children's art about the "monitor" versus the "merrimack" battle. and it was just amazing to see how this ship which still speaks to me after i wrote a book about with about it ten years ago and clearly speaks to all the people here in this room still in different ways speaks to children who are learning about it. and you found in these images everything from -- some kids just drew sailing boats, didn't want to deal with it at all. other kids drew, you know, fiery representations of the battle. one was sort of like jackson pollock, just scribbly mess, but the title said "war is messy." and this one i actually published in the book from a young man named austin du stout who lives here in virginia, just a very, very beautiful simple rendering of the ship where, in a sense, he really captured ericsson's original idea, which was these very, very clean lines, not very complicated,

very, very geometric and the kind of very modern, modern in the capital m sense, modernist sense of the ship, which is one of the things that made it so striking to people. it really was. you would not have been surprised if the monitor was built in the 1920s and not in the 1860s. that's almost how people thought of it. lastly, i want to talk just a little bit about all the things that have gone on. and there's been a lot of war in the last 20 years, since the first gulf war. and a lot of those same questions that came around the "monitor" were raised. this is, of course, not from them but from before. this is from world war ii. late world war ii. and it's an advertisement from general electric depicting the air war over europe, which was a pretty brutal and, in some ways, very monitor-like experience for the crews aboard the b-17s. and you can see the introduction of electronics and electronic technology, the idea is without it, everybody's flying all around and it's a big mess and

there are these messy people in there. add the electronics and everything's clean and the sun is shining and you have this bright new horizon. very much the idea that john ericsson had about what he called his new system of naval attack. very much the reaction that i'll come to when i close that nathaniel hawthorne had about the battle. and here you see it again in its new form in world war ii. and, of course, in the last ten years. the original book, i talked a little bit about unmanned aircraft now in development. but they've, of course, been used a great deal in the last ten years, particularly really the last 15. this particular one, predator, and then the armed version, which is called reaper. and all the different technologies about it. you see this all the time on the news, and i've had students now do dissertations about it, about what does it mean that these people are fighting in afghanistan and killing our enemies from air-conditioned, darkened trailers in las vegas? and how do they feel about it?

and what do they say about it? and what is their reaction to it? one of my students, who just finished his dissertation last summer, was an air force fighter pilot, and he went in and did an anthropological study of these operators of these remote systems. and none of them actually said what samuel dana green said, but they said very many things that are very, very similar to that. and a few summers ago, the air force held a symposium, which i was invited to give the keynote for, called the future operator. who are we going to be, they asked themselves. because pilots are no longer the social -- who have always been the social backbone of the air force have suddenly -- they're changing into something and we don't know how our entire social structure will be organized. and this was about 350 -- basically mid-career lieutenants and above. many of them fighter pilots, bomber pilots.

missilers. remote vehicle pilots. spent three days debating exactly this issue that had been raised in the 1860s surrounding the "monitor." and i opened with that talk. so i'll close then with nathaniel hawthorne's really prophetic response. he actually did visit the "monitor." he came down. his college roommate -- hawthorne had two college roommates. one of them was franklin pierce, who became president of the united states. and the other one was a guy named horatio bridge, which with a name like that, you have to go into the navy, right? and he was the head paymaster of the navy. so he was keeler's boss. and hawthorne had a rough time just personally during the war, and a friend said why don't you go down and visit the battlefields? that'll make you feel better. and he went to find his friend bridge in washington. the two of them came and visited the "monitor" soon after the battle.

and actually, interestingly, neither hawthorne nor keeler mentions the other, but they had so many similar reactions to the ship that i feel like they had a conversation. and this was one of keeler's reactions. "there must come up a race of enginemen and smoke-blackened cannoneers." so a whole different kind of person emerges from this whole idea of an ironclad warship, fighting inside a machine. "who will hammer at their enemies under the direction of a single pair of eyes. and even heroism so deadly a grip is science laying on our noble possibilities will become a quality of very minor importance when its possessor cannot break through the iron crust and give the world a glimpse of it." and he had other great sayings like "how can an admiral condescend to go to sea in an iron pot?" issues that are very much still with us. i think it's one of the reasons that the "monitor" still appeals quite in the way it does. interestingly enough, if this is not quite the accurate picture,

but behind -- this is the picture that people actually operate these remote vehicles in afghanistan. and it occurred to me yesterday as we were flying in, there are vast gymnasium-size rooms of people who just stare at the screens of the data that this comes in to and observe what's happening in villages on the other side of the earth. and one of those, the major one, is actually about three miles from here at langley air force base. another three miles to hampton road. so it's particularly fitting in a way that this issue is something we're discussing here in this particular place. i'll just leave it at that, say a little bit about for any of those in the room, my nephew sam is here, who's having a great time, and just getting interested in history. one of the things that's so satisfying about it is that it doesn't change. it hasn't all been figured out before. and the "monitor" as we know it is constantly changing and evolving, very much thanks to the efforts of a lot of the people here at the museum and at the marine sanctuary.

