blaming him at a time when it disclosed this. .. >> thank you so much for being here. thank you to the folks of the library here in yorba linda,

california, for hosting us at the richard nixon presidential library. there are conservatives here in california and i know a thing or two about what it is like to be embattled as a conservative, a very right-wing guy that lives and works in new york city. i used to live here in union square in new york, which was the epicenter of obama mania. i was up late doing commentary in 2008 at two or three in the morning. i went back home and i was irritable and here at union square. people were chanting and singing and randomly high-fiving people, little do they know that whenever i encounter these kind of liberal youths, i am reminded

of a reagan story when he was governor here in california. when i spontaneously broke out and he was at a meeting of the board of trustees and while he was there, a demonstration started at the front of the building. and a staff member wanted to sneak out the back. and i said no, i'm going to go through the back or he gets in his car. they are kind of scruffy and hippie looking, hippie types. and they were chanting that we are the future. the story goes that in that case i'm going to sell my bonds. [laughter] so i have written this post on lincoln which has been out about a week. i have had some interesting experiences with it. i live in new york city in a

doorman building. is a great guy, he immigrant from ireland. very hard-working. just had a child. from what i can tell, basically has conservative instincts are things that you hear him randomly say. he is delighted to get it and this is wonderful. and then he says, well, wait a minute, you wrote a book about lincoln and i thought you wrote about a republican. he meant that this wasn't a driver. he was not trying to get at me. this is a sincere inquiry, which i think tells us how much we need to do to save the true legacy of of abraham lincoln and that is why wanted to discuss this with you a little bit. fdr was very intense on this and he has been even more intense.

and he takes the oath on the lincoln bible and i believe that he has mentioned abraham lincoln 230 times. since he has been president. i just think that it's very important for us to get abraham lincoln right. if you get it right, then you can america right. and you get what i believe should be our animated purpose as conservatives. so by way of introduction, i think there are common misconceptions and we tend to think of him as a man of the earth, and accidental president. the common people and common sense. i think that really underestimates him and he would not be surprised by that because he was underestimated throughout his life. part of it was just very superficial. this ungainly character.

he said once that he had the insight that god must love common looking people more than anyone else because he made more of them. he was common looking. but anyone who judged him on this basis of his looks or thought any of those things i just mentioned about him was making a grave mistake, this was a ferociously ambitious man. it was possessed of extraordinary intelligence from the time of his youth, people and he would borrow newspapers. and he would be able to recite entire editorials line by line, just an incredible memory. then he had a wisdom about the world, a judgment about things and about human nature.

i love little store used to tell them he was trying to illustrate how if you try to change people's behavior on the promise of a far-off reward or on the threat that something bad would happen to you, you're not really going to get very far. and it is that you're going to have to pay that we meet the end of your days and in that case, i think i will take another. so one of the reasons he knew so much about those was he just -- it was due to the kind of life that he led and he had the most inauspicious beginnings that you can imagine. he was born in kentucky. he moved to indiana and in the middle of nowhere in the log a

log cabin and there are reports in that area the people who have bought cabins at night be the shining eyes of bears tearing into him outside. there is a story about a little girl who was killed by a cancer because the brother was able to kill the path panther with a hatchet to this goal fast enough. this is a very unforgiving environment. and he had an ax put in his hand almost at once and he had this until about the age 23. one of the great ironies of lincoln's life is that he did not like axes or splitting rails come even though we know him as the rail splitter. he wanted to escape of his unforgiving environment. his mother at a very young age

and his aunt and uncle came down with something called milk six. hr would wander off into the forest and would eat poisonous weeds and its milk would become poison. you drink the milk and you would die in indescribably horrible death in about a week. so this happens to his mom, he has to fashion the wood coffin with his father to bury her. there is no one to give the sermon and eventually a minister happen by the area months later. his sister would die in childbirth, which is not uncommon. and lincoln's family was very upset about this stuff. the in-laws didn't do enough to help her, they said well, we wanted to help her, but the nearest doctor was too drunk to help her, which gives you an idea of this way of life. lincoln said there is nothing to

