thank you for your questions . [inaudible conversations] >> thank you. >> coverage from the 2014 rose of of reading festival continues with amity shlaes on the great depression. >> good afternoon, everyone. my name is bob clarke, deputy director at the franklin d. roosevelt presidential library and museum. it is my honor to up welcome you to the 11th annual roosevelt reading festival parade before i introduce our distinguished speaker let me go over a few things. everyone please take out your electric devices and turn them off so we don't have any interruptions of our presentation today.

the next is if you have not had an opportunity to see a new permanent exhibit we installed last year about this time come find one of us and the library staff and will be happy to give you one of the buttons which will be you into the museum galleries for free today. finally, just a quick thanks to our friends and colleagues from c-span of our family this session today, great supporters of the programs that we do and it is nice to have them back with us today. just a little talk about how this session will go ms. amity shlaes is going to speak for roughly 30 minutes. she likes to do things very interactively. she will talk about the process and how it came about through and how it came to fruition. a very open to questions from the audience because she would love to take as many questions as possible. we will have you come up to mike so that c-span can catch your question on tape as well as your face because you will be so enthusiastic about her talk.

and then once ms. amity shlaes is done in the question and answer is over i will take her out to the book sale where she will be happy to sign all the copies of the book you want to buy. speaking of that, she wants me to let you know and i am happy to let you know the graphic addition is now three weeks at top of the amazon list. the new york times list for graphics. so amity shlaes is chair of the calvin coolidge foundation. she is author of "the forgotten man" graphic edition, her best seller about the great depression which cannot several years ago. she came and spoke at a reading festival and this was issued. also author of coolidge teaches at nyu stern school of business and has served for over the years as a

columnist at the financial times and is also a fellow with our sister library the charge of the bush presidential center. so everyone please welcome amity shlaes. [applause] >> can you hear me? okay. if you can't, stop me. i am so happy to be here today and i am grateful. i have known him a long time working on various projects you know, this library is just an awesome library. everyone of us has the same jobs which is to share information about presidents and history. and the library has been as

much of a pleasure to work with this is one overtime. so i'm here to tell your story, basically describes a work project. almost like a contractor, an architect, allied build a certain house. i am also eager to hear how you build your house is, that is how you tell your story. i know some people in the room are authors themselves as well. or questions you have. some of your educators. we as authors, if we fail to produce work that educators can use. we'll let you down so you can't do your work. these are some of the things i would like to talk to you about today. i put this picture appear because it is kind of fun. here we are at the franklin roosevelt library. and before i launch into however autograph it novel with a brilliant artist that the and i would give you president roosevelt and ask you how -- how many of you

think he is to mean in this picture? did i character chair and badly? raise your hand. do we get the cigarette wrong? some people said we drew the wrong kind of cigarette holder. did we get it wrong? so when we first used to this picture he had no pupils in his eyes. so it was sort of more blank sort of more blank. he was a noble because you could not see anything behind the glasses. the artist who is a genius. want to say that a few times. and i talked back and forth. and i kind of have the impression that to make him

an allies was to make into creepy, to make a president to creepy, and i did not like it. my name with this particular book was to convey knowledge, not just opinion. i don't think he was a creep. so when you have a creepy looking president that attracts some readers. readers like violence, sex, villains and heroes. you know, do they like -- so it is much harder to have characters who are in between in a book like this. it is a trade-off. thinking of doing a book now that has cannibalism and it. that appeals to a certain part of the brain the issue of jamestown. early american settlements when people did not have enough food. paul, her nose, they do sell better.

