 So, we're very pleased to have Rick Winston and Michael Sherman with us tonight. Rick grew up in Yonkers, New York, and attended both Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley. He arrived in Adamette, Vermont in 1970 and still lives there. Rick was the co-founder of the Savoy Theater in 1981. And one of the founders of the Green Mountain Film Festival, Rick is currently teaching film at the Montpelier Senior Activity Center and presenting programs on several film history topics for the Vermont Humanities Council. Michael Sherman is editor of Vermont History, the Journal of Vermont Historical Society He is the former director of the Vermont Historical Society. He is the co-author with Gene Sessions and P. Jeffrey Potash of Freedom and Unity, A History of Vermont, published in 2004. He is the author of articles and reviews on Vermont history, the humanities and public life, and the history of France in the 16th century. Which fits in exactly with all of this. He undoubtedly knows why Vermont is Vermont. Michael edited and contributed to a volume on Vermont State Government and Administration since 1965. Four books of essays on Vermont history, a book of essays on productivity, and three collections of essays on the humanities and public life. In 1988, Michael collaborated with Rick Winston and Richard Hathaway to plan and present a conference, Vermont in the McCarthy Era, co-sponsored by the Vermont Historical Society and Vermont College, which at that time is part of the Norwich University. Would you please welcome Rick Winston and Michael Sherman. Thank you. Okay. I haven't said anything yet. Just the way it's going to go. I'm going to give a very brief introduction, how this book came to be, and just an overview of what's in the book. And then I will join Michael on stage for a discussion about the issues raised in the book. And then we'll throw it open for questions. Yeah. And the lights down. Yes. That's good for now. Yes. All right. Okay. I should say this book was, all the creative impetus for this book happened right here in Montpelier. I got to give a big thank you to my publisher, Stephen MacArthur, who's sitting in the second row. He's got publications, publishing, excuse me. There's a little office right above Rite Aid. So it was edited in Vermont in Montpelier, designed. We got to give a big shout out to Mason Singer of Lathing Bear. Copy edited, et cetera. Anyway, a few words about how this book came to be. The title is Vermont in the McCarthy era, but the book is called Red Stair in the Green Mountains. And Michael and I will talk about that terminology and the difference between those two phrases. This book really came to be because of my parents. My parents were in New York City, high school teachers, both of them are teachers. And they were political activists, union, very strong union people, especially in the New York City Teachers Union. And they got caught in what Philip Roth very eloquently described as, they were impaled on their moment in history, caught in a trap that ruined so many promising careers. Philip Roth was eulogizing his favorite high school English teacher in Newark, who, like my parents, had to deal with the Red Stair when it was happening. My father did lose his job. My mother, through an accident of timing, got to computers until retirement. And actually taught at the high school where Michael Sherman went. So this was something that Michael and I discovered early on. So the Red Stair was always part of my family background. I didn't realize how much it was until I was a teenager and really started thinking about these things and asking my parents very pointy questions. I moved to Vermont in 1970 and just very idly sort of wondered whatever happened here during that time. And it just remained idle speculation until I met Michael and Richard Hathaway and the three of us collaborated on this conference. It held over one weekend in June of 1988. And the panels that we put together for the conference kind of formed the basis of what subsequently became this book. For instance, the Vermont farmer who used the Fifth Amendment when questioned on his Red Status, he turned out to be our keynote speaker. He was in later years much more well known for being a China scholar, William Hinton, than he was for being a Vermont farmer. So one chapter in the book is about William Hinton and his remarkable family and their history with Putney Vermont and the Putney School. His mother founded the Putney School. And two of the three Hinton children were very connected with the communist government in China. Alex Novikov was the one high-profile academic firing in Vermont. He was a biochemistry teacher at the University of Vermont. We had a panel about Alex Novikov and the chapter in the book focuses on Arnold Shine, who was Novikov's chief defender on the UBM faculty. That's David Levine's caricature of Henry Wallace. And we had a panel about the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948 where he ran on the Progressive Party ticket. And so the chapter in the book is about how the Burlington papers, most notably the Burlington Daily News published by William Loeb, really went after, viciously, went after the people who supported Wallace. Wackerel Kent welcomes aid for Wallace from Commies. Vermontra is best known during the Ritz-Gare era because our own Republican Senator Flanders was the one who introduced the centric proposal to the U.S. Senate. And there he is delivering papers to Senator McCarthy. And looking on it is McCarthy's odious aid, Roy Cohn. If you want a little connection between then and now, Roy Cohn was 25 years old when he was McCarthy's protege. When Cohn was 50 years old, he was Donald Trump's mentor. So