may be investigated for using new york state resources and the publication of his covid response book. in other news, print book sales were up 6% for the week ending april 10th in the 40 first annual los angeles times book prizes were awarded virtually last week. this year's winners include isabel wilkerson, martha jones's vanguard and williams outer's biography of john steinbeck, mad at the world. booktv will bring news programs and publishing news, you can watch all of our past programs anytime, booktv.org. >> thank you for joining us. i am john sanchez with blue bicycle books, really excited about this book. we heard about it coming out a year ago, reached out to a publisher to do an event on this. we are a couple blocks away from calvin street and there is

a large statue towering over that street and no longer anything there. there has definitely been a man who has been in the news lately although he has been dead for 150 years. the book itself is for sale and a number of you have already purchased it, thanks for doing that. it is fantastic and he is coming to us from baylor university in the midst of a very intense winter storm, record-setting winter storm. he and the good people of the postal service of gone to great lengths to sign these books, so you will get assigned bookplate book of calhoun. all right.

just so you know there's a feature on zoom called q and a, you will see participants, things like that and if you hit q and a, professor anderson can keep that and bob can see that and they can answer toward the end so thank you for using that. all right. one other bit of housekeeping. we saw the email, we are thrilled about the event on c-span booktv, thank you for thinking of this. it will be a fantastic addition. very interesting book. let me introduce our moderator, paul anderson, professor emeritus for 25 years, correct? >> 21, 22, somewhere in that

area. >> his book a short history of the american civil war was published in 2019. you guys have a teacher-student relationship way back. author today is robert elder of baylor university. his book on the american south, his first book was sacred mirror, i worked on this before hand. the sacred mirror, 1790-1860, phd from the mori university and two degrees, liz and shelley, thank you for being here, thank you all for attending and i will leave you to it.

>> thank you for that introduction. i am pretty sure it is colder if that is possible colder today than charleston, south carolina or where some folks are who are joining us, a chance to say hello. >> everyone who is on the call, thanks to paul for running the show here. it is a very wintry evening. so far the internet is working. i'm looking forward to it. before we get started. this is coming full circle. 21 years ago, in paul

anderson's classes at clemson, jefferson jackson and calhoun class that i first got hooked on history. he is the reason i have been inflicted on the historical profession so it is his fault. >> i'm not sure that is much blame my way as it is credit to you. one thing i remember about that first class at clemson all those years ago and where we are right now and that is calhoun is a hard guy to get to know so i can't imagine coming from student to scholar what that was like to write a biography of a very difficult person to make it breathe again. can you talk about that a little bit.

>> reporter: not an incredibly personable or colorful character in the sense, not somebody like john quincy adams his diaries or letters overflow with personality. he deserves his reputation but fascinating in a different way. goes back to a quote that i used to explain why i wrote this book in david potter's book the impending crisis which i read in graduate school. in that book he describes calhoun as the most majestic champion of error and i was an english major at clemson and if you read milton's poem, satan is the most interesting figure in the poem. i was fascinated with that

description as somebody who's brilliant and some of the arguments he made were about slavery reprehensible in his constitutional theory potentially destructive but literary, dramatic, idea of him as a topic of biography. when i regretted being drawn to him in that way. a personality like john c calhoun, the initial thing that drew me, started to figure out parts of him that you can see

through the chinks in the armor especially when he would write to his children. incredibly warm, overindulgent father, what you couldn't see in his argument, the darker aspects of the character. and is a very difficult figure and have vastly different reactions during his lifetime, some people find him charming and unfailingly polite, harriet

martin, giving the idea of demonic possession more than calhoun did come his utter certainty was unnerving. >> my fading memory, actually not been the subject of all that much biographical literature. charles wilson begged the 3 volumes that people .2, there are two others but the field seems more or less open. overly propitious for re-examination. >> >> it is an opportunity to write a book like this.

and people begin connecting issues of racial justice. and there are some activists who write, protests at yale university, the historian's job is to explain the path to the present so when i saw that happening, what is out there on calhoun i knew a couple of the biographies and when i went and looked, biographies had not been written at that time in 23

years or 28, a figure of comparable importance that is almost unimaginable that you have gone that long without a major biography and what happened is the entire field of southern history, slavery had changed so dramatically that i didn't think the interpretations of calhoun that i was reading in some of those older books which are great, and it is a great political in 1993. the entire field, changed in dramatic ways.

