had -- republicans it had a joint retreat the last two years but house and senate republicans are not on the same page yet. are suggestingns to the senate to get rid of pesky rules and senate republicans don't want to do that. agreements on policy issues but way comes to working to gather, the two chambers seem to be at odds. host: on the presidential what did you hear from him today? a verbal comments on speaker ryan as a possible dark horse nominee in the event of a contested convention. thatnk you are hearing from a lot of republicans who with thechanted candidates currently available, specifically donald trump and ted cruz.

shot, itainly a long think there are republicans out there may be including tom cole who are hoping for this to end up in a contested convention with paul ryan is the dark horse nominee. prospects arethe as good as he is seen them in as many years in politics. >> he suggested donald trump does not have the requisite number of delegates, anything could happen. host: it will be interesting to watch over the next couple of months. thank you for being our guest this week. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> the need for horses on the farm began to decline radically in the 1930's. thats not until the 1930's they figured out how to make a rubber tire big enough to fit on a tractor. andting in the 19 30's

1940's, you had an almost complete replacement of horses as the work animals on farms. i read that in the decade after world war ii, we had something like a horse holocaust that the horses were no longer needed and we did not get rid of them in a very pretty way. gordon,ht, robert professor of economics at northwestern university, discusses his book. of thes at the growth american standard of living between 1870-1970 and questions its future. >> one thing that often is the impactle of superstorm sandy on the east coast back in 2012. that wiped out the 20th century for many people. the elevators no longer worked in new york area the electricity stopped.

you cannot charge her cell phone. you could not pump gas into your car because it required electricity. the power of electricity and the internal combustion engine to make modern life was is something people take for granted. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern. both tv is in prime time on c-span2 starting monday night at 8:00 eastern. we will feature a series of programs on topics from politics and education to medical care and national security. plus, encore presentations from recent book festivals. tune in for book tv in prime time, all next week on c-span2 . takei talks george tw

ofut the imprisonment japanese-americans during world war ii. he is currently the star of the broadway musical," of allegiance," which is based on his experience of living in a japanese internment camp. >> welcome to a special event, barbed wire to broadway. i will moderate the discussion tonight and tonight we are fortunate to have george takei joining us for a discussion about an unfortunate chapter in our nation's history, the over 120tion of thousand persons of japanese descent, most of them birthright american citizens, during the second world war. george was a part of that. his own childhood experiences in informed the

currently running broadway musical "allegiance." 's acting career has spanned five decades includes many roles , the first one in which i became aware was his eye comic and unforgettable portrayal of the helmsman of star trek, mr. sulu. it includes many others. he is not just an actor. he is also an unprecedented social media presence. he is an activist for many causes speaking out for the people and asian americans and many others. in recognition of his contribution to the relationship between the united states and japan, he was awarded the order of the rising sun, gold raise with rosette, by his majesty the emperor of japan. please join me in welcoming george takei. [applause]

>> that's what they told me. thank you so much for coming. >> thank you for the invitation to be here and to the ambassador in the japan society. it's a pleasure to be here and to have a discussion with you titled written a novel "allegiance." i am halfway through that now so don't reveal any spoilers. [laughter] but youl try not to probably know a fair amount of it already. your own allegiances based in part on your experiences and inspired by them.

my book is as well and i read your autobiography as part of my research for that book. i found it very inspiring and touching. perhaps you would like to start by setting the historical context for the audience. the detention of japanese-americans is, i think, not covered in our schools as well as it should be. it's not a subject as well known as it should be because i think there are so much to learn from it. perhaps you can start by telling us a little about the historical background before we go on to your own personal experiences. >> i am an actor and i know the power of stereotypes. there is a long history of the stereotype depiction of asians and asian americans in the media in the united states. backdrop for the bombing of pearl harbor to

trigger this hysteria. that swept the country. we looked like the people who bombed pearl harbor. all the stereotype images promoted by the media fed into that war hysteria. there was also racial prejudice. from the very beginning, when immigrants started coming asia, they were denied naturalized american citizenship. immigrants coming from anywhere in the world could ultimately look forward to become naturalized americans accept immigrants from asia. there was that racial discriminatory background as well. used to denyas land rights to asian immigrants.

from asia, naturally [laughter] were denied the right to buy land but there was no language to that effect in the law. all it said was aliens ineligible to citizenship were denied landownership in california. that was first passed in california and then later by oregon and washington state. subterfuge had to be used by asian immigrants. my grandfather was a wily guy. he developed land that was wasteland into a productive farmland in the sacramento delta area. he wanted to own it but he couldn't because of that aliens land law. he bought it in the name of his , because son, my uncle

he was a native born american. used his young son who owned the property you work so there was all sorts of discrimination based on race. started, there were ambitious politicians who used that existing racial prejudice combined with war hysteria. in california, we had an attorney general who obviously knew the law and the constitution. but he was also an ambitious politician. elected governor of california and he saw that the single most popular political issue in california was to get rid of the jabs issue.

this attorney general who knew the constitution became an outspoken advocate, a leader, in the get rid of the japs movement. he made an amazing statement. he said there have been no reports of spying or several times by japanese-americans. and that is ominous. [laughter] because the japanese are inscrutable. [laughter] you don't know what they are thinking and so we better lock them up before they do anything ,o for this attorney general the absence of evidence was the evidence. that kind of political leadership fed into the existing prejudice and war hysteria.

we were incarcerated. that attorney general won the election for governor and he was reelected and reelected again. it was a record. he became a very popular governor of california. and then he was appointed to of thethe chief justice supreme court of the united states. i think many of you may have guessed who he is. his name is earl warren, the great liberal supreme court justice. all the background led to the incarceration of innocent citizens who happened to be of japanese ancestry. >> it's an interesting question how things like this happen. there are several factors that come together. back round of racism and some people you can identify

opportunists and to get their own economic advantages. then i think you also have to re-sign -- have to assign responsibility to the people who are not willing to stand up and say this is wrong. episodes like this happen when bad actors but widespread indifference. i hope that's maybe something we can learn from the past and a lesson we can take lowered for the future. -- take forward for the future. in this climate of fear with some people stoking the fire of racial prejudice and war hysteria, president roosevelt issues executive order 9066 authorizing excluding such people as he deems necessary for the west coast. this did not say anything about japanese and trust -- ancestry but everybody knew that's what it was about. that man, general john dewitt,

begin issuing orders requiring japanese and japanese americans to leave the west coast. there was no place they could go. order laters, the said you cannot leave until your order to when we order you to leave, you will only be allowed to go to one of these camps. could you tell us more about your personal experience in that program? age was incarcerated from five to 8.5. it was the duration of the war. i remember the tension and anxiety on the part of my parents. i just celebrated my fifth birthday. a few weeks after that, my got my younger brother and her baby sister, not yet a got a veryd they

early one morning and dressed us a my brother and i were told to wait in the living room. while they were packing in the bedroom. we were gazing out the front window and we saw two soldiers with a an it's on their rifles marching up our driveway. they stopped at the front porch and banged on the door. scary thatember how bang was, very loud. my father answered it and we were ordered out of our home. my father gave us little packages to carry. and my father i stood on the driveway waiting for my mother to come out. when she finally emerged, she had her baby sister in one arm and a huge duffel bag and the other and tears were streaming down her face. happened to me at five years

, the terror morning of that morning is still embedded in my memory. that was the beginning of it. we were taken to the san anita racetrack with other families and herded to the horse stalls, the stable area. we were each assigned a horse stall to live in. for my parents, it was degrading, humiliating, anguishing experience to go from a two-bedroom home to a narrow, smelly horse stall. another memory i have as a five euro here, i thought it was fun to sleep where the horses sleep. [laughter] my real memories are quite different. they are quite unrepresentative of the real experience that my

parents had. father told us we were going on a long vacation. it was that for me. it was a fun experience to ride on the train for the first time. we were taken to the swamps of arkansas but the first winter it snowed. i remember how magical that morning was to wake up in the morning and see everything covered in white. i remember we had snow fights with my father. he showed us that the snowball could be rolled and made into great big huge snowball's and we could build a snow fort. those are the memories i cherish. i also have the memory of black tarchool in a paper baric. at the end of the school day, every morning, was the pledge of

allegiance to the flag. i could see the barbed wire fence and the century tower outside the window as i recited the words " with liberty and justice for all." how this very touching closeness of your family and that intimate circle could transform what was a terrible injustice and an experience that was actually pleasant in some ways. i suppose many of the children did not understand what was going on. of course your parents did. do you know how that made them feel about the country? your mother was a birthright american citizen. >> yes, born in sacramento.

