 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the Ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with James R. Gaines about his new book, The 50s, which looks at the 1950s not as a decade of conformity, but as a time when motivated individuals pressed for change. Joining the authoring conversation is journalist Margaret Carlson. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up soon on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, April 12th, at 1 p.m. Cost of Kennedy brings us his biography of Jackie Robinson titled True, which focuses on four transformational years in Robinson's life. A letter Robinson wrote after an incident on a bus while he was in the Army in Texas. He's on display online and in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. through April 20th. And on Thursday, April 14th at 1 p.m., Michael Meyer will discuss the story of Benjamin Franklin's parting gift to the working class people of Boston and Philadelphia, a deathbed bequest of 2,000 pounds to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jumpstart their careers. Four days ago, on April 1st, the 1950 population census records were made public. At a minute past midnight, the National Archives activated a website where anyone anywhere can freely view, search, and download the census schedules, filled out 72 years ago. We may associate census records with genealogy and family history, but taken as a whole, the census gives us a snapshot of America on the cusp of a new decade, the 1950s. James R. Gaines takes us further into the 50s in his new book and brings us face-to-face with individuals who had the courage to ask questions and call for change. They lay the groundwork for the advances in gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmentalism. As Gaines states in his book's introduction, these solitary figures, though isolated by their personal histories, idiosyncrasies, flaws, and gifts, have in common the courage, the vision, and the profoundly motivating need to fight for change in their time and the future. James R. Gaines is the former managing editor of Time Magazine and the author of several books including Evening in the Palace of Reason, a study of Johann Sebastian Bach and the Early Enlightenment, and for Liberty and Glory, Washington Lafayette, and their revolutions. Margaret Carlson is a columnist for The Daily Beast. She was formerly the first woman columnist at Time Magazine, a columnist at Bloomberg View, a weekly panelist on CNN's Capital Gang, and managing editor of The New Republic. Now let's hear from James R. Gaines and Margaret Carlson. Thank you for joining us today. Let me thank David for that introduction and for the opportunity to interview Jim Gaines, who used to ask me all the questions when he was editor of Time, and I was a lowly columnist. Let me begin by asking Jim, we're celebrating the 1950s census arriving at the National Archives, and you brought the 1950s to life, again and again, chapter by chapter, person by person, in your book. Tell me how you came up with the idea to do the 50s, because I was very young, but I remember them as boring years, as opposed to the years after. And how you came up with these people who just rocked the world, but they were ordinary people who did heroic things. Yeah, and it took a bit to find them, because right, the 50s were kind of dull, but I write about people in what is called the long 50s, 46 to 63, from the end of World War II, and I have to say, I was right, I wrote one book before I wrote this one, and it wasn't published, but I did the research for it, and then I became so enamored of these special individuals, each of whom were fighting their own battle with their own conflicts, as a result of which they changed the world, or they changed our country anyway. So in terms of the 1950s census, there's not much that that census can say about the people in this book, because they did the census at about the time when, about the time when my period, 46 to 63, began. I think if you want to find what these people achieved, it will be in the 1970s census, because then you will have seen these movements that they, you know, struggle to start actually have some effect. So Jim, most of your subjects tried to conform, you know, Medgar Evers, the soldiers that you talk of at the end of the book, the last chapters, they loved their country more than their country loved them, and they wanted to fit in, they wanted to succeed, but they had to push back, and your first subject, Harry Hay, he led a very conventional life until he couldn't any longer. And then you end that chapter with Frank Kemeny, who's the opposite of Harry in some ways, because he's more conventional, and Harry becomes less conventional as he goes along. But this idea of the conformist then taking on this role in life that they never expected to have, how does that happen? It takes, it takes time for those people, even in those people's lives for that to happen. Harry Hay was a very thoughtful person who at about the time when the war ended, realized that he could no longer live the life that he was living. He was gay in a marriage, and his wife knew that he was, that he was homosexual. But she didn't believe