the chapter in the book that deals with Flanders is about Robert Mitchell, the editor and publisher of the Runtlen Herald, and how Mitchell led the support of Flanders as did many Vermont news papers. And this is Paul Sweezy who came to our conference to talk about the difference between what happened in Vermont and what happened in New Hampshire. Sweezy was a Marxist economist and a sometimes lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. And he almost went to jail for refusing to answer questions before the legislative committee in New Hampshire. The one who went after him was William Loeb who moved from Vermont to New Hampshire to take over the Manchester union later. So those were events at the conference that formed basis for some of the writing in this book. Then there were events that we didn't get around to covering. A land sale involving the Asia scholar Owen Lattimore and other summer residents of Bethel and Randolph Center. The very terrific looking, a really crusading newspaper man, Bernard O'Shea, who held Swee in the Swanton Courier at the northwest corner of Vermont, the only self-proclaimed Democrat who ran a Vermont newspaper at the time. Many of you probably know Andrew Newquist Jr. in Montpelier, this was his father, who ran against the right-wing congressman, Congressman Charles Plublee in 1946 and was renovated and wound up losing that primary election. And my final chapter in the book deals with somebody who's sadly forgotten these days, William Meyer, who in 1958 became the first Democrat in 104 years to win a congressional seat. And I end that chapter with him losing his reelection campaign. He was beaten actually by Robert Stafford. And here's another connection from the guest to the present. Meyer continued to run for office in the 60s, getting more and more disillusioned with the National Democratic Party, especially as the Vietnam War he did up. In 1970, he and a few others, including Bernie Sanders, founded the Liberty Union Party. So there's our connection with today. Bernie? Bernie election night of his first mayoral victory. Okay, I think we can have the lights now. Michael Sherman, Rick, fingered me as the interlocutor, not the interloper. And interlocutor has two meanings. One is a participant in a conversation, and the other is a person who asks questions. So I'm going to try to take both of those seriously. And just to start off as a kind of introduction about why, when you heard some of why, Rick asked me to join you. That conference was really one of the first big events of my tenure as the director of the Long Storyboard Society. I can't remember exactly how it came to be, but Hathaway was on one of the board of trustees. Rick, I had met already and as you heard, we had this connection through his mother. And when he, I think it was, he came with this proposed union with Hathaway, two indomitable horses. They went to my office and said, let's do this conference. There was no turning back. So I, in some ways, I guess I consider myself a godfather to this book. And the other part of it is that when Rick went on to continue his own research, he brought the chapter about the Bethel sale to me as editor of Long Story. And we worked on that one together and it was published in 2012. And subsequently bought another chapter, the Hinton family chapter to me, which sadly didn't get published because he decided he had bigger fish to buy. But we did go through a first draft together. So I have a great affection for this book and of course great affection for Rick and admiration for what he's done here. So let's just talk a little bit about why this conference and why this book is important as both local and global history and national history. Well, I always thought that this was a fascinating story with many different strands and being kind of a newcomer to Vermont, I was interested in finding out some of the history of how Bernie Sanders clearly did not come out of nowhere. And I always thought this was a story that really should be told. And oddly enough, started work on it in earnest the second year of the first Obama term. And I think I met Stephen to discuss the publication of the book just as the 2016 campaign was shooting out. So all of a sudden the appearance of this book means something very different than if it had come out in 2008. And especially as many people have noted, we have a president who is quick to use the terminology of McCarthy, accusing his opponents of McCarthyism and witch-hunting, but he himself uses the techniques that are right out of the McCarthy playbook. So trying to understand what happened in Vermont during this era gives the book a certain resonance that it wouldn't have had otherwise. I'll add to that that state and local history has a bad reputation among historians because it's thought of as being old nostalgia of the good old days. And what sometimes gets lost is the fact that history takes place in places, not in a single place. And in this case, especially, it seems to me that the local history, the state history, is a reflection on national history. And sometimes the local history as well. And it's a reflection that shows both what's the same, how was Vermont similar to what was happening nationally. How is it different? Sometimes it can be congratulatory, sometimes not so much. And it also, I think, by focusing in on what we know, the place we know, the people we know, it sharpens the details of the history that we want to touch with. And it gives a bit more life to the fact that history did not take place on the moon. It takes place in places that we know and inhabit. And that was what made that conference so compelling to me and I think what makes it so compelling. Yes, I often thought