raise taxes on 99.9% of americans in order to make sure that the tinies tiniest little r at the top gets a deficit busting, china borrowing, print more money tax bonus. i don't think that's what the people were saying. it is beyond comprehension that these folks have talked about deficit reduction. oh, deficit reduction. how many speeches have we listened to? our grandchildren -- i've listened to dr. coburn and i've listened to senator demint and i've listened to so many republicans talk about deficit reduction, deficit reduction, deficit reduction, and the tiny

little fig leaf they are hiding behind is the complete fallacy that a small differential in personal tax rates to people on their second million dollars of income is going to create jobs. it's not going to create jobs. people who are making more than than $1 million are not going to take a 3% personal tax cut differential and create jobs with that. job creation occurs with small businesses. it occurs with people in the middle class. it doesn't occur when someone has another $100 grand to put in their investment fund or another 300 grand to put in their investment fund. it is -- and i think people

really need to understand that we voted to give -- 53 senators voted to give a tax cut to everyone, everyone. i don't care how rich you are because you get a tax cut on your first million dollars of income. so even if you make $3 million, you're getting a tax cut. you make $5 million, you're getting the tax cut. you make $10 million, you're getting the tax cut. you're getting it on the first million. so everyone in america was denied a tax cut by the vote that just occurred by the minority of the senate, not the majority. the majority of united states senators who were elected to come here voted to give 99.9% of america a tax cut, and thinks maybe that $300 billion that we save on that 10%, .0001% of

america, that $300 billion, that would be a good thing to put in the deficit. it would be a great thing to put in the deficit. so don't let -- don't let the -- don't take these guys seriously about deficit reduction. don't take them seriously. it's a joke. it's a joke. i mean, some of these people that voted no just now didn't even vote for the bush tax cuts. really. some of the people who just voted no on giving a tax cut to 99 -- well, giving a tax cut to everybody in america on their first million, some of the people who voted no didn't even vote for the bush tax cuts. they knew they were irresponsible at the time. but now they have somehow tried to convince the american people that they're looking after them. as i said yesterday, i'll tell you who they are looking after. they're looking after the families that are deciding which home to go to for christmas.

should i go to my home in florida or my home in california or maybe up in the mountains or should i stay in the city? or the people who are deciding where should we spend new year's eve? should we go to paris? maybe we should go to rome for new year's eve. they're not focused on the folks that are trying to figure out if they can get what their kids want for christmas. and, you know, 53 votes, if you really think about that, there was a time in the senate that all kinds of things -- in fact, my recollection is that's the exact number of votes that clarence thomas got to join the supreme court. can you imagine in this day and age a controversial supreme court nominee not having to get 60 votes? clarence thomas got the same number of votes as we just cast to make sure that everybody in america gets a tax cut on their

first million dollars in income. you know, i -- i come from a state where elections are very close, and -- in fact, i remember when i passed my first amendment on the floor of the senate, the vote was 51-49. it seems amazing to me now, that was just a few short years ago that we had votes that were 51-49. they weren't requiring the 60 votes. that was back before motherhood and apple pie needed 60 votes. and one of the senators came over to me after that amendment vote and it was 51-49, and they said boy -- they were teasing me about how close the vote was. i said, senator, in missouri, we call that a landslide. this vote we just had, 53 votes. in missouri, that's a landslide. and i think it's -- it's

depressing to me that we have gotten to this level of posturing, that they really are saying if you do not give people a tax break on their second million, that nobody gets one. i'll say it again. if you don't give people a tax break on their second million, nobody gets one. really? are they going to hold onto that position. deep down in my gut, i can't belief they're going to do that, that they're going to go home and explain to their voters. yeah, well, you don't get a tax cut because this guy i know on wall street that makes makes $15 million in his bonus this year didn't want to have to pay the same rate he paid in the 1990's, when everybody cut a fat hog and did very, very well,

created millions and millions of jobs in the 1990's with these same tax rates. it's not like we're going back to the roosevelt era of taxes. we're not going back to 75% of your taxable income -- of your income going to taxes. we're talking about a 3% difference in what we pay right now versus what we pay people who make more than $1 million. so i hope this gets through to the american people, and i hope they realize this is not what this election was about. this election was about holding down government spending, and my colleagues and i agree on this. i have been working on trying to get a cap on federal spending with senator sessions for over a year. it's about tightening our belt on spending, but it's also about having a level playing field for the middle class in this country and not making it about the special interests that have -- that have jammed this tax code with so many provisions. most people don't realize it's

