[inaudible conversations] thanks for joining us tonight. On behalf of our cosponsors this evening for nieman foundation, im pleased to welcome you to this evenings event presenting when asking questions in the qanda, please note you will be recorded in a way for a moment for the microphone to come over to you before asking your question. Here at the bookstore we are gearing up for a fall season for topics including patti smith, e. J. For details on these and upcoming events, visit the Event Calendar and sign up for our weekly email newsletter or you can pick one up here. Todays talk will include with time for questions after which we will have a book signing right here at the table. Right door to my left and copies of the book are sold at the register in the other room. Tonight book is part of how we say thanks for buying books here at the bookstore. Your purchases ensure the future of an independent bookstore so thank you. And finally a quick reminder to silence your cell phones for the talk. And now im pleased to introduce tonights speaker. Andrea pitzer has appeared on fox, slate and advanced quarterly and she is the author of the secret history of vladimir and the founder of the nieman storyboard which is a narrative nonfiction site of the foundation. The storyboard highlights the future of exceptional journalism and nonfiction storytelling will bstorytelling long before she gave narratives, she was a portrait painter and backgrounds that have implemented or desire to uncover the forgotten history. Tonight shes presenting her new book one long night a global history of concentration camps. Reviews call it a powerful history and a a fearless and elegant tale of human cruelty and courage pulled off such clarity remind us all that its never too late to stand up for what is right. We are pleased to host this author tonight. Please join me in welcoming andrea pitzer. [applause] thank yo thank you for that lovely introduction. And i do want to come back to see patti smith. Thank you all for coming out tonight as well. I would like to start by reading you a little from the book and i will be reading a few short passages in these explaining a little bit about them and we will cover Six Continents and a century so hold on tight. This is from the first chapter and this is how concentration camps came to be in the world. Before nazi extermination factories rose in europe and before the first prisoner entered, before the 20th century had even begun, concentration camps found their first homes in the cities and towns of cuba. The modern experiment of detaining groups of civilians without trial was launched by two generals, one who refused to bring the camps into the world and another who did not. In 1895 cuban rebels declared independence from spain while the government in madrid collapsed in the face of anxiety over yet another war and harassing spanish forces occasionally ceasing rifles, bullets and food. Representatives had lived in exile in america for years organizing resistance, raising money into jammin and jamming ue sympathy stateside. Choosing the moment they returned to the island to fight. The first generals send to lead the campaign knew cuba while and talked for five years and a spanish war concluding a spark of the eventual slavery on the island and command of spanish forces in mexico and morocco and led the monarchy in spain and survived an assassination attempt. By the time he returned to cuba he was 53yearsold with a van dyke beard a mixture of progressive ideas known for the judicious use of both warfare and negotiation. But during the first months back on the ground nature appeared to stable the rebels. There was a heat stroke swamp of malaria and yellow fever some locals had in unity through prior exposure. Ole ms. And decimated forces just as profoundly as any stock attack. On the insurgent side of the of dynamite into ambush proved to be effective tools for the progress of the spanish troops were stealing this applies. A small number of snipers even without a license code installs herinstalledhere in a whole colf troops. Able to disappear in the countryside that will leaving the forces into the traditional battle. The insurgents spent their first months making strategic rates capturing the undefended towns. To provoke and only to see the troops at the severe rebel tactics. Even given the Intelligence Networks it was a staggering humiliation for spain. Faced with escalating measures and pressured by the new governmengovernment oversees les inclined towards obsession began to consider desperate means to end the uprising. Days later he wrote the spanish minister getting an assessment f the challenges facing his truth. As for what could be done in the future to improve the position, he explained that it would be possible to re concentrate hundreds of thousands of spanish held towns behind the trenches and barb wire that he would need significant forces to hold them there. To isolate insurgents would be effective but the price to be paid in misery and hunger would be horrible. History is full of moments which hindsight provides the only clear view. This is not one of them. During the final months when he became an official policy as his own troop troops and the rebelsh adopted harsh tactics, he explained to the spanish printer that hed already authorized those captured in battle and was caught sending fighters to the home. They found it in the interest and he described how they nursed a spanis spanish wound up that o their hands and