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>> and now on booktv, peter andreas talks about the long history of smuggling in the u.s. which, prior to the revolutionary war, was driven by a desire to grow domestic industries and bypass paying import taxes to the british. it's about an hour and a half. >> good afternoon and welcome, everyone, to the watson institute for international studies for the discussion of peter andreas' new book, "smuggler nation." housekeeping, i have to mention some things. the way we're going to run this is as follows, peter is going to get up and talk briefly about the book because, obviously, if he doesn't say anything, this will become a stunningly one-way conversation. after this, i will invite katherine, richard and james to

say their piece on the book, and hopefully we can get into a good discussion. at that point we will open up for q&a, and you will see there is one fixed microphone there, and there is another mobile microphone for this side of the house. if you wish to join the q&a, please, if you're on this styled, get up and stand behind the microphone. there is no mobile mic we can use for recording c-span, and we do want your questions and answers to be an integral part of this broadcast. without any further ado, i will begin my brief introduction, even though it's kind of redundant because obviously i've just done an introduction while i was doing the housekeeping. so here's the book. there we go. it's bigment. [laughter] now, for those of you who know peter, you will know this is unusual because peter tends to write short books. and there's nothing wrong with that a, but it's a bit of a surprise when you see a big one

because you think to yourself, ooh, this is serious. i'm not going to get into the details, i'm going to say three general things about the book. the first one is this bookmarks peter andreas' exit from the community of political scientists. [laughter] because it's well written. it is actually enjoyable. it is quite readable and clear. it is utterly devoid of jargon, and it contains a powerful salutary and political message. the second reason to like this book is it is not devoid of theoretical let's say heft, rather just theoretical pretension. because what it says -- and he riffs off of a well known sociologist who passed away recently, charles tilley -- and the standard sort of model we have in the social sciences where half states get built is

that states make war and wars make states. that is to say you need revenue, so in the process you develop these administrative capacities, and how you do this determines the type of state you end up. and peter's come along and basically said, yeah, that's right, but not quite. because as well as beating the bejesus out of external follies, there's also people who cross your borders, there's also people you want to keep out as well as those you want to bring in. there's the monitoring, the registering, the capacity building, the engineering that makes a state into a state. and we are remarkably blind as to how much of the state is a police apparatus and how much of that policing has to do not just with extraction, but with exclusion, and how much of that exclusion has to do with regulations and regulations as to who we are and who we think we are and who we pretend to be in the world. the haas thing i want to say about the book by introduction

is that there is no entry in the index for the word hypocrisy, but there should be. [laughter] because the moral outrage that is buried ever so slightly throughout the book is peter's outrage over the hypocrisy of all of this. the fact that we have had a hundred-year war on drugs that produces nothing except casualties, the fact that the united states was the world's biggest technology stealer throughout the entirety of the 19th century, didn't give a damn about foreign products. imported whatever it likes, reassembled it and then granted a patent to people in the country who stole it. the fact that we are a nation of astonishing hypocrites is something we need to come to grips with. i think that "smuggling nation" is a good way to start that conversation. so that's my introduction, and i'll pass over to the author himself to say why he wrote this book and what he hopes to

achieve by doing so. [applause] >> thank you, mark. you actually stole a few of my punchlines, but that's objection. i thought it'd be useful just to tell you a little about the book before people comment about the book. first, i'll tell you very briefly what the motivation was, and the motivation is really that i can't think of any policy debate today in washington which suffers from a more severe case of historical amnesia than discussions about border patrol, border policing, transnational crime, trafficking of all sorts. and the more i looked into this area, which i've been working on for quite some time, i feel like you need to dig not just years or decades, but, in fact, centuries. so this is a corrective of sorts, bringing history back in, if you will. and the argument is really the

subtitle of america, "how illicit trade made america." i discovered the argument was even more true than i thought at the outset which is you can't even explain the founding of the country, the american revolution, the new republic, wars of various sorts which i'll tell you more in just a second, westward expansion, the slave trade, economic development, border dynamics and so on without taking into account smuggling dynamics of various sorts. so put that more front and center in the story of america, retelling the american epic through the lens of smuggling is what this book does. and there's actually a large literature on various pieces of this, right? the drug trade, migration and so on. but this is a 300-year sweep, and so it's kind of a first take. i'm sure it's a flawed back as some of my colleagues will tell you maybe, but it's a first take of sort of rereading america's

epic and the rest of the world through the lens of smuggling and of trade. since we're here at brown university where i teach with my colleagues, one of the things i found quite dramatic and shocking is the importance of brown university and the brown brothers and rhode island. [laughter] a tiny state, the tiniest state in the nation punching above its weight significantly in the realm of illicit trade from the very beginning. and the great irony that i trace in the book is the country that grew up through smuggling, in facts has given birth partly through smuggling is today the world's leading policing superpower, the most aggressive, enthusiastic, anti-smuggling crusader, if you will. so it's quite a transformation. mark used the word hypocrisy. it's not only not in the index,

i'm not sure it appears in the text itself. amazon, you know, you can go to search inside the book. i'm wondering if you punch the word hypocrisy if it comes up, because i haven't connected. let me just tell you four stories. i can't tell you the whole book, there's 6 chapters and so on -- 16 chapters and so on, but four stories. one is a story about the relationship between illicit trade and work. and all these stories, by the way, have relevance, lessons for today. there's much talk today about the conflict between commodities and wars. for example, cocaine financed guerrillas in colombia, or opium financed mujahideen in afghanistan, or ivory smuggling-related conflict, and we even call blood diamonds to describe the conflict in west

