Drinking in america our secret history. She will tell us the secrets. Her distinguished bibliography includes the 2015 biography of e. E. Cummings, a life, which was chosen by the economist as one of the best books of the year, and is now considered the definitive biography of that iconoclastic poet. Other biographical works include, american bloomsbury the leading figures of the Transcendentalist Movement and my name is bill, on bill wilson, for his life and the creation of alcoholics anonymous. And home before dark, the groundbreaking biography of her father, writer john cheever. Shes also the author of five novels, and a frequent contributor of essays and articles to leading publications. Shes influential in shaping and sustaining our literary culture as a member of the corporations and of the Authors Guild council and is a faculty member at Bennington College mfa program, and the new school in new york city. In her fascinating and compelling new book, she traces the pervasive influence of alcohol at key moments over centuries of american political nd cultural history from the beer shortage induced a legal beershortageinduced illegal landing of the pilgrims at cape cod to the assassination of president kennedy and president nixons last days in the white house and explores its impact on many historic and literary figures in between and since, asking the central question, what orms a National Character . Ladies and gentlemen, susan cheever. [applause] susan thanks for coming. So, its a great honor to be here at a store that is the center of the literary universe in this country, if not the world. Im just going to talk about this book a little bit and read three short sections from it and hope that it somehow informs you and intrigues you at the same time. One of the great privileges of being a writer is that we get to make history come alive which is really fun. We get to take the pictures off the wall and make them dance and make them eat and make them drink and make them fall in and out of love with each other. We can notice that ulysses s. Grant was a short man at man that adored his wife or that Alexander Hamilton hated drinking because his father was a trunk who took offense left too often left him with his mother or that Henry David Thoreau was a favorite teacher and we can include not just the moment as events which happened and people in history books but also the texture of their everyday lives. Did their shoes hurt, how were they feeling about themselves that they were they thinking about what they were going to have for dinner that kind of stuff which really takes us there into history. The food, the sex, the clothes in the drinking. In this book by looking into drinking in america at the drinking in america and shoving its influence ive tried to bring our heroes and our villains to life on the page. I hope if you read this book you will come to think of John Quincy Adams as a sad friend who lost two brothers and two sons to alcoholism and sympathize with Henry Kissinger who had the unenviable job of babysitting a drunk. This book has spanned four centuries and starts with the pilgrims and we will get into that it goes through the revolution, the civil war, senator joe mccarthy, the jfk assassination. I just took a bunch of events in which alcohol seemed to have or did have a huge effect on what happened and went through them. Starting in 1620, so it begins with the pilgrims. When Henry David Thoreau moved to walden pond in 1845 the last thing that he had in mind was writing a book about it. He didnt have anywhere else to live, he had moved in with the emersons because emerson went to europe. So throw did but he did not hink he was going to write bout it, he thought he would write a book about a river trip e took with his brother. But hawthorne asked him to come give a talk at the concord athenaeum. He came and david talk about the river trip. In the q a, all anybody wanted to know was what it was like to live in a shack at walden pond. So i believe that q and as are magic. [laughter] and i know that this one will not disappoint us. Here you go. The pilgrims landed the mayflower at cape cod massachusetts on a cold november day in 1620 because they were running out of beer. Their legal charter from king james was for a grant of land in Northern Virginia instead they anchored illegally and carved their First Community from the sand. Laying the foundation of the american character. Since the beginning, drinking and taverns have been a much as much a part of American Life as churches and preachers or lections and politics. Glass of beer a bottle of rum or even a dry martini is a silent powerful thirdparty to many decisions that shape the american story from the American Century to the present. And one of the things is ambivalence. There are countries where people drink more and there are countries where people drink less. But there is no other country where we were the strongest country in the world in 1830, outlawed it in 1930, and by 1950 we were back to being up there and now we are on our way back in another direction so we get the medal for ambivalence when it comes to drinking. Every century the drinking pendulum swings wildly and that