colleagues from c-span. it is nice to have them back with us today. a little talk about how the session will go. ms. amity shlaes is going to speak for roughly 30 minutes. she wanted me to let you know that she likes to do things very interactively speech you will talk to you about the process of the book and how it came about and how it came to fruition. she is 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 and catcher questions. and then once ms. amity shlaes is done i will take her out to the bookstore where she will be happy to sign all the copies of this party will want to buy. speaking of that, she wanted me to let you know, and i am apt to let you know that the

graphic addition is now three weeks of the top of the amazon list in the new york times list for graphic books. amity shlaes is chair of the calvin coolidge memorial foundation based at the birthplace of president coolidge in vermont. the forgotten man graphic addition. the only graphic edition of her best seller. she also came and spoke at our reading festival. she is also the author of coolidge would debuted at number three on the new york times best-seller list. she writes a column for forbes, teaches at nyu stern school of business and has served for over the years as a columnist of the financial times and for its and believe she is also a fellow with their sister library that george w. bush presidential center down in dallas. everyone, please welcome amity shlaes. [applause]

>> i am going to push this back. can you hear me? okay. if you cannot hear me or there is something wrong with the audio, stop me. i am so happy to be here today. i will ask mr. clarke to give me that put tow. and i am grateful to mr. clarke a mile i have no long time working on various projects. this library is just an awesome library. every one of assess the same job, to share information about presidents and history. in no library has been as pleasant to work with as this one over time. so i am here to tell you a story, basically describes a work project. i am almost like a contractor, an architect and builder telling you our bill the certain house to about miami your to hear how your

building your houses, how you tell your stories. i know some people in the room are authors themselves as well. questions you have educators, we as authors fail as we fail to produce work that educators can use. we'll let you down so you can't do your work. so these are some of the things that i would like to talk to you about the day. at this picture up here because it is kind of fun. here we are at the franklin roosevelt library. before i launch into how i wrote a graphic novel with a brilliant artist i thought i would give you president roosevelt and ask you how you think -- let's see cover how many of you think he is to meet in this picture? did i caricature and too badly? raise your hand if he thinks he's too mean. does anyone -- know what? does anyone think he is too nice?

does anyone have an objection to the cigarette? [inaudible] >> some people said we drew their wrong kind of cigarette holder. did we get it wrong? so when we first drew this picture he had no pupils of his eyes. so it was sort of more blank it sort of more plank. he was unreliable because you couldn't see anything behind the glasses. and the artist who is head genius and i talked back and forth. and get the impression that it made him too creepy. it didn't like it. my name with this particular book was to convey knowledge, not just opinion. i don't think roosevelt was a creep.

and when you have a creepy looking president, that attracts some readers who like violence. you know, did they like shades of gray? it's much harder to have characters in between in the book like this. as the trade off. we're thinking of doing a book that as cannibalism and it. camels might sell a line. the issue of jamestown, early american settlements since when people did not have enough food. paul knows that the things with violence sell better. here we are. we settled on this. i would describe him. if we were to give an adjective, mischievous which i am at peace with because i do kind of thing president roosevelt was mischievous

these were hard calls. i am not an artist. i am a bookworm. but i felt like -- and i learned a lot to my would say, from the artists and from this process about the president's, about how to depict them, but history and so on. thank you for listening. now i am going to go back to the beginning. so how does -- what are we trying to do? we're trying to reach more people or reach ourselves. they believe -- may be be like. this story begins partly here at this library. it was the first reading festival, something like that, for this book which is my history of the great depression. along but for intellectual arguments. i am free market. went back to the 1930's.

maybe the new deal did not help the economy enough. inured by the way president hoover's work, and that was a bunch of content, mostly economic and historical, and it was executed in this book and it is all right. we are all proud of it. my friend, the author, all others work together. so it was translated into a few languages. and what you about that. i think that we fail if we only right old print books that they don't read. and i could see that millions of young people were not going to read this up, that they turned away. i see that from my experience at the new york university's stern school of business. they can make awesome power points. they would die laughing looking at this because it is so primitive.

