amendment in relation to african-americans. historian max hastings new book operation pedestal recounts britain's efforts to rescue its troops during world war ii. he joins us live next sunday june 6 to discuss his books and take your calls on our monthly author interview program in depth. in the man i knew, george h.w. bush chief of staff, jane becker calls the former president life after his time in office and chris matthews recounts his career covering politics in this country, also being published this week in mercury rising, jeff examines the impact john clemens friendships earth orbit mission on the space race and social psychologist weighing in on how to stop partisanship and conflict in the way out. find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for these authors to appear on the tv in the near future.

>> next on the tv, john way sick discusses the agency of abraham lincoln's plan. female journalists who shaped radio and television. find more schedule information at the tv don't work or consult your program guide. now here is john way sick on avraham lincoln's economic initiatives.at >> hello, everyone and welcome, including our visitors and viewers from c-span. i am jim kelly, director of the center of global security analysis. we are proud to be cosponsoring this webinar unlike economics with our partners museum in society. this event is part of our centennial serious salivating 100 years of purpose driven business education.

it's particularly time since we are currently offering cost and financial history in conjunction with the museum of american finance. during the presentation, please enter your questions by typing them on the q&a section near the bottom of your zoom screen. we will be addressing as many questions as possible after the presentation. last, as a participant in today's webinar, you will be entered into a raffle to win a free e-book of economics. windows will be notified at the end of the week. i'd like to turn over to david, president of the museum of american who will introduce our speaker. thank you. >> thanks, it's always great to be back with you our friends at othe cfa and this is the third

time i've had the pleasure to introduce john. the first time i introduced him, he had written ten books which i thought was impressive. the second time was up to 16 and now we are up to 19 books so congratulations on that in this book is particularly timely because part of it he's discussing aboutut infrastructui as we know, congress currently is debating infrastructure bill andin john ponders throughout te book what would lincoln do? john's prolific writing includes over 1000 columns, blogs and articles in places like the new york times, "wall street journal", and bloomberg but most importantly, our own magazine of financial history and an article based on the book will be out in the spring sometime next month. john has appeared on many outlets from nbc to npr, cnn to cnbc, msnbc to pbs.

is a native of illinois and during his childhood he visited lincoln tourists destinations andnd continued doing that as an adult around the country visiting various tour sites. when you read the book, there's several great parts and one is a review i don't want you to miss of the various lincoln tourist donations. john, it's been a very difficult 12 or 13 months for this country so please tell us what would lincoln do? >> thank you for that generous intro, it's always a pleasure to speak at the museum of american finance and thank you to our sponsors to the school of business, center for global security analysis, cfa society of new york and all of you for attending this zoom session on what i hope will be a revealing new book at abraham lincoln and

infrastructure. the storyan starts in 1828 a yog man is taking a flexible, transporting goods hogs, agricultural produce from southern indiana to the ohio river, down the mississippi to new orleans and on the way he discovers two things. he sees people who are enslaved do not have the same economic opportunity to advance their own station and it's more. he also sees the importance of transporting goods to markets and having access to those markets no matter where you live so if you are a rural farmer wherever in the country, you don't have to go through this

labyrinth of what was then the interstate system on the nation's large rivers together. this young man was abraham lincoln, he took another trip on a springfield illinois, 1828 is a really important here because that's when the canal opened. that gave new york city which became one of the greatest ports in the world access to the market west into the great lakes at the time chicago wasn't even the city, it was swampy trading post very inaccessible because the only way getting down to the mississippi river was through an ugly portage called mud lake which even in 1673 to explore father market said there should be a canal here because the chicago river

to lake michigan and great lakes near a canal in new york city, you can get to new orleans because when you can get to the river and the mississippi and on to the crescent city. so that was one of the first impressions abraham lincoln had as the nation was growing in 1830s, it was a time we don't reallye study a whole lot becaue we mostly skip from the revolution to the civil war, a lot of history in between, one reason i wrote the book because i wanted to know, how did our country developed? what did we need to do to get to where we are today eventually, what do we need to do to get deeper into the future and more equitable present? what was really important about that one trip, it was a very huckleberry finn like trip for lincoln changed his worldview and his inking, it changed the

