fair game. my own sense was that he was a lively woman but not the common trap that was in circulation at that time. jackson said at one time to cheer her up, margaret, i'd rather have scorpion on my back than the tongues of these washington women. ..

that will force everybody else to offer their resignations. that happen, and the edens went off to an ambassadorship and it all died away and jackson could return to harassing the cherokees. while he was distracted jackson was distracted with proving in his words that mrs. eaton was as chaste as a virgin, too much merriment. the state of georgia was coming up with its own solutions to the cherokee problem. this is what happened. first they pass the cherokee -- of 1880 and that annexed most of the cherokee territory that was a budding five neighboring white counties, and that code declared the church along with in those areas was null and void.

the code also prohibited cherokees from holding meetings are testifying against white men in the formerly cherokee territory, all previous contracts between indians and whites were nullified and less to white men agreed to vouch for their validity. the result of that of course was ruinous for the cherokees and it was a massachusetts congressman who spelled it out for his colleagues and i will read from that. if whites suffered guaranteed that no other white men were watching, then they could cross into cherokee territory, and this is quoting the congressman, they could burn the dwelling, waste the farm, plunder the property, assault the person, murdered the children of the cherokee and the hundred. >> permitted to be looking on, there is not one of them that can be permitted to bear witness against the criminals. then came george's legislation

that banned all flights, including missionaries from living on indian lands unless they weren't licensed by the governor and sworn oath of obedience to the state of georgia. several of the missionaries refuse because they said that, to sign that kind oath, would ruin their relationship with the people they had come to minister to. but, two of them, her refuse to sign the oath, were tried and convicted and sentenced to four years of hard labor. so, that was the same time that the state legislature created something called the georgia guard, which was a new unit specifically designed to enforce the provisions of this code. when jackson's allies finally introduced the legislation to call for the removal, it was a

new jersey congressman, senator, theodore freylinghuysen, who led the charge against jackson and against the legislation. he first spoke on april 6, 1830 and he spoke for the next three days and thanks to the wonders of the internet, we can now read the whole transcript of the debate, and it was probably as substantial a debate as there had been in the house and senate up until that time. it went on and on, but with a great deal of literacy and legal arguments. what freylinghuysen suggested was, if this removal is going to happen, then it must be

voluntary. everybody was convinced that jackson, whatever he said, was prepared to enforce it by military might if necessary. so it was interesting to me the counterattack from john forsythe of georgia, who i think made a pretty effective argument, he spoke about the hypocrisy of the northerners, who had been allowed for decades to deal with a would with their own tribes and no called in for federal interference. he reminded the senators that the north and midwest had vanished the tribes without provoking a national outcry. he mentioned the mohawks, the senate put, the peak was all work on and win a main senator against the removal urge people

to listen to the still small voice of their conscience, a senator named robert adams of mississippi returned to the theme of northern hypocrisy. he called indians barbarians any challenges northern colleagues to do justice to them before they lectured others. i think again, this is something we should remember. he said, about the indians, call them back from the deep wilderness to which they have been driven, adams said, restore to them a happy land from which they had been cruelly expelled. give them your fields, your houses, your cities, your temples of justice and your halls of legislation. do that and then call upon us to follow an example so worthy. adams said he did not expect to

see that sort of northern repentance. instead he was sure that rather than give up their own possessions, quote be portended philanthropist would contend themselves with permitting things to remain as they are. you can see how that kind of argument resonated. you did these things through treaty and abuse. you did these things to the indian tribes and now you are picking on us. now we are just doing what you did and actually we have better cause because there were some agreements with the federal government going back 30 years. why are you doing this? it was at that point that congresswoman lumpkin and others saw it as the first salvo in a war against slavery. so, the vote came.

