Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV In Depth 20130309

The people. Host what about the question of money supply in the government . Guest that is interesting. Take it back a little ways. In 199091 i was invited to a meeting in europe, only time i have been to europe to a meeting. There were a lot of big brains there. Going down the danube with five nobel Prize Winners and i wasnt one of them and it was Milton Friedman, and headed debate with Milton Friedman, mr. Freemarket about free and competitive money and he was arguing the government should control the money supply. Competitive money, reliable economy with fewer panic. Religion, what would the founders say . The founders were unanimous the government should not establish a religion nor should it prevent the worship of any sport. Every state constitution has the words god and half of them have a word jesus christ in them. And they had jesus christ in their constitution. Virtually all of the founders were of a mind that you needed to make sure government did not force people to practice a particular religion. To them that was different from saying you couldnt have a nativity scene on public property because the time almost all of them were engaged in some sort of Government Support of churches, paint pastors for example, have National Days of prayer, Prayer Services in the capital, things like that. Jeffersons famous letter which was a private letter and not a policy theme in which he says there should be a wall of separation in which people, there is no line in the constitution that says there is a wall of separation between church and state. Jefferson meant that in terms of we dont want to see Anglican Church establishment in virginia but we dont want to prevent anglicans from worshiping in virginia. Host with the mention of christ, does that say that yes we are christian nation and christianity is official . Guest i dont think it is the official but it is understood and the example i would give business, virtually all of the founders were christian. We have a pretty good link for example to disabuse people the notion that franklin was a deist. He was not. He believed in the intervention of god. The only one of the founders who could reasonably, diaz was probably jefferson. Certainly George Washington was a professing christian, he took us including the words jesus christ once a month, so they all came from a notion that america was the christian religion and they structured, Christian Country and they structured the government in light of that assumption and here is the example i will give you. When the Federal Reserve act was established in 1913 there is not one mention in it of gold, the Gold Standard and yet every single person, all the bankers who suggested the reforms everyone who crafted all understood this is operating under the Gold Standard. Is not meant to operate under any other standard at the time and it is the same way with the founders. Host Larry Schweikart, one more question about what would the founders say . a patriots answers to americas most pressing problems, you make the deck of all the founders were small government men. What do you mean by that . Guest i mean they were greatly concerned that government, either through its executive branch and in terms of the jeffersonians or the legislative branch and hamiltonians they were concerned government would and could be abusive if given half a chance and so they built into the system. Every conceivable check and balance you possibly could to keep government from acting radically and rapidly, they wanted to act slowly with great deliberation to make it very difficult for us to difficult for us to do host a patriots history of the modern world from americas exceptional ascent to the atomic bomb 18981945, just came out last year. You talk about what one of the themes is progressive versus constitutionalism, that fight. What do you mean by that . Where do we stand today . This originated in the 89s. The populist party, i hate using these terms for and older europe but populists were more a leftist party, world democratic, they died out after the election of mckinley. A republican backed wing, called the progressives, Teddy Roosevelt is the most famous, there were a number of progressives and the progressives believed man could be reformed, if you simply put man through enough hoops that he could be perfected. They are the one is that changed the penal system from one that punished and incarcerates to one informed. I asked how comfortable they would be with Charles Manson sitting next to them because he made a lot more license plates. At any rate they reform everything about the income tax or Federal Reserve board and their goal is nothing short of perfect man in this world. The constitutionalists are very much out of the founders mold and say we dont trust men. And so we want to make sure there are so many checks and balances that it is difficult for people to enact laws on other people even out of the goodness of their heart. Usually the worst legislation comes from. Host where do you teach . Guest i teach history at the university of dayton. It has been very good to me. A wonderful place to work. I have been supported, named scholar of the year, great place to work. Host along have you been there . Guest 27 years. Host how did you get into history and teaching . Guest i grew up in arizona, great little town of 12,000 people, and now it is a quarter of a million. All through high school and college i played drums in a rockandroll band and as soon as i got out i got on the road with a rock band and for the next four five years i played on the ground for groups like stephan wilson. Host the name of your band . Guest that band was called the rampage. We even used some of our music in the film rock in the wall. There are some rampage songs in that. Anyway, the road is very hard. The road is very hard especially if all these roadies and guys sitting stuff up and doing your driving, flying planes, we bring in vans, trucks with all our own driving, setting up, it was very difficult sell wanted to get off of the road. I wanted to play rock music at night and daytime, if i didnt work that we, as the money and i thought teaching would be easy. I thought teaching would be an easy gig. I wanted to Teach High School and i get back to arizona and dont have a teaching certificate. To get a teaching certificate i need a u. S. History class. I had gone to four years, no knock on Arizona State but i had gone through Arizona State university four years, b. A. In political science, never took a single u. S. History course. I had to go back during the summer in order to teach to get this u. S. History course. I had a professor named Robert Lundberg who runs a think tank in jerusalem. In six weeks he was so inspirational he challenged all my assumptions and within a six week period i said that is what i want to be, i want to be a professor and slowly i got out of music and got a masters at Arizona State, kicked me out because they cant get you a good job. So i ended up at university of california Santa Barbara with a great mentor named elliot brownlead. Got a ph. D. And went to i went to one job before dayton, i taught in wisconsin in the wisconsin system. Host are you a conservative . Definitely. Host have you always been a conservative . Even when you were opening . Guest the only member of the band who didnt drink. And wont say