, i would have to explanation how that was a farm area near sacramento and got absorbed into sacramento so i just say sacramento. for my parents, it was the most anguishing period of their lives. as a teenager, i became very curious about my childhood incarceration which i experienced with the innocence of a child. i wanted to know more about it because i read civics books. i was 14 or 15 by this time. i was also inspired by dr. martin luther king and his ideals. i was active in the civil rights movement. i could not really quite why thatd how and

incarceration happened. i had many long discussions with my father after dinner. i must say my father was an unusual japanese-american of his generation. so many japanese-americans who experienced the internment as adults and felt the pain did not want to inflict that pain and her anguish on to their children. so they didn't talk about it. surprise, i talked to many younger japanese-americans who saw our musical," allegiance" told me backstage and they knew that grandma and grandpa were in camp at that's all i knew because the it not share. -- because they did not share. i learned my family's history and why my parents did not want

to talk about it for the first time by seeing " allegiance" and particularly the loyalty questionnaire. they knew nothing about the loyalty questionnaire. to give you some background, right after the bombing of pearl harbor, young japanese-americans, like all young americans, rest to their recruitment centers and volunteered to serve in the military. this act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. they were denied military as enemynd categorized aliens. they were american citizens and they were called enemy aliens. some protein it -- if some protested, that was revised to enemy non-aliens. they could not put down enemy citizen. they took the word citizen away from us and we became non-aliens.

a year into imprisonment, the government had a wartime manpower shortage. there was all these young people they could have had that they denied military service to that we need now. how to get them? they came down with a loyalty questionnaire to establish whether they would be loyal and serving military. question inrageous that loyalty questionnaire was one sentence -- question 28 -- which asks in that one sentence, 2 conflicting ideas. it asked will you swear your loyalty to the united states of america and for swear your loyalty to the emperor of japan? we are americans. we had no loyalty to the emperor. we never even taught of loyalty to the emperor. for the government to assume

that there is a racial loyalty to the emperor when we are american, american born an american educated, it was outrageous. no i don't have a loyalty to the emperor, that same no applied to the first part of the same sentence -- will you swear your loyalty to the united states? if you answered yes meaning i do swear my loyalty to the united states, then you were confessing that you had been loyal to the are ready to for swear and set aside that he to the emperor. pledge loyalty0-united states it was outrageous and at became one of the two most controversial questions. my father was anguished by that. he shared that with me as well

as a lot of other parts of the internment we discussed after dinner. me our explained to american democracy. he said it's a people democracy. it can be as great as the people make it but it's as fallible as human beings are. drivele, earl warren's was ambition at any cost and he told me that story about earl warren. our democracy is dependent on people who cherish the highest ideals of our democracy and actively engage in the process. he took me downtown to the attlee stephenson headquarters.

he said we volunteered that he volunteered me. i just tagged along. there i was working together with other passionate people dedicated to getting this great stevensone -- adlai who was the personification of the test of democracy elected. that's what got me to be active and active in the social justice movement. >> the administrative and loyalty questionnaire is one of the point of moments in " allegiance." it had this paradoxical contradictory nature in almost the same way that the absence of access seven ties being claimed as evidence of intent to make some concerted move is paradoxical.

paradox another sort of co-our title "allegiance or it's about loyalty to the country and yet the whole program and what you describe is really an example of the country betraying its people. the japanese-americans were betrayed by the u.s. government and this great injustice was done to them. in act, the supreme court was not willing to say it at the time but later on, most people agree it was a constitutional violation. a very hard question is how to respond to that. does a good job dramatizing this choice. within the japanese american communities, there were different responses and some people wanted to do everything they could to prove their loyalty by complying with the program and volunteering for the armed forces and by answering the call to the draft when the

government began drafting people out of the camps. were other people who said what's truly patriotic is to resist his violation of the constitution and defend american ideals by actually challenging it. i was wondering if you could talk about that choice and the way that it comes up in "allegiance. " >> those that bit the bullet and swallow the bitter taste and went to fight for this country were put through another outrage, segregated japanese-american units and sent out on the most dangerous missions and they sustained the highest combat casualties of any other unit. but they also fought with amazing courage and literally heroism and they did come back decoratedand the most

unit of the entire second world war. that record still lasted until present times in the american military history. and they fought with amazing, unbelievable courage and patriotism. , thoseder the resistors that you described as standing on principles and resisting the draft within a prison camp -- their position was a very american position. they paid a high price as well. they did hard time in federal penitentiaries for standing for american principles. i consider them just as heroic. we worked in a love story where the sister of the young man who

goes to fight for this country falls in love with a resistor. she works with a resistor, marries him, and they build a family. when the young man comes home, that splits the family. that is a symbolic split of this the fracturebolize of the society. we see that today. people who were on opposite sides and because of that, paid a heavy price particularly the resistors particularly the resir families, there were many tragedies in those families, suicides were committed because of the vilification that they got from the veterans that , anrned and the j a.c.l. organization that plays a part

our drama, that is a real organization that exists today. i am a member of that organization because it became a change organization after the war -- changed organization after the war. they fought for many rights and improvement of the condition of japanese-americans. a.c.l. though if i'd -- the families of the resistors and there were some suicides committed by those mentee --nd that in a ity exists,enim today. does go of heroes, but both heroes made incredible sacrifices, and that was the price of winning our democracy. >> absolutely, and i think it is

one of the greatest tragedies that the two sides on this conflict taking such different paths, had difficulty seeing that they are both forms of patriotism and are both ways of expressing loyalty to american ideals. going back to the loyalty question, the loyalty questionnaire was responsible for your family moving from one camp to another. >> yes. >> can you talk about it? >> my parents answered no to both question 27, which asked to bear arms to the united states united -- -- defend defend the united states of america and to ask her to bear arms and leave her children in a prison camp was outrageous. the question had to be responded to by everyone over the age of

17 in the camp, and this was being asked of a 17-year-old young man, as well as an 87-year-old immigrant. it was preposterous with no real thought given. they answered no to those two questions and because of that, we were transferred to a camp which was a much harsher cap than the first 1 -- camp than the first one we were incarcerated in, in arkansas. i have wonderful memories of the camp in arkansas. it was lush and verdant. wintertime, and it was sultry in the summertime, but we had a lot of fun. to do lake -- it was a dried lake in northern california

right by the oregon border. it was -- the sand was not soft, it was hard, gritty and sharp, shells,e were shards of apparently there were snails in that lake in ancient times. very little bit is asian and -- very little vegetation and lots of tumbleweeds. many of the people there, particularly the young men, were radicalized by the goading of and theyel treatment turned into activists. they became -- they call themselves a volunteer corps.

they were going to rise up when japan landed on american soil and be physically ready for them, they did calisthenics and and jogged and they jogged in the morning around the clock, they wore the headbands and some sunted the military rising on their headbands and they jogged around the block to the cadence, and that is the sound i woke up to many mornings. --y would end their jogged they would end their jobs -- , andwith bonsai -- banzai then they would scatter.

