Hochschild who was a Founding Member of americas communist party. [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone, and welcome to politics prose. Hi name is matthew zipf, im part of the events team here. Each year we host close to 1,000 authors here at the wharf and at union market. Please see our web site, politics. Prose. Com or pick up a paper copy of our Events Calendar at the desk. Before the event, i do have a few short housekeeping items. First, please silence your cell phones so we dont have any buzzing or ringing during the event. When its time for the q and a session after the presentation, please come up to the microphone there as we are recording the event via audio. Please also make sure that your question is, in fact, a question [laughter] if you have a dissertation, we do have a selfpublishing arm. [laughter] well have a signing for the book up at the front at this table here after the event. If you do not yet have a copy, we have plenty available for sale at the register at the front of the store. Finally, at the end of the event please fold up your chair and put it to the side on one of the shelves. Thatd be a great help to your lovely vent staffer here. Today im excited to welcome Adam Hochschild to the store celebrating his new book, rebel cinderella. The book tells the story of Rose Pastor Stokes, a woman famous during the gilded age but largely forgotten now. Having arrived from russia in 1890 and working in factories since age 11, she astonished American Society by marrying a blueblooded new york millionaire. Together the unusual couple joins the socialist party and worked with figures such as emma goldman, eugene debs and w. E. B. Dubois. As with his previous work on the spanish civil war, hoaxchild keeps hochschild keeps an eye on literary life without ever devolving into mere presentism, he examines how historical figures responded to challenges that in some ways resemble our own. In reviving figures like stokes, his fork not only reminds us his work not only reminds us of our duty as citizens, but to widen our political imagination. Once again, his other books include King Leopolds ghost, shows not only his thoroughness as a historian, but also his mastery as an american writer. In this vivid account he has given us an important tale for our own time. Please join me in welcoming Adam Hochschild. [applause] actually, that music was supposed to be playing as you come in. [laughter] songs of the [inaudible] but ive got to stop it now because we have to get on with the rest of the show here. Anyway its great to be back here at politics and prose. A wonderful, wonderful store, and if i lived in washington, i would be here loitering all the time. And its a pleasure to see so many of you here to hear about a book that is not the latest inside story from Trumps White House [laughter] and isnt even about the origins of the coronavirus; but, rather, is about Something Else entirely, a really quite remarkable woman and also about her very unusual marriage which i think sheds some light on our country as it was about a century and a quarter ago and maybe, by reflexion, a little reflection, a little bit on the country today. So let me take, the i want to tell the stories of both people in this marriage, but let me start with her. The woman who would become rose z pastor stokes was born in tsarist russia in 1879. This is a small city that today is in the far northeastern corner of poland, but at that time, of course, there was no poland, so it was part of tsarist russia. And although she was jewish, the jews, or at least some of them, did not live there because roses father, who was a cobbleler, lived above cobbler, lived above his shop on the main square of town. He and her mother separated very soon after her birth. When she was born, the russian empire was under the rule of czar alexander ii. He was the good guy tsar, the man who freed the serfs, and he eased a few of the harsh restrictions on the jews. He was, shall we say, a little bit less antisemitic than many other members of the romanoff dynasty. However, the lives of rose and her family and millions of other people were upended by something that happened two years after she was born in 1881 hundreds of miles away in st. Peters burg. The tsar was assassinated. And as soon as he was dead, his successor imposed very hard. New restrictions on the jews of russia and encouraged, essentially quietly but unofficially yes, a series of pogroms over the next 25 years. Hundreds of people were killed, often jewish homes and shops were burned leaving their owners homeless. And thissing of course, was this, of course, was what spurred the enormous exodus of millions of jews from the russian empire going first to western europe and then, for most of them, on to the United States. And among them was rose, then 3 years old, and her divorced mother. They stayed, first, for seven years in london living in great poverty in the citys east end. And it was there that rose had the only schooling that she ever received, less than two years. But it was enough for her to learn to read and write english. She spoke yiddish at home and to acquire a great love for english poetry. Then in 1890 when she was 11 years old, she and her mother came to the United States like so many millions of other immigrants, packed ship like this one, and they immediately settled in cleveland, ohio. There, at the age of 11, rose had to go to work right away in a factory making cigars. This photograph is from a few years later. Thats her in the muddle of the back in the middle of the back row, age 16 in 1896. Finish she