home. who is qualified? i know you are -- the person who wrote this book and i see what you are trying to do but who is qualified until you read this book to when it is age appropriate to tell your kids about drugs on many levels? >> i think teenagers on up, it is appropriate for teenagers on a band of course adults. the problem in the country is our drug education in this country is at the high-level of a sixth grader, and eleven-year-old or 12-year-old. i am trying to increase the intellectual total little bit and "high price". we need -- i am arguing we need to have this drastic increase in drug education in the country. i think the book is appropriate for teenagers. parents will learn a lot as well.

>> so you think that as a parent in the home, parents are educated regarding telling their child about drugs, would you recommend them apart from reading the book where else can they go to get information so they can start telling their kids at a young age? or an appropriate? >> that is a difficult one. the country's education in terms of the drugs is that the adolescent level. "high price" is trying to have a more adult conversation so "high price" is the absolute requirement. >> another question. do you see yourself, i know you are incorporating this within your course, is that what you are doing? >> i don't use "high price" in my course because i have another textbook which i use for my course. that book is more draw, more

academic and it costs four times more than "high price". time for someone else. >> thank you. thank you all for coming. >> final question? >> em man has a question. >> i want to say how much i appreciate the book, i appreciate you, i appreciate your commitment to bring in your expertise to bear. there is a lot of anxiety, ambivalence about this to me as indicative of the deeply rooted myths that operate in our society. they have been destructive in society that have nothing to do with knowledge or facts and everything to do with prejudice and fear. much of the continent of actor got -- africa are under painful misapprehensions about sex and the transmission of aids and millions of people die because they refuse to understand what

is necessary to treat or prevent the transmission of hiv and i hate to think that in this day we want to not appreciate, at least information. everyone will respond accordingly as individuals, but to somehow suggest the transference of that information is not appropriate or because it makes us uncomfortable to me reminds us of much of the world around sex up until quite recently as a reproductive tool to gain pleasure from sex was to make a woman is immoral. we craft entire societies around binding women's ability to operate in the world because sex was not about pleasure. there's a lot in this space and i want to applaud you. i also want to say someone asked a question about appropriate drug use. if we want to save lives like we

want young people to use condoms properly, thank you very much. >> this event was part of the 15th annual harlem book fair. for more information visit qbr.com. >> next on booktv, maury klein recounts the creation of the american arsenal during world war ii. the author reports that the united states' military resources were depleted at the start of the war and only through the collaboration of men and women throughout the country did factories produce 325,000 aircraft by 1945, and at the height of production, one b-24 bomber per hour. this is about an hour. [applause] >> thank you, john. it's a pleasure to be here.

there are and to talk about this subject which has kind of been on my mind for the last few years. this is a strange topic in the sense that nobody had really done a book of this type, and i always had wondered why. i'd like to claim credit for the subject, but the fact is that the real credit wronged to my editor -- belonged to my editor, a really fine you would to have named peter who had asked me almost ten years ago if i'd been interested in doing a book like this because he always thought there was a story in here that needed to be told, and he had never seen it told. and i looked into it at the time, and i said let me think about it. i thought about it, i didn't see what i could do with it, and i said, no, i don't think i'm the person for this. and we went on, and we did another book, and i had to do yet another book that i'd committed to. and at the end of that second

book, peter came back and said might you still now be interested in this book? and i said let me look at it again. and for whatever reason, i did this time see a story. and and the reason for seeing a story is that every book, particularly in history, has what i like to call scaffolding which is the structure that holds everything together and makes sense of it. this story has so many elements to it that there is no obvious scaffolding beyond the fact of the chronology goes from 1939 to 1945. but within that, what do you do? and the second time around i saw some scaffolding. not all of it. it sort of evolved as i went along. but i'm very grateful to peter for being so per be isn't, because at -- persistent, because at the end i had a book that i had no idea that i was

