 Greetings Rick Winston my fellow Americans my name is Jim Higgins I've been in Vermont for about 40 or so years teaching, community organizing, journalism, and most recently editing. And most recently I'm part of the editorial team that massaged Rick's book Red Scare in the Green Mountains Vermont in the McCarthy era 1946 to 1960. And today I'll be interviewing Rick about the nature of this book what started it in his mind and what's in it. I first met Rick by the way about 45 years ago when he showed up at the Plainfield co-op upstairs and did a one-hour long Scott Joplin rag console. Which is when I realized this may be a true renaissance man. So I knew he had other strengths. The book that he is written is published by Rootstock Publishing based in Montpelier. The book is due out in July and Rick is along with his wife Andrea Cerrota the founder of the Savoy Theatre here in Montpelier. And also more recently since he sold they sold the theater a teacher organizer and musician and about six other things. So I have here in my hand to quote Joseph McCarthy in Wheeling West Virginia when he announced flashing a sheet of papers that had no names on it but he claimed 205 American names are on it who were communists in the government. But I do have in my hand a real document that is a list of 11 questions. I thought you were going to say 205. I would follow up questions and I'll start. But first a little quick capsule. The book is a description of nine rather disturbing incidents that happened in Vermont during the McCarthy era. It's also a profile of some rather remarkable and colorful characters. Some good guys and some less than good guys. I was astonished to learn for example that Putney School was part of an extensive FBI investigation. Primarily aimed at the founder, founder's children who had a love affair and lived in Red China wrote books and that got them on the A-list with the FBI. The Alex Novikov firing from UVM is in there. A famous example of a purge of a fellow who had 20 years prior. A membership in the Congress Party but was active in the trade union organizing with his colleagues. I learned that in Bethel Randolph era there was a massive cluster of Reds, so-called Reds, Owen Latimore among them. He is the one who single-handedly, according to McCarthy, lost us China. Another character that we should all know about is Senator Ralph Landers who was part of the takedown team on McCarthy in the U.S. Senate. Getting right to the questions Rick. Researching, writing, public speaking on this subject has been a decades-long mission for you. One that includes organizing from co-organizing of Vermont Conference in 1988 in Burlington. Tell me what makes Rick run down this particular road? Is this purely personal beginning with your parents? Life-changing encounter with the Red Hunters? Is that your prime motive power here or is your mission more of a present-day political crusade independent of that family upheaval? I don't think of myself as a crusader but let me go back to that 1988 conference which was in Montpelier by the way up at Vermont College. I've always had an interest in this period going back to my parents who are both New York City school teachers, act of union members and teachers union and also like many of people of their generation, especially children of immigrants, active politically in the Depression and Communist Party what I think of as rank-and-file members. They were very threatened by the McCarthy era at the Red Scare. I'm using those terms interchangeably but it has to be noted that McCarthy's rise and fall only took up five years and the McCarthy era expands on both ends of that chronology. So my father lost his job teaching. My mother was threatened with the loss of her job but through an accident of chronology by the time they got to her things had changed just enough so that she continued to teach till she retired. So I started learning about this when I was a teenager and asking them questions about what they have been through. I was coming into my own political consciousness. So I've always been fascinated by the period and it's all its currents and cross currents. I met people my own age, teenagers whose parents were way more involved than my parents were, learned quite a bit from them. Actually started out in college as a history major thinking I was going to pursue something in that area but wound up getting kind of the siren song of English literature took me away from that. So when I arrived in Vermont I started paying attention to okay where am I now? I'm in a state that elects hardly anything but Republicans but the very fall that I arrived in Vermont was Bernie Sanders first gubernatorial run as a Liberty Union candidate. So I started paying attention and I was thinking about well what what happened here during that time? How did people react to these to the strong anti-communist hysteria that was all over the country? I found two very like-minded people. One was Michael Sherman who had just shown up in Vermont to lead the Vermont Historical Society in the late 80s and another one was our mutual friend Richard Hathaway professor at first at Goddard and then at the Vermont adult degree program and the three of us kind of hatched this plan to put on this conference just in the not having any kind of crusade in mine but rather let's find out what happened here. There were title again Vermont in the McCarthy era that was and enough people who were involved were still alive at that time. William Hinton for instance was our keynote speaker. So the conference ended it was very successful but over the years I kept thinking we've only scratched the surface and maybe when I really retire I'll do a little more exploration. I went back through the conference booklet and I had reprinted a lot of headlines from local papers since one of my jobs