it was closer than jackson's people had expected. on april 26, 1830, 28 senators voted for removal, 19 against, the house vote was for jackson, 102 and 97 against. jackson sign his bill on may 28, 1830. davy crockett had been one of the people to vote against jackson. he had been a jacksonian and five at jackson's side but on this issue he broke with the president and he lost his seat in congress. he had served two terms in the lost it. he said i would sooner be honestly and politically then hypocritically immortalized. at least crockett said it would not make me ashamed in the last day of judgment. with the cherokees having lost

in congress, they turned next to the supreme court, and the two issues facing the justices worthy and posing of the sentences on the two missionaries for refusing to swear allegiance and the whole question of the georgia code against the cherokees. so, when john marshall's court struck down the law as unconstitutional, they also ruled that the missionaries be set free at once. been in new york, horace greeley summarized jackson's response to this. jackson didn't say these words although they are often ascribed to him. it was greeley's summing up what was known to be jackson's attitude. it was john marshall has made his decision, let him enforce it now if he can. so at this point the president of the united states was citing

with the state of georgia over the decision of the supreme court. and he did it, and the cherokees knew this, partially because he was being threatened in south carolina with the possibility of secession and he didn't want to go to war with the georgians over this issue, so he gave in and thought that by doing it, he was staving off what became the civil war but in many ways he may have been, in some ways encouraging it. a cherokee chieftain named liska was living in north carolina at the time and during the war of 1812 he had fought with jackson at four shoe bend alabama against the british and their indian allies. and his response when he heard about the ruling and jackson's

flaunting of that, he said if i had known jackson would drive us from our homes, i would have killed him that last day at a four shoe. by the time they removal actually began, jackson's term had ended and it was left to martin van buren to enforce it. now van buren had no interest. this was an emotional, personal issue for jackson, not even remotely for martin van buren and in fact at one point when it was suggested maybe it could be deferred, the removal for two years, he went along with it until the georgians were so outraged that he had to back down and have it go through the schedule jackson had first set. so, this is the reason that van buren would have been happy to differ it, was the kind of economic chaos that i was talking about here. the cotton market in new orleans

that collapsed, and there were bank failures all across the country. and in fact soldiers were patrolling the streets of new york city because of the fear of riots. so it was a terrible mess and that had priority for van buren. meantime, the removal went forward. so, as jackson left the presidency, people started to sum up his achievements and it weighed upon him very heavily at home in the hermitage, what was history going to say about him as president? the one thing you can say -- the two things. one is he was the first military hero since george washington to be president and second, he was the only other president without a college education. i really don't know if that is even significant but it was the case.

but, what is significant is the difference in their temperament. washington have the temperament to deal in peacetime with a lit akel affairs of the state and jackson did not. he saw himself this way, talking about the cherokees. jackson had persuaded himself that john roth and his allies represented the sort of arrogant aristocracy he had thought in his 1828 campaign against john quincy adams and indeed throughout his life. jackson could frame his removal crusade as one more popular issue like his attacks on the bank. by insisting on removal, jackson could see himself as taking the side of the beleaguered masses against their wealthy oppressors. privileged cherokees might paint him as an enemy of their people but jackson is added all -- always championed the ordinary man whether white farmer in

georgia or an indian prevented from moving west by a grasping tribal elite. jackson could yan bending on removal because he knew he was not the enemy of the indian and he was being painted. he was simply following what he termed the big tapes of humanity, his conscience was clear. but i wonder, because as he faded, and knew death was upon him, he returned regularly to this subject, and wanting to know what his crew was going to say about him. and i think, i don't know -- we have no way of knowing and of man is absolutely reluctance to express any kind of personal failings as jackson didn't leave any evidence for us to know, but it seems to me he may have understood even if he felt his conscience was clear that perhaps history would judge him

less favorably. now, lumpkin protested the way the northerners were using them. he said they were indicting his fellow georgians as"atheist, diaz, infidels and sabbath breakers laboring under the curse of slavery." but i would suggest as a summation for the removal debate in the congress at least is this. within the decorous precincts of the u.s. capitol, salvos have been fired in the nation's first civil war and the south had won the opening round. but i don't want tonight to explore the misery of the forced migration to oklahoma. i worry sometimes, and i worried writing the book, that we can

become hardened to other people's pain if you dwell on it too thoroughly. for instance, in los angeles, when the police were accused of beating rodney king, a rather celebrated case at the time, the defense attorneys played the tape of the beating over and over and over. they found every pretext for introducing it again because they counted on it, that the horror of it or the discussed would wear away and the jurors would be left with boredom and indifference. and i think when you write about misery, you have to be aware of that. so, i dealt with a marvelous diary kept by a northern missionary named daniel buttrick who he and his wife chose to go with their converts on the trail