isnt so true in other countries. We are a country of extremes and we love it or hate it. Now i will read the longest of the three sections. It has been said by a washington native, strobe talbot, in his wonderful book, the great experiment, im always selling other peoples books, that we began to win the civil war when lincoln fired his sober general, george mcclellan, and hired his drunken general, as grant. And, indeed, that is when the tide seemed to turn and it did urn because of grants cando attitude or his refusal to admit defeat because of the Forward Motion that nobody could seem to stop. As lincoln said of grant, he is a man who gits it and he was also a man who drank so here oes grant. Of all the drunken generals who fought during the civil war, and there were many, the one who most famously battled the bottle was ulysses s. Grant. Born the son of a letter to in ohio, grant was sent to west point where he graduated in the bottom half of his class. At west point he fell in love with his roommates sister, julia. He proposed, she demurred when he proposed she asks for more time. His father disapproved of julia. Her parents disapproved of him. After a fouryear courtship he finally won her over and they were married in 1848. The couple adored each other in war and peace in the sobriety and drunkenness. They had four children. Almost 40 years later grants dying act was to finish his great autobiography on the personal memoirs of ulysses s. Grant said so that they could be supported after he died. A soldiers life is not his own in the grant was posted from camp to camp finally ending up in fort humboldt in california. Here was his beloved wife and family far away. His drinking began to catch up with him. There was plenty of tolerance for drinking in the military but less tolerance for a drunk. Grant was a small man, 5foot 2 inches who became famous for being unable to hold his liquor. He would sometimes get a drunk on what appeared to be one glass and other times would drink a great deal. Grants commander at fort humboldt took offense. Colonel Robert Buchanan gave grant the choice of resigning his post in his military career or having charges pressed against him. Grant resigned. Suddenly at the age of 32 and with a family to support, grant had no profession. And even of his own grandchildren. Grant tried farming which didnt work out and finally his father came around. And offered him a job with no conditions. So grant moved his family back to helena, illinois, and joined his fathers story. But what of the alcohol and binge drinking that had gotten him booted out of the army . Under julias gentle influence, grant, who thought she was much too good for him, was able to moderate his drinking. He was able to drink less at home that as a soldier. Like many alcoholics, he struggled to control his rinking, a struggle that was sometimes more successful than others. When the war began in april, 1861, grant acted decisively. Soon he was the head of the company of illinois volunteers who launched an attack on the Confederate Army near the important junction of the ohio and mississippi rivers. At this point, grant did not drink and he didnt tolerate tricking among his men. Grants forces one and the early victory for the union, after the demoralizing defeat of bull run made him famous. Grants next engagement was more complicated and perilous but equally victorious. Now a major general, grant led his forces south to mississippi on the Tennessee River where the Confederate Army was massed. And by this time he started drinking again. On the morning of april 6, 1862, the Confederate Army launched a surprise attack with the aim of wiping out the main union army once and for all. The confederates name to battles after the places where they were fought, sharpsburg, manassas, bull run. Am i getting this right . And that union army named him after a landmark, shiloh, ntietam. I call it Pittsburg Landing but it was really shiloh. The first day of the battle was disastrous for the union but grants troops hung on fighting esperately in the mud. Other grant himself was not around. It was said he was visiting troops across the river. Night fell without her treat from the Union Although many of the men were 2 miles closer to the Tennessee River in defeat from where they had begun the day. The troops were exhausted. Many people thought the union was beaten including the Union General and grants friend William Tecumseh sherman. Sherman had been in the thick of the battle all day slowly losing ground. Grant had been absent during the first day and his men thought he had been dragging. Sherman, who had his own struggles with reputation when he had been treated for a nervous condition earlier in the war, was ready to quit. Perhaps he thought war was over. Hen, during the night, grant reappeared. It was raining hard, and grant set up camp under a tree, ignoring the pain from an ankle injury caused when he fell off his horse the evening before. General sherman found grant under this big oak tree before dawn, smoking a large cigar. The rain was heavier and thunder and lightning had begun to flash to the trees paired sherman was coming to talk about the details of what seemed