so i showed you this picture because here we are. we settled on this. i would describe, if we were to give an adjective as mischievous, which i am at peace with. i do kind of think president roosevelt was mischievous. but these were hard calls. i am not an artist. i am a bookworm. i felt like -- and i learned a lot from the artist and from this process about the president, and how to depict him and his dreams -- history and so on. thank you. going to go back to the beginning. so, what are we trying to do reach more people or reach ourselves. maybe we like picture books. it may be like. maybe like. this begins partly here. the first reading to --

reading festival, something like that for this book which is my history of the great depression. it was a long book full of intellectual arguments. i am free-market. what i discovered when i went back. and that was a bunch of content to mostly economic and historical and executed in his book. it did fine. all proud of it. swings of authors' work together. it was translated into a few languages. i was put in not reaching younger people. i'm interested in the inner people. we fail if we only right old print books that they don't read. i could see that millions of

young people were not going to read this book. my experience set the stern school of business. awesome power points, die laughing looking at this power point because it's so limited. they can do calculus in their sleep. they are not epic readers. there more analytic and interactive here are smart people that i would like to get through to. i was only trying to make a buck. i am going to try to make a cartoon book. i don't have slides for them, and i am sorry to say that. some of you may know a cartoon book called mouse. does anyone know this book? so let's just talk about it quickly. my husband was the editor

long ago of a newspaper called boers. there was a cartoon thread. all right. there was a cartoon -- there was an editor there who likes cartoons. it was a good editor i would not say that was especially interested in the cartoons. so much potential. one of the artists, correct me if i'm wrong, drawing in the foreword, had worked on this cartoon story where the jews were mice and the polls were pages. and the germans were cats. and my first reaction to that was offensive. that is offensive. someone who is part all of those three things, we are animals. we're not animals. that was mouse. in it, indeed, that jews are

mice. what i felt you could tell the story of the holocaust through cartoons, very serious material. that was the inside. very serious material. i think the cartoon media might even be better for a topic as difficult as the holocaust. there is not a lot of graphic murder if he recalled. there are terrible hangings of mice. i began to notice that cartoons are good for our top picks. a book about the iranian revolution and cartoon. again, very difficult topic. some torture, mostly not depicted, but mostly eluded to. millions of people, millions of people. this is an interesting

medium. it is not just for fun or even for basic material. it is for tough material like economics. people don't like economics. so i began looking for an artist who might draw "the forgotten man" and graphic. i did talk to one man who i did not end up working with, but he put it best. he said, oh, yes. this is known to us he was one of the people who goes up to of white river junction where they're is a cartoonist colony. he said, curtains are the gateway drug to content. i loved that. i am going to tweeted. every three months i tweeted again. gateway drug to content. a lot of the stuff -- that is true. and talking to bill bennett.

first i read one in cartoon. then i read, i don't know, some kind of short and one. then i read the real thing. and i never got to madison. the lot of us are in that. so we do the verbs and then the big grammar. so i was intrigued. i went on the hunt for an artist. want to give him a lot of seconds of time. to draw my complicated book about the great depression and cartoon. you -- the cover of this book already won a canadian price before it was published. you can see here. these are men marching. and now it has mice marching i like the way that the mice march. they even made a french flag

men marching. i have to say, i probably would not have thought about the mice men marching. it is more accidents. paul is kind of european. think that you can say his parents or family came from russia. they have lived in other places. this kind of colorful grown-up cartoon book is much more accepted overseas. you know, maybe some of you know. the grown-ups book, they don't think it is a dumbing down. a certain macho issue here with smart people especially used operating curtains when you are in first grade, right? and they never look back. they consider it babyish. i don't know, like a stroller or a walker, something they got past. but in europe they do not think that way. i became convinced that was not going to think that way

because many grown-ups like this kind of thing the way they like movies. so i'll just show you some of the things that we drew and some of the errors. but professor clark is going to let me know how many minutes i have from time to time. one of the things about cartoons, i think a picture paints a thousand words. right? i learned pretty fast. it is the opposite. it takes a thousand pictures to convey a concept sometimes. and sometimes you can have too many ideas. this is a half successful have failure. the content from the page and about to show you involves herbert hoover. as you probably know, the wrong thing to do while republicans did that a lot in those days.

but hoover potentially knew better he made his career in international trade. he lived in london, asia. so he knew help key trade was to increasing prosperity . he talked himself out of vanity into signing, although he did not want to be overridden. contributed one of the factors that made the great depression great. me even well be in the exhibit over their here at the library, the exhibit about history. so we said, how can we show that hoover approved by signing. of all people he should have hesitated more. and we look for imagery. a big heavy ball. it was the craziest doctor. whatever staff were lucky enough to get to play.

