Transcripts For CSPAN2 Alexis Coe You Never Forget Your First 20240713

Thank you, guys, for being here. Welcome to politics and prose at union market. We are so excited that youre here. Im jennifer mcdvitt, owners Bradley Graham as well as staff, we would like to welcome you to todays event. To briefly note housekeeping items before we get going, we would appreciate it if you turn off or silenced your cell phones. This is my favorite part. Everybody start reaching. So not to disturb the conversation. We do have ats microphone. Its going to be this one for the q a portion of the event. We do want to use microphone for any questions that you have. Copies are available if you want to purchase a copy or many copies. Theyll be a signing after the q a. This is the word im looking for at the conclusion of the talk, its my pleasure to introduce alexis coe, you never forget your first followed murder in memphis, soond to be motion picture. Lively look at George Washington that separates man from the legend. Host of audibles no mans land, founder through lens. She recounts how he was raised by a single mother and stubborn ness and face contradictions of a free nation reliant on free slave labor. Okay, good. Warmly welcoming alexis coe and jamaal bully to politics and prose. [applause] hello, alexis. Hello, everyone. Hello, audience. So lets just get started. Lets do it. So your first mentioned is a murder of a young couple and this seems a different direction. Im going to go on, they seem really different. As a historian when youre in ergrad school, you study this in theory. I studied literally a year, after that my first job was at new york public library, building in brian park and my job was collective memory, so youu start with tomorrows, its all over the place. During that time i began to think a lot about Allison Freda forever. I didnt want to be someone who is known as a woman. I thought i wanted tenure and you cannot catch love as a woman or historian or else youre not going to get a job and so i thought about it for years and i felt like it was a really interesting story and explained so much about the origin of prejudice and i liked president ial biographies. The audible series would require to my mind to really understand what was going on as i would read micro histories but i would also read 3 or 4 biographies at the same time in conversation with each other and i would buncher with some sort of understanding of the president hopefully and that just never happened for me with washington. Its a surprising assertion to make because you look at washington books, theres quite a few. One book on Allison Freda but i felt like i had to do something to that book shelf. It needed something. In the introduction you talk about the washington biographies,n its not just theres a lot of them but have a similar task, written by a similar kind of person, ill be honest, in the beginning typical biographer, grew up going to historical sites and grew up in virginia, i was like, damn, it sounds like me. What you were responding to in the world of washington biographies . I found that i joke that when these men got their book contract that before they signed it they had to take a solemn oath and say that i will proceed in the exact same manner. I will say the same thing and have the same goals and i will do it the same way. I didntt take the oath. Me[laughter] the thing i at first i thought it was sort of funny, they all say hes too marvel to be real and break him out and they doto talk about things thai jokegs about, they are really io his size in a way that seems appropriate. Its funny [laughter] i see nicer. Hamiltons are also nice. Founding father size or adam driver . [laughter] here is the thing while ths is called often a feminist biography, if they had written about marthas size, i mean, we would all be up in arms. Theres also the double standard. It works both ways and so i thought that was very strange. Theres a defensiveness around washington. Zero interest of women. We talk about ford, obama, lineon as clintons as president s who were raised by singlee mothers. Why arent we talking about washington . Why dont we talk about that . Nothing made sense to me and as soon as i checked the primary sources, what i do specialize at the same time we all know what the little number, you know, in a sentence means. You check the end note. If the end quote keeps quoting a secondary source and that quotes a secondary source that keeps happening, you know something hankie is going on. That kind of takes us to why didnt the four sections, one dealing with washingtons early life and i found the first part to be fascinating in part because you begin with a series of list of washington. You can talk about that. Even as someone who knows a bit about the guy, i still find it immensely useful to be giving info dump like that. I would love to hear you talk about that information like that because i think in a more more biographers think about it like that. His context as young virginia driver. A social climber. As a guy who wants to have his eyes at the top. He cant feed his horse. Theres a a lot of struggle goig on. In early virginia if you walked at all you were poor and looked down upon, that was essential to him, but i think the thing is, you know, if you also look at the front,i call them visual coffins. I dont think they do for you. Maybe like destiny which i also have a big problem with. No one is destined to do anything. Takes a lot of hard work. I want president