70% -- over 70% of americans don't even itemize. so imagine how many tax provisions have been written for the wealthy. i mean, it is just -- we have books and books of tax loopholes for the wealthy. as warren buffett has said, he does this great exercise every year in his office which i think is fascinating. he has everyone that works in his office, from the people who clean the board room to the people who park the cars in the parking lot. they calculate all the taxes they pay every year and figure out everything from sales tax, personal property tax, federal tax, state tax, earnings tax in some localities. they calculate all of it and figure out what their real tax rate is, and he said the folks that work for him that have very modest incomes pay -- i think it's 33%, 34% of their income in taxes, and he pays 16%. now, what's wrong with this

picture. listen, i have nothing against people who have captured the american dream. my husband is one of them. his first job out of college was in a steel mill, and since then he has taken huge risks as an entrepreneur, huge risk, and he has created thousands of jobs, thousands of jobs in his lifetime. and he's done very, very well. we are very blessed. does he need his tax cut? do we need it? no, we don't. and i think the people that are in that tax bracket have a great deal in common with my family, those that are worried about going back to the 1990's tax rate on their second million and their third million and their fourth million. mr. president, i also rise today to talk about a subject that is,

frankly, as depressing -- in fact, more depressing than the reality we just faced this morning on the floor, and that is the heartbreaking incompetence that has been uncovered at arlington national cemetery. this is, in my opinion, the most sacred ground we have in this country. this is where our highest ideal of what an american is, this is where they are laid to rest. the ceremonies that take place every day, day in and day out at arlington national cemetery are a great source of national pride. and for the thousands of families that have loved ones buried there, they deserve to know that that location is being run with the highest level of

integrity and professionalism, and in july of this year, my subcommittee on contracting discovered that they have to be bitterly disappointed because due to contracting problems, you cannot be assured that people are buried where arlington national cemetery tells you they're buried. that even though we spent millions of dollars on contracts to make sure that the system was reliable in terms of the location of the burial of these heroes, that the contracts had produced nothing, and, in fact, the discovery was made that there were many instances where what it said on the tombstone was not true. we began working on this, and

the hearing was mind-boggling because there was so much finger pointing, not my fault, not my fault, not my fault discovering that there was really no real chain of command at arlington national cemetery. there wasn't -- unlike the rest of the military and the rest of the army, it wasn't clear who the people at arlington even reported to, which is -- that is the management incompetence that breeds all kinds of nonsense when there is no accountability, and there was no accountability. so i think the army has taken this seriously. they clearly are embarrassed, as they should be. they are working to methodically go through the cemetery and make sure that they find any instance where there is a discrepancy in terms of the burials, and just a few weeks ago, we learned that they now have discovered another grave site where eight urns of cremated remains were located. and the tombstone was marked

unknown. now, can you imagine, there is actually someone who went back eight times to the same location to dump cremated remains in one grave? now, we have been able to identify some of those remains and those families have been notified and they will have the proper burial and they will know the location. unfortunately, one of the sets of remains we cannot identify. it has been reburied unknown. but as we methodically go through the cemetery and try to correct these instances of heartbreaking incompetence, we have got to have some legislation in place that provides the right accountability and oversight, and i had introduced a piece of legislation along with my ranking republican on the subcommittee on contracting oversight, senator brown from massachusetts, and we have tried to work this through the process, which everyone around

here knows is painfully slow and even more painfully slow over the last 18 months since the republican party has been rewarded for their strategy of block everything, including things that they support. i am encouraged that it's my understanding that after i came to the floor yesterday and said i was going to make a unanimous consent motion on this, that not only have the democrats all cleared this legislation but the republicans have also. i think that is a good sign. i wish we had more good signs, but this at least is a good sign. so, mr. president, i ask unanimous consent that the veterans affairs committee be discharged from further consideration of senate bill 3860 and the senate proceed to its immediate consideration. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: s. 3860, a bill to require reports on the management of arlington national cemetery. the presiding officer: without

objection, the -- the committee is discharged. and the senate will proceed to the measure. mrs. mccaskill: i ask unanimous consent that the mccaskill amendment at the desk be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid on the table with no intervening action or debate and any statements related to the bill be placed in the record at the appropriate place as if read. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. mccaskill: mr. president, i'm proud that we've been able to get this passed today. this is a giant christmas present with a bow on it, or hanukkah gift with a bow on it to thousands of american families. let them know that we are paying attention, that we're not going to leave -- we have very short attention spans around here. the cameras aren't rolling, we have a tendency to move on to something else and we're always gravitating toward the political fight.

