quite take what i'm doing seriously or don't think that i take what i'm doing seriously. no, the genesis of this book -- a lot of people say in their

acknowledgements how they came to write a book and it's usually quite frankly invented, but this is actually the real story that many years ago these record albums all came out in 1959, things like miles davis, norman mailer's advertisements for myself, the first french new wave films, lenny bruce, the record and i began to wonder if it was just a coincidence or was their something about that year that made all of these things coalesce with something broader going on sali casual they began looking into that question and came to the conclusion that yes there were actually not just a lot of cool things going on but that they all converged to form a pivotal a year. i mean that quite literally. the country was going one direction and at that point it

shifted and started calling another direction. not all the changes were apparent immediately. you know, there's the woody allen joked about how the guy says i have to get back in italy because the renaissance is beginning. it's nothing like that but there is a pit and you can see in retrospect things did change. so i worked very hard making the first chapter a summary with the book is about so i am going to read from that although i'm going to lead out -- if you are reading along i'm going to leave out little bits that slow things down a little bit in the oral reading. on january 2nd, 1959 a soviet rocket carrying a space capsule also known as mistha, the dream, blasted to the magical speech known as is to the philosophy, sailed past the moon and pushed

through orifice orbit becoming the first man-made object to revolve around the sun among the celestial bodies. time magazine held the feet as a turning point in the multi-billion year history of the silver system. for one of the sun's plan that at least a fault a living creature that could break the chain of its gravitational field. the flight of debate kosoff a deer win chains or broken off with apprehension not just in the cosmos but politics society, culture, science and sex. a feeling took hold the breakdown of barriers and space speed and time made other barriers right for transgressing. 1959 was the year the shockwaves of the new representative the scenes of daily life when humanities stepped into the cosmos and also the conception of human life. when the world shrink the knowledge needed to thrive the camel exponential. when outsiders can insiders and taboos were trampled, when everything changing and everyone knew it, when the world as we knew it began to take form.

two months before the jet age began when a brand new boeing 707 took off with fanfare on the long step flight from paris. on the runway the first lady eisenhower declared i declare a jet -- as the plane rolled down the runway while the air force band played the star spangled banner. "the new york times" interest over the quote the possibility of hurtling in ocean from one continent to another from one world to another and half a dozen hours age-old longings that were no longer your daydreams because the jets are here. now with the new year barely under way the world was pressed into the space age. the russians and the americans would go at it in a space race all year long back-and-forth each site trumpeting new triumph with a startling alacrity. outer space lightening speed and made it the popular consciousness. circulation magazines and newspapers ran lengthy articles

explaining the new geography of solar orbit and galaxies. nasa logo, blastoff, countdown, into the everyday lexicon. madison avenue picked up on advertisements touting the project from cars to telephones to the floor waxes as the space age, the world of the future, the countdown to tomorrow. and tomorrow promised to be not just another day but a new dawn. rising on political star john fitzgerald kennedy would run for president of the slogan of leadership from the 60's. the first time the future was determined in terms of a decade which held out negative and help but neither case great change. kennedy presented his youth as a virtue, another norm describing as a man born as a king to explore the new frontier. it was a reference to frederick jackson turner's s.a. of 1983 the frontier of american history which argued the american character, its restless nervous energy and individualism was a

product of the frontier vast emptiness first with its prospect expansion westward each step new opportunities for conquest settlement and perennial rebirth. by the fifties this frontier had been filled and settled. the frontier now only in elders base and its prospect seemingly infinite expansion set off a new way of seeing and experiencing on earth. the space program itself and markets it seemed certain to generate spurred scientists to develop new technologies most notably the microchip and faster smaller computers which work transforming science fiction into the routine daily life this new also galvanized a generation of artists to crash through their own sets of barriers and attracted a vast audience suddenly receptive to their iconoclasm. new canadians, sitcoms satirized the once forbidden topics of race, religion and politics brazen novelists, loosening the language and board the boundaries between the subject,

rebellious filmmakers shot in provides movies outside the confidence of hollywood studios. painters created a new art that streaked outside the campus. jazz musicians improvise a new music that broke through the structures of words and preset rhythms. a new record label motown laid down the jazz rhythm and blues that incinerated a black culture into the mainstream and inspired baby boomers rock-and-roll and supplied the soundtrack for the racial revolts that leah head. these were quickened by a series of expensive government, the new united states civil rights commission orders a series of investigations of racial discrimination and voting, housing and schools. the supreme court issued rulings that lifted restrictions on free speech -- unbridled and spontaneous yet the threat of the new as it intensified and