africa and elsewhere. what i do in this book is, actually, look at the u.s. experience in this realm and show that it's actually a very old story. the united states mastered the relationship between illicit trade in war long before we talked about conflict commodities, blood diamonds and so on. in fact, it goes back to the very founding. after all, how could george washington actually supply his troops without massive smuggling of gun powder from western europe and the caribbean since we had in the colonies no domestic gun powder production capacity? and who made the money from the gun powder? one of them was, in fact, john brown, one of founders of brown university, who sold powder at exorbitant prices who had no choice but to do it payoff extreme -- because of extreme circumstances. john brown probably emerged from the war the richest man in rhode

island. fast forward a little bit to the war of 1812. most people don't remember this war, it's an obscure war, but one of the reasons the united states failed to annex canada. cross-border residents were actually quite intertwined economically. not so enthused about fighting. and, in fact, the british troops in canada were greatly feint on the smuggling -- feint on the smuggling of more than beef to keep the troops alive, and they would have been in much more terrible shape if americans could have stopped that flow. the whole intellectual property theft debate which is a hot topic today. in this chapter i basically emphasize that the message to china and other countries on this realm is do as i say, not as i did. and from the very get go america's mode of

industrializationing -- tradition -- industrialization. alexander hamilton was the most enthusiastic proponent. his almost official state policy, that we need to go out and do this. interestingly enough, another brown brother has a crucial role here. not john brown, the bad brother, the slave trader, the profiteer from the war, but the nice brown brother, the quaker, the pacifist, the abolitionist, moses brown. how did moses brown play a role here? well, he hired samuel slater. samuel slater's considered the grandfather of the american industrial revolution. he's given crept as sparking the -- credit as sparking the whole thing. that's probably an overstatement, but he's been

dubbed this forever in history. who was samuel slater? he actually smuggled himself out of england to find some extraordinarily strict british immigration laws that did not allow machinists, skilled artisans like himself to leave the british isles precisely because if they did, they would end up helping other countries rather than england. so he pretended to be a farmer or some such, smuggled himself to new york. moses brown heard about him, brought hip up to start a mill -- him up to start a mill, and moses brown actually had some smuggled machinery for him to work on to see if it might help. turned out to be mostly useless, so he can can ballized the parts, and the rest is history. another story's about fortunes made from illicit trade. everyone talks about how much money pablo escobar makes.

i think a mexican drug trafficker has joined that infamous l list. you know if you're on the list, your days are probably numbered, because you're getting a little too much attention. if we look back at our history, some of our founding family fortunes are built on illicit trade. here, of course, i've already mentioned to brown brothers, but we can look to the hancock family in boston, we can look to america's first multimillionaire, john jacob astor. how did he make his money? dabbling in opium smuggling, dabbling in trading with the enemy during the war of 1812, most importantly by selling illicit alcohol to native americans in exchange for much-coveted and profitable furs. this trade was banned by the federal government but poorly enforced, so his company, the american fur or trading company,

and he's remembered as america's first wealthiest mull millionaire. last but not least, there's much talk today on immigration reform debate, but it's been going on for years now how our borders are out of control. the language is we need to regain control. how can you regain control of something if you never had control of it in the first place? in fact, america was built through highly porous borders for better and for worse. from the very get go, and this is the state building story that mark alluded to, the very effort however imperfect and failing to try to regulate border crossings of all sorts built up the american -- it starts with one of the first institutions of american federal government at a time when it was so anemic which was of the customs service. it's trying to enforce trade law so we can stop the smuggling that was so rampant, a newborn country suddenly has to stop

what it actually was encouraging its merchants to do. suddenly smuggling wasn't patriotic anymore. it was hitting at the core of state coffers. so we look at the u.s./mexico border today. we have to secure the border before we can move at all forward in immigration reform. it's really a stalling tactic, but it also shows a gross disregard, ignorance of history. after all, by any historical standard, america's borders are far more patrolled, far more surveilled, monitored, policed and so on today than ever before in american history by a long shot, especially the u.s./mexico border. it's an old story, and as much as we focus on the u.s./mexico border, we can actually look back not too far in history to show the u.s./canada border actually played just as

important if not a more important role in illicit tradeover the decades, over the centuries. fast forward to prohibition. the detroit/windsor crossing was just as much of a smuggling superhighway as juarez/el paso is today but how quickly we forget. today all the finger pointing is south. but actually pack then there was a lot of finger pointing north. in fact, so much corruption, it was m almost official -- it was almost official state policy the give out permits for warehouses right on the river so they could facilitate the moving of alcohol across the river, pretending -- these little boats pretending they were actually going to cuba and other places, signing paperwork looking the other way. so i'll end there. i've taken more time than i should, and i'll let my colleagues let me know how much they enjoyed or not the book. thank you very much. [applause]

>> i now invite katherine, professor of anthropology, to open up. >> okay, great. it led me to go book at the bestseller list because the book discuss strike me as distinctive. the books on u.s. history that capture the american imagination, at least that have the best marketing teams, are a pretty narrow bunch of. they tend to be about the founding, and that would tend to be reverentially capitalized, or they tend to be about soldiers at war, and they're properly saluted, of course, and they're also about individual u.s. presidents. and the worst works are often removed. is so this week's no different. the top 20 list on amazon has nine books on past u.s. military activities, got snipers and seals and world war ii missions and cia hostage activities --

rescues, and we've got you are the si's new history on the vietnam war. again, it's part of this cluster of nine. and then there are six book on presidents, two of them on a founder, thomas jefferson, and three given steven spielberg's work on lincoln. so peter andreas' "smuggler nation" stands out in several ways. first of all, rather than focusing on springs and choices and -- individuals and choices and values, this investigates broader social and political processes through which named and often very colorful individuals move and to their work. across an ambushesly long swath of three centuries, he takes us through the cultural and economic and political processes that, in fact, give us the very idea of a border. can and he identifies the national and international declarations that make certain

