>> my name is jim cook, executive director of the national parks association and sponsor of this session. western national parks association is the non-profit organization partner of the national park service. our purpose is to educate visitors about the history, nature, cultural and recreational opportunities in 67 national parks in 12 western states. ..

so as you are here with the tucson national festival of books and the main library western national parks association is very proud to present our special guest today , what a treat to have him back in tucson. with that, i introduce our moderator bill. >> thank you. yes, i am bill bill buckmaster i host a daily radio talkshow on kb oi a.m. 1030 the voice. also you can listen to the program live anywhere in the world. by going to buckmaster show.com.

i hope you will check it out. i'm excited to be here at the tucson festival of books and to be talking with douglas brinkley. just to mention about the fest of your tax donation, tax-deductible donation really makes this all possible. it is a free eve so we do encourage you to visit the student union south ballroom or go to the website. your gift will sternly make a tremendous a difference. before we get into douglas brinkley i want to mention the way this will work, i will be talking one-on-one with professor brinkley and then i will allow time for your question. we will at least to 20 minutes of questions after our one on one with douglas bradley. mr. binkley is a a professor of history at rice university, he

is a cbs news contributor, cnn presidential historian, and a contributing editor of vanity fair. the chicago tribune has called him america is a new past master. his mentor, stephen ambrose called him the bt of the new generation of american historians. seven of these books have been selected as a new york times notable books of the years, cronkite one the sperber prize for best book in journalism and was a washington post notable book in the year 2012. the great day lucia, hurricane hurricane katrina, new orleans and the mississippi gulf coast won the robert f kennedy book award. his newest book is rightful heritage, franklin d roosevelt and the land of america. that. that book is actually being released in conjunction this week with the tucson festival of

books. it is a follow-up to his a best-selling project, the wilderness lawyer which celebrate teddy roosevelt's spirit of outdoor exploration and bold vision to protect. get this, 234 million acres of wild america. let's hear it for professor douglas brinkley [applause]. let's begin with this being the centennial of the national park service, envision what the national park system would be like without the advocacy of the two president roosevelt's. >> thank you for being here, i am very thrilled to be in tucson. i come here every chance i got. i am launching my book here at your festival because a because a lot of this is a bout

arizona. and the beautiful places here, all of the grand canyon state magazine places fdr is really responsible for preserving, the civilian conservation corps for building roads and places to get to. a lot of the wildlife here in wild arizona from sheep and antelope, were all protected by fdr. when we talk about the national park service the first national park is 1872 with ulysses as grants. it is not the centennial and that cents. the revolution and the the revolution in the idea of national parks and public land the preservation kicks off with the presidency of theodore roosevelt from 1901 until 1909. he believed that democracy was about wild spaces and to our heirlooms, taj mahal and places called the tetons or the olympic

or big ben, or mammoth cave this is what defined america in the view. it's preserving the american landscape he views the number of mechanisms to get things going while he was in president. one one was to get a national park created. when fdr who loved executive power more than any other president would start signing executive orders and he did so by using the antiquities act of 1906, along with the congressman john lacey of iowa they put through the landed desk at capitol hill in congress, will

lacey lance commissioned if you are a westerner and needed to deal with the federal government on grazing rights, mining, gas, etc., et cetera, you would go through this land commission, everyone was kind of nice to lacey. he came up with the lacey act and the antiquities act which really says for scientific reasons the president of the united states can set aside places for the heritage of americans, largely thought to be for dinosaur bones. there were apparently intelligence were digging up dinosaurs all over the west and europeans we stealing these artifacts also people were vandalizing and native american sites stealing pottery and rare objects and the like. antiquities act of 219 oh six

was meant for something smaller, maybe 60 acres or 6 acres. roosevelt came to your state, arizona and he came into a territory when he was president. he stood at the lip of the grand canyon and was surrounded by roughriders, the man who served with him in the spanish-american war and many of them hailed from new mexico and arizona, oklahoma, along with plane swells and ivy leaguers. it was a legendary group. the roughriders. he goes to they grand canyon and says looking out over there great divine abyss and says do not touch it, god has made it, you can only bar it, borrow it, leave the grand canyon alone. [applause].

he did a similar thing with the redwood trees in california. people would name individual redwood trees and commercialize it, he physically started ripping the sides off the trees and said this is a cathedral you are defecating this redwood groves. it is driving the conservation message home. congress or senate was going to mine the grand canyon for zinc, or copper whether the roosevelt gave a good speech or not. they did not want as a national park. so roosevelt put that antiquities act which was supposed to be for 60 acres and saved 600,000 acres. you can clap for that [applause]. he say that 600,000 acres and when asked, that's illegal it went to court. he declared it declared it a national mountain you met with with executive power. it was legal that he did it.

when asked why he said they settled science a show me a better example of erosion at work. it is world-class world-class erosion so we have to study it. that begins this revolution in conservation. i wrote my first book about the inner roosevelt and john mere, and the gang back in that period of time, the early progressive era. i recognized that the big player becomes franklin roosevelt who is president from 1932 until 1945 who is enamored with his distant relative but he called him uncle ted. theater roosevelt oversaw the marriage of eleanor and fdr and conservation was in their family blood. when the national -- this is the centennial of the national park service in 2016, and august 2016 woodrow wilson, after being

prodded by stephen mather, great conservation activist and franklin lane, secretary of interior and horace albright, they got together, there, there was a summit at berkeley about the anniversary streamlined again, not just having a national park like yellowstone and yosemite, the u.s. army running them, it them, it was not a coherent system so woodrow wilson in those three gentlemen i mentioned in august 2016 made it the national park system. but the big game changers fdr because when roosevelt becomes the presidency in the midst of the great depression, just days after he said we have nothing to be about fear itself, he took took a ride and a card with horace albright, one of the guys who did the 1916 act and they drove to shenandoah national

park which roosevelt wanted to see made into a huge park and at that point he talked to albright and said i want all of our consolidation of all national monuments, alt military military battlefields, all big historic sites, the mall in washington d.c., all brought and stripped away from other agencies and put into a national park service. it is about american heritage. suddenly, they became the pet agency of the new deal and fdr built the modern national park system. he started saying, and hiring unemployed men, gave them a dollar a day to come work in places like arizona, to build visitor centers, civilian cap conservation corps planted 3 billion trees dealing with d4 station in the great plains in the southwest.

that is where my book picks up on this tree army of roosevelt and how he uses these people to build incredible structures and start doing heavy duty preservation of our national heritage. there was tremendous opposition early on to both wrote so well to what they wanted to do. we almost did not get the grand canyon national park. there was tremendous opposition, in florida the plumage for the birds, they would use all of these plumes and fashion. it pretty much had driven some of these birds to extinction, correct? >> yes. the reason you need a federal government and not state laws, birds do not have state boundaries.

