club. my thanks and the commonwealth's club thanks to wesley clark for his service to our country, for sharing his thoughts so openly and enthusiastically with us and for making a contribution to political tolerance and compromise in our country. >> corey, thanks a lot. [applause] [laughter] >> i want the last word here. [laughter] look, we have to come together as a nation. we've got to stop this dysfunctional politics in america. and if we come together, we can put this country on the right direction. i've laid out a blueprint for it, we should hold our political leaders responsible for coming together. that should be the standard. [applause] >> and on that note, this meeting of the commonwealth club is adjourned! [applause]

>> you're watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. >> this weekend on booktv arthur brooks is live on "in depth." jason so kill sits down on "after words," nick childs and robinship advise african-americans on how to deal with police and the criminal justice system in the u.s., robert baer provides a history of political assassinations and a literary tour of waco, texas. check out our full schedule online, booktv.org. >> you give me your name and the title of the book and tell me how you came to the project. >> hi, i'm lawrence knutson, the title of the book is "a wave in the white house," i came to the

project because i am a retired reporter for the associated press and in my last three or four years i exploited a personal interest and wrote a column about american and washington history. that led me to the publisher of this book which is the white house historical association. we started talking about it and someone said, why not? and the why not, the result of why not is this book. >> um, what was the most interesting thing about this project for you? >> i think, i consider it a back door to presidential history. back door because probably i am not qualified to walk through the front door as a historian. i am a journalist. but the back door brought you to a story about, basically, every president from george washington

on. sources for it were mostly newspapers, but they also were presidential libraries and archives, the library of congress, presidential memoirs. but newspapers and news magazines, there was a news account of a fishing trip by george washington and thomas jefferson back in the late 1780s in which the newspaper wished the president good speed to recover from an a illness -- an illness and saying that his good catch of sea bass and the fresh ocean air probably would do the trick, and it did. >> what was your favorite escape point or retreat? what did you think was one of the most fascinating places? >> one of the, what, one of the favorite retreats? >> yes. >> probably abraham lincoln's use of the soldiers' home, a cottage of the soldiers' home here in washington where he

spent at least one quarter of his entire presidency. he came in early spring, left in late fall, loved it because it gave him some peace and quiet away from the turmoil of the civil war and job seekers at the white house. and it, it was really a respite where he spent a full length of time and committed daily to his job. >> were there any places or trips that surprised you? >> lots of things. ronald reagan's ranch in california was a place, he called it in the ranch in the -- the ranch in the sky because once you were up there, you had a double view. you could look back and see the mountains and look the other direction and see sailboats on the pacific ocean. >> 2014 is wrapping up, and as

the year ends, many publications have compiled their lists of best books of the year. here are some of the nonfiction books that amazon has on their list: >> i was talking to my mom a few years back, and she told me she was being hounded by a debt

collector. she said i don't owe the money he says i owe, but i think i'm going to start paying him so he'll stop harassing me. my mom is no wilting lily, so i started googling it and saw there was a lot of this kind of going on and that, actually, the epicenter of debt collection in general in the united states was buffalo, or it was one of the big hubs. so i had in my head that i was going to do a story actually from the collector's perspective and what's it like to collect debt, what are the challenges you face, what's your life like. so i pitched the story to the new yorker just kind of bare bones saying what do you think about this, i'm from buffalo, i could probably get somebody to talk to me. my editor said, great, 5,000 words, when can you get me copy? >> and that's a look at some of amazon's top books for 2014. to link to the full list and see other publication selections, visit booktv.org. >> but you can see in the visual

representation of wonder woman that same influence; that is, the influence of suffrage and feminism and the birth control movement. here on the left is a panel of wonder woman doing what always she's doing which is trying to escape from bonds of chains which was because she's an -- [inaudible] for the emancipated woman. she has to emancipate herself in every story, so in order for her to emancipate her, we have to tie her up. so the publisher's like, hmm -- >> there are some other reasons we might want to tie her up. >> having to do with the boots. [laughter] here on the right is another drawing by harry g. peter which makes thattal gory quite -- that allegory quite clear. marson always said wonder woman was a work of scholarship. so anyway, here you can see harry g. peter doing that same work but making it visible.

and in the center is a completely typical suffrage cartoon from the 19 teens which you can see, obviously, the influence of that iconography in which suffrage is forever women being tied up and breaking free. until women gained the right to vote, they were essentially the slaves of men and that we needed to represent women in this fashion in order to alert the way in which the condition of being a disenfranchised woman was a condition of slavery. this drawing was done by a feminist cartoonist who published as lou rogers because she was told she'd never get anything published if she didn't get -- if she didn't have a man's name. is the reason i want to point that out is harry g. peter was a staff artist in the 19 teens too. he and lou rogers both contributed to judge's

pro-suffrage page, and it featured a cartoon in the center panel of every page. so harry g. peter was a former suffrage cartoonist. he brought to that, that job the qualification of knowing that there are women fighting for the right to vote. so the biographical story of marson illustrates that tie, but even peter's own visual iconography and his own life helps us to see just how much wonder woman is, i would argue, really the missing link in the history of feminism in the 20th century. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> welcome to waco, texas, on booktv. located along the river, the city was founded in 1849 and soon after the waco suspension bridge was built. cattle herds traveling along the chism trail to cross the river.

today waco has a population of almost 130,000 people and is home to baylor university, the oldest institute of higher learning in the state. with the help of our time warner cable partners, for the next hour we'll learn about its history and literary scene from local offers. we begin our special feature with robert darden on the role of gospel music during the civil rights movement: ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> i can only speak for myself as to why i think gospel music

resonates to such a degree to now. the music from the '30s and '40s no less than the very current gospel artists right now, seems to me, has a certain almost undefinable something. i would say black music in general has a underpinning of the pain and freedom struggle of african-americans which continues through to this day. why it never really goes out of style. it has this longing and this resonance of a deeper pool of emotion than songs about puppy love and songs about why i have a bigger car than somebody else does or -- can't match. when you're talking about a music that sustained a entire

race of people through some of the most brutal times in american history, civil war era and before right through the civil rights movement and on, you're dealing with a music with a gravity and an emotional core that makes it more potent. one of the fascinating things is i started working on what would become nothing but love in god's water, the influence of black music on the civil rights movement, was that from the beginning the spirituals were really protest spirituals. so many of them had a double voicedness about them that meant that, well, on the surface they might be about heaven, they might be about escaping to the north, they might be about escaping to the north, that the two messages were intertwined unless you were part of this inner circle that knew the coded words and knew what it was really about it'd go right over your head. you can sing these songs in

front of the cruel overseer, and he wouldn't know that you were defying him. spir churls are, in many ways, the first acts of defiance by an end slaved people. so we have that. and that they were sung for multiple purposes right up through reconstruction where they would help to give the release and the hope for better in the future, but at the same time to rally your people, to help them sustain through bad times, to teach them. there are counting songs and alphabet songs and sometimes songs with specific details on how to escape to the north which is almost like a map for people who can't use maps but who can see the great dipper to know they go north. the other thing we've learned through the black gospel music restoration project here at baylor as we began to receive the vinyl to be digitized, to be saved, we began turning over the b sides of the 45s that we received. now, first off, gospel music was not widely heard in the white

community. and what it was, it would only be the hits, if that. but the b or flip side would be heard even less. and what we discovered quickly was how many of the b side songs were directly related to the civil rights movement. >> here's a freedom song for all you freedom fighters out there everywhere. and when you sing, remember the wonderful ones who lost their dedicated lives for this precious presence and won't be around to see it through. now sing, sing, every one of you. ♪ well, sometime i wonder is there a freedom in this world? ♪ ♪ sometimes i wonder, is there a freedom in this world? ♪ sometime i wonder, is there a freedom in this world? ♪ well, then where, tell me where, where is freedom? >> since there's very few databases and none of them are complete on all gospel music -- we didn't know that. we didn't know the sheer number

of songs that had very overt song like "there ain't no segregation in heaven," type songs. at a time when possessing one of those songs, much less singing it, was a very dangerous thing in the south. singing that sort of song out loud, well, that's a risk. so it kind of continued this continuum of the double voicedness, the flip side of the 45s like the old protest spirituals in that way. and then, finally, the much better-chronicled freedom songs, all of which are based either on old protest spirituals and in a few cases old union songs like which side are you on or like a tree planted by the water. so when the civil rights movement begins, they have this deep, long pool of music that has been successful in empowering african-americans and calming african-americans down when they've within beaten and

a-- they've been beaten and attacked by overwhelming forces with guns and they don't have them, by lifting them up when they need to be lifted up and a dozen different things that the spirituals can do. once again, they start pulling from this pool, and that is the first music. and there are evidence of these protest spirituals, what will become freedom songs, as early as the montgomery bus boycott. it's not well chronicled, but they're there. you've got a lot of time walking, you've got a lot of time to sing. and in the beginning because it begins in the churches in montgomery, there's probably more of the old school hymns. very quickly as the young people get involved, they dip into this pool to pull out and resurrect the old protest spirituals. well, let's take ma hail ya jackson, who turns out was very active in the civil rights movement, although it's in very few of the books. ♪ ♪

