very thoughtful book, in addition to many other books he has written and published and he is someone that i admire a great deal. .. >> you welcome to bakersfield on booktv located on the southern

end of the san joaquin valley. bakersfield is the ninth largest city in california and the seed of current county which ranks third in the u.s. for agriculture and oil related production. with the help of bright house networks the next hour we'll bring you to the birthplace of the bakersfield sound to learn about the city's history and meet the local authors. we begin our special look at bakersfield with a look at russo's books a family owned and operated bookstore. >> i am michael russo of russo's books and bakersfield california. we have been here 24 years. it's a family owned business my parents, my two sisters my brothers and myself. we are here every day and loving it. my mom is the leader of the family and we have always been retail and we grew up with books. the opportunity came that a used bookstore went up for sale and we wanted to dive into the self ownership and own our own

business. we saw bookstore globe for sale. it was a used bookstore and we jumped at the opportunity and it has just blossomed ever since. we came into the business at the end of the 80s, early 90s just as barnes & noble and borders were getting their sea legs about them in redefining what a bookstore is with coffee shops and sitting areas. i like to say at that time it was also very dramatic, the chains that was going on. it was a tidal wave of change and for a lot of small bookstores that were there in the 60s and 70's and 80s they were swept away by that change. we really wrote that crest. we were able to inaugurate a lot of the things that they were doing, incorporate them into our store and have good customer service. so things have changed since then but those first two years were really special as the book industry was changing. we were just coming on board and we were able to keep it fresh. akers field is a meat and potatoes type of community and so we will definitely sell the

bestsellers and popular fiction is what tends to sell well. cookbooks sell well. local history although we have all the national books we specializspecializ e in local books too and local history is something we are very proud of. we are able to represent. bakersfield has a rich history. certainly not as timewise as deep as some communities back east but for the last 150 years a lot of things that have happened in america are represented here in the valley. there is an endless survey that comes out that always ranks bakersfield out of the top 75 communities of a certain size as dead last and is the most ill weathered if you will community and the nation. i am going to take exception with that report. we are meat and potatoes and we

have a migrant population. there are some issues so i don't take total exception. i do agree that there are certain things that are community needs to work on however very dynamic and very resilient. the people of this community and our business community. people do read. we have a very vibrant poetry groups, groups plural. a lot of poetry groups that are meeting at holding events. we have book festivals. we have a community book read and the list goes on and on. it's not just the schools although the schools schools are very active and all that they do. it's individuals that are bringing authors into town who are supporting in different endeavors. the library has a full slate of programming, so i think the criteria that study uses does not really reflect on what people are actually doing in

this specific community. i'm here to tell you, i see it every day this community does read on this community does support books. although we have a ways to go we are very much in the mix. i love what we are doing. i love books. i love my community and really that is how i see our store ,-com,-com ma serving our community for something worthwhile and i would love to see that grow and prosper. where the book industry leads us and what that means going forward, you know it's a little foggy, the future is. however, i am hopeful for books in whatever form they may take and i'm hopeful for bakersfield and for our community. >> a decade ago if you are driving down highway 89 which is the zipper of road that goes right down the heart of central california and he looked to the side of the road you would see this shack standing and i remember the first time i saw it

i thought that is something lifted out of the mississippi delta in the 1930s. who lives there? as i was driving to look a little closer you would see puffs of smoke coming out of the roof. it wasn't something who lived there but someone was still living there in the year 2002, 2003. one day myself and matt black a photographer who is a modern-day walker evans, we pulled off the side of the road and went up over the railroad tracks across this dirt road here across from this vineyard and we pulled up to the shack. it was in a little bit better shape than basically a tar paper shack. as we walked up because he there were rabbit first that were hammered onto the wall. i remember knocking once, twice and this place was on stilts. the door creak open and there stood this man who looked like he had been left in not out of the mississippi delta, 1930s.

he had a stutter and later he told us that he came west with a stutter one state at a time. his name was james dickson and he was 95. he was living there and had lived there since the 40s. he was part of this migration of blacks who did something that no lax in america and kind of went against the grain of the great migration. the great migration went from south to the northern industrial cities and became west to san francisco and l.a.. there was a tribe of blacks from the south and southwest who wanted to retain the rural lifestyle. it was very important to them to feel the wind that night and be out in places where no one bothered them, to be close to the land. about 25, 30,000 of them didn't go to the industrial cities. they went from from rural to rural in the fall of the cotton trail west and james dickson was

one of them. he was from louisiana and worked in the railroads for a wild as a porter. when i met him, he had a little water pump here and he was cutting down the pecan tree and the birch for a fire to keep himself warm. he was five-foot 5 inches. the iron trade was too small so we had a wooden beekeepers box for his head. there were, i remember looking inside and there were vienna sausage cans, empty ones that he had put in the crevices to keep the place from falling. i mean literally chickens have a better roost than he did. this is where he was living. he had, and we found him half a century later. he was nervous. he thought we were government