this legislation should send the appropriate signal to our nation's military, to our nation's veterans and, most importantly, to the families who have loved ones buried at arlington national cemetery, that we are paying attention and that we're going to continue to pay attention until we get this right. our american pride depends on it. it is the ultimate act of patriotism. and i'm proud of the fact that we've been able to get this legislation passed today. and i yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call: mrs. mccaskill: mr. president, i ask the quorum call be set aside. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. mccaskill: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent the rules committee be discharged from further consideration of h.r. 6399 and that the senate proceed to its consideration. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: h.r. 6399, an act

to improve certain administrative operations of the office of the architect of the capitol and for other purposes. the presiding officer: without objection, the committee is discharged and the senate will proceed to the measure. mrs. mccaskill: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent the bill be read three times, passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid on the table. further, that any statements relating thereto appear at the appropriate place in the record as if read. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. mccaskill: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent that when the senate completes its business today it adjourn until 2:00 p.m. on monday, december 6, that following the prayer and the pledge the journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day and that following any leader remarks the senate proceed to a period of morning business with senators permitted to speak for up to ten minutes each. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. mccaskill: mr. president, there will be no roll call votes during monday's session of the

senate. senators should expect a live quorum at 10:00 a.m. on tuesday, december 7 to begin the impeachment trial of judge j. thomas porteous. if there is no further business to come before the senate i ask that it adjourn under the previous order. the presiding officer: the senate stands adjourned until 2:00 p.m. on monday, december 6.

>> we now return to our booktv programming on this saturday with the author benjamin carp, author of "defiance of the patriots." he's an assistant history professor at tufts university, and be he discusses the causes and impacts of the boston tea party which took place in 1773.

the american revolution and -- [audio difficulty] >> who were these participants, why did they do what they did because that's a question i think most historians have avoided. and finally, i wanted to talk about the involvement of women in boston. they help connect the tea party participants to one another because some of them were related by marriage. there are some stories they helped the men prepare for the tea party beforehand and then helped them clean up, the soot and stuff off their faces afterwards. those are some minor ways in which women were important. the main ways were, a, their participation in boycotts of tea were going to be crucial, right? because who is that's serving tea, who is it that's participating in all the ceremonies at the tea table? it's women. if you can't get them to go

along with the boycott, any chance of getting people to push tea away on principle was doomed to failure. so women were incredibly important in that respect. and then also later on once you get to the 19th century, women with ended up playing a very important role in playing the stories of the tea party story they had heard there their husbands, fathers or grandfathers. and so in many ways women play a crucial role in the story of the boston tea party even though it seems like the kind of ultimate guy's guy event. i said before i also wanted to tell a global story of the boston tea party. so a way in which you can tell the story is just a story, but you can also tell it in the following way. you have the east india company which has a monopoly on all british trade east of the cape of good hope n. the 177 os 0 -- 177 0s they've become more and more of a ruler. their tea is mixed with sugar

which is farmed by afro-caribbeans, and begin anything 1600 this crop tea is becoming the favorite drink of many europeans. and when the bostonians protest the tea act, they dress as native americans all of these are dimensions that i explore more fully this book, and i can talk more about in the q&a if you're curious, but this is now all of a sudden a global period -- [audio difficulty] the tea party's iconic significance has captured imagine faces for over two centuries inspiring protesters from women's suffrage advocates to anti-abists -- anti-abolitionists. that's with regard to alcohol temperance, from white supremacists in the early part of the 20th century to civil rights leaders, martin luther king's letter from a birmingham jail in 1963.

all of whom found evidence as being the tea party as being an inspiration to them for one reason or another. ever since the boston tea party, people have celebrated but also debated and distorted the memory of an event that helped bring about the american revolution. i would argue that it's important to get this history right, and i want to conclude with another story from the pension records. in 1773, samuel allow el was a -- lowell was a boat carpenter -- [audio difficulty] in 1831 he lived in new hampshire, and here's what he wrote to congress. i was one of those who heralded themselves in that celebrated achievement. i was then young

>> three of those in shackles as punishments for attempting to escape and his recovery from yellow fever while he was in prison. while he and his fellow prisoners were being transported, he helped lead a mutiny when a storm helped separate their ship are the rest of the convoy, and the american mute nears led the boat to safety. so he has this amazing career. but now he was 86 years old in 1831. he described himself as being no longer able to work, and he says he has no means whatsoever to

subsist, he wrote, but he is wholly dependent on the bounty of his friends for his daily support. at the time, he writes, he was actively and now that the scene is reversed, his country is rich and happy, he is poor and miserable. so thank you, and i'm looking forward to seeing what questions you have. [applause] he's going to be our master of ceremonies. so he'll do the calling on you, and i'll try to field the questions.