excite an ambition for education in this time and in this place. his mother signed her name with an ax. his stepmother come who is very caring and was a great blessing to him, she signed her name with an ax and his father could barely sign his name. lincoln said that he could barely sign his name, which was a trace of contempt and that description. there were schools with a big part of what instructors did. and at times they beat the kids. lincoln told a story in the white house a kind of captured what the educational environment was like. and he said there was a schoolroom of kids and they are reading from the book of daniel. you have to cast your mind way back into this context was actually legal to read the bible and this wasn't was in the schoolroom in america and they are reading from the book of nebuchadnezzar and this one boy stumbles upon the name shadrach

and me shack and a bit ago. and it's like, boom, head up against the head. they're continuing to read the passage and the kids kind of calculated in their head. so it's now, why are you crying. you know, it's like they're come the three fellows again. and this might be coming to us, it might be speak very well of him that he came from that. but everything in his life was geared towards escaping us. he won a story that really captures lincoln and his ambition in this way, it is a story that he told in the white house about his boyhood but obviously stuck with them and meant a lot to him. he had fashioned a rowboat by

the side of the ohio river. and they wanted to put them out there. he willingly does it. he helps them with their luggage. as they are getting on the steamboat, he says, wait a minute, each one of them throws a silver half-dollar in the bottom of his though. i realized at that moment that i had earned my first dollar. he was a more hopeful and optimistic being from that time. so lincoln wanted to escape that isolation. he wanted to make america where no one had to live in that isolation. he grew up surron. he grew up surrounded by democrats. people who worshiped andrew

jackson, the great general, who was a mean son of a gun. if your member the late senator arlen specter, if you take someone with his personality, that was andrew jackson the neighbors loved and the jacksonian democrats and the jeffersonian democrats before them, they romanticized they romanticized this in agriculture and lincoln had seen as an experienced it and they wanted nothing to do with it ever again. he becomes part of the whig party and then a republican. they were consumed with the question how do we blow up that subsistence economy and how do we make something different. this was the purpose of their

entire program. well, you needed cash. so the weight is supported the banks. he wanted industry because he didn't want a country that was just exclusively agricultural for all time. so they supported us and you needed markets. if you're going to have markets come you have to knit together country. so they are supporting this and they are excited by canals and railroads and this is where the more active side of abraham lincoln comes in with regard to the government. he supported subsidizing those enterprises. but the context is very important. again, you're growing up in this area, there is no way to get goods to the market, unless perhaps you live near a river and perhaps they would float the goods down to new orleans, which is one way to get them to market.

but the problem is getting back up. and before that, you could not really do so. a lot of them walked back home. there were stories that his father made this trip once or twice and walked back. a market cannot work that way. that is not efficient. so what happens when the railroads, is that as soon as they touch these areas, those areas are utterly transformed because the appalachian mountains were just an insuperable barrier between the east and the rest of the country. you are a farmer now and you can buy manufactured goods at a reasonable cost. you can buy them from the east, you can buy clothing from the east. are you going to cash, you have to go goods for the market. farmers are no longer

subsistence farmers because the food is not the most efficient crop. as soon as the railroads come, everyone near them is a player in the market. he supported us and says they are towards the ultimate end of a market dynamism where you create a diverse economy and there are many different ways for people to rise up in the world and you had to have, he believed, some level of government support because these are enormous projects to speak of and you don't have angel investors of those sort they didn't exist and you didn't have big industrials. it is that people had to live

orderly lives and practice self-discipline to make the most of themselves. he lived this ethic and preached the epic. he would write to him saying how do i become a lawyer and he would write back things like work, work, work. that is the thing. if step others state that on the fun and would fairly often asking for loans. and they would say, you're not a bad person but you are destitute. but because you idle away your time. that is the only cure for your case and this might have made for awkward thanksgiving dinners, but this is where he was coming from and he exemplified this affect.

he was determined and stubborn as a reader. and this is part of the great lincoln myth that we let in and start on. laborneighbors say that he is lazy and he reads all day. there is a quote from a neighbor saying that he wasn't any good to do real-world work like killing snakes, but he read anyway. so it was really just a -- it was such a specific and conscience type of program of self-improvement that he embarked upon. at a time when the country is soaked in up on tobacco, he did not drink or smoke. he did not swear. he did not shoot. sharing a rare way car, they offered him a chew of tobacco and a fine cigar and he said no

