sagging 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 to me saying you only rent. i sleep as long as i want you and get up when i'm ready. look for these titles and book and when the beautiful wendy stores this coming week and watch for the authors in the gets to blowing, i can flap my near future on the tv and on wings when i want to slap them. i sleep easy at night, right booktv.org. here in my little run down shack by the highway. it may not be your dream, but ♪ its mind. now you can just turn around and it's gone. >> thomas baker is the namesake of bakersfield, california. he was a pioneer that came from ♪ >> welcome to bakersfield on iowa. came all across the prairies in booktv. located on the southern and of the san joaquin valley, 1850, went to the capital of california, which was a niche a bakersfield is the ninth largest city in california and the seat of kern county which ranks third telephone in those days.

then what a beautiful area, and in the us for agriculture and oil related production. with the help of bright house from there he went to an area networks, for the next hour we will bring you to the birthplace of the bakersfield sound to learn about the city's history called turn the island which was and meet with local authors. the former name of bakersfield. we begin a special look with a and in 1862, he came to current visit to russo's books, the island via boat because in 1862, local family owned and operated bookstore. we have the great flood of 1862. it rained for 40 days and 40 >> i'm michael russo, russo's books in bakersfield, california. nights. it flooded all the way from we've been there 24 years. is a family-owned business but canada to mexico. my tears, my brother, two sisters and myself, and we've colonel baker was not in our. been very active in the business. my mom is the reader in the family. and we've always been retail. -- entrepreneur. most people came to california we grew up with books, and the in 1849 for gold, but he came opportunity came that he used bookstore went up for sale and for merchandise. and he was looking for a place we wanted to dive into the self to farm. is looking for a place to build a store. ownership, owning your own business. he just like people. when own business. whistle a bookstore go up for sale, it was a used bookstore, we jumped at the opportunity and he liked creating a community.

it has blossomed ever since. and so he knew, they didn't we came into the business at the end of the '80s and early 90s just as barnes & noble and match what he wanted. borders were getting their sea when he came to current island he realized this was going to be legs about them, and redefined what a bookstore is, coffee shops and sitting areas. a city that would be an important southern california i like to say that at the time and he decided to make this his it was also very dramatic, a home. which when he came to kern change that was going on. it was a tidal wave of change island, it was all swamp land because the kern river have not and for a lot of small condemned at that time. bookstores that were there in so he saw indians. the '60s and '70s and '80s, they were swept away by that change but we really road he saw health, he saw the kern that chris but we were able to river flowing rapidly. i mean, it was a very, very beautiful area. inaugurate a lot of the things but he realized that you could they were doing, incorporate them into our store. we have good customer service. have built a community on swamp land, and in 1850 in so things have changed since washington, d.c. they passed the then, but those first few years spot act of 1850 thing you could were really special. drain swamp land, those lands the book industry was changing. would be given to the state for which is coming on board and were able to keep it fresh. taxes. and so in partnership with bakersfield is a meat and potatoes type of community. harvey brown, they went together so we will definitely sell the and they started draining the bestsellers and popular fiction swamp land. is really what tends to sell i want to that god help them out

really well. cookbooks sell really well. a little bit because they had a flood which changed the channel of the kern river which made it local history. although we have all the national books we we specialize easier to drain, and after that in local books, too. they had a seven-year drought. and local history is something so with god's help he drained that we're very proud of. and we're able to represent the the swamps of kern island. bakersfield has a very rich history. certainly not as timewise, as the first business he set up was real estate because when he drained the swamp land he received 87,000 acres. deep as some kennedys back east, but for the last 150 years a lot and colonel baker gave almost all of that land away. of things have happened in he only kept 100 acres for american are represented here in himself. and if he sold it, he sold it for pennies, so at first the valley. there's an annual survey that comes out that always ranks bigger deal out of the top 75 official thing was being a real communities of a certain size as estate broker. that last. but is also a politician. it is also a merchant. as the most illiterate if you will community in the nation. he was also a surveyor. so i'm sure after, between serving and selling land that and i'm going to take exception with that report. would be the first couple of we are meat and potatoes. years what he would've been busy but we doing them. do have a migrant population. there are some issues, so i in 1869, it was known as baker's don't take total exception. i do agree that there are field because anybody coming through, if you are a traveler

certain things that our you would stay at colonel baker community needs to work on. however, very dynamic and very some. he would feed you. he would give you hours of hell for. he was just, he new hospitality. resilient, the people of this community and are the readers of this community. so everybody is saying as you people do read. we have a very vibrant poetry pass amok maybe l.a. area going up, they would say stop at groups, and groups, plural, a lot of poetry groups that are colonel baker's field and make meeting, that holding events. we have book festivals. sure your horse is watered angel have a nice meal. we have a community book read. and the list goes on and on. so everybody knew this area as it's not just the schools, although the schools are very active in all that they do. it's individuals that are baker's field. bringing authors into town are and in 1869 can which was the year that we official received a supporting in different post office, colonel baker endeavors, the library has a full slate of programming. thought this area would be called kern island. so i think the criteria that and a sheep farmer at a meeting that uses does not really said let's call this reflect on what people are actually doing in a specific community. and i'm here to tell you, i see bakersville. he did not like that name. it everyday because this and, finally, he said if you community does read. going to call it anything, then

this community does support books. although we have a ways to go, call it bakersfield. we are very much in the next. i love what we're doing. so that's the official name and that was when they sent the i love books. i love my community. and really that's how i see our paperwork back for the official post office. store is having opportunity with it was bakersfield. something worthwhile. a friend of mine and i were and i would love to see that having lunch one day, and we grow and prosper. where the book interest leads us said we should do something and what that means going together. so we were kind of brainstormi forward, no, it's a little foggy, the futurist. brainstorming. and i just read a history book however i'm hopeful, i'm hopeful about my church and i thought, i wonder if we could do a history book on bakersfield? for books in whatever form they may be and i'm hopeful for at a went to the museum and to bakersfield and for our the library after that lunch, community. until i said no one had ever written a book about colonel baker. >> a decade ago if you're driving down highway 99, which that was just a phenomenal to is the flat zipper of road that me. just goes right down the heart of central california, and you so we started researching but we thought we'd have a book out in look to the side of the road, like a year. actually it took us four years. you'd see this shack extended meeting the great, great arm of the first time i saw i grandson of colonel baker thought that something had been lifted out of the mississippi delta in the 1930s. certainly moved us along the as who lived there? we started researching colonel baker and assert you know him as well, as i was driving you look a person, i found out he was closely you would see us of nicer and nicer. when i came your, imagine from

