incredible library, and so that isn't pejorative that it's not part of the official -- i mean, if i hadn't just stuck to those 13 libraries, i'd still be taking this trip, and my wife would have divorced me. >> thank you. >> so, now that you finished this one. what do you think you'll write next? >> well, i'm not going to say what is specifically, but i'm going to say it's going to have an outline. i'm so excited to have an outline to work off of. thank you for your questions. [applause] [inaudible conversations discussion]

>> our coverage from the 2014 roosevelt reading festival continues with amitiy shlase on the great depression. >> good afternoon, everyone. my name is bob clark and i'm the deputy directyear her tee franklin d. roosevelt presidential lie area and museum, and it's my honor to welcome you to the 11th annual roosevelt reading festival. before i introduce our distinguished speaker, let in go over a couple of housekeeping things. would everyone please take out your electronic devices and turn them off so we don't have any interruptions of our presentation today. the next is if you haven't had an opportunity yet to see our new permanent exhibit we signaled last year, come find one of us on the library staff and we'll be happy to give you an fdr button and that will get you into the museum galleries for free today. and then finally, just a kick quick thanks to our friends frid

colleagues from c-span who are recording this session. just a little talk about how the session will go. the author is going to speak for roughly 30 minute. she likes to do things very interactively and will talk to you about the process of doing the book and how it came about and how it came to fruition. she is very open to questions from the audience, because she would love to take as many questions as possible, we're going to have you come up to a mic here so c-span can catch your question on tape as well as your face, and then once she is done in the question and answer period is over i'll take her out to the book store where she will buy copies of the book. speaking of that, she wanted me to let glow, and i'm happy to let you know, that the forgotten man graphic edition is now three

weeks at the top of the amazon list, "the new york times" list for graphic books. she is chair of the calvin coolidge memorial foundation based at the birthplace of president coolidge in vermont. she is author he the new book, forgotten man." she also came and spoke at a reading festival. shes also author of coolidge which was on "the new york times" bestseller list. she writes a kole plumb for forbes -- column for forbes, and has served for over the years as a columnist at the financial times and forbes and is also a fellow with our sister library the george w. bush presidential center in dallas. so everyone, please william, amitiy shlase. [applause] >> i'm going to push this back. thank you hear me?

if you can't hear me or there's something wrong with the audio, stop me. i'm so happy to be here today. i think i'm going to ask mr. clark to give me that book, though. and i'm grateful to mr. clark, who i've known a long, long time. working on various projects, and mr. lobby and this library is just an awesome library. every one of us has the same job, which is to share information about presidents and history, and no library has been as pleasant to work with as this one over time. so, i'm really here to tell you a story of basically describe the work project i'm almost like a contractor, telling you -- or an architect or builder how i build a certain house but i'm also eager to hear how you build your houses, how you tell your stories.

i know some people in the room are authors themselves as well. or questions you have some of you are educators. we as authors fail if we fail to produce work that educators can use. we let you down, so you can't do your work. so, these are some of the things i'd like to talk to you about today. i put this picture up here because it's kind of fun. here we are, at the franklin roosevelt library, and before i launch into how i wrote the novel with a brilliant artist issue thought eye i'd give you president roosevelt and ask you, how many of you think he is too mean in picture? and does anyone -- nobody thinks he is too mean? anyone think he is too nice? does anyone have an objection to the cigarette?

[inaudible] >> did we get the cigarette wrong? some said we had the wrong kind of cigarette holder. so, when we first drew this picture, he had no pupils in his eyes. so sort of more blank. you see president roosevelt, more blank. he was unknowable because you couldn't see anything behind the glasses. and the artist, a genius -- i want to say that a few times -- and i talk back and forth, and i kind of had the impression that to make him have no eyes was to maim him too creepy, to make a president too creepy, and i didn't like it. my aim with this particular book is to convey knowledge, not just pinch. i don't think roosevelt was a creep so -- but when you have a creepy looking president --