never did drugs but never did drugs away kids do drugs. Realtime i have ever been drunk in my life i tell the story to my students was in mississippi and a hurricane was coming through, the first big hurricane after camille and they took it seriously, boarding everything up so we were sitting around that night waiting for the hurricane to hit and watching monday night football, the raiders and dolphins. They were always writing me trying to get me to drink or do whatever, come on, just a drink of why wont hurt you. All right, i will take that. They are back there spiking the wine with bob the. Pretty soon the game seems to be going on forever. The longest quarter of football i have ever seen. I think i am getting a little drunk here, get me some coffee, we will get you some coffee and their spiking the coffee too. Outside of that i was pretty much conservative. Host what does it mean to be a conservative historian . Guest it means you are a historian who has a conservative perspective on the worlds. One of the fallacies we got from the germans will historians is you can have a truly objective history. You want to have accurate history but that doesnt necessarily have to be objective history. Every selection of facts, the mere fact that i choose to report this fact over that fact is itself a bias. And so you cannot be free of bias no matter how much you say i am objective, your selection of facts is going to determine your bias. What you have to do instead is aim for accuracy and truth. Does this tell the true story, not just factual story but does it tell the story of what was really happening . That requires a historian put himself or herself in the era of the time. We have a lot of historians today who write with present him trying to criticize events in the past or justify events in the past based on their current political beliefs and you have to look at things in the context of what the people were seeing at the time, what were their views at the time. Most brought out by the film lincoln is doing well, brought out by the criticisms of lincoln, lincoln was a racist. For his day lincoln was phenomenally advanced in terms of race relations. By todays standards of course he was a racist. Everybody was that then. But compared to everybody else at that time lincoln was way ahead of the curve. Host 2004, christopher columbus, a lot of writing that his discovery was not so great, that he wasnt the first. Guest we have a sidebar, a two page sidebar called did columbus kill all the indians . Theres a tremendous amount of scholarship that has come out that shows that in fact a lot of the diseases that were attributed to columbus and the europeans in fact existed in the americas before the spaniards ever got here. Does he introduce some practices like slavery . Not really. Indians were engaged in slavery and aztecs were enslaving thousands, not only enslaving but murdering and cutting their hearts out. All in all columbuss arrival was a wonderful thing for all of humanity. Host what did he bring . Guest columbus bring the european context to the americas, the idea of human life has value, something called polis which thin people operate, you may have a king but even within the standards of the day monarchs could be challenged both within the Catholic Church and within the Civil Society up to a point. Once again in the context of the day nothing like modern democracy. But in the context of the time, it was a pretty credible world view where you see someone like montezuma is not a god and he you can divide his word. Host how many books have you written, co written, edited, etc. . Guest i dont know. I have given away a couple of my name is not even on. Host over 20 . Guest i think so. Host Larry Schweikart is our in depth guest, he is a historian. We will put the numbers on the screen if you like to participate in our conversation on booktv on cspan2. Two 025858880. In east and central time zones 5853881. In mountain and pacific time zones you can also contact us on social media. You can make a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. You can send us a tweet booktv is our twitter handle and finally you can send an email to booktv cspan. Org. Para eight of larry Larry Schweikarts books. Beginning with a patriots history of the u. S. Came out in 2004, americas victories, why the u. S. Wins war that will win the war on terror, 48 liberal lies about American History that you probably leaned in school came out in 2008, seven events that make America America and prove that the Founding Fathers were right all along, 2010, american entrepreneur, patriots answers to americas most pressing problems in 2011, the patriots history reader essential documents for every american in 2011 and finally his most recent, a patriots history of the modern world from americas exceptional ascent to the atomic bomb 18981945. And is there a second volume . Guest should be out in december, 19452012. Guest host back to seven events that made America America why do you include Martin Van Buren . Guest the most important event in the seven events and the one least known. Martin van buren was anti slave. When the missouri compromise was agreed to Thomas Jefferson said he sat up and heres a siren, Martin Van Buren had the same reaction. This is very bad for america. This is going to cause a civil war. His and jeffersons vision on that was as the territories are open up, more and more of them are going to be free. As more territories become free states, congress will get a majority of free votes and when Congress Gets a majority of free votes sooner or later it will vote to end slavery. Seeing that, when that happens you get a civil war. Seeing that on the horizon, Martin Van Buren sought to make an end run in which he would short circuit all discussion about slavery in congress and in the political arena and the way he sought to do this was to create a totally new political party. We were a 1party system, few people know this. We were a 1party system from 18161824. Called the democratic republicans. A lot of people think we are still a 1party system. Martin van buren creates a new party. To be a member of his party, all you have to do is essentials the vow not to talk about slavery. Not to bring it up in legislature, not to bring up in legislation, not to speak about it on the stump. Wont introducing legislation about it. You are just going to shut up about slavery. These anti slaves, what would he have to offer someone who is also anti slave who sees as he does a free state will eventually be in the majority or to the opposite . The answer is jobs, patronage. He create something called the spoils system whereby politicians promise supporters jobs in return for them getting out the vote and a great film version of this if you start getting to new york, terrific where theyre going through the bars and hurting people ought to vote. Martin van burens system depended on two other things, depended that the states be sovereign, that the state have a great deal of power the federal government remain weak and it depended on having a person in the white house, if he wasnt the southerner and Martin Van Buren did not think youd get a southerner elected again. If you wasnt the southerner, Martin Van Buren wanted somebody who would be sympathetic to the slave statess concerns. The phrase was a no. Man of southern principles. He succeeds in that all the way up to 1860 but in keeping the states