>> jackson provided music when it was needed, when they were at their witses end in chicago and had just been beaten and stoned and attacked by that angry mob in cicero and other places in chicago, they're huddled in a basement on the west side bleeding and in pain. she drives through all the rioting to come there and sing to these artists. when they're in trouble financially in montgomery and birmingham, she sends money. she sings civil rights songs at every one of her concerts when at a time she was one of the few black voices that white people would hear, and it could hurt her career. so you look at the great taylor branch biographies, and she's mentioned a few dozen times throughout, as she should be,

she's there and stuff, and her political affect, she was on first-name basis with everybody from harry truman to lbj. sang at the white house, was -- campaigned for -- but her own autobiography had hundreds of listings of where she was and what she sang and why she sang it. and she's just the best known. there's a whole bunch of other people who did that much and more. never financially did more. she was the lone black artist who could afford to do that at the time. the ward sisters to a degree, but very few others could do it. they were there. they were marching on the front lines. they were providing the music, they were giving where they could. they were giving benefit concerts. that's never been really chronicled the way i think it deserved to be. so when we started nothing but love, we went to the places where the movement happened and tried to track down not just the gospel singers, but pastors, the

deejays, the people who were on the front lines, the members of the mass choirs and said what did you sing, where did you sing it, why did you sing it. what were you getting from this that compelled you to sing this in the face of the dogs and the water cannons and the hate you were experiencing on a daily basis? and we went to birmingham very early in the project, and as people talked about those exciting nights for those months and months where they were having the mass meetings every night that would last three hours, so tell me ant the average mass -- about the average mass meeting. well, we'd have about 15, 20 minutes of announcements, we need you to do this, but don't do that, we need another hundred people to be arrested tomorrow at 16th street, and then we'd have about 45 minutes of preaching, fred shuttles worth, king, somebody, and then we'd sing for two hours. so at the most important time in

african-american history where they're changing the entire culture of the united states, they're changing against a culture that is stacked against them, they have no rights under law, they have no protection from the federal government, they're being bombed in birmingham and attacked everywhere, these meetings -- two-thirds of them are spent singing. something must be being accomplished if you're singing gospel songs and protest spirituals and freedom songs for two hours out of three. and the more i talked to the singers about it, well, we had no choice, we had to. we had to sing. we did it for a variety of reasons; to lift us up when we were down, to calm us down when we were angry, to do evangelism, to bring people into the movement. it was the best show e in town. the best voices in birmingham sang for free every night. who wouldn't want to come? if i missed church on sunday, i'm going to get a better church on thursday because i'm going to hear mavenmy brown and -- mamie

brown and the mass choir. it is accomplishing something that is hard to quantify, and we spent two books trying to detail what happened and where and why. and then in the conclusion show why this was a transformative agent. not just a transcendent one, but transformative in a way that changed the hearts and minds of angry white people. and inspired black people to be a part of it and suffer what they suffered. why wouldn't i want to save that music? why wouldn't i want to chronicle what they're doing? it's more than history, it transcends history. ♪ ♪ this is my life, yes, it is. ♪ you know that i'm going to let

it shine. >> the black gospel music restoration project began while i was writing "people get ready: new history of black gospel music." as i was researching and writing about these songs that were the foundation of most american popular music in many ways, i would discover that all these people would cite a song, and then i would go to try to hear it, and it was not available. i couldn't get it on ebay, couldn't get it on amazon, it was not available. and went on over and over again. so i, at the end of the writing of the book, i contacted a few of my friends i'd made while writing the book who are big collectors, and i said what percentage of the golden age of gospel music, what percentage of that music is available to the public right now? and e we all put our heads together, and we came up with a figure of around 75% of it is

not available. either doesn't exist, it's been destroyed, it's been lost, tied up in litigation, or the companies that own it have no intention of releasing it. and a number of factors came up with that figure. i was so angry about that because this is the music of my childhood. the soundtrack to my life had been gospel music. but i'd only heard such a narrow portion of it. so i sat down and pounded out an angry editorial and sent it to "the new york times" which gets about a hundred a day, and lo and behold, they ran it in february 2005. and the next day a gentleman named charles royce from new york called and said i think what you're talking about is important. you figure out a way to help save this music, and i'll pay for it. and with the library's technical help, came up with a state of the art digitization lab,

scanners, cataloging, storing, all the things we need and came back with a pretty scary figure. sent it to mr. royce, and he sent us a check. so it began partly out of my frustration and partly out of mr. royce's generosity of trying to save something he didn't know much about. another white guy, episcopal in connecticut can, saw that there was value here and wanted to be part of it. since then we've had a number of wonderful donors who have helped continue to build the process, the pritchard family foundation and others have helped pay for things as we didn't know we needed then and is should have asked for more money and have come in and stepped forward. and now it's the largest initiative in the world to identify, acquire, digitize, catalog and eventually make accessible this fast-vanishing legacy of vinyl from gospel music. this music is part of an almost apostolic succession that this music is being sung now as was

sung back and before the civil war days, and if you listen carefully on bbc international news or al-jazeera, you're going to hear freedom songs being supping right now in egypt and hong kong -- being sung right now in egypt and hong kong. i heard it sung in ferguson. i've heard it sung at every place where there is a group of people yearning to have the rights that are routinely afforded to everybody else and freedom. i want people as they read this book to know that i'm just trying to capture a snapshot of this music at this time and how it got from where it was to here. as this potent, powerful, transformative agent in american culture. ♪ ♪

>> and while in waco, we toured baylor university's armstrong browning library with director or rita patterson. >> robert and barrett browning were victorian poets. they were both born in the london area, met in 1845, '46, married in 1846 and lived for about 15 years in florence, italy. one of the things most familiar about elizabeth would be her novel poem "aurora lee" and then also especially the sonnets from the portuguese. she's well known for the 43rd sonnet which is widely used for greeting cards and

advertisements, how do i love thee, met me count the ways -- let me count the ways. i know everyone has heard that before. the collection came to baylor university in 1918 through the efforts of a.j. armstrong who was chairman of the english department from 1912-1952. and he was very enamored with browning's poetry, taught the browning course even before he came to baylor, but taught it probably yearly once he came here. he had started his own small browning collection and gave it to baylor in 1918. in the collection we have letters both by robert and elizabeth browning, letters that were written to them, books they actually owned, many art pieces that belonged to them, furniture, lots of memorabilia items. the collection just grew and grew. and at that time it was just

housed in the main library. it had its own room. but because there were so many items collected, dr. armstrong raised the money for this building. for today i've pulled out some samples of materials that we have here in the library, and i wanted to point out something that's one of my favorites. this is a sample of elizabeth barrett browning's material. it is a set that she prepared for the printer in order to publish the sonnets in 1850. inside are her hand-written sonnets. the interesting story about the sonnets from the portuguese, these were written as love sonnets from elizabeth to robert and done during their courtship time, 1845-1846, when they were published in 1850, elizabeth had

given the poems to to browning in 1849, and he thought they were some of the most beautiful sonnets he had ever read and thought they should be published. so she did prepare this set for the printer, and they called them sonnets from the portuguese as a way of veiling the fact that they were love sonnets from her to him. he did call her my little portuguese as a pet name. she did have a dark complexion. she was also interested in a portuguese poet. so sonnets from the portuguese, they also thought perhaps people would think they were translations from a portuguese poet. they were trying to veil it, but they were published in the back of elizabeth's poems of 1850, so it didn't take the public long to realize that they were love sonnets from elizabeth to

robert. then another thing that is very popular here and many of the scholars come to use is this other book of poetry written by elizabeth barrett browning, but what makes this one so particularly special is on the very back inside of the cover is a rough draft of sonnet v from sonnets for the portuguese. when we bought this notebook, we had no idea that this was in the back of the book, and we were very excited to find out that as far as we know this is the only rough draft of one of the sonnets that exists. also in the collection we have many of the books that belong to the brownings. i only have one sample here. this set belonged to robert browning. it is a carrying case, and it

contains greek classics. he would carry these small books around with him on the train, whenever he went to visit. we've jokingly called this robert browning's kindle. so as he would travel around, many times he was, would put an add dabbation inside -- an adaptation of where he read the book, what date it was. many times we pull these books for students to see, visiting scholars to see. also have an example of a manuscript that was written by robert browning. this particular one has a nice likeness of robert browning here on the left. we like for people who come here to learn that the brownings were great victorian poets to become more familiar with their works,

to maybe want to go out and read their poetry when they leave. we always have exhibitions up that are giving insights into maybe other people that the brownings knew, showing some materials that were in their collections. so we just want people to come and take away some new experience. >> during booktv's recent visit to waco, texas, we spoke with the author of "the first waco horror," patricia bernstein, who talks about the lynching of jesse washington which took place in that city in 1916. >> it is hard to imagine a an essentially modern-day town where our grandparents or great grandparents could have lived. it wasn't that long ago in 1916 where something like this could take place.

