be kind to everybody, make art and fight the power. that seemed like a good formula for me anyway.that see [applause] >> so bmf and if you have trouble remembering that, a good device to tell yourself is they can't break me because i'm a bad mother fucker, thank you. [cheers and applause] >> wow. very nice. yes. well done. all right. well, thank you, guys.

this concludes bet presents the national book award.esents [laughter] >> with special guest robert carl, i just want to say -- i[l just want to say how much i enjoyed robert carl, he was fantastic. but thank you so much for coming, special thanks to lisa lucas and the foundation, all the work that you've guys are doing, keep reading, keep writing and in the words of kendrick lamar, we are going to be all right. thank you very much. [cheers and applause] [music] >> follow the transition of government on c-span, as donald

trump becomes the 45th president of the united states and republicans maintain control of the u.s. house and senate. we will take you to key events as they happen without interruption, watch live on c-span. watch on demand at c-span.org or listen on our free c-span radio app. >> thank you all very much. welcome to congress. [cheers and applause] >> we are so honored tonight to welcome susan cheever, novelist as she launches her newest book drinking in america, our secret history. you'll tell us the secrets. [laughter] >> her distinguished bibliography includes the cummings alive chosen by the economist as one of the best books of that year and now

considered the definitive biography of that iconic classic poet. other works include american bloom berry, and my name is bill, bill wilson, his life and the creation of alcoholics anonymous and home before dark, the groundbreaking biography of her father and tree tops, a memoir. she's also the author of five novels and a frequent contributor of essays and articles to leading publications . ms. cheever is influential in culture and author skilled council and is a faculty member of program in the new school in new york city. in her fascinating and

compelling new book, ms. cheever traces alcohol at key moments over centuries of american political and cultural history. from the beer shortage induced from pilgrims at cape cod to assassination to president kennedy and president nixon's last days in the white house. its impact on many historical figures all toward asking the central question, what forms a national character. ladies and gentlemen, susan cheever. [applause] >> hi. thanks for coming.

and, yeah, the pilgrims. so it's a great honor to be here at a store at the center of the literary universe in this country, if not the world. i'm just going to talk about this book a little bit and read short sections from it and hope that it somehow informs you and intrigues you at the same time. one of the -- one of the great privileges of being a writer is that we get to make history come alive which is really fun. we get to take pictures off the wall and make some dance, make them eat and make some to fall in love with each other. a chart man that adored his wife or alexander hamilton hated

drinking because he father took off and left him with his mother or henry favorite teacher. but also the texture of their every day lives. do their shoes hurt. how are they feeling by themselves that day. are they thinking about what they are going to have for dinner. that kind of stuff which really takes us into history. the food, the sex, the clothes and, of course, the drinking. in this book by looking at drinking in america and showing its influence on events i've tried to bring our heros and our villains to life on the page. i hope if you read this book you will think of quincy adams as a

sad friend who lost friends to alcoholism and kissinger who had the job of babysitting a drunk. starts with the pilgrims. whether he get to that. it goes to the american revolution, senator joe mccarthy, jfk assassination. i just took a bunch of events in which alcohol seemed to have or did have a huge effect on what happened and went through them starting in 1620. so it really all begins with the pilgrims and i'm going to start with them as rhonda did. i'm hoping i can find a way to read and have you hear me at the same time. and i will probably go for about, i think, it's about 18 minutes, sarah, my daughter is in the back, she timed me earlier and then i hope you will ask me questions because i would love to answer questions and as i'm sure you all know when henry

david in 1845, the last thing he had in mind was writing a book about it. he really didn't have anywhere else to live. he moved with the emersons to do a favor to emerson and the household needed a head and when he came back from europe to find that the row had done his job all too well and emerson that you can't live here anymore and he said, what am i going to do, move back with my mother, i'm 35. emerson i have a woodland and why don't you go out there and built something and so he did but he didn't think he was going to write about it. he thought he was going to write a book about a river trip he took with his brother but hawthorne asked him to come and give a little talk at and he gave a talk about the river trip and in the qu&a all anybody wanted to know what it was like to live in a shack at walden

pond. i believe that q&a are magic and i know this one will not disappoint us. [laughter] >> here we go. the pilgrims landed the mayflower in massachusetts on a cold november day in 1620 because they were running out of beer. grant of land in northern virginia but they anchored it and community from the sand laying the foundation of the american character. since the beginning drinking and taverns have been part of american life as churches and preachers or election and politics. the interesting thing a glass of beer, bottle of rum, flask of when i whisky power and one of the things that's unusual about