ial history because the presidency and especially the person who was established the office, who was built around, everyone pressured but i think that the biographies are alienating in visual presentation and titles, the way they are written and so i really wanted the reader to feel like they had if they had never read a president ial biography, that they had everything they needed at the beginning of the book and the beginning of each section to feel as though they were i did think a lot about my reader and the other part that washington has been called by an adams family series editor, president ial editors, they edit the papers, called him vanilla once to my face and i think that is, well, first of all, you cant compare, too much fun thats why the letters survive. They knewer that. The thingt is, you can break hm out of the mold. He can be fun and can be interesting because you have to have fun with him as the person is called reverend which i think is a whole different thing, but a lot of the things that you see is the way that i organize the material in my head when i was trying to make sure that i got things across and i decided to be vulnerable and share it with everyone. Certain things that help you understand i can tell you in a sentence, the beginning of the revolution, okay, we can say as they all do, he lost more battles than he won. Why are we talking about the battles. Hes not fighting on the front lines. Hes in the tent most of the time. Hes not out there so why are we wasting time talking about it. Why dont i just tell you about the battles. Thats less important to me something that you understand than a sentence that really gets lost. You know, the the war went on for a long time, wasnt quick. We had one general and the british had many general and i really by presenting you with a chart at the beginning of that section and just listing George Washington, George Washington, you get it. I wanted you to have those i dont want my reader, longest answer ever, i dont expect you to turn around and give a really long talk about this. I want you to be really excited about it and turn around and talk about it at a cocktail ngparty. I will say that i read like half a book and when i was talking to my wife, i was reading, did you know washington loved dogs, she was like, i did not know that. To your point i really wanted to talk [laughter] its important to know that he lovedle dogs. He has to be a fully formed person to you. You have to know that he was silly enough to call his dog sweet lips and you need that, thats ridiculous and you also need details around other things like you dont, you cant just know how many people enslaved people he owned. You need an example of it. You need every detail i can squeeze out of it. You said something earlier and that was because the book does so much to demystify washington and places the context of his relationships and because hes the model for the kind of almostt does biographies of roman emperors and this is a biography of a president. Its just a dude, a dude that we chose and i think its interesting how throughout the book you always are short to emphasize to us not just the people around them but someone who has, also kind of the thing i had in my mind danny glover in legal weapons. Too old for this and doesnt want to do this anymore. Yeah, i think the thing is we think of the founders as one thing like modelist and he was doing the best that he could. I found that so revealing. How he understood himself doing the job. Yeah. I think that again, this humanizes him and the office and it should give us comfort in the messiness in some ways. So big part of the book deals with washington as a slave owner. You cannot deal with that. Its one of the overriding identities of his entire life. He was concerned and always concerned about what hes going to do about the farm and how hes going to feed and house other people he owned and what they were going to do for him, so the thick that you talked about towards the end is how washington sort of would always say that, yea, im going to free my sleighs at some point but never really asked. I wonder if you can talk about his unwillingness to take the extra step because you make step, peers in virginia who did take the extra step. Yeah. I feel like biographers pull over on this. They make it sound like if washington had this view and i think this is helpful. I h think they did which is a bias. Its hardh to do that if you cant see him as having this beautiful realization and so washington begins to have not a change of heart but a change of priorities during the revolution and that he meets different people. The argument is sometimes that, you know, enslaved and free black men fought during the revolution, no, he didnt want that. He was reluctant about it just like billy lee, righthand man, like hes always been there and represented of everyone rather than the exception. What i wanted to do was have that present because its present in his mind. Wait is as important and hes concerned about, what hes concerned about, forced labor force. Ve to me to be honest and understand him and his anxieties and priorities it had to be there the whole time as close as i could get it and the material is there and last like i wanted to smoosh a bunch of micro histories into one because i think it can be that way. Its notwa oh, i wish he would have done this. Its understanding why he ultimately did the thing that he did. He could have sold his land. When we say we call them