and jane addams the first american woman to win the nobel peace prize. >> good evening. welcome to book passage here in san francisco the historic building. we are thrilled to have you here this morning. we welcome c-span tonight as well for a special guest amy kittelstrom. we really do appreciate your being here and it's not something we say regularly and it becomes a bit of a cliché but we are quite sincere in pointing out that your being here and you're supporting an independent bookstore means we can introduce writers and authors and bring in children's authors and have writer sometimes is a life-changing experience for them. by your being here and supporting the bookstore we will be able to be here for you and bring you events such as this tonight. amy is taking a break from her regular job as associate

professor of history at panoma state university where her teaching specialization is 19th century thinkers. her new book "the religion of democracy" perplex her studies at boston university where she earned her ph.d. and study centers at yale harvard and princeton. "the religion of democracy" re-creates the liberal conversations in the 18th century to the 20th by tracing the connections between seven figures through whom they knew, what they read and wrote, where they went and how they express their opinions from john adams to william james jane addams from boston to chicago. reviewers are praising amy's book. they say it pours until a intellectual history for scholars and concerned citizens whether they are religious or not. one other said a light wind erudite reminder of deep roots in american soil and a role in

putting the mayor. it has also been called an illuminating story for our time as well as what it tells us about the past which he -- please join me in welcoming amy kittelstrom to book passage. thank you. [applause] >> thank you and thank you for coming. it's really nice to be here and to see that there are people interested in reading and ideas. it's cinco de mayo. you could be out looking for a happy hour special but instead you are here. you are making a choice about what to do with your time and i think the choices we make are the most important things about who we are. that contention is sort of a product of the research i did for this book which i can't lay out all the arguments in the short time that i hope to give you some sense of what's inside the cover and to explain enough that you can understand the passage. i'm planning on reading it took

me 15 years to write this book and usually the longer it takes a scholar to produce something the smaller their audience gets which is a paradox that has to do in part with the place of university and american culture so that those few americans who are still leaders tend to see more of the works of journalists and people who are turning a profit on their writing. people who are writing for the sake of intellectual liberty which is what scholars do so i'm really great hope that this book has seemed to start to reach a wider public and the only thing we know about the that public is that they are shapers of american culture and not mere victims of it, so i hope this book empowers you as readers to also. so i just thought i'd say a little bit about where the book came from in my own thinking and

then how it developed over time. it started with a question that's not a historical question at all but a question that preoccupied me a lot in my youth which is a question of how it is possible to hold a belief sincerely and at the same time to respect somebody who holds a different belief. like i say that's not and historical question. the question about pluralism. it's a question about living in society where people disagree with one another and where people have different back onto different values, different goals and yet they have to harmonize somehow together so they do that by all eventually coming to believe one thing or by learning how to deal with disagreement. so these are some of the questions that were on my mind when i was a graduate student in history and working on converting such questions about the way things are or the way things should be into questions

about the way things were. in the course of that search i found this philosopher who is very well-known in some circles and not in others and his name is william james. he is maybe arguably the most influential american philosopher and the hesitant part is ralph waldo emerson who certainly has a bigger global reputation but whose writings influenced william james quite a bit so james lived mostly in boston although he traveled to europe quite a bit. he was born in 1842 and died in 1910. the reason i ended up including him almost against my will because i found his ways of talking about these kinds of questions of belief human difference in how to treat one another so compelled me. so when i was a graduate student

in the dissertation phase of writing what became this book, i thought that by working through james' writing and readings and associations in its time i could understand something about the place of religion at a moment when america was modernizing and leaving behind traditional ways of thinking and producing an intellectual culture more like the one we live in. by doing so and asking questions about what he thought about religion which is decidedly and non-christian form of religion i ultimately found that way of thinking has christian roots and so my book had to go back and understand those roots and then take them into the 20th century. so what we actually have is a specific kind of orientation that is not represented in our public culture today and also not the kind that is really

represented in fellowship, so it's a nonevangelical form of religion because it is about not forcing other people into your way of thinking. so that's just some of the action that's happening in the book. figure after figure over time dealing with attention between their own individual way of seeing, thinking knowing and act being and living in community with people who had different ways of thinking and knowing and how they work set out over time. one of the things that happened is that they decided to think of themselves as liberals which has almost no relation to today's label liberal which connects to a certain set of political commitments that has to do with the nature of governance and