you can say we are protecting our birds in massachusetts and if they land in florida they can be shot and killed willy-nilly. there is no protection of birds. so species were being eradicated. the other roosevelt for example wrote the last recorded document we have of the passenger pigeon he saw near charlottesville virginia. now that bird is extinct, the last bird, martha died in 1913 and a cincinnati zoo. the extinction and the species is what really concerned theodore roosevelt a great deal. it did the same for franklin roosevelt. fdr's mechanism was again he had people coming in and say -- the reason they slaughtered all the birds was because any woman in the audience to hear me would have come years ago for a public lecture wearing bonnet with ornamental feathers. just like you see the pictures of the buffalo that some people say 30-60 million use to go across the great plains, in florida they would come with some i automatic weapons and these and gotten them all down,

plucking the feathers and stilling the eggs. we were decimating species. the flamingo used to be all over florida and now luckily there is a remnant survival birth in the bahamas but we drove them out of florida. roosevelt, theater roosevelt was told this and he said let's go to the indian river and pelican island and declare it a federal bird reserve. and he said i so declare it. that became the birth of u.s. fish and wildlife, although fdr creates fish and wildlife. what theodore roosevelt does is establish 51 federal bird reservations with executive power. from the allusions to the gulf islands off of louisiana, the parts of key west, all over. big ones, the yukon yukon delta, and alaska put aside parts of west virginia. fdr comes in and says let's

streamline it. we have some of these reserves but the ducks of america have been slaughtered, geese almost out of existence because when the midwest for example dried up in the dustbowl, there is no water stop places for birds. it is fdr says we are going to make the bird reservations at night national when you are hungry here is a president same birdsre priority. he says if you can build bird fly waste those migratory spots, those hotels for birds, that will also help water supplies for areas so in drought years they have a reservoir. it became a huge saving of the birth under fdr. he created a duck stamp making all hunters pay a fee. all of that money went into buying land for new

national wildlife refugees. in the back of my book, rightful heritage i have a a whole list, it will blow your mind how many national wildlife refugees fdr saves to protect vanishing bird species but to help repopulate the country with duck, geese, swans, he did for example in a state like texas that never like the federal government much. he went to the port -- near the golf and now it is the place you go to see the whooping cranes. fdr did that, he went fishing down there for tarpon, recognize the bird rich environment, signed an executive order saving it. he wanted the cranes saved, and on and on in every state to save bird life but also mammals, particularly the mammal life here in arizona. >> and you mentioned the dustbowl, many, many of us have the images of people in oklahoma

and in the central states that were out of their homes and had to leave the great migration. you mentioned the impact on wildlife. >> it is devastating. by the the time franklin roosevelt's president and 33, we had shot up the country. we had that big agriculture just took everything, no crop rotation, mashup sought soil erosion everywhere, d4 station, we were dealing with an america that had been stripped bare by the extraction industries, by big timber, by mining, they did not care, it is fdr came in and said -- my book, the land of america he said we are going to bring the land back. many people talk about the great depression about wall street and the stock market crashed, the big story is what happened to agriculture in rural america and how suffering

and not just the dustbowl but chronic drought, soil erosion, d4 station, fdr whenever he would go and say occupation on the form, he would write tree farmer. he grew trees, that is what he did, he was a christmas tree farmer for churchill's christmas trees were from his tree farm. so that hobby was forced tree, he believed any country in the world that d4 stated it was going to die. all you had to do today is if you fly over the hispaniola look at the dominican republic you'll see trees, look at haiti they d4 state. so roosevelt roosevelt said we have to plant these trees, now we write about the planting out here, he did a shelter belt of giant trees like miles long of trees to try to stop the wind from the dustbowl from blowing.

if you go to north dakota you are looking at 35 national wildlife refugees, saving, saving it all over the place, giving ranchers easement to work with the federal government to rebuild their land, setting up soil erosion workshops to train farmers on how to properly bring the american landscape back, not only did he go on to save national parks, places like the everglades and big ben, channel islands, joshua tree, the olympics and all of that. but he is really push the state parks, if fdr had the national park service going into states that had no state parks and said get a state park system and all of the states. if you go to florida about the birds in florida, fdr goes down there and basically creates the park system and truly puts work

relief, money, we are going to save this otherwise you will lose florida and he pushed through the protection of the everglades which was a bitter fight that does not come to its final manifestation when truman's president but it is franklin roosevelt in correspondence that i have with ernest co., naturalist, naturalist of florida that he writes, fdr writes nationalist audubon people all of the time wanted to say the local species. here here in arizona it was the boy scouts of arizona, under major general burnham, one of the founders of the boy scout that was here that did a massive arizona campaign to save the desert bighorn sheep from extinction. if you go down, i wrote on the acreage, the mountains, those are all fdr, one -- organ pipe

tactics is an fdr executive order here. desert botany became a big thing for fdr. protecting the southwest which people would just rape and not think it was a fragile beautiful landscape. i tell tell the book a story about obama, hamilton. pasadena socialite who is a new dealer for fdr and she started collecting pictures of the joshua trees. she became the apostle of the desert. not with ansell adams quality, she was able to insinuate that in 1933 a meeting to meeting to the white house because she had been a donor and have been part of the new deal movement. roosevelt had her in, in a wheelchair and shows them all the photos and says okay, a million acres, we'll do a

million acre joshua tree, now some of you are environmentalists and some had to back off, there is lisa and mining interests, that's for lawyers to do later, i am just declaring it. [laughter] as stalin said about fdr, he said that churchill would go up to you and cozy up and sneak his hand in your pocket to steal a coin get something little border definition, is something that he use the money -- he would smile and greet you and jan both hands into your pocket and grab everything out. that is what he was doing on behalf of protecting these wonderful places that we're

celebrating its national seashores fdr created all of this when he created this in north carolina brought that into the pork park system. >> he was going to fight the spanish in the war of 1898, he was really excited about going to cuba but as you talk about in a chapter in the wilderness warrior, he was really excited about the wildlife that he would encounter in tropical america. >> yes. when theodore roosevelt went to the spanish-american war and got all of the roughriders together at the manker hotel in san antonio when the hotel still exists there, a wonderful old-style hotel if you go to san antonio you should visit.

he brought these men to tampa bay and they had three mascots with them, golden eagle, a cougar, wild mountain line it, but they got it as a cup from new mexico and a dog, they had three mascots with them and here's fdr going training in tampa bay and cuba and he's writing his bird reports wherever theodore roosevelt when his first book was the summer birds of the adirondacks. he wrote that as an undergraduate. he died writing about pheasants, fdr, if you go to his home in hyde park new york you will see all of the bird collection, in those days they would shoot the birds because there is no dna testing and what you would do is you would shoot a bird, and scholars if you are studying eastern bluebirds you would have 100 caucus carcasses to look at

variation so we could create a guidebook of what species are here in north america. one of the great finds in the fdr book as i found an early essay that fdr wrote about wildlife sure enough it was never seen before a new document and as i continued my research there he is as president franklin roosevelt goes all the way out to hawaii to visit that national park he wrote about as a boy to go see the volcanoes of hawaii because it had been a lifelong fascination with him from doing those kind of childhood reports. we all a tremendous amount to theodore franklin roosevelt for saving our heritage. for not plundering our country and they did it in so many different ways it is almost hard

to exaggerate the legacy of the two of them put together. >> you had mentioned a woman environmentalist, hoyt i believe her name is, what about mrs. roosevelt? eleanor roosevelt, what role did she play? where she is enthusiastic as for slater about this passion that fdr had for saving our land? >> a great question. i write a lot about eleanor roosevelt to end their marriage in their book as i have to. what i think scholars have missed about their marriage is they had a shared love for an echo system, a treasured place, a sanctified landscape, the hudson river valley. that river meant everything to them and they would go on birdwatching trips together, fdr was more of an enthusiast than she was. i write about in the middle of