smoke coming out of the roof. saudi arabia with my husband who summon was still living here. in the year 2002, 2003. is a civil engineer, and we found this city to be so so one day myself and matt friendly. and i always wanted, why have black, photographer who is kind of a modern-day -- we pulled off they moved to other cities and have not been so friendly? everyone here is so friendly. and i think that is colonel the side of the road, came up over the railroad tracks, baker's legacy living on. he was friendly and the people crossed the old dirt road, across and the spaniard and we who live in bakersfield our pulled up to the shack. it was out a little bit better friendly. >> we went a number of years ago when my daughter was six or shape than but basically a tar paper shack it as we walked up seven, and we ended up going to we could see there was rapid for that have been, that were hammered onto the wall. watch aladdin, the plate a latin. i remember knocking once, twice and as we're watching the play, come and this place was on gets to the part where the carpet takes off. stilts. my daughter, it was a magical the door creak open and there stood this black man who looked like he had been lifted out of moment. the mississippi delta 1930s. she wholeheartedly believe that was all magic the smoke and mirrors and the lighting, and i he had a stutter. in fact, later he told us he thought to myself, this is a new came west with a stutter, one state at a time. his name was james dixon. specs how the magic of the market works.

he was 95 and he was living we don't see other people who here. prepare everything, to make the had lived here since the '40s. he was part of this migration of market workers like my daughter blacks who did something that no didn't understand all the blacks in america, went against preparation that went into making that magic carpet ride happened to me people don't the grain of the great migration understand the things that we get right to make our markets to you know, the great migration went from the south to the and our society function. so for example, if if i were to northern industrial cities and as it came west to came to give you, let's say you were oakland, san francisco and l.a. that there was a tribe of blacks going to be in an earthquake, from the south and southwest who 8.5 earthquake. you have the opportunity to be on the 32nd floor in the wanted to retain the rural lifestyle but it was very important for them to feel the wind at night, to be out in building in san francisco or in turkey but would you want to be? places where no one bothered turkey or san francisco? them, to be close to the land. some of the things we do including regulations help make and about 25, 30,000 of them our life better. the things we do for each other didn't go to the industrial cities. they went from rural to rural. and the different states, health programs, education programs we they followed the contract to have. the west. and james dixon was one of them. a lot of things are the things he was from louisiana. the state is right that we don't he worked in the railroad for a see, don't acknowledge. those things are actually while as a porter. necessary for making our markets

when i met him he was, he had a function. that example with a magic carpet little water pump your envelope ride, there are a lot of things eicon tree, and he was cutting that we don't see in the background just like you don't down the country to burn fire to see the people who make things work in the background, the keep himself warm. magic of the markets is much like the magic carpet ride in he was 5'5", sleeping on a little and create. the iron crate was too small for him so he had the wooden the disney aladdin play. beekeepers box for his head. and so because we don't understand, most people don't i remember looking inside and understand it doesn't necessary mean they don't exist the magic they were begin the sausage that happens is actually a cans, empty ones, that get put function of many things coming together and that's because it's in the crevices to keep the place from falling. i mean, literally he was -- an individual who decides that a great idea and they want to make money. perhaps the biggest myth is that the state is in impediment to chickens have a better risk than he did. markets growth, wealth creation this is where he was living. and the like. it, and he found in a half a century later. and he was nervous. but one of the points i make in he thought we were government the book is very clear that the state actually creates the workers here to inspect the house, shut it down, what ever. conditions under which wealth is created. without the modern state we would not have the levels of i told him no, we were here to tell his story. wealth creation that we have today. so what i try to do is explain we are standing in the old lake how it is that the state is

absolute necessary for creating basin, the biggest body of wealth today. so one of the things i try to freshwater west of the mississippi. explain is that if you look at 800 square miles of lake right the state, especially in the here in the middle of united states, there are a lot of things we get right. california. and these cotton growers from among those is creating the south were chased out by the opportunity. bull weevil, came west. so in order to help those opportunities what we have to do they claimed this land, this is come and what we continue to lake land and they took the do is we remove obstacles. we don't allow monopolies. we don't allow trusts. rivers and dams them and shouted we have very strong civil rights. we have a women's rights. we have property rightscome and that flow to places where they wanted to grow cotton. we force all of these things. if you go around the world and at some point they have to go back and find labor. look at states that don't get this right, they don't have very a number of folks came to the prosperous economies. we work hard at getting legal tulare lake basin and the rights and property rights and the sight of rights. narratives played out a. white okies, latinos and blacks so the state is necessary for helping to create opportunities okies. for everyone. no one had ever written about black okies. they came in the '40s when the we are led to believe and we cotton. want to believe that the rugged was just starting in the fields. it was clunky and big and it individual is the one who makes things happen.

that entrepreneur is a great idea, makes things happen. could and, if you take the middle swath of the fields in the '40s and '50s, but they we have a long history about could not pick the edge of the rose. people moving westward, and so the black okies were literally in fields working entrepreneurs, pioneers but a lot of people don't even think about or never learned about alongside the mission that would eventually idle them, picking that movement was was a direct result of the federal the edges of the cotton. government's income we're going and continues time they were to move westward. not only are we going to move idled. westward but we're going to the women ended up becoming develop a lot of programs to help this movement westward. so whether it was using the maids and housekeepers for wealthy white farmers, much like united states army to conduct the south. indeed, whether was army corps of engineers for infrastructure and can help projects, whether and the men, where they could, it was the department for found work but many of them were culture which help share information, get information out idled. the children of this place. about markets and in crops to farmers, all of these things so when we came upon it was mostly older folks. helped create the condition for people to become immensely has when i wrote my last book, "west been immensely successful in this culture. of the west," i came back to so we often don't think about find and because i want to open these things because we would up the book with the black okies, and everyplace that going rather focus on pioneer, the to a decade earlier was empty. rugged individuals. let me think about this way. they had died and in some cases if bill gates and steven jobs the places were still standing

like this place. >> there's the yellow house just was born and let's say to fields away. bangladesh, or they been taken off 15 years old the family this is where we found many moved, same brilliant minds, patterson. should come in 1945-46. she was done. same brilliant people. if they were in bangladesh at they set up a room for her in the age of five would they be the front where she could see who they are today? simply put, our country gets this great find that her husband had planted when they arrived here in california. she said they should come to these things right. this patch of brown surrounded and how to get these things right? well, this is where the state by a sea of white column -- comes in. the state has to get property cotton and 9045. rights right. the date has to get legal rights she decide the first night she wouldn't be staying. what kind of line have you right. and all these things that we brought me to, she asked her really just take for granted. and so while we have a lot of husband? rules and regulations and people driving three miles to fetch say, you want to get government water, reading scripture by off our backs them what they really are saying is i want kerosene lamp it you might as well have kept me hitched to the government off my back but i want him on my neighbors backs. that's a part of the thing, part plantations of east texas. she wanted a home, nothing fancy of what we really don't in a civilized city. understand about the role of the a house of the road in fresno or state of the state secretes the bakersfield would do. conditions which wealth is made but her husband kept pounding nails in boards onto the crooked to look at the scene of market bailouts in the 1980s, from