that a similar book could be written about every single state in the union because this was a national phenomenon. And it had different manifestations of different places depending on who was the governor, who was the attorney general in New Hampshire. There was an attorney general who wanted to be a mini McCarthy, no such figure existed in Vermont. And histories have been written about, of course, what happened in Hollywood, what happened in Washington. There were several good books about what happened specifically in New York City, especially in education. There was a wonderful book by Ellen Schrecker called No Ivory Tower about how McCarthyism affected academia as a whole, using cases in point. But it felt like it was important to say, okay, this happened here, and this is why it happened here, the way it did. And it's just full of fascinating stories that are not nostalgic. Let's talk a little bit about your title. You didn't title it Vermont in the McCarthy era in 1946, did you? You titled it Red Scare in the Green Mountains. Talk about that. Yeah, the conference itself was called Vermont in the McCarthy era. But over the intervening years, as I've thought about this a lot more, I've come to really prefer the term Red Scare. Because, for one, it's visceral, it's evocative, it connotes the fear that really gripped so much of the population. That's one reason that I like the term Red Scare. The other is it takes the focus away from McCarthy. And we have to remind ourselves that this late day, we look back at the 1950s, McCarthy's reign on the national stage was relatively brief. It started in the winter of 1950 and ended with a crash in the summer of 1954. So McCarthy, he had a bandwagon of his own that people jumped on. But he himself had jumped on the bandwagon that was already in motion with the beginning of the Cold War, the collapse of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. And I think Harry Truman has to take part of the responsibility for that under pressure from, like when Republicans said he was too soft on communism. Truman was the one who proposed the loyalty program that wound up driving so many people out of the U.S. government. And in fact, it's an even deeper history because the first Red Scare comes at the end with the Wilson's in 1918. There is an extension of the Espionage Act, which started making it possible for people to get prosecuted and lose their jobs or speaking out against the government in many ways. So it's a long history and it's in the QA that we started in the 30s. I was reminded that the American Civil Liberties Union started in response to what they called the first Red Scare during World War I. Okay, let's go on to another question. Talk about the primary sources and the secondary sources that you used. What was easy to get, what was hard to get, and maybe what was your most interesting source? Well, I volunteered for the job of researcher when we did this conference in 1988, partially because I love looking at old newspapers. And there must be people here who are put in their hours with micro-fell machines. It's really, it can take a lot out of your neck and eyes. So I went back to, I knew, for instance, that we were going to have a panel on Senator Flanders. So we knew those things. So going back to those newspapers around that era and following the Ronald Perle day by day, it was very instructive. Looking at the letters to the editors is always really interesting. It was very difficult not to get sidetracked. Maybe some of you have had this experience too. Oh, that was the week that the Yankees and Phillies played in the galleries. And look what the Power Mound Theater is playing. Anyway, so that was the primary sources. Once you find out that there are events you know roughly what era they took place in, you say, well, this is what the Burlington Free Press said. But let's see what Loeb was saying in the Burlington Daily News. And that was especially helpful when the whole controversy with Professor Novikov was happening, which took place over a course of a few months. And William Loeb is putting his personal editorials saying this guy has to be fired right on the front page. It was a real relief to find, I found this with two newspapers, the White River Valley Herald, which was now the Herald of Randolph. And the Swanton Courier both had bound issues that you could actually sit at a table and turn the pages. This was such a wonderful movie. And I had one of my great research experiences was walking into the Herald of Randolph and introducing myself to Dickie Drysveil who only recently stopped being the editor I retired a few years ago. And I introduced myself. I told him why I was there. And he said, hold on a minute. I went to his office and he came back with this big thick manila folder. And he said, this is a folder that my father labeled Red Scare 1950. And I always knew that somebody would eventually want to see what was in it. So his father had saved every clipping from the Herald of that whole time. So during the conference we were able to actually have panels with Robert Mitchell, Paul Screezy, William Hinton, etc. But those people are just about all gone. And so I relied some on the children and in some cases grand children or nieces and nephews who had memories of this era and were able to help me give me some wonderful old photos and some of which got reproduced in the book. Just a wonderful experience getting to know the children of Bernardo Shea, some of whom still live in the swan area. I should add that we videotaped the conference. So if you go to the Vermont Historical Society you can get access to those tapes. They're a little hard to hear because it was in the chapel at Vermont College