workers here to inspect the house, shut it down whatever. i told them no, we were here to tell his story. we are standing in the old basin it was the biggest body of freshwater west of the mississippi, it 800 square miles of lake in the middle of california. these cotton growers from the south were chased out by the bull weevil and came west. they claimed this land, this lake land and they took the rivers and dams them and shunted that flow to places where they wanted to grow cotton. at some point they had to go back to find labor and a number of folks came to the tulare lake basin and their nerd is played out here. white okies, latinos and then black okies. no one had ever written about

black okies. they came in the 40s when the cotton picker was just starting in the fields. it was clunky and big and i couldn't -- billy you could take the middle swath of fields in the 40s and 50's but it could not pick the edge of the rose so the black okies were in the field working alongside the machine that would eventually idle them, picking the edges of the cotton. in 10 years time they were idled. the women ended up becoming maids and housekeepers for wealthy white farmers, much like the south. and the men where they could found work but many of them were idled. the children left this place so when we came upon it was mostly old folks. when i wrote my last book "west of the west" i came back to find them because i wanted to open up the book with a black okies.

every place i had gone to a decade earlier was empty. they had died and in some cases the places were still standing like this place. there is that yellow house just two fields away. this is where we found many patterson. she had, 1945, 46. she was dying and they set up a room for her in the front where she could see this great find that her husband planted when they arrived here in california. she said she had come to this patch of ground surrounded by a sea of white cotton in the fall of 1945. she decided that first night she would not be staying. what kind of land have you brought me to she asked her husband. driving three miles to fetch water, reading scripture by kerosene lamp. we might as well have kept me in the kitchen. the plantation at east texas. she wanted a home, nothing fancy in a civilized city. the tract house up the road in

breads -- fresno and bakersfield would do but willie patterson and her husband kept pounding nails imports onto that cricket hut in the middle of horned toad country. the black people kept trickling in from oklahoma arkansas texas and louisiana. they had come looking for a place where the cotton grew a little taller and the white folks have been raised up a little nicer. they found the taller cotton. i'm not sure they found the white folks any nicer. the black okies thought coming west they would be behind the racism. the sun did shine a little bit more benignly on them here but i remember a number of them telling me it was a more cruel kind of racism. a smile on the face but a dagger behind the back is how they describe california. they were not allowed to live in any of the cities, not even the small towns. they were locked out so the only

land that was available for them for these patches of alkali land, literally right up on the land. if if you look at it is so salty it looks as if it had snowed there. this was the land that was available to them and they built their little wooden shacks here, no water. they had to go into town to fetch the water. no city sewers. they had outhouses. no police there. it was no-man's land. this core fied -- glorified squatters land. this was a place that got bypassed by the civil rights movement, by the war on poverty. none of it ever came here so it was a tough life. one of the things dickson told us before he died, he was stuffing cardboard boxes into the plywood of that house to keep it insulated.

he looked up i remember andy said, i worked all my days in the cotton field and on the railroad. i wasn't lazy. what happened to my life? we are standing in some of the poorest places in america right now. you would have to go to the borderlands of texas or appalachia to find poverty that we have here. that really is a function of the agriculture we agriculture we have. we have big industrial agriculture that concentrates wealth in a few hands and it depends on a constant supply of cheap labor. for most of the century that cheap labor has come from south of the border and farmers here are reaching deeper and deeper into the ripp is an part of mexico to bring up the labor but there have been problems with that flow now and again and that is why the farmers have reached two other people. armenians came here to pick, the

chinese, japanese, among, all of the month are from small farmers and the black okies at some point in the white okies were brought from the south and the southwest to come here and pick the crops. some of them moved up the economic ladder and became a tractor drivers, truck drivers, business owners. that has happened with the white okies and it happened with the latinos, some of them. the black okies though had to leave this place to find economic prosperity and the original family members who came here, the old folks, remains, stayed behind. they never acquired much. i think there's is the saddest story of all, those groups and they stayed behind here simply

because they loved the rural lifestyle. we went by martha williams house today. it's no longer there. she was an 86-year-old widow of an arkansas sharecropper and she was living with her son in a saggy house. don't feel sorry for me williams said. this is a shack but it's my shack. god gave it to me. i ain't got nobody coming and saying you only rent. i sleep as long as i want to and get up when i'm ready and when the beautiful wind gets to blowing i can flap my wings when i want to flap them. i sleep easy at night, right here in my little run down shack by the highway. it may not be your dream, but it is mine. now you can just turn around and leave us alone. steve thomas baker is the

namesake of bakersfield california. he was a pioneer that came from iowa and across the prairies in 1850. went to the capital of california which is volusia california in those days and went to beautiful area called for creeks which is now vice area and heard of an area called kern island which was the former name of bakersfield and in 1862 he came to kern island via vote because in 1862 we had the great flood of 1862. it rained for 40 days, 40 nights. it flooded all the way from canada to mexico. colonel baker was an entrepreneur. he was a merchant and most people came to california in a teen 49 for gold but he'd came for merchandise and he was

looking for a place to farm. he was looking for a place to build a store. he just likes people. he liked creating a community and so he went to phoenicia and went to buy sale yet but they didn't naturally want him. when he came to kern island he realized this was going to be a city that would be important in southern california and he decided to make this his home. when he came to kern island it was all swamp land because the kern river had not been damned at that time so he sought indians. he sought to lead elk. he saw the kern river flowing rapidly. i mean that was a very beautiful area but he realized he could not build a community on swampland. in 1850 in washington d.c. they passed the swamp act of 1850 saying if you could drink