>> all right, go ahead. >> so you said that it was ins boston where we had the tea party and that new york and philadelphia, basically, let them pass. but i understand there actually were other incidents like the boston tea party in delaware and near the river where i guess they just didn't have a good enough publicist? this. [laughter] >> well, the thirst thing i should say -- that's a very or good question. the question was weren't there other anti-tea incidents that happened in america? new york and philadelphia do something very important which is they are able to force the tea to turn around. so it doesn't end up being a violent, dramatic action, but they're still able to up hold the principle of the sea not landing in those ports. in south carolina they demand it be locked up in a wear house, and it basically sits there and

rots. so of the tea shipments, as a result, none of them are successfully able to make it into the american market with the exception of that fourth boston ship that wrecked on cape cod. the merchants were able to rescue some of that tea and get it to market. so the role of what the sons of liberty had done in those other cities is just as important as what had been done in boston. those other incidents that you're referring to, though, annapolis, maryland, green witch, new jersey, just to give a couple of examples, those were later events, and they weren't necessarily protesting east india company shipments of tea, but private shipments of tea or already-existing stores of tea. what happens is after the boston tea party, the boycott movement starts to spread everywhere, and people are saying, well, we won't drink duty tea anymore. people are like, well, how can you taste the difference? and people say, well, okay, we won't have any tea.

and two days before the boston tea party, lexington, massachusetts, you know, had taken all its tea to the town square and burned it. and charleston do some of the same things. so this then becomes the thing to do is to, you know, enforce all over the country the idea of not importing british goods by 174, but -- 1774, but especially tea. and so there are other actions, but often the boston tea party is kind of a very dramatic event. so that's a good question. there are other dimensions to the -- there are other tea parties that kind of happen elsewhere, but the boston tea party is the most dramatic one in december. >> the okay. question in back. >> dr. carp, would you comment on the role that the green dragon tavern prayed in the story -- played in the story? >> yes. i saw the tavern downstairs, i'm

hoping we'll be able to gather after the talk. the green dragon tavern was one of the many where where the bosn sons of liberty might meet to plan things. it was also one of the meeting places for the boston launches of free masons, and there's some conjecture that the boston free masons were one of the groups that contributed membership to the boston tea party. i have a whole chapter in my first book on the importance of t.a.r.p.es as gatt earn -- taverns. so in that way the green dragon tavern was definitely an important place. >> question in the back. >> yes. [inaudible] >> sure. >> [inaudible] >> yes.

i actually looked this up today because i was, like, i'm introduced to this concept, i'm going to get this question. both of those pensions were successful, you do see records of the government having paid out some monies to these men. knoll actually died in -- [inaudible] [audio difficulty] samuel had some nice obituaries when he died that talked about his participation in the tea party and his revolutionary service. >> up front. >> could you summarize for us your findings about the average age and the occupation of the -- >> sure. sure. more than half of the tea party participants were between the ages of 18 and 29, so it's a

very young group. but i should say there's also a little bit of a sample bias there because think about how young you would have had to have been and how long you would have had to have lived to be able to tell your stories once the stories start coming out? the stories don't start coming out until the 1820s. there might have been more 40-somethings, but they might not have lived long enough to share their story. so the 99 or 100 people on our list, you know, most of them are ages 18-29, and there are -- there's a big group that's younger than 18 as well. people who had been apprentices. one of the more amusing things about the boston tea party is the tide was out. it was 14 feet below high tide, so they throw the tea over the side of the ships, and it starts to clump up embarrassingly in the harbor, and they have to send a couple of apprentices in row boats to take their ores and break up -- oars and break up

the piles of tea. so there were some young kids as well. i think i found about two-thirds of them were artisans or craftsmen of one kind or another. these were boss bostonians who d with their hands, a large part of them in the construction industry. but i also suspect a lot of them had spent at least some time at sea, and some of them might have been laborers who were used to doing this kind of dock work. i think a lot of them were the kind of men who were comfortable aboard ships, and i think that's important because they did a lot of hard work, and they did it very fast. i mean, 46 tons, it's still a lot to be hauling around. and then in terms of political experience, i don't know the percentage, but a lot of them had participated in one or more of the, of either the important political groups in boston or one of the dramatic previous actions in boston like the stamp act riots or the boston masker. actually -- massacre. actually, i think i found the