objects, for example, including serb classes of people -- certain classes of people, things that should not move across borders. and that changes over time. for example, the british effort to suppress the slave trade, the categorization of who was not a desirable person to cross our borders, duties and so on on tax, taxes and duties on tea and other things which, again, come and go. so andreas also tells us about the much broader and significant consequences of the notion of mugging. what's at issue is not whether just a certain quantity of drugs do or don't come across our borders, but the strengthening of federal policing institutions in general over the course of the centuries as a result to attempt smuggling. finally, the book's ambition is to put into historical perspective a variety of contemporary moral panics on illicit border crossings of various types. and those we know these pervasive images of chinese

immigrants in boxcars, tunnels under the u.s. border from mexico with drugs running through them, trafficked women is the latest moral panic about women who have come across to truck stops and so on. so the notion that andreas is giving us is that prohibition itself is the original impetus to these kinds of economic strategies. illicitness or the legality of these things is the cultural and economic phenomena he wants to draw attention to, and he shows a piece of evidence is that what counts as smuggling, as i said, swings wildly through time. we can see the connections between these american panics and anxieties and the kinds of material conditions and the material interests of governments and smugglers and those who would make a profit by managing the border canal be seen throughout the bookment -- book. so while spooking to the broadest audience of readers, andreas shows the value of a

variety of kinds of work. mary douglas, whose idea on how humans regularly traffic in purity and danger at the site of all kinds of border, not just state, but the body and ore entities where inflows and outflows are closely and anxiously monitored. his history is consistent to focus on the singularity or thingness of the state or governments and to understand the you pick bity of of transnational flows. and the cultural construction of the legal and the licit. andreas and nordstrom pote treat it more as politics and cull which are than universal codes. they also show how we tend to think of smuggling as the exception when, in fact, it may be more the rule. smuggling turns out to be

percent conceived, not just a problem that the state tries to solve, but often as the route which the state and the elite who even in a democracy remain at the helm of the ship of state are achieving, through which they're achieving some of their own ends. and, again, this is the reason that peter's book starts with -- his first footnote is to charles tilley, as mark mentioned -- and he famously reversed the conventional wisdom about the state and war, and i think andreas -- you can see how tilley's point about the state as a protection racket which is the notion that the state garners legitimacy by protecting the people from threat that it itself has sometimes generated in the same way the smuggler is the figure that the state protects its people against, those who would violate our borderers and in a way garners legitimacy even as peter's pointed out it's often tacitly or very explicitly encouraging such movements.

and i think there's a genderrer story here, too, that is a masculinizing project in a certain way. the masculine state protects the feminized populace from these threats, and so in that way there's a legit legitimization r scheme that we live with as well through the last three centuries. so my bottom line on the book is it's lively, it navigates expertly between the details of these cases of smuggled rum and broad national histories of such things as industrialization and changing labor relations and globalization. it's a national history that suggests we rethink the idea of the solidity of the nation or the idea that a state comes into being or exists because it has borders, and it exercises sovereignty with the stroke of a legal pen. i'd like to suggest that andreas also points out that the emerging imperial reason that has created a -- a certain kind of imperial reason has created

this that he's replacing, that exceptionallist idea that america was founded on law, that even if it's now secular was nonetheless, is nonetheless seen to have been made by god rather than founded in the more complicated human politics of the struggles that he's so well illustrated for us. [applause] >> thank you. >> now we'll have some reflections by richard snyder, professor of political science. >> well, thank you, mark. it's really wonderful to be here for a number of reasons to celebrate the accomplishment of my friend and colleague, peter andreas. and especially wonderful because i remember sitting with peter at t luxury which is just up the street from us i think five years ago, six years ago, i don't exactly remember.

and he shared with me about a seven or eight-page prospectus for what eventually became this book. and it's just a pleasure that it's now here, and it can be shared with all of you and made public. and in a way i feel like all i really ought to do today is just say congratulations, peter, and then sit back down. [laughter] i will. no. i can't get away with that, you know? my role in addition to that is to push and pull and stir things up a bit. so i'll try to do best. finish to do my best. so "smuggler nation" has a lot of history, that's partly why it's such a fat book, mark. [laughter] history -- >> but it's an american history, so by definition it's short. [laughter] >> well, it's partly a book of

history, but this is a much more ambitious book than just a book of history, short or long. peter very self-consciously tries to speak to the present, to use history to speak to the present. and even to policymakers. now, this fits very nicely with the mission of the watts institute for national studies that we are standing in today which is to bridge the world of scholarship and practice, to bring scholars and practitioners together. so peter's retelling of american history or american political development through the prism of illicit trade and efforts to control it is an example of what we might call publicly-engaged historical analysis. if you don't like that term, if that's a little too stuffy for you, how about just useful history? or maybe usable history. and the idea that history might

be useful and each usable -- and even usable rests on a claim that the past can offer lessons for present action. to put this a bit more strongly, it rests on something a philosopher is remembered for saying, the belief that, quote: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. in other words, we neglect the past at our peril. amnesia is dangerous. is this true? is this true? how useful, in fact, is history to practitioners? to people who must act in the present? there's an opposite view on the utility of history, another george, george bernard shaw. a quip from him is that we learn from history that we learn nothing.

