Slow Burn - One Year: 1942 | 1. The Most Hated Man in America
One Year
Slate Podcasts
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the beginning of World War II, the greatest threat to the American war effort wasn’t the Nazis or the Japanese—it was runaway inflation. The man in charge of stopping it was the country’s “price czar,” Leon Henderson. In 1942, he controlled how much coffee ordinary people could drink and how many tires they could buy. Those rules made him a nationwide villain. But would they save the country?
One Year is produced by Evan Chung, Sophie Summergrad, Sam Kim, and Josh Levin.
Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts and Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sunday, December 7, 1941, was the final day of the NFL regular season. |
| 0:07.5 | At 2 p.m. Eastern, fans of the first-place New York Giants tuned their radios to WOR. |
| 0:19.5 | The game was still scoreless, 26 minutes after the opening kickoff, then suddenly a newscaster |
| 0:27.2 | broke into the play-by-play. |
| 0:40.4 | That was the first known radio bulletin about the military strike on Hawaii. |
| 0:46.4 | Within a few minutes, the news was everywhere. |
| 0:49.7 | The attack was a complete surprise. |
| 0:52.0 | At Pearl Harbor, only minimum forces of the Army and Navy were on Sunday morning duty. |
| 0:57.0 | The Japanese dive bombers have been making continuous attacks, apparently from a Japanese |
| 1:01.3 | aircraft carrier. |
| 1:02.8 | The attack on Pearl Harbor killed more than 2,400 Americans. |
| 1:14.4 | When President Franklin Roosevelt heard the news, he was getting ready to work on his |
| 1:18.9 | stamp collection. |
| 1:20.7 | By the next afternoon, he'd brought the country into an existential fight that had already |
| 1:26.3 | engulfed most of the planet. |
| 1:42.2 | In those early days, absolute victory against Japan, Germany, and Italy felt more like a |
| 1:48.0 | wish than a promise. |
| 1:50.3 | As the calendar flipped to January 1942, hundreds of thousands of young people enlisted in the |
| 1:56.6 | military. |
| 1:57.6 | Millions more were likely to be drafted. |
| 2:00.6 | But in 1942, the war wouldn't be fought only on battlefields. |
| 2:11.5 | Civilians were asked to contribute however they could, working on assembly lines, watching |
... |
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