planters which is i think misleading. They are plantation owners which is inflection for forced labor camp and they were all cash poor but they had land and no one had more land than George Washington because he had gained during french and indian war when he fought for the british which he would have been happily to do and we would have been british subjects if they had given the promotion he wanted. [laughter] we are not talking about thomas payne here. Its important to think rabbit the things that hes saying are not quite true. I dont have the money. I cant do this. I cant move out. He could have if he really wanted to, you know, if he wanted to be the person that lafayette thought he could have. He had examples. There were people in virginia who had to leave, you know, under direct because other slave masters wereus terrified of this thd so i just think look at him clearly and when we also do that lets talk about how it was kind of vague, it was a move to martha and left her in incredible vulnerable position and end up hurting the inevitable but also the same problem existed that he didnt want to see and be responsible for which was the separating of families forever. If you could refresh my memory, how many people were enslaved at mown vernon throughout . So martha was married before. She had 2 children from her previous marriage and the estate had over 130 enslaved people and washington inherited 10 enslaved parttime when he people whee was 11. Its not like he was oh, fine. Explicit purpose of buying people and so that number swelled to 214 by the time he tied. The thing for me reading about washington as a slave owner is also remind you that most of the people he saw for most of his life were enslaved people and i think i lived in charlottesville and monticello is right there. That for me at least radically changes how you think about these men and how they must have thought about themselves because its not it wasnt a salon every day with, you know, all the founder buddies. Ben franklin, thinking big thoughts. Right. It was from sun up to sun down most days seeing the people that you enslave, thinking about fast track at some point when you had to discipline. I dont know if i have a question there. Just an observation. You know, washington was always people talk about impressive the way he thought of new schemes and inventions. To maximize profit and labor to apke sure that, you know, he was applying that and i think thats really important because we think of him as sort of doing important work all of the time, they were they were messy, they were drama queens and also cruel and thought themselves to be better. You know, its important that we understand that. On a sunday washington would hang out with his wife and make enslaved people row boats and race across the potomac, i want to know that he went to church but i also want to know that he did that. A big part of the book and i neverev really thought about as far as washington goes as patriarch not just for enslaved people but large number of young men and women, some related to them through various connections. You say that this is something traditional biographers dont deal at all. Seems to be big part of his life and something he was invested in. They are married to this narrative which is that he had no biological children are conception of children has really changed over time. Itit wasnt uncommon to marry a woman who had children. That was a really good sign that he should have a child. [laughter] so it was so strange to me to talk ten pages about why he couldnt have children, instead, why dont we look at the fact that he was lousy with children. They were everywhere and they were giving him problems. So m many letters lecturing, finding a better tutor, giving a lot of unsolicited love advice and that was a part of his world view. Thats what he saw every day and you dont read those letters and think, oh, hes not really invested in this kid. Hes so angry and, again, its not like oh, they are just like us, but when he lectures grandson, we say step grandson, its like losing his umbrella. The other part of that and something that really struck me throughout is how much not just that washington seemsso followed by death, hes sort of most of the men on his side, on the e shington side of the family die pretty young but also at a certain point becomes hyperaware of his death and how are people going to remember me when im dead, what should i do now to ensure that those memories are e. Sitive. He was really sensitive and untouchable the first four years and the second four years he was not and created cabinet with people that he disagreed, jefferson leading the pack. I will ask them all for their opinions because he did value otherer peoples opinion and he thought he was a if you believe and, of course, it was his disaster and he became really aware of how people thought about imwhen they werent saying nice things. That was really rough for him and he did really think about how can i because he was a control freak, how can i get control of the situation. That was which is not to say that emancipating the people that he freed was legacy, we dont want to deny that it had a real impact on these peoples lives good and bad because, again, they never saw family members. He understood that we would probably judge him act slavery, so he would have to take care of that and begins to edit his papers all the way to french and indian war when he was in his 20s and parts he doesnt touch and the parts