American History Tellers - National Parks - Interview with Parks Superintendent Greg Dudgeon | 7

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

In 1980, Jimmy Carter signed into law the The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. That act remains controversial even today, as it set aside 43,585,000 acres of new national parklands in Alaska, including the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Superintendent Greg Dudgeon oversees both and continues to balance the mandate of the Parks’ mission with the needs of Alaskan residents.We’ll talk to Greg about his affection for the land, how Alaska captivated him early on, and the struggles of managing an area the size of Belgium, all entirely above the Arctic Circle.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history. your story. Next week, we begin a new series on the civil rights movement. As the United States entered World War II, the country remained deeply divided by segregation. For decades, Jim Crow had maintained a stranglehold on every facet of Black life in the South. And in the North, African Americans were often excluded from the best housing and employment opportunities because of the color of their skin.

But across the country, Black communities were beginning to rise up. They were fighting and sacrificing for freedom overseas. Now, it was time to fight for their own freedom at home. Today, though, we talk to Greg Dudgeon, Superintendent of the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Yukon-Charlie Rivers National Preserve in Alaska. For the past six weeks, we've explored the history of America's best idea, our national parks. They began as the nation was rebuilding from its calamitous civil war. Westward expansion had already pushed the nation's boundaries all the way to the Pacific, and it was there, in the wilds of the Sierra Mountains, that the seeds of our park system and a movement to preserve our natural wonders began. Passionate Americans explored the Yosemite Valley, got both lost and found in

Yellowstone, and brought the struggle to balance the needs of a growing population with the desire to protect the natural world all the way to the White House. Fourteen presidents later, in 1980, Jimmy Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. That act remains controversial even today, as it set aside 43,585,000 acres of new national parklands in Alaska, including Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Yukon-Charlie Rivers National Preserve. Superintendent Duggin oversees both and has had to work himself to balance the mandate of the park's mission with the needs of Alaskan residents. We'll talk to Greg about his affection for the land, how Alaska captivated him

early on, and the struggles of managing an area the size of Belgium, all entirely above the Arctic Circle. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Explore themes of friendship, loss, and hope with remarkably bright creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Find what piques your imagination.

Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Rising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Greg Dudgeon, thank you for talking with us today. In our most recent series, we've been exploring the history of America's national parks. Early on, when we were contemplating a series on the topic, I joked that rocks and trees couldn't be too interesting. But as we did our research, we found an expansive story as big as America itself and filled unintended consequences like the continued displacement and slaughter of Native Americans, the mishandling of natural resources, the pressure of commerce and development to exploit these resources, and the triumph of the park system to build itself, learn from its mistakes, and continue to this day to preserve and protect these lands and make

them available to every American citizen. You are a superintendent of the second largest park in the country. So I was wondering if you could introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the parks you manage. I would be happy to, Lindsay, and it's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for inviting me to speak with you. My name is Greg Dudgeon, and I am the superintendent for two of the national park units in Alaska,

Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and Yukon Charlie Rivers National Preserve. Our headquarters are here in Fairbanks, Alaska. Gates of the Arctic is actually entirely north of the Arctic Circle and north of us. It takes me about 90 minutes by airplane just to get to the gateway community of Bettles, a community of about 13 people year-round. And that is where we generally launch from into the park, which, as you may know, is about the size of the country of Belgium. We're about eight and a half million acres, all above the Arctic Circle. Yeah, that's incredible. Did you say population 13? Well, the community of Bettles, Alaska, which is where we call our gateway community,

is a year-round community off the grid, off the road, and has a permanent population of 13 people. Wow. I was curious how remote it was, so I did a quick check on Google Maps to see how long it would take me to drive from my house to as close to the park as I could get. Google Maps actually complained that it couldn't find a route all the way. And it would take me 71 hours of continuous driving. 12 hours of that, which is almost 20%, would be in Alaska itself. Just indicating how big this state Alaska is. Are you from Alaska? Well, you know, I moved to Alaska right out of college, and at that point, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with my adult life.

