from these television companies and more, including charter communications. >> broadband is a force for empowerment. that is why charter invested billions building infrastructure, upgrading technology, empowering opportunity in communities big and small. charter is connecting us. >> charter communications , along with these television companies, support c-span2 as a public service. >> for the 22nd year in a row, to be is live with a library of congress national book festival. all day, you will hear from authors, such as david maraniss, clint smith, elizabeth williamson, and many others. settle in. thanks for being with us. the national book festival was founded in two thousand one by

first lady laura bush along with then library of -- librarian of congress and the current librarian of congress has continued. carla: it is so delightful to see people line up outside waiting to hear authors and get their books signed and all of these things. there is just so much excitement . after two years of being virtual, that was good for when we all had to hunker down, but being in person is just delightful. >> what is your role today? carla: my role is head cheerleader, and also to open up the main stage to actually get a chance to moderate a panel of young adult authors. this year we are having a stage for the young and young at heart, teenagers, specifically. the interesting part is we had a

youth advisory committee which could all happen during a pandemic, and they zoomed in through the country and gave us advice about authors they would like to hear from. they recommended the books and so i am just being led on to the stage but young people will be interviewing some of their favorite authors. >> how many authors are participating? carla: almost 120. to have that aspect of them being right here. people can buy the books. some people i can tell have books from other times. they are bringing some hard read books to be signed you can also tune in at certain times to our website and some things will be livestreamed. so that is another opportunity.

in all day long on c-span book tv. the theme is -- carla: books bring us together. think about being all day long on c-span. people who can't make it in person and they can participate in my own mother said she is watching today she is 90 years old and she said she is going to do her ironing and watched c-span all day. the idea that it is bringing together people from all backgrounds, all places throughout this country is what we think really sizes the power of books. >> last night was the opening of the national book festival on live tv here what is the point of having that? carla: it is really a kickoff to the festival and started years

ago. there was a tribute, and i hope you will get to see the rerun of that for david mccullough, one of the people who suggested that we celebrate with the authors the night before the festival begins. so that special tribute to him really gave authors and illustrators who were there together because during the festival, it is hard because they are going to sessions in the pit interact as much, and to have the library staff member is there, sponsors, people there to just celebrate before the hustle and bustle of the day. carla: you became the librarian of congress in 2016 so you didn't get to work with laura bush on the founding. carla: what i had an opportunity to do was know about the texas book festival when she was the

first lady of texas and the first to be a librarian. then when she became first lady of the nation, she started with my predecessor the national book festival and now we have a connection with her again because our new literary director was the person who helped her in texas and also starting the national book festival. he joined us last year's now clay smith is back so it is full-circle. misses -- misses bush contacted me personally to recommend him. how is that to have laura bush call and say you might be good? >> you brought some books. what do you want to show? carla: i can't get enough of david maraniss

in his new best seller about jim thorpe. it is a heart rendering story. can we give a peek about it? he lost his olympic medals because of something other people were doing but he got caught because he told the truth. he went on to have a fantastic career. he has really been proclaimed one of the best athletes that ever lived. when you think about the inequities and the native american schools, that is part of the story. and then being an athlete at the wrong time in a way in terms of being recognized. then it is just a page turner because you want to know, did he

have happiness in his life and all of these things. so i would really recommend this. >> at 10:00 a.m., david maraniss is going to be live. carla: people should get the book. and then this one, he is an environmentalists. you can see tabs on this one because it speaks to what we are thinking about and going through right now in terms of our climate and environment and the local nature. >> is there a reason you used different colored tabs? carla: yes, but i won't reveal right now. rudy has their individual system. but as a librarian, you are

seeing this being revealed. sandy hook, in the news, but so elizabeth williamson in her book about it and lots of caps on this one. >> the audience will have a chance to chat with her later. carla: i hope that you will because it is in the news and has been in the news. some people might not remember all of the things that were involved and the subsequent parts of it. be prepared, it is heart-wrenching in many ways, but it is something we shouldn't forget. she is an excellent writer. >> you brought to mark with you and we are not covering these two. carla: she came out with this cool cover.

it is science fiction. but it is something. it starts off with this librarian. and then leslie jordan, he will be talking about his misadventures as he calls them. >> and he is being interviewed by megan mullally? carla: yes, because her husband is nick offerman to have that together is really going to be cool. there are children's authors and i see a lot of young people waiting because they have favorite authors and want to get the book signed and talk to the author. it is a fun time it appeared you can look at the schedule online and two in right here. i am a history buff. >> carla hayden will be back

later joining us and taking your calls. here is your chance to talk to the librarian of congress at the national book festival. the full schedule of events is available at book tv.org. it was september 8, 2001 at the first national book festival sponsored by the library of congress occurred on the capitol grounds peered we caught up with the founder, laura bush. >> is this day what you expected? >> i am thrilled and excited to be here. i want to thank c-span for covering this. have a sunny day and i hope the camera shows behind me how huge the crowds are. >> we talked a lot that this idea came from the texas book festival here but where did the idea for the texas book festival come from? >> it came from the kentucky book festival.

a writer came to me and said he had been to a book festival in kentucky and he knew that texans were part of our story set he thought texans could put on a great festival. we researched a lot of festivals. we saw what they were like and then we started hours. >> in texas, it is the third year in november. will you be back? >> i am looking forward to it. what i like about the national book festival and the texas book festival is that it is right in the capitol. i like the symbolism and the ideas in books with the national government and our democracy because the ideas in books are so important to our democracy. >> last night you quoted her,

why? >> her mother took her to the library and introduced her and said she is nine years old and she has my permission to check out any book on these shelves. and then she wrote this in her biography that she went to the library as often as she could and she put her books in her bicycle basket and she read. >> was set similar to your experience? >> absolutely. i went to the library at the midland county courthouse. to have a library be in the center of town in the center square of my town showed me how important reading and libraries were to everyone in the town of midland. >> when we interviewed you in

july, you named the writer she would want around your dinner table. anyone you would like to add? >> we have a lot of great people at this table and i hope everyone who sees this who is anywhere in the area comes down. they can meet david mccullough and hear him read from his books and john adams with his new about -- new book. i love the idea of the new book about the second president. i hope people will read that book but also other american history books. we have great children's writers here today peered chris curtis the first african-american to win the newberry award is here reading from his book. we have been number of storybook characters. 77 gate out i am the south is that you can get your picture

made with clifford the big red dog. i hope people come out and do that. >> we want to give you a book to be mug. >> thank you so much and thank you for covering the national book festival. >> we are back live at the washington convention center the 22nd annual library of congress national book festival. i've covered all day, full schedule available at booktv.org. some of the authors you will be able to interact with today include novelist geraldine brooks, clint smith, elizabeth williamson, jack davis talking about the bold people, will bunch on the higher education system and cochair of the national book festival and cochair of the carlyle group, david rubenstein. these are some authors we will

have here on set that you will be able to talk with. just a few minutes david maraniss will kick off talking about his book about jim ford. -- jim thorpe. both carla hayden and laura bush mentioned david mccullough who passed away. he was a guest on c-span many times in was a guest of ours at the national book festival on several occasions. here is a quick montage of some of his visits. >> mr. mccullough is here for his sixth national book festival appearance and we hope you will continue to make this a habit. >> david mccullough came into my office two days after the first national festival to say how important it was to continue to

do this kind of event nationally and offered to help in any way. >> it was here in this great library of congress while i was employed in a government job as a young man that i first discovered the pole of history -- pull of the street and found out what i wanted to do. i could never express sufficiently my gratitude for the library of congress or to the library system overall. when you think of what we had in this country in our public library system, there is nothing like it in the world. when you walk through the doors of the public library anywhere in the country, when you walk through those doors, you are walking through the portals of freedom. >> curiosity is one of the

essential elements of being a human being. curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. it is like gravity. the more we know the more we want to know. i applaud those teachers who encourage their students to ask questions, not just to know the answers but to ask questions peered by asking questions, you find things out. if i tell you the king died and the queen died, that is a sequence of events. if i tell you the king died in the queen died of grief, that is a story. i am moved by the story and if i am excited to pursue that story for three, 4, 5 or more years, then i can't pull back. it is not a question of what is going to be on people's minds

are what subject has it been done, but do i want to do it, am i burning to do it? i know it when it happens. so far it has happened many times. this was a young man's revolution, cause. washington being a member of congress was known by the others in congress and they picked him because of his character. they knew the man and knew they could trust him. when the war was over and washington did return the command to the congress, he did something that had never been done before. when george the third was told washington might do this, george the third said if he does that he will be the greatest man in the world and he stood back from power as he promised to do in the beginning. but the real story is with those

men and rags who marched with him. when his army finally got to the delaware river and crossed the delaware river at night, trying to put the river between them and the oncoming british army, they were men who were heartily exhausted, sick, hungry, cold. many of them at their feet wrapped in rags because they had no shoes in the stories of men leaving bloody footprints in the snow from their bare feet are not mythical. that is the truth. we must never forget them. we must never not recognize what we owe to them and among the things that we must do is know about them, learn about them, tell our children and encourage our children and grandchildren to read about them and to know what they went through. these were not characters in a costume hasn't. they were human beings, israel

and life as we are and all the state did for our three is also part of what is stirring much of the world. august 22, after having attended church all day which was to be a lifelong habit for john adams, he went out under the stars and so inspired by the sermon he said in a state of euphoria, and it would also seem in the intention closer -- the intense pleasure they evoked, the amazing concave of heaven sprinkled and glittering with stars and he wrote into a

transport and that such wonders that were the guests of god, expressions of god's love. but the greatest gift of all was the gift of an inquiring mind. he has given us reason and to find the two end of our existence, it will be hard, he wrote, meaning the study still have him, but the point is now determined and i shall have the liberty to think for myself. i think the first page of a book is critical in one of my favorite endings is when the wright brothers put on their exhibit of what they can do at

home off at the cowpasture where they had been experiencing all of those years. he wanted to take his father up and he was in his 80's and up they went. all of the time they were up there, he cap sent higher, oral, higher -- he kept saying, higher orville, higher. wilbur said, no bird ever soared , you have to have adversity against you to lift off that is so very true. if everything were easy and we did nothing but sit around, we would not only not accomplish much of anything, i don't think we would be very happy. there is always something that needs fixed and people who need

help and advances that are exciting. what is happening in medicine will be written about for years and years and maybe one of the most important events of our time. it is all human ingenuity and perseverance and admirable use of the mind in working together. >> but would you be most proud of being achieved? >> tried to do his best. >> that was the story of david mccullough talking up the national book festival. he appeared about seven times. you can see in different locations. the festival used to be held at the mall, the capitol but now for the last several years the washington convention center. in just a few minutes the first

author will begin talking david , maraniss we'll be talking about his book about jim thorpe. there is an opening celebration and is storing candy small lard was one of the speakers -- and historian candace lard -- and we wanted to share it with you. >> it is an honor to be in the library of congress to be the rare ian of congress who is a national treasure and to be with all of you. thank you for having me. one of the great regrets of my life happened at the national book stubble 11 years ago. it was the -- book festival 11 years ago. it was under big beautiful

tense, history, humor, every category. then there was an author's tent where others could hang out. after my even i went into that tent and i was talking with one of volunteers and she asked me if there were any others i would like to meet. i am pretty shy so i was about to say no thank you, but just then i looked up and saw david mccullough. i will never forget it. you couldn't assume. it was tall, straight back, white-haired, elegant, smiling. before i could chicken out i said yes, is any chance i can meet david mccullough? like many people, i had long admired his writing and read his book for enjoyment and to try to understand how he wrote them to try to learn from them. i wanted to thank him for that. but the real reason i wanted to

meet him was because his work had helped me through one of the most difficult times in my life. six years earlier when i was finishing work on my first book i had a child that was born with stage iv neuroblastoma. it is a common childhood cancer but extremely rare to find it in utero. even though we found it so early, it had already spread to the baby's liver. she was given a 30% chance of survival and we started down this road it would last for two years. eight rounds of chemo, multiple surgeries, and a lot of nights in hospital rooms, sleepless and scared. the only escape i had, the only thing that helped at all was books. at night my husband was home with our older daughter and my baby was asleep in the crib hooked up to machines and

monitors and i sat in the corner of her room with a penlight in a pile of books and realize that along with all of the other magical things they do for us, books give us one more gift, they remind us that we are not alone. my sister sent me some books to take with me to the hospital, books that i will always love and be grateful for, but i also took a few of my own. one of one was "the great bridge" by david mccullough. it was a page turner and exactly what i needed. for just an hour or two every night to forget, to forget and to remember, to remember that this might be hard and scary, but there are a lot of things in life that are scary and you have to be brave or at least pretend that you are. fast forward six years and i am standing in front of david

mccullough at the national book festival and my daughter is a healthy, silly six year old. [applause] and i have a chance to thank someone who is not only my hero and although he could not have known it, helped me through this terrible time. instead of telling him what his books to me, i froze. he was so kind and gracious and i was just nervous and starstruck, i couldn't do it and i never did. i never told him and i have regretted it ever since, no day more than the day just a few weeks ago that i heard he had died. but i can learn from my mistakes, especially when given another chance. this is another national book festival and another rare opportunity to thank the people i admire, whose work has

inspired and educated me, look in my heart, and given me hope. so if you will indulge me, i would like to tell you what your books, your poetry is, your histories, novels, illustrations, words of advice and comfort have meant to me. they are essential and irreplaceable. they are what makes us human and lets us understand each other. they make us better than we were before we pick them up and i am deeply grateful for you. if you ever have one of those days that we all have when you think no one is listening, no one is paying attention, no one cares what you are creating, remember this, you are wrong. there is always someone on the other end. it might be in a library, office cubicle, farm, or in a hospital room with a sick child, it

doesn't matter, because for that person, your work is a lifeline. as a grateful reader, i thank you and i think david mccullough . i am only sorry i didn't say it sooner. [applause] >> that was historian candace mo illard. david maraniss will be talking about his most recent book about jim thorpe. this is live coverage of the national book festival on tv. >> just a small housekeeping note for those who are interested, there are restaurants in drinking

fountains around the corner from the pavilion and if you need to use those during the author presentations, we ask that you do so by quietly departing. we also want to notify you that this event will be recorded and your entrance constitute your consent to be filmed or otherwise recorded. thank you and enjoy the program. [applause] david: good morning and welcome to the history of biography state at the national book festival. the theme of this year's book festival, books brings us gather , let me say how wonderful it is to see you all here together in person for the first time since we gather here last in 2019.

