Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20130721

With broad Economic Trends but also has to do with culture and the social breakdown we are seeing in this country where you have seen the breakdown of family and you are seeing the breakdown of the work ethic. You are saying the breakdown of individual responsibility. So i think it behooves conservatives to consider what is the program that will increase mobility in the society and i believe it goes back to what is a trinity that lincoln supported, a dynamic economy, education and a return to those very basic laws of virtues. This is an bible thumping stuff. It doesnt have to be moralistic at the things that make it easier to get ahead. Marriage, work and discipline. So, i will just leave you with one last passage from lincoln. Long before anyone had heard him he gave what was called the lyceum speech as a young man in springfield and it talked about how even then this week, amateur country that we are invulnerable to military assault. He said he can take all the armies of the world and put the greatest general anyone has ever known napoleon at the head of these armies and they couldnt take a step on the blue ridge mountains. They couldnt get a foot in the ohio river but then he went on to say if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time or die by suicide. Ladies and gentlemen i submit to you that we should resolve to live. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you. Thank you. [applause] mr. Lowry thank you. Ladies and gentlemen as sandy mentioned this is being broadcast live to the world. He picked clean ,com,com ma people. We have also taken questions from the internet and our first one is going to come from Jennifer Blake from alexandria virginia. Which leaders today are most like lincoln . Which leaders of today are the most like lincoln . I really dont think we have any that im aware of. I am open to suggestions. I have spoken why i think barack obama isnt that leader. I would say mitt romney wasnt that leader. You know it helps a lot in america if you live the story. And i think mitt romney through no fault of his own obviously had lived the story so i think there was always a selfconsciousness there, a certain defensiveness about his wealth that was in contrast to his dad who was there was a Wonderful Exchange with his father on the sidewalk during one of his campaigns. I came from nothing. I earned every dime of this and mitt was never able to quite say that. I think it behooves the Republican Party, everything it says, everything it does should be through this when colin when connie and prism of opportunity and aspiration and its heartening to me, i wouldnt team any of them lincoln like necessarily but its heartening to me you have marco rubio, paul ryan and bobby jindal leaders of that nature talking in these terms because otherwise i think the Republican Party has no future in this future. The whigs and the republicans at that time at the same problem. People associated them with the elite. People said they were prorich and the great achievement of lincoln was to demonstrate how his economics were designed to help everyone and to help the little guy climbing up and that is what the contemporary Republican Party needs to do as well. Here is our next question. Thank you for your presentation. Im one of those awful lawyers. I like to think of myself as a good lawyer. You mentioned early on in your presentation that lincoln has supported government subsidies as a way to sort of help things up and so i would like to sort of walk down that slippery slope just a little bit here. Milton friedmans position was that the government should have very little world and what goes on in the country within defense , criminal Justice System and the police force of those things that arent in the interest of private entities to produce. We have seen subsidies go to places like solyndra and there are all kinds of government subsidies now. Maybe back in lincoln state subsidies were relatively smaller and not intrusive but given that the government naturally grows if you are supporting subsidies in lincolns day, what it naturally follows that you would be supporting subsidies today and if you arent or you are supporting some of them where do you draw the line . Is a great question. I would say a couple of things. So much but every time government spends anything now its called an investment. Thats kind of a joke but these products some of them back then were generally investments. If you read about the erie canal it paid for itself almost immediately and transform the whole economy in that area and transformed it in a way that we would be much more favorable towards. It created a market where there wasnt one before so i think if you get a slippery slope from doing the erie canal to doing what we have now that is a heck of a slope. Theres a lot of distance between those two things. I think most people support, i dont oppose government roads. I dont oppose government riches riches not riches as long as they make economic sense funded in a rational way and they are not an excuse for was i spending and two a misbegotten attempt to create shortterm stimulus. You would just be finding stuff that actually makes sense. That is all the government did, what percentage of the federal government of gdp with the federal government meant to be spending . Is probably 1 . We have almost nothing that we have now so lincoln had a more positive view of government than we will ever have is conservatives but it was a different kind of government. But the federal government does now even though all democrats talk about is investments in infrastructure, maybe what it does and what its best at his taking money from some people and giving it to others. That is