way he said things in public. one of his first campaign planks in the 1830s when he ran for the journal assembly, he's in springfield, illinois, still a young man in his 20s, running to stores, tried surveying, putting wood, anything to make ends meet. he had some dense, a partner a storm left him high and dry and had to pay off the debts and he did all of this while being curious about the world and markets and economics and things that would transform not only his life but the lives of all rural americans and even people in cities so he proposed something interesting, the first thing he said was we need to build a canal from springfield all the way to the illinois river which would have facilitated a great newport and

access to the markets in new orleans and themselves and also create a canal that would later be called the illinois michigan canal which would connect chicago to the illinois river about 96 miles and as a third thing, which was pooh-poohed at the time because everybody thought it would be way too expensive, a major railroad line to connect thesh whole state to the rest of the eastern markets of the time and that railroad was going to be called alamo central so he worked with stephen douglas, he is great in politics to get this done, legislature passed this massive infrastructure plan promptly went bust. it was undercapitalized, the canal had to take some time off because they didn't have the money to hire an irish labor to get paid almost nothing and dig

it by hand but that was something that had to bere doneo open up chicago, thero great las and the rest of illinois to local markets. lincoln's office early and campaigned for it ander he was fairly successful in convincing people that this should be done. he wanted to put rural farmers and anybody who wasn't living near a big city or saltwater part flowing with everybody else, how you do this? you create transportation routes and build the infrastructure to get people there so lincoln wast fairly successful as a young assemblyman but what was more important is that he introduced his concept based on henry clay's american system that if you build infrastructure, it would create economic progress. this was fundamental to the world and the u.s., henry clay was a wood, abraham lincoln was

an early lead and they were very much into building infrastructure and tariffs to pay for them, internal tariffs and they did this at a time when they called it the air of good feelings, i'm never quite sure why they call it that but the biggest thing at that time was to build canals all over the country to connect major river systems which were interstates. of course railroad took off in the following decade, 1840s and whathe became this huge interste system really took off because canals preceded the growth. what happened when lincoln first proposed the little canal called a canal out of springfield was that he knew any place where the canal was at a conjunction with another river system, the

illinois than a lot of development would take off and this is very little-known but he was an urban planter, he planned a town at the intersection of this canal called huron, lake huron, it was never built, i saw the plans doing the research and something i've never known about lincoln and then he moved on to become a lawyer to make a little more money and he was a successful lawyer and dropped out of politics until 1854. in the interim, america is growing at a rapid pace. i and m canal, michigan canal opens up, 1848. what happens? it creates this major city on the other end, chicago chicago was a dumpy little swampy area on lake michigan and when it

becomes this major shipping port, it becomes the busiest port in the country when the canals finished for at leastto another decade and by 1900, the population growth is so explosive that it becomes the fastest growing city in the world at the turn-of-the-century and that was facilitated by this idea that we can champion along with. stephen douglas, even more importantly the illinois control railroad which a was built to supplementbo what was going on n the canals becomes the longest railroad in the world by 1850. he eventually goes from the northwest illinois all the way to new orleans but not until after the civil war and becomes a major transit route during the civil war so keep those things in mind, these are two months development in the history of the country, the midwest, links

eastern markets to the southern port, it's globalization in a very small sense but a very growing sense. what happens when the civil war comes along? we know what we can says, we know what the house divided speech, lincoln douglas debates what i started going into the material and found something very interesting that he said literally in the first debate with even douglas in illinois 1858 running for senator at that time against douglas, douglas controlled the illinois democratic party and at that t time senators were not directly elected, they were elected by state legislature so he became the senator so what happened was lincoln, talking about slavery made another argument in this was during the first debate.