[laughter] another shaw quote, we are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. there's actually a whole scholarly cottage industry on misplaced historical analogies, the misuse of history. policymakers who learned the wrong lessons from the past. make they don't repeat -- maybe they don't repeat the mistakes of the past. that's nice. but they create, they have new mistakes that may even be worse than the old ones. some examples of misplaced analogies. there's a wonderful book by pong called "analogies at war." he provides an example of how in the summer of 1965 the u.s. ambassador to south vietnam, henry cabot lodge, invoked the munich conference at a cabinet meeting and succeeded in helping

persuade lyndon johnson to escalate the war in vietnam. he argued, cabot lodge argued if the u.s. did not intervene in vietnam, world war iii would be unleashed. as he put it, quote: can't we see the similarity to our own indolence at munich, end quote. so history can be misused. history, like many religions, is multivocal. that is, it's malleable. it can be interpreted and deployed in ways that consciously, strategically or not simply suit the interest of the interpreter. so history can be useful, it can also be misused and even abused. both by scholars and

practitioners. although i presume that abusive history by the latter is more dangerous. so or for those who like peter aspire to produce useful history, they need to walk a line, a fine line between, on the one hand, the position that there's nothing new under the sun and, on the other hand, everything under the sun is new. so how does this book, "smuggling nation," measure up? is it useful history? well, peter, as he said at the beginning, his stated goal was to provide a corrective to presentist, often sensationalist views of history that grossly distort the novelty of the present moment. examples include the book "ill illicit."

hijacking is pretty sensational to me. so how does peter do in this book? i think he skillfully avoids in providing corrective to this presentist perspective the other extreme that there's nothing new under the sun. and i think this is most clear in the balanced concluding chapter. there's a subheading that is quite telling, "continuity and change," okay in so some things are new. for example, smugglers today, at least some of them, do have greater global reach. hand before. than before. even if, on the other hand, the extent of this reach has been exaggerated by journalists, politicians and script writers in hollywood. secondly, something else that's new, the absolute volume of illicit trade is, indeed, probably larger than it used to be historically. nevertheless, the relative share of illicit trade and overall

global trade may not be so different from what it was. things that used to be illicit t are not illicit todayment for example, marijuana is becoming increasingly more licit with medical marijuana as the weather channel. a similar phenomena happened, interestingly, with prohibitive-banned condoms the beginning of the previous century where medical arguments for the use of condoms were part of the eczema nation for the legalization of condoms. licit products in the past may become all licit today. for example, as pete err notes, few slave traders in the 19th century could have imagined that slavery would be illegal. okay? so what we get then is a

balanced, more complex, more nuanced and, therefore, less distorted and clearer picture of history. this balanced perspective that the book offers comes up in another way which i think is very useful. there's a tendency -- i mean, one dichotomy is then and now, and either then and now are totally different or not different at all. another is good and bad, okay? and good actors, good guys and bad guys, the world can be divided into the good cops, the good regulators, the good enforcers and the bad smugglers. well, not so. things are more complicated. peter provides numerous examples of enforcers who are the bad guys. they're complicit in illegal operations that they are tasked with enforcing. for example, well, cia

exploitation of illicit networks during the cold war, turning a blind eye to drug trafficking by anti-communist allies. converse ri, there are examples -- conversely, there are examples of criminals who are virtuous. if not virtuous, at least legitimate. peter mentioned at the outset patriotic smugglers during the colonial war of independence in country. so we see a blurring of simplistic dichotomies between good and bad. another virtue of the historical perspective in the book is, cathy alluded to the this a minute ago in her comments, it bring withs dynamism in -- brings dynamism in, and it does so by reminding you that what is forbidden now may not always be so. the impermanence of what is forbidden. it's an antidote to naturalizing

things, to taking for granted that the way things are is how they've always been, how they will always be and probably how they should be, okay? and how does the book challenge this? well, we have many very interesting episodes of demonization and also what we might call dedemonnization or purification. these are very telling, because it sheds a light on who gets to define what is forbidden and what is not on the power to define what is legal and what is illegal. the book is chock full of these episodes. patriotic smugglers before the revolution of independence become unpatriotic smugglers after the war of independence. in the late 19th and early 20th century we see the purity crusader anthony come stock

who -- comstock who cosaid existence -- crusades against pornography and condoms. condoms are illegal. this is rev.ed, and other forms are reversed by medical, scientific arguments in conjunction with utility of condoms for u.s. soldiers during world war i. finish -- i won't deconstruct the word "utility" for you. [laughter] there's a wonderful cartoon lampooning comstock in the book, a lot of great illustrations i like will have. you can't see it, but it's got a picture of com item stock. he's dragging in a young woman into the courtroom, and he's standing in front of the judgement, and he says, "your honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child." [laughter] so i think these processes of

demonization, criminalization and purification or laundering are very interesting. john hancock, how was his image laundered? his family was a smuggler, but he's a hero. brown university. when you think of brown university being complicit in slave trading doesn't come to mind for most people. this is a legitimate, good institution. but its roots are maybe not so pure. how is this laundering accomplished? i just gave a copy today to a visitor from brazil, the copy of the report of the brown committee on slavery and justice about the university's historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in an effort to provide a more balanced image of something pure. okay. one last point, and then i've got to stop because i'm sure

mark's got that sort of shepherd's crane thing. that's why he sits over there, put around my neck. um, so how far does the argument travel not historically for the u.s., but spatially to other countries of the world? now, people have mentioned several times this twist that peter makes on charles tilley when he comes up with the felicitous phrase that smuggling makes states, and states made smuggling. what he means by states made smuggling is that state authorities get to define what is illegal and what is not illegal. he also argues, peter argues, that all nations are smuggling nations. i think that's true. i work on latin america. that's the reason i know --