scholars called these events spectacle lynchings, and they took place mostly in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. now, one of the interesting aspects of this horrendous lynching is that it didn't occur in some little backwoods village where everybody was poor and ignorant, but it was in what the houston chronicle called in their editorial after the lynching the cultured, reputable town of waco that was known for its many institutions of higher education including not only baylor university, but two black colleges. in fact, it had the nickname of the athens of texas because there were so many institutions of higher education here. they also had a lot of libraries. waco society had always considered itself a little loftier, a little more civilized than other towns, so it was particularly ironic that in this prosperous, well-educated town with so many of life's amenities

that this incident could happen. well, the story of the waco lynching of jesse washington in 1916 really begins with the discovery of the body of lucy friar who was a farm woman who was his employer. he had not, he and his family had not been in the waco area for very long. they were itinerant farm laborers, but it was not only jesse washington -- himself 17 and mentally challenged -- who was plowing the fields and working for them, but it was also his parents lived in the little shack on the property with some other children. i think there was a younger brother, also a teenager, and some smaller children, and they were all doing some kind of work. and she was found at the door to the seed barn with her head bashed in. it looked like she'd been hit over the head really hard several times, and her clothes were somewhat disheveled also. and, of course, they called the investigating officers

immediately, and they looked around and noticed jesse washington had been nearby all afternoon plowing a closed-in field while the kids and mr. friar were off farther away from the house. and so they grabbed him, and one example of -- that might demonstrate the fact that he was mentally challenged is that he was upset at first when he was arrested, but then he just went to sleep in the back of the police car was what elizabeth freeman, the naacp investigator, was told. so they took him to the jail in waco, but they realized that a lynch mob might come after him there, so they took him on to the hillsborough jail north of here and then finally to the dallas jail, and at every one of these locations he was interrogated about the murder, and they were trying to elicit a confession from him. and he finally supposedly or allegedly, we really have no way of knowing what actually happened during those jail time

interviews, but allegeddedly he finally told them where the weapon was that he had killed her with, and it was a blacksmith's hammer, and it was found in some brush around one of the fields where he had been plowing, and it did have some blood on it and some pieces of cotton seed lint, so it appeared to them that it was the murder weapon. the trial took place only exactly one week after the murdered woman's body was found. it's hard to imagine a murder trial taking place that fast, but that didn't seem -- there didn't seem to be much interest in doing any real investigation in those days. so he was dragged into the courtroom. i think he was said to be mentally challenged, and he was only 17 years old. they said they had never been able to teach him to read or write, and it seems very apparent even from the meager record we have that he had very little understanding of even what was going on in the courtroom. they asked him if he wanted to plead guilty or not guilty, and

he mumbled something, and then he just said, yeah. so i don't think he really even quite knew what was happening. and it must have been terrifying because this relatively small courtroom was full of about 2500 people, and there were hundreds more filling the whole courthouse, milling around outside, climbing into trees outside. there were thousands of people in the immediate area all basically screaming for his blood. so it really was conducted much like a kangaroo court. there were six very young, very inexperienced attorneys assigned to represent him. they were all sons of very wealthy families here in waco guaranteed not to rock the boat. they never even met him until the night before the trial. and then the only advice they offered him was to tell him that it looked bad, and he should pray. and they never -- i think they asked one question of a witness during the trial. the courtroom was so packed that the jury members had to be

carried over the heads of other people in the courtroom, and then people had to be shooed out of their seats so they could be seated. and when the proceedings were done, it took less than an hour. the jury went out and, of course, came back in four minutes with a guilty verdict. and the judge began to write guilty and condemned to death or condemned to punishment -- he didn't even get to finish the word. the crowd had just been waiting for the proceedings to conclude, and they rose up, and one big, tall, young farmer basically climbed over everybody else and grabs jesse washington and hauled him into the little judge's office and down the back stairs and outside. and they tore his clothes off and dragged him down to the town square, and i think just about everybody, every man in waco tried to take some kind of pot shot at him. they hit him with bricks and clubs and 2x4s, and some people had knives. and by the time they got to the

town square, he was already covered with blood. as one paper said, he became the play thing of the mob. first some people said let's hang him from the bridge like we did the last fella who was lynched in 1905, and other voices said, no, that's not bad enough. he deserves something worse than that. and the truth was it was all planned. the mayor and the chief of police watched the whole thing from the mayor's comfortable second floor office at city hall, and they even had informed the most prominent commercial photographer in town, fred gildersleeve, to come and set up his equipment ahead of time. kindling and other flammable materials had been stashed near the center of the town square, so everyone knew what was going to the happen. and when he was finally, when he finally was dragged to the center of the square, they put a chain around his neck and threw the chain over the branch of a tree. and when he tried to pull the chain loose from his neck to be able to breathe, they cut his

fingers off. and he was mutilated, you know, in many different ways. and then they doused him in coal oil and started a fire at the base of the tree, and they would put him down in the fire and then pull the chain and raise him up out of the fire so more people could see what was happening. and every time they did that, a big cheer went up. as one reporter said, as if the crowd had just come from a football game where they had won a huge victory. and unfortunately, he was a very strong young man. it took him a while to die. at one point he even kicked himself off his funeral pyre, and they had to drag him back on. but finally all that was really left was a charred torso and a head and some bits of limbs, and someone came along on a white horse a couple of hours afterwards and dragged the -- lassoed the remains and dragged them around the street, and the head fell off and was put on the doorstep of a prostitute, and little boys pulled out the teeth

and sold them for $5 apiece. people were even fighting for links of the chain, for twigs from the tree which was completely destroyed in this process. and the mayor was heard to express great concern for what happened to the tree. no concern at all for what happened to a 17-year-old boy. the day after this particular lynching, one of the newspapers said yesterday's exciting occurrence is a closed incident. but it was the purpose of the fleckling naacp to make sure that these stories were not forgotten, to shame the town and to publicize them every way possible. so they sent in this young, white women's suffrage activist who was not an educated woman, but she had a lot of street smarts. she was very attractive and very charming. she used a british accent that she had obtained from her time this the suffrage movement in england where she'd been arrested several times. and they -- she was attending a

statewide women's suffrage convention in dallas when the lynching took place. t they sent her a telegram and asked her to go to waco and get all the facts, the true story of what had happened and get the photographs if she could. and she did, and she made up this story that she had been organizing in texas, and she knew people in waco -- which was true -- and she wanted to write a story for a new york paper telling people that waco wasn't all that bad. of course, nothing could have been further from the truth, but her story worked. she got in to see the mayor, the chief of police, the leading citizens of the black community, almost everybody who would be able to give her valuable information. and she even convinced the commercial photographer, fred gildersleeve, to give her the pictures even though he had already been ordered not to sell any more of them. and she was afraid to to put any of this material in the mail because it was so inflammatory. so she took a train to galveston is, took a ship back to new york and carried all the material

personally to give to w.e.b. dubois face to face who was the towering african-american intellect of that period and also the editor of the naacp magazine, "the crisis." and what he did was publish the first-ever special supplement to the monthly crisis magazine all about this lynching, and he used the pictures. and they didn't just send it to members of the naacp, they sent it to every member of woodrow wilson's cabinet, to newspaper editors all over the country and then elizabeth herself went on a speaking tour, mostly to black churches around the country. i don't think she ever came back to texas. probably would have been unwise. interestingly enough, the whole story of the jesse washington lynching blew up and was featured in the newspaper and on tv in waco twice while i was doing my research before my book ever came out, and i have to give waco credit for this. up like many, many other -- unlike many, many other

communities that have never confronted or dealt with or acknowledged their horrible racial past, the waco city council and the county commissioners did issue some sort of resolution of regret, if not apology, and a group of citizens from all walks of life came and stood on the steps of the courthouse on the 90th anniversary of the lynching and read a resolution of apology. i feel very strongly that you can't understand the present if you don't know what happened in the past. and these things cannot be forgotten. they're not forgotten. so you need to acknowledge it, understand it and know what happened. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. this weekend we're visiting waco, texas, talking with local authors and touring its literary sites. next, we speak with candi cann about her book, "virtual afterlives: grieving the dead in the 21st century."