and a more modest figure than we like to think about. we would like to portray him, the father a failed political project, and and acknowledge part of american identity. >> one thing that strikes me immediately. you don't shy from that was a couple things connected, the

notion of him, those of you on the call, this, bob and i grew up in scholarly terms with the view of the self it is totally been reevaluated not just politically but socially, culturally in every which way and one of those has been to get away from the old notion of the south has a reactionary reason, what might be called transatlantic or some sort of modernizing world. calhoun fits with that. >> how that shifted and i interpret calhoun.

calhoun, one of the things he's most famous for is his argument for slavery as a positive good. he moves the south away from this older argument of slavery as a necessary evil that people like thomas jefferson had offered, to this argument in 1837 in a speech in the senate the argument for slavery is a positive good for white and black people that is positive socially, politically, economically and that has been seen as a rearguard action against modernity. what calhoun was doing was trying to make a last-ditch effort for society and a system

that was really outside the currents of the modern world and calhoun stood in for this entire interpretation that we associate with scholars of slavery in the american south as premodern, pre-capitalist or anti-capitalists, even quasi-feudal and i was in grad school when you were in grad school that that was the interpretation, the new -- this completely overturned that and is still doing so it is controversial but one of the key insights is slavery was not always tied into that global capitalist system in manchester, england and rural

massachusetts, ran on some cotton and slavery itself as it was practiced relied on a lot of modern management techniques, planners used financial instruments that we associate with modern business history and accounting and when i reread and reinterpreted calhoun's argument in that light was what came out was he is arguing that slavery is perfectly suited to the two main developments in his world in the modern world of his time, capitalism and democracy and saying that slavery, would all out, this is all predicated on what was in his day emerging pseudoscientific, but accepted at the time, about black racial

inferiority and predicated on that, a class, and they are perfectly suited to be an underclass the lousy quality for white people, true democracy and equality for right people. this is a good thing. if you are white your equal like any other white person in this society, at least you are slave, at least you are not black what calhoun argues slavery solved the modern conundrum, the concept between labor and capital in a capitalist system. and calhoun's argument, and

labor and capital, and because of that, you're not going to have the conflict, and in the american north. and the industrial the lead. and no one would agree with his argument in a moral sense, it fits into how historians are interpreted slavery now, much better than they did 20 years ago. >> that is striking on a couple of levels.

i'm asking out of curiosity. is that a political argument? how convicted is he in that case? >> calhoun believes it. one of the aspects of his character, two interesting things about his character. he is capable of rationalizing almost anything, human beings in general are good at self-deception, calhoun is very good at it. but historians in general are an optimistic breed.

in addition to that, if calhoun came to a conclusion, rationalizing or whatever he is safe and he would hold to it. a lot of political allies have done this incredibly frustrating about calhoun and he never became present because he had this habit, putting him out there and a political argument but calhoun saw the need for an ideological, very aggressive ideological formulation that could counter the abolitionist arguments that were growing in the 1830s.

he makes his famous argument for slavery as a positive good beginning in 1837, 1836, 1837 and will make it for the rest of his life until 1850. and m turner in 1831, britain establishing slavery throughout its empire in 1833. petitions coming into congress, that is the location of his speeches he is responding to a lot of these antislavery petitions. he says the old necessary evil argument is not going to cut it politically reunify the south, what needs to be, to counter the abolitionist threat.