returned prisoners of war unharmed. He could not raise the state against an opponent he felt to the honorable. After years of fighting the rebels and multiple can aim, the general offered to surrender his post governing the island rather than to embark on the other atrocity. The men that fought concentration camps were the only road to victory wer victoro embrace them. He could hardly have imagined the gas chambers and killing field in the debris of the experiment. Yet he understood the suffering and the executions in clearing the countryside of inhabitants. I cannot, he wrote as the representative of a civilized nation be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence. So he was recalled a man whose nickname was the butcher was sent instead and came into the world. In the United States that is a lot of coverage of this and there were pictures of starving and dying children millions of tons of aid was sent by rail and boat to help and this was a key factor in triggering after the explosion u. S. Entry into the spanishamerican war. America landed in 1898 at Guantanamo Bay for that invasion and of course after, we inherited the philippines where there was also a really underway and we ended up using concentration camps ourselves in that conflict a very short number of years later. In the same decade with the provisions of africa, Southern Africa at the time instituted the camps during the war and in the same period couple days after that in the wake of a genocide and the colony in southwest africa set up camps so they come into the world and are used with colonial outpost is in in anumber of locations. After that, they die down for a while because the results are so horrific people want to distance themselves. But during world war i, this idea of preemptively detaining civilians become too convenient to resist. So in a short number of years from the beginning to the end, you have concentration camps which is what they were called at the time, although now they are referred to as internment camps so they were literally on Six Continents and from that, you ended up with a global bureaucracy. The red cross was involved. You could send packages and letters if there were Educational Programs and libraries and all of this served i think very effectively but it also served to rehabilitate the idea of concentration camps. So by the end of world war i they are not seen as a bad thing at all the same modern era and because of the global bureaucracy has been set up using the camps morphed into other forms and to tak take on l characteristics. So its very tied up with the history of forced labor in russia and becomes a new phenomenon combined with his idea of concentration camps and then of course you have the nazi camps, the american internment during world war ii. Each country that imposes them does it within the constraint os of their own institutions and so the outcomes are quite different and the book itself is told to the story of prisoners, so i want to make sure to give you a little bit of a taste of that. So this is the story from auschwitz. In the weeks that followed, she received the first parcel from her mother which she could hardly open from weeping. Because she found the roll call unbearable she began to compose poems in her head, something shed never done before it continuously she watched as the new acquaintance had survived interrogations and torture at auschwitz was taken away for good by the gestapo. They had to flee the barracks and hide to avoid being chosen for service in the camp of the. Another resulted in collective punishment of kneeling in the mud which led to widespread fever. After nearly succumbing to work in the field she was assigned to the camp office. Her salvation came to the one who admired her poem shed written about in the roll call assigned to process the new rivals and corral and reassure them she couldnt bring herself to hit prisoners with a stick. They came in with their mothers and wind up only to be taken away from the denationalization and integration into german society. A ukrainian woman gave up hope knowing she would be shot. One night during a concert performed by administrators she stopped into watch a violinist play and conduct. As the orchestra played she used the distraction to slip into the hospital ward and bring warm water. The beauty and the holder of the evenings structure stayed for most of her mind. They wondered if they would roast together in hell and soon died anyway. Anything was possible and im sure auschwitz. The violinist from performance e swallowed poison and killed herself and a former scream in the night he was tied to her bed. After she was sent medicine by a male prisoner who kissed her during outdoor duties, she recovered and an intervention that admired the writing helped keep her once again from the outside labor. Soon after the recovery a group of french women were taken in trucks to their deaths. Patients in the hospital with head and in order to avoid being selected with the sickest detainees though she would be chosen in the next round. Another prisoner wondered if the effort everyone was making. Why do we want so much to live after the weeks and hospitals, she finally joined the new block for the rollcall back in the tiny universe at the camp she watched a prisoner beating for stealing potatoes. A man on a bicycle paused for a moment to attack an old woman. They spat fire into the sky. They were the same committee and its routine but new prisoners lined up in place of