worked as a cigar maker for a dozen years, and by the end of that time she was the sole support of herself, her mother and six young or siblings who had been abandoned by a neer do well stepfather. For this work, and she worked not only days, but often evenings as well. She earned 8 a week, the equivalent of about 240 a week today. And working in cigar factories was not easy. The oil in the tobacco leaves seeped into your clothes, into your skin, into the wood surface you were working on, it was impossible to get rid of the smell. In order to not have heat dry out tobacco leaves so they couldnt be rolled around the cigar, the air had to be kept very humid in these factories, so the windows were nailed shut in summer if time so that the breeze wouldnt blow the humidity out. Very fine tobacco dust filled the air and filled the lungs of people working in these places. Cigar workers had the second highest rate of tuberculosis of any occupation in the United States. Only stone cutters had it worse. And rose would have lung problems for the rest of her life. When she was 20 years 21 years old, something happened that changed the course of her life. She saw a copy of a yiddish newspaper published in new york, the jewish daily news. The paper ran one page in english and invited contributions from readers around the country. It was a new york paper, but it was trying to go national, so it said to everybody wherever you are, send us your stories, write us letters, tell us whats going on in your life. And rose began writing to the patient. They gave her to the paper. They gave her a column, an advice column, just between ourselves girls. She was amazed when she received a check in the mail for 2 to learn that you could actually get paid for writing. She wrote under the pen name of zelda, and she was even more amazed and delighted when after two years of doing this from cleveland, the newspaper invited her to new york to work in its office and write for the english page of the paper full time at double the salary she was earning as a cigar worker. So she arrived in new york in 1903 at the age of 23. And imagine how the city the looked to somebody then seeing out for the first time. On elevated tracks above the streets there were steampowered trains like this one rumbling along, trolleys propelled by underground cables on the streets themselves. Below ground thousands of people were working building the subway system which hadnt opened yet, and on the streets even a few of the new horseless are cagers. And, of course carriages. And, of course, skyscrapers, unlike anything she had ever seen before. She had and new york, by the way, at that time is a city that would have terrified donald trump because it was a city of immigrants. More than half the men in manhattan over 21 years old were foreignborn. New york would soon be the largest city in the world. It was already the largest jewish city in the world, and this is a picture of the Lower East Side where rose lived and worked. Most of people that she wrote about for the newspaper were shop assistants, street peddlers like these on the Lower East Side. Shed gather their stories and then run back to the office and and write up reams and reams of copy every day. But one lady in the summer of 1903, the editor gave her a different assignment which was to go and is interview somebody who worked in a is settlement house in a settlement house. Now, you know what settlement houses were, i think. These were places that were established in poor neighborhoods, usually the poorest neighborhoods of every city, major cities throughout the northeast. They offered, you know, nutrition for children, they offered things like baths and showers not just for kids, but for adults because for millions of People Living in tenements in new york and other cities there werent baths and showers there. They offered literacy classes and classes and many other things as well. Although some of the houses served a population that was almost entirely immigrant and very poor, the volunteers who staffed settlement houses tended to be welltodo college graduates. Eleanor roosevelt, for example, at this time worked in the settlement house on the Lower East Side in new york. The settlement house where rose was sent to do her interview was called the University Settlement on the Lower East Side not very far from her newspapers office, and heres the man she was asked to interview, a volunteer working there, James Graham Phelps stokes. And as you can tell from the name, very different background, anglosaxon protestant. His friends called him graham, and he and rose fell in love. He came from the most different kind of background imagine bl. Here, for example, is his parents summer home [laughter] a house in the berkshire mountains in western massachusetts. At the time thatbuilt in the 1890s it was built in the 18 is 90s, it was for a time the largest private home in the United States. 