world war ii them going to find golden eagles and together and more importantly she wrote in her my day columns regularly about america's woodlands, force, lakes, lakes, species, she worked with the audubon movement, she tried to get progressive laws for animal protection, she was a true equal, fdr had a little more passion on how to do it, he was more into the science and the biology, she was more of a pastoralists looking at beautiful places, but she wrote better, she was a better writer about the natural world than roosevelt was. she said about her husband that he has a map mind, people often take of him as an intellectual she said he had a map mind, what he meant new every county line, every river, every forest, he

just left maps. that is why why he was such a great president, both saving our american heritage, he knew all of these, you couldn't beat him on naming a river, lake, he was a was a master of it and he mastered the globe so during world war ii he knew where the ports were, that map of knowledge that served our country exceedingly well and he lived, he went sailing everywhere as president. here we are on the eve of world war ii in 1938 and franklin roosevelt signs up with us the smithsonian institute and goes to the galapagos to follow the trail of darwin. he disappeared for three weeks. [laughter] this was in 1938, world war ii doing collecting and you and say well theodore you still like to

find new big elkin grizzly bear. they were looking for the smallest burrowing shrimp for this miss sony and institute. they got all sorts of new creatures and documentation about this incredible voyage to the galapagos in the middle of fdr's presidency on the eve of world war ii. >> they were great travelers, both presidents, it it must have been in the genes or something because you look at the travel that teddy roosevelt did in the amazon area, that trip i believe believe almost killed him didn't it? >> here's an interesting fact for you to remember, theater roosevelt would get terribly seasick. he would vomit if he got on water. he had a bad stomach. he liked seen ahead of him, his favorite landscapes were flatland and prairie, now not only is ex-president did he go to the amazon and do this incredible journey and he went

to africa and spent a year recording natural history of africa, i do not know if you realize that he came to your state and lived for a while in arizona hiking through the grand canyon he had saved. he then went and lived with native americas and wrote an article, he participated in a rattlesnake handling ceremony on his way from arizona into utah to see rainbow bridge. that is how committed he was, as x the president he wrote a very distinguished scientific piece on the tortoises of florida. franklin roosevelt wanted to go to galapagos because a distant relative had written one of the best books about the galapagos

pre-darwin. so the family had a real connection with the galapagos and fdr and harold hick us were trying to make the galapagos a world heritage park or jointly run between ecuador and the united states. fdr also wanted to have the big bend jointly run between the united states and texas, and glacier jointly run with canada. these did not happen because by coming up the state department with complications but roosevelt, he was are ready system seen that echo systems don't know borders. they they cross over the river on both sides. if you're going to protect you have to refrain from artificial barriers. right before he died, the big issue that roosevelt was pushing was conservation is the basis of world peace. with the old forster and his father for it was old man near death, pincher and fdr post the altar at the time were to save

the united nations were going to create a global standard of conservation, they were pushing to go that far, when fdr died, that movement whitman nowhere be cause truman's people came in and they were much more less idealistic. less conservation conscious. less wanting to please the big corporations. in that kind of global environmental movement squelched. we could certainly use it right now. it is a pity that he did not get to live an extra year to get that done. >> what would they be thinking right now, the roosevelt that they could see today's conservation policies? >> i could tell you in if theater roosevelt were alive, or fdr, they would have brushed out the slate of candidates like dandruff. [laughter]

these guys, roosevelt or giants, these guys because they put public service first, they were about about making america really truly the special place to live. but theater roosevelt, keep in in mind that when he went to africa, william howard taft fired gifford his forster that stayed on because he blew the whistle that they were coal mining in that national forest in alaska, that was the roosevelt reserve. pinchot got fired because they were letting cut companies out of seattle dude no money blown up the mountains in alaska because taft thought the conservation had gone too far.

after tr came back and got the last laugh, he created the bullmoose party in 1912, split the republican party into and came in second and taft finished third. the most successful third-party movement in american history was the bullmoose party. incidentally, but franklin roosevelt once he got polio a big thing was not to seem like a weakling and what he could do was build his upper body strength. he look like a big-time wrestler if you looked at his upper body because of all the late weightlifting he would do. on the high seas sport fishing, he had terrible health problems, today there might be something for him form but he had terrible sinusitis, all of the time which he would not have when he was at sea. with a little bit of sun, his polio condition and his health would go upward. he spent like one out of every four days of his president on

water, he would go all over because he felt so alive and also they call it blue mind night nowadays, but if you live near water features it is supposed to help clear your mind and you are able to think clearly, it's why so many people are attracted to living on coastal areas and the like, he had that. he loved the ocean, salt spray, he would use the ocean spray's now when they have sinus trouble just because that salt opens up the sinuses. >> let's start lining up for questions. i know you have a ton of questions for professor brinkley. while we are getting ready for a first question i want to ask you about the civilian conservation corps, talk a little about that. occasionally we hear that can be reinvented or reenergized, cranked up may be to help and

clean up some of our national parks. some of your thoughts on that please. >> it was next ordinary success that civilian conservation corps and we could use something like that today. it is difficult because back then even unemployed men looking for money they had to give their whole paycheck to their parents, even if you were 20 years old. money had to go back to your family, you are only allowed to keep a little of it for personal expenses. it wasn't public welfare, it was was hard work with the money going back home. one would get a sense of self-worth, they would get up, they would wear uniforms, they would work these hard jobs on roads and on for street all day in remote areas. i don't know if we created leisure ideas in american life. young people want time off, i have i have to go to this or

that, i don't know if you could militarize conservation in that sense in today's generation. there are programs doing like the civilian conservation corps but it has not taken on the imagination of the public but i think it's a great idea to get young people involved with the state parks, have schools adopt state parks, were talking about nature deficit disorder but people, kids do not know what the mountain ranges, they don't know the name of a tree, the name of their bushes near them, we need to teach natural history and high school or middle school so kids start lrning to create a new generation of conservationists. what fdr did by training all of those young men, the principles of conservation they became conservationists who led the 60s environmental movement. there is a direct link to what fdr did into the environmental environmental movement of the 1960s, rachel carson was

writing pamphlets on the sea for fdr's wildlife, i write about her in her book and later she writes silent spring, it's it's all going out of these new deal programs, the modern of our mental movement is really modern and bored out of the new deal. because even places like maryland is where they started saying how do we bring animals back into the wild, how do we -- so they would raise beaver and they realize that beavers were needed for echo systems. leopold and his almanac delivered the famous wildlife conservation committee reports fdr. he hired leopold and ding darling, the great cartoonist and thomas back and they came up with an amazing wildlife conservation plan which said we have to go by millions of acres and eat them over to the

species. we did that. part of my book, i think it is a victory for america that we got 550 wildlife refugees but the downside is people always wanting to dismantle it. they want to say it is not right and then we do not fund them. we treat our heirlooms terribly. i'm hoping on the centennial of the park service we stand up and say we love our national parks, let's take care of them because it is a fraction of our tax dollars goes into these wonderful natural resources that we all get to share. we on these. we on the grand canyon and big bend. they are the envy of the world believe me. >> are grand canyon international park system. first question. >> i hear the koch brothers and their friends have assembled this almost 1,000,000,000 dollars to elect candidates who want to completely do away with all rules and regulations

regarding the fossil fuels, fracking and all of this. it is really a scary thought. i'm wondering, does the other side of this, the people who are environmentalists, do they have funds and today have lobbyists, to the hip people that work to protect our land and to do these things? >> as you all know and we are in 2016 election it is a battle and people want to continue to save these places. the national parks and not debated as much because congress passed them, it is a lots of these wilderness areas are national forest were trump, or ted cruz, or any republicans come in and want to immediately gouge those landscapes. they want a sagebrush rebellion. they want to go in the keystone pipeline became a metaphor for the kind of conservative movement believed to open up all