what should provide. those are ecstatic he is fixed as in not moving and the way past liberals thought of what they meant by that term is that to be liberal and to be open-minded, to believe that they didn't know the whole truth and to be inclusive that is to include everyone who would also be engaged in seeking that truth. so that is a little bit of something about the vocabulary that's in the book and i'm going to read this passage from a chapter on william james. each chapter is devoted to one specific figure but they are not either face. the rule of the book is not simply have to get to know these past historical actors although you will get to know them and i'm not making claims that they are representative of large groups of people but instead for

each of the chapters being organized around a specific figure allows us to see the world through their eyes. and that's the historical discipline that is to leave our moment behind and to look at the past on its own terms. that is the action of historical writing and historical thinking and it allows us to see ways that people have blinders on in the past and what those blinders were how they were mismatched between what they held as ideals and what they wanted to do and did in society so that's one benefit of these characters but another is that they were all interconnected. i use this method of working through the sources one by one and networking out into this longer narrative that covers a

couple hundred years. so the first chapter about john adams who became our second president was a part of his life that i cover in aceh are into the revolutionary era has connections that go across lots of different chapters. they to hear little bit about that in this passage where john adams comes up and william hilleary channing who is the minister that's important in 18th century also is going to come up and hopefully you will hear a representation of the kind of approach that's consistent with the whole book. so in this passage the only other part i think you need to know to understand is that it's focusing on a monument that was erected on austin, and to the massachusetts 54th regiment

which fought in the civil war so a lot of me people might have seen the film glory which was a fictionalized representation of this all-black regiment in the civil war. by local standards is pretty good for -- it's overall depiction of that group of soldiers and the monument than which was erected on boston commons and i had to take a picture on my cell phone so to me that is quite wild and am not technically a sophisticated person at all but it was worth including in the book and i will indulge in a quick anecdote about that. i hope it's descriptive of some of this paradox of having limited site and ideals that may clash with some practice. this was this past summer.

i went to the monument. i hadn't been there in a while. i had taken a picture that was going to be an illustration. i felt a little emotional so i took my pictures pictures when there were no other tourists around so i got a pretty good shot and stood off to the side of the monument for a few minutes taking in the scene and i saw two african-americans in front of the monument taking turns taking each other's picture and then there was a euro-american woman there with her husband who started talking to them and said her husband had been an extra in the film glory. just trying to make a friendship with them. then she was taking her picture of the monument and one of the men was in the frame that was edged out and she said i was hoping you would stay there. what she meant was she wanted him to provide a living color in her picture.

it's a little bit object defying so i thought i would share that because i thought it was illustrative of the way our past historical actors like us have ideals that didn't match reality reality. so the mechanism of this thing that i'm calling the religion of democracy in the book i call practical idealism so it's about having ideas and your practice to get towards those ideals. it doesn't mean they get realized immediately. so i think that's enough for me to get into this section and i really look forward to your questions and comments and any kind of reflections that anyone has afterwards. as the introduction stated it's about a liberal conversation. what a liberal conversation means is of course everybody speaking their own viewpoint by their own vantage point.

by their own integrity and a person's equally listening to one another. everybody here has thoughts about democracy but i'd also like to hear. so this is the beginning of the section called our american religion. at the northeast corner of boston commons stance of bronze and granite monument crafted by gardens. the sculptor commissioned by the grieving great-grandson of john adams, henry adams for a memorial at the grave of his wife clover. for the monument on the comments saint gardens was hired by colonel robert shah to depict the enlisted men of the 54th massachusetts volunteer regiment regiment. the units most famous military deployment of former slaves and descendents of slaves. along with their son the officer. the shah's decision was

consistent with their insistence that their son's corpse be left in a common grave with his men in south carolina rather than receiving a hero's burial in boston. this resolve made the shah's and the monument 54th outliers on the landscape of civil war memory. once federal reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of troops from the battle in 1877 most of the countries agreed above the civil war had not been fought for emancipation and indeed had little to do with it. a collective amnesia reflected how the majority of civil war monuments depict only the classic soldier confederate or union always brave. the monument for the 54th was one of the few that included african-americans at all and the others were at the picture of slaves kneeling in supplication of standing soldiers bestowing