a fact. That is the entitlement state. That is the welfare state. There was not about a 19th century. There was no bureaucracy to speak of. The state department i believe in 1863 in the middle of the warhead 33 employees. There is no regulation and im a little hesitant to predict where lincoln would be 150 years later but i have a hard time believing that this would be an absolute anathema. All we do to obstruct the development of our own country. You have states like new york that are dragging their feet and doing everything they can to obstruct this great natural castor is the cast revolution that creates bluecollar jobs and get 12 out of the ground into the economy, that lowers the price of electricity inmates manufacturing better. Everyone should be doing somersaults of joy over this but we are blocking it. The same thing with the keystone pipeline. There is an Infrastructure Project and what is government doing . Its studying it and blocking it and layers of membership to review. No offense, i dont have that much of a bugaboo about lawyers all of these lawsuits, Congress Needs to stop it from happening. The nature of the American Government came with the new deal. It was the progressives and it wasnt Abraham Lincoln wanted to fund it. And by the way some of what he did was excessive and ridiculous. He supported a program in illinois that got way out of hand. Everyone looked at the erie canal and said that paid for itself so everything can pay for itself and they passed a program in illinois that basically bankrupted the state. The Transcontinental Railroad everyone decides it wants favorably for understandable reasons, kind of the moonshine of the age that enabled the worst kind of fraud and corruption you can imagine. I would be favorably inclined but that kind of transportation back then but even back then you have to have a very skeptical eye about a lot of it. The erie canal did not create Medicare Part d matt. They are separate things and i dont think the slope is that steve or quite that slippery and if you are set about you should blame fdr, not Abraham Lincoln. The next question. Thank you for coming. What is the National Review of doing and what are you doing and where are you going and what is your corrective . Sir i am trying to flaunt the book. Amazon. Com, lincoln unbound. The National Review we are doing what we have been doing since 1950 by one or founder the great william f. Buckley wrote the initial editorial saying our role was to stand up for history with capital h and yell stop. The National Review has always thrived in diversity of the good news is we have more diversity than ever. This country is really in trouble. Its not just the topline stuff, the size of government, the debt i really believe so many of our systems make no sense anymore and handed down to us from the mid20th century reflect assumptions that no longer apply. This is certainly chouinard of our and drama programs medicare and Social Security and troopers educational system. Not just k12 that college where we are spending more and getting less. Some studies have shown Cognitive Development and kids in college regresses rather than advances. And just the social breakdown. Its dismaying to me that its really the top third of the country in educational terms. People with College Degrees or more who have learned the basic bourgeois virtues work and they help you get ahead. If you look at the illegitimacy rate among the top third, its 6 . Just 6 . Thats the 1930s level. I dont even think thats 19th century levels. If you look at the middle swath of the country people with a High School Degree and some college but not a College Degree right in the middle and all the measures is beginning to look more like the bottom than they are the top. In 1982 when reagan was president the illegitimacy rate among those folks was 14 and now its 44 . Its harder for mothers and fathers of these children and its harder for the children so what i worry about is we have the top third that has all sorts of economic advantages and they are doing just fine in the globalized economy but also have the social advantages that are in effect passed down to their children and we dont see that happening in the rest of the country. That is how you get a class society. We may be american still and we may be pretty rich and still pretty powerful but that is not what this country was and that is not what it should be. Lets take another one from the web from jesse angelo from chicago illinois. How would you address the provisionprovision s in todays political Political Climate . How would lincoln have addressed the visions of todays legal climate . This is one of the objections i have to the movie lincoln. Its a wonderful depiction of lincoln going down to the small details. One scene i looked in the movie was it captured him to it t and it may sound strange but there is one scene where he is sitting at his desk in the white house and the white house and he is the ruler and there is a watch i think hanging off of his desk. He is just knocking it back and forth, back and forth. That is such a lincoln thing because he had a really birding and nature. We tend to think him him as this comment at this juncture but he was impossible to get to him. He basically had no clo clo separen. Even the people that spent the most time with him said there was this barrier that you couldnt get past. He was this brooding guy and he was also fascinated with how things would work. He would examine every new agricultural implement out on the circuit and he had this logical mind. When he got to congress he checked out euclid from the library of congress. How many congressman stay checkout a copy of euclid . This came through in his advocacy and orientation. He would refer to the declaration