and it was kind of a little bit funny. young person man and woman acting macho about sports and working out. we played on that. and it this is too small for you to see which is one problem. you can see in the bottom row. he is thinking he can catch the ball but what happens, he gets knocked over by it which is what happened with smoot-hawley. and then, you know, the ins aqueous. and this is the way of capturing the goofiness of an all and also the fall, they do fear, the tragedy that were the steps that led to the great depression. one of many, many bad decisions that caused the great depression. this is a picture. we had all kinds of people to draw.

i was eager. it's hard to read from far away. but came and wrote to vote -- wrote to roosevelt the number of times. we think of the cartoon. we think of him being on roosevelts side. you know, basically the father of all modern impulses as well. in fact, he was as subtle guy. in this particular letter that he wrote to roosevelt he really did say you should not be so mean to business because then business will be too tired and worn out to hire. so this is about the later 30's when you have politically oriented prosecution. we had a super hero in this book, utilities industry. so he says to roosevelts, i'm paraphrasing, evil villains or wolves and lions

a reader really businessmen are domestic animals. we should heard them. they are not your enemies. you should make use of them. and then he laughs at his own jokes. more details. we looked up, china and england at that time. his words were mostly written in a letter that was printed that was written to present -- president roosevelt printed, i think in the times. you can see how much work was put into it. you know, we have another where we use china as well and have jokes about drips of money where there are drips of tea. a lot of punning, an acquired taste for some of us. that part of the story, each one of these cases as like as seen from a play with a little joke at the end.

sometimes it's a lame joke. now we turn to something serious. how do you depict iconic images from the new deal? this is, of course, perhaps the most important photograph of the time. michele hear about this. michele hear about this. this was a photograph by a great photographer. and what i discovered in my print book in their research including here at this library was that i had not realized that i thought she worked for a magazine. she worked for the government. and she had a rather specific assignment to capture poverty and photographs. she worked for someone who's very good at visual images. and he sent out a photographer to look for images of poverty, frankly,

to, i don't know, to make the case that government spending was necessary. was the poverty real? totally. where is there a sort of propaganda? yes. so that is what i capture in "the forgotten man". we tried to draw that in a cartoon book. and here is what paul came up with. i think he did it beautifully. he has a great ability to capture pain. the migrant mother was not having a good day. a terrible time in california. paul also drew the pages before and after where the photographer got the assignment and ran often photographed. they were given to the magazine. use to document the need for federal spending. i was looking for ways to picture it. a long way around to conveying economics and

pictures. this is another hero of my book. her character. your graphic novel, i truly hope you don't do your cast of characters. but you build it into the business plan and the time commitment. garfield our boat, please give me your device. it needs even more and more careful after material for education. william craig sumner. the whole concept of the forgotten man, we think of roosevelt so often. a forgotten man is the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. that is what roosevelt said. even the audio that may be over there and the library exhibit in the time that roosevelt was living there was another forgotten man who was known to them but mostly not. the forgotten man described by a professor at yale named

william craig. he was the different forgotten man. little algebra. he said a wants to help ex, the man at the bottom, and he wants to help expiries sometimes there's a problem when they get together and to worsen a third party into funding government projects. the forgotten man. the man who is not thought of. and all throughout the 30's were i discovered in my research, the americans debated, who is forgotten? the homeless man, the taxpayer? low, so on and so on. but the story is lost to us because we did not get it in education. i was sure to bring it in. you know, i will show you later. these are just more pictures the soviet union, some of my characters. went to russia to have a look.