tempered by an undercurrent of dread and outer space loom as a frontier novel me for satellites and rockets but from missiles and h bombs so the years of panic over shelters, fear of a missile gap and explanation of the cold war. nikita khrushchev posted his defense factories were churning out nuclear missiles like sausages. in the u.s. congress the atomic energy committee held five days of public hearings on the effect of a limited nuclear attack. scientists were detecting hazardous levels of radiation as a result of the h bomb tests in the atmosphere. a physicist named herman toward the country in large crowds of marathon lectors how to fight survive and win and nuclear war. it was this twin principles the prospect of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation both teetering on the edge of a new decade that gave 1959 its distinctive swooned and it might its creative energy. the latter half of the preceding

decade especially from 1945 to 47 when america created the bomb won world war ii and emerged as a sprawling power also marked a vivid turning point that it would take another dozen years before the nation set out or stumbled fourth in a clear direction before it responded to the shifting contours and redefined itself in the light and shadows. the path was carved by the younger generation, those who grew up through the depression and the war and felt dissatisfied with the peace that followed bent out of shape or spurred to revolt by the dissidents between didier as promised hopes and paul pothier. it was the late 1950's the warriors adolescents and young soldiers came in to their own approaching the ages of 30 or 40, too young to of elders out of power but old enough and self consciously so to claim a stake in the future and make themselves heard. the rockets reached a crescendo with the sexual revolution, free speech, rock-and-roll, uprising,

racial bias all erecting against escalation of the savage war in southeast asia and the spectacle of landing and and on the moon. yet all these cataclysms' spring of from the impulses or ideals of the baby boom generation but rather the revolts and revelations of 1959 and many of the instigators were well aware and took inspiration from their predecessors. the pivotal moments of history are those whose legacies and were and as the mid 40's receded to abstract nostalgia in the late 60's evoked puzzled shoppers it is the defense of 1959 that continue to does it make in our own time. the dynamics of least 50 years ago that continue to and make life today, but when prospect of infinite expansion and total destruction seem to be shifting to a new phase crossing another frontier. a dramatic in some ways coincidental parallel is the emergence of a young outsiders elected on the promise of hope and change the barack obama board and the year of john kennedy's inauguration pushes the concept of outsider to

extremes. yet the more it can parallels are the conditions surrounding the to yondah presidents. global power dispersing kunkel terse factoring, the world shrinking and science placed upon in dreams and nightmares still again in these appear monstrously magnified. the distribution of global power which once led american policymakers get by with little knowledge about russia and maybe china began dispersing in the late 50's to the point ignorance of small countries like vietnam and cuba got us into deeply troubled. today the collapse of power centers brought by the end of the cold war require political elites to know about regional tribes separatist enclave, terrorists to say nothing of financial into dependencies, climate change, energy alternatives and other aspects of security that have nothing to do with the military balance. cultural power is also involved as they seemed so during 50 years ago and literature, music and film the idea anything can be art, anyone can be an artist,

any language is permissible. one kind of artist can be another kind and neither age or ethnicity determines eligibility having put themselves in the mainstream. now the next round of splintering already weigh on blogs, youtube kawlija turkoman tuesday, flicker and who knows what forms to come is not only broadening further the boundaries of art but stems to shatter the final barriers between artists and audience public and private spectacle and life. in science and technology the trajectory from 1959 to 2009 and likely on board into the future is one of ever expanding expectations what is explore rubble from the galaxies to subatomic particles and everything between to the point we seem on the verge of touching and fenty in all directions. the microchip that brought the digital age with its computers and multipurpose cell phones and instantaneous access to everyone anything anywhere made the next few decades spark revolution brain augmenting man of chips and other devices of such

minuscule size yet gargantuan processing power to can scarcely be imagined. advances in biological research which 1959 produced able to control human birth resulting in social and economic upheavals may in the coming years create therapies and synthetic organs that postpone human death with more tumultuous consequences. there was, is and always will be a dark side of this juggernaut of tomorrow just as the flip side of rockets and sell-off late swiss h bombs and missiles so biotechnology can also yield biohazards and buy weapons, brain augmentations my dehumanize the sold, on the presence of networks can warp community and erode the sense of self one of infinite fracturing of cultures threatens to wipe out the concept of a shared culture nation or world. in the summer of 1959 allen ginsburg the generations visionary poet of fixing runs and doom wrote in the village voice no one in america can know what will happen.