[applause] we are thrilled that c-span's book tv viewers are also joining us. so welcome. [applause] c-span will be here throughout the day recording the events on the stage. this stage has a long history of being one of the festivals -- festival's most popular stage and we will delve into the role women played in the civil rights movement, america's relationship with the bald eagle, and a more complete accounting of the mexican revolution, and the strange history behind the search of the source of the nile river and many other topics. you learn a lot here at the history and biography stage and

we hope you will visit us at the library of congress to do research about subjects you are interested in to expense the beauty of the thomas jefferson holding or attend one of our life at the library events. most thursday nights we keep most exhibits open until 8:00 p.m. and host dynamic, free events for visitors. on september 15, and actress and podcast sisters will join us for a discussion. determine 22nd, mosaic theater will present a preview of the upcoming series of plays. novelist ian mcewan will talk about his new novel, "lessons." our first event will feature the undersecretary for museums and culture at the smithsonian institution and a conversation

with two-time pulitzer prize winner david maraniss about his new biography about jim thorpe. please sit back, enjoy, and have a wonderful day at the library of congress national book festival. david: it is my honor -- >> is my honor to be here. why did you choose jim thorpe? david: i think of this as a third book in a trilogy of sports figures who transcend sports the first was vince lombardi, who is not only a great football coach but representative of the mythology of competition and success of american life and what it costs.

the second was roberto clemente, who so many athletes are called heros and he was in the way he died in a plane crash delivery military aid. it seems the national -- natural third trilogy that he was not only a stunning athlete but also offered the opportunity through his life to explore the native american experience from 1887 to his death in 1953, such critical years in the lives of all native americans. i am honored to be here with you. it means a lot to me. kevin: so very important in federal policy and you described it in your book. david: 1887, the year jim thorpe

was born was one of the crucial years in the government policy towards native americans, and that it was the passage of the act which was an effort to take away the sense of communal property that native americans had and send them onto small parcels of land that were often then taken away and they had to prove over 25 years that they deserved to have that land. that was part of the long process of trying to turn indians into white people in different ways and jim thorpe endured that in many ways throughout his life. kevin: and then in 1953, the termination policy was enacted. david: which was the same thing, trying to terminate reservation life.

luckily that one didn't prevail. kevin: if i started reciting the things i did not know, the review here until midnight. blackhawk. david: blackhawk, i start with the parallelism between black, and jim thorpe, because they are both from the same tribe, same clan or band, and it is a little bit unclear whether jim thorpe was actually a descendant but there is some indication blackhawk's great-niece was jim thorpe's grandmother. his mother often told him he was the reincarnation of blackhawk. what i found fascinating was

away to explore how both of these famous men, native americans, or treated by white society. lockout, in 1833, after the blackhawk war as it was called but it was really a massacre when blackhawk tried to leave, 1000 members of his trying over the mississippi into their homeland, the military chased them back and killed many of them. adjusting, -- interestingly, three future presidents were involved in that. abraham lincoln was in the illinois militia. zachary taylor was an officer fighting against blackhawk. jefferson davis worked under the president of the confederate states of america and work under

taylor and took while caulk down to saint -- blackhawk down to st. louis. once blackhawk was captured, he was taken east and he became sort of an iconic figure in white america. huge crowds would come out. that represented the notion of indians being romanticized and diminished at the same time. i found paralleling that trip of lack of to cincinnati, pittsburgh, washington, d.c., norfork and up to new york, it paralleled jim thorpe after he won the olympic gold medals and being taken on parades into new

york and philadelphia and carlisle. he wasn't a prisoner of war of fame. they were both equally being romanticized and mythologized. path lit by lightening -- kevin: path lit by lightning. david: the story is there was a thunderstorm on the night that -- and he was a twin -- he had a brother that died at age nine in a boarding school of disease. the night they were born along the north canadian river in oklahoma, there was a thunderstorm and jim thorpe was given a name which is often translated as bright path, but i side more poetic which was path lit by lightning. and i thought that eliminates

everything and that is how i chose the title of the book. kevin: great name. so jim thorpe is like a great many native americans during that time in history, is raised in very difficult circumstances but eventually ends up at the carlisle indian industrial school. david: that was the third boarding school he was sent to. he kept running away and eventually his father who had five wives and 18 children altogether, and the wife he was married to at that point, she didn't want anything to do with jim and they sent him away to carlisle, the flagship government school of all of the scores of indian boarding schools in the nation.

it was founded in 1879, only three years after the battle of little bighorn. most of their fathers fought against custer and in the indian wars of the mid-century. with her standing bear was one of those and he later wrote a book about all of his experiences and he said he thought he was going east to die , to show his bravery and die. the motto of the boarding school was killed the indian, save the man. that was the notion of the founder, who thought he was doing good, sort of saving the indians from the genocide of the past and that the only way they could survive was by being forcibly, thoroughly assimilated

into white society. it was a cruel and traumatic process for many indians sent their. -- sent there. especially in the early years of the boarding school, many of them died, literally died at the school had the most hunting experience of my research was going up to carlisle, where much of the school is still there although it is now the army were -- war college and the indian cemetery is there. looking at the gravesites of young indians who were taken there against their will mostly and died in the process was really a hunting experience. that is the school jim thorpe and about 8000 young native americans over the course of the school's existence endured.

kevin: it seems an odd place for a college football team. david: it does. it wasn't really a college, it was an industrial school, yet it had a fabulous football team that played against the big football powers of that era, it wasn't alabama, lsu, oklahoma, it was harvard, princeton, yale, penn, and west point. as part of i would say the acculturation process, football which was an eastern elite sport in that era would help the young native athletes. they had a brilliant football coach, pop warner, who was

taking these really great athletes, many before four. there, -- before four. there, -- before thorpe got there. there were all these fascinating formations and he loved to philip trick plays. i love that in that early era of football, warner devised a kangaroo pocket to hide the football in an no one knew where the football was here he also had a play where they line up by the sideline and go around the opposition bent and go around the other side to catch a pass. but yes, carlisle is playing against the great teams of college football in that era and beating them thoroughly.

kevin: including famously the team from west point. david: i consider that game in november of 1912 the greatest act of athletic retribution in american history. it was on the plains of west point and it was the indians against the army, and it was a level playing field at last. it was jim thorpe and gus welch and a family us -- a fabulous team against west point that had dwight eisenhower linebacker, omar bradley on the bench, and the indians won, 27-6. eisenhower in one of his teammates, before the game, football is always been a violent sport, it was even more

violent then. eisenhower would acknowledge that he and teammate were plotting and how to knock jim thorpe out of the game because he was the greatest player in america. they had one play where they hit him high and low, but he got up and capped playing -- and kept playing. kevin: that came just a few months after stockholm. david: yes. kevin: how did jim thorpe end up in stockholm? david: first of all, he was the greatest all around athlete, so he was not only playing football for carlisle but was also their trakstar.

the carlisle track team was also dominant, so much so that jim thorpe, who could compete in events of all sorts -- the motto of the olympics involves jumping, running, and throwing weights, and he could do all of those things. he and his teammate, a long-distance runner, literally beat entire track teams by themselves. both of them competed in tryout to go to stockholm and they were selected. they went over with pop warner who was their coach, and jim thorpe dominated their -- there. imagine competing in 17 events in two weeks. the decathlon is 10 events, the pen tackle on his five events, and he competed in the high jump and long jump and he won two

gold medals. during one period of the decathlon competition, he couldn't find tissues. -- find his shoes. the mythology is that they were stolen but i can't corroborate that. he had to find some shoes to compete in the high jump. define a mix matched -- they found a mix matched pair of shoes with one too big and he had were several socks but he won the event. at the event -- at the end of those limbic's, king of sweden -- of those olympics, the king of sweden was handing out the metals -- medals can trophies, and he said you are the greatest in the world. the mythology is that he

responded, "thanks, kid." it is funny but also the condescending in a way. he was the greatest athlete in the world at that point and world-famous. kevin: it brings this to mind when you talk about the mythology. one of the things i heard was that for one track meet they arrived at the stadium and it was just pop warner and jim thorpe. david: that is one of the myths. in any case, it is not true, but it might as well have been because they won all of the events. kevin: let's talk about pop warner. david: as i said to come he was an incredibly innovative, brilliant coach, but not a reputable human being. his coaching -- he became so

famous at carlisle and pitt where he won two national championships, and then at stanford. he is in the college football hall of fame. some might know that football is the pop warner league, but when you really study what he did at carlisle, it is not so good. that is putting it mildly here there was an congressional investigation in 1914 of the school, and among the many things he found was that warner was betting on games, selling tickets in lobbies, and mentally and physically abusing his students, many of whom turned on him at that point. the critical moment of jim forbes life -- jim thorpe's life when the metal medals were taken

-- medals were taken away, pop warner turned on him. kevin: the fact that jim thorpe had played minor league baseball comes to life. david: he played in the eastern carolina league for two summers, 1909 and 1910. for about $30 a month, scores of college athletes were playing minor league baseball then, but using aliases to preserve their amateurism. dwight eisenhower played in the kansas stately under the name wilson. the eastern carolina league where thorpe played for the

rocky mountain railroaders and the highlanders, has so many playing with aliens because -- that it was called the pocahontas league. jim thorpe played as jim for and he never tried to hide it. there are several key factors. one is that all of the powerful white figures who were involved in jim losing his medals, knew exactly what he was doing, starting with pop warner, who had been sending indian athletes to play baseball for years, whose close associate in pennsylvania was the scout who brought jim and his teammates and matt with thorpe at least twice -- and met with thorpe at least twice while playing baseball. once they went hunting in oklahoma. after the story broke that jim

thorpe had played baseball, the story broke in worcester, massachusetts in the "worcester telegram." a reporter in worcester heard one of jim's former managers was in town and talked about how he managed jim thorpe. he wrote the story and it became a big deal and got to new york. warner was asked about it and denied new anything about it here he was just lying. james e. solomon, the head of the american lipid committee and on the board of advisors of the carlisle athletic association, he knew and he lied about it to save his reputation. the superintendent at carlisle, moses friedman, who there are documents of letters urging him

not to play baseball, he lied and said he didn't know about it. pop warner even wrote a letter of confession and in its, in the most condescending way, he basically made the argument in jim thorpe's words that he was just an ignorant indian and didn't know any better. in all of those ways, pop warner was disreputable and disappointing, as with the other people who basically just saw thorpe as an easy target. the two other aspects to the amateurism part of it, one is technical, the rules said that to have a challenge to someone's amateurism, the challenge had to be filed within 30 days of the end of the olympics. the story broke six months afterwards, and it was too late. sweden even said when sullivan

and warner took the medals back, it was too late. the committee eventually agreed and took the medals away. it was morally reprehensible, not as for the reasons of hypocrisy of those people, but the notion of amateurs that it was a sham. another member of the 1912 a lipid team was george s. patton, the future general here he competed in the modern pen tackle alone, a group of military even, target -- in the modern pen tackle on -- pentathlon. jim thorpe played baseball and had nothing to do with the events he was in. the entire swedish team was on leave from there job to train for the olympics but getting full pay for their jobs is that

amateurism or professionalism? in so many ways jim thorpe was the victim of all of that sham of amateurism. kevin: that brings us to david breckinridge. and something i never knew coming in the 1912. -- avery brundage, and something i never knew. david: i always envisioned him as a fat cat traveling the world and staying in posh hotels. he was a did kathleen -- deca thlete himself. brundage had just competed and it doesn't matter what nation

you're from come he was so humiliated he quit after eight events -- what nation you are from, he was so humiliated, he quit after eight events. brundage rose to power and consistently denied jim thorpe's do and refused to give back the medals. kevin: after the olympics, these days, afterwards you are on the covers and making lots of money for endorsements. did that happen for jim for russian mark -- four jim thorpe? -- for jim thorpe? david: jim thorpe after he lost his amateur status did signed to play baseball with the new york giants for $5,000. he later played professional football making $300 a game.

he was never able to make the money out of athletics that modern athletes do. he was still world-famous. one of the reasons he was signed to play baseball for the new york giants was because at the end of the 1913 season, they were going to go on and world tour with the white sox. they would to japan, china, philippines, australia, egypt, and europe. there are a lot of famous american baseball figures on that tour, including john mcgraw, the manager of the giants, charles comiskey, the owner of the white sox and other hall of famers, but the rest of the world didn't know them. a new jim thorpe. wherever they went, everybody wanted to see jim thorpe. even as he lost the medals and

it went against them for the rest of his life, he never lost the fame and admiration from the world. kevin: so, one of the things that struck me, i had no idea how mobile he was. he saw the world. david: he did. he saw the world in 1913, all of those places. he saw it again at age 57. in world war ii he joined the merchant marines. he wanted to participate in world war ii. of his four sons, they were involved in the military. the army would not take him, even though he is great with rifles. so he joined the merchant marines and saw the world again. went through the suez canal for a second time. up through egypt for the second time.

in his -- in america after his athletic career was over he was constantly struggling to find footing come and he lived -- i documented -- in 20 different states. he took jobs ranging from at one point digging ditches in los angeles during the heat of the depression, to serving as a greeter in bars and taverns, to working for the chicago athletic youth association, to the most interesting period i think was when he was in los angeles and he was on the fringes of the hollywood studio industry and was an actor in about 70 movies. he was directed by john ford and frank capra. he was acting with all of the famous hollywood stars of that era. but most importantly, it was in that period he found his identity again as a leader of native americans and really

helped organize them to get the jobs in all of the westerns as indians, which were going to white people dressed in greasepaint. he became the spokesman for that, as well as fighting to get the stereotypes, the negative stereotypes in those movies, removed. kevin: in a phenomenon that has not entirely ended, actually. there was a line in your book that really rang huge for me. he pointed out the duality of honoring his ancestry while performing has a white man's version of an indian, was a situation jim had dealt with his entire adult life. david: he certainly did at carlisle. where these -- the carlisle indian team was the most popular team -- traveling team. they did not play at home. so here you have these exotic indians playing against all of

these teams for a school that is trying to rid them of their indianess, right? from the professional ranks he played for two years for unbelievably there was an nfl team called the indians based in a small town in ohio. they would have to perform at halftime all of these -- in headdresses and just different rope tricks from all of this. it was a constant in his life, the expectations of indians playing the stereotypes of what whites think of indians. most of he and his teammates and colleagues understood that dichotomy, and they would play to it but understand what was going on, and trying to take advantage of it in different ways without the white people knowing what they were doing. kevin: that was always -- that became clear to people like me, that seeing what they were doing and going, why would they -- compared to menstrual -- minstre

lsy at one point. the circumstances under which they were living at the time, and indians, he began to see it and understanding a little bit during -- little bit. so we are going to run out of time before too long and i don't want to miss this question. how did burt lancaster end up playing jim thorpe? [laughter] david: well, he is a movie star. not an indian, right? he was 37 years old. this was 1951. a movie was made called "jim thorpe: all-american," and it had starred burt lancaster and it was directed by lancaster's, who is better known for directing "casablanca."

even today it is hard to -- it is starting to happen with some great things that are organically native american, but in that era they needed a movie star, so it was burt lancaster. it is 37 -- he is 37 years old, playing jim thorpe at 16 for starters. but lancaster was a good athlete. give him that. he could not do the polevault, but neither really good for up -- could thorpe, because he was so brave the poor -- she was so big the pole would break. it is a sympathetic movie. many people have talked to about thorpe have said i read about him in four great -- fourth grade, or i saw the movie. that got me fascinated in his life. but the movie itself, like most biopic's, is completely wrong in almost every small respect.

you know, it has these big mountains in oklahoma, right? [laughter] among many, many other things. but it is also wrong in one crucial respect. which is that the narrator of the movie is pop warner. he is the white savior. he is the one who comes to jim's -- tries to shake jim out of his trauma and with a notion that, you know, jim, if only you had listened to me and thoroughly assimilated into white society would not have had the problems later in your life that you had. and, you know, it is just so wrong that i cannot get past that to see the larger, you know, the other side of the movie, which is sympathetic to him. kevin: and pretty much every indian at the time who did not meet somebody else's expectations are that same thing said to them.