of tears, and it is hard raking stuff. and i don't think it would make anyone indifference to the trail, but i didn't really want to go into it, and the same thing really about the fate of three of the cherokees who, the reader of the book will come to know best, when named major ridge, his son john ridge, and his nephew, elias. these are three of the men who, leaders, who saw the futility of resisting jackson, made their separate peace with him knowing when they did it that they would pay for their lives. with their lives and in fact that happens and it is to me a sad and shocking section of the book. but, what i would like to do instead is returned to what i

raised earlier about guilt and responsibility. i think i try to remember that those voices that were raised in congress against the removal did not represent the views of most americans. for most americans, they were caught up with their own concerns, the concept of manifest destiny was sweeping the country that we were entitled to occupy these lands and in fact, on the senate floor, missouri senator thomas hart benton, his remarks were probably more in keeping, closer to a national consensus and i will read them, because i think they do represent the way a lot of people were thinking. benton said he considered the white race to be uniquely blessed by it divine command to

subdue the earth. he put it this way, i cannot recline that this capital has replaced the wait long for this christian people replace the savages, the white matrons, the red squads. indeed, and look upon the settlement of the columbia river by the band of the caucasian race as the most momentous human events in the history of man since his dispersion over the face of the earth. and if the nation was indifferent, to the plight of the cherokees, harriet teachers though was holding all of america and not just the south to blame for her slavery. i think i at least had not known her conclusion to uncle tom's cabin. one of those books that we all know but nobody probably actually reads. what she wrote at the end was this. the people of the free states

have defended, encouraged and participated in the evil of slavery. they were the more to blame, because they did not have the excuse of their upbringing or the culture around them. both north and south had been guilty before god and the christian church has a heavy account to answer. i understood that indictment better because i grew up during world war ii. i was 12 and at a saturday matinee at the neighborhood movie, when i first saw those newsreel pictures of gis unearthing the skeletons from the auschwitz death camp's, ever since then i have felt they could hang whenever people askes asking in a friendly spirit, what nationality is that? and i was compelled to answer

german. that memory made me appreciate the pattern that kept repeating 20 years later when i was covering civil rights demonstrations in the south for "the new york times." in greensboro and jackson, i came to expect the fact that librarians and schoolteachers and shopkeepers would sidle up to me after some new outrage from bull connors, the sheriff in alabama, and they would murmur to me, you should know we are not all like that. and i realized that there were many georgians who were against the cherokee removal. it wasn't all northern voices. there were people, but they know more spoke out or could speak out then these people in the

1960s, so, they could champion the cause of civil rights. it was the social pressures -- were just too great. during the vietnam war, the antiwar activists, they launched a campaign to get protesters decided how that they would not pay their income tax until the war was ended. and i remembered very clearly an incident in los angeles where a southern california man had actually not only signed a vowel, but followed it. he was arrested. his property was seized, and he was put in jail. that was a one-day story what happened to him after that never made the newspapers, never made the television and i realize

that very few of us and i'm certainly not in

money that had nothing to do with the war itself. i also tend to think that even those northerners who spoke out against, on behalf of the cherokees were often patronizing and ignorant of the tribes that they were defending. ralph waldo emerson wrote a celebrated letter, open letter, to van buren about the issue, but even in a letter he described the cherokees as a racist savage band and in fact his concerns seemed more about this stain that the removal was placing a pond the united states honor than it did upon the

misery of -- that the cherokees were being subjected to. the letter though has great literary force. he says, van buren went ahead and implemented the jackson policies, you, sir, will bring down that renowned share in which you sit into infamy as your seo is set to this instrument of perfidy in the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty will stink to the world. for the georgian guard and a state politicians, i could hardly be surprised that they would refer the cherokees as barbarians, because they had taken them as their enemy and when we do that, we have to deny those people and a common humanity. peace marchers in the same

vietnam protests were shocked by the crude and racist names that our soldiers and marines had for the viet cong, but if you are asking some young men to go to war and kill other young men, you can't do it under a banner of universal brotherhood. you have to dehumanize. you have to demonize. and so, however, we try in wartime to turn the guilt of an individual, with the individual may feel, into a general absolution for our troops and yet we are reading these days regularly about the soldiers coming back from iraq and afghanistan, and they are deeply troubled, tortured by what they have seen and done. there is a price.