he said every man has a right to earn his own bride and -- i'm paraphrasing, equal footing with everyone so this is lincoln's view of economic progress you have a right to offer your labor for pay, you have the opportunity to ascend the economic ladder and used those words, economic ladder. how do you move up and avoid being this backwards in all your life doomed to scribal farming, how do you do that? this is part of the american system that we have grown up to learn in our history but there is more than that. here's something even more exciting, this is another side plot in thesp whole lincoln stoy that lori during his sort of, i wouldn't call it exile but estrangement from politics which lasts roughly from the time he

leaves the general assembly to roughly 1854 when douglas passes the douglas nebraska act allowing for expansion, lincoln comes to this realization that was reallyhe important other thn ending slavery is that we still need to pay attention to infrastructure. 1847 is the only term in the house of representatives, he gives a long speech, one of his longest speeches ever on infrastructure. why is it important to him force in canals and railroads? what does it mean too the health and future of the nation? lincoln thought it was essential and he was disparaging president polk at the time for fighting the next war and neglecting this huge national issue. keep in mind up until lincoln's euro, many of the founding

fathers and southerners thought federal funding of infrastructurere was unconstitutional. said in ane himself annual message, even before the cano era, i like the idea, we should be building roads and canals and things like that but it's not in the constitution so that was used as an argument against federal funding of infrastructure foror decades, decades before the civil war. lincoln selected, 1860, there's secession of the southern states, lincoln have to go into washington by secret route because of assassination plot and attempts. he getsil there and civil war starts. in prosecuting the civil war, lincoln's record is very well known but what he had embedded in this very basic messages or foundational ideas on raising

economic progress. what did he favor? first of all the railroad, it became a very popularar idea in 1840s, john c fremont ran for president againstt buchanan campaign on that. he was one of the first republicans, the republican party doesn't come along untilhe mid 19th century, 1850s and the new republican party is against slavery and for transcontinental railroad and lincoln having represented the illinois central as a lawyer knew the importance of it. so he favors that and in one of his annual messages which were then the state of the union speech is, it mentions a bunch of other things. he's the first president to do a telegraph message, he gets a message from san francisco and loves telegraph as we know the

civil war, he spent a lot of time getting dispatches from various battles, first year civil war went very badly for the union and of course lincoln shuffles generals, he's trying to get his troops where they need to be and most of them are the better generals, it turns out our the railroad engineers who became generals and later they become after and transcontinental building so here's what is remarkable at the height of the civil war this awful bloodshed, 700,000 people lose their lives, the majority of them news their lives in the cabs to various diseases, cyprus, diphtheria, pneumonia and there's no here and they have no idea what's going on because the germ theory of disease doesn't come along until 20 or 30 years later though lincoln is an early advocate of

medical research. he establishes pathology institute and i found the papers where he talks about using disinfectants and some of the union camps and he doesn't even know about germs, he just dares about it, i saw a letter where it says thisac looks like a good idea so he is our narrator in chief and wants to do new things and see new ways of communicating, transporting goods, of getting us to where we need to be and one of the biggest sort of bill swoops he signed into law are three fundamental laws, the homestead act which allows people basically free land out west, the moral act which establishes land grants and pacific rail wide acts, to laws which finance and give theta land for the transcontinental railroad.

the following year, 1862, the following year he passes the national banking act and this is for the first time establishing green dollar that's our national currency and establishes also an income tax to pay for the war and during the war the union, the gdp creates this, a very small tax, 3%, over $800 to pay it, flat tax but it was the first income tax repealed 1873, i believe and then it comes back in 1913 but it was a first way of the national v guardsmen financing its expenses on that level so that was a very important development all this s happened during the civil war, there's horrible battles, gettysburg in 1863 then the war ntis over, lincoln loses his lie 1865, he's assassinated at the h

theater but is legacy lives on and here's the most amazing part of the story, lincoln's view of economic progress, the building infrastructure, it comes out of another part of his psyche, 1847 invented a boat, a boat designed to lift up not a very big boat but it was lifted up in shallow waters and he patented before he left washington in 1848 and traveled onto the canal though lincoln is the only president who is a patented inventor inventor so he is this innovator in chief, how do we do things better and use technology? how do we do the things we are really good at to make this a better country for everyone? those of the principal things i discovered but again, the legacy

lives on, he inspired a whole new generation of progressive politicians thinkers, frank lloyd wright, james adams, social reforms, the lincoln highway which was the first national east-west route, because all the way to san francisco and named after him and inspired by him. in fact, i was born just off the lincoln highway, the hospital where i was born no longer exists but was called the crossroads of america and of course there's lincoln all over my state and on our license plate though we have all this inspiration. then it goes evenhe further, the roads in this country were really terrible going from one part of the country to another especially from the midwest to the west. 1919, a young girl named dwight eisenhower takes a convoy to explore the state of the rooms