they changed their jogging time , regularly so they could not be captured. they would stage at night raids on some of the units in the barracks and young men would be dragged out and they had a concrete jail, which was constructed by the interns and they were put in those jails and more often than not, the wrong people were dragged out. my father was a block manager there, as well and he had to explain to the cap administration that they got the wrong people and sometimes, he was not successful, so he would organize people to go to discuss with the can't administration that the group of people who were going to back him up and at

one of them was a demonstration and my father took the to that and i do have memories of going with my father to one of those gatherings near the administration building, and the gates suddenly opened and i remember jeeps came in, and the mps were standing with their and we alld at us scattered and my father grabbed back to ourwe ran barracks. the memories i have of that place are not the kind of memories that i had of arkansas, much harsher. pilgrimage, for a we have gone back three times and we went through the stockade, that concrete building , and we saw graffiti written on the walls there and we also saw

brown stains here and there. wereently, some men brutalized and their heads were smashed against the concrete stainsnd left bloody which turn brown over the decades. >> the description in your autobiography was really one of the most compelling parts, and it is an atmosphere that you also convey in allegiance, although allegiance is not set theerre. a couple of things struck me as amazing about tutor lake. the way in which things just keep getting repeated over and over again, there is a gel within a jail, for instance. the government keeps try to figure out who the dangerous

people are, keeps getting it wrong. washis case, there actually a pro-japanese element. the other thing that it demonstrated to me was you can take a population that is very loyal, that is intensely loyal as the japanese-american population was, and you can mistreat them and call them enemies and eventually make them into enemies, at least some of them, and that is something that we should definitely bear in mind in the present day, so we have about five more minutes to talk and i was thinking, it is an incredible story, a story that should have timeless appeal , but it's also a story that has special relevance now, in light of some of the things that are going on, so i was wondering if we could talk a little bit about how you take allegiance next to current events. iswe found that allegiance

eerily relevant to our times, particularly with the president campaign going on and the kind of rhetoric that is being heard, particularly on the republican side. there are responsible republicans who have been the extremeople of statements being made and trying butut those in context, donald trump has been particularly guilty of this broad brush sweeping characterization of a whole group of people with that same brush. terrorists today are muslims, but all muslims are not terrorist, they are a small fraction of the muslim faith,

and to make those wild banning all muslims from coming into the united states is outrageous and an american. when you go to arlington national cemetery, the headstones over the people that are buried there have religious symbols of the faith of the people buried there, and there are a number that have muslim symbols. muslims have thought for this country and have died for this ridiculous --t is it is reckless that statement to be made by a candidate for the presidency of the united states. and to havet out some fun with it, we have trumped a seat for donald at the longacre theater, and

seatis with a reserved sign and it has the number of performances that he has missed from the time the invitation was extended. [applause] he has now missed 44 performances. he has a lot to learn about american history, and it is really worry some, that so many americans don't know american history and are swept up by this man's rhetoric. ours a commentary on education and that is why it is so vitally in that we know our particularly, the more shameful parts of american history, because we learn more from those chapters where our democracy faltered than the glorious chapters that we are exposed to all the time.

trump need tonald know our history. roanoke has also expressed the same type of comments and i expressed an invitation to him and talked to him over the phone. he is a charming southern heatin test gentlemen and has not responded to the invitation yet, but he extended commission -- a human rights commission that extended an invitation to me to come and speak their, so i am serving as an example for the mayor of roanoke, i have accepted the invitation and we have set a date when i will visit roanoke, and i said to the mayor, that is time to see allegiance is limited, we are closing on the 14th of february, so you'd better hurry up because

i'm coming to roanoke. .> that is wonderful one of the astonishing things to me in this cycle of hysteria and xenophobia was that people were bringing up the attention of -- japanesetion of americans as a lesson, but as a historical precedent and it spoke to a real lack of historical education and awareness, but this is something that seems to happen over and over again. americans suffer some sort of attack, we get here, we overreact and perpetrate injustice and later we say you will never do it again, but we do. -- later we say we will never do it again, but we do. how do you think we as a people

can get better? i often quote your father and say a nation can be no better than its people. what do you think we can do to minimize the chance this will happen again? >> our education system has to be more comprehensive and working -- particularly these important chapters of american history. i personally have taken it on as a remission, from my 20's on, i frombeen on speaking tours universities to corporate gatherings to governmental museums, we found it a in los angeles called the japanese american national museum, where we institutionalize the story of the internment of japanese americans, because as the generation that experienced it died off, -- die off and those that did not experience it don't

share it with their descendents, and it's not in the history books, then it will fade away, so by building an institution, we institutionalize that story and by dramatizing it and telling it from the broadway stage, we again brought them that and we have been working education withof the state of arkansas, or the dust were, and we were incarcerated in one of the two and we have invited teachers, one -- a dozen teachers to come to the japanese american national museum every summer. wefund this program, and want to get them to incorporate the chapter on the internment camp into the education curriculum in arkansas, particularly because it is part

of arkansas history, they were two internment camps, there. we need to, as individuals and organizations, try to prevent that from happening, by ensuring that these stories will be remembered, in the same way that great heroes of the civil rights movement and all of the events that happened, being made into movies with .mazing performances the death camps of europe have been traumatized in movies, novels and television programs. story, by telling this all of theedia, and

axis is that we have to make this story an organic part of our american experience, then we can do our bid to keep it from happening again and making america a better. donald trump's motto is make america great again, but what he is doing is making america disgraced again. [applause] >> i know i speak for everyone when i say you are an inspiration in this regard and it has been an honor and privilege to share the stage with you. we have some time for question and answer. there are people with wireless mics on the side. i will call on people who raise their hands. starting over here. >> thank you very much for allegiance, i thought it was beautiful.

it was an important story to be told. it has been met with some criticism that it is not a hundred percent accurate -- not 100% accurate. the defection of real people and entities may clout the judgment of people in the audience into thinking that everything that happens in the musical really did happen in the camps. what is your response to the criticism that allegiance has received? >> allegiance is the work of the editor art -- theater art. we tell the truth by interpreting it. knowsample, most everyone van gogh paintings. he worked off of the landscape, but it is not photographic. truthtures the emotional of that landscape he is looking at.

and the grass in the breeze. everything that we talk about in allegiance happened. camp, or not in that time, but they happened, and that is part of the truth of it. it is essentially a fictional story. the family is fictional. actual factso use of organizations and individuals, because -- played a critical part and was a very active actor in the internment jcl a.as was the -- can't tell the civil war

you can't tell the story of the civil war without having the president of the united states, abraham lincoln. you can have a fictional story, but abraham lincoln really made things happen, so he is included in a fictional story. mr. roosevelt has written a fictional story, but he uses actual people that existed, just attorneye frankfurter, general michael. these are real people, but he is telling a fictional story, and we are telling a fictional story, using actual people and actual institutions and facts. i know that the criticism was made by documentarian, and his is -- his job is to tell the photographic truth.

we are the van gogh of the theater, we catch the emotional and essential truth of that experience. [applause] >> in the middle. >> i want to thank you. japanese-american buddhist temple. one of the offerings in our library is a book called rice country. book, in the early chapters, they talk about the -- ja cl.ay a.c.l.

i want to thank you for setting it straight and in my mind, allowing me to understand the l ingation that the jac trying to -- litigation that they for trade in trying to protect the japanese-americans in internment camps. results of of japanese-americans trying to stay under the radar, postwar. the mission in the united states is the buddhist church of .merica, is, is thereestion any way around that? i don't even know.

