[captions copyright national

cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪ >> i am here -- sharon mcmahon, longtime government teacher. i'm just going to give you facts about how this system works. you can then make your judgments about whether you think it is good -- a good system or bad system. every state gets various numbers of electors based on how many people live there. this is probably california.

55 electoral votes, you guys. they get a whole bunch of them because there's a ton of people. other states, like wyoming, a very small number of electors. three. any combination you can come up with that equals 270 or more, any combination whatsoever, you win. you are the president. end of story. thanks for watching my gross oversimplification, nonpartisan government education electoral college video. hit me with your questions and let me know if you want me to make more videos like this. >> sharon mcmahon. what were we watching? >> my goodness. my very first foray into making government content on the internet. blast from the past. >> and what possessed you to do that? >> you know, there were a few people who were confidently wrong on the internet in 2020.

maybe you have experienced it. people who were saying things like the electoral college is a university you can graduate from and that is just -- that is not a matter of opinion. that is the fact. it is not. so was the height of the global pandemic in a very fractious election season and i just decided to take some of what i had learned from all of my years in education and experience as a classroom teacher and start translating that into easy to understand nonpartisan explainer videos and the rest, as they say, is history. >> did you get a good response to your video? >> i did. people sent me questions and i started making more and more videos. just very simple five minute videos. i started making one a week. at the end of september of 2020. as the november 2020 election zoomed towards us, i started getting phone calls, emails from

local tv stations and local radio stations around the country who were looking for somebody who would come on and explain to their viewers or listeners what was going to happen in the 2020 election just from a fact based perspective without telling them which candidate was the better one to vote for because as you can imagine, local tv and radio cannot afford to have a strong ideological bent. this is not cable news where you can flip around and find what you want to hear, the narrative that you prefer. if you are just an nbc affiliate in peoria, illinois, you cannot afford to alienate half your audience by telling them to vote for biden or trump. it turns out that there was a big need for nonpartisan government explainers because the american government is intentionally complicated. it is large. and it was designed to be somewhat complicated on purpose so there was a good response and

then the responses continued to grow. >> sharon mcmahon, you mentioned you were a government teacher. how long have you been teaching and where at the time? guest: i have been teaching for 12 years in my most recent teaching experience was in the d.c. area. i taught in montgomery county, maryland. host: you were a high school government teacher? guest: yes. host: what is your take on the government books, the history books that were provided to the students? guest: we rarely used them. we had a very robust curriculum. i taught in a fantastic department, a well educated, smart teachers, so we had state objectives we needed to meet and sometimes, there might be something of interest in a textbook but by and large, textbooks tend to be very dry and guided by these ideas of

time marked by wars, heavy on names. that is not to say that wars should not be studied or names like george washington are not important. they are important. that is also -- what we are doing is leaving large quantities of very interesting history on the cutting room floor for the sake of time, for the sake of brevity. it is understandable why these things happen but nevertheless, the books were not particularly useful to me and i don't think my students enjoyed reading them very much. host: how do you teach the arc of history rather than big events only? guest: i mean, the big thing i really think is important that i think so many traditional history books are missing out on is how these events connect to one another. we tend to learn about them as disparate things, from the perspective of, ok, the jazz age, the roaring 20's. and we study the harlem

renaissance. we study this as a separate event from what is happening elsewhere in the country in the 1920's. we do not simultaneously study the second coming of the kkk, we don't simultaneously study the wild west. we don't simultaneously study the groundwork for the great depression. these are treated as separate things in the minds of students. even adults today when i am teaching don't realize how many of these things were happening at the exact same time. one example is very popular book killers of the flower moon which was made into a big martin scorsese movieecently. that is happening at the same time as the harlem renaissancea. and yet in most student history's minds, these are completely unrelated, totally separate events. they don't have anything to do with each other. in order to really understand

the arc of history, you have to understand how these types of things connect with each other. that means one of the most interesting things that i can bring to the table for my students, whether that is in a classroom setting or adults on the internet or readers of my book. host: what is a governerd? guest: it is a way of looking at the world but it is a name that numbers of my committee has sort of adopted for themselves and i actually have a funny story about the term. when my first -- when my community was first formed, people asked themselves, you know, what are we supposed to call ourselves? this was in 2020 and people said what are we supposed to call ourselves? they came up with that term and one time, i was invited to speak