the dead. And after that period the office moved to this camp and becomes a witness to what is happening. She herself was jewish and took on the identity in order to avoid getting killed herself. The world very much understood although it took time and still today we do not fully understand what happened in the death camps, that was but was understt after the war there was a quarter her the bar was reset for concentration camps and anything less than that became not a concentration camp. It changed the way they were viewed and anything less than that still seemed permissible so in a short period after world war ii, you have several communist revolutions, some of them real and in posted that happened in Eastern Europe and china and some others. I wont go through all of it. But in those countries what you end up with is a form of the stovsovietstyle gulags labor anl traditions but you have this whole kind of camp based on that at the same time some former allies you have a reset to the beginnings of the camps. In those cases it is much more often civilian location fighting insurgencies. It became binary and control thl they wont have the geopolitics have been and reflected that as well. This kind of a shift in the event from the 60s and 70s and 80s in the book i cover south america and you begin to see not so much the colonial insurgencies that you have with the british in kenya but countries putting down elected governments in their own natio nations. There were varying degrees of accuracy to preemptively detaining and often torture large groups of people, so in santiago if youve ever seen pictures of people rounded up into stadiums they did later shut those down and some people went to conventional camps but what grows in this movement is itemizing and clandestine attention. So you had thousands of people who were tortured and as some survived it worked as this camp but the people were killed when they were finished with them since you have this Cross National because theres something called operation where they collaborated with each other so we have this clan destined itemized operation and i argue in the book that that is than how we get to guantanamo as a sort of crown jewel of a Large Network of detention that is itemized clandestine and also involves torture us with its routine application of torture, the use of Government Contractors and the just in time interrogation and i see this as part of a postwar sleep. So i dont think guantanamo is just guantanamo but i focus on guantanamo because thats what we still have in place today because we have a smaller number of detainees at there are still some for better prisoners. Its a done extraneous leaf through the legal system at the time and i dont have time to go but if you do read in the chapter if you havent followed the ways people went to guantanamo and who they were as a group is very vague and undefined so one of the Bush Administration people said basically in summation that if theres a captain in afghanistan and hes deciding whether they need to be getting but its a prisoners want went on a level t is going to let this go or is he going to send them to guantanamo do you want to be the 23yearold who may be less of osama bin ladens lefthand man go i think that hes had a boom they go to guantanamo and that is how a lot of the people remember of them came to be there. So, it is this sort of the whoe arc, and im happy to answer questions. So you can see how it comes together. Without accountability, no dividing line can suc separatess from the future. Even a century later, many governments have been called to account for their actions. Along with the nuremberg trials and parallel proceedings of the camps, legal cases restoring property and money and other survivors of nazi camps continue today. In this century, germany has apologized for its actions against the people 100 years after the original extermination order. Those that brought cases to the internet or leader able to prove in court that the u. S. Solicitor generageneral havent followed guidelines in presenting evidence. Japan continues to be brought to table for the question of comfort and china and the government agreed to pay settlements to those that want were demonized. Argentinian courts continue to prosecute members for the torture and murder and work with grandfathers of those stolen from those who were killed. They had spent years bringing the generals to justice and even guantanamo, troubling as it is surrendered most prisoners in the first several years theyve been followetheybeen followed sn church departures established by executive order in 2011 they now give prisoners the opportunity to make a case for the release that dozens of others still believe they are dangerous but for whom no evidence were only evidence obtained by torture of able remain. Policy planners will always return to mass detention because it seems as if it should work and it feels as if it could be done humanely. The damage done by concentration camps has never stopped the reflexes and enthusiasm for their use. As Justice Antonin Scalia said that japaneseamerican in turn meant, you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again. 