no one is in real control. america is having a nervous breakdown therefore there has been great exultation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy and public gayety among the several city. he may have written it today. [applause] i'm willing to take any questions, discuss any ambivalences, explored mysteries of the galaxies. yes. >> you said that people of the time or not necessarily aware of the renaissance was about to begin. [inaudible] -- came before the 60's and everything that happened but were they thinking -- what kind of iran did they think of themselves and and did they think of themselves as stirring

or conformist? >> i think in the late 50's there were people that sensed something was happening. norman mailer, who kind of slips in and out of this book is sort of a very strange but nonetheless prophetic writer of the age wrote in this book advertisements for myself but cannot in 1959i detect the whispers of change or revolt and underlining revolution. nobody could put their finger on it. at that time there wasn't mass media. 1955 half the country on television. by the end of the decade about 70%. it was still new, transistor radios were new. they were putting radios and cars. things were going on in six different walks of life. yodidn't necessarily know about that but in each of those walks of life there were glimmerings. people did see something new was

taking place. sometimes it was explicit. for example in the realm of jazz which i write about charlie parker died in 1955. he invented the art of bebop, taking blues and ballads and improvising on the record changes of the music. he died. the next four years everybody in jazz was singing who's the next charlie parker? what's coming next? what's went be changed so when miles davis came along with improvising on scales and coleman came along with free jazz there were some people receptive to this change. they were looking for the change. i think just the act of a jet stream across the oceans in a matter of hours and rockets coming up in space also made people look for change. william burroughs and several of the letters he wrote to france about the time he was riding naked lunch, crazy novel of 1959

said in the space era or sometimes he called this the stymie era we must find new ways of writing. what is this notion things were going to be so different we would have to change the way of doing things? so there was that sense and i think it grew out of watching rockets and jet planes. but there were other things for example the microchip while it was introduced to the public in 1959 nobody quite -- nobody quite recognized how significant it was. i write in "the new york times" article the next day reporting on the show the mentioned three developments, three new inventions. one of them was the microchip but it was mentioned last in two paragraphs. the invention that took up half of the article was this thing westinghouse was developing that would allow people to drive across the country without their hands on the steering wheels. there were still making the

interstate highway system so they were going to put radar detector transmitters on the median strip on the highway and there would be a detector on your bumper and would detect what's going on and you would get a signal whether you should go straight or turn the car. this was a few seen things like the jets since that was perfect. this is tomorrow. of course it didn't get off the ground. then again the microchip might not have gotten off the ground and this is a lesson by the way for what kind of technologies now that we are looking for things to remove dependency on for awhile the microchip needed economies of scale. it's a very expensive thing at the time to read it probably wouldn't have taken off the ground except the john kennedy ordered we are going to the moon by the end of the decade. this created a market for these chips. if you are going to the moon you needed systems and you couldn't put these guidance systems using normal transistor's which would

take up space larger than any rocket ship so that created the market that produced the demand, produced the economies of scale, lowered the price and within a few years we had a pocket calculator, hand-held calculator also invented by jackson and clear -- jack st. clair who invented the microchip so it takes things revolutionary to get things under way. >> [inaudible] -- other uses like the microchip for the space program it was eventually pocket calculators, computers which was t original intent to be the same thing with other technologies. >> what are rocket firing drones going to lead to? >> who knows in the future. >> yes, sir. >> i was in high school, either

sophomore or junior year 1959. i don't know what i would have fought if somebody told me it was such a pivotal year but i guess when you're in high school you always think this is the most exciting and scary as time possible. are you close to the time period when the youth culture dramatically transformed? when was it in that the rock-and-roll star phenomenon, johnny ray, elkus and so forth, you know and the way these turned into colts by television and whatever else -- buddy holly. >> well, buddy holly died in february of 1959. elvis was on nsl will then 1954 but shot above the waist but nobody could see the source of his appeal. demographics produced -- the