inevitable, a union retreat. The trees were dripping water, the battlefields or a sea of mud. But grant was placidly puffing away, as if he were in a Gentlemens Club with a snifter of brandy. As the storm passed to the south, the two men stood quietly looking for the Rolling Hills beyond the battlefield in the darkness. Standing there, sherman found he could not bear to talk about retreat. Although he still believed it was necessary. Well, grant, we have had the devils own day, havent we . Yes, grant replied. We will lick them tomorrow though. Grant was right. Instead being finished off the next day, the union launch date furious counterattack, and it drove the Confederate Army back to its original position. Later in the war, sherman summed up his friendship with grant for a reporter, general grant is a great general, he said. I know him well. He stood by me when i was crazy and i stood by him when he was drunk. Now, sir, we stand by each other always. [laughter] so that is grant and sherman. Now i will go to this conclusion, which the more i think about this book, the more i become interested in the different ways we write history. And i do think that there is a new kind of writing history that is growing up in this country that is very exciting. But i do think more and more historians are including peoples intimate lives, rather than just the monumental parts and the big inventions. And there are many historians who are doing those who actually take you to the place and let you be in the scene with the people they are writing about. That is what, i hope to be, one of those historians appeared i hope that i, in this book, take you to that place and let you feel what it was like to be grant on that night, or that you feel what it was like to be ethan allen at ticonderoga. Also somewhat drunk. Ok. Words about the nature of history. In the second week of december 1620, almost a month after make our landing on cape cod, after bearing unimaginable hardships, the journey, the explanation of cape cod sands, winter storm hat almost wrecked the sailing ship they were using to explore the coast, a dozen men including bradford, Myles Standish and winslow landed in what would come to be named plymouth harbor. They landed around the bend in Provincetown Harbor but knew they could not settle there. So they spent a month looking for a place to settle. Im not saying that this happened because the rations were a gallon of your day, but they were between two of the greatest harbors, new york and boston and they went in circles until they found a place to settle, plymouth. They had to drink beer, because they cannot drink water. He way you drink water, they drink beer. If theres any possible thing that might have needed to do with a clear head, that was difficult for them. [laughter] that is not the point of this paragraph. For bradford, the pilgrim story was parallel to the biblical story of exodus. New world israelites had with gods help finally found their canon. Bradfords view of history, like many of his companions on the mayflower, was entirely shaped by his knowledge of the King James Bible Old Testament that was completed a few years earlier. Every seat was the red the. Every voyage was the voyage of the israelites. Every hardship was biblical. Whatever happened to the pilgrims happened in a larger spiritual, Historic Context overseen by an erratic but oving god this was the controlling idea through which he saw and understood and wrote about everything. Bradford took history personally. Modern history, unlike radfords history, claims to be objective. Our historians write as if they are reporting events within a biased i heard this happened, and then that happened. This is our modern equivalent of gods will, and observance neutrality, occasionally punctuated with wise commentary. There are many advantages to this kind of history. The historian ostensibly has no ax to grind. In taking a broad, dispassionate view, historians miss a lot. Their emphasis is on the sweep of time, not the moments that make up our lives. They are never personal. Their opinions and the assumptions on which they base their lives are Hidden History s as far away as it can get it from memoir. In these books we see that panoplies of history from the narrow keyhole of that day and time. Our own beliefs and knowledge are stuck in the First Quarter of the 21st century looking back is like trying to make out the details of the ship on the far horizon. Historians make many decisions about how to deal with this. Should we bring modern knowledge to bear on the characters we write about . What type of language should we use . How do we acknowledge the differences between then and now . How do we factor in womens rights or racial integration into times when those were unheard of . So those were questions. Now i will go to the National Character. Hat creates a National Character . America is another name for opportunity, wrote ralph waldo emerson. The american attitude toward the law, tort hardship, the american insistence on doing things to benefit the individual all come from that cold afternoon in Provincetown Harbor. Character is a culmination of environment and experience and the american character