20 miles from the spanish border, the entrance to the camp is in Southern France seems like a pass into a dark fairy tale. A single narrow road leads into the camp but its impossible to see through the trees where it goes. The road through the middle extends two thirds of a mile or more. Though most of it has fallen to ruane and undergrowth that have been allowed to swallow much of the former campsite. Small signs were the buildings stood up and walking past marker after marker for another island it is a strange to think of the world filled with these cities. Manmany permanents not the camps were even the larger integrate metropolises here in machine shops in this corner and in a uniform factory along with the closing of the murder over there a crematorium. They were burned because of him bury the corpses and risk of disease and others are destroyed by the nazis in the attempt to hide their crimes and train tracks taken up and the earth plowed to cover what was left. At the death camp, however, the barracks deteriorated on their own slowly collapsing through an. Was during the uprising and now its sitting open to the elements. Uneven piles scattered like broken teeth across the earth. Everywhere on tombstones in the Jewish Cemetery and along the dirt and debris, little piles of stone with tiny memorials to the dead. They labored before he was murdered in a hush prevailed. Most of the original buildings have been leveled. A little more rough foundations remaining. Come on rectangular shaped stretching on and on on the assembled graveyard for institution but one that refused to stay dead. In california and other japaneseamerican internment sites the barracks were gone. After the war ended and the camps closed, the houses that help the families were spli spln half and loaded onto an improvised flatbed trailer. Today some remain outside with the storage shed by a farmer and it ca interiorly with japanese graffiti scribbled up and down the. Leading on a clear day it is possible to see the naval base from up above and as its banks north, the landmarks that are forbidden from the security reasons across small and indistinct and it blurs into the complex detention rising higher over the open water leaving behind the base and then the island altogether along with the remains of the first cuban cant attrition kids from century before. Half a world away the camps of north korea and the sites for the systems yet to be discovered. The last moment in time when no concentration camp existed was more than a century ago. That moment seems unlikely to come again. It is riddled with camps and ribbons of camps even from the vantage of outer space it is still impossible to take it all in. In. Theres always a location out of view on the far side of the globe where the innocent and guilty and those in between hase been trapped together a time for now and forever. Old camps reopen the new ones are born, no final chapter can be written yet for the spectacle of the camps. So that is my attempt to cover them in 100 years but im happy to take questions because obviously this is just across the surface. Are there any questions . Whawhether the people in the concentration camp to be seen as the enemies were in latin america and you see this and it would be true in the non where you take a whole bunch of people out and you put them in a village so they are not providing materials has been torture, theres no coercion, getting them out of the way. Do you consider those concentration camps and deal with them in your book . They just pushed all of them out of the country site so everybody that was left was about to shoot a. It is an important thing to realize because this is also true for Different Reasons of the revenge. I dont think in the case you were talking about and i also dont think originally when they were first put into detention camps after the riots of 2012, i dont think that the intention was to kill them. We have all of the elements although we have to wait for the Human Rights Watch to finish the reports but what yo we are watcg them progress is quite restori restoring. The act forbidding them from coming back if the insurgency steps within the first people who are not going to get food are not going to be the so there is a number of outcomes i would say the best outcomes have typically been in world war i where it was professionalized into very few people died in those camps. Now there were some that were along the battle lines that were 50 dangerous because the towns would be surrounded with when the french would take over they want to know who would collaborate and they would want but in actual camps in berlin and london and around the globe, most people came out and i think that is an important part to understand a piece of also why the nazi camps were not paid more attention to. But they would do their time in a difficult to do with instability and then they they would elect out so they told the report anytime you take a group of people and they can go somewhere else and detained them is a concentration camp so we are talking labor camps, internment camps, death camps. Im trying to rather than just to see the nazi if we look back from today, it looms over everything that if we go back to the beginning and see a hell they emerge and how it is meant over time, i want to sort of bring definition back. Its more likely to be celebration like the hinges today with something that is meant as a detention and segregation. Then it turns into something more dangerous in this instance as you talked about also turned into Dangerous Things but sometimes it is just a matter of starvation and unjust attention so there is a whole range of things that happen in these camps. I cant wait to read the book. I have multiple copies i apologize. But i would like to pull one this thread of the