Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (Part 2)

Because of his previous ties to the Communist Party, his race, and his sexual orientation, the McCarthy era was extremely dangerous for Rustin. This was one of many reasons why his activism focused on other countries in the 1950s.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast Trade. Phoebe Wilson, Holly Frying say,
we are going to return to the story of fired
rest In. This is a man who spent twenty eight

(00:23):
months during and after World War Two. Is one of
the many conscientious objectors in federal prison. After his release,
he was part of the Journey of Reconciliation, and that
was a project to test a Supreme Court ruling that
found the segregation of interstate buses unconstitutional. He also spent
four months after the war in India studying Gandhian non

(00:44):
violence and speaking on non violence. The world changed a
lot during these years. As had happened after World War One,
black service members returned home and were dismayed to find that,
in spite of having served their country in a time
of war, they were still facing discriminate Asian at home.
That's galvanized the civil rights movement. Nuclear weapons had changed

(01:06):
the tone of the peace movement, and communism was increasingly
seen as a very serious threat. All of this change
had a huge profound effect on Byard Reston's life and work,
which is what we're going to be talking about in
today's episode, and if you have not heard Part one,
parts of this one are going to make a lot
more sense with with that context. I tried to make

(01:27):
it an episode that would also stand alone, but like,
there's only so much we can re explain without making
this episode twice as long. Uh And as was the
case at in Part one, there is a little more
talk by necessity of fired rest in sex life than
might be typical of our show. Because of his previous
ties to the Communist Party, his race, and his sexual orientation,

(01:50):
the McCarthy era was extremely dangerous for Bayard Rustin. This
was one of the many reasons why he started to
look beyond the United States in terms of his activism
in the nineteen five d's. In nineteen fifty two, he
toured North and West Africa, spending his time in Ghana,
then known as the Gold Coast in Nigeria. During his
time in Africa, he met with activists who were resisting

(02:12):
the British colonial government there. He Booke ended his time
in Africa with stops in London, where he met with
pacifists and civil rights activists about how to encourage non
violence independence movements. Among Britain's African colonies. He had originally
planned to do similar work in French colonies, but he

(02:32):
had been previously part of protests at the French embassy
in Washington, d C. And consequently the French government would
not grant him of a visa to do this work whoops.
Once he got back to the US, he set out
on a speaking tour and he started trying to work
out funding to go back to Africa and make a
more coordinated effort to encouraging non violent independence movements. But

(02:56):
as had happened while he was trying to integrate a
federal prison while sir time there is a conscientious objector,
his efforts were derailed Following a sexual encounter. In January
of nineteen fifty three, he and two other men were
caught in the backseat of a car in Pasadena, California.
All three were arrested on charges of lewd vagrancy and

(03:18):
ultimately sentenced to sixty days in prison. This was really
the last straw and Bayard Reston's working relationship with pacifist A. J.
Musty and his organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Musty had
been sorely, sorely disappointed by Bayard Reston's sexual misconbact charge

(03:38):
while in prison, after which Bayard had assured him that
his sexual orientation would not be an obstacle to his
ongoing work. That made this whole incident in Pasadena, from
a j Musty's point of view, a huge betrayal. On
top of the fact that once again byired sex life
had derailed his work. Fired resigned from the fellow Ship

(04:00):
of Reconciliation as a result, this was a hugely pivotal
event in Rustin's life. He had been in prison multiple
times before, but this was the first time that it
was because of something unrelated to civil disobedience or being
a conscientious objector. Since the sexual misconduct investigation had happened
while he was in federal prison, knowledge of what had

(04:23):
happened had been mostly confined to the conscientious object or community,
but now he was a convicted sex offender, and homosexual
behavior carried an enormous stigma. The Fellowship of Reconciliation also
publicized his resignation among its members, so it became common
knowledge in the pacifist community, and from there the other

(04:44):
social movements that Bayard Rustin had been part of the
prevailing wisdom at the time was that this being essentially
fired from the Fellowship of Reconciliation wasn't because Ruston was gay, uh,
it was the as he was flagrant and promiscuous about it.
A j Musty maintained that somebody caught in a heterosexual

(05:07):
encounter in a public place and then sent to jail
over it would have faced the same consequences. Rustin went
from being a sought after voice in the anti war
and civil rights movements and someone who really had the
potential to become an international leader in non violent resistance
to being someone who could really only work behind the scenes.