before they did the acoustics. So a lot of balancing stuff and you must have had to work very hard to get into that. Well actually the conference was not only videotaped but it was audio taped. And the sound quality on the audio tapes is a lot better. So that was another very good source going back to listen to these panels. What about difficulties? How do you see this is the book? Well, you saw that headline about Newquist denies any connection with communists. I'm sure more experienced historians also run into this problem. Here's a case where Newquist was running against Plumlee in the Republican primary. There was a story in the Barry Times that a group of a local reading of the Communist Party endorsed Newquist. It was right there in print in the Barry Times. It took about a few weeks for other people to pick up on this story. There was first a more conservative editor in S Extruction, a paper that doesn't exist anymore called The Suburban List. And then of course it was picked up by the Loeb papers. So all of a sudden Newquist, you know, the headlines went from Newquist proposes this, Newquist proposes that, this agrees with Plumlee about this and that, it is all like Newquist denies he is a communist. And I found a quote from Newquist in one of these articles saying, if they had only bothered to talk to me about what really happened at that meeting, this wouldn't have been a story. So there is no way of finding out what he meant by that. He didn't write anything. Andrew Newquist Jr. and Elizabeth, Andrew's sister didn't have any memory of that. I just clearly, Newquist senior felt that he was misrepresented in this article. I just couldn't, I went up against the brick wall there. Another footnote, recently Andrew Newquist gave his father's papers to the University of Vermont. So it wasn't there. You discovered that, or he told you about that when he released his production? Yes, you know, my, originally the first chapter in the book, Chromologically, was going to be the Henry Wollestamp Day in 1948. I thought that was a really good place to start. Then I ran into Andrew Newquist Jr. and he said, hey, did I ever tell you that at the time my father was rebated by Charles Plumlee? Oh, and by the way, I just donated all those papers to Newquist. So I had to change my plans. This is why, when it says, historians never finish their histories, they just abandon them. Because there's always something new turning up. At least we hope so. And what about the most enjoyable? The least enjoyable. You could also tell that the least enjoyable, if you wish. I already talked about the least enjoyable. I was getting an extreme at the State Library. And by the way, that is a phenomenal resource. It used to be in the law library in Montpelier. It's now over in Middlesex at the State Archives. They are incredibly helpful people there. And I have so many, I only barely scratched the surface of what they had. I think part of the most enjoyable was getting to meet some of the second generation people. And had just one person that helped me incredibly was William Hinton's niece, who is Carmelita Hinton's granddaughter, who is now sort of the keeper of the family archives down in Putney. And I said there, so I'd like to come down sometime and see the Putney School Archives. Because clearly this woman, Susan Lowe, 15 years earlier, had written a history of the Putney School. And so my friend, William Carmelita's granddaughter, whose name is Marnie Rosner, said, well, I'll make some inquiries, but I don't think these archives actually exist. I've been after them over at the school for ages to actually put everything together in one place. And she said, I'll ask for you. And one thing led to another. And the archives intact were discovered in the basement of one of the dorms. And it was also one of these classic cases of, well, I looked through all those boxes and I don't think I found what I really need. But hey, what's that box? That's what I really looked through that box. And the box was all the notes that this woman, Susan Lowe, had taken for her history of the Putney School, which included minutes of the trustees meeting. How do we deal with this? William Hinton was giving the school a black eye. He was testifying and refused 75 times to answer questions. And Carmelita Hinton said, my son did nothing wrong. I am not going to apologize for him. And we don't like it today. Quite a stance to take in 1954. Okay, so you've talked somewhat about the media, the rule of the media. Let's go into that a little bit more. Most of us, I think, remember McCarthy from the Army McCarthy hearings. That was our first real view of him, lives. But that wasn't the case in Vermont because the Army McCarthy hearings went from April to June 1954. The first television tower went up in September 1954. So most of them are way down in the south where they could maybe pick up an old radio station or something like that. Yes, in fact, an editor for many years at the Rutland Herald, Kendall Wilde, who was one of our panelists, as a young reporter, he broke the story that Flanders was going to give this earth-shaking speech on the floor of the Senate. And Wilde remembered all the reporters finishing their work for the day and going over to whatever hotel it was in Rutland where there was the one television set in Rutland to watch their hearings. I just want to talk more about the role of the press here. How influential was it? How destructive was it? Yeah, this research was very instructive about how strong the role of local newspapers can be. Because there were a few stories that had some real heroes to my point of view. And there were several editor publishers throughout the state scattered throughout. And I found