definition of little more because i find i have a mental image of this and it included the civil war though maybe it doesnt qualify for the enemy combatant. I was taking note of the defining features that seem to be the common currency so that is definitely the case mass trial, education through labor though that term seems to be absent from some of the examples. Examples. This is a concept that changes with time or does it just depend . It evolves and with each chapter there are so many things to be covered and they asked for 100,000 workbooks and i turned in 150,000. And i thought i probably shouldnt push my luck anymore than i did. So theres only two paragraphs on the balkans for instance which could have been the books all by themselves. The reeducation through labor is a Later Development and that is from the soviet model. And then it becomes part of part and parcel with you see the love of communist nations like the revolution. Vietnam has educational aspects to it. China certainly adopted about and expanded in its own way sitters these local characteristics but each deals with a kind of evolution. I went from that term that first emerged tha so that is where the book starts. But in the introduction you will be happy i mentioned andersonville and i mentioned the Spanish Mission system and native American Reservations because those are the closest precursors not just geographically in time but they are most became. The book was so this long without addressing the pow camps but there were times when they are made as. We let thewe wouldnt say what s was and i dont know if you remember that after 9 11 when people started in early 2007 my car the enemy combatants or they wouldnt say what protections because we wanted to be able to push them to stop the next 9 11 from happening. And if you walk them down with giving them the name then they would fall under so that is why the situations were mushy but that kinthats kind of been clos absolutely what would otherwise get. Theres also the Role Technology plays that is very important. It existed before then so i dont think that its an accident at a very long after that you have the first opportunity because it transforms warfare. You cant run a bunch of horses in a wall of barbed wire so they are just using it in different ways and one thing they can use it for is if you remember the general in the first section if you order a whole bunch of barbed wire which is what the next date, you dont have to have that many people. This is the other invention that makes it possible holding a large number of people in a fixed setting. They play such a role in e. War in terms of the camps and thereafter into that evokes defaults. When does it turn into an internment camp and when the guantanamo was a first camp we had haitians and i think there were 23,000. There was a huge number of people we didnt want to let on to the u. S. Mainland so we held them there and that saved them certainly so theres a refugee camp in goal to that but if you hold people for a long time, the places get acclimated to it and later the courts intervened to force the release of hivpositive because they were not getting medical care or access to lawyers so then we moved to the refugee camps to some and thats a little more disturbing and all of this was known. And in fact when the First Press Conference a reporter asked why would you use it every time that we use that awful things happen and he says it is the least worst place and if it is literally the quote because we wanted to be able to detain these people and we needed to do it outside of constitutional protections but the inside was under american control and so the faith of the strokes and was extralegal i think. So that is a long answer to a short question. Are there other questions . I have a question about some institutions that may fall in your analysis. Slavery and the american plantation system with a variety that you find both strike me as origin stories. Are you analyzing the word order that they . I distinguished the two bought by competitive levels because they represent the worst but for the Transatlantic Slave Trade i suggested the economics that drove back through the detention was an outcome of the economic model where it is the leading thinbelieved anything ie concentration camp but there are physical spaces. Just in the book is separate out the infidels. So i just separate it out. A i wonder about segregation. That also strikes me as a concentration camp. When its a deliberate attempt to hide with the clandestine nature that comes later not being able to detain people because that is after in the west at least at this scene is not permissible but there is a whole list of things i go into from africanamerican rates of imprisonment. Higher rates of incarceration, those are all legitimate things and you will see there is a two paragraph section that i cannot fit in the box but they are related phenomena and everything you listed is in that section. I dont want to dismiss but there was the question of putting a boundary around it but they are all related there is no doubt about it. They lay into each other. After the riot the white extremists i think we would have to call them supremacists turned down a middle clas middleclasst was called a black wall street at the response was to take all the africanamericans and put them in what was called in the newspapers a of the time a concentration camp system for focusing on those that have burned the place down they took all the