Bracero Program

For parts of the 20th century, the U.S. and Mexico had agreements in place allowing, and even encouraging, Mexican nationals to enter the U.S. to perform agricultural work and other labor in the American Southwest.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm three Cbe Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Today,
I think a lot of people think concerns about immigration

(00:21):
are a recent phenomenon. I mean definitely in the United State,
which is where we live and can talk about from experience,
but maybe in other nations too, but definitely in the US, right,
people don't think of this is a thing that's been
around for a long time. Yeah, I think there's a
prevailing thought that, uh, you know there colonists came and

(00:46):
that was the big immigration thing, and then there was
this big gap and now we're all arguing and worried
about it again. Yeah, it's been like the last I
don't know, thirty or forty years. So in a in away,
in a way, it definitely is a new concern for
people because for about a hundred and fifty years after

(01:06):
the nation was founded, there weren't really any immigration laws. Right,
if you could get here, you got to live here.
That was basically how it worked until um, you know,
the nineteenth century. So back in the late seventeen hundreds,
the country didn't really seem to care about about immigration.

(01:27):
But to look at another way, it is not a
new concern at all, because the United States started passing
immigration laws and a lot of them were targeted at
immigrants from specific countries in the eighteen sixties. So this
is both a really new idea given the whole history
of the United States as a nation uh and a
really old one given that it's been around for more

(01:48):
than a hundred and fifty years. So that whole division
between like legal and illegal immigration is simultaneously new and old.
And today's story or today's story is part of that
centuries long story. Because for parts of the twentieth century,
the United States and Mexico had agreements in place that
we're allowing and even encouraging Mexican nationals to enter the

(02:10):
United States to do agricultural work and other labor, mostly
in the American Southwest. And one specific program called the
Brissero program was launched during World War Two to address
a labor shortage um as American men were needed for
the war effort. But an unintended side effect of this
program that was about legally coming to the United States

(02:32):
to work was this huge increase in the number of
people who were crossing the border from Mexico illegally, and
these illegal entries reached a point that the government implemented
another program, which I'm gonna make it clear this is
not an acceptable word to use today, but it is
literally what the program was named. It was called Operation
Wetback to deport Mexican nationals and huge groups. So the

(02:56):
intertwined stories of these two government programs is what we
are going to talk about today. And before nineteen ten,
there was simply not a lot of regulation of the
United States border with Mexico. People pretty much crossed back
and forth as they pleased. And as agricultural industry started
to really grow in the Southwest, these industries started to

(03:17):
really rely on this readily available and seasonal workforce that
was coming in from Mexico in the nineteen twenties. This
also became true of other industries in the American West
and Southwest as well, including railroads and mining. But today
we're talking mostly about agriculture, so using Mexican nationals as
a source of labor basically came with some benefits. Agricultural

(03:40):
work and a lot of places is highly seasonal and
for the most part, migrant workers who were US citizens
were traveling as families. They would spend the year moving
from place to place as a family for the most part,
spending a lot more time looking for work than actually working,
and when there was work, it was usually worked that
the whole family did it, including the children, and an

(04:01):
effort to try to make enough money to last them
for the rest of the year. So that's not an
ideal situation in a lot of ways. Mexican workers, on
the other hand, tended to be young men traveling in
groups with other young men. A group of young men
was overall a lot more efficient than a family with children,
and on the more exploitive side of things, many were

(04:24):
willing to accept lower wages than what was considered standard
among Americans. Because of a limited proficiency with the English language,
Mexican nationals were often unaware of laws or standards that
could protect them in their work, and as a result,
there were a lot of growers and farmers in the
American West and Southwest who were willing to overlook the

(04:44):
issue of whether a person had come into the United
States legally or not in order to get cheap, easy
to exploit labor. By the early nineteen twenties, though an
increasing number of people were starting to think of this
basically open border in the way it affected the labor
pool is a big problem. Large farms were driving down

(05:05):
their own costs by employing large numbers of Mexican migrant
workers at a really low rate of pay, and small
farms considered themselves to be at a big financial disadvantage.
As a result, labor organizations started tacitly excluding Mexican workers
when they formed unions, and also started using their political
clout to lobby the government for more enforcement along the

(05:28):
border and to put a stop to immigration from Mexico.
In nineteen twenty four, the United States formally established the
Border Patrol as part of the Labor Appropriation Act. As
the US government started taking steps to secure the Mexican
border and curtail illegal immigration in the nineteen twenties, local
communities and states began taking steps to regulate their own