I came to Alaska as somewhat of a summer lark and unexpectedly found a home of the heart. I have considered Alaska home since 1983, and I have lived here all pretty much permanently since 1987. You know, you just used an interesting phrase, a home of the heart. I think if we look back at all the men and women that we've studied who were instrumental in the history of National Park System, they found or discovered a similar calling. They were very different people. From John Muir, a Scottish-American shepherd, all the way to Stephen Mather, a borax mining millionaire.

But they all found something in the wilderness that spoke to them. And so it sounds like you were one of them too. You've made a life out of service to the wilds of Alaska for, well, how many years? 20? More than that. My career here really began in 1987. That makes me a bit of an old timer, I guess, with a number of tree rings. But, you know, I can't imagine a better or more fulfilling place to spend one's career. And I can't imagine doing anything else. And I can't imagine not wanting to do this yet for a very long time. Well, that's actually something I would want to explore, if you don't mind being reflective for a bit. I'm sure you meet many like-minded persons who love and adore their national parks, not just in Alaska, but elsewhere.

What is it about the role, about the land, that is so attractive that one could commit 31 years to service to something that most people don't think about except maybe to get away on Labor Day weekend? Well, I think initially what struck me as does many people in Alaska is just the size and scale of the parks. You're talking about landscape-scale parks and Gates to the Arctic, for example, which at eight and a half million acres is about the size of four Yellowstones combined. And yet there are no designated trails, no designated facilities. It's all essentially a wilderness park. And not that parks of large scale with very little development in them is unusual in Alaska. But I think it's the. But I think it's the

landscape. I think it's the wildness. I think it's the opportunity for unconfined recreation and recreation that is so difficult to find, for some of us anyway, anymore in the lower 48 states. In some ways, any time spent in Alaska, if this place touches your heart, as we just mentioned, in some ways it makes you almost unfit to live anywhere else. Unfit. That's what I said. Almost unfit. That's right. So now, unfit for life anywhere else, you are the superintendent of the Gates of the Arctic National Parks and Preserve, as well as Yukon-Charlie Rivers National Preserve. Right. So in this case, I'm the superintendent for both of those National Park Service conservation units. Gates of the Arctic has the distinction, apparently, of being the least visited

recreationally national park of the system. Other than its remoteness, which is probably the answer, is there any other reason why Gates of the Arctic is set apart from the other parks? Well, again, I, you know, I don't know how different we are for those parks that are off the road system. I will say that compiling the visitor use numbers for Gates of the Arctic is particularly challenging due to the fact that visitors are not required to register or to get a permit. So the data that we collect on backcountry visitation is gleaned solely from visitors who, believe it or not, participate in our free bare barrel loaner program. And it's from these registrations that our visitor use numbers are taken. To be honest, it's impossible to know how many visitors are entering the park that aren't included in our data.

Visitors who bring their own bare barrels, for example, or visitors who enter the park from the haul road, the Dalton Highway, Anaktuvik Pass, or private aircraft are less likely to be counted. And that is a partial, but a pretty good reason as to why, again, those numbers are particularly challenging to derive. Right. Completely understandable. I think the distinction of the least visited national park is actually probably a badge of some sort of honor. It's not really derogatory. It's that this is so pristine and untouched a land. So I certainly hope you don't take offense if we point that statistic out. Not at all. Not at all. most of the central Brooks Range, which Gates to the Arctic does, was an idea of Bob Marshall,

one of the founding fathers of the Wilderness Society. And Gates to the Arctic, to a great degree, is the embodiment of Bob Marshall's idea that the Brooks Range should be a permanent frontier and that people visiting there should have the opportunity and the ability for, again, unconfined recreation in a sense, perhaps, that they were standing in a spot and looking at an area that maybe had not been seen by human eyes before. And that would be indicative of a preservationist mission for the park, to protect the land from use. We've explored another school of thought, one of conservation, the proper use of nature. But Gates of the Arctic isn't strictly preservationist. Its charter allows, in a very

limited manner, continued harvesting, hunting, and fishing. That's true. And again, Gates is not unique in that way. There are now 15 National Park Service units in Alaska, and a number of those, like Gates of the Arctic, were established in 1980 as a part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. And for those parks that were either created by ANILCA, as it's known, or enlarged by Anilka, the idea was that people living in rural Alaska that had some sort of geographic or cultural connection with these new park units would be able to continue their traditional life ways, including to hunt in the harvest where they and their ancestors had derived a living from in the same manner and in often cases, the same methods and means. Now streaming.