american drinking where countries where people drink more and countries where people drink less but no other country where we were outlawed it in 1930 and by 1950 we were up there and now on the way back in the other direction. so the middle when it comes to drinking. every century or drinking swings wildly and not so true. a country of extremes and we either love it or hate it. so now i'm going to read the longest of the three sections which, you know, it's been said by actually a washington elitist that in his wonderful book, the good experiment, we began to win

the civil war when lincoln fired his server general george and hired drunken general grant and that's when the tide seemed to turn and seemed to turn because of guarantees can-do attitude. what are we going to call it, because of guarantees refusal to admit defeat and forward motion that nobody could seem to stop. lincoln said of grant, he's a man who gets git, right? he was also a man who drank. so here goes grant. >> of all the drunken generals who fought during the civil war and there were many, the one who most famously lost battle, born the son of a leather-goods producer, grant was sent to west point where he graduated from the bottom half of his class.

he found in love with roommate sister. he proposed and she asked for more time. his father disapproved of julia. her parents disapproved of him. after a 4-your courtship he finally win her over and married over in 1948. the couple add -- adoured each other. they had four children. a soldiers life is not his own and grant was posted from camp to camp, finally ending up in port humble in california. drinking began to catch up with him. there was plenty of tolerance with drinking in the military but less tolerance for a drunk. grant was a small man, 5'2 who

became unable to hold his liquor. he would get drunk on one glass and other times would drink a great deal. guarantees commander robert took offense, he gray grant the choice of resigning his post and his military career or having charges pressed against him. grant resigned. at the age of 32 and with a family to support grant had no profession. his father who disapproved of julia and grandchildren offered him a job in the leather business if he is wife and children would leave and go home to her family. they refused. the couple refused and instead grant tried farming and finally the father came around and offered him a job with no conditions. grant moved his family back to illinois and joined his father's store. but what does the alcoholism and bridge drinking that got him out

of the army, was able to moderate his drinking. half eager to be the husband she felt he deserved. he was apparently able to drink when he was at home than he inevitable dranked as a soldier. like many alcoholics he struggled to control his drinking, struggle more successful than others. when the war began in april 1861 grant acted divisively. the head of the company of illinois volunteers who wants attack on cod -- confederate army in mississippi rivers. at this point grant did not drink and did not tolerate drinking among his men. grant forces one and early victory for the union after the demoralizing defeat of bull run made him famous. guarantees next engagement was more complicated but equally victorious. now a major general grant with

forces south on the tennessee river where the confederate army was and by this time he had started drinking again. on the morning of april 6, the confederate army launched surprising act wiping out the union army and the first day of the battle at pittsburgh landing which is also the battle at shiloh, as you know, all the battles have two names, right, and confederate named the battles after the places where they were fought, bull run, am i getting this right and the union army named after shiloh, et cetera. i call it pittsburgh landing. i will call it shiloh. battle of shiloh was disastrous but guarantees troops held on fighting in the mud. grant himself was not around.

it was said that he was visiting troops across the river. although many of the men were 2 miles closer to the tennessee river and defeat from where they had begun the day. the troops were exhausted. many people thought the union was beaten including the union general and guarantees friend william sherman. sherman had been in the battle all day slowly losing ground. grant had been absent during the first day and sherman who had own struggles with reputation when he was treated for a nervous condition was ready to quit. perhaps he thought the war was over. then during the night he reappeared, it was raining hard. the evening before, general sherman found grant under this

big oak tree just before dawn smoking a large cigar. the rain was heavier and thunder and lighting had begun through the trees. a union retreat. the trees were dripping water, the battlefields were a sea of mud but grant was puffing away as if he were in a gentlemen's club. as the storm passed away to the south the two men stood quietly looking in the darkness. standing there sherman found he couldn't bare talking about retreat although he still believed it was necessary. yes, grant replied. we will get them tomorrow, though. grant was right. the union launched a furious attack and drove confederate army back to original position. later in the war, general grant

is a great general, he said, i know him well. i stood by him when he was drunk and now, sir, we standby each other always. [laughter] >> so that's grant and cump and now i'm going to go to the conclusion which the more i -- i guess i don't reread it. the more i think about this book, the more i become interested in the different ways that we write history. and i do think that there's a new kind of writing in history that's growing up in this country that's very exciting and i do think that more and more historians are including people's intimate lives rather than just the monumental parts and the big inventions and there are many historians who are doing this, who actually take you to the place and let you be

in the scene with the people that they're writing about and that's what, you know, i hope to be one of those historians, i hope that in this book take you to that place and let you feel what it was like to be grant on that night or let you feel what it was like to be alan. okay. so this is my conclusion and we are coming back to the mayflower for the -- for the my final words about the nature of history. in the second week of december december 16, almost a month after mayflower landing in cape cod, the your honor ji, failed explorations, cape cod sands, a

dozen man including bradford and winslow landed in harbor. they landed right around the province town harbor but they knew they couldn't settle there so they spent a month looking for a place to settle. now, i'm not saying that the reaction was a beer a day, but greatest harbors in the world. new york and boston. they got in there, made little circles until they found a place to settle. but they had to drink beer. you drink water, they drink beer. any possible thing that they might have needed to do with a clear head that was difficult for them. >> i mean, you know, any ways that's not the story.