there were not mostly traders. there were not spies, but there were definitely influenced by what they saw and russia which seemed promising at the time. one of the fastest and most lovable and also the most radical. looking at the against soviets used giving excited about it. the romance of the economy. a lot of us love the idea of china because it is so big sometimes pig is not better. the same phenomenon going on in russia. this was exquisitely drawn in part because he is part russian. in get an idea of the detail of it. we kind of paraphrase. back into russian. i hope it is accurate. i bet it is. the russians dollar did it

just disgusted because americans chew gum. he actually did say that none of this meeting. but he wrote about his time in america. a younger man living in the bronx. somewhere above, you know, 96 street. and so a real meeting that took place. that was a real quotation. he was disgusted. but didn't know exactly. an adviser to the president telling the president that job sharing is not always economic. we have this debate today. this is really a scene about you know the president is operating in politics and race to make his own decisions.

in the meantime, we tend to know that it does not include productivity. it is not necessarily a great idea for the economy the politicians of both parties often do. so this is a debate. as you know, eventually left the administration, too controversial. this is -- does anyone know what i am talking about? this was right after. a famous scene in the industrial union into power. we wanted to draw how frightening it was. seoul a wonderful man, so big an interesting. this is sort of a display of power. this is simple. summarizing the idea of who the forgotten man ends.

you need to give readers breaks. and i'm just going to show you one more thing. the question of how you convey narrative. i have a narrative all over the place. i think our learn from paul to tell the stories one at a time. they're is a famous place in the new deal a little prejudice. [inaudible conversations] >> so they broke their rules of one of the national recovery administration codes. they were prosecuted, and they were actually target, sort of like our compound. the administration was at pains to demonstrate the constitutionality. they really went after them. so i tried to draw this

story. and this is a joke that the artist came up with, the health inspector is coming to inspect the health of the poultry. now, that is the kind of thing you would add that i have hesitation. we did not do it much. would we are trying to get at, the inspector was egregious. so a health inspector. i have no hesitation to make him look like a villain. he is a minor character. and he showed his handle and they were scared. trying to convey. we all know whether it is a tax regulator, you know cullis someone checking your license to lead is a creepy thing. you have someone telling a regulator.

page by page. one of the things they are asking that actually discovered was the government was very hard to intimidate. this was an example. this actual line is in the testimony. the government says, how do you know you are right to? and the experts were scared cover and so were there friends. so that is just to give you an idea. you probably have 65 france the supreme court sided. the justices began to use bad puns. so they used a chicken metaphor. as you know, roosevelt got a little angry and so on and so forth. the rest is history.

talk to you about what you tell me you want to talk about. thank you for your time in hearing about this experiment. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> i am curious how long this project to q? >> it took many years. i would say four years. if i had known how to do with i would say if you really were going fast it would take 18 months. it takes two days to draw one of these six panel pages, but you also have to write the book. it is like i can tell. the process is extremely

unforgiving when it comes to a vision. we did not -- we story boarded it out as if you were writing a movie. but the pictures were not drawn out. that was a bit hard. and i think optimally you want to have time for the artists to draw every picture so that you -- the content author can think about. so i think two years, one to two years. and we had some tough decisions to make. in the initial go round you will see there's someone here named jack dickson. the great depression came. and there were causes. and they were. and i did not like that. i'm not saying it is wrong. might have even made the book more clear, but i did not like it. we ended up going in another

direction and made one of the characters from the 1930's, the super hero of this book, the utility's executive telling the story. that's required a lot of -- i don't know, that is a novel. he has to say, gee, i remember when. of course i don't have that in the transcript. i know that he went from thinking one thing to another. so i was comfortable doing it, but that was a real difference from most standard adaptations. it sort of like wizard of oz when you make the movie and the book. it is the same kind of question. >> you showed though one-page talking about make work schemes.

and that the lower to panels shown in silhouette. and i notice in the boat that there is lot of fd are either in silhouette or not shown completely. is that sort of like a throwback to win that time in a move he would never see the president fully, or is it a commentary on fdr being in scrutable and why there is like a papier-mache trading fdr over the museum. >> thank you he was just finishing a book about 1933 which talks about what is happening in germany and here at the same time. different directions that the country took. i think about fdr the following. actually, i don't want him to meet -- to be in my book too much. the economics that makes the most sense to me says, the

economics of bureaucracy. there was a bureaucracy, and people played a role in it. so if i had made up of big character it would have taken away from the story of the economics and what happened with the other people. so many books where roosevelt is the whole story. what about the other people? this theory, all that. and so i try to minimize roosevelt without demeaning him. roosevelt is really dark here, not because i darkened him but because basically any president, and the president would hear good advice on economics and ignore it. something worse could happen presidents are realistic people. job sharing, it is not perfect economic spirited would not win a nobel prize. however, it is better than some of the other things that might be done.