during world war ii, the germans in my hometown, minneapolis, were not rounded up and put in concentration camps. even though the german-american german-american -- before the war had been disseminating very poisonous antiwar propaganda, but we were not seized after december 7. at the same time we were being spared, american society was being bombarded on all sides by the constant vilification of the japanese. again, i was a child, but i remember the movies, the editorial cartoons, the comic books, all of them portrayed the japanese as subhuman, subhuman creatures with buck teeth and thick glasses. they were no better than rodents. they were torturing american prisoners. they were denying on yankee flesh.

the impact of that indoctrination does not and with a peace treaty. i was reminded again of that in 1996. why was in hanoi when robert mcnamara, former secretary of the defense, held a meeting with a conference -- with north vietnamese generals and members of the communist politburo. they received him with exquisite courtesy. they could afford to, they had won the war. but, there was one rough moment, only once in the three days did their tempers flare. that was when mcnamara repeated a cliché that i've heard time and again, even from general william westmoreland. he explained to the north vietnamese that we americans have been at a disadvantage in the fighting because our culture

part of higher premium than bears on human life. around the table the north vietnamese grew tense and silent and then finally one communist leader said, and he barely describes his theory, he says let me assure you mr. mcnamara that our mothers grieve for their sons every bit as much as yours did. but, the fact is as a young officer during world war ii, mcnamara had participated in planning the firebombing of tokyo. it seemed to me he was still emotionally unable to see asians as fully human. so it is understandable for me that andrew jackson and the georgians of the era could not acknowledge the impressive credentials, the impressive achievements of the georgia cherokee nation. there were still men whom are

regarded as their enemy. after world war ii, you've remember the nuremberg tribal trials in bavaria were our attempt to mitigate germany's collective guilt. the trials were intended to establish which individual nazi's had been responsible for those unspeakable crimes. but post-war literature out of germany and much of it written by writers far too young to have been complicit suggest that a collective standard of guilt can be hard to shake off. and i have come to wonder whether we might not even field ill tear about injustices that occurred in our lifetime, again from 1945 this example. reading the newspaper on august 6 that year, i knew something fundamental had changed in the world when

america dropped the first atomic bomb. i was a kid. i knew it. all the justification since then about the american servicemen who were spared by an earlier end of the war, they have not changed my uneasy feeling and yet, i have seen my students at the annenberg school at the university of southern california, their parents had not even been born at the time of hiroshima. and they regard america's use of the bomb as a historical footnote, nothing more. it certainly has nothing to do with them, nothing more than the salem witch trials had to do with them. they didn't live through that moment. and i'm not suggesting that we go through life with constant guilt, but i do think that there are feelings that are below the surface that we sometimes don't even acknowledge. i think of another category, the

guilt of proximity. you know that when a man goes on a murder spree, his neighbors are inclined to wonder what they could have done to stop him and on a political example, now that i have lived half a century in california, i can attest that the rounding up of the japanese at the start of world war ii resonates more deeply in my state than it might here in atlanta. after all, white californians stood by and often profited while the japanese and even the native-born japanese americans were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps. the argument goes that they were sent to camps in wyoming,. with the wartime censorship however no one could have known their fate for certain. we didn't know what happened. if we want to indulge in blaming all the people of germany for

the holocaust, we must be very clear about just what their crime was. they send back when they reprinted their neighbors to be rounded up and shipped away and their offense is little different from the actions of the californians and by extension all americans. get our treatment of the japanese ended less horrifically than the treatment of the. but that is a blessing, not an excuse. as you may recall the congress got around to apologizing to the japanese and 1988 and it offered a minimal monetary restitution for their losses. but then congress refused for several years to make a similar apologies to the cherokees and the other indian tribes that had been victimized, swindled, mistreated by our government. republican senator sam brownback of kansas, he first introduced an apology is legislation in