(05:51):
Mexican population as well. As we've discussed in our podcasts
on Mendoes versus Westminster and Macario Garcia, much of the
Southwest and West approached its Hispanic and Latino population in
much the same way most of the rest of the
Nation did its black population through segregation, which was reinforced
either through laws or through social customs in places with

(06:14):
large Mexican and Mexican American populations. Discrimination was widespread and
socially accepted by much of the Anglo community during the
Great Depression, which lasted roughly a decade beginning in nine nine,
and the Dust Bowl, which was a devastating period of
drought and dust storms that struck much of the Southwest

(06:35):
and Great Plains during the same time, life was pretty
hard for pretty much everybody in the region, but it
was especially hard for people of Mexican descent. The Anglo
community was increasingly hostile towards Mexican migrants, viewing them as
unnecessary competition for incredibly scarce jobs. The industries that had
been relying so heavily on Mexican labor for so long

(06:58):
increasingly tried to exp blued Mexicans from their workforce during
the Great Depression. Prior to the Great Depression, the United
States and Mexico had been working together to find ways
to send Mexican nationals who were in the US illegally
back to Mexico. During the Great Depression, those efforts increased,
President Herbert Hoover ordered the Department of Labor to work

(07:20):
out a deportation program. The Mexican government tried to identify
its citizens who were in the United States and in
many cases paid for their return to Mexico. Also, due
to the Great Depression, Mexico was facing its own labor shortage,
so part of the reason it paid to repatriot its
citizens was to try to fill that labor shortage. Between

(07:41):
nine and ninety five, about eighty five thousand Mexicans voluntarily
returned to Mexico and another four hundred thousand words deported
or repatriated, depending on how you want to look at it.
Most of the ones who tried to return to the
United States during the Great Depression were turned away at
the board, which at this point was a lot more

(08:01):
secure that it had been earlier than the nineteen twenties. However,
things shifted dramatically once again during World War Two. The
draft applied to all men residing in the United States,
whether they were citizens or not. Roughly seven hundred and
fifty thousand Hispanic men saw some sort of active service
in the war, and with so many men serving in

(08:23):
the war, the job market changed dramatically in the United States,
many men who had held agricultural jobs went to serve
in the war, and then other men and women moved
out of agriculture and into higher paying manufacturing jobs that
were either opened up as part of the war effort
or because the people who had been doing those jobs
joined the armed forces. That were also disrupted trade with Europe,

(08:46):
which cut off the United States sources of many goods
and meant that basically America had to make them for ourselves.
The overall effect of all this on the labor pool
for agricultural work was, as you might suspect, enormous, and
it led the US to work out a program specifically
to recruit Mexican workers. And we're going to talk more
about that after we pause and thank one of the

(09:08):
sponsors that keeps our show going to return to the
Bricero program. That's huge shift in the workforce during World
War two had immediate and detrimental effects on agriculture. Soon
after the war began, the Southwest's cotton and vegetable growers

(09:30):
were petitioning Congress to hire temporary workers to help them
fill a labor shortfall that basically meant they couldn't harvest
what they needed to harvest. The key here was that
this workforce would be temporary. In the words of a
report from President Harry S. Truman's Commission on Migratory Labor
later on in nine quote, the demand for migratory labor

(09:52):
is thus essentially twofold, to be ready to go to
work when needed, to be gone when not needed. So
the United States, leaning on Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good neighbor policy,
started trying to work out a bilateral agreement with Mexico
that would allow Mexican nationals to enter the United States
to work and then return home when they were done.

(10:14):
At first, Mexico was reluctant to do this for a
number of reasons. Mexican citizens who had previously immigrated to
do exactly these types of work had faced discrimination and
exploitive treatment in the United States. Many had been forced
out of their jobs and stranded during the Great Depression.
So basically Mexico remembered all of that and just didn't

(10:34):
have a lot of confidence that its citizens would be
treated fairly if they went back to the United States
to work. So Mexico insisted that any agreement spell out
protections for its citizens. One that would protect Mexican laborers
while in the United States and would protect Mexico's own
industries from suffering due to a lack of workers. Mexico did, however,