on the conference was to put together that the conference booklet and there was a headline about Owen Latimore and Bethel and I said gee we never did anything with that and that'll be a good place to start and I went back to the library after all those years all the back to the microfiche machines and that resulted in an article for Vermont history the Journal of the Vermont Historical Society and that's what kind of started this this ball rolling. I've just been aware for a few years that even though bits and pieces of the story are available nobody has yet done a comprehensive look at this time this place and there we have it yes. All right just for the heck of it let's jump ahead for a moment before we slice and dice your book go ahead and draw me a political line if you will if you can between the so-called rock-ribbed republicanism of Vermont in the late 40s and 50s which you described quite thoroughly in your book and that same line say three years three decades later that includes an avowed socialist like Bernie Sanders elected and reelected to represent Vermont and Washington DC that's a strange quickly line but give me a little sense in you know three or four minutes yeah yeah well this was one of the fascinating things about the book seeing what that you know Bernie did not come out of nowhere and people talk about Vermont being rock-ribbed Republican and makes a nice image but the fact is and I'm generalizing a lot here is that in the 30s 40s and 50s there is basically two wings of the Republican Party in Vermont the Democrats never had a chance of winning any office but the Republicans were quite split and for convenience sake they were called the proctor wing and the Gibson wing where the Gibson Aiken wing and the the proctor wing you know proctor is the big name down in Rutland in the mining industry down there very business-minded very conservative tending towards right-wing Republicanism and on the other hand there was Gibson and Aiken who were could have been easily mistaken for a New Deal Democrats they supported many of the programs of the New Deal boy Republicans like that are few and far between these days so they Vermont was a very Republican state but it was not necessarily a conservative Republican state exhibit a would be Ralph Flanders who is seemingly the very picture of a conservative Republican businessman but he is the one who decided that McCarthy McCarthy's tactics were very offensive and and if well my golly if nobody else is gonna do it I'm gonna do it so there was enough pushback against the hysteria of the time and a Democrat in southern Vermont named William Meyer saw an opening and he's in the book yes we have a chapter on William Meyer who became in 1958 the very first Democrat to be elected to the US Congress in 104 years in Vermont thank you Jim now William Meyer after he lost his re-election bid and lost several other bids for Senate was one of the founders of the Liberty Union along with Bernie he Meyer got very disenchanted with the Democratic party's attitudes towards the Vietnam War and said this Democratic establishment is not gonna do the job we need a third party and that's where Bernie enters the picture I think the the the ground was very fertile so that's that's sort of it in a nutshell and it all passed through mr. Meyer Bennington I believe yeah Bennington area a teeny teeny town called West Rupert have you been through as Rupert it's I blinked it's pretty small all right well let's get back to Vermont again in the late 1940s and 50s set the table for us and discuss the national anti-communist campaign so-called red scare that eventually leaked into Vermont politics give me again a very quick overview of the primary strategic national livers for the red scare and ultimately the launch of McCarthyism a couple years later well the end of World War two saw the collapse of the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union and as the Soviet Union started making its advances in Eastern Europe all by the way agreed to by the the author conference that the that the Soviets would have a sphere of control in the countries that they occupied but there had been a strain of anti-communism in America ever since the Russian Revolution witness what historians refer to as the first red scare which is like 1919 and 1920 when they were rounding up anarchists and radicals like Emma Goldman at this time Vermont had a our sole congressional representative was very much an outspoken anti-communist Charles Plumlee of Northfield also featured in the book yeah and so just on the other end of the spectrum from Bernie the seeds had been planted in in Vermont and nationwide that when the US and USSR alliance collapsed there was a lot of fear about communist influence abroad and also subversion from within and just in those years right after the war there was Harry Truman under pressure from Republicans instituting a loyalty oaths program in also at government because he didn't want to be called soft on communism in the fall of 1947 there was the the hearings on Hollywood that resulted in the Hollywood blacklist and and one of the big national internet international events was the communists led by the Soviet Union taking over the government of Czechoslovakia because that sort of that was not in the that was not in the plan so one of the first chapters in the book has to do with Henry Wallace who was had been FDRs vice president from 40 to 44 and Wallace was getting very disillusioned with post-war US policy and he ran in 1948 as a third-party candidate and one of my chapters is about the Wallace campaign in Vermont and here's a headline from the Times this is the Burlington Daily news when the artist Rockwell Kent came to speak in Burlington in favor of Henry Wallace Rockwell Kent welcomes aid for Wallace from commies so that's that that's