strong and the federal government week, his plan worked against itself because each time there is an election politicians are giving away jobs and if youre going to run against me, they run against Martin Van Burens party they have to give away more jobs than i give away so pretty soon government starts to grow with every election, becomes bigger and bigger, states start to get weaker and the federal government is getting bigger. Before you know 1860, they have not paid much attention to the growth of government since 1828, it is very big and very powerful and has a lot of influence and the wrong guy gets in the white house, abraham lincoln. Of northern man of northern principals who said slavery is wrong, we are going to keep it from moving into the territories and that is when the fight starts. Host when did Martin Van Buren develop the system . Between 18241828, the bucktail party and then he creates the democrat party, modernday democrat party, gets its original Founding Mission was to protect slavery. I host plan eisenhowers heart attack is another of your seven events. Guest mike has a heart attack while playing golf. It coincides with a movement to have a big push on Heart Disease by the American Heart Association and they use ikes heart attack as the opportunity to press for more concerns about Heart Disease. There wasnt more Heart Disease, we now know. What was happening we have better testing methods and we were discovering more Heart Disease. It was like Breast Cancer, there was a Breast Cancer epidemic, which looks like there was an increase in the number of cases. This gets taken over by a nutritionist from minnesota, and the agenda is to reduce fats, and cholesterol. He manages to pack the appropriate committees on the american put Heart Association with his people and begin a campaign to get americans to each less fat and less meat, to eat more carbohydrates. Long story short by 197070 mcgathering committee has been heavily lobbied and put out new food guidelines, 40 more carbs, 40 less fat coincides pretty clearly with the obesity epidemic in america. Host going to the subtitle of your book seven events that made america and proved the Founding Fathers were right all along. How did that tie in . Guest i have a chapter in what would the founders say . a patriots answers to americas most pressing problems what would they say about the government getting involved in our diet, they would be aboard at mayor bloomberg. Washington probably laughing with his cane or something, it is not the federal governments role to tell people what to eat or drink. The founders were pretty good drinkers, have gone to some of their diets in founders say . a patriots answers to americas most pressing problems, you have that. Host americas rock music. We will show some videos, you talk about why americas rock music is so important in our history. Guest rock and roll and country and jazz, it is and essentially American Music form. American music, rock music starts to get there as a band, it ends together as a band, almost every song in the middle, a solo. This is a tremendous picture of america. We work together, we do things to get there but we never allow the individual to be subordinated into the group as in socialist societies. And i think that message comes out in the music itself even when you dont know the lyrics. I will give you two studies. There was one study that said 40 of kids dont know what any of the lyrics say and another study said that only 40 heard or understood any of the lyrics and yet they in turn allies this message that rock and roll is freedom. One thing led to another. I ended up with producer mark lee, documentary producer and hollywood, we did a film called rockandroll, documentary film on pbs right now, premiere in november. Going on right there. When i interviewed people behind the iron curtain they all spoke to the freedom that rockandroll brought in as inspirational, we see freedom when we hear rockandroll music. Host what we watching here . Rocking the wall . Guest this is the trailer for rocking the wall, we interviewed people like mark stein, not the writer but the singer, robby krieger, the doors,to, we had a panoply of rock stars but also people from behind the iron curtain who spoke about rock as it spoke to them. Host you say it brought down the berlin wall. Guest i dont go that far. Was influenced. Ronald reagan and Robert Thatcher brought down the berlin wall but it was a major influence, one of the reasons the tanks dont roll when the wall starts being chopped down. This is a question historians ask. Let me break down wall, why arent the soviets in the in the tanks and part of this is not only germany, but russia had been influenced by this. I interviewed billy joel for the book. He is not in the movie, he had back surgery at the time and couldnt appear in the movie. I asked about his experience, he was the First American to play moscow since than cliburn in 64. He said the guards were all armed with tranquilizer darts. They were told to tranquilize, to knock out the kids if they got too crazy. I said where you told anything you could say or couldnt say or could think or couldnt think . No. But they told me whatever you do dont incurred the kids to charge the stage or come to the front, first thing you did i told them to come on down. The guards were throwing their hats in the air. Host in the 48 liberal lies about American History that you probably leaned in school . How did you organize these 48 liberal lies . Guest pretty much juggled economic, political, cultural. We start keeping them all together might invite people to only read a little bit of the book. Host you organize them by priority, personal priority. Guest not at all. In terms of what we thought would interest readers. The way i got them was i looked at 20 of the top u. S. History college textbooks. I didnt go below that and i didnt include books like peoples history because it is used as a textbook in many College Classes as patriots history of the modern world from americas exceptional ascent to the atomic bomb 18981945 and sometimes theyre used together. I am happy with that. I found these were common themes on many of these subjects, that out his was innocent, things like this, i started kind of making a compilation of what all these books say about these Different Things and that is where we get the 48 liberal lies. Host lets go through some of the mend, and on the ones you want. Number one, the first president intended for the u. S. To be isolationist. Number 2, the mexican and spanish american wars were imperialists efforts drummed up by corporate interests. Number 3, fdr knew in advance about the japanese attack on pearl harbor. 4, harry truman ordered the atomic bombing of japan to intimidate the soviets. 5, jfk was killed by lbj and the secret team to get keep us from getting out of vietnam. 