100 roomings. And legend has it that one of grahams brothers who was in the class of 1896 at yale sent a telegram to his mother saying that he was bringing some apostrophe 96 fellows home for the weekend. The telegram got the appositive to to my got dropped from the telegram, and his mother replied many guests already here, have room for only 50. [laughter] when not in this home but later, summer and weekend homes, the family lived in new york. And this mansion at madison avenue on 37th street, a building that today is part of the morgan library. Here are grahams parents. Each of them came from a family with a substantial fortune which they combined. The familys wealth rested on a number of things. Part of the phelps dodge mining empire, new york city real estate, especially luxury apartment buildings on the Upper East Side and a cluster of gold and silver mines in nevada and a railroad that ran to them. The family was also very active philanthropically and did good works at various times. Graham and i think one or two other members of the family served on the board of booker t. Washingtons tuskegee institution, and there were other ventures as well. Heres a picture of grahams parents surrounded by their nine children and some of the spouses and you have spraining of those and offspring of those children. And, you know, it was in terms of the country at the time an immensely respectable family. The boys were expected to play prominent roles in life, and thaw did. One of and they did. One of them became a distinguished architect, one of them became an editorial writer for the new york times. One became what today would be called the provost of Yale University and later was dean of the National Cathedral here in washington. A grandson became an episcopal bishop. The girls were expected to marry well, as one said then, and thaw did. One married a nobleman in europe, another married into the family of a former secretary of state. But Graham Stokes took a quite different path in lieu in life. After he graduated from college, he went to medical school at columbia university. And then he worked as a medical student on a horsedrawn ambulance in new york, and for the first time came into contact with a very different side of the city where he had grown up. This was the new york of the tenements, and he was shocked at what he saw. Tuneny tiny apartments where immigrants were living packed six, seven, eight people to a room, often the only toilets were outhouses like these and, of course, famously the tenements of new york city also doubled as sweat shops for the garment industry. Graham was outraged by what he saw, and that was what made him become part of the Settlement House Movement and actually go and live in the University Settlement that we saw a a photograph on the Lower East Side. And that was where, of course, rose met him for the first time. They courted secretly for two years over the strenuous but very wellconcealed opposition of grahams family. And then finally the news leaked out probably because a newspaper reporter had bribed a telegraph operate to tip him off to anything of interest that came over the wires. And when it broke, it was front page news. This headline, j. G. Phelps stokes to marry on page 1 of the new york times. It was reported all over the world, europe, australia. Received immense attention. Here it is as the lead story on page 1 of the new york evening world. And as you can see, im not sure if you can read it in the back, g. J. Phelps stokes engaged to marry poor jewish girl, what attracted peoples interest was that it was not just a marriage of someone extremely rich and someone extremely poor, but of a jew and a gentile. Interethnic marriages were very unusual at that time, so both a class and an ethnic difference. And, of course, we are still interested in such matches today. Its what makes millions of people so fascinated with prince harry and meghan markle. This same newspaper immediately signed rose up to write a series of six articles calling her the genius of the ghetto. And then the they were married on july 18th, 1905, roses 26th birthday. Graham was 7 years older. The press remained fascinated by this couple, and they lived in a blaze of publicity for the next 20 years. And i think the core of the publics fascination was that here there seemed to be the cinderella story. Prince charming rescued poor virtuous cinderella from her Humble Health and and if brought her to live in castle. And i think what fascinates us about versions of the cinderella story is were curious about the possibilities for transformation. Will prince charming be somehow soft isenned by, you know softened by, you know, his new bride, will she be transformed and flourish and thrive in the castle in a way she couldnt before. And i think this is what, curiosity about this is what caused people to follow so closely for so many years exactly what happened to this couple. Heres a picture of rose taken the year after they married. However, their lives did not fit the cinderella script because Graham Stokes had to some degree left the castle, and rose had no desire to live in one. Even though they often stayed in one or another of his parents homes, it always made her uncomfortable. She and graham were a acutely conscious that they loved in a country with enormous disparities of wealth. Some people lived as grahams family did, others were desperately poor and often worked in dangerous conditions as well like these child coal minders in west virginia. Coal miners. In 1906, the year after they married, rose and graham both joined the group that they thought had the best solution to these problems, to the injustices of their time, the socialist party. At the time the partys leader was eugene v. Debs, much beloved, five times a candidate for president. He had begun life as a railway worker, then become head of the Railway Workers union. And when he campaigned for president in 1908, he traveled around the country in a special train called the red special. [laughter] that flew red flags and was drape with red bunting, and engineers of passing locomotives on the next track always recognized it is and gave long toots on their whistles when they saw the red special rolling by. When he came to new york, Graham Stokes was on the platform