they are not appear eager readers. they are more analytic and interactive. here are smart people i would like to get to with some knowledge i have acquired through research. i am failing to do so. i am going to try and make a book they read them going to try and make a cartoon book. i do not have as lines. i am sorry to say that. some of you may know i cartoon book called mouse. does anyone know this but? lets talk about it briefly. my husband is here. he was the editor long ago of a newspaper called the forward. there was a cartoon -- where are you? all right. and there was a curtain -- there was an editor there who like curtains. and seth, who was a good editor. i would not say either one

of us were especially interested, so much potential one of the artists who was running in the foreword, the english-language forward had worked on this cartoon story where of the jews were mice and the polls were police. and the germans or cats. and my first reaction to that was offensive. that is offensive. someone who was part of those three things. it is offensive. we are animals. that was a mouse. and in the indy did use our mice. and what i saw looking and what apparently millions of others saw was you could tell the story of the holocaust your cartoons. a very serious piece of material. that was the insight. we'll watch cartoons as kids or read them.

and i think that the cartoon medium might even be better for a topic as difficult as the holocaust. there is not a lot of graphic murder, if you recall. some terrible hangings. it it was more by illusion. i began to notice that cartoons were good for hard topics. persepolis, a book about the iranian revolution in cartoon. again, very difficult topic. there is some torture, mostly not depicted, but mostly eluded to end at polk millions of people, millions of people bought it, millions of kids knew about it. this is an interesting medium dated it is not just for fun or even for a basic material. it is for the material like economics. >> of a round looking for their artists, for gunmen in

graphics and reid added talk to one man and he put it best. and this is known to us. one of the people that goes up to white river junction where there is i cartoon colony. he said, cartoons are they gateway drug to contents. i love that. i am going to tweeted. i tweeted it. every three months i tweeted again. that is true. whether you are wrestling and not it is true. was talking to the former education secretary. first i read the class a affiliate in cartoon. then i read, i don't know, some kind of shortened bill. and i read the real thing in english. and never got to that a lot of us in that way.

we do the big river. i was intrigued. i found an artist. i want to give him a lot of time. my complicated book about the great depression in cartoon. she lives in canada. the cover of this book. already published. these are men marching. and mouse has mice marching. and i like the way that the mice did march. a french flap. men marching, great depression. the thought of that. the men marching it is no accident. kind of european. i think you can say that his parents or family came from

russia, lived in other places. this kind of colorful, grown-up cartoon book or non tunneled cartoon book is much more accepted overseas. maybe some of you know. a grown-up book. they don't think it is a dumbing down. a certain issue here with smart people especially who think that you stop reading curches when you are in fourth grade, right? when you reach high-school reading of all you are so -- some genius. they consider it babyish. it like a stroller or a walker, something they got past. but they don't think that way. i became convinced i was not going to think that way because many grown-ups like this kind of thing just the way they like movies. asians and main gap. anyway, paul and i went along. that is some of the things that we drew in some of the errors. and professor clark here is going to let me know how many minutes i have from

time to time. .. >> they were pro-tariff. but hoover particularly knew better because he'd lived in london, he'd lived in asia, so he knew how key trade was to increase in prosperity. and yet he kind of talked himself out of vanity into signing smoot holly, although he

didn't want to be overridden, and it contributed to one of the factors that made the great depression great. it may well be in the exhibit over here in the library, the exhibit about history. so we said how can we show that hoover goofed by signing smoot-holly? of all people, he should have hesitated more. and we look for imagery, and we know that hoover played with medicine balls. that was his sport. like a big, heavy ball. dr. boone found him a medicine ball, and he would heave it around with whatever staff were lucky enough to play with him. and-kind of, you know, a -- and it was kind of, you know, a little bit funny. a non-young person, man or woman, acting macho about sports and acting out on that. and so we played that out on this page. and this is too small for you to