when he makes the argument many of his fellow southerners are shocked by it. when you read the senate transcript when he makes the argument, william cable rides, a senator from virginia says the rest of us don't believe that. this is a radical argument washington and madison and jefferson, by 1860 calhoun's argument about slavery has mostly won the day in the south, that position makes the position of abraham lincoln, exit nonnegotiable. it is a political argument, realized power in a democracy

was cultural. it was more than a rational argument. >> a couple things. elaborating on i can't see anyone on the call but the notion that democracy is more or less in the early nineteenth century, a civic system. and 2, what is new in 1830, is not slaves. what freedom means, with

african-american slavery, permanent cattle, race-based slavery for 200 years, what that means specifically and politically and calhoun seems to be a key figure for us to understand if we want to understand what free society means. does this make sense what i am poking around that? >> in our day it is the same argument, what is democracy. who is part of it, calhoun's answer to that question, he

viewed himself as a disciple of thomas jefferson, supported andrew jackson, he sees himself as a small d democrat throughout his life. he comes from the upcountry of south carolina that has a more democratic culture in other parts of the state and so calhoun is part of this much larger argument about what democracy is going to look like in the modern world and calhoun's answer is to reject the natural rights argument of people like thomas jefferson which implies oddly inclusive democracy. really radical version of that and calhoun's argument is

instead to argue to have you quality for some people you have to have inequality for other people. what history shows, he thinks, is some people will always be oppressed in a society, some people will always be exploited in society. it is a very bleak vision in a lot of ways and his answer is simply that slavery is a more honest way of configuring that recently acknowledged straightforwardly that you are exploiting and to some degree oppressing people, that gives you responsibilities to them and it allows you quality for everybody else. i don't think that today looking back on that we kind of see that as a shocking argument and it is but we don't see how

close perhaps not just the united states but a lot of other societies that saw themselves as democratically great britain came to realizing that version of democracy in terms of their empires. it is an argument about the shape and composition of democracy, how to achieve equality. >> that leads me to this kind of question, a very interesting title for the book, very interesting view if i may take on the professorial tone here, very interesting indeed. why "calhoun: american heretic"? there is a loaded word. >> you can thank my editor,

connor is the guy who thought my original title sounded too boring. this came from a phrase in my book proposal where i called him an american heretic. at a couple levels, as a title, first of all it gets at the idea that even in his own day some people saw calhoun as a heretical figure. in some ways even though i am arguing we need to reinsert into the center of american history i also want to acknowledge there were people who saw him as heretical, constitutional theories like nullification which was seen by a lot of his contemporaries as a dangerous. it would lead to

disunion and also, about slavery, those were seen to some extent by the mainstream at the time. one of my arguments is calhoun is ahead of his time, by 1860 those ideas are mainstream but the other reason i like the title is i think it gets at something i mentioned earlier which is calhoun's role in modern american identity which we take his name off buildings and take down statues to him because we don't want to identify ourselves with him and his views today. i think that is appropriate and

good but there is also this thing happening that if you study religion at all, my first book was about religion, heretics have a cultural function, we banish them to absolve ourselves of our own anxieties and so i was curious how calhoun functions in that regard as modern americans, by associating him with the confederacy which happened until 10 years after he died we seal him off from this narrative of american progress and freedom and we don't want to acknowledge that part of our history sometimes i think. so the title is an

acknowledgment that he does function this way and a gentle prod for us to be careful as we exorcise him from the mainstream of american identity, we cannot do that with our history, we can't excite them from our history without doing real damage to it. >> can you elaborate on that one of the things that strikes me as well is you don't shy away from the need to understand calhoun, sometimes historians have a problem with that, we study the past in the past is the past but you make someone of the opposite assertion here.

>> in one since the argument is that calhoun is still relevant today, not in the sense of trying to rehabilitate him or apologize for him in the sense of that word but in the sense that objectively true that we run the risk of distorting the view of our world if we dismiss him totally and i mean that in a couple different ways, obviously this country is still struggling with the heritage of racial oppression that calhoun represents so that is the most obvious thing and the protests that events that led me to write the book show we still need to be studying and being conscious of that.