6, nixon expanded the vietnam war, 7, the Peace Movement activists were not dupes of the kgb, 8, reagan new star wars wouldnt work but wanted to provoke a war with the u. S. S. R. 9, gorbachev was responsible for ending the cold war. We cant go through all of these. Why dont we start with the first one. Read me the first when you did about the founders. Host the first president intended the u. S. To the isolationist. Guest one of the things i wanted to the publisher didnt want me to do is i wanted to call in 48 liberalize and a few libertarian one is too because you see with the one on fdr there are some fallacies on both sides of the political spectrum. George washington was not an isolationist. The famous speech in which he talked about no entangling alliances, in 20 years includes the term several times, it is written by hamilton, hamilton believed that and this 20 year phrase is interesting. First of all, but remember we took an alliance with france to win our revolution. We had an armed neutrality with holland. Washington had negotiated successfully for alliances with the indians in so far as they were nonaggression pacts. We dont shoot at you, you dont shoot at us so washington was certainly a fan of alliances. His concern was that the u. S. Did not have a navy, the u. S. Did not have a Standing Army, that we would be sucked into some sort of european war that might come over on our shores and not be able to conduct it and so he uses this term for 20 years and then he says something along the lines that at which time we will be free to act with impunity. In other words after we have established ourselves, we have an economy, we have a navy, we have an army, then we will be able to say to these people buzz off, we dont want to be part of you, we are not going to follow your rules here or there or whatever. He thought until we get to that point we were going to have to avoid any alliances all because it might suckers into something that would destroy us. Host y 48 . Guest we were going to do 50. I thought a couple of the overlap and then i began to think when you go on this is so mercenary when you go on amazon you look seven something, 50 something all these books come up, i need something where other books wont come immediately, who has 48 of anything . That me get back to roosevelt. This is one of the ones that starts on the left, that starts with charles beard, in more recent times it has gravitated to the right and the idea was roosevelt knew in advance about pearl harbor, that he allowed it to occur so the we could be sucked into the war, and the fact is almost all the recent scholarship, especially great work by a guy named Phil Jacobson who was a quick tallest in world war ii, they have shown various transmissions hardly got to us, they were not translated and they werent decrypted in any time at all to give roosevelt any warning of anything and even when they were they were not brought to his attention. We find for example that 80 of the decrease from 1941 did not go through the final phase where they were handed over as intelligence until 1944. It is things like that, i have my axe to grind with roosevelt but pearl harbor is not one of them. Host if you cant get through on the phone lines because they are busy you can contact Larry Schweikart and ask the question on social media or go to our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv, make a comment there and you can see professor schweikarts posting up there so go ahead and make a comment and we look at those as well and send us a tweet twitter. Com booktv or an email booktv cspan. Org. Lets start with this email from wesleyan rock in south dakota. Mr schweikart i enjoyed two of your latest book, patriots history of the u. S. And seven events that made America America. In your research for these books, what one event or persons surprised you as underappreciate it or underreported in the course of American History . Guest that is easy. Grover cleveland is one of the greatest american president s who doesnt get any credit. I call him the last good democrat. He was very constitutional in terms of his approach to the office and famous for vetoing a seed corn bill. There was a drought in texas and the texas farmers wanted government assistance, General Motors, to keep from going under and they wanted the government to provide them with seed corn. Congress, always being willing to tax their money to passed the bill, cleveland issued a veto message and he says i can find no where in the constitution that empowers me to take taxpayer money from one group and given to another group but i encourage members of Congress Want to be so generous to take up a collection among themselves and give it to the farmers. Of course they didnt do that. Host Larry Schweikart is our guest, david in florida, high. Caller good afternoon. Excuse me, peter. Good to hear your voice again too. As a non Christian Conservative unlike mr. Schweikart to always add that in america christianity was not perverted the way it was in europe to bring about wars and holocausts, that american christianity is a different variety than european christianity and he shall always mentioned this when he talks about conservatism and christianity and other than that keep punching, mr. Schweikart. Host you call it a non Christian Conservative, what are your thoughts about christian influence in the u. S. . Caller in the context of what i just said, for the most part christian influence in the United States has been terrific, terrific for the American People generally, terrific for catholics and protestants getting along with each other fat and yes, terrific for jews. This is great for jewish people and it was because of the american variety of christianity that was symbolized by president washington in his letter to the jewish congregation of newport, road island that in america, no man need fear persecution. Mr schweikart should talk about this when he talks about christianity in america. Host thank you. Guest very astute. Email it. That is exactly right. American christianity was different. There was a concern about catholicism only because american protestants were concerned catholics might take marching orders from rome and one of the forgotten elements of history is the intolerable acts right after the boston tea party, one of them was going to hand over jurisdiction and control of british north america to quebec. In the eyes of the colonists this is akin to place in america under catholic rule and one of the reasons americans so quickly in united behind the effort, the revolutionary effort. Let me also bring up your caller is exactly right, thomas paine was one of our most famous atheists and yet was certainly roundly accept among the sound founders. Host bill in meredith, new hampshire, good afternoon. Caller good morning, professor schweikart. Professor, what factors would you saying the Rosetta Stone has had on the course of the events and civilization after it was discovered by the french in 799 and captured by the british, a pile in alexandria captured by a squadron of lord nelsons navy and ended up in the british museum. Host what is your interest in the Rosetta Stone . What is your interest in the Rosetta Stone . Caller i just toomey it is my argument is if napoleon had captured it and reporter hold of it and the pope ended up with it he would finance the buying of north america and all World History would have changed. Host any comments . Guest i dont get into the Rosetta Stone very much. It is pretty much before most of my work on europe. Host john in michigan, you are on cspan2 on booktv. Caller i want to express my gratitude to dr. Schweikart making the point about the false idea that historians should be objective. That they cant be for the reason that as dr. Schweikart mentioned, being once you choose to report a fact, having done so you immediately stepped into a realm in which you may be operating from an agenda standpoint and i want to express to everyone