2004 but it kept being tabled. then, that will l. was finally passed five years later as an amendment to the defense appropriations act. president obama signed it a year ago this month. the language specifically forbids regarding the apology as a basis for any sort of monetary compensation. to sum up, here is what i have taken away from the cherokee experience. sometimes because of panic or greed, human beings and we americans are certainly human, may act against their own high principles but eventually remorseful assert itself in the form of what lincoln memorably called our better angels, those voices will insist that we live up to our ideals. to steal our conscience then, we may tender an apology. it will always be too late and it will always be inadequate. bearing that in mind these days,

i believe we must resist every effort to demonize the mexicans without papers or if the muslims living peacefully in our midst. if we insist on waiting them all as drug lords are terrorists, we are simply guaranteeing that one day our grandchildren will have to apologize for applying this and bigotry. i hope we don't pass on to them that burden. end of my sermon, thank you for listening and now it is my turn to hear what you have to say. [applause] they asked if you have questions, and i hope you do, that you come to the microphone. when i first started teaching,

the person i was replacing told me about having a guest speaker. it turned out to be i found out later, robert shearer who is a common the stands was at that time i think with ramparts magazine. at any rate, it was a class of 25 and he called for questions and nobody spoke up. and he said, well, we are just going to sit here until somebody has a question. [laughter] and of course you know, a challenge like that is irresistible so they sat absolutely silently for 45 minutes. the bell rang and they went home. i'm not going to make that mistake. [laughter] >> you spoke about the cherokees and the whites there were quarter blood, hath blood, the mix. when it came to the trail of tears, did those individuals have a choice as to whether they had to go on the trail or not if they had white blood?

>> oh, yeah. a lot of those mixed bloods, a phrase that comes a little hard to people, our generation, but they were called mixed bloods. many of them identified themselves as white, had nothing to do with the cherokees. didn't live within the territory, and that was considered their choice. the people who did were for one reason or another for instance one of them with a very small fraction of cherokee heritage was dressed by his mother as a little white english gentleman and he was so embarrassed and humiliated that he tore off the clothes and insisted on being seen as a cherokee. but it was, you know it is a little like what we know about,

we will never know the full extent of it, but the white skinned, black person passing as white and i think we are pretty well aware now that jefferson when he was leaving paris sally hemmings could have stayed on in paris as a white woman. she was very light-skinned, and he had to make certain and all of this is speculation but it looks as though he had to make certain promises to her about freeing her children if she were going to come back and lived at monticello. so yeah, there was a lot of flexibility and there still is. isn't the census form, don't we read that the census form has to be completely reorganize now because people don't find it easy to specify within maybe six categories.

thank you. yes, sir. >> was there any pretense of compensating the cherokees? i mean we took all their land away from them when they got to oklahoma. were they given property of there? >> oh yes. that is one of the arguments jackson made. they got land. they got money for their removal and i had assumed -- this is ignorance on my part -- i didn't know much about oklahoma and i just ludwell, the cherokees i had seen in this area of georgia very bad bargain, because this is a lovely part of the world, and dicing the fake god flat, sandy expanses but actually that area is very handsome.

in fact, those cherokee sogegian and came early had hoped that when the great mass arrived, they would see that this was not the wasteland that they had been told, that it was really fertilf course that misses the point that it wasn't their tribal lanr ancestors were buried. >> good evening, thanks for being here. i just wanted to ask you, president jackson is often at odds with senators clay, calhoun and webster. i was wondering what their stance was on removal? >> well, the cherokees hoped that clay would be elected president, and they felt that he was there one champion. when in fact, by the standards of the time, he was, although when he was the secretary of state for adams and the issue came up, he had said in in the

private cabinet meetings, you know, the indians can never be assimilated. they are going to die out and they be given their low culture, it is no great loss. and adams, who recorded all of this in his journal which he kept assiduously, was shocked by this. and the next day when one of his other cabinet officers came and said you know maybe we shouldn't be fighting with the georgians if what secretary clay says his journal. we are just alienating our friends and a lost cause. and adams was rigorously principled and said in effect that is not a consideration. that was clay's opinion and we are going to act on the law, not on that opinion. so that was clay, but he did, he

resisted the removal and i really came to like henry clay a lot. very smart. he had a lot of good ideas. he proposed that perhaps countries could get together and create a can now in panama that would facilitate traffic. he was an early proponent of the good neighbor policy. he had been a virtues. he thought that slavery would wither away on its own, that as more and more settlers arrived and more and more labor was available, that slavery would become untenable economically. so, he had a lot of blind spots. for calhoun, it wasn't the indian issue wasn't as far as i can remember particularly interesting to him. he was very concerned with the tariffs particularly.