these places that the federal government is controlling. don't kid yourself, the environmental movement groups are strong, whether it is a national park association or national park foundation, audubon, sierra, the wilderness society, one can rattle off a hundred of them. they do their job. they bring consciousness. unfortunately it has become a little bit too partisan like democrats, people want to vote for hillary clinton's are environmentalists and republicans are not. theodore roosevelt was republican, john lacey was republican. ronald reagan who we do not think of as an outdoor person he signed 51 wilderness or 50 some wilderness areas. that's how far now, you think one of these guys running now are going to sign wilderness bills? the republican party has gone very extreme right and part

of it is at the federal governments locking up these lands. this is what fdr came in strong when he did because we had to grow the grasslands because the dustbowl happened because of bad cattle ranching and just killed all the grassland. all the chapter was just going and to keep water supplies going and keep places force it. >> thank you sir. so you have such an amazing grasp of the lives of these two men if you could speak to either one of them today what would you ask them? >> i would like to ask them what we can do to get out of the political gridlock we have

americans turning on americans and it saddens me when we are a constant war with each other. i do not think it or neighborhoods neighborhoods it's that bad but our politics have gotten so terribly dysfunctional. i would also want to see who fdr would appoint to the supreme court to fill justice scalia. he appointed the great supreme court justice on conservation, fdr did, william o douglas william o douglas of washington. fdr wanted douglas to be president. douglas was ahead of his time on issues pertaining to the environment and as it pertained to the american west in particular. >> you are a presidential historian and i will get to your question but you brought up the election of 2016. some of your thoughts ray quickly, have you ever seen anything like we are seeing

today? is there historical precedents for this? >> the point of history is to remind ourselves that our own times are not uniquely oppressive. you have to go lecture on the civil war and you are looking at battle of bull run and the confederates in the confederates one bull run and lincoln stuck in the white house. thousands thousands dead and the killing fields of virginia and maryland. the scorched earth of the south in civil war. it is hard to think donald trump showing you that his stakes are real. it becomes very childish in those ways. with that said, meaning we have had it worse, one has to admit this is a surreal, bizarre and i'm afraid embarrassing moment for our country where instead of

his public service of the roosevelts, we are getting a bulgarian-ism of just the worst aspects of american culture coming to the forefront. it is due to many reasons, talk radio,. 1,000,000,000 reasons why why this is going on. i find it troubling when the press has about 15% approval rating in congress has a 10%. it's like people don't like congress i don't know who that 10% is who think they are doing that joe that conservation thing went up to protect the arctic and had a thing with the congressman when i was testifying with congressman young from alaska. he is a real conservative right

wing guy who just drill baby drill of the arctic. i went back to my university and i thought i bet texas has a lot to big oil people and i just have been a bear same fight with this congressman. i heard from conservatives, you earned a spur, i don't agree with you with the issue but i'm sure glad you told the congressman off. people just despise the dysfunction in washington d.c. right now that they will go with the bernie sanders who deals different or trump who is different just to send a loud message of dissatisfaction home. >> i grew up on a farm in north dakota, only only 2 miles away was a national wildlife preserve with all sorts of animals. i remember riding a bus to school in the winter and there was snow fences built by the

ccc. into the 60s they were still admire. my concern is sustaining our parks. with the population population growing every year in america, how do we sustain them and keep them beautiful? >> great question. in my book i had to pull out so much happened in north dakota and i did of the wildlife refugees i did a map of the wildlife refugees that i had to pull north dakota out separately because every 2 miles - mike the federal government came in and called it limited interest conservation programming just control that, that is the great bird breeding grounds right there in those. potholes of north dakota. we have got to continue to just

love the national parks, get involved with be a friend of one of the parks, stay engaged a vote a vote for people in the senate, in congress and the white house that are going to prioritize. the deferred maintenance of our national, forget the parks, places like independence hall, it is pathetic, we are not taking care of our historic structures. this is the first sign of national decay and decline when you cannot take care of yo country's historic places. we have leaking rooms, mold, yet when people try to trim the budget down for the parks so let's hope we can get a sense of robust budgets and keep talking about that is what we need. love the national parks and be loud about it. >> they are our heirlooms. >> you point out in your books that fdr was an avid reader of

maps, another hobby that he have and i am interested if you pointed this out, he was a very fervent stamp collector. every step tells a story story and many of those stories have to do with conservation. did you investigate that, how stamp collecting helped him with his thirst for geography? >> if we didn't know better i would think that you are a plants. [laughter] it is a very major part of my book. he actually designed stamps. he would design them for the parks. he designed them for the glacier national parks where he would do drawings on little pencils and say i want to stand for the national park and made to look like this. he started a series of stamps for all of the national parks to bring consciousness to them. he did this stamp series because he

declared 1934 the year of the national park. that's when he went to hawaii and up to glacier and did a live radio broadcast from glacier national park. that had never been done before, alive president from middle of a glaciers are fairly remote today to send a loud message that there's nothing so american as our national parks. >> i have been collecting u.s. stamps for 50 years. i i had to read your book. thank you. [applause]. >> helen davis from atlanta, georgia. >> how are you doing. she did an incredible book on the ccc which is an extraordinary guidebook that she

did with her husband and is he here? >> my husband, read davis. >> the davises and have done our country great service. remember they used to be the wpa guide that fdr would do all the places in america. nobody had done at ccc guidebook of any note, they took on that task. >> thank you. [applause]. i have a comment about the previous question. that is that the ten stamps that were done in 1934 to promote the parks, those were photographed, five of which by george grant, he was the first chief photographer of the national park service. to will by ansell adams and three were by commercial photographers. george grant is one of the unknown elders of the landscape photography. our new book is about him. i had to share that. >> great. there were ten in the series, yosemite was one, right? can you give us a couple of the other. >> let me call my husband up because his memory is better than mine.

>> zion became one of the big -- one of the things fdr did in utah was try to make it a -- do you know that i do high and utah voted for fdr all the time. they were giving public works jobs and trying to make national parks so cedar breaks in utah, fdr signed that in august of 33 and then he did capital reefs with an executive order is a monument. today is a national park. he took arches which is a roadside a roadside attraction and turned it into a mammoth national park and took zion national park quadruple. the zion national park to enlarge the parks, these were all strategies. his secretary of war was a man named george durden and his first term. he was a democratic governor, environment conservationist from

utah. he saw the advantages of trying to market it on tv. the you taught national parks state, this was starting with fdr in turn. >> quickly, about the 10, i'm just curious because i would like to collect all 10. >> the very first one was el capitan and yosemite, adapted capitan and yosemite, adapted from a photograph ansell adams, it debuted in 234 and sold over 250,000 the first day. others were great smoky mounts, gradient tetons, glasser, zion, trying to look at the m, can katie up in maine, and as hell and sent to her by ansell adams. >> it was not just that national parks they did it all, they they did ducks stamps that were

remarkable contents and the wpa posters for the national park which are now the retro in thing for the parks. it is like art deco looking, incredible graphic photographs of all of the parks which roosevelt -- >> we only have a couple minutes left. i'm curious curious -- >> my comment was, conrad werth has said that in the nine years and three months they accomplish what might have occurred in 50 years without their labor. now the ccc is the grandfather of many groups that do work in parks and americorps, job corps, and other things like that. my comment is we have to remember that although we do not have the civilian conservation