listening, the country as well of course, therefore it has been the case that news organizations could be called historical organizations, therefore there can be no such thing as a truly objective news organization. I believe this is relatively salient in the time in which we live. That is all i have got to say. Guest exactly right. Two things. First of all i will give a plug for a book you dont have yet. We have a new book coming out from rome in littlefield. I dont know the exact title yet but it is a journalistic history of america with jim kuipers of virginia tech. We make that exact point fell. The news media was founded by Martin Van Buren. Martin van buren creates the first newspapers to support the democrat party. They only publish democrat propaganda. They only advance democrat interests. The whig is due the same thing, they only publish whig oriented news but back then they would tell you what their agenda was. It was called the richmond whig, the arkansas democrat. They stated on the map what news you were buying but nobody pretended to be objective because their goal was to advance a political agenda. I think we are rapidly getting back to that point. We have 100 years of objectivism in the news but we are rapidly getting back to a very partisan news. I dont think that is bad. Eventually given the decline in revenue for most news organizations you will also see news sources dont and operated by some wing of one of the major parties. Host americas victories, why the u. S. Wins wars and will win the war on terror came out in 2006 and you write, professor schweikart, americans win wars because we tolerate and accept as fact of life and ongoing anti military segments of society whose constant criticism much to their dismay pushes our armed forces to even greater economy with our soldiers lives and to even greater efficiency of destroying our enemies. This email from david in new york city, the reasons given as to why nations fight wars i usually just rationalizations. Most aggressive actions are in reality for the benefit of the citizens who have the control and will gain for from it. Guest strongly disagree. If you look at for example the American Revolution, there had been a number of economic studies. The economist are the only ones able to quantify this. Otherwise as he said she said the economists of the number of studies and looked at the impact of the navigation act on the American Revolution. Peter mcclellan is just one. He found the cost of the navigation acts on the average colonist was 0. 20 to 0. 40 the year. Where you go to war over 0. 40 . The entire net impact of the navigation act on gnp was about 1 . Will you go to war over 1 of gnp . No. So the conclusion has to be the revolution was about something much greater. It was about the rights of englishmen and where these laws were going. Not necessarily the taxes but the ability of parliament to impose taxes without even consulting those who were paying the tax. No taxation without representation. If i can let me get back and address your point about americas victories really quickly. The idea that americans value life and Peace Movements have found that trying to emphasize to the American Public what were doing to another country, arent we destroying, look at the civilians who are being killed, tragic as that is that does not work on the American Public. That does not seem to move them. The only thing that moved the public to oppose war are american deaths. The Peace Movement has learned that lesson. Early on in world war i, the American Army figured that out too. The taxpayers and the public, citizens are not going to tolerate large numbers of casualties and this was an official paper published by the u. S. Army col the casualty issue and they said we have got to train better and find more effective ways so the we take fewer casualties. And if you want to use the term american way of war, one of the characteristics of the american way of war is we blow the hell out of something before we ever send in one soldier. Classic example, huge loss of life but nevertheless 600 ships and 11 fouls and planes pummelled the beach before the First American set foot on it. Host malcolm in columbus, ohio, good afternoon. Caller i happen to teach down a road from your guest. I wanted to offer two dissenting views. First of all he talks about american version of christianity. American christianity created slavery which enslaved and terrorized my ancestors, having the most brutal form of christianity in the world. Second of all, your guest eluded that lincoln in his day was an line as a white man. Not compared to Thaddeus Stevens, not compared to wendell phillips, not compared to Harriet Beecher stowe and many other white abolitionists of lincolns day. In lincolns day, he was very racist, so on television to say lincoln and not tell the audience there were many white radical abolitionists who were far more liberal toward africanamericans. Thank you. Host before we have professor schweikart answer heavy seen the movie lincoln and what did you think . Caller i did see it and it was a typical eurocentric movie that leaves out the role of Frederick Douglass and the Africanamerican Community in establishing the thirteenth amendment. I thought it was a good film. Typical eurocentric film that distorts history but considering the nature of what lincoln brought to this country is a wonderful film. He was the greatest president the country ever produced and he end they deuce most evil system of oppression world has ever seen, american slavery. Guest i am glad he mentioned Frederick Douglass. There is none other than Frederick Douglass who says of lincoln that he was extremely enlightened and that lincoln talked slow but acted fast and decisively. And Frederick Douglass was a phenomenal admirer of lincoln. Douglas does not go around quoting Thaddeus Stevens for the others because those guys despite the fact that their views were maybe in the callers mind more advanced, the fact was they were too radical for the time to accomplish anything. Nobody was really listening to Thaddeus Stevens that everybody listened to lincoln. Host what about his point on american christianity and slavery . Guest i didnt hear all that. Host american christianity perpetuated slavery. Guest that is true to and extend. Certainly christian teachings in the south changed beginning around 1790, 1800. They changed from a Necessary Evil kind of approach to the positive good kind of approach and you see ministers coming up with the wildest kind of explanation that mark of cain, and those writing for influential africanamerican ministers, he did a series on racism in america, and this is one of the things we talked about, the biblical precepts dont support slavery in the concept was used in america in any way, shape or form. Jews had slavery but under strict conditions. Had to be voluntary what would the founders say . a patriots answers to americas most pressing problems seven years, there was no racial or hereditary slavery in the jewish system and the system that originally came into christianity. The idea that these guys distort the biblical record is horrendous. This would have been fixed if you had free access of information in the south but of course all abolitionists tracks were shut down by southern postmasters. You couldnt sell Uncle Toms Cabin in the south. Ministers to preach against slavery were tarred and feathered and driven