and again, maybe all graduate students feel this way, but 20 years ago, i certainly felt like i was the only person in the world interested in the "monitor" and the "merrimack." it felt like such an old story. and now a lot of people have become interested in it and the wreck sort of continues to evolve. so it's great to be here. and thanks for your attention. happy to take questions. >> you mentioned that john ericsson's design was to avoid human consideration. i wonder what you think it might have been if he had incorporated some ergonomics or some concern for the human. >> okay. well, that's a good question. i mean, we probably shouldn't say it was entirely devoid because he did sort of appoint

the ward rooms very nicely and he had this notion that the officers would be so comfortable beneath the waves. i guess there were two points that i think he really missed. one was the details of the construction. he was right that his design was quite radical. but that design could really only hold together if it was -- and we saw a quote from the contract in the previous talk. "perfectly engineered" or "perfectly constructed." and any new technology has a lot of bugs. he was not that interested in working through those bugs. the major change he made with the second class of monitors was to put the pilot house on top of the turret. but there were a lot of other changes about ventilation and habitability and so, you know, the blowers -- the belts on the blowers were a single-point failure. if the blowers failed, the crew died. and they did fail from time to time. and the crew almost died. the "monitor" was hopelessly vulnerable to boarding. and the crew were terrified

about that eventuality. all the crew of the "virginia" would have to do would be to jump on board and stuff up the ventilator holes and the story would have been over. so there were a lot of things that could have been prevented that way. gustavus fox and gideon wells and many others constantly pleaded with ericsson to pay more attention to the question of habitability. and jeffers basically said, we had to pull off -- we had to end the battle at drury's bluff because half the crew were prostrate with heat exhaustion. same thing happened in the attacks on charleston harbor with the later "monitors." so improving the ventilation, improving the reliability of the ventilation, those were big ones. paying a little more attention -- again, we saw this in the earlier talk -- to the visibility that the captain would have had and that the crew would have had. communications internally aboard the ship. there were any number of things. not rocket science in a certain way. not maybe the kind of geometric genius that he conceived of.

but he is remarkable in his correspondence for how unwilling he is to acknowledge. and he says, you know -- he basically derides them and says, you know, the days of comfortable sailing ships are gone, get with the program, we're in a new world. and you know, these very professional active naval officers say i can't fight if my crew is sick, you know. and that comes up again and again. yeah. >> in the years after the battle prior to his suicide, did warden ever come out speaking in defense of green? >> yeah, that's actually a really good question. he did. in the 1870s he finally wrote -- and warden actually never wrote a formal report about the battle. nor did he make public statements about green or anything. and this upset green a great deal.

and in the 1870s, warden did write a letter where he said it's come to my attention that people are questioning green's heroism and basically he said i have to say he served heroically the whole time. because green said, "i didn't pursue the 'merrimack,' and i laid back to defend the 'minnesota' because warden told me to do that when he was injured. what else could i do?" he was 21 years old. and then people criticized him for that. again, you have to remember the crew were convinced they were going to go out the next day and have a rematch. and the next day and the next day. and all right up until the "virginia's" destruction the crew is convinced they're going to fight it again. so the fact it was left as a draw didn't seem at the time to be a problem. when they find out that the virginia has been blown up in norfolk, they're not excited. they're terribly disappointed because they're dying for the chance to go out and prove themselves, that they really could beat it. and now they realize, literally this is a quote, "that day will never come." and so warden did defend green, but it may have been too little too late. and then a few years later -- and ericsson, there's a whole

little episode where in about 1875, gideon wells begins to raise some questions. and catesby jones from the "virginia" has a few questions. and so gideon wells writes to ericsson and basically says what do you think of all this? i'm just trying to collect some data. and ericsson is literally -- you can't read his handwriting, he's so angry. and he says, we closed all these issues ten years ago, why are you talking about this? we all know -- and then he says that the miserable lieutenant failed to win the battle because he was a coward and didn't pursue the "virginia." so. >> green never got it. >> sorry? >> dana green never got it -- >> i don't think he did. he was commander of the "monitor" for a day or two, but he didn't -- keeler served with him on the "florida" most of the rest of the war and they became good friends.

but that wouldn't have been unusual i think for someone at that stage, because when the war ended, there wasn't a lot of opportunity. i don't remember what he did career wise after that. he was a naval academy graduate, which was rare at the time. yes. my friend sam. >> did ericsson picture in his head the bottom of the ship which was underwater, or did he just imagine the part that was on top? >> very good question. he designed it to be what he called a submarine battery. so the whole conception of the ship was that most of it would be underwater, which allowed the most destructive waves to just sort of flow over the deck and not damage the ship. also, because the turret was there, there wasn't much to shoot at if you were the enemy. so most of the crew he felt were well protected below the water line.