>> i think the grieving process is important because it's the way in which we resituate ourselves in the realm of the living without the dead. so part of what bereavement does is it allows us to live in a world in which the dead are no longer present. and what memorialization does, it allows us to resituate ourselves with the dead and to have a continuing relationship with the deceased in such a way that we bring meaning into our lives and that we can kind of go about our daily task as a new person without our mother, without our brother, without our best friend, without our spouse. my book is called "virtual afterlives: grieving the dead in the 21st century," and it's about the rise of spontaneous memorialization and popular memorials in the 31st century -- 3

21st century. i was working on my ph.d. dissertation comparing two different martyrs and their intentional process of helping people become martyrs, and one of the things i noticed while working on that subject was a lot of times the families are very much a process of memorializing their martyr. and part of that is the way that they give meaning to the death of the person who's died. and while i was working on that subject, i also noticed that there's an increase in popular memorialization. so i started seeing, for example, car decals on the back of cars remembering people who had died, i started seeing internet memorials, facebook memorials, social network memorials and also tattoo memorials. i think that we got to this point now because, essentially,

people became uncomfortable with death. and really the professionalization of the funeral industry, people were dying in hospitals. they were no longer dying in the home. so people weren't encountering the dying process. also after people died rather than washing the body and talking care of the body -- taking care of the body and preparing it for burial, people were sending the corpses straight from the hospitals to the funeral home. so you see the professionalization of the entire death industry from the dying process to the actual disposal of the corpse itself. so i think part of that then led to a disappearance of the dead which then led to more and more people not talking about death, people becoming afraid of death and the dying process, and so this is partly where this disappearance of death emerges from. one of the ways in which people

grieve, used to grieve the dead was by wearing mourning clothing or black armbands, so i think there is much more a communal remembrance of the dead. and also people were automatically recognized in society as being in bereavement or as mourning because they were wearing these black mourning clothes, because they were wearing the black armbands. so we don't see that anymore. modern bereavement practices, you're seeing these new practices where people are writing on social network sites, they're writing on a facebook page of a friend who's just died, and i think part of this is the same thing that we used to see before, only one would who r go to the tombstone, one would speak to the deceased at the site where they're buried. they would go to the tombstone, they would talk to them, they would have a conversation. so it's really not a change in practice as much as it's just a change in making private public. so what once used to be only taking place at the tombstone is

now actually taking place in a public forum and with an audience. and i think this is what's different about modern practices and memorialization. i don't think the processes themselves are that unusual, but it's the fact that we have a public audience for all of these conversations. a couple examples of modern day grieving that i really discuss in my book, one of them is tattoos. while doing my book i was able to interview different tattoo artists and talk with them about the process. this is a really interesting tattoo. it's actually a picture of a scorpion. the young man who has the tattoo on his leg, he purchased the scorpion when he was a little boy. the pet store told them they took the poison out of the scorpion, and then the scorpion bit his father and killed him. he has all of this grief, but what's interesting about this tattoo is he has the instrument

that killed his father tattooed onto his leg in the same place where his father was bitten. so it was an interesting reenactment, i think, of the death. it's a way in which the son can identify with his father, that he remember ares his dad always -- remembers his dad always, and he's carrying this symbol. he also remembers his dad and is allowed to grieve him. he's also allowed to start the conversation, he's allowed to talk about his father with his friends through the tattoo. so i really loved doing the research on the tattoos because i got to meet the tattoo artists who really function in a way in today's society as a kind of shaman or priest. they, during the process of etching the tattoos on people's bodies, they ask the person why they're getting the tattoo, what it means to them, and the perp's allowed to have that space -- the person's allowed to have that space whether it's two hours, three hours about the

person they're remembering. one of the big practices on a facebook page is to put a picture of yourself up with the deceased. and that lets everyone know, okay, yes, this person died, but i was a good friend of them. i am in mourning. and so part of this need is actually letting people know that you are in bereavement. so it's like warring the mourning clothes -- wearing the mourning clothes that you used to wear, say, 50 years ago. is the practice -- you know, i think a lot of people find it strange. i think where people really are finding it strange is in this new era of funeral selfies, posting a picture of the deceased, taking a picture at the funeral. but, honestly, i don't think that these things are that different. this is an era in which we use visual rhetoric to self-document our experiences. we take pictures of every experience we have, we post it on facebook. my daughter can, when she had

surgery, she went into surgery, and the first thing she said when she woke up after the surgery was, mom, take a picture of me. and i realized, okay, that's not that different from someone who's going to their grandma's funeral taking a picture of themselves crying at the funeral or with the grandma in the casket. so i think what's changed is the public nature, that we're all part of this audience taking place and partaking in these previously private experiences. we're seeing it whether we want to see it or not, so death interrupts us. and i think that's what's different, and that's what's disturbing to people today, is they can no longer choose whether or not they want to see pictures of the deceased, whether or not they want to interact with the deceased or whether or not they want to be an audience to someone speaking with the deceased. i hope people can have a conversation after reading my book about the dead. i hope people can talk about death. i hope that they can become

comfortable with the summit of death because, honestly for me, the most important thing about death is that it helps us to live better. and if we really recognize that every single person that's born on this earth will one day die, then i think we'll live better lives. we'll live more intentional lives. and we'll with be kinder and just and, hopefully, we'll do the things we've always wanted to do. we never know when we're going to die, so for me allowing death to enter the conversation really allows us to live better. >> this weekend booktv is in waco, texas, with the help of our local cable partner, time warper. during the trip -- time warner. during the trip we spoke with steven moss. >> i first heard about the african-americanings in the space program -- african-americans in the space program and nasa's involvement with civil rights and racial

equality when i was in graduate school at texas tech in 1995. when i was doing research for a paper, i started noticing little back page articles about the sit-ins at huntsville. well, there's nasa at huntsville, the marshall space flight center or what would be. and other smaller articles back page, two paragraphs, but they were all in nasa locations or nasa home states. i decided there had to be a connection, there had to be a bigger story. nasa was the federal government. the federal government under president kennedy and president johnson were advocates of desegregation or advocates of racial equality and equal employment. so there had to be some story there are. there were too many little threads not to have a whole sweater somewhere out there.

and there was more of a story than i was able to tell back in 1995 and '96 and '97. and that's what's shown in the book with the stories of these men, some of whom worked for nasa, some for nasa contractors and some who were part of the space program or used the space program to advance the idea of racial equality and civil rights. one of the early executive of orders of president kennedy was executive order 10925. and this, prior to a civil rights bill, prior to the civil rights act of '64, this would use federal employment and federal contracts to force the issue of equal employment. it created the president's commission on equal employment opportunity which would be

chaired by vice president johnson. it then required that all federal contractors advertise and prove that they are equal opportunity employers. which was a big thing. they could not discriminate based on race. and that made a difference to all of those contractors that nasa had. total number of african-american employees throughout the i'm sorrylations was always going to be -- installations was always going to be small. we're talking in maybe double digits at the most in some places, particularly in this time period. we look at 1960-64,' 65. that's going to be a very small number of african-americans in that type of work force in the south.

one case he was a space contractor, he worked for rca, that's julius montgomery. he was a range rat which meant that when a missile came down or something went wrong, he and a crew went out and worked on it to find out what was wrong, fixed it. his first day on the job at cape canaveral he goes in, and there are all these white people there. he doesn't know anybody, the only african-american there and final hi he decides he's going -- finally he decides he's going to go introduce himself to one. he puts out his hand and introduces himself, and the man looks up at him and says is that how you talk to a white man? and montgomery stops and says, forgive me, o great white bastard. and according to the story that

montgomery tells, they both laughed at it, shook hands, and everything was fine. i love that story. it's sort of like the two men were testing each other, are you going to be able to handle this job because there's a problem here? another would be morgan watson. morgan watson was one of a group of interns from southern university in baton rouge, and his group were called water walkers. they could walk on water. they were that, they were that good at what they did and had that type of respect especially within their community. the african-american community, the african-american college. morgan watson came to nasa, and he worked on rockets. it wasn't just working at an office at a desk.

he'd work on the engineering side of it. and he's very quick. in fact, he gave us the quote that gave us the title of this book that he felt, and others like him felt, that the image of black people in the professions was resting on them. was resting on he and his coworkers. and we could not fail, he said. that's reflected in comments made by others who worked at nasa and contractors at the time. they were fully aware that eyes were on them of the black community, of the white community, of the engineering commitment, of nasa -- community, of nasa. they couldn't take. there was too much. if they make a mistake, then

whatever mistake they make gets labeled onto everyone who comes after them. and these gentlemen did not be fail. not at all. george carruthers worked for nasa as an strong her, and his -- an astronomer, and i think it's the far ultraviolet camera is on the moon right now. and this wonderful piece of technology that took, i think, 20 years for him to e design and to build went up with apollo 16 in the 1970s because the closer you are to space, the better you can take pictures of it. and so as an astronomer, he had that. the others who are in the book, there's frank crossley who is a muttal you are gist, and he worked for space contractors. crossley was one of the first

african-american naval officers towards the end of world world , and he was also the first african-american to have a ph.d. in metallurgy. and his experience as an academic is very much hike a lot of african-american academic engineers at the time. he was told when he asked about promotions, you know, why, why no promotion, why am i still here, he was told, well, you've already come farther than anyone else in your race. we thought you'd be okay with it. couldn't see that happening now, and it shouldn't have happened ever. but that's the type of system that existed. there was political pressure that an integrated astronaut corps wouldn't make sense.