well-that attracts some readers. readers like violence, bayonets, sex, and villains and heroes. do they like shades of gray? so it's much harder to have characters who are in between in a book like this. that's a tradeoff. we're thinking of doing a book right now that has cannibalism in it. but that appeals to the certain part of the brain, right? and cannibals -- the issue of jamestown, early american set. when people didn't have enough food, and paul, who knows his market, knows -- i mean, that things that have sex or cannibals or villain does sell better. i show you this picture because here we and are we settled on this fdr. i would describe him if we were to geoff an adjective as mischievous, which i'm at peace with. i think president roosevelt was mischievous. but these were hard cal calls. i'm not an artist.

i'm a book worm. but i felt like -- i learned a lot from the artist and from this process, about the president, about how to depict them, about history and so on. so, thank you for listening a little. now i'm going back to the beginning. just moved forward. what are we trying to do? we're trying to reach more people. or we're trying to reach ourselves. maybe we like apps. maybe we like picturebooks. so their story began partly here at this library. when i came it was maybe the fourth reading festival. something like that, for this book, which is my history of the great depression, and it was a long book, full of intellectual arguments. i'm kind of free market and what i discovered when i went back to the 1930s, well, maybe, the new deal didn't help the economy

enough, nor by the way did president hoover's work. he was too interventionist, and that was a bunch of content ex-mostly economic, and historical, and it did fine. we're all very proud of it. my husband, my friend, the author, all authors work together with friends and family. but i was translated into a few languages. i'm lucky about that. okay. but i was clearly not reaching younger people. i'm interested in younger people. i think we fail if we only write old print books they don't read. and i could see that millions of young people were not going read this book. they turned away. i see that, too, from my experience at new york university stern school of business. man mb a's are awesome people, they can make awesome power point. they would die laughing at this power point because it's

primitive. but they can do calculus in their sleep but they're not big readers. so i learned, here's some smart people i'd like to get to with some knowledge that i've acquired through research at places like the library, and i'm failing to do so. i'm going to try to make a book. i'm going to try to make a cartoon book, and i don't have slides and i'm sorry to say that but some of you may know a cartoon book called, "mouse." anyone know this book? so, let just talk about "mouse." my husband is here and he was the editor along -- long ago of a up in called "the forward." right? where are you, seth? and there was a cartoon -- an editor there who liked cartoons and seth, who is a good editor, said if my editor likes cartoons i'll publish cartoons but i don't think either seth or i

were especially interested in the cartoons or saw much potential in the medium. and one artist, who was drawing in the forward, the english language forward, was -- had worked on this cartoon story where the jews were mice, and the pols were pigs and the germans were cats, and my first reaction to that was offensive. that's offensive. speaking of someone who is part of all of those three things. it's offensive. we're not animals. we have -- that was a mouse. and in it indeed the jews are mice, and what i saw looking at "mouse" and what millions of others saw you can tell the story of the holocaust through cartoons. very serious material, too can be conveyed through cartoons. we all watched cartoons as kids, or read them. i think that cartoon medium

might be better for a topic as difficult as the holocaust there isn't a lot of graphic murder in "mouse." there's terrible hangings but it was more by illusion, and i began to notice that cartoons were good for hard topics, and some of you have seen a book about the iranian revolution in cartoons, and, again, very difficult topic. there's some torture, mostly not depicted but mostly alluded to in the book. got to millions of people, millions of people bought it, millions of kids knew about it and i thought this is an interesting medium. it's not just for fun or even for basic material. it's for tough material, like economics. people don't like economics. as well. so i began to ring around looking for an artist who might draw forgotten men in graphic, and i did talk to one man, who i

didn't end up working with, but he put it best. he said, oh, yeah, this is known to us cartoon people, that -- he was one of the people that guess to white river junction, vermont, where there's a cartoonist colony, and she said cartoons are the gateway drug to content. i love that. i tweeted it every three months. gateway drug to content. a lot of us get that. and that is true whether you're right wing or left whining, that's true. i talked to bill ben net, the former education secretary, and he said first a read classic in cartoons and then i read some kennedy of -- a bridge, and then i read the real thing. in english. never got to the greek. he was mod test enough to say that. a lot of us learn that way. first the berlitz, and then the