60's were when people of that age came of age by you mention rock and roll. motown was started in 1959, and motown inspired a group called the silr beatles and liverpool to stop doing the buddy holly thing and to start doing more of a motown brothers and -- rivers and blues. not all of them had original songs. they included please please me, please mr. postman, money, that's what i want. those were all motown tunes. when motown did a tour in london the beatles were along those who waited at the airports to see these people that people re had never heard of before. yes? >> not another question but a comment on your war stories

articles in slate are great. i love them, keep them coming. >> thank you. >> this sounds like a brilliant time machine and go back. it just seems like you paint a portrait of a more exciting time. today almost seems bland by comparison. but i wanted to ask you is what about -- would you comment about the economic egalitarianism about that era? paul krugman said the 50's are part of what he calls the great depression when you have a strong middle class and one salary could feed a family, you had a lot more free time, and i'm wondering if there is a link between that and the creativity also flourishing. i don't think allen ginsburg could afford to live in manhattan and certainly not brooklyn. >> that's new. i lived in manhattan in 1974 for $125 a month on west eighth

street between fifth and sixth avenue. but it's a good point. all of these artists, it was a thriving artistic community most of them are not east av, ninth street around fourth avenue what is now called astor place. they all hung out there. it cost very little money. i mean there are good things and bad things. nobody was producing much wealth either but nothing cost anything. you could live on a nothing salary back then. one thing that it happened that made people urgent all through the fifties there was this post for prosperity toward the end of the decade there was a recession. a pretty deep recession. 1958, 59 eisenhower was the president. eisenhower was the oldest man to the president ought to that time eckert. he had a heart attack, stroke,

he was notorious secretary of state died of cancer in the summer of 1959. people looked at this as stodgy. we look back at eisenhower as being smarter than people thought at the time but he was old, without energy and he had his meeting with khrushchev, who was only a few years younger than he seemed dramatically younger, full of energy, boisterous. so that set the stage for the kind of youth culture and attraction to kennedy to a man who was john as he put it board of this century. so this undercurrent of rebellion that was going on was a reaction to the backdrop spaces and conformity that marked a large part of the 1950's. i'm not trying to explode the myth that was there.

what i'm saying is the changes that came were in response to that quite a bit earlier. what i said earlier about how people in the 60's took their inspiration from things in the late 50's a good example is c. wright mills, colombia a sociologist known for the power elite, white collar, in 1959 he wrote an essay called letter to the new left. there was no new left the time that he was imagining one. there was an undergraduate at the university of michigan named tom hayden who wrote that essey and took it as his inspiration. it was basically the source for the port huron statement which was the manifest for the new left and in haydn's memoirs, he makes no bones about this. he says c. wright mills was a combination of james dean and albert camus and he seemed to be speaking to me and me were was

also -- when he showed up at the chicago demonstrations of 1968, the young people cheered him because advertisements for myself in 1959. he hadn't written the stuff that he became better to be known for. so there was the finale these people were modeled for what happened later. in the back. >> i am just trying to collect my memories and try and recall what major events happened in 1959. i can think of 1958. i can think of i think 1962, in france it was the change of the new constitution and republic and i think in 62 when eisenhower chancellor of germany i think it was then it had been okay germany has paid its dues basically and from now on we are

pretty to take off. but i can't recall, maybe you can, what evidence would make 1959 a pivotal to the world at large. >> well, i have a three page time line at the beginning of the book that you are free to come out and study. i went over quite a few of them at the beginning of the space-age in its eckert. the microchip, birth control pill -- >> that's american centered. >> this is an american centered book, i plead guilty. >> [inaudible] >> it's true. i would have to the free right for the british edition. yes. >> [inaudible] psychedelia become in hollywood screenwriters like star trek --

i'm wondering what else. >> one thing i deeply regret and received a brief on the home front four is i do not mention the twilight zone even though it premiered in

the send signals on the radio astronomy said they came up with the frequency and so they said okay that's what you do. he would send a signal along this frequency or near it and if anything is out there may be able right back. they didn't know but at that time there was a physicist named frank drake doing just that had a big observatory in virginia. on his own he had come up with the same idea and actually started putting together the machinery they were going to use and 80-inch telescope. he got amplify years and tape recorders and things like that and they started doing this, and the experiment went on for a few months. nothing happened. but then the next year the

