i want you to tell me how does that commercial square with your values? just tell me do you stand for that you say you approve that message? where would your values be if it does alright then say so if it doesn't then take the darn thing off the air. i believe that would work. so you would encourage people of faith to not only be active but be engaged. >> yes. i think so and you know i wrote a book ten years ago called faith in politics and it was kind of a warning about don't overdo it and believe that such a such position is god's position because religion and politics can be terribly divisive. when i wrote that, some people said what you're saying that

religious people should get out of politics. no i'm saying don't use it divisive lee in politics. don't try to use religion or misuse booktv.

you can watch them on our web site booktv.org. you are watching booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. we are live from the wisconsin book festival in madison. right now you are looking inside a room of the madison central library, the home of this year's festival. all day we will be bringing you programs on politics, grammar, religion, justice system and more but here it is a history of the american public library system, wayne wiegand. >> good morning, everyone. the marketing manager for madison public library. on behalf of the library and the wisconsin book festival i would like to thank you for coming to this morning's event making the four day festival, i think

madison public library foundation and our festival for their support in making this happen. this morning we are kicking off the third busiest day of the wisconsin book festival with wayne wiegand's "part of our lives," a discussion with madison public library. before we get started a couple housekeeping details. issue happen noticed there are cameras in the room this morning. we are pleased to welcome c-span to the festival. they will be broadcasting live, when we get to the queue and a portion of today's events please speak into the microphone in the center of the room so you can be heard not just in this room to wall booktv viewers. silence yourself phones, if you would like to share on social media, use the hash tag -- after our talk there will be time for

questions followed by a book signings, books for this event will be sold there as well. it is my pleasure, 23 years ago i moved to madison. his classes were among the most engaging and blessed me with the appreciation for the historic role will libraries play in the community at large. wayne wiegand is professor of emeritus of library and information studies at florida state university and former director of florida book awards. widely considered the dean of american library historians and is the author of 100 articles and numerous award winning books including an instrument for

american public library during world war i. he will be joined by greg michaels, in 2012, he formerly held the position as assistant director, and library manager at county library in colorado. he consults regularly on the future of public library, most recently at the next conference. please join me in welcoming wayne wiegand and greg mikkels. [applause] >> thank you for the kind introduction. i think i might have given her an a in class at some time. i have a huge bowl today. to brought in your thinking about libraries in general, public libraries in particular

motivated in large part because of conclusions that emerge from research on a book that i publish, "part of our lives," a history of the american public library. my goal is to find out why people of these ubiquitous civic institutions. love them they do. 2013 report by the pure research center's internet and american light project noted that in previous decades every other major institution, government, churches, at corporations has fallen in public is seen except libraries of military first responders. the study also found 91% of those surveyed said libraries are important to their communities identified the public library experiences. libraries are important, 84% because libraries developed love

of reading and books. my historical narrative did not take the user in the life of the library approach, and the user prospective, trace the history of the public library not so much by analyzing the words of its founders and managers but by listening to the voice of people who use some since the nineteenth century. i got the user in the library term from a former colleague. part of our lives adopts bottom up prospective featuring voices of generations of public library users. largely because of recent technologies and covering many of these was not difficult. autobiographies and biographies, some in manuscript collections and public library archive across the country. vast majority are fixed in thousands of u.s. newspapers and

periodicalss digitized since the 1990s and the huge databases. by using public library as a search term i found thousands of voices and letters to the editor, thousands were quoted in stories reporters wrote about local libraries. as i analyze this data i was surprised at how quickly it organized into three main categories. in no particular order people who love their public libraries for the useful information they made accessible, for the public spaces they provided and the trans formative potential of commonplace stories that circulated and help users make sense of their world. if you historical examples that comfortably fit the category of information as we currently define it. sitting in cincinnati public library desk in 1867, thomas edison compiled a bibliography on electricity. colleagues later recalled many

times edison would be excused from duty under pretense of being too sick to work and invariably strike a beeline to the library where he would spend the entire day and evening reading such works on electricity as were to b had the 1899 wilbur and orville wright came upon an ornithology book, rekindled their interest in flight, one of the biographers write. in the detroit public library reading room on the 1950s a teenage e-mail pored over comedians printed monologues. she appeared in drama is written by herself without makeup or crops, conjured up the personality of the characters she portrayed and that of an seen people with whom she was talking. about the same time in arkansas 10-year-old william jefferson clinton discovered the garland county public library. i would go there for hours browsing among the books especially those on native

americans, he said. that probably explains the shirt. in a detroit ghetto in 1960 to sonya carson, a single african-american mother frustrated with poor school performance in all the television her 11-year-old son and his older brother were watching made a decision. from now on, she said, you boys can watch no more than three programs a week. instead they were to go to the local detroit public library branch to read at least 2 books every week. at an end of weak week give me a report on what you read. it sounds like a big assignment, ben carson, the republican presidential candidate remembered but he reconciled, since i always loved animals, nature and science i chose library books on those topics. i began looking forward to my trips to the library he said in part because librarian's came to know him. i thrived on this new way of life and in my interests widened

to include books on adventure, scientific discoveries, my reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension. 1971, barack obama returned to honolulu after living with his mother in jakarta. first place i wanted to be was in a library he later recalled. often he had specific information, one saturday with the help of a librarian who appreciated the seriousness i found a book on east africa. obama wanted information about kenya, the birthplace of his father. they raise cattle and live in mud huts, something called millet, the book said, traditional costume with a leather thong across the crotch. shocked by what he read obama left the book open on a table and walked out.

all these people had information that needs of a library that. and the prospective focuses primarily on information and translates into services. librarians institute maintained spaces and resources. for most of its history librarianship has been focused on what in the 18th-century was called useful knowledge. in the nineteenth to ban 22 was called best reading in the american library association, best reading but in the late 20th centuries that moved into information. this focus gives particular meaning to the phrase access to information and nominates the profession's thinking but the american public library is a unique set against the tuition because unlike most other civic institutions people don't have to use them.

as result of regeneration users have of the influence the process of shaping library collection services. library inship is not addressed in any direct way, this bottom up pressure for me was not comprehensive enough to explain what i was discovering about the library and the stories over the generations. to explain my findings might challenge became how to expand beyond the profession's traditional prospective, how to craft a framework that accommodated and explained the voices of library use this i was uncovering in my research. to illustrate the importance of place let me introduce you to three trailers that are forthcoming in a documentary on the american public library by two san francisco film makers.

>> san francisco, have been here for about a decade's and i do go to school. my apartment is about this big and i don't have any room for a desk so i come to the library to. it is a great resource and come to the gallery and see what shows they have, is in the lectures to see what they do. the mayoral debate i have been here for a while. the reason i am here is it is important for people to understand. when i first moved to san francisco i was broke and literally starving. hi had a place to live but the

library kept me warm. i will get it together in a second. there was a truck that came out side once a week. they have computers and i can work on my resume and apply for jobs and did i mention it was warm here? it has been there for me when i needed it. it is a valuable resource and oftentimes i think people see the library as some place for kids or homeless people and there are normal people like me that need it as our resources. i am grateful it is here. >> from my narrative a few more quotes and anecdotes. in the 1930s at the atlantic library's african-american branch, one of the few places where blacks felt safe and

welcome, director waters funding adult education programs including discussion groups focused on mohammed hadi. to ground these discussions waters purchased a number of books. among their most devoted readers was martin luther king jr. who came to the library many times during the week, she later recalled their interactions which not only showed king's reading interests but manifested the value of library as place in the black community. he walks up to the desk and looked me straight in the eye. hello, martin luther, she would respond, calling him by his first and middle names, what is on your mind? oh nothing in particular. that was the cue king had learned that new big word and between them and they had a conversation in which he used the word repeatedly. another game they played involved, tree. he would stand by the desk waiting. what is on your mind, martin

luther, waters would ask? i dipped into the future as far as the human eye could see, he responded. what is recognized and finish the verse, i dipped into the future as hard as the human eye could see, saw a vision of the world and all the waters, the gun the collection presented a problem because king was too emt check out these adult books. that is how it became -- he had his father get library card. when the cincinnati public library opened the piano room in 1955, and its firsts visitors was jimmy oblivion as he scratched his pencil on the sign up sheet. >> is signature to j. levine and then james levine. when the game but concert to 150 children in the children's room in 1957 he had already performed

as the cincinnati symphony soloist. today he is the artistic director. in 1969 the indiana public library sponsored a local talent contest with a group known to be known as the jackson 5, although they didn't win little michael was an audience favorite. in 2005 the washington post carried an article that focused on a district of columbia branch library, in it we reported every tuesday night homeless man named conrad entered the library and set up his chessboard on one of the tables. we immediately notice the transformation taking place. no more ignored pleass for this homeless man, he wrote, no third glances. in the next our people will look him in the eye, listen to his words and this library, he is the teacher.

among his students was 9-year-old alley osmond who explained her son's confidence soared after playing with conrad. he was bragging to friends about being a chess player. we owe it all to mr. conrad, his mother said. we love him. inside the library, we reported, we call him mr.. all these the jury meaningful experiences occurred in a place we call a library. i categorize them as information gathering, fails to capture their significance the lies with each of these individuals. let me turn to the transformative potential of commonplace stories, public libraries have circulated by the billions over the generations. >> i started to use the library,

i would consider those -- i was born in st. petersburg, russia. my english was zero. the library was a couple of blocks away. the library was everything to me. there was another library. the library fills a certain place in my life and fills

certain needs. you have to -- see something. and i was going to the library. come out on the street, complete the different, gave me such a relief. >> some more from my narrative. in a 2008 interview, pete seeger recalls an early life reading experience. at age 7 the library and recommended me a book about a teenager who runs away from his

stepfather who is beating him and he is adopted by middle-aged indian whose tribe was massacred, his wife sold into slavery and living alone but he remembered the so vividly 80 years after reading it, his testimony, the power of stories, a new york times editor, sitting for someone who went on to engage in the issue. 1984, president ronald reagan wrote the daughter in law harold bell wright his best selling religious novel reagan read as an adolescent, wright was no favorite of contemporary literary critics. he called him a liberated yoga will. another critic was equally harsh. harold bell writes supplies, more negative data on the literary quality of a piece of fiction than any other. no matter to younger reagan.

after reading the book, he declared himself saved and was baptized. the novel's protagonist, he writes 60 years later served as a role model that changes like jefferson's. is highly likely the copy of that came from the dixon public library which he visited twice a week, checking out sherlock holmes's stories and books by horatio alger. i am a sucker for hero worship, he said. oprah winfrey, reading, and play stories was an open door for freedom and allowed me to see there was a world beyond my grandmother's porche in mississippi that everybody didn't have an out house, everybody wasn't surrounded by poverty, there was a whole world out there that could belong to me.

the stories became her comfort, her solace, to learn something about myself, learn something about other people, learn something about the world. she read a public library copy of the tree grows in brooklyn, her first all night book, she said, the story of francine no one whose life was full of humiliation and his only friend was in books letting the public library shelves. i felt like my life was hers. after her father died in 1960, 3-year-old sonia sotomayor buried herself in reading and her bronx library, an apartment she shared with her brother. nancy drew had a powerful hold on my imagination, she remembered. every night when i finished reading and got into bed and closed my eyes i would continue the story of being in nancy's shoes until i fell asleep, her

mind work in ways very similar, i was a keen observer and listener, picked up on clues, figured things out logically. i loved the clear focus feeling that came when i concentrated on solving a problem. reading that summer, she later admitted, was her solace and the only distraction that got her through this time of trouble. all these anecdotes point to the power of printed commonplace stories did change people's lives the stories reside in all cultural media. if you watch television, go to the movies, read popular magazines, look at advertisements, you are exposed to many of the same kinds of stories as someone who studies the great books of western civilization. you have been encouraged to look at them differently. stories, richard nash argues, constitute recipes for the imagination. media scholar henry jenkins adds stories are basic to all humans, a primary means by which we

structure, share and make sense of our common experience. >> another thing about a library, a place where i actually absorb american pop culture. like the library for people and the way of -- a place where i could get free media. when i was a teenager i was begin to punk rock culture, the music scene. i couldn't afford records. i was always going to the library. my friends were able to by their records with their parents's money or steal it. i would go to the library and check some out. i was a teenager. i might have been 15 years old. i had heard about a film called a beautiful thing based on a play the gay film.

i remember going to the library and looking up the catalog, nobody saw the, i went to the stack, found it, kind of hid it underneath a stack of books, sandwich between a stack of books, take this video home, had to hide it from my parents, i remember watching this film and it was so powerful, a love story between two beyond british teenagers. for me dropped a certain danger wn on an emotional level. i didn't feel i was floundering somehow. that felt really good and i remember playing that cassette tape over and over and over again late at night.

i would sneak to the living room and play what was borrowed from the library at least once a night for three weeks in a row, sometimes repeating certain scenes over and over again because they really spoke to me. >> public library's played a primary role in making stories accessible to millions of users, ever since the boston public library opened in 1954, a particular form of story consistently averaged 66 to 75% of the library at circulation. every generation of public library users insisted on store is acceptable to community members that it contain messages they wanted to hear and view. the latest public library

circulation statistics i will detail in a minute. by historical research clearly demonstrates the capacity of commonplace stories to stimulate reader's imagination, instruct the community with shared meaning and demonstrate moral achievement. readers move into and out of the text and appropriate meaning relevant to their own lives because readers can control it the act of reading stories becomes pleasurable and then powering, intellectually stimulating and socially bonding and is in the act of reading stories that social and cultural acts of the finance take place, expert community's lack the power to check voluntary reading for interpretations they find acceptable, ordinary readers construct their own meanings sometimes as groups or individuals. most often public libraries of data very good job of democratizing their spaces and supplying information in

stories. sometimes they haven't, however. i show you a picture of two be white cops, an african-american teenager out of albany, ga. public library in july for transgression, reading the library table. although in 1963 most american public libraries have nancy drew on their shelves new york public library did not. their librarians considered serious fiction trash. instead sonia sotomayor got her copies from her mother for good behavior. new york public library did not drop nancy until 1976, san francisco public library not until the 1990s. pulp paperback titles from the 1950s and 60 had many gays and lesbians reading voraciously to consider survival literature

were never reviewed in library publications were required by public libraries. what libraries give them instead was misinformation. cannon house office building for areas where the place where we can be most anonymous and delve deeply into areas we wish to uncover in secret, one 15-year-old later recalled. it was the library in 1969 to uncover the meaning of my lesbianism and what i found was not similar to my own experience. the information she found their frightened me and convinced me this was not lesbianism my was experiencing but something else. remember in the 1980s when many information technology predicted the demise of public libraries by the turn-of-the-century? they were wrong. dead wrong. in 2012 the latest year for which we have national statistics, the u.s. had more public libraries than ever, 17,219 including branches, over

3,000 more than the number of mcdonald's restaurants. .. public library libraries also provide users access to 250,000 internet ready computers in the

100% more per capita than a decade earlier. library and government officials learned the most important goal is role is to provide access to information that develops consumer's creative entrepreneurs and citizens, the kind of information thomas edison pursued in their public libraries and many people can now cannot retrieve on computers at information thomas addison pursued and that many argued people do not retrieve. what they circulate in the forms are as important as access to information and a variety of reasons. in her book, the village affect, how face to face contact should

make us happier and smarter, her research in the development of neuroscience demonstrate the substantial benefits that accrue to people who experience high levels of face to face contact including increased ability to empathize and vocabulary and most important, a longer life stand span. they come to similar conclusions with other research. negotiating the social world effectively is extremely effective. just as computer simulation can help us come to grip, stories and novels can help us understand the complexity of social life. as i ponder these conclusions

from the field of social narrow space, i wonder if they're made possible in so many ways to enable users to live longer, happier and healthier lives than non-users. that is a researchable is a researchable question. if they do, why? answering that question requires us to expand way beyond information access in order to explore the community building that public libraries place and what reading, listening and viewing fosters. adolescent fiction, horror, mystery and science fiction novels have driven library circulation. they still do. through commonplace stories like these that they circulate by the billions, billions, american public libraries have helped empower, inform and intellectually's stimulate their

readers, viewers and listeners, just like they did for ronald reagan, oak from winfrey and sonia sotomayor are. in my lifetime of research, i've read thousands of statements like public libraries are not just where houses of books anymore. part of our lives accurately represent public library history, they never were. instead for the past century and a half they have been public places of performance where users displayed moral progress of achievement. they also operate as a robust commons for members of the public discuss the variety of issues that concern them. they function as centrifugal forces among district populations and evolve community trust in its multicultural

elements. they construct group identity through the stories they provide. they started neighborhood conversations welcoming the recently arrived in the mist and served as community anchors. accessed information, library is place. the transformative potential and reading. i hope this has encouraged you to broaden your thinking about libraries in general and public libraries in particular. it's all on the internet typed many evangelists of information technology. libraries are dinosaurs says some looking to cut budgets. to combat this limited thinking, you have to reach beyond the perspective of information access to look at the deeper analysis. i show you a picture of the lobby of the toledo lucas county

library. that is the night a new harry potter novel was introduced. if you just cast your eye on that audience and examine the diversity there and men spend some time thinking about the dynamics of community construction that goes on at an event like this which is regular to library programming and has been since the late 19th century. we also have to look more on commonplace stories. here is your aha moment. that is my son andy reading to his son. he got that book at the public library in he is fully capable of reading it, but he wanted his dad to read it to him because they share an interest in this particular subject. i would argue that that particular dynamic that public libraries have been nurturing for 160 years may have more to do with the increase in literacy

than the mechanics of formal education of note child left behind funding and common core principles. by looking into the questions like these, my historical research demonstrates we can document hundreds, if not thousands more ways the incubators of personal happiness and informal self education contribute to the daily lives of patrons as individuals and members of their community. we can show much more clearly how they function as an active and effective agent in the construction of that very community. thank you very much. [applause]. now greg michaels and i are going to engage in a conversation, but i would like to turn this over to craig because i represent the past. i'm a historian who leaks archive dustin only knows historical anecdotes.

>> thank you wayne. i thought i went back to library school for a while. thank you for that. it really sets up where libraries are right now. a lot of the core services and principles that he discussed, discussed, the history of public library, there are still evidence in what we are doing today. the internet is not replacing the library. i get questions all the time about is the book going away. if you travel to our library, you will see we still have that technology available and it's still going to be around for long time. it's terrific technology. where the library is evolving is that it's becoming more of a dynamic place instead of a static place it once was. the changes shifting over to where we are looking at the community providing content as

much as the library used to provide the content. madison public library has the provision that this is your place to learn, share and create. we invite the community to come in to our building and share their expertise. when you enter a library now, it's not just necessarily for that one book or that one resource you might be looking for. entering a library b's days is an experience. you might be coming into the library, perhaps looking for that book but you might come across the program of how to make cheese and you stop there. or you might be bringing your child and you'll find a set a lego's when you get there. what were discovering is that we need to be more holistic about the approach. preparing young people for literacy and that includes

playing. a lot of times we engage the children in play and they learn in that capacity. we are the major shift that is me happening is that libraries are discovering that we are bigger than our building. we need to be bigger than our building. we need to get outside of our building a lot of the time. case in point, we do a traffic job with early literacy in the library. a lot of times we don't reach the population that we really need to reach with this information. librarians do a traffic time with story times and it's a terrific experience and they take a lot away from that, but there is a lot of barriers in that type of service. one there is a particular time

that they are available to come in. there are transportation issues for some individuals. there are some inherent barriers. how do we remove those barriers and become more relevant for more people in our community question? especially populations that could really use early literacy literary training. to give you an example there was a program called parents as first teachers. what we do is we coordinate with the public health department and the visiting nurses program and when the visiting nurses go to child development information, we also have been training those nurses to give a lesson in literacy. they also take with them books from the library and we read books with the family as well. that is where i see libraries moving.

that is where we need to be aggressive with our service to these populations. i would only add to that before we open up to a question-and-answer period, there there is no holy book i have found in which god tells us what a public library should be. people make public libraries. what they make of them is probably somewhat unique from community to community because communities have unique needs. i would argue for all people who are thinking about the future of public libraries, bear that in mind. in my historical research, perceptions may be somewhat fogged. >> i would agree. were open to questions.

the one thing that i would add is some really define the public library as a resource. you might think well that was san francisco. just weeks ago here in madison, there was a mom with her to children sleeping behind the building. one thing we do provide now at our central library are social services. we have caseworkers that keep regular hours that are central library. we were able to bring that mom and children into our building and basically be a source of shelter to begin with. we were also able to put her in touch with a caseworker.

just yesterday she was able to get an apartment provided by help here in madison. that's the conduit. that's the value that public libraries can intrinsically bring to the community. >> i will only add to that that there is plenty of historical precedent to demonstrate that the homeless have always been a part of american public library from the day the boston library opened in 1854. there were several were several homeless people who went in in january as you can imagine. so, questions? >> please give me a second to collect myself. i'd never been convinced i'd be on c-span so this is quite an extraordinary moment for me. i have a two-part question.

what american cities, in particular, have been, i don't know, the gold standard of american public libraries? the second question is who is the gold standard for university libraries at this point in time which are also arguably public. here in madison you can get a card and get it quite reasonably and i've benefited from it quite greatly. >> i will take on that first and then pass it to you. i'm currently on a book tour of 30 cities, and speaking at many public libraries.