on their passage often semifigures. they are the soldiers march with resolute faces each set of features unique. their postures are proud and direct their guns smartly shouldered their packs neatly rolled their strides aligned with colonel shah and college friend. inscription emphasizes that not only was the end of slavery the meaning of civil war, it was something white officers in the black rank-and-file accomplish together. these volunteers gave to the nation and the world proof that americans of african descent possess the pride courage and devotion of the patriot soldiers. those quotations are drawn from inscription on the back of the monument. of unmanned -- monument as was liberal cultural but made it possible confirms that the war

was about slavery about denial of human rights to human beings and fulfilling the promise of american freedom. the monument to shaw and the 54th was unveiled on memorial day 1897 with remaining survivors of the regiment in a place of honor. afterwards the crowds move down the road to the music hall where theodore parker had once delivered sermons and supportive human rights illustrated in the monument. there were two speakers at the commemoration and 3000 investigators in the audience. one speaker was booker t. washington the most common former slave. washington gave when it dressed in the exposition in atlanta which he comes to comedy jim crow. washington had written -- was not from slavery as the title to automatically put it with the help of white philanthropist who he followed in bleeping african-americans worked hard and got the skills industrial america needed discrimination

would not be a barrier. in boston the line of washington that drew the most applause showed what a great politician was. the white man who discloses on development by opposing a black man. one witness said he dashed -- everyone's her. the other speaker that day was when james. why was he chosen? ciardi taught as a student and posted as a dinner guest the man about to go into washington's chief antagonist that the eb dubois but he had chosen to speak in part for his public reputation in the part because one of his younger brother served suffering grave wounds in the battle where shaw and so many men die. james wrote to washington in advance of the event using carefully respectful language offering a draft of his address inviting washington's critical suggestion and acknowledge in

washington's proved powers and oratory. in letters to his wife or brother however he referred to washington as a -- the casual square marked washington as an outsider to liberal culture in visibly toted anglo protestant at the end of the 19th century. the distance between the liberal belief in universal freedom and equality and liberals cultural practices homogeneity and hierarchy was large. it was hard not to see washington as a mascot for liberal inclusivity. the wild praise for his speech which promised african-americans would cause no trouble when asked only that their efforts need no opposition has a locally deleterious and that did not exist but the event and the idea that it fostered became the basis for a future liberal culture in which practice came closer to theory in which belief in equality help the society pursue its realization.

writing this speech forced james to specify. when he took the meaning of the civil war to be. undoubtedly he was an emancipation is belief of a civil war what he called in the speech the profound meaning of the union cause. that was an inherited from his liberal context. so indeed may have been his way of talking about our american religion that faith and freedom and the common people working together for their salvation yet because the occasion compelled him to think deeply about the meaning of the american creed and about what shaw and his comrades stand for and show us james brought his philosophical thinking about pluralism and into his awareness of the white house -- wider social world around him. james had always been an ambivalent american at best him up with german culture when he was in germany and with american mountains when he was with them allergic to american accented english and eager to be like that american farmers who lived

during the summer home in new hampshire. cosmopolitan for contemporary thought and irrepressibly iconoclastic his affection for eccentrics and originals in multiple walks of life the diversity found in the united states. designated to speak on behalf of liberal culture as a monument commemoration he started thinking about the country in terms of cooperation across difference different sandy started representing america is an ideal of equality that could shape behavior is taller -- powerfully as religious ideal shape in a determinate life. the heroism of shaw and the 54th demonstrates the practical possibility of lived equality. americans have all complex and sing conditions can go forth like brothers james said and made death cheerfully if need be in order that this religion of our native land should not be a failure on earth. use the line a tribute if i is like alluding to. tonight the of the new jerusalem bed with the a city upon a hill.

some ar ransom country james said like the city of the promised life foursquare and there have been in the ways of all the nations be lit up by this lie. his uplifting message carried with it a warning bell. democracy is still upon trial. no one's can rest on the competence of the past. the sacrifice of shaw and his soldiers would be in vain unless today's americans have the courage to live by the same civic vision for which those men died. [applause] thank you. i didn't want to take up too much time with my own talking. i'd love to hear if anybody has a question or a comment or anything. [inaudible] >> you said if anything he was as important as william james. why not mention.