was being formed those minutes when the pilgrims finally, exhaustively, reached the beach. O survive they have to develop a fierce individualism and a craving for freedom toward what will become the Louisiana Purchase and westward to where their feisty spirit will settle huge tracts of land and explore seemingly impossible rivers and mountain ranges. The american character has been formed by 100 forces that is defining it is like trying to meld jello to a wall. But it has been driven by many forces, natural and manmade. One of those forces, a force of brilliance and incompetence, was their passionate connection to drinking. [applause] questions . This exciting new history you talk about writing about, is it that what you try to aim with is a secret history, somewhat of a blurring of the lines between like a psychoanalysis of history and History Today . Not at all. I do not think it is about getting inside peoples psyches, we cannot do that. Yes, exactly. This young man is intelligently asking, i will try to rephrase his question fairly. If this new kind of history i am talking about is more like psychoanalysis than history . Or more like psychoanalysis than the old history, or is anything like psychoanalysis . My answer is no. I do not think this new history im talking about a writing is going to get inside peoples psyche. That is what novelists do. On a good day. I think it is about the details that make up their everyday lives. You can say the right brothers invented the airplane. Or you can say, on such and such a date, but wrights shoes hurt and he had okra for breakfast. Thats a bad example but im talking about getting down into the lives, drilling down into the everyday, so i as a reader feel that i was there as well. What i want to know what the right brothers, and im not saying my questions were not answered by dan mcculloughs marvelous book, is worded that inspection come from . Those guys outworked everyone else by a factor of 7 million. What was it that they had coming from dayton, ohio, that enabled them to just go back at it and back at it, and back at it, until they got it. And even after they got it, go back at it, because nobody cared. So, that is what interest me. Yes, good question. I was curious as to how you got interested in this topic and putting various historical incidents together . Susan that is good question, how did i get interested in this topic . For me, writing comes from obsession. I usually do not know that im writing a book. I usually just cannot stop thinking about something. So it is all about obsession. Actually there is an obsession expert in our audience. For a long time i have been obsessed with American History and have written a lot of American History. Ive also been obsessed with alcoholism and recovery, both because i have personal experience with it, my father had experience with it, and it is very interesting. I knew about the pogroms and the beer, it is fairly commonly known. One day i thought, i wonder if these two things go together somehow . And so i started reading, starting with the pilgrims. And i was amazed. I sat on the floor of the library going, youre kidding, really . I was so surprised. There were so many things. Senator joseph mccarthy, i had no idea. Ut he died of cirrhosis. I was very careful not to do any guessing, to keep the bar for alcoholism. If you do not die of Liver Disease before 40, youre not an alcoholic in this book, by definition. It was amazing to me, the effect alcohol had on our history starting with the american revolution. Which was planned in the basement of the green dragon tavern. The boston tea party, they went to the ships to secure the teat so it cannot be shipped back to england. And guess what . They threw it overboard instead. And guess where they had just been . The green dragon tavern. [laughter] so over and over again, i was like, what . So in that way it was very satisfying. [laughter] thank you for appearing here. I will start with an observation and then a question. As a reporter, i think your ability to take disparate information and bring it together is fantastic. As a retired educator, if i were not so lazy, i would like to come back and write a curriculum with lesson plans for the book. I think he did such a great job of making it real. You cannot argue with what you have read and i think kids would be in that. There very fuel schools in america that would let you promote that. It would really bring history alive. As a recovering alcoholic i think your writing is very important. And you have skills no question. So now the question. You are the daughter of john cheever that i consider a Great American writer. And you have talked about that. From the professional and, what are the advantages of being John Cheevers daughter, have you found and im sure their disadvantages as well. Could you comment somewhat on that . Susan the question, i think you cannot hear these questions, right . My daughter is in the audience. Im not going to tell you which one she is. But just know that as i answer this question. How can one talk about ones parents in two minutes . You are right, there were many advantages and many disadvantages. Let me say that the advantages