-- expectations heard that same thing said to them. how did jim thorpe's body end up residing in a mountain valley in pennsylvania? david: this is another unbelievable story. jim thorpe died of a heart attack at age 65 in california. he was living with his third wife. he had told his children that he wanted to be buried in oklahoma, in the fox region. he was brought back to oklahoma, his coffin was. it was the beginning of a ceremony. you know, a very important spiritual ceremony. patsy thorpe interrupted and took his coffin away because they were unhappy with how oklahoma was going to honor him. she eventually sort of put them up to the highest bidder. she took the coffin to tulsa, then to -- you know, she tried to get pittsburgh and philadelphia interested.

she was in philadelphia watching television and saw a report about these two struggling coal towns in the pocono mountains. she developed this scheme. she went up there and said, look, if you merge and rename yourselves jim thorpe, pennsylvania, you can have him. she was sort of like harold hill in "the music man." not only can you have him, but we will have a college named jim thorpe. a hospital. i might open a tipi style -- teepee-style hotel. none of which happen. but they did change the name to jim thorpe, pennsylvania, and they did get jim thorpe's body. i have nothing against the people there. it is not their fault, really, what he doesn't belong there. it is a nice park on the side of a road in a place he had never

set foot in his entire life. kevin: to this day they resist returning the body? david: it went to court. his sons filed suit, you know, based on the museum act, bringing artifacts back to where they belong. they won the first federal court, and then the appeals court overturned it. the supreme court upheld the appeals court. so, the legal part of it is over. jim thorpe, pennsylvania is taking some of its fame from him being there. they are not going to give it back. would take an act of real integrity and moral courage for it to be returned to where he belongs in oklahoma. i do not see it happening. kevin: not soon, but one thing we know about native americans is stashed david: they are patient. let's hope so. kevin: absolutely.

jim thorpe continues to make news. david: i had nothing to do with it, but it was good timing. his medals were taken away from him, and in july this year all of his records were restored after a long campaign from many, many people. anita france on the international olympic committee. robert hill and his wife, who were his earliest chroniclers. a lot of native american activists were fighting for this forever. and it finally happened. 110 years too late. the other way the story is in the news is, the indian boarding schools. here you had the pope going to canada only a few weeks ago to apologize for the way that the catholic church had handled indian boarding schools over the years and the trauma of that. we have this wonderful secretary

of the interior, deb haaland, who has made it one of her causes to study both what happened in those schools, and the intergenerational trauma that ensued from that. kevin: most of the boarding schools now are closed, and good riddance. david: yes. kevin: those that remain are largely run by tribes themselves. it is a fascinating legacy, because they were, as you point out, there were -- the failings were obvious, and yet the students found a way to persevere and make something of it. david: and the -- and a lot of those students and their children became the lawyers and activists who have fought against that whole system, right? including kevin gover. [laughter] kevin: well, i will say this. i did not go to -- actually, i went to a boarding school, but not one of these. that's right. i had relatives who went to the

boarding schools. but i will say the native people who survived this period did what they had to do to survive this period, and really did in so many ways lay the groundwork for current generations of native people who are doctors and lawyers and museum administrators and scholars of various types. and so we owe them a profound that. david: if i could say one last thing, that is the central threat of my book in the end. that person -- that perseverance that thorpe and bloom eyes, and the entire native population did as well, degree on how to survive through that. kevin: that is right. i will ask you if you can quote his daughter, grace thorpe, when addressing the question of whether jim thorpe was great? david: she gave a speech in 1968

where she dealt with that question. first of all, i thought of him as a father, not as this mythological figure, but, you know, i'm terrible at remembering things precisely, but she basically took the dictionary definition of what it is to be great and in every possible definition of that jim thorpe was. for all of his -- all of the obstacles he faced, for some of his own doing he had trouble with alcohol, and he was constantly on the move. but in what he did he was the best at what he did for a long period of time. no one could match him, and in that sense he met the definition of greatness. kevin: remarkable in magnitude, degree, and effectiveness. he was great. we are at the end of our time, but i want to congratulate you on a wonderful book. i would point out it was produced during covid, which is

quite extraordinary. but also to thank you very sincerely for such an insightful and synthetic treatment of jim thorpe and of the native people of this period, because it was a particularly dark time in many respects, and too little known, two -- too little written about. david: i can't say how much that means to me. thank you. [applause]

>> and you are watching live coverage of the library of congress national book festival 2022. coming up in 20 minutes or so is another author discussion, this is on women leaders in the civil rights movement. we will bring that to you live in about 20 minutes. we are at the washington convention center and now joining us is pulitzer prize-winning historical novelist geraldine brooks. the last time we saw each other was in 2018 when you did our in-depth program. >> i remember it well. it was a marathon and very enjoyable. i loved talking to the readers all over the country. >> we had talked about your books, but you have a new novel out called force.

is it historical fiction? >> it is historical fiction, and the historical spine of the model concerns trouble be the greatest racehorse in american racing history. he is a 19th century racehorse called lexington. >> why is he the greatest horse? ms. brooks: he was the fastest horse of his time and possibly would be the fastest worse today in the 19th century. his races were four miles long, which is like two kentucky derby's. he may still be the fastest horse who ever lived. he had the stamina, he had the heart and courage, and he had a lovely disposition. and then when he retired from the track he produced more champion horses than any other race horses -- racehorse has ever produced. >> and this is antebellum period? ms. brooks: before the civil

war, so a lot of those horses never raced, because they went to the military instead. so he would have had even more champion's if it had been normal times. also he was at the center of some very dangerous situations during the civil war as well. it was a fantastic story to tell. >> is the story of lexington lost to general history but still morning -- still known in horse circles? ms. brooks: in the inner horsey circles. i was astonished i had not heard of him before, so i asked people, and every time they said no, i went, yes, because this is what a novelist hopes for, is that you can re-reveal something that was once well known. he was a huge celebrity in his own time. the racing press covered every beat that he took, so i was lucky in that regard, reading

the racing papers of the day i could track his career in great detail, which was a wonderful thing. when he died his obituary ran over three pages of the newspaper, and they made a coffee for him, which anybody who has ever had to sadly bury a horse nose is quite an undertaking. they made him a coffin and buried him overlooking the barn, and that was appropriate. because he was so celebrated and his fame wasn't so enduring, years later they exhumed his body and prepared his skeleton, and he was a feature at the smithsonian institution. >> is he still at the smithsonian? ms. brooks: no. that is how i came to hear about him. his fame waned to end the smithsonian's mission change from a cabinet of curiosities to being a scientific research organization, and they were not

interested in lexington the racehorse, but they were interested in the skeleton. he was in the hall of mammals as "horse", to "dog" and "pig." then he was in the attic for a while in the natural history museum. but the newly-founded international museum of the horse in kentucky, in lexington wanted him, because he is more than any other horse the reason that lexington, kentucky is the center of europe red breeding today. -- thoroughbred breeding today. is there with a hall dedicated to his insignificance. >> your story centers around the group. is this a fictional part of the story? ms. brooks: as soon as i started to resort -- to research this story of lexington i quickly realized the absolutely fundamental and integral role of

skilled black horsemen. the grooms, many of the jockeys, the trainers were extraordinary for their expertise, and the industry was based on them, much of their labor, of course, was plundered, because many of them were enslaved or formerly enslaved. i realized i could not tell the story and erase their contribution. so there is a missing painting of lexington, and it is described vividly, because it is supposed to be a wonderful painting by the artist thomas j. scott, who also features in my book. and it is titled "lexington being led out by black jarrett, his groom." as somebody who has a horse and loves horses, i know the person who has the closest relationship with the horse is not the owner, not the trainer, not the jockey, it is the groom, who is there first thing in the

morning, feeding, brushing, caring for the horse's almonds, and who has the strongest bond. i knew i wanted a story to center on the relationship between garrett and his horse. >> if you are familiar with geraldine brooks, we are going to give you a chance to call in and talk with you. the numbers are up on the screen. we will try to work in a few of those calls in a minute. i'm getting a little bit of noise in my earpieces right now. a phone hanging up. geraldine brooks, how long have you been working on horse? ms. brooks: i started working on it -- i heard about it before i started working on it, but it took me about seven years to

write it. >> and i apologize. i'm having a bit of audio trouble here. ms. brooks: i'm getting it too. >> with the numbers dialing? you are much smoother than i am. [laughter] you spent about seven years working on horse? ms. brooks: this is the book that has taken me the longest to write. some of it was the difficulties of researching the lives of the black horsemen. that was extensive. but then the story took all kinds of crazy twists and turns. it led to unexpectedly a connection with jackson pollock in new york in the 1950's. it led to the science at the smithsonian and learning about how bones are prepared. the labs and the incredible treasure house that is the

museum support center in suburban maryland. >> what is the benefit of writing historical fiction and what is the limitation? ms. brooks: i like to think of myself as the gateway drug to real history. [laughter] look, to me it is about finding something that is true in the historical record, where you learn something that is astonishingly interesting and unlikely and plausible, as mark twain said, to paraphrase him. fiction is required to be plausible. truth needn't be. if you find a truth that if you made it up nobody would believe it, follow the line of fact as far as you can. what i'm interested in is the stories where you cannot know everything. because if you could, if jarrett had been able to tell his own story and if we knew all about him from his own point of view, would be for a narrative historian, devon mcculloch, but

we do not know. it is in those voids i think you take your imaginative empathy to work. and when the line of fact phrase becomes too faint to follow, that is when i allow myself to think, maybe it went like this. so to try to hear the unheard, the people who did not tell their story. >> my guess is you had trouble with the historical research on the black grooms and horsemen. ms. brooks: that was a challenge, because enslaved people, generally speaking, were not allowed to become literate. so they did not leave an account of their own lives. you can find them. you can find them, it is just that you have to look very hard. the interesting thing was that the white owners who had enslaved these men differed to their expertise. because there thoroughbred

horses were prestige and wealth for them. they wanted the best horses, and that meant they wanted the most expert in the field. you see in their letters to each other how much they put in the knowledge of the black horsemen. so, it meant that these men -- and they were all men, of course, at that time -- occupy an unusual niche in the brutal system of slavery, where they could use -- they could do things like travel across state lines, amass some property. which is why many of them were able to buy their way out of enslavement. >> prior to starting this segment you and i were talking and you said you had been on book tour in your home country of australia. is a story like this popular down there? ms. brooks: you know, australians love racing. [laughter] the whole country stops for the

melbourne cup, which is the biggest horse race. it is our equivalent of the kentucky derby, although it has become controversial in recent years because of concerns about the welfare of equines and some of the practices within the racing industry, check think we have to look hard at. too many horses are dying on the track and thrown away if they do not make it, and i think that is tragic. having a bond with a horse that is 27 years old, some of these horses are over and done with that five and discarded, i think is a shocking tragedy. >> you have a horse that is 27 years old? tell us about her. ms. brooks: she is a mare named valentine. i keep her with my neighbors horse, who is an off the track race horse named screaming wings.

he is 33 years old and he has had so much to give throughout his long life, teaching children to write. he still loves to go out on a trail ride and it is hard to stop him from thinking he is on the track. [laughter] >> let's take some calls. don is in westmoreland, virginia. you are on with geraldine brooks. >> good morning, miss brooks. ms. brooks: good morning, don. >> i was calling concerning a huge horse that raised in the 1970's and 1980's. he was like 17 hands high at the shoulder and he never lost. i was wondering if his genetic line could be drawn right to lexington? ms. brooks: i would have to look in the study books to find out, but i would not be surprised, because a lot of the really great racehorses can be traced back to lexington.

that is the incredible thing. also one of the poignant things about writing this book is, we know a lot more about the horse and the horse's genealogy then we can know about the enslaved men who trained the horse. you know, who could generally trace their lineage is only back two generations. but they had memorized lineages that carried these horses all the way back to the original four-stud the rubber adds from which all resources are said to -- four-stud thoroughbreds from which racehorses are said to descend. when you look at the stud book you can see all the way back. >> what did you find out about lexington's owner? ms. brooks: lexington had a couple of owners and they were fascinating people. his first owner, although it is murky, and this is one of the things that go into in the novel. his black trainer owned his

racing qualities, and that may have in a means of letting the black on or own a race horse, because in those days a black man was not allowed to own a resource that raced on the track. it may have been he had a black owner from the beginning, the titular owner was dr. alicia warfield. he had been an ob/gyn, although they did not call it that in those days. he actually delivered mary todd lincoln. he had the horse and was the titular owner for its first successful races. then it was bought by a syndicate headed by an absolutely fascinating man named richard tim burke, who owned the metairie racehorse in new orleans. he had been kicked out of west point. he had gone down the river riverboat gambler and made a fortune. and he bought lexington, and he

was the one who promoted the races to the point that 30,000 people would show up in the whole city of new orleans would shut down when lexington was racing. presidents came to watch the races and it was a huge celebration. then he sold the horse to -- back into kentucky, to an owner who had interests in scottish estates, as well as the finest livestock breeding establishment. and that was where lexington stood stud, to such great success. he had a long life and was very well cared for, which was a good thing. host: geraldine brooks won the pulitzer prize in 2006. cooper, bridgeton, new jersey. please go ahead with your question or comment. caller: i'm just wondering, what

really wanted -- what made you want to write this book in the first place? i am an avid reader and a curious guy. you know, out here in new jersey. [laughter] host: thank you, sir. we will get an answer. ms. brooks: yeah, cooper, i wanted to write this book -- i will tell you, because most young girls become horse crazy at five or 15, which is a sensible age to do that. i became horse-crazy at 50. i don't recommend taking up writing at 50, but that is what happened to me. i had an experience on a trail ride in the next thing i knew i had a horse of my own. all i wanted to think about was the horse. how to care for the horse, how to be a better writer, everything about it. i wasn't getting any work done in my writing life because i was thinking about the horse. actually by accident i overheard

the story about how this horse's skeleton was being moved from the smithsonian to the museum of the horse, and i heard about the horse and his fantastically successful career, and then the twists and turns in that and what happened to him during the civil war, which is a period i'm quite fascinated by. i realized this was a story for me. it was the next book i absolutely had to write. host: geraldine brooks appeared on in depth in 2018. spent three hours with us talking about her entire body of work. since that point, though, you have had quite an eventful life. ms. brooks: it was a attached fee. my husband, who some of your viewers may know from his works like "confederates in the attic," he was on book to her -- book tour and he had a wonderful

session with c-span in atlanta, and he had come to washington, d.c., which is his hometown, collapsed in the street, died suddenly without any indication that he had a heart problem. and me and my two boys, as you can imagine, were devastated by that. it knocked us all right out of our orbits. host: i don't mean to be insensitive, but how does that change how you do your work? ms. brooks: it took me a long time to get back to work, actually. it was about a year where i could not get the level of focus you need to engage with all of the strands of a novel that you are trying to bring together. but, you know, it was something ruth ginsburg had said to a journalist colleague of mine, because i used to be a journalist before i took up fiction writing. and this person had had a loss, and justice ginsburg said to

her, you must do your work. it might not be your best work, but it will be good work and it will be what saves you. eventually i learned that was true. this book, tony had left at the subject of this book and he had helped me with researching it, because he was a genius in the archives. and they knew i had to finish it so i could dedicated to him. and turned out that the book was the lifeboat i crawled into. host: "horse" is the name of geraldine's latest book. thank you for being with us. we appreciate your time. ms. brooks: thank you for having me. host: live coverage of the national book festival continues now. here are authors talking about women in the civil rights movement. live coverage.