are First Americans and those parts are native americans. We should just say genocide. He left all of that. He was proud to be called the town destroyer, that means raising a town. He was proud of telling indians that, you know, their way of life was over, you know, a white mans way of life was better and why dont just they follow his example and he would say in way, i will retire in my farm and you should figure out yours, he thought that was a very positive thing. This is well known when he left office, farewell address, all of the things. You mentioned earlier, he sort of unavoidedly became a partisan figure. One of the most things that you tell on his birthday, last year of his last term, someone made a motion in the house that kind of adjourned for a little bit to just celebrate washingtons birth and people are like no, we are not interested in that anymore. What do you think not washingtons life per se but legacy, what relevance do you think that has for the present and the moment where people are lots of partisanship and people have some idea that we can vanish those things. Seems like we cant. From washington what do any less sons to take about how to manage it or deal with it . Partisanship is inevitable. It doesnt have to be a terrible thing. It is i think the job of the president s to do a much better job of being a unifying figure and then say what you will about obama, he could control himself and he acted in an appropriate manner because at the end of the day hesct serving the entire american body not just the people who voted for him, so i think we need to expect more of our leaders, not civility, thats meaningless, say what you mean but also act in a way that serves everyone and i think at the end we as the electorate have more power than, you know, its hard and we get really frustrated an seems impossible to fix, but, again, Like Washington was not a natural revolutionary, you know, he had to fight his way out. [laughter] we are closesh but not there. [laughter] but that we can demand that things get done because we are at the point where, you know, we have people like mcconnell who washington did warn against that they would just get nothing done. They would try to maintain power and we really need to focus on holding them accountable and thats our job and thats the best way we can improve on legacy of founders and not emulate them because that was never the intention. The mic will be going around. Yost raise your hand, im going urge you to ask a question, i wont have a mic but i can say loudly if i think youre not asking a question. [laughter] so my question is basically you alluded about dislikable aspects of washington especially slave holding, im curious if you can tell us most dislikable that most people think is admirable, anecdote that talked a lot about personality, something that spoke to you about his personality . That was a question, 3 questions. I will try to get through them. I think the thing with washington that surprised me, maybe his worst attribute is when he was done with you he was done with you. He could be very cold. He could let you possibly die in a french prison. He could he would claim, that was thomas payne. He would sell one he could not aldiscipline, a man he put on a ship to barbados where he knew he had 3 years to live under the conditions and he told the captain of the ship, this guy is bad news knowing that like he might not even make it there, so i think he knew what he was doing. I think that washington did have a greatat sense for a Certain Group of people what was right and what was wrong and he did believe in ambition and opportunity and those are fundamental americans, Certain Group of people and i think, you know, he was a good friend. He could be a good friend to someone like lafayette. He was an amazing athlete. That is something everyone is grasping to describe, why him, wide dye they all why did they revere him . That was probably the greatest attribute that we can least describe. Hi. Im curious telling complicated narrative about a historical figure in the me too area trying to figure out whats black and whats white and how to make sense with gray areas, im thinking kobe bryant and how he was memorialized, how you think about grabbing all the details and telling a story and whatat you think is important. Well, you might be able to answer in a contemporary sense but for me its, for someone Like Washington or jefferson, we cant really allow cancel culture because you cant cancel them, you cant cancel washington which is why i dont understand the defensiveness. I dont pose a threat to washington. [laughter] hes going to be just fine. So i think the thing is we have to we have to remember that these were people and so we see them on their best days and their worst days and we have to allow that to be balanced. Kobe bryant, i dont know. Im not a sports fan, but i think it is sort of the same idea, right, that you have to try to look at them on the whole and not let them be defined by the worst thing they ever did or the best thing they ever did and thats really difficult when you person. Ow the i think of washington now as a person. I was terrified it would haunt me last night as i spent the night at mount vernon. I do think of him as a person who was amazing in a lot of ways and really disappointing and its just like anyone else you know. I think part of the part of the thing you have to do is avoid moralizing, like its difficult especially for a man Like Washington, jefferson, madison, all