organization seti began and in the popular consciousness grew out of this article in nature magazine. so that the family -- psychedelia i decided not to cheat. larry did his experiments lcd but i decided to let it go. but the beats were heavily -- burrows, heavily into all kind of psychedelic and hard drugs as well. ginsburg wrote the first part o how -- howell on drugs. drugs are very much part of this. i wouldn't say for better and worse, but for more stimulating and less stimulating, you know. there was a lot of self-destructive behavior going on with alcohol and drugs among

some of the more creative people at the time. and carol black was a buddhist, ginsburg was a buddhist. they were reciting first thought best of that sort of thing. it was definitely in the era. definitely. yes? >> [inaudible] -- great time for women's options. were there any precursors' or grumblings about what came out in the 50's or 60's or 59? >> not much but there was a crucial event and it was inigated by two women. the bill was started -- it was the brainchild of margaret sanger, firebrand socialist suffer who had been since the 1920's who latched on to planned parenthood as a big cause. she created what became the planned parenthood foundation. she was putting out pamphlets

instructing women in the art of contraceptive devices in the 30's and 40's and gting arrested for it because it was illegal. even to talk about these things watch less for a doctor to administer or prescribe. in some states of these were still on the books until the early 70's. but a around the early 1950's she met a scientist named gregory at a dinner party. pinkus got thrown out of harvard because he did artificial insemination with rabbits and the fact he was jewish probably didn't help in those days and he had gone off and formed his own lab and margaret sanger says to him i've always had a fantasy of somebody making a magic pill that would keep women from getting pregnant and he goes well, you know -- this was just the beginning of age of research and hormones. he said you might be able to do that, so she got a hold of her

friend, katherine mccormick, the widow of one of the richest man in america, the son of the guy that invented international harvester, she founded the international harvester. she inherited millions and millions of dollars. she was also smart herself. she was the second woman to graduate from mit with a degree in biology. so she put up the money for this. she came out and met pinkus and asked scientific questions and said how much money do you need? and she wrote him a check for $40,000 on the spot and gave over the course of a lifetime probably about a million dollars. so they did these experiments on rats and worked and then they needed to do human experimentation. now the standards of ethics back then were not what they are today so they went to housing project some puerto rico to test for side effects they took women in in san asylums and it was and to test for contraceptives but

for side effects and you needed a doctor for this so they got dr. john rock who at that time, remember the show, will this guy was dr. brock, it sounds like a ayn rand nickname, rock-solid. he had a mean of white hair. he was the leading obstetrician of the day. he had done things to help get women pregnant so he put his name on this because he also was a fan of the idea of birth control and in fact against massachusetts law he asked for volunteers at the women's clinic to take a spill so they got reams and reams of data. in fact it was the data submitted to the fda is the largest collection of data that had never been submitted for a new drug. the fda at that time was nothing to it had three full-time scientists and consultants and this was during the fifties which was a revolution in

biological research going on so they took little while and the guy that asked him the questions at the hearing was also a catholic and a little had moral problems against it but it came out. one thing a little pre-lewd. 1957 the company that made the birth control pill called it envoid at the time they got it approved by the fda that only for use for what do they call it, some kinds of diseases, menstrual aches. naturally about a million women suddenly get diagnosed with menstrual problems and they are taking this tool and it's so popular that even though at the time of 17 states outlaw contraception and the catholic church, which was politically very active railed against it, they took the plunge and applied

for an fda approval as a contraceptive drug and that's what happened at the end of 59. and it's interesting suddenly millions of women start taking this drug. you couldn't say that even through the 60's there was a real feminist consciousness. almost anywhere in american society but all of sudden the birth rate goes down i think because of the pill. more when and in smaller numbers at the beginning but more and more are hard and to professional jobs because someone interviewing them doesn't have to worry that maybe some spontaneous sex with a husband might give her a kid and that is the end of her career. gloria steinem who was later the founder of the movement and found the magazine wrote her first article in 1962 for "esquire" magazine and she talked about how the pill had created what she called the new autonomous girl and this autonomous girl would think