1982, which really wasn't a hud in the middle of horn toad bailout for mexico. of the bailout for the banks had country, and the black people kept checking in from oklahoma and arkansas and texas and overextended themselves, not only to mexico but all of latin louisiana. they come looking for a place america. and if we had not done that in where the cotton grew a little the major banks in the united taller, and the white folks have been raised up a little nicer. states would have collapsed. so it wasn't a bailout for mexico. it was a bailout for banks, the they found the taller cotton. biggest banks in the united states. i'm not sure they found the they preceded to give his already in the 1990s. white folks in nicer. spent the black okies thought we had to bail out long-term capital management in 1987. we had a bailout the savings and coming west they would be -- leave behind the racism. loan institutions. the sun did shine all of the went to bail out -- again it was more benign way here, but i remember a number of them telling me it was even a more for the banks. we had to bail out issue. think about continental banks. cruel kind of racism, a smile on so you string together all these the face but a dagger behind the bailouts and what you find is back is how they describe that the big market players are california. they were not allowed to live in not operating by market rules any of the cities, not even a for operating by completely small towns. different set of rules that you they were locked out. so the only land was available for them was these patches of and i don't have access to the you and i can't go to a member of congress and say we write our god land.

literally when you rid write upn this -- will you write this the land and you look at it, piece of legislation for me so i can do this? it's so salty it looks as if it snowed there. right before the market collapse in 2008, in 2004 the guys on this is the land that was available to them. and adult the little wooden wall street went to the security and exchange commission and said we have always beautiful shacks, no water. they hav had to go into town to fetch the water. investment instruments but we can't borrow enough because we no city sewers. they had out houses. have these rules that don't no police roamed this area. permit to borrow in its we can invest in these products. it was no man's land. and so normally wall street was borrowing at maybe seven to basically horrified kind of eight times what they have on the books. squatters buildings. this is a place that got they went to the fcc and said bypassed by the civil rights movement, i the war on poverty. hey, we need to borrow more. so they security and exchange none of it ever came here. commission against the wishes of so it was a tough life. paul volcker was on the committee said why don't we go ahead and do that? >> one of the things dickson and so what you saw was these investment houses borrowing at told us before duncan he was rates of 30, 33, 35 to one. stuffing cardboard boxes into the plywood of the house to keep and so, you know, imagine if insulated. and he looked up, i remember, he you're able to borrow at 30 times what you earn in a year. said, i worked all my days in the cotton field and on the railroad. and then not only bar at 30

i wasn't lazy. times but then go to vegas and what happened to my life? see how the dice rolls. >> were staying in front of some and then if it doesn't roll the of the poorest places in america way you want, you're able to say to the house, you know what, i right now. you have to go to the borderlands of texas or think i need another bail out. appalachia to find poverty that there's the house in vegas that we have here. was okay, we will let you gamble i can. and there really is a function .. of kind of agriculture we are. we have big industrial agriculture that concentrates wealth in a few hands. and that depends on a constant supply of cheap labor. and 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 rural peasants hard of california to bring up the labor. there's problem of that flowing again and that's why farmers have reach to other people. i mean it's came here to pick. >> every time a financial chinese, japanese, mong. institution got into trouble, there were so many bailouts that were led by alan greenspan

whether it's long-term capital management, mexico in '94, asia than the black okies and white in '97, time after time the okies were brought from the south and southwest to come near and pick crops. private market players got bailed out. and some of them moved up the and because they continued to get bailed out through the late economic ladder, became tractor '90s and the -- late '80s drivers, truck drivers, business and the '90s, they just owners. assumed what they were doing was that's happe happened with white fine, so there was no penalty. so the 2008 market collapse was okies. it's happened with latinos, some of them. not an unforeseen event, it was the black okies though had to a direct result of private leave this place to find economic prosperity, the players overreaching and trying to deregulate the market so that original family members who came they could do whatever they your, the old folks remain, wanted to do, and they did. we have committed about $15 stayed behind. trillion either through credits they never, they never acquired or guarantees to wall street for about four trillion of that's much. i think there is is the saddest already out the door. story of all, and they stayed if we had that kind of money and behind here center because they had committed that kind of money to helping the american economy loved the rural lifestyle. and middle class america, we we went by martha williams would have done all right. ousted a. but what's happened is that we

it's no longer there. but she was an 86 your widow of have taken all of the money that we have for the bailout and an arkansas sharecropper, she was living with her son in a concentrated it mostly with the too big to fail banks and the big firms, financial firms on wall street. so to get back to the 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 banks. but because we bailed out the banks, they would not and still will not share any information with regulators or with the government. and so they're able to say, well, wait a minute, we're 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, and people would have been in jail, 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 a jobs program putting people to work on bridges and roads and the rest of this stuff, we would have been much better off. but instead what we did is we took the money from the federal reserve, treasury and just shifted it all over to wall street, and if you think about it, it probably is the largest and most massive transfer of wealth in human history. and why did we do it? because these guys said if we don't do it, the market's going to collapse, and everything's going to disappear overnight. the economy's going to disappear, we're not going to have an economy in the morning. in effect, it was extortion. you need to bail us out or else everybody's going down with us.