as the definition and the definitions and axioms of a free society. My problem with the movie is the way it was interpreted. What was happening in the movie . Lincoln wanted to get the 13th amendment because it was right as a matter of principle and he was impatient about it and wanted it right then. There is a politician getting it and the wheeling and dealing and getting it but it wasnt a compromise. It was someone getting what they wanted as a matter of principle. I think too often i think about washington today we think we should split every differencdifferenc e and compromise every issue and perhaps there is something to be said without that is not where lincoln would be. As a young man he was incredibly incredibly there was something called the skinning of thomas. There is a debate between lincoln and this guy named jesse thomas and lincoln mocked him. He imitated him and ridiculed him and this poor guy left the stage in tears and lincoln eventually apologized. He would write anonymous newspaper articles ridiculing people. He did it to the state auditor of illinois who found out it was lincoln that did this and challenged him to a dual. As the challenged party you got to pick a weapon so he said we are going to do it with it calgary. That might seem like a ridiculous choice of a weapon until you realize lincoln had had a foot long reach on this guy. Someone afterwards said why did you choose the weapon . He said i was worried if we picked pistols he would shoot and kill me. It turned out the dispute was in a dual didnt happen but lincoln was a man that partisanship was for him his younger days but he was a man of principle. His statesmanship existed as all great statesmanship does having a fixed goal and then be flexible in how you get there and being persuasive. He had a line in one of his addresses that a drop of honey attracts more flies than a gallon of gall. Some of our friends dont understand that a little sweetness and persuasion can go a long way. He was flexible and persuasive but the ultimate goal never changed and he didnt just compromise away those goals. He compromised how he achieved them and he ultimately did. See the next question in the front. See i am curious to do doing a research about his and marys relationship because we hear they werent each others first pick to marry and that kind of tolerated each other. Did they really love each other . Mary todd and lincolns relationship. There is so much literature on this. There is a story about lincoln had when he was going to their wedding which was kind of a snap wedding some kid asked him where are you you going and he said im going to hell. Its not the greatest start to a marriage. I think mary todd, she was a little bit crazy and horrible blows to her that made her really crazy but i am not with those that have this contempt for her and blame her for every difficulty in a relationship. Lincoln as i was just discussing was not an easy guy himself. She said afterwards in an interview when lincoln felt the most and express the least. Im a little bit like that. I am sure Joe Mary Todd crazy and the way she was good for him. She was just as ambitious, just as ambitious as he was. At his First Campaign for the senate, where lee was in the campaign because the the state legislature put the senators then but she was there when the legislature was voting and keeping track of every single vote. If you are an ambitious political guy there is no substitute for a wife who is right there with you and also she was a huge step up for him. She went to a fancy french academy. She had a pony that she took to show. Henry clay the former statesman so in that sense she was quite cash for him. Obviously it wasnt a perfect relationship and there is so much about it we will never know but i am a little softer on mary todd than others are. And thats a pander for the women in the audience too. See i am curious as a Current Affairs writer and commentator what drove you back to the history of the white house . I have always loved the story there is nothing, people make the most of themselves and their talents is important. I have it disabled brother so i feel strongly any talent you have is a complete gift and its a shame and a sin not to make the most of it. I love how lincoln made the most of themselves. It would have been very easy, just a subsistence, life in subsistence agriculture wasnt necessarily that bad. His data confiscated, just had a bad relationship with, he was perfectly content. He wasnt a bad man. Spent a lot of time hunting and fishing. Some eyewitness neighbor said of his dad he didnt think god was gold. He didnt chase after things so there is something to be said for that way of life but it doesnt make the most of you and lincoln strive to make the most of himself, i was really drawn to that. I really think that undergirds everything. The twopart program, and that kind of isolation so people in the hinterland had their chances to rise and end slavery. The opportunity of an entire class of people and it blights the opportunity of poor whites who cant compete with plantations because they dont have the game labor and the brute force to god into their field. Lincolns aspiration to make the most of himself and then how he made it possible for others to make the most of themselves and the fact that i think this is an area where we have really a country need to do better. The next question right here. You mentioned president lincoln read euclid when he was in the white house and he was an avid reader throughout his life. What are some of the other looks that he liked . Thats a great question. He was soaked in the bible and as time went on he became a more religious man under the pressure of events and personal tragedy. He was never i dont believe he was