don't. but how can you closely study the life of jesus christ, who was turned on by the crowd, abandoned by his friends, stripped, hung on a cross with criminals and left to die and not getting? that is the price for the moral life. as martin luther king said in one of his great sermons, jesus didn't come to bring peace of mind. and my sadness over the church is they forgot the radical message of the gospel itself and they allowed the rise -- i wrote a book about the christian right call the american fashions war on america. i was trying to reach out to them. [laughter] [applause]

and i look at that as a mass political movement that fuses the language of american nationalism with of the language of the christian religion, and when that happens, you get fascism wrapped in the american flag and clutching the christian cross. ..

>> that's the kind of thing we have to begin to do, and, you know, i watched in war zones how solitary acts of defiance have an immense power that ripples outwards across a society, and at the moment are often seen futile. 1968 in prague, you have a czech student to protest the occupation who walks, i believe, into the square and burns himself to death. hushed up in the state yield ya. nothing -- media, nothing was said.

what i coveredded, there's posters of his face everywhere, and i tell this story in my first book, wars of first that give us meaning, which to me exempts -- it's about a farmer and i heard this story from a serbia couple. they lived in a safe area that was under intense bombardment. there's a great book about it, and like many ethnic seshes, they through their lot in with the seshian led government. as the serbs and the pair know ya rose, the police came and took their eldest son away.

the son was executed. the second son died in a car accident. they were left childless. the wife was pregnant, and she gave birth to an infant girl, and because there was no food and because of the stress, she was unable to nurse the child, and the child was dying. they were feeding it weak cups of tea keeping her alive. at 10 days at dawn, there was a knock on their apartment door, and it was an it literate muslim farmer in a pair of rubble boots with a liter of milk. he three gray and white cows that he milked at night to avoid sniper fire. he came back the next morning, the morning after that, the morning after that, and the morning after that for a year,

and all of the muslim neighbors when they saw that he was giving milk which was precious was worth a lot of money to keep alive a seshin infant again to spit on him, revile him, and insult him. i heard this story. they said we hate the muslims, and yet, it is our duty to tell you that not all muslims are bad, and so, of course, i went into the town and i found the man. his cows were slaughtered for the meat. his apartment block bombed into rubble. he was sleeping on a cement floor on newspapers, and by day he collected with several other men worm-eaten apples and selling them on the sidewalk. when i said i had seen the

family, he said, the baby? how is she? now, in that act lies an ocean of lope. he -- hope. he stood up and shamed everyone around him to defend, protect, and champion the sanctity of all life. that little girl will grow up, and she may never meet that man, but she will know as a serb that she has alive because of a muslim farmer. that kind of activity and moments of extremity ripples outward with an undeniable power. i think we have to regain that form of resistance and it's lonely and hard. martin luther king writes about it where he breaks down in the kitchen and thinks he can't go on.

there's another death threat on the phone, and we have to remove our trust in institutions that speak a language which no longer reflects the ultimate concern of those institutions and trust finally in ourselves and maybe by the end of your life and my life, things will be worse, probably they will be worse, but that does not invalidate what we have done. we trust in the good. we believe the good attracts the good. we cannot know what the good knows, but faith is finally believing that it goes somewhere. [applause] >> chris, having read your books, i deeply respect what you've done tonight and what you did this afternoon, and i was so

glad i've been trying to talk to the unitarians to come to town, and here you are, and i just barely found out you were here. thanks. i know that you deeply respect -- i wonder if all in all when you reject the 9/11 as a false claim in this country, whether or not you had any question about the ability to question, you know, the corporate fascism that we live under? >> i don't want to get into 9/11 because it's close to home. i covered al al-qaeda for a year, and i am willing to concede i didn't do the structural studies used to talk about how the buildings collapsed. on the other hand, by the end of that year, much of my work was retracing every step taken including in spain, the last ten days when he was, and it is my

