parliament demanding the same thing. why didn't you, the government, do more for me? america was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state i can do just fine if you can show your not stimulating stimulus, your job was jobs bill, and jim multitrillion-dollar corporate bonds and to stay the hell out of my life and out of my pocket. ..

of course we are aaa. these are loser countries in the aaa category. they are loser nation, and they can't compare with us. we have to understand, we are not aaa. when you got $15 trillion in debt, you can't be aaa. when you have triple that in liabilities, you can't be aaa.

the british impeer roar left this -- i took the wrong assimilation pill before i woke up. the deplorable british imperialist -- [laughter] distilled generations saying to be born an englishman was to be get first prize in life. they turned the thought around to turn the ruling class too smug to see what was coming. do you think, he wrote, the laws of god are suspended in england because you were born in it? to be born a citizen of the united states is to win first

prize in the lottery of life, and as britain did, too many americans assume it will always be so. do you think the laws of god will be suspended in favor of america simply because you were born in it? think carefully about that question. when you live in the north country, when you live in a state where the weather spends six months of the year trying to throttle the life out of you -- [laughter] one thing you understand is the fragility of civilization. back in the spring, i was walking on an abandoned class six road behind my house with my two boys one morning when there was a huge momma bear to the left in the trees, and then there was a cub, and behind us another little cub, and we were in the middle, and my boys were excited. [laughter] a little scared.

that's the way i feel as we embark on this critical half decade. i feel a excited, but a little scared. i wonder if our society still has that instinct of the mother bear protecting her cubs. if you agree, don't wait for a messiah to descend from the heavens in november. we tried that in 2008. we entrusted a multibillion enterprise to a guy who never created a dime in his life, and we were surprised when it didn't work out. this time, it's up to you. ordinary citizens need to do this year and next year as they did in 2009 and 2010 and move the meter of public discourse. i quote milton friedman who says don't elect the right people to do the right things, but create the condition by where the wrong people are forced to do the

right things. every time -- [applause] that deserves a cheer. there should be nothing controversial about that because he's absolutely right. every time you see obama, go and give a speech and someone is taken the precaution of loading up some lame boilerplate into his prompter about how we need to get our fiscal house in order and control the deficit. the only reason he's even pretending to care about it is because the meter of public discourse was moved in 2009 and 2010. he's the wrong person being forced to pretend that he wants to do the right thing. let's keep changing the discourse until the wrong people are forced to do the right thing. milton freedman is -- friedman is right about what. if i moved to new hampshire, i generally assumed general stark

said live free or die before a battle. i thought it was red meat, the battle charge before the routine, and then i discovered our state's great revolutionary war hero made his creed occur decades after the cessation of hostilities writing in a letter he could not attend i dinner. many of us can rouse people to rediscover the primal impulses like on flight 93. they thought it was a routine commuter flight, and when they realized it was not, they went into general stark mode and cried let's roll, but it's harder to maintain the live free spirit when you have a slow unceasing ratchet effect which is in unstable societies threatened by revolution or wars in their borders, how liberty

falls, traded to the state, incrementally painlessly. live free or die sounds like a battle cry. we'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death, but, in fact, it's a prophetic statement of the obvious, of the reality of our lives in the prosperous west. you can live as free men, but if you choose not to, you're society will surely die. live free or die. it's new hampshire's choice. it's america's choice. make the right call because the fate of our world depends upon it. thank you very much indeed. [applause] [applause]

for more information on mark styn and his work, visit stey nonline.com. >> up next from the recent 2011 national book festival from the national mall here in washington, the historian david mccullough, presents his book "the greater journey: americans in paris." >> welcome you here on this first national book festival in our history to continue for the second day. thank you for coming. [cheers and applause] thank you for bringing the sun out and making it clear that sheer humanity can always overcome the most inaccurate of weather predictions. [laughter] a special thanks to one of our

new sponsors, wells fargo, specifically sponsoring the new history and biography pavilion. we're coming to the close of this 11th annual national book festival, and all of us at the library of congress, we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we've enjoyed planning and bringing it to you with so many great sponsors and partners. it's a joyous event, but it's also an important one because the ability to read is key to a good life in every sense of the word. reading is central not just to enriching our own lives, extending our horizons of society and building and sustaining a dynamic democracy, and we're grateful to the 115 writers who brought us the ongoing richness of american creative spirit in the collective and public and national way here at the mall.