out about some of them because Bernardo Shea of the Swanton Courier, everyone's in Hawaii would say what other editors are saying. And during the Army MacArthur hearings, he ran a whole page of excerpts from different newspapers around the state, all supporting Flanders. So I found out about papers like the Woodstock standard and the Addison Independent. And of course the Springfield reporters fill around. And also going up to the Swanton Courier at the Swanton Historical Society where they have all these newspapers and actually looking through it. And seeing that I got this feeling from O'Shea reading his writings that there was this very informal, maybe also informal network of like-minded people who were really devoted to their communities, devoted to their newspapers. And they had a very influential voice in the community. They also, as you reported in the chapter on lethal, actually did their own investigation. Yeah, this, you saw the headline briefly about the MacArthur charges of land sale on Walden-Ladamor. This was a situation that just kind of exploded onto the front pages nationally in late June of 1950. And it was very much centered on this teeny town of Bethel. And the nearest newspaper was in Randolph where John Drysdale, Dickie's father, was the editor. And, okay, so what do you do? You send a reporter out to look at the actual land deeds. And, okay, here's what MacArthur is charging. Well, that's just not true. There it is. But he's got a small newspaper. He actually owned one in Bradford, two in the Bradford opinion. He's got a small newspaper. It only comes out once a week. So he calls up his friend Robert Mitchell. This is a story that Dickie told me. I'm saying, you know, this is way too big for me to handle. And Robert Mitchell calls his friend, the Bradford reformer, his name is John Hooper. And Mitchell and Hooper together hired an investigative journalist from New York to come up to Vermont. And the result was a six-part series running every day for six days on the front page of both the Rutland Hairling and the Bradford reformer. A little box on the front page and then a full page, sometimes two pages on the inside. Here's what really happened. And one result of this was that the controversy was over within a matter of weeks. I kept looking for more stories about this and it just completely disappeared from the front pages. Well, that's one more question than an open floor. And when we talked about this, it encouraged me to give my own personal reflection on this. And the question really is, what makes this period in these events so enduringly interesting? McCarthy now is a trope. It's kind of a metaphor that we use all the time. And so how did that get there? I mean, there are other bad things that have happened in our history. This one seems to have stuck really deeply. And I'll just offer my two experiences from my life that made it indelible. The first was, like many of my generation, and I think this is a generation story, my first real political memory was watching the Army McCarthy here on television. It's the first thing that really stuck. I was 10-9 years old at the time. My mother kept me from school to watch. And maybe I'm imagining this, but maybe it really happened. I did see the moment. I think I saw the moment when Welch confronted McCarthy and said, have you lost no humanity? Whether or not I saw nine or fifty or something like that, those are powerful images. And I think they are part of the images of certainly my generation. And perhaps most of you, I think, are seeing in this room. So that was one, a very early one, and a very important one. One I think that suddenly made me realize I am in history. I am part of what's going on, and as I reflected on that over the year, that is my real first historical memories, one of my first political memories. The second one is a little closer to this personal stuff. I lived for four years in Appleton, Wisconsin. My wife Nancy and I went up there. I taught at Lawrence University. Appleton, Wisconsin was the hometown of Joseph McCarthy. He is buried in Appleton, Wisconsin. And more to the point, his first political position. He was elected a Wisconsin circuit judge in 1935, and was re-elected over and over again until 1944, left to go to World War II, came back, and was re-elected a circuit judge in 1945. He stayed there until 46 when he ran in the U.S. Senate, reading the father. When we got to Appleton, we lived two blocks from the county courthouse. That was in 1974. The year before they had been put up in the courthouse, an enormous, larger-than-life-sized bus in bronze of Joseph McCarthy. He went? This is 1974. And the funny story of it, about that, I mean, it's horrifying to walk into the county courthouse and to see this enormous, twice three times life-size. But the story that I heard and never verified was that the local paper that Appleton posted, when the ceremony took place the next day, the headline was, Bust of McCarthy, Unevaled at... I don't know if the headline person got fired or what, but the second thing is that, for all the years that Nancy and I, and our two sons were born there, lived there, there were, every year, on McCarthy's birthday, there were grave-side ceremonies. People would come from all over the country to pay their respects to Joseph McCarthy. Now, this is from 1974 to 1978. I think it has been discontinued, you know, but I get to realize that he didn't die when he died. I mean, there was something deep in our culture that preserved him for all those years. The other thing is that in 19, I think it was 1976, but I'm not sure, the local newspaper Postcrescent, and that would have been, I think, the anniversary of his, he was re-elected to the Senate