>> i do spend a lot of time on emerson and i do appreciate the question. why did i not devote a whole chapter to emerson? i and pushing back against something which is that emerson was so huge and so massive that he actually obscure the history that i discovered so it's part of my intellectual discovery process was i thought i was going to find the roots of democracy in the transcendentalist so i decided to go mallory channing has a little older than emerson because i had read his sermon on subculture and it look like christian pragmatism to me. i knew i would find a hero there that was important that is when the bottom dropped out and i had to go into the 18th century because the roots were actually there. the way emerson has affected our understanding it's almost like he blocked the trail. the bloodhounds would lose this and because emerson had been

there. he was so huge and i don't want to pay homage because i don't think he deliberately did but he presented himself as such a renegade, such a maverick, such a new thing under the sun but in fact he was absolutely a product of the history that had come before him. his leaving the church on grounds of conscience was a completely pulled liberal thing to do driven by conscience. so i didn't want to devote a chapter to him because i would have to use so much debunking of the way emerson is already represented and i found that his his -- was a much more descriptive character. the second chapter is about mary emerson, ralph emerson's favorite aunt who never married because she said her nature was not destined to be. at that time the nature of marriage was such that women had

to submit their own will to their husbands and as i said at the beginning this thing about choice cultivating your own individual will is a pious act so mary emerson did this very well. she influenced ralph waldo emerson so she between her and william ellery -- i was able to do all that work in that. not that ralph waldo emerson would have done through the narrative and then in the later chapters i'm able to show how ethical culture leaders and others spent so much time reading emerson and drawing strength from emerson that it was evident that those attached to emerson who had great resonance were in fact they product of this prior culture. so it's a great question my hope that answers it.

>> i am curious if you see the ambivalence that dcn james and the other liberal thinkers and what does that play and how does that relate to your religious faith? >> okay so when you say ambivalent is that about the inconsistency? >> i think that was what you are saying. >> yeah. so did the prior come to the thinkers before james had a similar ambivalence about america and the answer is no. because well okay the prior characters jennings thought america is the most because it has this democratic form of government because devoted to the principle that all men are created equal announced just getting rid of slavery and giving women the right so channing's -- there was noted

dissonance but the exception is john adams of all people because no question a revolutionary patriot, a man who loves the constitution and all of those kinds of things but he was also not an optimist. by the end of his life he was depressed about the prospect of america because as happened during his presidency the politics of dishonesty of manipulation of backroom dealing and so on was so far from his conception of what america should be that he was despondent that it wasn't like james loving german culture for example. john adams didn't have a substitute for america. i mean he remained committed but i think that helps describe the bit about his legacy also of

being so prideful and all those kinds of things. he was really proud and accomplished in his generation and he was really afraid of seeing it squandered. >> i haven't had a chance to read your book yet and i look forward to it but i noticed at the beginning you have used afraid -- the phrase moral agent and throughout the book you talked about that also. is that what we would call behavior or is that something else? >> that's a great question i'm really glad you asked it in part because i'm very fond of this term as you have party notice. moral agency and for a long time i wanted it to be in the subtitle of the book but i was afraid of would make sense to anyone but me so didn't belong there but it is hugely important because one of the things for me

that was so surprising was i was interested in the way of thinking about human difference that was universal back could include all of human difference and instead i found a christian origin that specific and particular and there's actually a christian way of thinking and believing that helps produce a universal way of thinking and believing and moral agency then as a concept originated in the gerston context as a christian idea and became a universal idea over time. ..

>> so that's one. and the second then is this is then the reason that to use the most obvious example slavery should be abolished. all right? so there's a christian objection to slavery that's not about that is not only about the humanness of the slaves who are absolutely credited with humanity in this viewpoint but it's also about what's wrong with slavery is that they've been robbed of their moral agency. their masters tell them what to do therefore they don't get to