>> welcome to the 20 second annual library of congress national book festival. a place where books bring us together. at this time we ask you all to silence or turn off your cell phones. for those who are interested, there are restrooms and drinking fountains around the corner from our stage today here. he asked that if you need to use those facilities during our talks this morning that you please try to do so limiting disruption as much as possible for those around you. we also want to notify you that

this event will be recorded, and your presence at this program constitutes your consent to be filmed or recorded. thank you so much and enjoy the program. ms. ulaby: morning. i am a reporter with national public radio. it is such an honor to be here with you and with two distinguished authors. we are going to spend the next hour, almost, which is not enough time, learning about two of the most unsung female heroines of the civil rights movement. two women who in many ways could not have been more different. one was establishment, one was grassroots. one was upwardly mobile, incredibly well educated, and the other one came from a background filled with such deprivation that to describe it as poor seems too grand. one was an obvious leader, the other was an unlikely and late in life luminary. both of them changed the course of history, and neither one has

been given their due. hopefully these two biographies will help change that. tamiko brown megan is 18 at the harvard institute and a history professor at harvard university during her earlier book is " courage to dissent the book we are going to be talking about today is "civil rights queen." kate clifford larson is a distinguished scholar whose earlier books include a biography of harriet tubman and "the assassin's accomplice." today we will be talking about "walk with me," a biography of fannie lou hamer. i'm going to assume many of you are like me. maybe you have heard a little bit about fannie lou hamer. maybe you have not heard anything about constance modly. i'm hoping will introduce us to

the subjects of these books. yours is, i think, unjustly less-known. will you tell us about constance motley and why you chose her? ms. brown-nagin: happy to. thanks to all of you for being here. i'm delighted to share about constance baker motley, who is a legendary civil rights lawyer who in her time was very well-known. i set out to write about her because it is the case that people today do not know her, to the extent that they should. legendary civil rights lawyer who litigated the cases that made it possible for all of us to be together today, regardless of race. made it possible for me to be a law professor, and kate to be a

scholar. symbolically she was very important to professional women. to give you three points about her achievements, in addition to litigating cases like brown v. board of education, james meredith case, university of georgia, and the university of alabama, motley was a path breaker in politics. she was the first manhattan borough president, as well as the first black female state senator in new york. and then she capstone her career by becoming the first black female female federal judge, appointed by lyndon johnson in 1966. as you can imagine, she has inspired a generation of lawyers, including women of color lawyers, like my late

colleague, the first black woman appointed to the faculty of the harvard law school. and judge ketanji brown jackson, who cited constance baker motley as a role model. so, motley is a person who should be well known by all of us, because, as i said, she really did lay the groundwork for modern american society, changing the legal and social landscape. >> and fannie lou hamer? ms. larson: fannie lou hamer rose up to become an incredible leader in the 1960's, but as was brought up, she had an entirely different life trajectory than constance. it cannot be underestimated the deprivation and poverty that she was born into.

in 1917 the 20th child of a mississippi sharecropper, and her life was defined by a hunger , lack of access to health care, education. she attained a six grade education, and also the incredible violence that permeated life in mississippi. and she rose out of those circumstances as an adult to become a path breaker and to really change the landscape. she came out of the earth of mississippi and was very different than the elite civil rights organizers and figures we know so well today. the martin luther king's of the world and others who were managing and pushing the movement forward on the national level. she had this passion that she had to make a change, because

her life was so profoundly difficult, and she wasn't so oppressed, and so many things had been taken from her that at a very late age -- she was about four years old, 44 years old -- she decided it was time she would make a difference. she was a deeply spiritual woman. her faith was everything to her. her family meant everything to her, and so did her community. that is where her activism started. and her faith fortified her to move forward when violence was perpetrated against her. her body, her soul, and she went on to lead people around the country and inspire them. she became famous, for those of you who may know, in 1964 at the democratic national convention in atlantic city. she was given a platform to talk about what was happening in mississippi, and how african-americans were not

represented there and denied the vote in mississippi. and her heartfelt speech that was so powerful it shook the people in the room that heard it. men and women were crying, and people around the nation who saw the video of it later that evening in august 1964. it deeply moved all of them and changed people, so that it altered really, i believe, the civil rights movement. president johnson was affected by what she said as well, and he went on to sign some very important legislation, including the 1960 five voting rights legislation, which has been powerful over the past few decades and is under threat today. so, her legacy lives on in voting rights campaigns around the country, and i think there are people just like fannie lou hamer in our communities today, and they need to be recognized

and supported, because they can make a world of difference for all of us. ms. ulaby: one of the things i did not know that has been sitting with me is the words on her tombstone are a term she introduced into the cultural conversation, which is "i'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." ms. brown-nagin: with constance my -- with constance motley, she grew up in new haven. her father worked for skull and bones. ms. brown-nagin: he did. ms. ulaby: then she was plucked, a wealthy white man learned -- i think -- what set her on the trajectory to columbia law school? ms. brown-nagin: right. let me tell you about it, and a bit about her background. she was not a person of privilege. in fact, her family was a working class family.

her parents immigrated to this country from the west indies in the early 20th century. virtually every male relative in her family worked for yell university, and she grew up in the shadow of yale, in new haven. something i know in what -- in my work, one could imagine one is a working-class black person growing up in new haven in the shadow of yale, there might be resentment. but for her family, their position was inspiring. her father really read the privilege of the young man that he served at yale as a chef, into himself. and the parents thought of themselves as the father in particular, as superior.

they were part of the british empire, and proud of that. they were ambitious in their own way, and yet constance baker was a young girl and not expected to go far. however, she was incredibly intelligent, ambitious, had teachers who introduced her to the work of wb to boyce and james weldon johnson. debbie eb to boyce and james weldon -- w.e.b du bolis, and james weldon johnson. they told her women don't get anywhere in the law, and yet she was able to attend college and then law school because she gave a talk at a social club, a civic club in new haven, which happened to be attended by

clarence blakeslee, who is a graduate of yale and a wealthy man, philanthropist who heard her speak, and said to her afterwards, why are you in college? because you clearly should be. and he offered to pay for her college and law school tuition. and she said it was like a fairytale. that she could be plucked in that way. and it set her on this course where she was able to attend law school and got her first job out of law school with thurgood marshall at the ncaa -- naacp legal defense fund. during that time she was the only woman. and just to say a little bit about who she was as a person, she was reserved, she was

graceful, elegant in her bearing, and a lot of this came from a sense of being connected to the british empire. she grew up in a homework you mother would play god save the queen. and one could, to see her was to understand she did feel herself to be different, and it was really important she felt this way. when she went down to the deep south to litigate these cases on behalf of people like fannie lou hamer and others, she was subjected to the same kind of indignities as were her clients. so, she was not called mrs. by opposing counsel. there were judges who were not -- who would not even look at her. on the other end of the spectrum there were members of the black community who loved her. called her a queen. the civil rights queen, because

she was doing this work in the courthouse, translating the deprivation of these communities into the language of the law. i thought it was important to write her back into history. she represented thurgood marshall, the birmingham children's marchers. she was a colleague to thurgood marshall, who thought very highly of her. i believe it was a sort of historical malpractice to not have her considered one of the greats in the same way that these men are. ms. ulaby: who is fannie lou hamer in that same way, as a person? who was she? ms. larson: i love what you said about motley translated the deprivation that a fannie lou hamer was experiencing, discrimination, the violence, into the courtroom and back to the community. because fannie lou hamer, as i said, was the 20th child of jim

and ella townsend. what i discovered is that seven of those children had died before was born. -- before fannie lou was born. her siblings talked about how it seemed fannie lou was the mother's favorite. she was raised and loved and cherished and protected in this really horrific environment as sharecroppers in mississippi. she survives childhood, and has a spotty education. and she grows up to be a very strong child. and taking care of her elderly parents wants her elder siblings had moved on. and during the great depression she struggled with them to feed themselves and work and earn

money. and that informed her being, that struggle just gave her in an odd way this sense of strength and a nobility, even though she had very little education and had no resources whatsoever and was the poorest of the poor. so, when she became an adult she looked around at those indignities and they frustrated her. so, while she could not speak out, because speaking out meant she would be killed or hurt in some way, or fired from her job as a sharecropper, she found other ways to fight back. that meant, you know, picking the cotton and the boss would cheat the cotton pickers and underestimate how much the cotton weighed. and she would jiggle with the weights and change the weight so the sharecroppers were paid

fairly. and the fellow sharecroppers that she was crazy to do that, because they knew if she got caught she would be in so much trouble. but she just knew what was right. as i said, she was profoundly faithful. she married another sharecropper in 1944. and they lived on this plantation outside of rural though -- ruralville, mississippi. they adopted two little girls and try to have children of their own, but fannie lou had difficulty conceiving. she had several stillbirths and miscarriages. so they raised these children and had deep love and passion for family. but it was a struggle every single day, and one day she was talking with mrs. marlowe, the

wife of a dacian owner. she told her she -- wife of -- she told her she should go to the local doctor and he could take care of the tumors that fannie lou was suffering from, and assured her this would help her get pregnant and carry a baby to term. so, hamer did this, but he sterilized her instead. they called at a mississippi appendectomy, because they did this to a lot of black women in the community. when that happened in 1961 it changed her dramatically. she went through a crisis that tested her faith, and some women would have just receded into their home and do nothing after that. but it angered her so much, and she knew she had to fight back. that doctor took something from

her he had no right to take. and there was no recourse, because she was a black woman in mississippi, and she could not sue a white doctor. she became involved in the civil rights movement. when the student nonviolent coordinating community -- committee arrived in ruralville, mississippi bob moses -- many of you probably know who he was. he was an activist dedicated to the snick. any group of other young students and young people came to ruralville and ask the people there, what did they want the civil rights movement to do for them and help them with? and they wanted to vote. this became the cause. and fannie lou hamer eventually was able to register to vote and pass the onerous voting rights test. and she went on to keep fighting for the rights for everyone to

be able to vote, because once she went and register to vote, the plantation owner evicted her from the plantation that very night. so, she was determined not to let that bring her down. she just had this fierceness about her. and some of her neighbors were very frightened for her and themselves, that she would bring a reign of terror down on them. that white supremacists would become brittle and tried to kill them, which they did do. people fired shotgun blasts at the neighborhood all the time. but she had had enough. and after she was arrested for her role in the movement and brutally beaten and raped in the wynonna county jail in june 1963, she faced another crossroads. and she later said, they have

been trying to kill me my whole life. well, they might as well do it, but i'm not going to stop fighting for equal rights. as i said earlier, she went on to fight, and fight, and fight from the grassroots level. in those young people from the student nonviolent coordinating wowed by her. she was 20 years older than them, but she was inspired by them. she once said those students, she felt, was the new kingdom that had come to mississippi. that there was more christianity in those young people than she had seen in any church she had attended. so they inspired her to risk her life and she inspired them to risk their lives too. and she went on to really mobilize change from the ground up, grassroots, and challenge civil rights elites, as well as the white supremacists who would circle her house every day,

showing their shock nouns, threatening her. so, her legacy is so powerful today for the people that knew her, and i think a new generation needs to get to know her and know that you can come from the most obscure circumstances and the most difficult places and still rise up and be a leader and create change. ms. ulaby: fannie lou hamer was born and raised in her activism. [applause] -- and her activism was in mississippi. it's a sippy is where constance motley had one of her most extraordinary legal battles. describe her role in desegregating? ms. brown-nagin: yes. i just want to pick up on something you said, and something that kate said.

in many ways these women are contrasts, but it is also the case that both of them -- and something i deeply admire about motley and about hamer, they both had tremendous courage. it is moral courage, but also the case that motley, when she litigated in alabama and mississippi in particular, she did so under threat of her life. this is the case when she traveled from her new york city apartment down to mississippi 22 times in the span of 18 months. ms. ulaby: with a small child at home? ms. brown-nagin: yes, with her son at home, with her husband back in their apartment. and just imagine doing that. you would only do something like that if you felt yourself on a mission.

and she did it because, first of all thurgood marshall signed the case to her. they were in the office at ldf and received this message from james meredith, who said he wanted to challenge segregation in his home state. thurgood marshall said, this man has got to be crazy. that is your case. it was because of the violence in mississippi. the threat the absolute stranglehold of white supremacy on people of the state. and nevertheless, molly went down to mississippi, she represented james meredith. it was a terribly difficult case for also it's of reasons. first of all, the fear and

anxiety that was provoked by being a black person, coming down from new york, you know, the antithesis in many ways of mississippi. it was considered daring to come to a courtroom, a federal court room, and stand up. motley stood nearly six feet tall. and claimed that a black man should be able to enter the university of mississippi. and she did that and she did it despite hostility from her co- counsel who refused to recognize her. he would call her "that woman," and motley said to the judge, who himself was a segregationist but on the spectrum that even he knew that was wrong. so, he admonished the opposing

counsel when motley said, he should call me by my name, mrs. motley. "the woman from new york" is what he ended up calling her. another point i want to make about the ways in which this was a difficult case, meger evers would pick motley up from the airport and he would take her to the courthouse. she stayed with evers and his wife and children when she was in mississippi. they were her community. feeding her and they experienced the terror of mississippi together. when they were traveling to the courthouse more than one time, medgar said to her, do not look

back. we are being followed. the state police are trailing them as they are traveling down the highway in mississippi and he says to her, put that legal pad inside your "new york times." you do not want to be stopped and have evidence that you're doing civil-rights work. that happened time and time again. she said to medgar evers when she was staying in their house there were some bushes, hedges close to the house. she said, you need to cut those down because someone could harm you. that is exactly what happened. he was assassinated a few months after she left for the last time, after battling in court.