with him because graham was running as a socialist candidate for the new York State Legislature from the Lower East Side. And rose went out and campaigned for both of them. Neither graham nor eugene debs won their elections, but people remained fascinated by this couple. Everyone still saw it as the cinderella story. The marriage if inspired two novels. Heres one of them, and it was turned into a silent film. Unfortunately, the film was lost as with many films of that era, it did not survive, but we still have promotional photos from it of the actors playing rose and graham. Heres one of them. What theyre saying to each other in the film, your guess is as good as mine. Now, this was a time when many people, even those who were not involved in the socialist movement or other progressive movements, became acutely conscious of some of the injustices of American Life. One episode that dramatized the terrible Labor Conditions of the time involved clothing workers. Workers who worked in the Triangle Shirt Waist Company in new york city just off washington square. There wases there was a terrible fire. The workers on an upper floor were trapped. Most of them were unable to get out. There was an inned adequate fire inadequate fire escape and a stairwell which could have allowed the workers to escape was locked to keep out uniorganizers. Union organizers. 146 people burped to death burned to death or leapt out the windows to their death to escape the flames. Almost all of them were women, half of them were teenagers, almost all were immigrants, jewish and italian. 120,000 people marched in a morning procession through new york city, more than 300,000 people lined the sidewalks. And as i say, this was something that seemed to crystallize and dramatize the awareness that people had, began to have at that time of the enormous disparities of wealth in this country. Rose continued her journalism but now issues of labor and social justice were what she was writing about and also womens rights. Finish she got very involved in one case that had echoeses of some of the kinds of battles that were still going that are still going on in the me too era today. One case that drew her attention was that of a woman named sarah coaten who was an immigrant from russia, worked as a nurse in manhattan for a doctor whose home and office were in the same building, and the doctor had given her a room to live in there. One night when she was asleep, he pupilled chloroform under piped chloroform under her door, and when she was unconscious, raped her. A couple of weeks later she realized she was pregnant, she got a gun, shot and killed the doctor and surrendered to police. Rose went to the prison where she was being held, interview ared her in yiddish interviewed her in yiddish and told her story in the press at much greater length than anybody else had, and then rose announced she would pay sarahs legal expenses, and once she was released from prison, would give her and the baby a place to stay. The trial was delayed until sarah gave birth in prison, and then she was found not guilty in part because another woman had come forward whod been assaulted by the same doctor. Starting a few years after rose and graham were married, for a decade or so the United States was convulsed by strikes with hundreds of thousands of workers walking out every year. And it was at a time when labor unions had almost none of the rights that they later acquired. Strikes were often suppressed by police. These are chicago cops putting a striking garment worker into that paddy wagon. And sometimes by militia. Or National Guard troops. These are striking clothing workers in massachusetts facing state militia. This strike was organized by the iww, the Industrial Workers of the world, the wobblies, a snatch of whose music we heard before. One big strike of garment workers was in new york city, probably not close enough to read the signs that the strikers are holding up there, but the remarkable thing to me is that there are signs in english, russian, ideaish and italian yiddish and italian. Rose was heavily involved in this strike, speaking to groups of strikers often many times each day. And in that Garment Workers Strike which began in 1909, she really came into her own as an organizer and as an immensely popular speaker. And she soon became recognized as one of the great radical orators of her time, eclipsing her husband. And now the cascade of newspaper stories that continued were more about her than they were about them as a couple. And there are signs that he was not completely happy about this. The most interesting strike rose got involved in happened in 1912, and it was a strike of hotel and restaurant waiters in new york city, also organized by the wobblies. A wobbly organizer would walk into one restaurant or Hotel Dining Room after another, delmonicos, the waldorfastoria, and usually just as lunch or dinner was about to be served, the organizer would blow a whistle, and all the waiters walked out. Rose was on the strike committee. She addressed many rallies of striking waiters, helped to handle publicity for the strike and wrote about the miserable conditions in which many of the workers worked. And in her papers, there are many heartfelt letters of thanks from waiters who took part in the strike. Now, one of the buildings involved in the strike was hotel new york, the ansonia, its still there on broadway between 73rd and 74 street as an apartment house today. It at the time claimed to be the Largest Hotel in the world which was possibly true, a although a difficult thing to fact check. It had a