beyond that it is objectively true that calhoun's constitutional theories and his thinking are still fresh and relevant today. in the epilogue i talk about a revival of his political theory that begins in the 1970s with a field called consists he is all democracy and one of the features of this field which features democracy is a deeply divided society, one of the founders of this picks up calhoun's idea of mutual veto. at the end of his life in his final speech the only way to maintain the union, peace between north and south is to

institute dual executive, a dual executive north and south that would give both sides speed up our over one another. that idea gets picked up by a field of come so see you all democracy, proposed in south africa as a way to end up are tied, opposed by anti-and pro-apartheid groups in south africa and they don't end up adopting that system but northern ireland does adopt it directly from this political scientist influenced by calhoun's theory. in northern ireland, the good friday agreement institutes a dual president and the

institute calhoun's idea of the concurrent majority, the idea that in a deeply divided society you have to decide things by consensus in the date institute an arrangement where unionists and nationalist groups separately approve major legislation and you don't have to look far to find we are still figuring out what the exact relationship is between states and federal government and how to protect minority rights in a system while maintaining a majoritarian system. how far can you go in protecting the rights of a minority the way calhoun argued we should end in his case that was slaveholders, how far can you go in that before you

cripple a majoritarian system and so we are still asking some of these questions modern scholars see calhoun as being incredibly relevant to. i don't see what i'm doing is arguing that he is relevant today so much as laying out examples including secession. americans think of secession as a done deal, we hope we've solved that debate but the study and argument of secession is a lively field today because all over the world this is one of the features of the modern nationstate, they come undone and get an made and how that happens in the pools governing that's, calhoun is one of the first figures to start to work that out in the american system.

>> a lot of things going on. a long time ago i remember sitting in a class, the professor who was living in colorado saying the effect that calhoun was one of if not the last great constitutional thinker, he meant it as an observation and it strikes me, don't want to put words in your mouth that you are sympathetic at least in the notion of it as an observation that that is probably true. >> back to the comment about him as a figure like he makes these incredibly reprehensible arguments about slavery and at

the same time defense slavery and slaveholders within the american constitutional system in the union but because he is doing it in the union and the constitutional system that exists, works out constitutional arguments people are studying, he has a sense unlike a lot of other people even of his generation calhoun has the sense that the constitution is a work in progress, that it should be amended constantly, this is what he thought nullification would do. the mechanism of nullification was a way to force a constant reevaluation and amendment of the constitution in the light

of experience and a is a conservative for sure but is a living constitutionalist, no doubt he believes it can and should be amended and people, one of the things i talk about in the blog is the english philosopher john stuart knoll who was completely opposed to slavery, didn't approve anything about calhoun in terms of what calhoun was defending and in the 1850s after his death, obviously talking about calhoun's two treatises on government published posthumously after his death, also calls him the best speculative thinkers since the

founding generation, that is not a comment on his moral character or anything, it was simply a comment on his intellectual stature. >> lasting before we turn to questions and this is an important for me to make sure i stress here, bob is a truly gifted stylist. you are -- he began his life, undergraduate comes from a family of readers, his mother might have read 16 libraries as far as i know, quite a well read person. how do you adapt the demands of

accessibility and a certain style to someone who can be so distant from that, i will let you tell the jokes about calhoun but how do you -- what are the demands on you as a writer, crafter of narrative, to approach someone who seems elusive but from a narrative sense? >> the famous joke you are probably thinking of, when calhoun sat down to write a love poem he began with whereas. there are lots of jokes about that and those reflect a reality, these letters, one from a congressman who shared a room with him who by the end

said i can't take it anymore, he is serious, cerebral, too intends for me. there are a couple things, one of them is to find the moments there is drama or human connection and the main way i did that in the book was calhoun's relationship with his daughter anna which i argue is the most important relationship with his life and probably of hers as well and that relationship does humanize him although this is a challenge, humanizing a character like calhoun you run the risk of humanizing them so much that

you sympathize with some of the arguments he is making outside that relationship and certainly other moments like that but my strategy in that regard, i hope this works out in the book, people have to read it and see, i even show all thought i will give the human aspect of calhoun is much as i can but what is compelling about calhoun is his arguments, his ideas. how do i dramatize those? how do i explain, i tried to view this as an intellectual biography, didn't necessarily mean his influences, calhoun is tightlipped about his

influences, i meant how did his arguments function in their original context and how do i dramatize for the reader how compelling or repelling some of these arguments were 2 people in their original context? in that sense a lot of what i tried to do was simply to lay out what everybody acknowledged about calhoun, his friends and even his enemies which is he constructed these arguments that were incredibly well constructed and well thought out and even if you hated him and thought they were morally reprehensible or destructive they were in genius arguments which is why people compared him to milton satan. that to me is the drama i ended up trying to do in the book. as a person he is hard to get

at but his intellectual contribution was the thing most people knew him for any way. >> i'm going to dip into the q and a. we get some really good ones. i will kind of go through these, 15 minutes or so, so the first is from elias crim who wants to know, this is an interesting question. i have a thing for the 1930s american south, very dynamic, interesting time, he wants to know what did southern agrarian's of the 1930s think of calhoun? were they able to make selective use of his legacy?