out by government. Here is a case where you have government oppression, government restriction of the free market. I think slavery would have ended if there had been a truly free market . Know. Because slaves were capital. Lincolns mistake in thinking that he could buy and a mad pace waves at a fundamental flaw, and was with each additional slave that you purchase to liberate, the value of the next slave goes up. So you would eventually get to the point that you couldnt afford to buy them even in the u. S. Host in your book seven events that made America America you write about the dread scott decision. The decision in 1857 represented a unique moment in which the Supreme Court managed to simultaneously abuse the constitution, ruled against humanrights, severely damage the economy and help start a war all in one fell swoop. Guest that was quite a trick. Host explain. Guest he was a former slave holder determined to interpret dread scotts appeal, at that time scott was already free, to interpret scotts appeal not only in such a way as to say scott cant bring a case, he is a slave, but to make a grander ruling on all of american slave legislation including the northwest ordinance which prohibited slavery in the american northwest, including the missouri compromise which said all territory above the 3630 line had to be free, this is why Martin Van Buren got so agitated because all of the state including south dakota were going to be free states and outlaw his goal was to overturn all of that. And he does and he persuades two of the northern justices to go along so that it looks like bipartisan court. Heres where bipartisanship is bad. Game that a bipartisan bad decision and starts a panic and this is the only part that i claim any kind of the original rights to, i did a paper probably most prominent paper i have ever written in 1991 on the panic of 1857 and i think we should convincingly at least so far after 20 years no one has raise a serious challenge, that the dread scott decision opened up the territories to bleeding kansas. Was going to make the dakotas, wyoming, all those territories look like kansas, with bloodshed and dollar rests. As a result, what dread scott did was caused the railroads running only east and west to just collapsed. None of the ones running north and south. That in turn caused the banks in new york city to fail provoking the panic of 1857. Host you are watching booktv on cspan2. This is our caller in Depth Program. Where this month our guest is university of dayton history professor Larry Schweikart. Robert in livingston, montana. Good afternoon. Caller good morning. What year did you graduate from a as you . Guest 1972. Caller 62. In all your travels and universities, writings and etc. Have you found any university that teaches two courses on the Federal Reserve . And have you read secrets of the Federal Reserve, a creature of Jekyll Island and montana, high, white and hanson chapters 21 . Guest i have not read that but i know the essence of that book. I have not found i do not teach in the Economics Department but i have not found any history departments that teach about the Federal Reserve. I am a dissenter in terms of demonizing the fed. I dont think the fed does a very good job put on the other hand i dont believe in conspiracies. The fact is eugene elson white has a terrific book called regulation reform of American Banking and he traces the fact that the Federal Reserve was the result of 30 years of efforts by local, small, montana, arizona, nebraska, South Carolina, unit bankers seeking to reform the Banking System to minimize the power of new york city and they thought they had done that with the fed by splitting into 12 districts of which new york is only one in missouri has two, providing a lender of last resort so it would not be the new york fed or jpmorgan. So i understand the concerns of the fed. This is what i told prof. Friedman when we debated going down the danube, my view is competition solves problems and if you allow free and unlimited private note issue, i said allow people to print their own money, you will soon minimize the power of the fed because you will have groups and institutions whose money will be more valuable than dollars and the fed will have to compete with that. Host last summer booktv interview the author of the creature from Jekyll Island. If you would like to watch that go to our web site booktv. Org. In the upper lefthand corner you will see a search function. Type in Jekyll Island and you will be able to watch it on line. R j in brooklyn, new york, you are on booktv with Larry Schweikart. I you with us . Please go ahead. Caller mr schweikart, i have a brief question regarding the past. You use the term conservative, we know it is a wing of the republican party, it always makes me wonder because what are you trying to conserve . You look at the titles of your books, pounding of is, european slave holders, these are people, anybody in who is a minority these other people we look up to, we start from that point. Conservative, what you trying to conserve . The next question is you can tell america, everybody not being indoctrinated, reading for themselves, not becoming just christian because the everybody is thinking for themselves and a problem the conservative movement is having is different people of different religions, people who are hispanics, minorities, how do you as a conservative, how are you able to maintain a conservative viewpoint . How can intellectuals based on an ideology that doesnt based on nothing but european ancestry and culture . That would be my question for you . Guest thanks. First of all i grew up in chandler, ariz. With tons of conservative hispanics. Wasnt that all of back then to have conservative hispanics. What has happened in the meantime is many groups have become wards of the state, as it were. It happened with africanamericans, largely in the Great Society. People want to blame fdr but really the shift occurred in the Great Society with a single program, afdc that we dont need to get into. In terms of the term itself, conservatism, im a political conservative and again, we cant look with present to spies on people in the past and say they were slaveholders. Most of the world were slaveholders at that time. The muslims were the greatest slave holding area region in the world at the time. Certainly the vast majority of slaves did not come to america but when south of america to cuba and the west indies so again when you apply present test glasses to the past you are asking for trouble. But political conservatives, what the founders wanted to do was to maintain the rights of englishmen as outlined by john locke and keep the state small so that individuals would have the greatest opportunity and freedom to pursue their dreams. Host Larry Schweikart is our guest. Here is the cover of some of his 20 plus books. In 2004 a patriots history of the u. S. From columbuss discovery to the war on terror, americas victories, why america wins wars and will win the war on terror in 2006. 