bullets during the boston mass kerr almost missed about four or five people who later participated in the boston tea party, and there are descriptions of them, you know, catching some of the fallen men in their arms. you've got to imagine that an experience like that would really lead you to be the kind of person who dump the tea into the water afterwards. so, yeah, the profile of the tea party participants is really interesting. >> go ahead. >> [inaudible] the popularity of coffee and tea. we think of 18th century, the great coffee houses and that. coffee became the dominant drink in this country because tea was associated with the english. and i wonder what the facts of the matter are. >> yeah, yeah. that's a very good question. the question was about the relative popularity of coffee and tea. europeans discover coffee, tea and chocolate all around the same time from about the 1580s

into the 17th century. you know, chocolate is more popular in spain and portugal, coffee is more popular in france, tea tends to be more popular in russia and great britain. the europeans can only tolerate them if they mix them with sugar which is not true in the places where people originally started drinking those drinks. eventually, as the east india company's connections with china get better and better, tea really becomes, like, the drink of the british. and for that reason it was the drink of the americans too. they loved tea. you know, that's why they're so scared of these tea shipments, because they know it's so popular and so seductive that, you know, they were afraid the americans would kind of not be tough enough to resist it and, therefore, would accept the tax imposed by the 1767 townsend act. now,ing after the revolution -- now, after the revolution america becomes a

coffee-drinking country for the most part, but it's not because of the political principle of, you know, we still hate tea after, you know, what the british tried to do to us. the reason is just that coffee is grown, starts to be grown in jamaica, and it's a lot -- you know, it's just a more available market and a cheaper market for them to get tea from -- coffee from the caribbean than it is to get tea all the way from china. it's not until well into the 19th century that the british start growing tea on plantations in india. all 19th century ip veptions -- inventions in some ways. earl grey, it's interesting to note, was named after a british general who fought against the americans during the american revolution. so just an odd thing there. but, yeah, i mean, if americans had their own kind of connections to get lot of tea for as cheaply as the british could get it, they probably would have stayed tea drinkers, but coffee just becomes more readily available from jamaica and brazil, you know, so frank sinatra can sing about it.

[laughter] >> did you have a question, sir? >> well, actually, the prior gentleman took my question, but i've come up with another one. [laughter] with all the controversy surrounding these tea shipments and the taxation issues surrounding it, why wasn't there better security provided for these ships? >> that's a very good question. i mean, there is -- the curt that's being -- security that's being provided in the weeks between when the ships arrive and -- okay, well, let me back up for a second. the rule was that if a ship comes into harbor, it has 20 days to unload its goods if it has custom bl good or duty bl goods aboard. and if those 20 days elapse, then the navy or the customs service can come in, swoop in and sell everything at auction. you had to get rid of it in 20 days. you couldn't just wait around and keep it aboard ship. the deadline was going to expire

on december 17th at the stroke of midnight, so that's why december 16th becomes the last day for the bostonians to somehow deal with the tea. so, but the thing that the bostonians were afraid of while the ships were riding in the harbor was that it was the tea agents, the east india company's agents who were going to sneak aboard the ship, take all the tea and smuggle it into the countryside so they could then begin telling it -- selling it and do all the things the americans didn't want them to do. so the americans actually establish sentries to watch those ships at night. and they vote on this at an open meeting at the old south meeting house, and they say, okay, we're the 20 guys who are going to be onboard tonight, and they do this until the 16th. so thest the americans who are watching the tea -- it's the americans who are watching the tea. they have the power for that entire period. now, the british navy, there are three warships in the harbor, and there are regiments of troops at forth william in

boston harbor where they'd been since the immediate aftermath of the boston massacre. so in theory, governor hutchinson could have ordered those ships to prevent the boston tea party from happening, and the british later asked admiral montague and colonel leslie, why didn't you do this? the truth is that the rule was that the governor had to order that in order for that to take place, and governor hutchinson was hampered in massachusetts because he would have needed the approval of his council in order to do this. now, one of the problems with massachusetts politics was that the council didn't have to do what the golf said because they weren't -- governor said pause they weren't appointed by him. which is why one of the coercive acts, the massachusetts government act, was going to change that and say, oh, you know, the council will now be appointed by the governor, not by the house of representatives anymore. they wanted to make sure governors in the future in massachusetts would have a cooperative council rather than a resistant council.