washington and wall street have this very cozy relationship. the people in washington need campaign funds. the people on wall street have lots of money. every time they need a favor, they go to -- every time the people on wall street need a favor, they go to washington and say we need this, we need that. the market bailout was a classic example of this. you had, for example, investment banks that after the market collapse were allowed to reclassify themselves as commercial banks. why? so that they would be el i didn't believe for bailout funds -- eligible for bailout funds and for fdic protection. who gets this type of protection? if you or i, for example, go bankrupt, we can't go to congress and say, hey, well, why don't we reclassify the rules so i don't have to declare bankruptcy, i no longer have to pay these guys back. we can't do that. the guys on wall street can do

this, and that's one of the problems. they can literally purchase their way out of trouble, and it's one of the reasons why what this bank bailout, this bailout of wall street we've probably already sent well over $4 trillion to wall street just already out the door. and give you an example, idea of how much that is, that's -- we'll be lucky in 2013 if entire economy in the united states produces about $16 trillion of goods and services. so in effect, we gave one quarter of the total value of our, what our economy is going to produce, perhaps produce this year to wall street to help bail them out from some of the things that they were betting and gambling on. so one of the complaints that i hear about regulations is that we don't need to regulate markets, we shouldn't regulate markets because market players know what they're doing. well, what i try to tell

students and i say in the book is we don't regulate markets. we regulate people. and we regulate people for a reason, because history has shown us that we don't often do the right thing. and even though we have the capacity to rationalize, make rational decision mustn't necessarily make -- mean that we're going to make rational decisions. and so i think when we're looking at the marketplace, we need to move away from this idea that we're regulating markets. we're not regulates markets. we are regulating people, because we don't necessarily have the best history. >> biddy mason was a remarkable woman. she was born in louisiana, mississippi in the early 1800s. she was a slave. and she walked 2,000 miles behind her master's wagon to get to california. her master, whose name was

white, was converted to mormonism. there were some missionaries traveling through mississippi and louisiana, and he took, he, his children, his wife and all -- and slaves, i think there were about 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 there because mormonism at least at that time thought blacks were evil, and they were painted evil because they were black. and they went from -- then they were there for several years. then they went to san bernardino

which, where they had a mission or a community or something. they were there for quite some time. and then she became acquainted with other blacks who were, who were free and it was a peculiar thing with the california constitution. if you, if you were -- if you had come here on your own, in other words, if nobody claimed you, you could still, 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 she -- they helped her to go to los angeles. and at the time her master -- her master took the whole group. they were hiding out in the hills in hollywood waiting for transportation out of california, wanted to go to

texas, i think. and it was while they were there that her friend who, her black advocate, i guess, got if touch with the sheriff and told the sheriff what was going on. so the sheriff arrived to where they were all camped out, biddy and the others and the white master and his family, and he took her and the others in to -- 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 not represent her in court. and as i 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. and when he learned what was, what was going on, he set her free. and this was also, ironically, a year before -- it was in 1857, a year before the dred scott case which changed the federal law. so that might have affected her too. but she went, she delivered whites and blacks and probably people who were brown, and she became well known in the community. she saved her money, bought a lot of property. she took the last name mason it

is thought, no one knows for sure, from a mormon guide that they had. but as i say, she became very wealthy, and by the time she died in the 1890s she, her estate at the time was $300,000 which 1893 was a lot of money. see women in california could own land. it didn't matter what color you were, you could still purchase property. but not very many women in california did own property then, you know? it was still a very male community. the first mace that she -- place that she settled in, settled on is what is now spring street in los angeles between 3rd and 4th streets. and the city about 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago turned that

into a small pocket park between spring street and broadway, and they called it biddy mason's place. when 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 gonna take it no more, or words to that effect. and he said she set me free. indicating that, you know, she, what she did was a very courageous act. didn't mean that things went on to be wonderful for blacks in california, but she certainly set the mark. i was, i've always been interested in california history. my ancestors came here in 1851 just right after the gold rush, and it was while i was doing

some research for information about pioneer women in california, and it was -- i can't think of the name of the book at the moment, but it was a collection. and i know that probably one other black woman in it. but she was in this, she was in this particular book. and it wasn't very much, it was just, you know, a couple of paragraphs. but i was just fascinated with her. i thought, gosh, what courage to do what she did. unfortunately, she couldn't read or write, so everything about her is really secondhand. she never wrote anything so, that i know of. so it would have been nice to have heard her thoughts. so we can only assume from what others who knew her have said. i think she's an example especially for children, especially for girls that

there's always a way out, but it takes, it takes being willing to trust somebody else to help you too. can't do it all by yourself. >> oh, i've been collecting books since i was a kid, probably 7 or 8 years old. i collect history, mostly history books, but i also collect ephemeral items, i collect old documents and photographs. i love to find treasure-troves of papers and photographs. you name it, if it's old and it has relevance to the local level, i collect it. there are books here from the 15th, 16th century. but california history is what i specialize in and pretty much anything i can find on california and the west, i'm going to grab. this is a space that was built specifically as an arkansas kentucky building. it was the first building we built with on the ranch here, and it's only about 1200 square

feet, but it has 13-foot ceilings so we can go up with stuff. and it's well protected, you know, as far as climate is concerned, and, of course, it's got security. but it was built for the archive and built so we can keep ambient temperature and humidity in here. like i say, the book shelves are all built up the walls and up in the center so we can house, you know, make the maximum use of the space. so the cubic footage instead of the square footage. i'd like to show you some of the things in my collection. here we have a couple of what they call gold pokes, and these are the gold rush, the california gold rush and made to put gold dust or gold nuggets in as they take them out of the field or out of the rivers and things. they would put them in these

bags -- pokes, as they called them -- and they would be taken from here to the assayer and poured out into the assay trays or actually the scales, and they'd be weighed, and then they might as well get money for their gold. these are very rare. they're made out of -- this is probably deer skin that these are made out of. these are fascinating, very, very rare items. let's look at this, this is kind of an interesting item. it's a letter from a yolo senator, yo to lo is in california. yolo senator letterhead, but it's a letter to a historian, frank latta, who was working on his book the dalton gang days at the time, and it's a letter that was typed telling latta that, you know, he was interested in

what he was doing. anyway, it's signed by littleton dalton, one of the dalton brothers of the dalton gang fame. and 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 who, of the dalton gang who escaped death at the coffee bill bank rob keys. the -- robberies. the daltons were trying to be a little more clever than they should have been, and they tried to hit two banks as well. unfortunately, coffeeville was ready for them, and it was a terrible bloodbath. anyway, this is a letter out of emmett got out of jail. he went to hollywood and was set up to make several movies. and these are some interesting things that make up a collection. if i go over here in this logo area, we have a couple of