every library has its positive and negative moments in american public library history, at least the ones i've study. as for the university library, i wouldn't comment on that either. everyone has its strengths and weaknesses. my own choice is not an academic library. the library of congress which is where i found most of my data. i love that place. i've asked my place that when i die if she could please cremate me and put the ashes in a book and donate it to the library of congress so i can be in perpetuity with my friends. greg. >> i have so many colleagues across the country and internationally to be able to pick out and single out one library is difficult. i would save madison public library, actually, is right up there. [applause]. just to kinda give that some punch behind it, the seattle library came came out here with a group of individuals to look

at our operation. next week we will have another library from texas coming appear and they want to look at our central library. they are building a central library in texas and they will look at our facility. they were very impressed by the programs that we offer here. so actually, madison is right up there for the gold standard. >> and who am i to argue with that? >> you mentioned that the boston pub. library opened in 1854. i wondered if that was the first and if it was the first, how quickly did it spread after that across the country and what was the historical impulse for libraries to come into being at that time question. >> that's a very complex question. first, wasn't the first? that depends on what you call a public library. people like me develop careers

debating fine points like that in the literature. the boston pub. library was the first urban public library and the governance structure that it created has been passed down to us for the present day. i would guess the madison public library governance structure very much resembles the boston public library. i would say that's the one, the one to which people turn most. did it rapidly spread? it depends on what you mean by rapidly. it really wasn't, it spread fairly rapidly if you judge it by the late 19th century standard. what really gave it acceleration were the carnegie that came in the late 19th century. the carnegie people stopped giving grants for construction of building in the 1917 or 1918

timeframe. it was expected that every community should have a public library if it wanted to talk about being a place that valued culture. the second acceleration. , and surprisingly there is a growth line in american public library that only goes up sometimes gradually or significantly, in 1930, the depths of the depression, when you can impair compare the number, there were 800800 more of them because of franklin roosevelt's funding. african americans in the rule south experienced library services for the first time in their life. the second acceleration was the war on poverty that came out of the johnson administration that increase the number of libraries again. so those two periods of time, that's where the acceleration

came from. now, you look at a community that talks about closing its library and it makes the new york times. >> i have a question about the most creative program you have seen in the library. i'm sure hours, i think is very good, i'm just curious. >> most creative, i'm not sure, but what i'm very proud of your madison is our early learning program which includes participatory learning. i mentioned earlier you might come across a program about cheesemaking. i find the creativity by using

the expertise of the community and bringing them into the library. there is tremendous want by the creative class analysis to share what they know at the library as well. so i find a lot of creativity there. we expand and are looking at what the needs of the community are. we try to address those needs. recent renovation that we did in the neighborhood library was to include a community kitchen in the library. where we came upon that concept was we had in middle school half a block away where we have a huge crowd of middle school students that would calm about 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon when school let out and they would stay at our building until 9:00 o'clock at night. we know that the last meal those kids had was probably their free lunch at the school around noon. so we thought, this is something

we could offer in a a public library setting for the community. we have a traffic program for kids after school to come in they are shown how to prepare healthy snacks and they fix them themselves. then they have something to enjoy after school as well. they're taught how to prepare and cleanup and it's a great learning environment in the community. we also look to sponsor community meals at the library as well where the community would come in and prepare a meal for the neighborhood and bring people together. we talked about place making and library being a place. it's a huge service we bring to the community to bring people together. >> being an old historian, i can

come up with an antidote to demonstrate precedents for some of think greg is talking about. the carnegie buildings that were donated, when people would write to them they would ask for money and they had a formula by which he would decide how much each money each would get. they came up with a plan depending on size of town. that's why the libraries look so similar because people would adopt one of those six plans. in every one of those six plans, he had insisted there be a community room designated as a community room. over time, librarians did a very good job of amassing collections. those collections sometimes

crowded out those community room so we needed a new generation to discover that that is a place where community wanted to meet. in some of those community rooms, for example, they would open up a kitchen in the early 20th century for the farm women who would come in on saturday to shop for their materials that they need for the rest of the week. they gather at the virginia public library in minnesota and they learn new met recipes through the kitchen. so that occurred 100 years ago. i have more of that that i can apply at any time left. >> okay, i have a question. is there a role for classics and literacy. i'm actually here thinking of children's literature and thinking of certain children's books that should pass the test of time. the one i'm thinking of right now is blueberries for sale. i guess my point is there are some books that are just extraordinary and we ought to

urge readers to encounter them. >> that's a great question. there are classics and children literature and one of the discussions are, was the lack in children's literature for individuals of color. we have the classic literature and that's terrific. we provide that and those are excellent resources for people to come in and to share, but the one area we really like to see flourish is for the latino population in the african-american population. we want young people to see themselves in these books. a great example of that was was

about a princess she put in a book and she said what am i i doing for latino heritage and i put a white princess in my book. she said that's all i had in children's literature. she is one of the authors that are trying to integrate people's color in the story as well. that is something we are really trying to promote as well. >> from history again, i read account after account of black librarians in the black segregated branches in new york in places like new york city and chicago where black librarians are serving black libraries, the difficulty of finding children's material that appropriate illustrate black children in their literature. it's an age-old problem.

>> before i asked my question, i would would like to take the opportunity to congratulate you on the upcoming induction to the wisconsin library library hall of fame. that will be taking place [applause]. that will be taking place at the wisconsin library conference on november 5. we look forward to that. >> think you've. >> my question is, based on all of the voices that you have heard in your research and perhaps even in conversations that you have had about public libraries, are there any messages perhaps, or what messages are there that maybe need to go a little bit better heated on the part of public libraries staff and board members? >> i don't know whether i'm going to directly answer your question about public library staff and board members. i may come at this from left field.

bear in mind, i have only been working at this for about 40 years. i only read so much material. the impression i get back from the historical record is that where library staff and library board members treat their users as objects in a bureaucratic system that enforces a set of rules.

>> i used to work at a public library and we tried very hard to make the library a welcoming place that occasionally for actually quite often we needed the city of police to guard us. what are your comments on the kind of security that is used here and the need for its? >> that's a great question because one thing that we strive to achieve is that our facilities will be a welcome place for everyone and safety is a huge issue for everyone that uses our facility. in fact, in the surveys for teen library users, the number one reason for the public library for dennis safety. it's a safe place for them to go

so that is a concern for a number of people. what we do at the central library here in madison is we have security monitors and we approach it from a more relationship building approach that these are individuals that are not uniform, they are just kind of dressed like the people that use our facility. but they establish relationships with our customers and the people that use it to make sure that the rules are being followed and we do have behavior policy that is fairly consistently applied so that maintains to it maintains to be a welcoming place for all. >> we are getting the signal. [applause] on behalf of the library i would like to thank you so much for coming to this event. we will be doing signings out in

the hall and we will continue the conversation there. thank you so much. [applause] you are watching the tv coverage of this year's wisconsin book festival in madison. that was a look at the history of the public library system in america. the next panel from wisconsin is going to start in about half an hour the first we want to show a couple of programs from booktv recent visits to wisconsin. last year booktv traveled to madison to two or the special collections library at the university of wisconsin. >> we are on the ninth floor of the memorial library in the

middle of an exhibit called 1914. the goal is to commemorate the 100th anniversary by highlighting the collection of the university of wisconsin madison library as well as the historical society the different artifacts related to not only wisconsin's role on the war but also what was happening when the conflict began. the war broke out in the summer of 1914 after the archduke was assassinated in sarajevo by a member of the serbian military group whose goal was to bring all troops together in one country independent of control. after the assassination of the

frown, ostia put pressure to allow them to conduct an investigation about the assassination. austria acquiesced on all of austria's demands except that austria would be able to use their own police in serbian territory and this led to a standoff and eventually military confrontation when they ostracized and russia declared they would help defend and germany asked russia to stop the process and threaten if russia mobilized to become a war and russia wouldn't back down and then there's a sort of cascading act where france stepped in with support. and then when germany invaded france by way of belgium bartender cleared war in the belgian atrocity. we chose to focus on the western

front for practical reasons. that's where the strength of the holdings came from so a lot of material on germany's role as well as what was happening in belgium and france into so we wanted to bring the sources to the floor and really sort of focus on the western combat. so the first cases here in the collection will focus on the outbreak of the war in different countries, so here is what we are calling a germany mobilizing in the war and within the a case you can see different images so here for example the crowds assembled in berlin to receive news that the germany declared war on russia and right here they created the crowd from the royal palace. some of the more interesting aspects of what we have for this exhibit are the materials that had been donated so within just

this case we have two different ones that were passed around in germany during the war and these include calling on germans not to forget their colonies so they are reminded that they were fighting not just one territory but also the holdings in africa and then there is a pin here to show solidarity with the combatants j. person could win to dignify their loyalty to the war. one thing that was really heavily represented in the madison collection was anti-german propaganda and a lot of that is focused on the german invasion by way of belgium in this case we have once again the idea that they've violated the neutrality and the crimes for which a bloody knife is starting through the german treaty but

also we have a couple of nice images for example this image from reality in which they are bombing belgian children on a country road calling his military necessity and then this pamphlet that was given out cry into you to save them and here the idea is again germany is committing crimes against civilians if they are not conducting an honorable war and in conjunction with the there are lots of books that are put out against germany that claim to either told the truth about what germany is doing in belgium, tell the truth about the german war or just to highlight the different atrocities germany is committing against the civilian population centers germany versus the civilization and here's the idea

being that germany is in fact to stand among them members of western europe and in this book called conquest is all about how there's something flawed within the german culture that has led them to start this war and to engage in an unjust conflict against the civilian population. what's interesting about the first world war is the print culture is so advanced that even in putting together this exhibit it's not the first time the propaganda but it's certainly a h. richer trove of propaganda. a lot of this propaganda bits in this case but in this case in the belgian case is aimed at trying to get americans to put pressure on the civilian government to join the war so america is neutral all the way until 1970 and these materials from 1914 and 1915 are trying to show that america needs to fight

because of the unjust conflict but there is a clear case represented by germany that needs to be done before further damage is done in the civilian populations. all of these cases are overseas. it is true that germany would commit reprisals against the civilian population for example if there was a sharpshooter in the village to find it germany would shoot unarmed civilians that there are lots of stories for example the most famous is the belgian base which is not true and one of the things that's interesting in the second world war is that this leaves the allies to downplay the stories of the german atrocities because the case was to discuss a the overstated. in each of the outbreak cases,

we try to capture part of the mood of the country at the beginning of the conflict started to get at what is the method of all of the different sources from 1914 and so for example in the case of france, it is overwhelmingly that france is fighting the war and has been attacked by germany and the french nation needs to rise up to defend the home front so in this case you have for example a french researcher in the woods to say no one shall pass and given that germany has taken part of that or they will not gain any more territory and then in these images here, it's actually french soldier is straight out of paris in order to confront. there were a lot of memoirs written about the combating experience in the first world war and one of the most popular

was under fire which he recounts his combat experience and in germany they praise the combat experience as a heroic time and he dwells much more on the trauma of combat and the way how it's traumatic for the combatant. what's interesting is that they come after the war and the combat experience isn't widely circulated as and with the french case and the german case there is a sense that all political differences need to be set aside. in germany they say a no longer

see political parties all i see are germans. the idea being that united, we can conquer them quickly. what's interesting about the first world war is that none of them have a territorial stake on any of the other countries. the war that for example germany had in mind when they decided to engage france and russia are without legal cause to attack france after declaring a war on russia was the war of 1870 to 1871 which they won quickly against the french army. this idea that we would be home by christmas, something that all sides germany believed they would quickly arrive at force the treaty on france, and maybe take a little more territory. nobody imagined that when they

met it would lead to a stalemate and bloodshed within this collection there is a sense of knowledge described the competition's combat began on the western front the armies are equipped with very effective defensive weapons but not highly effective self things like barbed wire, the machine guns are really good but not necessarily useful for breaking through. as the board developed each side attempted to find new weapons in order to counter the strong defensive positions that were opposite them in the western front and this took a number of developments and included things

like poison gas that the flamethrower, the tank, putting guns on airplanes, all of which were aimed at trying to get over the trenches in some way so in this case we try to highlight the differences so we have a map of what it was like in the interior of a tank required six men and it was very crammed conditions but it took a lot of different terms. there were units set up. the atlanta fire while on skis. i think one of the biggest results of this is the casualties that drove up the number of deaths and one of the

reasons people on either side were willing to back down his paper trying to nick the sacrifice to come up with some reason for so many have given their lives and demand something and that helps drive technological innovation that will finish off the opposition. they needed to force the decisive defeat in such a way that they would have no choice. both sides were surprised by the number of casualties. it wouldn't actually be a quick fight. but there was going to be some sort of earth changing event for the balance of power but also shift the way in which it was

structured. the german high command or realized they were going to collapse but they were not actually going once they stopped the western front and joined so they asked the civilian government to form and they then went into exile and ultimately the treaty signed in which the germans were forced to acknowledge they were responsible into a tv and maybe debate as p6 -- yet he and they lost all of the colonies and it was partially going to help lead to up to the second world war and the campaign promising could change the treaty which they see

as unfair for the outbreak. >> you're watching the tv on c-span2 and on the screen right now is a live picture from the madison central library in wisconsin, the home of this year's book festival. we will be back with live coverage in about ten or 15 minutes or so but while we wait we want to show you this interview with the author of my life with the green and gold index from a recent visit that booktv took to green bay wisconsin. >> i didn't set out to write a book at the beginning of my career. it wasn't on my agenda but i kept thinking to myself these are such funny experiences of people only knew if people only knew it was really like behind

the scenes and i also had some things i thought were common to a lot of people like being a parent, juggling kids and work and having the career but also having my children. there's a funny picture in the book where there are 40 pictures in the buck but book but the one that patronizes my life is when my oldest son who is now 15 but he was only two months old at the time and i had to come here to record something and he had to come with me and he slept most of the time that i had to change his diaper at one point and i went into the tunnel which is where the players run out before the game and i changed his diaper and a ton of and somebody snapped a picture of me doing that and it's the opposite of the table of contents chapter in the buck that they think that the book is so much more than that. it's think of it as having three parts. one of them is being a parent and having children and working and all that. the second one is being a woman

in a male-dominated field and third is just behind the scenes with the packers and all these other sports teams. i was privileged to cover the packers are three different super bowls, two of which they one and one day lost, went to the white house with the packers, to japan was a sideline reporter, we did the mike mccarthy show, so a lot of experiences i thought people might enjoy reading about. >> it's the mike mccarthy show. ' neck welcome to the mike mccarthy show and thank you for joining us. breaking into a male-dominated field, i came out of college in 1992 and at the time in the state of wisconsin, there have never had never been a female sports anchor. i wound up being the first one to anchor a sportscast. i knew of one who had been a reporter for the only operative report and to anchor so there

were some role models for me on a national level. robin roberts and leslie and hannah and some of these early pioneers in female sports casting but on the local level, there were not. people ask me how did you feel breaking into this male-dominated field? it's interesting because i was born into the high-tech feminism. my mother was a single mother, it was just the two of us. my mother had a nontraditional career. my father was a carpenter when i was growing up, then she became an architectural designer so to see a mother walking around with a hammer in her hands building bookshelves you never think that a woman couldn't do or be what she wanted to be. but i need only child, the sports part came along later because my mother was not a big sports fan. breaking into the field in 1992, i thought why can't a woman be in sports? so in 1992, my station, which

was the cbs affiliate in madison wisconsin, they hired me right out of college. i had in terms of air and and so they knew me but they hired me as part-time sports reporter and i was only supposed to be a reporter. that was my title. they were nervous about how medicine response and would report to the responder to a woman sitting at the best anchoring the sports, so a couple months into the job of the sports tracker was sick and the other number two guy was out of town so they called me at home and they said can you anchor sports tomorrow, he's sick and i was so nervous. here i am two months out of college and i didn't even have money for clothing, tv clothes. i borrowed a dress from a friend of mine. it was like the movie broadcast news. i was sweating buckets through the entire thing they made it through and they did inspire me and that was actually i didn't realize at the time that i was making history because there was that was the first moment a woman anchor a sportscast and

from that point forward a allowed me to stay and do both anchoring and reporting. and thankfully most people seem to agree that i do detail in the book several stories of a man calling me after i anchor a sportscast in madison which is where i started working saying i'm never going to watch channel three again and i said why and he said because you are a chick and chicks don't know anything about sports. and i said to him i hope you change your mind one day and i just hung up the phone and i don't know if he ever changed his mind, but i was kind of my goal was to make people change their mind a little bit that women could talk about sports and it wouldn't be a big deal. it's really any 22 career in a 22 year career there for very few incidents so i feel very fortunate for that. but early on i'm not going to sugarcoat it, there were a few moments i write in the book about a player who told me he

wanted to do an interview with me unless i gave him my phone number, i also write about a coach from one of our wisconsin sports teams who asked me out and sent me a box of team paraphernalia and when i turned him down was very awkward for years covering him. so there definitely were some moments like that. so i only had one really terrible locker room experience in my entire career and it was very unexpected. the cleveland indians, i will say their name because i put them in the book that they were in town playing it i was asked to interview the indians before the game. my photographer and i walked in and by the way led by one particular player, one ring leader they started catcalls and making me very uncomfortable and saying i was only there to see the guys naked and things like that and i was shocked. i never had that experience before. there didn't seem to be any

managers, coaches, anybody except the team in this locker room at this point and most of the other guys trying to the hack only to be crispy six heckerling. i was floored and i looked at my cameraman close to retirement age and i said would we do and he said let's get one interview and get out of here. there was only one player that came to my defense and that was the picture. he simply her alone, cut it out. so i thought maybe we will just ask him so he asked if we could interview him and he said yes. he gave me a look like these guys. but as we were doing the interview, the original offender came over and he actually went to my photographer's camera and flipped the switch while we were doing the interview and my photographer i think was about to back him but i said forget this lets just get out of here and we hightailed out out of their environment or i have tears in my eyes and went back

to the station and i told my sports director would have happened and he said that's ridiculous we aren't going to put up with that, we are calling the president of pr. but the response we got was that's just boys being boys. they do that all the time that's just the way they joke around around about what they get but would it get under your skin they are just having fun. they do that to all the reporters. so my sense was nothing was going to come of my complaint that i had watched. but at least i felt like we informed them of it and it just in the end it serve to show me that again it wasn't going to be smooth sailing all the way through and that was fine. i didn't expect it to be. go ask about how my peers and colleagues have treated me over the years and are really i would say again 99% it's been great. when i first started i was the rookie and i had great bosses and mentors who are 100% behind

me and my peers for the most part have been very open. we were just reporters trying to do our job and i think if you bring a level of professionalism to your job then that hopefully radiates back at you in terms of professionalism. but there's no question throughout the years you occasionally will butt heads with people and i tried to be as honest as i could in the book about some of those things. i wanted people to see what it was like working for a tv station especially in the high-pressure situation of the super bowl or something like that where we are all running on caffeine and no sleep. i definitely detail in the book butting heads with my bosses when they wanted me to go when they are at four in the morning after working until midnight tonight before and that kind of thing or some clashes that maybe have happened throughout the years with a reporter from a different station that sort of thing. somebody that thought i was honing in on his interview time

with donald driver when i didn't feel that way. when i talk to young women or young people in general and i told them that when i graduated from college there were no female sportscasters on every college football game you're going to turn on on a saturday they would get me like i'm nuts because they don't remember that and so i want them to understand that times have definitely changed and changed for the better although we still have a way to go. i still would love to see more women doing play-by-play. i can only think of maybe two that do that on a regular basis for college football. so i would love to see more women in those types of roles. i would like to see more women be executives for sports teams. there are not very many women in the upper echelons of any professional sports league that you look at and yet they are trying to covet women and their fan base so i think that they

would be really well served if they had one in as general managers were just even any higher up positions so that is an area that we can grow in. i never considered switching out of the field despite any bad experiences with the man calling to tell me that he wasn't going to watch sports because i was a check or a player asking for my phone number or these guys in the locker room making me feel uncomfortable. it kind of just made me more determined than anything to go out there and show everybody that yes women the man can talk very intelligently about sports and also that we are not just these pretty talking heads. i want to be known for my words and thoughts and not for what i'm wearing. i'm very careful about at higher

in treating everybody with respect and everything. so yes it was important for me to sort of keep forging ahead because i love the job and i didn't want to leave the job. i felt like i had -- you know when they say find something that you love to do and then figure out a way to make money doing it and it will never feel like work and that's exactly what it was for me. i loved the writing and creativity. the creativity. i love telling stories about people. i'm not much of a staff person but i love telling the human side of sports; it's tried to do that and showcase a player as a husband, father, son, that kind of thing or coach in that way so just now i loved the job and i would never want to leave it especially if it was somebody else forcing me out. so the challenges i faced in my career just serve to show me that there were things i would have to go over and that was

okay because i'm not sure that i would want -- i'm not the kind of person that wants everything to be smooth sailing all the time. i appreciate if you were going through some hard times by saying what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. it does make you stronger and and it it makes you more appreciative of the good times and the people that like what you do and might say nice things about what you do and that sort of thing so i was fine with that and getting into it i wasn't sure how a woman would be treated that i was starting off in my hometown of madison wisconsin so i had a really big family-friendly beach and i look back on all those different things i covered and just have a ton of great memories. i didn't keep a journal or anything like that. people ask about how did you write and i it and i just remember a lot of details and

things that stand out in my mind and everything shapes you and makes you who you are today and i'm glad i had all those experiences. >> booktv is back in madison, home of the wisconsin book festival. starting now you're going to hear from mary norris and she takes a look at grammar. her book is between you and me confessions of a comma queen. this is line of -- live on tv. >> welcome to everyone that is here today. i will say this we are live on tv so -- [laughter] ..

and here inside madison public library bringing this sense to people across the country. thank you. for that reason and in courtesy to mary please silence your cellphones at this time. many of us have questions for mary, there's a microphone in the center of low room. all questions avenue and have to come from that microphone today. if you have it in mind, step up

to the microphone early and get your question in. we are delighted to be hosting mary norris today for her memoir "between you and me". mary norris began a career as a foot check erratically than city pool checkicheckin athlete's foot. to many of us mary norrise clar

cross referencing >> thank you for that amazing introduction and thank you for coming insight on this glorious day. we got lucky. people are into reading and it is raining out. it is true about the foot checking but to give you an introduction, i visit the introductory part of the book that is about my career in the dairy industry. since we are here in wisconsin,

i went to rutgers university, where i chose to go when i got out of cleveland to brunswick, new jersey. because it at a renowned department of dairy science. while i was there i did take one course in how to judge dairy cattle and i've learned the differences between brown swiss cows, it has not come handy at all. when i went back to cleveland after college i couldn't think of anything else to do. i called a local dairy and asked if there were any openings for milk men. it would be interesting to be in the dairy industry at any level and i had a fantasy for years about holding a dairy farm.