that could be either party. so i try to adjust minimize him. the issue of his disability came out. i decided that we would not ignore it but certainly not play it up because it distracted from our story which is what happens to the economy and the people in the economy in the great depression. we tried to do that respectfully without losing our focus. [inaudible question] >> flip through it and get an idea than non graphic version. if we had not read the graphic version would we get any different impression of this situation? and a preference for which

one should read. >> that is a great question. which style does mom liked better. [laughter] ago, i hope i know. i like them both. there is more material. for the economic mind, if you're going farther, how they should deal with this, what is our position, i want to fight with her which is, of course, why some people read books. pugilistic lead. they want to fight with you. that is part of the way they learn and think. more material. so you want to know. you can see. honestly, the older i got the more clear my opinions got about economics, and i wanted to share some of that with these pictures.

so i think contract for his "the forgotten man" was signed in 2000. i started to write a book about the great depression it was so long ago, a decade and a half. i did not know what i thought. there were a lot of people i did not want to offend. so i went on a trip of learning. so by now i have thought about it quite a bit. it is a great question. hopefully people will go from the cartoon book gave way. it could be my constant. more serious content. go to the book. i do that all the time. some insight for you on teaching in no, and teachers i no there are teachers in the room teaching to be have to follow the curriculum. anything that you think you could use. of course other graphic

novels. please speak now. [inaudible question] [silence] >> anything in either of these books of the discussion of 1937. >> oh, yes. essentially this boat over. yes, sir. as book opens with a boy who killed himself in brooklyn his name was william. he was 13 years old and he hung himself. and so it is kind of, like you say, a bit of tricks. goes on about the sad story of the board hanging himself. he was reluctant to ask. and this story was in 1937. i used it at the beginning of the book and then flashed back to the beginning to make the following point. the depression is a terrible

under study depression. my economic work is about why the depression lasted ten years instead of five. so the answer is one was labor policy. to was uncertainty. uncertainty. and the monetary and credit access. it was in the depression itself. so these explanations are detailed in the print book and our marquee in this book . >> any specific cause? >> well, the area where i place value and one of a gratifying things is many, many economists have come to me and said, i have data for

this. the labor policy in the wagner act is not benign. made the labor party go too high. and if you read video, it was not designed for employers. they failed to employ. and so now for example an economist at the university of chicago has written about labor policy and how that contributed to the legal coverage. the labour component of the trouble was never studied by anyone in particular. now it is coming out in many bucks. the economists, we are handling. an adviser. and it is about this huge book with large, i believe what i would characterize as sections on the depression

with than the depression. it punishes people are forcing unemployment. >> your point before,. [inaudible question] so these pictures really give you an indication of the poverty. >> well, i were showing you pages that did various things. you know, that were hard to do. i think that they do. i mean, you know the column by florence, what is the meaning of this command going down the avenue? elisa you will see. we have a beautiful depiction of that. we have beautiful depictions of the stock-market crash and the hunter. of course the boy who hanged

himself, he was hungry. i do think that poverty, especially in the early 30's gets adequate coverage. and it was real poverty. no one denies that people were hungry or that monetary policy was often the early 30's. >> thank you. >> thank you for the wonderful presentation. [applause] [applause] >> now from the roosevelt reading festival david kaiser recounts president roosevelt preparation for american entry into world war two. >> before today. bob clark. the deputy director of the franklin d. roosevelt presidential library and museum. my pleasure to welcome you to this session of the 11th annual roosevelt really festival. as an archivist myself this is one of my favorite events op the year because it is an