that, that anyone could resist her charms, I guess. She thought that all homosexuals needed was a good woman, and he realized that that was not the case. At the time they had two adopted daughters who were very young, whom he loved. And the idea that he would have to leave them, even just moving away, but still seeing them, made him enter into what he called his period of terror. When he had awful dreams about sliding down mountains, and hurting his children, and hurting his wife. It was an awful time for him, especially because he was also not only attached to his family, but he was a very active member of the U.S. Communist Party. And it meant the world to him. And the Communist Party of the United States cast out gays just as everyone else did. You know, it's troubling, and it's something I did not realize, that Nazi Germany in the United States had the same view of homosexuality, which was that it was a felony, and it was punishable by imprisonment. And when we liberated the concentration camps, we did not let loose the men with pink triangles on their shoulders, who had been identified by the German courts, Nazi German courts, as gay. Because we felt if they had legitimate sentences, they should serve their time. And beyond that, they should serve their time with no credit for time in the camps. To me, this was just amazing. And to be homosexual in the United States was a felony in every state, but New York. And it came with life prison terms in a few states, and 10, 20, 30 years. I mean, it's almost impossible to believe from this vantage point that that atmosphere existed. Have I answered your question? I don't know. In some quarters, some of it still exists to go back to another day. You know, what's in that chapter? The it's almost like a novel because the heartache that went in to going from conforming to what society wanted of you to not came through in the breakup of that marriage and the family. And each of your each of your subjects has that to go through. And you know, whenever I watch a movie or a series, as I want, I watched during during the lockdown was a French village. As it got towards the resistance, I kept asking myself, would I would I have resisted? What would I have done? And I came up a little short. These people didn't they they didn't come up short. And I'm I'm just fascinated because there there is a novelistic part of your of your book. It's all true, which is remarkable. But just character how it how it works, how you get the gumption to do that, like Pauli Murray. So one of one of the things about people is that that they all seem to have a secret life. Pauli, Murray, Rachel Carson, there was a secret life that they had, they wanted to come out. Rachel Carson's didn't come out. And and you know, maybe she didn't have a secret one. But I read Jim as if she did. But is there is there a uniting characteristic to the heroes that change the world? Yeah, I think the there are a couple. One is just stubbornness. Just a an absolute determination. The the the real one is you mentioned Pauli Murray. I mean each of them had conflicts that were heinous with regard to the to the rest of the American culture. She was she had a horrible life. She was a light skinned black woman who who always thought her of her race was in between because she was a you know, light skinned and she was made fun of in school for being light skinned. And later got no benefit from having light skin. And she was also somebody who was conflicted about her sexuality. She thought she was a man. She thought she she wrote these awful, I mean, in endearing but but awful letters to doctors, spelling it in detail why she felt that way. And asking them, can't you help me somehow? And doctors saw her. But you know, some of them were were just aware that there was nothing they could do about it. And so she she was tested on on both race and gender. So she but she was very strong. You know, her mother died at three when when she was Pauli was three. She was born Pauline. She changed her name to Pauli Pauli as a gender indefinite. Her father was brilliant, a pianist, a constant reader. But he was also insane, at least according to the people who put him in an insane asylum. And she only heard the stories about her father that were complimentary. But when she went to visit him at age nine and wanted to pour out her herself to him about how good she was in school just like him. And he was he didn't know who she was. And the next time she saw him was at his funeral when he had been murdered by one of the orderlies who found him uppity or bigotty as the word was at the time. So she lost her mother and her father at a very young age. And she lived with a very strange couple, her grandparents, her grandfather fought for the union in the Civil War and her and her grandmother was very proud of the plantation where she was a slave. So she was living in between the north and the south as well. But she was strong and she was really smart. And her and her aunt Pauline, who was she was named after, managed to get her to Hunter College. And she she got her degree. And then she started working for Philip Randolph and in his March on Washington movement. And, you know, one night she