in 1952, the second term. The Postcrescent printed in its newspaper the petitions that were signed, both in support of him for the second term and opposed him. There was a Joe Must Go group in Appleton, and they printed it on the front page of this paper, but of course it was reduced, right? So you had the big petitions. Everybody, it was a run of the positionary store for magnifying glasses. Everybody wanted to see who was on whose side. And this was the sad part, it re-inflamed those conflicts. This was so deep a story in American political history that it continued for another 23 years to inflame people and excite people and turn them against each other. Pretty small community. Appleton was about 125,000 people, but it could still stir things up. So here we are with a book that is sort of passing along to the next generation of stories. What is it in the story that has such enduring importance? I think you touched on it a little bit when you made a passing reference to Joseph Welch and the incredible drama where he challenged McCarthy in that way. And I think the inherent drama of these years is something that has lodged in the American psyche. That is, people were in a way that maybe hadn't been quite so national or dramatic at that point, had to take sides just about whether they were going to submit to these feelings of fear and hysteria or take a stand and say, I'm willing to go to jail rather than name. You want me to name people whose names you already have. I'm not going to do that. So the first big drama was even three years before McCarthy was on the scene was the Hollywood, the U.S. and Hollywood hearings that resulted in the beginnings of the Hollywood Blacklist. And so there was the spectacle of it became not only a political issue, but a cultural issue as well. And think of some of the films, Point of Water, which was about battery at the front. We had Trumbo recently. And on the other side, there were people like Ilya Kazan who gave names and then apologised, sort of did his mea culpa on the waterfront, which is a great movie, but looked at it through a certain lens which is really an apology for being an informant. Anyway, it's, you know, every time you have people who are ready to stand on their principles and are willing to lose their jobs or go to jail, that is in turn dramatic. And it makes, you know, it makes people, younger people wonder, well, what's going on? What are these principles that people are standing for? I have my own memory of the Army McCarthy hearings, not watching it on TV because we didn't turn on our first TV until I was over. But my older brother was one of the charter subscribers to mad comic books. And in the summer of 1954, Mad did an astounding take-down of McCarthy, presenting the, they said, you know, they could improve these ratings with the, with these hearings, if they just turned it into a quiz show. And here's an idea for a quiz show. They called it, if you remember, one of the central characters in the Army McCarthy hearings was Roy Cohn's friend, partner, whatever, David Shine. So they called this quiz show, What's My Shine? And they go back and look at this and it's brilliant and it's pretty courageous for the time. Okay, so now it's your turn. Rick will call and people will all bring their microphones up and you can ask, should we turn the fan off? I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. Great, great evening. Just a bit of nostalgia. As many of you remember in 1981, the Goddard, a full compliment of the Goddard College adult briefcase was purchased by the Polish University Courts on College campus. And we immediately set about the plan of this conference, and another conference I just want to call to mind, and that was 1984. Ed Batom and Bob Linty, founders of the massive program, of course in 1984, planned the 1984 conference and after the 1988 conference, halfway, and you guys organized, I always thought both of these conferences should become a book. Little did I know that this one had long been underway, so I just want to thank you guys and somebody should pick up on 1984. These both have the message, don't give in to fear. Don't give in to fear. And I think it's too relevant today. Thank you so much for putting this book together and I'm glad to know there are tapes of the conference. Two very quick questions. One is, what got somebody labeled a communist, in addition to basically being the entity of somebody who wanted to get into trouble, was if they were working for racial integration, if they were union organizers, and so forth. And I was wondering, so the first question is, in the course of your research, do you find that the labeling was just oh communist, et cetera, or did they actually get into the reasons, the reasons why here in Iran? And second quick question, what really broke the fear over HUAC nationally was, well part of it was will, the Women's Terror Nationally for Peace and Freedom, when they were called before HUAC and that's a whole other story. In your book, the focus is on a number of men. And I was wondering, of course, in your research, were there any real members or other women, perhaps, that might have had some instructive stories as well. Thank you. Okay. The first one, Charles Plumlee, who was the right wing congressman who entered Newquist senior, challenged. Going all the way back to the 30s, one of his major planks was control of unions as socialists and communists. You couldn't say the word union in his presence without you. And it brought to mind a theory that my father always propounded talking about his own experience in New York, which was the whole anti-communist boogeyman was an excuse by the hours that they would break the teachers union in particular