at the george w. bush presidential library and we were backstage and as he was getting ready to leave, he is being swept back out to his car out the back door by the secret service and he kind of put his hand on the doorknob and turned and looked back at me and said what you call yourself? governerds? i said yes and then he did his smirk and said, i like it. host: here's where it gets interesting. what are those? guest: it's the name of my social media handle, my social media platform. at the time when i founded it, sharon mcmahon, my name, was taken. i could not use it as a handle. it was going to be some sort of memorable play on words. it was just the name of my social media account and that of course has become something i am known for. and here is where it gets

interesting is my award-winning podcast is in the top 1% of all podcasts out there. we have over 400 episodes, he produced docuseries, interviews with authors, thought leaders, so that is my podcast. >> you just published a book for the first time. the small and the mighty. 12 unsung americans who changed the course of history from the founding to the civil rights movement. you write in there that you have long suspected that the best americans are not always famous. guest: i mean, it's true, right? if you ask people who is the best person that you know? almost never will they say jeff bezos, right? almost never will they say some tv star. they will almost always say somebody that has impacted them in some really important way and

very often, those people are not famous. they are not rich. they don't have their name on the side of the building. there are thousands of americans who have shaped the course of history, who have changed who the united states has become through their actions but for a variety of reasons, their stories have not been recorded in those boldfaced fonts in the history textbooks. it is their stories that are incredibly interesting to me and it turns out they are interesting to other people, too. host: you tell the story about how you got interested in people. how was it? >> i started out as a child, as a 12-year-old. i had a paper route in northern minnesota where i grew up and it required me to get up in the predawn hours of a minnesota winter. sometimes, it would be 30 degrees below zero. it is 4:45 in the morning, very dark and cold, difficult to motivate yourself to get out of

bed, and this was before phones, before ipods. you know, they ran on batteries and they did not perform well in cold weather. there was literally nothing to do on my three mile long paper route other than surreptitiously read the newspapers so i would, you know, secretly kind of read the paper. as i walked along -- i learned the route like the back of my hand and i got good at folding the newspaper so that people could not tell that i had been reading their newspaper before i delivered it to their house. that is really, you know, one momentous time i can point to in my life that was the genesis for how i became so interested in government and in history. it was from a exposure to the newspaper and also the fact that i grew up one block from the library. so i could spend as much time as

i wanted there. and i did. my parents gave me unfettered access to the library. it was a small branch library but when i got to be older, i would take the bus, the city bus down to the main library which had a much larger collection, and i could just spend my whole saturday afternoon there, just roaming around, seeing what interested me that day, checking out books on random pockets -- topics. because it did not require money, you did not have to decide to buy any of these books, you could just take a stack of books home and see if there was anything of interest. i really point to my access to libraries and my access to the newspaper early on in my life is very formative. host: which newspaper were you delivering and does it still exist? guest: the duluth news tribune. i am still a subscriber. host: in your book, the small and the mighty, i have titled this next section while

swatches. and you tell the story about how sears and roebuck started because of lost washes. is that a fair connection to make? guest: i think so. i love those kind of connections where you are like, listen, there is not a single historian who would say that sears roebuck and company didn't change the course of american history and by and large world history. what they did was momentous. it was amazon well before amazon existed. they were helping to bring things to rule america that had never existed before, helping to subvert white supremacy in the south because black patrons could order whatever they wanted without fear of retribution or fear of not being served at a country store. but the way that it got started is so interesting and most people have absolutely no idea.

they don't know that it was a man in minnesota who worked at a small train station who happened to come upon a shipment of washes that were rejected by a local shop. the shop did not want them so this box of gold watches came into his possession as a railroad employee and he wrote to the watch company and said, can i sort of keep these? if i can sell them, i will pay you for them, and the watch company was going to be out the money anyway so they said ok and within short order, he had sold all the watches and made a tidy profit. he did not have any overhead selling them to passersby at the train station. and over time, he recruits other railroad employees to help him sell these watches and he discovers that he's actually pretty good at it. he takes on a partner who is good at repairing watches.