nothing about that is necessarily a bad idea. but again, it depends on, you know, the seals between the two decks. there were -- if you look at this classic cross-section of the ship, it's really two hulls. there's this upper hull which is described as a raft which is wood clad by iron, and this lower iron hull which hangs underneath it. and this was really one of the great weak points of this particular "monitor." and probably what happened when it sank was either on the beam or forward, that split and let in an awful lot of water. that joint and that union just required a lot, a lot of thought and a lot of great deal of precision. in the later "monitors," it was a smoother transition and didn't have that sharp corner. but so it's possible to build a submarine. there's nothing inherently wrong with that idea.

but it depended on the details of the construction. and ericsson wasn't that interested in managing that part. he just felt like if they didn't do it absolutely right, they're not following my directions. but it was so novel and it was so hurried that it was difficult to get all that really right. good question. >> you have talked a lot about the ship itself. but how about some of the systems inside the ship that would have advanced our technological understanding from the 1860s? >> good question. there were a lot of very state-of-the-art systems from the toilets to the anchors to the, as we just heard, the pumps. and again, ericsson really imagined this mechanical environment.

it was a kind of fully automated -- it's again -- to the modern mind, it's not that foreign. when you think about -- i mean, every time you go into a subway or into an airplane, you're living in that kind of environment. it was quite radical for the time. and, you know, there's a myth that people say, oh, there were 15 -- there were 50 patentable inventions on the ship. nobody actually went through and counted them, but isaac newton once came on board and said, wow, there must be 50 patentable inventions here. and that number has always kind of come down as the classic number. but there were a lot of very interesting modern pieces. some of them worked better than others. and, again, it's possible that the rudder -- sorry, the anchor compartment, the haws hole in the rudder may have been one of the things that contributed to the flooding and the sinking. and we just heard also there was a new pump installed in the yard period.

period. so, yeah, there were a lot of new contrivances as they called it at the time. although the question of the speaking tube came earlier. every crew member's account said there was a speaking tube between the pilot house and turret, but it was out of commission during the battle. and nobody's really clear on what that actually means and how a speaking tube can be out of commission. but, again, the communications part, the internal part for how the crew was going to learn what was new, and to expect the crew to fight the ship without any training. they had no training on the ship the first day. the exigencies of war forced them there. but you'd think they would have thought that through a little more. time for one more or are we getting pulled off? okay. great. thanks so much. as commemoration of the

150th anniversary of the civil war continues, join us every saturday at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. and sundays at 11:00 a.m. for programs featuring the civil war. for more information about american history tv on c-span 3, including our complete schedule go to c-span.org/history. and to keep up with us during the week or to send us your questions and comments follow us on twitter. we're at twitter.com/cspanhistory. you're listening to c-span 3. the united states built and operated ten internment camps to hold japanese americans after the bombing of pearl harbor. the eastern most camps were located in arkansas towns of

jerome and rohwer. there's a collection of crafts and artworks created by internees at the rohwer camp. >> the arts and crafts were sort of how they kept their sanity and it gave them something to do. depression was so bad in a lot of the camps in that people -- there was a high incidence of suicide. so people would make these little things of beauty to give to each other just as a way to say we support you and we care about you and here is a little something to cheer you up. so i think that they really used the art as a way of expressing hope in a time that sort of seemed hopeless. the rohwer camp opened in 1942 in september. so the first people arrived then and then over the next several months, the bulk of them came. they filled their time working within the camps. but then they also had a good bit of free time, too, that they had to fill. and so a lot of the things that are in the collection that we

received are pieces of art that people in the camp did. some of it was done by students as class assignments in school. but a lot of it is 3d art and found object art that was from people trying to do what they could to decorate their barracks and do what they could to build functional things for their family or to entertain their children, because, again, when they moved, they weren't able to bring a lot of toys. so they had to make toys for their children. they definitely weren't able to bring decorative things with them. so they tried to make the barracks as home-like as possible and have some sense of normalcy for their children and families. jamie vogel was an art teacher at the rohwer camp and she presented hundreds of pieces of art done by her students. after the camps closed, she maintained this huge collection. she willed this collection to a lady named rosalie santeen gould who lived in mcgee.