it was parallel to the biblical story of exodus. bradford viewed history like many companions on the mayflower which had been completed just a few years earlier. every voyage was the voyage, every hardship was biblical. the world view made him effective leader and resilient soul. whatever happens to pilgrims happened in larger context overseen by erratic but ultimately loving god. this was the controlling idea for which he saw, understood and wrote about everything. he took history personally. modern history unlike bradford's history claims to be objective. historians write if they're reporting events with unbiased eye. this happens and then that happened.

this is our modern equivalent of god's will, observant neutrality with some wise commentary. historian has no idea to sell, no political point to make. but there are disadvantages, one is that in taking a broad dispassionate view historians miss a lot. emphasis is on sweep of time not on the moments that make up our lives. they are never personal. assumptions are hidden and far away as they can get. we see history with a narrow key hole of our own time. we are stuck in the first quarter of the 21st century, looking back over the past 400 years it's like trying to make out the details of a ship on a far horizon.

historians make many decisions about how to deal with this, should we bring modern knowledge or what kind of language should we use and acknowledge the differences and language between then and now, how would we factor our own tolerance for women's rights or racial integration into times where those things were unheard of. so those are the questions and now i'm going to go to -- rhonda set me a perfectly, the national character. what creates a national character, america is another name for opportunity ralph waldo emerson. an opportunity that starts with the bill grimes taking the opportunity and landing in the wrong place. the american attitude toward the law, the american attitude toward hardship, the american insistence on doing things to benefit the individual all come from that cold afternoon in province town harbor.

character is a combination of environment and experience and the american character was being formed in those minutes when the pilgrims finally exhaustedly reached the beach. to survive, they will have to develop a fierce individualism and a craving for freedom that will spread down from the bent arm of the cape toward what will become the louisiana purchase and west ward to where their feisty spirit will settle huge tracks of land and explore seemingly rivers and mountain ranges. the american character has been formed by a hundred forces, defining it as someone has written it as trying to nail jelly to a wall. still, to try it it began with new england with the pilgrims landing in the afternoon in province town harbor both natural and man made and one of those forces, a force of pleasure and pain, brilliance and incompetence with passionate connection to drinking.

okay, thanks. [applause] >> so questions? yes. >> exciting history that you are writing about. is it that you think and what you tried to aim with the secret history is somewhat of a blurring lines the between psycho analysis of history and history today? >> not at all. i don't think it's about getting inside's people, we can't do that. i think -- rey. exactly. so this young man is very intelligently asking, try to rephrase the questions fairly. if this new kind of history this i'm talking about is more like psycho analysis than history or psycho analysis than history, or anything like psych analysis and

my answer is no. i don't think that the new history that i'm talking about or writing is going to get people psyches. that's what novelists do on a good day. i think it's about the details that make up their everyday lives. in other words, you can say the wright brothers invented the airplane or you can say, you know, on such and such a date wilbur writes, shoes hurt and he had okra for breakfast. i'm talking about getting into the lives, drilling into the everyday so that i as a reader feel that i'm there too and just to whack on the wright brothers a little more, what i want to know with the wright brothers and i'm certainly not saying that my questions weren't answered by dave's marvelous book, where did that inspiration come from? i mean, those guys outworked

everyone else by a factor of 7 million and what was it that they had coming coming from dayton, ohio that enabled them to go back at it and back at it and back at it until they got it and even after they got it go back to it because nobody cared, right? so that's what interests me. yeah. good question. great. >> i was just curious as to how you got interested in this topic in putting historical incidents together? >> that's a good question. how did i get interested in the topic? from my writing comes from obsession. i usually don't know that i'm writing a book. i usually just can't stop thinking about something. so it's all about obsession. actually there's an obsession expert in our audience.

for a long time i've been obsessed with american history. i've written a lot about american history and i've also been obsessed with alcoholism and recovery both because i have personal dpernz with it, -- experience with it and my father had experience with it. i knew about the pilgrims and the beer. whoa, i wonder if these two things actually go together somehow and so i started reading starting with the pilgrims and i was amazed. i mean, this is the book where i sat on the floor of the library going, you're kidding. [laughter] >>eally? i was so surprised. so many things. senator joseph mccarty, i had no idea. he died of say --pisrosis.