well, richard sears, the man who was selling watches, discovers his aptitude for writing compelling sales copy a h begins writing the copy for what becomes the searsalog that is sent to thousands of people all over the country and it encouraged people to send in their orders no matter how well they spoke english. some of them said send us your order in whatever language you speak. don't worry about spelling, don't worry about getting it right or wrong. of course, this is the turn-of-the-century where the united states has massive population. they have immigrants coming from eastern and central europe. many of them do not speak english and are in the process of learning english so he caters to an audience that many other people would never have thought to embrace and he says, in

effect, send me your orders in whatever language you speak and we will send you your stuff. don't worry about it. don't be ashamed of your lack of ability to speak english. eventually, richard sears gross this business into such a behemoth that he is unable to manage it. the logistics of sears roebuck and company become, you know, almost like a two headed dragon. he cannot manage his inventory. he is allowing people to pay for things when they receive them and if they get the wrong thing, which sometimes would happen given the size of his business, that he would not get paid for it. it becomes very clear that he needs to take on more help to deal with the logistics. well, to make a long story short, he takes on a partner whose name is julius rose involved. i will leave some of the story to the reader to discover when they read the small and the mighty but julius rosenwald

becoming the partner of richard sears in this endeavor changes the course of history in ways you are unlikely to already know and in ways that are still impacting us today. you can still put your finger on these impacts and trace the through line to america as it exists in the year 2024. host: let's not forget the other half of the sears name. sears roebuck. roebuck, was he the watch repair man? guest: that's right. and eventually, he exits the business and richard sears becomes sort of the primary owner of the business but he keeps the name for continuity purposes. he eventually takes on two partners. julius rosenwald is one of them and julius rosenwald's brother-in-law was the other one. both julius -- both of them

invest some of their own money into becoming partners in this business. eventually, things become contentious between the three of them and richard sears is like, listen, either i am going to go or he is going to go, referring to him. and rosenwald and sears sort of forced him out and it ruins his relationship with his brother, his wife's brother. but eventually, richard sears has health problems and needs to leave the business, leaving everything to julius rosenwald. not leaving everything financially but leaving all of the management. he ascends to the presidency and is in sole control of sears roebuck and company. of course, he keeps the name in part because the names rosenwald and not spam would have been signals to people that jewish

people were running the business and they felt like that is probably not the smartest business move. sears and roebuck sound far more american so even after richard sears exits the business, they keep the name. host: i will just note that both jane adams and marshall field play a role in the story that sharon mcmahon tells in the small and the mighty. i want to quote from your book. this is on the clara brown chapter. out of curiosity, i became interested in what german immigrants to the ozarks were eating in the 1850's. how did you become curious about that? >> i mean, honestly, who knows? where your curiosity takes you is something that i honestly cannot answer. i think each one of us has things that we are uniquely curious about and you can see many of the things i am uniquely

curious about in this story and i have a number of what i think are interesting asides of lake how would clara brown have learned how to make sauerkraut? that was an interesting thing to me and i began to explore it and in fact a lot of the things in this book are just based on -- i discovered because of rabbit holes i was willing to go down. i honestly cannot say why i was curious about it other than it just piqued my interest and what i found made me even more curious when i discovered how unique a dietary experience german immigrants to the ozarks had in comparison to many other people. it made me even more curious and i went farther and farther down the rabbit hole. that is true of quite a few things in this book. host: how does that tie into clara brown and who was she? guest: she was a formerly enslaved woman whose family was sold and she is sold when their

collective owner dies and her children and husband are sold off. she is sold to a family who has daughters and she hopes to raise the daughters and eventually, clara is emancipated and she never gives up hope that someday, she will be able to find her children or husband again, that if she keeps looking, if she dedicates her life to looking, someday, there might be a reunion. eventually, clara gaines employment, paid employment in the central part of the united states, in kansas, in missouri, and that is how clara ends up in this place and she ends up becoming employed for pay to a family of german immigrants and she learns to cook german food. she learns a lot about preserving food, things she would not have had the opportunity to learn at a plantation in kentucky where she was from and those skills that she learns end up becoming very