corps, we do have a lot of these other grandchildren of the ccc. we need to promote those and trying to get our young people to think about service, whether it be in the armed forces or service for our nation as a part of their formative years after high school. >> excellent comment. thank you very much [applause]. >> what is your favorite parker national monument? >> well they change a lot. you go and it is your new favorite. right now, i would have to say it's an obscure one, canyon lands in utah. it was stewart whose papers are here at the university of arizona along with ansell adams photographs of the rare collection here, you'd all flew over that area and said my guy, if that's a national park if i've ever seen one. people are looking to dam the river there and so he started

moving quickly to go to canyon land. i got to go back for the 50th anniversary of canyon land in 2000, 2014 to give the keynote speech at the park. they took me to see some of the special features there. it was amazing. i was very big on canyonlands but for new ones i'm hoping that president obama signed the national monument in utah. it is a very important one for him to do before he leaves office. also the maine woods in the middle of maine, we have the woman who created bert's beeswax , she has acquired all of this land and to begin to to the national park service. i'm hoping we get a big parker monument in maine coming up now.

i hope the arctic and it alaska and the arctic national wildlife area becomes a monument so it gets a permanent protection. >> we are going to have to wrap it up. i was over at volcano national park last may, that is something, something, that site at night is something you will never forget. douglas brinkley, thank you all [applause]. professor brinkley will be signing copies of his newest book at about 11:30 a.m. that will be happening at the you a bookstore tent over on the mall. he is is going to do some national question q and a with c-span, we are are going to let him go. thank you very much.

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[inaudible] >> book tvs live coverage of the tucson book festival continues. we are live from the university of arizona. we have a full day of coverage coming up from this beautiful campus. located right in the city of tucson. we have got doug brinkley coming up in just a minute to take your calls. if you been listening you have heard him talking about his a brand-new book, rightful, rightful heritage. after that you can talk which on a phone jonathan coles oh in the guantánamo bay detainees, linda hirschman about her book on ruth bader ginsburg as well. you will have other panels all day long. if you go to our website, book tv.org, you'll get the full schedule of events, and you can

follow us on twitter, book tv is our twitter handle. you have been listening to professor doug brinkley talking about the newest book and he joined just now with the gallagher theater. professor brinkley, you have pivoted in your last couple of books to the environment, why is that? >> .. >> my mom and dad took me around america. had a lot of time off in summers. we go for weeks and months on end going to places like the great smoky mountains or big ben national park and i just loved it. now that i have three children i realized i could do research and i am writing on franklin roosevelt in the hudson river valley where all of his pictures are and fell in love with the catskills and adirondacks. it is wonderful, i love hiking,

kayaking, and my mother and father, my and the dad and the duty of the country. >> jimmy carter or someone else you heard about, and in a serious way, what is the world's going to look like 100 years about. and count basie, and not just national parks the state parks and monuments and historic sites. otherwise america, skyscrapers and fast-food restaurants for havens that we go to the national battlefields, national

forests in lake mead and keep hatteras, that makes america's special and i wanted to rate the president and roosevelt is the number-1 conservation president, franklin roosevelt is tied and lyndon johnson and jimmy carter. and nixon in some ways, richard nixon created the environmental protection agency, clean air and water, endangered species and pressure from congress, give credit where credit is due. >> host: if you watch any of the networks you have seen professor douglas brinkley. he is a presidential historian. we are going to talk about that as well, but this is your opportunity, at 748-8200. 748-need 201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zone.

accretion of the everglades. >> really difficult to create the everglades. there is a nucleus of people, and everglades, and in miami, when he got pulled away, he disappeared and in his wild years, to learn how to get back and went with a man who was the top ornithologists and roosevelt early, in the 1920s we got to save the everglades. the water supply for miami, the

florida coast would work, and the first biologically -- biological crossroads. both parts were about the wonder of the mountain side. it wasn't a post card, being saved and he had to do propaganda films that eventually -- able to be preserved. the hero of that story, who fdr worked with. >> host: you got this all lit up especially at night and then it is really dark on this side. >> guest: anyone who wants to get behind the everglades that is the national park place struggling due to pollution,

climate change, struggling because of invasive species, it has gone haywire. huge appropriation of the everglades, one of the most amazing national parks. it is not the easiest to access but would would florida be without the everglades? >> host: you were on nancy reagan's team. >> guest: i met with her many times, she turned over her husband's personal papers to me, the white house diary he kept and a couple speeches and things, and the reagan diaries became a best seller.

it is a nice relationship. to be one of the people to obtain guns at funerals because the family had this relationship. >> host: brad is in lakeland, fla. you are on with douglas brinkley. >> caller: hello, professor. your dad was -- brinkley, was? >> host: we are having a bit of an audio problem. we have to let you go. let's see if we can get the next caller on the line, steve in new york. are you -- >> caller: between national monuments and national thought and funded. >> host: i am sorry.

are you hearing? i am not hearing it. it is very fuzzy and distorted. maybe we can get that fixed. what percentage of the united states is dedicated? >> caller: >> guest: every state state park system is radically different meaning some to concessions and some are industrialized state parks. what is public land? we are dealing with a national wildlife refuge, in many cases protect wild -- sometimes -- i didn't get a chance to talk about the damn roosevelt built. this is an environmental problem. he built the dam which he should

have done, it created problems for the fish, the salmon couldn't get over so there is kind of -- they created lake roosevelt, an artificial preserve. the key thing with the environmental protection agency, formed in 1970, we have clean air and water standards. you see what happens if you don't, the flint water crisis. i worry when i hear people talk about getting that epa. this is about the air we breathe. we want to breathe clean air and go into a polluted city you get ill. health problems of not keeping air and water clean is important. we talk about public lands and recreation areas. >> host: let's try barbara in

jacksonville, fla.. >> caller: hello? >> guest: please go ahead. >> caller: i wanted to make -- davis talked about the ccc camps organization. it is not just -- we should expose all of our young people to this, but i think even if the young men ice interested in going i would imagine many, of many young women in this country would be delighted to go and experience something like this. i am 80 years old, bought i would have done this in a new york minute and i thank you for your program. this has been wonderful. i wish you much good luck in your work from now on and i will be getting your books, thank you

so much. >> guest: it is like america or. there are state conversations and deterioration and climate conservations, they haven't collectively captured the imagination will waive that ccc did. eleanor roosevelt promoted she she she camps and she opened some of these in new york and other places and it didn't quite work as well. i don't want to overromanticize it, they were segregated. we were inert jim crow situation. i have written about african-american ccc camps and hispanic ones. and integrated camps. they took over the public

imagination. it was the most popular program of the new deal which is conservation, congress in 1942, broke fdr apart and fought to the bitter end, a permanent part of america. world war ii, republicans in the senate did not want to put any money into conservation and they thought the money would have to go into the war effort and roosevelt argued the ccc was training but he needed skills in conservation, we needed supplies of water and all that but the ccc died in 42. we have many state conservations and other programs, they are just not as grandiose. >> host: which president is responsible for the grand canyon

in the state of arizona? >> guest: and national monument by theodore roosevelt, i mentioned in my talk today, god made it, leave it alone, it is a protected monument. it was very controversial. the grand canyon in arizona, didn't have two u.s. senators and then. with out two u.s. senators roosevelt was able to get over the politics to get it done. >> host: let's listen to kathy, in west virginia. bill ahead. >> caller: wyoming but that is the day. >> host: that is exactly what i said. >> caller: douglas brinkley,

would you consider, these are some of my heroes and i have a lot of respect for fdr and i will be reading your book. i think the real heros of the environment are people like christopher who got arrested for illegally purchasing at an illegal bidding event and he end ed up going to prison for a while and williams recently purchased lands being sold and to me, these are just the more famous names, but there are a lot of ordinary people fighting to preserve our land, the public land, trying to keep them from being taken over by fossil fuel companies. would you ever consider people like this? >> guest: yes. all three of them i giants.