(05:28):
When he was released from prison, he was depressed and
he felt desperately alone since many of his friends seemed
to have abandoned him. He came to the conclusion that
he was arrogant, that it had been selfish of him
to follow his libido when he had other important work
to do. When he got back to New York, he
entered therapy to try to get back on his feet
and to try to figure out how to exist as

(05:50):
a gay man without sabotaging his work. Again, out of
work and with little left to live on and with
a sex offense conviction as an obstacle to finding employment.
He spent several months trying to figure out what to do.
Was the fall of nineteen fifty three before he found
another opportunity, which was the War Resistors League. Like the

(06:10):
Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resistors League was an anti
war organization, but unlike the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which most
of its members were clergy, most members of the War
Resistors League were secular. Ruston was already actually involved with
this organization. He served on its board, which he had
actually offered to resign from after his arrest in Pasadena.

(06:34):
The board had had declined his offer to resign. The
War Resistors League was at that point struggling, and the
hope was that hiring Rustin as its program director would
help them build connections with other pacifists. The decision to
bring him on was far from unanimous, and A. J. Mustie,
who was on the War Resistors League board, resigned after

(06:57):
it was made in protest, although he returned earned after
his retirement from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the two
men eventually made at least some amends. Rustin would work
with the organization for more than a decade. This return
to the world of act of activism was really difficult
for Rustin. He was still really trying to reconcile how

(07:18):
to live his life as a gay man with how
to follow his life's work as an activist. He felt
like a lot of the activist community was just waiting
for him to mess up again. And even though he
had always been willing to go to prison for his
beliefs and every time he undertook an act of civil disobedience,
he was prepared to be arrested. Now that he had
a sex offense conviction on his record, being arrested again

(07:42):
came with a much higher stake. He started to worry
about his sexual orientation in a way that he hadn't before.
In general, he became a lot more discreet, and he
advised other gay activists to do the same. In the
mid nineteen fifties, Rustin was part of the American Friends
Service Committee study that wrote Speak Truth to Power, which

(08:03):
was a document urging the United States to take non
violent responses to international conflicts. At his own request, because
of his nineteen fifty three arrest, Rustin asked that his
name be left off of it. At about this time,
the civil rights movement and then in the United States
took another turn, and we'll talk about what happened and
how it led to rust and being involved in it.

(08:25):
After a brief sponsor break, get back to the life
of fired Ruston. In nineteen fifty four, the United States
Supreme Court issued its ruling and Brown versus the Board
of Education. This was the ruling that public school segregation
was unconstitutional. We have a whole series on this ruling

(08:48):
in the archive which goes into a lot of detail
about the civil rights movement and how it led to
this ruling and what happened afterwards, So we're not going
to rehash those details here. Basically, though, school segregation unconstitutional.
Although Rustin had been involved in equal rights for black
Americans for much of his life, he hadn't had a
lot of direct involvement in the movement between his advocacy

(09:10):
for integrating the U. S Military in the late nineteen
forties and the decision in Brown versus Board. But the
Supreme Court decision and the backlash that it spawned were
immediately compelling to him. In nineteen fifty five, he started
working with an organization called in Friendship to provide uh
support directly to black civil rights activists who were being

(09:32):
targeted by white supremacists in the South. While the n
double A CP took on various legal aspects of combating
what was going on in the South, and Friendship offered
direct assistance, including food, clothing, and funds to people who
were being affected by racism. On December, one of n

(09:53):
ROSA Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her
seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This act
of civil disobedience, which we have talked about at length
on the podcast before, touched off the Montgomery bus boycott
that is the subject of two episodes in our archive.
Soon Montgomery area civil rights leaders houses were being bombed,

(10:14):
and that includes the house of Martin Luther King Jr.
In Friendship wanted to send somebody to help, and their
most logical choice, in spite of his now checkered past,
was Byard Rustin. Specifically, they thought it would be best
to send somebody who already had lots of experience in
nonviolent resistance and in organizing non violent movements for freedom.

(10:36):
This is exactly what Rustin had spent so much time
doing in the forties, including studies and travels with followers
of Mohandas Gandhi in India. Since he was black, it
also meant that he was less likely to be seen
as an outsider once he got there. Labor leader A.
Philip Randolph connected Rustin to the leaders of the bus boycott.