(10:57):
see some potential benefits to allowing its citizens to work
in the United States. It was hoped that anyone who
entered the program would return home with money that would
be injected into the Mexican economy. Running parallel with that
was the idea that Mexico's workers would learn new techniques
relating to agriculture and then bring those new techniques back
to Mexico. The result of this negotiation between Mexico and

(11:21):
the United States was the Brissero program, which was launched
in nineteen forty two by executive order and then formalized
by a bilateral agreement on April nine. It would later
be amended by Public Law seventy eight and nineteen fifty one.
The basic terms of the Briscero program would be that
this would be non military work was not acceptable to

(11:43):
recruit Mexican nationals to work in agriculture and then put
them into the military service. Mexican nationals would be protected
from discrimination. Employers would pay transportation and living expenses, as
well as a fair wage. Workers would get medical and
sanitary services at no cost to them. People enrolling in
the Broscero program would sign a Spanish language contract and

(12:06):
be paid a fair wage that would not be less
than what was standard for Anglo workers in the area,
and workers under the age of fourteen were not allowed.
There were also protections if there was a shortage of work,
guaranteeing a subsistence level pay. If someone contracted with a
Mexican national but turned out not to have work for

(12:27):
them to do, a percentage of the broscero's pay was
also to be saved and returned to them once they
returned to Mexico. The criteria for the workers themselves were
that they had to be young, healthy men who had
agricultural experience but did not own land of their own.
They also needed to have a letter from local authorities

(12:48):
saying that their labor wasn't needed where they actually lived,
and that was to try to diminish the impact on
Mexicans Mexico's own labor force. Applicants would go to collection
points in Mexico, be fingerprinted, be sprayed down with d
d T, and then be taken to the United States.
In spite of concerns that Mexican nationals would take jobs

(13:08):
away from Americans. At first, this seemed like a mutually
beneficial agreement. The United States would get the farm labor
it needed, and Mexico would get new, modernized farming techniques,
an injection of cash into its economy, and jobs for
citizens who needed them. However, things took a turn for
the worst pretty much immediately. Most of the work to

(13:30):
be done was known as stoop labor. This was cultivation
work that was done using a short handled hoe stooped
over rose into the in the fields. This was grueling
and like it could have been done with a long
handled hoe instead of a short handled hoe that required
you to literally stoop over, But for some reason people
thought a long handled hoo was damaging to the crops. Today,

(13:55):
the short handled hoe is regarded as an occupational hazard
and many states it is banned as unsafe. There were
also way more interested Mexican nationals than there were jobs,
and soon officials processing applications were accepting bribes to move
people ahead of the line. Recruitment efforts became prone to corruption.

(14:19):
People who didn't meet these qualifications for one reason or
another also started using the constant traffic back and forth
across the border to make the crossing themselves illegally, and
as was the case before, there were still plenty of
growers who were willing to hire these people for almost
no money. Unscrupulous growers also figured out that a lot

(14:40):
of the Mexican nationals who were actually part of the
Broscero program didn't have a lot of proficiency in English
and weren't aware of the pay and protections they were
legally entitled to under the terms of this program. This
definitely was not universal. In various parts of the United States,
broscero's organized themselves and when on strike, to protest wages

(15:00):
and poor treatment that were specifically outlawed in the Briscero
program's terms. Many growers flouted the rules of the program
and hired people who had crossed illegally to get around
having to worry about all of this. Mexico eventually refused
to send workers to the entire state of Texas because
of flagrant hiring of unauthorized workers as well as other abuses.

(15:25):
So soon illegal border crossings were rampant and the employment
of people who had entered illegally was widespread. Wages started
to drop for basically everyone, because there were so many
low wage workers who had become part of the economy
in the Southwest that minimum standard housing and medical care
that was supposed to be part of this program also

(15:46):
didn't materialize, and a lot of people who actually were
part of it wound up tightly packed together in barracks
on canvas cots, where respiratory diseases and other illnesses spread
like wildfire. Over the twenty two year life of this program,
four point five million Mexican nationals legally came to the
United States to work, some of them returning to the

(16:07):
US repeatedly under new contracts, but far more entered illegally
outside the bounds of the program. There was actually a
six thousand percent increase in illegal immigration between nineteen forty
four and nineteen fifty four. Support for the program, which
had never been universal, started to wane after World War

(16:29):
Two was over and Americans who had survived the war
started to return home and to try to reclaim their
old jobs. The official wartime program ended on December thirty
one of nineteen forty seven, although the program continued to
be extended for peacetime purposes for quite a while after that,
and eventually Mexico, fed up with what it saw as
the United States refusal to enforce the terms of their