it personal friend of mine in the refuge, so beautiful. i spent some time with her, she is constantly fighting for something i am interested in which is a greater grand canyon national monument to extend the size of the grand canyon, and up to the larger part of the colorado plateau. since that everett is very important, look at greater grand canyon national monument, if we can start lobbying and talking about that maybe something will happen before president obama leaves office. national monuments can do it. the roosevelt, 48 hours before he left the white house in 1909 saved mount olympus national

monument in washington state so big ones can get done in the last year of a president. >> host: what do you think of the renaming of mount mckinley? >> guest: it is no real history to william mckinley. he was kind of the -- assassination, native american -- that particular case is more appropriate. i prefer the native american names, but also a little less thrilled when they named places after people like sonny bono national wildlife refuge or sometimes we use these, rather have them saved and have somebody's name on them than not say that all. >> host: john from oregon, you are on with douglas brinkley. >> caller: fascinating discussion. i look forward to purchasing the

book. my question is what your opinion would be about the lens of the indigenous first nation's people, what we referred to as reservations and surrounding lands and how that can be protected in a manner similar to it national parks and wildlife refuges and stop the pillaging of minerals and mining on land that was theirs to begin with and freezer the natural grasslands of the lakota and maybe restore the fish runs in colombia as you were talking about earlier. thank you so much. i will enjoy more of your

discussion. >> guest: you ask the tremendously important question. the first peoples, native americans, some of the lands under their jurisdiction, i do think we need to work closer and subsidize those areas to rehabilitate what it would have been like before the european migration to north america. our secretary of the interior and secretary of agriculture, both very keen right now on looking at how we can do more on native lands. roosevelt did more than any other president, it was called the indian ccc in the 1930s, john collier was superprogressive on native american affairs. even today, native heritage and

culture and landscapes, the native americans took care of their own lands, had their own newspapers so when you look at the abysmal record of american presidents in native american history, one high watermark, dealing with native americans of shares, the best by far as franklin roosevelt's new deal at the beginning of treating native peoples with respect for their being but also their culture. >> host: douglas brinkley's new book comes out on tuesday, rightful heritage, franklin d. roosevelt and the land of america, this is book 15. even you have lost count. bruce in santa cruz, go ahead. >> caller: i am a genealogist and i was wondering if he was related to david brinkley at

all. that was my first question and i wanted to -- this second question, four of my great grandfathers were trustees, one was appointed by thomas jefferson in the louisiana territory, rufus east, i wanted to see if the national parks in the louisiana territory, and i wanted to know if he came across the family when he was researching theodore and franklin because they are so intertwined with each other. >> guest: i am not related to david brinkley. i get asked that a lot. the tucson book festival somebody put david brinkley, it happens a lot. no blood relation at all.

my father was from western pennsylvania, clarion, pa. from the north, 0 north carolina brinkleys. the louisiana i write about in my book, write full heritage, fdr went to new orleans, they had done a big spill way to prevent flooding, went into the mississippi and went into the gulf of mexico, spent weeks there. he was deeply concerned louisiana, at deforested, thomas jefferson's louisiana purchase, these rich hardwood forestss allover louisiana gone, stripped bare. fdr worked hard with the rockefellers and others to create reserves, the national

wildlife refuge and many others to save louisiana. if you see the ragged boodle of louisiana, delta national wildlife refuge is fdr at work saving that great fishing area for future generationss. as for the afters franklin roosevelt himself would go on a yacht of the astors and go to the florida keys. they went to port jefferson and got saved by fdr did, dragged toward the national park, one of fdr's conservation gambleds. >> host: if we hadn't had a depression what we have a conservation we have had? >> guest: no. one of the great ironies, roosevelt's freedom to do what

he wanted, congress in 1933 said do what you got to do. what shocked people is he said i want to buy a lot of land and rehabilitate it for wildlife. bring the wildlife back, the land -- living and farming and sustainable living, so he sent a man when all over in an oldsmobile buying up land with federal fundss to freezer, that is how we got the national wildlife refuges in minnesota, north dakota and on and on. the federal government was the only person with the money to buy land for the lowest possible and rehabilitate as gifts to the american people. conversely the depression was largely caused in agricultural

areas by the lousy agricultural practices of 1870-1920. >> next call from dave in massachusetts. you are on with douglas brinkley. >> caller: conservation on a global scale, broke up a corporate robber barons koch strickland worked with world powers to defeat the axis. how would you think these two individuals would you what is going on with climate change today? >> guest: one thing about historians is to be careful of what if. what do you do with climate change? i wouldn't be able to tell you in a real sense. he was deeply environmentally minded. before he died in february of 45 fdr's number one project was the idea of creating a united

nations and holding a conference on global conservation the day summit to get countries of the world immediately after world war ii to agree on global conservation standards. i have letters of franklin roosevelt riding leaders of iran, jordan and syria, middle eastern leaders, got to start reforestation, got to create clean water. fd are fighting global conservation terms so i would imagine he would be dealing with global climate change given that. one can never be 100% certain of what someone would or wouldn't do when they are not here to speak for themselves. >> host: in washington, go ahead. >> caller: thank you for your outstanding book. i would like to know what is being done to protect our

national parks, in particular the olympic national park, that harm the habitats. >> guest: what a great question. it is franklin roosevelt national park, he went to washington and saw kids with banderas save the olympic rain forest, he took his car and drove all over the rain forest and decided it had to be a huge national park saved from the extraction industry. fd are famously look and saw land cleared of trees and said whoever did that should be running in hell or roasting in hell, he was so furious by that kind of management and

helter-skelter timbering. remember, forestry is a conservation wyatt use but when it came to those parks he decided when he did the national park that it should be preserved, not timber did it did and constantly people come to do military exercises, some people send marijuana and invasive species. it is the bigger topic than law enforcement in our national parks and forests, needs to be honored. i think the u.s. fish and wildlife need to be more rigorous in making sure public lands are used for what they are supposed to be, not being taken advantage. as for the u.s. army, fdr famously we have a 10,000 at division in lake idaho where we are training, spent millions of dollars to fight in world war ii

and roosevelt found out they were disturbing where the trumpet had gone and wrote a letter to secretary of war henry stenson, you have to nest -- i vote in favor and against the u.s. army. this was 1942 in the middle of world war ii, roosevelt in colorado to save this important mentor uncrowned. he thought that the native wildlife defined our culture and we needed to protect it at all costs. she wasn't going to let the swan go extinct during world war ii simply because our army was running ski exercises. >> host: let's get mike in massachusetts in here. >> caller: i would like to tell you a quick story and comments.