that's the region i know best. there's a phrase in spanish -- [speaking spanish] basically, you make a law, you make a loophole at the same time. however, the power to be hypocritical is not distributed evenly across the globe. some countries are not makers and breakers, but rather takers, okay in in fact, most countries in the world are. so if states make smuggling by defining what is legal and not legal, some states have a greater influence across the world tan others, okay? and -- than others, okay? and i think your countries in latin america, the war on drugs and, you know, to say that

colombia, peru, bolivia are smuggling nations in the sense that autonomously those governments, the governments of those countries and states of those countries choose to define coca as illegal would not be useful. so it would be helpful to, well, for me to refer you to another book that peter wrote called policing the globe which takes on the issue of who gets to define what is legal, what is forbidden and not forbidden in a more comparative, broadly cross-national way. okay. so let me conclude by thanking peter for giving us a useful work of history. [applause] >> and now james pa roan, also political science professor here at brown. >> thank you. it's such a pleasure to be commenting on my colleague, peter andreas' book. it's a splendid book.

he takes things, as so many good books do, he takes things we've always seen and taken for granted and shows them to us in a quite dramatic new light. this may be a rhode island thing, but the idea of samuel slater, this man who had worked for richard, the inventer of the spinning jenny, crucial for textiles and then recreated that textile mill from his head, the idea that this great tourist attraction in rhode island was a pirate takes some getting used to, as peter says to china, sorry, china, do as we say, not as we did. so what is marvelous about this book is to see the world anew. and to see so many parts of the world anew. you've gotten a sense already. this is about borders, this is about foreign relations, it's about government expansion, about economic development, about societal transformation and american political development. it's also, i think, an important book for political sign

terrorists, because it's so -- scientists because it's so well written. there's a debate in political science, and peter has weighed in heavily on this debate, i can make an important argument and not put you to sleep. i can make an important argument that people will like to read, and for that this book is a clarion call in a debate about the nature of our discipline. and for that i say cheers. now, there's a puzzle, a puzzle running through this book. it's almost like there's two stories in it. and i want to tell you about the two different stories running throughout this book and then try to sort out how to make sense of puzzle. you see, story or number one is the story of a nation that winks at rogues. it's a mischievous, tolerant nation. there's john hancock, the big signature, the first man to sign the declaration of independence with a signature so large that, as he put it, king george will be able to see it without his

spectacles. smuggler. and that's okay. he's a patriot. in fact, can i say this on television? peter appears as the first smuggler in this book going from bolivia to peru, smuggling toilet paper. don't ask, read the book. [laughter] this comes up again and again in american history. we've got the story of the oklahoma land rush. it's not a national border quite, so it's not in peter's book. but the oklahoma land rush, 1889, they line up thousands of people on the oklahoma border, and at noon sharp on april 22nd, cannons sound, and the military steps aside, and the settlers go rushing in to grab the land and discover that the best land is already staked out and taken. by whom? by people who cheated. by people who bribed the government agents or were government agents themselves. and how does oklahoma remember this? it calls itself the sooner state.

for the people who snuck in, the scalliwags who snuck in sooner than everybody else. we celebrate the cheats. what a easygoing nation to cheer its rapscallions. there's another story. very vivid. it becomes more striking as the andreas book goes along. and that's the story of a fearful, frightful, repressive nation all at the same time, this winking nation and this repressive nation. marijuana may sound like something that's finally coming of age, that's what you want to do in instead of drinking wine, but two years ago 758,000 americans were arrested for participating in marijuana. that's down from a almost a million a few years ago. as peter points out, the united states has the world's largest prison population in some large measure for the very reasons he

describes. six million americans are in prison or jail on parole or under prohibition. six million americans in the criminal justice system. this story of a repressive country, of a cup that's fearful -- of a country that's fearful, frightful, comes to a point at the immigration story. this is a story that comes up million billion times, and all of a sudden the story of the winking america becomes the story of a terrified america. and i think in the immigration story we begin to see exactly what separates the two americas. immigrations and worry about immigration is as old as america itself. one of the first great american bestsellers, a book by maria monk. she didn't write it, a bunch of ministers did, but it's a pornographic account of the horrors of catholicism.

priests kept nuns in convents and did horrible things with them, murdering the babies they produced, etc. i was stunned the to read that despite all those various forms of horror about immigration, it wasn't until the 1870s that immigration became a question of borders. and it became a question of borders about chinese in the 1870s. the united states tried to resist criminals, prostitutes, lunatics, idiots, people with moral internship tuesday and those with contagious diseases and all wrapped around this fear that began of the chinese immigrants. by the way, mexicans? no problem at all. mexicans could come and go as they wanted because they wouldn't stay forever and, in fact, the great way of chinese to smuggle in was to pretend they were mexicans. how things change. the immigration story, i think, kind of reveals this story of two americas.

when does smuggling trigger a particularly intense lame? my reading of this book, peter, i'd be interested to hear your comment, is when it's about smuggling creates alarm went it's about definition of america itself. when it defines, when it's about defining us as opposed to them. the endless debates of the culture war really trigger the most intense border protections that americans know. when the question of americanness, the question of who are we not at stake, the borders are quite loose. when it becomes a question of us versus them, when it becomes a question of culture war, then it's a different story entirely. in sum, two stories; one tolerant, one intolerant, and the tirches turning on -- the

difference turning on this question, this construction of who we are. and to be a little provocative, i read this as a or the of series of levels. economic smuggling is all over the map. sometimes taken intensely, sometimes not so intensely. smuggling that turns moral, far more intense. not surprising in a puritan nation. but the greatest intolerance is smuggling that has something to do with the question of who are we. the smuggling of irish, the stories of the irish black americans, jews, la tee mows, muslims, those are the ones that really get america going. let me conclude by just giving you one larger tale in this marvelous book, and that's the tale of prohibition that i think ties together much of what -- many of the strands that i've been suggesting. prohibition, if you haven't read