so i -- you know, i kept it as small as i could. it was amaze to go me the effect that alcohol had on our history starting with the american revolution. arguably which was planned in the basement of the green dragon tavern. the boston tea party, they went to ships to secure the tea, to secure the tea so it couldn't be shipped back to england. guess where they had just been, the tavern. over and over again, i was like, what? so in that way it was very satisfying. thanks, good question. >> hi, susan. thanks for appearing here. i will start with an observation which will lead me to a question. as a reporter, i think your

ability to take information and bring it together is fantastic. >> thank you. >> as a retired educator, i should have said educator, if i weren't so lacy i would like to come back and write lesson plans in the book. you can't argue what you read. kids would be interested in that. very few schools in america that would let you promote that but it would make history. i think you're right, it's very important. you may build and as may students would have said, you have skills. no question about that. but you are the daughter of john cheeveri consider one of the great american writers. from the professional land, what are the advantages of being john cheever's daughter and i'm sure there's disadvantages too. could you comment on advantages

and disadvantages on being john cheever's daughter? i think you can hear the questions. my daughter is in the audience. i'm not going to tell you she is, of course, just know as i answer this question, so, you know, how can one talk about one's parents in two minutes. you're right. there were many advantages and many disadvantages. let me just say that the advantages people think i had are not the ones i had. my father did not want me to be a writer, did not want any of us to write, he considered a miserable life. i couldn't agree with him more till i was about 35, right, but i saw, you know, and for a long time i learned nothing from him and he was very careful not to teach me anything. once when i was my 30's i took him out to lunch, i had a -- i was a reporter, you teach

people, give me writing advice and he said, don't use dialogue again. >> i did not get writing advice from him. i did see that it was something you could do and i did see that sometimes he was so excited that he couldn't keep himself from reading his work to us. you know, i could see that there were some -- has to go to public schools and with all the stuff, right, and all the misery and all the late nights and all -- the house where we lived, my father had a little study and my bedroom were on the same floor. i knew he was in there knocking around at 3:00 in the morning, you know, but still i saw him -- i thought that it was doable and

really all he did was he did it every day all of the time and so that, i think, was a huge benefit and great benefit was i grew up in a household and this is one of the best stories about my father. we were living in italy for a while and english books were gold and he came in with woman in white, i was 12. i started reading it and when the time came to go to school i told him i was sick. i'm way too sick to go to school and i had the book under my covers and i was like, sick, and he came into my bedroom and he saw the book and he said, okay, you know, it was that kind of household and, i think, all good writing comes from reading. you know, if you're not reading all of the time you probably -- it's going to be hard for you write well and so that also was

a huge advantage growing up in a household we were all talking about books all of the time and reading books all of the time. did i answer your question? >> i'm going to use my old reporter's prerogative and ask a follow-up. you come over and i will follow you. i thought one of the most interesting parts of your book, and i never really considered it and you talked about the flow and change in america which we do consider. from a writing standpoint, you had emerson, hawthorne and crazy poe, edgar, probably more dips than maniac -- than alcoholic. all the way up to your father, heavy drinkers. i do think if you look at writers today in a decline. >> not drinking. >> some drugs. >> also parallels. do you think writers are ahead of their time.

deflecting their time. what's your thoughts on that. writers ahead deflecting. >> i tackle the -- the idea that all writers have to drink, that drinking is sometimes somehow helpful to writing and what i pointed out, when i thought about it a little bit, this only was true from 1920 to 1980. it was not true in the 19th century. you remember literature was 1850 to 1855. all those books, right? five years. those guys didn't drink. they weren't drinkers. so if -- if you have to drink to write, what about all the guys who wrote american literature. so, you know, i kept looking and looking and i realized that the whole myth in this country of

drinking and writing is just these two generations of writers and i believe that it was caused or at least partly caused by prohibition which, of course, made drinking far more attractive to writers who, you know, need to find their own way, break the law, whatever you want to call it and now writers now don't drink. our contemporary writers don't drink. there's the occasional but really they don't. so it's a very isolated movement -- moment. i think it has nothing to do with writing. i think those guys were drunk of prohibition. drinking looked really good, they did it and i think when the effects of prohibition wore off, writers stopped doing it. i actually don't think that -- that drinking is going to help your writing or really hurt it, at least not for a while and at the end it does hurt it, of course.

