been projects, these reinvestments, these… stimulus, whatever, to make those things happen. I also have seen this disconnect between people and the environment and also a major issue with health. So when I thought about all those things, the challenges of the outdoors, the infrastructure, the poor health, I instantly think something like the CCC, which was really designed to take malnourished, usually young men. You could do it men and women these days, but at that time it was young men. Get them to be able to work, feed them a lot of food that they weren’t getting at home, and fix all of these things that needed fixing or provide access to natural areas. And a part of their paycheck would go back to their families. I don’t know if it would work, but part of me, as I’ve been on the road a lot, going back to visit family in Kentucky, I’ve consistently seen road signs, CCC Camp Road, just everywhere. Every county, every community, especially in rural areas, had something that they touched, that they were involved in. And I don’t know if it’s viable, but it seems like that would solve some of the ills that we have. with current generation, with health and food and rebuilding literally the natural environment to make it more accessible and to engage this new generation. Because the CCC served that, like the WPA served the purpose in some ways, of preparing these young men to go to war, right? Because they were organized as military groups that eventually went on to fight. But that wasn’t the point when it started. It was to mobilize these unemployed young people and give them a purpose and give them an understanding of the world that they hadn’t seen before.
[Eira]: Yeah, the CCC legacy is amazing. It’s for our listeners that CCC stands for the Civilian Conservation Corps. And my favorite CCC place is there’s a state park in eastern, southeastern Tennessee. And I once rented a CCC cabin, which is still in great condition, and wrote one of the final drafts of my Green New Deal for Archives there.
[Aaron]: There you go.
[Eira]: So its legacy still lives on and I can recommend it as a DIY writer’s retreat. Well, Aaron, this was really fun. And I should note that even though your book is out of print, it is still available as an ebook. I found it through Google Books. So we will link that in the podcast notes. And I’m really grateful for your work because I think anyone who’s interested, even if you don’t think you’re interested in the TVA, which of course, the people are listening to this podcast, they probably are. probably are. But there’s so much to learn about 1930s political history as well from this, and I’m really grateful for your work. So thanks for joining us today.
[Aaron]: Thank you for having me.
OUTRO:
[Eira]: Thank you for listening to this episode, and thanks to Aaron for being a guest on our show. You can find links to Aaron’s work in the show notes, including his ongoing editorial work for the Journal of East Tennessee History. Thanks to everyone for their patience while the podcast was on unintentional hiatus for several months. I was dealing with some unexpected life challenges, and I’m thrilled to be back behind the microphone and lining up new interviews for the rest of this season about New Deal electrification projects.
No Time for Fear is celebrating its first anniversary this month, and I am thrilled that we recently passed 1,000 downloads of the show. If you like what you hear and want to support the work that goes into making this podcast, please visit notimeforfear.net. I’d love it if you could share this episode with a friend and consider making a donation if you’re in a position to do so, so that I can keep making the show, including the launch of season two later this year. Thank you to all of our first-year supporters, including Sean, Katie, Lee, Arian, Kate, and Jess. This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tansey, founder and manager of the archival consulting company, Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house. I’ll see you next month when we’re back to talk more about the history of the New Deal.