outlaws or bandits, outlaws, i guess, that were called -- they were known as son tag and evans or evans and sontag, and these were actually local men who went the way of the train robber, ended up robbing several trains and were eventually captured, but this is an interesting letter. when they were in the real estate business. it was out of modesto, and it's signed by on sontag and evans, e realtors. just a fascinating example of what goes on in the world of a bandit, of a robber. let me take you over here because there are a lot of things that are interest withing. interesting. i have a wonderful document that is actually signed by my great, great grandfather, colonel thomas baker, and it's on a slip

of paper which is what they used back then because paper was scarce. and it's actually a loan note. colonel baker, $500 in gold for one of his little projects. he had a lot of little projects going on. that's how bakersfield got started. this was in 1872, but it's one of the very, very few documents that exists with the signature of colonel thomas baker. now, in this file we have some very interesting things. this might be of interest to you. this is a picture of st. paul's episcopal church, the inside of it, of course. and it shows the pews and the altar. the interesting story on this is the altar was purchased by mrs. lloyd tevis from the church where president mckinley last prayed prior to being shot and assassinated. and this was the altar, and it was brought to bakersfield by

mrs. lloyd tevis. and be this is a 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 curren county that people don't know about. and this is what's so fascinating about all of this. you find these things, and you can save them. and this is what we're trying to do is save these things for posterity so people will learn from history. back here, we go farther into the depths of the collection, i have a very interesting photograph that i think you might enjoy. and this is a photograph of tobersio vazquez taken at the

time, taken pretty much just before he was hanged in, i think, 1874. vazquez was a, what would you call him, noted bandito 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. and it's just fascinating what people would do in this day. so and even in those days you find that outlaws and bandits have a -- there is a stigma, and there's a fascination with them by people. and this is a writing by vazquez , part of the material that came from the jail cell as he was waiting for execution. but if you save these things, we

save them for the future. we're only keepers of these things, and i may have purchased many of these things, but we're only the keepers of them. we don't really own this stuff. it's kind of like land. we don't own it, it's something that was put there by the almighty, and we're only mere keepers of it. now, the biggest question now is what do you do with things like this, and this is where, of course, the big college libraries and the public libraries come in, the difficulty of which is, of course, money is scarce. so i'll continue to grow the library. it'll grow and grow and grow. i think we've grown out the doors. and even so, we'll just put in some other method of storage until there's just no more to grow. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> i'm the beneficiary of a right total hip.

i had daily nocturnal and nocturnal pain. if i didn't know better, i would think i had prostate cancer, cancer to the bone. and i saw the best surgeon, and i got a wonderful procedure, a right total hip. that was, by the way, just seven weeks ago. and a week ago i played nine holes of golf. that's how good it is. so i would challenge anyone in integrative medicine to say could you have done that? if somebody has pneumococcal pneumonia, you need pencillen. if -- penicillin. you need the right medications. somebody fractures a bone, you probably need a sling and a good orthopedic surgeon. so western medicine does amazing things, and we shouldn't forget that. somebody needs a liver transplant. i had a patient who required a hundred units of blood and survived a liver transplant and

two years later ran the boston marathon. so complimentary and integrative medicine has a major role in preventive medicine. how do we prevent obesity, how do we prevent depression, can we cure somebody's wheezing. but there is, in my mind, a certain limit to it. and as a child -- [laughter] i preface this by saying dee pack and i will disagree. so it has a role. i've actually experienced, i had orthoscopic knee surgery, and out of the blue suddenly my be knee was -- my knee was swollen. and i had actually canceled the golf i was going to play that weekend which was very depressing. beautiful summer/spring day in boston. and then i meet a friend, and she said, sanjiv, you had mentioned you got relief from your back pain by an

acupuncturist, and i went and saw that lady, and my knee was really hurting, it was swollen, and i got act chew puncture, and she got out of the car in the parking lot of the country club and kicked her foot into the air. see how good it is. so the next day on friday evening around 4:00, i had a little hiatus, and i called the act chew puncturist early in the morning. i went to see her, and she did the acupuncture, and i got up. you can compare one knee to the other. and suddenly the swelling is gone, the pain is gone. i couldn't believe it. i don't understand how it happened. and i called home. my wife was not there, so i called her on her cell phone, and she was going to come home to us later, was doing some shopping. i went to the country club, i played nine holes of golf. [laughter] so i've benefited from acupuncture and things of that sort. i'll pass -- [laughter] i'll pass it on to deepak.

[laughter] >> i have benefited from what i practice. i don't take any medications, i've never had surgery, never been hospitalized, but i agree with much of sanjiv what he said, but i want to answer your question. because she asked a very specific question about remuneration and how medicine is practiced. now, sanjiv comes from harvard medical school which is the gold standard, and there are many other places like that. but here are some statistics -- [laughter] here are some statistics, and you can look them up, okay? i didn't make these up. between 36-40% of patients suffer from at to generallic disease which means decide which has been a result of medical treatment. 80% of pharmaceuticals are of option am or marginal benefit which means if you didn't use them, it won't make a bit of a difference to the natural history of disease except save you some side effects and some

money. next time you watch television look at the commercial for any pharmaceutical whether it's for migraine. it starts with, it'll give you sexual impotence, it ends with it could cause death. [laughter] in between is the total panorama. [laughter] now, also the most common heart surgery is coronary artery bypass for stable angina. it doesn't prolong life in more than 2% of people, but it's the most common procedure. the second most common procedure for heart is angioplasty. doesn't prolong life for more than 3% of people. these are alarming statistics, and yet this surgery is being done everywhere, okay? back surgery, 98% is useless. hysterectomy, 95% is useless. so we are talking about huge

amounts of money that are spent on procedures, okay? my father, our father would make diagnosis, a neurological diagnosis with precision. today if you have a headache, you go to the emergency room, if you don't walk out with a cat scan or an mri, you're lucky, okay? because nobody has the time to do it. so we have a crisis. what we call health reform is not health reform. it's insurance reform. it has nothing to do with health threats. most of the expenditure is end of life care, okay? nobody's allowed to die in the house. i just made my will, and i said i'm not going to die in the hospital. i'm not going to have any of these resuscitative procedures. i've been in community hospitals where the same standards don't apply, and i see doctor cans directing -- doctors directing something which is a little minor -- not minor, but

aberration in electrolytes which if you didn't correct would cause cardiac arrest, and the patient would die. but they keep correcting it even though what is there has no life there. so a lot of what we call prolongation of survival is actually prolongation of suffering. for the patient, for the relatives. the only people who make money are the medical providers. so this has been a huge problem. i've discussed it with politicians. i've even brought it up to our president, okay? but we have -- [applause] we have a is system, we have a system and this, again, nothing to do with the gold standard where sanjiv practices. [laughter] we have a system where for every congressman there are 28 lobbyists in washington, okay? and their only business, they are either medical industrial complex lobbyists, or they're