number of dining rooms and restaurants and was a famous Gathering Place for musicians, show Business People and mobsters. And its owner was grahams uncle, william earl dodge stokes, or uncle will as he was call in the family, a passion naught hater of labor unions passionate hater of labor unions, immigrants and much more. And he was absolutely furious that rose was encouraging his own workers to go on strike against him, and he exploded at her in anger, and he later comes back into the story. Youll see. Let me turn to another aspect of roses and grahams lives. One of the things that made them so fascinating for me to write about was their friends. They knew and worked with what, to me, are some of the most interesting people in the United States in that era. Here are some of them. Theres rose with eugene debs on the left and behind them is max eastman, editor of the magazine, the masses, which in many ways was the best magazine in the United States at that time and in some wayses a kind of precursor to the new yorker. Another friend was mabel dodge, famous for holding salons in her again up Village House where the greenwich Village House, and she sometimes asked Graham Stokes to moderate one of these discussions. They were also friends with big bill haywood, the leading figure in the iww, a former miner, cowboy, saw saloon card dealer, a criss mat ific orator charismatic, famous for using his fists when required and for being able to recite long passages of shakespeare by hart. Another friend was the journalist john reid, in many ways the liveliest journalist of his generation determined to be at the center of the action whether that meant being in jail with strikers in new jersey or in the midst of revolution in mexico or russia. They also knew lincoln stephens, the muckraker, w. E. B. Dubois, the greatest black intellectual of his time and an extraordinary historian, Mary Harris Jones or mother jones, famous labor organizer. Upton sinclair to whose novel, the jungle, we owe our food and drug laws. As he was writing that book, he sent it chapter by chapter to graham to get his comments. They were also friends with margaret sanger, the burt control pioneer Birth Control pioneer. Birth control, of course, is something we talk for granted today, but the brooklyn sangers brooklyn clinic was shut down by the police, and sanger was sent to jail. Rose was active in the campaign for Birth Control when talking about such things publicly at that time was against the law. Another friend frequently arrested and shown here in one of her mug shots was emma goldman, the anarchist firebrand. And all of these folks rose and graham knew, they worked with, many were house guests on occasion, some of us left their recollections of rose and graham. The period of American Life when all these people were active was a remarkable time. It was a time, and im speaking of the years sort of 19001914 or so, when many people believed that the world could be changed and that a new and more just society was in some undefined way just around the corner. But then something happened that shattered those dreams, the First World War. Which not only culled some 9 million soldiers killed some 9 million soldiers and untold civilians, it also shattered the radical dream that the working classes of Different Countries would never fight each other. Now, of course, as you know, when the war began, the United States was not part of it. And american socialists and other radicals agitated very strongly for the u. S. To stay out of the war. Rose, emma goldman and many other friends joined something called the womens peace party and took part in demonstrations like this one. Then, of course, in april 1917 wood wilson went before Woodrow Wilson went before congress and asked congress to declare war. And by the next year, large numbers of american troops were going to france, eventually by the millions, and by mid if 1918 they were heavily involved in the fiercest fighting of the war. The coming of the war brought an upsurge of war fever and ferocious government propaganda here at home like this u. S. Army recruiting poster. There was also a tremendous paranoia about size and not just government propaganda, but in most of the press a tremendous push against radicals and dissenters and anybody who questioned the war in any form. You cant see the caption on this cartoon, the i think, because its in very small type at the top, but it says now for a roundup, and it shows uncle sam rounding up the iww and other assorted radicals. However, many people in this country and not just those on the far left felt very strongly that it was a huge mistake for the United States to enter the war. The government cracked down harshly on dissent, both agents of the Justice Department and local police raided the offices of leftwing organizations all over the country. This is what the office of the wobblies, the iww, in new york city looked like after a raid. This was an office that im sure rose was in many times. The First World War created whoops a rift between rose and Graham Stokes. She became firmly convinced that it was a terrible mistake for the United States to go to war. He was so enthusiastic about the war that hen listed in the military he enlisted in the military, went in the uniform was too old to get sent overseas, but was in the new york National Guard for several years. Never got closer to combat than marching in parades like this one down fifth avenue. Something else that divided rose and graham happened in late 1917, the Russian Revolution. The second stage of the revolution when the bolsheviks took