going to write. and that's the one i'd like tell you a little bit about. why does it matter? it matters because world war ii literally shaped the world we live in today i. preserved, and it's easy to forget this because it always sounds like a cliche, but it preserved the world for democracy. world war i, which we're going to mention in a moment, had the slow began that woodrow wilson called making the world safe for democracy. didn't work out that way. what it did was make the world ready for yet another war. but in this case if the axis had gained more momentum, they might very well have snuffed out the large democratic society in the world. that's one element of it. it also ended the depression. the new deal had tailed to do that -- failed to do that despite very strenuous attempts, but the start of large expenditures in may of 1940 is

what finally started putting the depression to bed. and from that point on, the economy grew by leaps and bounds because of the war effort. and in doing that, it put a whole generation of unemployed americans back to work and then some, and a lot of people who had never worked. when we talk about sacrifice, which we will in a couple of minutes, it's an ironic thing that the war made a lot of americans much better off than they had been in the past, if at all. because they had gone through some very, a lot of them had gone through some very hard times. it created all kinds of modern institutions, everything from the tax system to social security which was on the books then but which was, in effect, nailed down during the war. it created what we now call the industrial military complex, and

it created literally the american military. if that is the way that this war turned out, nobody saw this pretty much at the beginning. and that's where the story starts. i want to make two or three basic points that really govern where the book went. the first, excuse me, the first of these is that there's really two eras that we're talking about here, and they're very, very different. the first one, which we call readiness, begins when hitler invaded poland september of 1939 and goes to pearl harbor. that 27 months is the most difficult time of all because we're not in the war, we don't want to be in the war. we want to, in cases, pretend that we have nothing to do with the war. and i'll explain why in a moment.

and as a result, it was very difficult to get america to start mobilizing its defenses. so this period is full of conflicts, disputes, denials and so forth. the second point is that one of the reasons why you have this kind of difference is the legacy of world war i. the end of world war i left a very bad taste in americans' mouth. didn't come out the way it was supposed to, the idealism got crushed, it ended up with a very cynical treaty of versailles that set the stage for world war ii. it did not, there's that old to tom lear joke about we beat the germans in 1917, and they've hardly bothered us since.

[laughter] they bothered us much in the years to come. but more important for americans was how the war ended at home. number one, and we sometimes forget this, on the tail end of the war came the worst epidemic in modern history, the great flu epidemic of 1918-'19 which killed over 20 million people worldwide and quite a number of americans. that was just sort of a sidecar. number two, the american economy had ramped up to produce armaments for the war. now, ironically, most of those armaments never got in the war. when we went into the war in april of 1917, we used mostly european weapons. for example, we started building airplanes, not a single american plane got into the war. not a single american tank got into the war. our hand grenades, our ammunition and so forth we bought from the british. but we had, at that point, what by be 1918 was the large

armaments industry in the world. almost immediately after the armistice and the end of the war, the government started canceling contracts. and when i say canceling, i mean just like this. without warning, they pulled them. factories were left, you know, literally with production lines still half full. thousands of workers were let go without warning. in a state like connecticut, they really felt this because it had so many of these kinds of plants. and companies were left with buildings, factories, plants that they had built to produce armaments. well, they said, you've got to do something for us. what are we going to do with all these build, and machinery? at the very least, give us some kind of tax credit so that we can carry these in case they're ever needed again. government wouldn't do it.

and the result was that in almost every case these companies, everybody from remington arms to you name it simply tore down the factories, gutted them because they didn't want to carry the expense of them. the result was by the time you get to 1939, we have no armaments industry. so when the war breaks out in europe, we're in very pitiful shape. the u.s. army is something like 28th in the world. when it went on maneuvers in 1940 which were kind of a farce, "time" magazine said that after looking at these it appeared as if they might give a good battle to a group of boy scouts. and not much more. all of this coupled with the scandals that emerged after the '20s and the 30s over

munitions contracts, bankers there developed this whole idea which became very popular that the war had been brought on by the bankers and the munitions manufacturers simply for profits. and that weighed very heavily so that when it came time in the 1939-40 period to talk about mobilizing, preparedness, one of the themes was we're not going to make another instant generation of millionaires. franklin roosevelt was very sensitive to this because he, obviously, had had his conflicts with the business community, and he wasn't about to let that happen. but at the same time, he had to get this process moving. and so that was one of his many column pa mas -- dilemmas after the invasion of poland. the third thing that i think confuses the way we look at this

is the way in which the past very often gets encrusted in some sort of mythology that shapes the way we see it. in this case, that mythology is the greatest generation. the notion that somehow this generation of americans linked arms, marched forward, did the patriotic thing, stepped right up to the plate, choose your own cliche. ..