was she was presenting a case before an audience that included Thurgood Marshall and the Dean of Howard Law School, who offered her a full scholarship. And from there her career just took off. She she wrote her for her final thesis in law school. She wrote the argument that eventually overturned Plessy versus Ferguson. And she helped Thurgood Marshall win the case of the Brown versus Board of Education. And ultimately, her great gift was to write the argument that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was still then a lawyer, used in the case of White versus Crook to overturn to make sex discrimination unconstitutional. I mean, that's a trajectory that doesn't just happen. It is like joining the resistance. But it's that you and I never went through a life full of those issues. I don't know whether we were lucky or unlucky in that respect, but we didn't. And it took people who were that troubled by what was deep within them. And and there was and there was made them a scourge of American society in the 50s that that pushed them along the path to a better United States. Jim, another thing that they had in common, Polly with Gerta Lerner is that what's that old saying about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? She had to be she had to be as good as he was to do it backwards and in high heels. They're they were brilliant. And the scholarship plus persistence saw them get where they get where they did. But not without a lot of sorrow and and I think still feeling slightly in the shoulder of the road, especially Polly before she turned she didn't take a conventional route. She simply she wrote her way through. She wouldn't have made it if she if she'd gone the Yale Law School route to a law firm. And so tell us a little about Gerta Lerner. Gerta Lerner was a Jewish child in Nazi Austria who managed to get out with her parents with with her sort of parents. I mean, her mother didn't really want to be a mother. And her father wasn't much of a father. And they lived separately with their paramours. And it stayed together only by a legal document. So she really didn't have good parents. And she was jealous of the kids she saw walking to school, who were in the orphanage, because they were laughing. She made herself a tiger it to sustain herself in that environment. And and when they left, she she was able to get to the United States. Her parents were not. By that time, she was about 19. So she could hold her own. But when she got here, she was not befriended by the German or Austrian community in the United States, because she was Jewish. And she wound up in Harlem for a variety of reasons. And her only friends were the black women who lived in her building. And they too were kind of standoffish until she related her issues to theirs. They were all in flight from discrimination. They were all poor. She was dirt poor. She was hungry most of the time. There was no work for her. She spoke English because she had learned it in Austria. But she was determined to make herself of something and to and to apply feminism to in terms of race and gender and and to make it long story shorter. She ended up being the first woman to start a course of women's studies in an American college, which was Sarah Lawrence and the first woman to start a PhD program in women's studies at the University of Wisconsin. She had gotten her PhD at Columbia while she was writing books and taking care of a house. And she too was a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Briefly, but her husband, the film director she married, was a real member of the Communist Party. She was nominally a Communist until she she joined up and started something there called the Congress of American Women, which actually changed the position of the Communist Party of the United States on women's issues was much like the position of the average man. They should stay at home after children. Not going to work. I mean, not try to be an intellectual or anything. And she was determined to change that and she helped. And so the Communist Party, it's kind of a standing, though, because when in 1950, the Congress of American Women turned up on a on a list of subversive organizations that Congress put together. And the Congress of American Women decided to fold rather than go through a lengthy investigation that wouldn't benefit no one. And at that time, she decided to quit the Communist Party because it had it had because of, you know, McCarthy had spoken to the Republican women in West Virginia and he'd spoken his peace to the Congress and it was quite clear that the witch hunt was on. In anyway, she she never mentioned her past in the Communist Party until she published an autobiography toward the end of her life. And she then, you know, blew it open and talked about how she had she had burned papers in her fireplace. Everything that had to do with the Congress of American Women, as she had helped her parents burn documents in their home in Vienna. For similar reasons, I mean, because Nazis were taking over. And communism was not popular. She so she ended up being an amazing scholar on feminism. And one of the things she undertook first, actually the first big undertaking that she did