thanks. and he says, i have learned one thing in life and those with few vices have gone few virtues, but lincoln had gone few vices. at a time when casual cruelty towards animals was common, lincoln was impairing tenderhearted towards animals. there was one incident where he was at the back of the pack and also disappeared and they wondered where he had gone and the lawyer who had been writing about what had been happening to lincoln and they're like oh, he is off looking for the baby birds that fell out of the nest and they all had imagined, the tough guy, they made fun of him. he said if i did not return those birds to the mother, i wouldn't have been able to sleep tonight. there is a cat in the white

house and there's a story about the official white house flatware and mary todd was outraged and says he is crazy that the president of the united states is beating a cat with official white house silverware and lincoln says it's good enough for buchanan, it's good enough for buchanan. [laughter] >> through this relentless effort, he becomes a lawyer. but then lawyers are really the shop of american capitalism and they were part of this new emerging market and he wasn't at first a big-time lawyer, but he would carry lawyers around in his hat. one lawyer says i'm sorry it took so long to get back to you,

but i left your letter and my all hat when i brought on bought a new one. one clerk says that they actually, because when lincoln was a congressman, he would carry around seeds to distribute to farmers. apparently he dropped some in the office on the floor was so dirty that there is actually enough soil for plants to spring up in the floor. eventually he became much more important as a lawyer and he became a lawyer for corporations. in fact he was on retainer for the biggest corporation in the state of illinois. the illinois central railroad. a lot of them had a hard time getting their heads around it. he was a friend of corporations and his economics gave them a place for private property rights and patent law and he gave a speech saying that cut

them off was one of the top three discoveries of all of human history. lincoln said he didn't believe there was anything that was a zero-sum of economics properly working. and he rejected class warfare and lincoln center delegation of working men who came to visit him in the white house during the war that let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another. but let him labor diligently and build one of his own. the most important thing with the entire view is a belief in the fundamental dignity of labor and the rights of people to the proceeds of their own labor. lincoln would come back to a line from genesis, thou shalt eat through the sweat of their brow. he earns the corn and he shall

eat the corn. anything that violated this was an act of theft. this brings us to slavery because he talked about it in exactly these terms. the second inaugural address was the same. what was slavery, it was the theft of people's labor. to give you an idea about how strongly he felt about this, when he was a young man, his father hired him out, as was his right and he would go and take care of hogs and split rails and chop down trees. his father would take the proceeds until lincoln was age 21. but instead it was an exaggeration, but again, it gives you an idea of what he came from. he said, i used to be a slave, used to be a slave because he worked and someone asked of the proceeds. of course you had a much more

serious slavery in the south. a system that was based upon classification and a caste system of human bondage that required stealing the labor of others. lincoln hammered away at the system throughout the 1850s. he argued that slavery is the only good that people want for others but not themselves. he wrote when he was thinking things through. he would write fragments to himself. there is one on the aunt. he says this is such a natural universal pencil. even a crawling insect like an ant works to take it back to the nest and you try to take the come from the aunt, he knows that the come along soon because it has worked for and it will fight you to hold onto the come.

an advocate to slavery fought back and it's like, okay, sure, we have slaves that you have a class of people in the north that may not have very much opportunity to get ahead. at least we care for our slaves, but we have this callous system of every man for himself and you pretend to care about paying them acadians. lincoln rejected as with every fiber of his being and he said that they do not understand the way a free economy works and how it should work. he said that the man who labored last year this year levers for himself and next year will hire others to labor for him. on another occasion he said investment and improvement of condition is the order of things in a society of equals. where as slavery, on the other hand, he says that it had a tendency to dehumanize -- excuse the antiquated language, to take

away from him the right of ever striving to be a man. and that is such a sentiment. we strive to be men and women. it is in the pursuit of bettering ourselves that we are fully human. throughout this. mecca time, his rhetoric is used with a profound sense of loss. because he believed that our founders had been embarrassed by slavery and they tolerated it because it existed and there is no easy way to do away with it right away. the constitution tolerate slavery but it does not mention it. clearly embarrassed by it. but you have in the south slavery that rose up that was affirmative in nature and positive in nature and said that this is a good thing that is good for society. it is good for the slaves. so lincoln looked back to the

past with yearning and at almost all times lincoln was unabashed about referring to the founders as the time and in the old decoration of independence and he advocated for the old faith. his program, i believe, as any conservative program worthy of a name should be, was about renewal and progress in creating more opportunity, but doing it for a return and a restoration of our principles. one gorgeous passage in the speech was that it was soiled and trailed in the dust and let us return fire, let us turn and watch wash it in the spirit if not the blood of the revolution. history institutions bequeathed to us not only guarantee our rights, but they guaranteed prosperity as well.

