so the way things that are going now every day that somehow that facebook page. [laughter] if you live in america in 2016 you could not drive up my old without seeing a six-foot donald trump signed. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening.

i am the vice president of public programs here at the new york public library purposes of privilege for the library to host tonight's program celebrating mike wallace new book. the long-awaited sequel to his previous book goff of. picks of the story at the turn of the last century with his son paralleled growth and expansion and consolidation when infrastructure was developed and many institutions were founded including the new york public library. incidentally the we are we're all seated it is part of the reservoir there is a great before and after illustration in the book and it is a special honor to host but only because of the importance of the book and subject matter but because mike wallace to is a fellow and a scholar in residence

research to a good deal of the book right here in the archives the archival holdings are vast and include collections from "the new york times" and the waldorf astoria even your city miscellaneous. [laughter] but it is the of painstaking work of scholars that brings the contents of this collection into a life through a meticulously researched book so we are thrilled to welcome you back to share your research with us and to moderate the conversation we're honored to have another distinguished historian writer and scholar his piece in "the new yorker" as a staff writer providing a steady stream of intellectual and emotional nourishment to many of us seeking to understand today's political climate

with a historian's perspective to help current events and i just have to say the peace that you wrote yesterday what happened in las vegas was my morning and nourishment today. thank you for that. also greasing the state john occasions and last spring he gave an outstanding lecture to the center entitle the half-life of american freedom available for download on the of libraries podcast and should be required listening for anyone to make sense what is happening in america today we are grateful he has joined us this evening. at the public library programs like this are the extension to provide people of the city of new york with access natalie to great books also a forum of discussion of the critical issues facing community in

city and country in world. when you read mike's book in particular a quotation by london i will not give away you will learn that is always the case here at the library to view of services including public programs as a lifelong educational journey if you're interested in your city history or any subjects we will touch on tonight the library is your partner to get deeper insight into those issues i encourage you to visit your local library get a library card and check out a book or five where there will be hundreds of thousands of books that can be downloaded for free. . . . .

[applause] >> good evening. thank you for that introduction and i wanted to -- to start, i guess, on a slightly somber note just acknowledging what is happening in las vegas right now. it's a tremendous opportunity

and really privileged for us to and really privileged for us to together and enjoy discussion and trust fellow citizens and for us to enjoy the company of each other and that's something that has been taken away from a large number of people in las vegas and i wanted them to keep them in our thoughts as we start this evening. so part of this, mike and i talked, when was that? about a week or so and so we kind of got into a long sprawling conversation and i was saying to myself, save it for next week, save it for next week and so we try to cover some of the same ground but one of the things that was really interested to me was the story of the book itself, the story

that the book tells, but there's an equally interesting story of how you came to even being involved with writing the second volume of this now, so i wanted for you to talk about how these two books began? >> this really is a collective project and to set in context, we have to go back aways. i'm a child of the 60's, 40's, actually, but -- and the 60's was a moment of historical revolution as social and economic people and in fact, the two were related in tandem. the 50's take on the narrative

of american history was unrecognizable now, not that, you know, yes, there were blocks in american history, george washington carver, and there were the slaves who were happy and there were more or less women, betsy ross sewing the american flag. no significance violence because there was no significant tensions across class race and ethic lines. the view about u.s. position in world affairs was totally benign, it was all flaws and

then came the civil rights movement and the civil rights movement was calling for a transformation position in contemporary society and it had a correlate that at the same time people wanted to change the president, they began to change the past, the people in the past which was so limited in its definition of membership. the histories that were written about the united states focused on the notorios guys and affairs of states and business, social and economic history were sort of by the boards. so now african americans were not only protesting to state of affairs at the workplace, ballot box, here and there, everywhere,

they were protesting their absence from the historical narrative and historians, black and white, intandem began to insert blacks into the narrative. when you did that, you weren't just adding, you were, in fact, considering now racism as major force in american life, contradiction between declaration of independence and reality of slavery and racism. so just going on the massive transformation, w.b.dibois and the women's movement erupt.