an Orthodox Christian ever but he was deeply religious. The second and not guerrillas dressed as i think the most profoundly religious state paper in American History. It will never be surpassed. He spent a lot of time grappling with god and with gods will and then shakespeare. He loved shakespeare. He would recite shakespeare by hard and if you consider those things and if you read nothing else but the bible and shakespeare that is good training as a writer. He was our best president ial writer with the exception perhaps of Thomas Jefferson and on top of these things he was an amateur poet which tends to make you a better writer. Music and words matter deeply to him and when he take their music and you wed gets to the profound purposes he had in the attachment to our founding principles that is where you get these speeches from the ages. Also if you go back and read, look at what was in these readers, i had a very skeptical depiction of education at the time but i did have these readers for kids that had everything in them. Excerpts of all sorts of literature, excerpts of great speeches throughout American History and one of the tragedies of American Life as we dont have anything like that anymore for kids. We have watered down politically correct textbooks that have language that is forgettable at best. He was really able to soak himself in the best words that have been uttered and written in American History through shakespeare in the bible throughout human history. See we have time for one more question. This is from james snow for otter tail florida. His todays gop anything like lincolns gop . Is todays gop anything like lincolns gop . We talked about the view of government but i think the economics are very similar. I think obviously the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats is a commonality and that devotion to the founding is a commonality. Its astonishing to me politicians like ted cruz who are constitutional is at the core are treated with contempt of some sort of weirdo because they care so much about the constitution and the founding. That is something where lincoln was right there. Another line he quoted from the bible was the declaration is like the golden apple and the constitution is the silver frame so the declaration represents the purpose of our government, what want to achieve their government the equality of all men and the means of doing it is the constitution. He basically is confronted by two rival camps both of which wanted to dispense with the constitution, one of which he is allied with. The abolitionists that the constitution was passed with the devil and they would earn it and tear it up and condemn it and then you had the secessionist who wanted to leave. The abolitionists thought it afforded too much protection to slavery in the secessionist wanted to write another constitution because it didnt think the constitution afforded enough protection to slaves. Lincoln was in the middle in the constitution that ultimately is the most important thing and a commonality with todays Republican Party. Mr. Lowry thank you. Lets give them a round of applause. [applause] thank you. In nepal this book will be published, wonder woman is the name of the book sex, power and the quest for perfection and the other is debora l. Spar who has a day job as president of college in manhattan. Debora l. Spar are you a feminist . See it if you would have asked me that question five years ago i would i would have said absoly not. The combination of taking the job i have now in writing this book has made me a die hard feminist although i think the word itself is a complicated word and i think we can get too caught up on the word itself rather than thinking about the issues behind feminism which most women are stones lay in favor of. See how do you define feminism and what are we getting caught up in . Theres a great tshirt we have floating around the system to the effect that feminism is a crazy idea and women are equal to men. That is what feminism is about. There is no one who can argue with that anymore these days. Spielberg did you grow up and how did you grow a . I grew up outside of new york city a fairly typical uppermiddleclass white suburban childhood and i grew up in the era when feminism was at its hottest. One of the things i write about in this book is when you grow up during an era in some ways you dont buy into that eras arguments because they are older than you are so by the time i came of age, i was born in 1963 so the time i am a teenager much of the great fight of feminism were over and won so i think many girls of my era grew up saying im not a feminist, thank you very much all the women who came before us and im delighted that can go to an Ivy League College and play sports in high school and delighted i have the pill but i dont see those struggles as being something that im personally invested in because they were over already. See how was import was Betty Friedans book the feminine mystique . That came out the year is point. I have zero knowledge of that. My mother read it but i dont think it affected her life in any huge way because she was in retrospect a schoolteacher and very vivacious and is still very vivacious so i did not read betty friedan. I didnt read it in college and i really have only rated much later in life and was in fact quite shocked to see ,com,com ma first of all to brilliant book how relevant it is in the sense that i think although women have one legal rights workplace rights in great numbers since 1960 3a lot of the problems she points to our problems we are dealing with today. Debora l. Spar you started by saying ever since he you took the job as president of Barnard College you have become a diehard feminists. Why . I think to be a little clearer