>> around what? i see people who are around camps,e who grew up in and you are right, they won't talk about it. for my own experience in high school, my high school social studies teacher, two sentences, yet happened, so what? happened, so what? there are people that do talk about it. my father certainly talked about it to me. there were those that even challenged -- professor roosevelt can tell you about

cases where they stood up and challenged the internment, all the way up to the supreme court and failed in 1944. prevailed with what in latin the call -- means finding fault in the original ruling. there were those that stood up, and the resistors, dated stand up and that is why we focus on the resistors in allegiance. they stood up and said this is wrong, and i will stand for my rights as an american. they paid a high price for it, stand, theyd take a did speak out, and i want to mention one extraordinary elected official of the time, the governor of colorado, ralph

carr. the only elected official at that time to take a principled stand and speak out against the internment, and for that, his political career was demolished. he ran for reelection and was slaughtered. there are people. there is this myth that japanese-americans did not take a stand. in there sheepishly camps, that is not true. people did take a stand and others resisted and challenged it all the way to the supreme court. >> on the right. >> a quick question. >> where are you? >> the gorgeous lady over here. [laughter] you guys were both impressive but i love me some george. >> what was your question?

[laughter] they ever admit that it was constitutionally incorrect? >> never during his living years, but he left a memoir and in that, he said the greatest regret in his life was the role he played in the internment of japanese americans. he owned up to it in his memoirs, which were published after his passing. >> in the front. >> i was wondering. what kind of buildings they were put in and did you get enough

food or clothes or whatever they needed or how many people were in one camp or how many buildings were in one camp and what kind of buildings? so many families must have been there. so many people living in one place. >> there were 10 camps, altogether. they were built in military fashion, black tar with paper barracks arranged into little units with black tar paper. no privacy. we all ate in a mess hall, a massive dining area. we all showered in a massive

shower. just put potsere and a roll, no partitions, and for women, it was extremely mortifying to use those partition lists toilets -- partition-less toilets. also that were interned built their own partitions. they made tubs out of lumber that they were able to secure, but it was very wrong and primitive. >> we have time for one more question and there will be a reception afterwards, during which you should be able to ask for question. second row in the purple.

wondering how you feel about the fact that allegiance is closing earlier than expected and do you have plans to bring it back? expecting a much -- butrun, of course and we accomplished so much with this production, this is the first time in american dinner history that the story of the internment of japanese americans is being told on the broadway stage, it is a landmark event. this is the first time in american inner history that so many gifted performing artists, asian-american performing artist are on that stage, using their own experience and background in the work that they are doing,

playing full, rounded characters . the kind of characters that the audience identifies with to the point where they are literally sobbing with us in the tragedy and it certainly we hear the laughter. it's not just applause at the curtain call and spontaneous standing up, it is outright shearing that we hear. the record of -- the average record of asians in the audience in broadway theater is about 7%. that has always been something that i was concerned about, because when i go see david henry wong play and i look around, i see only a light sprinkling of asian faces. asians are not theater goers, we do not support our artist. plays aboutsee

african-american labor i who talked about the african-american experience in pittsburgh, you see a dominant african-american presence. with allegiance, that 7% has multiple.fied, we have an average of 37% asian americans and more asians in the theater. we have accomplished a great --l in the time that we have in the five months we have been playing on broadway. we are very proud of what we have accomplished. broadway is the academy of american theater -- is the butome of american theater it is new york theater and we played in sam -- san diego prior to coming to broadway at the very respected regional theater. there, we broke their 77 year record for both box office and attendance.

we have a fantastic record to be very proud of, and we want to continue that record and we are exporting a lot -- exploring a lot of different options for allegiance. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> thank you. >> as i said, i am halfway through current roosevelt's book

, the same title of our play, you allegiance -- allegiance. i still don't know who the whenrer is, but i told him i met him, do not spoil it for me. book, allegiance. [applause] >> thank you so much. as i said, there is now a reception. you can buy my book, you can buy his cd. i hope you will join us. >> the need for horses on the farm began to decline radically in the 1930's. it was not until the 1930's that they figured out how to make a

rubber tire big enough to fit on a tractor. starting in the 1930's and 1940's, you had an almost complete easement of horses as the work animals on farms. i do believe one of my books on in the i read that decade after world war ii, we had something like a horse holocaust, that the horses were no longer needed, and we did not get rid of them in a very pretty way. >> tonight, robert gordon, professor of economics discusses his book, the rise and fall of american growth, which looks at the growth of the american standard of living between 1870 and 1970 and questions its future. >> one thing that often interests people is the impact of superstorm sandy on the east coast, back in 2012. that wiped out the 20th century for many people, the elevators

no longer worked in new york, electricity stopped, you could not charge her cell phones, you cannot pump gas because they require electricity to pump gas. electricity and the internal combustion engine to make modern life possible is something that people take for granted. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span skew and a -- c-span's q&a. starting monday, the supreme court's cases that shape our history comes alive with landmark cases, historic supreme court decisions. we explore real-life stories and constitutional from us behind some of the most significant decisions in american history. >> john marshall said this is different, the constitution is a political document, it sets up political structures, but it is also a law and we have the courts to tell you what it means

. ultimatethe anti-presidential case, exactly what you don't want to do. >> who should make the decisions about those debates. the supreme court said it should make the decisions of those debates. >> landmark cases begins this monday night at 10:00 eastern on the span and c-span.org. makert, remarks from film ken burns and -- on race relations in america. they spoke at the national press club for about an hour. >> welcome to the national press club, i am the washington -- espondent our guest today, how document terry d -- harvard professor henry louis gates jr. -- i like to welcome our c-span and public radio audiences and i want to

remind you can follow the action on twitter using npc live, that if nbc live. that each of you stand briefly as your name is announced, please hold your applause until i have finished introducing the entire table. from your right, mike or fletcher, senior writer for yet he ends undefeated and the moderator of the luncheon. anchor at wsa channel nine. >> jeff, vice president of the national press club and news editor at al jazeera english. sharon percy rockefeller, president and c.e.o. of weta. elizabeth, washington bureau chief of "the new york times." skipping over our speaker for a moment. alison fitzgerald kojak chairman , of the press club's board of governors. skipping over other speaker for a moment, lisa matthews, vice president at hagers sharp and member of the speaker's committee who organized this luncheon. patricia harrison, president and

c.e.o. of the corporation for public broadcasting. amy henderson, the historian emeritus of the national portrait gallery. joe madison, host of "the urban view" on sirius-x.m. gil klein, american university and a former press club president. finally, john hurley of hurley consulting, a press club member. [applause] >> thank you, all. race continues to be part of the american fabric and the two men joining us today have opened the door to compelling discussions of how it impacts much of american life and culture. through their works, filmmaker ken burns and harvard professor, henry gates jr. shows how -- economic future and past. burns' documentaries have given us insight to facinating and

troubling parts of the american story, be it jazz, the civil war or baseball. i'm particularly fond of burns' national parks documentaries and am proud to say he's a fellow national press club member. gates has extended his work beyond the classroom to the pbs series "finding your roots" which shows how diverse racial, religious backgrounds challenge our myths. late last year, they both launched a series of conversations about race. hoping to provide a forum that would encourage participants from having an either/or response to having -- both have documentaries on pbs. burns' documentary on jackie robinson is on april 11 and 12. gates's black america since mlk and still i rise premier in the fall. today, a break from our tradition, i have asked mike fletcher to moderate his discussion given his expertise in the field of sports.