so governor hutchinson is completely unable to order the army and navy to do anything. also if they'd done anything, it would have been risky. what's the admiral going to do, fire cannonballs into the town? they weren't ready to make it that kind of fight just yet. so it's a tricky thing, but some of it has to do with how the british thought about the kind of constitutional role of the armed forces and civilian, and civilian control. so the boss toke yangs talk a good game about, oh, they could have fired on us all the time. that's a good question. >> actually two points. the first is one working at an historic site, i sometimes get involved in explaining tea as a commodity to young chirp. and the question -- children. and the question always comes

up, was it loose tea? did you ever get into what type of tea it actually was? and secondly, did the british ever successfully identify and prosecute any of the people that dumped the tea? >> okay. the first question is what do we know about what kind of tea it was that was dumped into the harbor. it's all loose tea, two varieties of green tea and four varieties of black tea. the fancier green tea -- no, singlo tea, i believe. and the varieties of black tea was the most common sort of tea, congo which is also the word for kung fu, actually, because it required skill, you know, in order to make. suchong and i can't remember the fourth. anyway -- what's that? >> [inaudible] >> no, 40, no. there's a fourth one. so we know what kind of tea was

dumped in the harbor because that's in the lists of the east india's claims afterwards. the second question was, was anyone prosecuted for it? no. the governor said, it's treason! we probably can't make a case for treason, so it's burglary. it's just persons unknown, they were indisguise, right? who in boston is going to say i recognize my neighbor? because that guy would have gotten beaten up. the bostonians -- the sons of liberty had so put everyone in thissal that you were never going to get anyone to come forward, and in london they find the same thing. they interview some witnesses, and they listened to all the reports from the governors, you know, and from other people, but there's no one they're able to confidently identify. there's this one crazy guy, samuel dyer, who goes to london in chains, and he's like, i know somebody who's there, but one of

the people he names was a ship captain, and his ship wasn't even in this boston at the time. yeah. we don't have any definite ideas about anyone who was there until really the 1 teens with the -- 18 teens with the the exceptioning of one person who was caught trying to stuff tea into his own pockets. they grab his coat off, and they beat him up, and can they hang his coat in front of his door and say, this is what this guy tried to do. the idea was, look, we're doing this as a matter of principle, we're not trying to pocket the tea. so ironically, he's not considered one of the heros of the boston tea party, he's the only one that we have multiple corroborating accounts that he was actually there. and the other stories don't come out until the first one is, like, 1813. >> yes. i've recently been to the old south meeting house, and i was disappointed with the amount of detail about the boston tea party. i know you're from the boston

area. i don't know if you have any interaction with them? okay, because they advertise themselves as the launching pad for the -- >> yeah. the old south meeting house was the largest building in boston at the time, and there were so many people interested in in protesting the tea tax, they couldn't fit in the town hall where they held their regular meetings. there were people who were from out of town and people who weren't ordinary voters but were still interested. it really is this important place where these meetings are taking place, these big public meetings talking about what to do and bringing the ship owner in there and confronting him and saying, are you going to turn your ship around? we have some great descriptions of it. i actually think the old south meeting house duds a very good job -- does a very good job with their interpretation. right now the for-profit museum where you can throw those crates in the ship and play with that,

that's been closed, so the old south meeting house is the place to learn about the boston tea party right now. i've given a couple of lunchtime talks there, i think last december, and i'm going to be giving another talk for my in-town launch of the book in a couple of weeks. so, yeah, i'm fans of theirs. it's possible when you went the interpretation wasn't as good as it is now. i don't know how recently you were there. >> you said -- >> wait for bill to bring -- >> you said that the tax on the pound of tea was three pencesome. >> yes. >> what was the wholesale price of a pound of tea? >> oh, that's a hard one. it was about two pounds, i think. it fluctuates a lot. yeah. >> is that in relation to today's -- >> you know what? i'm flattered that you think i've memorized the price indexes.

[laughter] it's, well, let's see. i guess we could extrapolate by saying if a ton costs as much as paul revere's house which was, i think, maybe 200 pounds, then -- let's see. i think that the total tea shipment was worth about a million to two million in today's pounds. it's difficult to figure these conversions -- >> at today's prices of tea, tea was much more expensive. >> yes. a cup of tea was probably more expensive in real dollars than, back then than it was today. but still unexpensive enough that an ordinary family could enjoy a cup of tea. maybe not every day, but for special occasions. i mean, the tea had to travel a long way by trip. it had to come 5u89 way from china, over to america. they were reclimate on wind back then. as all professors are. in.

