the whole country went into. so jobs, even though they weren't high-paying jobs, it at least put money in people's pockets. >> next, george washington university professor alvin felzenberg sat down with booktv -- this interview was recorded at george washington university. it's 45 minutes. >> this is booktv on c-span2. we've been doing a college series on booktv where we visit colleges so we can talk to purchases who have also written books and expose you to a few more ideas. now joining us is al felzenberg, a professor at george washington university. we're on site here. and here is his book, "the leaders we deserved and a few we didn't" about the american presidents. al felzenberg, how do we typically rate presidents?

>> guest: not well. every presidents day or july 4th or slow time in the news we're told by the newspapers that yet another fall has been done where a ballot was set to 50 historians, 100 historians, and here are the great presidents. they usually put them into five categories; great, near great, average, below average and failure. various changes in it. and they'll tell us what goes into the criteria. all the familiar faces come up, the ones we see on the currency, the ones we build monuments to in this this city and others. it doesn't really tell you what distinguishes the great from the ordinary. and i was just overjoyed yesterday to see that somebody's putting a bill in congress giving george washington back his birthday. you know, somebody decided in the '70s that all great men were born on a weekend, and so every holiday was changed except veterans' day and july 4th,

which you can't change to a weekend. and all presidents are the same. they're not the same, and the result is students have a very hard time distinguishing them to the extent they study any history at all which gets -- [inaudible] so i thought that i would, i would try my own, and i would actually tell the viewer what i think made for a great president. and i invite the viewer to disagree with me. i don't really care how people come out, but i'd like to know when i'm teaching students they can defend their opinions with facts, stories and evidence. so i came up with six categories. and students like this because they all get grades in various courses. they get biology and french, whatever. so i gave them grades in six of -- three are personal components. presidential character, we hear a lot about character during the two impeachments in our lifetime. and what i call vision.

i mean, why do they want the job? and in retrospect was it the right vision for the country at the time or the wrong vision. confidence. i always love to say -- and i don't want to pick on mr. carter because he gets picked on a great deal, but i would say the point of having exemplary character and having a sense of vision, particularly in the environmental front where we look back on that as time missed, but not the competence to implement it. and so presidents who were pushed around more by events than changed events and made history. and then i play out these three components over a couple of policy areas that no president can avoid. one is economic leadership, one is national defense. call it what you wallet, foreign policy, national defense, national security. they all have to deal with the rest of the world in some way. and then the hard one is how

well they extended or preserved liberty. this is the founding ideal of our nation. sometimes the mind or the mouths of foreigners we learn more about ourselves. well, when mrs. thatcher stepped down as british prime minister, she said ours is the first nation deliberately formed with an idea. not on land, not on bloodlines, not heredity, an idea. an idea of liberty. and whether it shrunk under presidential terms or expanded not only home, but abroad are the six criteria i use. six components, rather. >> host: what's the value in rating presidents? >> guest: well, i think it's a story of leadership. only 44 men in 230-something years became president of the unite. of the united states. that's a very, very small club. to get in it, most of them

fought very hard to get there, all but george washingtonment of some point -- [inaudible] and to have gotten there they had to have been, they had to have something going for them in their time. they department all succeed -- they didn't all succeed. and this can be used, hopefully, for people who study business, what makes for an expansive and creative ceo of a company at a time the nation's going through transitions. what makes for a good labor leader, what makes for a good professor, university president. so here are some of the best known americans in the world, and they were not equal. all presidents are not equal. we shouldn't celebrate the office on presidents day. as early as 1777 women started naming their children after george washington. without 24/7 news, without the internet and without television and, you know, heaven knows without c-span there was

something in the man's character and in the man's ip mate nobility or sense of sacrifice that ordinary americans -- we used to call them common men, but there were no common men or women -- ordinary americans meaning people who go about their business and don't spend most of their days worrying about public affairs got the point. and i don't want to offend listeners, there aren't too many franklin pierces or warren hardings running around. but i thought that matters. it matters a great deal. >> host: do american presidents benefit or suffer because of their predecessors? >> guest: oh, well, american's very -- america's very interesting. people who have been married multiple times always tell me they wind up with the same spouse. well, this presidential selection it's always the opposite. we always want the opposite of what we had before.

