<Begin Segment 8>

TI: This is really fascinating to me, because every day you read the Capital News, which you mentioned as sort of an isolationist newspaper. So a lot of the information you were getting was sort of slanted for perspective of sort of more isolationist, and not getting involved in Europe and perhaps helping the Jews and things like this, yet you were questioning all this.

RM: Oh, yeah. I questioned the Capital News. I would read the editorials, I would read the articles, and I'd look at the adjectives and the adverbs, and I knew that there was propaganda coming through. And, and I particularly knew it because I would talk to the politicians on the street, and they were so opposed to preparation or rearmament, and I couldn't understand that, 'cause I could read the headlines about the Austrian Anschluss and Poland and that kind of thing. And when World War II started, I think they put it on page 4, September 1, 1939, somewhere like that, they hid it, you know. And we'd dig that out, kind of thing, and so I looked at the newspaper more as an element of propaganda than I did of history of truth.

TI: It sounds like almost as a teenager, you were being an editor in some ways, or you were editorializing the Capital News.

RM: Yeah, yeah, I did. And I didn't hold back on that. We had a, the person who we checked the newspapers out was a fellow named Frank Anifin. Really sort of a character. And, and he was, I think, very much on the interventionist side, and so we'd be waiting around for papers, and so I did hear intervention talk, but I, I knew World War II was coming. I could see it, feel it, know it. And to be going the opposite direction of, as the newspapers were publishing. It seemed to me it was wrong.

TI: For the people in Idaho, how would they get sort of the other perspective? I mean, if the Capital News, was the Statesman more interventionist? Was there --

RM: No, no, it was even more isolationist.

TI: So in terms of the news that they were getting, how, so how would people...

RM: Well, I compared it with the beginning of World War I. I had read the origins of World War I, probably in the eighth or ninth grade, and I was, I could tell this is blindness, sticking the head in the sand. I remember Franklin D. Roosevelt coming through in 1936 and us outside the elementary school, and he, waved at him in a convertible, and then being taken over in front of the capitol. And he gave a speech, wasn't interventionist, but it was, "Hey, we have to keep an eye on both Europe and Asia, and watch the aggressive powers." I think he used the term "aggressive powers." And so that had an impression on me, and I saw these outside forces. And I wasn't alone; most people who sold the paper were cynical about the newspaper's stand. This is misleading to people, type, and there was some of that. Maybe my mother had an influence in that. I don't -- and I think maybe, in particular, when I got to high school, my teachers had a, a lot of them were interventionist. There was a different point --

TI: So I'm curious, I mean, for the isolationists, which, what were they hoping for? What were they thinking?

RM: That it'd go away. That we'd had war scares since 1919, and all of this would just blow away, and we wouldn't have to worry about them, particularly in Idaho. And we weren't close to the Pacific Coast, so we didn't have to worry about Asia. But they failed to realize the term "world war." And I remember distinctly, the one thing I really remember, that really... I don't remember when Lindbergh came through Boise, but I remember selling the paper, and I can remember that, "Hey, this man flew the Atlantic Ocean, he destroyed the theory of isolationism, and yet here he is out here practicing isolationism." He was speaking against intervention in Europe. And as a kid, I was very interested in current affairs, current events. It stuck with me. It takes me forty-five minutes to read the paper, and I mentally joust with people who write, I think, and I've done that ever since I sold papers.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.