and that's no different from this generation than from any other. though for every one who went out there and tried to enlist to serve his country, there was more than one of him that was doing anything they could to get out of being in the military. for everybody who cheerfully accepted rationing and did their bit collecting shortages, there were people who simply thumbed their noses and visited mr. black, the black market. mr. black was one of the busiest businessman throughout all of these years ago is simply no way to contain it. if you want to call this generation anything, i call them the unluckiest generation, because they found themselves having to deal with the worst economic crisis in american

history, that literally threatened the american dream, only then to deal with the colossal war on an unprecedented scale that literally threatened the existence of democracy itself. not many generations have to deal with that much within a short span of time. in looking at how they did what they did, it's important to realize why and how we managed to win this war. first of all, as john pointed out, no war had ever even remotely approached the scale of this one. it is truly a world war. it's font on three continents. it's fought on virtually every ocean, and the fact that we are split between a war in europe and the war in the pacific, vastly complicates not only the production of goods but even more the delivery of goods. getting them there at the

problem in the atlantic is getting them through the german submarines that were taking an incredible toll of ships. first with the british and then when we got into the war they were literally up and down the american coast. and in that coast, from some places you could literally see ships being torpedoed and sunk the faq it to to the beach in those days, you might often find everything from body parts for pieces of the ship washed ashore. it was a very ugly scene. the same problem didn't exist, except on a tiny scale in the pacific, the problem there was sheer distance. how do you get stuff all the way to where it was going? now, in trying to mobilize the country, and roosevelt who had not, as far as we know, and this

seems to be the case, had not plan to run again in 1940. he thought that if we could mobilize industry to a least start preparing for goods -- war goods, that we would be in a position to help the allies, ma once the war started. the problem was that many americans didn't want to help the allies. they didn't care who they work. you had some on the extreme i can report a sort of suggested that led britain to fight it out with germany. maybe they will kill them both off. henry ford's attitude was, during this period after the european war broke out, the french and the british rushed to the united states with orders because they were behind in their armaments and they wanted to buy stuff from us. we were cheerfully ready to sell

them this. one of the things they needed were aircraft engines for their plants. and edsel ford, henry's son, was called to washington instead we desperately need engines for the raf, can you make them? he said sure, we can turn out quite a few of those. and he went back, told his father what he had said, and then with an embarrassed face had to to washington that we can do it. because my father will not build any goods or foreign government. he'll make them for america but he will not make them for foreign government. so that border into with chrysler who didn't have the same qualms. the opposition of the war and getting them not only getting into, that was widespread, but even helping the allies was

incredibly strong. and roosevelt had to literally walk a tightrope. the first thing he ended up doing, of course was running for president for an unprecedented third term because he did not want to leave the country. and he did not announce by the way that is going to run for the third term until the democratic national convention met in july of 1940. and everybody was playing the will he or won't he? it was the great washington lottery in the spring of 1940. when he finally did inform the convention that he would be a candidate, they breathed a sigh of relief because they didn't have a strong candidate. and he couldn't campaign because he had so much else to do, so his campaign consisted of seven

speeches, major speeches. and his traditional tour of this neighborhood on election needs. now, roosevelt had a difficult time campaigning anyway because he had to go by train. he could not, he hated to fly. he had only flown once in his life and that was to accept the nomination in 1932. never did it again. and he had a large entourage as the president does, so to the extent that he could go give speeches, they all had to be within 12 hours of washington. that was just part of the political gain for him. what helped him immensely in 1940, and what helped the process we're talking about a bringing american opinion around, was that he happened to be at the edge of a revolution in the republican party. the republican party was pretty