i think those two things are separate. the question is why do people want to believe this. what are you going to walk out of here, yeah, she was really smart, but the thing about writing not related to drinking, that's not right. [laughter] >> and i don't have the answer to that. >> we have time for one or two more questions. >> i just wanting to back to your comments about history and the new history because i'm a business journalist and i've been sort of really irritated at this tendency of a lot of business journalism that writes about history, specially about the crisis and about some of the -- some of the things in the past. they write it to be hbo ready. and you lose a lot of the details and i think, you know, when you have a cultural history, that might be nice to

be there, to be a plymouth rock but when you are talking about subjects that need the details and worried about what color tie they were wearing, maybe you could just elaborate a little bit more about some of the trends or tendency you're seeing in that kind of writing nonfiction writing amongst your colleagues? >> i'm appallingly ignorant when it comes to business writing so i can only guess. memoir has eaten biography and on its way for eating history and i'm for that. i'm a big fan of memoir so i just think what's happening is there's more and more intimacy in all of our writing and let me just whack about memoir for two minutes, memoir has the tremendous political dimension. it has given a voice to people who had never had a voice before, women, servants, people who didn't write before and

people's stories weren't heard before, and because of that, we developed something i call memoir shame. i think we are at the beginning of the golden age of memoir and we have only begun to see what can be done but at the same time memoir with intimacy irresistible and certainly now when you read a profile of someone in the magazine, the writer is always a character. that's moving forward in that way. i think it's also going to happen with history that we are going to have more and more, a real feeling about what these people's lives were like, you know, i don't -- i don't wanting to back to the wright brothers. think about another book of history that we have all read. the pill -- pilgrims, they discovered this new world. i want to know if they were hungry.

i hate this word relatable but i want to know in what way they were like me. what was on their minds. what are they worried about. so that's, i think, when i'm talking about -- when i talk about the new history. although it certainly sounds pretentious. sorry about that. next question. >> i want to talk a little bit about the schizophrenia in america between the drinking and not drinking and i loved starting this with the battle of shiloh and pittsburgh landing. i'm from tennessee and, of course, the entire economy of tennessee before the civil war consisted of whiskey which was transported from pittsburgh landing down to new orleans to sell it. it was the only cash crop but later half of the counties in tennessee to this day are still dry. so i would like for you to

comment on how you could go from the sole economy on a cash basis before the civil war to half of the counties being dry today and how that transformation happened historically and where you think it's going to go because i know you have observations about that. >> again, ignorance. i don't know about tennessee history but that's certainly what we do. we were only able to pass the prohibition amendment because thanks to alexander hamilton the entire economy of the united states was based on liquor taxes until 1916. so we couldn't have prohibition, right? but so they passed the income tax amendment and then we could have prohibition. so it's so weird how we are about this and, you know, this coming together of dry and wet is just -- i mean, the same counties that had liquor as their primary means of income

become dry. i mean, it's astonishing, i don't have, you know, the tablets on which it's written, all i can notice is that we are. i think it's part of the american -- the extremes of the american character. either we -- i'm not going the mention any issues here because here we are in dc, we are a very passionate people, how is that? [laughter] >> you're the first person i know who is -- talked about alcoholism and history so this is why i want to ask you this question. it's an addiction and that once you take one drink you want more or a sip, you want more and to me i've never thought about this until i was sitting here, to me terrorism is an addiction of

sorts also, one has a firm belief about something and once you start wanting to push that belief and punishment, you know, and other people it keeps going and, in fact, what isil has cede and reported to said, this is the beginning of the storm. so as a person who is talked about the relationship of history and this addiction, do you have any thoughts about -- about this other addiction of terrorism or what we -- and understanding of it? thanks. >> it's a terrifying question and i don't know how it works with isis but i do know that the 9/11 guys were drinking the night before. and that's pretty much all i know. in other words, i don't see alcohol the way you do.

for most people they can have a drink and it's no big deal. for an alcoholic whoever that is, you know, whether you're born that way or who even knows, there's a mystery to it. if you have drink one more and then want more and more. i don't know if that's how terrorism works but it's a very interesting question and i urge you to find out and let me know. [laughter] >> how is that? thanks. >> i will try. [laughter] >> thank you very much. [applause] >> if you would kindly line up long this aisle for the book signing. we will appreciate it, thank you . [inaudible conversations]

>> sunday december 4th on book tv in-depth, we are hosting discussion on attack on pearl harbor, on the program steve toomey, 12 days to the attack. author of japan 1941, countdown, and craig nelson with his book pearl harbor followed by interview by donald, pearl harbor survivor, american sailers firsthand account of pearl harbor. we are taking phone calls, tweets and e-mail questions live from