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Right. Well, before I fully answer that question, let me again emphasize that Anilco was very clear that this was not a promise or a guarantee to Alaska Natives, but this was an allowance for anyone who lived at a permanent residence in one of these remote communities or perhaps even lived in a remote cabin away from any community, but again, that had a geographical or cultural connection to the parklands. And so, to help answer that question, how many rural Alaskans would be eligible to harvest and to hunt in Gates of the Arctic National Park. And I would estimate that number to be somewhere in the vicinity of 400 to 500 people. Most of those communities, again, are outside of the bright line boundaries of Gates the Arctic with one very important exception. And I'd love to be able to

talk about that exception if we have a moment. The very last nomads, if you will, in the United States were people, essentially five families, if you will, who had descended from almost 10,000 years of people traveling behind the caribou herds and making a living from caribou and doll sheep and fish and the things that they could harvest, animals that they could harvest in the central Brooks Range in the Arctic coast of Alaska. And in the 1950s, these families were convinced that in order to be able to school their children and have a post office and to live a life that I guess was more characteristic, if you will,

of our modern days and times, those families settled into a valley in the heart of what was to become Gates the Arctic National Park. And they called their community Anaktuvik Pass. To this day, that community, which is on private land surrounded by the national park, has a population of about 300 people. And they, again, are descended from, and some of the remaining elders still remember, the very last migration, if you will, before their grandfathers and mothers settled into the valley and this permanent community called Anaktuvik Pass. So, five families. Five families, essentially, right, yes. It's astounding to me, a city dweller, that there could be such a massive expanse of land

so sparsely populated. That expanse must make it hard to manage. I'd assume, like any job, that there are good days and there are bad days in the park. What would a good day be for you? Well, on a really, really good day, we might have heard that there was somebody missing or who had not arrived at their departure point from the park. And we would begin a search of the area and reach out to people maybe living in or having traveled through the vicinity recently to find out if they had seen or heard from anybody that might meet the description of someone we're looking for. And then, of course,

the really good news is when you find them. And this particular summer has been somewhat unique because of all of the rainfall that we've received in the park. And as a result of the rainfall, very high water levels in the rivers that people will travel down. And all is well and good until you get people who are maybe less experienced with their pack rafts, and they get into high water situations. And we've ended up with a fair number of people that have had to be rescued, if you will, from the park. Fortunately, we've had no fatalities this year, but we have had quite a few extrications. That's been and has made up a number of really good days here. So, a good day is when someone gets lost, but you find them. I suppose a bad day is when you don't. A bad day, a really, really bad day,

is when you don't. And again, because parks remote like these require a fair amount of effort and and energy to get to or to fly into. There are mishaps and incidents of that type that are difficult to deal with. We have not had that kind of difficulty this year, thank goodness, and hopefully will not. But we are also in a busy time of the year where people are out harvesting before the harshness of winter hits. And so every day we stay tuned to our telephones and our computers. And, of course, our field ranges are out and about patrolling by aircraft and by boat, too, to ensure that if people are out there and need help, that if we're not there, that we can get to them. Let's assume that I want to stay an average of eight and a half days in the park. And I am, as your website states, proficient in outdoor survival skills and