a little speech he gave during the war to the regiment from ohio, 166 regiment and the kid is in the white house and he said anytime the troops come to see me, i want to tell them a little bit about why i think the struggle exists and why this war is so important. and why we are fighting it. nec, i am this big individual and your son can be in this big individual. it is an order that each of you may have heard of free government, which we have enjoyed an open field and a fair chance for your industry enterprise and intelligence that you may have equal privileges and the race of life with all of its desirable applications. but we may not lose our birthright, but for maybe two or three years, is worth fighting for to secure it such an

inestimable jewel. i was for the struggle was won. i believe that they bequeathed to us modern america. so here we have as great american and he believes in the dynamic economy. and there is an importance of individual striving and initiative and he rejects class warfare and he has this ironclad fidelity to the free institutions and founders and we're supposed to believe that barack obama is a natural heir to him, which i just totally reject. and i think it's so important for us to focus on lincoln at this time. because i think there is a crisis of opportunity in america. a lot of focus over inequality, which is genuinely grown over the last several decades. some of it is inevitable in a free society.

we should focus on mobility and do people like lincoln. do they have a chance to rise up for nothing in this country. the fact is that we are not as mobile as we think. there are western european countries that are more mobile than we are, other english speaking countries and scandinavian countries that are more mobile than we are. as always we have a large part to do with broad economic trends and culture and a social breakdown that we are seeing in this country with the breakdown of family and the work ethic and then i think it is the individual breakdown of who's is who to consider what is the program that will increase mobility in this society. i believe it goes back to what is eternity that lincoln

supported her in a dynamic economy. education and a return to this very basic force law virtues and it doesn't have to be moralistic. but the things that make it easier to get ahead like marriage and work and discipline . so i will leave you with one last passage from lincoln. long before anyone had heard of him, he talked about his speech as a young man in springfield and he talked about how even then this week and immature country -- that we are convertible to military assault. he can get the greatest general that anyone has ever known, and they could not take a step on the blue ridge mountains and they could not get a foot in the spirit of the night went on to

say that if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. as a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide. estimate you that we should resolve to it. thank you so much. [applause] [applause] thank you. [applause] thank you. >> rich lowrey, thank you so much. ladies and gentlemen, he has agreed to take questions. as was mentioned, this is being broadcast live to the world. >> keep it clean. [applause] >> we have also taken questions from the internet and our first one is going to come from jennifer blake from alexandria virginia. which leaders today are most likely to be like lincoln? >> okay well, i really don't think that we have any that i am

aware of. i am open to suggestions. i have spoken about why i think that barack obama is not a leader. i would say that mitt romney was not a leader. you know, it helps a lot in america if you have lived this story. i think that mitt romney through no fault of his own, i was we had not lived to this story. i think there was always a self-consciousness there and defensiveness about his wealth that was in contrast to his dad, a wonderful exchange with his father during one of his campaigns. and he's like, no, i came from nothing and i earned every dime of this. it was never able something that he couldn't quite say. i think that it issues the behooves the republican party and everything he says and does should be be through this

opportunity and aspiration. it is heartening to me. it is heartening that you have a marco rubio and paul ryan leader of that nature talking in these terms. because otherwise i think the republican party has no future in this country. the whigs and the republicans at that time have the same problem. they were associated with the elite. people say that they were pro-rich. the great achievement of lincoln was that they needed to demonstrate how the economics were designed to help every one and help the little guy climbing up, and that is what the republican party needs to do as well. >> next question? >> thank you for your presentation. i am one of those awful lawyers. i would like to think of myself as a good lawyer.