she would win positions in court and the court of appeals just would not countenance what was inevitable. ultimately, after being in court time and time again, meredith was able to enter ole miss. but that was hardly the end of the story. he met a riot when he entered and two people were killed, all with medgar evers trying to enter ole miss. it was quite a trial. she had to buck him up several times. there were times when he had had enough. and she brought him out of the state into her new york city apartment where he could essentially taste freedom. and she got him through that, which illustrates how she not only was working in the

courtroom, but outside the courtroom. helping her clients to continue in this perilous fight. ms. ulaby: there is a great moment in the story. the book is so incredibly researched. i like the little details, like james meredith had when he was admitted into the university of mississippi. he had to be in a two-bedroom room because his bodyguards needed their own room. and you tell this incredible story of how there was such fear. it is incredible not only did they all survive physically but mentally. he needed to take a break and there was fear he might flunk out. constance motley said, you need to study. he said, i need to go dancing. [laughter] ms. brown-nagin: that's right. she brought him up to the apartment. he stayed with her and ultimately, he said that he needed to be with his friends

and dance. he needed not to feel like a soldier every day, which was what was required to be part of these landmark cases. ms. ulaby: can you tell us a little bit, kate, about how fannie lou hamer challenged the civil rights leads and whether these two titans of the civil rights movements crossed paths? ms. larson: i do not think they did. certainly, hamer would have been aware of motley. especially with her work in mississippi and hamer knew medgar evers. she was aware of things going on in the movement. and i think she probably paid special attention, i am imagining, because another woman was in the trenches fighting like she was. ms. brown-nagin: that's right. i do not think they knew each other, but certainly, they knew of each other.

i am so interested to hear about the challenge to the civil rights elite. i know the hamer story, including one line i had in my earlier book where she says, there is nothing she respects less in naacp. ms. larson: i know. ms. brown-nagin: you tell the story. ms. larson: she did say that, which is interesting because, during the 1950's, she tried to get people to sign up to be members of the naacp. but it was elite middle-class men that ran most of the chapters, specifically in mississippi. she tangled with some of the elites and the movement once she became nationally known. she was in atlantic city. martin luther king and abernathy and all of the group around king, they disrespected her because she was not well educated. she had a fairly strong

mississippi delta accent. she was very poor, so her clothing did not meet their standards. they even said that directly to her, that she was an of harassment. look what you are wearing. you should go home. you are not going to say that to fannie lou hamer, for sure. [laughter] she was not going to take any of that. she was so grassroots she could not relate to the elites in the movement. martin luther king could not relate to her, despite how we think of him as this grassroots organizer. he was not. it was all the people below and under him in communities across the country that were the organizers. and he was the figurehead and inspiring leader. but he and hamer taught past each other. in atlantic city, hamer was there with a group from mississippi challenging the right of the mississippi all white democratic party to be seated on the convention floor

and vote for president johnson as the nominee of the democratic party that year. and she belonged to a more diverse group of people that wanted to represent mississippi. so, they have this challenge. martin luther king was there to support them, but he did not have a feel for the people. he inspire people and he spoke eloquently, but he read his speech before hamer got on stage and she was the one that wowed everyone personally. the press followed king around until they heard hamer speak and then they could not get enough of fannie lou hamer. she spoke to people across the country living in circumstances like her. and so, some of those, mostly men around king, felt threatened by her rising power. they did not want her to have

the strong voice that she had. but there was no denying fannie lou hamer. the nation really responded to her. she also had this amazing singing voice. so, she used that so effectively as part of her rhetoric, as part of her speeches, her presence. people felt connected to her once she would start to sing. she had these qualities that many of those men did not have. so, there was a big divide between, you know, those elite leaders who are absolutely necessary, and she was just another part of the movement we often forget about. ms. brown-nagin: if i can piggyback on that comet and talk about motley's relationship to the elite, she was one of them. some of the things that she did were consistent with the attitudes that kate is

discussing. for instance, in the university of alabama case, there were two plaintiffs originally. one of them was pollyanne who was a good friend of lucy. pollyanna meyer ran into trouble when the university found out she had become pregnant before she was married. her husband had some run-ins with the law. on the basis of morals, they said she was not qualified to apply, much less attend, the university of alabama. the naacp legal defense fund, including motley and the local

lawyer, dropped her. there was no effort made to stand up for pollyanne meyer. the reason is in these legal cases in particular, the plaintiffs needed to be the best in the community, as was understood. the politics of respectability, which motley certainly believed in, were very relevant to the types of plaintiffs who were chosen and could be successful. for instance, in the university of georgia case, one of the plaintiffs was charlene hunter gault who had done really well in school and she was very beautiful. she was easier, i guess you would say, for some to accept. but the thing about motley, she

also had trouble with some of the men in the naacp establishment. in fact, after she litigated her first case mississippi, which was on behalf of black teachers -- a salary equalization case -- she marched into thurgood marshall's office and said she was napping paid what she should be paid. [laughter] and she did not have the title she deserved. he eventually did give her a raise and was working with the and aa cp national -- and the naacp national, but it was not easy for her at all. one of the deepest valleys in her life occurred in 1961 when she was passed over for thurgood marshall's job once he was appointed to the federal court. she wanted to be director counsel. she thought that she deserved it.

but she did not get it. it went to burke, who was a terrific lawyer, supporter of the civil rights movement. he also was a white man. motley thought both race and gender had to do with why she was passed over. and so, there are two sides of the coin and all kinds of gradations. i love juxtaposing the stories because it shows the different experiences and how gender is very relevant to historical memory of the movement, and also whom we should understand as leaders of the movement. it was not just the men giving the speeches and rallying the crowds. as important as that was -- and it was not just thurgood marshall, who famously was extroverted and charming and the alpha male. it was also these women. motley was reserved.

she was now trying to put herself out in front. she was just doing the work and it is important to appreciate all parts of the spectrum of leadership. ms. ulaby: we have a few minutes for questions if anybody has any. >> i am intrigued by the relationship between ms. motley and polly murray. with a contemporaries? especially considering what you brought up about leadership at the time they were both practicing? ms. brown-nagin: they were friends and they supported one another. at the same time, motley was able to go further within the context of the naacp

establishment and the legal establishment and be received better than polly murray was. as you know, polly murray had a hard time getting her legal theories accepted by the men of the naacp. although, as they thought about it, they decided they would use it because it was so great. they did know each other. they loved each other. when motley was appointed to the court, polly murray sent her a note saying, hooray for our side. we finally done it. they thought it would be so great for her to have one of their own on the court. thank you for that question. >> when fannie lou hamer was so badly beaten in prison, a yale law student elinor holmes helped her get out of prison.

she was in there with lauren sciacca as well. those injuries she had were throughout her life. ms. larson: they contributed to her early death. she died of breast cancer in 1977, but she had been suffering from kidney disease -- not disease, but a damaged kidney -- from the beating she took. the people around her were quite amazing. eleanor holmes norton actually was very close to hamer and later when hamer had a miss ectomy, norton helped her get prosthesis because she could not afford to do that. yes, she was the young lawyer that helped bail her out of jail in june 1963. >> how old was hamer when she died? ms. larson: she was 59 years old. ms. ulaby: next question.

>> first about, i am happy you mentioned gender and the civil rights movement when you were discussing these two wonderful women. in my research more with the antislavery movement, we talk about how even if you are fighting for the same thing, you might not agree how to fight for it. so, i was happy to hear you talk about that. but also, sometimes women in particular field a special burden -- feel a special burden to bring women's rights to the forefront. they represent two constituencies in the fight for anyone's rights. can you talk about whether or not either of these women felt a burden because of their gender? ms. brown-nagin: i can tell you that motley, when she became a new york city politician, said

when people called her a feminist that she was not. so, she made a choice, publicly, to put distance between herself and the women's movement. both because she did not think it was necessarily representative of her and the experiences of other black women. but also because, in the context of politics, when she already had so much against her, she was not going to take on feminism too. and yet, as i said before in reference to myself and kate many other women, she was important. when she joined the court, decided quite a few cases that opened the doors of law firms to women, to journalists. and so, she was a very strategic person and had to be supportive

of women's issues but in a way that enabled her to move in these circles she needed to move in. ms. larson: i have to say the same about fannie lou hamer. she would not have described herself as a feminist. actually, she belonged to the national organization of women and she helped organize the black women's caucus, and she was colleagues with shirley chisholm and marlee evers. but she was a very conservative woman and they would have called her a conservative feminist. she was antiabortion, which is interesting. because before she was sterilized she had helped other women access abortion services in mississippi. she was anti-birth control, too. kind of really blew the minds of all feminist women in the late

1960's and early 1970's. what do you mean? she was very conservative. i do not think she looked at gender as a burden. it was who she was and she was fighting as a woman for rights for herself and everybody. and she was particularly protective of black men because she watched the violence that was disproportionately visited upon black men in mississippi. she was very protective of her husband and other men in the community. ms. ulaby: any other questions will have to be addressed to the authors as they sign books after the session. i wanted to say, at a moment when these forces of misogyny and white supremacy feel on the rise, when the political climate feels daunting, i wanted to thank you for bringing the message of both of these women into 2022. ms. larson: thank you. ms. brown-nagin: thank you. [applause]

announcer: this is live coverage of the 2022 national book festival. we have been in the history of biography room. we are going to go over to the society and culture room for our next events in about an hour. there is all sorts of areas you can see. the children's area, book signings, everything is going on at the washington convention center. it is back in person for the first time in three years. joining us on the book tv set is

author clint smith. his new book is "how the word is passed: the reckoning with a history of sleepy across america." you might know him through his writing in "the atlantic" or his youtube series "crash course in black american history." mr. smith, you were raised in new orleans. what was your life like? mr. smith: it was great. it is the best city in the world. it is one of those places you do not fully appreciate until you are not there anymore. i was 17 years old when hurricane katrina hit new orleans. this week marked the 17th anniversary of katrina. it was a surreal moment for me to reflect on the fact this was half a lifetime ago. in so many ways, it feels like yesterday. i have been thinking a lot about how new orleans shaped me as a husband, a father, a writer, a person. but also thinking about all the

ways my life was offended in ways i do not think i have fully processed yet. i just wrote about this incredible documentary, "katrina babies," and done by a young man -- will he is similar age to me -- but 13 when katrina hit. he made a documentary about the way young black children who were children when katrina happened, who did not necessarily have the language or vocabulary to express how they were experiencing this trauma, he is giving them a platform to do a retrospective and look back and explain what that felt like and how it has continued to impact than the last 17 years. thinking about new orleans and my relationship to it, but even beyond katrina and my entire life before that was wonderful. it was a fun, vibrant, dynamic place unlike anywhere else in the world.

>> were you in new orleans when katrina hit or had you gotten out? mr. smith: part of what people do not always understand is if you are evacuating for hurricanes, we did that on an annual basis. it was rite of passage for living in new orleans. this is what you do every year. you pack some clothes, you go to your aunt poor uncle's house, a hotel, or you decide to stay. for so many years they said there was going to be the big one. you would come back and they would be minimal damage. branches on the ground, a window busted. but no one was prepared for what was going to happen. we were in houston, texas. i was at my aunt and uncle's house. it was surreal and unsettling to be sitting on the couch as a 17-year-old watching cnn and seeing the grocery store, my church, my school, my neighborhood submerged under 8, 9, 10 feet of water.

that was the experience of so many people. 80% of the city was underwater. it was something that people from new orleans, you know, our lives are bifurcated by the storm. there was life before the storm and life after the storm. hit is the marker in time we often use. was that before the storm or after the storm? i imagine it will be like that for a long time. >> your new book, "how the word is passed," has a new orleans connection. mr. smith: it began in 2017 when i was watching confederate statues come down in new orleans. statues of jefferson davis, robert e. lee. i was thinking about what it meant i grew up in a majority black city in which they were more homages to the slavers than the slaves. to the grocery store, i had to go to jefferson davis parkway. my parents still live on the street of someone who owned 150

slaves. these are reflected of the stories people tell and has shaped the narratives. those narratives shape policy and policy shapes the material and conditions of people's lives. not to say if you take down the 60 foot statue of robert e. lee you erase the wealth gap, but we recognize the ecosystem of ideas that give us an understanding and appreciation for what has happened throughout american history and the way communities have been disproportionately and intentionally harmed throughout america history. i was looking around portland's and thinking about, what other ways i was taught about his history? i realize new orleans was the busiest and largest slave market in the country at the mouth of the mississippi river. i had never been taught about it in a way that was commensurate with the impact it had on the city, this day, the country. i went out on an exploration across the country where i

traveled to different historical sites, memorials, museums, prisons, plantations, cities, cemeteries, trying to get a sense of how different places across the country, including new orleans, tell the story of their own relationships. do they acknowledge it honestly? do they run from it? do they do something in between? over the course of four or five years i traveled across the country and the ocean to find those answers. >> in your first 17 years in new orleans, did you think about the monuments? were you aware of them and what they stood for? mr. smith: i was aware of them. i don't think i was -- i was certainly not aware of the history the represented. that is part of the success of the lost cause. this idea that, after the civil war while the union won the war, the confederacy won the war of ideas. for generations following the end of the civil war people were talking about the distorted

sense of what the world was about. there was a concerted effort, state sanctioned effort, to prevent people from understanding the dynamics of what the war was about, what people were fighting over. i remember growing up and, again, you're in the city 60%, 70% black and the biggest statue is robert e. lee. not having the full sense of what this man represented. the iconography of the confederacy was so ubiquitous across the country. i had never been taught about the declarations of confederacy session. in 1860 and 1861, as states were seceding, they were outlining what the war was being fought over and why this was happening. mississippi in 1861 says, our position is identified. the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world. they are not vague about why they are seceding or the wars being fought.

but i was never taught about it in those terms. they kind of became part of the landscape of the city. i think about the sort of cognitive dissonance of so many of my fondest memories as a kid being literally beneath the shadow of these men who fought a war, predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery. my mom and siblings and i would go to city park, which is our central park in new orleans, and feed the ducks. the statue you passed until a few years ago was beauregard. he ordered the first shots to be fired at fort sumter. that exists all across the city. my middle school was named after someone who was an avid confederate in support of the segregation of schools. and so, part of what happened for me was i wanted to write a book that would have been helpful for the 16-year-old version of me.