48 liberal lies about American History that you probably leaned in school came out in 2008. Host the philosophical setting of these primary sources. Does this book include the typical documents, the constitution, the declaration of independence, etc. Guest no. And we deliberately left those out because we figure that most people who are going to get readers, most home schoolers, for example, theyre already going to have that. We wanted to include representative documents that arent always found. Obamas cairo speech, for example. Host why was that included . Guest that was included because i think it was quite revealing about how barack obama sees the world, how he sees americas role in the world and how he sees islam. There were a number of other documents in there that i think were quite representative of the time. Mellons booklet on taxation, for example, is incredibly appropriate to todays debate. Because Andrew Mellon came in in 1920. You never heard of the Great Depression of 1920. But we had 22 unemployment. It was very high in some parts. Most unemployment was reaching on average well over 15 . We were already producing at 100 , and here come all these veterans, so youre going to have some unemployment. Host treasury secretary, correct . Guest mellon . Yeah. And, of course, hes not in until 1921 when harding is elected and mellon comes in. Mellon does a study of tax revenues x he says it looks like tax revenues have been declining a little bit. Why are tax revenues declining . And in his study he found that tax rates had gone up steadily. And every time the tax rate went up more, the revenues declined a little bit more from that group, and he concludes that, you know, it might be better to actually lower tax rates, and the government would get more money. Its an early version of the lover curve laffer curve that theres two points on a curve in which the government will get no money. Nobodys going to give away 100 of their check. So mellon makes an argument for lowering taxes. What follows is the roaring 20s. We get down to an astounding 1. 6 unemployment. Now, a president today who could get 1. 6 unemployment, theyd just blow up Mount Rushmore and just put him up there. I mean, it would be treated with that kind of appropriate level of achievement. And yet somehow the roaring 20s are kind of demonized as this period that leads up to the Great Depression. Well, no, the 20s are not the cause of the depression. The cause of the depression more than anything is the smoot smootholley tariff. Host did you think about putting in his race speech in philadelphia from 08 . Guest sure. We wanted to use his hope and change speech and could not get rights to it. This one was a Public Document host hope and change not public . Guest as far as i know. Thats what i was told. I could be wrong, but that was the first one we asked to get. We wanted to use a couple of other speeches, as i recall, and we couldnt get rights to use them. So all the time you cant get the rights to use everything you want to use. But, um, you know, we have the agenda 21 which i dont think you going to find in a lot of readers which americans really ought to be aware of host which is . Guest agenda 21 is the u. N. s agenda for Climate Change and all these other social changes that theyre going to institute through controlling urban growth, Economic Growth and elements of the u. S. Government are, unfortunately, already adopting elements of agenda 21, and americans dont even know its out there. Again, im not a conspiracy theorist. I dont think this is being done under the radar, its all quite public. Host john in syracuse, new york, please go ahead with your question or comment for Larry Schweikart. Caller yes, how you doing, mr. Schweikart . Yes, briefly i would like you to comment on your book about that america will win the war against terrorism and what happened is back when the ussr was involved with afghanistan, they lost the war because afghanistan did not have a fixed army. Therefore, its just about impossible to win a war of that nature. Because you go pack to vietnam you go back to vietnam, they were similar to afghanistan. And the United States backed out of that conflict. And also i heard somewhere where George Washington was the eighth president and not the first. Would you please comment . Thank you. Host well, why dont you start with washington guest with the eighth . Host thats right. Guest ive never heard that one before. Maybe ill wikipedia that one and see what comes up. I would argue vietnam is a very poor example of how to win a guerrilla war. A better example of one that we fought and won quite handily was the filipino insurrection and the wars of 19011911. Interestingly n americas victories i point out that the percent of land forces fighting in the philippines as a share of total land army, that is army and marines, was very close to the percent of troops we had fighting in iraq and afghanistan in 2001 through 2010 as a percent of our total land forces. Guest malaya is one that the government won. The average length of time it takes to win an insurgency war is about six years. Host Larry Schweikart, you wrote that book that was published in 2006, where in your view do we stand in the war on terror . Guest i think that weve made some Great Strides in some ways. We have not experienced another major attack on measurings homeland. On americas homeland. I think alqaeda is pretty much defanged and was before we killed Osama Bin Laden. I think weve taken out the whole deck of cards, three or four others. In americas victories, for example, and i dont think that bush intended this, but what happened was by putting troops in iraq, we sucked in virtually all of alqaeda from around the world. And so i did a study, its in the conclusion of the revised edition only of americas victories. What i found were iraqi morgue statistics. And in those morgue statistics they separated out iraqis, other. Well, our soldiers had their own morgue and handling procedures, so we would not be other. These were clearly not iraqi soldiers. So who are the other . Be youve got civilians, who are the others who are being killed . They would be terrorists. And so i evaluated, added up all those and found that from 2001 to about mid 2006 we had killed conservatively about 40,000 terrorists, most of them in iraq, most of them alqaeda. We had captured, by official statistics, over 25,000. Using traditional military wounded to kill ratios, i cut it in half. Instead of 8 to 1, they probably dont have very good medical care, i assume 4 to 1. You can figure another 100150,000 wounded and typical desertions are about 10 , so you figure another 10,000 deserted. In other words, we captured and culled or wounded or took off the battlefield almost a quarter of a million terrorists or insurgents. Nobody survives those kinds of losses. The persian empire gave up trying to conquer greece when it lost about 300,000 men with an empire of 20 million people. So i think that we badly damaged alqaeda and the world terrorist network. Its also a mistake to say, well, you cant win a war against an ideology. We clearly won a war against fascism, we won a war against communism, and we won a war against japanese pew she doism. You can defeat ideologies and guerrilla groups, and i think weve dope a great job so far done a great job so far. It does appear that some of the effort in afghanistan is unraveling, but thats a little too current event toss go there. Host gregory, montclair, new jersey, you on booktv on cspan2. Caller im amazed by your disingenuousness. First of all, those terrorists were in iraq because we invaded it. Second of all, the previous caller when he said washington was the eighth president , its common in trivia games to count the seven president s of the Continental Congress under the