a black astronaut, an african-american astronaut. 1961 the white house is sending memos to get a black astronaut. we need to find a candidate to eventually qualify to be a plaque astronaut. a black astronaut. 1962, and there's never -- it's never quite clear who orders it, whether president kennedy is directly involved with it, whether his brother, the attorney general robert kennedy, directly involved with it. it's never quite clear how this exactly happens. curtis lemay, who's the air force chief of staff, tells chuck yeager that bobby kennedy wanted an african-american candidate, that he was given this by the attorney general. so by 1962 a black candidate, ed dwight who's an air force officer, jet pilot, starts the

full training to qualify for consideration into the astronaut corps. in the black press, he is front page. his picture is everywhere, headlines everywhere. he is every bit astronaut that any of the mercury seven were. white newspapers in the south wish him well and call him a credit to his race. which is an unusual thing for a white paper in the south to say about any african-american. but he was a rock star. he was the guy. he was going to be the first african-american astronaut. and then he wasn't. it's never quite sure what happened. he finished the training programs and was nominated to nasa, but so were 130 other people. they took, i think, less than 20

out of that 130. he wasn't one of them. that led to some controversy, magazines, some investigations, calls for investigations. no one's quite sure exactly how it ended up. there are lots of different stories. dwight has a version of how things went, there's pieces of the official version. all we know for sure is he never became an astronaut, but nasa -- while he was a potential astronaut -- took advantage of his publicity and his press. they just didn't see a way to take advantage of the press that would have come along with an actual african-american astronaut. i think that this, the story of that is saw's involvement in

the -- nasa's involvement and the space program's involvement in civil rights fell through the cracks because there was so much bigger, fancier stuff. when people think of the space program, they don't think of an entry-level african-american engineer. not in the 1960s. they think of all of those launches; gemini, apollo, mercury, they think of the mercury seven, they think of all those launches and splashdowns. but they don't think that, wow, there were five african-american engineers working at huntsville, alabama. what a great thing. they don't think about that because there's all this other excitement with the space program. and then there are all the other social and economic histories and project histories. there's so much about it that it

just got overlooked. it's not a big story in that sense. and it's the same in how it fell through with the civil right histories. there are so many central figures and events to write about in civil rights history in the 1950s and '60s; the march on washington, dr. king, malcolm x, the black panthers, sncc, students for nonviolence. there's just so much there that, again, the stories, the personal stories of these men and how nasa just doing its job more or less as an agency affected racial equality, it just -- nobody made the connection before. they didn't make the connection, and on the personal side with the gentlemen, these weren't the

guys that were on tv. back then. these were just guys that went to work, came home, went back to work. they weren't part of the protest movements because as it was described, they had their jobs at stake. it's important that these get out while some of these men are still with us so they can see that their stories are making a difference on a broader scale, can they -- and they can contino be an inspiration and a role model not just for african-americans, but for anybody who's facing a sort of discrimination. that because these men could not fail and did not fail, we have a more fair, more equal society. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to waco, texas, and the many other cities

visited by our local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/localcontent. >> here is a look at "the chicago tribune"'s list of their best of 2014 books. to begin, childhood immunization in "on immunity." then in "the most dangerous book, "kevin birmingham recounts ulysses. also on the list is adam resnick's essays, his book is called "will not attend." next, in "being mortal," a surgeon looks at end-of-life care. and elizabeth kohl burg theorizes humans will be the cause of the next mass extinction in "the sixth extinction." >> and what we're doing when we burn fossil fuels, is we're taking carbon that was buried under the earth and transferring it back up into the atmosphere. so we're basically running

geological history backwards and at a very high speed. we're taking a process that took hundreds of millions of years to run in one direction, and we're running it in the other direction in a matter of centuries. and if you were an alien and you came to visit the earth, you could easily conclude that what we're doing, that the fundamental purpose of modern industrialized society is to affect this transfer as quickly as possible. to see how much carbon we can get out of the ground and put up into the air and how fast we can do it. >> and that's a look at some of "the chicago tribune"'s top books for 2014. to link to the full list and to see other publications' selections, visit booktv.org. >> well, i know if you can see the wind blowing there, but the wupped we moved from our outdoor set, and we arn on the c-span bus. hector tobar is our guest. here is the book, kind of hard to see the title, but it's "dee down dark."

what isn your book about? >> guest: it's about the famouss chilean miners who were trapped 2,000 feet underground for 60 days in 2010. .. >> when in 2010 did 2,010 did that happen? >> october of 2,010 trapped at the bottom of this copper and gold mine between 700 meters of direct down. the first two weeks they were slowly starving to death and then they were miraculously found but had to spend another ten weeks waiting to be rescued. >> the mine is located in northern chile, town that is 500 miles north of the driest desert on earth operating for 120 years. they worked at the bottom of a spiral highway 98 degrees,

90 percent humidity, and the mine collapsed and trap them. the only way out was a spiral highway. >> and was it gold? >> gold and copper. >> when they got trapped, what trapped, what happened exactly? was there an explosion? it was like living in an earthquake underground the way the men described it to me. they said the stonewall in the caverns began to undulate. there were explosions. another minor told me it was like listening to a machine gun fire at them. they were trapped. it was like living in a massive collapse underground

they had enough food for 25 meant to last two days, what they went by, they began to ration their food. they lived on a single cookie a day, and then they had to make it a cookie a cookie every two days along with a spoonful of tuna. they gradually began to die as they waited to be rescued. they could hear drills coming for them. but the drills kept on missing them. very existential tortured two weeks waiting to be rescued, waiting to be found even. >> no one knew they were alive? >> no one knew they were alive. they believe that they were going to die down their. many of many of the fathers and grandfathers believed they would never see the kids again. trapped in total darkness, the the laps of their helmets began to go out after a few days. the second day they began to pray. one of the men who became famous leader, he rallied

them, we should pray. he got to his knees in a speech full of expletives said that this was not fair, that we needed to pray. from that day forward the hell the kind of mass everyday at noon just before they ate. they pray for their deliverance. >> hector tobar, how did you get access? >> the men were trapped down their for ten weeks. the very last couple of days they knew they would be rescued and pulled up in this castle. they would be pulled out one at a time. the whole world would see them come out, but before they come out they have one last meeting underground. they agreed we are going to share the proceeds of this collectively. no one is going to sell a separate deal. when they finally get above ground they hook up with the

biggest law firm calls new york literary and they contacted me. i was the person who got the exclusive access. i spent the next three years traveling to chile. i interviewed all 33 men. many tears were shed because the world does not know, but a lot of these men were four years broken psychologically. they were tortured tortured underground by this rumbling mountain for ten weeks. it really ate away at there sense of self, their dignity they they were not the same and that i was interviewing. so they spent a lot of time recovering from that in the years after. >> are all 33 still alive? >> they are all alive. that is the great miracle. they miracle. they all made it out. a lot of people ask me, why did what did you make this a tense read and we all no the

end to make the answer to that is that this is a story about who these men really work, family men, most of them. many of. many of them had pregnant girlfriends, pregnant wife's they went down into this very dangerous place to work to make money to feed their families, and this book is really about their lives as mining men, workingmen, husbands, fathers and how they fought to get back to there families. you families. you know, for me it is comparable to the odyssey. a book about family, about odysseus trying to get back home. these men go through an odyssey of stone in the mountain trying to get back to the families. cliques and he divorces or anything traumatic happen in the next three years? >> even while they were still trapped there were a family dramas going on. after this 17th day alone was lowered to them. then they got letters. so an contact with the

family through correspondence and phone calls. some of them actually got back together with their divorced lives. their wives show up at the mine. they want to show solidarity they start correspondence. one of the men actually got back together with his ex-wife. many of the men who were just dating their girlfriends well they were trapped ended up getting married with them. and so, yes, in the years after the family dramas continued there is the famous minor who became infamous because his wife and his mistress pot on the surface. now,. now, this story is a tale at length in my book. how they fought, and the two women on the surface. the media created a myth. supposedly they encounter each other, discovered each other but knew about one another for a long time before that.