i wanted to write a book -- i remember being a kid and feeling a sense of intellectual and social and psychological paralysis being told the things that were wrong with black people. sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, and not having the language to push back. not having the language or sociology to more effectively contextualize why new orleans looked at the weighted. why one part looked one way and another part looked another way. if nobody teaches you the history, you fall into the trap of thinking the reason one part looks one way and another looks another way is because the people, rather than what has been done to those communities generation after generation. part of the object of the book was to write the book that i felt like i needed when i was in american history. >> "how the wood has passed" is the name of clint's new book.

if you would like to join in, eastern and central time zones and mountain and pacific numbers on your screen. you have a robust social media account. how did that develop and what do you use it for? mr. smith: it has evolved over time. initially, i was using it because i was in grad school. i was getting my phd and for most phd students your life is 12 hours a day in the library. one of the things i was happening was i started graduate school in 2014, the same week mike was killed in ferguson. you think about the beginning of the black lives matter movement. trayvon martin in 2012. the second wave of its beginning was the death of michael brown in ferguson following the

succession of people killed. we were in a moment where people were looking for that affirmation of historical context with which to make sense of why we saw some of the things happening that were happening. i was in graduate school getting my phd and study, broadly, racial inequality. i was reading these books giving me new language and new frameworks, ideas with which to make sense of what was around me. wide police the pardons existed the way they did. why inequality was so profound in different urban cities. new language and framework with which to understand how the history of public policy decisions created the inequality we see in the cities. part of what i started doing on twitter was i had these threads where i was talking about the books that were in conversation

with the moment we found ourselves in. you begin to editorialize and it becomes many blogs -- mini blogs. and then i began to turn those threads into more thoughtful pieces. it is interesting because my journey to becoming a journalist and writer begins with those threads in my little library in the early days of graduate school. i think people were hungry for that information. now i mostly use it to talk about arsenal, my favorite soccer team in london. but that is how it began. >> "how the what is passed" has been named one of the top 10 books of last year. it won the circle award for

nonfiction. where does that phrase come from? mr. smith: "how the word is pas sed? " the first chapter is about monticello. i think the jefferson, in many ways, in the cognitive dissonance and contradictions of the american project. america is a place that provided unimaginable opportunities for many across generations in ways their ancestors could not imagine. it has also done so at the direct expense of millions of people who have been subjugated and depressed. both of those are the story of america. it is not one over here and one over there, they are deeply entangled. jefferson similarly embodies the contradictions of america. he wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the western world and enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. he wrote all men are created

equal and in his book he wrote black people are inferior to whites in body and mind. he said a slave was incapable of love the same way white people were. they could not sustain complex emotion. he talked about phyllis wheatley, the first black woman to publish a book of poetry and set her work was below the dignity of criticism. it was not worth in with because black people did not have, to his mind, the dexterity necessary to create works of art. i thought about that and i was thinking about how so much of what i learned about jefferson growing up did not include other pieces of history. i thought about how that is a reflection of the way which we talk and failed to talk about american history. for so long we only told one part of the story and for so long, until recently, have left large parts of the story out. i went to monticello to get a sense of, how is this institution that carries the

responsibility of conveying the legacy of jefferson, how is this institution communicating who jefferson was? are they communicating the totality of who jefferson was? part of what they are doing in monticello is including the narrative of the descendants of people who were enslaved. one of the descendants had this moment in the research i was doing where he said -- talking about the oral histories passed down from people once enslaved. he said, this is how the word is passed down. is one of those moments where you come across a sentence, like, this is it. this is the embodiment of the project. that is where came from and i felt lucky to spend time in monticello with the historians, the descendants, and monticello is a place that has done a lot of important work. it reflects the way -- telling

the story one way for such a long time does not mean you have to tell it that way. and how they tell the story of who jefferson was with the enslaved folks held monticello is different than how they told it 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago. that is important because these institutions are not stagnant. they can engage in reflection and retrospective of themselves and think about, what are the ways in which we are effectively doing our work? what are the ways we can do it better? >> there has been quite a kerfuffle at james madison's home about how to present history and where the right balance is. in your view, where is the right balance? mr. smith: i think you have to be honest of the totality of who someone was. i remember when i was at monticello, i was on a tour with a guy named david. this older white guy, widebrimmed brown hat, professor looking.

this was the slavery at monticello tour. the way it operates as they tell -- there is a slavery tour, a house tour, a horticultural tour, the hemmings family tour. jefferson was a dynamic person and had a lot of different interests and different facets to his work in personality. he was outlining, as i did before, so many of the moral inconsistencies of jefferson's work that consisted in his letters. our member watching these two women, donna and grace, listening to david talk about the things jefferson wrote about black people in his writing. their faces were wilting, mouths hung agape. they were unsettled. i went up to the matter and said, i would love to hear about what you are feeling. i always member grace turned to me and said, man, he really took the shine off the guy. i had no idea monticello was a plantation. i had no idea jefferson owned slaves. these are folks who bought plane

tickets, got hotel rooms and came to the site is a pilgrimage to see the home of one of the founding fathers, and get had no idea he was an enslaver. it made it clear to me there are millions of people who do not understand the history of slavery. i think part of what monticello and part of what is out of these places and plantations, madison's plantation, washington's plantation, they are, in different ways, grappling with how to talk about the things these men contributed to the american project. while also not shirking away from the moral responsibility to also talk about the ways these men were inconsistent with the very principles they were espousing. >> let's hear from our viewers. clint smith is our guest, "how the word is passed" is the name

of the book. go ahead and make your comment or question. >> i would like to know if you are familiar with the well-established black doctor at tulane university, james puckett carter. he wrote "racketeering in medicine." dr. carter died about a year after katrina and on his website or email to me -- i had to simplify his sentences in "racketeering in medicine" -- it shows his home and though water was up to the window edge and a fire was inside. according to his wife, he felt that is what did him in a year later. he wrote "racketeering in medicine" and he was an ivy league doctor. are you familiar with him?

host: thank you. mr. smith: i am not familiar but tulane is the name of the late tulane who owned enslaved people. this is how ubiquitous it is across new orleans and in so many cities across the country. the names of people who were slavers or supported the confederacy or supported school segregation or in favor of jim crow. their names are emblazoned across the buildings and museums and monuments all across places like new orleans and places throughout not only the south, but across the country. host: so, in a case like that, should the name of the university be changed? mr. smith: i think it is a case-by-case basis. i think each university, each city, each town, each community

has a responsibility to grapple with the competing legacies that exist within any statue or name that exists. i will not sit here and pretend it is an easy answer. we take down all the statues of jefferson or we take down all the statues -- i think there are different gradations. for me, confederate iconography and names are the low hanging fruit of this debate. there is no reason at all that a confederate statues, a statue of someone who supported a war that was explicitly predicated on expanding and maintaining the institution of slavery -- and there's analyst evidence that they wrote, the state and individuals responsible for pushing these policies through -- that this is why they were creating the confederacy. the idea we would lift someone up on a statute or have a school named after them or street named

after them when they were not only treasonous to the cause of the united states, but also were fighting a war to keep 4 million people enslaved and their descendants enslaved, to me runs counter to any notion of justice or what we espouse of the american project that we are tending to move toward. i think if you want to have a statue of robert e. lee in your backyard, that's fine. that your private property. it's strange, but your prerogative. but the fact that taxpayer dollars would maintain the statues and keep them erected in front of courthouses, parks, traffic circles, those for me should be removed. when you get into conversations of jefferson and washington, founding fathers, each community has to make that decision on an individual basis. what that looks like in richmond is different from new orleans, which is different from what it might look like in georgia,

which is different from what it would look like in south carolina. it depends on the context and history of those communities. host: this is a case where a lot of the statues were not put up right after the civil war. they were put up at the turn-of-the-century. mr. smith: there were two primary spikes. many of them were put up in the early 20th century and many of them were put up in the midst of the civil rights movement. if you look at the chart of time, each of these spikes were synonymous with moments in which black people were gaining a larger set of access to political, social and economic mobility. and so, the role of the statues was not simply to commemorate, you know, people fighting a war to protect their communities or protect their families or the south. they were put up explicitly as signs of terror. they were put up explicitly as a

way to communicate and demonstrate to the black populace in these places what the state sanctioned views, what the history, who was in charge, who holds the power. i think all about the tennessee state legislature. in the capitol, there is a bust of nathan bedford forrest taken down a few years ago. this was put up in 1978. nathan bedford forrest was the first member of the ku klux klan. he led the massacre of black union soldiers who had already surrendered. he is someone who was ardent in his beliefs of white supremacist as he. and this bust of him was put in the tennessee state legislature in 1978. that 1870 -- not 1878. there is no way to understand --

that is like when i talk about the relationship between public policy and symbolism. putting up a bust of the first grand wizard of the ku klux klan and confederate army general, there is no way to understand that without having it reflect a set of ideologies, priorities and policies that would be pushed and espoused and advocated by people whose interest is, in some ways, represented by the head of this man they intentionally placed in the space. host: let's hear from don from new orleans. go ahead. caller: love the book festival, love c-span and the library of congress peered we need to have more books to read. i have the issue of slavery, and

we talk about thomas jefferson and his dominance of the african people, in the dominance of universities. -- the endowments of universities. these endowments support scholarships, fellowships, professorships, and then we talk about the issue of slavery. the pilgrims came over on ships. the matilda was a slave ship. the issue of transcontinental slave trade and the issue of ships -- host: i apologize. we are getting tight on time.

what is your question? caller: my question is, when we talk about these presidents and statues, the statues of these white supremacists and the statutes, the laws there representing. virginia has had eight presidents out of 46 and they are the leader of the enslavement of african people. host: we are going to leave it there. clint, anything you want to respond to? mr. smith: i think part of what exists is a fundamental understanding from the larger american public. not even a misunderstanding but lack of understanding of the origins of the african slave trade. i think part of the way we are taught about slavery has historically been on such a service level to the extent it is engaged with at all.

we find ourselves in a moment where, because of projects like the 1619 project in black lives matter that helped usher in a new set of scholarship and books and ideas -- not that the ideas themselves are new, but put into the public consciousness as an effort to tell a fuller story of american history. for many people, that represents a crisis of identity. that represents a crisis of self. for so many americans over the last 10 years the, way in which we talk about racism and the way we understand the history of racism is that it is not only interpersonal but systemic. one that is embedded in systems and structures. it also demands that we tell a fuller, more holistic story of

america in ways that, look at some of our founding myths. they challenge the ideas we have a spouse as being synonymous with the american project. we include the perspectives of people whose voices have not always been included. that challenges the rendering of america many people have had. so many people in this country's sense of themselves is tied to the story of america that is not include the voices now being included. when you ask people to learn more about slavery or learn more about indigenous genocide, to learn more about the chinese exclusion or the range of different things this country has done that have not always been part of our public discourse around with this country has been. for many people that is not only a challenge to the country but themselves. they see it as an existential crisis and i think that is why we see such vibrant pushback in

the form of state legislatures trying to prevent people learning about the history that explains why our society looks away does. school boards preventing teachers from teaching books that help share perspectives that have not always been included in our larger public discourse and consciousness. it is important -- what so many people are experiencing is a sense of fear because their version of america, the story they so long believed, is being recognized as being an incomplete story. for so many people, when you say the story of america we have told for so long is incomplete, you are on tethering something that has anchored them in their identity and sense of self and community for a long time. host: clint smith, his new book is called "how the world was -- of what how the word is passed."

he also appeared on book tv in the past. a couple of years ago he was leaving a reading program at the d.c. jail. book tv covered it. it is a fascinating two hours. mr. smith and his partner leading some of the prisoners in a book club. i recommend that to you to watch online if you get the chance. thank you for being with us at the national book fair. mr. smith: thank you. host: coming up, elizabeth williamson who has written about sandy hook. we will also be taking your calls during that segment. it was 10 years ago that book tv was out on the mall with the national book festival and david and julie nixon-eisenhower were talking about his grandfather, dwight eisenhower. here is a portion. [video clip] >> a lot has been written about your parents' relationship with the eisenhowers.

how would you describe it? >> one of the things i enjoyed doing when i was working on eisenhower's retirement years was to look at that relationship and think about it more. i am amazed eisenhower and nixon got along as well as they did. when you think about it, you have two presidents rumbling around together. a president is someone who is very driven. he has an agenda. he has a vision. he knows where he is going. you have dwight eisenhower and nixon, at 39, is already showing signs he is on his way. the fact they got along so well, as well as they did i would say, i think is a testament to several things. first of all, eisenhower should be praised. eisenhower made the vice presidency significant. he sent my parents to 53 nations around the world as goodwill investors.

they were in vietnam in 1953. they were in africa and asia and all of the world, 53 nations, because he believed in person-to-person diplomacy. he used his vice president and my father liked that. let's say, eisenhower led the way on that relationship, with making the vice presidency more than what it was, a warm bowl of spit? who said that? [laughter] >> to add to what julie was saying, and is covered in mr. smith's book, the fact they got along in spite of their circumstances and abilities, the alternative would be eisenhower and macarthur. when you see pictures of eisenhower and macarthur together in this cozy situation in manila, you had the general and the staff aide. they are leaning over slightly in providing the general with the draft of the message he is to approve. it is all humble and that kind of thing.

but this relationship is going to blow up and you say, of course it was going to blow up. the person who commands u.s. forces, accepts the japanese surrender in tokyo-based september 1945, this is macarthur, the far eastern theater commander. dwight eisenhower commands the theater. neither are subordinate. no wonder that they blew up, and they did. eisenhower and nixon, in hindsight, what was it herndon said about lincoln? the ambition was an engine that never rested. you have to have that to be president, to even be eligible to become president. to be within the zone of people considered for the presidency. they both have this tremendous inner dine -- dinism.

there's this wonderful account richard nixon wrote of his last business meeting with dwight eisenhower. the torches passing. dwight eisenhower was somebody who knew two things. first of all, he knew the nature of soviet communism and he knew america's important in defending the free world. but he also knew that his perspective and his wisdom were generation bound. nixon represented the next generation. they would have to make their own evaluation of the situation. but it was probably confusing.

what you said about the eisenhower doctrine, if you fight a war, you are going to win, that was not applied in vietnam. richard nixon was running for president in 1967 on a platform not promising to obliterate north vietnam or win victory. what he was promising to do is end the war and win piece. what happened at the final meeting, eisenhower has read the articles, he approves and things he understands. he realizes he is now older. he will not have the energy to see this project through. this is why we turn to able people. this is why we regenerate the presidency. nixon was in a position to make a call in 1968 that have endless positive international

ramifications. host: mrs. eisenhower, did you want to add anything? >> the last meeting where my father travels up, he had a copy of foreign affairs where he said we need to end the isolation of china and recognize the united states and china have to move forward together. eisenhower had based his presidency and post-presidency and saying, no recognition of red china. at the end eisenhower came to agree that it was time for a new shift. host: that was david and julie nixon-eisenhower 10 years ago when it was held on the mall. we are the washington convention center are in the washington convention center. a lot of activity, a lot of people come book bags being passed out. all sorts of events happening.