i started becoming a feminist although i wouldnt have used those words earlier in my life when i was at Harvard Business school. I have seen this happen to so many women my age is that as we got older and as we grew into our marriages and our professioprofessio nal lives we started to realize that our lives as women were evolving differentdifferent differently than where the mens lives we saw around us. To be blunt to womens lives are still harder in many ways a more complicated than their male counterparts particularly women who are trying to do the feminist promise which was balancing family career husbands love in all the richness of life. Dont men do that . I think men do it differently and one of the things we havent really seen yet societally his favorite position of mens roles but i think men have always through modern history been aware of the fact that their primary job is to have a career to bring bring home that they can empty the provider for their family and spend time with their families in the father role but they feel less of a compulsion to be perfect dads and perfect husbands and to devote themselves or their family life as much as to their work life. The women of my generation and younger is what i call the double and triple whammy of expectations. As women we retain all the expectations that surround motherhood and life good is good and we have added to them all of the expectations of a professional life in an athletic life and all these other things so we are trying simultaneously to be perfect wives and mothers and perfect career women. I think men have done a better job of not trying to do everything at once. Debora l. Spar if you had been born and 53 rather than 63 how different would your life have been . Thats a great question and i cant really tell but looking at women who i see as being like myself were 10 years older i think i would have encountered feminism earlier in my life. If i hadnt been born in 63 i wouldnt be in college in 1960 which probably would have been late. It would would have been a moret in time to be in college that women who were in college in the late 60s and early 70s almost inevitably to get caught up with the feminist movement whereas its funny 10 years later when i went to college in 1980 this was the reagan years. Activism on College Campuses was certainly dead and certainly feminism is dead. Who is khalid captain . An amazing woman and very wellknown in the city of new york. She was one of the first women to become a lawyer, partner at one of the major new york law firms, went back to law school after she had her second child and after she had gotten her children over the Primary School years and she has been a real role model for me. She is an amazing woman. In 1950 by the right to years after graduating with honors from harvard she was married to a man she loved deeply. She had one infant infant daughter and a second slightly older toddling beside suddenly walking with her daughters the husband is a central part. She sat down on the bench and began to weep. I was only 20 porsche recalls my whole life was good. As much as i love my girls i always wanted to be a lawyer. She went back and became a lawyer and a still a practicing lawyer and grandmother. Debora l. Spar you write about being raised in what does that mean . I suspect most of my generation member commercial that ran ran in the late 1960s. It was the same time the charlies angels hit the airwaves on television so theres a lot of charlie and both the charlies angels and the charlie person portrayed women in this fantastical way. They were gorgeous of course and they clearly had careers. They clearly had men in their lives and one of the ads i remember for charlie perfume the woman had a child in a powerful way because the child was there but the woman was going to work. I really think charlie is a perfume ad and the tv show created a subconscious expectation and women of my era that somehow this was the kind of life we would lead, that would be the gorgeous row of our lives and we would find men easily and sexual opportunities easily and that we would have careers and have babies and great homicide. Presuming that all these things would be ours. And . It didnt turn out out to be true because its a Television Ad and it wasnt true. I think it did create these deepseated expectations that really has been perpetuated to this day. See this as an autobiography isnt that . It is in part. Its far more autobiographical than i expected it to be. What was the process like for you to write its . It was hard. Ive written several books that were academic books so becoming becoming putting my own life on paper was hard but it was useful to understand the forces that have molded me. Are you giving future students at our nard ammunition when you write this . One of the best jobs i had was at the ymca. I got to spend an inordinate amount of time lounging around around the pool in a swimsuit and learned vital lessons from my mail swim instructors. Im not sure that passage is designed to be advisory. We have all been teenagers and there are certain things that tend to accompany that stage of life. Do you regret teaching nine euros how to play spin the bottle . Im not sure if the retrospect i would have thought nine euros out the play spin the bottle but none of them was so brave as to risk a kiss. Debora l. Spar what you want people to take away from wonder woman . I want women in particular young women and older women to walk away from this book with a sigh of relief, to be able to say okay i am not perfect. I am not a wonder woman but nobody is and i have more power and like to make choices and make me happy and to bring me joy rather than constantly feeling as so many women do put my my students and all the women that