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>> hello, everyone, and welcome, including to all our visitors and viewers fromer c-span. i am jim kelly, developer of global security analysis at fordham university, proud to be cosponsoring lincolnomics with our partners, the museum of american finance and this is part of our series celebrating business education affordable university. it is particularly timely since we have financial history at fordham university in conjunction with the museum of modern finance. please enter your questions by typing them in the qa section in the bottom of your screen.

we will be addressing as many questions as possible after the presentation. you will be entered to win a free book of lincolnomics. winners will be notified at the end of the week. now turn it over to our speaker. >> thank you, jim, and we also appreciate everyone at the cfa. this is the third time i've had the pleasuree to introduce john wasik. the first time he had written 10 books come in the second time he was up to 16 and now we are we're up to 19 books in total. so congratulations on not, and this book is particularly timely because part of it they are discussing infrastructure in congress is debating an infrastructure build and john

ponders what would lincoln do. his prolific writing also includes over 1000 columns and blogs and articles in places like "the new york times" and wall street journal, reuters and bloomberg and most importantly our own magazine and financial history an article based on a book. and we will have a springpr isse sometime next month. john has appeared from nbc to mpr, cnbc, msnbc and pbs. he is a native of illinois and there are many destinations and he continued doing that. therefore when you read the book there are several great erappendixes in one of them is e

review of the various lincoln touristin destinations. and john, please tell us what would lincoln do. >> thank you, david, for that generous amount of words. it's always a pleasure to speaker and i thank you so much to our great sponsors from the school of business and the center for global security analysis and trend analysis and all of you for attending this session and what i hope is going toto be a revealing new look at abraham lincoln and infrastructure and the story starts in 1828, when a young man is transporting goods, agricultural produce from southern indiana, down the

mississippi to new orleans and he discovers two things. he sees people that are enslaved do not have the same economic opportunity to advance their own station and he also sees the importance of transporting goods to market and having access to matter whereke you live so if yu are a a rule farmer no matter wherever, you don't have to go to the celebrity of what was then then interstate system to get their this young man was abraham lincoln. he took another trip out of springfield, illinois, in 1820 is important because that gave

new york city, which became one of the greatest ports of the world, access to the web into the great lakes at the time chicago was not even a city. it was a trading post and the only way getting down is through an ugly portage called montlake which even in 18 -- are actually 1673 saying that there should be the erie canal, new york city and others, you can get to the illinois river and mississippi and on to the present city one of the first impressions is the

mission was growing, that was the impression that lincoln had, at the time that we don't study a whole lot. because we mostly skimmed from the revolution to theut civil wr and there was much history in between. i wanted to know how that our country develop and what did we need to do to get where we are today and what we need to do and to the more equitable presence. like it changed his worldview and his ranking and he is in springfield and he was doing

anything to make ends meet. and by being very curious about the world and marketsio and economics. and the things that transform not only t his life, but the lie of all americans and even people in cities. so he can post something interesting and the first thing he said is that we need to build a canal from springfield all the way to the illinois river which would have facilitated a great new port and access to the markets of new orleans and further south. also creating a canal that would laterls be called the illinois d tmichigan canal that connects chicago to illinois river, only about 96 miles and the third thing which is actually, they

thought it was way too expensive, connecting the whole state to the rest of thef easten market and that was going to be called illinois central. and that includes massive infrastructure plans and then promptly it was under capitalized. the canal had to take some time off because it t didn't have the money to hire irish laborers to get paid almost nothing to did it by hand and she had to do that open of chicago, the great lakes, and the rest of illinois to the global market. abraham lincoln saw this early, and he was fairly successful at convincing people.

and not living in the big city, on equal footing with everyone else. you create transportation routes, you get the infrastructure to get people there. and lincoln was fairly successful as a young assemblyman and she introduced this conceptdu vase on the american system and it would create economic progress, fundamental to the view of the world and the united states and they were very much into building infrastructure and internal church to pay for them. and they call it the era of good feelings. i'm not quite sure why they call

it that, but the biggest thing was to build canals all across the country to connect these majorry river systems which were our inner states at that time and of course the railroads took off in the following decades of the 1840s in what became of this huge interstate system because the canals exceeded the growth. what had happened when lincoln proposes little canal out of springfield is that he knew that any place where the canal was at a conjunction, a law of commerce and development would take off and this is very little known, but he planned the town at the intersection of this canal and it was never built and i saw it

from doing the research and something i'd never known about lincoln before and then he moved on to become a lawyer to make a little bit more money and he was a very successful lawyer and kind of dropped out of politics until 1854. but in the interim everything is growing at a rapid pace. the canal, the illinois and michigan canal, opens up in 1848 and what happened was he created this major city on the other end of it. chicago, which was a dumpy and swampy area on lake michigan and what it becomes this is major shipping port, the busiest port in the country when the canal is finished for at least another decade. and by 1900 the population growth is. so explosive that it becomes the fastest at the turn

of the century and even more importantly the illinois central railroad which was really built to supplement what was going up and down the canal becomes the longest railroad in the world by 1850 and eventually goes from the northwest tip of illinois to it in new orleans, but not until it becomes a major transit route for a troop of material during the civil war. thesewo are two very immense developments in the history of the country, the midwest and eastern markets tost western markets to southern port of. in a very growing sense. so what happens when the civil war comes along? well, we know what lincoln does,