swamplands those swamplands would be given to the states for taxes. so in partnership with harvey brown, they went together and they started with the swampland. i will tell you that god kind of tell you that god kind of help them out a little bit because they had a flood and change the channel of the kern river which made it easier to train and after that they had the seven year drought. that is how they drained the tule swamp of kern island. the first business he set up less real estate because when he dreamed of swampland he received 87,008 griz. colonel baker gave almost all of that land, 100 acres for himself and if he sold that he sold it for pennies. so his first official thing was being a real estate broker. but he was also a politician. he was also a merchant. he was also a surveyor. i am sure after between

surveying and selling land that would be the first couple of years in what he would have been been busy doing. in a teen 69, it was known as baker's field because anyone coming through if you are a traveler you would stay at colonel baker's home. he would feed you and give your horse alfalfa. he knew hospitality. so everybody is saying as he passed from the l.a. area going back to the vice failure area they would say stop at colonel baker's field and make sure your horses watered and you will have a nice meal. allen baker makes a good meal so everybody knew this area as baker's field. in 1869 which was the year we officially received a post office, colonel baker thought this area would be called kern island and issue farmer at a

meeting said let's call this baker's bill. colonel baker was very upset with that and he did not like that name. finally he said we are going to call it anything, then call it a curse field. and so that is the official name and that was when they sent the paperwork back for the official post office it was bakersfield. a friend and mine and i were having lunch one day and we said we should do something together. so we were kind of brainstorming and i had just written a history book about my church and i thought i wonder if we could do a history book on bakersfield. i went to the museum and to the library after that lunch and realized that no one had ever written a book about colonel baker. it was just phenomenal to me so we started researching. we thought we would have a book out in a year and it actually

took years -- four years. as we started researching colonel baker and i started to know him as a person i found out he was certainly nicer. when i came here, i moved here from saudi arabia with my husband who is a engineer and we found the city to be so friendly. i always wondered why when i moved to other cities they had not been so friendly and everyone here was so friendly. i think that is colonel baker's legacy that lives on. he was friendly and the people who live in bakersfield are friendly. >> we went to disneyland a number of years ago when my daughter was six or seven and we ended up going to watch aladdin, the play aladdin. as we are watching the play, it

gets to the part where the carpet takes off. my daughter, it was a magical moment. she wholeheartedly believed it was all magic through smoke and mirrors and the lighting. i thought to myself, this is in many respects how the market works. the things that we get right to make our markets and our society function. for example if i were to give you the option let's say you are going to be in an earthquake and i say it's going to be an 8.5 earthquake. you have the opportunity to be on the 30-second floor of a building in san francisco or in turkey. where do you want to be? istanbul turkey or san francisco? some of the things we do including regulations help make our life better. the vaccines that we do for each

other and the different health programs, education programs that we have so a lot of the things that the state is right we don't see and don't acknowledge. those things are absolutely necessary for making our markets function. in the example with the magic carpet ride, there are a lot of things we don't sing about round just like you don't see the people who make things work in the background. the magic of the markets is much like the magic carpet ride in the disney aladdin play and so because we don't understand that most people don't understand doesn't necessarily mean that they don't exist so the magic that happens is a function of many things put together not simply because an individual decides they have a great idea may want to make money. perhaps the biggest myth is that the state is an impediment to markets, growth, wealth creation and the like but one of the

points i make in the book is it's very clear that the state actually creates the condition for which wealth is created. without the modern state we would not have the wealth creation that we have today. what i do is try to explain how the state is absolutely necessary for creating wealth. one of the things i try to explain is if you look at the state especially in the united states there are a lot of things we get right. among those is creating opportunity so in order to help create those opportunities what we have to do and what we continue to do is we remove obstacles. for example we don't allow monopolies and we don't allow trusts. we have strong civil rights. we have women's rights. we have property rights. we enforce all of these things. if you go around the world can look at states that don't get this right, they don't have very -- economies. we work hard at getting legal

rights and property rights right so the state is absolutely necessary for helping to create opportunity for everyone. we are led to believe and we want to believe that the rugged individualist, the one that makes things happen, the entrepreneur with a great idea that makes things happen, we have a long history about people moving westward and the entrepreneurs and the pioneers. but a lot of people don't even think about or even learn about that movement west was the federal government saying we are going to move westward and not only are we going to move westward but we are going to develop a lot of programs to help this movement westward. whether it's using united states army to put off the indians or the army corps of engineers infrastructure and canal program projects, whether it was the department of agriculture helping to share information. you get information about markets and crops to farmers. all of these things helped create the conditions for people to become immensely successful in this country.

and so we often don't think about these things because we would rather focus on the pioneer, the rugged individualist. let's think about it this way. if bill gates and steven jobs let's say in bangladesh or if they had taken off when they were five years old and her family moved, the same brilliant minds, the same brilliant people. if they were in bangladesh would they be who they are today? simply put, our country gets these things right. how do we get these things right? this is where the state comes in. again the state has to get property rights right and the state has to get civil rights right, the state has to give -- get legal rights right. all of these things we take for granted so while we have a lot of rules and regulations and people say you want to get government off our back what they are really saying is i want government off my back what i want them on my neighbor's back.