my father was born in 1920. he was real for. she was an orphan at the age of 10. the absolely lied about his age to get into the ccc. he describes it as a great experience. they provide uniform, food, he was really effective, his experience in the ccc. my comment is we should go from there, national service, this country's hills, we should give tionals their service and that could go hand in hand protecting national pacts. it would help the country. hi would like to run that by

you. >> guest: these are great service people who work in the ccc, the civilian conservation corps many are dying. their alumni who association, the legacy project is incredible but we could interview the old timers, the big point you have not been able to make yet today, helped the men, not just they were helping plant trees or helping wildlife recover or building a wreck center, it gave them a sense of self-worth to form lifetime sanctions and each one had its own entertainment and and it was a kind of community college with trade skills being learned and lifelong conservation, and immense amount of good to be the soul and spirit of the corps men who were coming, roosevelt and

stream army and they did the best and finest american work. i lived in texas. there is a book at texas a&m press. it is stunning, hiking trails and on and on. every stage is now putting up online their own stories, these incredible highway is, andn amphitheater outside denver. it is remarkable. >> host: usually when you are on we talk about current politics. every call was about the environment. >> guest: i am proud of that. i am passionate, this is the 100th birth day of the national parks and the good news is we concelebrate the national parks and wildlife refuges.

i am trying to remember not just franklin and eleanor roosevelt but a whole cast of unsung heroes, cartoons to promote conservation or henry wallace, secretary of agriculture, first and foremost the secretary of the interior who was a brave person who stood up against people trying to abuse the land, and rachel carson during world war ii which would lead eventually to a revolution in the 1960s. the cast of characters he's entered around fdr. >> host: douglas brinkley, presidential historian, his newest book rightful heritage, franklin d. roosevelt and the land of america. appreciate you taking calls from our audience. booktv live coverage from the tucson festival of books on campus of the university of arizona continues, we have

several more call ins today, go to booktv on.org for the full schedule. the up next, a panel on public education, this is booktv live coverage. >> hello, everyone. welcome to the eighth annual dues on festival of books. i am david garcia, your moderator for this panel today. thank you for joining us. our discussion today of politics, education and inequality will last an hour and i promise you are going to get an opportunity to ask your questions of the authors at the end and also immediately following the session, natalia will sign her book about jonathan will not be signing immediately, i want everyone to know. he will be signing later run today starting at 5:00 in the

children's and teen signing area, that is the best time to catch him, has nothing to do afterwards, stick around and sign for a long period of time and tomorrow from 12:30 to 1:00 he will be in the central mall. before we get started by indeed to thank the sponsors of the jews on festival of books and remind all of you i know you have a great time today, it will be an engage in conversation and encourage you to be a friend of the festival. you and do that in the student union or on line, great opportunities continue to be made available to the public for free so take a moment to become a friend so we can have great programming like this. next thing, right to on time, take a moment to put these on stun, silence, whatever you need to do so we do not interrupt

authors today. i am honored to be sitting up here with two great authors with amazingly strong voices in education and politesse, one newer voice and one long time voice in education for many of us for a long time. pleased to be here with natalia mehlman-petrzela and jonathan kozol who needs no introduction. to get us started today, given that this is the panel i get a chance to work with we are going to start with one of my favorite questions just to get to know them better and ask both jonathan kozol and natalia mehlman-petrzela to tell your education story. let's start with jonathan kozol. your education story. >> i began by going to harvard

college majoring in english which people said would be useless in the real world. i love literature, could have spent my whole life writing about metaphysical poetry, john donne and elizabethans. by some fluke i won a rhodes scholarship, went to oxford, got bored they're actually and so i moved to paris, fortunate that some older riders took me under their wing. one was probably only a few of you will remember, a wonderful writer named james jones who wrote to the world war ii classic from here to eternity. james baldwin was there and other writers. i came back to the united states in 64, and suddenly i heard the

voice of dr. king on radio and tv. it changed my whole life. the from cambridge into the black community of boston and started teaching. i actually -- the end of that year since all my students were black, almost all of mm-hmm, there was no black literature at all in the curriculum, i brought in a single poem by langston hughes, the kids loved it. but i was fired the next day. it is called curriculum deviation. our country worked those days, he immediately got fired by the federal government. i have gone on ever since then working with black and latino

children, 20 years in the south bronx, new york, two thirds of the kids i have been writing about, latino, 1-third black, spent some time in this part of the country long ago, cesar chavez asked me to come to arizona to meet with children and their parents which i did. to bring it up to date, we still do the same old thing, i am still very angry our nation has reverted to the deepest racial segregation in schools since we have seen since 1968, we turned back the clock and our schools are savagely and equal in funding. we are back tos versus ferguson accept they are not separate but equal. they are separate and unequal.

anyway, i promise i won't the press use of the rest of the time. [applause] >> i am so happy you asked for my education story, not just my school story, education does not only happen in the classroom. i am fortunate that much of my education has happened beyond the former classroom. who i was very young growing up in not bilingual household, spanish and english and this to me, growing up as the upper middle-class kid, seemed to me there was a huge badge of pride to be cultural ambassador between my grandmother who spoke no english and might english-speaking community, was my first education and this was a great source of self-esteem and fried from the spanish speaking background. that had a lot to do with being

an upper middle-class kid and i went on, i grew up in boston and went to a very progressive school system and learned about social justice but it didn't seem like something so pressing in the world. a lot of these problems are getting solved, the buzzing problems, the first day straight alliance in the country, beazer intellectual problems but not really problems that demand immediate action. i started learning the world is not the world i was seeing in massachusetts when i got an after-school job working as a waitress in a place called friendly's in this city. no one else was on a college track except for me. a lot of people have different colored skin than i do. i went on to columbia, studied history, i was interested in social justice. and then i went on to the school teacher and one of the things

that was self reflection was when i was looking to attend school myself and apply to schools i wanted the most kristy distract possible but when i wanted to teach at a school i wanted the most troubled school possible. i have seen that repeated many times so as i was working at this school in hell's kitchen, new york city, almost all black, latino and american arab populations during the day and that night tutoring very well the kids as a college consultant to pay off my loans and that experience of teaching in these environments was one of my most education ever. i was teaching in middle school, very forthright conversations with our principal where it was clear she was building the school from the bottom up and older kids were already a lost hope. i saw very diverse latino population was grouped into one category. kids shared basically nothing

with one another. kids had come from catholic schools who were grouped with puerto rican kids who would migrate back and forth with mexican children, whose manager was one of citizenship. what we are doing is not right in grouping these kids together and i also thought what they did share, linguistic art and spanish speakers was assumed to be a deficiency. it was not even on the table. this was an issue to be fixed, not something we could all learn from. there is no universal. one issue from that year, also learned that teachers where seen as disposable as the children we britt teaching and the idea that teachers are a valued profession, valued as human beings was not a given their. i wrote an op-ed about this,

typical 1922-year-old, i came to change the world through public schools and look what happened. there was a lot of blow back, what happened is my colleagues saw that op-ed, parents were mobilized, delighted somebody was on their side and are realize i could make an impact through working in education but not necessarily -- went on to get -- went on to get my ph.d. in history at stanford and shifted my perspective, realizing that the west is where it is, the contemporary social landscape and i think i will stop there. i am learning as a professor. >> excellent. you gave me a lot to go on. given that i teach, i will star