>> besides the 33 were there other heroes in the story? >> oh, yes. the drillers, the drillers, the chilean government. the chilean government pulled out credible technological feat to rescue these men, reached down through 2,000 feet of stone, and the drillers sue who are ordinary working stiffs, roustabout themselves. they usually drill holes looking for minerals. this minerals. this time they drill the hole looking for men. they found these miners through 2,252,000 feet of stone. the story the story is also above them and the wives and families and the children of these miners themselves who fought on the surface to try to get them back. >> any villains? >> yes. the general manager of the mind.

many of many of the miners blamed him for the conditions inside the mine which were very poor. there was no escape, no emergency escape, very poor ventilation, very poor ventilation, very limited food supplies. they almost starved to death he appears in the book. i interviewed him at length about the conditions. he feels terrible. he knows he is the villain of the story and has spent his life trying to redeem himself. >> what does he do? >> he continues to work in mining but he is a much better boss, much more concerned with safety, of course. >> what other 33 doing? >> they have gone back to work, most of them. some of them are retired. some retired. some of them were already in their 50s, which is kind of old from minor in this part of chile. some of them

actually had to go back and work in underground mining again. i describe this in the end of my book, how one in particular just a few months after being rescued from the san jose mine actually has to go back underground. the first day, the first two days re: encounter with his nightmares of being buried alive. he does this work for a short while. many others are still working underground. it is the job that pays them best and unfortunately they have not gotten richer from the movie rights or the book rights. the book we will be of film that should come out next year. hopefully that's the book does well in the film does well they we will get a little bit more than they have already. >> are they keeping the name deep down dark. >> the name of the film we will be called the 33. yes. stars antonio banderas as the man who was really the dominant figure underground, someone low in the mining hierarchy but who became a

very inspirational figure. he rallied the men to pray. he often would have very, very sharp mood swings, would get depressed, would get depressed, fight with the other miners. half of half of them loved him and half of them hated him. and so he is a dominant figure. there is also a female lead in the movie based on a person in my book. she was the sister of one of the miners. she organized the camp of families on the surface to fight for the member low. >> are the 33 close? >> i can't really say that they are close. number they are bonded by there experience, by the fact that no one else in the world knows what they have been through accept them. they share this experience of having been buried underground, having become

world-famous. they all became famous together, came out, went to disney world, went world, went to london, went to jerusalem, saw the holy land from being buried alive in thinking the world was going to forget about you, you would die in the dark to becoming a world celebrity and being shown the world. the only ones who share that together, but at the same time some of the conflicts that took place underground that i describe in my book have continued on to the surface, especially around the figure of the nominal boss underground but who wants the accident happened, the collapse happened admitted to me that he did not no what to do, there was not much he could do command he surrendered his authority

and said to my ammo longer in charge. we are all equal. we will vote on what we do, and a lot of the men felt that was an abdication of responsibility. that was an abdication of responsibility. so he has become also someone who is, people who read the book will see he has become a controversial figure for the miners. >> hector tobar, the capsule they were rescued from, was it remarkable that people here in the states were watching this happen for hours? >> zero, yes. 2 billion people around the world saw this. you know, i describe it in my book. first they send in a chilean rescue work, a man who is a mining rescuer who goes in like an astronaut. training the way astronauts train, the way submarine rescue restraint,, going down into this capsule 2,000 feet below. the whole world is watching. when the men come out they come in through this stone cavity that is 25, 26 inches in diameter and they come up one at a time and are alone. so before the world saw them come up they were alone in this stone cocoon, the stone capsule. many of them said their

lives flashed before them. they remembered everything that happened in the mine. they remembered the day that they met their wives, the day the children was born everyday was like being reborn. many of the women believe that what was happening to the men as they came up was like a childbirth, it was dangerous and so yeah. that is what what those men were going to. >> did they send down maybe some anxiety relieving pills or anything for the men? >> they did. they tried to calm them down i i saw video of the first man coming up. he is having his pulse taking, and his pulse was racing. he was just so nervous and scared. they let him go up anyway. the condition. i think they realize that no one could really be calm at that moment. they also picked one of the strongest and youngest man

to go first. in fact, the rescuers used the principle of submarine rescue, you choose the fittest man to go first in a rescue. >> where is that capsule today? >> is on display at the regional museum, on display for tourists along with a bunch of other memorabilia. >> hector tobar and his book "deep down dark: the untold stories of 33 men buried in a chilean mine, and the miracles that set them free" >> now on book tv alex@steen said the public only hears one side of the argument in the debate over fossil fuels. he argues that fossil fuels have done far more good than damage to the world and not a safe and reliable source of energy. this is a little under an hour.

>> good afternoon. welcome to the heritage foundation. we, of course, welcome those who join us on all of these occasions on our heritage.org website heritage .org website and those who would join us on the future program. we ask that everyone check to make sure their cellphones have been turned off. we will post the program on the heritage homepage for everyone's future reference. as always, internet and other outside viewers are welcome to send questions or comments. our vice president for domestic and economic policy a lawyer by training, served

in all three branches of the government before coming to heritage. [applauding] >> thank you, and thank you for coming, for bearing the weather outside which i'm sure has something to do with fossil fuels. very good to see you all here. we here. we believe in free markets, not just because it works best overall, though that would be enough. it is also moral, the free market system that respect private property, rule of law, and freedom to contract. encouraging each person to find something that they can do or produced that we will be beneficial to other people. every time you make a purchase both sides profit, both sides are better off.

mutually beneficial exchange by billions and get a little bit of a sense of the magic of the free market. i mention that because oil, coal, and natural and natural gas producers are making their customers much better off. if you doubt that think about the lives of many of our fellow human beings who do not have access to plentiful in the inexpensive fossil fuels. the villager in africa who burns dried dung, the farmer in india uses an ox to plow his field, and the elderly woman in ethiopia who walks miles each day to fetch water. inexpensive energy would help them and us in so many ways, but we in the us and the west often take it for granted that we we will have electricity and gasoline to make our lives comfortable and productive. that is great, you might be thinking, thinking, but are we running out of these resources? thinks the human innovation new supplies of coal, oil, and natural gas have been found. those who learned about peak oil and diminishing

resources were astonishingly wrong. 500 years of cold. the world's biggest producer of coal and natural gas. we actually have plenty. shouldn't shouldn't we transition to new fuels? well, maybe if we can find a better source of energy that is less expensive and just as plentiful. wants to make these oil, coal, and natural gas resources more expensive so their preferred fuels will be used instead. the cost of energy is reflected in everything you buy, everything that is transported or made by machines or made by using electricity, which is just about everything. of course higher energy prices are especially bad. spend more of there income in energy. okay. wait. wait. wait. all fine wait. all fine and good, but what about the environment? well, at least the cleaner environments, the cleanest countries in the world with the best environments are

those that have the highest economic freedom score. as my colleagues jim robertson ryan also have written to my lips look at the united states briefly. ozone is down 33 percent. cleaner air, much cleaner now than when i was a boy. okay. something icky about fossil fuels. can't be moral to use them. well, it can. to answer that question we have alex epstein, president and founder of the center for industrial progress. debated some of the biggest names, writing seven published in the "wall street journal," forbes, investors business daily and other publications.

>> i did and experience about five years ago that really captures the way we are taught to think about fossil fuels and what is wrong with in my view not just the way that the left thinks of fossil fuels but often the right thinks of fossil fuels. so i am from southern california, i grew up in this area. the climate out there is just amazing. so i moved there about ten years ago for work and have not been able to leave. five years five years ago i was in irvine, california, farmers market for lunch. and there is a greenpeace booth outside. this girl comes up to me. now 34. must've been 28, 29 at the time.

you are an environmentalist. don't you want to help us get off our addiction to fossil fuels? and thinking, she is really 25 she really does not no what will happen in terms of what my view was. i said, well, no, no actually. i really like fossil fuels. what the fossil fuel industry does is great. now now think to yourself, what is she thinking? what is she going to say? that is what i wonder. the reason why i raised it that way, and that is my view, i wanted to see the father wanted her to bring up one of the common objections. for example, catastrophic climate change, climate change, catastrophic pollution, gladys --

catastrophic resource pollution. i wanted to show her there is a different way of thinking about these things. if you look at the big picture in the full context of these things insofar as there are challenges are far outweighed by the benefits human beings get. unfortunately she did not ask about any of those things. she did not even get mad at me. she did something that at the time took me aback. she looked at me almost in all. what is going to happen? and i realized later it was as if an alien creature. she looks at me after i say i think we should use more fossil fuels, while. you must make a lot of money by the way, definitely not the case.