people think i had, are not the ones i had. My father did not want me to be a writer. He did not want any of us to write, he considered it a miserable life, and it obviously was. I did not want to be a writer either, i cannot agree with him or until i was 35, right . But i saw, and for a long time i learned nothing from him and he was careful not to teach me anything. Once, when i was in my 30s, i took him out to lunch. I had a house account of the our seasons in those days. I was reporter. I took him out to lunch and said ok, you teach people, give me some writing advice. And he said, do not use dialogue tags. So i did not get writing advice from him, although that is pretty good writing advice. But i did see that writing was something you could do. And i did see that sometimes he was so excited, that he could not keep himself from reading is work to us. I could see that there waswith all of the misery and all of the, we cannot pay for braces and that you have to go to Public School now, and all that stuff, and all the misery, and all the late nights. In the house where we lived, my father had a little study and my bedroom was on the same floor, so i knew he was in there knocking around at 3 00 in the morning but still, i saw that it was doable. And that really, all he did was he did it every day, all the time. So that, i think was a huge benefit. The other great benefit was, i grew up in a household where books were king. We were living in italy for a while and english books were gold. He came back with the woman in white by wilkie collins. And i was 12. When the time came to go to school, i said i was sick. And i have the book under my covers. He came into my bedroom and he saw the book. And he said ok. So it was that kind of household and i think all good writing comes from reading. If youre not reading all the time it is very hard you to just for you to write well. So we were talking about books all the time and reading books all the time. One of the most interesting parts of your book, and you talk about the flow and change of america. From a writing standpoint, you had emerson, thoreau, hawthorne. Then you go to the. Of hemingway, fitzgerald, etc. And all the way up to your father and his contemporaries. Heavy drinkers, the mad men era. I do think if you look at writers today, very much a decline of not drinking some drugs, but not the same. Do you think the writers are ahead of their time, reflecting their time, what are your thoughts on that . Susan referring to what to me is the most interesting chapter in the book, where i tackle the idea that all writers have to drink. That drink is sometimes or somehow helpful to writing. What i pointed out and what i just when i thought about it is that this only was true from 1920 to 1980. It was not true in the 19th century. Fo matheson said all American Literature was written in five years, between 1850 and 1855 and he is referring to moby dick, longfellow, the scarlet letter, emerson, walden. Those guys did not drink. They were not drinkers. So if you have to drink to write, what about all those guys who wrote American Literature . So i kept looking and looking. I realized the whole myth in this country of drinking and writing is just these two generations of writers. I believe it was partly caused by prohibition, which made tricking far more attractive to writers who need to find their own way, break the law, whatever you want to call it. Nd now, writers now do not drink. Our contemporary writers do not drink. So it is a very isolated moment. I do not think they were ahead of their time or behind their time. I just think it has nothing to do with writing. In other words, i think those guys were drunk because of prohibition, drinking looks good and they did it. And when the effects of prohibition were off, writers stopped doing it. I do not think drinking is going to help your writing or heard it, for a while. In the end it does hurt it. I think those things are separate. The question i can answer is why do people want to believe it . Are you going to all walk out of here and say she was smart but the thing she set about writing that related to drinking, that is not right. And i do not have the answer to that. We have time for one or two questions. I want to go back to your comments about history and the new history. Im a business journalist. I have been irritated at the tendency of business journalism about history, especially the crisis and some of the things in the past. They write it to be hbo ready. And you lose a lot of the details. And i think when you you have a cultural history that might be nice to be at Plymouth Rock but when youre talking about about subjects that need details, and instead theyre worried about what color tie they are wearing. Maybe you could elaborate about those trends or tendencies you are seeing with that nonfiction writing . Susan i am ignorant when it comes to business writing so i an only guess. I think memoir has eaten biography and is now on its way to eating history and im all for that. I am a big fan of memoir. So i think what is happening is, there is more and more intimacy in all of our writing. It has given a voice to people who never had a voice