over. Rose was in favor of this, Graham Stokes was strongly against it. She continued speaking out against american participation in the First World War and now in favor of the Russian Revolution as well, and this drew the anger of many people including grahams uncle, the angry hotel owner. You remember him. Here is a report about him from the files of the bureau of investigation, the predecessor of the fbi. It says agent received word from w. E. D. Stokes that Rose Pastor Stokes at various times at her residence held meetings with socialists in iww and if a search was made of the premises, some valuable information could be secured. A few days later we know from the records of the bureau he called the bureau, told them that rose and graham would be out of town and that it was a good chance to search the house. The bureau of investigation kept a close eye on rose. Agents followed her, government stenographers transcribed her speeches which turned out to be very useful for me [laughter] and they kept close track of her. In 1918 she was arrested, put on trial for speaking against the war and sentenced to ten years in prison under the espionage act, a very stringent law that essentially criminalized all forms of dissent in this country. Graham put up bail money, thaw appealed the they appealed the case. The sentence was eventually overturned on appeal, and she didnt have to go to jail. But by this point, the marriage was really on the rocks. They reare mained together for remained together for seven more years but very uneasily because they went radically Different Directions in politics. Rose joined the communist party, went to russia in 1922 as an american delegate to a meeting of the communist international. Like far too many people then in labor. Later she thought in soviet russia she had found paradise. Graham returned to an interest hed had early in his life in religion, particularly in bringing together the traditions of hinduism and christianity. They got divorced very bitterly in 1925. This put them back on the front pages one last time, and as soon as they were no longer a couple, the press completely lost interest in them. But happily for me, they saved all their letters. Rose kept a diary, they wrote dueling, unpublished memoirs. Roses was finally published about 50 years later, not to mention the recollections of their lives of their friends. So there was rich, rich material to work from, and i would urge all of you, save your letters, keep diaries, give historians something to work from. Finish after their divorce rose, as a matter of principle, refused alimony, and she was reduced to poverty again. She remarried, but to someone as poor as she was. Very soon came down with cancer and died at the age of 53 in 1933. Graham also remarried but without a leap out of his class this time and live on til the age of 88, dying in 1960. So thats their story. I wish i could say they changed the world. They didnt, but perhaps through their eyes we can see a world that needed changing and that still could use some changing today. And i hope you yet, you enjoy getting to know them as much as i did. So why dont i stop right there, and if youve got questions or comments, i would be twhrad to hear them. [applause] and i think come to the microphone if you have something you want to ask. Oh, heres someone coming. Can you make out to the microphone up here . Okay. Thank you for coming. I was really interested as to the storytelling approach you took to telling your story. What made you want to take that type of approach rather than a generalist historian approach. You mean write a sort of boring book the way all too many professional historians do . [laughter] well, i dont know, to me history is filled with people whose stories are inherently much more human and much more interesting than professional historians often tell them. And i see no reason why you cant apply the techniques of good narrative, of good storytelling to history, to biography the way you would anything else. Its curious in the storytelling in history, there is sort of a tradition of lively narrative writing about certain subjects. Hook at the vast plethora look at the vast plethora of books about world war ii, for instance. But often forking you know, some of the less familiar figures of our history, other parts of history, you know, people are not accustoms to approaching them in a narrative way. But why not . I believe you can be true to the facts, be accurate as hell, have everything footnoted and still tell a lively story. And how could you find a more interesting one than this one of these people from extraordinarily different backgrounds who fell in love and thanks to the ed thats there the evidence thats there in letters and diaries and other forms, we can sort of see inside that relationship. So im amazing that there respect more people who have arent more people who have written it before. There are a few but not many. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks so much. My question is for somebody like rose who was pretty much involved in politics, activism, also supporting her husband in pursuit of, like, running for office, how come she herself never thought about running for a position and also, you know and, yeah. Actually, they both ran for office several times, each of them, but unsuccessfully. Rose ran for lets see, graham ran once for the legislature in new york and then for a time they were living in connecticut. He ran for, i believe, a School Board Position there. Rose ran for borough president of manhattan, and i think once for congress. But this was on the socialist ticket, and they got, got very few votes. So she did, she did definitely take part in politic herself. And really for the last decade of their marriage she was a much more public person on the public stage than he was. Thank you. Hi. I was wondering if rose had any relationship with trotter who was a contemporary of w. E. B. Dubois. Not that i know of. Not that i know of. I wish i could say i knew more, but his name doesnt show up in her papers. I know a little about him, but his name does not show up as a correspondent i just wondered because you said that she knew dr. Due boys, and i know that they were involved with the knew if agra movement around 195. It was later that duboise, that they knew duboise. I think more like 198, 19 10. But not trotter that i know of. [inaudible conversations] i was just wondering if you knew, you said that her husbands parents, part of their wealth came from coal mining, if their workers were unionized and if rose ever made any attempts to try to influence them. Good question. Actually, not coal mining, but gold and silver mining and originally going back a generation copper mooning. Rose mining. Rose was never involved with the mine Workers Union because all of the actual labor organizing she did speaking to striking workers and so on was mostly in or around new york city. Not much mining there. But or so, no. The answers no. It would have amounted to a much better story, but unfortunately not. The hello, hi. So you talk about a cinderella story from rose, and i was wondering what hidden message if or, like, untold truth about rose you hope to convey, you hope to have conveyed in your book. Well, in a way i would pay tribute to both of them for making leaps out of the worlds that they were born in. For graham to, you know, do something as radical for someone in his class as to marry a factory worker was not only a factory worker, but a russianjewish immigrant was really quite extraordinary and took a certain boldnesses. Rose, what i admire about her is that she, she seemed to grow intellectually through most of her life. I would say that she shrank intellectually at the point that she became overly enamored of the soviet union. But up to that point, you can sort of see in the records that she left, letters, diaries, so on a sense of her world expanding. And i admire that, and i admire her ability to adjust to a very different world than the one that she grew up in, to get along with grahams family. She actually became very close friends, a friendship that continued after the divorce, with a sister of grahams who shared her politics. And she was at ease with people at every class and occupational level. You can sense that in the tone of voice in the letters that she writes, what people write to her, what they say about her. She had a wide network of friends. And, you know, to navigate in the world that way especially in the highly stratified world of that time and, of course, we still do live in a very stratified society it takes a a real human warmth and imagination, and i think she had those qualities. Thank you. Hi. I was wondering to what extent do you think rose had an influence on graham with their life after marriage like joining the socialist movement and running for office. You know, i wouldnt say that she had an influence on him. In some ways i wish she had had more influence on him. One of the peculiar and intriguing things about this relationship is that even though they were ostensibly radical in their politics joining the socialist party, you know, appearing on the platform with eugene debs and so forth when they married, i think they both went into it expecting a very traditional marriage. Graham was 7 years older, you know, rose had had only two years of schooling, he had multiple graduate degrees. She very much looked up to him, admired his learning, the books that hed read, the writers that he knew and so forth. And i think it took her about 10 or 12 years to realize that she was at least as smart as he was. Is so they both began with a kind of very traditional expectation of the marriage. Rose got frustrated with that, and i think graham got frustrated that she wasnt the kind of more subservient traditional wife that he had expected. Thank you. We have time for about two more questions. Hello. So with democratic socialist running for the democratic nomination as well as with a multibillionaire who ran, what can you say this story tells us about current day, and how can we take something out of that and bring it into now . A lot of things havent changed. [laughter] even though bernie calls himself a democratic socialist, i think socialists of that time would not use those words to describe it. He really advocates a sort of western european welfare state. But more importantly, i think the, you know, the problems that the United States had then which seem so stark to us when we look back at the pictures of those people in tenements and so forth we still have with us today. The visuals are different, it looks a little different, but the income disparity between the top 1 and the remainder of the population today is greater than it was when rose and graham got married in 1905. The, you know, the other disparities are enormous and glaring. Its outrageous that, you know, tens of millions of people in this country dont have medical insurance. This is something taken for granted, you know, throughout western europe. There are many, many other things like that that we could point to that i think illustrate that in the different forms the same sorts of things that outraged people then should outrage