>> sam brower, who is warren jeffs? >> warren jeffs is the self-proclaimed prophet of the fundamentalist church jesus christ of latter day saints. he followedin his fathers footsteps was was a prophet before him. and kind of took that religion and the idiosyncrasies to new levels, new heights. >> what do you mean by that?

>> they practice polygamy, for one thing, which is illegal in all 50 states. >> it is illegal? >> it is illegal in all 50 states. >> in utah? >> in utah as well. and because of that i think there is this cast of marrying underage little girls. it's kind of a reward system that's been going on now, well, when warren came into power in 2002, it started mushrooming, getting worse and worse and worse. >> when you say he came into power, how did he come into power? >> when warren was a young man, he was kind of an odd duck. he was his father's favorite

son. his father took a shine to him, and his father had dozens of sons, but took a shine to warren. and warren was made headmaster of their private school system, and managed to worm his way into the position of leadership next to his father. and his father started to become ill when he was old, started having a series of strokes. and warren was able to kind of maneuver himself into a position of power. sort of like a medieval power struggle. he was able to move himself in for when his father died, he was the gatekeeper for his father. and made himself the new profit. >> where is warren jeffs now? >> warren jeffs is in jail in el dorado, texas.

for the past four years he's been doing around from one prison to another prison to another prison. he was convicted in utah of being an accomplished -- and a compost to ray. that conviction was overturned by a technicality in utah, by the utah supreme court which, in my opinion, a shameful system that should never have happened. >> it was on jury instructions? >> it was the epitome of a bad ruling i guess, and instruction that the jurors didn't even understand. a lawyer would understand that perhaps, but the jurors had no clue that anything was wrong. but it was overturned on that technicality. and then he went to arizona, and arizona, his attorneys fought it for years in arizona, and after

about two years, finally the victims got tired of it, the prosecutors got tired of it and hit charges waiting for them in texas more serious than the arizona charges. so he was extradited to texas. and that's where he is at now in texas awaiting charges on very serious felony charges on child abuse. >> sam brower, what is the fundamentalist church of latter day saints, and what is its connection, if any, to the lds church? >> nowadays there's absolutely no connection to the lds church. at the turn-of-the-century it was an offshoot from the mainstream lds church. there was a group of people that, when polygamy was outlawed and banned in the lds church,

that felt like that was something they didn't want to participate in. it was a small group of people that left the religion, were excommunicated, and from there it just started growing. bits and pieces at a time. until it has become what has now. it's become thoroughly corrupt and it's just, in my opinion, it's an organized crime syndicate that specializes in child abuse and underage marriages. >> how many followers? >> there is between 10 and 15,000 followers in the s. flds. it's hard to put an exact number on it because they keep very poor records purposefully. they have their own doctrines, -- doctors, their own clinics where children are born. they shy away from hospitals because that's where records are

kept. that's what they can be discovered. they stay away from mainstream hospitals. they have set up their own hospitals and doctors and resources, midwives for giving birth. and actually when there was a raid in texas, they found birth certificates that were in various stages of being filled out. summer filled out, some are partially filled up. some were just a blank so they could fill in the dates that suited them. and so, their records are not very good. some are bogus. and so initially hard to put a number on how many exactly there are, but they are all over the country. >> mr. brower, how did you get to write "prophet's prey"? what's your involvement with the fundamentalist church of the latter-day saint?