so i like to tell student, well, after wilson -- great cerebral man -- certainly made a lot of noise, got us through a great world war, failed to implement the league of nations, the country was exhausted. four constitutional amendments passed in wilson's time including the federal reserve, a good many statutes erected to senators, the income tax which we're still talking about, and the one that he had mixed feeling was really against prohibition, but other regress is thought what herbert hoover called it a double experiment, so they were divided on that. but four constitutional amendments, a world war, a federal reserve, abolishing child labor, regulating the trusts, enough. so the slogan was back to normalcy. and we got warren harding. not the most intellectual of our presidents, not the most visionary of our presidents. after eight years of serenity

and prudence bordering on boredom, america wanted camelot. so from ike to jack. a very startling inaugural. and no one accused eisenhower of hanging around hollywood greats. a couple of golfers, yes, but not the great actors of his time and, of course, we all know about the kennedys and the arts and hollywood and camelot and the fact that it's named by jackie after a great broadway play. julie andrews and all of in the. after george w -- well, after bill clinton we have george bush. the two sides -- i tell my students, these are the two bookends of the 1960s. we have the war protester and all that brings to mind with what he did not inhale and what he didn't do and all of that, and the frat boy. i mean, so i say we had, what, ten civil war presidents, maybe eight world war ii prime ministers, and our generation

got the two bookends, and that's it. obama claims to be a baby boomer, he was born at the tail end. >> host: al felzenberg, in your rating system for warren g. harding, you rate him at 26. he gets rating number 26, he gets a 2 for character. he gets a 4 for preserving and extending -- >> yes, yes. first of all,. >> host: it's a 1-5 scale. >> guest: yeah. 1-5 scale. well, harding is always rated next to last, i have to say, so was grant. we'll talk about grant as well. when you get the early polls that arthur schlesinger sent out to historians, harding's always at the bottom. watergate's good for them because nixon comes along, and the others sort of go up. but i went back, and i looked at mr. harding's record on race, an

extraordinary record on race. he was very much in fair of an anti-lynching law, he actually put it in several state of the union messages. he got it through the house. he could not get it past a senate if filibuster. he then went down to alabama, and he gave a startling address to a segregated audience where you have african-american listeners sort of chained away on one side and then you have all the, you know, dazzling southern gentlemen and ladies coming out to hear the president of the united states. and he gives a startling address about race relations, and he says the south is never going to catch up with the rest of the world as long as you carry this problem around. factories don't want them to come in here, bad press will happen. it's time we treated all men as equal, and i shouldn't have to tell you this 50 years after the civil war and this kind of speech. i read "the new york times"' account of that, and you have these stone-faced southerners

just sitting on their hands and the african-american crowd going wild down there. i should point out the anti-lynching law, what it would have done was, basically, made lynching a federal crime on the grounds that southern jurors would not convict, so the idea we tried them in federal courts. it never passed in the his time, it didn't pass in the later times. but very enlightened gentlemen did very, very well in the african-american community, but i would say that was the party of lincoln and many national republican candidates did. same thing with mr. coolidge. now, mr. coolidge was also a very progressive president on race. most analysts give him rather low grades. in many way, he was the ronald reagan of the '20s. he cut taxes four times and, you know, before we had the crash, we had the roar, right? we had the roaring '20s. and because of those tax cuts,

money found its way into new industries; aviation, automobiles, radio, other forms of communication. the automobile became very common place. this was the time when henry ford decided as long as it's black, we can mass produce. and the average man and woman -- the average working man could afford a car at this point. a good job, not a millionaire, but it was the coming middle class. radio. radio becomes a universal figure, a universal item by the end of the coolidge period. aviation, i mean, the great secretary of commerce in those days, herbert hoover, was the great secretary of commerce because it was his job to hire the first air traffic controllers, to site the airports, to come up with federal policy. well, you had to have a stimulating economy to do that. and i looked back and, in fact, ronald reagan was on to this when -- two reagan stories. when he moved into the white

house, he ordered some favorite presidents -- predecessors' portraits for the cabinet room. and "the washington post" opined that the old man was already losing his mind because he asked for calvin coolidge to adorn the mantle place. and then we fast forward six years later, and reagan is in walter reed recovering from one of his many surgeries, and he's dozing, and he's got an army blanket on his lap. and, you know, where the knees would be he has this book opened face down with his half glasses on and be some white house aides were there. and how long have you boys been here? not very long, mr. president. we didn't want to disturb your book. i was just reading this book on calvin coolidge. he cut marginal tax rates four times. how many times have i?