and webster was a northerner. he had northern sympathies about it, but wasn't a principle leader. you know, it is important for me to remember at least that i can get very caught up with the rhetoric of the anti-movement but remember that this was a relatively spot number of people who really cared passionately on the issue. >> from reading your review of your book, one of the things that the reviewer pointed out was the nexus that you made between the civil war and the removal of the indian. coming to atlanta, expected you to talk about that, but you have not talked about it. you have alluded to it but you have offered very little evidence or examples of that, and i would like for you to

discuss it briefly, please. >> well, first of all we start with the premise that i have a lifetime, have given a lifetime pass to jon meacham because he did a very, very good review of my last book on the war of 1812. [laughter] so he can do almost no crime. now the thing is, he wrote a book on andrew jackson, and he has a vested interest in andrew jackson. and so, to me, we have a difference of opinion. i think jackson was fantastic in so many ways are actually almost literally a fantasy figure almost. but, i don't agree with the point. now, i mean, meacham is certainly entitled to his opinion but the fact is that men like wilson lumpkin and john

ross and the cherokees side, they saw very clearly that this was an early attempt of the north to impose its values on the south and in the case of lumpkin, it was to be resisted. ross at first thought it was a good thing until a correspondent from philadelphia wrote that it was very bad to get the antislavery movement mixed up with the anti-removal movement because so many even in the north were not abolitionists. but what you watch -- i mean you have to start with the premise that in 1828, the campaign didn't even mention slavery, and yet by the time jackson left, it

was at the forefront of the national debate. now something was happening during that period and the something was the mobilization of the quakers, the northern missionaries, the congregationalists against the removal but also against slavery. and i think it is not a -- but i think when he defied the supreme court, think that was a very important element in the thinking of the south and you know you can disagree but something happened that went from being a nonissue in 1828 to south carolina in 1860. >> thank you. >> thank you.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> the as was hosted by the atlanta history center. for more information visit atlanta history center.com. >> we are at the national press club book and the other night talking to eugene robinson about

his new book "disintegration" the splintering of black america. can you tell me how you came to form for groups in these new splintering? >> it just seemed to work out that way. you know, for seems like an arbitrary number. it seemed to be the way that it worked out. it is clear there was, one group was the mainstream middle-class black america. was clear one group was the abandoned non-middle-class black america. and then the other groups were you know, i did think that the distance of a small but very powerfully powerful elite was something new and so i call that the transcendent group and that i needed a category to deal with other groups that didn't fit the other categories like immigrants for example from the caribbean and africa, and also bi-racial

americans. and i thought they would kind of fit into an umbrella group called the emergence so that is how i got two for. >> yes i noticed that you put new immigrants and bi-racial people together. and you are comfortable with that, grouping them under the same umbrella. >> well, i was mostly comfortable without. it was not precise, and it didn't make for as clean a category as the other categories. however, i thought some similarities were -- this concept of emergence -- groups that were becoming more prominent that hadn't been around anymore in numbers at the fore as as at least acknowledge and those numbers before and i thought were going to be more important in the future. so i was comfortable with that aspect of it. i kind of wished it had worked out exactly, but i didn't think

they kind of stood 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? >> as what? >> expanded the most in recent years? >> well, in numerical terms i would say probably the mainstream just because it's numbers are so great relative to really any of the other that i would say, depending on what you consider recent years, you know. in the middle of this recession recession. >> lets say the last decade or goes. >> i would say the mainstream group has expanded the most in real terms, and the emergent group especially the immigrants mostly in percentage terms. >> what were some of the more surprising findings that you

came upon in writing the book? >> there were tons of them. there was an amazing figure from a pew research center study that shows that 37% of african-americans didn't believe black americans were still to be thought of as single race. i thought that was a striking figure. after certain age, there is only -- there is something like 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. >> were there any stark comparisons to white americans in similar groups? >> well, yes there are some. middle class to middle middle-class there's a start

difference in wealth as opposed to income. middle class and locus -- low class income there is a huge gap and that is something that some people have been talking and thinking a lot about including bob johnson the billionaire who is a project about that. >> do you talk about any solutions for top stopping the splintering? >> you know i think it may be a process that kind of happens. a lot of it is organic. what i do hope i have identified some possible solutions for the plight of this a bandit group, which i think is really the group that needs urgent attention right now, and i think it has been a success. >> thank you very much for your time. >> booktv is on twitter. follow us for a regular update

on our programming and news. nonfiction books and authors. twitter.com/booktv. >> we or hear the national press club talking with spencer abraham about his book, "lights out." can you tell us what some of these solutions are to our energy crisis that you detail in the book? >> i will. as energy secretary i watched what i felt was not working and working and we have a real energy challenge facing america going forward. and they think first we need to increase dramatically the role nuclear energy place here in the united states. rideout is 20% of our power and i think it should be 30% by 2030. we also need to increase the role of renewable energy here in the united states. right now it is wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, these were nobles are only 2% of our energy and we really need them to be much much higher. so we need to support that effort.

