Heather Ann Thompson

Keep your eye on the three-headed baby.

Don't keep your eye on the fact that there's no more public...

hospital care for you know x y and z so you can get the point i didn't realize how deliberately this was all kind of crafted over 50 years to end up where we are right now so i want to i want to test something on you and get your reaction to it and

Yeah.

It's a great question.

So there's a little bit of a yes and no in there.

So on the one hand, when we look back in American history, there is this kind of romantic view that at least there was a time, and I do think it's a little romantic, that rich people understood they had to take care of at least enough people through philanthropy.

And it's not that that wasn't the case.

There was always philanthropy.

There was always rich people that were willing to

you know, fund a hospital or set up a library or, you know, try at least to give a little bit back.

But one of the most dramatic things that happens over the course of the 20th century, it's the thing that actually allowed your

your family to become union members.

It took a lot of fights, deep, deep fights.

Ford was in a bitter, bitter battle with the UAW, with the UAW insisting that workers had the right to a decent wage, and Ford bringing in goon squads to absolutely try to break the union.

By the way, unsuccessfully, there was a union that came into Ford.

And the truth is that rich people, every bit of the taxes they had to pay, they had fought it really from the beginning.

They fought the New Deal.

They fought the funding that it would take for things like Social Security for everybody.

They fought unions tooth and nail.