one, sir. well, get busy! [laughter] they were teaching economics, they were really teaching the old school of adams economics. he was an economics/sociology major. something stuck. something stuck. >> host: and you rank calvin coolidge number 12 right after jfk. >> yes. >> host: jfk you have tied for seventh place. >> guest: yes. >> host: and he gets straight 4s across the board of the six categories except for character, a 3. >> guest: yes, well, character's a mixed story. you know, on the upside two things about kennedy always appeal to me. he was never a whiner. he never, you never heard stories about the isolation of the presidency and woe is me which we heard there our current leader a few days ago about being stood up at the altar and not getting the speaker to return his calls and -- poor thing. you never heard the whining from

kennedy. every day was a new beginning, very much like reagan. they were both very proud of their irish roots. there's something to that. and the fact that kennedy took responsibility for his mistakes. he stood before the cameras and said the problem of the bay of pigs is mine. i'm the president of the united states, i am the commanding authority of the government, and are there any questions? very silent, you could have heard a pin drop. the whole congress is going to be taken to the wood shed, and here he says it's my responsibility. the downside, of course, a lot has come out since the kennedy years that i'm not so sure we would recommend for his successors. i'm not even talking about the personal life, i'm talking about perhaps putting one's self at one's own risk, the kind of people being shepherded into the white house, waved through without security clearances, questions about girlfriends who

had ties to the underworld. you wonder about that happening again. but on the upside, he was not a whiner, and i point out like mr. coolidge he also cut taxes. and we called them the kennedy tax cuts. now, kennedy was at a time where the keynesians now -- studied a different form of economics. ironically, his economics professor at harvard was a fellow named nixon. figure that one out. oh, professor nixon. and there was a split in the keynesian view. what do you do to get the economy moving again? we had a small recession, nothing like now. and the question was, do you put it in public investments, john kenneth galbraith, or, you know, the affluent society was the argument that public squallor, private glory and all this. or do you cut marginal tax rates temporarily, endorse your deficit and grow?

he took the latter path. but it was a keynesian path, it wasn't supply-side economics. and this was, again, what fed the aeronautics industry, the computer industry, defense and many, many things that gave us, again, the roar of the '60s. now, the '60s were very -- we baby boomers grow up in very prosperous times. we all had our own room, we all wanted our own car, we went to college, we all did this, we did that. we wanted our summers in europe. and a lot of that was financed because our parents were able to do this partly because of the kennedy tax cuts. and i thought of him, they asked paul ryan when he came up with his road map last winter as a 5 or 6 or even 7% growth to the economy feasible, and even he didn't think so. well, go up to the kennedy library. it happened. it happened in our time. it happened again. >> host: al felzenberg, you have

president kennedy tied with president truman, president mckinley, zachary taylor? >> guest: yes. yes. here is my theory about old zack. old rough and ready, by the way. and he was the commanding officer of a fellow named u.s. grant, and there are a lot of similarities in that. a lot like harry truman. they belong in the same category. you knew where zachary taylor stood. and i advanced a theory had zachary taylor not died 18 months into his presidency, food poisoning and, of course, one of the first conspiracy theories, did he die of natural causes? he insisted that california come into the union as a free state. and here is a southern slave owner, sugar plantation, baton rouge, louisiana. spent his entire life in the u.s. army. was the only national institution we had on the edge

of civil war. and he's not going to let these people destroy his union. so we talk about richard nixon, only nixon could go to china because of the democrat had been to china, the conservative republicans would have attacked him like heck. but if nixon goes to china, well, then who can oppose it? well, if you have a southern plantation owner who's the war hero, the man who was the chief of staff during the mexican war double the size of the united states, and then, of course, with his death becomes the starting gun of will these new states come into the -- [inaudible] and there was a proposal on the board to divide california, keep the balance slave-free in the united states senate. and he said, no. he wants california to be a free state, and he told his son-in-law in the time, a fellow named jefferson davis who was a senator from mississippi who we will hear from again in a generation, he tells him he'll