and tying this into the racial justice system I discovered a few years ago reading a wonderful book by Marjorie Hines called Priests of Our Democracy. She really took apart how the red scare affected the New York City teachers union. And she said that many of the teachers who might have been already left wing to begin with found a lot of gratification and purpose in teaching in minority areas. And one of the things they discovered in teaching in minority areas was racist textbooks. And that was one of the planks of the union that they wanted to get these textbooks demanded. Well, it turns out that the history teacher who is the head of the team that wrote the textbooks was now the superintendent schools in New York. So it was like he really had a game for the union. I just had one more thing that one of the characters in this Owen Lattimore vessel story was an anthropologist who had a summer home in vessel. He had been a former arctic explorer in the hall of more Stephenson. And it turned out that there was a book called Threatening Anthropology by David Price. He says that the FBI and the GWAC went after anthropologists in particular because they found that because of their training they had theories about racial equality. So they were always joining these organizations in favor of racial justice that were communist fronts. And I'll just get in a plug for Dorothy Canfield Fisher who was a great heroine during this time and did a lot of writing, defending people who were under attack. I was hoping to find some more women in this story but they were not in public office, they were not writing the newspapers. I'll just answer that, but it was the teacher's union here and that would mostly have been women in the 1950s. The teacher's union really led the charge against employment. They said, tell us who we have, who do you think they are? Give us names. He actually turned McCarthyism on its head because he said, I have here a hundred and whatever names. And so those teachers were taking a big risk in their own communities, speaking through the union. And then we'll start with Canfield, who was very often and was very well known and very much respected in this thing. So she was a major voice in speaking out. I'm just wondering, listening to this, it so resonates with what's happening today. I'm wondering, since Joe McCarthy has got such a historical hold on people, I'm wondering if that same segment that goes to his brain side is the same people who were so angry that they put Trump in power. And we're talking about very similar eras in history. But I'm just wondering if you think that McCarthyism sort of was underground all this time and has now surfaced again with Trump. I'm afraid to mind his fond of saying, once you turn the rock over, they're always there. I think that if you go back, Andrew and I were in New York last year at the Museum of the City of New York, which has happened on this exhibit, about the anti-immigrant riots in New York in the 1830s and 1940s. This has been such a strong strain in American cultural life. Fear of the other, economic fear, cultural fear. And you see, as long as there is fear, there are politicians who are ready to take advantage of it. In the 1970s, I think it was a graduate student named Martin Thoreau who did a survey in Bennington. It's a very flawed survey. He didn't only interview men, he only interviewed industrialist merchants, there were people, no farmers, but he found a lot of support for McCarthyism then and still when he did this. And when he asked why, he said, well, he's standing up for the little guys. Government has lost touch with us. Okay, and I think that's the key. We're talking about populism. Populism has been around for a long time. The first big populism was in the late 19th century, right after the Civil War. And it's there all the time. It's the sense that there are people who are forgotten by the powers that run the state. And then there's a guy who stands up to the government. McCarthy was really standing up to the government, especially when he got to the army with McCarthy heroes. He was challenging Eisenhower, he was challenging the army, he was challenging the whole deep state is what we call it now. And that really has and had and I think continues to have its appeal. A radio listener keeps it on all day. But I would like to know if radio played any role with a regular population with a real newspaper. But keep the radio on all day. And then they react to what was going on with McCarthy. That was another area that I just didn't really get to explore. I got as far as talking to Ken Squire, WDUV, who said, you know, we were just doing farm news and you know, the trading post and the old Squire. And I think the, I didn't hear about any influential radio people locally. There might have been stations that carried people like Louis Jr. and other writers. But they were very important readers of Captain Warren, who was very rabidly at the time, and Walter Woodchill who had deep and young. Right. And all the men had seen. But in the post war period, he also became very, very much a supporter of. And they, you know, it's harder to get that because I think this is the age before the Nielsen ratings. They came in, the Nielsen ratings came in fairly early in the media era, but I think it's before they started. So it's a little hard to be able to track how popular and how influential they were. I mean, I've seen articles about other things where WDUV and Captain Warren take the task, the left wing politics are going on around here. That's a little bit indirectly getting into that question. One more question, I think. Go ahead. Thanks for doing this. Is the story complicated, or should it be complicated? And this