military industrial. so, you know, where do we think our country makes must money? they supply arms to pakistan, they supply arms to afghanistan, they supply arms to india. they go to dubai and, you know, they trade. so we have huge problems when the incentive for treatment becomes money, and it becomes then a corrupting influence. you know, if you go to a baker, what's he going to sell you? bread. how do you think chemotherapists make money? for every chemotherapy treatment that they give. am i saying you shouldn't have chemotherapy? i'm not saying that. i'm saying question, i ask everyone here to be a difficult patient. question your doctors, get the statistics, go to google, get the information -- [laughter] and you will know more than the average medical provider. >> wait a minute -- [applause] >> you can watch this and other

programs online at booktv.org. >> and now on booktv, a preview of professor wendy allower's new book, "hitler's furies: german women in the nazi killing fields." professor lower, what's your book about? >> guest: it's about an entire generation of german women, i call them the world war i baby boomers. there was an increase right after the first world war, a spike in births about 1918, 1919, and that coincided with german women getting the vote. so you have a surge of kind of the female population coinciding with the opening up of women's opportunities politically. with the vote. so the stories about this generation that came of age during the period of the nazi regime in the '30s who saw, you know, opportunities that they didn't have before to be part of the political system, part of a revolution was all

very exciting, job opportunities, their first ways of getting out of their villages, many of these women, you know, were living in small, remote villages and wanted to get out and see the city and experience city life. so it's about these women who come of age with their ambitions and dreams, but these coincide with the establishment of a criminal genocidal regime. so what happens when that political awakening is also part of this horribly kind of political system that they come of age in, right? and i ended up tracing these women to the eastern territories of the nazi regime where the crimes of the holocaust occurred, the so-called blood lands, the killing fields of the holocaust. so we see how they kind of come in the german system in germany proper, and then they are mobilized to participate in these campaigns in eastern territories. and i had not read any books before that really placed women in large numbers in these sites,

these crime scenes, and that's what my story's really about, is how they get to these crime scenes, how they react to what they see, how some of them move into the role of accomplices and then the worst cases of those who move into killers. we often think of german female perpetrators as camp guards and in small numbers, about 3,500 based on some very sparse documentation. but the reality is that this was a mass movement. german women were sent to the east to be part of hitler's colonial imperial project. part of it was called the war of destruction. as nurses, imperial kind of developers, colonizers in all different capacities. and they directly participated in this imperial project which included the holocaust, which included these genocidal programs. i, in understanding the magnitude of this, discovering the magnitude of this through the extensive research i've

done, i wanted to make the book accessible to as many people as possible. it's grounded in a lot of research. i've been in this field around 20 years working around the world. i went to the ukraine in 1992 and started collecting these stories, and it just took all these years of going, you know, to israel, spending a lot of time at the u.s. holocaust memorial and museum in washington, d.c., and they have a fabulous collection there, going to archives in germany, going to -- collecting material from survivors in the u.s. so this massive collecting effort of stories to place these women in these killing fields, as it were, these sites. and concluded that there were at least a half a million, half a million, 500,000 women who were mobilized and sent east. this is new. not only that we're putting them in the eastern for stories, that my book is doing that, but in significant numbers and in a variety of roles. and that figure, half a million, is, obviously, quite a contrast to when we think of female camp

guards in closed camp settings behind barbed wire, behind the walls, trained to be cruel. now suddenly we've got a scene of women in all different kinds of capacities in these open air settings where mass shootings were occurring. half the victims of the holocaust died, productionly half, in shootings -- approximately half, in shootings, starvation, so forth. it became in these settings, you know, communities of violence started to develop at these scenes that very much included women. in these different roles. so i, with this large number, right, i had to then kind of bring it down to individual faces to put human faces on these perpetrators since in the history books they're often very kind of demonized and presented as freaks of nature or kind of sadistic figures, even pornographically so. and i wanted to present the reality which is that a these

women when they came of age were likable figures. so the book kind of, you warm up to them in the beginning, and then you start to see how they're transformed by being moved to the east and confronting, witnessing this violet. and then we see, you know, there are different reactions, the spectrum of that behavior. this is really the main story of the book. >> host: were women supportive of the nazi regime as it came to power in the early '30s? >> guest: they were. but they were involved in many different -- this is a political awakening, political explosion. so they're involved in the communist movement, they're involved in a number of kind of folkish kind of people's movements, what would be right-wing movements and moderate, social democratic party. they were largely represented. so they were really, you know -- >> host: kind of a normal political spectrum. >> guest: yeah. active in all these movements. and you cannot say, for instance, that women were responsible for voting hitler into power. he was actually placed into the role of chancellor by a cabal.

but during the, you know, in '32 we look at the election results, july '32, for instance, hitler was made chancellor in january of 1933, we can see in certain regions where the nazi party was strongly represented in germany female kind of participation in that and in participation in the movement as such as aid, you know, to the stormtroopers and so forth. but, no, we couldn't predict, for instance, 1933. again, that's part of this kind of tension and the contingency that a's so important in history that, you know, go completely 100% nazi and rush off to the east and become killers. it's a process, a transformation that i'm trying to delineate through these biographies. >> host: wendy lower, whose picture is on the front of this book? >> guest: that is lisle vidal willhouse, her married name.

it's a very chilling photograph. the stare is quite -- it still grabs me, still startles me. she was a baby boomer born right after the first world war, world war i, who grew up in a working class family in the czarland, you know, it was a contested territory, a border region where there was a lot of nazi fanaticism, you know, attempts to rejoin the czarland, a league of nations mandate, with germany in the '30s. she worked on a chicken farm, she had a, you know, kind of grammar school, grade school education. again, trying to get out and see the world, you know, this, these ambitions that are stirred by all the excitement of the interwar period for women in particular and trying to find her way. and what she does is she finds her way to a nazi newspaper office and is working as a kind of typist there because she had some clerical skills. and she meets her husband there who is a real rabble-rouser, a