africanamericans, put them in a camp and would invoke them go until a white person came to vouch for them and david for this at the time with no sense of irony at all. It almost whimsically is too strong a word but many of the white people that came to get people out of the camp only knew the nickname of the servants were their first names and so it became very difficult to get people out because there might be 50 people answering its a sort of horrid looked back but it was described as a concentration camp comes with a phenomena certainly. First, i apologize for chuckling when you asked if there are any questions because this book stipulates above questions. I hope so. Also, when i read about the american citizens into the japanese internment camps of which there were two thirds, that number is correct. We kept workers on that but i really got a chuckle out of when they said american citizens which was two thirds of them identified to go about the absentee ballots on voting. Youve already read the book. Youve already read that section. They are in the camps and they get notification on how to vote in the next election. They called them relocation centers. They were careful to try even though people call them concentration kids because they didnt know about the camps yet the government caused them relocation centers. So they asked what they like to participate. That is one thing that might surprise you when the first concentration camps were formed, they rounded up a vote of communists at first in the first wave. But then they are held and in this first camp at nora, they take them to vote. So they actually took them to vote which resulted in this amazing spike in that little town because they took the prisoners to vote so then suddenly all the ballots because it was the prisoners for the camps said youd be surprised if there are more parallels than you might expect. Prisoners in a lot of systems you heard in all sure its not in the death camp the main camp they were allowed to receive packages. In argentina they sometimes had family visits. One woman said you would think they let you see your family and you would think that would mean you are going to live but no they might kill you just the same that there is a mix of things trying to look better in keepinandkeeping society thinkit they are Something Else with all the horror going on so there might be more parallels than you think that im not saying that the japanese intern camps were not death camps. I am not making that comparison at all. [inaudible] certainly into this is an attempt to lay out all the tragedies you you talked about in the vietnam when they tried to concentrate civilians so they wouldnt help the military with food and supplies and what have you. In south africa when the british put the women and children of the soldiers the british claim thaclaimedthat they were doing r humanitarian and military reasons because these civilian women and children were supplying them at night and the british they also said they were going to block them. Theres always been a combination of trying to sell it as a civilized thing because they were teaching the children in such a part of the reason for putting them in the camps come a humanitarian reason and there is usually like a number of things going on in any camp system that you sebutyou see the same thinge again and again. I know theres other people with questions. Did you want to ask anything else . I will ask later. Are there any other questions . Is it possible where you take them out of the current incarcerating a lot of people. Im still in touch with people that are in the camps. But im still able to communicate with them. It is a little overwhelming. So i think im going to write my next book about the pieces of this book like the journalistic magazine pieces. I think i need a break before i do the next one, but i do plan to do a second book on detention because i feel that there are so many other things. In definition was it outside of the law and trying to bring it into law. I will talk about that when the system is sort of choking on its self and i think that is dangerous and can also be a sign of health when its choking on itself but there are still some remedies that allow it to. But yes, the idea of legal attention to something i might look at in a future book because it needs one and the issue of border detentions there is a number of things happening like right this moment in the u. S. Are there other questions . Thank you very much for coming out. Im happy to sign books. [applause] [inaudible conversations] campaigned for justice to pursue the killers because of prejudice the white authorities often neglected these crimes because the victims were native american. One of the things that shocked me was how corrupt much of the Justice System was and how wall with the country was back in the 1920s especially in this remnant of the frontier. There was very little training and it was often easy if you were powerful to buy off. Marley turned a private investigators that actually had a much larger role in society back then because they often have to fill the void but they often had criminal backgrounds and were available to the highest bidder. The boundaries between a good man and a bad man were extremely porous and many of those that were working the case seemed to be concealing evidence rather than unearthing it. While this was going on it wasnt only the family that was being systematically targeted, others were. There was a call one