belief that 9/11 would not have happened without him, that it didn't come -- that the government was asleep at the switch which defines eight years of george bush, but that's not -- i know it's -- i have friends who are passionate about it as you, but it's a long and difficult argument i don't want to ascend into here. >> well, chris, there's a bill before congress for the last four years. this young lady next to me and i had put together a bill for the third party and presented it to 19 congressional offices to get a new investigation of 9/11 because i wanted to ask you -- this is really my question -- >> all right, let's talk about it afterwards. there's limited time. >> no, no -- >> very quickly. i don't want to get into the 9/11 stuff. it's long and complicated, and i get it from a friend of mine, and i'm not, you know, in the end, i'm enough of a reporter not to be an absolutist, and i

didn't report it. i mean, ultimately i don't know, but okay, go ahead. who is next? okay, over here. [laughter] okay, the right side -- [laughter] definitely the left side then. >> i really do enjoy -- i haven't read your other books, but i enjoy this one and the youtube videos of you and your analysis and it's very helpful, but i try to share your ideas with my children and young people, and dispair and hopelessness is hard for young people to take.

kids raising things about institutions that maybe don't look like the liberal institutions that you and i are familiar with and that you write about, but a whole range of grass roots local things going on today of labor, antiwar or poverty, but that have hope for young people, and i see this as a mechanism maybe to bring about change with some of the institutions that we embraced over the years that are collapsing. could you talk more about that? >> well, i fully support -- i mean, i think the argument is that i begin the last chapter by quoting the great alexander who tells anarchists trying to overthrow the czar that you think we're the doctors, but we're the disease. it's not our job to save a dying system, but to kill it. they are trying to sever

themselves from a corporate state or hope. i don't like the words pessimism and optimism. people with a view of the world around them in wars didn't live long. there was a very well-known cor spot in who drove and he painted on the side of his car, save your bullets, i'm immortal, and in the morning, he would -- [laughter] well, he was admired for the human human hubris of it. he would drive on the and bought cigars and would smoke them p on the way back. another person says he was shot through the head and killed, but look, it was our job to totally assess reality, to determine

what weapon systems were at the end of the road and what the capacity of those systems were to do us harm and then to act. if we can't understand the reality around us no matter how bleak it is, we can't even use the word hope because we're not responding to the real. we're responding to the fictional, and of course, it's bleak, but i didn't make it up. i don't make up climate science. i don't make up the american working class. i don't make up the fact that one in four children in this country depend on food stamps to eat or 2.8 million people were driven from their homes because of foreclosure and bank repossessions matched again by this year of 8,000 people a day. none of this is made up. it's just that the pain has become because of a corporatized commercial media largely invisible to the rest of us. it may be visible on a local level, but we don't hear the cries of our own people.

i'm with these kids, and i think everything they are doing is important and great. on the other hand, i think we also have to understand what's about to befall us and to be prepared. the secret of surviving in a war zone is to know how bad it is and how bad it's going to be. in fact, that makes survival both in a physical sense and psychological sense far more able to endure. >> i was wondering -- >> wait for the -- >> i was wondering if there was something in your research that sense you're so well versed that you found profound or awakenings to something you had not been aware of. >> well, you know, it's always humbling to be a reader, and i found a lot of amazing stuff.

i think dwight mcdon't is incredible, and i urge you all to read him. a beautiful thinker and writer, unrepentant anarchist. he was thrown out, but didn't follow the orthodoxy of the party and he sent a message to the party in new york and said everyone has a right to their own stupidity, but comrade mcdonald abuses the privilege. [laughter] he was invited up to columbia in 1968, and everybody was wearing little buttons and said, where are the black flags? where are the anarchists? i rely on the writers of the 1950s, riceman, c wright mills, jacobs because i think they resinate with me with tremendous power. there's a book called "exiles

return" which is an intellectual history of the movement after world war i. it's brilliant and sering analysis how the bohemians and ultimately the new left embraced the corporate values of hedonism and values. it's a stunning book that's beautifully written. again, there's a lot of books that, you know, are when you begin and when you write a book you read around a book that are very, very humbling, and they are out there, but i think that that 50's generation is important to me because they still remember what was destroyed. they remember what was dismantled, and when you sit down with a figure like riceman, the lonely crowd or the power lever of mills, it's not just how precedent their analysis is,