of them because they werepe involved in somethig that was evil and you can communicate that but its important to you present, its not a matter of factually but this is part of their life and trying to understand the relationship to it. You as a reader can draw your own conclusions but the goal isnt moralization and thats a difficult thing to do and especially writing about frost individuals. People get mad and its okay in engaging in magical thinking. Jefferson didnt have a clout, if he had written the things and acted in the way that was consistent with him we probably didnt know his name. When he interviewed her a few years ago, thats not true for washington. Would it had made a difference . Would we have had a civil war a lot sooner . I dont know. It is a circular thinking. Nothing is really clean. In the middle. And then after you so first thanks so much for coming. This was awesome. And i was just reading through a bit of the introduction when you speak about washington and i was curious to hear how you thought about writing so directly about historians when you are also writing history and i was curious about that dynamic itself of like choosing to name people and how you decided to do that . So i have a graduate degree. Do i come from this background ini which i think about history but im a popular historian when i get to chapter one is narrative. I have notes and im telling you a story. I need it to be direct in the beginning and situate you really quickly ine hundreds of years f research and the only way i know how to do that is to give you the best examples i have and to talk about why i thought it was wrong and to do it in this way which, again, revealing of my process which is i began to think of them history and that was just the name i give them. I put it as a place holder which is also by the way a title and it was in brackets and my editor and my husband is an editor and having to read everything. They both took the brackets out and capitalized and so i thought, okay, they are actually reacting to this and if thats engaging you really and making you understand it and not just sentence but general approach or charts like anything else, we are in it together and its inviting you in thought process and the whole section is meant to prepare you to start out a totally different way because we start out with his mother, withh his story being told through his mother and its never told that way. Its always through his father. He was 21. We dont know what happened really before which is like a move, you know, and enviable one atat times, but you have to try and work with what you have. So the last few weeks theres been a lot of discussion about what the founders thoughts of limits of executive power, they were afraid of tyrant or the article 2 gives you the ability to do what you want on the other end. Im curious as framer but also a first president , what was his perspective on the limits of the executive and how did that change as his role changed from, youan know, president of the Constitutional Convention to actually the president . He was giving his input and how things worked. Thats madison, thats jefferson, it would not put monroe in that group, if you talk to washington scholars, monroe was not a great thinker. [laughter] so much shade thrown at him. But he was annotating it. I dont think he had the idea that the founders were monolith and this is what we were going forward, its total bull shit. They were fighting all of the time. Thats why partisan happened and so i think that its really important to remember that, so some, you know, healthy amount of fighting is good, its a conversation. Ats ridiculous to imagine that a country that had fought 8 long years to break free of a monarch, of a king wanted absolute power. If they wanted that, they would have had a king. Theres a romance novel called american royals and its about how washington decided to be a king and sort of like its sort of interesting, the same publisher. They sent it to me. We dont have that for a reason and it makes me so upset to hear that. I also think that, you know, sort of abuse of our history to present it in this way and when people do that and they are being general you shouldnt trust them. They could say it 3 times and you take it away like a toy. Theyre not allowed to do it. [laughter] so i do think that thats ridiculous and ii saw inappropriate tweet from the white house account. You have to present yourself as representing all americans and, you know, you never saw obama doing this. You have tweets. I dont think w. Had twitter and so theres a tweet that said, you know, by todays standards of the democrats, the following people would be impeached and of course, washington, lincoln. Anyone can be impeached. Thats the whole point. If you are a president you can be impeached. Everyone can be impeached, so i theirin other words, greatest fear was that we fell into decay because we allowed corruption to be ramp it, if you can say they agreed on anything, that was it. What corruption was, they did not grow on. I think thats the best way to think of it and any time its presented otherwise you know that they dont know what theyre talking about. In the back. You mentioned like looking at the sources in other biographies and i was wondering where you started with your sources and if theres anything that you were trying to uncover, like what sources you used to sort of find your new perspective. When you research a woman, theres very little in the