important to her later in her life when she becomes an official pioneer of the state of colorado. clara brown has a very important role in the formation of the history of colorado in that she becomes a self-made woman when she migrates there. she becomes very wealthy by the fruit of her own labor. i even say in the book that if there was a picture in the dictionary next to the term self-made, that clara brown should be in that dictionary because she started with truly absolutely nothing. she was enslaved. and eventually, earns enough money to invest in all kinds of claims and to buy all kinds of properties and she earns the money through becoming a laundress, somebody who takes in the washing of all of the gold seeking and silver are seeking minors who to colorado. one of the thing that clara

chooses to do with her money is she invests in colorado's infrastructure, not in the form of the way we think of infrastructure today in terms of roads and bridges and sewers and electrical lines but she invests in what infrastructure meant at the time which was ways that people can form committed with each other. she began to invest in the building of churches and schools , even churches she had no intention of ever attending. she helped to found methodist churches, catholic churches, presbyterian churches, because she believed people should have the freedom to worship in the way that they felt was right. and some of the churches that clara helped to fund still exist today. you can find pictures of them on the internet. they have beautiful historic interiors and some of them are so -- still open to the public where you can take a tour of them. and eventually, clara becomes

designated an official pioneer of the state of colorado and befriends the governor. she befriends the mayor. the governor sends her on sort of missions on behalf of the state -- what becomes the state of colorado and she becomes very well known during her lifetime by a nickname which was angel of the rockies. host: sharon mcmahon, when did clara brown live?" we talking about the 1870's, 1880's or so when she was in her prime? guest: she eventually -- she's actually emancipated during the time period of, yes, the civil war, immediately following the civil war, so yes, the late 19th century. host: are dates important in history? memorizing dates? knowing eras? guest: yes, i think more than learning that something happened on june 2,

1874, more important than that, and let -- unless that date is very important for some reason that needs to be committed to memory, understanding time periods helps you better orient yourself in time and space. if we know we are talking about the immediate time period following the civil war during the time period of reconstruction, that can often help you feel like, ok, reconstruction is a time period i know about and here are other things that are happening during reconstruction. so more than just committing dates to memory, i think understanding the times and places in which people live, the geographical places in which they live, sort of historic heroes in which they live, helps readers remember the story surrounding somebody and humans of course are very adept at

remembering stories. you're much less good at remembering dates and if we can connect something to a story, we are much more likely to commit it to memory so i think the era's tend to be rather important and of course, there are absolutely dates that are very important but if we think about history as the committing of dates to memory, then what a dry and boring field that would be. >> how did you find clara brown's story? guest: clara brown was somebody that i came upon when i was reading newspaper accounts of other things that were happening during the colorado gold and silver rush. her name was mentioned in the newspaper and you know, they referred to her as, you know, a former slave. that is how they referred to her in the newspaper.

and yet here she was doing all of this investing and owning all of these properties and it piqued my interest and so i stumbled upon her name in an old newspaper and then began doing some more digging. host: in the chapter about bleeding kansas in the 1850's, you open that section with this sentence. many, many bad things in america lead back to my least favorite president, andrew jackson. guest: he is my least favorite president. most people do have in these favorite president if you study history. and there are many bad things that lead back to andrew jackson. it is almost like six agrees of kevin bacon, you know, that game that people play of where you can connect somebody to kevin bacon within six moves. it is almost like that. you can connect a lot of things back to andrew jackson if you just spend five minutes looking into it. host: andrew jackson was

president from 1837. bleeding kansas happened in the 1850's and you write this about it. the national park service rerdbleeding kansas like this. during blein kansas, murder, mayhem, destruction, and psychological warfare came a code of conduct in eastern kansas and western missouri. what exactly was the bleeding kansas? guest: this was a time in the united states when there was a tremendous amount of contention about how to admit new states to the union and whether they would be designated a slave state or free state. and of course, the southern states in which enslavement was legal wanted to maintain their share of power. they felt that if too many free states were admitted that soon, they would find their political power dwarfed by the free states and they saw the writing on the

wall. they knew what was going to happen. they knew that if there were too many free states admitted, they would soon be forced to end enslavement so they were fighting tooth and nail in an effort to maintain this balance of power. they wanted only to admitted states that were considered slave states at the same proportion as states that were considered free states. well, through a lot of back and forth wrangling about whether or not we should compromise on this or whether we should compromise on that, how states should be admitted, what ends up happening is that the state of kansas becomes almost up for gra about who is going to movehe in large enough quantities to see it become a slaveholding territory or a free territory. and these things came important because of the balance of power throughout the rest of the united states so you saw other