that started filling in those blanks, if you do that, you have to deal with sexism, sexuality, the whole range of things that were simply not on the table, stone wall, gaze, that hadn't been an issue before, unthinkable thought, now again both particular and large scale dynamic forces and this was in the middle of the resistance of the vietnam war and suddenly america's discussion seemed not as clean as it had professed. i was a child of the 50's in that i was very nervous. my mother convinced me that

hoover had been watching my every move. [laughter] >> and i went to colombia in 1960 and i was shy about getting involved in student movement, there wasn't much in 1960 but as they came on, i was cautious beyond belief. i did actually go down after selma to partake in students who were going to mississippi and replaying in '65 freedom summer of '64. at one point i found myself marching in a parade next to norman thomas who i had never heard of actually. and then came the '68 strike in colombia in which i was probably the oldest person in the occupied buildings and -- and

had many ramifications for me. suddenly the notion of history as political fact was on the table in a way that it had not been before and i was converted in midstream my doctor, changed course. looking at the same issue, political parties from now different perspective and that became a collective, there was a group of students, colombia and the history department, there were colleagues in harvard and in wisconsin, here in there and we coalesced and we signed on through a project of redoing

american history, nothing less, we started a journal of radical history review, i'm not involved with it anymore, but it's many decades on down the road, we had conferences, we had -- trying to integrate with political movements as well. there was a collateral movement in public history's terrain, so colonial williamsburg which had been for decade the temple of liberty where jefferson once traveled the earth and now african american community and the historians, how about the 50% of population of slaves and everything was up for grabs and we did a lot of organizing around the reconstructing narrative business part because knives the middle of the matrix. i had the sense that we had

rewritten the narrative but nobody knew it outside of specific arenas because there was no accessible overview that presented the totalization that we had come up with and made it accessible in plain language for ordinary folk. so youthful enthusiastic i set out to write the history of the united states but the whole usa, my colleague ted burrows, long essay, short isn't my middle name. [laughter] >> the american revolution and we set out to do this in narrative style but with footnotes and arguing and explaining the debates, the

discussions, we like x and we don't like y, et cetera, and we worked in for several years and we had many hundreds of pages and looked like we hadn't gotten out of the 17th century which we had not because we were telling the story and the perspective of european imperial expansion, the framework which you have to understand happened in the u.s. and it was born in on thaws this would takes 1 lifetimes and we only had two to spare. [laughter] >> so after another year of being depressed, i thought, well, let's decant all of this stuff into something more manageable. history only of one city, new york. an important city but the thing was to set it in global and national context that we had already worked out. so we did.

it took a while to change course and a lot of the work that we had done was available but a lot new work had to be don't and we did it. and now we have an, effect, gotham2 and the question that immediately arises, who is volume 3 going to be? it'll be 2042 before you get around to it and mildly reassuring, to say that, in fact, we had -- i had now because it was a solo operation i had thought that the second volume would go to world war, 1945 and it became clear that -- another reason that's so bloody big compared to the other one in

given time duration, there was an avalanche of work that's been done on all of the arenas in which i tried to keep up, economic history, political history, cultural, social, architectural, flood of new work and also this is perhaps not the appropriate place to say this but i spent decades in the ellen room which was the new york public library's great gift to scholars. it was the pipeline into the great hard of material that's here. the thing is that i tried to avoid doing primary research as much as possible because the idea is if you got stuck on researching anything as opposed

to waiting for other people to do the hard spade work and -- [laughter] >> integrating it with -- with history is grand larsoning and then came google which digitized everything. this had the fortunate or unfortunate impact of saying that, well, whereas in the old days i would not have gone to read irving bush's autobiography what he thought he was doing, wound of the revolutions of this period, now quick and it's on screen, so the temptation to do primary research was overwhelming, which is another reason that slowed the process down. anyway, it was clear and i had

written a lot, in fact, the second world war was done before the first world war, partly because nobody had really grasped the experience of the city during second world war and i was bored so i just jumped. there's, in fact, a great deal that's been written through second war and while i won't go on record predicting when volume three might thud into place, it won't take 20 years because a lot of it is done already. >> you gave me a date but i shouldn't say it. [laughter] >> so this book, volume 2, picks up in 1898 which is a pivotal year because it's the year of consolidation of the five burrows into greater new york city and, you know, tremendous change and tremendous

implications of that and i wondered if you could just talk about the dynamics of, one, how this incorporation happened and who were the primary movers dedicate today making -- dedicated to making this happen? >> you would have thought that this being a political merger, first largest, fourth largest city in the united states plus many communities that were, in essence, grouped around the harbor, not the new jersey harbor, that was screw-up by somebody who still hasn't recovered from. [laughter] >> it was a political consolidation and it was thought out the political process but it wasn't initiated by the political elite. it was a phenomena that