along the lincoln highway from one coast to the other and comes to theu' real undeniable conclusion that they are just awful. some of the routes following were just ruts, pioneer trails through the mountains and deserts and from that time on even into the new hour, people are saying how do we pay for this, how do we do this? the first idea was the lincoln highway 1913 and the first concept of financing was that it should be privately financed so when entrepreneur was there, we can raise the money to do this. henry ford says look, you're not going to do this and i'm not going to contribute. you're going to need federal funding to do this so they don't raise enough money, they get some subscribers including

woodrow wilson, i think he gave $5 or something and it terribly underfinanced and doesn't happen until eisenhower becomes president 1956, interstate highway act and creates the largest network of highways on the planet, 40000 miles plus. i tried inflation adjusted for today's dollars, it would have been at least $600 billion project. now we face at least $6 trillioo in repairs, of course there is a proposal for the 2 trillion-dollar american jobs plan by president biden and we are looking at that now so with a lot of my stories, this is like my fifth book on infrastructure history, finance, telling stories about the people behind these ideas and the principal here is very powerful you do need to make these investments, this is how we link

our cities and towns and farm fields from coast to coast and there's a lot of things we need to do and i'd be happy to take questions but i'll leave you with this one thing that what we are very good at that lincoln personified was this idea that innovation would not only lift our economic station through entrepreneurship invention, discovery, new technologies but also lived our spirit that this is aspirational, we still truly believe this new invention out of the market for this new idea change the world and that's what i think makes us americans and that's part of the path forward and one of the reasons i wrote this book, and i have to tell you one last

anecdote, i wrote it backwards. i started with the covered era the pandemic we are in and i lost two friends and i know lots of people who lost friends and my condolences if you knew somebody who perished in this ugly thing revealed something about us we do need to create a better infrastructure, social infrastructure, better educationallp infrastructure, health infrastructure as well as physical infrastructure and better roads, bridges and tunnels, railroads, all of these things that come under the huge category of infrastructure and i can't say enough that building is what we do and it builds our spirit andns confidence and givs usee something to hope for, it's aspirational. with that, i'd love to take your questions and there's a bunch of

stories in the book and it was a pure joy to write living in the land of lincoln and people asked me how long it took to write and it's like all my life but it's an ongoing story andnd i know al of you will contribute to this effort to realize what we need to do and we are back to jim, i think. >> thank you very much. just to start off, before i even ask let me encourage everyone to enter your own questions in the q&a box and we'll keep going on that. with the tariff the main source of income, do you think lincoln would be in favor of higher tariffs today given china? >> i think the whole tariff formula proved to be not enough to do what we needed to in terms of infrastructure. this is the whole argument

during the 19th century, tariffs for used to fund some infrastructure but it wasn't enough. is it a good way to finance these things i'll leave that to the historians andwe financial analysts, i think what we do need is broad-based sustainable way of financing this weather is public-private or bonds or carbon tax, there's so many proposals on the table but we need to get that discussion going because obviously look at the nation as our house so if you don't invest in your house, you will need to paint it and replace heating and air conditioning, all of these things we are out. if you don't do that, you're looking at problems so the house is our nation and it needs to be fixed and upgraded put in technology and address climate

change, all of these things. and that isat the current argument.so hadley planets? >> you mentioned in the book and innovator in chief, one of the things, i'll relate you mentioned the patent, i'm wondering if you can expand upon them, the only president and secondly, a lesser note story that you bring out is a dual challenge lincoln had an bit about that, most people aren't aware of that. >> there are two good stories and they both happen at different times of the inventors story was that for lincoln to get to washington, he had to take this awful route through the great lakes, through the erie canal down the hudson river and sometimes he took the overlaying house and often when he was on a boat they would get

stuck and they would pry the boat loose with physical labor so he came up with this idea, designed it on the ship where he had these polls, would lift it and had inflatable buoys to float the boat up higher and it was a clever invention. he made a model of it, he had a friend constructed in its now a smithsonian, a beautiful craft. not built as far as i know beyond the model stage and nobody used it besides the railroad era, probably not much need for it. the dual challenge was lincoln had some issues with depression and several courtships, one of his sweethearts died in springfield, madly in love with her, she dies and he's corrupt