choose what to do, therefore they don't get to exercise their powers of personal choice in the pursuit of truth and goodness. so moral agency is like, on the one hand, a right to liberty gives you a right the liberty, but -- to liberty, but it also gives you a duty to use that liberty in this particular way. so it involves the use of reason which is considered a godly characteristic and ease of conscience which makes everybody carry an inborn chip of divinity. and part of the practice of pluralism in the religion of democracy is remembering that everyone has that. so even when you're in heepted disagreement, to try -- heated disagreement, to try to remember they also bear some innerty divinity that you have, therefore, you shouldn't dehumanize them and run them over. you should, you know maintain your respect for that quality or

potential of the moral agent. so moral agency, the noun, is the thing that everybody possesses. moral agent then is what you are and what i am and what everyone is an agent who makes choices that have moral consequences. does that help? >> yes, it does. to expand on that though, if you will please, would you say that moral agency is almost the opposite of exceptionalism? >> um, so exceptionalism like -- so when i use the term exceptionalism, i'm often using it to talk about america this earlier question about america being different from and better than every other country in the world. but when you're using it, are you talking about an almost narcissism? >> yes. it seems more self-centered than the idea of agency because agency implies pluralism. >> yeah, yeah, yeah.

yeah, yeah. no i think you're really right and i've never thought of it that way and that's so helpful because it is, it's actually -- it is a radical personal practice right? so it's not about legislating that people think in any way it's saying, you know, if you think in an open minded, inclusive way, then you're going to be more humble. and so this is one of the things that i talk about in the book. once you have this concept that every human being is a moral agent and that's a sacred thing about them, then your pursuit of virtue isn't just don't kill, don't steal don't lie, etc. it's also about how you interact with one another. it has a social prescription. and so the moral agent ideally is humble right? so the opposite of exceptional, just like you're saying, is humble because they have to remember my perspective is limited. i don't know the whole truth okay? so i have to listen to others.

but at the same time, they have to express their viewpoint honestly and sincerely. otherwise it won't be out there in the public sphere for other people to interact with. the dialogue won't happen unless you go ahead and speak with candor and sincerity. is humility and candor or humility and sincerity are the two social virtues that come from this ethic of moral agency. >> this is a complicated question, but i see your -- the book is book ended with john adams and jane adams. and starting with john adams at the beginning now john adams his relationship with democracy was somewhat ambivalent. he was sort of an elitist democrat, if anything as leader of the federalist party. he posed kind of the more ground-up, jeffersonian democrats and, as a matter of fact the word democracy among federalists was a bad word, the

dem accuratic -- democratic and republican societies. so his view of government is definitely it's not like common people make all the decisions, it's really a republican view. common people elect republican leaders who are wise and virtuous, and then they make the disinterested decisions. and that's the vision that sort of gets degraded. now i look -- go over to the end, and you have jane adams and before that the ethical culture. and these are much more grounded in common people and it's sort of a very different concept of democracy. and i think a lot more pluralistic too, because adams was also the author of the massachusetts constitution which is state-supported religion. so my question to you as the author who's book ending this, does this represent like a thread that you're making through, sort of the increasing evolution of what constitutes a democracy? >> yes. and we may disagree on some

points right? so yes, indeed, the federalists were opposed to democratic republicans, but i don't think lower case d democracy was a bad word for john adams at all, okay? so, i mean, this is one of ideas in american history that i'm pushing back against the idea that the federalists were conservatives, right? the federalists were conservatives. first of all, i don't find conservative a meaningful term. it's actually problematic for me always. but these are the people that were calling themselves liberals, it just happens to be the case, but what they were talking about had nothing to do with politics it had instead to do with religion, right? so the yes is there is change over time right? is so this is not a static history. i'm not finding something that was constant across american culture because that's exactly the change that happens, is that

jane adams is almost like, she's like a radical democrat in that sense of she's really going to listen to different people's viewpoints. it's not just the common people, the immigrants and workers who lived around whole house. she's listening to the industrialists. she's having conversations with george pullman. and, of course, she's trying to get them to see the point of view of the workers, but she's also trying to see his point of view right? in a way jane adams seems like the most realized character, you know, from a historical perspective. but what she believed and practiced was consistent with ideas that john adams had. and that to me, was the biggest shock, to find sometimes in the writings i would find jane adams writing things that were almost very verbatim things john adams had written. just a little bit different and i don't think she was cribbing off him. i think there was a cultural continuity that had to do with this ethic of moral agency, but then it's a slow sort of