was to her attempt to get a women's studies program going, where was where the men of the history departments who said there's not enough. There's not enough that primary source material. She took it upon herself to go out and get the source material for black women, the writings of black women. And she published a very thick book of writings by black women. And it was that I think as much as anything that got Sarah Lawrence and, and, and the British Wisconsin, and all the women who are who gave her credit for adding race to the issues implicit in feminism. You know, all of these people broadened their causes. It's, it's amazing to me that it wasn't until the 80s that feminism inflected by race, class and gender could be described by Kimberly Crenshaw as intersectionality. But and they were still these people were still I mean, girl learner and Pauli Murray were both instrumental in second wave feminism, the Betty Friedan feminism, until they discovered it was never going to be anything but white middle class women. And they pulled away. This would been 1963, 64, to start this new kind of feminism, which didn't really get defined until 1986. I mean, it's, it's, it is amazing. First of all, how long things take, you know, Martin Luther King was not wrong. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. You know, we see today, we see, you know, we have the Emmett Till, we finally made lynching illegal. How is that possible? You know, I mean, the, you know, not possible. No, it's, you can't imagine. Yeah, don't say gay. I mean, really? You know, how many years is this? This is, you know, give me arc also bends backwards. It can. Yes. You know, the in speaking of scholarship and persistence, it took a lot for you to find and learn enough about Pauli and Gerda to make this as incredibly interesting as it is. I know read it twice. So I attest to that. And I, and I, when I knew I was going to do this, I read a couple of book reviews and one in the New York Times said something that I agree with, which is it's the only book I wish were longer. I've never heard a better compliment from a book reviewer, especially in the New York Times than that one. So, I mean, Gerda Lerner actually paved the way, you know, for me and my daughter, you know, the whole women's studies thing. I mean, it's, we take it for granted now, because I think the arc is longer. It's longer more than it bends. So these are, these are remarkable stories of success in the end. Should we move on to Rachel Carson? Sure. Who, you know, I, there seem to be gender issues in, in like at least four of these people that, that you talk about. And I was very interested at the end of that chapter about Dorothy Freeman and the letters they wrote. It reminded me a little of Emily Dickinson. But Rachel Carson, we, we, we know something about, and you had to bring to life somebody that we know something about, which I think is, is sometimes harder. Yeah, I agree with you. I worried about that as I was doing the research. But fortunately, there is a lot of research that hasn't been used before. And, and she was, she's a very interesting character because her, her books of the fifties, the sea around us, especially in a book she wrote before that and a book she wrote after that were about the invulnerability, the, the, the awesome kind of spiritual quality of nature that wasn't susceptible to our implications or, or anything. I mean, we, we lived among a natural world with which we couldn't do any wrong. So it was very difficult. I mean, these were her best sellers. It was very difficult for her to change gears in her last book. It happened that a friend of hers was suing the the Fish and Wildlife Bureau for having sprayed their garden several times with a DDT, which was known to be, by that time, was known to be a poison. But it, you know, it was known to be a poison of, of, of, you know, unpopular insects. And she didn't really want to cover the, the trial, even though he asked her to. So she wrote her friend at the New Yorker, who had been one of the first people to write about DDT, E.B. White. Why don't you do, why don't you cover this trial? And he sent his, he sent her letter to Sean, the editor of the New Yorker at the time. And, and Sean was smart enough to know, I mean, he had, he was a big fan of Rachel Carson's earlier books also. He was smart enough to know that she should do this, this story. And so he assigned her to it. And she did. And she did an amazing job, I mean, of research, the kind of research she would hate, because it proved everything she, not everything she wrote, but it proved to her general view of nature had been misguided. So anyway, she set out on this, and she did very painful research into the actual effects of what, of our synthetics and our, our practice, our our agricultural practices, and put herself through that at the same time she was dying of cancer, of unknown origin, but very severe cancer, which she had all through the writing, the publishing, you know, all the the passes that come back at you and, and she had very little help. Her mother died at about that time, and her mother had been the person who helped her through everything. So it took great courage for