[laughter] >> [inaudible] how they went about it. >> that's very tricky, right? because no one's going to kind of come forward and say this. i mean, i think, i think there were two dynamics at work. one is that there were influential members of the sons of liberty, the north end caucus, the boston committee of correspondents, you know, these movers and shakers. people like samuel adams, but also including some more middle merchants and craftsmen. you know, there's some indication that they were the ones who were kind of coordinating this protest, you know, making sure that the positive tone yangs did what they had to do and that they pulled in some of their employees and apprentices and associates and said, okay, we've got a job to do, let's put on indian disguises and to this. there's some indication it was a top-down affair. but i also found this very weird document of a bunch of yale students in the early 19th century who were traveling

around the countryside, and they run into this old guy who talks about his experiences at the boston tea party, and he says it was a bunch of craftsmen who got together and said, you know, we are the ones who have to do something about the tea party. and they tried to get a leader, one of these elite leaders to back them, and guys would come in, and they would kind of, you know, dance around and say i don't know if i can countenance this. and one guy the farthest he's willing to go is say if you do it, you will find friends. so they take that as a sign, and they say, okay, we'll just choose a leader fro amongst -- from amongst ourselves. was the revolution something that was directed by these elite puppeteers kind of controlling what everyone was doing, or were ordinary working class, artisan positive tone yangs kind of taking it upon themselves to protest against the act of parliament? this the boston tea party seems to indicate that it's a pix of both. so the planners may have been familiar leaders like samuel ann adams and john hancock, but they

also may have been these more unfamiliar, ordinary artisans from boston. >> hi. i was just wondering, after a safe period the revolution settles and all, and did they have just coming out of the woodwork men claiming i was there, i was there, i was there? >> yeah. it actually becomes a big dispute. and nathaniel hawthorne weighs in on this and says wouldn't it be better if mystery of the boston tea party could just survive? and there were people who came out and started telling their stories, and then in the press, you know, some of the printers would attack them and say, oh, there's inconsistencies in this story, and it's probably not true, etc., etc. so there was a real resistance in the 1830s to having this story come out. and the reason for that is that i think americans weren't ready to embrace the tea party.

it's not just this kind of -- they don't see it as this heroic action, they also see it as something that was dangerous and, you know, subversive and, you know, and pair sidal in a way. that was really a sketchy thing to do. you still had people in upstate new york or in maine well into the 19th century who would black their faces and protest against their landlords. so it was really seen as a very subversive thing to do. so the conservatives of of that time were not ready to celebrate the tea party because they didn't want to end courage that kind of protest. -- encourage that kind of protest. but the people who were working against that is that all of a sudden there's more of a labor movement, and there were artisans who wanted to celebrate the participation of artisans in an event like this. so it's contested history even back then in the 1830s, and one of the ways that that fight plays out is over, well, should anyone be coming forward? should we even believe them? i mean, but it's also a problem for the historians which is that, you know, we want to see

that there's some kind of corroboration for these stories. so that was an issue that i had to struggle with, you know, which of these stories should i reject because i think they're false or because i can see something false final in them? and i did that in some cases, but then the story got mutated, and they said, oh, no, he wasn't a participant, he was a witness. he was one of the chiefs. right? so some of the stories do end up getting exaggerate inside this the telling. it's like a game of telephone. but the 99 or 100 people that i list at the back of the book, i feel pretty confident that that's our best guest of who was at the tea party. this woman's question about the profile of the tea party participants, everything makes a lot of sense. this is exactly the kind of people who you would have expected to board the tea ships. they were to some extent politically connected, but not all of them. they were mostly young men, and they were mostly artisans.

that makes sense as far as who would have been there, and those are the names that have come down to us. some of them were a little more elite, there were a couple of college graduates and some merchants and a doctor, you know, and so on. but, yeah. i mean, the so that's what i would say. it's a very tricky issue, but i did my best to work it out in the book. >> we have time for one last question. one more? all right. >> just a quick segway to what you were just describing as far as the participants. was paul revere among them? >> yeah. paul revere is one of the participants in the tea party. that comes out in the 1830s that he had been one of the people there. and he's very closely associated with both this leadership group and, also, ordinary artisans because he was himself a silversmith. and paul revere had already done a lot for the sons of liberty

before that time, so it's not surprising to see him there. thank you all for coming this evening. >> with we have a reception downstairs and, please, give professor carp another round of applause. [applause] >> this event was hosted by the david library of the american revolution. to find out more, visit dlar.org. >> host: cleo paskal, global warring. not global warming. >> guest: yeah. it's a little bit of an extreme title, but the situation is quite extreme. a lot of the analysis around climate change stops with it's going to get warmer and the sea level's going to rise. that doesn't go on to describe what that means in terms of geopolitical issues. we're starting to see it a little bit in the arctic where suddenly there's conflict where there hadn't been before, and new players are coming into

