a "washington journal" and sq "american history tv" live special call-in program looking back at woodstock, 1969 cultural and musical phenomenon. historian david farber, author of the book "the age of great dreams: america in the 1960s" joins us to take your calls. >> drugs matter, but who takes those drugs, why the drugs have the effect they did in the '60s and early '70s is, again, something we're still wrestling with as scholars to understand. the technology of drugs, we got david courtwright in here, some other people, have thought long and hard asht this, bout this, imperative of the understanding of not just of the '60s but the production of history, what drugs we use in a given period and place have an incredible ability to change the direction of a given society. >> call in to talk with david farber about the social movements of the '60s leading up to woodstock and its legacy. "woodstock 50 years" sunday at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span's

"washington journal." also live on "american history tv" on c-span3. i woke up at my home which was in eagle river. a suburb of anchorage. and it was all over the news. so by the time i got to work, i knew all about it. first reaction was disbelief. how could this happen? and the second reaction was just shock at the enormity of it. they spilled, i think, 11 million gallons of oil and covered, like, 11,000 square miles of ocean. before it was done. the scale was inconceivable until it happened. >> where r you working, what was your job there? >> i worked for the "anchorage daily news," a reporter at the time primarily doing investigative work but also covering business so i had covered oil even before the spill. >> can you tell us what the history of the oil industry was

in alaska, how large was it during that time? >> the modern oil industry that we know today got its start in alaska in 1967 when there was a huge oil strike on the bay of the state's north slope. the pipeline began operating in 1973 and that's when the tanker traffic in prince william sound began. so about 16 years, 15 years passed before the spill. the oil industry in alaska from the day oil was discovered, had an enormous mineshare in this state. it was instantly recognized as the biggest sort of funding for state government. for a long time, it was the only source that mattered. the oil industry produced money so fast into state coffers that one of the jokes even was the alaska legislature couldn't waste it all. some of it was accumulateded in the permanent fund.

a lot of it was spent on state services. so the oil industry, besides generating all this money, took and cute interest in politics because they're always interested in taxes and in regulation. so over time, their influence over the legislature became enormous, and it was almost mandatory to be oil friendly, to get elected to the legislature in this state. >> who are some of the big company who are operating out of here? >> well, the big three were and are bp, exxonmobil, and conocophillips. over time -- the names have changed as companies merged and absorbed each other. earlier in the day, what's now conoco was really arco but the big three players haven't changed much. the big two are bp and exxon. >> you mentioned their influence of the -- over the legislature. what did that mean for

regulations regarding oil in the state? >> that meant it was always an enormous battle to get any new regulation in place and the trend really ran in the opposite direction. regulations tended to get looser, not tighter. that really was a factor in what happened in the oil spill. most regulation having to do with the operation of that tanker, the exxon valdez, were federal in origin and focus. the regulations having to do with cleanup, on the other hand, were fundamentally at the state level and that was part of the problem that regulations were a big part of the problem in the spill. the federal oversight of tanker operations was too loose. and that's why the tanker hit the reef. and the state oversight of cleanup readiness, too loose, and that's why the company that o runs the system in prince williams sound, the tanker

terminal and e port tugs were just unprepared for a cleanup, so for the first three days or so, there was essentially no cleanup effort. and it was ideal cleanup weather. they had uncharacteristically for prince william sound for that time of the year, they had three days of really good weather after that spill. and you had this glossy lake of oil just spreading out from that tanker and semplly nothing happened to clean it up. >> can we explain to the people who are watching how does the oil process work? where's the oil pull from? and then why it was even on a tanker truck -- a tanker, then where was it going? >> sure. the oil is produced on alaska's north slope. which is, you know, up in the arctic. really a harsh climate, harsh environment. tundra frost, permafrost country. so it's hard to operate in. you have to be careful not to disrupt things. there's population of caribou and polar bears up there that

have to be protected. oil industry has actually done a pretty good job on that part of it. so on north slope, on the north slope, the two big fields are cuparic and prudo bay. they're just gigantic fields on a scale of saudi arabia, russia, or something. and on the north slope, it's put into a pipeline that runs 800 miles south across the middle of alaska to the port of valdez on prince william sound. there it's loaded onto oil tankers and shipped to markets on the u.s. west coast. i think the exxon valdez it lost about 20% of its cargo. and the rest is history, sad lay. >> can we actually talk about what happened on that day? >> sure.