-- a digital site will explore the intersection of race, sports and culture. the new effort will generate stories and content for its own site as well as other espn platforms. it's scheduled to launch this spring. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the national press club, ken burns, henry louis gates and michael fletcher. [applause] ken: good afternoon. i first of all want to thank the national press club for inviting us back and for giving us the opportunity to change their normal format in this way and i'm very grateful to be back here. i have a lot of thank you that yousank use -- thank

that are necessary. first of all, the film that was referenced, that thomas referenced on jackie robinson was produce and directed by sarah and david as well as myself and written by sarah burns and david mcmahon and i wish they could be here to participate in the discussions of this project. i do not go anywhere without my beloved network as represented by its extraordinary president, now 10 years in office, paula kerger. [applause] ken: or my longtime production partners and longtime even for ken burns means 35 years, 40 years and that's weta. many people here from weta. the leader sharon percy , rockefeller who is also a good friend. we've also enjoyed funding from two organizations. principally the corporation for public broadcasting and i'm glad that pat is here. and also we've enjoyed the support for 35 years from the national endowment for the humanities and its chairman, bro adams, is also here and i'd like to thank those who i have forgotten.

they make it possible for us to do our films will stop -- films. the events in charleston of last june disturbed and disrupted skip's and my equilibrium tremendously. it's not that we're unfamiliar with that level of violence. it's just too much. and we reached out to then-mayor joe riley to talk about what we could do. we were pleased that the confederate flag were removed from the columbia, south carolina, state grounds. and it's true. i'm glad you're applauding. symbols are important and this is a hateful symbol. not of even people's history but their resistance to progress. most of the presence of the confederate flag arrives in our consciousness after 1954 when brown vs. board of education. so it's not somebody's history we're taking away but in fact we're acknowledging this

represents resistance to an american ideal of equality. but we felt that while it was important that a symbolic change could be made, it was equally important that we just not leave it alone. it was like oh, good, now we don't have to talk about race anymore. which is what always happens after that, and skip and i were looking for ways to figure out how to do that. and mayor riley asked us to come down and we began a conversation about race. we continued it in pasadena. we just came yesterday from austin where we were at south by southwest. we're heading to george washington university tonight and to the brooklyn academy of music on wednesday night. and i, you know, we sincerely want to do something that is -- that has preoccupied all our of our lives' work but doesn't exclude people but includes people and to try to move the discussion a little bit further. and so my greatest thanks today is to my friend, dear, dear friend and partner in this crime, professor henry louis gates. [applause]

henry: i have the same angels on my list of thanks. to whom i owe so much, but i have to start with, and of course it's sharon, it's paula, and pat. and -- but i have to start with sharon rockefeller. i met sharon rockefeller in 1967 in the hills of west virginia because we both are west virginians. my family lived in the 30-mile radius of where i was born for 250 years. so you could say either my family had great stability or we were incredibly lazy. [laughter] but when sharon married jay rockefeller i was an undergraduate -- well, i was finishing high school and i went off to yale and i wrote my senior project, the scholar of the house project at yale, about jay rockefeller's 1972

gubernatorial campaign. you remember teddy white, theodore h. white, president? well, i was going to write theodore h. black. one small problem, jay lost. so i had to write the unmaking of a governor. but they were here in washington. sharon became involved in public television. you know, from the beginning we had a very close connection, unusual connection, and she would say, you should think about making documentaries. and i was premed like every smart little black kid i knew at yale. like smart kids, what's his name, ben -- ben carson, yeah. [laughter] i ran into him -- ran into him at labs every once in a while. and i found a way. and i started watching this guy ken burns who had this capacity to tell stories. i love great storytelling and i love great storytelling because

my dad, god rest his soul, whom sharon knew, was a fabulous storyteller. and i thought, i could never be a storyteller like my father but maybe i could find my way in this new medium and maybe through some back door i could become a documentary filmmaker. and paula kerger was in new york, and executive there before she came here and i got to know her. and she was so encouraging. why couldn't you think about making documentary films? and why don't you find your home here in new york? and as soon as i did that, she welcomed me so warmly she left and went to -- and went to washington. but when she did, she introduced me to not a force of nature but a force of culture. and a woman who was running the corporation for public broadcasting. and the three of them will be my guardian angels, my advisors, my protectors, gie saving m

advice all along my career and through a miracle -- i don't know about you all. who each of you has a day job. i have a day job. professor at harvard. i in english and am african-american studies. i moonlight. i have a second job. i made 16 documentary films. if i could -- if they were all dedicated appropriately, they would be dedicated to sharon and paula and pat, with a little footnote, in homage of my hero, ken burns. [applause] >> i wanted to start a little conversation about race. people talked about this for decades. i remember covering myself when i was at the washington post. bill clinton's conversation on

race. i'm curious what you two hope to come from this conversation a, and b, about preaching to the -- how do you prevent the preaching to the choir quality, how do you get those other views involved? ken: well, i think the thing that limits anything about race is we tend to do it dialectically. it's not black and white, it is complicated. i think what we tried to do in our own work, in his scholarly work and skip's documentary films and the work we've done over the last four decades there is a kind of nuance, there's undertow, there's complications, it's possible that something may be true but also the opposite might also be true at the same time. and it's very important to understand all of those sorts of nuances so that you can have a discussion that doesn't just add fuel to the flames of our already divided rhetoric. we are so dialectically preoccupied right now. everything is black or white, old or young, red or blue state, rich or poor, gay or straight.

it -- it becomes important to say that we wish to describe a more inclusive thing. we'll give an example and let skip respond too. when we were in charleston, south carolina, and having a conversation with 1,800 people in the guy arts center just a couple blocks away from mother emanuel, where the tragedy happened in june of last year, we were in a town which welcomed 48% of the africans who were stolen from their country, their continent, and brought to the united states. it's the ellis island of the african narrative but without a welcoming statue of liberty. and what mayor riley, even though ex-mayor riley proposed to do and is in the process of doing -- and skip and i are helping -- doing a memorial. -- doing a museum where all this took place it's very ambitious. , very important. but it's not trying to say that if you add this story you are

taking away someone else's story. what you're doing is adding to the story and that's what we need to have. we know that we are, you know, in pursuit of happiness, that we are a nation in the process of becoming and that requires process and that requires inclusion. when thomas jefferson said, all men are created equal, he men -- he meant all white men of property free of debt. that's not what we mean anymore. that has been the progress of the united states. henry: some people mean that. [laughter] ken: we find ourselves now in a particularly retrograde moment where this discussion is more critical than ever before and a discussion that stays out of sort of the superficially and conventional wisdom of what passes for media in the conversation. i think skip and i are just hoping some way to see if we can join a discussion and warn people as a white man and a black man that is the conversation we wish to have that brings everybody around.

it doesn't make anybody wrong, it tries to include as many as we can. henry: ken and i are i think in a pursuit of a more complex narrative about the american past which is another way of commenting on the american present of course. , any historian knows that. any journalist knows that. that you're writing now but it's an analogy for something that happened a long time ago. if you're writing something about what happened a long time ago it's an analogy of what's happening now. it's inevitable. an example for me and you know this and most of the african-americans in this room would know this, i have a contrarian nature when it comes to writing about the black experience. i don't believe in being an ethnic cheerleader. i don't think that helps anybody in the black community. i want to -- i did two different kinds of documentaries. one set of my documentaries are about africans and african-americans. the other thing is about finding roots and we'll talk about that. i'll give you an example.