see, and that's one problem with the book, it's even too small on the page, but you can see hoover in the bottom row of the frame, he's thinking he can catch the ball, but actually what happens is he gets knocked over by it. and that's what happened with smoot-holly. and the aide says, oh, sir, how are you? [laughter] and we tried -- so this is the way of capturing the goofiness of it all ask and also the foul -- and also the foul, the goofy error and then the tragedy that were the steps that led to the great depression. one of many, many bad decisions that caused the great depression. so this is a picture, we had all kinds of people to draw. i was eager to, again, economics. this is a scene with john maynard keynes. it's hard to read from far away, but keynes wrote to roosevelt a number of times. we think of keynes as being -- and people are not always the cartoon that we contended, right? we think of keynes as being on roosevelt's side because keynes

was for stimulus, john maynard keynes of england, he's basically the father of all modern stimulus impulses as well. but, in fact, keynes was a very subtle guy, and in this particular letter that he wrote to roosevelt, and he really did, he's saying you shouldn't be so mean to business because then business will be too tired and worn out to hire. so this is about the later '30s when you have politically-overyeted prosecutions -- oriented prosecutions. we had a superhero in this book, it was the utilities industry. so cains is writing, and he says to roosevelt, you're wrong to think they're evil villains or wolves, really businessmen are domestic animals. you should herd them. they're not your enemy. you should make use of them. and then keynes laughs at his own joke. now, more details about this page, we were at pains to be accurate. we looked at china what they had

at this time. these words were mostly written in a letter that was printed, i think, in the times even. you can see how much work was put into it. i, you know, we have another theme where we use the china as well and have jokes about drips of money where there are drips of tea. there's a lot of punning. if you hate puns, you won't like cartoons. puns are an acquired taste for some of us, they're acquired for me, but i see people respond to them, and that's part of the story. each one of these page is the is like a scene from a lay with a little joke at the end. sometimes it's a lame joke, but that helps the reader along. now we come to something serious. how do you depict iconic images from the new deal? of course, high grant mother, perhaps the most -- migrant mother, perhaps the most important photograph of the period. and you probably had a show here about this. ten minutes, you think?

had a show about this, right, at some point? this was a photograph by dorr thea lang, great photographer. and what i discovered in my print book in the research including here at this library be was i hadn't realized it, i thought she worked for "life" magazine. she didn't. she worked for the government, the photographer. and she had a rather specific assignment, to capture poverty in photographs. she worked for a man named roy striker who was very good at visual images. he would do a great cartoon book now, and he did great ones, and he sent out the photographers 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. was florence hungry? probably. was there a sort of i want to say a propaganda aim too? yes. so that's what i cop fur in

"for-- capture in "forgotten man," the book. so we tried to draw that, and here's what paul came up with. i think he drew her beautifully. he has great ability to capture pain. migrant mother wasn't having a good day, right? this was in a pea field in california, but paul also drew the payments before and after where the photographer got the assignment, and she ran off and photographed. and then what the photographs were used for. they were given to regular magazines, but they were also used to document the need for federal spending. that's what this economics we call public choice theory, i was looking for ways to picture it. so this is a long way around to conveying economics in pictures. there he is. we talked about that. this is another hero in my book. we have a cast of characters that we added at the last minute. when you do your graphic novel, i truly hope you don't do your cast of characters and your sort of educational info as an afterthought, but you build it

into the business plan and the time commitment because i feel our book -- please give me your advice -- needs even more and more careful after material for education. this is the hero for me, william graham sum they are. the whole concept of the forgalten man, we think of roosevelt as the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid, that's who roosevelt said. and think even the audio of that may be over there in the library exhibit. in the period that roosevelt was living, there was another forgotten man who was known to them but mostly not us, that was the forgotten man described by a professor at yale named william graham sumner. sumner spoke of a different forgotten man. he spoke, he had a little algebra. he said a wants to help x, the man at the bottom. and b wants to help x. but sometimes there's a problem when a and b get together and coerce c, a third party, into

funding their government project for x. c is the forgotten man, that's what sumner said, the man who pays. and all throughout the '30s what i discovered in my research was the americans debated, whose forgotten man is it? is it the homeless man or the taxpayer? i have the better forgotten man, yours hurts might be, but the sumner story is lost to us because we didn't get it in our education. so i did be sure to bring it in, and i'll show you later. anyway, these are more pictures. this is the soviet union, some of my characters went to russia to have a look. they weren't, mostly, traitors. they weren't spies. but they were definitely influenced by what they saw in russia which seemed promising at the time. this is rex tugwell who was one of the most lovable and tyesiest new dealers -- feistest new