about love, work and even marriage the same way that man and it was very prescient and created -- you know, feminism wasn't even on anybody's agenda than but i think without that help it really couldn't have gotten, it couldn't have formed the material base for any political agenda in the coming decade. anything else? yes. >> one last question, did you like the 50's better or the 60's? [laughter] was there some aspect where the restrains of the time made the experimentation better -- >> that's an interesting question because of course one thing that happened in the 60's is it started going a little too far. you know, when he first played free jazz it wasn't just anything that came out of his horn but suddenly people started

playing jazz and was would ever came out of their horn. when william burroughs was writing these strange collage literature and naked lunch there was a structure to it but some people just started putting mishmash together. the new left initially was a philosophy of political participation. they never figured out how to get anybody to follow them, but as the revolutionary movements of the early 60's didn't find the corresponding response from the political system this let to nihilism, riots, so forth. so i guess you're right. for some bizarre reason and it's not just because i was born in 1954, i've always been attracted to the 50's partly as a counter intuitive thing. i think for a civil when you mentioned feminism people don't think of it this way feminism really blossomed in the 70's.

the 60's were nothing for feminism. it was the 70's when things started happening. cities and 70's are underrated decades for social and cultural phenomenon. that's it? okay, thank you very much. i'm happy to sign books. [applause] >> fred kaplan is the author of daydream believer is how a few grand ideas racked american power. mr. kaplan likes the war stories column for slate. he was formerly a reporter for the "boston globe" and has written for "the washington post," new yorker and the cleantech. for more, visit the books website at 1959thebook.com.

this summer booktv is asking what are you reading? >> my name is mashaal bachmann a member of congress from minnesota sixth congressional district. i have to great books i'm working on right now for the summer and early summer and i will switch into something a little bit later but the first book is by dr. mark leff in a constitutional scholar called liberty and tyranny. it's been on "the new york times" best-seller list for nine out of the last ten weeks and it's now sold over 1 million copies and is essentially a treatise on why conservatives believe what they believe. he goes through a number of different issues. it is a fabulous book. i've read it once, highlighted it. it's all dr.. i've written notes of the margins. i am quoting his book on the

liberty and tyranny everywhere i go and urge people to read his book. it's fabulous. i'm going through a second time and taking more notes. i also working on another book by a great lady i've heard several times speak about the book and it is the forgotten man by amity shlaes. it's so timely because she's writing the history of the hoover and the years of fdr and great depression and the forgotten man is the american tax payer paying for all of the expense for building up the welfare state so it's a fascinating story to see how the american economy is taking a parallel today, in 2009 with the same course you might say of action taken back in the great depression so this is very instructive for members of congress right now, very pertinent to what we are doing because if we are going to apply the principles of big government interventionism we see how it played out in the 1930's and

approved actually prolongs the depression rather than shorten the depressions of the forgotten man is a great book plus we've been able to hear from her personally. we had dr. mark here last summer speaking at a luncheon and he hadn't yet written liberty and tyranny but since the book liberty and tierney there has been so much excitement in washington about that book and i am hopeful he will come back and allow us to hear from him personally but that's the number-one book by encouraging all americans to read, liberty and tyranny and also and the shlaes the forgotten man. >> to see more summer reading lists and other period information, visit our website at booktv.org.

joseph lowndes in your new book from the new deal to the new light, to argue that modern conservatism was founded in the south. why? >> the reason i make that claim is i think often people talk about a southern strategy and capture of the south by the gop in the 1960's beginning with conwell, beginning with goldwater and then mixing's 72e election but in some ways it is the reverse. southerners play a key role in the development first of the conservative capture of the republican party itself, and then of republican ascendance nationally. i think in certain ways a combination of segregationist politics and more economic conservatism were blended over time by various political actors in a way that allowed an

national language of resentment and opposition to federal-state power in the democratic party generally. >> two questions arise from that answer. number one, how did they planned and when did this begin? >> i think the story begins decisively in the 1940's. in the 1930's in congress there's a conservative coalition which comes together after 1936 to resist some of fdr's political imperatives, but really it is after world war ii during the truman administration he begins to push for federal employment practices commission and desegregation of the military that you have southern political colleagues suddenly declare independence from a national democratic party and first run in dixiecrat states' rights revolt in 1948 the strategy was to try to get enough electoral college votes in the south to throw the