and i'm a conservative, so i believe in conservation and one of the things we also need to do is to find ways to improve our energy efficiency so that we don't have as much growth in energy demand projected to be the case. >> and what do we do about the arguments to keep costs down in terms of incorporating other energy sources? >> while that is certainly a challenge and i think though that it is, most of these are costs we should be willing to bear. i think first of all the private sector should and canada will play an active role in deploying these new forms of energy. but i think there is a role for the federal government to encourage them as well. i think in the last couple of years we have seen some progress along these lines but it is going to take a lot more at least given right now what looks like the demand for not only in the united states but the rest of the world. if we don't do it, we are going to see prices for energy

skyrocket. we are going to see america at the mercy of producing countries who are exporting to us our energy and that could put us in a politically difficult position and of course if we don't address these issues we will have growing environmental challenges as well. so, what the book tries to show is a pathway for to address all of those. fortunately i think there is but it will take willen tough decisions and we have been a little bit unwilling to make those tough decisions in the last few years. >> do you tackle how to change i guess public perspective and their perception of what we should do and being more cooperative? >> well, it is a good point. one of the real intent -- impediments to what we need to do an energy is what they called a knot in my backyard, the nimby syndrome. the one thing i found as energy secretary is it didn't matter what type of energy project you were talking about our energy infrastructure and mike --

deployment. there was tremendous resistance because people didn't want it anywhere near them. they wanted lots of energy and they want a cheap energy but they didn't want anybody to either make it or use it around them. and you can't do that. at the end of the day we have to as a country, we have to sort of be grownups about this and say yes it would need terrific if we could have all the energy facility somewhere else but we need them to be deployed on a broad basis. i do address that in the book. i don't profess to have a solution to convincing americans that they ought to do this, but i think the more re-explained to them the consequences of not allowing projects to go forward they will see the benefit ultimately is to our country. >> and have you found that resistance follows more along party lines or is that something that is more kind of a myth? >> do not in my backyard

resistance is universal. it knows no regional or other kinds of boundaries and it has grown i think in recent years. and that is not surprising because the country has gotten larger. the population has increased so that means we need more power. we also as a people, and in the history of mankind, almost every new major innovation tends to be dependent on new supplies of energy. we all marveled at the high-tech revolution of the 1990s and since, but that revolution is largely driven by electricity, the electricity to manufacture the chips and components of computers, the electricity needed to operate laptops and pcs. and that is a challenge because that has meant that we needed to ramp up the amount of energy available which in turn has meant more plants, more

transmission lines and hence more public resistance. >> thank you very much for your time. i appreciate it. >> let me ask you, the comanche and the story of quandt of parker and indians in texas is just such a great story generally and one that we all grow up hearing. we see on movies and television we read books about it. i sense is that every book as an occasion so what was it for you to write this particular history at this particular time? >> it is a good question. about 12 years ago i read a wonderful book by walter prescott webb called the great plains and inside this book, he was about the great plains but really about texas mostly and inside this book there was a chapter or even a subchapter about the comanche senate put forth as premise that there was this enormous for sitting in the middle of the continent that determine how everything happened. i am a yankee. i'm going what? wait a second. i might know it he climbed -- at pequot or algonquin or wampanoag

but i did note comanches at all. the only thing comanches or something that in john wayne movies was code for the zero. or we are in trouble now. that is the comanche area. so what happened was, that is what set off my interest so then i did all the normal things you are doing if you are interested in comanches. beyond that it was really about a yankee's love affair with the state of texas. when i was times for your chief i traveled all over this day. when i was a writer in texas monthly i traveled all over the state. i heard comanche stories are going let the planes. we are all looking forward to getting an assignment where you have to go to amarillo or love it. [laughter] but it was true. >> so it was a bit of just understanding that what the planes were and what al