(10:57):
Once in Montgomery, Rustin wrote speeches and protest songs, and
he also did a lot of practical work arranging car
pools and other transportation for black passengers who were protesting
segregation by refusing to ride on segregated buses. And he
advised everyone who was being indicted in connection with the
bus boycott to dress in their Sunday best and go

(11:18):
to the courthouse rather than waiting for their court date
to arrive. His original plan had been to formally train
the bus boycott's leaders on Gandhian nonviolent resistance, but when
he got Once he got there, it became a lot
more practical and effective to become part of the planning
itself and to offer insights and strategies as situations arose.

(11:41):
He also started to advise Martin Luther King on the
direction of his civil rights work. He strenuously advocated a
form of pacifism, informed by both his Quaker beliefs and
Gandhi's non violent resistance. As one example that kept being
sited the first time he went over to the king home,

(12:02):
there were armed guards outside and numerous weapons in the house,
and Byard Rustin was basically like, dude, you are leading
a pacifist movement. You cannot have all these guns here.
That's not not how it works. But it wasn't just
that though, like we're gonna talk about more, but like that,
that is the keystone example that a lot of people

(12:22):
start with, and the non violence approach that became such
a fundamental part of King's leadership was largely refined and
directed by Rustin's influence. King had plenty of theory, but
not a strong practical sense of how to translate the
idea of non violence to a working social movement. Rustin's
work with King was ongoing until King's assassination in nineteen

(12:44):
sixty eight, although from time to time Rustin's sexual orientation
and his past conviction led him to make himself scarce.
Through the late nineteen fifties, rest and continued to work
both within and outside of the United States. He King
organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in nineteen fifty six
and nineteen fifty seven, and in the late nineteen fifties

(13:07):
he also went once again to Northern Africa, this time
to protest French nuclear arms testing there. He also did
lots of other work within the anti nuclear movement as well.
In nineteen fifty seven, he was invited to attend the
National Congress of the Communist Party of the United States
of America. He had not had any ties to communism
since the nineteen forties, and he was invited as an

(13:30):
outside observer. He attended, and this was apparently when he
caught more serious attention of the FBI. Uh The FBI
maintained surveillance of Buyard Rustin for much of the nineteen sixties,
including wire taps of his phone conversations with Martin Luther King, Jr.
You can read a lot of this online at the

(13:50):
FBI thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. In nineteen sixty,
Rustin's arrest in Pasadena really came back to haunt him.
He and King were planning a protest outside the Democratic
National Convention because no Democratic candidate had expressed a clear
support of the civil rights movement. Democratic Representative Adam Clayton

(14:13):
Powell Jr. Was angry about this planned protest and trying
to put an end to it, so he blackmailed Martin
Luther King with the threat that he would tell the
press about Rustin's arrest and also plant a false report
that King and Rustin were lovers. Terrified at what such
a scandal would do to the movement and to his

(14:33):
own reputation, King canceled the protests and he convinced Rustin
to resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At the time.
Rustin was devastated, but inn He expressed a belief that
his sexual orientation had not been a problem for King
until it became a problem for the movement because of
these outside sources that are jerks. For the next couple

(14:59):
of years, as much of Ruston's work was focused on
nuclear disarmament and freedom movements in Africa and travel abroad
for a while after this whole incident, the civil rights
movement largely went on without him. But this was not
the end of his work with King, and we will
talk about it in the March on Washington. After another
brief sponsor break, it is probably safe to say that

(15:31):
a lot of folks in the United States think of
the civil rights movement in terms of things like segregation
in schools and on buses, discrimination in employment and housing,
and that sort of thing. But there was a whole
additional layer to that, and that was a focus on
economic issues. The March on Washington gets shortened to just
the March on Washington, but it was really the March

(15:54):
on Washington for jobs and freedom, and originally the focus
was largely on jobs. The idea for this march started
with labor leader A. Philip Randolph in nineteen sixty two.
We talked a little bit about him and our podcast
on the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters. Randolph recruited Rustin
to help him plan a march that would draw attention
to the economic issues that were running in parallel with

(16:17):
desegregation in the South. At first, other civil rights organizations
were really slow to join this march, though, and the
War Resistors League had also declined to temporarily release Restin
from his duties to work on it. But in nineteen
sixty three, Commissioner Bull Connor of Birmingham, Alabama turned fire
hoses and police dogs on teenage protesters the KU klux

(16:40):
Klan began bombing activists homes and the hotels where out
of town activists were staying in Birmingham. With this, the
March refined its focus to jobs in freedom, and it
got a lot bigger. Martin Luther King became involved. The
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality,
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Urban League, the