big grammar. so i was intrigued and i went on the hunt for an artist and i found an artist and i want to give him a lot of seconds of time. it's paul revosh to draw my complicated book about the great depression in cartoon. he lives in canada, has won many prize. the cover of this book already won a canadian prize even before it was published and he made the cover. you can see the influence of "mouse" here because the are men marching and "mouse eye" has mouse marching, and we had forgotten men, ralphing are all that. we did it with men but i probably wouldn't have thought of it,, if i hadn't seen the posters of mice marching in "mouse." his family came from russia. they lived in other places.

this kind of colorful grownup cartoon book, nonchild cartoon book, is much more accepted overseas. maybe some of you know -- grownups look at pictures more in and don't think it's a dumbing down, whereas there's a certain macho issue here, where smart people thing you stop reading cartoons when glory fourth grade. when you read high school reading level, and they never look back. and they consider it babyish, like a stroller or like a walker, something they got past. but in europe they don't think that way, and i became convinced i wasn't going to think that way because many grownups like this, the way they like movies, asias -- paul and i went along and i show you some of the things we drew and the errors, and professor clark here is going to let me know how many minutes i have from time to time. w. of the things about cartoons,

you always think, a picture paints a thousand words, right? i learned pretty fast from paul it's just theisms it takes a thousand pictures to convey a concept sometimes. and this -- sometimes you can't have too many ideas on a page. this is what i consider a half successful, half failure page. the concept in the page i'm about to show you involves herbert hoover. herbert hoover signed a bad tariff which was the wrong thing to do. well, republicans did that a lot. they were pro tariff, put hoofer knew better because he made his trade in international trade, and he lived in london and asia and he knew how key trade was to increase prosperity. yet he talked himself out of vanity into signing halley, he didn't want to be overridden,

and it contributed one of the factors that made the great depression great. it may even well be in the exhibits over there here at the library, the exhibit about history. so i -- we said, how can we show that hoover goofed by signing hally. he should have hesitated more. and we look for imagery and we knew that hoover played with medicine balls, like a big heavy ball. it was dr. the doctor there was the coolidge doctor, found him a medicine ball and he would heave it around with whatever staff were lucky never to get to play with him and it was kind of a -- a little bit funny, nonyoung person, man or woman, acting all macho about sports and working out in that way so we played on this, and this is too small for you to see and that's one problem with the book. even too small on the page but you can see hoover in the bottom

row of the frame, talking he can catch the ball but what happens, he gets knocked over by it, and that's really what happened with smooth halley, and then the -- the -- said, how are you? and we tried to -- this is the way of capturing the goofiness of it all. ...

in this particular letter that he wrote to roosevelt he saying you shouldn't be so mean to business because then business will be too tired and worn out to higher. this is about the later 30s when you have politically oriented prosecutions. we had a super hero in this book that was the utilities industry. keynes's writing and he says to roosevelt businessman i'm paraphrasing here you are wrong to think they are evil villains. really businessman our domestic animals. you should make use of them.

keynes laughs at his own joke. more details about this page. we looked up what china bad in that time to get likely china for keynes. these words were mostly written in a letter that was printed that keynes wrote to president roosevelt and printed i think in the times. you can see how much work that he put into it. we have another scene where reuse china as well and have jokes about drips of money where there are drips of tea. there's a lot of planning and if you hate puns you won't like cartoons. puns are an acquired taste for some of us. they are acquired to me that i see that people respond to them. each one of these pages is like a scene from the play. sometimes it's a lame joke but if that helps the reader. how do you detect comic images from the new deal iconic events? perhaps the most important

photograph of the period. we had a show here about this at some point. this was a photograph by dorothy lange, great photographer and what i discovered in my book in research included here at this library, was i hadn't realized i thought dorothy lang worked for "life" magazine. she worked for the government as a photographer. she had a rather specific assignment to capture poverty and photographs. she worked for a man named roy stryker who was good at visual images. he would do a great cartoon but now and he sent up photographers to look for images of poverty and frankly too i don't know, to make the case that government spending was necessary. was the poverty real? totally.