corresponded with the economic elite's decision to reconstruct american capitalism. to understand is you have to understand that this is the era of rockefeller, jpmorgan, et cetera, these two really didn't like one another at all. but they were as wrong in being convinced that free enterprise capitalism was the pits. you had competition between firms. you had competition between firms, price wars, cut throat price car wars, build them up again, you cut union, wut labor -- cut labor unions, labor unions are crushed through force and violence which leads to socialism movements who overcome capitalism itself. so as far as corporate elite was concerned, this was maddens and

the solution was to bring as much competition as possible out of the economy and between 1898 and 1904, short space of time, thousands competing firms are merged into hundreds of gigantic corporations which the united states steel is the preem nant example -- example, was a progressive move. morgans and rockefellers were convinced not entirely without reason that this would allow a more rational economy and would get above and allow for long-term planning and making money to people who i don't ever saw the corporate movement but it was also an ideology, a

culture had emerged that argued this this was good in a variety of arenas and one of them was the lunatic competition between brooklyn and new york and other towns around the harbor when they should be concentrating on combine to go deal with the problems of the harbor, to deal with problems that were area wide, deal of the challenge of chicago which was going by leaps and bounds and were afraid it might become the new economic capital of the united states and the europeans would bypass new york and go downhill and end the nightmare of villains, so they oversaw the consolidation of the political units into greater new york. that's why it's called greater new york. it's not chauvinistism.

maybe a little bit. the cultural correlate of that was to do many consolidations and libraries consolidated and formed the new york public library and housed themselves but there was a movement to turn this consolidation on paper into a reality and there was an explosion of energy and creativity that's been rarely matched in our history. >> you talk about this because there are two different things as the political act of consolidating brooklyn and

manhattan, then, of course, the bronze, queens and staten island and then the other actual physical structure that has to go into making these desperate into an actual city. >> there are several things that happened, one of them is that there's a movement that better connects new york to the global arena. so the rail tunnels are built under the hudson and allowing you go to pen station, you're linked to the mainland has strengthened, the docks are built, chelsea piers for titanic operations, bridges are thrown across the rivers, the subway is dug throughout the entire arena. populations are free to move

without boundaries of any sort so the subway system, miraculous transformation, reminiscence of old colonial and they are rapidly replaced, real estate booms take place, bring the end -- by the end of this period, bronx is worth -- considered as being independent entity, sixth largest city in the united states. in brooklyn, the deagriculturization process but brooklyn was a fruit basket and vegetable basket for the city and now subway lines, elevated

lines, housing subdivisions instead -- this sense that you can bind this on paper entity into a reality if you build enough trackage, if you develop the water system, if you develop the electrical grid. enormous infrastructure operation that makes this possible. mirrored in the private sector by the explosion of sky scrapers. these are, in fact, the physical of the corporative organization. they represent themselves enormous amounts of capital,

henry morgan got together which collects and pools capital and puts them into the the skyscrapers. >> one of the things that's notable to me about the book is there are parallel stories like you're telling this story of physical geography of new york, you can begin to see what the adult version of this entity will look like and at the same time you're telling the story, that's one of the political elites and the physical landscape also the social and cultural landscape and the population and what they are experiencing of this gigantic

metrop and new york looked like the plan to create better new york, looked one way to architects who were taking all of this and another way to the people who were actually living in the midst of all these changes. >> right. >> i have try today break it out into sections, focusing on different aspects of the struggle over the provision of social justice, of public goods, housing, health care, et cetera. appears to me that there's at least 4 broad schemes and one of them is ethnicity, one of them is race and the other is gender and the other is class. this is a period of staggering

integration flows and the flow is not either a great uniform mass or entering the country in the city drop by drop but the new-comers particularly jews and african americans from the south and the caribbean are flowing into existing enclaves that are unlike enclaves in other places, huge and big enough so that you can sustain a national language culture, you have restaurants, religious institutions, you have newspapers, you can walk-through and afterwards through the jewish lower east side and no