that is part of what we really don't understand. the state actually creates the condition which wealth is created. going from 1982 through mexico which really wasn't a bailout from mexico. it was really a bailout for the banks would overextended themselves to all of latin america. if we hadn't done that than the major banks in the united states would have collapsed. it wasn't really a bailout for mexico. it was really a bailout for the biggest banks in the united states. they proceeded to do this over again in the 1990s. we had to bail out long-term capital management in 1997 and the savings and loan institutions in the late 80s and early 90s and we had to bail out mexico again. again it was for the banks and then we had to bail out of asia and so you string together all of these bailouts and what you

find is that these big market players are not operating by market rules. they are operating by completely different set of rules that you and i don't have access to. you and i can go to a member of congress and say will you write this piece of legislation for me so i can do this? right before the market collapsed in 2008, in 2004 the guys on wall street went to the exchange commission and they said do you know what? we have all this beautiful investment instrument but we can't borrow enough because we have rules that don't permit us to borrow enough so we can invest in these products. normally wall street would borrow seven to eight times what they have on the books. they went to the sce -- sec securities exchange commission and said we want to borrow more and the security exchange commission against the wishes of paul poker who was on the committee said why don't we go ahead and do that. so what you saw was these investment houses borrowing at

rates of 33, 35 to one. imagine if you were able to borrow at 30 times what you are in a year and then not only borrow at 30 times what you make the thing go to vegas and see how the dice rolls. and then it doesn't roll the way you want and you're able to say to the house i think i need another bailout. there is no house in vegas who will say okay we will let you gamble again. that is what is happening right now. and they will get another shot at it. when we think about what happened in 2008 you have people like alan greenspan who talk about unforeseen events that we could not have predicted would have happened. absolutely we could have predicted this was going to happen. if you look at the steps of the deregulation steps and what alan greenspan did with making access to easy money with low interest rates. every time the stock market got

in trouble allen greenspan was there to put cheap money into the market. every time a financial institution got into trouble there were so many dale loves led by alan greenspan whether long-term capital management, asia and 97, time after time the private market players got bailed out. because they continue to get nailed out through the late 80s and 90s, they just assumed what they were doing was fine. there was no penalties for the 2008 market collapsed and it was not an unforeseeable thing. it was a direct result of private players overreaching and trying to deregulate the market so they could do whatever they wanted to do and they did. we have committed about $15 trillion neither credits or guarantees to wall street.

about 4 trillion of that is already out the door. if we had that kind of money and have committed that kind of money to helping the american company and middle-class america he would have done all right. but what has happened is we have taken all of the money that we had for the bailout and concentrated it mostly with a too big to fail banks and the big firms, financial firms on wall street. so, to get back to your question if we had not bailed out wall street there would have been a downturn absolutely and it probably would have been very significant. absolutely no doubt but we would have done two things. we would have been able to go in and clean up this mess and say literally what happened with the bank's? but because we bailed out the banks, they would not and still will not share any information with regulators or with government and so they are able to say wait a minute, we are doing good here. you don't need to look at our

books. if we had let these guys fail we could have walked in and taken a look at the books. people who are now getting bonuses would have been in jail and we could have taken the trillions of dollars that we dedicated to wall street and if we had taken that amount and simply dedicated it to creating the a jobs program and putting people to work on bridges and roads and the rest of the stuff, we would have been much better off but instead what we did was we took money from the federal reserve and just shifted it all over to wall street and if you think about it probably the largest most massive transfer of wealth in history. why did we do at? because these guys that if we don't do it the market is going to collapse and everything is going to disappear overnight. the economy is going to

disappear and we are not going to have an economy in the morning. in effect it was extortion. you need to bail us out or else everybody is going down with us. washington and wall street have this very cozy relationship. people in washington lead campaign front. people on wall street have lots of money. every time they need a favor, they go to, every time the people on wall street made a favor they go to washington and say we need this. the market bailout was a classic example of this. you had for example investment banks that after the market collapsed were allowed to reclassify themselves as commercial banks. why? so they would be eligible for bailout funds and eligible for fdic protection. who gets this type of protection? if you are eyed for example go bankrupt we can go to congress and say hey with why don't we

reclassify the rules so i don't have to file bankruptcy. we can't do that. the guys on wall street can do this and that is one of the problems. they can literally purchase their way out of trouble and it is one of the reasons why with this bank bailout this bailout of wall street, we probably already spent well over $4 trillion on wall street, just out the door. to give an example of an idea of how much that is, we will be lucky in 2013 if the entire economy of the united states is $16 trillion in goods and services. in effect we gave one quarter of the total value of when our economy is going to produce to wall street to help bail them out from some of the things that they had been gambling on. so one of the complaints i hear

about it is we don't need to regulate markets. market players know what they are doing. what i try to tell students and i say in the book is that we don't regulate markets. we regulate people in the regulate people for a reason. history has shown us that we don't often do the right thing. even though we have the capacity to rationalize and make rational decisions doesn't necessarily mean we are going to make rational decisions. so, i think when we are looking at the marketplace we need need to move away from this idea that we are regulating markets. we are not regulating markets. we are regulating people. we don't necessarily have the best history. >> biddy mason was a remarkable woman. she was born in louisiana, mississippi and the early