but how they knew the consequences and how they saw what decent gracious would bring. of those great last public intellectuals who wrote to be read unlike most academics. i'm not sure who they write for, but these are people who understood and knew language is a form of thought. go ahead. >> yeah, i'd like to quote a definition of a liberal that i saw on a bathroom wall in wisconsin in 1970. a lib ram is someone who listens to both sides of the argument and then cuts the baby in half. anyway, my question is i'm glad to see the bigger use of the a as an anarchist word. has something changed in your thinking because you genuinely

seem -- and i'm critical of the deterrence and genuinely a critique of authority design other than the right authority. >> i'm critical of the institutional structure. >> but, you know, i'm by anybody right at any time -- [inaudible] the role problems with authoritarianism and any anarchists. >> all institutions including the christian church are inherently demonic, and i'll buy that. i was the only member of the reporting staff of the "new york times" to have a seminary to read, so they recruited me to cover religion. well, you can imagine how that went over having watched 40 years of a church persecute my dad, and i said i'm the last person you want to go to a convention of southern

baptists. [laughter] i have so much emotional baggage that i carry into the room. i do make a huge division between loyalty to religious values, and religious constitutions which like all institutions serve human power, and i think that, you know, julien does great work in the 1920s, talking about that in order to maintain not only intellectual independence, but honesty, one must be alienated from all forms of institutional power, and i do differentiate between institutions and movements. movements have when they are right specific goals that are hardly free from the antagonisms, jealousies, back stabbing and read the articles of king if you want to know what

king went through, but movements are different in that they don't seek to perpetuate themselves. he writes about how institutions can never achieve the morality of individuals because under pressure, institutions always retreat into mechanisms which ensure their own survival the you see that with the press. i think part of the failure of the dwindling print-based media is that as advertising revenues decline, as circulation declines, as this monopoly that once a news print had of connecting sellers with buyers vanishes, they become even more craven in their service to the powerly. the new york noshing is running -- the "new york times" is running story after story of lifestyle stories of the house in the hamptons, it's the lifestyle of persons they want to reach own who the advertisers want to

reach. it's a good example of how dying institutions very swiftly walk away from the very principles that once played a part in the society and the church is certainly no exception. >> john is talking about voter turnout, and he made the statement that if we came above more than say 55% or 58% turnout, we would have a more socially democratic country. do you believe that if we could get what is essentially the underclassmen and lower class to vote that political institutions could become more of the public will? >> no. [laughter] look at 2006, the democrats took recontrol of congress based on the issue of the iraq war, and what did they do? continued to fund the war and increase troop levels by 30

million or 30,000 in iraq. the issue after issue after issue after issue all the promises that are made are utterly repealed once they get to washington that is run by corporate lobbyists. until we have serious campaign finance reform and corporations cannot game the system -- i mean, what are 45,000 lobbyists doing in washington other than write legislation? they greece the palm -- grease the palms. it's called corruption. the system is so far gone we can't depend on the system to reform itself. you know, why do you become the head of the banking committee? because you want the money from the banking committee. it works. the whole system is so rotten that i think that the place faith in electoral politics is

extremely naive. >> i'd like to hear your take on wikileaks. >> well, thank god for wikileaks. [applause] >> he's done us a great service, and shamed that the american press is actually pressing a little journalism. i'm all for him. okay. i guess we can move. okay. go ahead, we'll do the back. >> in the last part of your book you talk about the importance of movements as a mechanism of democracy, and 11 years ago today, actually, a convergence

of social movements in the united states led by youth primarily shut down the wto in seattle -- [cheers and applause] remember that one? out of that came a social forum movement in the united states that formed itself and after katrina, organized its for a social forming that landed 10,000 activists, many of which with anarchist tepid sighs were there -- tendencies were there discussing events on how to deal with neoliberalism. they did that recently in detroit in july where 11,000 activists registered from all across the country. i'm hopeful that you would address those types of social movements in your discussions because i -- i'm not --

most people -- we have to fight within groups and social movements, and i know you know that, i just didn't see it addressed 234 your book. -- in your book. >> i think that's a good point. i think it's probably a fair criticism. i don't know that there's one root to fight back -- route to fight back. my personal constitution is one that doesn't make me particularly amenable to groups. i cover the first gulf war in which i defied all the pool restrictions, went out, spent most of the time with the marine corp., the pool system ran by the army and the marine corp. and their infinite wisdom understood this was one more conspiracy of the army against the marines. [laughter] that led me into first battalion and first marines, shaved my hear, and had a uniform and

never used my press credentials until kick cheney sent a list of 14 journalists he wanted expelled, and fortunately for them, they couldn't find me. [laughter] the end of the war, johnny apple said i just have one question for you. what is about you and authority? i said, johnny, i don't have problem with authority. just as long as they don't try to tell me what to do. he said you dummy, that's what authority does. i think that that there are many ways to resist. i think movements are really important, but as you know, from coming out of movements, they require a lot of emotional maintenance. we're all limited in terms of what we can do, and my focus is as a writer which ultimately is

a solitary form of protest. we need the baregans, and we need the activists who show up at the g-20. we need both. we need everything, and i think it's incumbent upon us to search within our own consciousness for how we respond, but i'm with you, and i think that, you know, i think you pointed out probably a fair failing at the end of the book that i should have focused more on that. thank you. where's the mic? i guess over there, over there. >> thank you. >> yeah, well, wait for the mic. >> ralph nader thinks the only salvation is a good guy that's rich. my question is do you know any really good rich guys like teddy

roosevelt or fdr? >> oh, teddy roosevelt is awful. well, i love ralph, and i actually slogged my way through the book, but i did ask him when in human history the class stepped into save anyone, and he sort of mumbled something about fighting robber barren or something. then he said something that sort of broke my heart. he said, look, it's all we have left. ralph who has a kind of eternal optimism maybe that i don't share i think was really seriously trying to appeal to enlighten figures of the class which is why he names them. it has not worked.

the rich take care of the rich, and boy, human history bore that out. i'm a huge admirer and friend of ralph, but i break with him on that. i don't think the superrich are going to save us. right over here with the red hat. purple. [laughter] >> so, thank you for coming. i heard you on the radio this morning. first time i listened to k news in a long time. i have a question regarding to the fact every time i send money, we're voting to keep those things in business; right? >> yeah. >> christmas is right around the corner, and my thought is i'm 23 and have family to buy presents for, and spending money which is obviously supporting big businesses which support like the propaganda in the media and support things that keep us down

as, you know, the lower class people. why is it this group like, what can we do especially like us young people? how are we supposed to like overturn this? is it just like giving up on like spending money? i mean, is that an answer? spending money? >> i always tell me students when they get out of school is don't get in debt. a lot have tremendous debt because in this country -- request you imagine in france if they told university students they have to pay $50,000 a year to go to college. it'd shut the country down. what are we doing? you people from your generation graduate, and that's what they want. you know? >> i decided not -- i'll go to college at 24 because i'm not on the taxes. well, ultimately, i have a luxury. i can read, and that is something that the majority can't do, and if we can

self-educate, then we should be educating the people around us because obviously like minded people create the most social change. >> have you read wendel berry? after you buy my book -- [laughter] that's one the great prophet and he's an amazing figure writing on this issue. we have to learn to live with a new simplicity. 70% of the american economy is driven my wasteful consumption, and you're right, we have to -- the more we sever ourselves from that con consumer society, the freer we become, and i recommend berry to you. he's a great, great writer. >> i think we should all talk to each other more. none of us -- like here, we should be spreading the news and let people know that we're here because like minded people stick

together to change things. >> all right, thanks. [applause] [applause] >> this event was hosted by powell books in portland, oregon. to find out more visit powells.com. >> now, a.j. recounts andrew jackson's forced removal of indian tribes that resided in the southeast in the 1930s. they recall debates that surround the policy and the argueous travel of the cherokees and the trail of tears as they were led from their former home to the atlanta territory. this is an hour and 20 minutes. >> usually on an evening like

this, i talk off the cuff, but tonight i want to cite some material from my book, and sense i was a reporter for a number of years, it would be too ironic to misquote myself. [laughter] i prepared a little something which i can repair to. one thing i'd like to start with is tell you how pleased i've been in doing the research for this book, to be received by such spectacularly informed and helpful people as your archives and at your libraries around the state. i particularly remember dawn hampton in rome, georgia, and miss kitly rutherford.

they were good for my, but the one i was most impressed by and the location, and maybe i hope a number of you know it is the state historical cite that presided over at that time by a dr. donna meyer, and now because of the budget constraints, i understand that all of these sites can be curtailed in some cases and even closed in others, by the site was a wonderful exhibition of what life was like among the cherokees until 1830s, and when i was there, you saw troops of georgia school children coming through, and really they were learning about the history in the most dramatic way, and they seemed enthralled by it. this is probably inappropriate,

but i'd like to make a pitch for a support group. if you decide that you should support the site, you can reach it -- this is all one word -- friendsofgaparks.org and designate that site as your chapter. that's my commercial. my interest in the cherokees started some years ago when i finished the book on the war of 1812, and it ended with a spectacular victory in new orleans by andrew jackson. you know, one the great military victories of all time of 2500 british soldiers badly led, i might say, and then 7 or 8 american casualties. you don't get that often in many

wars, and, of course, it made jackson a huge legend among the american people, so i felt for a long time that because we usually get our american history in the 10th grade and reluctantly, we miss the epic sweep of our own history. it's a great, great story, and that's what i hoped to tell in my books. for example, you take george washington. i think a case can be made without any shoulderrism that washington was one of the great men of all time, not just american history, but a great, great man, and similarly, jackson was a great general. now, in doing my research, i found that writing about jackson's life after his military exploits presented

quite a different picture from what of the celebration that i really had enjoyed writing about when he succeeded so try up faintly, but the most troubling aspect of his presidency to me, and there were others, but one was his determination to force the cherokee nation off its land, and that's what i'd like to talk to you about tonight. i'd already suspected even before that his very well publicized sympathy for the common man sprung from a sense that jackson had from an early age that the elites at the time, the virginia planters and their allies in the north looked down on him, and they did. our albert gallaton who is a

swies and very sophisticated man who probably helped us stay afloat more than anyone else financially during the war of 1812, he summarized jackson as a rough ax woodsman, and thomas jefferson was more dismissive. he said he remembered his time in congress, and he said, he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. i have seen him attempt it repeatedly and often spoke with rage, so it has seemed to me that jackson was motivated in part by a desire to revenge himself on that kind of person, and he succeeded very much when he took on the bank of the united states. you remember that he was opposed

to it. he thought it was run by rich people for their benefit and not for the country. he was able to destroy it temporarily and to put in its place what were dismissed as pep banks, little banks in the various states. i was happy to leave to economists the whole ends and outs of the story, but what we can't overlook is the fact in the year after he left office, the economy suffered a huge collapse, and there were misery because of his victory, and eng in many ways the same thing happened with the cherokees. he succeeded in his aim, but misery followed in his wake. one of the things that struck me, and i hadn't anticipated it

at all is reading about this whole period and thinking about it and immersing myself in it, it brought up all kinds of questions about guilt, and i started to think about individual guilt, collective guilt, historical guilt, even geographical guilt, and i'd like to talk a little about that later with you this evening because i think that they have -- those questions have reel advance to a -- relevance to a more recent history. first of all, we could review, and i'm apologetic that in a setting like this, most of you know this information very well, but for those who don't, for those like me who came late to the subject, we could review the

state of the cherokee nation when jackson appeared on the scene. five tribes had lived for centuries in this particular corner of the continue innocent, and -- continent, and that was long before desoto arrived from spain in 1840. later we call them the five civilized tribe because they seemed to be the best to adapt to the white culture. there was the tribes and the cherokee lived in the valleys of what is now tennessee, carolina, and georgia. travelers who came to this section of the world in the mid 1700s found the cherokees to be