the tanker left valdez a little bit before midnight and sailed out of valdez and through prince william sound and at 12:04 a.m. on the 24th of march, which was good friday, it hit bly reef, a well known and well marked navigational hazard in prince william sound. what had happened before, earlier in the day, there had been reports of icebergs in the tanker lanes. so the captain requested permission to deviate from the tanker lanes to avoid these icebergs in case they were still there. so it's a fairly tricky maneuver, but nothing unusual. it happened all the time. and the failure was to return to the tanker lanes at the proper point and instead, the ship sailed into this reef. there were some conditions on the ship that contributed to the accident. the master was a guy named joe haz hazelwood. there was always a question as to whether he was drinking and if he was drinking, was it a

factor? that was never established clearly, and i kind of doubt it, myself. what he did was to put the third mate in charge of the bridge and go below to do paperwork. the tanker crews, this was identified as up one of the facs in the accident, were worked very hard. the size of the crews on these ships had been reduced over the years. so there was a constant battle with fatigue and overwork and stress for these crews and and it -- skinniness of the krcrews on the tankers and all those things were addressed after the spill and theoretically remedied and we haven't had another one, so, perhaps, they were. >> how much oil was this tanker carrying, and how much spilled

out? >> well, it had about 53 million gallons onboard. and they usually measure tanker cargos in barrels. so that was about one and a quarter million barrels. and in the spill it lost about 11 million gallons which i think was around 2250,000 barrels. the number that's been lost is controversial. what i gave you have the general aaccepted figure. as oil came out, water came in. it was hard to get a measurement of how much it lost. >> you mentioned tha eed this h in prince william sound. where is that located and if people had visited there prior to the oil spill, what would they have found there? >> prince william sound is located on the gulf of alaska. it's a couple hundred miles south of anchorage. north to south, it's probably

more or less in the middle of the state. so it's this beautiful expansive enclosed waters with islands and peninsulas and coastlines and

if you get a storm, as happened at prince william sound, it gets churned into the waves and. when it's on the surface, it's a threat to birds and sea otters and whales because they have to come up to breathe. it hits the beaches and destroys the beach ecosystems. when was, i guess, exxon alerted that the spill had happened and when did the actual efforts ts to try and stop it begin? >> well, i'm sure that exxon was

alerted immediately by the crew of the ship. we're parked on bly reef in prince william sound and we're leaking oil. i know for a fact the kapt captf the ship got on the radio and called the coast guard in skrvaz immediately and said evidently we're leaking some oil. he said on the radio he was going to try to rock the boat and get off the reef and proceed which was just a terrifying possibility. the ship was so badly damaged there was a good chance it would have sunk or capsized if he had succeeded in doing that. well, he didn't so the ship stayed on the reef and continued to leak oil. the response effort began almost immediately, the problem was there were so few resources or boats and booms and cleanup

available not much could be done. is stait started from a tiny beginning and ramped up over the spring and summer. >> whose responsibility was it for the oil spill or did exxon have a plan? >> a response plan? >> a response plan. did alaska have a response plan or was. >> the primary responsibility fell on exxon as the shipper. in valdez, the response plan, at least in the immediate aftermath of the skill, is carried out by the pipeline service company. when there's a spill, alieska at the time was responsible for the first three days of the response effort. they're the ones who send out the boats and booms and cleanup equipment to try to clean up the mess and prevent it from spreading and after that first three days the spiller is supposed to take over management of the response. and exxon did that after a

relatively short time. it was exxon running the spill. >> what -- what is the process of cleaning up oil? what has to be done and anyothe what are some of the challenges of an oil spill of that magnitude? >> well, to oversimplify it a bit, there are two aspects of cleanup. one is containment. try not to let it spread any farther than it has. the other is removal. and both are very difficult. we had a huge area that had been -- that had spilled oil on it. and then some of the oil, a lot of the oil, hit the beaches and immersed itself in the sand and gravel and the plants and all that kind of stuff. so removal was very difficult. one of the responses to the spill was to use something called a dispersant. the name of the dispersant used at the time was corexit and what a dispersant is supposed to do is break the oil once it gets into the water into tiny little

smaller globules that can be processed by bacteria and so on in the water. oil is an organic substance and given enough time in the right circumstances, nature will reprocess it into harmless things. the problem is, corexit is pretty poisonous, itself, and it's not year it actually did what it was supposed to. there's some evidence what we ended up with was not one poison in the water, but two, oil over here and corexit over here. they tried krory eied corexit an abysmal failure. they noticed all the oil in the rocks on the beach, of course, and they had two solutions to that, one of which was ridiculous and one of which was devastating. the video, they hired people to go out on the beach -- we'll blast

them with this water an wash it back into the water and clean it up. they may have cleaned up some oil that way. i don't think it was much. they did further damage to the ecosystems on those beaches with this hot water that was hot and also probably blasted some of the oil deeper into the sand. so the cleanup was for the most part an abysmal failure. i think i recalled some claim that maybe they got 15% of the oil, you know, a wild guess. nobody really knows. probably fair to say per the most part, the cleanup effort was a pr effort to show america and the world that something was being done to clean up this oil. one of the exxon officials said soon after the spill that they were going to clean it all up. and, of course, they didn't even come close.