an indication of the tenor of the Times so anyway nationwide anti-communist hysteria and you know finding little fishers in Vermont to spread out well that word fissures leads to my next question what about that leakage into Vermont of this hysteria when exactly did it first appear and who in Vermont got publicly smacked first maybe second give me a few names who got it well originally this book was going to be subtitled Vermont in the McCarthy era in 1948 to 1960 because from what I learned that the first evidence of all this was the Henry Wallace campaign and how in the specifically the Burlington Daily news and the Burlington Free Press were so anti-Wallace and the the Daily news especially went after a one of the deans at Linden State Teachers College named Luther McNair who gave a speech endorsing Wallace and advocating peace with the Soviet Union they went after him so viciously that he wound up resigning in the the Daily News and yes let's back up the Daily News was owned by William H. Loeb who in later years was very well known for running the Manchester Union leader in New Hampshire but not many people know and it was a surprise to me that he got his start in Vermont first with the St. Albans messenger and then with the Burlington Daily News so they led a campaign against this man Luther McNair and were basically in their articles threatening to put pressure on the State Board of Education and he resigned before things got too heavy so anyway that was going to be my first chapter 1948 and then I discovered in 1946 that Congressman Plumlee who had fended off many different primary opponents over the years had a true serious challenger Andrew S. Newquist Andrew E. Newquist I have to separate that because Andrew Newquist's son Andrew S. Newquist is a long-time Montpelier I was very helpful to me and putting this chapter together anyway Professor Newquist who he was a political science professor at the University of Vermont announced that he was going to run against Plumlee and was attacked by Plumlee and several other newspapers of course the Daily News among them for being a communist leaning and a New Deal supporting and the knives really came out for him so he had to constantly be defending himself saying I'm not a communist I'm not a communist sympathizer and he did pretty well but he could not beat Plumlee so he was one and done right yeah one and done and then Plumlee won one more reelection campaign and then retired he had a role at Norwich University he had been the president of nor he was first a legislator from Northfield then president of Norwich and I think his first run for Congress was 1934 just before we were born the the episodes of anti-communist witch hunts in Vermont that you examine clearly many of them do have their origins in national politics for example Professor Alex Novikov his fire at UVM in 1954 began many years earlier with two anti-communist witch hunts that turned his name up one in the New York State and one in with the Jenner Committee out of Washington did you root out any episodes of a witch hunt that was purely to bring it to the present locally grown someone who was not fingered first by a DC Congressional Committee but originated right here in Vermont well you know there were the there were national resonances with the Wallace campaign I mean you could say that the campaign against Luther McNair by the Daily News was Vermont grown but it had its origins in what McNair was saying about national politics same thing with Andrew Newquist and the episode that happened in Bethel was an interesting one because there was a local woman in Bethel named Lucille Miller who had kind of taken upon herself to be an exposure of communist domination and infiltration etc. and she was feeding a national columnist for the Hearst newspapers Westbrook Pegler another funny headline here's a here's a column from Westbrook Pegler 1950 Vermont Yankees or suckers for commies but this was fed to him by Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Miller was trying to get attention to the fact that in Randolph Center there were a group of people who had summer homes who were in the circle in Washington DC that included Alcher Hiss there were labor lawyers and they're like five different families and she said you have to go to Randolph Center with them you can go there with a butterfly net they're all over the place so when oh in Lattimore was going to buy a summer home in Bethel and then got named by McCarthy as the top spy in the State Department incidentally this was a big surprise to Lattimore's she didn't work in the State Department and spent many many years fighting this charge in court so that brought national attention to Vermont although the the story was locally manufactured before you describe other episodes deeper into the situation tell us about the Vermont lay of the land both the mainstream political power structure which you touched on and the mainstream landscape and the land of hard-week hard-working people who were paying attention but first show us a few more of those newspaper show us what Vermonters were seeing in their daily papers well here's a headline from the Rutland Herald what's it saying Flanders moved to oust McCarthy sent to committee Joseph McCarthy and Ralph Flanders were on the front page of Vermont newspapers seemingly every day from March 54 till September 54 when the centra vote was taken and when William Hinton was called in front of the Senate Internal Security Committee in 1954 there was a headline from the Free Press Vermont farmer cites fifth amendment when questioned on red status at the time yes William Hinton was ever he was a farmer he was farming in Putney he was living in Vermont but the fact is he had just returned after six years in red China so he wasn't any old Vermont farmer yes he certainly was but