we never had a lady drive a milk truck but there is no reason why not. he let me come in and talk to him. heated milk, undercut with bracing whiff of ammonia. it was the first time i could be completely honest in a job interview. i didn't have any experience but i was sincerely interested in the dairy industry as you can tell that i have perhaps told a lie or two about the speed at which i typed that a job before them. i guess i didn't have to lie about the foot checking job but that is because they didn't ask me if i knew what happened. on a frigid morning in february i went along with the milkman on a ridge in fairview park west side of cleveland. the milk truck had two sets of petals, one with a standard shift, the driver sitting down

when you were going long distance and the other for driving standing up when you were hopping between houses. the second set had two battles, the clutch and break were combined in one. when you needed to slow down or shift gears your left foot squeeze down through the clutch to the brake on one pedal and you had to lift your right foot off of the accelerator and balance on one healed. the route was available and they gave me the job. generous friend lent me her car for a crash course on how to drive a stick shift. the foreman who was training the notice i handled the track better standing up and sitting down. the seat was designed to fold up and swing around to the side where it could be stowed out of the way. all the folding and swinging at isn't it up so when i turned the steering wheel receipt swung in not opposite direction and i find myself facing out the side instead of the direction the

truck was going as if i were on some disorienting amusement park. at the foreman's suggested i was driving back to the plant standing up brook park road, the road in cleveland, and i went through an underpass on the far side of which was a traffic light and i was almost under it when i saw red so i had to slam on the break and try to steer while gripping the steering wheel and balancing on one heels. i lost control. the truck smashed into a concrete barrier to. the form and was thrown into the creek and i landed on the floor. he was okay. i was bruise and humiliated. the plant had its own tow truck and mechanic and i wrote back with the mechanic wanting to bum one of his unfiltered camels. the fact that the plant had its own -- should have led me to realize this at happened before. i thought it was a first. the form and got blamed because

the boss that he shouldn't have had been driving standing up and i got another chance. i had some really nice customers. there was a couple who bought only a pint of have and have once a week for their coffee and i had an deadbeats, the kind of people who knew if they ever paid their bill in full year dropped from. there was a man who rehabilitated claim changers, those contraptions with barrels, we wore them on our belts. the milk shoots, boxes beside the door where you put the milk between the storm door and the inside, milkman. i wasn't the man but i did like the word lady. it seemed not feminine so i wouldn't shout milk lady. milkmaid was a little too fanciful. i settled for milk woman which was a bit too anatomically correct and made me sound like a wet nurse.

i muscled the last syllable. milk woman. i have half a mind to stay in cleveland and try to marry the boss's son. he raised the cattle but i gave up the military to accept the the ship at the university of vermont while pursuing a master's degree in english, kept up my interest in the dairy industry. there was an agricultural school not unlike the university of wisconsin. i learned to milk cows and so there were university cows. pmi first job once the academic life had warned me down, packaging mozzarella on a night shift in a cheese factory. the team of women wearing white rubber aprons, yellow rubber gloves and hair nets full of mozzarella out of cold salt water, label them, back at them, box the cheese, i had a secret

in the trunk. the popeye style muscles i developed my forearms atrophied soon after i moved to new york. sometimes on the sides of trucks making deliveries isil recognized the logo of wholesalers. in the red, white and green on the trucks that deliver cheese, pizzerias. i don't suppose i will never be long to the brotherhood of teamsters again. i still have a chauffeur's license. or have callouses on my palms, from handling a gallon of cartons. so i moved to new york and got a job at the new yorker in that editorial library. my first day there, there was a big snowstorm and most everybody went home but i stayed with my boss in the library so quitting time, when we were leaving that night, an editor, on the

elevator with us. i noticed his. mud green rubber boots said those are the kind of boots we war in the cheese factory. he looked at helen and said it so this is the next stop after the cheese factory. i kind of soft pedal to the dairy industry in my editorial after that those still came up -- i thought that for today i would -- i know you are dying to learn about commas, i, i would give your money's worth and then i remember you got in for free. i thought i would try to cover the the three most important things about english grammar in usage, some of them have to do with commas, some of some don't but this seems to me more

crucial today. just to introduce what i do as a copy editor, this is from a chapter in the book called that which, and the issue is the use of the words that and which. whenever i am asked on the radio or in public i fumble. is almost impossible. so far i found it impossible to give a straight answer. but i will try this, see if it comes out. i always forget in the popular imagination the copy editor is a bit of a witch and it surprises the when someone is afraid of me. not long ago young editorial assistant getting her first tour of the new york offices paused at my door to be introduced and when she heard i was a copy editor she jumped back. as if i might poke her with the red hot -- relax, i wanted to say.

i don't make a habit of lecturing people in conversation or printed message is a publication. change the course of the missile. have our way with a piece of rose. the image of a copy editor is someone who favors -- amine person who enjoys pointing out other people's errors. a lowly person just starting out in her career and eager to make an impression or at worst, a bitter thwarted person who wanted to be a writer. and instead got stuck dotting the is and crossing the teens ended venting the careers of others. i suppose i have been all of these and there is a big fancy word for going beyond your

promise. in webster's second unabridged. a lot of times copy editing is about not going beyond your problems. and i'll protect the nation areas some. writers might think we are applying rules and sticking to their prose or some standard but just as often with backing off, making the sections or at least trying to find a balance between doing too much and doing too little. a lot of the decisions you have to make as a copy editor are subjective. an issue that comes up all the time, whether to use that quote which depends on what the writer means. it is interactive, not mechanical. the example i give in the book is the dylan thomas klein force but through the green hues, the force, that, you can take out the phrase beginning the -- what is that called?

the relative clause. if you can take it out and the sentence can do without it, then it is nonrestrictive, something extra. if the sentence makes no sense without applause, in this case the force driving flower, that is not poetry. that means that clause is restricted, define the meaning. which course? the force of the green cute to drive the floor so that is restrictive. nonrestrictive is anything else. americans have agreed to use that when the clause is restrictive and to use which when the clause is nonrestrictive. it works pretty well. but not always. and either restrictive one

nonrestrictive is in the lord's prayer, our father who art in heaven, matthew, verse 6, line 9. is a restrictive or nonrestrictive? just where is god? i think it is nonrestrictive as indicated by the comma before who, it doesn't define the father, just tells where he lives. it is as if you could in search by the way, our father, who by the way lives in heaven, except that our father, the grammatical term -- direct address. in direct address there would be no need to tell got where he is. in the original context, in prayer to his disciples. if there are no commas the implication is whoever is

praying has another topic. joseph? conceivably christ intended the phrase as restrictive to identify and the heavenly father, putting theology aside, i might say speaking for my siblings and me, our father who art in cleveland, we all understand our this talking about our one and only dad in cleveland. new testament did without the commas and a sense has been up for grabs ever since. the latin which comes from st. jerome, nonrestrictive, you can hear the commas. the english translation from the book of common prayer make our father, comma, which art in heaven. nonrestrictive. even if you did later changed it to who. got is the creator.

father in a figurative sense and monotheistic position there's only one, but a modern english conversion makes it simply our father in heaven which is restrictive. our heavenly father. one modern english version both catholic and a glutton does without the comma, our father who art in heaven. little we did you have to admit. the restrictive one without the comma is more direct. almost goes out of its way to snub the earthly father. the nonrestrictive with the comma is acknowledging he is the father of us all. i am not religious. so far that has not gotten me in any trouble.

the other huge issue in english usage today is gender. english lacks a gender neutral word for pronouns meaning both he and she, has become very sensitive since we have become more sensitive to trends gender in our lives so i am going to be a little from my chapter on a gender. perhaps the most intractable problem hovers around conventional use of masculine pronouns to include the feminine when the antecedent is mixed for sheet or unknown or irrelevant. collapsed gender in the english language, the third person singular personal pronoun, he, she, him, her, ancient birds and rounded with where have become

the most ticklish subject in modern english usage. if the english-language properly organized it would be a word that meant both he and she so i could write it john americans, hesh will want to a tennis, which would save a lot of trouble. there have been many attempts to come up with the gender neutral pronoun. it for instance it, him or her, is him, bar wing from mandarin, shem and herm which some like noaa's offspring, used by an online group devoted to sexual bondage. gha

ghachwhich is klingon. none of these have caught on surprisingly. we have the venerable english language usage pandit h. w. fowler is seas three makeshift solutions for this deficiency in our language. we can use the so-called masculine ruling which he is understood to stand for either the masculine or the feminine, use he or she, himself or herself however awkward or revert to the non gender specific there which bends the number rule. that is what is happening and is going to happen but we are against it. and will paint on to our pronouns as long as we can.

i hate to say it but the proper use of their or his or hers is wrong. it may solve the gender problem and no doubt has taken over spoken language but does so at the expense of number. and antecedent in this into a cannot take the place of a pronoun, certainly in speech, it is not fair. why should the lowly common gender plural pronoun trouble our singular, feminine and bastion announce? nobody seems to take very seriously, why not mix up a bit. why can't a woman use feminine pronouns if she feels like it? what is stopping a man from filling in the her or sheep? modern american usage entertains this very briefly but thinks

that it could be dangerous, a male writer using he and she could be making it even worse, turning this crew a little, teasing, making it worse than it ever was before. i personally find when a male writer uses that it is very endearing and i know that it was a statement some new yorker writers started doing it with. any mail writer in his use of pronounss is admirable. that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine singular. i think it is possible the makeshift come more easily to meet because i have experience

with the transplant. nothing makes it clearer how intimately and deeply pronouns are imbedded in our lives than having to alters them with someone you have known all your life. i started studying italian and try to figure out which now owns were feminine and which were masculine and is not always easy. just because it ends in a doesn't mean it is feminine, just because it's the class in of this mean it is masculine. i was trying to figure this out, gender leaped out of the text looking to my life. my brother said he was transgendered. these two years younkers and me and we have been close or at least i thought we had been close, dropped to getting cleveland, escaped to new york, we were collaborators, this chapter goes on to describe pronoun words we heading cleveland and i sibling and die, my sister and i are good friends now but what has really jumped

out in this paragraph, i don't know if you noticed this sentence, two years gender isn't me, i got so many letters about that, people reading along in the book, that is not one of them. just made one about the word van and trying to answer all these letters at once and attached to the letter and say please see my video. them can be a conjunction and i learned in third grade, two years younger rhythm i because of them would introduce the

pause, subordinating conjunction and you are supposed to hear the understood i was. if you understood the firm following it, but a pronoun in the nominative case but then is the position. it is in the dictionary, you can look it up and it is a preposition it takes the objective case. prepositions followed by me so i stand by, he was two years younger isn't me. one person wrote in with a sentence, younkers in the. which was also true and thinking about making that change but the point i want to make, gets stuck on what i learned in third grade, his brothers, only for a

couple days, not sentence diagraming but it is also a preposition, you can use prepositions, appropriate pronouns, objective pronouns and the only note i would add to that is somebody might notice i am about to launch into an intimate discussion of gender and family and that is not correct someone's grammar. [applause] >> i am now since we are on pronouns and the title of the boat is "between you and me" and one thing i found that i am sick about is the title between -- "between you and me". some people have a bad habit of saying between you and i or they

use the nominative pronoun when they should be using objective pronoun. i tried in this chapter to diagnose that problem and so glad people who good does it don't put me on stage with steven tinker. steven tinker is a famous sidling list with really great hair. when i was in graduate school living on my own in the vermont countryside i decided to learn how cars work. i wanted to be self-reliant. i drove a 65 plymouth, dark blue-green with the huge expanse of windshield and the v-8 engine which meant nothing to me. i knew how to pump gas and check

the oil and change of flat tire. that is about it. my father had discouraged me from learning anything about the workings of the engine. when i said i wanted to learn how congress works he said it is easy, i will tell you everything you need to know. he put the key in the ignition and turned it. like this. so i tried to take a course in auto mechanics, at the local high school. on the first night the auto mechanic use the word i had never understood, a gasket. i had known one once on a friend's car in utah and i knew it costs a lot to replace and the car was never the same. now i was going to find out what a gasket was so i raised my hand and asked what is suggested. the teacher who looks like a used car salesman defined gasket

by using tweet the other words i didn't know the meaning of, crankcase, piston, carburetor. i am still not sure what a gasket is. that got quite a lot about what a gasket isn't acting kind understand. grammar has an intimidating term and grammarian's throw the morale. you don't need to use them in order to use the language. e.b. white admitted the 4 elements of style he was the kind of writer who did not have any exact notion what was taking place. to understand how language works you have to roll up your sleeves, join the stained wretches as we name the parts being careful to define the middle way that makes from simpler instead of more complicated and see how they work. just between you and me, eyes of shirt, the whole body of the

english-language, trying to gain my trust, leans forward and says between you and i or when a character in a movie complaints to a girl it is just not right one thing you and i to get there or when the winner of the academy awards thanks a friend for getting sally and i together. maybe it is the heat of the moment. maybe people think it might be of a bit at home, but can't possibly be right in a formal setting. brian garner white mentioned earlier devotes a column to the problem of between you and i noting this is a grammatical error committed almost exclusively by educated speakers trying too hard to sound refined but stumbling badly. this kind of thing occurs all the time. an old episode of the

honeymooners, ralph clanton jilted ed and found another bowling party and says to norton we have already reserved that alley for patty and i. ralph tried to show his superiority. he is not the most articulate guy. but by putting the other person first, he and the others have less word order for confusing the pronoun. first let us praise the impulse behind all these flips, salesmen and emotionally damaged sun in the movie or script writer and the movie star are all humdingers themselves by putting another person first. that is point out if they were not so alike, if he occasionally puts himself first they would know that had it wrong. no one -- between i and you or

complain because someone was lumping i end you together or feigned a friend for getting i and sally to the bleeding and ralph clanton would probably not say we have already reserved that alley for i and happy. caddy might. if you go ahead and put yourself, using me instead of by you can be sure he is right, between the end you. living be and you together. me and sally together. if you still think it is impolite in your mother or first grade teacher, move me to the other end and you have good grammar. between you and me, lumping you and me together. thanks for getting sally and me together. and the case of ralph kremlin more ridiculous that he makes his characters are more ridiculous. funny with a mistake. it makes him feel superior.

also exposes his ignorance to us the viewers and makes us feel superior. dealing withs are on ralph grant's side. a staycation and i, vicki and i, whatever our a unit and people tend to keep them in variable even when they function in the sentence dictate fake unchanged. they treat these compounds as if they were quotation marks around the mic the king and i. i love the king and i, like saying shall we dance, between you and me i could do without it. a friend of mine said in the facebook conversation after her son said to her is that is what they did for nolan and i. nolan and me, she said. her son argued languages evolve and today many people think it

was wrong. he added stinker of hearts, the parental units. besides, who cares? well, why exactly do we care? why is it wrong to say between you and i? you can't even tell your children you have to learn your grammar if you want to grow up to the president because barack obama says in his most eloquent president in decades, he says things like thank you for graciously in fighting michele and i. i got excited when i read a passage in gone girl, the woman remained in the car the whole time, to pacify her toddler in her arms, watching her husband and me trade cash treaty.

that is the correct grammar, you know, her husband and me. wait to go, gillian flynn, i thought. may use sellers many billions of books as mcdonald's sells burgers. leader i realized it was the character's thoughts, not the author's into character turns out to be just the sort of uptight, entitled snob who gives good grammar a bad name. the next five minutes i will attempt to give gramm lessons. i feel and should have something -- saw something in half. the most important verb is the verb to be. was, where, will, have been. grammarian's know it as the

copulative verbal. many prefer linking verb but i think the term copulative avert impressed me in my junior year of college. it was my first inkling that english grammar was interesting. the function of the copulative verbiage to fit nouns together, to con jo lin king them as a plumber fit speights, screwing the mailing to the female. these are actual terms from plumbing to. to make the two one. the copulative firm functions almost as an equal, i am a copy editor. my plumber is a st.. you are the reason. nouns and pronouns in the simple sentences all fall into the same category, the world that known plays is case. the known this is the subject, i, you, my plumber is in the subjective case ended known it

links to, copy editor, reader, through the verb is also the subjective case, that is the power of the serbs. the term for the subject in this case is nominative, easy, in english -- areas also trended to verbs. this kind of verbal transfers some kind of activity from the subject to another known not so closely identified, the mechanic inspect the car, the cocktail's, the engine needs oil, the transitive verb points forward to something. in english we need to know who did what to whom, very accusative language. the term for the case of this

kind of known, objective, also the accusatory. i never learned any of this. i took a german my senior year in college. we learned as children how to do pronouns that it takes a while. her is a sweetheart. strictly speaking the copulative firm calls for the nominative case. the child should say she is a sweetheart. used to call her husband on the phone, call from work and announce herself. and turn stuff it was made of. when mr. burns on the simpsons find out homer's father used to

wrestle shouts you were he, his excellent grammar marking him. tentative terms reflect on the subject. intransitive verbs directs the action on to an object, the intransitive verb, some action purely as the subject. there are a couple of firms that have to do with the intransitive verbs. grow and remain, also in transitive verbs. when we say something tastes good, not well you are showing a subjective complement for something, good reflects back on the subject.

is not an adverb that developed the meaning of the verb. to feel badly would mean to grow about indirectly. the verb itself uses the bad to the subject rather than being used as an adverb. one might reasonably ask if we can use the objective or subjective, it is me again, which defines the or not that extreme, why can't we use objective for the objective, grammar is a little like plumbing. some systems are designed to expose what paper. and designed for a capacity for one, you can -- if you force two ply into a system that tolerates only one why you are asking for

trouble. i will wind up here. i don't know that i made this crystal clear. it is an interesting mistake. that pronouns were more formal as if english had separate forms for i and me the way an italian, french and german do. i is not formal, mead does sound more infinite somehow, maybe it is a confidential error of someone speaking in public, by, he, she, we, as they, their software. it is something to do with being object. subject which take responsibility for the action.

it would help if singers vocalize between you and me me me me. if you prefer an automotive explanation, keeping the engine out of car parts, carburetors, crankcase, where it mixes with oxygen in just the right proportion to fire the pistons that keeps the motor running. pronouns have increased, the verbs are the gasoline and the nouns are the air. the case system is the gasket that keeps everything running smoothly. you notice it only when someone blows it. if that doesn't work for you, just put the key in the ignition and turn it. thank you. [applause]

i am here to answer your questions about commas. >> reminder questions from this microphone, we have 15 minutes. >> hopefully and presently, we still find those fights to keep them as they were intended or do we give up the popular usage and accept hopefully means and presently means doesn't mean soon, it means now. >> that is a question that comes up at the new yorker. we don't use hopefully, it is a sentence at byrd and it has been accepted by the associated press, there is no holding it back. my solution to this, there is nothing i can do about other people especially once the associated press says okay but i

don't have to do it myself. and presently doesn't mean what people think it means. presently means in the future. it doesn't mean in the present. presently means in a awhile, soon. that is a different issue. better not use it at all. amazing there aren't more questions. yes. >> [inaudible question] is this true in the new yorker? i would have gone, i would have went. >> maybe you could briefly explain the past parcelling tell me if it is true. >> we could say that is going to be bad grammar wherever you go

because the birds have three principal parts. and from third grade i remember the teachers, it was like chalk on the blackboard when the last child came and set i seen it on my way to school. i see is the present, i saw as the past, i have seen is the past perfect. that is the one that demands the principal form of love her. there are some verbs that have two rations. i snuck in. i would say i snuck in. the dictionary put first sneaks. i would never say i sneaked in. that is something in copyedit you have to decide, but the writer in the straight jacket or use the first form the dictionary gives or you let the

writer have her own voice. it is not less proper, just an alternative. that is bad grammar. i thought you were going to talk about the past perfect when you came up. i have gotten a lot of interest in that form of the verb, and i had gone. a lot of people use that when they don't need to. >> this appears past tense. >> shrink shrink shrunk. i hardly ever -- >> i shrank my teacher yesterday. >> that is because of that movie honey i shrunk the kids. it is true that once something enters popular usage like that you can't put it back in.

another thing, though only thing we can do, our own good usage, we don't, there is no getting other people to our way. thank you. >> given your colorful work history how did you become a copy editor and how did your learning on the job developed? >> i did in fact learn on the job. i started in that editorial library taking apart the pages considerably. i wanted to help put it together. my first job outside of the library, i got to do something like founder reproved reading which is the last step between proof and print.

just comparing the last version we generated by editors and proofreaders with the new version and making sure they are the same and not impressive if you have any opinions. i moved to something called collating where that department and everything came together, copied to changes from the editor, the authors, proofreader, fact checker all on to -- i got in trouble because i condensed the wording of something written by libel lawyers. you should have a rubber-stamp. anyway, that was the place either in a lot because i saw what the proofreaders did in copying their changes. what i first wanted to be a copy editor, from my place in the library i could see through our window to window on the next higher floor, i could see the woman who had that job get up and turn around and consult the

enormous dictionary, that is the job i wanted and when there was another nitride for an didn't get the job, i didn't have any experience. i tried to spin it as a good attribute because i wouldn't have anything to unlearn. i did not get the job. but after being in and collating for a while i did learn enough, i was able to work and manuscript and copyediting at the new yorker is really very -- ita while i did learn enough, i was able to work and manuscript and copyediting at the new yorker is really very -- it is like to see if, traveler with two els, were slight cooperate and reelect which we get teased about alive and play a little with commas, very conservative,

serial comma, the new yorker uses that and the comma after the introductory phrase. that is how i came to do it. i was terrified for the first year i was on a copycat of doing too much too little. both are bad. but i kind of had to do too much to learn to do less and there in to do too little and little more. it has gone back and forth. i learned by trial and error. >> talk about some of the new words, my ask is that you -- >> some of those sound better

than others. that is something the english language has been doing ever since the english-language was the english language, making other parts of speech. the big fail is another one. there is something that as they come into the language, people who are young and going to carry on the language, there is not a lot you can do about the in the great course of events. i don't use the myself. i feel like i am trying to masquerade, as someone who graduated from college and hasn't had a chance to die her hair. is inevitable. one word, helpa, not sure what part of speech that is.

it is short for helluva, right? that is what i assume. i queried it in something and was persuaded is -- has its own t-shirt. we have to get used to it. we permit them in the new yorker kind of gradually, but it is inevitable july hope ask doesn't take over, the failed is going to happen and there are a lot more. it is not such a terrible thing turning a better been to a known. no stopping it, i am afraid. >> in racial matt out's interview of hillary clinton, she said the democrats are doing

terrible act -- i generally have a great deal of respect for racial matt out a comment on the disappearing -ly. rachel matt out said that, not hillary clinton? >> i have to cut broadcasters a lot of slack. they are in the hot seat. if they say something wrong they have to bear on. they didn't do such a terrible thing and i i think you could probably make the case for occasionally calling it colloquial. let's get rid of that. we have something serious to

considered. >> wrap up with two final questions. >> when you mentioned, i am wondering when the coffee gets to you are you ever -- how much i you attempted to work on the story, the organization or the logical issue, with the editors. >> generally i don't work at the level of structure. i work at the level of sentences and paragraphs, mostly sentences. it did just come up the other day. a piece i was working on by michael specter, there was one sentence he was trying to say too many things in. i didn't get it. the piece was going to press. what i'd do in this case because

if you speak with the author you are in for a two our conversation. if you speak with the editor you get a decision and bypass the author. i hope michael specter isn't watching. we just went in there and swiped the sentence in two had started it with a different conjunction and it was fine. so you kind of have to work around. we all have relationships. you get used to working with a certain editor and author and you have a flow to the work and everyone knows what everyone else's job is. so we can cut people short. >> the word peak, they mean peak

when they mean peek but morse of people using ppek or peak w when they mean pique. >> let's straighten everyone out. >> is it going away forever? >> with two es, a took a peek through the window, it is the height. i am at the height of my career. at the peak of my career. this is it, folks. pique is when somebody is -- what part of speech is that? i am not even sure. you don't say you are in a peak.

is a verb. peak curiosity. i have seen all of those in copyediting. i have seen the all used wrong. used wrongly. >> stupid auto correct. >> auto correct is no good for those things and spell check is no good. that is why we still need copy editors. [applause] thank you. thank you so much. >> thank you, what a wonderful greeting. mary will be here to sign books out in the lobby. we will get the signing in two minutes. please come out and say hello. up next will be david maraniss. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] a [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. we are live at the wisconsin board festival in madison. you have been listening to mary norris talk about her book on grammar. in half an hour we will be back live with our next panel and this will be david maraniss, a washington post editor and author and his most recent book is about the choice in 1963, once in a great city. while we were in madison last year we sat down with david maraniss to talk about the writing of his book.