english. this is not new. the irish and the germans before had created enclaves, what's new in the spirit is there's new appreciation for this. guide books which use today say don't go to 5 points or dickins is coming to town, we will give him a police escort, visit the lower east side, visit europeville, this and that part of town and understand that the multinational character of new york city is one of its greatest strengths, something to applaud and even more than that, people like randolph, john, others argue that although this is unplanned, this is the cities and america's great contribution

to human society. the possibility for the first time in human history, these wildly different cultural communities living next door to each other relatively peaceful, there are clashes at the border, borders expand through the marketplace or through violence so it's not lovey-dovey. but it's unprecedented and anybody who tries to reverse this multinationalty is doing the city and the culture and the country injustice and there were, in fact, that were doing that specifically the anglo protestant community and had social order by right of cultural, it was their city, it's okay to have immigrants come in as long as they know their place and ideally drop

customs in the language and the clothing and the food and all of that, keep a little bit of that for variety sake but basically looked like -- so one of the tensions that happens during this period is debate over ethnicity, legitimacy and the desirability of constraining it. there's an extreme dimension to this that emerges out of the ano -- anglo protestant community that argue not just that some immigrants are less good than others by virtues of cultures which can be transformed if you pressure them enough, but rather biological. these people are inferior, not only that, they have the capability of dragging down through contaminating the gene pool, people like us.

and this tension is extremely visible and growing more so as we drift towards the first world war, but let's save that for a bit. the cosmopolitan does not break the color line, the african-american community has it had been for a hundred years, jim crowe, they are forced into the bottom wrongs of the economy, the ten pan alley, culture of content, and applications of violence deemed necessary, the opening act in terms of race relations in new york of this period, this is when a period of time when race riots meant whites invading

white districts and this is in fact, happened, the stories told in detail like everything else in volume, largely irish versus black, the communities on the midwest side were competing for spacial territorial control and blacks are dragged off streetcars and beaten with lead pipes and police showed up and joined the rioters and police dragged blacks to 37th street, police station, make them run a gauntlet. the black community calls for investigation, the grand jury finds nothing happened, the, new

york city police department has internal investigation cannot surprisingly clears all of its members. so this is the norm. this is continuing and heightened by all of the confederate, post confederate statures, so new york is nestled in this racial repression moment, the worst period arguably in american history for race relations. there are however, two things that emerge in opposition, one of them is, in fact, collective movements by african americans in the city. w.b.duboise.

hubert harris, speaking all over the city including wall street, marcus is getting off through start and thinking in terms of africanism. >> you make mention of one of my personal favorite figures in african-american history is a. philip randolph. >> he's on the board, the messenger is his newspaper. has the greatest impocket on this horrible situation as the arrival of black harlem. harlem is white middle class. depends on exactly where you were. it's a reproduction of a lot of

lower manhattan. but then in the after math of the arrival of subway which comes right off the west side in san juan hill, the struggles were to be taken place and then goes up under the park and up lenix avenue, mass migration. blacks had never had a locale they could call their own, a few streets but vulnerable to this kind of outside from the old south street area to the village to san juan hill on the west side and now to harlem. but now the numbers are phenomenal and some accelerated by impending story. and once in small space you have

70,000 african americans, no right crowd or wrong mind is going to think about invading particularly after the first world war, so that transformation is important, gender, another major upheaval, several different kinds, one is the emergence of the new woman that emerged in 19th century but particularly middle-class women who inch their way into professional schools over beginning to overcome the barriers to law and medicine and everything. but now part function of the corporate revolution and

skyscrapers are now filled with clerks who used to be all male and now are turned female, the department store expand the -- specially as they move from sixth avenue to luxurious to sixth avenue, restaurants, the fashion industry has created and journalism, in fact, opened to female employment. in addition to this general state of affairs one by one operation there are collective movements, most famously the suffrage movement and the degree of organization and militants that marks the least ten years long struggle for the suffrage

which means getting an old-male electorate to approve granting the right to their sisters, children, et cetera. and there's an enormous push in 1915 and they lose. they lose big time. and they come back again in 1917. again, it's a complicated story, i tried to map out the ends and outs but, in fact, they win and they win november, november, election day the sixth or whatever it is, 100 years since the referendum passed giving women the right to vote in new york state which by all counts was the critical factor in the passage of the 19th amendment. but this was also the beginnings of a movement to have women

allow today control their own bodies, this is barbara arrival on the stage together with emma goldman who combat -- birth control a crime but even talking about birth control was criminal and the struggle over the issue soiled out of planned parenthood entity a little later down the road. last item is class conflict. some of this is relatively familiar, organized labor movement for people who are largely german, anglo, irish, who are skilled workers who is withholding give them muscle.