hang him from the highest tree if he keeps talking about this stuff. had taylor lived, he was the eisenhower of his time. he won the most senate war at that time, and he might have pulled it off. now, on the other hand, mr. fillmore was ranked very low. i forgot where i put him, but pretty low. >> host: 33. >> guest: okay. that's pretty low out of 44. well, fillmore was told by his wife, you sign the fugitive slave law, you will not only end your career, but you'll destroy the union. that was the compromise to, you know, that california was something the north got, and the south got the fugitive slave law which meant if you harbored a slave in your home, you're committing a federal offense. if you know of a neighbor who's going it and don't -- doing it and don't report the neighbor, you're guilty as well as he in the era of the underground

railroad and of uncle tom's cabin. we talk about our greatest president, in if my view abraham lincoln, when he meets harriet beecher stowe, lincoln was 6-6, something like that. 6-3. and harriet beecher stowe was barely five feet tall. lincoln looked down and said you're the little lady started the big war. the polarization grows. zachary taylor might have pulled it off. might have pulled it off. had more union states come in, they might have been able to abolish slavery constitutionally with a constitutional amendment. more states, more legislatures, okay? and history may have been a lot different, i argue. >> host: along with kennedy, truman, mckinley, taylor all ranked above coolidge is one other gentleman. he's the gentleman here with the pin on the front of your book.

[laughter] >> guest: that was the publisher's idea. >> host: u.s. grant. >> guest: yes. >> host: why -- >> guest: well, let's talk about him too. here's a gentleman who had a larger funeral than abraham lincoln had. the american people adored him. the historians department like him. the american people adored him. they trusted him. two elections after the civil war his first slogan was let us have peace. how do you run against that? on the other hand, let us have peace, but the cause of the war were slavery. everybody argues it was slavery. no question the southerners said it was slavery, they wanted to extend the system. the north knew it was slavery. even the young mr. lincoln knew that slave labor in illinois would drive down the price of white free labor. you name it, whether it was an economic cause, moral cause, the cause of the war was slavery. grant had the idea that this could be a war of attrition.

you know, he coined the phrase total war where you take it to the population. sherman's march to the sea, we're going to destroy the enemy's capacity to resist. so we're making that the idea that he could use his extraordinary powers as commander in chief to destroy the enemy's capacity to make war, free your slaves, okay? so people say, well, the emancipation proclamation freed no one. they knew it was freeing them. frederick douglass had sentinels all through the south telling them, run away now! and grant got the idea, why don't we put them in the army? we now could fight this war of attrition. no end of manpower available as we're marching through the south, we're putting these men in uniform. some of our listeners may have seen the movie "glory" and all that that meant. that was a very interesting period in grant's life. so he becomes president, and he

has this, basically, impossible situation. let us have peace, let 'em up easy, the famous coming together of -- [inaudible] where they decide not to shoot the enemy officer corps, and they decide not the hang william davis, and they decide we're going to have a very benign, we're going to try to have -- we have it worse later on -- we're going to try to have a benign reconstruction. and then you have johnson in between who was a southerner, pro-union, but very racist and had very awful attitudes about african-americans. that's one of the reasons he was impeached, because he was trying to delay the passage of the 14th amendment, 15th amendment and what have you. lincoln got the 13th through. that was the abolition of slavery. that's done, in the constitution. but the other two are not clear. grant says he's not going to be president, not going to accept the nomination if we don't pass the 15th amendment which allows african-americans the right to

vote. and, of course, everybody said in '57 when eisenhower passes the first civil rights bill in 90 years -- 80 years. you were in the grant administration. and u.s. grant was the last republican -- last president until eisenhower to send troops to the south to enforce, first, voting rights, but then civil rights. and if you're looking at extending freedom, i'm not even counting the the times as generl when he was the man who physically carried out lincoln's work. but he believed he would not sell out the troops. he said that many be times, that he was their commander in chief, he brought them in uniform, and he's not going to have them oppressed by their former masters again, and thai going to have a right to -- they're going to have a right to vote. and i quote directly in this that he cannot let this happen. and we all know that the hayes election, well, very, very