we are pleased to be joined by elizabeth williamson, her book is sandy hook: an american tragedy. she is a writer. how tough was a do it right book and to research it -- was it to write this book and research it? >> i owe a great debt to the families of the victims and were forthcoming with me and trusted me with the story. that was a privilege. >> this happened in 2012, the massacre. the families were not out there. they did not speak publicly very much. how did you get them to talk? >> initially, a couple of them had made comments and actually those comments were used against them by conspiracy theorists.

they did end up really kind of being quiet after a wild because you have to remember that these were private people. there were not public figures, they have never spoken to the media previously. not all, but most. when they gave interviews, what they were completely unprepared for was the fact that conspiracy theorists who said that the shooting never happened, it was a gambit, a pretext by the government to create gun control and portrayed them as actors in this government plot. that led to a lot of silence. >> how did what the families that initially became conspiracy theory fodder? >> one father in particular who is the father of emilie parker who died in sandy hook, when he went to make a statement on behalf of his family about his

daughter, speaking about her as a child and their gratitude for the outpouring of sympathy that they had already received. this was the night after the shooting and he did was as he stepped into the microphone he thought he was going to be addressing one camera crew. it turned out to be a sea of cameras and a reporter. he gave this a nervous laugh, not knowing what to do and what happened was that was portrayed as why would a grieving father who had just lost his daughter the laughing? that was spun into a pot for years. -- plot. >> alex jones had a leading role in this plot? >> he was spinning this narrative that this was a pretext for conine gun control measures -- four draconian gun control measures. >> what was your view of the

verdict? >> the verdict will still be appealed, it was a hefty judgment, $50 million. there is some question as to whether the families will collect that full amount. what it was an opportunity to confront alex jones with the damage that his lies had caused. >> do you think he believes this was not a conspiracy? >> he has acknowledged that the shooting occurred, the victims died. what he does do is sort of say that and wink and nod to his audience. many of whom actually believe this. people ask me does alex jones believes the shooting actually happened? the answer is it does not matter what he believes, he has an

audience, many of who believed the shooting did not occur and will defend that mistruths. >> how long did it take for the families to trust you? >> i would say a couple of months, maybe. lenny pozner, he was very leery at first. he is a central character in the book, the person who saw the sandy hook conspiracy theory as a foundational story of how mistruths and disinformation has gained traction. he had dealt with the media more, he was concerned that his story would be portrayed -- the broader story would be portrayed accurately. it took him a little while and for us to get to know each other. >> elizabeth williamson is our

guest, the book is called sandy hook: an american tragedy. the numbers on the screen. if you would like to dial in, 202 is the area code (202) 748-8000 four the central time zone. (202) 748-8201 if you are in the mountain-pacific time zone. how are the families? >> the parker family moved to the pacific northwest, lenny pozner and vernie delarosa are the parents of the youngest sandy hook victim have had to move a dozen times trying to escape the people who put their personal information and address online. as soon as they would move,

someone would post their address and they have to move again. they live many hundred miles from the sandy hook area. >> have you suffered repercussions because of this? >> and nothing that really bothers me -- nothing that really bothers me. let me put it that way. >> did you try to talk to all families? >> there only two families, only two families that make contact with the father of the gunman. one found that conversation very satisfying and cathartic. another did not find it helpful. because most of the families did not make contact, i did not do so either. i do quote an interview from the new yorker with the father of the gunman as a means of explaining who this family is. and also neil hesseman is one of

my main characters and he did sit with the father of the gunman and i described that interaction. >> how do conspiracy theories, this is not the first one. this is one of the bizarre ones? >> the significance of this particular conspiracy theory is that it began a decade in which we have seen this information, conspiracy theories, and false narratives really ramp up and surge in our society. part of the is the uptake in social media. people who spread these theories that way. part of it is we have had a conspiracy minded president immediately preceding jill biden. who saw in this group of people

who are suspicious of the government and who are inclined to be distrustful of everything from the federal government to traditional medicine, he has found a vital constituency. clint has contributed to the fact that every mass shooting generates conspiracy theories and in fact a fifth of americans believe that every high-profile mass shooting was staged. >> 1/5? >> 1/5. what is at the site of the sandy hook elementary school? >> they built a new school in its place. that was a significant undertaking. it is quite a state of the art school, it is secure, it is beautiful and combing. it was built near the site of the original school. where the murders actually occurred has been preserved and not really as a park but as an

unmarked space. it is not called to mind because children go to the school. it is built immediately behind the original site. >> can you talk to the families after the uvalde shooting? >> some of them reached out to me and exchanged messages in the hours after the shooting. they had a range of reactions. some were angry, there were certainly sad, they are also worried about the families of the victims. >> sandy hook --sandy hook: an american tragedy is the name of the book, dan is coming in from brooklyn. go ahead, dan. >> i keep wondering about the perpetrator. over the years, we have learned to characterize him.

he was autistic or something? usually people like that are not prone to this kind of an personal random violence -- impersonal random violence. also, i wanted to know if you think that there is an understanding of this kind of problem from outside the schools that results in better security in schools? in all of the cases, all the way to texas, that seems to be the poorest part. art has a officers there reacting -- preoccupied with some other security aspects? >> i think we got the point, thank you. the shooter's psychological makeup and school security? >> significant red flags were

raised by mental health professionals and by the people in the gunman's world. people speak a lot about the fact he was diagnosed with autism but in fact at the time at the shooting he was engaged in a profound mental health struggle that had little to do with autism. he was living in a smaller world, he was isolated and he was struggling with a lot of demons. as to the school safety issue, a number of the sandy hook families have engaged in different efforts including an effort to improve safety in schools also to reach out and teach compassion and empathy and social emotional learning. scarlet lewis, the mother of jesse lewis is engaged in

something called the jesse lewis to the love movement which teaches social emotional learning in schools to try to mitigate factors that lead to mental health struggles in children. >> it has been 10 years since this happened. >> sarah, san diego. go ahead. >> i am so sorry for your loss, first off. bless you. recently, i had a sort of epiphany about possibly creating a crowd source for people to give money to people in congress who are running for congress who commit to not taking any money from the nra. do you know anybody who i would contact for that type of endeavor? >> deal and be clear, she did

not lose a family member at sandy hook. -- thank you and to be clear, she did not lose a family member. thank you sarah. they think to respond to it when it comes to the nra? >> i appreciate that compassion for the families, who lost children and educators at sandy hook, thank you. on the nra issue, i deliberately do not engage in the current policy debate in the book because i focus on the spirit of this and disinformation in society. -- on misinformation and disinformation in society. i am sorry, i cannot help you but some of the parents are very much engaged in that issue. i would encourage you to seek them out. >> the next call is there in drums, pennsylvania. -- is larry in drums, pennsylvania. >> on the subject of books and

classifications, i was wondering if all of the books that were put out attacking president donald trump with a bunch of misinformation included in them, are these books considered fiction? are they considered fact? even though there are few facts in them? i was wondering if there are any books out there in regards to president joe biden's mental health and capacity and what the findings -- >> let us take the first part of that question. the reporting that was done about the so-called russian hoax or the russian connection. would you classify that as a conspiracy theory? >> conspiracy theories are

bipartisan. if was often -- before the trump era, people tended to say that you could find more conspiracy theories on the left around the jfk assassination. i would view conspiracy theories as a bipartisan phenomenon. i think that is absolutely the facts. the other thing is that you have to distinguish conspiracy theories that are true and those that are false and i think that only research and reputable fact-finding can make that distinction. >> you said 1/5 of americans believe that all mass shootings are created or fake. how do you combat that? >> that is a great question. it is difficult to combat this when people have already embraced a conspiracy theory. it is difficult to talk them out of it.

what has happened lately is that there has been research into trying to quote, inoculate people. against believing in conspiracy theories or recognizing them when they spread as misinformation and that has been helpful to people. as long as it can identify those theories before they embrace them. that is a bit more successful. >> talking about her book, you can watch that online anytime at book tv.org. the book is called sandy hook: an american tragedy. thank you for your time today. they live coverage continues now, next up is an author discussion on creating community in america, this is a live from washington bc -- washington dc.

>> i am beatrice, collections officer of the library of congress. it is a honor to introduce you to the national book festival. books bring us together. at this time, we ask that you turn off or silence all of your cell phones. if you need to leave the room, use the doors on the left. we want to notify you that this event will be recorded and your entry and presence at this program constitutes your consent to be filmed or otherwise recorded. i would like to pass the microphone to the moderator of the session today and i thank you i do hope you enjoy the program. >> good afternoon, i am a journalist and the editor of chief -- editor in chief of the newsroom. i am delighted to be here today, to moderate this discussion,

citizens united creating community in america with two fantastic authors i admire. a writer and editor of the new york times book review and catherine judge, who is a professor at the columbia law school. let us start with your book, this is the second time i have moderated with you. in your book, the quiet before, you take us on a broad romp through the world of ideas from the 17th century france to tahrir square, occupy wall street and the streets of indianapolis. you talk about the network effects that enable ideas to generate and build on each other in a way that is harder to do online where it is hard to get momentum out of a tweet or a post. tell us a bit about the

arguments you make in your book. >> the impetus for the book with a feeling that i had that social movements were -- we were seeing in our moments, social movements who burned very bright, briefly and then flare out. sometimes they would leave a national conversation for us to have. the activists at the center of the movements were not getting the goals they wanted to achieve. this was almost a communications problem. if you ask people where a movement starts, or a movement incubates, they would say the social media. put a tweet out there, if it gains enough attention, if enough people respond to it emotionally, that is a successful movement. it is not, really. it does not allow for the sustainability that a movement actually needs to make real concrete change on the ground

and activists were saying this. -- seeing this. let me do what i do when i feel stuck in the present which is let us look to the past. understand in a predigital age what forms of communications and media did people use when they wanted to begin to develop and grow a radical notion some ideas that would upend a status quo, knock down some orthodoxy, my ending slavery or giving the women the right to vote. what tools did they use actually come together and this took me on the journey you described, starting with letters before the scientific revolution, going through petitions in england and the effort of the working class to get the right to vote, to see

independence in small newspapers, each place had a medium at the center. when all the way to the 1990's, zines and the birth of third wave feminism. that exploration of the past of these historical moments of what i call incubation for a lack of better term, they elicited from a bunch of qualities that a medium needs to have. to really create the sustainable, long-lasting kind of movements that are going to make change. we can talk a bit about what those are later but things like patients, allowing cohesion, getting people a chance to imagine together, to really plot in a way that may be a bit private. the public and performative as our platforms are today. -- not as public and

performative as our platforms are today. where we may find a possibility in terms of a social movement building up again. >> your book is a tour de force, working through it i really came to see how the modern economy has come togethe the last four or five decades. you described so vividly what has changed in terms of our consumption habits, our assumptions about abundance and waste. the power of concentrated capitalism, what got you started on this look at the middleman economy? could you start by defining it? >> i may have to take those in reverse order. my work originally is in banking and financial regulation. anyone who has studied the financial system knows it has been -- is that better?

all right. my work is in banking and financial regulation and anybody who has spent time studying finance knows that the entire field has been transformed starting around 1980. it used to be that we had a small, community banks that took local deposits and circulated them into the local community which made them a willing to make loans to small businesses that were risky but they were building a relationship. what we saw was two shifts went from -- you went from having community banks to having five banks that play an outsized role in providing financial services and shipping policy. they did different ways of banking where they used all of the resources and data to standardize the lending process and that in turn enabled a

secure innovation that allowed this a long and complex capitalist supply chain where you had investors in europe and asia filtering money and to u.s. housing. -- into u.s. housing. it seemed to create efficiencies. we saw that the housing ownership rates were going up, the racial disparity it was going down, it seemed like a great thing. then the other shoe drop and what we realized was in addition to creating efficiencies and benefits, there was an fragility that was built up -- eight fragility that was built up. we think marcus create information, look at the structures and it is producing information gaps -- markets create information, look at the structures and it is producing

information gaps. incredible long-term pain for the economy and americans. widespread fraud, and bad actions and predatory lending practices but little ability to hold anybody high up accountable. we see these exact same trends. i am looking here and my aunt, we have relatives in illinois who are farmers. i've tried to buy food or i know it comes from and i realize how hard that was to do. you see a family farm as the norm. you have individual consumers and get in between we have companies like kargil that has produced more billionaires than any other company anywhere in the world. look at retail and is the amazon and walmart are the biggest revenue generators in the entire country. the two biggest employers and this incredible gains from this, they appear to create

efficiencies. their scale also demands a different production process. it is -- the book, i explore how in the process of demanding the scale you have to have a disaggregation of production. about corporate power, and it shows where that is -- we talk about corporate power, and it is important, it maps out the concentration and the growing power of these entities has been fed and is feeding a diffusion of responsibility. an inability to hold people accountable. if you want to know where your food is grown or the working conditions behind the people who made the clothes you are wearing, it is almost impossible to relearn these days. it is looking in sector after sector of how we have had this,

this goes back to the middleman economy, it is an economy or we have these large and powerful middleman and the long and complex supply chains that help to feed their dominance. it has transformed our economy. >> thinking about the title of the book, creating community, i am curious about your thoughts on the internet? you point out the limits to a # activism. it is wiping out almost all prior mediums. does that make it impossible to develop the kinds of social movements and political movements and revolutions and ideas that characterize the past? >> i do not think so, i am not one of these cyber pessimists who thinks you should unplug because i know that is not

possible. people are not going to do that and i think that we need to have a more nuanced understanding of what the internet is good for and what different tools it provides us. i would hope that the awareness people emerge from my book with is not let us never do activism online, let us think carefully about what is a twitter or facebook or other large social media platforms good for? it is good for being a bullhorn, it is effective at calling everyone to the square or street at the same time. it is good for refining a very good three word blurb, a slogan that has embodied a narrative of a movement you can ping around very fast. it is not good at strategizing and building cohesion and taking what is often an emotional

trigger for movements and turning them into strategy whether it be legislative strategy or figuring out where should we protest and who should -- what lever should we pull at any particular moment? i what i hope people learn, i think they own people are beginning to understand this more than those of us who are older and are still dazzled by the internet and it can do is think carefully about what we speak online. i have a chapter on black lives matter activists in minneapolis and florida and they went through is interesting trajectory of saying their movement gain incredible visibility and attention and then feeling that in many cases like the goals they had for police reform were not effectuated. they understood this problem of social media, getting sucked into this sense that all we need to do is gain visibility and that is making the movement. they have retracted and said

that his focus on who gets elected to the city council and coming up with as a proposal that the community buys into. it is an older form of organizing. in terms of online, a lot of these groups have told me that they have their small, chat app. what's up group or single group where there is i-10 people who talk about strategy -- 8-10 people who are talking about strategy. that is really good for that sort of work. once they had developed an idea they can disseminate it through different avenues. tools we can pick up online, i think is -- and may seem like an obvious conclusion but i think we focus on the quick but there are ways of being slow and unfocused and intimate online. >> speed is a theme that gets me

thinking about catherine's book. ours is a society obsessed with having a wide array of choices, being able to order instantaneously and have same-day delivery or next day delivery. the vast american majority it uses amazon and amazon prime is a lifeblood of the company and but also something that so many millions of americans have come to rely upon. can you reflect on the trade-offs between fast, cheap, and lots of choice, and the downside of that? >> the first step is to recognize that there are trade-offs. it is so easy to fall into the dominant system without thinking about the ramifications of that choice. part of what drug documents is that the benefits are often immediate but the price that you pay is often a long-term.