>> you mentioned early on in your presentation that lincoln and the whigs had supported subsidies as a way to sort of build things up. so i would kind of like to walk down a slippery that slippery slope with you a little bit here. his role was what goes on with the criminal justice system and those things that aren't in the interest of private entities to produce. well, we have seen subsidies with places like solyndra and all kinds of subsidies now. maybe back in the debut a day were relatively small and nonintrusive. given that the government naturally grows, you're supporting subsidies in lincoln's day, wouldn't it follow that you would be supporting them today? if you are not the you are

supporting some of them, where you draw the line? >> this is a great question. i would say a couple of things. and so much of what government does is kind of a joke. but some of this was general investments. he read about the erie canal, it paid for itself almost immediately. and it transformed the entire economy in that area in a way much more favorable towards a market where there wasn't one before. i think you get a slippery slope to doing what we have now, that's a heck of a slope and there is distance between those two things. i support and i think the most people do, i do not oppose government roads or bridges, as long as they make economic sense and are funded in a rational way and not an excuse for politicized spending or a

misbegotten attempt to create short-term stimulus. funny stuff that actually makes sense. while the government did, what percentage of the federal government would they be spending? >> 's public 1% or something. we have almost nothing that we have now. so lincoln had a more positive view of government than we will ever have is conservatives. but it was a different kind of government. what they do now, even though all they talk about is investment in infrastructure, mainly what it does and what it is best that is taking money from some people and giving it to others. that is a fact. that is the entitlement state and the welfare state and there is none of that in the mid-19th century. there is no bureaucracy to speak out. the state department, i believe, in the middle of a war, it had 33 employees and there is no

regulation. i'm a little hesitant to predict where lincoln would be on various things 150 years later, but i have a hard time believing. he just wouldn't find it in this way. all we do to obstruct the development of our own country. you know, you have states like new york that are dragging their feet and doing everything they can to obstruct this great natural revolution that we have going on that trades good blue-collar jobs and get 12 out of the ground and into the economy. that lowers the price of electricity and everyone should be doing somersault of joy over this. same thing with the keystone pipeline was a government doing? it is having layers of environmental review. but all of these lawsuits as

well have environmental groups to stop it from happening. i would just argue that the fundamental break came with a new deal, those are progressives, and it wasn't that abraham lincoln wanted to fund now. by the way, some of what he did was excessive and ridiculous. he supported a program in illinois that got way out of hand because everyone looked at the erie canal and said, well, that pay for itself, so everything can pay for itself. the pastor program in illinois that bankrupted the state. the transcontinental railroad looks unfavorably towards us. kind of the moonshot of the age. it enabled the worst kind of fraud and corruption that you can imagine. i would be inclined to that. but even back then you had to have a very skeptical eye about a lot of this. but we did not get this -- it did not create medicare part b.

separate things were not quite that slippery. if you are upset about that, you should blame fdr and not abraham lincoln. >> next question to the right. >> thank you for coming to yorba linda. could you tell us something about what you are doing. what is the national review doing and where is it going in this direction? >> well, maybe i haven't made this clear, but amazon.com and we are doing what we have been doing since 1955 when our founder of the initial editorial saying that our role is to have history with a capital age and yell stop. and they have always thrived in adversity and the good news is we have more diversity than ever.

his country is really in trouble. it is not just the topline stuff and the size of government. i believe that so many of our systems make no sense anymore. it has really been handed down from us reflecting the industrial age assumption that no longer apply. this is certainly true to our entitlement programs and medicare and social security and our educational system as well. much as k-12, but college, we are spending more and getting less. there are some studies that show the cognitive development of kids have regressed rather than advanced. as well as this social breakdown. it is the top third of the country who have learned that the basic borislav or choose have worked and help you get

ahead. look at the village of illegitimacy rate is%, you know, that is 1930s level or something. really low numbers. you look at the middle swath of the country. people with a high school degree, right in the middle. and they then they began to look more like the bottom than the top. in 1982 when reagan was president, the illegitimacy rate is 14%. now it is 44%. and it is harder for the mothers and fathers of the children and for the children. what i worry about is we have a talk there that has all sorts of economic advantages because they are doing just fine in this globalized economy and also have these social advantages that are in effect passed down to their children and you don't see that

happening in the rest of the country. that is how you get a caste society. we may be america still. we may be still pretty rich, we could be proud pretty powerful, but that's not what this country was or what it should be. >> let's take another one. this is from jesse from chicago, illinois. how would we can address the positions in today's political climate. >> this is one objection i have two the movie about lincoln. did everyone see that? okay, so it is a wonderful depiction of him. one thing that i love in the movie and you may think that i am strange, but they have a ruler and there is a large hanging off the desk and he is knocking it back and forth.