samuel is the large organizer of this. the great vast majority of it is unorganized and then comes the arrival of italians and the jews and industrial unions are formed in the garment district in particular, in addition the industrial garment unions are the backbone of the socialist party, the socialist party is a force in this period and it calls for the public provision health care, housing, specifically it's now clear this period is divided into three sections in overall economic terms, there's the years around

formation of corporations 1898 to 1907 and then there's the panic, they didn't call it market corrections in those days which leads to a period of 7 years recession, homelessness, unemployment which is ended by the arriefl of -- arrival of cascade of weaponry coming from the european combatant company. a recession requires some response and you get perspectives on this. socialists argue that programs of public works, schools, highways, bridges should be built in the public financing.

middle-class progressives who are complicated in political economic forces in the era but the progressive movement argues as they have with a variety of reforms that the united states, new york in particular should follow the european movements for social insurance and in the case of recession, there should be unemployment insurance. this seems to be most outrageous thing they ever heard of, these people are lazy, they don't want to work, let the market work its way, it'll be to everybody's good and threaten the industrial

workers of the world. at that point is a busboy, march hundred strong from one church to another asking, demanding shelter for the night and asking food for the hungry. it's a vast canvas, elite in skyscrapers and board rooms and it's not simple-minded. divisions inside the elite to the immigrant working class which is floating out into alone in the subway lines.

>> i think you do that amazingly well. >> it is epic story when you think about the cast that's involved in this. socialists, suffragists, anarchists, immigrants, politicians, police, crime bosses, reform politicians, crooked politicians, business elite, laborers, university presidents, multiples, anthropologists, multiple.

before the indexing had been done and i was just saying, if i was just -- you wind up with this sprawling cast of people who are all integral with the way the city looks, to what's even right now at this moment. i know we could talk about this a lot. i want to make sure we have time for questions. so there's a microphone, if you can ask your question succinctly as possible we could get to as many as we can. ask another question, i'm fine with that too. should i call on someone? [laughter] >> i can do that. actually two historians up here.

i will ask you this, there's a question. microphone. [inaudible] >> brings to my mind the novel and i wonder actually both of you your reaction to that novel versus -- what you have done with sequel to your first book. >> well, it's been long time since i read book and i enjoyed it and i would have to comment again after gotten to speed but structure is pretty on target but i make a bigger point, i mean, in a sense in this

colloquey, the way academics and divvy up territory and the socialist or the political historians as culture historians and these can develop fairly set of terminology and language but, in fact, usually it's important in probing and deepening our understanding of that track and real life doesn't happen like that, real life doesn't happen all at once and i think the only people who can really do it justice are the novelists . méxico's preeminent novelist so i get the inside scoop on this

process. great novelists do is they integrate all of these things because what they are looking at are not women and blacks but they are looking at the integral relationships between them, the images that people have of the other of how it helps to support movements and that's why i opted for as much as possible telling as a story and i'm sympathetic to people who picked this thing up which is -- [laughter]

>> it's a daunting enterprise. oh, my god, a thousand pages so i'm here to tell you that while it is true that there are these tracks that run through and underline and tie together the various chapters looking at the city's changing position at the planet, looking at changing relations with the country, looking at it's point in cycle, all of these things are things that are carried over to the first and to the second and will continue to wherever as far i get. but the chapters are modular constructions even most of the sections that make up these chapters which are big enough to

be chapters themselves. they can be read independently. so my advice to potential readers is to look at the table of contents, look at the chapter names, pick something that interests you and plunge in and you'll see that if you come back later and read it again in the larger sweep of things, there are all that run horizontally but it's an independent any rean its own but this is the intention. >> can i defer on that. i want to make sure that we get the other questions in. very succinctly i read a few years ago, i thought it was an interesting way to approach history but i won't go any

further than that. do we have another one and two? oh, you have the microphone. >> hi. i'm back here. i was wondering if i could ask your comments on other factor which seems to underlie much of the city, you can't really have skyscrapers without elevators, you can't have the brooklyn bridge without the technology to -- to weave cable. it seems to me that the time was for make or changes in science and engineering which kind of underlied all of this and i am wondering if you would care to say anything at all about that? >> can i say -- can i say really quickly that i learned what a no, ma'am --