day and evidence later indicated that he had been poisoned and for those of you familiar with these mysteries you know that this is just an absolutely awful poison that causes the whole body to come bold as if with electricity and you slowly suffocate while youre conscious until you mercifully die. One of the reasons poisoning was so common, such a common way back then was to even if scientists could detect poison the local wal men would have performed toxicology so you could simply go to the local drugstore or grocery store, pick up a form of poison and give it to somebody and it was an easy way to kill somebody and be undetected. And by 1923, other people who also were trying to catch the killers were being killed. There was one man, a lawyer who started to gather evidence and one day he received a call from oklahoma city. He took a train and told his wife before he left, with ten children, i have evidence in a hiding spot if anything happens be sure you get it and give it to the authorities. He then went to oklahoma city, gathered up evidence and she called authorities and is that i have enough evidence to catch the killer. Im coming back and getting on the next train but when the train arrived, he wasnt there. He didnt get off the train and they sent out the bloodhounds looking for him. There were local boy scout troops in the area taking up the search and he was eventually found with his body lying on the railroad tracks. Somebody had thrown him from a train. When his wife tha went to the hg spot, somebody that has already got in there and clean up all the evidence as well as the money that he had left for her and the ten children who were left destitute many of the children were then raised by the family. There was another man, an oilman who was a friend and he went to washington, d. C. To get authorities to investigate these cases especially given the local corruption and he got to the house in the capital and received a telegram from an associate of oklahoma that said be careful. They carried with them a a bible and a pistol. He left the boarding house and was abducted and at some point somebody wrapped a burlap sack around his head and he was found the next morning in a colbert. Hed been beaten to death and stabbed more than 20 times. The Washington Post that the times said the headlines of what they had already knew. A conspiracy to kill rich indians. Finally, in 1923, after an official death toll, the Osage Tribal Council issued a resolution of pleading and demanding for federal authority ountainted by corruption to intervene. And it was then that the case was taken up by a rather obscure branch of the justice department, one that certainly wouldnt seem very obscure on this day in particular. It was then known as the bureau of investigation and it would later be named the fbi. And i think it is somewhat fitting to this day to talk about the bureau because i think its probably on a lot of peoples minds. The bureau back then was really a ragtag operation that had only a smattering of agents. They were not authorized to carry a gun. If they wanted to arrest somebody, they had to get a local mall than to make the arrest and big. Ltd. Jurisdiction over crime, but they had jurisdiction over American Indian reservations and so that is why the osage murders became one of the fbis first major homicide cases. 1925, the new boss man j. Edgar hoover summoned this man tom white washington. He said he needed to see him right away. Now, this is also a remarkable man and in many ways hes like molly. He reflects and embodies the transformation of the country. He was born in a cabin in texas on the frontier. He was from a essentially a esse of walden and his father a sheriff, he grew up and saw people being harmed. He became a texas ranger as did many of his brothers. He crept us to be practiced law with a gun and at a time when justice is often held by exploding barrel of a gun. By the 1920s to 1925 when hoover summoned him to washington, he had to wear suit and adapt techniques like fingerprinting, handwriting analysis would become an important part of his case. He has to file paperwork, which he cant stand. And he gets to the bureau, he doesnt know why hoover has summoned him. But hoover at the time is replacing any of the frontier wall man with a new breed of agents, these college boys that type faster than they shot. In fact they had very little criminal experience and so hoover ha have kept on the role just a few white white and they were known as the cowboys. This is a picture of hoover, taking just a few months before, so this is exactly what hoover looked like at his desk. He was only 29 when he became the director. He was not yet an autocratic or have all of the power that he would have over the next several decades. He was new to his job, and he was still insecure about his power. And the funny thing about hoover was he hated our agents. So, they hated to be summoned to headquarters because they were afraid if they thought they were tall, he might fire them. And he also kept a dice behind his desk so he could stand on it and seem taller. So, suddenly, white stood 6foot 4 inches. [laughter] whats more, even though he had on his new suit he was supposed to wear, he was wearing a cowboy hat which violated all protocols. Here he was, looming over hoover, and hoover begins to tell him about the osage murder cases. The bureau actually at that time had been working on the case for two and tear ears, and the resus have been cut completely disastrous