territories, other states, sending large amounts of people to move to kansas in an effort to stake a claim, in an effort to vote in local elections, in an effort to either tipped the hand of kansas towards a slave state, or to tip it towards being a free state. there were abolitionist groups who sent people to kansas and there were a lot of rabble-rousers, for lack of a better term. there was a tremendous amount of political violence in kansas during this time as these outside groups who have diametrically opposed ideas all flood into this one region with very different ideas about how government should work and whether or not they should be able to enslave other human beings and so you reference the national park service which i bring up in the book which describes very sustained lee the political environment of kansas during that time period which

was like murder and mayhem. these are things that a lot of schoolchildren, a lot of adults have never heard of unless you are from that region and it is taught in your state histo curriculum but the idea that it was murder and mayhem in kansas and that there is an actuasort of time period in that state's history called bleeding kansas which bled over into other parts of the united states as the conflict grew more and more well-known, it is an example of how political violence has existed in america's past and that is not the only example i give in the book of political violence in america's past but it was the place that clara found herself during that time period. she moves into what becomes bleeding kansas. >> tie that back to andrew jackson. who had been dead for a number of years by the time bleeding kansas happened. >> yes.

well, of course, andrew jackson was an enslave her and he had appointed somebody to the supreme court. roger is the author of the dred scott decision, one of the worst decisions that has ever been made in u.s. history that is the decision that essentially says -- of course, i am paraphrasing here -- that it doesn't matter if somebody was an african-american who was born enslaved or taken to a free state, that they can never be citizens of the country, that because of their station in life , even if they are born free, they are not united states citizens so consequently, because they are not citizens they are not entitled to sue and that is what dred scott was doing, suing for his right to be free when he had been taken to free soil and this of course had

profound consequences on the entire country. i don't think there is a single legal historian who would look back on the decision and posit otherwise. nobody would say that was a good decision on the part of the supreme court. and you can connect it directly to andrew jackson because of his relationship with the person who authors the dred scott decision. he is on the supreme court because of andrew jackson. >> host: throughout the book, the small and the mighty, you give announcers. is that the teacher in you? guest: it totally is. many times, i experienced this as a student where i read something in a book that i checked out of the library but i had never heard somebody use the word in conversation so i would mispronounce the word when i would bring it up in conversation and people would

have no idea what i was talking about. so when a word is said in a unique fashion, you know, when i look at a word and i would think to myself, here is how i would say it, i would sometimes -- i mean, i do this a handful of times in the book -- i tell people how to say it correctly so that they don't bring it up in conversation and embarrass themselves. the same is true for a place in the book. that is how i would say it if i did not know it was pronounced that way. they are just little -- it is a little gift to the reader. you don't know how it is pronounced? here you go. host: you also write in this chapter of the book that statues of roger were removed over history and that the law school name for him was renamed after thurgood marshall. i want to quote something that a recent guest on this program wrote in one of her columns.

peggy was on to talk about her book, a certain idea of america, and in that book, she included a column called against the tear it down movement. want to get your take on this. she writes, and once the teang down of statutes starts, there is no knowing where will end. edmund burke famously said we have a duty to the past, the present, and the future. in the minds of the tear downers, only the president -- present is important and only your higher morality. guest: i can see where she is coming from. i can totally see what she is saying that their presentism gets in the way of seeing that arc of history. i do also understand this idea that statues are meant to elevate somebody to a special status, that we don't put up statues of hitler's.