real thug a street fighter. i mean, he's showing off his scars and bruises to her, and she's somehow enchanted by that, by his brutality. and he's in the ss, and so he's got, you know, a rising career. he's going to be part of the elite. and she attaches herself to him, and that's from her marriage application, the ss marriage application file. their marriage had to be approved by heene rick himmler -- heinrich himmler, the finish. >> host: because he was ss? >> guest: yes. very invasive gynecological examinations, very invasive examinations to pass the test of her racial -- not only their ancestry going back to the 18th century, but just their biological features. so that's her front shot. the rest of her application has her profile and a full-body image of her. her husband is eventually made the camp commander of one of the most notorious sites in the ukraine, the biggest concentration camp called ya now

and a which was western your crane. it was a site where hundreds of thousands of jews were transported to these gas centers, and many died in the camp as well as laborers. and they set up their villa outside the camp perimeter, and when he got there -- she got there, lisle said, well, i would like a balcony, a terrace, a balcony. and they brought forced laborers, and they had to lay all the tile and make this nice for her. and what did she do with her daughter, 3-year-old daughter who was also there, she brought the daughter, the whole family was there? well, in the setting of this villa sitting on the balcony where they would have their ritual, afternoon ritual of coffee and cake, she would pull out her flow bearer pistol which was a typical weapon,

domesticated weapon, a bourgeois kind of parlor room, people would -- it was a recreational kind of weapon. you'd shoot little fowl, shoot a squirrel or shoot something in a garden, right? so they had one of these, and she pulled this out and would shoot at the jews who were down in her garden, and she would shoot across over the wall of the camp into laborers themselves who were making their way through the camp. and this was a routine for her. this was not a one-time kind of incident. she developed a kind of reputation for these balcony shootings. and many women in these sites, we have testimony of shootings from balconies which is an interesting coond of pattern -- kind of pattern, but it also just brings literally home the fact that these are women killing in these intimate kind of domestic settings.

it's not their official task, but they're in these places where they realize this is possible. everything's possible here in the wild east, and, you know -- >> host: wendy lower, how did you find her story? >> guest: um, i found her story, i first came across her story in the testimony of a very, very important collection of essays by a scholar who was also a survivor by the name of phillip friedman, a very pioneering scholar in his field who was from this region and heard about her during the war through other survivors. and he wrote about this i think it was as early as the '50s. and i was shocked by this, and he, you know, identified her and even quoted some survivors who had, were astounded by her violence. and that got me, you know, on the lead. that was the first indication that here's someone who's an

outstanding figure. let me, let me test out, you know, whether or not this is true. let me try to corroborate this particular testimony with other materials. and then i got into the primary german documentation and found, in fact, her marriage application and verified who she was and what her own biography was and that she was, in fact, sent there and that she was a real person, and she was there with her daughter. we could see that in the german documentation. and then continued to collect more victim testimony about her. and that's really, those are related to primary sources i used in this case. other cases in my book of these 13 biographies where i identify people through memoirs, i mean, they came out, had kind of the audacity of their own memoirs and leave out some of this history and i used that as a starting point and started to dig and make phone calls and send letters and do all that. >> host: where did these women go after the war?

what happened to them? >> guest: most of them went back to west germany and austria. i have women from vienna who were in the gestapo, secretaries in the gestapo there and went back to vienna, went back to their towns in west germany. one couple in the particular from what became east germany, um, and that figure, that particular woman figures very prominently in this book, um, she was responsible for in this plantation she and her husband were running a farm, an estate in, again, this actually is another case in ukraine, and they were jews that were trying to flee from the railway transports, the boxcars would end up on their estate trying to find refuge. and this couple would hundred them down -- would hunt them

down, and they had a special site on their farm, an actual killing site. and this figure, erna petri, you know, she was on her balcony serving coffee and cake and heard the men talking about what should be done with the jews, even the details of how they should be killed, the proper method. so one day some jewish boys, six boys, she found them along the side of the road leading to their estate, brought them back to the house, calmed them down, fed them, you know, something to eat, and they kind of gained their trust, and then she escorted them out to this killing site and shot them in the back of the neck. that was, that's a pretty detailed story because -- and i can tell you that story because erna petri was arrested by the east germans and subjected to some pretty harsh interrogations in 1960, '61 with her husband.

and so they confessed to these crimes, and i've, you know, since corroborated her confessions with other testimony and gone to the site and matched what she said with the actual layout of the place and talked to local witnesses there. her husband was guillotined, he was given the death penalty, and she was given a life sentence. so when these women went back to these different places during the now the context of the cold war, their faiths varied quite a bit. i mean, erna petri got a life sentence. this is not what happens in west germany, for instance, where i have another case of a secretary who with her boss was indicted for the murder of 9,000 jews, and they were both acquitted in the '70s. to have the case of the austrian perpetrators who go back to vienna and don't even, i mean, their cases are in -- are heard in a kind of closed court, but they're treated with the utmost

respect as being these ladies and told to go home. >> host: so most of these women who worked with the nazis kind of faded back into normal, so-called normal life, correct? >> guest: yes, yes. and this is really another astounding piece of this story, is how much context, how much these settings really brought out this hour to risk behavior and how after the war they slip back into society. you could say they got away with murder. they did. but it's what we would, what i would call as scholars refer to, psychologists that i refer to in my book the chameleon effect which is this ability for these perpetrators, you know, to just slip back in, and everything's normal. they don't go on, they're not psychopaths, you know, who continue to kill, homicidal maniacs who continue to kill after the war. of they become normal, upstanding citizens -- they're no longer threats to society. it's a different system. the system that kind of nurtured that, incited that kind of horrific behavior has been

defeated, and so they kind of move into these earlier roles. they slip back into the house frau, the mother, the secretary, the nurse. >> host: wendy lower is chair of the history department as claremont mckenna college s that correct? >> guest: i'm a john k. roth professor of history, i'm the chair of history. not the chair of the department. >> host: there we go. and this is her new book coming out in september, "hitler's furies: german women in the nazi killing fields." this is booktv on c-span2. >> 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. >> host: talk about the importance of confidence in being a united states senator, but being a woman and how important it is to foster that

in future women leaders or business owners or even moms. >> guest: absolutely. i encourage young women to be involved and to, you know, step up front, frankly. and, you know, i always say to graduating classes, you know, i could never have imagined that i would have been, you know, running for the united states senate when i was in your position either. >> host: yeah. >> guest: but leave open the possibility of doing that, because it is critical to have those examples in our governing institutions and in all places in our society that are important to have women's voices and reflective, you know, of women in our population. and the second part of it is, is that they bring a different experience x. that's also important to have that voice at the table. and so i encourage them to think about it as a possibility in the future. and, you know, and those choices present itself. and even for me as much as i was passionate about politics, the thought about running for public