>> i became involved originally as a private investigator, actually have taken a case involving one of the flds members who is being excommunicated. it just peaked my interest, something unusual. i was not from southern utah and i was kind of an outsider, and was curious about it. and what i found shocked me. when i went to short creek, it was like driving off the map, like no place else in the country. when i talk to people about it, they just don't believe that someplace like that, without a doubt the most lawless town in this country. so it really piqued my interest. when i started becoming involved and i started working the cases, i was finding out about these

atrocities, about things that are not supposed to be happen, people being kicked out of their homes where they can't come back. and they can't talk to their families. they can't even visit their family. and then i was asked by a prominent baltimore attorney to work on some civil cases involving child abuse, in that sense. and what i found there was just unbelievable. i interviewed two young men who had grown up in the religion. they were actually warren jeffs nephews, and he had a abuse them, raped and sodomized them from the time they were between the ages of five and seven years old. and that experience was what

really turned the tide for me. that was the experience that kind of like a fire under me, and i thought somebody has got to do something about this. that was a lot of motivation to do the book. and for pursuing this, just get the word out so that people know that there is something that this horrible caliber that is going on in our country. >> sam brower, is there an issue of freedom of religion here? >> you know, the freedom of religion issue is an issue only with the flds. in reality, the freedom of religion is their wild-card year what they do has nothing to do with religion. i mean, unless, unless -- it's

okay for religions to molest children, unless it's okay for a prophet to take a little 12 year old girl by the hand and take her into a temple and perform a ritualistic rape on her. in my mind that's not religion. that's criminal behavior. and the biggest hurdle, the hardest part of dealing with this and getting law enforcement to do with it, hitting government entities, agencies, politicians to deal with it is to overcome that religious hurdle. they've been able to cover the activities under this smokescreen of religion, and that's all it is. they know it. they know it works. warren jeffs knows that it

works, and they have done really well in cloaking that illegal activity under religion. i mean, if this was a cabinet of satan worshipers, the question would never come up. if it was a cabinet of satan workers going out and read and will gross they would know they were going to do. but somehow this so-called religion is able to mask and cover up their activities and say it's their constitutional right to do this. >> where do they get their money's? >> the money comes really office went in off the backs of thousands of workers that believe that they're doing the right thing. that they are involved in the religion of their ancestors, they are involved in something that they've been brought up in, a cultural thing more than a

religion really. and they are in construction. they are in manufacturing. and i would say probably a majority of the money comes right out of the taxpayers pockets. it's from public works projects. billions of dollars worth of public works projects in las vegas, all over the last. and even back east, here back east. they are manufacturing. they produce top secret government projects for military. they work on the latest generation night vision scopes that are being used overseas right now. the failed o rings in the shuttle, the challenger disaster, was a product of short creek. so they are involved in many different areas. and their zeal for raising money

is more than just about money, it's a religious calling to them. and so, they are very good at it. they're very good at putting together millions and millions of dollars. >> the preface to book was written by john, who is he and why did he write the preface to chris jon krakauer is a friend. i got to know john when i began working on the book. john have done research on his book, under the banner of heaven. and i guess that both of us working in the same area kind of brought us together. we just kind of clicked and have been working together ever since. he was great help for me. it's a bit dangerous to be out there to the kind of work and john was a good backup and good help for me. he was somebody i could depend

on. so we've traveled all around the country and we've worked quite a bit on this. and he was past the learning curve. it's very complex, very hard to get, to learn and understand everything that goes on with this. john was past that learning curve, so he was very helpful to me. >> sam brower, the photo on the front cover of the book, where was this taken? >> this was taken at short creek at vermillion cliffs right at the edge of town on short creek there. it's a couple of the polygamist women that are strolling through the little park area there. >> are either you or jon krakauer of mormon? and could this be considered an anti-mormon book? >> i am lds. john is not.

and as far as i've -- i i've -- i don't feel this is an anti-mormon book in any way, but the flds are nothing, you know, they are not mormon at all. they have chosen to distance themselves from the lds church. they don't practice any of the police. the only thing they will have going on is they believe in some of the same scriptures as some of the lds church, but they've taken on taken put their own spin on it, and things like that. you know, i think a lot of the outside world tends to group the two together, but mormons are no more flds than lutherans are catholic, you know? i mean, the lutherans chose to separate themselves from the catholic church, or episcopal church, or whatever. they are their own religion and