>> how far did the oil spread? >> i think the farthest oil from the exxon valdez that was documented was, like, 1,200 or 1,300 miles away. i mean, it flowed out of prince william sound on the currents and worked its way around and actually came up to the south end of cook inlet which is where anchorage is, a completely different body of water. and by sea, several hundred miles. we talked a few minutes ago about who had to come up with a response plan. and i told you that the primary responsibility lay on the spiller, which is true, but at the same time, all of the agen y agencies, federal and state, that are in line to participate in the spill, they have to have their own response plans, say what they're going to do. so everybody in prince william sound, every agency in prince william sound, was theoretically ready, as a practical matter none of them were, but day were all sort of on the front line

immediately. anybody who had a presence in prince william sound had to jump in immediately. the oil spill had a devastating impact on the fishing economy of prince william sound. and that, other than people who work for the oil industry and valdez, fishing was the mainstay of the prince william sound economy. so outside valdez, it was kind of fishing or nothing. commercial fishing. so they get salmon out of there, shrimp, herring, crab. and after the spill, the fisheries were just closed because it would have only taken one oiled salmon to hit the market in seattle to just destroy the market for years to come. so they just shut it down, said no fishing. so that was the first impact of it and then later on, it turned out some of those populations were damaged and couldn't be fished for a while. herring was one big example. i think shrimp was another. so the fact that fishing had been shut down and everybody was going broke forced this

agonizing dilemma on the fishermen of prince william sound and that was should they hire their boats and crews and themselves out to exxon to help with the cleanup? and there were some who just wouldn't do it. they just couldn't work for exxon. there were others who could. it provoked hideous divisions in prince william sound and there was a kind of derisive term for people who did work for exxon. they were called spillionaires, the theory they made millions of dollars off the spill. the longer-term result of all the disruption in prince william sound was real social dysfunction and that was one of the things that was intensively studied by the group i worked for, prince william sound regional advisory council and there were increases in every form of family and social dysfunction you can imagine. there was more drinking. there was more suicide. more divorces. more family violence.

everything bad that can happen to a small sort of one-industry society happened to those people in prince william sound. >> how long did it take the cleanup until it was completed? >> the cleanup was intensive in the first year and it continued, i think, in the summer for another year or two then was discontinued because there wasn't much left to do. it's worth saying that even today, there's some oil under some beaches in prince william sound. not a lot. just a few thousand gallons now. but it is a testament to the persistence of this oil. that's a cold climate, cool, at least, and once that oil gets below the surface, it doesn't degrade very fast so that oil has not been consumed by nature and turned into routine compounds. >> did congress ever get involved? >> congress did get involved. they passed, i mean, they did what congress does. they passed legislation and they had hearings and did investigations.

the biggest legislative outcome of the spill was a law called the oil pollution act of 1990. which remedy add lot of the perceived defects that led to the exxon valdez spill. >> what were some of the key points in it that would effect oil? >> well, there were several. one is it required tankers be escorted by two tugs all the way out of prince william sound and those two tugs not only were there to assist the tank fer it became disabled or made the kind of blunder that led to the exxon spill, they had response equipment on them and no theory would be able to begin the response immediately if the tanker started leaking oil. if it had just been possible to put a boom around the exxon valdez, it would have helped. the other big change, fiercely advocated by people in prince william sound and, indeed, by alaskans in general even before

the oil trade started, was to require double hulls on oil tanker and is exactly what it sounds like. before double hulls, wroud hayo a bunch of oil in a tanker and have an inch of steel, however thick it is, and have sea water so any puncture would result in a oil leak. with double hulls on the size of tankers used in prince william sound, there are two hulls separated by about 1 1 feet of airspace, whatever they want in there so you could get a fairly serious puncture and have no leak. it was estimated after the spill that if the exxon valdez had had a double hull, the size of the spill would have been dramatically reduced. i forget the exact number. on the order of 8 o% less. it would have made a tremendous difference. so ultimately as we people in

the oil spill bureaucracies called it, the oil pollution act of 1990, did require that ships coming in to valdez, indeed, i think all american ports that carried oil, had to have double hulls by a certain deadline and they did make the deadline. >> the influence in the alaska legislature, and also did alaska impose any regulations? >> well, alaska law was revised and regulations were revised. some of the lessons of the spill. as far as the political climate goads, you know, for a year or two, alaskans were sort of down on the oil industry, but it passed. it's the biggest funding source for state government. and i'm sure the biggest source of donations to the legislature. a lot of people work in the oil industry. a lot of people know the benefits they get from the state come from the money taxed from the oil industry.