and the same experience this morning. i was on bloomberg and decided i'm not going to where my usual costume, which is this. [laughter] went by the way i wore to the people's climate in new york city if you want to check it out on youtube. that was actually less dramatic than the 3' 3-foot by 3-foot i love fossil fuel sign that i was carrying. those are fun things. anyway, i was just wearing this little pen. i i don't know if it is hostess, but the woman host looks at my pen. what does what does that say? i love fossil fuels. taken aback a little bit. well, do you love fossil

fuels or do you just love the oil industry's money? so again, you must be paid off. no, i just love fossil fuels so why this story? it really captures what i think are the three different moral views of fossil fuels. and though one that we should use more, which i'll talk about last, so out of bounds that you can't honestly hold it. but if we actually think about these issues logically it is the only one that makes sense. one one of the conventional views is what i call the unnecessary evil. fossil fuels fossil fuels are an addiction, evil, destroying the planet. we have all of these promising renewable technologies to replace the. the idea is we need to get off fossil fuels, and we can get often quickly. now, the response to that

too often, particularly by the energy industry, well, no. they are they are not an unnecessary evil. they are a necessary evil. they are not an unnecessary addiction. they are a necessary addiction because unfortunately solar and wind are not going to come along quickly enough. look at show is a a recent example. they have a necklace of policy on the website that shell's goal is a company is to reduce co2 emissions to zero. that is an oil company. and you no they do these little skits online about how they are going to power things my footsteps. i calculated that at minimum 147 times more expensive and natural gas. but this is the view. and then at the same time, let us drill into the arctic

well, we can't. unfortunately we can't get-well. unfortunately we can't get rid of it all now. yes, we want our industry to expire, but unfortunately we disagree with the expiration date. this is a view. what was your adjective? >> icky. something wrong. unnecessary evil, necessary evil. if you hear necessary evil, think about a lot of stuff you are hearing from the right that has at least a tinge of that, especially every time someone says we are going to move the solar and wind as soon as we can. and my view is different. different. i don't believe an unnecessary evil or necessary evil. i believe in the third which is superior good. and superior and superior good just means it's like anything else, like this. it

is just saying, i, i buy this, i use this because it is the best thing available to me. it will enhance enhance my life more than any of my other options and by the way it does not mean it needs to be renewable. everyone should use an iphone six for the end of time, otherwise your not allowed to use it. it is not saying, zero, it is perfectly clean. of course. but what we're saying is, is, this is a good thing and the risks and side effects are worth it and should be minimized. they are worth it. the value that we gain is so large that it is good and we are not going to feel guilty. that is the way i feel about fossil fuels. again, the three moral views are unnecessary evil, necessary evil, superior good. make sense?

anyone know what this is made of? natural gas. okay. my question, how to get their. you know, there's a whole thing on that, but i just want to give you an indication of my own journey toward this. i grew up in this area. as most of you probably know, it's not exactly a fossil fuel hotbed. ideologically it is not an and physically it is not. it's not like there is lot of tracking taking place, a lot of shale resource that people call industry or anything like that. so i grew up, like like everybody pretty much in montgomery county public school system learning nothing positive about

energy, certainly not about fossil fuels, but fuels, but learning that they are destroying the planet. we're running out of them. they are polluting. it will only get worse. of course they're causing causing catastrophic climate change. i went to montgomery high school, school, a very math and science oriented high schools. my teachers my teachers were quite big into that, which had an impact on me. particularly when i was younger. so if this was my background , and the question is what changed for me. and part of what changed for me is studying philosophy which i will get back to, but in terms of just subject matter what changed for me as i studied something that

i think i think everyone should study and almost no one is taught, the history of energy, the history of energy. what was life like before we had cheap, plentiful, reliable energy? what was life like after, and how did we get how do we get from one place to another? because i never even thought of that until i was maybe 25 years old. i. i had not thought of in any serious way how much better life is and how much overall energy plays in that. so a story that really influenced me, studying how we came to use oil. you think, we use while now. now. why don't we just choose something else as if we all just get together and voted on oil and that is why we use it, no logical reason, but it is a real question. why we why we use this particular substance. and i was studying it, doing some research on rockefeller. to understand rockefeller i needed to understand how the oil industry came to be.

and it was fascinating to me, the old story i had heard about whale oil, the story about we were wailing, , this is partially true. we were wailing. we got all of our oil from whale oil. we started running out of wales. one day magically they discovered oil. but it wasn't true. there were at least six major competitors that were long-standing. for example, a substance based on turpentine. and that had certain properties. it was cheap to make but it tended to be quite explosive, which is not the greatest thing. there was different but interesting things like different kinds of animal oils, standard lard oils, this highly technological lard oil. there were different grades of whale oil.

perhaps the most promising thing was call oil, the biggest predecessor to what we can call rock oil or petroleum. and what struck me was that in looking at all of these things, these all could produce energy. solar and wind, they can produce energy or they work in a lab. but looking at the history it became clear that it does not matter too much if you can produce some energy. can you produce it cheaply and scalability? and that the fire before that nobody could produce a cheaply. i don't know, i don't i don't have visuals, but has anyone ever seen those overhead maps and night? so one is dark, one is light this is pretty much what happens to the american countryside with oil because it was expensive to eliminate your home. the countryside was dark at night. you lose four, five, six

hours a night, your life is shorter, and it struck me as not just years in our life, life in our years because just as when i was reading thinking about it, how many plans i had for my life and how many of those involved being able to work at night or do things at night. their lives were effectively shorter. and and then the oil industry came along in 1859, edwin drake drilled the first commercial oil well. there was this quote from a new york chemist in 1864, and what he said in effect is in the countryside it used to be dark and now it is like. that just struck me. me. zero, my gosh. that is five years. is going it's going to take solar and wind a long time to mature. how long did it take oil?

it must be 80 years or something, how long it took oil. two years. in five years it was so much better. what this impressed upon me was to things. one is energy is life-and-death. and the more i learned about energy the more apparent this became. one one quote that i love that i use in the book. the thing to take note of is that this is coming from a time in history about call where call was far, far dirtier than it is even in the worst place in china today by far. this is how they felt. they had encountered personally the value of energy. so just a letter to a major

newspaper. and they were worried about running out of coal. i did not really understand how much call there was, how technology can improve your ability to find it. look at look at what happens. today people talk lethally about not using fossil fuels the guy says: is everything to us. without call our factories will become idle, idle, foundries and workshops will be still as the grave. the locomotive would rust in the shed. our rivers will forget the paddlewheel, and we shall again be separated by days from france, but months from the united states. linkedin is periods and protracted. 1000 special thousand special manufacturers one by one stenographic. said to disappear.

_is the one that i never forget. we shall miss our brand as a man misses his companion, his fortune for more limp. every hour reminded. so i felt like i had gotten nowhere near the appreciation of how important energy is. in the book i elaborate a lot on that, but i want to to stress now that it is that important. i like the term machine. our body needs calories, so our our machines need calories. in the us are machine does a hundred times more work than we do. they need 100 times more calories. we need to figure out, food is pretty expensive. we need to figure out a way a way to make

calories for machines that are way cheaper than food. way, way cheaper than that we can produce a lot. the first., affordable energy. affordable energy is life-and-death, and affordable energy is incredibly challenging. that is -- i call it the original alternative energy market. that is what that shows me. it is not easy to produce something that is affordable and scale. you have to use a lot of ingenuity, find the right material and find a really good process where you can produce a lot of it. when somebody says, hey, i have for stepdaughter from my first inclination is that we will be really hard to do cheaply. you go for it, but don't take away my energy in the meantime. feel free to try to have competed, but this is part of the reason why in

the whole history of civilization there are only three even partially scalable sources of energy that we have. fossil. fossil fuel, nuclear, and to some extent hydroelectric. so that was really striking. with the three moral views, these views, these were the two insights about energy that i had. affordable energy is life-and-death and incredibly challenging. that led me to the last step of the journey that i am going to talk about today. i want to make sure we can get questions and go into some of these details. the the last one was then looking at the modern debate my background is in philosophy. philosophy is all about how to think logically, how to

think logically, particularly about issues of right and wrong. one absolute rule of thinking logically is that you have to always look at the whole context of the big picture which means if you are considering a a choice you have to look at both the risks of it and the benefits the negative and the positive, and if you just look at one side you're going to make really bad decisions, and if you don't look at them carefully you we will make a bad decision. when i started reflecting on our current energy, it struck me that it is bizarrely biased because my own education, i had gone to one of the best high schools in the country and one of the best colleges in the country. nobody spent five minutes the entire time of those eight years talking about the value of fossil fuels. all they talked about were these risks and site elements. in very dire terms no less.

and so and so that just on the face of it, now that i know all of this, even if all of those risks and side effects were true, which i was suspicious of, we can't have an intelligent discussion if we only look at one side of the issue. and that then made me really interested in, well, let's actually study the evidence of the benefits and what is the evidence of the risks and side effects? and one thing in particular, particular, and i talk about this in the first chapter, one thing that struck me in particular about the risks and side effects that nobody talks about is has to do with the issue of tracks. whenever we are doing predictions we have to realize predictions are difficult. if you think about something like the financial crisis, how few people predicted that, how many people

predicted. >> you have to -- it is really hard. if someone claims to be able to predicted, all these really bad things, the stuff that you are using today, the way i flew here this morning, the way your food gets here, the way your food gets here, the thing that runs everything in your civilization, it is all going to destroy and the world is going to end. you would want to no. okay. that is a big claim. lots of experts agree, that is not too much by itself unless you really know.

you have evidence that they have an ability to predict. one easy one easy question, what is the track record? people are making these predictions of catastrophic resource depletion, catastrophic pollution, catastrophic climate catastrophic climate change. can we look at the track record? that is a great tool knowing how good somebody's thinking methodology is. if someone makes makes extravagant, confident claims and turns out to be completely wrong his theory may well be wrong and he is certainly wrong about his level of content. what struck me is the more i read this publication called access to energy, the best energy publication ever. i basically inhaled that thing. from 1973 to 1993. i read the whole history of energy and environment month by month by the best guy from then to the present. maybe it was about 2,008 for 2,009. everyone was making all the

exact same predictions. predictions. the exact same predictions. running out of resources. for example, one of the worlds leading ecologists was so popular he was invited on the tonight show over a dozen times. he predicted that england would basically be destroyed by the year 2,00010 that we would run out of american economic joy ride is over. that is what he said. and tons and tons of people. the same thing with pollution. derek mentioned the actual stats, but people thought pollution from fossil fuels and instead of saying, this is a problem we can solve. solve. there is no solution.