this could not, of course, been the success it's been, the unprecedented number of people who participated without the work of over 100 volunteers who gave generously of their time, and it's actually more than a thousand -- it's a record in that respect as well as the number of people like you who have been here. i want to make special recognition of jenna, the wonderful librarian here, the executive director of the festival. jennifer gavin, john cole, long time center of the book with the 15 state centers and the authors coordinator. the director of development, and the thousand volunteers made up of library staff here on their own time. it's a free weekend. this is not their duty, but it's their pleasure, and also members

of the junior league, half a thousands of them -- half a thousand of them and others who love the book festival. the volunteers return year after year to help, and we could not manage a book festival without them. they deserve special recognition of the logistics, getting the tents up and the technology making this possible. our security staff works hard to ensure the book festival is a safe and happy experience for all book lovers who joined us this weengd. we're especially grateful for the many who brought their children and celebrated the multigenerational task of reading and reading to each other and extending the conversations that you never quite have with that screen in front of you with one another, so it's grateful to our many, many sponsors who have contributed the financial resources and the partner institutions with all kinds of

corrections that made this event not only possible, but sustaining, and i want to especiallily mention our co-chairman of the new board for the festival, david rubenstein, a great benefactor, and unfortunately, he can't be here today, but deserves our great thanks. he's co-chairman with me on this board of this festival, and many of those members are also here, and we thank you. finally, we thank the authors and their publishers for making the books, having them come alive here at the book festival at the national mall making it a lasting event here in washington. [applause] a nobel laureate, and we begin with one, and i was reminded a nobel laureate began in a talk

before the library of congress, he said, you know, i've reached the conclusion that the human brain is wired for narrative, and so we close our festival today with a man who has drawn more of us than we can imagine into fresh and new ways and with many parts of the unique narratives that is the history of the united states of america. he twice won the plitzer prize for listing harry truman and john adams, lifting them out of the relative neglect they received compared to the presidents that preceded and succeeded. after john adam was was between washington and all of these are iconic figures, but he's created

new icons, new narratives who humanized history, and more than that, he's also celebrated the human stories behind great events like the building of the panama canal, the brooklyn bridge, and also historic tragedies like the johnstown flood. the latest book is "the greater journey: americans in paris," the 19th century story of americans going across the atlantic to learn about the old world even at a time when other americans were journeying physically through the pacific to discover the natural resources, challenges, and beauty of the new frontier. they enriched themselves culturally and intellectually and the great city of light in

the journey eastward across the sea. ladies and gentlemen, david mccullough came into my office two days after the first national book festival to say how important it was to continue to do this kind of event nationally, and he offered to help in any way that he could. one day after that came, the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11, one of the darkest days in along the narrative of our national life. he came back the next year to give the final talk at the book festival a year later, and he ended it in a way we'll not forget. some will argue he suggested that you have to regulate what people think and write and even read, and he ended it with just two words. we don't. we are --

[applause] we are glad to have him here, the middle of freedom winner back to end the first two-day national book festival we've ever had, and the first of the second decade of this wonderful event that we, at the library of congress, are so privileged to share with you all. ladies and gentlemen, david mccullough. [applause] >> thank you very much. [applause] thank you. thank you, thank you very much. what a thrill. what a thrill to be here among people who believe in ideas, in

the printed word, in the use of the language, and this human spirit as expressed in books and writing. what a tremendous pleasure and thrill and honor it is to be introduced by james billington. [applause] we have had a number of distinguished members of library of congress. the famous poet, scholars, and historians and attorney, but we've never had a more accomplished, productive, or farseeing directer of the library of congress than james billington. [applause]

i like to think of our library of congress as the mother church for our national public library system. one of the greatest institutions in american life. free to the people. [applause] just imagine every single citizen, every of every age in this country can get essentially a free education by going to the public library. [applause] furthermore after one has finished one's formal education, one can then start the great adventure of learning that can begin the journey of life at the library. [applause] let's never forget it's not just the book in the library or the

manuscripts or the maps or newspapers that are of value, but the people who work there, the librarians. [cheers and applause] it took me awhile to catch on for this when i start doing research for my work that if i went to the librarian that if i told her or him what it was i was tried to do and achieve and how much i don't know, they went right to work for me and solved all kinds of problems, and they still do, and i'm forever up debted to them -- indebted to them. [applause] i'd like to begin with a couple of lessons from history. there are innumerable lessons from history, of course, but just a few to set the scene. one is you can make a very good case, and i try to make the case that nothing ever happened in the past.