archives. You have to really work hard to find it. Theres embarrassment of riches when it comes to the founders but theres no excuse to sort of generalize and the material is there, too much of it. Theres something called founders online. I go to the archives, i went to mount vernon and spent a lot of time in all of these places but you andnd your home can google foundersy online and you can te in dog or sweet lips and you can see jefferson asking about sweet lips and, all kinds of results for that. Queen of the absolute, the dog is called a absolute, theres jefferson is, you know, single dad and he tells his daughter not to dress like a absolute basically. Dont dress like a absolute and so i think its real easy to check these things and what i did when something seemed strange like, you know, washingtonske father, this was the first time i realized something wase wrong. He said washingtons father wanted to tame his mother and he had this like desire to do so. Theres no theres no end note and turned out that he had to give one and i say this in the book and plagiarizing myself here and probably worse than i wrote it but, you know, in the we just accept that. Sure, needs taming and, of course, that was really embarrassing to washington because he was the general. He never wrote the letter. She never wrote the letter. She talked about struggling as ngl people in their 70s did which is why virginia was giving out pensions to older people and, of course, they were Like Washingtonses mom lives here, e would be first on the list. She never did that. Oh, my god, how could she do that . How could she embarrass him . She didnt. Not only that she is really struggling and he admits that later, she actually had a terrible manager who was stealing from her and mismanaging everything. I guess she was telling the true he writes to benjamin, shes fine, ignore this, whatever, please dont give her any money and writes to his mother who is struggling months later and instead of looking at negative, hes being negligent to his elderly mother and its a matter of checking sources and when it doesnt check out asking what is another way to look at this and its it doesnt readily come to think and you have to think about it for a while. It takes forever to write these things because i have to think about what could possibly have been going on and present 3 different options and suggest which one i think might work best. So the w book is really funny and it says that on the back too but also a serious topic so i was wondering how you maintained that like sort of humor playfulness and second you mentioned in the prologue how your perspective as a woman allows you to read sources differently than the men had and i was also wondering how youre perspected as public historian or being in the museums world to present sources differently than a traditional historian might . Its interesting. People keep calling it funny which is nice. I will i think the preface in the introduction are funny, y history and all these things. I dont think the rest is funny. I think i do have a dark humor. I know that about myself and i think if you read my first book you would see that while theyre really different that theres the same sort of tone to them, but i dont i dont think its funny. Im bringing the female perspective. Im just one of 3 women who have done it and thats 3 women compared to hundreds of men, hundreds and these other two women, one was a conservative writer and the other a novelist, they werent historians and thats also Something Else that im bringing and so its really, not so much about, its deviating and its i think that i dont know. I feel like if its not just that im a woman, women and people of color and other people took on president ial biographies which means they also have to do micro histories because thats been left out of the narrative. If they do the double duty and they do all of the labor, i dont think that they would miss the thingsy either. I think its just that the people who have written washington biographies are men of a certain age of certain background and they dont have curiosities about certain things and there are many men who i know who write about politics who have some curiosity about half of the population and are not upset and i also just think that theres a changing of the guard. History wasnt even really a profession. There wasnt a way to go about it forever, you know, it was the last hundred years. We figured out what it means to be a historian and so i do think that its an ever evolving thing and thats why its so important that every generation needs new storytellers and historians have to do all of this work where they have to, okay, theres we have to think about the woman who have been dismissed or mischaracterized and we have to look at the works and see what was going on and a more dramatic example than what im doing here is gordon reed. She taught us in the most dramatic way that we dont know what we think we know and that these these men were defensive about jefferson had been denying that was really obvious forever and she wasnt the first person to say it but people had done it in sort of wrong way. They had sort of like a psychological approach or whatever and she did it in the right way and she had all the best examples and it was just like a really tight delivery, so its everyone is always improving on each other and i hope that this is not, you know, well, this is the woman, you know, this is the biography written by the women and the