that's a whole other story you mentioned that they were daily exposed to these head launch reminding them of the national drama playing out in your hundreds of hours of research through microfiche machines quite a number of newspapers tell me about what you might have seen in the lettuce the editor yeah I would say yes the fact is that people were depending upon the newspaper people in general were not afraid of expressing strong opinions against McCarthy or against McCarthy's persecution of Owen Lattimore even though the Vermont Daily News the Burlington Daily News and the Burlington Free Press which was a conservative paper but not quite as a headline hunting as the the Daily News those stood out as the as the more right wing of the Vermont papers but Robert Mitchell writing in the Rutland Herald John Drysdale the White River Valley Herald thought of Randolph and I have a whole chapter on Bernard O'Shea who was first in Swanton and then in Enosburg Falls these people were pulling no punches in their editorials and and people were responding you know I would say it was it was at least one-to-one of the pro and con and as soon as Flanders got into the act there were many more letters supporting Flanders than being against him so there's one thing I didn't quite manage to get into the book a graduate student at Columbia University in 1954 did his doctoral thesis on taking a sampling of opinions about McCarthy in Bennington and and showed that on the one hand people liked his aims but disapproved of his methods there were all kinds of ways to read the statistics that he got but I think there was more pushback in Vermont that there may have been in other places nationally and it helped that if Ralph Flanders was was out there that people felt well of our senators saying these things then maybe it's not so bad if I say these things I recall reading in one of your chapters that William Loeb was famously biased of course from page editorials but he also so you reported famously edited out letters to the editor that contradicted their editorial position do I have that right I never got a hard and fast answer on that you know it was hard to find that the daily news did not print nearly as many letters as the Herald the Brattleboro former you know you could count on seeing a letter to the editor every day in those papers not in the daily news and of Chittenden County no less yeah yeah at the time one of the most populous counties in the state all right now let's take a look at the pushback that you mentioned earlier one of the testimonials for your book came from Tony Hiss Alger Hiss's son who wrote the view from Algiers window he stated in the blurb they submitted supporting your book that your book quote recreates the little-known story of how valiant Vermonters rallied to withstand the pressures and distortions of the McCarthy era close quote give me a few more examples of the valiant pushback from Vermonters that you unearthed first a little word about Tony Hiss of course the son of Alger Hiss who was famously accused of being a Soviet spy not convicted of that he was convicted for perjury and went to jail for two years and while he was in jail Tony Hiss who is like seven or eight at the time because the Hiss family had a summer place in Pecham Vermont was sent to stay with friends there and he in in this memoir called the view from Algiers window which recounts that his how he was able to maintain his relationship with his father while his father was in jail but he talks very eloquently about the just good old ordinary folks in Pecham who liked the family and took him in and gave him a kind of measure of sanity that that let him have a somewhat normal childhood also he went to as a adolescent went to Putney's school she also credits a lot but the pushback you know on one hand we had senator Flanders the the most prominent of Vermont politicians taking on McCarthy and saying I am I am offended by your behavior and your methods and you're ruining it for the real anti-communists like me down to the newspaper editors like I'm thinking specifically of John Drysdale who when McCarthy was slandering Owen Latimore did expose after expose of what what the real story was and at a certain point Drysdale realized he only had a weekly with a very small circulation so he talked to his friends Robert Mitchell the Rutland Herald and John Hooper at the at the Brattleboro reformer and they kind of formed a consortium to get a very well respected journalist from New York to come up and investigate and do a six-part series that ran on the front page of both the reformer in the Herald every day for a week that summer and that you know went a long way to saying we don't do things like that here so that was nice to say somebody else who was very outspoken about these things and she needs some good PR these days is Dorothy Canfield Fisher a really amazing person and who lived in Arlington and wrote a book called Vermont traditions and she quoted a neighbor of hers in the book because people were always accusing the Communists of trying to bore from within and her neighbor said anybody who tries to bore from within and Vermont is gonna hit granite and I have a little article in there about people who started a summer camp for children of people who were under suspicion nationally who could send their kids to camp in Vermont in the summer and not be not be bothered and let their parents deal with crises at home you didn't have to go to that camp did you no I didn't even know about it eligible all right let's looking back to the eventual Vermont fallout from that nefarious time do you believe the Vermont that Vermont finally fell in line as it were did we eventually after even after McCarthy died and McCarthyism faded a bit did we succumb to the national anti-communist Cold War militaristic fervor or yeah it's