areas that are completely unexpected. so china has an ice breaker. they know what's going on in the arctic caused by climate change, and so they want a piece of the action. it's rechanging the way global politics and economics are acting out. it's a little bit disconcerting. >> host: why would china have an ice breaker, and what's going on in the arctic that we should be concerned about? >> guest: well, there's major oil and gas fields in the arctic, a lot of them are in russia. the pipelines in the russia, like the alaska pipelines, are built on thawing perm ma frost -- perm frost. if part of the part-timeline goes down, you've lost your delivery system. it make sense to start to shift to shipping. if russia shifts so to shipping, they could deliver to china instead. so they could continue to supply without losing the revenue stream. so china increasingly wants a piece of that action, especially the russian arctic oil and gas action.

>> host: what is your background? how'd you get involved with this issue? >> guest: i was a journalist for a long time, and i would do foreign correspondence, and i was going places in the pacific, and it comes up a lot in a place where, you know, it's going to disappear because of rising sea levels. i started to wonder what does that actually mean? you know, if it disappears, does it cease to exist as a country? do the waters become international waters? this overlaid on the top of that, you see china and taiwan fighting for control in the region and increasingly the u.s. as well. it was the u.s.' stomping grounds, the u.s. pulled out over the cold war. hillary clinton was just in american saw mow ya of all places. the area's getting quite extreme. so if you get countries disappearing, that well-balanced geopolitical chess board starts to shift in ways we haven't really considered and perhaps should be considered. >> host: cleo paskal, "global warring" is the book.

>> follow booktv on twitter. send us a tweet at booktv with your favorite booktv program from 2010. from now until december 10th, we will select one tweet per day at random to receive booktv swag and the tweeted program will be included in be our holiday schedule over the december 24th-26th weekend. we look forward to seeing your favorite booktv programs from the last year. thank you for watching. >> here at the national press club's book and author night talking to eugene robinson about his new book, "disintegration: the splintering of black america." can you tell me how you came to form four groups? >> it just seemed to work out that way. four seems like an arbitrary number, it just seemed to be the way it worked out. it was clear there was, you

know, one group was the mainstream of the middle class black america. it was clear that one group was the abandoned non-middle class black america. and then the other groups were, you know, i did think that the existence of a small but very powerful elite was something new. and so i called that the transcendent group. and then i needed a category to deal with, with other groups that didn't fit the other categories like immigrants, for example, from the caribbean and africa. and also biracial americans. and i thought that they would kind of fit into an umbrella group i called the emerging, so that's how i got to four. >> are yes. i noticed that you put new immigrants and biable people together. and you were comfortable with that, grouping them under the same umbrella? >> well, i was mostly comfortable with that.

it was not precise, and it was -- it didn't make for as clean a category as the other categories. however, i thought that the similarities were -- this concept of emergent groups that were becoming more prominent, that kind of hadn't been around in larger numbers before or at least acknowledged in those numbers before and that i thought were going to be more important in the future. so i was comfortable with that as penalty of it. aspect of it. i kind of wished it had worked out, you know, to exactly four, but i didn't think they kind of sood alone either as separate groups. >> and can you tell me which of the four groups do you think has expanded the most in recent years? >> has what? >> expanded the most in recent years? >> well, in numerical terms, i

would say probably the mainstream just because its numbers are so great that relative to, really, any of the others that i would say it has -- depending on what you consider recent years, you know, in the middle of this recession -- >> let's say the last decade. >> in the last decade, i would say the mainstream group has expanded the most in real terms. and the emergent group, especially the immigrants, has probably expanded the most in percentage terms. >> what are some of the more surprising findings that you came upon this writing the book? >> oh, there were tons of them. there was this amazing figure from a pew research center study that showed that 37% of african-americans didn't believe black americans could still be thought of as single race. i thought that was really a striking figure. after a certain age, there's

only, there's something like a 40% chance that a black woman, i believe, in her early 20s would never marry as opposed to a 20% chance for white women. i thought that was an interesting figure. so there are lots of these things that i kind of stumbled across. >> are were there -- were therey stark comparisons to white americans in similar groups? >> well, yes, there are some. one is even if you compare middle class to middle class, there's a stark difference in wealth as opposed to income. middle class to middle class income is fairly close now, but wealth is a huge gap. and that's something that some people have been talking and thinking a lot about including bob johnson, the billionaire who's now got a project on it. >> and do you tap into any solutions for kind of stopping