there are 42 million african-americans today. since 1970, the percentage of african-americans whose income is over $100,000 has quadrupled. since 1970, the percentage of african-americans whose income is over $100,000 a year has quadrupled and the percentage over $75,000 since 1970 has doubled. we have the largest middle class and upper middle class in our history. it is the best of times economically for the african-american community. at the same time the percentage of black children living at or near the poverty line since 1970 was just over 40% as of the 2010 census. the percentage of black children living at or beneath the poverty line is just over 38%. it's the worst of times in the black community. both of these realities are true

at the same time. there are more african-americans than all the people in canada. and that always is a stunner. it is as martin delaney, as you know, martin delaney said the negro is a nation within a nation. in 1852. and we are a nation within a nation. so that any rhetoric that attempts to describe a nation within a nation of 42 million people, with one set of descriptors is dishonest. we have differences among us. we have major class interest and racial interests and habits and traditions and they're not all the same. what brings us all together is racism, like what unifies the jewish community, anti-semitism. what brings us together is racism. when that goes away, then we're all fighting again, right? what i'm trying to do in my films is show the complexity of

the black experience, to show on the one hand how there is no american history without african-american history. how we don't -- to me black history month, i love black history month. i celebrate it. ken and i were joking, it's the coldest, shortest and darkest month of the year. [laughter] the one that was left over was the one that we got, right? everyl was my day job and -- evening job, is to make every month, every day in the school system black history month. you can only do it by creating a complex narrative. a complex narrative about the human beings who were of color and who interacted with white people and native american people and later hispanic people to create this great patchwork that we call the american republic. and you can't do it by taking shortcuts. you can't do it by being an ethnic cheerleader. you can't do it by pretending

all the black people who walk the stage of history were angels and, you know, had no bad things. and i think that makes for a more compelling case. and finding roots, the whole point of finding your roots is to show no matter what the law says, in any society and any point in american history or history, no matter what the law said about who you could or could not sleep with, when the down, everybody was sleeping with everybody. [laughter] michael: what drew you to jackie robinson as the subject for your latest documentary? ken: i covered jackie robinson in my series. there is only one episode where some part of the narrative didn't obtain and yet at the same time you had a sense, too, that we were repeating some of the more familiar things about

him. so his widow, rachel, who's now 93, had been pressing me to do a stand-alone on jackie and at some point, sarah burns and david mcmahon had the bandwidth to do after the film on the central park five. and we dove into it and over many, many years we began to realize that in some ways jackie has been burdened, has been smothered by the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. he's been made in a two-dimensional figure, almost christ-like figure but it doesn't reflect the whole will -- whole person. what we found we could do is liberate him. what skip was talking about, a complex narrative. if you take away some of the tropes that have become familiar to. reese put his arm around him. that didn't happen. branch ricky like god reached down by heaven and michelangelo touched his son and turned his cheek. branch ricky had important

economic motivations which we made clear in our old film. deeply held religious and moral opinions that were right about ringing jackie, but he intended to bring several african-americans up. he was not the lone voice in the wilderness there was an active , african-american press for decades that was pushing for this. there was a left-wing american press, a communist press. the daily worker was arguing. we don't like to talk about that. there was a left-leaning republican. i have not lost my mind. left-leaning republican from new -- mayor of new york city who was pushing for this. there were lots of want for this progress in the pent-up emotions -- lots of want for this agency in the pent-up emotions after the second world war. we wanted to do a multigenerational complex story of an african-american family. to talk about a love story. this is an amazing story. we validate that love story in some respects by having the

president and first lady there who also goes through their own who also goes through their own, kind of version, there are different couples and different spaces in time but me do interact with the same dynamic -- but they do interact with the same dynamic and so they both can comment on eave other in -- on each other in very interesting ways and it was possible for us to scrape away some of those barnacles. the truth was not revision we , assume in revisionism that the pendulum swings the other way. oh, thomas jefferson, man of the millennium. owned slaves. worst of the millennium. in fact it's neither and it's both. you have to do that. in the case of jackie robinson, making him more complex made him much more interesting and permits us not to focus safely in that narrow year of 1947 when he came up but to do his birth in 1919 and jim crow, georgia, and his death in 1972 as a 53-year-old man feeling that he didn't have it made, that he still didn't have it made. he was a black man in a white country. so what happens to him before baseball? how did he get there? what happens during baseball

when he no longer has to turn the other cheek? what happens after baseball as a republican and african-american republican, all of these things disrupt the familiar convenient story that we want to have. michael: but this is a story that you would have heard. henry: remember, i was born in 1950. every two weeks i'd go to the barbershop, right, and listen to the men, as we call it. black barbershop, you go on saturday and stay all day. you hear the man talking trash all day long. and they would say two things. jackie robinson was not the greatest black baseball history who was alive. and nor should he have been the first one. they liked jackie and most black people from dodger fans. not my dad who loved willie mays and loved the giants. they said he was being destroyed by the rage inside of him. and jackie robinson was to me

killed by the pressures of being black and that -- and playing the pioneering role that he did. and more especially, as ken points out, by the fact that richard nixon refused -- he implored richard nixon to use his good offices when he was candidate richard nixon for presidency of the united states. get martin luther king out of jail. at the same time black democrats were imploring j.f.k. and j.f.k. did it and richard nixon didn't and jackie was very embarrassed for the black community that he didn't have the juice to persuade nixon to do that. and he -- i don't think he ever recovered. that is just my barbershop version. i think that was a big difference. ken: skip is right. they brought up different names -- probably you would never know. sam jethro, roy, some of the folks that came later. but jackie happened almost accidentally by several forces.

i disagree about that. rachel said he died of congestive heart failure and diabetes. he got up every day to help the lives of others and he was -- but in his eulogy, jesse jackson said he had carried this weight for everybody. and if you think about when he arrived, april 15, 1947, martin luther king was a junior at morehouse college. harris s. truman had not integrated the military. there was no organized sit-ins. rosa parks was a decade away for refusing to give up his seat -- her seat. he refused to give up his seat in the lunch counter until he was served. henry: he was court marshaled. ken: and he was a sit-in before sit-ins and a freedom rider before freedom rider.

we have a lot of people who are active in the 20th century but jackie represents the beginning of the modern civil rights era because he takes our national pastime, walks through that door and carries it single handedly. michael: with you talk about the myths? i thought i knew something about jackie robinson. i went to school in brooklyn. and the pee wee reese thing. why is that ms. been so enduring? ken: you know, i have to be honest. we perpetrated it -- we passed it long the way they passed it on. they are simpler, easier, they don't represent the complicated narrative -- and there is a statue out of the great american park park. in 1947 when the dodgers went to cincinnati, the racist stuff that attended every place he played for brooklyn and sometimes even there was just horrific and that pee-wee reese supposedly went and put his arm around jackie robinson in a sort of symbol of solidarity between the white man and the black man.

henry: iconic moment. ken: it's in children's books. there's that statue anrachel says in our film, we asked him not to do that because she had a better picture of them coming off the field. their hands touching momentarily. and we know from roger, the historian, that pee wee reese had never shaken the hand of a black man until he met jackie and was from kentucky and that's where it came about. and red barber promoted this. there is no mention in jackie robinson's auto biography and no mention in the press and black press which had done 20 related stories if that had happened. baseball etiquette suggests you don't do that. jackie is at first base. pee wee is at sharp. you don't walk across the diamond. i think white people seeing the nobility of this story wanted to have, no pun intended, some skin in the game. and they wanted to show that this were supporting this. and they put themselves forward in this way. i believe what happened is

several years later when jackie was playing second base that they made a good play together, told each other a joke or something and ended with arms around each other. that migrated. stuff in history migrates all the time so this migrated back in time to become a symbol of white solidarity with this lone action of jackie robinson. you can understand why it is, but it's really important we don't perpetuate it. baseball, hall of fame is in cooperstown because we think doubleday which we don't have any record he saw a game -- but the real story in hoboken is not good enough and so we perpetuate this myth and we're happy or reassure ourselves of this myth about the creation of baseball . so, too, with jackie robinson. there are so many things which the sort of conventional wisdom, the superficial conventional wisdom obtains no matter what. we have to say, look, it's so much more interesting this way. henry: we as society needed that myth at that time.