is for both of you, by the fact that what was going on in the Soviet Union at that time and also for decades was really horrible. That is a complicated question. And I know that there are a lot of people on the left who started hearing about what was really happening in the Soviet Union. Some of them got very disillusioned right away and left the party. But there was an incredible exodus around the Nazi-Soviet act. But then there were others who felt that, well, we've cast our lock with our idealism that this is going to be a better world somehow. And we can't give J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy the satisfaction of saying you were right. And so I think if somebody said you can't let fear take you over, I think there is also a warning about true believers of any strength. I think a lot of people got, because of their own idealistic beliefs, got a very rosy picture of the Soviet Union and signed on to that program. And there was no doubt about it that there were terrible things happening, many of which did not become public until years later. I think you also have to remember that Russia was an ally in World War II. And when the Battle of Stalingrad, there was great affection and great admiration for them molding out against the Nazis and sustaining all those losses. So there was a sense of heroism about the Soviet Union that I think attracted people and then held on to them. And then I think, Rick is right, that afterwards people more and more started coming out. Some people just didn't believe it. So it was just propaganda. And remember Will Rogers' famous thing, I've been to the future and it works. I've seen the future and it works from a generation earlier. So there was that view about the Soviet Union as well as the great enemy. There's a question way back. Can that be a last one? No, no. Steve is the last one. My question is about discernment, subtlety and mythology. You guys give us the background. But first of all, thank you for the references about Mother's Day and Dick Hathaway. I went to elementary school in Swanton. As a fifth grader, I was a Swanton Curry paper boy. And Dick Hathaway's last years of his life I was his personal assistant. But discernment, subtlety, mythology. The oldest form of communism in the human story is monasticism. In monasteries, there's no private property that's all held in common, point one. Point two, in Vermont, from the 1900s through the 1950s every county had a dairy cooperative. The workers owned the means of production. The survivors are Kavit in the St. Albans Co-operative. It used to be a huge one in Barrick called Grand City. But every county had a dairy cooperative where the workers owned the means of production. Where dairy cooperatives and monasteries attacked by McCarthyism and it's not quite on. Not very many monasteries in the United States. I don't know that he ever attacked the dairy state. I mean, he was from Wisconsin, the dairy state. You know, you start attacking the dairy industry in Wisconsin. You know, the survey is strong. So I think he may have kept hands off because I mean, above all, I think of McCarthy as an opportunist. He saw which way things were going and he got on that bandwagon. He didn't necessarily go into Congress as an anti-communist candidate. It was something that he came to at some point and saw that it was working and so he pushed it as far as he could. So I'm not sure that he was motivated by ideology which may be the other answer about the monasteries. I mean, there are many monasteries in the country but that's a whole... Monasteries are communities held together by a theology, certainly, and particularly. It's a hard one to attach to. He was born in Catholic himself. So hands off. And I think that that may be... If there is any answer to that, I think it may be in there. I just had a quick question about your interactions with Tony Hiss and if you might share a little about it. The question is about Tony Hiss, the son of Alger Hiss, who... Tony Hiss wrote a very nice clerk for me when I sent him a copy of the book. Tony Hiss's father, Alger Hiss, was a... What was his official? He was... He worked in the state department. Yeah, yeah. So he was accused of running a spiring, an espionage spiring in the late 40s. This is how Richard Nixon first got his big headlines. And he was convicted, not for espionage, but for perjury, after three separate trials. And Tony Hiss wrote a wonderful memoir called The View from Alger's Window. And it was about his memories of being a kid and having his father jailed, and letters that would come to him. And we first got in touch because I wanted to reprint an excerpt from this book. His family had been coming to Pichon since the mid-30s. And during one of the trials, I forget which one, the family thought... The trial was taking place in the summertime and the family thought, it would be better for Tony to not be around while this controversy... I sent him to Pichon to just stay with friends that they had made in the community. And Tony wrote very eloquently about how welcomed he was in Pichon and how important this was to him as a little kid to feel like he belonged somewhere. And he said his experience in Pichon gave him his first inkling that McCarthyism was not going to go down well with a lot of Americans, that these people were not afraid to say, well, I may disagree with what your father says, but you're kind of part of our family. So we never met Tony and I, but we have a few emails from him. I think someone's here from Bearpont so it works, right? Yes. So we should stop now. We're getting used to others. Thank you all for coming. Thank you very much for this book. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.