1800's. she was a slave and she walks 2000 miles behind her master's wagon to get to california. her master, whose name was white, was converted to mormonism through missionaries traveling through mississippi and louisiana. he, his children and his wife and the slaves, i think there were nine of them at that time, all traveled to salt lake city, what would be salt lake city today, in 1847. and became quite active in the mormon faith there and biddy mason felt very uncomfortable they are because mormonism at least at that time thought blacks were evil and they were

painted evil because they were black. they were there for several years and then they went to san bernardino where they had a mission in the community or something and they were there for quite some time. and then she became acquainted with other blacks who were free and the constitution, if you would come you're on your own, in other words if nobody claimed you you could be a free person in california but it was kind of a catch-22. anyway, she became acquainted with some blacks who were knowledgeable about the california law and they helped her to go to los angeles. at the time, her master took the

whole group. they were hiding out in the hills in hollywood, waiting for transportation out of california they wanted to go to texas i think. it was while they were there that her friend who was a black advocate had just gotten in touch with the sheriff and told the sheriff was going on. so the sheriff arrived to where they were all camped out, did he and the others and the white master and his family, and he took her and the others, her two daughters, into protective custody so she found herself in jail in los angeles. and then when they went to court, i think her lawyer, i think her lawyer was bribed by someone to represent her in court and as they say she

couldn't testify for herself. but somehow through prayer and just her inner strength, she was able to talk to the judge benjamin hayes who was known for being very fair, being a fair judge, she talked to him in private. he learned what was going on. he set her free and this was also ironically in 1857, a year before the dred scott case which changed the federal law. so that might have affected her too but she was a midwife and she delivered -- she delivered whites and blacks and probably people who were around. and she became well-known in the community. she saved her money. she never married.

she saved her money and bought a lot of property. she took the name, the last name mason, it is thought, no one knows for sure, from a mormon guide that they met. but as they say she became very wealthy and by the time she died in 1890s, her estate at the time was $300,000, which in 1893 was a lot of money. women in california could own land. that was one place where did not matter what color you wear. you could still purchase property but there weren't very many women in california that did own property then. it's still a very male community. the first place that she settled

on was what is now spring street in los angeles between third and fourth streets. the city about 20 years ago, 15 or 20 years ago, turned that into a pocket park between spring street in broadway and they called it biddy mason's place and they dedicated the park biddy mason's place. one of the elected officials who was black also i believe, he said biddy mason said i ain't going to take it no more, or words to that effect and he said she set me free. indicating that you know what she did was a very courageous act. it didn't mean that things went on to be wonderful for blacks in california but she certainly set the mark.

i have always been interested in california history. my ancestors came here in 1851 right after the gold rush. and it was while i was doing some research for information about pioneer women in california and i can't think of the name of the book at the moment but it was a collection. i know probably one other black woman and it was she was in, she was in this particular book. it wasn't very much. it was just a couple of paragraphs but i was just fascinated. i thought gosh, what courage to do what she did. unfortunately she couldn't read or write so everything about her is really second hand. she never wrote anything that i know of. so it would have been nice to have heard her thoughts. we can only assume from what

others who knew her have said. i think she is an example especially for children, especially for girls, that there is always a way out, but it takes being willing to trust somebody else to help you. you can't do it all by yourself. >> i've been collecting books since i was a kid, probably seven or eight years old. i collect mostly history books but i also collect old documents and photographs. i love to find treasures trove's of papers and photographs and you name it, if it's old and it has relatives in the local area i collected. there are some books here from the 15th and 16th century but california history is what i specialize in and pretty much anything i can find on california i will grab.

this was a space built specifically as an archived building. as the first building we build on the ranch here and it's only about 1200 square feet but it has 13-foot ceilings so we can go up for stuff. it is well protected as far as climate is concerned and of course it has security but it was built for the archives and build so we could keep ambient temperature and humidity in here. like i said the bookshelves are all built up the walls and to the center so we can house, think the massive -- maximum usage of space. i would like to show you some of the things in my collection. here we have a couple of what are called goal posts. these are bags that were made during the gold rush, the california gold rush in 1848 through 55 and they are made to

put gold dust or gold nuggets in as you take them out of the field or the rivers and banks and put them in these bags. these totes as they were called them and they would be to be taken from here to the trays are actually the scales and they would be weighed and they would be given money for their gold. these are very rare. this is probably your skin that these are made out of. they are just fascinating and it's very rare item to have anymore. as we are here let's look at this. this is kind of an interesting item. a letter from a senator in california. yolo senator letterhead but it's a letter to historian frank latta who was working on his book the dalton gang days in his

time and it was a letter that was typed for wilton dalton telling him he was interested in what he was doing. anyway signed by littleton dalton one of the dalton brothers at the dalton gang fame. better than that i have another letter over here that is typed and signed by emmett dalton, another brother. emmett dalton is the only one of the dalton brothers or the dalton game who escapes death at the coffeyville bank robbery. the dolphins were trying to be a little bit more bit more clever than they should abandon i should have been and tried to hit two banks that want. unfortunately coffeyville was ready for them and it was just really a terrible bloodbath. anyway this is a letter after emmett got out of jail. he went to hollywood and started making several movies and frank latta had written him to try to put a book together.