much bankrupt of ideas and new blood in 1940. so much so that an outsider, wendell willkie, who was essentially a utilities executive, had once been a democrat, but they managed to get willkie the nomination in 1940. willkie, like roosevelt, was in a national to willkie believed that the allies should be helped. and by taking a position he took the issue basically out of the campaign. which was a great help. in fact he took some of the issues out of the campaign and then had a hard time finding something to run on. and that's why the campaign that kind of personal and nasty ivy and. -- nasty in the end. what he proceeded to do was,

step-by-step, increase american aid to the allies, increase the buildup of american armaments, and in every way possible find outlets that would increase the finances available for all of this. because this is going to be an unprecedented set of expenditures. that's why the tax system was revolutionized during the war. the way it was revolutionized is a way that might surprise you. it was not a case of soaking the rich. it was more of a case of moving the exemption down farther and farther until millions of people who have never had to pay taxes now did have to pay taxes. in other words, not just the middle but the lower middle and even below now found themselves

having to pay taxes. and that never went away. that's where you can thank that part of the tax code. it was a strange time and it was a strangely doing things, because in polls, the american said yes, they should be taxed more. they didn't really kick about it. the hard part was finding -- two things. finding the ways of getting goods to the allies, and creating an organization that would ramp up production. the key to getting goods to the allies turned out to be one of the most powerful bills ever passed by congress. plan to lease. at the time it was said that this bill, act, give the president more power than any act that have -- had been passed by congress.

roosevelt never hesitated to make use of the power. he had difficulties, even then. for example, when hitler invaded russia, the russians were indeed in need of weapons. roosevelt was perfectly happy to furnish him if he could get into them, but there was a lot of opposition in this country to getting weapons to the godless communists. remember, this is on the heel of all the stalinist purges of the 1930s. so there was a lot of tap dancing around that issue. the argument of roosevelt and others is very simple. every nazi soldier that the russians killed, we don't have to deal with. every antitank they destroyed them we don't have to deal with. and if they can do it, let them do it. the only question is how long could they hold out?

because, remember what hitler had done, he had taken poland very quickly in september 1939. then nothing happened. there was what was called the phony war. now, we invade -- when he invaded poland, american businesses since that there was going to be a wave of war orders and they were encouraged to build up their inventories, and they did build up their inventories. and then nothing happened. who business with flat begin for the next several months. and everybody thought, it's not going to be any for the war. not until may 1940 when hitler launched the real blitzkrieg and took over the lowlands, france, and eventually other countries as well. he not only planted the german flag over most of the european

continent, he collected all of the resources of those countries come and those resources were considerable. germany is very short of a lot of resources. and this was one way that he could get them. in a sense, germany owned europe, where would they go next? and a lot of people warned that it would be south america, or even north america. we actually at one point, roosevelt sent chips to greenland to make sure that they didn't go there. because that would've been a nice stepping stone to this country. the real menace when hitler began pounding great britain was if great britain fell, not only would it like it its resources, maybe even its navy, but that isn't the navy that we counted on to control the atlantic.

the american fleet is all in the pacific, as pearl harbor demonstrated. and as result, what would happen if in effect hitler controlled the atlantic? we would have no capacity for getting out of our own ports. and at that time we didn't have a two ocean navy. that was one of the things that have to be built up. so this is a very serious situation. how then did we meet it? we met it largely by utilizing the one thing that americans have always done best, which was mass production. we invented it. we invented it in the auto industry. this is the first wholesale mechanized war in history. and you're talking about in the country, the united states, that's basically on wheels.

way more americans own cars and our drivers and europe. and as a result we have not only the scale of our productive capacity, but we have the technical know-how. all we had to do was organize it. all we had to do. and the space of what the book is about. if, in fact, we could do that, and the goal was literally the very the axis in weapons. the germans have better weapons. they had superior weapons in many cases. i'll give you one exception in a moment, but they didn't have nearly as many. and the result of that was, once we got production moving, and that did not occur and kill 1943, the tide of the war could change. and it did change.