her to do this, but it was that important to her. It's, it's interesting, I dedicated this book to my grandchildren, partly because of Rachel Carson's last appearance in Southern California, where she was giving the graduating class of 1962 their, you know, graduation speech, their commencement address, and she ended it by saying something like, I'm sorry, I can't tell you that we dealt with all these problems. It felt, it falls to you. And even my, my daughter is now in her late 20s, told me about 10 years ago how angry she was, what, what we had left her. You know, why hadn't we done more? And I left, I addressed my grandchildren because I wanted them to know that hope is always a good idea, because we are addressing it now, it's decades too late, and there's still forces, you know, amazing forces against it, but we are addressing it more than we ever did before. And you know, we aren't perfect, and it takes us time to find the right path, but sometimes we do. You know, I love that line, it falls to you, because it does. I'm, you and I, Jim, we've mostly, we've done our part to the extent journalism accomplishes much. And hope is good, but hope is not enough. So, you know, onward and upward for your grandchildren and mine. Well, exactly, I didn't mean just hope. No, no, I know you didn't. I know you. Go in and get them, you know. I just can't tell you how much I enjoy filling in your sentences instead of you. So just, just involves me a little bit. That's great, thank you. So when, when, I love that chapter, I was, you know, the idea, she was in a race against that cancer there, and it was so sad that, that chapter is so sad. I thought you were going to ask me about Norbert Wiener. No, yeah, tell me about Norbert Wiener. Aside from the unfortunate last name. Yeah, right. This is the one chapter where the various characters are not from the same place generally. Rachel Carson was a biologist who worshiped nature and studied nature in the raw, as it were. And Norbert Wiener was all in his brain. He was, there was an article on the, in the Sunday World, Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, in 19, mumble, mumble, that called him the most remarkable boy in the world. And certainly he would qualify because the reporter said, Tim, do you do anything that normal children do? And he said, oh yes, swimming is my forte. But when I've done those things, I like to return to my, oh God, what did he say? My Aristotle, which he read in the original Greek, and my Ernest Hegel, who was a mathematician and philosopher of mathematics, which is the, which is the career he took up. He was not, he was not in any physical science. He was all cerebral in the, in the kind of, you know, philosophy of math, studied with Bertrand Russell, told Bertrand Russell that one of his papers was inferior to his. He was, I mean, the stories that told him about him at MIT were hilarious. I mean, he was known to walk down the hall with a finger reading, but with a finger on the wall, so he would know where to turn. And he was known to go into a classroom when he came to it, all the way around the classroom, back through the door. And he, he, he swam with a cigar. Because the cigar helped him think, so he did the backstroke. I mean, crazy, man, but brilliant. He did a lot of World War II work because he was a mechanical person as well. And he devised a way to, the Luftwaffe were very fast, very high-flying, nothing we've ever seen before. It used to be that you could do it with a, with a mechanical slide rule or something to aim the cannon in the right direction ahead of the airplane. But this was moving so fast, you couldn't do that anymore. So he devised what he called his predictor, which, I shouldn't go into this because it takes too long, but it, it joined human capacities for, you know, human movement to a, a circle of information, which came from the gunner, to the gun, to the airplane and pilot, and made of one, made of that activity a single thing. The pilot was part, the German pilot and the, and his plane was part of the ground control. It was all one thing, and I can't describe it any better than that without taking up all this time, but it was brilliant and it, and it had, it was called cybernetics eventually, and it had, like, un-numb, un-numberable applications in the space program, in the nuclear, in, in, what was the thing called, the global, the thing that looked for Russian ballistic missiles coming at us. I forget what it's called, but anyway, it had, it had applications everywhere. And, but, but he got tired of that and started going into other things like prosthetics. He developed a prosthetic because he had fallen once. I mean, just an amazing mind, but the, the, the interesting thing about this is that Rachel Carson from her perspective and Norbert Wiener from his very different perspective arrived at the same point, which is, don't imagine that things we develop will be innocent. Remember that any weapon, this was Wiener talking, because he had, he had foresworn any military work after, after Hiroshima. Don't imagine that any weapon we create will not be created by our enemy. And he would have nothing to do with that, with that. He wrote books that, at