society produced myths that recognize sides of the aisle irreconcilable things. ken: if you go and look for it you don't find it in the mythology of jackie. you find another kind of mythology that maybe itself frozen but later on it sort of gravitates, as books get written and people's stories get handed down and red barber, the now-deceased broadcaster, told us this story that worked its way into our film. but we read it in a few other places. and it comes, as you know, it's hard to turn around a ship that's got some momentum and i think what the constant requirement of historians, both professional and amateur, is to try to figure out how to, as we learn new information, say, about thomas jefferson and d.n.a. and sally hemings, how you turn that ship around and say, you know what, guys, the father of our country, the author of our catechism. we hold these truths to be self-evident is the father of sally's children. henry: the which weigh turn it around is by assuring political

correctness and say this is the story of the -- truth of the story. you may not like it. we are not going to be myth makers. we are not going to allied the bits of racial history. michael: you talk about some of the contrasting views within the black community. it's not a single narrative that can capture the complexity. henry: what every white person knows. michael: and jackie robinson supported nixon in 1960. henry: yeah. michael: and against paul robson. how much did he suffer for that? henry: well, let's go with the first point and then the suffering. i teach a course -- when i was an undergraduate at yale it was 1969-1973. so that was the height of the black arts movement, black power. everybody remembers.

he's smiling. i had -- you have to cut back to 1969. you see my class pic. i had a two-foot-high afro. cornell's afro looked like a crew cut next to my afro. i had a -- it could come back if i wanted to. i had a closet full of -- and i changed like a computer code. make sure you were so -- right on brother, right on. [laughter] [applause] henry: people on campus because, where was i, in 1970, i was in new haven, connecticut, in calhoun college, a block away from the courthouse where bobby field was being tried. so it was full of black panthers

and there was a drugstore on the way to the yale co-ops. it would where we got the books. the first person, you had to get by, was a black muslim. a guy with a white shirt trying to sell you mohamed's speech. i got it. i got it. then there would be a big brother with a beret on and a leather coat and panther speech. where will you be when the revolution comes? i got that one. but there was so many people who would come to the black -- i was secretary of the b.s.a. the black student alliance at yale. and there were so many of these guys that would come and try to tell us how to be black. i saw a lot of damage in the black community. i saw a guy in love with this white girl. up the street.

he loved this girl to death. should have gotten marry. he wouldn't marry her because it would un-black him. he never got over. i decided if i ever were in a position of power, i was going to -- if i ever became a professor, as i said earlier, i didn't know i would be a professor because my mama raised two boys to be doctors. my mother is in heaven. there is a father, son and holy ghost. and white between them is a medical doctor. [laughter] henry: it's true. so i end up becoming a professor. i teach a very large and thank god popular course at harvard and it's got a simple name. introduction to african-american studies. i teach it with -- i did teach it with evelyn brooks higenbaum. and now i teach it with larry. the whole course is about how black people have been arguing with each other since the 18th

century about what it means to be black. and the reason i do that, the last line of my final lecture is i say, if you take away one thing in this class, just one that professor bobo and i have said, i want it to be this. there are 42 million african-americans in this country, which means there are 42 million ways to be black. never let a bully tell you how to be black. [applause] michael: what do you think the black lives matter movement fits into this larger narrative that you just described? henry: well, i just wrote an article about it in "the times" couple weeks ago. and i tried to put it in historical context. i just got on my friends "at the new yorker." one did a piece. it's all about how they hate each other and who created -- i

wrote to -- i can't say which editor. this is like the battle royal scene. why not talk about the intellectual roots? what do they want to achieve intellectually. it would be nice if "the new york times" did that. i believe -- and the editor -- brilliant editor at "the times"" my editor said, we can't find this assertion anywhere. where is the footnote? i'm the footnote. ok. we're going to run it. this is what i say. precisely because of the classes divided within the african-american community, there is a tremendous amount of guilt. there is a tremendous amount of guilt on college campuses about these kids are very successful and they're going to be successful. and the guilt is about all the people in the hood who are left behind and unless there is something drastic -- some drastic changes, both structurally and behaviorally, then those group of people are

going to be exactly where their parents were socioeconomically. what is the most likely predictor of your economic outcome? your parent's economic status. if you're born in a household that is deeply deprived, chances are unless there are government intervention, philanthropic intervention, behavioral intervention, nothing is going to change. black lives matter is because of this class divide. i think you have to be in the race to think about it and know. i say they were carrying out due boys' charge and that is we're not free until we're all free. not one of us is -- ken: jackie robinson says, you say -- jackie robinson of all people, you have it made and he says, i don't have it made until every person in st. augustine, florida, has it made. michael: do you guys think the rise of donald trump says anything about racial relations

in this country today or does it say more about the -- ken: yes. we are in a retrograde moment right now in which the dog whistles of race have been with us. we can't pretend that a phenomenon of the kind of racial innuendo what's happening right now is somehow new and we're shocked this is happening. this has been going on for a long time. ronald reagan opened his 1980 campaign in philadelphia, mississippi. he was saying wink-wink in -- henry: and that's where goodwin were murder. ken: it was important for ronald reagan to go there to talk about states' rights and he swore to that which was a wink but that's been going on since richard nixon said this would be good for to intervene -- and barry goldwater is we're going to go hunting not where the ducks were. in 1956 whose principal idea was

to introduce the abolition of slavery. that's an important thing to remember that's been advocated. so when you have a presidential candidate who takes a day to remember that he had already once repudiated david duke and took him a day to remember that he -- was going to do it now, that is the wink-wink dog whistle that signals to our unreconstructed brethren. we like to believe in the better angels of our -- we like to believe we're making progress. we like to believe we would all be that slave ship owner who, you know, gives it up and writes amazing grace. we like to believe in our better selves but in point of fact, a lot of us aren't that and the old guilt, that robert penn warren talked about, don't often transform into goodness but metastasize into darkness. henry: i agree. i agree. [applause]

henry: i, alone in my little coachery at harvard, when people were mocking donald trump, i turned to my friends and i said, you got to watch this guy. this guy is not going to go away, as he famously said, and he is speaking to a need and a deep set of fears within a large segment of the american community. and -- we were talking briefly at lunch, we've all been frightened. you know, you can't mock the people who are frightened. when you're frightened, does somebody mocks you and call you a scary cat, did that make you feel better? it made you feel worse. it's not an exact analogy but i think if i were an advisor to hillary clinton, who i support, a very good friend, i would say you have to study what the needs are, why these people are terrified, why are they so prone to anti-black feelings and anti-muslim, islamaphobia, why they want the wall up, etc., etc., and what policies can be

formulated that speak to their fears but from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum that donald trump is doing? rather than exacerbate their fears, how do we assuage their fears and teach them how to reach across ethnic and racial and class lines, create new coalitions, and form bridges rather than to erect barriers? we cannot -- i told an audience in texas, i grew up in the hills of west virginia. i'm as west virginian as i am black. and in many ways i'm more west virginian than i am black. we all have multiple identities. if you ask me how i got to this stage, i would say growing up, independent, rugged, in the hills of eastern west virginia, on the potomac river, shaped the person that i became. get me here as being black. that's just true. and i grew up overwhelming -- with an overwhelming percentage of white kids.

many of those people are supporting donald trump. and i'm still close to them and they would use the n word. i grew up with people that would say, if all -- were like you we wouldn't have problems. i would say, littlie, if more -- were like you -- \[indiscernible] these are my people. and i don't think that calling people trailer trash, i think calling people trailer trash is just as offensive as using the n word. and i think we can't just push a whole segment of frightened people down the sewer pipes of western history. we have to figure out how to bring them up, how to give them hope, how to create problems -- create programs like bill clinton did. hillary said last night that the

-- the town hall that, look at the way race relations were much better when we had the lowest unemployment we had since the great depression under bill clinton's economic policy. people start to look for scapegoats when there's not enough lasagna to feed. that's when they look for scapegoats. we have to look at how to coin vince people there is not enough to feed the people and the these black people, women, a people, jewish people are not eating their share of lunch. michael: does it dissipate if trump loses and -- ken: no, i think it's already there. i have spent my professional life dealing in american history and you -- the 30 films i made, you know, maybe three don't deal with race in some way or another. doesn't mean i'm not going to look for it. it's always there. we put black history as if it's some politically correct agenda in february.