it and you haven't read the book, you'll be surprised to hear, is arguably the most sustained reform movement in history. not the one you would have picked, never the less, there it is. it's not even a contest. there were a series of waves by the 1850s, three different states had outlawed alcohol, and then after endless effort, a century of trying, americans stop the drinking of alcohol -- no, that's put wrong -- try to stop the drinking of alcohol from coast to coast. first, why does it happen? there's a series of explanations. one, foreigners again. the big cities, particularly on the east coast but los angeles fit too, the big cities were full of foreigners who hung out in many saloons and had to be controlled. they were ruining america. the people in the heartland who always voted for prohibition

were particularly worried about in this threat of others. race. the final wave of prohibition, for prohibition starts in the south at exactly the time jim crow goes into place between 1905 and 1915. and the idea of trying to control african-americans, needing to control african-americans led to the idea that we had to control drink throughout the south. is so prohibition becomes very important, all wraps up with trying to keep african-americans in their place after 50 years of struggle following the civil war. it was crucial for prohe can that the democracy -- prohibition that the democrats retook congress, by the way, in the wilson administration. third and very differently, it was a women's issue. it was a moral issue that was part of the effort to stop violence against women in the 19th and early 20th century. wherever women's suffrage as in

at western stages, prohibition in every case but one followed on the state level the following year. the state that won was new york. world war ii, as peter writes in his book, so we've got foreigners, race, the moral uplift of gender, and finally world war i. world war i made the whole effort of prohibition a patriot you effort. the commencement at brown university, the president looks out at the young men who are going off to fight and says you will be the great christian army, the most christian army the world has ever known, and then he turns to the rest of the audience and says, and can we do anything less. and then makes his appeal for prohibition. it's a very mixed story in this chapter peter tells, controlling them, moral aspiration and patriotism. but the consequence is interesting, the rise of big government. the rise of big government is usually a contributed to the new

deal. all those things roosevelt tried. he never tried anything as ambitious as telling people from coast to coast thou shalt not drink. and today all the institutions built up to run down liquor are now cheerfully applied by the supreme court in the effort to run down drugs. incidentally, speaking of marijuana, the narrative of prohibition -- and here i differ with peter just a little bit -- the narrative of prohibition is what, a failure. the newspapers like to have their reporters go woo a strange city -- go into a strange city and see how long it would take for them to find an illegal drink, and in the big cities if it took more than ten minutes, you weren't really trying. but prohibition succeeded in the conservative areas of the country, in the south and in the mid wen heartland -- midwestern

heartland and all the places that wanted to say we, we're not like those people until the cities. we're not formerrers, we're americans, and we believe in prohibition. to this day half the counties of the united states are still dry. you just won't find those dry counties in places like rhode island. which is just to say that the culture wars and the efforts at prohibition so beautifully described in this book go on. as everybody in the panel has said, that's not very good news for america or for our trends and neighbors around the world -- friends and neighbors around the world. but it's very good news indeed for the longevity, the legs that this book will have. thank you. [applause] >> i think it's only fair at this point that peter responds to some of those comments. what do you think? >> actually, i'm not going to say much. i'm still digesting the comments, i must say, that some of my colleagues explain and

decipher and make sense of the book better than i did. so, and so i was thinking what am i going to do with these comments? be on next edition i will have -- i'll footnote you appropriately. actually, my preference would be to open it up to -- >> okay. so we're going to open up for questions. on this side there's a mobile mic, and on this side please stand behind the mic that's available on the stand. and we'll go from there. mobile mic down here, please? >> hi. thank you, professors, for coming in today and speaking to us. you talked about the transition point at the beginning of the 1900s when the u.s. went from a growth economy based on smuggling, at least partially, to the hypocritical switch to become withing this global enforcer against it. and that seems like a transition that a lot of countries around the world would like to

replicate. so i'm wondering if you could, for one, speak to what the catalyst of that transition was, whether it was kind of organic or circumstantial or due to policy issues and then, two, what could the governments down in south america in brazil or in the new administration in beijing, what lessons they could learn from "smuggling nation." >> great question. one way to rephrase your question is how did the united states become a hegemonic global policing superpower, right? and that's contextual in the sense that it's part of a larger rise of america as the world's superpower. so when we think of that, we think of military power, and we think of it in terms of economic power, the largest economy in the world. and so the addition here is to look at the law enforcement side of things and not just domestically or at the border,

but the aggressive effort to export our preferred policing priorities, laws, criminalizations and so on. and this is, actually, drawing from the book that rich mentioned, "policing the globe," which i did with my co-author, e man needleman. this gets to jim marone's piece about the righteousness, moralizing. the other story, there's an exporting of u.s. prohibition, so it's not just what's happening domestically. so, you know, any u.n., you know, agreement on anti-trafficking, anti-money laundering, anti-drug trafficking, you'll see fingerprints of u.s. officials all over them. so in a sense, the nationalization of anti-smuggling is also a story of americanization of anti-smuggling, but it can't happen without the larger rise of america as a superpower. >> would anyone else like to jump in on this question, or

should we move to the next? and we shall move to the next. >> thanks for -- is it on? >> are well, we can only hope. [laughter] please talk loud. >> no, but use the mic, because it's being recorded. >> thanks for the panel and, of course, thanks for writing the book. i wanted to ask peter, most people who have spoken have talked about the theme of hypocrisy as you have, and my question is whether the book is really about hypocrisy or whether it's about something else, namely decriminalization of drug laws or a lot of things that are currently illegal. and the reason i ask this question is there are two ways to respond to the charge of hi hi -- hypocrisy. one to say this person is a moralizer, they should stop moralizing and, you know, stop criticizing others. but the other way to respond to the charge is to try to live up to the ideals that supposedly somebody was claiming to have.