we know about the house divided speech, we s know about lincoln and douglas debate, but going over some of the material i found something very interesting that he said in the first debate with stephen douglas and douglas had controlled the illinois and democratic party and at that time the senators were not directly elected and they were reflected by state legislator jim legislature, so what happened was that in talking about slavery he made another argument, and this is during the first debate and he said every man has a right to earn his own bread and i'm paraphrasing, equal footing with everyone. so this is his view of economic progress that you have a right to offer your labor for pay and

the opportunity to assume the economic ladder use of those words, how do you move up and avoid being this backwoodsman all your life doomed to hardscrabble farming. well, this is part of the american system that we have tried to. grown-ups learn in our history, but there's more to it than that. there is something more exciting than this is another side in the whole story that really during his sort of i would not call it exile, but his estrangement from politics, which lasts from the time to roughly 1854 when douglas passes it, allowing for the expansion of western territories, lincoln comes to the realization that what is really important here other than

ending slavery is that we still need to pay attention to infrastructure. he actually gives a long speech, one of the longest ever and he was disparaging president whole providing the mexican water and keep in mind and he said even before the canal, i like the idea, things like that amount

was used as an argument against federal funding of infrastructure for decades before the civil war. so lincoln is elected in 1860 and in the civil war starts. clinton is very well known. but what he had been vetted in the basic messages were veryge foundational ideas on raising all those and so what did he favor? well, first of all, the transcontinental railroad. john fremont who ran for presidentre against buchanan and

the republican party doesn't come along until the mid-19th century. and they knew the importance of it. he mentions a whole bunch of other things as well. he is the first president to do a telegraph message transcontinental. and he loves the telegraph, he spends a lot of time giving dispatches from the various battles, it went very badly for the union. and of course and most of them are the better journals, the

railroad engineers and they later become active in the transcontinental railroad. in the height of the civil war. 700 people lose their lives. 700,000 of them. many talk about diphtheria and so lincoln is an advocate of metal research and he has established the apology needed to. and i found the papers were he talks about using disinfectant and some of the union camps and he doesn't even know about germs, he hears about it and click okay, this looks like a

really good, he wants to do new things and see new ways of communicating and transporting goods and getting us where we need to be in one of the biggest sort of things that he signs into law are three fundamental things, the homestead act, allowing people free land out west, and the moral land grant colleges and of course the pacific railway as well, including finance, and the transcontinental railroad. when i was 1862. he also passes the national banking act. this establishes the green dollar also an income tax and a

very small 3%, the flat packs. and it was the first ways the national government financed its expensivee agenda on that level. so it is an important development. and lincoln loses his life, 1865, but his legacy lives on. the most amazing part is that his view of economic progress buildingng infrastructure is really coming out of another

part, in 1847 he had actually invented this, he patented it before leaving in 1848. and lincoln is the only president who is patented investor. so this innovator in chief, how do we use technology, how do we really do the things we are really a for the principal thins that we have discovered. we inspired a whole new generation of progressive politicians and thinkers. that includes the lincoln highway, the first national east and west route, times square to

san francisco, named after him and inspired by him. i was born just off the lincoln highway but it was called the crossroads of america. and we have all this inspiration and then it goes even further, the roads were really terrible going from one part of the country to another, especially from the midwest to the west. in 1919 dwight eisenhower took a convoy to explore the state of the roads and that includes pioneer trails, thehe mountains,

deserts, and from that time on people are saying how do we do this. and henrys. ford said you're not going to do this with privateng money, you're going to need federal funding to do it. so they don't raise enough money, they did a subscriber with woodrow wilson, i think that he gave $5 to something. and that includes a network of highways on the planet.

the nearly 600 billion-dollarol projects. not includes what we are looking at now. and as with a lot of my stories and this is like my fifth book on infrastructure history, finance and telling stories about pool behind me and the principal idea is powerful but you must make investments. this is how we link cities and towns in our farm fields from coast-to-coast and there's a lot of things that we need to do, and i'd be happy to take questions but i will leave you with this one thing.

that what we have got that lincoln personified as the idea of innovation that not only was economic entrepreneurship in inventions and discoveries and new technologies, but also with their spirit as well that this is aspirational we still truly believe that this o new inventin in this new idea is going to change the world and i think that is what makes us americans and part of the path forward and i have to tell you one last anecdote is a rotor backwards and s started off in the pandemc and i lost two friends, i know lots of people who lost friends. but it reveals something about

it that we do need to create a better social infrastructure and health of the structure as well as physical structure and better roads and bridges and how most, railroad all the things to come under this. and it gives us something to him i would love to take your questions now. there's a lot of stories in the book's and it was a pure joy to write. living in the land of i lincoln. and this is an ongoing story and i hope all of you will continue

with what we need to do. >> we encourage everyone to please enter your own questions. and what does the main source of income, can we talk about china and the tariff? >> i think that the whole tariff formula proved not enough and this was the whole argument during the 19th century, they used to fund some of the structure, but it wasn't enough. is it a good way to finance these things, i will leave that to the historians in the financial analysts. we will break away here to

fulfill our more than four year commitment to congressional coverage. we will return to this program momentarilyug following a pro forma session in the senate. we are lied to the senate floor here on c-span2