unspooling of the implications of this idea. right? so on the matter of voting, i'll go to william elly channing so this is then the era of the rise of the democratic party and the spread of voting. so then you have universal white male suffrage, right? and now they're whigs because the federalist party's over, and they're horrified. they don't think most people should vote. but that's because they're afraid of exactly what happened, which is that the democratic party would co-opt their vote, buy them off with rum and do what they wanted. so the whigs instead wanted them to be educated. so it's no coincidence at all that the common school movement develops right about the time of universal white male suffrage. it's the realization these immigrants are going to become voters, and they need to be educated right? and so the democratic portion is in that sort of sacredness of each individual. the mechanics of who should vote are not, obviously have to get

debated and hammered out over time. and john adams, you called an elitist -- oh, i'm sorry, i mention to say this about william channing. he said when alexis de tocqueville came to visit he said to tocqueville that -- oh, man, i would no sooner want a working man to vote than my 10-year-old, right? that's elitism right? thinking that a labour would not have the capacity to exercise that kind of governance. and at the same time when he delivered his address self-culture, he said i rightfully belong to the great fraternity of working men. he's putting himself on a par with the workers which is pretty radical for a rich guy to do, right? on the other hand, maybe he's a hypocrite. i don't think a hypocrite i think he's so out of touch like he doesn't really realize that never having worked a day in your life has conventions and -- consequences and actually makes you not know your audience

very well. and at the exact same time, working men really liked that speech. he got a lot of praise for it. so it's really one of those things that it looks different from there. to me, it looks different from there. and i don't think that the democratic republicans were advocating exactly ground-up democracy, right? i mean, the slave holders weren't. >> not the slave holders. actually, what i was referring to mostly because i'm much more familiar with washington than adams, and washington was very upset with what they called the democratic republican societies. >> yeah. >> which a century later would be called ethical culture societies where people are getting together and they're talking, you know, the common people are basically talking politics and caucusing, but around issues that affect them and trying to make the right choices. but they're outside of government. and that to washington, was a denigration of what government was.

because they were usurping the role of government. and the people who should be talking about those issues and making those decisions in his mind were the elected leaders, you see? so now i don't -- i'm not familiar enough with adams to know if he shared washington's view on that altogether. >> yeah. and what it illustrates so well is that the whole concept of a party is illiberal, okay? from this definition. so you already know, of course washington said, oh we shouldn't have factions and so on. but the fact is the federalist party happened because politics happened because people are human. and so federalists, you can't generalize about all federalists. where did john adams get attacked from, right? within the federalist party. and so the party's spirit i mean, here again we can bring back ralph waldo emerson who wouldn't even declare himself an abolitionist. i mean opposition to slavery was the most popular reform in his milieu, you know in boston

conquered and so on. he wouldn't even declare himself that because being under a label and letting that label do the work of thinking cuts moral agency undermines your power to think for yourself. and so this is, for all of them, it's about intellectual independence. thinking for yourself, but doing can it, you know, hopefully with some humility. john adams was, of course, quite short on humility. but he wanted to be humble. i mean, that's all we can give him credit for, he wanted to -- [laughter] but he never really made it. any other questions? well then i think -- thank you for coming. [applause] >> i'm certain that amy will stay long enough to sign any books you have for her to sign, and you can chat a bit as you're having your books autographed and those are available at the counter. thank you all very much for

coming and thank you amy, very much for your thoughts. >> thank you. >> booktv is on twitter and facebook. and we want to hear from you. tweet us twirl.com/booktv -- twitter.com/booktv, or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. >> author john ferling now examining some of the causes of the american revolution. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

>> good evening welcome to the atlanta history center. i'm in stereo, it feels like. i'm kate whitman i'm the vice president of public programs here at the atlanta history center, and i welcome you here this evening. if i could ask everybody to turn their phones east off or to silent -- either off or to silent. c-span is filming this evening, so we want to make sure atlanta doesn't get a bad reputation for having cell phones go off. tonight's lecture is an ellson lecture, and we thank ambassador and mrs. edward ellson for supporting the lecture series. john ferling is the author of "whirlwind: the american revolution," and that's what he'll be talking about this evening. he has written 13 books on the american revolution, an early american society. his books include biographies of george washington and john adams. his books also revolutionary war and in 2013 jefferson and