nobody ever lived in the past. they lived in the present, but it was their present, not ours. different from ours, but they didn't live in the past. washington, john adams, jefferson, they didn't walk around saying, suspect -- isn't this fascinating living in the past? [laughter] nor did they have any idea how it's going to turn out anymore than we do. very important point. they couldn't foresee the future anymore than we can. there's no such thing as the foreseeable future just as there's no such thing as a manmade man or woman. it doesn't happen. life is a joint effort, a great accomplishment is a joint effort. education is a joint effort, progress is a joint effort. a nation is a joint effort. and we have to see it that way, and one of the key factors in

all of our accomplishments, all of our lives, each and every one of us has been our teachers. we are more indebted to our teachers than anybody in our society. [applause] yes. and let's not do anything that makes their job harder. [cheers and applause] each and every one of us, i hope, has had one or two or maybe more teachers who have changed our lives, who made us see in a way we never did before, who opened up the window, let in the fresh air, and changed our outlook, changed our love of learning, which is really what it's about. curiosity, curiosity is one of the essential elements of being

a human being. curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages, and it's accelerative like gravity. the more we know, the more we want to know, and i applaud, particularly, those teachers who encourage their students to ask questions, not just to know the answers to every question, but to ask questions because it's by asking questions that you find things out, and later in life especially, i have never embarked on a project for one of my books, and, now, this is a confession in front of a large and very important influential audience, but i've never embarked upon a book on a subject i knew everything about. i knew something about it, something was interesting to me, i was compelled to write about, but more important, compelled to write about it. if i knew all about it, i

wouldn't want to write the book. what's the use? it's not a journey or an adventure. i want to tell you how this present book of mine got its start, or at least a good nudge in the right direction. it happened right here in washington. i was driving down massachusetts avenue one morning during the rush hour, and all of the sudden, right by sheridan circle, just past embassy row, there was a horrific traffic jam. everything stopped, and i looked over, and there was old general bill sheridan up on his horse, the bird on his hat, and i began to wonder how many people who go around this circle every day, twice a day, thousands of them, have any idea who he was? as i was thinking that and getting a little discouraged, the rhapsody in blue began

playing on the car radio, and suddenly, the magic, the power of that music, not only lifted me out of my traffic jam dull drums, but sent me soaring, and then i thought who is more alive in our world today, in our lives today? sherman? who is more important to american history? of course, they were important, but we must not, i said to myself, we must not leave him out of it. history is much more than politics and the military. i'll say it again. history is much more than just politics and the military. [applause] there are as many that appreciate and know about ancient civilizations which all we know is their art and their

architecture, so we must take art and ark tech dhur and music and poetry and drama and dance and science and ideas seriously as a subject for history. it's who we are as human beings. take away mark twain, take away winslow homer, take away the poets of our time and times before, walt whitman, and it's like you took away the mississippi river or the rocky mountains. we wouldn't feel the same way about who we are, and the greatest statesmen of all have in their own way been masters of the literary form. lincoln's second inaugural address, for example, is a work of art, and here we are in this magnificent capitol of ours surrounded by science, art,

music, history, all part of the story, so it couldn't be a more appropriate place for us to give our respect to o and our belief in that we have to do more to understand the history of our culture, and we have to keep on teaching the culture that we profess. [applause] we cannot, we cannot, we must stop cutting back on art programs, music programs, theater -- [applause] and we must concentrate on what our children and grandchildren are reading. when i set out to figure out who

i'm writing, i try to figure out what they wrote, and because of our wonderful libraries like the library of congress, university libraries, letters and diaries survived that take us into the lives of these vanished people, and you get to know them in a way that you can't get to know people in real life, and in some ways, you get to know them better than people in real life, because in real life, you don't get to read other people's mail. [laughter] but i try, also, not just to read what they wrote, but to read what they read. it's a very revealing part of who they were and what their time was. we are what we read to a far greater extent than most people have any idea. we walk around, all of us, every day, for example, quoting shakespeare, alexander pope, but we don't even know it.

what we read shapes how we think. our vocabulary shapes what we think. we think with words, and when we have a student body whose vocabularies are declines. the total number of words they know and use in everyday language is declining. we have a very serious problem. it has to be faced. one of the best of all ways is to make sure we know what they are reading and to encourage them to read the best work possible. we have to encourage the best teachers to show them what they love. showing what they love is what the great teachers have all known how to do. now, in my book about the americans who went to paris, i'm writing about a generation beginning about 1830, extending on into 1900, really two generations, who went to paris

not because they were alien identitied with american life or american culture, not because they were angry or feeling an overwhelming sense of self-pity, but the contrary. they were going there to improve themselves, better serve their country, and they said so again and again, not to serve their country in politics or in the military, but to serve their country to perform to the best of their ability, the desire to excel, ambition to excel. not to be wealthy or famous, not to be powerful, but to excel. whether they were painters, musicians, writers, sculptors, or physicians, or in one case, a politician named charles sumner, who wanted to improve his mind, who wanted to come back with a greater sense of the potential of civilization. in the public garden in boston,

there's a statue for charles, and all it says there is sumner. there's no explanation as to who he was, no explanation who the sculptor was. most people, i think, probably more than one out of a thousand people in boston has no idea who he was. if they have any thought about it, it's probably that he built the sumner tunnel in boston, which he did not. he went to paris because he wanted to attend lectures, and he attended lectures of all kinds, and he took notes. he crammed in french before he started the lecture attendaps, and he became fluent in it, and he took notes on everything, everything imaginable. one day, his mind began to stray a little because the professor was running on a little longer than he expected, so he began looking around at the other

