In the 1970s and 1980s, my father, Sam Merrill, had an interview segment on a local radio show in New York City: Direct News. When he passed away, he left a crate full of vinyl records, each with a radio show on it. I’m digitizing and archiving his interview segments here.
In this segment, my dad interviews Sam Brown, socialist agitator, about radicalism and keeping the fight going when everyone else seems to be selling out.
He correctly identifies that a great deal of anti-Vietnam protesters were motivated by self-protection. As the world turned, the war ended, and stagflation began—it had been grinding for years at the time this interview aired. Former radicals grew up, and younger people became more concerned with their economic prospects than with political change. But change came, in the form of Reagan, and the country has never been the same first.
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