it's every day. it's part of the american narrative. when thomas jefferson said all men were created equal. he didn't mean the 100 people he owned. that would ensure we would have a civil war, both symbolically and literally and everything that led up to the civil war, everything before it led up and everything since has been a consequence. you run into race all the time. i spent my life deflecting criticism from the haters, we would say, on the internet, but writing letters and colleagues would say, would you let go of this thing? now that obama was elected, would you now shut up? wait, wait, you watch. remember the onion headline when he was inaugurated. black man given worst job in the world. that was a sort of preview of what was actually going to happen. so that is going to disturb the molecules in a lot of people. i think it's never going to go away until we begin to move and advance the conversation. and skip is absolutely right.

if you can reach out to the people who are now so frightened , and i believe a counternarrative has been drummed into their head for decades and decades and to be able to look up and see a black guy fly in air force one and look at the supposed hordes of people going over the no wall where there is a net loss of mexicans. more mexicans are leaving than coming over. those that do come over are about 1/3 less likely to commit a crime. if you can educate people by having a conversation that does it, you don't call them as trailer trash. and don't refer to them as ignorant or whatever and say, you are supporting who doesn't have your self-interest in mind and you have a lot of self-interest in a lot of the folks, as skip says, that are perhaps eating your lasagna. that is not the case. in fact, you can break bread -- you have common cause with poor blacks and those stuck below the poverty line as skip said. you have -- nobody is eating your dinner.

in fact, there are other people who are so self-interested, they've been eating your dinner for a long time and they have been convincing you to vote against your self-interest for decades and decades and decades and maybe we can help through a little bit of counternarrative remind you what's really happening, this is after 72 straight months of job growth. this is after an auto industry that is now making a profit. this is after the end of capitalism didn't happen. this is after 20 million more people with health insurance, whether it's flawed or not, means it's human. we've actually -- it's not as bad. henry: because make no mistake, if ever working class white people and working class black people ever realize their -- that the greatest thing that could happen to them would be to break their common economic interest there would be a major social transformation. ken: evolution. henry: these are michael: has this a backlash

that we have our first african-american president? henry: no, no. you lie. [laughter] michael: is that -- henry: that drove some people crazy. what happened is some people on the left started checking out books. one of my friends is at the end of the black literature. what? i called him. are you crazy? like somehow racism disappeared. this is the promise land. barack and michelle are here. it's good. when the man yelled -- what was the congressman's named? michael: joe wilson. henry: what would lyndon johnson done to that brother? he would have disappeared. ken: his district would have been gerrymandered out. henry: and johnson would say, i

hated to do it. and the other thing is, when the press conference, the republicans said we'll do everything we can to defeat this man -- ken: from day one. henry: unprecedented. unprecedented. michael: many people would argue this is just hardball politics, right? i'm a republican, i don't want to see this democratic president have a second term. ken: so i asked shelby why the civil war came and he said, americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising people but we're not. our genius is compromised and when it broke down we murdered each other. 750,000 people died in the greatest war. and we are now in a political environment in which we celebrate the no compromise in which since the passage of the affordable care act, there has been almost party-by-party vote on every single thing. lockstep. and that is the greatest threat to the united states is our unwillingness to bend and a lot

of it has to do with, you know, basic, as you say, hardball politics. it's always been around. but those hardball politics when johnson passed the civil rights act and the voting rights act, he had huge republican support. he was able to make that happen. even though republicans, as a party, had essentially abandoned in a southern strategy reaching out to african-americans. but he could individually say this is what's right. one of the great floor leaders in that is everett dirkson, who is a republican. those things happened because people were willing to compromise and we don't do that anymore. so it is, of course, a political dynamic. but i think what has made it easier for people to do it, just as it's easy in a mob to say fire or get him, we -- it takes the calmer voices. it takes the more complicated narrative a long time to gear up to the simple one in which you say the n word or you say you lie or you say i am not going to compromise because that's against my principles. our genius is compromised. henry: there is another thing

too. lyndon johnson was one of the founders of the tea party at the white house asking them to participate. johnson was knocking heads. and it's a hard thing to talk about. i've noticed many of my friends in the press are very reluctant to criticize barack obama because obama has taken so much criticism, undue criticism, right? but i think there is room for a critique of how the president has or heapt used the hallmarks and tools and perks of office to affect compromise. i think he's worked very hard, but i think not a -- he's not lyndon johnson. you can't ask him to be that but maybe he could have done more. what do you think? ken: you and i talked about this more and i respectfully disagree because i think you gave it. on the very first day, nobody said it when ronald reagan, no democrat when ronald reagan was

elected, you know, said my one job here is to make sure he's a failure. which means your one job is to make sure that the united states is a failure. let me also point out, not to keep beating to death affordable care act, but this is something that teddy roosevelt wanted, woodrow wilson wanted, harry truman wanted, lyndon johnson wanted, bill clinton wanted and he got it done. [applause] i would say is he stylistically not a southern person who knows how to get votes pocketed and knows how to get a drink? no, he's not. but i won't say, you know, he's without failure but i think it's very important to put this in perspective. if you tart start off from not even day one your negative three months one. the day you're elected, you're not inaugurate and you have an entire party that says, nope. michael: how much is he constrained, do you think, by race?

the idea that a black president could cajole, knock heads if need be, i know it has changed since the 1960's, but is it harder for a black president to do? ken: of course it is. he has to come here having to represent all of the people or try to represent all the people who didn't vote for him and a lot of those votes were people that didn't vote for him based on the color of his skin. he's had to be incredible circumspect. i think i would have an easier time talking about it and do have an easier time talking about it. in a few instances he's been able to do it effectively. i thought it was very moving when trayvon martin was killed and he said, he could have been my son. remember he went on a date in new york city with his wife. now, if anybody else would have done that that would have been a moment. pbs posted on entertainment weekly a little bite in the film where the president and first lady are speaking about how they needed each other in times of trouble just reich jackie and rachel needed each other. it's a very wonderful and moving bite.

i'd urge you to go to that link and look it up. it won't ruin the film. it's one of the best moments in the film. then scroll down and look at the comments about it. they are beyond the pale in terms of vitriol. this is a beautiful moment between a husband and a wife. any person, white, black, purple green, it's very funny and embarrassing and kind of loving all at the same time and you realize there's a relationship between jackie and rachel, you know. no rachel, no jackie and maybe no michelle and no president obama. but the vitriol just for the fact there is a black man who's president talking about marriage is so instructive. you cannot -- i mean, we all know. we've all been singed by, aware of the unfettered internet which allowed the ungovern -- to be out there saying the worst possible thing anonymously. michael: anonymously. ken: it shows you what lies beneath the mob.

if you are at all surprised what happens in our political process now, if you have been dedicated to no compromise, you can see this in the way that's called trolling that takes place. this is beyond the pale. you couldn't imagine if we had looked ahead -- if we were five years ago and looked ahead to the kind of stuff going on. this sounds like stuff you read in the 1880's about why so-and-so was lynched, right? this is not a modern, progressive republic that is the leader of the free world. henry: at ferris state university there was a jim crow museum. i thought our documentary -- i guess it was two years ago when we filmed that. and already there was not a wink but this is a jim crow museum. these are all of the negative images. they already had a huge

collection of the most demeaning -- i mean, demeaning even images of barack obama. so you're absolutely right. but, you know, ken, when i was growing up there were no excuses. we expected white people to be racist. i think that barack obama was shocked, just like you were, unlike i was, at the degree of racism. i think a little bit, maybe he let his guard down. i think maybe he believed the narrative that a new racial -- a day of racial harmony had come. i think they were caught offguard. i don't think that they -- i think -- i don't think they had anticipated the depth of american racism or -- and how much had not changed because a black man had been elected to president of the united states. michael: let me ask you this,