(16:52):
bilateral agreement, stopped participating by just declining to send any
more workers through official channels. According to the Texas State
Historical Association's Handbook of Texas, the US retaliated against Mexico's
non participation in nineteen fifty one by allowing thousands of
people to enter the US illegally, arresting them and then,

(17:13):
rather than deporting them, turning them over to the Texas
Employment Commission to be put to work. By the nineteen sixties,
the Broscero program was officially on the way out. Labor
organizations had become a lot more influential in policy and
had started advocating very vocally for jobs in the United
States to be filled by Americans and not by Mexicans.

(17:34):
At the same time, increasing mechanization in the agriculture industry
meant that a lot of the physical labor that had
required this huge labor pool was disappearing. The need for
physical labor became a lot smaller. The Brassero program needed
to be reauthorized periodically, and there were increasingly contentious debates
whenever it came up for renewal. Its re authorizations in

(17:56):
nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty three in particular, were
extremely hotly debated. There was a lot of pressure to
end the program after a bus accident killed thirty two
migrant workers in nineteen sixty three. The Burcero program eventually
expired the following year in nineteen sixty four. With the
abolition of the program. One of the things that proponents

(18:19):
had often said about it turned out apparently to be true.
A lot of people who were in favor of the
program insisted that American workers did not want to do
this work, which is why it needed to be open
to Mexican nationals. After the abolition of the program, there
were about five hundred and nineteen thousand unemployed people in California,
which should have been plenty to cover the seventy thousand

(18:40):
people who were needed to do stoop labor in the
agricultural industry, but the nature the nature of the work
and the wages that were that were offered meant that
a lot of these jobs went unfilled and tons of
fruits and vegetables rotted in the fields, so that there
was a lot of argument that this should have been
like a gradual phase out rather than just an abrupt abolition.

(19:02):
As we said at the top of the show. Running
parallel to all of this was a mass deportation program
focused on Mexican nationals called the horrible name Operation Went Back.
And we're going to talk about that after we pause
once again and take a break and hear from one
of our fantastic sponsors. To get back to Operation Went

(19:27):
Back as an example of how the United States thinking
on immigration shifted. In the nineteen thirties and forties, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt combined two other government agencies to form
the Immigration and Naturalization Service in three This agency was
originally part of the Department of Labor in NTY that

(19:47):
changed the I n S and the Border Patrol that
fell under it moved from the Department of Labor to
the Department of Justice. So with that the I n
S and the Border Patrol were no longer about work.
They were about law enforcement. And as we said up,
Ration Went Back was a mass deportation effort that came
along after the I and S moved to the Department
of Justice. It's often portrayed as a swift decisive effort

(20:09):
to deport people who had entered the US illegally, but
it was really part of a decades long effort that ran,
as we said, parallel to most of the Burscero program.
In the nineteen forties, for example, special Mexican deportation parties
were established to try to apprehend and deport Mexican migrant
workers in There was an attempt to reinforce targeted portions

(20:32):
of the border with chain link fencing. In the nineteen
forties and nineteen fifties, some border patrol agents ran an
unsanctioned quote little barber shop, basically clippers that they carried
with them to cut the hair of repeat immigration offenders,
sometimes in intentionally humiliating ways. In terms of the more
above board efforts to control immigration, a lot of them

(20:54):
really were across national The United States wanted to keep
illegal immigration from driving down wages and causing housing and
social issues within its own borders, and Mexico wanted to
have enough workers to meet its own labor needs, and
also protected citizens from exploitation and discrimination while they were
in the United States. In nineteen fifty one, a report

(21:15):
on Mexican migrant workers in the US pinned all sorts
of social and economic ills on illegal immigration and characterized
the situation as an invasion. Soon, the US was diverting
more and more of the border patrol and I n
S to the Mexican border, more than doubling the number
of agents that were stationed there. In between nineteen forty

(21:36):
three and nineteen fifty three, there were a lot more
people apprehended in illegal border crossings. The number rose from
eleven thousand, seven hundred and fifteen in nineteen forty three
to eight hundred and eighty five thousand, five hundred eighty
seven in nineteen fifty three, with Mexicans making up more
and more of those apprehended. At the same time, though,