unusually attractive and aimble people. they were taller than the white settlers and spoke in a language than sounded to the european ear like singing. the cherokee wives reveled in hard work. they tended to the communal farmland, did all the chores around. their husbands hunted during the season, and then with their live encouragement, rested the rest of the year. you can imagine the french fur traders found this very attractive, and they often times took the soft spoken women as wives. they also learned that they could strike a hard bargain with the cherokees by bribing them with liquor. when the english traders took the place of the freeness french, they brought alcohol

with them. anything you did when you were drunk except murder, if you were drunk, that was reason enough. the northern in addition -- missionaries begin to come south and for appalled that the cherokees held slaves. the slaves were originally taken from other tribes in battle, but as hunting became harder on the plains and as cotton became an attractive crop, the cherokees began to buy african slives like their -- slaves like their white counterparts. also, the united states throughout the continent was buying up large tracks of land from the various indian tribes. the cherokees became alarmed enough at the roads into their

holdings that they instituted something they called the blood law. it held this. if a cherokee sold any property, traded any property under a treaty without the permission of the entire cherokee counsel, they could be murdered. they should be murdered. they could be murdered without any legal penalty of any sort. that was very briefly the state of the cherokee nation when andrew jackson appeared on the scene. by the time he was elected president, jackson had a new grievance and a very legitimate one. he felt cheated out of the presidency in 1824. what happened was he won the popular vote. he won the majority of votes in the electoral college, but he

did not win enough votes in the college to be declared president, so the race was thrown into the house of representatives. now, if we remember the year 2000, we remember that that kind of disputed election can linger long after it's officially been decided, and that was certainly the case with jackson. he felt victimized. in 1824 that same year, the reason john adams was able to become president even though he placed second to jackson in the areas that should have counted was that henry clay would come in 4th, and a very extraordinary man was to get to know more

about him, but this distrusted, a military man as president, and he particularly held the common assumption about jackson that he was not fit for the office of what they called chief magistrate, and so he met confidentially with john adams and they struck a deal, and the deal was that if clay threw the votes he controlled to adams enough to put him over the top and make him president, adams would appoint clay as secretary of state, and in those days, that was about a sure path to the presidency that you could have. it was done -- it was unusual because these two men met and got to know each other very well

in the peace treaty negotiations in brussels that ended the war of 1812, and they didn't like each other at all and for good reason. john adams, i think, we have to have a grudging affection for him, but he was very stiff necked and self-right courthouse, and henry clay was opposite. they shared quarters in brussels, and when adams was getting up in the morning to start his early prayers, henry clay was coming in after a night of drinking and cards, so they were opposite, but they found that they had common political interests, and that was enough for them to strike the barter. it did happen. clay true his votes to adams.

adams then did appoint him secretary of state. this outramminged all of jacksons partisans, but no more than jackson himself. he had a temper, but it was really -- he was truly outraged and he talked about this as the contemptible bargain, and this was a label that stuck. people had no proof, but it was self-evident without proof. you find historians that will still say, oh, we don't know that they did this. well, you have to be, i think, quite innocent about politics to believe that it was just happenstance. what happened was, of course, jackson then is not president then for the next four years, but more determined than ever to get the prize, and the campaign of 1828, you know, when we dispair about some of the

things, the charges and countercharges, we should remember that campaign. the jackson people called adams a pimp, and their reason was -- the reason was when he was the american ambassador that he procured woman for the czar. now, you know, it's -- if there had been television and if anyone had been able to lay eyes on john adams, they would have known how this was, but, you know, it happened. the charges were made, and not that the other side was immune, the adams people called

jackson's mother a prostitute, his wife an adultress, and claimed that he had negro blood, so i think that we can say in this area that we've made a little progress. [laughter] at any rate, he then finally got the job he wanted. it was fascinateing to the other party to see the celebration this set off in the united states as daniel webster's brother noted. he said, it is as though jackson has come to save the country from some great menace, and the menace was just john adams, but

there was that sense that he was -- jackson was going to adefend the commonman against the elites. they didn't call them elites, but that was the sentiment. we found out to the cherokee's dismay that election also meant the end of the cherokee nation. let me read a summary of what jackson, the speech jackson gave when he was sworn in in 1829. jackson's inaugural address lasted a scant 10 minutes. perhaps intentionally, his remarks on the issue of the day were vague. he made no mention of slavery since it played no part in the campaign, and only one newspaper, the "new york american" condemned jackson for owning slaves.