>> great question, thanks for joining the call. one thing i talk about in the epilogue is -- i could have written an essay about this, how calhoun, my editor is somewhere saying don't know why we didn't. how calhoun, for american conservatism in the twentieth century and one of those strands is southern agrarian this, this is the group of southerners, 1931 i think it is, something like that. i will take my stand, which is a statement of agrarian resistance against the industrial north and they think capitalism and industrialism is

taking over the south and they are going to resist that, protect what they view as the southern way of life. they saw him as in the 1930s a defender, this goes back to the old interpretation of slavery in the south, as a defender of an agrarian society against an aggressive capitalist north. and there are parts of calhoun that they certainly key into but they misread calhoun, because calhoun always viewed himself as allies with progress, all americans thought progress was the main force, calhoun did not see himself as

resisting progress. the argument was slavery in the south fit into the demand of progress in the modern world and only after the defeat of the confederacy and the end of slavery that people then begin reading back into calhoun, reactionary defense of feudal discovery system that is not quite accurate. >> for what that is worth, those who are listening have ever read the declaration of independence, many seceding states wrote in 1860-61 when they left the union as they left the union on the election of abraham lincoln, the immediate proximate cause of secession, jefferson davis was

a president before abraham lincoln, that's how quickly secession came about but if you read those they are all very very clear they stand on the side of progress so i will pick up with mister randy love who asks digging even deeper, calhoun's position is a continuation the men of our do what they can, the poor suffer what they must, do democracies just war inside themselves with men of power seeking power, as slaves make them powerful. we get that. >> so in one sense yes, i would love to know if he had read lucidity but getting this from

history, his position is exploitation is a common fact in every society, he stands up and says let's not denies this but in every society the rich prey upon the poor and exploit them and it has been this way through all of human history and that is a very bleak pronouncement. calhoun in that sense is a realpolitik or philosopher of naked power in that sense in human relationships and his argument is slavery is simply a more honest configuration of

that exploitation in his accusation, this is why marxist historians are fascinated by calhoun, let's not pretend you northern capitalists don't do the same thing that you simply conceal it with your wage labor and your banks and financial wrangling's, you can feel the exploitation and you are attacking us for the exploitation and even if you believe there is a real and important difference between slavery and free labor, that argument is a striking argument. i think calhoun is simply adopting an older insight and applying it in the modern world and fundamentally rejecting what thomas jefferson argued in the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and all the political and social implications become out

of that. >> one or 2 other political questions. i want to make sure we have time to address them and you touched on this, can you talk a little about what it was like to be finishing the book at the calhoun statue of charleston being taken down. >> good question, connor is my editor so he knows about this question. as connor knows i was writing the epilogue to this book when as -- i finished a version of the epilogue the week before this past summer when they took the statue down in charleston and i had to rewrite the epilogue. i rewrote the preface and the epilogue to account for this because it was the clearest

example possible of both people rightly connecting calhoun and his legacy to the issues of racial justice that surrounded the statue coming down and also a moment that in some ways my entire book was aimed at which was now that we are taking the statues down and taking the names off as historians and as citizens we have to do the work of actually knowing the history. i don't think taking the statues down easy racing history or anything like that still have to do the work of knowing the history but it was anxiety producing to not know whether that statue would be up or down as i was ready to turn

the epilogue in. >> history being rewritten even as it is being written. >> one of the quotes i use in the preface is from his kind of speech which i thought was great when they took down the statue, he said it is a given that we have to struggle with calhoun's towering legacy but we don't have to do it in the shadow of the statue and that is what the book is is my effort as a historian to say let's take this down, the names off of buildings but we still have to struggle with the history and the legacy. >> i will get this out of the way, there must be some