we don't put up statues of villains from history. we don't put up statues of people like benedict arnold and think to ourselves that this is a guy who needs a statue dedicated to him so i understand the perspective that statues are meant to indicate a community's higher value, that we value this person and they deserve to be remembered in a special way. i do think there is sort of a third way of going about this which is rather than taking down all of the statues, which is to promote education about the statues. perhaps rather than just having a little plaque that says, you know, andrew jackson fought the british in the war of 1812 here, perhaps instead of having the statues in new orleans or instead of tearing down the statues of andrew jackson in new orleans, perhaps there could also be some kind of plaque or some kind of educational

material at the statue that says here is why this was put up in the first place. here is what we know about this person now. here is why we are leaving it up , so that we can see where we have come from we can see how we have evolved as a society. that we used to value andrew jackson as somebody who had a big contribution to america's military prow s, their unique contribution to american democracy, but he also did a lot of really bad things and here is some of what we know. that is perhaps a more fair way of going about this, talking about somebody's entire contributions rather than only their faults, which is what the tear downers want, or only their positive attributes, which is what the people who put it there statues to begin with would think. host: in this section of the

book, we also learn about levi strauss and denim. how does that fit in? guest: again, these are ideas that are pervasive around the country at the time and again, it speaks to my idea that i really enjoy connecting what a lot of people view as disparate things and being able to make sense of them so that people can understand the big puzzle of american history better than if you had just learned about one person at a time or one event at a time. levi strauss was of course very famous for making levi's. he was not the inventor of denim pants. he was not the inventor of jeans. people have been wearing jeans for a long time prior to that. in fact, there are quite a few examples of people who were wearing jeans when they escaped enslavement. you can find advertisements in newspapers that describe and escaped enslaved person is wearing what they referred to at

the time as negro cloth or sometimes they would call them jeans and they were work pants. they were pants that were, you know, hearty and hard wearing and inexpensive to make. levi strauss came along and improved on the idea of denim pants. he improved on them by adding rivets to the joints so they became much more durable and difficult to rip them so they were popular with people during the california gold rush, people who needed really hard wearing clothes. one of the reasons i bring him up is because he is an example of how the entire country, whether or not they expressly, overtly brought it up, the entire country's economy benefited from enslaved labor. even levi strauss, who says on his tags that he is the only manufacturer of denim that does not -- that uses all white

labor, he wants people to know, i don't use chinese labor. i don't use enslaved labor. i use all white labor and that was supposed to be -- it was almost like a made in america sticker today. that is how he wanted people to see it. you know, if you do some more digging, you can find that of course, very often, the cotton levi strauss was using, grown by slave labor, the knowledge of how to dye indigo, brought over by enslaved africans from western africa. even the people who are attributed with the invention of indigo as a crop especially in places like south carolina, even people who are attributed with this invention of indigo dye gains that knowledge from enslaved africans who lived on the plantations where they lived. so the entire country's economy, whether or not they were a free state or slave state, benefited from enslavement.

i give an example in the book about how the streets of rhode island were paved from taxes from enslaved imports. there was no aspect of the american economy even in free states that were not touched by or benefiting from the labor of enslaved africans. host: sharon mcmahon, and learned in the small and mighty that a woman named catherine lee bates made five dollars from her song, america the beautiful. or from her poem, america the beautiful. why so little? guest: isn't that just incredible? one of the most popular, most enduring songs in united states history, she made five dollars, a total of five dollars. catherine lee bates was a woman who becomes educated at a place called wellesley, a school that still exists, and when she is an

adult, she becomes a professor there and she spends the summer on a train trip across the united states and we visit the 1893 world's columbian exposition ichago which was ula marvel. that event, you could write -- people have written entire books on it and it never stops being interesting. all of the things that were invented for the columbian exposition, all of the events that took place, and she references it in a lyric to america the beautiful. she talks about alabaster cities and that is a reference to the columbian exposition. but her journey eventually takes her to colorado where she takes a tram up to -- up to a beautiful view of the mountains and she says that it is almost like this lyric record this line

of poetry -- it is not a song at the time -- sort of floats into her consciousness and she later describes it as she does not really know how to explain how it gets there. maybe it is some sort of divine inspiration although she is not quite sure what to make of that idea but she jots down these lines and she tucks it away and they go back to their life in massachusetts and eventually, she takes that poem back out and polishes it up and things, you know what question mike this isn't too bad and she decides she's going to see if she can get it published and she sends it in to a magazine that was published for congregationalist churches. her father had been a minister, and the magazine is called the congregationalist. she sends it in to them to see if they would like to publish it in they do. they want to publish it in their july 4 addition and they say we will pay you five dollars for

the publication of this poem and she accepts it. that was, you know, more or less the going rate for a poem in a church magazine. in the poem quickly becomes very popular, quickly becomes popular far beyond her wildest imagination, far beyond the confines of congregationalist churches. people began to adapt it in newspapers and begins to be reprinted and soon, it gets set to music by a man named samuel ward who writes this melody that occurs to him as he is sailing away after spending a fun day at coney island, sailing away from the island -- sailing away with a friend, viewing the island off in the distance, and he says to his friend, i wish i had some paper. you know, like a melody has just come to me.