with the word deviation. as jonathan mention, statistics, i appreciate that. we are going to take a second and have you comment about the broad perspective on this. the idea you called an obsession with standardized testing in the united states which by the way is now being exported outside the united states, a former scholar, in standardization and accountability, testing, global education is one moment that many other countries are also engaging in as well. let me talk a little bit about this obsession with standardized testing. >> i might just save a scholar you just referred to. he is at harvard this year from

cambridge. he is from finland. the reason i mention this, far right wing critics in public schools for years have been saying why can't we do as well as the kids in finland? our kids are not competitive with them. those tough guys, no excuses people, people who brought us this entire misery agenda of castings i eddie, what they never tell you is finland has no standardized exams, it doesn't have any of this rat race, kids actually have a precious commodity called happiness while they are students which is hard to find in urban schools today because of this misery agenda. anyway, so much for finland sounds like a wonderful place to

go to school. a universal prekindergarten, is but disaster we still deny three full years of rich developmental to low income children in this nation. i will connect that with testing maniac in the nation. it has become obsessive, far too much. it is not having such a dreadful effect on after when suburban schools. there kids will do okay. in wealthy suburban schools, i grew up in the same standard in that school district, they don't worry about standardized exams, they just worry if their kids are going to get into harvard or

dartmouth or a second-rate place like yale. it is in the inner-city schools and for rural schools that kind of siege mentality has taken over because these are the places where the principals are running scared and even the best principles say jonathan, i can't do any of the stuff i love to do because i will be in trouble if i can't come the test scores by 2% or whatever the majority number comes up with. as a result, good principles are saying don't waste any time on anything that is not on the exam. the exams i usually limited to literacy, math, social

studies, and literacy, no idea at, they live in new york and have no idea what massachusetts is where i live. don't know if it is the city or another country. so they have no longer to and latitude of their existence. it is not just crowding out the arts. anything to do with cultural cut spaciousness, they are dying in these kind of schools. bad enough they are excluding latino literature and classics. they are excluding almost all good literature, there is no

time for is that. the principal looking at a teacher and saying is piglet on the state exam. if they do occasionally let the kids read classics and beautiful but like that they will excavate it immediately for a testable proficiency, you know what i mean by that? improved, provide us with a long 0 or short a. spit out a consonant so they are destroying literature. kids are reading books to the extent they read them at all out of fear of failure instead of love of learning. it is the disastrous agenda, it is the worst piece of education

legislation in my lifetime. also a disaster, testing these kids remorseless lee. it is unthinkable. here is the government in -- testing these kids. even though they don't call it a high-stakes test they start in first grade, second grade, third grade to prep them for the fourth grade test and some of these schools take a two thirds, not just the test but the pretest, post tests, and meanwhile low-income kids, black and latino have had no preschool usually. the children and children of my harvard classmates typically get free.5 years of the best, beautiful, developmental free school in new york starting in their 2-1/2, they are taught preschools in new york, $40,000

a year and meanwhile we are giving almost nothing to low income children. detests in first, second, third grade prove nothing. all they measure is the accident of birth, are your parents wealthy enough to send you to school? why did you spend those years at home looking at tv? until we deal with these gross inequalities, the testing is a monstrosity, it is a substitute for genuine equality. the worst thing is the testing debate has taken us all so much time, preoccupied us ball so much that no one is talking anymore about the eleant in the middle of the room which is the we still run and apartheid

system in america. that is the heart of the issue. [applause] >> i am afraid to do this given i am sitting so close to jonathan kozol's left hand. but by will channel one of our policymakers that have the react to what i hear at the policy level is the reason for standardized testing, accountability. we need testing in order to hold our schools accountable. i will be ready to duck at any time. how would you respond to that argument which i hear? >> the testing issue in general one of the crew ironies' intensifying the apartheid you talk about is if you look at the discourse among higher social class college-bound kids the entire movement of curriculum

and the polls zeitgeist is let's move away from tests. there was a report from harvard grad school a couple weeks ago called turning the tide, which says we should move college admissions from test scores and account for other things like character and social engagement. that is great. those are the same kids for college bound who are also getting in their schools a greater emphasis on all listed child and holistic learning and expressive parts. these are dueled conversations. we need more tests for poor kids. there is a sense they need to be held accountable and i hate to say it but the kind of losers the end up in these schools, kids with parents who are supposed to not care and teachers who are so poorly trained they couldn't be left to their own devices to come up with their own curriculum, we need to enforce accountability but in the higher echelons there

is no presumption that something so basic like accountability which you would hope kids, parents, teachers would intrinsically have by being part of this project needs to be enforced. i want to point to one historical irony about this testing issue which is much of the impetus for the early testing movement in schools and for a profession was actually a movement to open access to these institutions to people who had been excluded and a lot of that revolved around some of the best evidence of this is around jews. when they were talking tests to be led into the ivy league for the teaching profession and a lot of jews said we want tests because those are objecti measures. you can -- of we have a test you can't keep us out because we are not a good fit for we didn't have the right kind of

after-school activity or accent doesn't sound like what you want to hear. it is such a perversion of one of the original intents. there were pretty nefarious ones as well. one of the original tenths of testing to expand opportunity that now is collapsing. the accountability thing on the one hand i want to cry that the right has taken accountability which is generally a good thing, as their own principles and we all recoil at the idea of accountability but the accountability language is just one symptom of this. >> may i add one thing? the of this thing about accountability that is intolerable is -- i am speaking of the accountability of teachers, the use of test scores to judge how well teachers are doing, i understand in arizona that counts for 50% of teachers's rating, what scores kids got on the exams. that is to me absolutely useless.

as one function, not a good one, that function is to demoralizes teachers in public schools as part of a larger agenda to demoralize public school teachers as part of a larger agenda which is to discredit the public school as american legacy altogether and this has been -- this has been cleverly, ingeniously pursued. this goal has been pursued for decades now by the same folks. i am sorry i am including one wealthy family whose name begins with w, the john birch society, years ago, and that became the voucher for the idea of vouchers as a way to replace public

education by private market. that idea was discredited. a reintroduced it in a soft way. it is called charter schools. it is us off voucher. part of the business of holding teachers accountable according to the numbers is an effort to pay the way for the private sector to move in and make a profit on the lives of low-income children by setting up commercially profitmaking charter schools in poor communities or else in affluent communities which are the most segway -- segregated schools in america, charter schools are notorious for that. that is at stake in this business of measuring teachers. if you judge teachers, hold them accountable for the right

things. holding them accountable for this year's tests for means nothing. thousands of teachers, hundreds of thousands of teachers do not teach in the subject areas that are tested. what do you do if the teacher is teaching social studies or art or music? i tell you what. in some states, they are letting those teachers decide do you want to be judged by many teachers's scores or english teachers scores? i will add one other thing. the other point is when an entire school is judge it introduces another and certainty because so many schools from one year to the next receive a lot of new territories to bring examples, don't speak english,

not just talking about latinos but kids from all over the world in big city schools and also receiving kids from other schools that have been shut because they were failing. so suddenly two percentage points and lo and behold we have now put that on watch lists. what do you do to principals when that happens? decapitate them? i am not sure. i like teachers. there are hundreds of thousands of wonderful teachers in schools in the united states. i do not like to see them lead to, beaten up by ignorant politicians just catering to --

[applause] >> many in arizona know about school choice. no other state in the united states has embraced school choice like arizona. over two decades of school choice policies and in your work, you call the idea of choice the society centrality of markets. i would add competition and choice. really in arizona, put forward as if it is a little innocuous. ..