us today. Thanks. Hi. What would you say was the hardest part of starting your writing process for this book . Starting the writing process. Getting that first word on the page [laughter] the first draft is always the hardest for me. When its a first draft of a chapter, the whole book or whatever. I find every possible excuse to find things that need fixing around the house [laughter] find people to call ive been out of touch with for too long, every possible excuse. And ive learned, if youre interested in this process, that actually once you get that first draft done, it becomes a lot easier. Especially when youre doing these researchheavy works of history where theres just huge amounts of information, you know, thousands of letters, enormous quantities of newspaper stories and other raw material. If you have a first draft done and i think this applies to whether youre writing a book, a College Paper or anything else once youve got that first draft done, then when you discover tidbits of material, you know where you can stick them in. Or you see where the blank spaces are, and you know what you have to go and look for in the library. This was, in a way, an easier book for me to write than some of the others ive done because it was so focused on two people, and the basic raw material was their memoirs, their letters, the diary rose kept. That was sort of the core of it. The, fulling in the material around the edges what was happening in the country at that time was easy enough to do and very enjoyable to do. When youre dealing with sort of a larger stretch of history, more complicated stuff, a cast of characters with many people in it, then it becomes much harder. Thank you. But its never easy. [laughter] thank you so much, adam. Well have the signing up at the front in a few minutes, and there are Copies Available of the book at the register. Please also make sure to fold up your chair as you leave. Thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] this weekend on booktv, tonight at 9 15 eastern former Federal Reserve chair ben bernanke talks about the actions the fed is taking to mitigate the economic effects of the covid19 pandemic. Fiscally, again, were not really talking here about a stimulus package because people cant really go out and shop. What were talking about here is emergency relief. What we need to do primarily in a fiscal package is make sure that people can survive this period without very low income, that businesses that are losing revenue can pay their bills, pay the rent, pay the utilities. And then sunday on after words, square cofounder jim mckelvy offers his thoughts on competition for startup businesses in his new book, the innovation stack. Hes interviewed by a Washington Post policy reporter. It turns out theres this thing that happened, this process that can a happen when you start to solve a perfect problem, something that has not been solved before. Because most of what we do is copying, and most of our tools and training and comfort is with solutions that exist. And at 10 p. M. In his book hacking darwin, Atlantic Council senior fellow jamie metzl looks at the future of genetic engineering and discusses if that technology had been used in the fight against covid19. Weve never been able to develop diagnostic tests this quickly, and now with the rapid sequencing, the kind of sequencing that george innovated, were able to see, to watch this viral genome mutate as it spreads around the world which is creately important. Watch booktv this weekend on cspan2. Recently, historian Megan Kate Nelson discussed the impact of the American Civil War on the midwest. Heres a portion of her talk. So between 1861 and 1868, the union and the confederacy and native people struggled to control this region. The union and the confederacy wanted the west for its gold and its pacific ports. Also saw the west as part of this really important vision for their future so that the north was with envisioning this empire of free labor, free of slavery from southeast to coast from coast to coast, and the west was pivotal, and the confederacy saw their future as an empire of slavery also from coast to coast. And so they thought if they could secure the west, then they could kind of jump off from there and actually move south and invade mexico and create this sort of hemispheric empire of slavely including the caribbean slavery, up colluding the caribbean and latin america. Andahalf hose, who had been living navajos saw this white mans war as an invasion of their territory, and both the union and the confederacy saw these indigenous groups as [inaudible] to control the west and their vision of this national future. They also learned that after the union successfully defended new mexico territory from confederate invasion in the spring of 1862, they turned to these other enemies and initiated hard war campaigns against them. So what this meant is at the same time that the union was fighting this war to e emancipae enslaved men and women in the east, they were fighting a war to exterminate or remove native peoples in the west. To watch the rest of this program, visit our web site, booktv. Org. Search for Megan Kate Nelson or the title of her book, the threecornered war, using the search box at the top of the page. Appreciate it. For those i have not met my name is melissa giller, before we get started in honor of men and women in uniform who defend our freedom around the world if i could ask you to stand and join me in the edge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of america and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank y