everybody gave forth. i'm glad it wasn't swept under the rug which they -- i'm sure politicians would have loved to have swept. they did. slipped interest under the rug, you know. they told the american people it was a victory. it was. at what cost? so the movie and -- was wonderful. they did a great job. lot of truth to it. and -- more truth than hollywood. and -- i'm just happy it is out there in the book for generations to read, future generations to read. and -- we pray to god somebody will read and it change history the way we do things the way things are done. i mean, find a way, better way than war. find a better way than war. i mean, read that book and read other books on horrible battles over our time. the things going on today. and say -- you know, between can't just keep getting these

58,000, 226 kids and 2040 kids to this date, 45, constantly give, give, give. you have to find some other means, how know. it would be nice. i don't know if it is ever going to happen. i'm glad the book and everything is out there for people to read. i hope the younger generations are reading and learning because it is a good book. good story that was told. >> all right, bill. thank you so much for sitting there and doing this. >> thanks for your time. thank you for your time.

douglas mack arthur, you ar actually -- we are filming of douglas macarthur in little rock, arkansas, one of the little moan pacts important a lot of people, macarthur's father, captain arthur, was in the u.s. military polling his service in the civil war. in 1959 and spent about 18 months here serving at the

arsenal that existed on the site where our building is located. he brought with him to little rock his wife and two sons. they've actually lived in this building they were in in one of the apartments that was contained in this structure, and then the following january 26th, 1880, douglas was born here and spent his first six months in this building. six months after this birth, his father was transferred outside of arkansas, and he only came back to arkansas one time in his life, in 1952, 72 years of age. during that return visit here on these grounds for the first time publicly he acknowledged in a speech to 10,000 people that he was returning to the place of his birth, and for us, that's a very significant part of our site's history, building's history and embrace this and proudly include him in the name of our museum. 1952 was very pivotal point in macarthur's career. that brings us to this room

we're seeing right now. in april of 19 51 after a lengthy military service that spanned three worldwide conflicts. world war i, world war ii and korea, macarthur was abruptly removed of command by president harry s. truman. i think it's important for us to consider that the korean conflict occurred just five years after the end of world war ii. and that was a conflict that had spanned all over our globe. millions of people had died. lives had been uprooted and affected by it, and then here we were five years later getting into another conflict. for americans, in a country most people in america had no idea where it was, and the united nations forces were led by general macarthur, and he disagreed with the way that the war was conducted and made this disagreements, with the

president, public, and because of that, president truman decided that he needed to relieve him of command and bring him home. >> it was with the deepest personal regret that i found myself compelled to take this action. general macarthur is one of our greatest military commanders, ldeathe cause of wor individual. >> at the time, macarthur was held as a hero. he returned to this country after a very lengthy absence and was rallied, receives by parades on the west and east coast. he addressed a joint session of congress. >> mr. president, mr. speaker, and distinguished members of the congress, i stand on this rostra with a sense of humility and great pride. >> as i said, he was welcomed as a hero and truman was widely scorned.

the issues examined since that time transcending into the korean war, the issue of civilian control, of the military, the issue of the containment of communism while we fighting in korea and for i think an overlooked issue, the issue of the conduct of a limited war versus the conduct of a total war. which i think really is the crux of what macarthur's dilemma was in fighting the korean conflict. >> if you look at the way wars have been fought from world war ii, prior to that time, the basic philosophy was simply this -- the politicians get us into a war. they send the military figures in to fight the war. the objective is to destroy your enemy, and then the politicians negotiate peace, and then you try to return to normal. and that's what happened in most of the wars up through the end of world war ii, but the advent of nuclear weaponry totally changed the way warfare could be

conducted, because if you went into a conflict with the goal of totally annihilating your enemy, with the use of nuclear bombs, you would not only destroy them, but you could also destroy yourselves and our entire population. so the idea, the way that wars had traditionally been fought was changing, was evolving, and for someone like macarthur, who in 1950, he was 70 years old. and you have to understand that macarthur had been trained in the military tactics of west point back in the early 1900s. and the tactics he been trained on how to fight a war, worked in world war i, in world war ii, but with korea, he was having to work under constraints that went totally against the way he had been trained, yet the realities of having to conduct a limited war dictated you could not

totally go against, and throw everything you had, all your arsenal of weapons against your enemy. you have to correct macarthur for believing in his principles to the point he was willing to sacrifice his military career for those principles. he had been taught all of his life, from his father being a military man to his military service that you obeyed your commander in chief. heave he was going publics with disagreements with his commanding chief. many say he did so because he felt his point was so right that he was willing to sacrifice his career, which he ultimately did. truman fired him. brought him home, and the war continued on until its conclusion a few years later. now, we, today, have the benefit of hindsight and there are people today who would argue that had macarthur been allowed to pursue the war as aggressively as he wished, to go

on in and invade china, that we would not be seeing the -- the geopolitical influences that are there today, between north and south korea. but you have to remember at the time that all this was occurring, five years after the end of world war ii, and was this country, was the world, ready to go into another potentially worldwide conflict over north and south korea? >> since i took the oath on the plain at west point and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but i still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day, which proclaimed most proudly that old soldier never dies. they just fade away. and like the old soldier of that

ballad, i now close my military career and just fade away. an old soldier who tried to do his duty as god gave him the light to see that duty. good-bye. [ applause ] all weekend long, american history tv is featuring little rock, arkansas. learn more about little rock and find out where c-span's local consent vehicles are going next online at c-span.org/localcontent. you're watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3.

next author and history professor david hackett fischer discusses the tactics and strategies that george washington used to confront challenges. he spoke at a university of oklahoma symposium on the founding of america. this is 50 minutes. good morning. how are the acoustics? loud and clear? i have two mikes on me. i think that might be one too many. i'm here to tell you a story you heard before. we're going to talk about george washington. and in light of the frame that everybody else has been bringing to this occasion, that is the troubles of our time, i wanted to talk about washington and some of the troubles of his time and how he dealt with it. and i want to do it by story telling.

the great attraction for me to history are these wonderful stories. i think of arthur snobl who sat down to play beethoven and he stopped and turned to the audience and said, this music is better than it can ever be played. i think that's the way it is with these stories. they are better than they can ever be told. i want to do that also with regard to a picture that you've seen before. this is washington crossing the delaware. and next time you're in new york city, go to the metropolitan museum of art. they have just opened a new american wing. it's gigantic. it's 60 galleries of american painting. just opened a couple weeks ago. and at the center of it is this painting. when i visited, my wife and i always go there whenever we're in new york. in the olden setting, there's always seats in front of the

painting and the seats were always full. one day i was there and the seats were filled with japanese tourists. they were getting a lecture in japanese and they were absolutely riveted on this. this image even said that our constitution is not traveling as well as it used to be doing, some of these stories are traveling very well. we have sold the translation rights in croatian. my publishers did not know about. and it gives a new meaning to freedom spreading through the world. but what i want to do is to invite you to look closely at this painting and to think about what's going on there.

this was emanuel leutze's work. he went back to study painting in germany. and then after the failure of the revolution of 1848, he did this painting to inspire liberals in europe primarily with the revolution that succeeded against long odds. and then he came to america and the painting began to travel here as well. americans love to celebrate this painting and they also love to debunk it. the americans were debunking in 1922. this inspires some really world class debunking. people have gone through this painting and they observed all the obvious problems and others

that are not so. you will see washington not only standing in the boat, to which there's much discussion, but standing precariously on one leg. i just got a letter from a reader who was an expert on backwards. the man behind him is james monroe. he was lieutenant and was in fact in this event. but he is struggling to held up an american flag that 00 been invented yet. it would be coming in 1777. there are many people in the boat who inspired some debunking. there is that interesting figure bending over an oar in the long red shirt just behind the flag. and i got a letter from a

radical feminist debunker. and i had speculated in my book as to whether that was a woman. it might well have been a woman. there were many women in these armies. general howe kept records and 10% of his armies were women on the ration. and it was probably something like that number at least in the later stages of the war for the american army. but the feminist said about that person, yes, it is a woman. and look again. she's the only person in the boat who is actually rowing. there's some interesting things that are going on here. just a word about george washington. this was a man who came from a very special part of america. it was called the northern neck of virginia. it was the land between the potomac rivers.

it extended a very great distance. and yet was largely owned by one aristocratic family who took up residents there. its size was such a magnitude that in the early years, it was measured in degrees of longitude. it covered 3 degrees of longitude. this was a world in which george washington grew up. it was very top down. after the death of his father, the men in the fairfax family were his mentors. they raised him in that tradition of that society. he was a slave owner and not only a slave owner, he was a slave driver. we have accounts of washington actually whipping his own slaves with his hand. and before the war, he showed no sign of discomfort with his role with respect to slavery. he was also a man who aspired to a military career and he modelled his idea of military leadership on british officers with who he served in the french

and indian war. so in all those three ways, this was very hire ark call in this world he grew up in. then the continental congress appointed him to be commander in chief of the american forces. and he turned to patrick henry at the back of the room and he said, depend upon it mr. henry, for the moment i take command, you may take the ruin of my reputation. he was sure it would be big trouble. and it was when he went to new england and met an army that was mostly of massachusetts and connecticut, rhode island, new hampshire men.