students in the hall. the hall is still there, by the way, and there's close to a thousand students in the hall, and he noticed that the black students were treated just as everyone else. they talked the same, dressed the same, and they had the same ambitions that he had, and he wrote in his journal that night, "i wonder if the way we treat black people at home has more to do with how we've been taught than the nature of things." it transformed him overnight, literally, overnight, into an abolitionist, came back, got into politics, elected to the united states senate at 40 years old, and right up there on the hill, he led the abolitionist movement in the senate with the strongest, most powerful voice of all. second only to abraham lincoln in what he felt as a force in the country, and as many of you

know, he almost paid the price for it with his life. he was almost beaten to death by a congressman from south carolina who attacked him blind sided him with a heavy walking stick and virtually killed him from which sumner never recovered either psychologically or physically. that man, that remarkable man was changed by his experience in paris, and we were changed as a people and a country as a consequence, and if you think that's an exaggeration when john brown and his band of men in kansas heard about what had happened to sumner, that's what caused them to attack and make us become known as the pottawatmie massacre that inflamed that country when it

broke. one thing happens after another like in real life which is one of the many reasons we have to do a better job of teaching our children and grandchildren in history. [applause] i want to read you something written by a boston irish boy who is about almost 21 years old, not quite, who had no money no friends in high places, knew no one in paris, no contact, spoke not a word of french, but he was am bishesz to be a painter, and so he went to paris to study art and he succeeded in a great fashion which is a story unto itself. here's what he wrote. "in those far off days, there were no art schools in america, no drawing classes, no collections of fine plaster cass, and very few

pictures on exhibit. i knew no one in france. i was greatly, utterly ignorant of the language. i did not not what to do when once there, but i was not yet 21 and 20, and i had a great stock of courage, and of inexperience which is sometimes a great help and a strong desire to do my very best." the strong desire to do my very best. that young man became the most accomplished and commissioned portrait artist on both sides of the atlantic painting virtually anybody and everything who was anybody on both sides. right now, there's seven paintings, portraits by george pa heelly hanging in the white house. 17 portraits by george peely

hanging in the national portrait gallery, and over this this our capitol, over in the portrait gallery is his great picture of abraham lincoln painted in illinois in springfield just after lincoln found out that he had been legislated president, and it was -- elected president, and it was while lincoln was sitting for that portrait, and heely was painting him without the beard that he read aloud a letter from the young woman telling him, abe lincoln, he would be much hand somer if he grew a beard. he said, heely, can you paint me with a beard, and he said with all honestly, no, sir, i cannot. it's one of the very few images in color by a painter that we have of lincoln, and one of the greatest of all heely's portraits. another heely portrait of

abraham lincoln hangs over the mantle piece in the state dining room at the white house. here's this young man with no advantages, none, never been to college, never been to high school, who decided to take upon himself to do this brave thing. my thesis is that not all pioneers went west, and that's what the book is largely about. oliver wendell holmes senior was a poet and he wrote one that kept the uss institution that kept it in boston whether. not because the medical training in paris was far advanced by our terms, but it was infin nitly

far advanced and way ahead of american medicine. american medicine was pathetically back ward. there were very few medical schools. over half l off the -- over half of all the doctors then had never been no medical school, and they trained with other doctors who never been to medical school. the harvard medical school had a faculty of about seven. they got to paris and they were in a medical school with several thousand students taught by the greatest physicians in france, who were the greatest physicians in the world. it was the leading medical center of the world, and if they could go there, in two years, they would learn as much as or more than they would learn in general practice here in ten years. there were two very important reasons for this apart from the fact that we were so far behind and because paris was paris. it was the cultural capitol of

the world. both of these reasons had to do with our culture, our society, our miranda rule rules and regulations than it had to do with science. most american people, at that time, would have truly, literally, preferred to have died than have a man examine their body, and because all doctors were men, alas, thousands of women died unnecessarily because of that. in france and europe, there was no such stigma of women being examined for illness, birth, or whatever by male physicians, none, and equally important, students could make the rounds with a trained physician in the hospital to watch the physician attending, doing examinations of women patients. the second very important roadblock for us was the strong

position to the use of cadavers. in many states, really more than half of the states, they were illegal. now, what that meant was that there was a black market for human body, and because of that, the bodies were very expensive, and because of that, students almost never got to dissect a body, a cadaver, whereas in paris, again, france, there was no stigma about it, and so dissecting for hours at a time every day for years at a time was an enormous part of their training. one of the young american students who loved this best and became extremely good at it was oliver wendell holmes, sr. who came back to teach athatmy at harvard for more than 35 years ti