and then we have in the state this thing called the alaska permit fund, which was made up entirely from part of the oil revenue. it now stands i think at around $60 billion. the income from that fund is now starting to pay for state government because oil revenues have declined as oil production has declined. within of t one of the uses that fund has been put to is the alaska pe permanent fund didividend. once a year the state sends every alaskan a check, once a year, every alaskan gets this check, alaska permanent fund dividend and all know it comes from oil money, basically, now it's the earnings from the fund but that fund came from oil money. so as i was saying earlier, oil, and the oil industry, just has this tremendous mineshare in alaska. at time it's definitely a love/hate relationship.

people -- a lot of people hated the oil industry because of that spill. a lot of them still do because of the way it kind of controls our politics. but the fact is, you know, kind of like a bad marriage, not quite bad enough to get out of. >> can we talk about the -- relate this to the bp oil spill that happened off of the coast of louisiana. were there any similarities and did they learn anything from what had happened in alaska? >> so, there were no real parallels in the operational sense. two completely different sets of circumstances. what was similar for us alaskans watching from afar was the fact that the oil industry was just caught flatfooted. i'm sure they had all kinds of plans to keep that from happening on that oil rig, and plans to deal with it when it did so then what was very familiar and very, quite, to a

considerable extent, the same as up here, was the impact on communities that lived along the coast of the gulf. especially the fishing communities. the cajuns and so on. so after that spill, a lot of people from that area came up here to look at what we had done in the prince william sound regional citizens advisory council in having a mechanism to give citizens a voice in how the oil industry operates in these areas. the micondo spill i think was much larger than the exxon valdez and as i recall, the flow just went on for day after day after day for an inconceivable amount of time whereas the exxon valdez was a one and done event. >> do you think that the oil industry is -- has learned its lessons from valdez and the oil spill off the coast of louisiana? >> yes and no. yes because, you know, in the

immediate aftermath, they did respond. i make no judgment as to the sort of sincerity of their response. if history is any guide, those lessons will be lost. the attention of the public will turn to other matters. but the attention of the oil industry on the issue of getting lighter regulations never wanes. they will always be there. they will always be doing that. so i have a -- i have a saying about capitalism that is not quite as damning as it sounds. capitalism is amoral, it has no soul and no conscience. the goal of capitalism is to minimize costs and maximize revenue. it will always do that because that's in its dna. well, capitalism is a wonderful tool for increasing economic efficiency. but it comes with a whole set of risks and we've seep the consequences in the gulf of mexico and in prince william

sound. so what society must never do is forget that it's up to society to set the rules under which capitalism operates. because as i say, capitalism in and of itself has no soul and no morality. it will do what it has to to make money. and, again, it's up to -- it's up to society to never let up because when we do, we get micondo and exxon valdez. all week, we're featuring "american history tv" programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. "lectures in history." "american artifacts." "reel america." "the civil war." "oral histories." "the presidency." and special event coverage about our nation's history. enjoy "american history tv" now and every weekend on c-span3. weeknights this month, we're

featuring "american history tv" programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight, a look at world war ii. we begin with high school teacher karen kabana on food rationing during the war and innovations that led to modern day processed food. she then discussed wartime policies dealing with farm labor shortages and food rationing on the home front. watch "american history tv" starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. saturday on "american history tv," at 10:00 p.m. eastern on "reel america," the 1970 film, "communists on campus." >> yes, they are communists. their mission proudly proclaimed the violent overthrow of the democratic system, and yet our nation seems unbelieving, even unconcerned. >> sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. eastern on "oral histories,"

woodstock co-creator artie cornfeld details how the festival came together. >> i said, yeah, well, if we took it outside, michael, supposedly henrix, joplin, how many people? michael said 50,000. i said, no, there would have to be more. my wife said, no, there will be 300,000. i swear to god, i looked off that terrace and saw that. i'm interviewed in the movie, everybody was like, spaced out? of course. i was looking at a dream that came true. >> at 26 on "american artifacts" karen sherry. >> they were not content with their lot. they wanted to enlist their e n enslavement and tried to run away. unfortunately, they were not successful, they were captured. as punishment for their attempt

to escape, robert carter got permission from the court in 1708 to have their toes cut off. >> explore our nation's past on "american history tv" every weekend on c-span3. more than 500,000 students competed this year at the local level of national history day. just 3,000 students advanced to the finals at the university of maryland in june. the theme in 2019 was "triumph and tragedy." and presentation categories include exhibit, website, docume documentary, paipeaper, and performance. up next, a ten-minute performance by three middle school students from ralston, nebraska. >> this is "glowing girls triumph and tragedy of the radium women." >> i'm olivia van lancker. >> i'm carol van lancker. i'llpl