and gets very depressed and there was mary owens before he meets mary todd whose very sprightly, intelligent. legally savvy, new henry clay, corrupt with that full cultural and louisville, kentucky. a fellow kentuckian and lincoln was very awkward socially for some reason unless he was given a. things didn't go well at first they brokend then off and he was horribly depressed and his friend joshua took away his razor and he wouldn't come out of his bed and it was terrible and somebody would insult him and there was a challenge and fortunately 19th century duals were complex affairs, you could apologize or somebody could piece so he didn't fight it and there was a good thing. if we lost lincoln, i t can't

imagine what this country would be t like. good question. >> here's an interesting one, if you could pick one thing to spend infrastructure money on today, what would it be. >> that's easy for me, it would be healthcare because one of the things they discovered in writing the book backwards is that there are massive inequities in terms of healthcare coverage between communities ofse color and the rest of the country, it is an evenly divided, i live in a county north of thehe city where we have a plethora of good hospitals but if you go the south side of chicago that's not the case, they are struggling to keep hospitals open so i would spend the money and say look, how do we get these plans so everybody gets decent basic healthcare? i don't know if that's healthcare system or medicare for all but we need to come up

with something. the covered crisis exposed a lot of these inequities and it was horrible because some evil didn't have access to healthcare or they didn't go into the hospital because they were afraid they couldn't pay for so this is part of my social infrastructure t argument with lincoln would have embraced because i go as far as the 14th amendment inspired by him the equal treatment clause think at the very least in this country we should treat everybody fairly and equally. of course they haven't been but i think that's something we need to talk about when we talk about infrastructure. >> very good. leo schmidt, would lincoln be in favor of a line item veto for belly financing out of infrastructure bills ? >> i don't think he would have

looked at that specifically because he was kind of a big picture thinker so transcontinental railroad, how big of a project was that? of course when you look atin his three, the robber baron era and waste and displacement of native americans murdering them and putting them on reservations, there's a lot of bad things that happened because of the expansion economic policies no doubt about that. how can you see that? i don't know b what he would hae thought to be honest about that. the question during time wasn't necessarily government waste, it was government not spending enough money on the things that matter the most, the greatest number of people so that is a tough one and i went to really pass on that but i think he would have looked at it eventually. he was very open-minded to new ideas. >> abraham lincoln and frederick

douglass knew each other well, tell us about their report and how their relationship impacted lincoln's values and policies. >> in modern parlance, i think they would have been enemies. lincoln was the first president i could tell who welcomed douglas into the white house. douglas was a thinker, speaker, abolitionist. he wrote two autobiographies and you read them, he is amazing. he opens up the whole issue of slavery and economic equality and what we need to do. there's probably no better person if you want to understand where we are today, read frederick douglass and there's a good biography on him right now. douglas was very critical of lincoln in the early years even though they talked on what we

would consider a fairly regular basis and he was in the white house and lincoln welcomed him in. douglas didn't think lincoln was doing enough to end slavery. emancipation proclamation didn't and slavery in totality and it was incomplete declaration that mostly read slaves to fight the union side so that is one interpretation. all the pieces thatre need to fall, equal education and funding infrastructure for every community, that would come later but douglas lived into the 1880s and pretty much was advocating for equal rights, he was at the 1893 world exposition in chicago and i think in the end he agreed lincoln done more than any other

president to advance the issue of equality and ending slavery and i don't think too many historians going to disagree and inspired the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and of course the great civil rights legislation in the 60s but i think both would agree there's more work that needs to be done. >> is a different kind of question, how would lincoln convince folks broadband is the new canal system. >> i don't think he would hesitate in doing it and this is why. when he received since sent the first telegraph, he been peddling his invention since the 1840s and he was really struggling to convince people like hey, this is global communications, folks.