it and lastly on that note did you on earth any continuing efforts after the McCarthyism climax to purge investigate teachers trade unionists in Vermont as sort of a residual effect of all that yeah well second part first just you know in 1971 the history professor Michael Parenti was fired from University of Vermont for being a little too politically outspoken in his classes it was perfectly echoing the Novikov case of 20 years earlier where the faculty votes one thing and the trustees say howdy-goes so that happened to not only it's Parenti but four or five other UVM professors Bernie Sanders was continually red-baited in one way or another whether he was took his honeymoon in Russia you know when he got married or whether he spoke in favor of the Cuban Revolution and so people were even people in the Democratic Party who were in the Burlington Alderman Alderman you know that whatever that council is called we're saying you know the socialists are going to take over Burlington we can't have this but you know I think it's hard to generalize and about any political era that it's one thing or another and what's fascinating about this period in Vermont is that there was acquiescence sometimes there was that falling in line and there was pushback sometimes and there is on the whole more pushbacks than acquiescence which is which is certainly not the case in New Hampshire where it was they had an attorney general who wanted to be a little McCarthy and Loeb really had his headquarters by that time set up in Manchester there is by the way full chapter in his book yeah it's very instructive to see what happened in New Hampshire that didn't happen in Vermont and vice versa and it really gives a lot of fodder to all the historians and philosophers who say there's a there's a real difference between philosophically aesthetically you know whatever so I'm reluctant to say yes we did this or no we didn't do that and you know to it must have been difficult for people in Burlington 1953 to come forward publicly and support Alex Novikov you know there were people who did that and I have a chapter on Novikov's chief defender at the at UVM who never lost his bitterness about how his friend was treated there remember reading about your Wallace campaign chapter that he came to Vermont came to Burlington and had an awfully difficult time getting set up for his whistle stop tour in fact the Loeb newspaper the Burlington Daily News captured the guest the list of who attended this slightly attended and who gave him money who gave him money and how much and published it so it was perilous times to in Burlington certainly with the Daily News right there to come out even for a nationally recognized presidential candidate who was once the vice president alright someone once said and correct me if I got this wrong I think it was Kurt Vonnegut that history doesn't repeat itself but it sure as hell rhymes that is a great quote I have never heard that and I it sounds like something Kurt Vonnegut would say right did you trick Google I try to what Google whenever possible so what have we learned if anything about resisting those quote four horsemen of Calumni fear ignorance bigotry and smear that main senator Margatre Smith mentioned in 1950 another forthright Republican mm-hmm especially now that social media plays such huge roles in fueling those four horsemen and especially and I'm going to pull up another quote from a blurb and especially as Joe Sherman wrote quote the nasty life tearing reputation ruining anti-comic campaign of 70 years ago has many similarities to what we're being swept along in with the Trump administration as I'm sure some of Winston's characters thought or said this can't happen here it can and will if the momentum that the Republican nation Republicans nationwide are now writing like power drunk horsemen of the apocalypse is not brought to a halt that's quite a colorful quote is history rhyming Rick yeah by the way Joe Sherman is a terrific writer and his book about Vermont politics from 1940 to 1970 called fast lane on a dirt road is I have used that book and hopefully turned a lot of people on to it you know another quote occurred to me as you were quoting Vonnegut who said it I don't know but something to the effect of a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can put on its boots and and so things are you know the the news cycle is so much faster that if somebody is accused of something these days it's it's a very dangerous situation and there is a lot of accusation going around and fear mongering one of the big aha moments for me was when I realized that there there was a direct line between what's happening today and back then it came out during the presidential campaign in 2016 that Donald Trump's mentor in New York State in New York City real estate as the social world his mentor was Rory Cohen who had been McCarthy's right-hand man and destroyer of many reputations and all of a sudden it all became made a certain terrible kind of sense to me that you know there's who would want Donald Trump as a protege and who would want where I cone as a mentor so there you go cone does rhyme with cone yeah it's a little dangerous to get into specifics now because you know we're doing this interview on Valentine's Day February 2018 and Trump might be gone by the time this book comes out who knows but the forces that Trump has unleashed are not going anywhere and I think we are seeing a fear mongering that does have a parallel in the McCarthy era the fear of the other those people are going to come over and take away what we have and telling blatant untruths and smearing people calling them names without regard for you know McCarthy didn't have any sense of propriety himself he was constantly making up a littling nicknames for the people in the Senate who boy that rings a bell