interloper, trey wellborn is known to both of us and i don't know what he is out there doing tonight that he wants to know if there are serious questions, did you ever find out what gloria calhoun thought about calhoun's net fear, the clearly human dimension of this whole book. >> the neck beard. this is an important issue from calhoun's matthew brady portrait of him a few weeks before he died, where calhoun looks like he is dying which he is of to procure ptosis. once you see it you can't see it, the neck beard. this goes to a larger issue, i think they had for a historian,

she did not write him a lot, complained about that frequently and for instance, when she got word of his final illness in washington dc she didn't travel to see him. at the same time they had many children but calhoun to one of his sons when they were having a conflict that involves calhoun called her the only cross of my life which says a lot about their relationship right there. that is all i know. >> the next archive never came up. but this is more of a general question, from a couple other

questions but he sensually coming back to the question about him in his role in american history, the general approach to him as an obstructionist getting in the way all the time and it doesn't sound to me like that is how you view him. >> he can be an obstructionist when he wants to be but the key is calhoun believes the world would work better if everybody agreed with him. >> don't we all. >> the key to understanding nullification, seen by a lot of people as obstruction and paralyzing the government which

it could have and did but if you read how he thought it should work and if everybody agreed with this it could have worked and that is how calhoun viewed everything, he had a theory how it worked, it was all worked out and no one else had worked out the constitutional mechanisms for how states nullification would work, calhoun did that, just that nobody would follow his system. he always -- he was not a compromiser like henry clay but his obstruction is usually not standing at history yelling stop, it was here's my version of what should happen and we should all follow that. >> time for one more question and it seems to me particularly

appropriate at least from my perspective, someone who stepped out of the academic realm, comes from jennifer howard, reminds me of many conversations and it is important to ask, what wisdom, would you share with budding authors as they work on learning history, quite a substantial book about the work of learning history in a world ripe with media distraction and demand for the entertainment factor. >> that is a great question. >> passing the torch to you. >> 5 or 6 years to write and

for historian to get a book out, and - compared to that what i would say is the work that had to go before i could write this book one of the reasons i could write this book is the papers of john c calhoun have been compiled and published over 50 some years by the university of south carolina press, multiple different editors died while they were compiling these things so that we would have this really complete incredible record of the past and our society today is not geared to

appreciate that kind of work but it is absolutely essential to preserving and understanding our world, i took 5 or 6 years to write a book, these editors and all the people associated with the project spent decades on network and i don't know what to say, don't have any advice in terms of how we encourage and instill in people the willingness to put in network and to read it but i think it is absolutely essential because otherwise we are stuck in the tyranny of the present to rough off of calhoun. >> i want to thank everyone for coming tonight, listening to our conversation. i will let jonathan come back on and say a few words but thank you again to everyone for the beautiful evening.

♪♪ >> on our weekly author interview program afterwords nationally syndicated radio host discussed his life and career. >> finally after i wrote my biography on martin luther which came out four years ago and wrote a book on american founding, finally i got to

write this book and i did not intend it, like people talk about the writing process, become something you didn't anticipate. it became a literary retelling of my life with a level of detail i had not anticipated but i found myself telling these stories i have been telling verbally most of my life. some you tell because they are so funny you have to tell people that i got to tell you what happened and a lot of it involved humor growing up with the greek immigrant father with the misunderstandings and stuff but the book became something different in my head than intended, i have to be honest and say i almost didn't know what i had. i thought hope this makes sense. i told this story, the feedback

drastic so i'm not as worried as i was but initially i thought i'm not sure what i have here. i needed to be a great read, literary memoir with yale university and all these different pieces but i didn't know if it would ever congeal. that's an ugly word but you know what i mean. >> watch the rest of the program visit booktv.org. click on the afterwords tab near the top of the page to find this and all previous episodes. a look at some books being published this week.

find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for the authors on c-span2. >> hi, everybody, thanks for coming, glad to have you here to talk about the book "sidelined: sports, culture, and being a woman in america," thanks for hosting this event. there's a button at the bottom of your screen where you can get 10% off of your copy of the book. julian laura -- laura okmin. a couple questions we will get into drinking our signature drinks. >> my not -- mine is