slowly we have an economic depression in the 1870s, the in-party gets whammed. but when the democrats lose congress, this is inspect in 1874 by election, we just have been through that. we've been through the democrats losing the house last fall. and it's 2006, both houses. so we have these swing elections. 1874 the union, the northern states also send democratic legislatures. democratic congress begins to cut off grant's hands. and you can't send troop toss the south anymore without our consent. and, of course, they're not going to give consent too easily. so by the time hayes runs against tilden, you have that fraudulent election because by this point in all but three states african-americans have been completely disenfranchised. that was one of the great disappointments of grant's presidency. congress had already impeached

one president, he's not going to have another. and he tries to get a third term. imagine that. the u.s. grant that those of us who grew up hearing about scandals, hearing about his drinking which he wasn't the only one who drank in the white house, take my word for it, and the other things. we never hear about the glory of grant, and he should be -- and, in fact, it's time he was. grant got his memorial before lincoln, grant's tomb became more than a joke about groucho marx. who is buried in grant's tomb? that was the most visited site in america. grant's tomb was an icon before the statue of liberty, before the lincoln memorial was even in. and i urge readers, if you read nothing else, please, pay attention to the grant story. >> host: abraham lincoln.

>> guest: yes. >> host: according to al felzenberg gets 5s all the way across. george washington comes in second with an overall rating of 4.67. teddy roosevelt comes in third place, 4.5 tied with ronald reagan at 4.5. james k. polk, a couple of new biographies have come out on him recently. >> guest: yes. >> host: you have him down at number 20 right below george h.w. bush. he gets a 1 in character and a 5 in competence. >> guest: right. right. james polk by himself, all right? decided he was going to grab two-thirds of mexico. all by himself, okay? and wasn't clear whether the northern states wanted that. [inaudible] he did it in very, let's say he was called polk the mendacious by his opponents for pretty good

reason. but he did achieve his goal, so he gets a 5 on competence and a 1 on character. >> host: george w. bush you have in this book. this book came out, obviously, very recently. but you have him ranked tied with jimmy carter. george w. bush, 3 in character. >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: why? >> guest: well, now, maybe as papers come out and maybe as we get into his files we'll see, um, a little more. the family saga, well, i won't call it "dallas," okay? but who's going to carry the father's medal. and why did he want to be president? what goals did he want to achieve? this is all very unclear. i take him at his word that he became a new person after he hit

40 and the crisis in his time. but i also take him at his word that he lost out on a lot and wasn't paying attention when he was going to yale and going other places. and there's reason for, you know, seeking the presidency. we need to know more about. ..

no one ever said that before. now, it doesn't mean you can do with the tank. you can argue that. but that needed to be said. the american dream and the american life in the world, it just doesn't mean white people, anglo-saxon people verses the jews. i give him credit for that. on the character question, i didn't find -- maybe it came up in the new edition. i didn't get a sense of great intellectual curiosity which i got when i looked at reagan. i'm sure he reads. i don't get a sense that this

president would get up in the middle of the night and start asking questions like lincoln did. something we can no. get out there. he has his own spies. why isn't this army moving. i think bush was more inclined to sign i guess he had this perhaps false impression of reagan. reagan was a great delegator. he did not check up on people. reagan checked up on people. how's it going, charlie. okay. he would go away again. i get a sense that bush got advice and get the best people around. before he found there is the story about a colonel coming in who had actually seen the vice-president that things were working up the way they thought.

the insurrection and disorganized. he gets in there. bush said tuesday it, the tax cuts. he couldn't find anyone in the treasury department. he called, eight or 9:00. the white house dinner. and he gets a lowly clerk. i want to ask about the budget. okay. so the next day, of course, they go through the building. all the lights are on the treasury building. i didn't have any stories. >> host: one incompetents.