yeah so and we have you know we have a situation where people say am I gonna stick out my neck against the immigration agents and protect this family who's gonna get taken away or am I going to do something about cutting all this funding for whatever helpful program you could name you know I think people are asking themselves these days how much am I willing to put myself out there seeing that the atmosphere in this country has changed so much so quickly so anyway hopefully this this book has some lessons for that we look at the examples of people like John Drysdale and Bernardo Shea and Bernardo Shea had a editorial in 1950 that's that was labeled this silly hysteria and he talked about an incident that's been repeated many times you know somebody in a very public place having a clipboard with the Bill of Rights saying will you sign this petition and that's what you know there is a kind of a fear of keep your head down don't sing anything and don't get on a list yeah don't get on a list so that's that's what we have to be fighting these days well I have to warn you that you're you just made a headline that is probably halfway around the world by now which is that Vermont author author claims that Trump will be gone within six months stranger things have happened let's put it that way before I ask you the little what's next for you having done these nine compelling stories which one the end of the day do you think about most I am still really drawn to the Bethel and Randolph episode with Owen Lattimore's involvement because it had the most it had the most strands this is the Lucy Miller chapter yes and that it involved a very local event that all of a sudden became national very quickly it had the local people who said how can we get the truth out quickly and it had an absolutely fascinating cast of characters we haven't mentioned yet the guy who started it all in Bethel who was a well-known architect explorer named Bill Hollenmore Stephenson who as a summer resident in Bethel who sold some land to Owen Lattimore and Lattimore brought his friends who are escaping the Chinese communists from Mongolia so there's a whole Mongolian contingent that was in Bethel the story screwed up the FBI investigators opening mail written in Mongolian in fact a very early iteration in my mind about this book was maybe maybe that chapter could be could in essence be the whole book but I think this serves a better purpose so what is next for you Rick one of your blog posts that I saw by the way if you want to get to the blog post just Google oh I mentioned that dirty word Red Scare in Vermont or Rick Winston Red Scare and you'll get right to your blog and other postings really started yet needs work that's a work in progress anyway I saw someone had written a little note there to you some day quote someday I'll tell you my father's story yeah surely in your travels you've encountered a lot of people with stories to tell are you gonna begin collecting more stories and passing them along or are you gonna wrap up your briefcase and rest for a while truthfully I haven't thought that far ahead okay but it is great and I and I'm sure once this book will start circulating I will start hearing more and more of these stories in fact I got a call out of the blue from an author in New York who is doing a memoir about her father and she did the same thing she just typed in Red Scare Vermont and came up with me she has been trying to find out information that family legend has it that her father was named as a communist by Loeb on the front page of the Daily News Burlington Daily News and he had to resign his post in Vermont and move the family to New Jersey unfortunately I couldn't help her and short of going in those microfiche machines going through every day of the Burlington Daily News in 1954 and 55 but I am sure I'm gonna hear a lot more of those stories and I've included in the book as an overview at the beginning an essay that Richard Hathaway wrote for a 1988 conference and he was kind of setting the stage for this is what was happening nationally and internationally and he was writing in 1988 the legacy of McCarthy and McCarthyism is still unfolding and those very words could be written today so the book is by no means a definitive picture of the times because I can well imagine meeting people who tell me stories and say oh if I had only known I would have that would have been chapter 10 or whatever the seat will stop somewhere well you're not gonna be stopping because you have a book now coming out in July again that's root stock publishing in Montpellier and how are you gonna get the message out are you gearing yourself for a book tour book promotion speaking engagements radio interviews you're gonna do all that most of the above fortunately Vermont is a small enough state so we could say well this bookstore and that bookstore and you know it's it's doable there's only a few overnight stops and if you remember the great New York Times columnist Russell Baker oh I love Russell he wrote a fantastic column imagining Mark Twain and Herman Millville meeting each other in the airport on their on the respective book tours I don't think I'll be flying anywhere but you know I'm hoping to there are now at least three book festivals in Vermont maybe more for all I know and and and hopefully you know they're the story will get beyond the Vermont borders and and people are saying oh that sounds interesting certainly classes in the 50s and colleges and universities around the country should take note of this book will probably it'll cross their desk at least if they don't order five fifty copies they'll at least know about it yeah well very good Rick Winston author of Red Scare in the Green Mountains Vermont in the McCarthy area night era 1946 to 1960 I'm Jim Higgins and thank you all for listening thank you Jim