instead, the national debate centered on the tariffs, but then soon afterwards, jackson outlined his proposal for removing the cherokees from georgia. the uproar that followed that ignited again the simmering dispute, a dispute that had never gone away over slavery, so although i wouldn't ever argue that it was a straight line from jackson's behavior with the cherokees to the succession movement decades later, you can see that there was a beginning. the north organized and they organized against the proposal that jackson had made, but they also were opposed to slavery and the georgians knew this was just

a little thing in the broader battle to come. when wilson, perhaps many of you know of him, he was a congressman and a governor. when he went to congress from georgia in 1827, his goal was to expel the cherokees from georgia. that was his goal. he described his legislation, however, as indian reform. that was the way, but his opponents knew what his mission was about. workers got thousands of petitions signed by more than a million men, women, and children to proposal the removal of the poor dear indians from the states they were located to the western mississippi. there was a powerful ally, and

jackson had convinced himself that he was doing the cherokee a favor by insisting that they move. there was increasing friction between the white settlers -- excuse me -- the white settlers and the cherokees, and jackson felt that his humane answer was to force the cherokees to leave their traditional tribal land. what he didn't ever hear was the response of the cherokees themselves including school children. they learned that they might be driven west. their teachers told them study hard because you may be going where there are no schools, and one boy asked about the white settlers. they've got more land than they use. what do they want to get ours for?

another had a more practical suggestion saying if the white peoplement more land -- want more land, let them go back to the country they came from, but jackson believed and persuaded himself that the majority of the cherokees agreed with him, that they were being held back by the wealth cherokees often times with a lot of white heritage. in fact, john ross, one of jackson's chief opponents was only 1/16th cherokee, and he had to use a translator when he spoke to the tribe in its language. in jackson's view just as he had fought the northern establishment, the virginia plantation owners all his life, he was now again on the side of the common man, but this time the common indian. the problem is that he got a wrong.

the -- as it turned out, those partially white indians with the wealth and education saw early on that the futility of challenging him, and they were the ones who voluntarily did move west, and the people that john ross represented were the very poor, and uneducated cherokees who, however, put great store in the land where their ancestors were buried, and they hadn't been converted as many of the wealthier cherokees had been to christianity. they still maintained their original faith, and in that faith, the spirits that they worshiped would come and protect them and they couldn't be driven off the land, so he really didn't understand his opponents. the fact was that if john ross

had agreed to leave, this massive cherokees, talking 17,000 would have listened up and deposed him as their chief. he was doing the bidding of his constituency. now, as jackson prepared to introduce his legislation, as you can imagine, the anxiety among the cherokees was running high. i think it's interesting, i found it interesting, to quote from a chief of 80 years who said this, "when i sleep in forgetfulness, i hope my bones will not be deserted by you." he heard the united states planned to break its treaties.

"it may be sew, but not without our consent or misconduct of our people." as he rem necessaried, the chief introduced a phrase i find poetic to describe the previous relations between the cherokee nation and the federal administration. he said, "the tribe waslinged to the united states by a golden chain of friendship, that that chain was made when our friendship was worth a price, and if they kill us for our land, we shall in a state of unoffending innocence sleep with thousands of our departed people." that persistence on passive resistance surfaced 10 years earlier when among young cherokees when they went to washington to negotiate one more treaty. they made it clear they would never take arms against the united states government. on the other hand, the

government, federal and the state of georgia, never believed that, and periodically the army would be put on alert because there were alarms that the cherokees were prepared to fight. as it turned out, the cherokees kept their word and no battle ever happened. now, the first year of jackson's presidency was relatively tranquil on this front because he was so distracted by what had been called the petticoat wars. do you know the story? he decided that his wife who had died just before he took office, that she had been killed by the slanders of the political campaign, and it's true that she was devastated when she