be prepared to care for their own life and their partners if an emergency arises. I know my cell phone won't work too well, but let's say that I am prepared. Could you walk me through perhaps what I might explore and discover in my eight and a half days in the park? Where do I start? I'd be happy to. Well, just to go back to your cell phone, you might as well leave that at home because your cell phone isn't going to work. satellite phones, or there are other products there that utilizing satellite technology, they can use the internet or other means of reaching out to their families or friends, but the cell phone's not going to work. We don't have cell towers in the park. What most people will do is, since we do not, we are happy to help people plan their excursions, but we don't make specific suggestions about sites to visit or places to go or do route planning because, again, going back to that frontier ethic or thought that Bob Marshall helped to promulgate. We want people to have a full

opportunity to explore and to have a sense of independence, even as they are planning their trip, let alone when they're within the park. And so what you would likely do would be go online and start researching about Gates to the Arctic and getting a sense of landmarks or geography, places you might be interested in seeing or an experience you might want to have. A fair number of people, almost 20% of the people that visited Gates to the Arctic last year decided that they wanted to float a portion of the Noatak River.

And so why don't we start there? You'd go online and would research and look up what you would find interesting about the Noatak and get a sense of where you might have your float plane or seaplane, as some people down south call them, land you. And depending on whether you're going to use

a float plane or a wheeled plane, you would contact a local air taxi provider and find out what their recommendations might be. You're going to go into the upper no attack, and so you're going to find that it's likely best to use a float plane. And to do so would require flying in the Fairbanks and then flying into Bettles. And from Bettles, you would pick up even a smaller airplane on floats that would fly you into the headwaters of the NOAA attack. When you arrived in Bettles, you would stop by the Park Service Visitor Center and you would talk to one of or a couple of our rangers there to get most recent conditions and to find out if anybody had any information from a recent trip that might be helpful or informing to you.

We would provide a backcountry orientation, answering any of the questions, specific questions you might have, or giving some advice from things that we know or have learned through the School of Hard Knocks ourselves. And then, of course, we would provide you with some of those bear barrels so that you could put your foodstuffs and other scented items in a locked container, a locked metal container that would prohibit an animal, should they come across your foodstuffs, access to that. We don't want to habituate the wildlife, bears or what have you, to human food sources. And so with that, with your food packed and your gear ready and your folding canoe or your inflatable raft, or perhaps even your pack raft, you would fly into the headwaters, get dropped off, the airplane would take off, and that entire

eight and a half million acres is now entirely yours. That's a lot of acreage to contemplate. Do you have a favorite spot of your own? Do I have a favorite spot? You know, generally speaking, it's wherever I happen to be at the moment. I do have a fondness, though, for the Arragach Peaks, which are large granitic spires

in the central portion of the park that, to the Nunamute, the inland Eskimo, look like an outstretched hand from the landscape. And their word for the mountains, the Arragach, meant essentially that, an outstretched hand. I also, I love the no attack, I love floating rivers, and there are six congressionally designated wild and scenic rivers in the park, and they're all somewhat different in terms of geography and geology, though you'll tend to see much of the same wildlife. And so, Gates to the Arctic, just as you said, has a lot to offer, a lot of different experiences.

And it's really up to you and what you find most interesting and how you like to recreate. You're not, of course, confined to a river trip. You may decide that you want to put a backpack on and do what people for 10,000 years have done there, and that is traipse across the landscape, following a trail of the caribou or different river valleys, working your way to a particular landmark or a lake for a pickup later. Part of the glory, again, if you will, is the fact that this is unconfined recreation, where your campsite is wherever you happen to choose it. And it's all about recreation as well as recreation.