dealers. this is really about the romance of the economy of scale. big sounds great. a lot of us love the idea of china because it's so big. sometimes big isn't better. and so the same phenomenon was going on in russia. this is trotzky which i think paul due exquisitely in part because he's part russian, and again, because you get an idea of the realism of it. an actual russian wrote it back into russian. i hope it's accurate, i bet it is because the russian scholar did it. and the quote at the end where trotzky says americans, he gets disgusted because americans chew gum, and it grossed him out. he actually did say that, trotzky. not of this meeting, but in a diary he wrote about his time until america when he was a younger man living in, i believe, the bronx, right? somewhere in new york -- >> [inaudible] >> somewhere above, you know,

above 96th street. and so we were at pains to use, this was a real meeting that took place. that was a real quote. he was really disgusted with them. they really had a fight, but we had to novelize it a bit because sometimes we didn't know exactly what they said. this is an advisor to the president telling the president that job sharing isn't always economics. that's another -- we have this debate today. and this is really a scene about when you as an expert know something's wrong, but you also know the president is operating in politics, and he has to make his own decisions. in econ, i'm getting too serious, but in econ we tend to know that job sharing doesn't increase productivity. it's not necessarily a great idea for the economy, but politicians of both parties up do it because we love to give people jobs, right? so this is a debate between tugwell and roosevelt. as you know, tugwell was eventually -- left the administration.

he was too controversial for them. this is a union theme. that's john l. lewis. does anyone know what i'm talking about when john l. lewis punched the car carpenters' unin head? that was a famous scene when the industrial unions came into power, and we wanted to draw how frightening it was, you know? so this, you can see lewis is very tall. he's a wonderful man to draw because he was so big and interesting. this is sort of a display of union power subsequent to passage of the wagner act. this is a simple page where we replied that sumner idea of who the forgotten man is. i think in cartoons you need to give readers breaks which is different from print books, and i'm just going to show you one more thing. the question of how do you convey narrative, i have narrative all over the place. i think what i learned from paul and in doing this book is you have to tell the stories one at a time. there was a fake case in the new

deal -- famous case in the new deal called scheckter. scheckter poultry, right? little chicken butchers, and the -- >> [inaudible] >> right. and -- right. in brooklyn. do you know them? >> [inaudible] >> we can talk. [laughter] so they, they broke the rules of one of the national recovery administration codes, and they were prosecuted, and they were actually targeted sort of like al capone. and 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 or cause it to be drawn, and this is a joke that the artist came up with. the health inspectors coming to inspect the health of the poultry, and the health inspector is, cough, cough, sick. now, that's the kind of thing that you would add that i had hesitation to add.

we didn't do it much. i think it kind of works. what we're trying to get at is we're certain is true was the inspector was egregious. he doesn't have any eyes. i had no hesitation the make him like a villain because he's a minor character. he came in and inspected the scheckters, and they were scared because i was trying to convey what it's like when you're investigated by a regulate err. and we all know this whether it's a tax regulator or someone checking your license, it's a creepy feeling, right? so we have to draw them, and we have here one of the selectors' friends -- scheckters' friends telling the regulator, be nice. and one of the things that happened at i actually discovered researching at an nyu library was the government worked very hard to intimidate the scheckters. so this actual line is in the testimony. the government says in the trial, no, you're not an expert.

how do you know you're right? and the scheckters were scared and so were their friends. and so that just gives you an idea. you tell one story, we probably had 65 frames just about scheckter poultry. a famous case, wonderful case. the scheckters won, the supreme court sided with the scheckters. the justices began to use bad puns themselves and said the new deal must -- the nra must fall be, sorry. that's a bone and sinewu -- sinew, so they used a metaphor. and as you know, roosevelt got angry. you know the rest of the history. i'm going to stop there, this is the cover, and talk to you about what -- tell me what you want to talk about. and thank you for your time and hearing about this experiment that paul and harpercollins and i did together. [applause]