and we made the decision that we would basically focus on europe, and even though the first attack had come in the pacific, we would fight a holding action there. now, a couple of quick examples of how ill-equipped we work to do this. -- we were to do this. there is a shipbuilder named andrew jackson higgins in new orleans. higgins built landing craft. he had originally build small boats because new orleans and the shallow waters in the bayou and so forth, and he got a very nice start, first by building fast, small boats that the coast guard could use to chase robin roberts. and then by building slightly faster wants to sell to the rum runners. and he did pretty well at this. [laughter] but nobody could match his

the navy hated his boats because the navy's bureau of construction wanted to design its own boats, and when they designed in and when they put them in competition against higgins boats, they died. they just absolutely died and they had no chance. nevertheless, they were very reluctant to give higgins contracts. the marines were entirely different. the marines said, we need landing craft. and we need them badly. because we have virtually none. and they are part of the navy, remember. to which the navy said, you don't need landing craft. what on earth are you going to use them for? their idea was, you see, world war i. in world war i a jet to land stuff, you simply go to the nearest port in france or whatever and offload it, no problem. the only problem now is, number one, hitler has all those ports.

there's no place to offload. number two, the war in the pacific is going to be an island were. how are you going to get to those islands? because they are already in japanese hands. you're going to need landing craft. the marines understood this. the navy didn't. and finally they began to cry the boats out of the reluctant navy. there's a wonderful letter that i quote written by general holland smith to higgins, saying that i don't know what we would have done if it had not been for you and the marvelous ships you build. and we are forever grateful for that. the date on that letter is december 6, 1941. >> all, wow. >> there are many examples like this in the book of how we simply didn't know what to do or

how to do it. and we had to learn. nobody knew how to build tanks. when the president of chrysler, a man named keller was called and asked if chrysler could make thanks for the government, keller said, i don't see why not. what's a tank? [laughter] so he and his engineers went to the rock island arsenal were there was an actual tank. they had never seen one. none of the engineers had ever seen a tank. they took the tank apart piece by piece. they made drawings and, from which they could the blueprints, so that they would have every piece. because now we're talking mass production. and then they left the pieces for the local in years to put back together again. and then they went back and they made wooden copies of each one of those pieces so that they could fit together a model.

because what they were trying to do when you do mass production, is you've got to build machine tools that can turn these out in quantity. and you've got to know each of those pieces are. you literally end up with thousands of blueprint by the time you're done with this sort of thing. and none of them, i repeat, had ever seen a tank before. but by the time they got through with this they were building tanks. they were not as good as the german tanks. they were much weaker than the german tanks, but there were so many more of them. now, the way mass production works is, and most people didn't understand this because they would, too, said chrysler afford and say look, you guys turn out a thousand cars a week. why can't you just turn out a thousand thanks? well, not one, a tank is not at

all like a car. totally different. and number two, they are not set up to make thanks. to set up to do that, you don't just say okay, stop making fords and start running tanks down the line. you need a whole new set of machinery. you either have to take everything out that is there and put new machines and, or you have to build a new plant, which in most cases is what happened. lots of new plants got built. and it takes time because you have to go through the process i just described. you have to first break down what it is you're making, naked in a form that engineers can understand, and then find and design machine tools that can manufacture those parts in large numbers. and then you have to design how those machine tools are going to fit on the factory floor so that the product can flow from one station to another. and that's a very complicated

piece of engineering. and only then, and then, of course, you to start bringing in all these raw materials. but only then can you start production. in other words, what i'm saying is, it's a very slow start up, but once you're there it rolls. and because it was so slow there was a lot of criticism, particularly in 1942, when not a lot was happening. and everybody was saying, what are the place? where are the ships? were on the thanks? nobody had ever tried to build planes on an assembly line before. and the guy who was one of the instrument of people in working that out was charles swenson of ford, because automobile makers knew how to do mass production and he went to the aircraft plants, which are basically -- you build planes one at a time. piece by piece. and before long, there were

assembly lines turning out planes. henry kaiser did the same thing for ships, for at least liberty ship's, and a great engineer and architect named william francis gibbs was instrument and helping do this for naval vessels, fighting vessels. because there are really two navies can you see. there's the merchant marine and then there's the navy. the merchant marine is crucial because everything has to go overseas. so you better have a lot of ships that can carry the stuff. so that, in essence, is what won the war, the ability to solve this incredibly complex problems, and to design a couple of new weapons which changed the world in every sense. the two weapons that were truly unique to us was the b-29 bomber and the atomic bomb, which, of