I'm glad that you used that phrase again. You've used it before. It's to recreate or recreate. I think all of us who have even just gone camping can understand the recreation that being in the wilderness can afford. I wonder if you have met someone who, after visiting the park, was particularly moved or touched, who found something in the park that they didn't bring in with them. I could give you any number of examples, and it's a difficult one, only because of the number of people who have shared their own stories with me or examples of how a trip to or an experience in Gates to the Arctic helped change their perspectives or even put them on a different life way. I won't share his name, but there is a well-known writer and photographer who lives in Anchorage who shortly after I arrived here wrote to me at a rather eloquent and lengthy email

about a trip he had had, a backpacking trip he had had in Gates to the Arctic that helped change his views on life and the direction he was going at that time and has now been fully and wholly engaged in helping to conserve and preserve what's left of wild Alaska and particularly its wildlife and writes and is published regularly on those types of subjects that reaches probably a good number of people living in Alaska and perhaps even outside that, again, not only helps inspire, but helps to inform and educate as to what some of the contemporary issues are today and the opportunities as well as challenges for those of us who believe and understand that there are parts of this world that should remain as they

have been, not just for this generation and our opportunity to experience what Wild Alaska has to offer, but the future generations to come who will need these places just as much as we do, if not more. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on

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Join Wondery Plus and The Wond land that, in 1980, suddenly became the purview of the National Park Service. With a mandate of conservation that sometimes was at odds with how these Alaskans lived their lives. That tension boiled into some violence and continued for years. How are relations with Alaskans now? How has the Park Service and its relationship with these Alaskans changed? It's a really difficult question to answer because some of the answers depend on where you're living and the relationships that people have with park staff and park management. I would say on the whole, things have

changed rather dramatically since 1980 when a number of Alaskans, and again, I'm speaking in generalities now, but Saul understood the creation of parks and refuges up here as a locking up of the land. And I think over the years, many more Alaskans have begun to see that and understand it's not a lock up of the land, but it's a locking the gates open, if you will, whereas development and extraction activities are prohibited, if not severely limited, in most national parks, that the fact that national parks and the wilderness resources and the wildlife that they contain provide not only an opportunity for recreation and recreation, but also the economics, if you will.

I think that as I look back over 2017, I understand that the economic benefit of parks in Alaska equated to about $1.9 billion. That's with a B, dollars. There were 2.8 million visitors and 19,000 jobs specifically connected to National Park Service units in Alaska. More than 400 private businesses operate in national parks in Alaska. that are not necessarily consumptive, but in other words, can be utilized over and over again through tourism and the fact that people, not only from our country, but the world over,

want to come to Alaska to see its naturalness and to enjoy the empty horizons. And so that's helped over the years. Now, there are certainly places, and there are certainly communities that look to their backyards where a national park site is located and would still say to this day, you know, we were never asked, and, you know, we don't welcome this. And I'm certainly in my position used to communicating with people who

have those sentiments. And then, of course, there are those who live in the off-the-beaten-track places, the rural communities and the bush. Some of those individuals probably wish that there were more development and extrication activities and businesses, but many, many others, many others, I think, have become grateful and have voiced their gratefulness that the national parks, as established by ANILCA, with the provision for subsistence and traditional life ways have made and have allowed them to continue their lifestyles that otherwise would have been gone. And so as I started, it's a mixed bag, but I think more Alaskans, probably more than ever, see national parks and national park sites in Alaska as a benefit. One of the other tensions that the National Park Service has had to deal with is that of wildlife, and in particular predators and humans. I know that for 20 years, the National Park Service has been monitoring the wolf packs in your Yukon-Charlie Rivers National Preserve, but there perhaps has been some difficulty wolf packs in your Yukon Charlie Rivers National Preserve,

but there perhaps has been some difficulty with that program. Can you tell us what you perhaps were trying to do and what's been happening recently? I'd be happy to, right. So over 20 years ago, the staff who managed and worked in Yukon-Charlie River's National Preserve began to look very hard at the wolf population in particular. And back then, the idea was to try to understand wolf ecology and what that predator did or its impact on not just caribou and moose, but the larger ecosystem in the National Preserve, and to try to understand what predator-prey relationships meant. And for over 20 years, we, the National Park Service, had a capture and collar program that would help us understand how many animals and where they traveled and where they would den and what have you.