(17:04):
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the
Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters would become the Big six
organizations who all came together for the March. Once again,
rest in sexual orientation and his past arrest put a
dent in his ability to take the helm, even though
he was the one to wind up doing a whole
lot of the planning. Roy Wilkins of the Double A

(17:26):
CP cited the risk involved with putting Rustin into such
a position at such a high profile event, afraid that
having him in such a public facing role would jeopardize
the march and its respectability. In the end, A Philip
Randolph became the director and Rustin was his deputy. The
bulk of their planning took just eight weeks of continual

(17:49):
negotiations among all of these organizations and the people involved,
many of which just did not see eye to eye.
So much went into those eight weeks before the March
on Washington. Apart from the speakers, the musicians, and all
of those logistics, there were the simpler logistics of handling
an expected quarter of a million people. I say simpler,

(18:11):
that's not really correct. It's just a different logistics. Apart
from the speakers, the musicians and all of that, there
was the simple logistics of handling an expected quarter of
a million people. Instructions for protesters were exact, including that
each person should plan to bring nonperishable food for both
lunch and dinner. In The march itself had a lot

(18:32):
of moving parts, including portable toilets, shuttle buses, first aid stations,
just on and on the things you would need for
a massive group of people. As the march got bigger
and bigger, it also got less radical. Restlon's original plan
had been for it to be a wide ranging, active
demonstration with lots of sit ins and direct lobbying, but

(18:54):
as it got bigger, its focus had to get bit
broader and less militant in order for it to still
work and for all of these people to still want
to be involved with it. The whole time they were planning,
the collection of organizers and civil rights organizations expected some
kind of resistance from segregationists and others who wanted the
march to fail. The biggest piece of that resistance came

(19:16):
just three weeks before the march was to take place,
when Senator strom Thurmond of South Carolina read from the
FBI file on Rustin on the Senate floor, including calling
him a sexual deviant and effectively outing him to the
entire nation. This time, though, the movement that had more
than once pushed him out because of his sexual orientation

(19:37):
and his behavior had his back. A Philip Randolph publicly
defended Ruston and denounced Thurman's invasion of his privacy, which
he pointed out pretty pretty clearly was only being made
in order to persecute him. In the end. Of course,
the march itself was huge, between two hundred thousand and
three hundred thousand people. As the last of the formal remarks,

(19:59):
King ate his famous I have a dream speech, and
after he concluded, A Philip Randolph led the gathered crowd
in a pledge to continue to fight for civil rights
after they got home. The leaders of the march then
met with President John F. Kennedy. Rustin was not one
of those who did, but he and A. Philip Randolph
were on the cover of Life magazine that September six.

(20:22):
From there, Rustin really tried to get social movement organizations
to build on the success of the March, to expand
their focus to include other disenfranchised populations, and to try
to work towards a solid plan of progress rather than
going from one individual dramatic protest to another. He also
returned to his work with the War Resistors League and

(20:43):
the Peace Movement, while also traveling and speaking on behalf
of civil rights. In nineteen sixty five, A. Philip Randolph
resigned from the War Resistors League, and he announced that
he and buy Ard Rustin were launching the A. Philip
Randolph Institute. The institute's goal was to expand the impact
of and strengthen the civil rights movement by building connections

(21:05):
between labor and civil rights organizations. The same year, Ruston
published From Protest to Politics, the Future of the Civil
Rights Movement, which was a call to transition the civil
rights movement from a series of protests against equality to
a political movement. He saw the need for civil rights
activists than anyone else he was the target of discrimination

(21:26):
and inequality to band together to form a real political majority.
In some ways, this uh this document was more optimistic
than his real thoughts on the subject, and part because
he was writing it for a broad audience who he
was hoping to get on board with this plan. However,
in the years after the March on Washington, Rustin found

(21:48):
himself on the receiving end of a fair amount of
criticism from the very movement he had been so instrumental
in shaping. A lot of this boiled down to his
being seen as more moderate in a movement that was
becoming a radical, and for calling for building a political
coalition rather than a true revolution. An influx of young
activists saw him as a traitor for trying to work

(22:09):
out compromises with legislators, even though he had gone to
prison for his opposition to World War two. People did
not think he took a definitive enough stance against the
Vietnam War, in part because he was trying to work
within the system, which involved maintaining productive relationships with a
lot of people who were in favor of the war.
By the late nineteen sixties, and part because he had