these are some interesting things that make up a collection. if i go over here in this area we have a couple of outlaws are candidates or outlaws i guess that were known as son tag and evans. or evans and son tag. these are actually local men who went the way of the train robber and ended up dropping several trains who were eventually captured. this is a major sting letter. when they were in the real estate business i was in the gusto and it is signed by son tag and evans the realtors. this is an example of what goes on in the world of a robber. let me take you over here because there are a lot of other things that are pretty interesting. as we walk through the archives here i have a wonderful document

that is actually signed by my great great grandfather colonel thomas mayfair and it's on a slip of paper which is what they use back then because paper was scarce. it's actually a low note. colonel baker borrowed $500 in gold for one of his little projects. he had a lot of projects going on a lot of projects going on and that is how bakersfield got started. this was done six months before he died in 1862 but this was one of the few documents that exist with the signature of colonel thomas baker. in this file we have some very interesting things. this might be of interest to you. this is a picture of st. paul at episcopal church, the inside of that of course and the shows the pews and the altar. the interesting story on this is the altar was purchased by

mrs. lloyd travers from the church where president mckinley last prayed prior to being shot and assassinated. this is the altar and it was brought to bakersfield. this is a little photograph of the outside of the church and you can see how quaint this little church was. there are lots of very interesting pretty much national, nationally known items and things going on in kern county that people don't know about. that is what is so fascinating about all of this. you find these things and you can save them and this is what we are trying to do is save these things for prosperity so people will learn. back here as we go further into the depths of the collection i have a very interesting photograph that i think you might enjoy. this is a photograph of diverse

fields ask was taken at the time, taken pretty much just before he was hanged in i think 1874. vazquez was what you would call a noted banditos in california. the ladies loved vazquez. in fact i have letters and notes from ladies who visited him in jail as he was waiting for his trial and sentencing. it's just fascinating what people would do in this state. even in those days you find that outlaws and bandits, there there is a stigma and there is a fascination with them by people.

this is a writing of vazquez. part of the material that came from the jail cell as he was waiting for execution. if you save these things, we saved them for the future. we are only keepers of these things. i may have purchased many of these things but we are only the keepers of it. we don't really own this so it's kind of like land. we don't really own it. it was something that was put there by the almighty and we are only mere keepers of it. the biggest question now is what do you do with things like this and this is where the college and public libraries come in. the difficulty of which is money is scarce so i will continue to grow this library and it will grow and grow. i think we have grown out the door. even so we will put in some other method of storage until there is just no more to grow.

>> booktv is on facebook. like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers. watch videos and get up to date information on events. facebook.com/booktv. >> the intense discussions and arguments that i alluded to were primarily, not totally but primarily in the 60s. the conservative movement was still jelling. in the 1970s, russian's focus is on, is initially on the possibility of actually replacing the republican party with a new conservative party. i found a letter in which he sent to a friend. my problem ,-com,-com ma about 1975, my problem with the

republican party isn't that it's not conservative enough. it's that it isn't big enough. again he wanted to win and the republicans after watergate in the mid-70's were just in terrible shape. i won't recite the details but a lot of them probably felt that they were back where they were in the 1930s, not only the minority but the small minority. rusher wants to take this opportunity to start a new conservative party, not rigidly conservative but consciously conservative, one in which the liberal wing of the republican party would not be present and therefore would not have the kind of veto power that he thought they had. he believed the key to this was one, not necessarily the most important thing but an important thing, was to moderate economic

conservatism, to be a little more populist, recognize the needs, the position of the little guy. he always had some of that in him. but also to welcome social conservatism, the sort of populist issues. not only southerners but what then were known as conservative democrats, people who later became reagan democrats. rusher was one of the first to note the size and importance of that voting bloc. he was one of the first and i'm sure one of the most effective advocates of bringing it into the republican party and he advised reagan to do this. he knew both reagan and the first president bush pretty well had known reagan since the 60s. he advised both reagan and then vice president bush some years later to do this.

he was successful in that although i don't think reagan really needed -- though i'm not sure that reagan really need to be told that but certainly encourage -- encouraging to hear from someone that he respected as much as he respected rusher. rusher also wanted reagan to be the head of this new conservative party. well, to make a long story short reagan refuses probably prudently most political scientists and i have had training in political science will tell you that the third party is going to be picked on a national level and will not start small. it's got to start big probably with the superstar like reagan so once reagan refused in mid-75, early and mid-75 to join this third party project to rusher got going and wrote a book about, it was probably curtains for that particular idea. but rusher had succeeded in