but at least as i hear you, i don't think that you think that a good response to the history that we've had in the past would be for the u.s. to start basically prosecuting more, to increase regulation within the u.s. in order to be less hypocritical abroad. at least my suspicion is that really your concern is about decriminalization and liberalization. so is that right, or is the response to the charge of american hypocrisy equally, an equally good response would be more consistency, more domestic enforcement of the kind of limits on smuggling that we want to see internationally? >> another great question. it's on the hypocrisy which i mentioned the word doesn't appear in the book as far as i know, but what's interesting is i did a book event in washington, d.c. a few weeks ago and also last week at the council on foreign relations, and all the commentators brought up hypocrisy. so it's like i'm out to lunch,

everybody's read the book, but it's implicit. it's so implicit that it hits you over the head over and over again. but i don't him frame it that w, and again, next e do -- edition, hypocrisy will be underscored. ..

counterfactual without the laws, with these species be extinct. note it is not an argument for the legalization, but and is interesting because some people will, carrying at, manifesto, that would be somewhat right but really explain that. >> right from the beginning it said active when you read the book, hypocritical nation, i don't see it that way. i think you can read it as how

americans are constructing the way they think about their borders. if you come from a cynical perspective, it is delusional. but i think peter andreas is trying to get something more which is how we can construct the way we see the world so we don't have a category of smug as expansive as reality. so we keep making these various constructions that kind of explain what we are about. you can really see two different frames. one is a peculiar set of constructions, really seen and done and back at it and delusional because once you look at them it is a different set of frames. so talking about constructive, what is it?

read this and you really get it, the policy, not at all systematic and some things, we should come to local systems, this is stupid. he himself thought of it. other things he said no. and smuggled into the country, you don't want capital punishment for what those people are doing to the snakes. you can't just say this is an argument for or against. if you like trees -- [inaudible] >> have to read the book. >> moving away from toilet paper.

[inaudible] >> opium is illegal. it is imported from india and southern china. and it provides a lot of things. you know that. and stationed in india. and so however, the same question, even those -- and have

leveled that. have noticed deep moral courage, again and again. >> no. i have worked with you on this problem. but collecting that. one can say that deep moral courage that gets into that. things that we have said. those forces, the version in a very interesting look, and the

government, less is known about it. and the last, and modern life. because the ideal should set itself. so all of that what north america does and proposes, cannot disappear because of the value, the values of independents and all of that.

at least to some extent. [inaudible] >> it is interesting. is did this or is it this? is both. a false dichotomy if you will. the ideal of the gap, arguably this gets the comparative budget too and at the beginning of your comment, which is that is the very nature of the state, this gap that is actual enforcement and some of those gaps are glaringly apparent. are you in united states the

most ambitious? zero tolerance, secure borders, the war. so that suggests the gap is a bit larger because the invasion are not so glaring and the ambitions are equally glaring so in a sense i am agreeing to that there is a hypocrisy here and we are talking about hypocrisy, don't think it is -- in some ways he is right that in some ways so much of their hypocrisy you don't even have to say it. why tell people the obvious? the last thing i will say is i have a job -- [inaudible]

>> he published a copy that is significantly fatter than this book and i will be honest that it was inspirational. here was a colleague dealing with american history over centuries. through the narrative of fruit roll ups. and light bulbs went off. but i can tell him what critical time, smuggling. so where we actually overlap on this thing. the sex trafficking, anti pornography, birth control, eradication efforts and prohibition. others he can do dramatically.

and rick snyder. the one image in the book that i had to track down, it was hardest to track down of anyone. so this archive, sending a copy. soak that one image is similar but it allowed me to reproduce over 40 images. for that. last but not least not to take a too much time, when you were first talking about other countries being smuggler nations and the british story helping trade, the introduction towards the end, there is nothing uniquely american about smuggling. to varying degrees and various

ways all nations are smuggling agents. some have even been smuggler empires. consider the crucial role of brooklyn smuggling, financing the british empire in the nineteenth century. no so-called drug cartel today can doubt the power that enjoyed the straight when it was needed. >> more questions? comments? interjections? bring it on. >> absolutely. part of the point of the book is history continues. the part of the point is all the alarm is some in washington over the fact the we are smuggling

nation has all these historical precedents that are interpreted, it is much less consequential today that it was, less consequential today in the industrialization storing, western expansion story, various wars of the nineteenth century that the united states was implicated in including america's on civil war. you come up with the term in terms of the dependence on smuggled, and but absolutely this is where the issue of change is, not just about continuity but change. cybersmuggling. this is totally new and different. it is still smuggling but in

cyberspace, territorial borders. smuggler student body, my students are experts at downloading music illegally and movies illegally and so on and the police in the dorm saying you use too much, students getting noticees to tell you to stop downloading so much, your system cutoff. endangered species is different in terms of recent decades. a discussion about the black market baby train which we don't talk about much, kind of uncomfortable but frankly the united states is number one use the word importer of babies in the world and a certain unknown

number of them come from the adoption processes that are very questionable. markets where they actually had to shut down the adoption business because it is so corrupt. and that doesn't get the attention, it is part of the profile of the united states today as a smuggling nation. >> you could add human body parts as well. >> technology has enabled the organ trade and so on. technology also can put some of these trades, you can imagine fast-forward into the future, trading organs, reasonably accessible. >> it may just be a transition.