biography written by the men. I hope that this is the beginning. I cant do it all. There are too many president s. We have time for one more question. [laughter] now everyone is silent. So going off your last point, do you think we are entering into a new age of history like during 70s, women do exist, we should probably talk about them, its safe to say, maybe we can start, you know, taking shots at some some of the figurs that we thought were infallible before . E i hope so. Probably other books of washington will not draw this crowd and i think that at the same time theres an interest within this crowd. I was at mount vernon last night and i thought they told me there were a few hundred people that would rsvp, it wasnt, its the same crowd that i have seen. A sea of old white people and they were excited. I thought i was going to get a lot of comments, not questions and that people were going to be very offended and they i mean, they just didnt speak up but they were excited about something and excited to have a conversation, to bring something, bring some conflict thats not saying, you know, washington was awful, he was a terrible person and we should not be studying him because he did x, y and z. Instead, this is complicated and we should work this out. I do think its the next step and i do think just like we are supposed to get better as the country and i hope personally i feel like im Getting Better as a person, as a friend, mother and wife and i hope everyone else aspires to be that too. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you. Signing books and that will be up here. We will have the signing up front. We have plenty of copies behind the front desk up there, if you will line going this way, we will get started. As coronavirus continues to impact the country here is a look at what the Publishing Industry is doing to address the ongoing pandemic. James patterson will donate 500,000 to save indy bookstores. Bookstores around the country continue to provide Remote Services for their customers through online sales and virtual author events. Source books in detroit has closed its doors but selling online while palace books in portland, oregon announced rehiring of 49 of Staff Members to assist with rise on online sales. Bay area book sales, series of authors events at we love bookstores. Also according to npd book scan, book sales dibbed 13 compared to last year prior. Many announced layoffs and closing of distribution festival. Festivals and conferences have been canceled. The American Library association also announced the cancellation of annual conference this june in chicago while Los Angeles Times festival of books originally to take place in april have decided to take 25th annual festival in october. Book tv will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. You can watch our archive programs any time at booktv. Org. Here is a portion of the program. And sort slapped big numbers on me and having coming from zero money myself. 55 million was a whole lot of own and i owned 40 of the company which is a lot of money, let me tell you then, 1981. We finally decide to do that, to make the transaction because i was faced with as we grew and grew, we needed more and more money to grow. You need that in capital and i was turned down by many venture capitalists along the way and wall street didnt come to my aid because we were creating competition and we were just lowering the prices and making Great Service for customers and thousands of customers were joining our company as clients, and so they didnt want to finance it any further and so we had a tough time raising money. It was attractive at the time, the development of the company. Soon over next 3 to 4 years it became clear that we were under the wrong umbrella and had to work our way out of there. Not only that, but they ran into huge problems thats what i mean. They ran into huge problems. They lend money to greek shipping guys that went down the tubes and argentina, they had all kinds of loans, south america, it went on and on and so they had to sell the big building, big Tall Building in san francisco, they sold a couple of other subsidiaries. And i said, sell us. [laughter] so i convinced them to sell us and that was another interesting story about and i said they said, they will sell you to highest bidder. I said thats terrific. You know for well that im not for sale. You can sell the company. I will start a Similar Company right across the street and that was a real threat because i was going to do it and i was a little bit upset with them because going back when we made the deal with them our stock, we went at a stock for Stock Transaction and their stock was 24 a share and that was a top tick and the next 4 years 24 years all the way to 9. I was an unhappy guy for many reasons. My wife is in the corner, sort of shy. [laughter] its a nontrivial point they could sale Charles Schwab but they couldnt sell Charles Schwab person. That wasnt for sale, and so i used my name and face by that time and advertising. I was getting people to identify the company with me. I dont know who they are going to sell it to. The guy opens up around the block and opens up competing company. We came to terms and they were happy. They ended up what 5 or 6 times what they had paid me in compensation in 5 years time, that was a good return for them. After words is a Weekly Program interview nonfiction authors about their latest work. All after words programs are also available as podcasts