.. >> then i saw a sign that said

detroit and saw the first and the mural and all of the icons of detroit; abandoned warehouses and gates and houses abandoned. the beauty and promise of detroit. and then this incredible beat came on. it was eminem who is a detroiter driving through the city and the voice talking about how this isn't the emerald or the windy city. and eminem comes out of his car and walks into the fox theater, this grand ole theater, and there is a black gospel choir rising in song and eminem says: >> this is the motor city and this is what we do. >> something about it made me choke up. my wife said you sucker, they are selling cars, and this is a commercial. but it made me think of something different.

i was born and lived there until six. detroit was my pre-mortal place. i started thinking if it went that much, i should write about it. i thought about the collapse of detroit and is being important and there are economic writers that can write better and what can i contribute to detroit? i wanted to write a book about detroit when it was glowing and show america what detroit gave it. this book is about music, motown which i love, cars, civil rights, labor and the middle class. you get a deeper appreciation of what detroit contributed to america. >> can you talk a little bit about the collapse of detroit and how you chose those topics and take us through that a little bit. >> well, as i was reporting this

book, detroit was in the news almost every day. at one point the bankruptcy was filled. it has been struggling for many years. so that, you know, that was the backdrop to my book. but it wasn't the book. you could see 50 years ago, a lot of the elements of the troubles that were to come. the economy was then and always too based on cars. although the political leaders in 1863, which was the heart of the book, understood they had to change that. they were trying to get defense and modern technology but it didn't happen. the auto industry was aspeci aspecial -- essentially leaving detroit. it is this huge city, 28 miles across, and it is unlike a lot

of other big cities because it is single-family homes and was built on the working middle class that the auto industry offered it. so when that industry suffered and left, and the jobs were gone, you had all of these swaths of neighborhoods. i would drive-thru the area where i lived as a little boy and three out of every eight houses were gone. either levelled, burned or abandoned. so it had this difficult of all of this lost land and property. it gives a hollowness to the people trying to survivor -- survive there. >> when did it start changing? >> it changed over a long period of time. i found an interesting document as i was researching the book. the tendency to say detroit's

collapse was caused by a series of events, including the riots in 1967 and the white flight that resulted, the rust belt infirmries that many cities have, its dependence entirely on automobiles, civic corruption which was a factor or more reported on in the last 15 years, and hard labor contracts. to some degree those are true and false. but they are irrelevant. detroit was dying before that. this study in 1950 showed detroit had already lost 600,000 in population from 1963 back from 1950. by the end of the 1960's it

would lose another 500,000 people and predicated all the way to where it is today which is 700,000 people. it was because of the larger forces. beyond the corruption or the labor unions and riots it was the integration of the institutional model of detroit and the huge industries, right? the factories being there. it was the trend away from cities in general toward suburbs. and so these social said productive people were leaving and non-productive people stayed. that was the fate of detroit. all of the other things i mentioned didn't help turn it around but it was happening already. >> how did you do the research for the book? >> well, my first model always

is go there wherever there is. i did not move to detroit. but i spent a lot of time there. nine visits over the course of the time period i was working on the book. found a wonderful little bed and breakfast near the detroit history building and two blocks from the building with great archival information for me. and five miles away was dearborne with henry ford and henry ford the second. the grandson of the major -- founder is a major character. and then a accolade as kennedy was rising his papers are at the library. the detroit public library was a

block away. not always open because of the financial struggles of detroit. and the institute of arts was right there. i could say at the bed and breakfast and walk every place i had to do my research unless i was driving for an interview. motown itself -- this bed and breakfast was off woodward avenue, the corridor that separates east and west detroit which everybody identifies as east or west detroit. you go up woodward avenue, hang a left at west bend boulevard and go down a mile and there is motown. these series of houses that are now a museum because motown abandoned detroit as did everything else at one point. that is how i did most of the research; going there, interviewing, a lot of archival research. all of my books i say there are four leg do is a table. one leg is the observation of

being there and understanding the cultural background. the second leg is the archival research and finding news documents of the period i am writing about. the third leg is the interviews and i found as many of the people as i could from that era. of course, i had to travel to other places. the founder of motown lives in a mansion high on a hill in above bell air in los angeles. and the fourth leg is looking for what is not there. you know, there is always a conventional wisdom about something and i am trying to find other ways to explore the reality. >> interesting interview. you mention barry gordy. what did you learn from him? >> he is 84 now. he was 33 when the book came out in 1963 that he published.

he is sort of synonymous with motown. it was his idea. he brought the artist in. i learned two important things about motown that gordy helped me shape but go beyond him. one is he came from this incredible family and four older sisters who don't get as much credit as they really deserve and who were part of motown and were much more organized and in a lot of ways. he is the creative force. in the book, i try to give more credit to his older sisters and also to his parents. it was a family, like so many african-american families, came from the south to detroit and they were part of sort of the booker t washington sense of

help and formed a grocery store first and other enterprises. he started motown with $800 and came from the bare bear corporation. berry senior is part of the organization. the family had their own farm and they would gather around and vote on whether they would help one of their siblings with financial help. berry got his first loan from his own family to start motown. the more important aspect of motown was why did it happen in detroit and the book explores that in a lot of detail which i will not get into now. but the essence is the geography made it possible because of the single-family homes.

pianos in the home all throughout detroit. great public school teachers -- music teachers. almost every musician i interviewed remembered their music teachers from elementary, junior high, and high school which i don't think you find today. and then the migration from the south, bringing the whole oral tradition of singing up to detroit, great jazz that was sort of the root of what turned into motown in many ways. and a sense of freedom. it happens in certain cities and certain times and happened in detroit in that period. >> did you find any connection between motown and the politicians? >> motown connects everything. one of the criticisms was it was

an assembly line. diane ross, not diana ross, and came to town and they turned her into a world class diva. she started at the age of 17 and by 24 everyone knows her. there was a certain style of music in motown and where did that come from? i think it is partly false but the notion came because berry gordon worked on an assembly line. he worked on the lincoln-murphy assembly lined and watched the process of developing something into a beautiful think and thought about that as he developed motown.

berry wasn't very political, but during the course of the time, he started records out of political speeches. and the most important speech in the 21st century by many standards is martin luther king's i have a dream speech. he gave that in detroit before delivering it. he was about to sell it on august 28th. the first date of sales is the day king gave the speech in washington rendering the first speech irrelevant.

he recorded langston hughes and many other african-american figures. he wasn't directly political though. >> you mentioned characters. can you tell us about why you chose the characters you did and what you found. >> they emerged from the reporting. there are many, many characters in my book. i didn't start saying these are the key people. i thought these are the key ideas and how do i enrich those. and so henry ford ii, you can write about gm but ford is more interesting and always has been from the start of the original henry ford and his notions of the assembly line and his

anti-symmetic behavior. harry reid all of these con t e contradicti contradicti contradictions, though. we brought african-americans to detroit and hired them. his grandson, henry ford ii was a larger than life figure and very colorful and friendly with lbj. the deuce was his nickname. he was dealing with everything that was going on at that time; political, economic, his relationship with walter luther was fascinating because his grandfather during that era had tried to beat all of the unions physically and henry ford ii had to deal with the accommodations of that and with the anti-sim

anti-simatism. he was underappreciated. griffith was a labor leader and during the particular era, the uaw really helped play a key role in the whole civil rights movement. the summer of '63 was the summer of birmingham and martin luther king wrote the letter from the birmingham jail. and many of the people supporting king who were jailed in birmingham were bailed out by the uaw money. they came down and bailed everybody out and were really the sponsors of the civil right movement. walter luther was progressive on civil rights. not as hard as king and the movement itself but for a white

labor leader he was essential. yet, think about what happened in michigan and in detroit and all of the auto workers moving out of detroit to the suburbs and becoming the reagan democrats in response to the pressures of the civil rights of that era. the police chief was a progressive liberal trying to change the climate in detroit. they made a lot of dramatic changes. they were succeeded against all of the odds in some way but that success led -- not the success, but four years later, detroit in '67 had one of the worst race riots in history and everything was up in spoke and the efforts were decimated. another figure i haven't mentioned is aretha franklin's

father. he was an incredible speaker and breacher of bethel baptist in detroit. he actually -- preacher -- organized the rally that brought king to detroit. they emerged from the story i was trying to tell. >> if you could summarize the story you were trying to tell what did you learn throughout? >> i learned how central detroit was to america in so many ways, helping create the middle class, helping bring this wonderful music, the mustang is another part of the book. lee coke was at ford there and the mustang was being developed and became the symbol of some kind of freedom and sexual freedom and it was all contrived in a sense as trying to sell a car that way but the mustang

represented a lot of that. so, you know, detroit was at the center of things. even though it is in the midwest and not new york or la and had so many flaws. it was really a very important part of all of these several generations of how we come to thing of ourselves in america. but detroit, because of its problems, always has great promise. if you are 25 and free to do something, go to detroit. the property is cheap, more kids are coming, there is a boom of artist and tech people and activist. it has that same sensibility of anything can happen that motown had when it was just started.

but parts of it might never come back because of the geography and loss of jobs. >> when will it be published and who is publishing it? >> it will be published in september of 2015. and simon and schuester has been my publishers for all of my books. >> david, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> as you can see we are waiting

for the wisconsin book festival to get seated. david maraniss is here to talk about his finished book, "once a great city," live from madison. back in just a few minutes. >> booktv covers hundreds of author programs throughout the country all year long. here is a look at the events this week. we are in portland books for you and me parks ecount of the escape from south korea. we start with harvard bookstore then for sonia pernel's recounting of winston churchill's wife. and then we talk about the research that finds young americans rank running for elected office near the bottom for career choices.

on the west coast, booktv is live for david talbet's discussion on the life and career of the longest director of the cia in san francisco. and thursday night we will tape an event at town hall seattle and we will discuss the creation of america's central bank -- the federal reserve. and then we go to louisiana next weekend and we have talks about african-american history, hurricane katrina, the deep horizon oil spill and much more. that will air the weekend of november 14th and 15th. that is a look at the author programs booktv is going to cover the upcoming week. many of them are open to the public and look for them to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> i think we have a lot of

misconceptions about the middle class. i am not going to go through all of them. but one is we think the middle class is based on income and that ain't true. and one of the ways we know it isn't true is because at least since 2008 a lot of people who earned a lot of income found themselves in the dumps. and that took place for 15 years before and during the depression. in 1938 a writer called luis corey wrote a book called "the crisis of the middle class" and it was a best-seller for about three weeks. the thing that is interesting about it is corey had a definition which i think had a

economy based idea. and there is a second definition that is a cultural middle class. those are people that go to the opera and concerts and read the book reviews and so on. they are not the same people but they coinside generally speaking. the only group of salary people who are genuinely of the middle class are the managers. plumbers who may make more than mng managers and often do are working class. and in construction, you can make a lot of money, you are not middle class. what you find is your job is over and you are over until you find another job. we have to be careful about it.

the loss middle class is one that is very wellbeing rehearsed in the presidential campaign. i would argue that bernie sanders, not withstanding, none of them have a clear idea of what the middle class is and what the middle class isn't. most of us are working class. and we have to really come to terms with that. if you are a contractor or free lancer you may be in the cultural middle class but you are not middle class. more and more young people, especially millennial generation like my daughter, they are in the working class but they have cultural -- you know journalist and so on -- have cultural interest and capitol and that gives them to opportunity to make income but they can be

dumped anytime any place. and she has been dumped four times in the last years. >> when i think about my definition of the middle class, i grew up in a college town in northern california and i would describe my family as lower middle class. to me upper middle class or middle class meant not only did you have to -- it meant there was a catastrophic event and you might not be empty of all of your money and pushed out on the streets. there was an anxiety even though i was middle class that one small thing could have ruined by family that i don't think peers in middle and upper middle class share. i want to hear your definition of the middle class and how it changed.

>> i really like the tension -- well, like it for purposes of talking about it -- between the economic and the cultural/social. politicians are able to obsess with this phrase "we have to protect the rights of the middle class" because they know middle classness, particularly qualified by lower middle and upper, is very much a state of mind and by that i mean needs, assumptions, convention, snobbery, aspirations, anxiety, all sheltered by your income and neighborhood. some level of security and privilege implied with middle

class at least inside your head even if you are scrimping by so they want to be labelled as such. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> and here is david maraniss talking about his book "once a great city". >> welcome. i am conner miran. i am the director of the wisconsin book festival book festival and i wasn't lying.

i would like to thank madison public library and the generous sponsors making this possible today. you can applaud for them, too. and as i said, i want to thank booktv for being here to cover this incredible weekend celebration of books and authors like for you and the rest of the country. because this event is being televised a couple things. everyone turn off their cell phones and all audience questions and comments need to be made from the microphone here. if you know you have a question in advance, make a line, and don't just shout out. if you are sharing your experiences on the internet use the #wibookfest so everyone see

what we are doing. we are delighted to host david maraniss for his book "once a great city." david is a two-time pulitzer prize winner. david's book, when pride still mattered, is maybe the best sports biography published according to sports illustrated. and for us at the wisconsin book festival david maraniss is far from a typical author. as a resident of madison, david has meant an incredible amount to the history of this festival and the space where i am standing right now; madison public library. this is the seventh time we have been lucky enough to host david at the festival over 14 years. his leadership and passion were instrumental in helping rebuild

madison library and we could not be more thankful. today we celebrate his sweeping look at detroit in the early '60s and learn from his ability to weave together threads and how the intersecting words of motown, labor, auto industry and the civil rights riots helped shame america. please welcome david maraniss. [applause] >> thank you, conner, and thank you all for being here. >> i had two aunts and uncle who

were librarians, three cousins who are librarians and my father, in the last year of his life when he came from the hospital, a visiting nurse came to his apartment and said elliot, you are getting healthy enough you can get out once a week and go to church. he said the imminoriortal words church is the public library. for the larger books, i need an obsession to report it and write on it. it was february of 2011, i was in new york city at a bar in

midtown watching the packers play in the super bowl against the steelers. and i was with, and sort of a surreal setting, the cast of the lombardi play. and dan who played vince lombardi on broadway was standing next to me and was also on the screen enacting a scene as vance. and after he was done, i wasn't paying attention, but i looked back up at the television and i saw a commercial with an image of a freeway sign that said detroit. i started paying attention and saw the iconic images of the city. the joe lewis first downtown. the first of the great heavy weight boxer who grew up there.

the great mexican muralist who came from detroit to portray the industrial might of the city. woodward avenue and a black sedan driving down the street and inside the sedan was eminem, marshall mathers. i am too old to be a big eminem guy. but it had a hypnotic backbeat to it as we was driving down the street. he got out of the sedan and walked into the fox theater and there was a black gospel choir rising in song and eminem turned to the camera and said this is the motor city and this is what we do. i choked up. i had tears in my eyes watching th that. my wife, who is in the audience

so i hesitate to tell the story, she said why did you fall for that? it is selling cars. it is a chrysler commercial. detroit is a mess. he was right. but it got me thinking why did it affect me that way. what did it mean? i was born in detroit. i am more associated with madison, the city i went to grade school, high school and college and got married and had kids here. but detroit is the premortal memory of my life. the bob low boat and vernor's ginger ale and hudsons department store downtown are fond memories.

and of taking the bus from our flat on dexter down to the fischfis fisherwide and going to the wide to take swimming lessons as a six year old, naked, in a freezing pool. i wanted to honor the city and thought what can i do? well, i am a writer. so i will write. at the time, 2011, detroit was in deep trouble. it was on its way to bankruptcy. i knew there were other people that could write that story better than i could. i am not a financial writer.

then i started thinking about what detroit gave me, but america. when was enormous. not just automobiles. but played a rise in the role of labor in the united states. in the 1960's detroit played a central role in civil rights during that important period. so all of that together makes detroit a city of critical importance to 20th century american history. and that is what i wanted to try to capture in the book. the mexample i use is an oil ri down as deep as i can.

to get the four threads together, i ended up writing about an 18-month period between the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964 when all of those elements were at their peak and you could see the shadows of what was to come even then. in the fall of 1962, to events happened on the same two days. the detroit auto show unveiled the 1962 cars that sold more than history. there was a brief spell when detroit started considering smaller cars, but by '63 the chrome and aluminum was back and the big fins.

the same two days, the first review left detroit on the first national tour taking the sound of motown across the country. it is amazing to think about the talent on that one bus leaving west grand boulevard. little stevie wonder at age 13, smoky robinson and the miracles, marvin gay, the supremes were there but nobody knew there -- if they were any good. berry gourdy, the founder, thought they might be cut halfway through the tour.

motown represented that creative force during that period. i was trying to think about why it happened. why do certain cities have burst of creative eneries at concern points. for motown some of the reasons were apparent from the beginning. one was the entrepreneural genius of gordy with his sisters. he started motown with a loan from his siblings and parents. his four older sisters had to support him to get the money. they are sort of underrecognized in terms of the forces that shape motown. they were in it from the

beginning, they helped organize everything that berry did. the family is part of this. part of this is just american history. detroit, like other industrial cities in the north, was lucky to have this amazing influx of the great migration from the south with african-americans from mississippi and alabama and georgia. there were influences of blues, and jazz and songs in the church. every friday the song writers and producers would gather at west grand boulevard and they would have contest to see which of their songs could be turned into actual records and gordy would often lose to smoky

robinson and his sisters voted against him. but two other factors fascinated me the most. one had to do with geography and economics. detroit was a vast city 28 miles across, mostly single-family homes, and in those homes were pianos brought there by one of the largest manufacturer of pianos in the country which was gur nel brothers in detroit which had affordable pianos and every musician i talked to remember the piano in their house. the other factor was public school music teachers. every musician i interviewed remembered not only their element school teacher and junior high and senior high

music teacher. one of the thrills of researching the book was interviewing martha reave and she remembered emily wagstaff, her elementary school teacher, and her high school teacher and she said her high school teacher taught the students the classic and fundamentals of music. she was plucked from the choir at age 16 to sing at ford auditorium. i have interviewed bill clinton, and barack obama, and one of my favorite interviews is the story of her breaking into the the

crowd at 17. so that creative energy was there from the beginning. at the same time, a few miles away, in either direction, dearborne or downtown, ford motor company was developing of the car of the 1960s; the mustang. it was done in secret. the marketing campaign was formed by the thompson advertising agencies in new york city. but its largest client, by far, was ford motor company and the biggest advertising campaign in their history was the mustang. they did it in private in a series of rooms in the boule building that they called the tombs. one of the fun discoveries of researching the book, i knew a lot was written about the

mustang and its physical creation. i am not a car guy so that interested me but it wasn't what i was after. i wanted to learn about the essence of the mustang and what it meant to america. my wife and i went down to duke university. book research can take you to the funniest places. they had all of the thompson's papers there. as we go through the many files, we discovered the first idea for the mustang was to be called the torino. and they developed this entire campaign about the sexy italian-looking sports car the torino. it was the model that they were going to use for it was imported from detroit which is the exact same phrase that chrysler used

52 years later selling the chrysler i didn't want to buy but inspired me to write the book. it wasn't called the torino and the reason is the president at the time of the company, henry ford ii, who was flamboyant and had a model never complain and never explain, was having an affair with an italian jet setter and was about to leave his wife for her and they thought it might not be a good idea to name the car such. the super of the book happened in 1963 in detroit. that part of the story has to do with civil rights and also with one of my other favorite characters in the book who in

some ways was kind of like henry ford ii the deuce. this was reverend franklin, aretha franklin's father, and his church attracted thousands of parishioners a week and there were loud speakers outside during the summer when it was in the heart of black detroit, and later moved to the west side. but he was so poplar in the 1950s he was what i call a flying preacher. he would fly off from detroit with the travelling caravan that included his daughters, aretha among them. and they would fill up an arena somewhere in the south with thousands of people and franklin would preach and his daughters

and others would sing. and franklin was so poplar with the sermon they were reported by chess records and on the radio. and people came to his events like it was a rock concert and call out their favorite sermons asking him to deliver them. let's hear the eagle stirs its nest they would say. and he said, reluctantly harry reid -- he had to do whatever we wanted. franklin was a friend of jackson and jackson called him saying we have to help the southern civil rights movement. 1963 was the key year of civil rights when king and the southern christian leadership conference was moving through the south, there had been major demonstrati

demonstrations in birmingham. many of king's supporters and king himself were arrested in birmingham after being sicked on by the racist police chief's dogs and fire hoses. and jackson called and said to reverend franklin we have to help them. why don't you hold a rally in detroit? so franklin started organizing a rally. he wasn't poplar among the black establishment in detroit. he was considered too controversi controversial. they tried to stop him from leading the march several times. but it all proceeded in the end. even the naacp opposed it at first which they would like to not acknowledge that today. but it all started to come together.

the mayor of detroit then was a liberal, irish catholic, named jerome cavanew, who was elected largely because of the african vote. his commitment to try to change detroit from the history of racial violence and tension. in the years before he was elected there was a lot of confrontation between the police and african community. the tensions went all the way back to world war ii where in many african-americans were coming up to the area from the appalachians and there was tension over jobs. it was a sore point in detroit

history and 20 years later the mayor was trying to overcome that. he appointed a progressive police commissioner, george edwards, who had been trained at the united auto workers by walter ruth and his brothers as a progressive labor person, who had been active in detroit politic for a long time, and was on the michigan supreme court and persuaded to resign from that to take the job as police commissioner with the single idea of trying to improve race relations in detroit. so edwards met martin luther king at the airport when he came for the rally. his first words were "you will find no police dogs or hoses he here" detroit was embracing king. they went to wayne state

university and there were 150,000 people gathered on woodward avenue marching down eight lanes, all the way downtown to the hall where king delivered his first public, major iteration of the i have a dream speech. he was walking arm and arm with walter ruther, the great labor leader of the united auto workers, who had been the banker for the civil rights movement that summer. it was ruther's money that bailed most of the demonstrators out of jail in birmingham. it was ruther who later helped fund the march on washington. this was two months before the march in washington and king is delivering the i have a dream speech. it is being recorded by berry from motown records.

unfortunately for detroit, although not perhaps unfortunately for the nation, everything was overwhelmed by what would happen in washington two months later. his record was released august 28th, 1963 and no body paid attention because king was delivering the i have a dream speech in washington. and the rally was large. it was basically completely washed out of history. it happened in detroit first, though. in the months after that incredible event things started to unravel in some ways. you can see it already. earlier that year, some social issued a report saying detroit is loosing half a million per

decade, and would lose half a million for every decade afterwards loosing the tax base and productivity is city needed. it was unnoticed because of all of the energy in detroit at the moment. in 1963, detroit was a luminous star but it was dying with the people not realizing it. this was four years before the riots of 1967, it is before the city government/pension contracts, it is before the decades or years of some municipal corruption. one can argue one way or another about the affects those events had on detroit. it is important to realize the

structural problems were there already starting in the 1950's. the auto industry was leaving the city in terms of factories and jobs and emotionally turning its back away from the city. i think much to the regret of auto executives today who belately came to realize how important urban vitality is as a symbol of their entire industry. and not only was the auto industry leaving, but so were white citizens, long before the riots. and part of that had to do with urban renewal which many african-americans called negro removal. they chose to tear apart the black neighborhoods in detroit and built the chrysler freeway and other freeways through the heart of detroit having a ripple

affect through the city. it had a double negative effect. it destroyed part of the black society of detroit -- one of the ministers there, reverend hood who was 90 years old when i interviewed him, he said he was shown when the urban renewal people showed him a map of what they would do they showed him a map around his church and it included every establishment except for the black churches. they were ignored. so the unsettling affect of the urban renewal with the highways made it easier for people to leave the city which was a common trade in many of america's large cities. and a ring of major shopping centers was build, eastland, northland, creating a noose around the city sort of.

and all of this together helped lead to detroit's decline. i was struggling at first about where to end the book, whether it be at the end of 1963 or later, and then i came upon two events in the spring of '64 which gave it a logical conclusion. one was the unveiling of the mustang at the new york world fair in new york in april of 1964. i was there, i was a 15-year-old. i am not in the book except the epilogue but i was at the world's fair. my strongest memory is walking up to the coke pavilion and ordering a pepsi. or vice ser -- versa. i remember the look on the guy's face. it was innocent. but i road the ford wonder

rotunda. my book starts with the burning of the rotunda and it was an incredible structure and on november 9th, 1962 it burned to the ground. that same day the police department and irs invaded the major black hotel in detroit, the gothem, and basically it they didn't burn it but axed it into pieces -- gotham -- and these icons were lost on the same day. the ford rotunda was never rebuilt but in new york city at the world's fair they built a replica of it and thousands of

tourist every day came and would ride around in the ford rotunda looking at disney designs or whatever and they were riding in mustangs. i probably road in one of the first -- rode -- mustangs without realizing it. but the event i ended the book with took place in may of 1964. lyden johnson was supposed to come to detroit and the auto show but the cuban missile crisis broke out that very same day and he didn't make it.

60, and it was in detroit that he first uttered a variation of the most famous phrase of his life ask not what your country can do for you. he didn't start with ask not. that was changed for the

inaugural address but to make it more poetic but it was the same phrase uttered in the troy first, so it's amazing to think that perhaps the most famous presidential. they were both set in g. tried -- detroit first. lyndon johnson came in and he arrived at the detroit metropolitan airport and was greeted at the airport by walter reuther. he endorsed johnson for the first democrat he ever endorsed, he got on the helicopter and flew to ann arbor and was it was there that he delivered the

great address. i first started going to g. tried -- detroit to research this years ago and i say half jokingly my wife and i would say most of the time at a bed and breakfast on don cherry street is a at the block from the detroit institute of arts and it's two blocks from the walter reuther library where we did much of the research. i felt like on the way to the end of the library i could walk across woodward avenue in the middle of the street.

going back i have more energy and this last time i'd been back twice on the book tour just a few days ago and ten days ago and in both of those trips back it was vibrant in a way that really lifted my spirits. they were betting on dietrich trying to make money off of it but the effects are nonetheless positive for the most part in the midtown area near the museum at wayne state university is being filled with young people and musicians and artists are coming into detroit by the

thousands. someone said that it's becoming the new brooklyn but that is the insult to detroit. [laughter] no offense to a couple of my friends here. my dad is in brooklyn but brooklyn is not now what it was. anyway, it's very vibrant and accents but there's still wide swaths of detroit that are left behind. the first day of my book tour in the marketplace they met me in detroit and said what's going where. it was rubble and five out of the eight houses on the block were gone. now the mayor says that as a positive sign that he's tearing down houses and neighborhoods

where they are trying to build new communities and perhaps he is right. but nonetheless, miles and miles of detroit but feel that same desolation. so when people talk about the renaissance revival in detroit yes, it is happening but it figures out how to deal with all those people whose houses were being repossessed and lost their jobs and who are the backbone of what made the troy didn't make the country it can't be called a complete medicine. but i say that the most important word in my book and the title of my book is in. once again a great in a great city it's not once a great city. once upon a great city but it's once in a great city. thank you very much. [applause]

if anybody has a question please stuff appear to the microphone. >> i have a question about urban renewal. it seems across the country every case it destroyed cohesive but poor neighborhoods, and i want to know what the politicians really wanted of the urban renewal for. like did they say and believe that it was for economic development or was it the burgeoning civil rights movement were they wanting to destroy those neighborhoods.

the results would be not unwise that an accurate to try to lay one reason for it but the effects were negative in almost every case. madison is going through changes with high-rises and poverty.

>> that is a loaded question >> at the national audience won't know why that is but some people in the audience do. i think the change is inevitable. my strongest argument always has been you have to accommodate change but the most important thing to keep in mind as the city is made up of neighborhoods and that the long-term effects of some of that change can the change can have a negative impact on neighborhoods and families with children out of those neighborhoods and have these effects for a long period of time. [applause] you mentioned at joe louis and the tigers and lions in the

distance. did you correlate anything in the greatness with those sports franchises? >> i'm more of a baseball guy but they didn't fit anymore than they would have worked. it was with the connection to the mob in 1963 several members of the alliance including alex the most famous players were converting with mobsters in the troy. tony domain numbers guy in detroit said what they call the party bus which is a city bus they turned into the turned into a traveling bar and they pull up to a giant and drive around with their buddies and detroit lions in tow and it was that connection to the mobsters that

led to the suspension for a year the same year he was also suspended for converting with gamblers. so the story connected with my book because the police commissioner was determined to try to break the mob in detroit thinking that it was having an effect on everything that he was trying to do to prove and the lions were sort of caught in that. >> your term desolation is what it was like and it looked like a science fiction movie. everything was empty. these grand department stores, there was nothing there. what was it like in 1964?

it was still the longest department store in the world and had the famous thanksgiving day parade and detroit downtown was pretty vibrant and the communities where. it wasn't desolate but it was part of the translation. >> could you address how realistic that attempt was.

they almost got to the 1968 olympics within the decision that was made in 1963 right in the center of the book it had been the united states representatives for times before that and this time they thought they were going to get it. there were a lot of reasons they didn't get the olympics and part of it was just geopolitics at that moment the block was turning against any sort of agreement with the training back and forth post to sites it is a block in the olympic movement as well. i don't deal much in a counterfactual history but it's

interesting to think about what would have happened. those i trust the most think that olympics don't necessarily have a positive economic impact on the city. when they raised their fists in protest in mexico city they

would have had a much more powerful difference. hopefully this is not a loaded question that you have a favorite pony dog or american? [laughter] that is a great question. since i disparaged brooklyn before -- what do you think that the state taking over the isle? >> i would prefer the state is taking over anything.

if you take away the better place now. i'll i'll have a lot. my main interest is being restored to the greatness however that happens. yes. >> i look forward to reading the book and i have three sisters still live in the area, i groove up on a farm north of detroit.

on october 17 and 18th in 1967 kathy actually went to school with your sister at madison west. so we experienced what you wrote about in a march into sunlight on the campus of wisconsin walking past the commerce building. india not as a fighter pilot and a fifth soldier what that book has meant more to me personally than any other book i've ever read because it brought together those two formative experience experiences going to school at wisconsin when that time was going on and then what you wrote

about about him being on the later on and i want to thank you for that. [applause] i will never see which one of my children or grandchildren are my favorite and i sort of feel that way it had the most profound affect on me.

i do remember my wife taught at wayne state university and i was very impressed with the architecture and i was very excited when he became the architect was that interesting history as well and the other thing is we went many times with her young family was also named pig island and i always kind of had a hankering to return to that name. [laughter] anyhow, thank you very much for a wonderful talk. >> thank you. [applause] any more questions?

>> i read your book also and was reminded of my years in detroit growing up on the west side near illinois and delivered the westside carriere i've seen a tremendous transformation of one book that you don't mention in the book or the writings is the transformation of what's happening in the arab american communities in the city and i wonder if you would address that. >> of the detroit area has the largest population of any region in the united states and it started primarily with lebanese almost every nationality has come through that area so they have become more prosperous moving further out and they are rarely in the dearborn area now.

one of the things that has one key guide and others have spent all their time working on the trick very closely with the mayor's office. they are going to start with 150 families on a fuse the sidewalks that can be restored and that's the opening process of thought and as time progresses but the community and the detroit in the detroit area is another vital

part of the whole sensibility in the suburbs [inaudible] [laughter] the lira c. of it like you're saying after homeroom. so i loved that. [laughter] i do not pay her i will tell you that. [laughter] at the end of any chapter i can't go on because i have to think about what i read thank you all very much. [applause]

that was inevitable performance and i also want to just say to everyone who came here today. [inaudible conversations]

live from the madison central library at the wisconsin book festival next presentation will begin in about half an hour and while we wait we want to show you a couple of interviews from booktv recent visits to wisconsin. first here is the history of madison wisconsin capital city. >> i decided to write a book that covers all of the history of medicine because i'm not from

madison. i grew up in a suburb of seattle and i moved here not knowing much about wisconsin or the place that i was living. i started learning more about its history as i spent more time here and i really wanted to write a book for someone like me who maybe didn't grow up here, wasn't really familiar with its history as well as people who maybe have lived here their whole lives and just had no idea what its story was. one of the things that was most surprising to me learning of history is how hard it syntax to hang on. madison was in constant jeopardy of losing its status and i think that in part had something to do with how madison began. it really began as an idea on a piece of paper. there were enough people living here when it was proposed that madison would become the state capital. first a territorial capital and in a state capital was just this guy who was a land speculator

and he had invested in this land and the only people who were living here were some who had a camp along the lake shores and there were some for traders who occasionally set up shop. but on the whole no one was living here and so he comes through and sees this land thinks this could be a great town so he hired someone to draw out the boundaries of the town and presented it to the territorial legislature and said this is it. this should be the capital of the new territory. and he really have to convince a lot of people because again, there's nobody looking here at this time. and so i think that has a lot to do with how madison both grew and really had to fight to hang on to its status because there were other places in the state that had more people has more people living in them, larger industries so the process for selecting a state or territorial capital is really just about

convincing other legislators. you put forth a good case of why this should be the center of government for your territory and event or state. at the time, the major center of population in wisconsin was in the southwest part of the state where people were doing like mining and some people have suggested that where the capital should be because that's where the people are and there were also quite a number of people up in the green bay area. they would've for a mother for traders along the great lakes and so there was a kind of heavy concentration of people there as well and in one of the arguments was that madison is kind of centrally located so that will be easy for people all over this territory to get there if they need to be in touch with their government. and so it's mostly just a marketing job to be selected as a territorial capital so when james went to the territorial legislature to present his idea that medicine should be the capital, of course it wasn't the only city competing to be the capital of the new territory and

the territorial legislature's job pretty much the only thing you needed to do is pick a capital cities with a mint in belmont wisconsin in the southwest part of the state and so he brings this kind of extravagant plan, and he is a little bit manipulative. obviously he has a financial stake in madison. he names it madison after the president james madison who just died and he's trying to play on the national sympathies for this beloved president that we have just lost. he also named the city streets after the signers of the constitution again trying to show this as a patriotic place that he brings it over toward the territorial at a but a citrus meeting and presented with 19 other cities competing to be the capital, and he basically starts bribing people. the building they were meeting and was a little bit chilly. you will find lots of people complaining about the poor quality of the building, how

cool they are. he knows this. he's very smart. so he brings with him his plan from madison will hold up as well as a bunch of buffalo robes he starts handing out to the territorial legislatures saying d. want to hear about my city and madison and are you cold, here is a buffalo robe. then he starts offering to sell the legislators land for a discounted price. so it does go through quite a number until he's actually successful but his word carries a lot of weight because he'd been in wisconsin for quite some time and was probably the only person who actually go to all the cities that were under consideration. he'd come to wisconsin in the 1820s. he's a very prominent figure and so if he said that madison had some potential, then people were bound to listen to him and they did end up after many votes as electing madison as the capital and maybe not surprisingly he

made and ends off of that decision so wisconsin by the 1840s was experiencing about immigration particularly from europe. but people from new york and england those are the two main immigrant streams and by the 1840s wisconsin has enough people to qualify for statehood. you need 60,000 people. wisconsin has more than that. and there were various groups that were trying to push forward the legislation to move wisconsin to the statehood. it took a while to move to the point where we could move forward with drafting the state constitution so the democrats are finally successful in 1846 and they go to work.

people were distrustful of banks thanks at the time and so they fought by outlawing banks they wouldn't have to worry about fraudulent activities among someone's banking employees and then another kind of controversial measure they took took as they about married women to own property. pretty much every other state a married woman was property. so these were very radical provisions that were included in this draft constitution. there was debate all over the state about how they were going to move forward. it was eventually overturned. we couldn't agree on this very radical constitution and so we sent a religious haters back to the drawing board and they drew up a new constitution that was finally approved and got rid of those controversial measures

that were in the original constitution and that one was finally passed so it could become a state and may 1848 is a by the time we get to the early 20th century there is a man that is hired and he is a landscape architect. they delivered this shocking message to the residents of the city. he's not not on staring at his criticism of the city as well but he also sees and presents very specific plans for what the city can do to become somewhere up with paris and new york and i think for the first time people in madison were reminded that they have the potential that

they could be someone from the outside salt them as this really fantastic place filled with possibility. a lot of the things they set off to the decades to actually develop. some had never come to fruition but in a lot of ways the things he suggested in 1911 came through throughout the 20th century and i think that helped madison kind of builder confidence. one of the things that he suggested in his plan for the city was that there should be an arboretum. he thought there should be more green space in the city. when he initially suggested this, we didn't end up getting it until a couple of decades later. he also suggested that the main the main street but was connecting the capital to the university staged street should be a closed pedestrian mall where people would gather.

that didn't have enough of the 80s opened to traffic and could easily opened for buses and we will see the pedestrian thruway but that was a part of his vision for the city. he also suggested the buildings downtown shouldn't be taller than the capitol dome. he thought the capitol dome was the centerpiece of the community and would we be sure not to obscure it. one of the things fascinating to me as we are completely surrounded by water and it was pretty hard to enjoy it. there is a lack of restaurants and things on the water where you think they would be and madison has kind of voice turned its back on its leaks and he really said no we need to pay attention. these are beautiful and we need to protect them and i think that is something that has become more and port import into the city ever since then. i want people that are reading

my book to understand how the history is connected to the history of wisconsin as well as the history of the country. the local history established. but they tell you so much about the world and i wanted people to understand that part of it and the importance is to understand how we got got a way to believe that we are today.

[inaudible conversations] booktv is covering live this year and we will be back with

more coverage in about 15 minutes but first we want to show you derek jeffreys sat down with booktv during a recent visit to green bay wisconsin. the book tv on c-span2. as a part of the present challenges and possibilities program i published a book on torture on the war on terror and as i wrote this book i realized

some of the techniques that we were using for the war on terror. the prison system and i noticed all of these old connections between. i started looking those having a prison system so i started looking at another book the united states has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world with 5% of the worlds population of close to 25% of its prisoners. african-americans and hispanic americans are incarcerated at much higher rates than whites. the united states holds more prisoners in solitary confinement and any other democratic nation. these are human rights issues that we cannot ignore. >> we decided we were going to develop a new system of solitary confinement.

solitary has always been part of a prison system. people have been throwing -- prisons began as a solitary confinement. everybody was in solitary confinement in the early part of the 19th century but what they discovered is that it drove people mad and they gave up on it and they decided this wasn't something they should be doing to prison inmates. but in the 1980s the country pulled it back and gradually through the 80s and the '90s built this incredible system of solitary confinement and at least 50 to 8,000 people now in solitary confinement. some of it is in the super maximum prisons about 44 of these in the country. the most famous is in colorado which is the famous super max for terrorists and people like that. but california also has a very famous ones. each of the states built a special facility to isolate people. we had one here in wisconsin

it's no longer a super match but it's out of the middle of nowhere and i went to visit this prison it's got 500. it's no longer a super max because they were sued by us and inmates and they actually won but that's part of the phenomena is the super max prisons were built all over the country and people were isolated. in prisons and jails they replicated the confinement so super max prisons have 10250 beds per solitary confinement in our jails in new york and rutgers island there was a big debate about that right now all of these big institutions have a large number of solitary confinement wings and some

solitary is spread all over the criminal justice system. >> by resolving the solitary confinement practices the united states can protect human rights coming from public safety and the fiscally responsible. it's the right and smart thing to do and the american people deserve no less. >> it's a decentralized because the prison system is centralized and when you get to prison to prison officials will make a decision on whether or not to put you in solitary depending on the policies. and so if you are a gang member you can spend years and years in solitary until you agree to announce your filiation which nobody in the system is going to do. but all kinds of offenses can land you in solitary. in riker's island for example they have 115 land you in solitary and you don't even know what they are. so if you're fighting obviously that is serious if there's violence but there is violence but if you talk to an officer you write something people consider to be offensive and

politically. you get a couple of months in the wisconsin system 360 which is a year year and people continue to misbehave while the bigger in solitary and they add on time so we have people in this country that are in solitary for a year or decades. some 30, 40 years by themselves. the thing of solitary confinement is to use all of these unusual words the general public doesn't really know about, administrator, segregation, all of these euphemisms for solitary confinement. basically what they mean is that someone is in a cell for at least 23 hours a day and when they are released they are released for exercise or shower by themselves and often it's controlled by technology and distance, so corrections officers really don't have to have any contact with the inmate

into the conditions you have a generally small so often the light is on 24/seven for security reasons, but that really does raise the capacity to sleep command of the person is fed through a spot in the door. if they receive any visitors and many times they are not original to receive visitors that they receive any kind of visitors, the visitors would have to come to a similar kind of situation where they can talk to them and say chaplain or a psychologist will come to the door and speak to them. they can't really attend religious services which is something that bothers me a lot because i attend religious services at the prison and the idea that these people could be without any kind of capacity for any kind of religious services disturbing and the atmosphere in the secure housing unit and it's

the segregation which is a very strange term because in our racial history the segregation is an area within the prison or jail or solitary confinement that exists and often these places are filled with people screaming and yelling. people can sleep. they are going mad they are screaming and yelling or smearing feces on the wall or -- it is just a dad come a horrible kind of a sphere. >> the heat and cold are often unbearable and normal physical and mental activity in human contact and it access to health care are severely limited. as harmful as these conditions are -- like in solitary is made all the worse because it's often a hopeless existence. humans cannot survive without food and water. they can't survive without sleep but they also can't survive without help. years on and solitary particularly on death row will drain that help from anyone because in solitary there is nothing to live for.

>> the effect is devastating. and i talked to many people who've experienced this. psychologists and psychiatrists have studied what happens to a person and they've developed these very distinctive syndromes it's developed very quickly and we found after 20 or 30 days.

>> i can see no reason to subject anyone to the state of existence this type of existence no matter how certain we are that they are guilty of a horrible crime and are among the worst of the worst grade even if they want to punish them severely we should restrain from this form of confinement and treatment only because it's the humane and moral thing for us to do. my religious faith teaches that we should be humane and caring for all people. what does it say about us as a nation that even before the law allows the state to execute a person we are willing to let it kill them bit by bit and day by day by suggesting that to solitary confinement. >> i've heard about people's physical deterioration and not seeing the sun in years, so they develop vitamin deficiencies and their bodies gradually

deteriorate. i spoke to someone who spent a decade in solitary confinement. i've heard of people hallucinating. it's very common. i've heard about people, the kind of bodily harm they do to themselves in solitary confinement, the damage, the self-mutilation, the feces they put on the door, this kind of deterioration of your whole sense of self, i have no more respect for myself. i'm going to damage my body. i've heard a good number of these horror stories in the time that i was preparing this it is very painful to hear. >> lives are more. most often they are assaulted in the high-security institutions. in addition, nearly 200 inmates were seriously assaulted by other in the. >> i spent time in a prison and i talked to her actions officers and i understand why we use this

because people all of a sudden have become violent and can have people yet you can't do anything. i couldn't teach a minimal kind of security and a grateful to the corrections officers for doing this but i just don't think that it's accomplishing first of all the goals that we say it's accomplishing. it's not clear that it makes the prison must violent. that's what we say that as i said earlier, when you release people, sometimes it becomes more violent, sometimes you make somebody violent and better through this entire system. one of the argument is that arguments is that it reduces gang violence. that's one of the arguments they make but we are not so sure if this is working. but i would indicate that much short-term -- the united nations has recommended only maybe 15 to 30 days in solitary confinement and prison systems all over the world don't really have this kind of trick on me in solitary confinement. there are so many wind and some

in some other countries. there is a whole where they are pretty different and so it will take a long time ago to sort of back away from this. we've seen mahon has gotten rid of its solitary confinement. mississippi, illinois closed super maximum prison. so all of the country people have began to pay attention to this. >> disproportionate and arbitrary use of solitary confinement is not only a moral, it is a missed opportunity to break the cycle of crime. this approach does not increase public safety, it is contrary to the justice goals for the criminal justice system. accountability and restoration. teaching people to become good citizens rather than just good prisoners is a charge entrusted to the correctional officers by the taxpayers. the orange ring they become responsible productive members of society at large is. not to the safety of the communities whether inside or outside of the prison walls.

we've known this for years. it does indeed help them. but again it's something we just don't want to spend the money on i can't point to my own. it was founded by. they are really devoted to these inmates.

i would like to give a class on how. i've done a class on pope and they really have things to say [inaudible]

i was watching 60 minutes. he was coming out to fire on the point that there was no real outside of the health. they don't deserve programs and money for these men they are religiously diverse prisons and we have a lot of muslims and

catholics in the prison and it's very adversarial on catholic and i try since i teach religion i try to show them that we can talk about religion in a way that's not so oppositional because there are some inmates, not all. religion is just a continuation of battles they have with each other so i try to show them that we can have conversations and i think that we have been successful. >> what do you feel is the difference between islam and what you see or what you teach? >> a big issue i don't really talk about here but both traditions worship they say that

it's one or three into subjects that a lot of the conflict over there is one god it becomes who delivers the message. >> they also participate in a restored justice program and at the end of this program or class they receive a certificate was the first times they received any kind of a school certificate and graduation and it's a really beautiful event. i've been teaching there for four years and we do see from this program as a whole the possibilities in the program and we do see people tend to have fewer disciplinary encounters to the authority so we do have some evidence that it has helped them

but i don't have a lot of strong empirical evidence but we have anecdotal evidence. i see it as more of a spiritual thing into difficult measure being valued so the rehabilitation this kind of given up that ideal so i don't think that we can sort of point to the clear evidence that this is necessarily made. here's some best-selling books according to the best-selling book club.

booktv is back at the madison public library for the wisconsin book festival. the next presentation is about to begin and this is the author whose book is called unfair the new science of criminal injustice. thanks to the madison public library and all the other sponsors of the festival and a

special thanks to adam the author of this fascinating book for change in the kernel justice system in america. he's an associate professor at the university and graduate of the college and harvard law school who served as a federal appellate law clerk and published numerous articles. including the "washington post," philadelphia inquirer and he listened with adelphia with his wife and daughter and he's here in madison with some along nine as professors at the university of wisconsin. i'm especially excited about this opportunity to hear about this book because when you become a justice reporter from the wisconsin public radio and i've been trying to cover the issues discussed in the book for

the past 15 years i've been trying to keep up all the research that been described so well in this book. research that you will hear is already having an impact on the way crime is being investigated, how criminals are tried, how they are punished and how it may be researched the all too frequent instance discussed in the book when the justice system fails to deliver the justice to either the victims or perpetrators. he begins back 900 years ago when the guilt or innocence was determined by whether someone float or sink when you throw them in a vat of water. when people believed that witches and ducks such as sir belvedere and the holy python if a woman weighs the same as a duck she's most definitely a witch. [laughter] he ends the book by suggesting that as we move ahead we should consider conducting virtual

trials so the jury is here and watch testimony from witnesses and arguments from attorneys who were seen as computer-generated avatars instead of watching the trial in person so too will hear they are not distracted by visual cues that could buy the deliberations. he says that isn't a prediction although it may be a long time before such a change occurs. but let's let at him talk more about that and why he thinks that the result of the things he's proposing that would be more likely to determine actual guilt or innocence. i would ask you to silence your cell phones and give a warm welcome to adam. [applause] ..

>> we have had always had wrongful conviction and unequal treatment. but a lot has been hidden. and we still don't understand the scope of the problem and still don't understand the ultimate causes of the injustice we see.

it is about the behavior that shapes the behavior of the detectives, jurors, judges, witnesses, experts and prison guards. i take up a different character in each chapter and contrast the stories we tell about how these people make the decisions and where thinks can go wrong with the latest evidence from psychology and neuroscience has to say. my conclusion is a lot of the criminal justice system is based on myth about what defeat looks like, how our memories work, why people commit crimes, what it takes to deter a would be-offender. and my assertion is this is the

major impediment we face in delivering criminal justice and not criminal injustice. i want to focus on three myths about the system in this talk. the first myth is all victims are equal in the eyes of the law. the second one is when a witness comes forward and says, yup, that is the person who attacked me -- when they come forward and say that with certainty. all of the rest us are confidant we got the right guy. the third myth is the notion that judicial bias is subject to introspection and control. in essence it is a choice if you be an activist judge or an umpire judge on the other hand. i want to start this afternoon in the nation's capitol. a few years ago, cold winter night, a man named jerry needs

something out of his car and steps out on to the stoop and sees a body on the sidewalk. the man is alive, but unable to speak and is growning and pitching his head back -- groaning -- jerry tells his wife to call 911. a fire engine pulls around the corner and firefighters get out and almost immediately the man on the ground starts to vomit. one of the firefighters say i smell alcohol this is just a drunk. when the police arrive a few moments later they are called it is a drunk and nothing to see. they keep to the situation and the emergency response team comes around the corner and the crew leader said we came all of this way just for a drunk? they put him in the back, don't go through the normal protocols

and don't even go to the closest hospital as required. they go to the one that is more convenient for the crew leader that has to run errands. at the hospital, the man is put in the hallway to sleep it off. that makes sense. it is just a drunk, they are understaffed and a lot of times anyone who worked in the hospital, when someone is drunk wakes up they can be belligerent and cause problems so best to let him lie. that is how things proceed until one of the nurses notices a man is breathing in a strange way. a growling, snort almost. she gives him a sternum rub and his arms flip inward, posturing, and that is not a sign of drunkenness. that is the sign of head injury. doctors run over, rush the man to the room and trauma team is

called in and it is too late. he dies of bleeding in his brain ultima ultimately. this was no drunk. this was david rosenbom. 700 people came to his funeral, including many congressman. how did his happen? david had dinner with his wife, got the hicupps and decided to walk around the block. two guys jumped him and hit him over the head with a bar and robbed him. this case illustrates when it comes to assessing victims we sum them umon what is in front of us. might be the color of their

skin, rich or poor, if they look old or young, might be the smell on their breath. these initial assumptions can shape the trajectory of a case. it can be the difference between justice and injustice. between life and death. one of the psychological methods mention in the book ask young people to draw the face of a man -- look at page 20 if you have the book -- the only difference between these two groups was that one group was told you are drawing a picture of a black guy. the other group was told you are looking at a white guy. it is the same photograph. that should not matter at all. but it did matter for some participants in the study. for those told this was a black

guy they tended to draw someone who had more stereotypical black features. they were just looking at the picture and that should not have an influence. but it does. the labels we give people alter how we see and treat people. when jerry first encountered david on the sidewalk with his wife without the label of drunk what did he see? he described the person as looking like someone from the neighborhood. he and his wife thought this was someone who probably suffered a stro stroke. contrast that to the description of the doctor after the label of drunk was attached. same person. how did she describe him? looks deshovelled, like your typical alcoholic homeless guy. one of the things that is damaging about labels is once

they are attacked to a victim or suspect they are very, very hard to remove. and we saw this with david rosenbom. once he was labelled a drunk, all of the other evidence that the responders encountered was filtered through this frame. things that conflicted were discarded. there was a lot of stuff that did not add up to a diagnose this was a drunk. he had dilated pupils, the back pocket of his pants were ripped out, there were headphones on the sidewalks. none of those things added up but people didn't focus on them because they were not relevant to the initial name tag stuck on to david's shirt. this problem of tunnel vision of conformation bias affects not only emergency responders but

detectives, judges, jurors. indeed it can affect the most seemingly objective aspects of the criminal justice system. forensic analysis. you would think matching up a finger print, doing dna analysis, that has to be cut and dry. you are just looking at the world pattern. there is no subjectivity in that. scientist ran studies on such analysis. they found when the person, the forensic examiner comes from someone who say already confessed or an eyewitness picked out, they are significantly more likely to find that match. they start with a frame, they find what they are looking for. and that is one of the reasons in the book i suggest blind testing seems like an obvious answer. it has worked tremendously well

for the medical community. we need to make it a standard across the board when we do forensic analysis. let's turn to our second myth related to eyewitnesses. in writing this book, one of the most staggering moments for me was when i came across a photograph of 1979, a lineup from mary weather, georgia. this case was a brutal rape and a woman had been brought down to the local jail and looked at five men, scrutinized each one, and she said number three in the middle. john jerome white, young lanky guy wearing a white t-shirt, ends up spending two decades in prison. they eventually test the dna and he didn't do it. that is not what took my breath aw

away. i study the criminal justice system and i have seen many cases of mistaken identity with grave consequences like this. but the actual perpetrator appeared in the photograph and was locked up on an unrelated offense. he was brought in as a filler. what does that mean? that means the victim looked eye-to-eye with the man attacked her and picked out the guy standing two people over. and this holds an important lesson from the entire book: the threat to fairness and justice does not primarily come from evil people. the ones we should not be afraid

of are the ones trying to do the right thing. good people can create terrible injustice in our system even when trying to do everything right. every year tens of thousands of americans are charged are crime after an eyewitness comes forward and id's them. but what does the science say? one third of the time when an eyewitness picks someone from a lineup they pick out an innocent filler. one third of the time. out of the first 250 dna exonerations in the united states, 190 involved mistaken eyewitness identification. what is behind this problems? our memories, first of all, don't work like cameras as we assume they do. seeing something doesn't commit it to memory. there are many things that can negatively impact how well we encode and recall a memory. white guy trying to remember a

black suspect versus trying to remember a white suspect. in studies, i am 50% less likely to be able to do a correct identification. light -- seeing someone at midday versus dusk has a big affect on how well you will remember and make identification. whether you are physically exurting yourself at the moment of encoding the memory and that is often the case when you are suffering a crime. i think the bigger problem with eyewitness identification has to do with factors in control of the police. memory is easily lost and easily corrupted and research suggests that subtle suggestions by the person administering the lineup, little things like when the witness starts to pick out an innocent filler saying ma'am, we have plenty of time, take your

time. that seems like a prudent thing to tell a person. afterall, a mistaken identification can derail a whole case that is being worked by detectives. isn't that a good thing for an officer to say? well the research suggests no. that can lead to misidentification. same thing with just saying after the person has picked someone out. good job, ma'am, you got the suspect we brought in. how does that change things? well, subsequently those individuals given the feedback feel more confidant, they remember better after the fact, just by that little subtle push. one of the biggest problems with eyewitness identification is we cannot do just one. so in this particular case, they brought the victim in initially

to look at paragraphs. she looked actually at john jerome white. then they brought her back to do the in-person lineup. she picked him out again. then they brought her into court where she said yes, i see the man who attacked me in the court today. so from the jury's perspective well, one, two, three you are out. clearly she remembers very well. but what about those second two identifications? was she remembering the person who attacked her? or was she remembering the photograph she saw a week earlier? when she was brought into court was she remembering the man who attacked her or was she remembering the man who she had seen twice? we know seeing someone's picture on facebook can make it more likely we will pick them out of

of an eyewitness idenidentifica lineup. we need to handle eyewitness memory like we do other trace evidence. think about how careful we are with a blood sample. how careful we are to preserve it. how we carefully track the chain of custody with memory. what do we do? we let people go out in the world, talk to other people, go back to the crime scene, go over the events many times in their own heads. what does that do? it corrupts the memory. we need to think about ways we can treat all evidence with scientific care. let's now turn to the third myth about judges. in the united states, we tend to assume there are two kinds of judges. umpires/activist.

chief justice roberts told us at the senate conformation hearing he was an umpire calling balls and strikes applying the objective law to the neutral facts. activist judges we are told the only problem we face in the judiciary. people who chose to forward their own agenda and ideas over the good for society. what is the latest scientific evidence say? all judges are bias. actually all referees are also bias. often in ways that are beyond their conscious awareness for control. many times factors, which are not supposed to have any impact on outcomes in court, end up having an affeeffect. one of my favorite questions is

what determines if someone gets parole. i teach criminal law and i would have said what did the person o do/how bad was the crime and did they reform themselves in prison. did these factors matter when they looked at parole board hearings? no. what mattered the most? timing. first thing in the morning is the time when you want to go before that parole board in israel. better than not chance of getting parole. that drops radically by the time of the first break in the day. the things we believe are determining outcomes in our courtrooms are not the things determining outcomes. it is the time of day. it is the color of the defendant's skin, it is the

attractiveness of the witness, it is the judge's personal identity. as a nice example of how bias can come into a real court case i want to talk to you about a supreme court case from a few years ago. and the case involved a police chase just outside of atlanta. so car driven by victor harris goes by a speed trap, 73 in a 55, not the worst thing in the world. i expect many people in this room have done that on occasion. but rather than slow down, 19-year-old victor harris makes a grave mistake hitting the accelerator. a few minutes later, another offic officer, timothy scott, joins the case and after six minutes he asks for information to pit the vehicle meaning coming up behind it, tapping the back bumper and sending it into a

controlled stop and extracting the suspect. now, this technique is supposed to be used only one certain conditions. those conditions are not present at the moment when the officers uses this technique. they are driving on a straight away at high speeds. there is a ravine on the side. initia initiates the pit maneuver and victor's car flips over and spins and he is paralyzed from the neck down. he decides to sue officer scott on the theory this is an illegal seizure. you cannot shoot a shoplifter in the back as they run away and victor's argument is in the same manner you cannot use a potentially lethal pitting maneuver on someone who has just been speeding 18 miles over the speed limit. in the lower court, harris wins on the grounds that scott's action were unreasonable under

the fourth amendment. but in the supreme court things go differently. this is interesting. usually the supreme court is very similar to the resolutions related to how serious the risk of the chase posed and who was to blame. but in this case there was a twist. there was a video tape of the key events. justice scalia watching the tape during oral argument said this is most dangerous police chase i ever saw since the french connection and wrote in the majority opinion that no reasonable juror could possibly watch this video footage and not believe it was anything but incredibly dangerous and victor was to blame for his own paralysis. the supreme court was so sure they were right they put the

video on the supreme court website, first time they did that, so that everyone could check it out for themselves. some clever law professors decided i wonder if that is true that no reasonable juror in america could see things differently. they showed it to 1400 people, broad cross section, what did they find? distinct subgroups of citizens saw things differently. young, african-american women living into the northeast who happened to be democrats, tended to see things in the same way victor saw them; as the police were to ultimately blame for creating the danger and ultimately to blame for the bad results. that was very different than how white, older men from conservative western states saw things. they tended to be much more likely to see the version of

events as supporting the police. what this tells us is that people's backgrounds and experiences matter quite a lot. they can shape people's views of seemingly objective facts and can actually be far more of an influence than the black better law. in another experiment, these researchers wanted to look at the effect of different rape statutes on the outcomes in, say, a typical date-rape case. does that have any influence? i teach criminal law and my case book has 80 pages or so on rape law. there is a lot of time and energy spent on the distinctions mean different states. the case book suggests it matters whether you are in a state that recognizes a

reasonable mistaken consent and defense. what happened when these researchers checked the influence of changing the legal framework? the law that was on the books? keeping the same scenario. had no affect at all. the particular rape law didn't matter to the outcome. what mattered? the backgrounds and experiences of the jurors. it all came down to who are the jurors on the jury. now the very interesting thing was this culture cognition affect wasn't just about men and women as the experimenters suspected. the most interesting division was actually within women. women who were older and ascribed to more gender norms were far more likely to acquit

the defendant in a rape case than younger women with gender norms. there is another reason why we need to be unsure of the video tape offering an objective tape on reality. that is something that has been dubbed as perspective vice. the interrogation contact has received the most experiments. the way the experiment is done to place a camera behind the suspect and a camera behind the interrogator. it is the same interrogation in both cases. but what happens when you she this and ask people is this cohor cohorsed? it matters the perspective. if people watch the perspective

of the people asking questions they say that should not ask. but if you so the suspect, they appreciate the forces and are likely to say that can not come in as evidence and that is cohearsed. the camera angle offered to the supreme court was not a neutral one. it was a squad car camera. you are getting that traditional cop's view. you are sitting with officer scott in the car. you are seeing exactly what he is seeing, you are hearing what he is hearing. perhaps that might have an affect on how much you see things from his perspective when

it comes to who is at fault. imagine if we had different footage. the oj angle, right? up in the helicopter. would we feel the same way about the dangerousness of this police chase?

would that have impacted the outcome at the supreme court? i think the answer is, perhaps. and, perhaps. and i think that is one of the reasons why we have to be careful. there has been a real push in this country to equip all officers with cameras on their ray bans on their lapels, more cameras in squad cars. overall i think that is a good idea. there is other research that suggests when people no they are being watched that affects their behavior. i think that is a good thing. what i worry about is how it is used. is it will be brought in as evidence to say, well, actually, this was no answer the police bertelli because

the officer was threatened. well,. well, if we are only seeing things from the officers perspective it is a lot more likely that we are going to agree with that assertion. i want to assure we use videotapes -- we need to be recording all custodial investigations, but they should be tape from a third-party perspective, and we should have limits on how there use as evidence. now, and each chapter i offer a respect the court to have specific reform can do right now to address these problems. but we also need to think about a broader synergy. indeed, i think we might think about it is a revolution. we need to embrace evidence -based justice. we had evidence -based medicine. for a long time doctors made calls based on there got. based on anecdote.

after a while people think, wait a 2nd. we are scientists. that is a really bad way to determine whether an medicine is effective or a particular procedure is actually warranted. we need to gather empirical evidence and come up with best practices. business organizations have embraced evidence -based business with billions of dollars at stake. it is not enough just to rely upon gut instinct. for the board'sboard's judgment. no, you need to collect data on your customer to figure out what they actually want and how much they will pay. even sports have adopted evidence -based practices, but law has been relisted -- law has been resistant. why?

the law seems different to a lot of us, my students, when i talk to them about it, somehow the people who gave us our law seemed more enlightened, more pure hearted. my assertion is, even if that were true, they did not have access to the tools that we have now. the ability to collect information, to analyze that information, to run experiments. and there is no way that our founders would have ignored that information, and there is no reason we should now. what is it going to take to make it happen? well, i think we are at a rare moment in history. i could not have foreseen this moment when i started doing this research and writing this book.

this is a truly rare moment. it will justice reform is probably the only issue in which people on the right and left are willing to even talk to each other. we have possible bills in congress that would make a meaningful difference. but to ride this momentum i am actually counting upon all of you in this room. you thought your only responsibility was to come and listen, and ilisten command i am sorry to say, it is not. i am giving you homework. and the homework is to go out and talk to people. if you don't care, so be it. if you care about what you have heard today, go out and talk to people about it and demand more, demand a better system. we all no what is going to happen. the media is going to lose interest in some point and criminal justice reform. ebola is going to come back, the stock market will go

down. it could be anything. there will be a squirrel, and metaphorical squirrel, and the media attention will be drawn to it, and so, the only hope for people who are suffering from injustice is if you all in this room can keep the momentum going. there are two many people people who have suffered the crooked nice dick of the law that must stop, and it can start stopping with the actions of everyone in this room. thank you very much. i would now love to hear any questions you have. [applause] >> just a reminder, ifa reminder, if you have questions, lineup behind the microphone here. we won't take questions from the audience.

[silence] >> okay. alexander, a great poet coined a phrase to err is human. he followed it i saying to forgive is divine, but forgiveness is not part of our system. to err is human, and we know from experience that everyone makes mistakes. we all make mistakes. my job happens to be a relatively simple one. i inspect machine parts. i have a machine shop in town here. i am sure 89 percent of all the things i look at are perfect. it's all good. maybe one time out of 100, one time out of 200 they're is a mistake, and my job is

to spot that once out of 100 or once out of 200 and catch it before it goes down the line, gets put into a machine that will then cause a great deal of problems and here is where the problem is because is buried into a machine. so i am reminded constantly that everybody makes mistakes. that would imply that district attorneys on occasion make mistakes. i am not here to give aa speech, but my question is, in your experience, sir, about how many times have you ever experienced a district attorney admitting to a mistake? [laughter] >> so the answer is that prosecutors, like all of us,

-- i don't think it is just prosecutors who don't like to admit there mistakes. that is all of us, that is a human characteristic. i actually have a chapter all about prosecutorial misconduct, and one of the things that i will tell you is, we only hear about a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the misconduct that goes on because a lot of it no one ever knows. right? you have a duty to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence of the other side. but what happens when you don't turn it over? it never, ever comes out unless, right, there happens to be dna which is saved for 20 years and tested. then maybe it will come up, but that is a real problem. one of the things that i like about what you said is, the need to look for mistakes. our prosecutors offices are

not traditionally set up to do that. they goal is to get convictions. i propose in the book that the goal ought to be, achieve justice. what does that mean? well, all guilty people should get their just desserts. on the flipside, all innocent people should be let off. and we should be looking for that one mistake in part out of 100 or out of 1,000, are some prosecutors offices doing this? yes, there are a few in the united states. it started in dallas texas, dallas county prosecutor's office set up a prosecutorial integrity unit which is focused on looking for mistakes. i am giving a talk next week down to the atty. gen.'s officeattorney general's office in delaware. delaware has just this last month set up a similar system looking for ron

convictions. to me, that is a no-brainer and no-brainer and should be part of your job as a prosecutor. it is not how many people can i personally lockup. too many prosecutors think that that is the goal. it is poundage, how many pounds of human beings can i send to the slammer? that is going to result in wrongful convictions, i can tell you. that is a machine that we have built that makes wrongful convictions. but we can change. thank you so much for the question. >> well, i am a professor. that is is my goal. >> i appreciate every word you have said so far. the question was, how many times have you experienced or heard of a district attorney or office admitting a mistake? >> i would sayi would say that it is very rare. i cannot think of an instance right now that comes to mind. and i think that is a humbleness that we need to see.

>> i. >> in your 1st example, in your 1st example where you talked about the chain, kind of how the firemen identified, you know, it just went on down the chain and everyone started assessing the case on there own, his experience on there own. i think it is fine that we talk among ourselves at prosecutors offices. they get the information from the cops, who get the information from the people at the scene which is, to me, how it goes up the chain >> i think it starts with more rigorous training and protocol. a lot of hospitals, right, know about this problem, which is that a dr. comes in the person says to them, yes, i have ask, and the dr. st.

and that leads to bad outcomes. and so how did doctors approach intake of patients? well, they go through checklists. there actually werethere actually were checklists in these cases for checking persons who are unconscious. there are so myhow my tests, different things which are supposed to dictate certain treatments. that kind of thing needs to be regulated -- rigorously adhere to. people need to understand why i should go through the steps. human instinct is to once i, once i have a shortcut, i don't need to follow this protocol effort. if they had stuck with the protocol, if any of those people have stuck with the protocol they would have plant fat -- found plenty of things to suddenly say, wait a second, this is this is not just a drunk. side note which i did not say, what if this was just a drunk? well, guess what? he needs to be taken to the

closer hospital and assessed sooner, too. people can dive alcohol. so even if the label was correct, the protocol was not followed it either. either. so i think the 1st solution is just confining human behavior, making points where we can stop and say, your instinct is to do x, july. make sure you do i. thank you. >> good afternoon, and thank you for coming. i am a reformed government prosecutor, also defended those i had once oppressed, and there is splendid parable from the time of william tell called the parable of the perfect archer, and there was a contest during that era, and they were looking for, you know, archers of great renown. and they found this splendid

kid who exhibited talent that was,, perhaps, beyond his means if you looked at it from the outside looking in. but he always hits the target. so finally someone in the contest did their due diligence and said, how did you do it? he said, that is easy. i shot 1st and then i'd you the target. that happens in law enforcement all the time. and i am wondering what you maybe think about parable. >> i think it does happen and it is not just detectives in the case of patrol officers, a recent example, the shooting of minority members were evidence was then tampered with to make it look like the person had taken a taser

something like that. it is not just there. all members do similar things on the siding with the outcome of the cases and then finally evidence to support that. supreme court justices do that really interesting study on the use of amicus brief research. so what do practices do? well, it appears that they often determine what outcome they like and then they go looking for legislative facts to support whatever they already believed to be true. police chases are inherently derek -- dangers. they naturally think, yes, please chases are dangerous.

high command to mean? it would benefit the supreme court. similarly the idea of the prosecution should be in charge of handling evidence and decide what to turn over to the defense. that seems like a recipe for disaster, an independent entity, entity, i think, ought to be making a determination.

[inaudible question] >> here is one thing. we know a lot about wrongful convictions in the reason why we have them, psychological, police misconduct, much of the psychological stuff won't go away. one thing we have been thinking about in the past is how we make the process as a teacher more precise.

i have recently written an article and a recipe about reform models, it's actually a study on reform. we put our stuff on top. one thing we could not agree on. 1600 exoneration so far. 98 percent of all cases no one front of a jury. so the jury's cruiser love. how things work, i am contesting the argument. the best evidence, it is still a jury they gives a

story out of well a -- well-equipped prosecutor. we had cases in which. >> this is all fantastic. really the area of disagreement is that ii am optimistic that we can actually address some of this problem. this to give you a few examples, one of the big problems is tell them the wrong stuff. what you are told, ask

questions, more or less likely to flee off police officer. usually some people check no we all have these little devices. control that. then everyone says okay, i can do that judge. they don't work like that, and the legal system perpetuates these myths and we often tell jurors to focus on the wrong stuff. demeanor. look at their face, look at their hand.

what do people focus on? jittery limbs coming days version, those are poor predictors. there is a lot that we can do to guide jurors. jury selection process, the focus was originally on evening the scale. there are biased people on juries. make sure they end up on the jury. as the goal.

i want to get rid of that approach. that does not make any sense. i always get struck from juries. again, you guys may think that makes sense. what does not, i studied criminal justice and care deeply and results. that is not the system we deserve. it is absolutely an uphill battle. we are always going to have cognitive biases. there is no way of getting around them,them, but i think we can do so much more. thank you. [applause] >> i am hopeful that the

policies and procedures to review our current. what do you think would be the one most important thing that committee could try to do to make at least the police part of our criminal justice system more fair? >> the single biggest thing is committing to evidence -based policing. i wrote an article couple of months ago and started to hear from police officers around the country. got an e-mail a couple days ago and she said it's hard. they don't want to think about scientific studies, but here is someone who is

starting an organization who is talking to people around the country how can we have more effective interrogation procedures that don't result in false confessions. how can we have better eyewitness identification procedures. i look through hundreds of thousands of studies. all it takes is for the commitment. the courage to say you know what this is how we have always been doing it. most of the practices do not have empirical backing it all. they are based on anecdote.

that is not a good way to run organization so i would say that is the starting point. hey, let's actually look at what is effective. if we care about cutting down minority shootings what causes this, is it a few bad apples in our midst? is there no problem at all? or is it implicit racial bias, exposure to the damaging stereotype in society that links the concept of blackness and violence are crime that lead to automatic responses and disparate impact, not only impact, not only for police officers, but for judicial behaviors which results in young african-american males having higher bills, longer sentences.

but they ought to agree with a lot of it. i work with low income mostly african-american women who are impacted significantly by the criminal justice system, families, partners, and i got and i got to sit in one of the focus groups and listen to those women speak about their concerns. and i think that the problems is how the limits about who gets the information, who has control over it. and the wisdom in that room

i don't know if you have any suggestions. people in communities most impacted have concerns and questions. >> my take away message come in general there are good idea. we should always try to take whenever possible all the relevant actors we should be cautious how we use that evidence.

if it is brought into suggest that this woman is a threat to me it is going to look a lot more like she was a threat to you we are seeing her coming past me. it may look like the officers the aggressor. so that is where i am worried. i think body cameras are a good idea. i don't want to see them being abused. >> we don't allow lehman to play a role play a role in

whether or not someone was guilty. the elite lawmakers. i think we need to have individuals in the process in medicine they are starting to augment the doctor sue have a limited capacity to know everything, especially with are amassing knowledge of medicine that an individual dr. would need to know. >> absolutely.

>> that is one of the reforms that i suggest is an unnecessary one. has never made sense with respect to a sanity defense that we bring in experts who have studied may not have take science is the 4th grade. i think it's great to augment human cognition with technology.

actually, this apartment, another officer was here they are less likely because they had just been told this person is a mental illness. don't be threatened immediately and guilty again. that is the kind of technological advance that can play a big difference in our system. >> you can come up. thank you all so much. >> thanks all of you for coming.

get find out more about how you can buy the book. [inaudible conversations] >> live coverage from the wisconsin book festival. that was author autumn been for auto talking about the criminal justice system in america. he will begin in about a half-hour. we want to show you this interview we did with the chief of police for the university of wisconsin madison. she sat down with us during our visit here last year to talk about the state capitol.

>> everybody. >> no. >> and this is why please repeat after me. [chanting] [inaudible]

>> governorgovernor scott walker introduce the budget repair bill and when she was trying to fill a gap the budget and at the same time proposed an end to collective bargaining for public employees in the state of wisconsin. the right of employees to unionize and get together and speak with one voice when it comes to bargaining for benefits for pay, work conditions kemal those types of things. wisconsin was the 1st date of the united states to allow public employees to collectively bargain for those things. particularly with the unions to agree with, essentially collective their dissolution and having employees have to speak individual voices instead of collectively. and this was met with some resistance from the collective bargaining units, all the different unions of wisconsin, and people came

to the capitol to protest over a 30 day period in january and february of 2011. [chanting] >> i justi just thought it was an interesting story, especially because it was nonviolent, especially because there were so few people arrested. especially because it is the way the system is supposed to work. and we don't have a lot of examples of that often in our country that people can gather, have theirgather, have their voices heard, and something really, really bad does not happen. and that is a really good thing. and i think it was just unique. and so, i was here one day and turned to somebody and said, no one would believe the behind-the-scenes, what is really going on here.

i ought to read the book and the person said, yeah, you should. i thought, welcome i will give it a try. as he began the budget repair bill was introduced and then there was a weekend, and the unions to the saturday and sunday to organize and on monday the students from the university of wisconsin marched on the capitol from the campus that was only a blocks away, and they were about 1500 to 2,000 students who came up and delivered about $8,000 signs were the governor. they were not exactly heartfelt. the dump them on the public desk in front of the office. and then by the tuesday of that week, february 15, the unions had organized and at a rally where they expected summer between ten and 20,000 people, and they came, and escrow was shut down for traffic. they came around and went inside the building and let there voices be heard. well, by the next day the grounds grew even more commend in the madison teachers, many of the teachers associations around the state started a massive

walkout call in sick,sick, and with the school shut down because really began to swell, and by that weekend we were up into the high 60s, low 70s thousands of people. somewhere around 70,000 people descended upon the capitol square, and it building from there. without the thought -- the following weekend we had a hundred thousand people on the square, and they continue to grow, and we have had over 100,000 on the square. the weekdays in between every day there were tens of thousands of protesters here, both inside and outside the building. ourour tradition is that you go around the capitol square counterclockwise. the entire square is filled with people, streets closed to traffic, filled with people, and they would walk carrying there signs and banners and things around the capitol counterclockwise. that on the grassy areas of the capitol that was full of people who would watch people want by.

periodically we had tractors, farm tractors tractors come through. we had harley davidson motorcycles come through. very large buses, drop people up, pick people up. thereup. there were just thousands and thousands of people bundled up for the weather, but still out here and partying. inside the building, the 1st three days there was no limit to how many people could come inside the building command we had summer between 22 to 26,000 people inside the building, and the building is just not built for that. after doing some measuring we figured out that the building could hold 9,000 people. so on sunday's we counted as many as 47,000 people that would come through the doors

the protest march. state street is the street that is closed to vehicle traffic and open for pedestrian and bicyclists, what is the natural kind of place where we set states were protests because the state street entrance is a little bit on a hill, and the hell goes down toward state street. it is the natural way for you to be able to look up and see estate and listen to music i i can here it for a long-distance because of just the geography. the people we gather and have an application system so people like michael moore , many federal representatives and senators came and spoke. they would set up

amplification and have crowds that were far smaller. i have been in law enforcement for 32 years, and 22 years ago i had an incident with a younger situation. after that i began to develop an expertise in crowds, how political crowds act differently, and people being facilitated the act differently than being confronted. i've been the police chief for 21 years.

i had all this background the capitol police chief the department of natural resources helps us out and had a huge expertise of logistics. they'rethere very good at moving people and resources in and out of remote areas, so the capitol is pretty much a piece of cake. state patrol who can always give you staffing and a very disciplined person. if you tell them to stand here and do such and such, they are going to stand they're and do what you asked them to do. they are very reliable. the capitol police, they knew the building inside now.

the 2nd was the make sure that people's constitutional rights were honored. in the 3rd was to ensure the government which was democratically elected functions and was allowed to function and could not function. a democratically elected government. genuinely and legitimately elected, that is the way democracy works command we have to keep that government functioning. is it safe? is the government continuing to function? now, not to say that there they were not pickups in all three categories, because there were. the constitutional rights of free speech and free expression, that was all

well and good, but there are limits to that.that. you cannot go in to a crowded building and yell fire. there are certain things you can limit. the 3rd was the government functions and they still continue to have hearings, hold hearings, still continue to have their meetings. we wear our same uniforms every day,day, so we do not get into that heavy gear that you see a less there is a reason to do so. and most days you just come to work looking like you would any other time as a police officer on the street, so there was not the sense of putting on a helmet, taking out a baton and standing with your baton. there was no need for any of that command we did not escalate in that way. we can do everything through dialogue. they were tense moments of pushing and shoving, but again, you try to isolate it

and make sure that the dialogue begins right away about how we got here and how we can de-escalate this, and you keep the tension down as much as possible. i also believe that ethically it is right when your dealing with a big crowd always give fair warning. if you do things suddenly to a big crowd, the 1st 50 people in the crowd may know what caused it, but the people beyond them do not. all they know that is the cops are moving or if the cops are doing this or that. that. the police are acting. as a response they then get tense and start their things 50 feet deep. they become no longer calm. balls being thrown. give time, communicating, given day, give two days. at one point we gave five

days warning. we were going to close the building at fivein five days. the next day for his chronic state three days. in every day we give closing and closing closing every day announcing ahead of time what we were going to do the next day as if there were not any surprises. the end result is collective-bargaining for public employees came to an end, and the unions had to actually take a vote from one of their memberships to see if it was still being and existence. union duesunion dues that normally were taken out of paychecks as an automatic stop command employees then could decide whether or not they wanted to give money to the unions. there were a whole series of things, the budget that filled so that there was no longer a budget gap, so the budget repair was done. and then from they're i believe it was nine senators and the governor faced recalls, and that took about

a year to have that all come through, and some senators will recall, and the governor was not, and other senators were not. they went through the process, and then we just move forward from that point. but i think in many ways this has been regarded as an american story about people coming together and exercising their first amendment rights to let the democratic government no that there is this piece in a completely legal on both sides, the process actually worked here. you know, we did not have mass arrests. in the course of 30 days year or subtly 13 people, and only four of those people were arrested while i was in charge. nine were arrested when they disrupted the galleries on the 1st couple of days of the protest.

and so it really shows the democracy works because it tells a story of how the police can be used as political fodder or can be used as a political tool if you're not careful. and it is not our job to be used politically. it politically. it is our job to ensure safety and ensure the government functions. and ensure the constitutional rights are met for all americans. [applause] ♪ ♪

>> now, and about 15 minutes book tv book tv will be back with more live coverage of the wisconsin book festival being held in the madison central library. while we wait here is an interview. he talked about fdr on a recent visit book tv made to green bay. >> it is immature and incidentally untrue for anybody to brag to the unprepared america single-handed and on the one hand tied behind his back and call off the whole world. >> in 1930 in the midst of the great depression one result was governor of new york state he wrote to a friend and said, he said, as i see it, i am convinced

that we need to make the united states fairly radical for a generation, and he said in part it was because that is what jefferson understood. that is what the best americans have always understood, that to revive america you radicalize it. you make it live up to his progressive image of itself. >> give up essential liberty to purchase a liberal temporary safety, preserve neither liberty nor safety. [applause] >> already been president for eight years and was reelected for an unprecedented 3rd time. and he knew that he had to massive crises to deal with. he still wanted to sustain the new deal. he still wants to reduce inequality, still wanted to empower working people. on the other hand, he knew that the war has already

begun. the japanese in east asia, nazi germany and fascist italy and europe, and at this time, by late 1940 britain is essentially on its own, the soviets have been involved in the treaty with the nazis and even then the nazis can turn on the soviets. he wants to inspire american to pursue. we will not stand by. the freedom of speech and

expression. worship god in his own way. freedom translated into world terms, the economic understandings which will procure for every nation a healthy, peacetime right for its inhabitants everywhere in the world. of course with freedom comes fear. it is translated in the world, a worldwide reduction of armament to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will

be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor anywhere in the world. [applause] >> that is how we -- and then during the new deal, during world war ii over and over again what roosevelt knew because he knew his american history is, the way america survives, the way it transcends the crisis, the way it continues to be the nation that it proclaims itself or at least has a chance to pursue is by way of making the nation free or more equal and democratic. that generation fromthat generation from the 1930s all the way through i believe the 1960s. after world war ii even as americans were pursuing the full freedom. theyfreedom. they really did come home with the ambition of pursuing freedoms,, if i can segue little bit, in 1944

for franklin roosevelt given a state of the union message of equally historic importance. he knew the war would go on for some time, but he already knew that we would be victorious. and he went before congress and the american people and called for the creation of a 2nd bill of rights, and economic bill of rights. >> certain economic proof, a 2nd bill of rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station or race or creed. among these are the right to a useful and enumerated job, the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right of every farmer to raise and sell his product at a return which will give

him and his family and decent living. the right of every businessman, large and small to trade in an atmosphere of freedom, freedom from unfair competition and nomination by monopolies at home or abroad. the right of every family to a decent home, the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness and unemployment, all of these rights spell security. and after this war is one, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights with knew goals of

human happiness and well-being. for unless there is security here at home, they're cannot be lasting piece in the world. >> and i we will tell you that it was not simply some idealistic vision that popped out of roosevelt. he actually had asked for service to be done by the national opinion research center which then headquartered at princeton university,university, and they asked americans what they wanted to pursue after the war, and i am going to round it out, but 85 percent of americans wanted to pursue what was delineated by roosevelt and the full freedoms and that economic bill of rights. they wanted national healthcare, education for all, to make sure that everyone had housing, to make sure that government, business, and labor were partners in guaranteeing

work to all-americans commence on americans came home from a soldier's even more perhaps than the average american at home wanted to pursue the four freedoms in the 2nd bill of rights, but they ran into obstacles command not just obstacles, but obstruction. as i said before, conservatives opposed the pursuit. southern white supremacists who had, you know, -- these are the folks who are in many ways running congress opposed the 2nd bill of rights command i will give you the best example. on the question of national healthcare. if they could have limited it to only whites they would have been more than happy to enacted because they wanted support for southern working people. but national healthcare meant that they might have to integrate hospitals, and there racism kept them from supporting the idea of national healthcare after the war. as truman discovered when he tried to secure its enactment. and big business fought the ideas of the 2nd bill of

rights. in somein some ways that that would liberate americans to no longer be subject and thedependent on the bosses as some kind of paternalistic figures. and they really was the case and it was very well organized and spend millions of dollars trying to limit the pursuit of the full freedoms by the labor movement, again by women's movement, and also decidedly by the civil rights movement. this was the most progressive generation in american history. if you look at what they accomplished. they transformed america. all well and good. for that we should applaud lincoln continued.

social security and the national labor relations act all the way through to the 1960s, my parents, your grandparents generation that really did enact the civil rights in the voting rights bill, medicare and medicaid, environment protection agency, occupational safety and health administration was instituted. the consumer product safety commission. a reformed immigration, 1924 we had severely restricted immigration in a decidedly racista decidedly racist way. they rewrote the rules and laws on immigration. from the 30s to the 60s for all of their faults and failings, and we know the racism, the, the mccarthyism, for all of the faults and failings it

remains the case that that was the most progressive generation in american history, and in essence, that is what i wanted to remind americans of, not that we should worship them, but that we should consider what americans are capable of and should ask ourselves, do we not also still feel the full freedoms and want to make america great in that fashion? ..

>> in many ways i am going to confess and admit that i wrote my book not just as a historian but a historical and political advocate. i wanted americans to remember where we had been, what our parents and grandparents generation accomplishedded -- accomplished and is now under siege. if you think of freedom and expression t way citizens united threatens freedom of speech for working people. if you think about freedom of worship depends on on really truly separation of church and state and we have seen through the bush, maybe go back to clinton who has seen 20 years

efforts to turn that wall and decisions most recently around obama care indicate an effort to turn down to separate church and state. unemployment, the increasing poverty after so many years of declining poverty. freedom from fear, let me count the ways. i mean, the freedom from fear is both -- it's both the idea that we are going to have to realize that we live in a global age and fighting terrorism means to turning in an isolation directions, many people might disagree with me on that, but that's part of it as well. we are americans. there are great words in american history, you know, the words from the declaration, all words are -- all men are created

equal, we, the people, the bill of rights, that we have, specially the first amendment, the gettysburg address. probably the greatest speech of the 19th century. in the 20th century, the great words, i think the fourth freedom are among the most -- they line up with the declaration, the constitution and the gettysburg address. freedom, those who struggle, to gain those rights and keep them, our strengthses is our unity. with that high concept, there can be no end. [applause]

>> and now live from the wisconsin book festival in madison here is evan thomas, most recent book on president nixon, it's called being nixon, a man divided. live coverage on book tv. >> okay. good afternoon, all you readers thanks for coming back to the wisconsin book festival. this is my hometown and i am truly and honored ant -- and participate evan thomas. each of us spent most of our careers working for the graham

family, washington post, we both taught at princeton at various times and we both have written many books, but he went to harvard. [laughter] >> his books sell more. >> he's written some wonderful books including edward benet williams which any packer lover should know edward bennett williams, he is the guy who convinced lombardy to leave to the washington redskins. and his latest book other people i'm totally obsessed, richard

nixon. we can learn a little bit more about evans and i wanted to start with his grandfather. [laughter] >> for those of you who don't know what that means, he will tell you shortly one of the great speakers of 20th century america. i wanted to introduce you with a quote that i saw you wrote a little piece about your grandfather and you said, he understood it and forgave me. and i think that sort of inherited some of that from your grandfather. tell us a little bit about norman thomas. >> my grandfather told my

father, god is disappointed in men in our ways. so must be the devil. wonderful truth. he was saving the world. he was a great grandfather. by the time i came around he was around more and he was a lovely guy and, you know, he was a brave guy, i have a terrific photograph in my study of him. he was standing up, in jersey city there was a boss and in this photograph there was an egg splattering as giving a speech,

a policemen in the background, jersey city and they throw him in jail that night. the look on his face is the classic to turn the other cheek. he still believed in turning the other cheek. sort of part of the establishment. he went to princeton, right? >> he was a presbyterian minister. he was pastor of a little church in harlem where he saw a lot of poverty and wanted to do something about it and the socialist were the only in town in 1917, and so he became a socialists.

felt guilty about it and decided to give him honorary degree. they forgot to give it to him. [laughter] >> there's a wonderful segue from norman thomas and richard nixon which is the first time -- i think the first time that you met president richard nixon. >> only time. >> what did he say to you? >> nixon was on rehabilitation tours. late 80's. he gave a little talk. maybe 30 or 40 of us there. he came up, your grandfather was a great man. he was a good grandfather but i was taken back. typical nixon. nixon who is very shy man tried to make up for it.

30-minute, he got in the guest list, had some intern, probably researched it. of course, it worked. i was flattered by that. i felt better of richard nixon who i mostly hated. [laughter] >> after that. >> one of the question as an author i hate the most, why another book, how many thousands of books about abraham lincoln so i'm not going to ask you that. >> that's okay. >> no, i'll ask it in a different way. what inspired you to write this book about richard nixon? >> i worked for the washington post company. nixon was the devil. he just was. a lot of people, you know, and i shared that vision, but --

[laughter] before but i thought, you know, i bet you there's another side to him and he's such a complicated character that i thought john machump said, why don't you write about nixon and i said why not, i spent the first two years wining about it, complaining about it, i didn't like the guy, he was a bad guy. and but after a couple of years i came around and it turned out to be the most wonderful guy because he's so interesting and he did have redeeming sides. he should have been driven from office. he committed offenses, but he was a much more complex to me interesting figure than the cartoon version that i believed

and many people still believe in. so it was actually a on the of -- i could tell when i was writing it. i've written a lot of books. i have never been so excited writing a book because i felt like i was onto something about him that couldn't be done, a took to do it but that i could bring out this more complex figure. you have to be the judge whether i succeeded but to me was incredibly exciting. >> did you have the construct of the book first that you wanted to get inside him as much as possible and is that how you'd approach it? >> it took me a long time, but, but i knew from the beginning i'm not really a policy guy and i'm not a great what are -- archivist either. i'm a top psychologist.

that's a dangerous thing to be. you can make mistakes as psychologist, but nixon left a long and deep record. 3,000 hours of tapes. you know, he had analysts memoirs, dairies and presidents leave incredible paper trail. here in the oh -- oval office, staff is writing memoirs, a on the of stuff. my face was deep and wide, and so i was able to write about imin the moment, in the moment because the secret service logs of where he was, he was making dairy industries and hr staff did a wonderful daily dairy. you know, henry kissinger did a memoir. i felt like i was able to get

into his head. now, did i truly get into his head? , no i didn't. what was he thinking at 4:00 o'clock in the morning? you never know that but i got close enough to tell. >> i might be too obsessed with people that shape someone, but i am fascinated since your subtitle is a man of idol. mismother -- his mother ann and he called his mother sanitily but passive aggressive. nixon is within of -- one the self-reflected men i ever met. he didn't like confrontation. he said he watching his mother

and father fight. i didn't think father hit his mother but she was verbally -- he was verbally abusive to her and nixon was made extremely uncomfortable by it. >> what was his mother like? >> his mom was saintly, she was -- >> when she said my mother was a saint -- >> it was true enough but i read some histories that said she was scary at the same time. you could feel her judgment, and i think nixon did too. she -- she was a kind of em -- so she was not a comfortable person to be around. henry kissinger said about

nixon, imagine what it would have been like if he would have been loved. i think that's an overstatement. i think he was loved. nixon's wife loved him. i don't think that's quite true. a truth about nixon is his insecurities were profound and as the case of so many great many, propelled him to do astonishing things and crippled him in this particular drama ruined him, destroyed him. >> there was a doctor at one point -- one of the forces propelling nixon to prove his mother he was a good boy.

>> he became psych therapy and diagnosis was that nixon was trying to please his mother. nixon's older brother who was a charming, lady's man died of tuberculosis and younger brother died about 9, and the mother, said i always that my son richard today to be all three boys. this is the mother talking. that was a terrible burden on him and that nixon strived to fulfill it desperately, but, you know, a hole in his heart. one of the personality questions about nixon, how someone who who was so shy, adverse to the public could take on such public roles. >> yeah, that was one of the things that drove me to write

the book, how is somebody shy could in the business. how did he do it? i mean, nixon's shyness, we all -- i do, nixon really did. he would get awkward. he almost ran to jacqueline kennedy martin luther king's funeral, this must bring him ris. -- memories. >> he didn't know what to say, i like your work. [laughter] >> millions of those stories about nixon. he was just very awkward, but he compensated in a variety of ways and it had, proved all sorts of

twist and turns. you know, i i have to put down y mic to show that. he got that from eisenhower, churchill. by 1970, of course, the peace sign. nixon forever going up to crowds of andy ward's demonstrators. it drives him crazy. >> tell them the story right after -- he went out, that's an amazing story. >> you all remember a very rare moment, nixon, you know, invasion of cambodia, people are

killed, nixon says, was this because of me, in a very rare moment, oh, my god, did i do this. he was tortured by it. he could never sleep. nixon, i read in another doctor's dairy, that he would take a valium before he took another one. >> still couldn't sleep? >> couldn't sleep. particularly tortured at this period. may 1970, there's going to be a big demonstration in washington. 4:00 o'clock in the morning to valet, let's go look at the lincoln memorial. secret service freaks out. search light is on the lawn. code name is search light. heading to the monument, nixon

patriotic, reading from the lincoln -- >> valet. >> all the kids start coming around him. >> this is now 5:00 o'clock in the morning. thinks poignant to me. he didn't want to talk about the war. that's just not true. nixon tried to engage these kids in in conversation about the meaning of life, now, of course, he was awkward and gainly about it and started talking about winston churchill. the point is he try today try to talk and reach them. they talked past each other. it didn't work, it was a failure but he did try and it was one of

the most bizarre scenes in presidential history. >> i did a biography of bill clinton and there's a moment when he's a young man, when he writes about how he wanted more in the billion pages of the book of life. there's something quite similar with richard nixon, driving need to -- >> yeah, i mean, he wanted to be actors are shy. so not unusual in that way. one of the things he locked onto he was never a popular kid. he was actually an unpopular kid. but he found that he could win student body president by, this is of incredibly importance appealing to the outsiders against the insiders. when he got to college, harvard, scholarship to harvard, no money to go, he gets there and finds

out that there's a fraternity for the cool kids, at every college. he start a fraternity for the uncool kids because there are more of them and he consciously outsiders against the establishment. he was running for student body president, bring dancing, dances to college, very proper, don't want to have dances, why is -- why is that his flat form? he know that is the rich kids can go dancing any time they want, they can go to country club, they can go the fancy restaurants. it's the poor kids who don't. by bringing dancing he won the poor kids vote. there were more poor kids than rich kids. he won by a landslide. >> when does the dark side start to show up? did you see anything before that

-- >> he was glooming and moody to given to outburst. he was not popular. he was always campaigning. so you can see, and he had a temper. first girlfriend, first girlfriend thought he was kind of cruel to her in away and cheated on her not in the modern sense by dancing with others even though he was a terrible dancer. signs of being a difficult person. but then the sort of rough politics point, early interesting figure in american politics. california was an early leader in negative campaign. partly because california classic rule of unintended consequences. took power away from the bosses and gave it to the people. a number of things, and so

manipulating public opinion became important in early stage and california was a leader in producing consultants who were good at manipulating at public opinion by going negative. something that we now take for granted in politics, but early master at this in the late 40's, he was nixon guide, consultant. he helped fashion nixon's campaign. remember the famous campaign in which they branded -- pink lady. actually it was her. history is more complicated than the fun part. that was actually her who came up with that name. nixon used it. >> the massachusetts -- >> yeah. was not invented by the bush campaign. smart enough and use ited it

against her. he also plays her up in the classic role of vice president, presidential candidate as bad cop, so that the presidential candidate can be the good cop. they wanted to let eisenhower be the great saint, general eisenhower, richard nixon, running mate had to attack eisenhower's opponents. [laughter] >> so he got a reputation justifiable so early in his career for playing rough. rock them, sock them campaign. >> he gets to congress and is put on the houston american activities committee, a committee which has a particular residence in my family and some of the other families in this room, what was nixon role there?

>> ridiculous committee. evil and stupid. nixon was smarter than most of those guys because he -- he discovered a real spot. socialists and whatever. nixon found a real won. classic nixon class anger. harvard law school graduate. he's actually a soviet spy. we now, i think, pretty well established that he was. he was protesting, there was an investigation and they said no, it was a case of mistaken

identity, tall and handsome. he's a spy, he was all alone on that. the committee ready to give up, but nixon alone said, no, he really is a spy. went after him partly because he hateed, in fact, made the mistake in saying, my law school was harvard. i believe yours was woddier, he just drove nixon crazy. nixon won that fight and you know there are years of dispute, i think the record now is soviet archives record is pretty clear. >> so here you have this guy who is incredibly shy and yet very good at politics. what were the political

electorates for? >> he point the phrase, silence majority, he sensed that in 1968 and 1972 that most of the country was not in madison wisconsin demonstrating against the war, they were disliking that, you know, made uncomfortable by that. they may not protest but made uncomfortable. he won running against the government, third largest landslide in history. he won every state but massachusetts. massachusetts, yeah. and dc. by appealing to the silent majority. that was the macro. appeal to the silent majority. he also at micro level, he was a terrible campaigner because he was weirder and awkward, he -- he remembered names that's important, that's really important when you're out there

doing politics, he studied and he would not just your name but where your grandmother was from. he's terrific at that kind of retail politics. and he was good at negligenttive politics. early leader and going negative as we now say. he was clever about that. he was good at also hiding the ball. he ran a very bland campaign because he sensed the country wanted somebody who was not going to rock the boat, so he didn't, he let the press that he had a plan for ending the vietnam war. he didn't have a plan, people wanted to believe so he let that belief kind of hang out there and just sort of pose as responsible, more responsible than early nixon, more likable nixon, but cooler nixon, nixon was not hot in 1968, that was on

the left and on the right, that was a good place to be, good enough to win. >> and i should say that since i'm a product of the capital times here at madison, every day after the election, there's been so many days that nixon had a plan to end the war. [laughter] >> he never actually said he had a plan to end the war. ap said it. he never disputed. typical nixon too clever. >> most of the presidential presidents that i've studied had no father or a weak father but we are searching for father figures. how do you describe the uneven father relationship? >> ike despite that big smile

was a cold guy. if you've invaded europe, you're pretty cold guy. nixon typically was awkward, eisenhower picks nixon knowing nothing about it. he's a californian, so any objectionon goes to meet and he says, hi, chief, you do not say hi, chief to the general of the army, eisenhower, right away on the wrong foot. he tries to jump him. nixon gets caught up in a scandal, looks like ike is going to dump him and nixon has to go to the country and big radio address and mockish speech that people gave fun of but was pretty successful, kept his place and eisenhower tried to different him again.

i wrote a book about it, i talked to johnnie sen hour, johnnie sen hour told me my father gave himself an order to like nixon. he never did. [laughter] >> in 1960, final straw, nixon is now running for president and a press conference in 1960, eisenhower is asked, tell us something that vice president nixon did to further american foreign policy. if you give me a week, i'll think of something. wow. >> why did he say that? >> well, it's so cruel. the reason he said it was he was tired and they were attacking him for playing too much golf and cranky, and so he lashed out, but the collateral damage was poor nixon. >> getting back to 1968 and the end of that election, i've

always been very interested in not quite certain about nixon sabotaged the process right before the election. you sort of think he might have. >> with nixon there's always a butt. let me briefly tell the story. 1968, nixon is ahead and president johnson declares peace talk in paris, nixon goes, oh, my god, typical nixon, he already had a back channel to president through the wonderfully dragon lady and nixon starts sending a signal, don't go to paris, don't make any deals, wait for me to get elected and, you know, it'll go better for you. of course, lbj is eavesdropping

because the cia has wiretapped the south vietnamese and it was pretty bad, but, but the scholars now think that there was no way that president was going to take the deal anyway. advisers were all against it. even though nixon was doing this it didn't really make any difference because he wasn't going to take the deal. it probably didn't really change things because she wasn't going to take the deal. >> imagine in nixon were a democrat and congress would be investigating that? >> oh, my god. in those days there was both sides would dig up dirt on the other and usually not use it.

i remember -- i'm sofas nateed chief of dirt digger for lbj, he was digging -- used to dig up dirt on -- used to keep the dirt, so both sides -- each side up dug up. but they often didn't use it. mutual assured destruction. they didn't do it. johnson never even though he had evidence of the treason but threatened to use it but never used it. >> let's start getting to the watergate area. >> now you went around calling information on that era. >> i didn't listen to every one.

one thing you do if you're a journalist like me is you find scholars who know this stuff, i depend on scholars and so i always make it my business to find top scholars, there's a guy name luke at the texas a&m and i got to meet luke. stanley cutler of the university of wisconsin, i think ruined his hearing from listening to tapes. literally, actually. i'm standing on their shoulders but i spent a lot of time to listen to tapes. it's hard to hear. it's allowsy -- a a lousy syste. johnson had tapes and elaborate taping something. nixon ripped it all out because nixon did not want the pentagon spying, and so he doesn't want

to pentagon and he gets taping system and when he puts taping system, he puts the secret system. you can't understand the things. [laughter] >> so i spent hours going back and forth. my wife spent even more hours trying to -- i think i quote from 70 conversations in the book and it would take hours and hours getting that. >> where were you -- >> you can, it's complicated. you can listen thoth tapes online through nixon.org. you can listen to them too but really the quality on the internet is not quite as good if you're sitting there request some of these tapes. nuances can be very important on who was really saying what. you really need to listen over and over again.

>> i mean, anybody trance scribing -- transcribing can make mistakes. the other day i was working on the middle class, somebody next day wrote how i talked about the middle class. it's very easy. [laughter] >> your wife played a crucial role. >> she did, more patient than i am. >> just like nixon himself many, many, many books have been written about watergate. how did you try to approach the construct of how you dealt with that? >> it's easy to get lost in. there's many rabbit holes there. you could get totally lost in watergate. my job was not to represent what

stanley had already done. i was focused more on nixon. i was less interested in dean state of mind. i kept my focus on him. that was my approach. when nixon was on stage, i paid attention. it's not entirely clear who gave the order to break into the watergate. it wasn't any nixon. you could write a book just about that. i was -- i -- when i could, i chose not to go down the radical. >> it is clear he gave the order for bookings. >> this is a histor call context. remember the pentagon, so they leak in june of 1971.

and nixon is -- nixon's name is not even named in the papers. they're about democratic. nixon is obsessed about leaks and he wants the fbi to get him. the fbi, this is a historical context, always happy to do the bidding of presidents before. political but hoover by 1970 sees that the wind has shifted. liberal war in court describing the bill of rights including the amendment -- [laughter] >> hoover refuses to do nixon's spy. what does nixon do?

he goes in-house. he create it is plumbers, they have been casts cia and fbi. those guys were -- they didn't know what the hell they were doing. nixon would give them crazy orders. break in. they didn't carry out that order but they carried out other orders and nixon was just in sense that he couldn't make the government work for him and the fbi was no longer doing his bidding and he was going in-house so to speak because plumbers were incompetent. eagle crowe was nickname. he had no business trying to run

a -- a bunch of plumbers, a bunch of people doing break-ins. it was less a sinister plot to overthrow the constitution. they kind of clumsy attempt to carry out the boards and rage of richard nixon. dangerous, but nixon would blur things out. they often knew not to carry out those rules, by 1972, those were weary, they were tired, they just allowed themselves to get dug in watergate and nixon could never confront them, that would actually happen. if nixon had gotten and said, what the hell happened here,

let's bring in the lawyers to deal with it, he would have served two-full term. none of us needed to have it. nixon hated personal confrontation was unwilling to do that. he doesn't get everybody in one room until march of 1973, nine months after the break-in. it's too late, too far down the road. so it was a long way of saying, nickon watergate more of a screwup. >> when you say that he was reluctant to confront them, one could also argue and i think you do, reluctant to confront himself. >> yes, and critically important. nixon destroyed himself. nixon destroyed himself because he could not understand his fatal flaw, he really did have

enemies, he made them worse, you know, he tried to take away the washington post license, they knew that over the washington post. ben bradley, executive head, pretty ambiguous to get dick nixon. he wasn't hiding the ball. nixon made enemies and then tried to step on them and crush them and when you try to crush the press, they've going to win eventually. if you go after the press, eventually in our system, and this is a great glory of the american system, but the press is going to win, and they did. >> if one were to look at nixon's domestic policy in the context of these times,

republican party -- what does that say about where he was? >> i felt so strongly going through archives. nixon is a republican and rhetoric pretty conservative, he creates apa, 18-year-old vote, draft, ssi out of social security and other social security not just for the elderly but disabled, that was under nixon, affirmative action. desegregates the public schools of the deep south. that was nixon. nixon did all sorts of things and when you're reading this archives it's clear that nixon gets up every morning wanting to do something, the atmosphere at the time it's very activist. the general assumption is we are going to do something to today. nixon is working with a

democrat-controlled congress, other party totally in control and creates coalition and they pass awful lout of legislation, so much today that they would be drummed out of the republican party. you remember him. attractive young senator from main is coming from environmentalist, that's where the epa came from. nixon loved to confound enemies. nixon comes up with epa to counter and he is signing clean air act, he didn't invite.

if you're a republican you're actually supposed to work with democrats, those days there were southern democrats were conservative so they were natural allies with republicans, and nixon created coalition and passed a on the of legislation. >> have you ever seen in the book where private lawyer after the nixon resigned, he comes out to talk nixon about the part and doesn't seem to quite get it. >> yeah, it's a pathetic scene. he has nothing left. he said they have taken it all away from me. he couldn't understand what had happened to him. he also knew that a pardon was an admission of guilt.

he really didn't want to make admission so he tried to get around it, but the word to his credit hung in there, no, you take this part and you're admitting guilt. nixon never really admitted anything, nixon, i searched and searched with nixon having a sense of moral wrong doing, you can't find it. [laughter] >> you know, david frost, nixon said i gave him the sword and stuck it in and i would have done the same. that's as close as he came to admitting error but you wonder what are they thinking at 4:00 o'clock in the morning. nixon, nixon weirdly as he's leeing -- leaving the white house before talking to staff, the very last thing he says,

your enemies may hate you but if you hate them, they win and then you destroy yourself. it suddenly occurred to him? [laughter] where was that before. this is like a greek drama, it has to play itself out. i was curious about that that he mentioned that. i wondered if he read any shakespeare plays. they have all the school papers. he did read shakespeare and wrote a paper about it. it's a terrible paper. he completely missed the point. he just didn't get it. [laughter] >> but my wife and i went to see ed nixon, the younger brother who lives up in seattle. that was interesting, ed nixon said grandmother told us do not

hate your enemies. let it pass. nixon was just unable to internalize that. he couldn't somehow take that in shy, this loser as if he was in high school, a loser, he did do great things, first ever arms control with the soviet union, he did great things before he destroyed us. >> one more question but we also will take questions from the audience if anyone wants to line up, the microphone. i always thought that patent is his favorite movie but it turns

out it's another movie. what is it? >> around the world in 80 days. [laughter] >> nixon would say -- he wanted to be. julie, his daughter julie describes coming home. he would whistle when he came in the door and turn on the lights and tune on the player. he wanted to be upbeat. he watched and ed and trishia would try to sneak out. he would say, wait, wait, it'll get better. for nixon it did not get better. there was a side of him, late at night he wrote notes to himself about the need to be joyous and serene. all of the things he was not and wished that he were. >> after pat nixon died -- he

paid tribute to pat and nixon was touched by this, are there other instances that part-time were on the other side and enemies that he reconciled with eventually? >> yes, this was -- chief of staff, richard nixon is the weirdest man i have ever man. immediately nixon sends spies out to dig up dirt on it and all the way they are going to get teddy. three days later, teddy kennedy shows up in the oval office with a bunch of senators on some official business. nixon takes kennedy aside and sympathetic with him, don't trust them. and he -- i can't believe it. it's like bipopar -- bipolar.

he wrote wonderful letters. remember when he got thrown off the ticket for mental problems, social problems and wrote touching letter to son who was in camp at the time, it was just terrible because it made it much harder to hate dick nixon. >> i've always wondered about the situation in the watergate breaking, wasn't being looked at very closely by anyone till january january of '73 when the judge was about to sentence the seven members and james -- >> yeah. >> wrote the -- >> yeah, yeah. that was march.

the letter was march. but you're right. for a long time the press ignored. they were digging up dirt on him. not dirt, exposing what nixon had been doing and they were alone on that because the regular press was kind of scared of nixon, but those guys were alone for a long time. then the judicial system kicks in. that's the beauty of our country gets the watergate burglars and gets to crack, hey, there's more here. >> my question to you is, do you really think that the whole watergate thing would have unraveled hadn't ford not written that letter? >> our system works kind of

after we do all the wrong things we do the right thing. so -- but eventually the wheels were grinding here at the u.s. attorney's office, fbi, in the press, sooner or later the stuff was going to come out. even if he hadn't, i think eventually the system -- nixon had done enough wrong in enough different places that sooner or later it was going to catch up to him. >> thank you. >> i remember in college salvaging some feeling for nixon for one reason. i had to take a class in american foreign policy and henry kissinger book, the one with the blue cover was 1600 pages --

[laughter] and richard nixon's book was a economical 3-4000 -- 3-4000 with larger type. did nixon -- can he take a lot more credit for his foreign policy than we might initially believe or was -- >> little known fact. the taping system was in to rebut kissinger, he was going around town bragging about achievements suggesting opening to china. it was not. it was richard nixon's idea. the boss wants to go to china, kissinger said, fat chance. kissinger, the idea it was