course, the b-29 bomber carried. it may surprise you to know that the single most expensive weapons project during the war was not the atomic bomb, even though it costs money, it was the b-29. it was so difficult to design, it was so radical a concept, it had so many problems, and has a particularly engine problems, there's a wonderful quote by pilot that said, i logged more engine time on that plane then you could ever know. [laughter] by contrast, you see, the b-17 which have been around for a while the most pilots loved. they called it the queen of the skies. by the time the war started it was already in phase four. so there is an example. i'll give you one more before we go to questions. which is something little-known

that won the battle of britain for the raf. if you wonder how did so few pilots and so few planes ward off so many german planes, the answer was 100 octane gasoline. we had it. we could produce it in quantity. we got it to the british. the germans didn't have it. because they don't have an oil industry. that's why conquering europe and places like that is important to them. and so they planes did not have 100 octane gasoline. why did that matter? if you use 100 octane gasoline, the plane takes off in a shorter distance, it can fly faster, it can fly higher, a cam kerry heavier armaments. it's a far more efficient fighting machine, and that's what made the british spitfires, yes, the pilots, too, of course

but that's what made him such a formidable weapons in the sky. and that gasoline as i said came from the united states. 100 octane gasoline was the one commodity that we never succeeded in making enough of during the war. there was always a shortfall of it. even synthetic rubber, which we had to do from scratch by, well into the war, say 43, 44, we had enough that there was never a problem. there was a shortage but there's always a shortage of 100 octane gas because their war was taking so much larger apart. and, of course, the farther away the were moved the more ghastly we needed to and in the pacific that's a long, long way. that's just kind of a little preview of a very complex story. one of the things that it did in

this book was to tell the individual stories of a lot of ordinary people. and the source for those stories was one of the things that enabled me to find the scaffolding for the book, and that were the magazines of the period. they have incredibly good writers. i would like to have acknowledged and but very often what they don't have a byline so you don't even know the world these wonderful articles. but if you should happen to get a copy a look at some of the footnotes, you'll see how many of the citations go back to these magazines, and you'll meet a wonderful collection of people. i certainly enjoyed my spending time with them. i would love to know what they did after the war. one of the curses of doing what i do is that your knowledge stops with the book stops. and if you want to take it beyond, you've got to do something else like another

book. [laughter] so let me see if you have any questions for me. yes, sir. wait for the mic or phone. >> -- microphone. >> i would like to ask you if you spent all of it on the role of henry j. kaiser, just how efficient he was with his boatbuilding. >> well, kaiser became i'm not sure if you know how he got his start. he got his start building hoover and the grand coup again. i got them into concrete business. he was a guy who sort of moved from one business to another. and he played some part, i'm sorry, the hoover -- you're right. it's the shasta he didn't end up building. he had never build boats. he didn't do much about them, but his partners had. there was a consortium of them. and together, they bid for some

contracts for merchant ships. and that got kaiser interested. now, what kaiser was very interested in, because this is where his home base was so to speak, was developing the west. he gave the west a big cement plant. he gave it its first female. he gave it a magnesium -- first steel mill. and he gave it a host of shipyards up and down the pacific coast. and once he went into this business, he had this group of very talented, young engineers. and he would do, and i'm not exaggerating, one of them was a young guy i think in his middle 20s, and one of them, by the way, was his son. both of his sons. he calls up clay who had with kaiser build roads in cuba, knew how kaiser work. clay, we're going to build a

shipyard. clay did know a shipyard from the banana boat, but he knew his boss and said okay, where? richmond, california. there was nothing there. before long there were three shipyards there, richmond one, richmond two, enrichment three. his son went up the coast of vancouver and there were to our shipyards there. huge ones. and what kaiser did was, if you look at the existing shipyards, they were always crapped for space. so when you build a ship, what happened was you build it piece by pace. it's another boutique operation, and the result is you have all these people falling all over each other trying to do whatever job they are doing. and it's a very inefficient thing. it would drive a production manager crazy. kaiser changed all that. he said, build them from the bottom up. break them down into larger part as you can make.