instead of pony express and putting something on a packet boat the slow route, your sending messages at the speed of light in this was quantum and lincoln loved the idea and there is all of this accounts of him being in the white house receiving and sending messages and it was something i think he would hold party have embraced. we can allou be hooked up to the same system travel globally, i think you would have loved the idea. >> we got some good questions coming in, keep them coming. i'm wondering lincoln's actions on education and if any of his ideas would apply today and equality. >> here is a great back story, the moral act he signed in 1862

establishese land-grant college, state universities we know today. the first iteration set aside 30,000 acres for state they could do anything they wanted, they could sell it,ls farm it, produce income from it and r that's the concept of the land grab. it wasn't direct subsidy as we know today and it was the principal means in the 19th century were doing something big as the federal government didn't have the income for one and of course there was the states rights argument that states should be doing at first. well, states didn't have the ability to raise capitol and a lot of investment that went into this, especially railroad, so education, lincoln, i discovered was so focused on education because of his own shortfalls in the area and only had about a

year of formal education and the rest was self learned. he learned the law and became a lawyer studied and was a great reader of all sorts of history and red you clips and was into math all sorts of subjects i never knew you read so he would have embraced the idea of expanding the educational system and the moral act was just one of many, there are several other extensions of that that went into the 20th century that established universities at historically black colleges that came out of the, native american colleges out of that and subsequent iterations which i think he would have loved but the real story is even more interesting, the vermont senator who had his name attached originally proposed the universities inspired by the

idea of baldwin g turner who knw lincoln as a young man and proposed this idea of land grant called industrial university which would be teaching two basic things, agriculture mechanical arts which became engineering that he had this idea for decades and pretty much passed on moral who tried to get past in 1858, buchanan vetoed it and it became law under the can but lincoln was very well aware of turner had him as a visitor during the civil war and turner was a famous abolitionist. ironically in the same time were stephen douglas got a start in jacksonville illinois, he was the father of the moral act in what we calll the state college systems engineering schools and things like that. >> we have a what if question, what you believe president lincoln would have achieved if

he had been able to serve out his second term? >> i think that's one of our most essential questions to ask today.il the low hanging fruit for me is that he would have completed reconstruction had he lived even longer, he wouldn't have abandoned the 1870s and that led to the horrible jim crow era and lynchings in awful times in our history. lincoln would have followed through, he would have witnessed the passage the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment and would have taken it a step further. he would have insured political equality, complete voting rights and we generally read it him for being the inspiration of the great society programs, civil rights laws of the 60s so i think he would have been able to

see that through and add to it. he was definitely the soul of all those laws. >> john, i'm curious, how would you explain or interpret the transition between the canal system and rail system? how long did that take and what were the stages of development? >> that is a fascinating question. it didn't take long in terms of history because what needed to happen for railroads to take off his they had to mass-produce rail cut a lot of trees to build ties, they had to create the technology to extend real over long distances and with that came the steam engine, breaking systems, a lot of this was

centered in chicago and one of the ironic fact of history is that the car company was one of chicago's biggest industries and inception. they literally had to build all of this out of wood, lincoln traveled inie his son became a lawyer was president of that company for a while and there was a horrible strike so thousand important parts. with every one of these stories there are advances in history, how do you build a better real durable in alls conditions? how do you make better iron? a lot of this happened in chicago, pittsburgh, cleveland where he had all of these things that contribute to advancement of one technology so we go from

the canal air, 1830s/40s the real takes up because of the mass-produced railroad cars and engines and ties and spikes and when the goldenea spike driven into the transcontinental railroad in 1869, interesting things happen. they had to w reinvent, build bridges, most bridges were made out of wood. here is one great story, lincoln was defending a complete and build a bridge across illinois and the railroad needed to get across the river and at that time at the end of the steamboat era, they thought they owned the river and had a right to the river and know the technology like railroads will cross their river so it's an incident where the steamboat either crashed or lost control and hit this bridge

and since the river was, the bridge was made of wood, it burned to the ground. the steamboat owner who had underinsured sues the bridge company and bring on lincoln as an attorney to represent the bridge company and makes this interesting argument and doesn't win the case but eventually it's one and he makes this compelling statementre, it's not a bridge r trader or anything, it's a public amenity. links chicago, the rest of the country across the mississippi. we need to build more, they are not stopping congress or stopping people from discovering land in the west, we needed so that was a really important case called fef, i wrote a whole

