Don Wildman

It also has these, you know, ideas of helping charity, you know, all these ideas that the government is taking part in, which is a first.

I mean, that was the world of the churches and social organizations.

So are we saying that those steps that Hoover blocked, mitigated by that which he was trying to do also, but those were the steps that got him so unpopular that are the reason that we paint him with this brush?

Yes.

There's such a unique characteristic of people that can read a room like he could, you know, and run a room then as a result.

But he really had that radar that is rare in human beings to the degree that he had it anyway.

I want to understand, I mean, this is a lot of what we're doing here is storytelling our way through the Great Depression, which is so misunderstood as like the day it crashed, everybody was on the soup line.

It wasn't like that.

It was a growing story that was unfolding.

When do things get really bad like the pictures tell us?

And is this the image of guys jumping out of windows because the savings are gone?

This was that time period?

Gotcha.

Now, the images that tell the truth, in my mind, are there's the burning, you know, the searing images of Dorothea Lange, you know, in the in the Midwest and all these sort of things that she tells these stories with.

It's just an extraordinary picture of a country that had prided itself on its steady rise.

And suddenly every the trust of the rug is pulled out from under him.

That's the sense that you get.

Part of the problem is that you've got this emergency crisis happening that is very unfamiliar to the extreme they're in.

But then there's also no experience on how we get out of this.

You know, there's no tools that people naturally fall back on.