the essence of their own religion. >> sam brower, this is his book, "prophet's prey." it comes out in october 2011, published by bloomsbury. >> senator daniel anyway a democrat from hawaii is reading the law simple by dan brown and the fiery trial by eric owner. >> visit booktv.org to see this and other summer reading lists your. >> his book of "the idea of america" is a fabulous book. you be doing a book signing afterwards if i'm not mistaken. it really is one of those books that if you love history, not just the revolutionary period, but history in general but this is something you should have on your bookshelf. so having said that, i'm hoping for 10% afterwards, what is that we would do is start out by, i would like to purchase a question about history, and the

talk but you all a bit and then we will ease our way into the book as well. to start, since what at the national archives, the first thing that want to gauge what thoughts on, the following, many of us with, can you take a second to tell us why is it important that we study history's? >> well, history is to society i suppose what memory is to an individual without knowing where you came from, what your background is. you would be lost. i think there's a movie where a man has no memory, can you imagine how terrifying that would be, not knowing your past? and i think that's for society i think that's a comparable situation. if you don't know where you came from, it's going to be difficult to know where we're going to go. and so i think to get our

bearings, our directions, we need to know where we have been. so that's the classic answer to why we should study history. i think it is the queen of the humanities, and without knowing history, i think one is living in a two-dimensional world. not experiencing reality as it ought to be experienced. i think history is a mode of understanding. i think it's as important as the other senses, and once you acquire a historical sense, i do think history is just information about the past. i think once you study history and read enough you develop what i would call historical sense, so you see the world differently. and add a dimension on the world, on reality. suddenly the whole world appears different. the perception of your present is different because you have an understanding of the past.

>> as we sit here speaking, the scent of remarkable momentous events are sweeping the world today in the middle east, the so-called arab spring where people are rising up and they're trying to grab a piece of a greater say in a destination, a greater self-determination, what do you think the founders could teach them? and in the same breath, what can they learn by looking at the experience of america as young americans wrestled with setting up the republican? >> well, presumably these people are seeking democracy. that's what we're told, and i think that's true. they want to vote. they want all the other things that come in their minds with democracy. they see how the rest of the world is living and they want a share of that. i think the issue is, is that democracy is hard work.

it does not come easy. and authoritarian governments are easy to put together. and the world has always had authoritarian governments, monarchies. although monarchy is a wrong word to use not because half of native, we have a benign monarchies, england, sweden, holland. so monarchy is not quite award, but that's how the founders saw it. monarchy was the enemy. and what they've meant was authoritarian government. authoritarian governments have existed because it's difficult to govern a democracy. because democracy has to be governed from the bottom of the people out to be willing to sacrifice their selfish interest for the good of the whole. that's what the founders meant by virtue. classical terms. summoning somebody a private interest for the sake of a public good. it required a lot of self-sacrifice. and it's not easy to do. montesquieu who was the leading french philosopher of the 18th

century, very much red by the founders said that democracy can exist only in small states because you can't build a consensus if you have a large diverse population. that was a very, very important principle with which the founders had to confront when they were drawing up the federal constitution. because montesquieu would not at all be surprised by what happened when tito, for example, was removed. the authoritarian government was removed from yugoslavia. suddenly the serbs and the other ethnic groups were at each other's throats in the yugoslav area. or when the soviet union was removed. suddenly all of the various parts began fighting with one another. he would have said of course, once you remove the authority from the top down, then these various ethnicities, these differences will come forward. and they make democracy very

difficult because people have willingly surrendered some other self interest. and that's not easy to do. the founders would have been, and they became very pessimistic about the ability of other peoples to become democratic. they thought the french were following them. tenure slaters. and, of course, many french leaders thought so. lafayette, who was at the outset, was one of the leaders of the french revolution, 1789. he said the key to the bastille, the bastille been to prison, and, of course, bastille day in france is still july 14, still celebrated as the beginning of the french revolution. he said that key to george washington and it hangs today at mount vernon. that was his way of saying to washington, you, americans, are responsible for our revolution. and americans assume that, that they were responsible. and they thought they were responsible for all the