office, you know, i was going to come to washington to work, you know, you always have to go against the grain at whatever you do in life, you know? it's what it is. and that's what i always did. i ran against the grain. and i felt so strongly about the things that i believed in. and so that voice is important to fight for, and out may change -- it made changes in policy. there was a direct correlation. you know, i love the fact that, you know, that even today the women's health initiative that we spawned by the disclosure that the nih was excluding women in clinical study trials -- >> host: yeah. >> guest: -- to this day, the largest clinical study trial ever for women is still revealing results and life-saving discoveries for women. and that's so important. it's a cause and effect to having women participate in the political process in what evolves from it. i think about title ix, for example. i mean, in fact, i was talking about it the other day with

donna brazil, as a matter of fact. and, you know, she was a beneficiary of title ix. i said, you know, i love the fact that you get young women who are just so active, there's no second thought about it, you know? they're active in sports because the law made sure they were treated, those sports for women were treated equally. >> host: it's so fascinating how late so many rights and responsibilities and respect came and protections came all during your four -- i mean, many of them during your four decades of service that you were really there at a formative period that many, you know, people, women younger than you may take for granted. but you were a witness to the changes. >> guest: right. >> host: women especially really should read about the fights you had to wage on behalf of women. i loved, also, an anecdote about your much-revered senator margaret chase smith of maine

when gave a speech called "the declaration of conscience" really directed at mccarthyism but not naming senator joe mccarthy in june of 1950, and you quote a political consultant named bernard baa rook who said if a man had made the declaration of conscience, he would have been the next president of the united states. and you mention in the book when you're talking about hillary rodham clinton who is an old friend, you said an extraordinary role model, you've known her for years because your husbands served as governors together. did they sit next to each other at nga meetings? >> guest: yes. the order in which the states came into the union. >> host: oh, right. and it was so serendipitous. you are old friends and, obviously, colleagues, and you said that the united states is ready for a woman president. so i have to ask you, she's obviously the great hope of the democratic party, the great hope of many women.

whether or not you want her to run, whether or not you would support her, any feelings that you have. you said that you have enduring respect for her service as secretary of state. she, um, you know, barring whatever is, you know, wrapping her up in any current benghazi, you know, excitement on capitol hill, when you look at the future and you think that this country is ready, would you as a republican sit it out if she ran or -- [laughter] >> guest: well, that's too far down the road to speculate about all of that, but i think that, you know, if hillary wanted to run, she should run. i mean, she did set, i think, an extraordinary example of how a woman, you know, can run for public office. and so that's what's important. she, i think, broke down that barrier single-handedly and is highly talented and capable and smart. so if she chooses to do that, i think that, you know, many women

will embrace now her candidacy. but i think country is prepared to have a woman president, and i think that by virtue of the fact of what she was able to accomplish at that point in time in her own candidacy, i think, has dispelled any notion that a woman could not be prepared. even though she didn't win the primary -- >> host: right. >> guest: that's differences within the party in a primary. but by virtue of her candidacy and how she conducted herself, i think she has basically eradicated any fears about how a woman would handle herself. >> host: well, there's many delightful anecdotes as i keep mentioning in the book and little nuggets for congress watchers like myself to enjoy. but one of my favorites is that you divulge how frequently and regularly women senates get together, how privately they sort of nurture each other and mentor each other which i thought was so impressive, and

that you actually dine with female justices, something i'd never known before which i thought was really quite wonderful. >> guest: yeah. >> host: and what an honor. >> guest: oh, it is. >> host: also. and i thought that that was, that that's, you know, really another reason to sort of delve in here is to learn not only about the way things used to be, um, but how much women look out for each other in positions of power and how truly bipartisan it is. >> guest: right. >> host: the way you talk about hillary clinton and, obviously, you know, your friendship that formed years ago before she was in the senate is just a unique connection, i think, it's very interesting. so you have, um, you don't want to depress anybody. you want to tell them that there is a way out. >> guest: absolutely, there is. >> host: and even if it's not near term, there's a path to unity and productive future for

the congress, diminished polarization in the future if some steps are taken in the meantime. and you list them in the book. you have relations for a five-day workweek, an annual budget -- i'm sorry, biannual budgeting. >> guest: yeah. >> host: restoring the process of getting to a budget. >> guest: right. >> host: a bipartisan leadership committee which is so interesting. that means they have to leave the congress and get out of their own partisan leadership where they're worrying about reelecting everybody. no budget, no pay which means they're not going to collect their own paycheck. filibuster reform, a more open amendment process, no more secret holes on legislation and return -- i think this is so critical -- to regular order in the committees. >> guest: right. >> host: that you can't throw up an emergency supercommittee sequester bill at the last minute. everything would have to go back. and abolish leadership pacs which actually made me chuckle

because you were only one of five senators without a leadership pac. [laughter] so i want to know, semi-open primaries, i'm a big believer of that myself and commissions instead of state legislatures -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- deciding on redistricting. and i think it's important for americans to read your book especially on the chapter on all of these political, the fix kind of in on the system. so if they don't know about redistricting and they don't know about how few districts actually swing every election cycle and how 79% of us shouldn't even get in the car and vote because it was already decided. so this is really, i think you have all the right ideas, and i want to -- if you can share a little bit although it's outlined in your book, how -- you have a great anecdote that congressman rick nolan who left the ho in 1991 is backar later, where do you get the

establishment, the incumbent, the crusty old system that might seem new but is now so set in, where do you get them to throw away the leadership pacs, to change? >> guest: right. they would find it a relief if everybody had to stand down on both sides of the aisle. .. give money to candidates and at much higher levels than you can as individual. but the point being, it is now

raising money for their own campaign. they also have to raise this money for their leaders because it is expected. you're going to raise some much money. especially if you are chair of committee. >> you are expected to. >> guest: it takes so much time. it is another huge distraction. reminding me of the honoraria issue when members of congress get paid for speeches. and so the whole schedule revolves around the day's mummy killing the speeches on monday and friday. but ultimately we came to the conclusion that we should ban the spirit had an impact because then you have people. right. one last level of raising money because that is a huge time consuming effort, and not to

mention a distraction. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. up next on book tv, after words with guest host, president and founder of the institute for the study of four. this week military historian victor davis hansen and his latest book the savior generals. the hoover institution senior fellow and syndicated columnist profiles five generals that he says single-handedly turned around wars that their countries are losing, including civil war general william sherman and barack for general. the program is about an hour. >> first of all, congratulations , professor come on another great book, t