he had a brooding nature. we tend to think of him is this common jokester guy. he was in possible impossible to get to know. he basically had no close friends. even the people that spend most time the most time with him. there was a barrier that he couldn't have passed. he is brooding and fascinating. especially stopping and examining every implement that you could see on the circuit. he had this logical thing in mind. so how many congressmen today go and check this out. and this came through with the advocacy and referring to it as the definition of a free society what was happening was the 13th amendment, which was

he was patient about it and wanted it right then. but it wasn't a compromise. it was someone getting what they wanted as a matter of principle. so i think that too often when we think about washington today, we think that you should split every difference and compromise every issue. he would make people cry. there is something called the skinning of comments where there is a debate between lincoln and this guy named jesse thomas and lincoln mocked him. he imitated him, he ridiculed him, and this poor guy left the stage in tears and lincoln eventually apologized. he would write anonymous newspaper articles ridiculing people, and he did it to the state auditor of illinois.

he found out that it was lincoln who did this and he challenged him to a duel. he had no interest in this, but he pretty much had to accept best and as the challenged party he picked the weapon and said we're going to do it with the experience that might seem like a ridiculous choice and we realized that he had about a foot long reach on the sky. and they said, you're making fun of the whole thing. and it's like no, i was worried that he would shoot and kill me. and it turned out that the dispute was adjudicated and the dual did not happen. but lincoln was a man from his younger days and he was a man of principle. his statement ship consisted, i think, has all great statement statesmanship does, having an ultimate fixed goal and being flexible in how you get there by being persuasive. so that a drop of honey always

attracts more flies. some of our friends especially don't understand not. a little sweetness and persuasion can go a long way. so he was flexible, he was persuasive, but the ultimate goal never changed. he never just compromised away the goals or how he achieved them. he ultimately did. >> next question i hear? >> did you do any research about the relationship that he had with mary. you know, they weren't each other's first pick to mary. the kind of tolerated each other. >> yes, their relationship, there is so much literature on is that i couldn't get into it except for the very surface. there is a story about when he was going to a wedding, which was kind of a snap wedding, that some kid asked him where he was

going and he said he was going to hell. it's not the greatest start to manage it i think that mary todd was a little bit crazy. the horrible blows made her really crazy. but i'm not with those that have this sort of content with her and blame her for everything and every difficult in the relationship. he was not an easy guy himself. when we can help the most he expressed the least. i'm a little bit like that. but it drives my wife crazy. i'm sure that it drove mary todd crazy as well. i'm sure she was very good for him, though, that she was just as ambitious as he was in his first campaign for the senate. she was there when the legislature was voting and she

was in track of every single vote. there is no substitute for a wife who is right there with you. also she is a huge step up for him, you know, shut up only if you took to show henry clay, and in that sense she was quite the catch for him. i say not a perfect relationship. so much we will never know. i'm a little bit softer on mary todd than i was before. and there is pander for the women in the audience as well. [laughter] >> i'm curious what drove you back in history to write about lincoln. >> well, i always loved him. and i really love the story.

people making the most of themselves and their talent is so important. i feel very strongly that any talent you have is a complete gift and a shame and a thin not to make the most of it. i love how he made the most of himself. you know, just the subsistence agriculture, it necessarily was not that bad for his dad who had a very complicated or bad relationship with him. he was perfectly content. he was not a bad man. spent a lot of time hunting and fishing. some neighbors said of his dad that he didn't chase after things. there was something to be said about that. but it just doesn't make the most of you. and his drive to make the most of himself was really -- i was really drawn to that. i really think that that just

was part of everything. that kind of isolation as well. people have their chances to rise and slavery because it lights the opportunity of people by definition and the opportunities of poor whites who cannot compete because they don't have the labor that they can force by brute force brought into the field. so the aspiration is making the most of themselves and how they made it possible for others to make the most of themselves as well. in fact i think that this is an area where we really, as a country, we really need to do better. all of that as well. >> next question we hear? >> you mentioned that president lincoln in the white house and that he was an avid reader throughout his life. what are some of the other books

that influenced him? >> that is a great question. as time went on he became a religious man under the pressure of personal tragedy. i do not believe he was an orthodox christian ever. but he was a deeply religious. the second inaugural address is the most profoundly religious in american history and will never be surpassed. he spends a lot of time grappling with god and grappling with gobs well. then shakes her. he loved him and he knew him, he could recite him by heart. you consider those two things. if you read nothing else, that is a pretty good training as a writer. he was the best presidential writer with the exception of thomas jefferson. on top of that he was an amateur poet, which also tends to make