(21:57):
the United States didn't actually increase the immigration and Naturalization
services budgets, so even though there were more agents on
the Mexican border, there were fewer agents overall, with the
forces numbers dropping a third between nineteen two and nineteen
fifty one. When Dwight the Eisenhower took office as president
in nineteen fifty three, it's estimated that three million Mexican

(22:18):
nationals in the US had entered the country illegally, but
previous efforts to deport them had increasingly stalled out because
so many farms and ranches were dependent on this illicit
labor pool. In the words of Walt Edwards, who served
in the Border Patrol from nineteen fifty one to nineteen
sixty four, quote, when we caught illegal aliens on farms

(22:38):
and ranches, the farmer or rancher would often call and complain,
and depending on how politically connected they were, there would
be political intervention. Yeah. That political intervention was basically getting
their workers out of jail and turning away from the
fact that they were not supposed to be in the
United States. In nineteen fifty four, Eisenhower pointed General Joseph Swing,

(23:01):
also known as Jumping Joe, as the commissioner of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service. Swing started transferring immigration officials who
had spent a long time in the Southwest to other
parts of the country with the hope of breaking all
those social and political ties to all the local farmers, ranchers,
and political big wigs that was leading the service to
not actually enforce immigration. Then, on June nine four, Swing

(23:26):
announced the commencement of Operation Went Back. One arm of
the operation was meant to physically apprehend and remove people
who had illegally immigrated into the United States. The other
was meant to publicize this effort to make sure people
who weren't in the country legally knew about it and
see the deportation force as a threat. A lot of

(23:47):
this publicity deliberately exaggerated the size and aggressiveness of the
deportation force in the hope of scaring people into leaving
the country voluntarily. On June seventy four, immigration officials started
the actual sweeps to apprehend and deport people who had
illegally immigrated. About seven hundred and fifty immigration agents moved

(24:09):
north through California and Arizona. They started in those few
states because the entrenched resistance to deportation was lower there,
so they were hoping to kind of get a good
foothold before moving on to places where it was more contentious.
They had a goal of apprehending a thousand people who
had entered the country illegally every day. By the end
of July, fifty thousand people had been arrested in California

(24:31):
and Arizona, and an estimated four d eighty eight thousand
had fled the United States on their own, and as
Tracy had said. It started in California and Arizona, but
from there it moved into Utah, Nevada, Texas, and Idaho,
and immigration officials put the people that were apprehended in
these sweeps onto trains and buses bound for Mexico, far

(24:52):
enough south that they simply couldn't turn around and re
entered the United States. Two ships were also used for
this purpose, the Emancipation In and the Mercurial, carried people
from Port Isabel in Texas about five hundred miles to
Vera Cruz in Mexico. At the time, the i n
S claimed that it deported one point three million people

(25:14):
during operation went Back, but those numbers have not really
held up to historical scrutiny. It was definitely lower than that,
and it might have been as low as three hundred thousand.
These efforts actually disrupted some of the agriculture industry in
the states that were targeted by deporting their workforces. Like
we said, a lot of the agriculture industry in the
Southwest and West had become highly dependent on this illegal labor.

(25:38):
The government tried to reassure people that they could get
new labor through the Brascero program, which was still in
effect at this point. In addition to the immediate impact
that it had on the agriculture industry, there were other
problems with Project Wipe Back as well, aside from its name,
which I'm going to say again is a racial slur
we would not normally say. On this show, everyone of

(25:59):
Mexican to scent was suspect, whether they had entered the
country illegally or not, and a lot of the lawful residents,
some of them American citizens, were deported in error. Families
were broken up when some members were caught up in
a sweep and others weren't. Children were left with anyone,
without anyone to look after them when their parents were
arrested and deported. Mexican American communities were disrupted when their

(26:21):
populations were basically decimated, and then that would basically leave
whoever was left without the basic life amenities that they needed,
and the problems did not end north of the border.
People who were dropped off in Mexico were often left
in completely unfamiliar territory where they had no friends or family,
without any food, without water, and with no money. Eighty

(26:44):
eight people from just one roundup died of heat stroke
after being left in remote territory without food or water.
Conditions on the emancipation and the mercuria were also appalling,
incredibly overcrowded and dismal. On one voyage a Ryan, it
broke out and the use of ships was eventually stopped
after seven people drowned during one voyage. Apart from all