revolutions that took place in the 19th century. somehow or another they were in the vanguard of history spreading democracy around the world. but with the french revolution spidering, spiraling into tyranny, then they became pessimistic about the ability of other peoples to be like them. which gave us that notion, gave them the notion that they were exception. exceptionalism fema which is very controversial is in comparison with europe. but the hope, the dream that other peoples would fall's, has always been there. that's one of the articles, one of the essays my last essay in the book is why america wants to spread democracy around the world. we have wanted to do that from the very beginning. not necessarily send troops but by example, by showing the world that we could do that. and that's what lincoln was all

about in his mobilizing the north, the last best hope, that could we survive? the world was already -- napoleon iii was on the throne. the new empire in france. there were no democracies left. and so lincoln was appealing to that training that we had to keep the hope alive. so i think that's been in history from the beginning. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> susanna ashton, how did you select the narratives you included in your work? >> we were looking for out of print narrative. mayors which were not largely known at all for other reasons. and also narratives which might be no, but were not known as south carolinians. boston kings one the 18th 18th century slaves, he is

known in british abolition circles. is been identified in transatlantic connections. but he was from south carolina and affected to british lunch in the american revolution. then went to canada, to nova scotia and into africa when he ended up his memoir. so including them as a south carolinians was a new way to conceive of his history. people like that. when a collection of seven people that were not well known or were known in other contexts. for the first time ever we could bring them back into print and put them together and see the connections between the moral coherent narrative of what the store in south drive slavery was like. >> what were the major themes included in the recollections. >> well, there were both small and big themes. there were small patterns. three of the seven people were child jockeys. two of the seven individuals actually were slaves to confederate forces in fort

sumter and the cold war of the carolinas. they were not confederate. they were slaves to the confederate forces. so there were odd little connections to that but the bigger connection was that even the people who left the south carolina and were very glad to have escaped or survive slavery and otherwise left the state all wrote of their lives as south carolinians. all from and identify themselves as sort of having a relationship to where they're from, but they were going to let someone take that away from them. they would not identify themselves as africans, with one exception perhaps. the rest of them, they distinctly wanted to claim themselves as part of this history, even though they may have left the state. and i think that was the most powerful fema we found from the 18th to the early '20s century of these people's memoirs. >> what story resonates the most with you? >> a number of them speaking in

different ways. one of the narratives is a very short, mr. sort of odd document written with a dictate as told, we don't know the promenades, but we know she talks about playing the violin and leading people into sin. when i read that, i want to know her. who was she? what was she about? she doesn't seem your normal "slate" story, what happened to her. and another 20 century writer wrote his memoirs, a very old man, around 1913 is when he wrote his story, so it he was a child as a slave. that meant -- one of his famous lines, there are many people will talk to the better sides of slavery and how you can do with woodlands. the good thing about as far as i'm concerned is emancipation proclamation. so he had an edge to them and i think that's meant i would've

liked to know. they all spoke to me in different ways with different voices. >> what do you hope readers will learn from this book? >> oh, i hope they learn to get rid of their expectations, i think. the voices were hard. so for example, the 18th century, the two narratives, these are two individuals who spoke about slavery and about their lives under slavery. but they also define their lives as slaves to sin. their memoirs are also about religious awakening, and the freedom that they found through their spiritual awakening. and that doesn't fit we think what a slave narrative should be about. and yet i respect that. i really learned from that town. two of the narratives written during the abolitionist era are by men who escaped, and they depict a lot of really violent and distressing scenes.

they are witnesses, i hope readers really come away with respect for the political and personal goals are trying to tell us like individuals in the own life, but also about 1300 other voices that are not allowed to speak. those are the really to terrifying and powerful narratives. as i mentioned in a real edge to him. but the other two, jacob and curbing allow ready when much more anti-postville narratives because i wouldn't say that good things to say about slavery, but they were testimonies