chapter and it's fascinating about how lincoln constructed this argument about the public good of infrastructure. >> hr 40 is in front of congress possibly, dealing with preparations for descendents of slaves. what would you can think? >> i think he would think about it thoughtfully and it is a complex subject and i think we need to address inequities in all of our systems in education and healthcare and the fact that there is an environmental justice issue that a lot of etoxic plants and refineries in communities of color and a raft of things that i think lincoln would have fundamentally addressed. it really spoke to his sense of fairness and the idea that equality is truly based on your

ability to take advantage of opportunity and somehow if you are held back for whatever reason, it should be addressed. i think he would have discussed it and talked to frederick douglass about, had he lived he would have talked to washington and all the people talking about it today. i even think he would have taken a hard look at how we do this. >> one specific question, when i can out as finance, public or privately and the railroads, there's a lot of speculation, can you explain that this whole process was financed. >> this is one of the interesting stories of american finance, when the state of illinois planets in michigan canal, it flowed, it was

horribly inadequate to pay for this so what they did is said okay, we're going to have contract, private contracts who can hire their own workers to build small sections of the canal, which you think management. probably not a good idea and one contractor, you put the contract out for bid, the best bidder gets the job. they send notices out to ireland and other countries say they promised these irish guys, a navigator on a canal and that's what they called them, navigators and digging it by hand so at first it was undercapitalized project and then they got foreign planets and so foreign money came into

building these canals and then into the railroads and the land grant system was that basically you get the land and find the money to build it. there's some money raised for the railroad again mostly bonds but there's a lot of foreign investment. >> john with 19 books now to your credit, what is number 20 going to be about? >> well, i hope it's about bringing the environment to every neighborhood in the country, climate change of course is our existential and what i call a reverse walden, how do we enjoy nature in suburbia in the middle of the city? what does that mean? how do we produce our own energy? how do we clean our air and water and stuff like that? how do you localize it? one of the things that i

discussed in the book is that climate change affects everything and certainly affects our way of looking at infrastructure we build bridges hire and redesign our water systems, everything. so this book will look at, how do we shrink this question down, break it down a little bit, what does it mean for my neighborhood? hopefully that will be my next book and i would call it the natural labor movement. >> i wanted to -- would lincoln have embraced the concept of public-private partnerships? the cooperation of federal government and pharmaceutical companies, is there an analysis

in the era of public-private partnerships? >> i think so. a lot of these projects done, what really provides and undergirding the financial structure is the fact that they were able to solicit eastern european investors should so the most the federal government could do because most of the land appropriated for native americans, they say will give you the land, baby states can help a little bit floating bonds but it will be enough, is never enough and you're going to have to find the rest of the money to do this and that was certainly the story with all the railroads. all the railroads after the transcontinental railroad, local systems and there was one side story originally a journalist

named henry bullard, had started out his career covering the civil war, created the first newspaper syndicate and became . friend of lincoln but he eventually got so much information on these railroad projects out west that he became an investor in a financier, there's the famous house in manhattan that was henry bullard. of course he lost a lot of that railroad stocks crash, they were up and down but eventually financed thomas edison so that is another great story but he brought in, he go back to german investors because he was originally from germany and say look, you know this railroad your financing in kansas city? you might want to take another look at the paper statements and i can help you with this and made huge brokerage fees and got stock became filthy rich the

bullard house is still there and his history is probably just as interesting as anybody else from that era. >> john, a final question. you put so many lincoln tourist destinations, which is your favorite? >> oh, gosh. that's tough. that's like taking your favorite child, but not there. come on. you know, the thing that strikes me, and this is not something most people even associate with lincoln, a place called lincoln landing in lockport, illinois. it's one of those things where lincoln came through. after his only term congress and that is what spurred my imagination and like how did he see the future of the country?

abandon ... you think of all of the towns along the canal in new york city in new orleans and all of the things that happened after it. he had this vision, and it sometimes places have this power to really instill his vision. no eternity given lincoln said and all of us have tried and we don't, we don't completely understand and we will but it's important to see what he saw in the field maybe what he felt. and to aspire to a better country. it was still a worthy goal in a moral principle that we cannot abandoned. >> what on behalf of the school and the cfa, it is wonderful to have you back. and to our audience thank you for tuning in. we have grero