she wanted to find a place where it could be more publicly accessible so she contacted us at the butler center for arkansas studies because she wanted to find a place where not only the documents could be maintained but the artwork in an archival research room but because we had both a research room and art gallery, she knew this would be a place where everything could stay together and it would remain as the collection. the collection is kept in our research room closed stacks which is through this door. rosalie gave us a couple hundred pieces of art and about 20 boxes of documents. this is one of my favorite pieces that wasn't part of the original collection that rosalie gave us. but one of rosalie's caveats for giving us this art and documents, we make this

publicly available to anyone wanting to see it. she was very specific that anyone who came from the camps or their descendants that wanted to see the art, that they should be able to see it. they should be able to touch it. they should be able to look at it because it was so much of their heritage. and after we received the collection through all the publicity that we got, we started being contacted by other people who had little pieces of memorabilia or things from the camps or things related to the camps that they wanted to add to the collection. so we've sort of continued rosalie's tradition of receiving things from people so that this part of history can be preserved. now, this piece was given to us by a pair of twins whose family was at the camp at rohwer. they told the story that a man who lived in the same block that they did had carved this for their mother so this was in their bar rack the whole time that they were growing up. then when they moved away they took it with them and it had stayed in their mother's house the whole time.

and so they were just so happy that it was going to be reunited with other art from the collection and that it would become part of the rohwer story here in arkansas. because it was such a swampy area, it was filled with cypress trees. and so they had these cypress roots. and the people in the camp would go out and collect these cypress roots because they wanted to make kobu, which is this. >> what is kobu? >> kobu is the heart of a tree root, and what they would do is gather these and then boil them and peel away all of the outer bark, and it would leave these wonderful just little bumpy art forms. kobu actually means bump. but you would have these little art forms, and then they would polish them and use them just for decorative pieces. and then this is an example of a

vase that was made out of the cypress tree stump. and so they would use that as a flower vase. this folder has an interesting item. it came from the department of justice, and it's conduct to be observed by alien enemies. keeping in mind the vast majority of the people who were here were american citizens at the time that they were taken away to the camps, and these regulations have things like no alien enemy shall be affiliated with any organization designated by the attorney general as opposed to the public interest of the united states nor shall any alien enemy attend any meeting or possess or distribute any literature of such an organization. the other thing in this folder are little coupon books from the

camp canteen. most of the people who were in camp worked in some capacity. some worked in the kitchens. a lot of them worked outside the camp helping clear land. and they were paid a very small wage for doing that, but then they could use these coupon books at the canteen to purchase supplies. and when they first got there, they had very few things to choose from. but over time they were able to purchase art supplies, and they even ordered things out of catalogs. at the point that the people knew that they were going to be sent to the camps, they had to disperse themselves of all of their business things, their farms, their houses, their vehicles, anything that they couldn't take to camp. and some of them tried storing some of their possessions. but a lot of them just sold things off. but they sold it off at sort of fire sale prices. they didn't get hardly anything of what their possessions were worth. so they didn't really come to

the camp wealthy people. the people in the camps found wonderfully creative ways to deal with the shortages of materials and personal items. for example, they were able to make zori shoes out of scrap material and just braided canvas to give them tread. >> how did they know how to do this? >> necessity. necessity became the mother of invention for them. i'm sure some of the people who were there already had skills and they passed those on to their neighbors and their friends. but they used whatever was available. this one is made out of dried grass that they gathered from the surround area.

so this would be like a shower shoe. they made a lot of their own tools. they would take dinner knives and things and sharpen them to use as carving tools. and then as time went on, again, they were able to order things from catalogs or get supplies. also a lot of community groups would send things in to the camps because there was a lot of sympathy for the people who had to move in there. and so the good-hearted people would put together care packages and send in. these three pieces are bird pins that were carved from pieces of scrap wood. the bird pieces are almost a phenomenon all over the camps. they didn't take a lot of materials to do. it became a real skill for people to make these little birds. they would use things like audubon prints as their models. and so if you look at bird pins from the different camps, you'll see the same model bird from a lot of different locations.

but there's some really wonderful things about these pieces. i mean obviously they're beautifully carved and the painting on them is just highly detailed. but you can see things like on the back they used little safety pins for clasps. and because bird legs are so small, they couldn't really carve them well. so they would use tiny pieces of wire to make the legs. and i heard stories about how they would take little pieces off of the salvage edge of the window screens for the wires and then twist them together to make these little bird legs. >> what does this work tell you about the type of people who are at this camp? >> i think the fact that they took so much pride in the things that they were making, and they worked so hard to create these little things of beauty tells you a lot about the spirit of the people who were in the camps. i think the important thing to

take away from this story is not to panic. a lot of people have talked about the similarities between the attack on pearl harbor and 9/11 because that's another instance when something terrible happened and there was a lot of confusion and the automatic response was, well, let's round up all of these people and protect ourselves from them. and it was very interesting to hear people from the japanese-american community talk about their reactions during 9/11 and after 9/11 when there was a lot of talk about condemning an entire people because of the acts of a handful of people and how they just wanted people to remember what had happened in this case so that they didn't make the same mistake again.