>> guest: for the best of motives no one can say that it was doing well when he left office. we head seven years. wonderful economic growth. then we had the crash. and you know, there were in office. he was in office for some time. no one saw this coming, nobody asked questions. and then where we're going to entice the government and underwrite banks to lend money to people can afford it, pau we should own their home. he did many speeches. ownerships society. if you look, incentives are given to banks who lent to people who cannot afford to pay them back i paid ten or 12 percent down, maybe 20 percent down from my home.

but the idea of 5%, 2 percent, nothing down find no sense of responsibility, and this is the government policy that started in a geithner. but when push came along. >> host: and finally from your book. we deserved and people would didn't tied with george w. bush, jimmy carter, rutherford b. hayes, james madison. one in competence, one economic policy, and the one in defense. >> guest: i would urge people in the current administration to read about. he was an intellectual. he carried around his own library. the good down and show you where

the bookcases were. he lined them up. he was an ideologue. he was jefferson's -- is on the ideology. jefferson would say, you read the constitution. you tell me. you can only do with the constitution tilsit. it doesn't say. we have to get a constitutional amendment. changes mind. the british are knocking the hell of a firm. either way if he wins or loses. so he says okay. so now you have madison believes . the legislature should be in the supreme rant. the dominant branch.

congress wants this. the ten or. there is no money to fight the war. he doesn't like national banks. and so he lets the charter expired. he won't veto. i have to do what they say. they won the war, but i don't want the bank. lisa fight the war. no money to implement the war. bottom line, the burned on the white house and the capital. the hero of that administration, the declaration of independence out of there. george washington out of there. the smart man. tremendous integrity. i will say he did a great deal

after the war. very popular. he and his wife, after september september 11th as never this reminded me a lot. when the some, it was in the logic of events he was a captive to his own theory about how the world should work. he had great authority on that. being sneaky, being politician found a way to make it look like he was being loyal. even ronald reagan, the most in the logical president we ever had was capable. attacking reagan for going

dugout. even reagan could talk and say cool it. but going to stop. but madison. >> host: what is your job here? >> guest: i teach seven courses. one is presidential rhetoric. a very important part of the presidency. persuade people and change minds. speak for 300 million people with one voice and be respected. some of them rose to great heights and others did not. we think of lincoln and the majesty of lincoln. it should be given in english courses as well. and then i teach a course on presidents and foreign policy. up to you a story about that. i start by saying okay, 1945. well, the beginning of the

atomic era. what happened in 1865, 1989, the fall of the wall. so what happened in 1763, nothing. nothing. no reaction. 1763, the end of world war, the british get the french out of north america, master of our own destiny. what happens? two years later it all blows up. great care. and as the mall. still waiting for problems to be behind us. yeah. and each of those men in their own right track to do with these issues. >> host: how long have you been teaching? >> guest: on an offer, good lord, of 30 years. i was in and out of government.

less government job was the september 11th commission. i worked in georgia roper bush's of ministration, briefly in the second president bush's administration. i worked in the house, the hill for five years. i was assistant secretary state of new jersey. so in between those stretches i have been teaching. i find it exceptionally rewarding. the students here are exceptionally able and motivated and wanting to learn. >> host: how many books have you written? >> guest: let's see. three. another one with two colleagues. >> host: what was your experience like on the september 11th commission? taking part in any activity. >> guest: on going to some of these. there are still some unfinished

recommendations that the commission made. look how well that's going. i should say the one that has not been enacted, congress is to be more of a player and it's on oversight and how they handle their own intelligence committees. very low specialization. this is a problem of the hill or congress in the sense that there is no incentive structure for somebody to want to go on there. the head of the at community you're doing something for farmers, food in the world, something that if local people know. but if you're protecting gasol the free rider problem, everybody benefits. people sort of see the intelligence committee has jury duty. so it was an extraordinary time.

the height of all of these partisan battles. bush and the democratic congress all of those. we had ten commissioners. the republicans, by democrats. there road unanimous. a report the get unanimous consent. with us putting too many differences. they get the attention of the congress and the president. i heard of. everybody thought we were going to end up in deadlock. again, an even number. they had tom keane. turned out to be moderates for the party.

ahead of any other motive. they said a tone. the others chimed in. he used to say, republican or democratic. so the facts. then the politics. when we learn what the facts were the can tell us the narrative. it became evident with the recommendation might be. the dots that connected with agencies to talk to what agencies. then it forced the recommendation from that. it was extraordinary. both commissions failed. there were ignored. the commission, i pray for the country. what they're doing on the hill.