was there a sort of, i would say propaganda aimed too? i would say yes so that's what i capture in "the forgotten man." we tried to draw that in the cartoon but then here's the cartoon buccaneers apollo came up with. i think he drew her beautifully. he has great ability to capture pain. migrant mother wasn't having a good day. it was eight terrible day. they were used to document and needs of federal spending. they were given to regular magazines but also used to document the need for federal spending and that's what an economically call public choice theory. i was looking for ways to picture it. this is the long way around it. i truly hope you don't do your cast of characters and educational imposing after that but you build it into the

goodness plan and a time commitment. i feel our book there is a cast of characters and a timeline. even more and more careful after material for education. there's a whole concept of the forgotten man. we think of roosevelt and the forgotten man cometh a man at the bottom of the economic. med. status of roosevelt said and given the audio that may be over here in the library exhibit. in the period but roosevelt was living there was another forgotten man who was known to them but mostly not us. that was the forgotten man described by professor at yale named william graham sumner. sumner spoke to different forgotten man. he spoke of his algebra. he said a wants to help x the man at the bottom and d wants to help x but sometimes there's a problem when they coerce c a

third party in defending their government for x. sumner said the man who -- on offense for 30s when i discovered in my research was the american debated whose forgotten man is it? is that the homeless man or the taxpayer? your forgotten man hurts my forgotten man and so on but the sumner story is lost to us because we didn't get it in our education. so i did make -- be sure to bring it in. i will show you later. anyway these are more pictures. this is the soviet union. some of the characters in the book went to russia. they weren't mostly traitors. they were spies but they were definitely influenced by what they saw in russia which seemed promising at the time. this is rex tug well who was one

of the feisty asked and most lovable new dealers and also the most radical. he drew him looking at the soviet and getting excited about it because this is about the romance of the economy of scale. big sounds great. a lot of us love the idea of china. the chinese market makes businessman dizzy with happiness but sometimes that isn't better so the same phenomenon was going on in russia. this is trotsky which i think paul drew exquisitely in part because he's part russian andy had an idea of the detail it. we have paraphrased trotsky and the russian wrote back into russian. i hope it's accurate. i'll bet it is because the russian scholar did it. trotsky says americans get disgusted because americans chew gum and it grossed him out. he actually did say that, trotsky. not at this meeting but in a diary he wrote about his time

when he was younger man living in i believe the bronx. somewhere in new york. somewhere above 96th street. they were at pains to use a real quote. he was discussed with them but we had to novel is it a that because sometimes we didn't know exactly what they said. this is an adviser to the president telling the president that job sharing his advice economic. we had this debate today. this is really a scene about when you as an expert know something's wrong but you know the president is operating in politics and yes to make his own decisions. in econ and i'm getting too serious but an econ we know that job sharing doesn't increase productivity. politicians of both parties do it because we love to give

people jobs. this is the debate between tug well and roosevelt. as you know to well left the administration. he was too controversial for them. this was a union scene. that's john l. lewis. does anyone know what i'm talking about when john l. lewis punch the carpenter -- head. this was the famous human industrial unions came into power and they wanted to draw how frightening it was. you can see lewis is very tall. it's a wonderful man to draw because he was so big and interesting. this is a display of union power subsequent to the passing of the act. this was a simple page where we apply the sumner idea. and cartoon cartoons you need to give readers breaks. which is different from print books. one more thing, the way his