(22:32):
not been as demonstrative as people wanted against the Vietnam War,
Ruston had few ties left to the peace movement. He
was also at odds with the Black Power movement. They
were definitely prominent Black power leaders who did not agree
with his philosophies at all. His calls to work together
to build political power rather than focusing on individual issues

(22:55):
and individual protests were increasingly unheeded. In the all of
nineteen seventy one, having put himself under an enormous pressure
to write the movements that he saw as floundering, Buyer
Rustin had a massive heart attack. With an increasing number
of disagreeing voices on how to change things in the
United States, Rustin wound up focusing his efforts on foreign

(23:17):
affairs and travel abroad after he recovered from his heart attack,
working with an organization called Freedom House, and that was
a bipartisan organization aimed to spread democracy internationally. He also
advocated on behalf of refugees from numerous nations. In the
late seventies and early eighties, the gay rights movement in
the United States was moving more into the public sphere,

(23:40):
and by ed Rustin did as well. Part of this
was because he'd met Walter Nagle in April of nineteen
seventy seven, just after he turned sixty five. Nagle was
twenty seven, and it was love at first sight. It
was Nagle's first long term relationship and Rustin's most serious
and steadfast of his life. With Nagle's encouragement, Rustin renewed

(24:01):
ties with some of his old pacifist connections. He returned
to an old love of scouring auctions to buy and
restore antique furniture as well, and he joined the gay
rights movement, speaking advocating against racism within the gay community
and lobbying New York Mayor Ed Coach for a gay
and lesbian rights bill. In spite of having lived his

(24:22):
life as a gay man, he declined in nine six
invitation to contribute to an anthology of gay men's writing,
say that it would be dishonest to present himself as
being at the forefront of that struggle. It was not,
in fact being gay that had caused him to be
an activist, because gay marriage wasn't yet legal, and New
York's rent control laws meant that Rustin's death could render

(24:44):
Nagle homeless without some kind of family connection to Rustin.
They created that connection and the only way that was
available available to them at the time. Rustin legally adopted
Nagle in nineteen eighty two, Buyard ruston Can tinued to
be politically active for the rest of his life, including
working as an election observer and visiting refugee camps. On

(25:07):
a trip to Haiti. In seven, he and Nagel both
got sick. A doctor diagnosed them both with an intestinal parasite.
In reality, by Ed Rustin had appendicitis. On Friday, August
twenty one of that year, it was the term and
that his appendix had ruptured and he had parrot nitis.
He died three days later at the age of seventy five.

(25:29):
In the American Friends Service Committee Board restored Rustin's name
to the authors of Speak Truth to Power. He was
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal Medal of Freedom by President
Barack Obama. In that is, Byrod Rustin. A lot of

(25:49):
people speculate about how his life would have been different
if he had been born a little later. Uh that
there are in the whole wake of that Pasadena sex
crime charge um he did some soul searching that was like, Yeah,

(26:11):
even though I've never really hidden who I who I am,
the fact that society causes me to keep this secret
it is definitely a factor on like how I have
conducted myself. Yeah. Anyway, Uh, even though that was like

(26:33):
almost eight thousand words on buyard rust and spread out
over two episodes, there are so many things that he
did that we did not touch on at all. That's
always the case anytime we do a fascinating person's life, though,
you just you can't include every single thing. And he
just never stopped like that was part of it. And

(26:53):
all of these things that he were doing, he was
doing We're we're important. It's like, okay, well, in this
big gap of time between the between the Montgomery bus
boycott and the march at Washington, he was doing all
of this anti war protesting, like all of this travel
abroad and all of this encouraging African nations to non

(27:15):
violently rise up against uh against colonial government's uh. Like
he was just ongoing constantly. Uh. And so I mean
he he was less active and the rest of his life,
but he still like was was touring and speaking and
being an election observer and all that. Even until they

(27:35):
end do you have a little bit of listener mail
for us to wrap up with? I do. This is
from Diana. Diana says, Dear Holly and Tracy, I just
finished your podcast on the eruption of Eldfell on Hayming
this piece of history I've actually heard a lot about before,
but I always enjoy hearing the story. We told. I'm

(27:57):
a geologist, and in two I went to ice Land
for a geology class trip. Among other things, we visited
Hama and hiked up Eldfell. What was so amazing to
me was that l Fella is still very hot. Rocks
are incredibly good insulators, and if you dug down just
an inch or two you could boil water. One student
melted part of his hiking boot. If you think you