>> [inaudible] please come up and ask amity your question, very open to talking more about -- [inaudible] >> i'm just curious 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 -- if you really were going fast with one artist, 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. and it's very, as far as i can tell, the process is extremely unforgiving when it comes to revision. we, we didn't, we storyboarded it out as if you're writing a movie, so there's a screenplay, but 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 pep

sill so you as -- pencil so you as the content author can think about that. so i'd say two years really, one to two years. et took four, but -- it took four but that was just because it was the first time for me. and we had some tough decisions to make. in the initial go round, you'll see there's an adapter here named chuck dixon, and he wrote it in a very march of dimes fashion, and then the -- march of time. and i didn't want like that. i didn't like that. it might have even made the book clearer. so we ended up going in another direction with the book, and we made one of the characters from the 1930s wendell willkie. he's is the superhero of this book tell the story, and that required a lot of -- i don't know, that's the novelized part because he has to say, gee, i remember when -- and, of course, i don't have that in a

transcript, him saying it. i know a lot about willkie, and i know he went from thinking one thing to another over the course of the 1930s, so i was comfortable doing it, but that was a real difference from most standard adaptations that we actually a bit, you know, sort of like wizard of oz, if when you make the movie, is it like the book? it's the same kind of question. that, too, took time. >> amity, you showed the one page with rex tugwell talking about make work schemes to fdr. and in that the lower two panels fdr's shown in silhouette, and i noticed in the book that there's a lot of fdr either in silhouette or not shown completely. is that sort of like a throwback to when in that time period in a movie you would never see

president fully, or is it a commentary on, the dr -- on fdr being instatute and why there's like a papier-mache sphinx portraying fdr over in the museum for such a talkative guy? >> oh, thank you. that's david, 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, right? in different directions the country took. i think about fdr the following: actually, i don't want fdr to be in my book too much because the economics that makes 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. and there's so many books where roosevelt is the whole story. what about the other people and

what was at work? the bureaucracy was at work, this theory, public choice theory, parkinson's law, all that. so i tried to minimize roosevelt without demeaning himment -- him. so roosevelt is really dark here not because i darken him, but because he's basically any president. any president will hear there economists good advice in economics and ignore it because he needs votes, it's not reality, something worse could happen if he does -- presidents are realistic people. so supposing i do job sharing. it's not perfect economics, it wouldn't win a nobel prize, however, it's better than some of the other things that might be done, and that could be either party. so i tried to just minimize him. the issue of his ability came up, i decided that we would not ignore it, but certainly not play it up because it distracted from our story which is of what happened to the economy and the people in the economy in the great depression.

so we tried to do that respectfully, without losing our focus. >> [inaudible] i actually saw your book in a local library, the graphic version and the nongraphic version. of course -- [inaudible] graphic version first because flipped through it and get an idea of what the nongraphic version was like. if we read the nongraphic versus the graphic version, would we get any different impressions of the situation? and do you have any preference for which one we should read? >> oh, that's a great question. which child does mom like better. [laughter] oh. [laughter] i know. i hope i never say, right? i like them both. there's more material -- for the

economic mind if you're going farther and you're, like, well, how does she deal with it when england went off the gold standard, what is her position, i want to fight with her? which is, of course, why some people read books, they go in there armed for -- they read pugilistically, right? they want to fight with you, and that's part of the way they learn and think. the print book has more material. so you want to know, you 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, and i wanted to share some of that clarity with pictures. so i think, you know, when you think back, the contract for "forgotten" was signed in 2000. when i started to write a book about the great depression, it was so long ago, a decade and a half. and i didn't know what i thought about the great depression, and

i had a lot of people i didn't want to fend, right? i went on this whole trip of learning. by now i've thought about it quite a bit, and that's why i turned to graphics, but it's a great question. hopefully, people will go from the cartoon book, gateway drug to content, to content. it could be be my contempt, it could be the -- content the, it could be the opposite view. i mean, i'd love some insight from you on teaching, you know, teachers -- i know there are teachers in the room teaching, you have to follow the curriculum, the kids have to take tests. but if there's anything that you think you could use because, of course, we'll make other graphic novels. please speak now. oh, this you go. >> if you're -- [inaudible]

>> do you have anything in either of you books on the roosevelt recession of 1937? >> essentially, when this book opened -- >> of 1937. >> this book opened with a boy who killed himself whose name was william. he was 13 years old, and he hanged himself. and so it's kind of a, what you say, a sort of trick opening because it goes on and on about the sad story of the boy happening himself because they didn't have food. he was reluctant to ask for food. it was in the new york times. and this story was in 1937. i used it at the beginning of the book which -- and then flashed back to the beginning to make the following point: the depression was a terrible understudy depression, and my economic work, what i teach at university and so on, is about why the depression lasted ten years instead of five. so, and the answer is, well, one is labor policy; two is

uncertain people versus experimentation sounds great, but it scares markets, and people don't always hire when they're concerned about uncertainty. and there were monetary and credit aspects to the depression. it was in the depression as well. so it's those three, four, five explanations are detailed in the print book and are marqueed in this book. >> do you have any thoughts of a specific cause of the '37 recession? >> well, the area where i can add value and one of the gratifying things of this 15-year process is many, many economists have come to me and say i have data for this, thank you for writing the narrative. is that the labor policy of the wagner act was not benign. it made the labor price go too high. and if you read the new york times, it says, that's fibro, because the -- that's fine because the economy will each out. so nice work if you can get it, they failed to employ.

and now, for example, an economist named casey mulligan at the university of chicago has written about labor policy now and how that's contributed to the meager quality of the recovery. but the labor component of the later '30s trouble was never studied by anyone in particular. now it's coming out in many, many books, and forgotten man is a narrative for that. the economist i respect most is an adviser to the fed, he teaches at ucla, and he's about to publish a huge book with lance armstrong -- i believe, large sections on the depression within the depression. how making labor expensive punishes people by forcing unemployment. >> time for one more quick question. >> to your point before, as a baby boomer and a retired teacher, what i always had

trouble was convincing kids -- [inaudible] toward the suburban school. to these pictures really give you an indication or give readers an indication how much poverty there really was? >> well, i was showing you pages that did various things, you know, that were hard to do. i think they do. i mean, do you know the poem by florence converse "what's the meaning of this queue," of men going all down the avenue, the lines you'll see when you go to the photos? we have a beautiful depiction of that. we have a beautiful depiction of the stock market crash and the hunger. and, of course, william, the boy who hanged himself, he was hungry. so i do think the poverty especially of the early '30s gets adequate coverage, and it was real poverty. in one denies that -- no one denies that people were hungry or that monetary policy was off in the early '30s. >> thank you. >> thank you.

>> [inaudible] [applause] >> [inaudible] outside the bookstores. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv asked, what are you reading this summer? >> well, i'm reading a varied list this summer. i try the keep a lot of things going, and one of the books i'm reading is called "lincoln's boys." i think it provides the perspectives of the two secretaries. reading the founding brothers which is the group that founded our country and how they did some things that are off the normal record, so that was really interesting to me. one that is sort of interesting in the lighter context is a book

called roosevelt's secret war, and it's about the starting of how he started that in a hodgepodge kind of way, so that's made an interesting read especially in light of all the things going on currently with nsa and things we have, puts it in per spectivity. another one i'm reading is obama's enforcer, probably my most political book of the summer, but i think it goes to the heart of what we're dealing with in congress and the article i powers in congress and the executive branch as well. one i'm also reading for the historical that is really interesting for me is the white house ghost, and it's about speech writers and how they have developed in the modern times since roosevelt forward and hearing how from a personal sense as a congressman how i interact with the tokes who help me -- folks who help me with speeches see how presidents interact with their speech department. and one i'm getting ready to read about a local writer, and

it's getting ready to be made into a made-for-tv movie, so we're excited about that as well. >> what are you reading this summer? tell us what's on your summer reading list. tweet us @booktv, post it to our facebook page or send us an e-mail, booktv@c-span.org: >> charles cobb, former field secretary for the student nonviolent coordinating committee or sncc, recounts the possession is and use of firearms by civil rights activist for self-protection during the 1950s and '60s. this is about an hour, 15 minutes. ..