convey narrative. i think what i learned from paul in doing this book is enough to tell the stories one at a time. there's a famous case in the new deal called schecter. schechter poultry, right? the schecter's work chicken butchers in the government came, right in brooklyn. do you know them? we can talk. [laughter] they broke the rules of one of the national recovery administration codes and they were prosecuted and targeted sort of like al capone. the administration was at pains to demonstrate the constitutionality of the nra, the centerpiece of the new deal and they really went after them. so i tried to draw this story were caused to be drawn. this is a joke that the artist came up with. the health inspector is coming to inspect the health of the poultry and the health inspector

is cough, cough sick. that's the kind of thing you would add that i have a hesitation to add. i think it kind of works. what we are trying to get at which we are certain is true is the inspector was egregious. you notice he doesn't have any eyes. i have no hesitation to make him look like i know him because he's a minor character. he showed his i.d. and inspected the schecter's and they were scared. i was trying to convey what it's like when you're investigated by a regulator whether it's a tax regulator or who knows. someone is checking your license. we tried to draw them and we have here one of the schecter's friends telling him to be nice and we do it page by page. one of the things that happen in the schecter case which i discovered in the library was the government worked hard to intimidate the schecter's. this was an example, this actual

line is in it. how do you know you are right in the schecter's were scared. that gives you an idea. you tell one story and we had 65 frames about schechter poultry. a wonderful case. the schecter's one. the supreme court sided with the schecter's. the justices began to use bad puns and said the new deal must or the nra must fall. that's a bone in sinew. they used a chicken metaphor when they turned on the nra. as you know they got a little angry and so on and you know the rest of history. so i'm going to stop there and talk to you about what you tell me what you want to talk about. and thank you for your time and hearing about this experiment that harpercollins and i did

together. [applause] b i was just wondering how long this project took you from the beginning? >> it took many years. i would say it took four years. if i had known how to do it, i would say it would come if you really were going fast with one artist it would take 18 months. it takes them two days to draw one of the six panel pages but you also have to write the book. and it's, as far as i can tell the process is extremely unforgiving when it comes to amnesia. we storyboarded it is though we were writing a screenplay that

the pictures weren't drawn out. that was a bit hard and i think optimally you want to have time for the artist to draw every picture with a pencil so you as a content author can think about that. i would say two years really, one to two years. that was because it was the first time for me. we had some tough decisions to make. in the initial go-round and you haven't adapter your name chuck dickson, he wrote it in a marginal time fashion and then the great depression came and there were four causes of the great depression. i didn't like that. i'm not saying it's wrong. it might have even made the book cleared to do that but i did my kids so we ended up going in another direction with the book. we named one of the characters from the 1930s wendell willkie tell the story. that required a lot of -- that's

the novel lies part because he has to say chico i remember when and of course i don't have that. i know a lot about wilkie and i know he went from thinking one thing to another over the course of the 1930s so i was comfortable doing it. that was a real difference for most standard adaptations sort of like "wizard of oz" when you make it read like the book. it's the same kind of question. that too took time. >> amity you showed the one page talking about schemes with fdr. in that the lower two panels fdr is shown in silhouette and i noticed in the book that there is a lot of fdr either in

silhouette or not shown completely. is that sort of like a throwback to win in that time period in the movie you never see the president fully or acidic commentary on fdr being inscrutable and why there's like a papier-mâché sphinx for portraying fdr over the museum for such a talkative guy? >> he's just finishing a book about 1933 which talks about what's happening in germany and what's happening here at the same time. the different directions the country took. i think about fdr the following. actually i don't want fdr in my book much because the economics that make the most sense to me says is the economics of bureaucracy. there was a bureaucracy and people played a role in it. so if i had made fdr a big

character it would have taken away from the story of the economics and what happened to the other people. there were so many books with roosevelt. what about the other people in what was at work? that bureaucracy was at work and this public choice theory and parkinson's law and all that. so i tried to minimize roosevelt without demeaning him. roosevelt is dark here now because i darkened the book but because he's any president. any president will hear from economist good advice in economics and ignore it. something worse could happen. presidents are realistic people so supposing i do job sharing. it's not perfect economics and who couldn't win a nobel prize however it's better than some of the other things that might be done. that could be either party. i tried to minimize him. the issue is -- of his disability came up and i decided we would not ignore it but

certainly not played up because it distracted from our story which is what happened to the economy and people in the economy from the depression. so we tried to do that respectfully without losing our focus. >> i found your story in the local library and read the version. i read the print version first to flip through and get an idea of what the other version was like. if we read the nongraphic versus the graphic version are there any different impressions of the situation and do you have any preference for which one should read? >> that's a great question. which child this mom liked better?