election to the house of representatives which didn't quite work began the process of separating southern democrats from national democrats generally and from the growing racial liberalism of the democratic national party and i think then what happened is that conservatives in the north frustrated with eisenhower, frustrated with what they saw as the need to of the republican party in the new deal era began to look southward for allies and kind of a new coalition to rebuild a conservative party and push back against the new deal. so, the "national review" magazine for instance begins inviting segregationist writers and journalists and others to pan editorials and write articles for the "national review" and some conservative republican strategists began to try to build a republican party in the south which had not ever been a viable party certainly not after the reconstruction so

both on the level of kind of intellectual discourse and party strategy begins in the 50's northerners begin to look south. -- of shared interests for economic? >> economic and racial i think. partly it's southern segregationists saw segregationists leaves salles that was going to remain regional unless they could find allies outside of the region and convince other white southerners who were quite a wheel to the new deal that they needed to abandon their democratic loyalty for politics bill would resist the racial liberalism of the national party. so i think that's probably more than conservatives who didn't have a big stake in the race prior to the 1950's began to find ways to see how racial politics with an inmate number audiences and began to peel off segments of the white working class and others from a kind of hegemonic democratic party. so it is kind of both.

>> who were some of the leaders of this movement? >> i trees in the 1940's to certain dixiecrat leaders, charles wallace in particular. >> huessy? >> intellectual do ruler of the revolt to not only is a hard kind of white supremacist segregationist leader but one who seeks to convince strom thurmond, other southern eletes that they have to articulate a conservative anti-government politics, business conservatism as well as a kind of racial anti-government politics so she's one of the leaders. in the 1950's and 60's buckley, william f. buckley, it isn't often remembered he really makes dramatic efforts to bring southerners' into the conservative coalition. he pans and editorial in 57 arguing that the denial of the

vote to black citizens in the south is perfectly justifiable because these people haven't reached a level of civilization that would allow them to participate democratically so buckley is a mother figure. goldwater clearly is someone when he runs in 64l side of his own state of arizona only wins a handful of deep south states nowhere else in the nation is he a strong figure. >> why did he win those states? >> in the 1964 election one of the major issues was that the great civil-rights bill that johnson had proposed and goldwater's opposition to the civil rights bill was one of the things used by his other supporters over and over to try to get votes for him so it was in civil rights and south for him articulated as a kind of strong constitutionalism and states' rights and individual

list ideology. >> what is the southern strategy? how would you define that? >> what people refer to as the southern strategy they begin with either goldwater or nixon and the idea is whether republicans hope to win over southern voters in southern states in the national elections by pushing the race issue, by articulating kind of either coated or open language of for nixon's antibossing. for gold barbour its opposition to the civil rights bill. so that is what people refer to when they talk about the southern strategy. but again, what is missed and that is the agency and activity of southerners themselves to help put this on the table and provide a language of racial politics that will play not just in the south, but, you know, gary indiana and teach right michigan and baltimore maryland

and philadelphia pennsylvania where issues of open housing, open unions, other anti-discrimination measures and things that were focused directly on his race potentially can reap a broader white audience. >> how do you get from the new deal to the new right today? >> of the new deal to the new light? i began by the story i tell is looking at elements both in and outside of the new deal. southern democrats and northern republicans, conservative republicans and western republicans will begin to bring their political perspectives together in opposition to the new deal and finally to a place where by 81980 ronald reagan wins decisively and by 84 even more so and in the beginning of national realignment regime change which is what we are at the end of.

>> ronald reagan kicked off the 1980 campaign in mississippi. why was that significant? >> it wasn't just in mississippi. it was a much of the county mississippi where the site of the three civil rights workers, james chaney, andrew goodman and michael had been slain by klansmen in 1963. so, this was a place that was steeped in racial history, steeped in meaning for mississippians and was trent lott who brought him to give a speech there and reagan says in that speech like you, i believe in states' rights which is he could have made any number of things that a certain message was carried forward. >> what is the state in your view of today's new right or conservative movement? >> i think we are in a twilight of the reagan revolution and in fact many of the soldiers of the

revolution say the same thing. pat buchanan, newt gingrich and others i think what happens in american political history is that certain ideas dominate and certain political imperatives shape the landscape and over time they start to weigh in the new political questions arise and circumstances arise and new players come onto the scene to change political identities. but i think now in some ways like democratic liberalism in the 1970's the republican right has run out of gas or is in an era of splintering and major internal flights over the future direction of the party. it was interesting to see in the primaries to have a range of candidates none of whom could claim a conservative credentials and all of them invoking break in over and over. >> what does that mean for the