getting conservatives to think more about the need to expand the republican party and for the republican party to be mower company hearing. not so ideologically coherent that it was willing to forfeit elections. i think rusher was passed that phase of his political development corp. perspective by then. so he recognize that if reagan wasn't going to head it, it was probably not going to get too far but he stuck with it. the full details are in the book, chapter 13. but he came to see in the late 70's that it really was possible for a guy like reagan to win the republican nomination and once reagan did ever since reagan won the republican nomination in 1980 and had rusher a total

successful nomination he remained a republican loyalist. rightly or wrongly. the man who at one at one time d been a third-party advocate comes back to a more convention political field but also a strong conservative. in closing i just want to say two words about rusher's significance as a symbol among conservatives. he was a very elegant man. he was not particularly tall. he was athletic. the things that buckley was but he was wonderfully articulate. he'd always spoke in perfectly formed sentences both in public and private conversation. he was always very well dressed. he loved fine wine and opera and traveled all over and knew all the great hotels of the world so this was a little unusual for a semi-populist conservative and for a guy as ideological as he

was. perhaps leading conservatives today -- in other words it was hard for a manhattan liberal to say oh rusher, conservatives are hicks than the sum that. you couldn't say that about buckley and you couldn't say it about rusher so rusher reinforce the sense that while they are pretty smart and they are sophisticated people and fun to have around if you can stand their viewpoint on them. rusher was another example of that kind of conservative, younger conservatives tended to admire that and try to bring them along in that kind of style. also as dr. edwards referred to rusher was a major conservative debater for quite a while. most prominently on a pbs show called the advocates. he was the conservative

advocate. he did extremely well and a lot of people would watch that and say well, we can do that too. we can be as good as he is. you can watch this and other programs on line at tv.org. ..

>> that result is that almost everyone wants to do it at the expense of authors. diminishing the value of copyrights and paying loyal royalties for the publishers want to do. so that you can get books from the libraries. all kinds of things that will diminish the market. somehow people have the attitude of that those stores are so greedy, but as if you were talking about this, general motors understand. there are some great things for others, it especially kendall singles and they have also done things that i think are not

necessarily in our best interest. now they have got the ability to resell e-books. if they have set up by this market to resell hardcovers which is damaging sales. you know, this is an example.

sort of no matter what you do, this was sort of an esoteric case. would be explicit provision in the united states a young student began importing these english language books you can tell it to whomever you want. so it wasn't really and he does

it on the internet and ebay. especially with how it has been to the world, and it has several sources of income. >> what is their role. >> authors and library's have long been friends they are very

aggressive about copying the books and advancing e-book lending. traditionally you can use a library book for free. but now they want and have succeeded and persuaded the publishers to make the e-books available to anyone with a library card and internet connection. my publisher was publishing identical with the next novel. you know, the hessian group which is part of this, they will sell you the e-book. there are all kinds of ways that

we are dealing with the obvious fact that it will have an impact on e-book fine. this is a tough question, because in the united states we have always had a couple of library systems, which has made books available without cost. you know, people will go for the free enterprise system without realizing that a library is an enterprise grade it takes good and delivers them for free to the masses. it works well for me.

but the fact that people and it's pretty amusing. one example is microsoft, for example. they don't say that you can download microsoft word. if you can't lend it, then you can't buy it. >> is there an estimate of a percentage of how many of your books people could get for free on the internet? >> there are two means of getting books for free. one legitimate, which is from a library. it will last on your device for two weeks and then it will

vanish. the far more unfortunate way is that there are tons of book pirating sites located offshore. and unfortunately for my publishers, every book i have written is available both ways. as i have said, i am happy that i have readers in public libraries. for somebody like me, it doesn't matter. there is a history of sales and nobody needs to explain that. but it drives me crazy about pirating. it has such a big role. they don't want any legislation that will keep them from their customers being directed to these pirate sites. you know, you put in free e-book and it will direct you to the

site to google or tr or yahoo!. and as i pointed out, if i went to a street corner and said to somebody, where i buy this or that around here, and they got paid every time that they gave directions to a customer, they would be in the penitentiary. yet, google tells them, don't be evil. the truth is that we all have to exist together. it is an interdependent ecology. we cannot have libraries without

authors. you will have a problem if you don't have more people writing books. it will be a cooperative venture. >> we settled a big lawsuit with google and a division comes in and says we do not like it because it will have a monopoly.

that is sort of typical of what is happening. even people within the ecosystem can work out their differences. google and the authors guild, for example, they reached this in the best interest of readers. the world of knowledge was work for google, work for the authors, and the justice department says no. so that's difficult. >> this hits the fan soon. what kind of copyright protection you have on this? >> as you might expect, my

publisher will copyright the book on my behalf and the copyright turn, i'm embarrassed to say, i am not completely sure of. it will certainly last the rest of my life, and i believe 50 years beyond that. the term has been extended mostly due to the influence of companies like walt disney. in the authors guild, by the way, it does not advocate on copyright. we were not there on congress. and at that point it becomes part of the public domain. that was the idea in the constitution that authors were supposed to have a monopoly for a limited. lack of time. the idea was that would encourage an independent creator

class that would literally traffic ideas for profit. in the framers view courtesy of noah webster, who was the original promoter, it was that a democracy thrives on having an independent class of people creating literature and the resulting ideas. representing reality as novelists. this was good for the democracy and it is in the constitution. empowering congress to make copyright laws. i am not spouting off the wall notions that have come up with on my own. this is deeply embedded in our concept of democracy. >> there is so much pushback on this or it you were a variety of names because of your position.