[laughter] i hope i never say, right? i like them both. there's more material. for the economic mind if you are going farther and you are like how does she deal with it, maybe not the gold standard. what is her position? i want to fight with her which is why some people read books. they read pugilistic leave. they want to fight with you and that's part of the way they learn and think. the print book has more material so we want to know how i fudged the monetary. i did. you can see it better in print but honestly the older i got, the more clear my opinions got about economics than i wanted to share some of that clarity with pictures. when you think back the contract for "the forgotten man" was contracted in 2000.

when i started to write a book about the depression it was so long ago. i didn't know what i thought about the great depression and i had a lot of people i did not want to offend. so i went on this whole trip of learning in a print book. i thought about a quite a bit and that's why it turned to graphics. it's a great question. hopefully people will go from the cartoon book gateway content to content. it could be my content up or the opposite to a more serious content as people see a movie and go to the book. i do that all the time. i would love insight from you on teaching. i know there are teachers in the room. you have to follow the curriculum and kids have to take tests but if there's anything you think you could use because of course we will make other graphic novels please speak now.

>> do you have anything in either books on the roosevelt recession of 1937? >> essentially when this book opened. when this book opens with a boy who killed himself in greenpoint brooklyn whose name was william. he was 13 years old when he hanged himself. so it's kind of a like you say trick opening because it goes on about this sad story of the boy hanging himself because they didn't have food. he was reluctant to ask for food. the story was in 1937. i use it at the beginning of the book and then flash back to the beginning to make the following point. the depression within the great depression was a terrible understated depression in my economic work that i teach on is about why the depression lasted

10 years instead of five. and the answer is, well one is labor policy. two this uncertainty. experimentation sounds great but it scares markets and people don't always hire when they are concerned about uncertainty and there were monetary and credit aspects to the depression in the depression. so those three, four, five explanations are detailed in the print book and art mark keyed in this book. >> was there a specific cause of the recession? >> bay area and one of the gratifying things of this process is many economists have come to me and said i have data for this, thank you for writing it. the labor policy of the wegner act was not benign. it made the lead group -- labor price go too high and if you

read the times is has says that's fine because the economy will even out. it's nice work if you can get it but they failed to employ. now for. now for example an economist named casey mulligan at the university of chicago has written about neighbor -- labor policy and how that is contributed to the maker quality of a recovery. the labor component of the later 30s was never stuttered by it -- studied by anyone in particular. forgotten menace america for that. the economist i respect o'hanlon is an adviser to the fed. he's about to publish a huge book with large at least what i have seen the depression in the depression and making labor expense it punishes people by forcing them.

>> to your point before as a baby boomer and the teacher the hardest part i had was convincing kids how unpopular was. do these pictures give readers an education on how much poverty there was? >> i should pictures that did various things that were hard to do. i think they do. do you know the poem by florence converse what's the meaning of this queue of men going down the avenue and the lines. we have a beautiful depiction of that. we have beautiful depictions of the stock market crash and the hunger. of course william trailer the boy who hung himself was hungry. i think the poverty especially in the early 30s get adequate coverage and it was real poverty.

no one denies that people were hungry for monetary policy was often early 30s. thank you. >> thank you for a wonderful presentation. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> now from the roosevelt reading festival david kaiser recounts president roosevelt's preparations for america's entry into world war ii. >> i am bob clarke and i'm the deputy director of the franklin d. roosevelt presidential library and museum and is