before, women, servants, people who did not write books before and whose stories were not heard before. Because of that, we have developed a i call memoir shame. Authority when challenged bites back. Think we are to be any of the golden age of memoir and are only beginning to see what can be done with memoir. At the same time, memoir with this intimacy, is irresistible. And now, if you notice, when he read a profile of someone in a magazine, the writer is always also a character. That is moving forward in that way. And i think it is also going to happen with history, that we are going to have more and more real feeling about what these peoples lives were like. I do not go back to the wright brothers. Think about another book of history we have already. With the pilgrims, i want to know, were they hungry . What was on their minds . What did they worry about . Where they like me . That is what im talking about hen i talk about the new history, though it sounds pretentious, doesnt it . Sorry about that. Next question. I want to talk about the schizophrenia in america, between the drinking and not tricking. I loved starting this with the battle of shiloh and Pittsburg Landing. Im from tennessee and the entire economy of tennessee before the civil war consisted of whiskey that was transported up the Tennessee River down to new orleans. It was their only cash crop. Ater, half the counties in tennessee are still dry. How you could go from the sole economy on a cash basis before the civil war to half of the counties being dry today . And how that transformation happened, historically, and where you think is going to go. Because i know you have observations about that. Susan again, i do not know much about tennessee history, but that is what we do. We were only able to pass the prohibition amendment, thanks to ellen centre hamilton, the entire economy of the United States was based on liquor taxes until 1916. So we cannot have prohibition. Right . They passed the income tax amendment. And we could have prohibition. Its so weird how we are about this. And this coming together of dry and wet, i mean, the same counties that had had liquor as their primary means of income become dry. Our ambivalence is astonishing. I dont have the tablets on which it is written why were so ambivalent. I can notice that we are and i think it is part of the extremes of the american character. Ither we are pro this or antithat, a passionate people house that. How is that . Youre the first person i know who talked about alcoholism and history. This has to do with paris, yesterday. My experience with alcoholism is an addiction and that once you take one drink, you want more. Or a sip, you want more. To me, terrorism is an addiction of sorts also. One has a firm belief about something and once you start wanting to push that belief and punishment on other people, keeps going. What has been reported is that this is just beginning of the storm. As a person who has talked about the relationship of history and this addiction, to have any thoughts about this other addiction of terrorism or an understanding of it . It is a terrifying question i do not know how it works with isis, but i do know that the 9 11 guys were drinking the night efore. That is pretty much all i now. I do not see alcoholism the way you do. Most people can have a drink and it is no big deal. As an alcoholic, whether you are born that way, if you have a drink, you want more and more. I do not know if that is how terrorism works but it is an interesting question. And i urge you to find out and let me know. [laughter] hows that . Thanks. I will try. Thank you very much. [applause] kindly line up along this aisle for the book signing thank you. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] crowd conversations] today at 4 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv, on cspan3, on real america, the 1985 Allstar Party for ronald dutch reagan. Tonight we honor the only man from our community who ever wound up living in public housing. [laughter] by the way, you got a lot of friends here tonight. Some of the White House Press corps, who will be serving a favorite meal, leake soup. Beginning at 5 30, a threepart program looking at the House Judiciary Committee debate, house floor debate, and the senate trial of the impeachment of president bill clinton. This weekend, explore our nations past on American History tv on cspan3. American history tv products are now available at the new cspan online store. Go to cspanstore. Org to see whats new for American History tv and check out all of the cspan products. Next on American History tv, journalist talks about her book code girls, request the untold story of the women code breakers of world war ii. She discusses the role of women who were recruited by the u. S. Navy to help decipher intelligence codes. Her remarks were part of a conference hosted by the National World War Ii Museum in new orleans. The next session is when i can mention earlier. Our panelists liza mundy has agreed to expand on her original talk. Thank you. To open the session and leave the conversation and q a after the presentation, we have asked our friend catherine barb e. A. , professor at the city state