the time when labor was seen as all communists, the, the great strike wave of 1946, 47, he stood up for labor and he was just a genius. But, but he, he agreed with Rachel Carson that they never met. And, and I don't think he ever read Rachel Carson's book and I doubt that she read his. They arrived at the same point, which is that this world we live in is one thing. It's not them and us. It is one thing and we, we risk our own lives. Particularly this was Wiener. We risk our own lives if we don't see that. He was a great man and a great, a great public figure. So, Jim, it was, it came to me that with the Rachel and the, and the Mr. Wiener, that great minds think alike if they're, if they're brilliant enough. But what made Wiener different, I think, I, I love the going around, you know, corners with his, his finger on the wall, is that he was a man, so he got to be eccentric. So, he was almost the liveliest character in your book in some ways. Well, Harry was too, but, but, you know, that he, you know, mostly men get to be eccentric, I think, because if you're an eccentric woman, as Polly and, and, and Gerda could tell you, then you're like the doddy old aunt who shows up for Thanksgiving. So, just a little aside there about the, the man. So, can we go on to Medgar Evers and, and, you know, what, what remains to this day, which is this lax, love their country more than their country loves them. Yeah. And it was never truer than in the military in World War II and beyond. Yeah. What, you know, they, Frederick Douglass suggested that Blacks joined the, the Union cause, fighting for the Union cause, because it would, it would, it would help give them, demonstrate their right to citizenship, self-respect, and respect of their communities. And down, every generation since has said the same thing. Well, not every generation since, but what we're talking about. So, naturally, Black, young Black men, particularly those without jobs, and there were a lot of them at that point, joined the military. And, but the, but the odd thing was for them in France and Europe, wherever they went, they were treated just like anyone else. England, France, you know, they danced with white women at, you know, parties, without trouble. And they, and they were treated on the battlefield by their comrades as equals, because they were, they were fighting together against a common enemy. So they, Colin Powell called it a breath of freedom for Black soldiers. But when they came home, there was no breath of freedom. They were met at their trains that, you know, if they were in uniform, they were warned not to wear their uniforms anymore, or they'd be killed. Their uniforms were sometimes the only clothes they had that were, that were decent. And so one, one man that we know of wore his uniform again and was shot and killed. I start that chapter with Isaac Woodard, who was coming home after, after the peace, after 18 years, 18 months in, in the Pacific theater. And he was on his way home. He had no clothes with him, but his uniform was just our papers. And, and he was on a bus sitting on the, at the rear of the bus. When the, when the bus stopped for lunch, the White Passengers got off and had lunch, and he could not, he knew he could not, he didn't even try to get off. But at some point he went up to the bus driver and said he needed to go to the bathroom. And the bus driver just said, no, sit down. I don't have time to wait for you. So he did. He went and sat down. And then the bus driver called ahead to say he had a problem with somebody on his bus. And at the next stop, the police chief and deputy were at the bus waiting. And the bus driver said that they wanted to see Isaac Woodard, was his name, you know, outside. And he went outside and he started explaining. And the chief of police hit him over the head with a baton, which was a special baton made for extra force. He, he started taking him off to jail. They rounded a corner where no one could see them. And Woodard got the baton away from the chief of police. Just then the other cop raised his gun, you know, appeared and raised his gun and said, drop that baton or I'll drop you. And so he did. And then the police chief started beating Woodard again and then dragged him off to jail. At some point during that confrontation, the police chief ground his baton into each of Woodard's eyes, blinding him for life. That happened, I mean, and worse, obviously. People were lynched very frequently after World War II, soldiers especially, speaking of which it's never mind. And Woodard went to New York and the rest of the rest of that chapter, until I come back to Woodard at the end, is about all the all the black soldiers who came home and felt exactly the same way. Medgar Evers and his brother Charles felt like and started amassing weapons for a race war against the United States to get their rights by force. Fortunately, they didn't, they gave up that plan because they would have obviously been killed pretty quickly. And Medgar, by securities' root, became the first NAACP officer in Mississippi. Because the NAACP did not want to come to Mississippi. They thought it was too dangerous. And so Medgar Evers took up that challenge. And as we know, was