the one we have been talking with george washington university professor. his most recent book, the leaders we deserve and a few we didn't published by basic books. >> you are watching book tv on a c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. up next, the origins of franklin d. roosevelt's plans to confront the nation's economic depression this is just over an hour. >> tonight it is our great honor and pleasure to welcome author michael hiltzik. a b.a. from columbia. during his extensive career with

the l.a. times he has been a financial correspondent in new york city. nairobi bureau chief and financial staff writer, editor, and columnist. i think he's had every job there. oh, yes. topics he has written about include business, technology, and public policy. among his many writing awards of the pulitzer prize for next was a on corruption in the music industry, a gerald loeb award for distinguished business and financial journalism, and a silver gavel from the american bar association. three politically canned books, the plot against social security , dealers of lightning, and that in kenya. praises been enormous, including the following. a sweeping lively survey of the

roosevelt administration is effort to restart the american economy nearly 81 years ago. a timely, well executed overview of the program that laid the foundation for the modern progressive state. please help me welcome author michael hiltzik. [applause] [applause] >> thank you so much for that very kind introduction and for having the collected works out here. thanks to all of you for coming and out on dancing with the stars night. i guess i have been saved by tito. we are all here, i hope tonight for what i think will be a joint effort to look back at a turning point in american history and to explore how that moment still

resonates for us today. my goal tonight is the same as the goal that i set for myself when i started my books, which is to recover the new deal from the mists of time and the accretion of eight decades of ideology and misunderstanding and sure forgetfulness. i'm going to speak for about half an hour, and then i hope we will have time for questions from all of you. i just can't cover everything. i no there are points that you will be curious about that i will mess. but want to set the stage by establishing the relationship that franklin roosevelt had with the american people. so on going to read from a letter that came into the roosevelt white house in january january 1934 from a farm wife in the midwest seeking advice on an excruciating personal dilemma. the letter began, dear frank.

[laughter] our neighbor loaned us $25 on our team. now he says he will take the meals lsc can come to see me when my husband is away. here's my question. what should i do to save the meals? now, it's hard to imagine a citizen putting the sense of a personal question to any president including barack obama , but i think this tells you something about the deep personal affinity that millions of americans fell for fdr. tell the privilege, product of a harvard education, amanda groped servants on the family estate in upstate new york. tells you not only something about his personality and how he projected the sense that he cared about americans in all walks of life and all socio-economic glasses, but about the time. a unique time in our history when america had been beaten

down by an economic crisis so lengthy and so crushing that even the wealthiest businessmen and the most experienced political leaders that we had a literally thrown up their hands and declared that they had no answers. so roosevelt alive in the white house having declared quite candidly that he didn't have the answers either, but that he was going to try everything he could to bring america out of crisis. as he put it in an important speech during the 1932 presidential campaign, the country needs, and unless i mistake is temper the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. it's common sense to take a method and try it. if it fails admitted frankly and try another. above all try something. what he tried was an amazingly varied slate of programs. the new deal closed the banks and reopen them within days

under and a president of the stringent set of new regulations it sent hundreds of thousands of young men from city and countryside into the wilderness to clear brush and create parks and build roads. that was the ccc, the civilian conservation owners. the very first court relief program of the new deal and one of the first american history. the new deal tossed out the mortgage system to require homeowners to refinance their loans every three to five years, preventing them from ever building up equity in their houses and replaced it with the form of mortgages that we have come to know today, long term loans that and to help you eventually own your house, that is, of course, if everything goes right. these loans, by the way, were refinanced at rock-bottom interest rates by the government. this was the home owners loan corporation which turned a profit for the u.s. government. i think we would love to see

something like that today. the new deal implemented price supports for farm sectors that by 1933 had been in a depression for more than a decade. it created social security, it took america off the gold standard releasing the u.s. economy from the shackles of the past, and it builds more than america had ever built before or has cents. highways, bridges, tunnels and dams, source systems, schools, civic monuments, theaters, and airports. for most of those there probably is in the day on which we don't drive, fly, play, learn, or flush and a structure built by the new deal. the program was so diverse because it was the product of an amazing diversity of advisers, some of whom are remembered only as names in dry history textbooks as a muffin have been completely forgotten. one of the ways i tried in my