i wish i had something to write it down on. his friend just sort of is searching his pockets, looking around for something to write on. he eventually takes off his shirt cuff and gives it to him and he jots down this melody and it eventually becomes the perfect melody for catherine lee bates -- that is the nickname she went by, to her poem, america the beautiful. and later, they have an entire very extensive contest to find an original melody for the poem. the melody that samuel ward had written was not designed to be accompanying the lyrics to america the beautiful. they have this very extensive contest and they get over 1000 entries and ultimately, they cannot find anything better than the one they had been using, the one that we know today, and she

rewrites some of the lyrics to make it easier to sing them and then throughout the course of her lifetime, this song, this poem becomes so popular that the correspondence related to this poem becomes nearly a full-time job. the amount of correspondence she receives is so copious that it takes up a tremendous amount of her time. she has to have people help her. and she approves nearly every reprint request that is sent to her. and she approves nearly every single one for free. she could have been making a lot of money on royalties of america the beautiful. it was such a popular song that especially later in her life, given how popular it was, she could have said, yes, you can go ahead and seeing it at your event but it will cost you five more dollars or whatever it was.

we license music today. she could have made himself wealthy and instead, she chose not to. the only money she ever made on her tremendous contribution to american history was the five dollars from the congregationalist magazine. host: that was around the turn-of-the-century. is that a fair time frame to put on this question marks guest: mm -hmm. host: i want to show some video from the c-span archive that relates to your book, the small and the mighty. >> it is just hard to imagine that let's say in 1942, being evacuated from your home, placed on trains, under armed guard, transported off to camp, and here, some 20 something years later, being able to be sworn in

as a member of the congress. host: sharon mcmahon, you write about this in your book, the small and the mighty. guest: i love norm. he is a great example of somebody who is small and mighty and one of the things that strikes me about him is that he served in congress of course. his family, when he was young, was incarcerated by the united states government during world war ii. incarcerated because his family is of japanese ancestry, not because they had ever been accused of any actual wrongdoing, and the united states government actually incarcerated more than 100,000 people of japanese ancestry, most of whom were citizens, many of whom, like norm, were children. he went to a camp in wyoming when he was 10 years old and when he eventually grows up to become the mayor of san jose,

california, the first asian-american mayor of a major city in u.s. history and then later gets elted to congress, he is chosen to be in bill clinton's cabinet and then when george w. bush is elected, george w. bush chooses to keep him in his cabinet. he switches him over to the department of transportation and it is norm who is the secretary of transportation on 9/11, who grounds all of the planes in the sky on 9/11. a very memorable role on a momentous day in u.s. history but i asked george w. bush once why he kept norman minute. it's not like george w. bush could not have found -- it's not like he could not have found a republican to be the secretary of transportation. norm was a relatively liberal democrat. that is how he described himself, as a liberal democrat from the bay area of california,

the child of immigrants. often, people from that demographic have a very different view of how government should work and what the role of government is. and that was a little different than how george w. bush viewed the role of government so i asked him why did you keep norman panetta in your cabinet when you could have gotten somebody from your own party to do it? his answer really struck me. he said there was no better servant for america then norman panetta. i thought like what a legacy to leave. not that he was the best member of the democratic party or norm agreed to do whatever i told him . norm was the most loyal to my views his view was that there was no better servant for america and what an incredible thing to be known for. host: one of the s i had

forgotten was his friendship with alan simpson, getting a letter. remember that fat kid from the pup tent? guest: this story really amuses me. alan simpson becomes the united states senator. by the way, he is still alive as of today. he is still alive. he is in his 90's. this is a great example of how history is not that long ago. he grew up in wyoming and belonged to a boy scout troop and his boy scout leader said to the families of wyoming that we are going to go inside this camp, which they called interment camps, not a correct name really, but that is what they called them. we are going to go inside these camps and have a little boy scout jamboree. and many of the families on the outside were like why would we do that? they are surrounded by barbed wire. there's men with guns. the boy scout leader tells the