(28:20):
had trouble with Icelandic pronunciations, you should look up newscasters
trying to say a f y yoko, which is a
volcano started erupting in March and disrupted air travel across
Europe for weeks. See it in even did a whole
story about the name. Many Icelandic letters look the same
as the English alphabet, but they often have different pronunciations,
especially for combinations of letters. You really have to think

(28:43):
of it as a whole new alphabet. I would add
just one thing to your mention of the mid Atlantic Ridge.
In addition to the mid Atlantic Ridge, there is also
a hot spot beneath Iceland, which increases the amount of
volcanism to produce rocks. Without the addition of the hotspot volcanism,
it is unlikely that Iceland would break the s of
the ocean. Hot hot spot is an area of volcanism

(29:03):
that can occur anywhere in a tectonic plate. The Hawaiian Islands,
for example, we're created by hot spot. Movement of the
tectonic plate over the hot spot creates the chain of islands.
We don't yet know what causes hot spots to occur,
or why they occur where they do. Thanks for a
great podcast, Diana. Thank you Diana for writing in. I
have in fact seen that video. It is hilarious for

(29:27):
several reasons. One is that, like so many of the
pronunciations are so incongruous from one another, and then the
other thing is I'm pretty sure this is the video
that I'm thinking of. I've watched several videos of people
trying to say the thing I'm going to try say again, uh,
because I keep transposing two of the syllables when I
try to say it. And I also freely admit I

(29:48):
cannot make the noise that is two els at the
end of a word in Icelandic, like, I can't do it.
I have tried a lot. Uh. So I think it's
this video where that they then called someone like the
Icelandic Consulate and we're was like, how do you say
this um? And the final pronunciation they had basically had

(30:10):
the end of it sounded like yogurt, which is not
It's also not right, so it was like, there's twenty
seven different weird, bizarre ways people try to say aya
fietla yoko. There we go correctly except for the L part,
which I can't do it. I can't do the L
of them. Uh. And then they're like and this is

(30:32):
how it really is, and then that one is also wrong. No, yeah, uh.
I also have a refrigerator magnet on my refrigerator that
we bought that like it says uh yet ya af
yetla yoko. It's easy to say, and then it like

(30:54):
sounds it out in syllables, except the last syllable rendered
on this magnet is definitely not how it sounds. So anyway,
thank you everyone who was from Iceland for putting up
with the fact that I cannot make that sound that
all of these volcanoes really in with. Uh. We did
walk around on l Belt a little bit while I

(31:16):
was there. We did not dig down in there. Our
plan was to go all the way to the top,
but we were there really early in the spring season,
and it appeared that some of the path that goes
up to the top had been kind of covered over
by some sliding volcanic debris. Uh, And we made we
turned up what we thought was the path, but it

(31:36):
was really just the place where everyone had turned thinking
they could get up that way. And then it became
clear that we had been led astray and we had
to catch our ferry back to the mainland, so we
didn't We didn't get a try again, but we did
b wlok around on there. Did you find it more interesting?
I didn't dig down into it, but I kind of
wish I had, so if you had reached down and

(32:01):
touched the ground, though it did not still feel warm
or did it or do you know, well, the like
the the loose scattered surface of the ground did not
feel warm, But I can't remember whether we said this
that the primary source of heat and hot water in
Haymany now is is residual cooling from that eruption, like
it has become the heating source. Um. And when I

(32:25):
first heard about that, I thought, isn't that a whole
lot of work to put into something that's eventually going
to cool off. It's not gonna cool for a really
long time anyway. Thank you, Diana. And if you would
like to write to us, swear a history podcast at
how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at
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at missing history. Are Tumbler is missing history dot tumbler

(32:47):
dot com. We're also on Pentterriest at pentrist dot com
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And then you'd also come to our website just missed

(33:09):
in history dot com. You can find show notes of
every episode that Holly and I have worked on together,
and an archive of every episode that has existed ever.
In the show notes for this episode, UM, we will
have some links to some of the recordings of Buyer
dressed in UH singing, and we'll have links to his
FBI file the documents from that they're publicly available. And

(33:33):
maybe I'll also link to the video of the guy
from Iceland saying if yet your local correctly uh, which
I think this time, when our listeners have stopped listening,
I said it the best of all the time. So yeah,
So you can do all that a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missed in history
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.

(34:00):
Is it how staff works at home in the