[laughter] >> engineering plays a tremendous role. is -- the way the building is through various buildings. i spent a lot of time. you're right, they are building the city. there's a tradition in new york dating back to canal of being willing to take enterprises from which the engineering is just emerging so they figured out how to build the canal as they went along and engineers who worked

on that, wind up becoming in the next generation engineers moving into territories, electrical, mechanical, et cetera, and case ons are -- first used in bridge building and then skyscrapers. engineering of plenty. >> i know we are close on time. can we squeeze the last two questions in? ask the question sequentially and maybe we can deal with them at once. she had her hand up and someone else. >> hello. >> hello. in your presentation at the beginning you were mentioning from neighborhoods switched from the you're going to go there, you need police protection and a full escort to, you know, you really should go check out

neighborhoods and tour guide books, maybe parts of queens and brooklyn are going through that transition and they feel that they are south of sink of being part of new york city, people who live in those communities, as historian who has studied new york from the earliest days, what would you say to the people in the community to assure them that it's okay that this is part of fluidity and dynamic of new york city? >> i have to confess that all of of my varying hearing -- >> can you -- [inaudible] >> so you were saying -- your question was about people feeling safe -- [inaudible]

>> make people very uncomfortable. what would you as a historian who has studied the changes to make sure it's okay that people wanting to to long island city, you're part of -- you're still part of the cultural content with new york city. >> did you get the question? there have been a long-time history of people saying that you should not go to particular places in new york city and transitioning to saying, okay, it is okay to go to these places and that is happening now and what would you say to people about whatever community if it's williamburg or another that

people have idea about whether or not you should go there as a tourist? >> yeah, it's -- it's a difficult business. on the lower east side there were tourist that is would come and a number of people would say, get out of my face, you're turning us into objects. thrafs -- there was a particular struggle in chinatown which was notoriously considered a dangerous spot which it wasn't, but professional -- tourism emerges is a major industry in this period. there's an outfit called seeing new york which runs bus tours and they have a special night-time chinatown bus tour.

they arraigning for you to visit a real open opioid den. [laughter] >> by real police officers just as you happen to arrive there. [laughter] >> there's a movie. i think griffin about great exposure. >> that's right. >> chinatown tourism. so it's a complicated business because when at one point the police institute a curfew, there was a murder where a woman was killed, not in chinatown, in fact, but associated with the chinese issue and the police impose a curfew and the

restaurant, which are getting defined in this period as vice, are outraged. you cut off supply of tourists. so when you get into any one of these and i do get into several of them because i'm looking at tourism as a phenomena, it's very complicated. it's varies from one to the other. >> i think a jewish colleague of mine kind of summed up neighborhood change in a way that i found amusing. he said his family was an american success story because it was lower east side to lower others -- east side and it only took three generations. [laughter] >> one more question. >> in all these hours and day that is you spent in the archive, you must have

discovered some character that was absolutely phenomenal or a person that we have never heard of that you discuss in the book, somebody that came out that you never heard of, phenomenal or most failure? >> niagara falls amazing. there are 1,631 entries in the names index for this volume. >> wow. >> and the great majority of them nobody has ever heard of and i wouldn't know where to begin although i must say the thing that i find remarkable is the degree to which even the famous and powerful are unknown. how many people have heard of -- >> who? >> that's pretty good.

[laughter] >> you're not demographic -- >> can i add one thing to this, though? i did learn things about root that i didn't know previously. so even though i had heard of root and read about root i didn't know involvement. >> he arguably was the most single, most-powerful man in new york during this period. teddy wanted him to be as success or. he was jpmorgan's attorney. he was at the center of the incorporation movement. he remade the american military because he felt it would come in handy as the corporate world expanded particularly into the caribbean. he was secretary of defense, he was secretary of state, he was the head of the -- the organization and he was a political activists on the local

scene, the guy operates on all three levels, local, national and international and truthfully i had the notion of who he was. he very much for completing this

this. it was informative and engrossing and i'm looking forward to really reading the next volume in that year. [applause] [inaudible conversations]