Charles W. 'Chuck' Bryant

Dude, she couldn't vote until she was 40.

But wasn't allowed to vote for her boss, essentially.

Oh, yeah, that scared them to death.

Yeah, and pre the union stuff, like kind of right after the Great Depression hit, one of the first things they did together was created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, which was a really big success, one of the big early successes of the New Deal in that they said, you know what? We have all this – we have this workforce of these unskilled, unmarried men.

And let's get these guys working in conservation. We have this vast areas of rural land and natural resources. And let's send these guys out there to work on this stuff. And they did. And it provided a ton of jobs to the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Oh, I think you mean the Wagner Act. Yes.

That's amazing. I feel like we had to have talked about her in our unions episode, and if we didn't— Shame on us, but also shame on the fact that she probably didn't pop up in our research, which is one of the problems.

All right, so I'm going to pass that buck.

The buck stops over there. Well, we're making up for it now either way.

Yeah, and boy, we should do one on Social Security at some point.

Go ahead. I'm looking at it. Well, no, I'm going to have our little assistant over here check that. Can you go and check on that? Okay. They're on it.

Like we've ever had anyone that worked for us. That's the funny thing is when we get emails over the years, they're like, well, to Josh and Chuck and Jerry or whoever on your staff is reading this. It's like, yeah, it's pretty much us.

Well, I want to be fair. To be fair, we work for a big podcasting network, and there are a lot of people that help us get stuff out in the world, but we have never had, like, a Stuff You Should Know staff of eight people who only work for us and research for us and all that stuff.

I feel like—I'm glad you said that because it felt like I was patting ourselves on the back for a second there. No, the opposite. You dashed that very fast. Sure.

So Social Security, what we're talking about in general, everyone knows what this is, is basically a system where younger, hardy people working hard in this country help out older people, retired people, perhaps disabled people, people that have had work-related accidents. People who wear funny hats. People who wear funny hats. Yeah.

And pay into this system that ideally – and we're not going to get into the weeds here. That would come on our social security podcast. But ideally then when you are old or in need, then you have that same money waiting for you because of the younger generation and the younger workforce.

Yeah. And it's not like, I mean, he didn't run for office with Social Security on his list of things to do.

Yeah, and it's not like I was saying at all that FDR was like not a champion of it or was just lazy. He had a bunch of stuff going on, and he had a bunch of irons in the fire. So he needed her to come in and say, hey, listen, this is all great because we're in a – tragic situation right now, like we're trying to put out a fire.

But what I want to do is make sure another fire doesn't happen in the future.

Yeah, and she also, you know, we talked about some of the things she did earlier in terms of her career, in terms of fair labor practices. But when she was secretary of labor, she had real teeth to make real change. And during her tenure, she helped craft the Fair Labor Standards Act. She helped establish minimum wage laws, maximum work hours laws. And she finally said, you know what?