(27:07):
of that, that ten percent of their pay that was
supposed to be withheld for legitimate participants of the Burcero
program and then returned to them when they returned to Mexico,
A lot of people never saw it. A settlement was
in the works in two thousand and eight to restore
this pay to the former workers and their descendants, but
as of there were still marches and protests going on

(27:27):
to have this money restored because it had never actually happened.
So that is the basics of like this long kind
of convoluted, intertwined effort to both recruit and deport Mexican
nationals in the United States. Uh. I know for sure
that there are folks in the world whose mindset is, well,

(27:49):
they're illegally in here. It serves them right. I personally
think that if you are traveling hundreds of miles away
from your family to do physically grueling, stoop labor for
little money. Like imagine what your life is like to
lead you to that decision? Right, Like what other option

(28:12):
might you have? Have empathy? That's what I'm saying. Uh,
do you have some listener mail that is empathetic or otherwise? Oh?
It is, It's so empathetic. It's from Richard, and it
is about our recent podcast on Desmond T. Doss and
Um And Richard says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I want

(28:36):
to drop you a note and tell you how much
I enjoy listening to the podcast. I go for a
walk every morning before I go to work, and I
listened to podcasts as i walk. I'm pretty sure that
friends and family are tired of me telling them things
I have learned by listening to you. Your recent podcast
on Desmond T. Doss really struck a chord with me.
I didn't learn about him in history class, but I
was familiar with his story. When I was a boy,

(28:56):
I love to read. My favorite place was the public
library and long Mont, Colorado. During the time I was
going to school in long I read just about every
book in the kids section of the library. I still
remember being disappointed that I was only allowed to check
out three books at a time. I also didn't understand
why I couldn't check out books from the adult section
on my kids library card. I'm gonna pause from this

(29:18):
for this, from for this. This was exactly my experience
as a child, so it was pretty close to mine.
And I will say when I first read this email,
when it first came in, my first thought was, Tracy
is going to fall in love with this? Yep. I
also had the problem of when I was in preschool,
I had read all the books in the classroom and

(29:39):
then there weren't anymore, and I was very frustrated by
the situation as a as just as a comparison. My
solution was to kind of sweet talk the librarian and
I got books on the down low. I was too
I was too socially anxious to do this. In kindergarten,
my teacher wanted me to go to the library by
myself to get books to read, because like I already

(30:02):
could read, so I didn't really need the lessons about
how to read, and I would just I would just
cry because I couldn't handle the idea of going to
the library by myself and asking a stranger to help
me find a book. Anyway, I'm gonna get back to
the letter now, which is much more positive than the
story that I just told. So Richard says, I would
take my three books home and have them read in

(30:22):
a day or two, and then beg my MoMA to
take me back to the library. I kept a flashlight
handy for reading after I was supposed to be asleep
the long mom The long Mont Public Library was my
access to knowledge. One of the books that I read
that made a big impression on me was The Unlikeliest
Hero by Bouten Herndon, was a story of Desmond Doss.

(30:43):
I had the honor of listening to Desmond Doss speak
to a group of young people. I had taken a
group of young boys, they just ten to fourteen to
hear him. After his talk, my boys wanted to meet him.
We waited for a chance to talk to him. Doesn't
state until everyone who wanted to meet him had a chance.
He took the time to visit with each one of
the boys personally. After he talked, the boys loved him

(31:04):
and were very impressed. They said to me, we got
to meet a real American hero. I am proud to
have been able to meet this gentleman. His story made
an impression on me when I was a boy, and
when I met him, I was impressed by his humility.
Even though everyone in the audience wanted to hear about
his medal of honor, he was uncomfortable talking about his actions.
He focused more on being prepared and being willing to

(31:26):
help others. He stressed the importance of standing up for
your convictions. I remember talking him talking about the poster
that showed the Ten Commandments in the Lord's Prayer and
what an impression it made on him. Thank you for
making more people aware of this humble American hero, Richard.
Thank you so much, Richard. I don't have anything else
to add because I interrupted a letter to add all

(31:48):
of my commentary support your local library. I can say
that sure, I so much of our work is tied
directly to our local library. And I have such such
fond memories of my local library when I was a
child and summer reading programs, and where we lived was
kind of rural, so it took us a little while

(32:09):
to get to the library, but all summer long, I've
basically looked forward to go into the library and getting
as many books as possible. Uh. If you would like
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(32:31):
We're also on panterst at pinterest dot com slash miss
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(32:51):
notes and an archive of every podcast we have ever done,
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