he took an instant dislike to each other. he wrote home about new england as if he was visiting a foreign country. he said they are a nasty and a dirty people. he said they are a leveling people. and he thought they had no discipline, no order. they did not approve of washington and his heirs. they wrote many verses of yankee doodle, which are not sung by children today, which were about washington -- captain washington they called him -- and his slapping stallion. there was a great distance at the very start between washington and these men. and it grew more difficult as more men joined that army and it began a national army, at least through at least ten of the former colonies. and the back country riflemen arrived in cambridge, massachusetts. you can see one at the stern of

the boat and another wearing, i think, more of a 19th century fashion coonskin cap behind washington himself. and then just in the bell of the boat, you'll see a man who is a former slave himself, who was in the marble head mariners. he had become a seaman. and a good many of those back country riflemen who came from virginia had been slave holders themselves. and when these two groups met each other in cambridge, there

were words of abuse and insults and blows and then suddenly there was a riot that was larger than the battle at lexington when the revolution began. and washington rode on to the scene with the man who accompanied him through the war, it was his slave who was always riding with him. both brilliant horsemen. they rode into the middle of this riot. we have eyewitness accounts. and the eyewitness tells us that washington leaped off his horse, threw his reigns to william lee, grabbed the rifleman in one hand and a new englander in another hand and he "spoke" with them. suddenly, there was silence on that field and then the riflemen and the new englanders ran off in all directions and washington had survived one of the first tests. but then other tests followed. there were gentlemen in virginia who joined gentlemen rankers. this was from maryland, but

bending over the gunnels of the boat just under the sword is a man who is some of affluence, he's wearing an oiled hat and something like a raincoat and we can just barely make out the facings of his uniform under that jacket. he belonged to a small woods maryland regimen, which was recruited from maryland, and when they joined they insisted on signing a contract and the contract said they were enlisting not as privates, but as gentlemen. if anything that was done to them was a reflection on their honor in any way, they reserve the right to go home. and then behind them are some men from pennsylvania in those very plain blanket coats as they were called. and they were pennsylvania

farmers and they were pennsylvania associators. and they believed very much in equality. they organized committees of privates and sergeants to tell their officers what to do. and all of these men came together to form an army. they also all believed they were there because they believed in a cause. they called it the cause. but they had very different ideas of what the cause was about. always two words were used. liberty and freedom. but those words had very different meanings.

the back country riflemen, not in this version but actually in the hunting shirts that they wore, actually had in large letters across their chests "don't tread on me, give me liberty." their model was patrick henry. and it was one of the strongest expressions of liberty as an individual right that peter was talking about. but the people who came from massachusetts thought in terms of the liberty of their towns of the right of belonging to communities of free people. and they had a much more communal sense, a social sense of liberty. very different from these back countrymen. the people who came from virginia chose for their symbol of liberty the goddess of liberty, the roman goddess. and more than a few had none at all. and in other parts of this -- the people from pennsylvania already had a symbol of liberty, which was that great bell, as it was called the quaker bell sometimes. it wasn't called the liberty bell until the 19th century, but liberty was at its very heart, and around the crown of the bell

in 1751 there was a verse from leviticus that was proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof. this was an idea of universal liberty. of reciprocal rights of extending the rights that one claimed for themselves. there were four versions of the cause and all of them were in that boat. and all of them were grounded in different senses of a kind of social order. and it was washington's job to lead them. and he had some success in the first campaign, which was in

boston and drove general gauge out of the city of boston, the town of boston. and then he moved his army to new york and they knew this would be the great test in the summer of 1776. this was the moment when britain, one of the great powers in the world, greater than ever before after their victories in the last war, decided they would make their maximum effort to break the american rebellion, as they called it. and they sent sailors and soldiers something like 60,000 men to new york harbor. their purpose was to capture new york and then to begin to recover the colonies one by one. and they were commanded by two brothers, william howell and robert howell. william howell commanded the navy. and it was the largest projection of sea board power over a longer distance than any other than in the modern period. it was also the largest force that britain put into the field during the entire span of the war, which lasted longer than the civil war combined. eight years. washington's job under orders from the continental congress

was to defend new york city, which he really felt to be indefensible, particularly as the british commanded the sea. what followed was a total disaster for american arms. absolutely everything went wrong. one thing that went wrong was the health of the army. there was no camp discipline. in the civil war for every soldier killed at battle, one died of disease. in world war i, it was about one to one. in the american revolution, the ratio was 8 to 1. 8 deaths from disease to 1 in combat. and that was for the british armies and the americans were much worse and washington's army began to waste away in the summer of 1776. and then the next failure was a failure of intelligence.

the british were very skilled at that. they built a network of american loyalists and they knew of much more about what was going on in new york than washington did, and he was taken by surprise again and again and his army was defeated with only a few small victories to claim. and the worst of it, it continued until november of 1776. and the worst of it happened when a large part of washington's army was surrounded at fort washington, which was at the northern tip of manhattan. washington was across the hudson river in new jersey watching as that army was defeated and forced to surrender and then worse than that, after the men surrendered particularly those riflemen who had been shooting

the officers of the british forces, a good many of those riflemen were beaten up and some of them were put to the sword as washington watched helplessly from the other side of the hudson. washington irving, who wrote one of the first and i think one of the best biographies interviewed the people that were there. they said washington burst into tears of helplessness and frustration. he had been responsible for that. it was his decision to defend that indefensible fort. and he began, and others around him, to wonder if this man was up to his job. and there were grave thoughts that maybe he would have to be replaced. and then he led his men in retreat across new jersey west toward pennsylvania, and he asked lieutenant monroe to