south? >> the salafist very much in play in a way that it hasn't been in a generation and this last national election was all in north carolina and south carolina, georgia, mississippi across the south i think black voters played a more decisive role than they have. latino voters are playing a more decisive role and i think white voters are themselves much more fragmented and part of this has to do it changing political identities and part of it tested with strong enforcement in the south more so recently which has opened a lot of territory to exciting change. >> this is your first book. what is your déjà? >> political science professor. i teach at the university of oregon. >> and what are you teaching? >> american politics right now a course on comparative conservatism, u.s. europe with my great colleague and i teach a course right now racial politics

from the mid 20 it central to the present. >> when it comes to politics between the u.s. and europe and conservatives what is the difference? >> one difference is that america was founded on kind of liberal ideas, classic liberal ideas in a way that european states don't have and so here if you look at the origins of conservatism you see strains of hamilton's ideas about the manufacturer and capitalism and markets and centralized power and the jeffersonian notions of antisadism and pastora was some kind of blending together into a conservative movement in the 20th century secure there isn't no clear whigs lacked to offend against and so in some ways you don't have feudal traditions in the same way. >> professor joseph towns from

university from the new deal to the new white race and the southern origins of modern conservatism. michele goldberg, senior writer for salon.com states she believes women's rights and human rights are synonymous. the carnegie council on ethics in new york city hosted the seat and. it is just under one hour. >> welcome to the carnegie council for ethics and international affairs. we are here this evening for an interesting discussion with the carnegie new leader's program. welcome to all of you, glad to have you here today. we are going to handle this discussion in something of an interview format fairly casual so please get your questions in mind and think about what you want to ask. our guest today is michelle

goldberg. >> thanks for having me. >> michelle is a journalist and author. her most recent book is the means of reproduction, sex, power and future of the world. the future of the world. this particular book won the john anthony lukas award. michelle is also a senior correspondent with the american prospect and michelle is also noted expert in reproductive issues and reproductive rights and michelle, i would like to ask if you don't mind to give a short pressing of the book, a backlog on the book. >> certainly. thank you for coming to hear me tonight. i wrote a book that came out in 2006 about religious fundamentalism in american politics and when i would talk about the book people immediately understood what i meant even if they didn't know the details everybody knew that religious fundamentalism in

american politics was a phenomenon you could kind of summarize whereas this book is about the global battle over reproductive rights and one of the things i found while talking about it and in fact one of the reasons i wrote in the first place is nobody else side of people that work directly on these issues know what that even means. it's this kind of international in scope. it's actually quite profound and far reaching on its effective people's lives. it involves all of these kind of fascinating character and strange alliances. but most of the coverage of eight and part just because the coverage of the lives of women in the third world isn't a topic of major concern to the mainstream media to begin with and a lot of these debates are cloaked in this choking bureaucratic language that kind of leaches the drama out of it. so the essentials story is not

only that the story hasn't been told in a really mainstream accessible format. it's that very few people are even aware there is a story to tell. and so, the book basically begins -- let me say this, the essential argument of the book is there is a global battle of the reproductive rights that women's human rights are the major human rights struggle of our time and that reproductive rights said the center of them. that there is a global international network of fundamentalists who have mobilized and sometimes worked an alliance against reproductive rights who tend to see when and actually i think correctly as kind of women's increased autonomy as harbingers of modernity of globalization, of urbanization and everything that social traditionalists tend to hate and so often see putting

women back into support net traditional role as being a way to assert a world that is slipping away from them. and then finally, the final peace and we will get into this as how this works is i wasn't trying to be either a modest or hyperbolic when i used the future of the world in the subtitle. these issues are not just about women's lives although women's lives are obviously hugely important and neglected topic. many of the major rushing catastrophes' facing the planet, you know, environment in terms of the environment and national security and hundred and poverty and development, there will be no progress on these issues as long as women's rights and reproductive rights are a court. so the story, and i traveled all over the world to report this and i spend lots of time digging through archives and lots of interviews and the story starts in the 50's when there

book and i want to get into a