And then about the time that I arrived on the scene, 10 years ago, the state of Alaska started its latest venture into more aggressive predator control. Now, that doesn't take place within the boundaries of Yukon-Charlie River's National Preserve, but the state was quite active outside of the preserve. And early on, the state manager for Fish and Game and I would sit down and talk about how could they best avoid collared animals that were a part of the study, the long-going study, for the National Park Service when those animals were located outside of the preserve. Often the wolves that would call Yukon Charlie home or would have denning or home ranges within the preserve would, of course, go outside of the preserve in pursuit of prey. And when they were outside the bright line boundaries, they were subject to predator control,

particularly aerial predator control. And for the first couple of years, we were able to work out an agreement that essentially protected the collared animals within the packs that had home ranges within Yukon-Charlie River's National Preserve. And then over the ensuing years, there was less and less of that cooperation for a variety of reasons.

What I'd like to be able to share now and am happy to share is that it looks as though the state is going to take a hiatus with the predator control. And as a result of that, not only are we able to recolor wolves now, which we have done, and are following them again. These are satellite collars, so we don't have to be intrusive. But it's going to give us, trying to make some lemonade out of lemons, it's going to give us another opportunity, a different opportunity from the long-term study of predator-prey relationships in the preserve. It's going to give us a chance to see what happens when an active predator control program like the States is shut down, at least for a while, and what happens to the wolves. Does their population rebound? And if so, how, and how quickly, and how do the animals then begin to disperse as wolves do? We're going to have a window into a number of possibly different questions and answers that we've been, we up to now have not been able to answer,

perhaps even known well enough to ask. Well, that's fantastic news. You've had a long, decades-long career with the National Park Service. I was wondering, from all your travels and all your service, how has it changed in this time? Where do you think it's going and where should it go? One thing for sure I can say, that we can say, based on our monitoring of what's going on in the parks, is that the climate is changing. And things look different now than they did when I first came up to Alaska. They'll continue to change, but of course that's what nature does, left to its own, and that's part of the mission, a big part of the mission of the national parks,

and that is for us to be observers of what takes place. The naturalness of these areas is really critical so that we can understand the place, we can understand what happens to these places as change occurs, and understand better our place in them. So that is taking place. But, you know, more than that, I think to really accurately answer your question, I think I've changed, and I think the people that work for the national parks, I think, you know, the marks are left on us, not the landscape, right? And I think what we understand and the marks are left on us, to what we understand, to what we

think we know. And of course, as we've talked about several times already, the opportunity and the ability to recreate ourselves through recreation and through education and maybe most importantly, inspiration, which is what the national parks are all about. So what's changed? I think I've changed in good ways. Well, Greg, thank you so much for talking to me today. I hear some congratulations in order. You may have become a recent father-in-law.

Just this past weekend, thank you. Yes, my youngest daughter was married in Seattle. And so I am fresh back from that experience. And we leave her and her new husband in Seattle with new stories of their own to write. And my wife and I and our park family, if you will, are back here ready to write new chapters here at Gates the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It was a good and enlightening conversation. And best of luck in the frozen, frozen north.

Thank you so much. And, Lindsay, I really enjoyed this. And any time we get an opportunity to talk about and share about these special places, it's a privilege. Thank you for that. That was my conversation with 30-year veteran of the National Park Service, Greg Dudgeon. He's superintendent of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Yukon Charlie Rivers National Preserve in Alaska. I hope you've enjoyed this series on America's national parks. Next week, we return with a new series on the fight for civil rights

in America. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863, freeing the slaves and much of the South. From there, the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6th, 1865, abolishing slavery in the United States. But the road to freedom, true freedom, would take generations longer for most Black Americans. But the road to freedom, true freedom, would take generations longer for most Black Americans. We'll investigate their struggle, picking up in the heady post-war years of the 40s, and discover the remarkable courage and sacrifice required to effect change. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now

by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This interview episode was facilitated by Caitlin Plummer, produced by Jenny Lauer. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. For years, American Scandal has taken you deep inside the biggest controversies and shocking events in U.S. history. And now you can listen to exclusive seasons on Wondery+. Go beyond the headlines with jaw-dropping stories and immersive reporting that unveils

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