they have to be everything to all people at all times. Former professor at Harvard Business School President of Barnard College what does the Glass Ceiling term mean to you . I think the Glass Ceiling is a term that captures the sense of frustration that many women feel individually that they have maxed out in their careers but more importantly i think it does capture what remains true that although women are 50 of the population 50 of the Ivy League Universities 50 of graduate schools if you look at the tip top levels of power in this country across all sectors women max out at somewhere between 15 to 20 of those power positions so there is a Glass Ceiling. Whether that is imposed by a certain forces are internal courses, thats more debatable but it purely a statistical level women do not hold anything close to 50 of the positions of power in this country or any country. We have been talking to the present of our nerd college previewing her new book coming out in the fall 2013 wonder woman sex, power and the quest for perfection. We sat down with Richard Carter chairman of the Heritage Commission in delaware to learn about the organization and what it does. The delaware Heritage Commission which arose out of the old American Revolution bicentennial commission in the 1970s and they kept it going because they felt there were a lot of other historical commemorations that need to be attended to sow the Heritage Commission came into being. We have been publishing delaware books since about 1990 or 1991. We now have a pink 26 or 27 books in print of which are new as one just came out in midapril. Its called delawares destiny determined by lewis and its the story of the great lawsuit between william penn and Lord Baltimore in the english courts which resulted in delaware being a separate state rather than being part of maryland. Some of our other books, we do a combinaticombinati on of new books on delaware history such as the one by dr. Bradley skelter about africanamerican education in delaware and we do reprints of classics. This is one of my favorites. This is called delaware tied to the firstaid and the original history of this was published in 1938 as part of the depression era Works Progress a demonstration of federal writers and its a guide to the state status it was at that time and it comes complete with a map of 1938 rosendahl that. This is a reprint of another classic colonial delaware tied dr. John john heyman monroe. When i was attending back in the dark ages everyone had to take a delaware history class and he was a professor of the course. He walked into the lecture hall and it was like you would turn on this bigot and all this stuff came pouring out of him and then it turned off at the end of the hour. This is one of his many books on delaware history. This is one of five books. I am the author of this just by accident but we also have a process of trying to do oral history interviews with former delaware governors and im presently working with a woman named dr. Harriet windsor who is a former delaware secretary of state to do interviews with the governor who was our only female governor and she served from 2000 two to 2008 and will do i hope maybe eight or 10 taped interviews with her and then those will be placed in the delaware archives for the use of future biographers. Another interesting book we did in recent times was man and nature in delaware by dr. William h. Williams and its an environmental history of the first state, which has changed substantially since the dutch landed at lewis in 1631. One of my favorite parts of the book, there are a couple of maps that show what is now delaware has it was 9000 years ago and 15,000 years ago when the ocean coast extended out another 30 or 40 miles out into the ocean. You can see the beach erosion that has been fairly steady over the last 2000 years. This is another one of our reprints. This is a book about delaware, delawares role in world war ii. Practically everybody who served in that war of any capacity is in here someplace. The search is to crosssection of some of the folks at the Delaware Heritage press have done over the years. We have relatively limited funding and we do a lot of this on gone on the person person that designed it myself but books. We have them printed as cheaply as possible and try to sell them as cheaply as possible. These books are important because they represent as complete a crosssection as we are able to do a delawares long history and heritage. We tried to touch on as his many of our communities as possible. We have a pamphlet about the italianAmerican History of delaware. We have books about the black heritage. We have the talk about delawares unusual boundaries called east of the masondixon line. We have all sorts of other books that touch on various aspects of our history and culture. We tried to make these available to citizens of the state and others who are interested in our history as cheaply as possible. In fact we would give books away in some instances. We are now getting into doing ebooks. We are converting several of our older publications into ebooks which are available or will be available free of charge on the delaware Heritage Commission web site. We are trying to find as many ways as possible to reach out to people their history to them. Its a nonpaying job. We have 17 members of the commission who dont get paid anything and i think theyll do it kind of out of love for the state of delaware. For more information on booktvs recent visit to dover delaware and that many other cities visited their local content vehicles go to cspan. Org local content. Mr. Rubin presents a collection of interviews he conducted with men who served in the American Expeditionary forces in world war i. This is a little over an hour