it's going to be a disaster. and what i have seen and what i show in the book is that we use 25% more 25 percent more fossil fuels, but pollution has gone way, way down. in addition to fossil fuels help us with environmental things like clean water. and then with climate change , that is often viewed as, well, this is some brand-new theory. it turns out, no. the leader, the world's leading media climate solidus, he predicted in 1986 the temperature between 2000 2,002,010 would rise between two and 4 degrees fahrenheit. that did not happen, by the way. a very small fraction of a degree. so what you have over and over is that people are completely wrong, and that is not discussed. and the other thing they showed me, me, okay, we need to totally re-examine this issue from the perspective of let's look at all the

benefits and all the risks and look at them with precision. we precision. we can just have this bias that fossil fuels must be bad, we can't exaggerate. if you restrict 1 calorie of energy you are restricting somebody's opportunity to use a machine to improve his life. everyone we talk about, let's restrict restrict co2 emissions, that means restrict energies which means restrict our progress. _ a really good reason. so in the moral case for fossil fuels, that is basically my conclusion. i do my best to look at all the evidence, look at all the positives and negatives. and where i get is superior good. good. the most important thing, even more than the pollution , so as a society

politicians like talking about we have a broken ax. we have a broken method method of thinking about energy and environmental issues. it is incredibly biased, and that serves nobody except for people who really just don't like industrial civilization. so i am happy to talk about any of the issues in any kind of detail, but the.i wanted i wanted to get across today, we have a broken method. we need to really start thinking big picture about these things, and part of that is we always need to recognize that affordable energy is life and death and affordable energy is incredibly challenging. i just want to take questions. [applauding] >> i am going to ask for you to please wait for the microphone to get to you. raise your hand and say your name and affiliation. i want i want to do one plug for one of our papers coming up. steve moore has gone back and looked at all the things

that were said and compare that to what is being said now, and it's the same thing all the talking points are the same, and none of them came true. maybe i will just ask you a question about the global warming issue generally. is there anything different from the global warming agenda and the environmental agenda from 1960s and 1970s? seventys? what are the similarities or differences that you can take out? >> how the issue is portrayed. >> the aims, the goals? in coming to this issue, having issue, having a background in philosophy. i was really interested in environmental philosophy which is really about how we think about our relationship with the rest of nature, with our environment. and what i find is most

people are not aware that their are two -- that their are multiple environmental philosophies. zero, my philosophy as we all care about the environment. that way of putting it, the environment actually obscures because there is one viewpoint, the humanist view of environment and the non- humanist view of environment. the humanist uses our goal is to maximize human well-being, and we want an environment that we will do that. so if so if we are going to presume a park is for human enjoyment. but there is another school that says, the ideal is human nonimpact which means we want to impact as little as we can, even if that goes against human life. so you take something like alaska, a place that basically nobody goes.

for all intents and purposes mostly a wasteland. nobody wants to go their. people hate the idea of human beings treading their. and and so that is the idea of non- impact. and this goes to in the environmentalist movement in the 60s and 70s they were more vocal about this. for example, a very bad word in environmentalism and so maybe the '80s was technology. a very, very explicit that if you are in favor of this non-humanist view you have to be anti- technology. technology, what is technology? using human ingenuity to transform our environment for human purposes. what happened is digital technology became so popular that it became un- pc to say i am against technology. so don't say i'm against

technology, but technology, but those really run together. they are basically the same thing. i bring this up because what happens is the viewpoint is we should impact as little as possible. and usually that is ethics. metaphysics, the worldview. worldview. the metaphysics is usually, well, nature is the fragile mother. nature is this fragile mother. it will give us everything we want and need, but only if we don't disrupt it. if we mess with things too much, if we play god we are going to -- things are going to go haywire. this viewpoint has existed for everything, anesthesia, computers, every new technology people are afraid that it is going to take over. what over. what they always.to is some new side effect. with fossil fuels there is a

side a side effect. when you burn fossil fuels you can get things like -- sulfur can be in there. but you have water vapor and carbon dioxide. h2o and co2. that is true, that side effect does impact the atmosphere, but what happens is if you have this fragile mother view of the world you are going to suspect that that is not merely a change or even a challenge but a catastrophe. and so this is the mindset that has always existed and why they are wrong about everything because they assume. all the predictions are wrong. but like ddt, man is changing things, making a chemical. therefore it must be a catastrophe. it was actually a catastrophe not to use it. but there is this assumption of catastrophe. to go back to the example, it is really this philosophical bias that is

driving everything. that is why people are so out of their mind about 1.3 degrees fahrenheit. some portion of it is caused by fossil fuels. you know, before this before this time everyone in history wanted it to be warmer. always. if man does it it must be this really bad thing. that's why they renamed it climate change. and even though the co2 levels of been ten times higher in history, it doesn't matter. matter. it is this fear of man may change. this view of the fragile mother plus the nonimpact few of ethics. i hope that answers the question. the mindset has always been the same. so there was a brief flirtation with global cooling based on particulate matter coming out, stuff that -- co2 will reflect a

certain amount of feedback and whereas other things will reflect heat out. but in all these cases it is always equating change or challenge with catastrophe. and they see no catastrophe in the state of nature. whereas as a humanist i see a catastrophe in the unchanged sea of nature. if and when, even though it has been tapering off, it will never change, these catastrophic predictions will never change unless the mindset changes, unless this dogma about the fragile mother because it is an unscientific view. >> all right. time for your questions. >> hello. i want to ask you, you said about those resources, coal, nuclear energy, and hydroelectric, i want to

make sure you consider hydroelectric as a renewable or nonrenewable? you never touched on it. the majority. >> good question. so first of all, nuclear and hydro. fossil fuels. in terms of just the major energy sources such anyway, in terms of hydro, why didn't i include hydro under renewable? two aspects. one is mainly because the environmentalists do not include them together. if you look at what is impeding hydroelectric development, let's say the world has -- and not sure what you are shaking your head at, but if you look at what the world has in terms

of hydroelectric capacity and who poses the building, it is not conservative. it it is not libertarian. it is environmentalist. so those websites among your list of achievements are dams that they are shut down this is a particularly objectionable view given that they claim there is a co2 related catastrophe. so the reason i focus is because those are what they claim is the replacement technology. i am a huge supporter of hydro and discuss it at length in the book. hydro is limited by the fact that their are only certain water sites that can accommodate it. in terms of renewable, i consider renewable a useless classification. i don't think -- no other industry -- again, a renewable cell phone, renewable building. the way.

the way life works under capitalism, we make progress explaining new ways of doing things. the question of what should i use for fuel or what material should i use for a book is not what can i do over and over for 1 billion years are 1 million years. the question is, what is the best way of doing this that mankind knows and tomorrow we want to figure out an even better way. when i fill up my car with gas am not saying, saying, this is a commitment for everyone until the end of time. this is a really good thing for us, us, and i welcome other people developing other things so when i buy my next car it can be powered by something else, whether that's methanol or compressed natural gas or some advanced battery technology. those are great. we want whatever whatever the best thing is. so to think of it as solar and wind we should give some preference because they are renewable, renewable, that

means we're settling for something inferior on the grounds that we can have something inferior forever. why would you want it forever if it is inferior? and it is joke anyway because all the materials, only one of the components is renewable which is the sun or the wind. that is the exact same thing with oil, by the way. oil is just compressed stored solar energy. so let's tie it back to the last point.. renewable as an ideal is not a scientific ideal, not an economic ideal, not a moral ideal. it is an ideal based on the idea that we should minimize our impact, that that should be our goal. people have these very woozy ideas that somehow we are living in harmony with nature, which is complete nonsense. just to do that just as well as we have to do other things.

but it is this ideal of let's not impact things and also the idea which is even worse of let's be repetitive that is an ideal fit for an animal, not a human being. >> my personal favorite is mr. fusion. >> drew schaefer. in terms of regulation as a result of very simple, inherent negative externalities, what do you think as far as and trade programs or taxation? >> two issues. one is do i think that externality is a good framework for the law to operate under? that would be no. two is, are there externalities for these negative externalities particularly with climate issues.

so the way my framework's property rights. let's take standard pollution and then we can take something more complex like the alleged danger of co2. in general you have to decide at a certain.what threshold of omission constitutes pollution and what doesn't. and and there will always be a threshold. very important. lower is not always better. better. i will give you the example i gave before, coal-based england. imagine if they if they had imposed epa rules in 1970. everyone everyone would die of call starvation. ..