you a better writer. so the music of words matter deeply to him. when you take that andy reid in regards to the purpose that he had in his principles, that is where you get these speeches from the ages. if you go back and look at what was in these readers, i had a very skeptical depiction of education at the time. and they did have these readers for kids that just had everything in them. excerpts of literature. excerpts of great speeches throughout american history. one of the tragedies was that we don't have anything like that anymore really poor kids. we have watered-down politically correct textbooks that have language that is forgettable at best. is able to soak himself in

american history and through shakespeare and the bible throughout human history. >> we have time for one more question. this one is from james snell in fort lauderdale, florida. >> is this like wakens gop? >> there's a difference. we have talked about the view of government. i think the economics are very similar as i thought. i think the idea that a rising tide lifts votes is a commonality. as well as the devotion to the fountain. it's astonishing to me that politicians like ted cruz constitutionalist to the corner are treated with contempt because they care so much about

the constitution and the founding. that is something that lincoln was right there with. another one he quoted from the bible was that the declaration is like the golden apple and the constitution is the silver frame. it represents the purpose of our government and what we want to achieve throughout the government. the equality of all men. and that means of doing it is the constitution. and he basically was confronted by two camps, both of which one of a defense of the constitution and one that was part of the allies with. he would burn it and tear it up and condemn it. and then you had those who wanted to leave. many were thinking that it it had afforded to munch secession of slavery. because they didn't think that

it afforded enough protection for slavery and lincoln was in the middle and that ultimately was the most important thing. that is a commonality with today's republican party. >> thank you. let's give him a round of applause. >> is there a nonfiction author or book featured onbooktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> booktv is on location at book expo america. it is the annual trade show held in new york city and we are talking with the publisher of chicago review press about some of their upcoming titles. cynthia, what do you have coming up out this year? >> we have the last warlord. he was the afghan warlord who led the u.s. special forces.

he led them on horseback and he is an interesting character who has been fighting the taliban for 30 years. and he is a professor at dartmouth. he embedded and got to immerse himself in the culture and when the u.s. forces pull out of afghanistan, he has been fighting for all of these years unlikely to come back to the forefront. >> so he has been an ally of the united states when we have been in afghanistan? >> yes, that is him in the center. he also believes he is kind of a unique character and believes in the education of women in afghanistan. he has some liberal tendencies. >> what was it like for him to write this book and how well did he get to know him? >> you did get to live with him and get to know some of his family and friends. so yes, i think it was a unique experience for him.

it is a unique view of the world. >> any chance that he will be coming to the u.s. for the book to her? >> no, probably not. >> what else you have coming? >> we are very excited about this book. it is how parents can fight the stereotyping of young girls. there have been a lot of books on the subject as far as the issues are concerned. this book is very practical and it gives the strategies of looking for costumes. writing letters, fighting the manager, practical steps that they can take. it is very practical and get parents to think about starting young. so it's all about redefining this. >> that is coming out in the fall of 2013?

>> yes. >> this includes the halloween costumes. they are appropriate for young girls and it goes throughout when you go into this. you have the whole section and you have this so it is getting more and more, i would say. >> are you private? >> we are independently owned and have been in publishing for 40 years. we are celebrating the 40th anniversary this year. >> not associated with the university or anything? >> no, the owner of the companies was a grad student and he worked for the magazine there. the chicago review. so when he got some wonderful things, he wanted to do them on

his own. >> i have worked my way up throughout the company. >> i want to ask you about another book. >> yes, this is peter. he is one of our great authors. he traveled and really met people there and talked with them about what the experience has been with the u.s. occupation. he needs with the shopkeepers. >> another book that caught our eye was this new book. what is this about? >> it is very practical and it isn't about financial education and have to be responsible about

spending. they tend to spend a lot of money on fancy joy and this is looking at how to spend money and have better habits of your kids. >> this is a wonderful diary. it is a diary of a woman from chicago who grew up in chicago during the war. she was really smart, started at the university of chicago. and her daughter from her journals much later in life and published them. they publish this and it was a glimpse of what it was like to be part of the war. ..