assassinated for his trouble and not even a decade later. And his murderer was tried three times. The first two were all white juries who of course let him off. And the third time was with a jury with, I think, four or five black members who convicted him. But Medgar Evers had by then been dead for decades. And he was only one of the people in my chapter who proved how lethal it could be to stand up for a good cause. But there were many like Medgar Evers, and that's what the chapter's really about. It's about all that the black veterans of World War II gave to the civil rights movement, the nonviolent civil rights movement. The nonviolent civil rights movement needed people like Medgar Evers, and Jose Williams, and Floyd McKissick. They had a snick, and no, sorry, I guess I'm confused. But anyway, almost all of the leaders of the black civil rights movement came out of the military, including Jackie Robinson. I see that the National Archives is going to be doing something about Jackie Robinson soon. And they will find out that he was a member of the Black Panthers, which was the nickname for the 371st Infantry Battalion in World War II. And that's where the Black Panthers got their name. Jackie Robinson had been offended by treatment that he received at his base, and he got into a physical fight and was court-martialed. But those stories were, I mean, there are so many stories like that that it's just a blizzard of research. And I keep thinking about the people I wrote about, and I don't want to get caught up in too many asides, but one, for example, is God, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say we're kind of running out of time. And the Woodard actually makes you cry, because he didn't see himself. He was just like Rosa Parks. He's just on the bus. I mean, Medgar Evers took up the cause and lost his life to it, and Woodard lost his eyes to it. But just in the little bit of time, you went from being a journalist to being a historian. And at what point did you say to yourself, in which I see is the crucial point in all of this, okay, I love doing this research, and now I have given over an entire room of my house to this research. And now how do you then, you know, every week I try to get something into 800 words, but you had to get this book here into this. I love the author's story. Just a few minutes on, did you love the research more than the writing? It's my view, nobody likes writing. They only like being done writing. How did you feel about that in the end? Well, the problem was I did twice as much research as I used. No, no, no, I did many, many times. But I was researching a book initially that was about all the various rebellions of the 1950s, especially in culture, which were real rebellions. They accomplished what they tried to do, abstract expressionism, jazz, free jazz, challenged heroes of books like you know, like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, and you know, just rebellion in the arts was easy compared to this. So I threw out all that research that I'd already done to concentrate on these people, because there's a theory about change, which I heard from literally Clinton, and I think I heard it from Bill as well, that you don't make change by changing hearts and minds. You make change by changing the laws, because then hearts and minds will have to follow. I just, I just, I never made, it never made sense to me. And in this book, I certainly proved the opposite, which is that you, that it's hearts and minds that change the minds of the citizenry, and they change the minds of their representatives in Congress. You can't do it without, without them. And these people proved it. I just think, I just think it's a wrong-headed way to approach. In fact, it's impractical, because you can't convince Congress to do almost anything, but you can't expect Congress to move to the, you know, to the left of the, left or right of the people. Well, you can sometimes count on them to move to the right, I think, more than, more than the left, because change, change is scary, especially for members of Congress who are reading the polls. Right. That's true. So you just kind of drag people forward, I think. Yeah. But anyway, go on. We have just a couple minutes left. Yeah, well, just, just that. I mean, that it takes people who are, whose lives are deeply affected by a, by a flaw in our society to really do something about it. Because it's, it's so stressful. It's so difficult for them. You know, you just, I, I, I can't imagine, like your problem with the resistance, I can't imagine going through what somebody like Pauli Murray or somebody like Harry A or somebody like Medgar Evers or Norbert Wiener lived a crazed life. I can't imagine having, having had a life like that. And, and I'm not sure whether we're the lucky ones or the unlucky ones. Well, Jim, on that, I can't answer that question, but a cause, a cause is a great thing to have. And maybe we can leave, if there are any young people watching, read the book to know what it was like when things needed to be changed. And let me say in 2022, it falls to you. So thank you for listening. And thanks to the National Archives. And thanks to Margaret Carlson. Appreciate it.