you number the parts and they literally do this. you know, it's like a puzzle. and what determine how large a part you could make? two of three factors. one, how much with the crane lift? because without that you're in big trouble. and number two, if the parts are being made here, and they're being assembled here, what is the railroad, how much clearance doesn't have? can it get through, that sort of thing. in california that wasn't a big problem. there was lots of land so they could spread it out and literally fabricate the parts here, have what's called the wave where you build the ships year. and they literally built them -- first he took them out of the water and put them on dry land. and they would build them on dry land and they would build them, if you will, i have a picture of this in the book, there's a row of them.

and they're going down, and each person is doing their job, just like an assembly line. it's a very different assembly line, and if you look over this part of any shipyard, you'll see the parts. and their labeling. we need this, we need this. grab one of those, stick it on the crane and get it over there. and that's how it went from building one ship at a time for turning out a ship, at one point edgar and clay bedford had a little contest to see you could build one the fastest by setting everything up. everybody thought this was a publicity stunt, but it really did help the people who came to see it come and give them ideas on what to do. clay built one in 10 days. the whole liberty ship. editor then turned around and did one in five. and after that they went back to

normal production. but amy, you've got all your crew set up, everything is just in place. but that's basically what kaiser did. now, if you asked what is kaiser's role, it's not doing all that stuff. that's his voice doing the. his role is come he learned to become the ultimate washington insider. so he knew where to go, who to talk to. he had, for example, an idea that one of the weapons for submarine warfare would be baby flag carriers. because one way to fight the submarines was airplanes, but you can only go from land-based. but what if you have these many carriers, they calle call them y carriers, and you could put ships out at sea to go after submarines. and what finally ended for submarine menace was not convoys, which the navy, the navy leadership was sporadic to say the least.

admiral king, ahead of the navy, insisted the only, not just the best way, the only way to fight submarines was with a convoy. wasn't working. what finally became was a combination of lots of new type of destroyer, escort destroyers, and airplanes. especially modified the 20 force, which sought out the submarines when they had the surface. and knock them out and. but kaiser got, the navy said no, we don't want these to so kaiser went to roosevelt and roosevelt said let's build some of these. and that's the kind of thing he could do. that was his ultimate talent, finally come and he got so much publicity he became coming in a, the celebrity of the production process. anyone else?

here you go. >> which you speak very quickly about the rationing that was necessary? and price control. >> one of the biggest problems you have in wartime, and it was a horrible problem in world war i, these inflation. now, there's a couple of ways to fight inflation. the best way, is kept getting bogged down in politics, is taxes. americans are making more than they've made in ages, so you've got to tax them to do that. and they were willing to be taxed. congress was reluctant to do this but the other way is by rationing goods so that there are goods available to buy, and the military kept growing and, therefore, kept absorbing more goods. so the rationing that started on a modest scale and it eventually

extended to a large number of products. when it first started, i'll give you just one example see you can see how these things evolved, let's say shoes were rationed, which they were. okay, you are entitled to x number of dollars worth of shoes. well, that could be a $5 pair of shoes, or what if you want a better parachute? the way they went about it, finally when they saw that wasn't working was, you're entitled to a pair of shoes. and what they are is up to you. in the case of strategic foods, the focus -- the stamp folks basically when it finally evolved into their final form, every food on the list had a point basis, at that point thing was revived according to what the supply was. so let's say you wanted beans,

canned beans your that might cost you five points. cost you five points. every person had a ration book with x number of points for that month. and you could spend the point anyway you wanted to originally, they tried to ration it by commodity and that was incredibly cumbersome and awkward. so this way, you know, if you want to blow it all on a piece of beef, do that. beef was the scarcest thing. but let me say in addition to that, food in general is the hardest possible thing to control or ration. and the government had to control it. price controls were necessary to keep the inflation from beating up literally beating up the economy. that would take a little while to explain, but it's a serious menace in 1941. a lot of the food ultimately,