parents, these are children. they do the same activities and they be the same boy scout manual. we are going. they met when they were 10 years old and they had what they referred to as a shared pesky nests in that they both loved to play practical jokes and they both loved to laugh. they liked to get into trouble and you can see they some pictures from this time period and then later on in their lives that often, it appears as though alan is the instigator and norm is the one who is kind of just going along with it and alan is always trying to make norm last. well, they get into trouble one night for digging a moat around their tent and it diverts all this water into somebody else's tent and of course, they had dug it that way on purpose. and they get woken up by shouts of this boy's tent flooding and it is so hilarious to them and they get in all kinds of trouble for being too noisy and making trouble. they stayed friends and continued to write to each other

and see each other whenever there was a boy scout event and eventually, they go their own way as they go off to college to join the military and one day after alan simpson has become a lawyer, he opens his newspaper over breakfast one morning to see the story of norman panetta elected to be the mayor of san jose and he's like, well, i will be darned, and he fires off a letter to norman mehta and his like, hey, norm, remember that fat kid from cody? that is how he referred to himself. and of course, norm remembered him and later, they are both elected to congress. they have a decades long friendship. norman said, you know, i am a liberal democrat and he is a good republican, referring to alan simpson. and you know, we might have fights in committee hearings but then we always slap each other on the back and say, come on, let's go have dinner. let's go have a drink. when you look at pictures of

them, and there are many, you look at pictures of them throughout their life starting in, you know, their 30's, 40's, when they get to washington, all the way up through their 80's, they are almost always in states of uproarious laughter. they are just clearly just enjoying each other so much. even their wives described -- what is up with them question might even their wives were like, these guys are weird. they just have such an affinity for each other. the pictures of them are really quite charming if somebody wants to look them up. you will get a big tickle out of them. they eventually start a retreat center at the former incarceration camp, heart mountain. and they stayed friends throughout the rest of their lives. when they got to be old, alan talked about how we no longer go out for drinks. we have what i refer to as organ recitals where we say how is

your heart? how is your liver? we recite our organs like old guys do. they never stopped loving each other and it is just such a heartwarming story about friendships that can cross bridges. host: from the small and the mighty, you write the text to the preamble imagined america at its finest, just, peaceful, good, and free. with astonishing rulity, americans have held fast to these ideals despite the clickbait stories that portend calamity. and america has too often fallen short of the standards. both of these things are true at the same time. why are we writing about the preamble to the constitution? guest: the preamble was written by somebody whose story has largely been written out of the founding fathers story, somebody

who most americans would not know who he was and yet he was very famous during his lifetime. he was best friends with alexander hamilton. he did not make it into the broadway musical but it is his hand that rates down we the people. some of the most important words not just in u.s. history but t preamble has become some of the most -- one of the most important portions of a document in world history. american democracy has had global impacts, global and morris on the other people of the committee that helped sort of form the text of the constitution laid out in that preamble exactly what the constitution was meant to do, and we know -- many of us were encouraged to memorize this in elementary school. we the people, in order to form

a more perfect union, establish justice and i will not recite the whole thing here today but you probably recognize some of the words of it. it is saying what america at her best will be and this is in many ways america's mission statement, the northstar that we can point ourselves to during times of trouble, the america at her best is just -- we are meant to establish justice. america is peaceful in that we are meant to do things like insure domestic tranquility. america is good in that the constitution was meant to establish principles that exist for the greater good. and america is meant to be free. it is meant to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. if you stilled the preamble down

to its essence, those are the four principles that americans can take into their heart and compare the election of leaders, they can compare laws, proposed legislation. does this make us more just, peaceful, good, and free? that was america at her best. host: sharon mcmahon, is that one of those things students should memorize, the preamble to the constitution? guest: it certainly would not hurt, would it? we would be well served by tucking that when into our pockets. host: sharon mcmahon is the author of this book, the small and the mighty, 12 unsung americans who changed the course of history from the founding to the civil rights movement. she is also the creator of the here is where it gets interesting podcast and the sharon says so social media account. thank you for being our guest on q&a.

guest: thanks for having me. >> programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our c-span now app.