if benefits are tangible and individualized to you whereas the cost is diffused and it is one that you will pay but oftentimes over time. think about the rise of amazon, it is, the majority of americans are prime members. the process of going back is easier and easier. once amazon grows in dominance, it squeezes out the alternatives that used to exist. for any individual to go outside of it, it becomes more difficult. as a challenge is how do we mitigate between them? like all of my points, it is pragmatic. we do not go back to the producer every time that we want to get a good, but that is a seed that i plan to help people understand of what is at stake, through whom we buy and whom do we invest?

understanding the current structures leaves us blinded to the impact on others and our actions on the planet, and how even a little bit of going to the opposite theme reawakens the awareness of that -- the awareness that has been dulled by the court system. it leads to the awareness of think we need to have the political will to bring about more sustained and systematic changes. we are knocking away from being online or from a world of middleman and intermediation. there is a meaningful rebalancing of power so that more of the control and the choice really lies in the hands of creators and consumers. less of the power lies with the middleman that have come to play such an outsized role, shaping our economies and our lives in ways we do not always appreciate. >> i would like to know if government has a role to play?

for the internet, should things like section 230 we revisited? should the government take a role in grading a healthier or save ecosystem -- in creating a healthy or save ecosystem? should they play a greater role in breaking up large companies that control so much of the economy? >> yes. [laughter] >> that was easy! >> has internet has become our public sphere. -- the internet has become our public sphere. these social media platforms are the place where ideas circulate. every public sphere needs -- historically, i am not saying this because it is my own feeling, being online and

billing bombarded often and worrying about the direction of discourse. historically there has always been a sense of his or the guard rails, this is what is permitted and this is what is not permitted. i have a chapter on the pre-internet when indicating online in real time meant dialing up into a modem. bulletin boards. >> i have a chapter on the well, for the first real attempt to bring people together in this way. it was weird to them that there were in writing in a disembodied way online talking to each other and literally the second day they said we need some rules here. there was a troll on day three. there is a constant sense of communication behind the scenes. people were moderating to make sure that the talk was productive, that it actually did not push into the worst

instincts of people who are communicating without seeing each other face to face. this is a small group, this is not millions of people that are on twitter, those instincts are there right away. this was a new way we are communicating, we need some rules here. that is always the underlying notion behind a public sphere. going back to the idea in the coffeehouses of europe, it is never a sense of a free for all. them on a person can hijack a situation -- that a person can hijack a situation. a group of people come together and decide this is how we talk to each other. >> is there a profound sense of

disillusionment on how the early internet culture hasn't replaced by these social media dominated silos? or by forms like a-chan or people are spreading misinformation about covid? >> i think there is a romanticism that emerged from the early internet which is we can all meet each other online, around our common interests and this is a beautiful thing we did not have before and it is. there was a core layer -- a corollary, this is a new and uncharted way of human beings communicating to each other. we need to be thoughtful and deliberate about how we do this. that was forgotten a bit. or a lot. instead, this free speech absolutism took over. our thinking about what kind of speech goes on online and especially as it thinks scale up to such an enormous degree it is

not a bunch of professors and futurists in the bay area that are talking on the well. it is everybody. we lost that initial insight i feel that did characterize the early internet. >> what about the government role? should the government have a role in curbing the power of these middlemen? >> so, yes! [laughter] the question is what does the role look like? more vigorous enforcement of any trust law which means try to revisit the law as it stands, figure out where it needs to be built out but also as we are currently seeing happen with the biden administration, an effort to an earth the original aims of the laws and reclaim those purposes with the terms of political engagement and a balance of power that they have

been interpreted in rigid decades -- recent decades. the top-down way of leveling the playing field. there is a lot the federal government is doing and more that they could do to level the playing field from the bottom up. i have about the community sponsored gardens as a way to connect it directly and understanding these sorts of things. most markets are happening on three owners -- street corners. the government plays a role in making those spaces available. part of what the book explores is intermediaries playing this critical role of helping to overcome all of the challenges. that bring creators and consumers together. as a government can really play a role helping to restore a more meaningful choice for people on

both sides of the change by creating the infrastructure. talk about amazon, at this point amazon has an amazing fleet of warehouses and trucks and so does walmart. that makes it so much easier and faster to go to amazon than anywhere else. for the u.s. postal service, they are trying to make some changes, we are trying to make it to where they can make their ends meet as opposed to making it a public service. they are stretching out delivery times. it can be for five days for a package, that makes it harder to opt out. the government will subsidize and support the public infrastructure that we need to maintain meaningful choice that people want to do. they may have to wait a bit longer and pay a bit more, but the cost of opting out can be

meaningfully reduced by the government come in and not telling people where to go, but creating the infrastructure that allows a balance of power. a more healthy balance than i think it is right now. >> what about the argument they hear all of the time? the goods are cheap and we like our convenience, we like our fast fashion, clothing waste,. >> what is interesting to think about is to take a step back. one of the things i like about his book is this incubation environment is you can experiment. what i invite and bright as one experiment on what ends up feeling meaningful and where dwight ends up coming from. astounding numbers when you look at it, goods have gotten cheaper and food has gotten cheaper and we consume more.

we buy a lot more clothing, with or away a lot more clothing, we consume more food. there is interesting empirical work when a new walmart supercenter pops up, waistlines in that area get bigger. we really do eat more good there is a question of what is the optimal level of consumption? a lot of the infrastructure we had was built upon the scarcity mindset. there is not enough so therefore we need to build more efficient systems so we have more. now we are living in a world we all have more and everybody is overwhelmed by having more. trying to figure out how do we actually create a balance that serves us individually and collectively i think is a challenge we have going forward. it is helping us to develop a better set of tools for more thoughtfully engaging in those choices were as right now, our desires are determined by the environments we are in. we are taught to want more and want cheaper goods and what more goods.

i think we are already seeing a rebellion. i think that is something that our books have in common, there is a dominant system but there is a lot of evidence of dissatisfaction within the system. it is easier for us to communicate, but we have all of these cheap goods, are we any happier? oftentimes, no. >> robert putnam's research on social and the disappearance of political institutions, there are fewer civic associations. fewer people bowling together as putnam explained. even in sports participation has declined during church attendance has declined. public spheres have not been invested in.

parks, libraries, museums. how do we turn this around? to me, the reason why so many people are perhaps in their basement playing video games or in their basement doing all my shopping is partly a response to a feeling of community bonds of weathered and covid did not help anything. >> i think the first thing is to understand the often need a medium. i found this wonderful metaphor that was used in the human condition, this is my kind of crowd! she talks about -- he is looking at one of the binding agent that holds society together and her metaphor is a table. she says if you have people sitting around a table, they have come together, let us imagine that table suddenly disappears. you have a random bunch of people standing around. the table itself has brought people together.

that notion of the need for a table, as any for people to come together, whether it is a library or a park or a book club or a bowling league is really key to our thinking about the internet. we think of what we are doing online as being part of communities. i think we need to think about the features of what allows a real community to come together. what gives people the opportunity to speak their mind, to release each other, -- to release each other. it is not happening in these meetings we imagine are supposed to do that job. to make, the first thing is to have a self-awareness. self-awareness that will push back against some of the things we have been talking about. the drive for efficiency, for quickness and also performative in.

-- performativity. thinking about creating structures where people can speak to each other or among each other. we have had these's the town hall, the coffee shop's these are structures that have existed and some of the ones i look at in my book that are not a person to person but are mediated through some form of communication. like the scenes. -- zines. they can express themselves and can make it with one another. thinking about how to re-create those mediums, the table around which people can actually begin to have meaningful discussions. >> starting from the premise, i see individual change has two b with social change and hand and hand. it is a messy process. understanding part of it means

the increase in awareness. understanding our own individual culpability. we have laid a role and -- we have each played a role. would it to the realities i do not like. -- i contributed to the realities that i do not like. when i am in a hurry and i am trying to buy leggings i am going to go online and get whatever leggings i can find. i am willing to spend more to know where they come from, you do the research on fair trade and organic and it is really depressing. we have this incredibly complex system that causes us to lose information and slap a label on it does not tell us anything. we can also ban together collectively to bring about structural changes that we need to restore community.

a lot of direct traditionally has been based in geographically where we live. there is an incredible value for that and brooke will always be a part of that. i celebrate those spaces because those are the settings where the process of transacting and buying and selling 10 feet in two relationships of people you are seeing and other parts of your life. where transactions where we think about you are a consumer can be something other than a consumer but you are a citizen. member of the community coming together. i want to live in a world that is not hierarchical and in meaningful ways. having been to -- making goods cheaper for us has raised quality of life in other parts of the world. the challenge is rebuilding of community and also to broadly

conceived community in new ways. try to think how can we harness a different type of understanding? these incredibly innovative entrepreneurs, who are oftentimes harnessing their own dual identities. it is a way of creating new companies where you have a beauty company that is sourcing all of its from ghanashea -- shea from ghana's they do not pay a premium for the goods, and who can give money separately for the health care. eca shorter and transparent supply -- you see a shorter and crisp air supply chain. a community is being defined by people who face common oppressors and are trying to reclaim who they are and thinking black owned not only

be about as owner but everybody involved. we are saying that in a lot of different spaces in some innovative -- seeing that in a number of spaces in innovative weiss. we pay attention through whom we have to think about. [applause] if you have questions, please line up and i will be certain to call on you. i make it in more questions. -- let me get in one more question. what you think about the institutions of today that are withering? i am thinking about newspapers, and magazines. a lot are being eviscerated or even illuminated. -- eliminated.

-- >> some of these things and platform like next door and i know that is not even the best one, there are a few place that re-create the functionality of the new cement paper -- of the small newspaper. >> you will find a nonprofit and newsrooms across america who are trying to do that. what's the point of understanding the importance of those things, that is what we are both driving home in some ways. the shifting conversation from a model of efficiency, everything at the altar of efficiency,

seeing the friction that existed with older forms was good. it was creating meaning for people. >> it is work to go. that is a source of friction if your goal is efficiency which is getting everything you can with as little work as possible. wrecking oars -- recognize that is a chance for connection and community building on both sides. historically, it has been. we have seen that at this point, and loneliness is almost as much of a public health epidemic as obesity. that was true even before covid. it has got it worse but it was true before that. in trying to get everything we wanted with as little effort as possible, we are also feeding 882 this way that we became isolated -- in to this way that

we have become isolated. that little interaction that actually can start to see the different meeting. the community, to use the theme here, we think this is the commonality. we have technologies that are great and we need to figure out how to harness them for the collective benefit. we need to be wary of where they can take us. be aware of frictions are often where meaning comes from. that mom and pop store will always have a place but it will not be nearly the footprint it was historically. balance is what we have to forge. >> question? what's your disk -- >> your discussion talks about printing the pool, whether it is a pool or a library where people can

meet in community have been spaces that have become forced to shut down because they have a book about lgbtq people. i would like to hear your thoughts about how you push past that and the desire of certain aspects of society to drain the pool, eliminate these public spaces where people who are marginalized can run to? >> i think it is a sad phenomenon and i -- my only solution is for people to think locally about saving the institutions that matter to them. like the pool or library. i did not write my book as a guidebook for activism. as a result of doing the research i did, for people who want to get engaged, choosing targets that are actually close to home and not thinking in this

big, national scale, some of these big conversations we have, that is something that social media pushes us towards and away from saying why do i know fight a group of people who want to -- find a group of people who want to save the library because it matters to us? this makes a lot of sense. if your mind is turned toward activism. >> think locally, act globally. >> thank you. what i am seeing with great joy in the united states when i was beginning was more unionization. that goes back to what we are talking about. homegrown, organizing communication and not being afraid of the forces who are out there against it. what i have been watching

closely is not only the organizing but also the amazon workers organizing, for unions. my question to you is and again this is going into the future, you think that will have any impact whatsoever on people perhaps using amazon less? >> hopefully, but it is hard to know. a couple of different pieces to make. it has been incredibly hopeful because we all know the trend. unionization grew grammatically in the post-new deal era and has been declining. there is revived interest in harnessing the collective interests and energies of workers to look out for the interests. i do think that right now, one

of the benefits of the unionization efforts have not only been the limited circumstances they have already been successful but they are illuminating the spotlight we needed on the reality of working in an amazon warehouse and how dehumanizing it is. one of the things i saw at her direct is the ship from shorter supply chains, it also changes the nature of work. it changes the nature of what you are doing. just as importantly, or treated as fungible because you are a part of a system. -- you are treated as fungible because you are part of a system. i do think that the focus on amazon workers has been a critical first step. it is only a first step. we need to understand as dehumanizing as the conditions are that they are facing, when we take a broader perspective

over all of the workers that are playing a role in the production of most of the goods we are getting on amazon, a lot of them would kill for the wages and safety and protections that they would enjoy in an amazon warehouse. >> one final quick question. >> thank you. my question is for misjudge. i worked in agri-food trade and insecurity and that is a context i have been thinking about as you are talking about reducing has authorized power of an intermediary. it is inevitable that comes with a raised cost burden on the people who are then producing or consuming goods, especially when it comes to food. considering the fact that millions of americans are food insecure and not necessarily hungry, but depending on systems like amazon or walmart to get there basic caloric needs, what

mechanisms do you suggest to support them when the government may not be able to subsidize them. the only accessible food that they have is cheap and often non-nutritious. >> food insecurity of one -- is one of the most difficult challenges we face. articulate right now, as we have, rising food prices and we have so many more people going hungry and we are suffering because of that. i would say food prices like clothing prices have been artificially lowered because we are not actively paying the full price of the cause of production. if we look at the impact is of current growing practices from where we are destroying land and consuming water and using fertilizers that have really adverse consequences in

incredible amounts, it is not a sustainable path. thinking longer term, and start to raise the question, on one hand, we make sure the people get fed. the challenge of living with hunger is incredibly challenging. how do we do so we have had a wonderful upper charity -- opportunity to learn. i want to give a warm thank you for this discussion. [applause]