book to recapture the reality of the new deal for modern readers is by bringing these people back to life on its pages. so there is frances perkins, the first female cabinet member in american history who almost singlehandedly brought social security into being and to on her first day as secretary of labor not only had to physically evict the cigar chumping gangsters with whom herbert hoover has damped the labor department, but then she had to take mop in hand to evict the cockroach's of illiberal apartments filled the headquarters building. and harold ickes, fdr interior secretary in the head of his public works to ministration, a republican, but a progressive republican who had staged a hoover campaign at the 1932 gop convention the failed because it cannot find anyone else who wanted to run. and my personal favorite, general hugh johnson, a big plus

street often drawn profane exit was pointer who brought the national recovery administration or the nra into being, created its symbol of the blue eagle, which many of you have seen or, perhaps, even remember and he was famous for being a will to intimidate the nation's biggest industrialists into doing his bidding. and he was secretly checking into walter reed hospital to dry out. [laughter] now, how big a figure was general hugh johnson? well, 1933, the first era of fdr administration, johnson, not fdr, was time magazine's man of the year. today almost nobody even remembers his name. of course at the center of all the selectivity was fdr. like president obama, he was viewed as an untested cypher when he took office. the x in the equation as the editorialist william allen described him after the election

roosevelt was so adept at making himself seem all things to all people that everything the memoirs of his closest aides you can sense their love and devotion to the man, but also their uncertainty about what he had in mind every time he talked to them. i think that explains why so many of them who had spent years of their lives serving him ended up deeply disaffected. it started out working for the fdr they imagined in their minds only to find out that when political expedience called he could be somebody entirely different. that wasn't the way the public felt about him. after years in which the national did not seem to have tried anything, roosevelt pledged uttered in his magically listless was delivered confidence, so much so that for most of the next six years the country went along with them, even when it was obvious that one initiative or another have failed. and that is an important fact about the new deal that i think

has been largely forgotten. some of it worked and some of it quite distinctly did not work. but what underlies the whole effort, the unifying principle and the lasting legacy of this huge disorganized an incredibly messy program, if you could even call it a program was the idea that the federal government's responsibility was to do something, not merely stand aside. inaction was absence, but the wrong kind of action. it was the federal government's responsibility to make sure that unemployed americans had something to eat and a roof over their heads and opportunity for work, even when it was being provided by the private sector. so the new deal created the template for fadel efforts to improve will lot of all americans, regardless of their station in the furnace of the great depression the roosevelt of ministration forced a new style of government and a new vision of government responsibilities to its citizens

but i want to up talk a little bit before we get more deeply into the new deal to discuss what it was not. in fact, one of the most important lessons i learned from writing my book is that today both conservatives and liberals get the new deal wrong. although the new deal is picture today as quintessentially liberal and progressive, the fact is that many of its initiatives were staunchly conservative. sure, the first law passed during the hundred days and those new regulations on banks, what the very second piece of legislation was the economy act, which mandates a 25% reduction in the federal budget, including cuts to congresses pay, federal employees' wages, and even veterans benefits. roosevelt constantly threatened to raise taxes on business, the wealthy, but it fell to do so until the very end of the new deal. for most of the time the bulk of federal taxes were paid by the

middle-class and working-class. more taxes were piled on them every year. there were higher excise taxes on cosmetics and tobacco and after the repeal of prohibition in 1933 on liquor. social security tax. further, many new deal initiatives personally favored by roosevelt or failures, many of its successes were conceived by others. the first great triumph, the ending of the banking crisis during the new administration's very first weeks in office was mapped out not by roosevelt but by herbert hoover's own economic advisers at the treasury department. fdr was opposed to adding old age pensions to social security until the very eve of the bill the introduction on capitol hill he threatened to veto the bank regulation bill if it included deposit insurance. he was overruled by congress and

luckily so because in time he would claim paternity of both of these landmark programs which was an indication of his political supplement and, of course, his ability to understand when things to work. roosevelt reputation as a quintessential tax liberal is misplaced. he pushed for a balanced budget every year, though he never achieved one. he was skeptical of large public-works programs comanche even veto bills that he thought would give him too much spending authority. he detested programs you thought would result in too much redistribution of wealth, which he dismissed as the bill which is why he was at first opposed to old age pensions for social security. the new deal may have forged an alliance between minority voters and the democratic party that has lasted right up to the present day, but it is to cut its worst short, was in the field of racial e