[talking over each other] [inaudible] >> and the migration. too far away from any change, i would be curious to know about the future of those. and the immigration level. >> a great question. >> we have already determined the immigration question. immigration and naturalization service is defiant the department of homeland security. so raise angle issue agency of

which immigration control is the core mission is part of a larger homeland security mission which at the top of the list is prioritizing counterterrorism and regardless, i don't see any dramatic flow of people anytime soon that there will be single forms coming up as things go as the obama administration hopes. in washington certainly the relationships are different. and interesting difference between the fbi setting and the federal police force, the d a is a single issue agency. it is very survival, depends on a singular focus on one thing. a shift from terrorism that is

deteriorating and so on so they have a long life ahead of them. they e a is more problematic. an interesting hint of the problem facing the d e a that has grown dramatically in recent decades is after 9/11, single issue agency, suddenly the name of the game in washington is terrorism so suddenly the main theme is the relationship to show the relevance of their issue area, it is terrorism. testifying in congress with hearings on the relationship between drugs and terrorism and so on. i am not suggesting that it is important, it is interesting how the selling of their jobs shifted to say we are crucially important to the war on terror.

>> can you get closer to the microphone. [inaudible] >> for example where this sort of trade might be beneficial somewhat, walk down the street, and you will see movement to be used on the ground and the retrieval and intellectual property, revving not beneficial but at the same time ed deal with pop culture, so much as fat. >> a great question. [inaudible]

>> the stated starting point reflects some kind of harm automatically and one of the stories in the book is not necessarily true. it is perfectly legal, we take advantage. when is illegal and one is not. and other automatic correlation between criminalization and would it cost to society. your second point was far harm that it speaks or what not and frankly it is a mixed bag, and relatively benign, and certainly such a low priority for law enforcement that the companies that are most concerned about this often have to coax them, pay them, private security firms

can do the enforcing to keep it serious because cops around world have one thing in common which is violent crime trump's other types of crime. murder is the most important thing. in the spectrum of violence and illicit trades, the less violent and your last point is quite telling which is there is an upside. what is the word? plagiarism is the greatest form of flattery so if you, you are it. or pretend they are rolex or nike or what not and they have been screaming bloody murder but their branches not proliferated for free around the world. said there's an upside, and arguably even a recent book at

ucla law school that the rip-off of those designs spurs innovation and we have to be careful about not getting too draconian. inaudible [inaudible] >> separate dimensions, to believe that everything legally is good, that guns are good and condoms are bad. because they go back to an earlier period. one of the great utilities and also the imperative perspective is to alert us to the menu of

feasible options, historically possibilities you can craft other countries where things illegal in one place are not in another and get a sense that you can travel in time historically to moments when things that are legal now were illegal and get a sense of possibilities and the breakthrough out of the equations. [inaudible] >> from smuggling to the next generation of public service. >> that is a good question. it is interesting. there is a lot of mythology,

smuggling and prohibition put the best book written about a corporation is by daniel oakland and serves as the basis of the recent pbs documentary series -- bob morrison was the director -- on the prohibition era. hole last segment of the book, the myth of joe kennedy actually being involved. he did make money right in prohibition, more of a speculator than a smuggler, but somehow it is interesting, there is this sort of taken for granted mythology that made this. led. but the real profits years --

[inaudible] and similar family members actually funded the center for european studies at harvard, something many totally respectable legitimate institutions got their start from this, and pushed for a aggressively. so they had this question of origen's and went alleges after prohibition sodas a much bigger story. >> a huge boost for prohibition. they would set out a warning label that said--awarding after six months this is allowed to sit for six months to become alcohol and illegal and people bought it up a storm.

they really expanded the industry. was hard to get wine. a lot of whiskey so that was part of the genesis of this. >> two examples, something i know a little bit about. in san francisco the popular story with the sort -- it was made to a formula that could convince anyone, it was on the market and some kind of terrible thing. and it made up -- the other one is the relationship between the greeks -- basically putting pine oil into the wind.

it was not drinkable. so a comment? >> thank you very much. thank you for coming. [applause] >> the problem with banning any book is once you ban one, you don't know where it will stop, and that road takes us back to totalitarian states and they have been banned many times especially in classrooms simply because sometimes a parent doesn't understand the novel. they haven't read it.

there have been places where school boards, parents have asked to ban the novel and it turns out words or phrases or paragraph, but i am glad to say that in every instance where censorship of the novel has happened, every instance that i know of, have gone to the schools and said this is our literature, this is important literature and you can't ban because of a word or two or paragraph and every case that i know of, the banning has been overturned. >> more on censorship and banned books on booktv, american

history tv and c-span local content vehicles looking behind the scene of history and literary life in albuquerque, new mexico at noon eastern on c-span2. and sunday at 5:00 p.m. on c-span3. >> are you interested in being a part of booktv's online book club? we feature a different book and author and you are invited to join. interested? send an e-mail to booktv@c-span.org. post a comment on facebook.com/tp, or send a tweet to booktv. >> you have to understand all the founders, the primary concern, number one, was with national security. what would they say for example about a company such as lockheed? i am opinion that based on how they are acting in other

instances they would have grudgingly favored a bailout of lockheed's because it supplies the united states at the time with its top fighter jets and top reconnaissance airplanes, you can make an argument they would have supported the bailout of chrysler in the 1980s but not the bailout of chrysler today. what is the difference? chrysler back then maintains, they were our only eat manufacturer and it is interesting when chrysler comes out of, and comes back to health, and selling off the tank division and filing the money back. >> author and university professor larry schweikart will discuss the founding fathers and other key events in american history, in depth live sunday at noon eastern on