>> that is right. there are all kinds of different interests that do not like the idea of copyright protection. the search engines, as i said, they want to be able to exploit copyrighted work in all kinds of different ways. people do not realize how powerful google and its cousins are in google is the second-largest company in the world. and guess what, in a political system where money makes a difference, they swing and enormously. but it is not just the googles of the world. of course amazon doesn't like some of the things that i have to say. they, too are a mighty entity. they are referred to is what is the copyleft. the people who want all books to be free. or they have a limited term.

most of them are academics. and they drive me nuts. because their books do not make much money. of course they think that they ought to be free. because their economic well-being depends on being promoted within the university system where they are rewarded if their books are out there and well read and well reviewed. they have another way of making money and saying everyone's work ought to be free. it's like, thank you, but the constitution did not envision the system for the creator class. it wanted them to be independent. so it is really quite infuriating when people wrap themselves in the mantle of all knowledge ought to belong to all people. but they don't forsake their university salaries which they are paid in order to create the

works that they want to be free. >> its predecessors sold better as an e-book on and a hardcover and i was lucky that both versions sold really well, by at least three years ago. you cannot begin to imagine how dynamic the book market has been throughout my career. but the percentage of hardcover versus e-book is somewhere between 75 and 70% hardcover still. and if i were guessing, i would say that it probably sold by 35% and that has to do with the fact that it is unpopular especially with lawyers and they make the candles and the ipads and the nuts and reading devices. so i think that that is what

accounted for it. like every other offer whoever reads identical, whether from a library or a reading device or the old-fashioned way of turning the pages, it is great by me. >> can you check online to see if people can download it for free? >> i don't need to check. they are downloading it from the piracy sites. there will be the ability to

understand the file. >> we referred to it a couple of times. what is the plot of your new book, which is called "identical." >> they also have a hand in the murder and this includes all bubble affairs and, you know, the mystical kind of relationships between identical

twins. >> how does it end? >> it ends very well. >> scott turow. president of the authors guild has joined us here on booktv. identical comes out in october. >> is a nonfiction author or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv at c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. so in 2006 i was a reporter in miami. and at first it seemed initially to me that they came out to announce the case and they declared ground war and the fbi office answer the question.

and then i realized that there is an importance involved. but these men understood that they were posing as an al qaeda operative. so my stories when i was in miami, i kind of put them in this and these people were involved in several spots. but they never had the means or ability to acquire weapons. and those weapons were provided by undercover agents or an fbi informant posing as enough relative of a terrorist organization of some point. right around 2010, i began to talk how many of these cases

these involve people that had no capacity of terrorism or terrorists on their own. so i applied for this every year with the program, which hosts them and it comes to the u.s. court since 9/11. and how many of them involve others as well it seems like in the cases of more than 150 defendants, the informants either play a part in the plot or play the role where they provide the means and the opportunity for people who never

had that capacity before. i think it is important that we can show these men and their high capacity on their own for terrorism. but those that did, they came close to the system in times square and these were dangerous terrorists. but you can really count on one hand those who proposed a serious threat. the others are this case going to trial right now. they never had capacity on their own or the ability to fire weapons. to go from being these men to essentially being dangerous terrorist overnight.

they had been ostracized as well and were working at a videogame store and had no place to live. but just after that his car had broken down. and the informant informant talked to him just before ramadan. and they say, well, you can come live with me. you can eat my food and he just says, this must be the work of god and over the course of seven month they talk about islam and he says in his way, well, they

don't have the names of any judges. >> the major thing is that derek doesn't have any money. the informant says, well, i know and you know, i don't know much about that and it seems like derek brings over and the agent hands over the five grenades and

he is serving 25 years in prison. what is regulatory about this to me is that it seems like that illustrates the capacity. it was a crime at best, but yet there was an elaborate operation which the government was able to say, here it is. another plot foiled. >> you are able were able to talk to actual people and find out what they were thinking in this process. they are doing this with

rationale of their point of view. >> they work in the fbi and our critical what they believe is that al qaeda as is an operative does not exist, that there is al qaeda that are overseas. they have feelings about it and al qaeda moved to this franchise model and it's kind of part of

this idea. they are specifically looking for people who are on the spectrum. one side is operational in the other side is a sympathizer. it is just about to cross over to operations i think that this identifies them first. i think it is easier to be empathetic to the fbi's view. saying that i want to bomb that building and the subway system. you probably don't want to be the guy that says, let's just ignore it and then six months

later he actually does commit an act of terrorism. but when i put in the book as there has yet to be an example of someone who is a loudmouth and someone who doesn't have any weapons and i think that they arrest a person they can buy and sell at this price point.

when you have someone who is on his own as a sympathizer and he crosses over to operator and wants to commit an act of terrorism, that is how it happens. >> you can watch list and other programs online at booktv.org. you are watching booktv on c-span2. and then we have the associate curator leading a panel discussion about the assassination of president john f. kennedy. lee harvey oswald shot the president on november 22,63