particularly meet, which was the hardest thing of all, and i go into considerable detail on that in the book, a lot of that stuff mr. black did very well. mr. black made out like a bandit. the black market is worth a book in itself, the way it worked during the war. anybody else? yes, sir. >> i'd like to know how roosevelt was able to get through the isolationists congress? >> by a very familiar tactic. he had the voice. i mean, i'm sorry, he had the votes. they made the noise but he knew going in that in this particular case he had the votes. in other words, enough republican support who saw the

necessity for it. and it was not a particularly close vote. but let me describe another vote, which was just as important to one of the most controversial acts that past was our first peacetime draft. now, how are you going to get americans to accept a draft at a time when we are not in a war, and we're very convinced we are not going to be in this war? but it got past. and when it was passed people were called up for one year. and that you came to a close to have not renewed it. in other words, to not extend the term of service for these people would have literally gutted the army. i mean, literally gutted it. and george marshall, chief of staff, was beside himself at this possibility. but it had become a political issue. we made a promise to the boys that they could go home after a year. we have to honor that promise.

and this went around and around and around. and when it came, the bill to extend in before congress in the senate, it passed by a few votes. in the house, one vote. shortly after this happened, a reporter was talking to one of, a frigid citizen, you know, in london, which is getting bombed unmercifully at this time, and this britt said, you know, the americans are hves people. one day to talk about extending freedom and democracy everywhere, the next day they decide by one vote that they will go on having an army. [laughter] any other questions? yes, sir.

>> did you ever look at how russia reformed in building their armament up? with it as poorly prepared as we were? and if they were, how did they address at? >> no. the reason, you may remember that the world was shocked when stalin and hitler signed a nonaggression pact. the reason for that, fron pact. the reason for that, from stalin's point of view, he knew he was pretty sure any -- and innovation is coming and basically he was buying time to build up. and so the russian industrial plan, insofar as it existed, and it wasn't too bad, was in pretty good shape when the war started. the problem of course is a lot of that was in western russia which is exactly what the germans were overrun. so the russians kept having to pack up plans and equipment and machinery and keep moving it farther inland.

when roosevelt wanted to know what we could do to help them, and he didn't know stalin yet. he sent harry hopkins, who is very sick but who still underwent this torturous flight to russia, and he met stalin and as stalling, what do you need? and stalin said basically machine guns and anti-aircraft guns now, thanks and airplanes later. and hopkins got a feel for stalin, and it was a pretty good one. he came back and you don't roosevelt this is worth doing. and roosevelt, roosevelt had to push his own cabinet to get this done, even after. and at one point this was all recorded in henry stimson's diary. at one point he went on a tirade and just the only time we can every member roosevelt -- treating them like they were school children because he won s this done and he wanted it done now. and it's not as if the stuff was

lying around. it had come in fact, to get some of the planes russia, we borrowed them from british planes in storage and then replaced those. any other questions? >> so now you know everything. let me leave you -- [laughter] well, not quite, maybe. let me leave you with one interesting fact that always stuns people when you talk about sacrifices that people made. it is true that more americans had a rising standard of living during the war. however it may surprise you to know that more americans died in industrial accidents during the war than died in combat. now, when you consider there's

about 11 million in the military, there's about 47 million, or 30 some million in the workforce, but if you look at those factories and to look at all of these people working under some really tough conditions, it won't surprise you. but that's a shocking statistic. well, i thank you very much. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> maurine beasley is next from the 2013 roosevelt reading festival. she discusses her book "women of

the washington press: politics, prejudice, and persistence." the annual festival is hosted by the franklin did roosevelt presidential library of museum in hyde park, new york. this is about 45 minutes. >> good morning. my name is jeff urban, and education specialist at the roosevelt presidential library and museum and a map of the library and museum i would like to welcome all of you in our audience here today and those of you at home watching on c-span for the 10th annual roosevelt reading special. franzen was a plan for the library to become a premier research institution for the study of the entire roosevelt era. the library's research room a consistent one of the busiest of all the presidential libraries. this year's group of authors reflect the wide variety of research that's done you. let me quickly go over the format for the festival's concurrent session. at the top of each are a session begins with a 30 minute author talk. followed by a 10 minute question and answer pair.