articles of confederation as the first president s. I know thats pseudo history. What i really want to talk about was a comment you made early on in the program playing down the effect of columbus. I thinkyou look at the i think if you look at the chronicles of the explorers of the generation of columbus, youll find that the population of north and south america was vastly more than it was than when those areas were settled 100 years later. I also think that youll find that its disingenuous to compare the slavery that was imposed in the western hemisphere to any other sort of slavery both in its duration and in the fact that it involved the wholesale importation of peoples into a new place. And not only was there much more slavery in the southern hemisphere, yes, but lets not forget that after the war of jenkins ear, the slave trade was monopolized by the british pretty much until they abolished slavery. What i really wanted to talk about host you know what, gregory . Theres a hot on the table there. Lets get an answer from professor schweikart. Guest first of all, lets start with iraq. In fact, the information is pretty clear that asal sa carry himself showed that foreign fighters were just pouring into iraq after we went in, so i think i use the example of a roach motel. We set up a roach motel, and the roaches came in. In terms of columbus, thats why i have that large chart that says did columbus kill all the indians x i have some of the most recent scholarship you will find. One of the things you will notice is that every single new piece of scholarship that comes out reduces the number of estimated, ill call them indians, in the new world with every single new estimate, it gets lower and lower and lower and lower. So this notion that the indian population numbers were just decimated is just simply wrong. Dont do trivia a lot, so i dont know the one about washington. In terms of slavery, im sorry, the callers simply wrong. Islam you can slavery was by far the worst in the world. It was perpetual. They were going everywhere. They were going up and down the coast of africa, and this is where we yet the very we get the very word slave, from the slaves that the muslims were taking out of eastern europe. So hes right, there is no comparison. Islamic slavery was worse. Host book we havent talked about, american entrepreneur, came out in 2010. Who was jack daniels . Guest jack daniels was a baptist whiskey maker, its either in kentucky or tennessee, i forget which. And he founded, you know, people had a hankering for his product. And he became quite famous at selling jack daniels whiskey. Interestingly enough at almost the same time, dr. Thomas welch comes out with a grape juice so that people dont have to drink wine, and we they can get the se wine taste. You can get entrepreneurs out of almost any product. Host why did you include jack daniels in your book . Guest because he was a successful entrepreneurs. My goal was to include as many entrepreneurs from if as many walks of life as possible. By the way, thats i coauthored that with lynn pearson doty, but that is an expansion of a book i wrote in 2000 called entrepreneurial adventure. And i wrote that book originally to be a general trade book. But it was picked up by harcourt as a textbook, and i learned a harsh lesson that textbooks dont ever get into bookstores. It was written for a broader public, but it never got out to a broader public. It was quite successful as a textbook, but when we wrote american entrepreneur, again, our goal was to make sure we had something that would go out to the broader public in book stores. Host you mention that jack daniels was a baptist, and in your book american entrepreneur you write capitalisms spiritual side is most clearly seen in the activities of entrepreneurs who constantly must act on faith. Ultimately, they must believe that their idea, product, service or business will succeed. Guest yeah. And i think authors know this as well as anybody, right . Because, certainly, your first book for some people our tenth, twelfth book, you have to write it first. And you submit it to the publisher like a sacrifice. Here is, here is my creation. Please say you love it. But you dont get a dime from it until its already accepted and put out and published and sold. So you really have to have that leap of faith that what youve done is worth while, that people will like it and that youre going to submit it out onto the market and see what happens. Its a very spiritual exercise. Host do you have a favorite entrepreneur that you mention in this book in many in this book . You talk about isaac singer, charles post cereals earl tupper of tupperware, etc. Guest i think post is one of my favorites. Hes washed up. I mean, hes done everything. Hes been a schoolteacher, sold insurance, and his health is failing, and hes a middleaged guy. I mean, its just like ray crock is a 55yearold dixie cup saleman. This is al bundy, right . Hes a more than middleaged shoe salesman. And yet post goes up for Health Reasons to battle creek, michigan, to the cel olds kelloggs. They themselves are these great entrepreneurs. And post doesnt get well. And so he goes to another sanatorium where he comes up with this stuff which is a coffee substitute, right . And then he starts coming up with a cereal, and its very crunchy, and it tastes like grapes, so he calls it grapenuts each though it doesnt have grapes or nuts in it. And he starts the post cereal empire out of almost nothing. So hes one of my favorites. Host j. B. In toledo, thanks for holding. Your on with professor Larry Schweikart of the university of dayton. Caller thanks for taking my call. A couple of issues. One, you spoke of the johnson Jfk Assassination connection to the vietnam war which you discredited. I was just wondering what you thought of jfks executive order 11110 in relation to his assassination. Host j. B. , will you tell us what executive order 11110 is . Caller yes. Yes, im sure that the professor can give you a more succinct explanation. I have another question. And i would wish that you had not cut off the guy who was talking about disingenuous, because he had another question, but let me ask another question. Can you give me the import of the issuance of greenbacks during abraham lincolns presidency . Guest sure. Im not sure what order hes referring to. I suspect its the order in which jfk removed a thousand engineers from vietnam after an Engineering Battalion had completed its job, and this is used by all the conspiracy theorists to say, see, jfk was going to get us out of vietnam. I dont see how you make that argument when kennedy had 600 american advisers in vietnam when he starts and hes got 16,000 when hes assassinated. By his own admission in a speech, in fact, he later said later he said that at one point we have, quote, 25,000 American Military or personnel in southeast asia. So i dont know if he let the cat out of the bag and he actually had more there, if he was counting everybody in thailand, i dont and he never made clear what he was talking about. Again, im not a conspiracy theorist. I dont think i think oswald acted alone. If he didnt, show me the bullet and show me the audio soundtrack. Because we have no other shell casings, no other bullets that day. The guys from csi would say, hey, theres no forensic evidence, you know . And we have audio recordings, theres three shots. What was his other question . Guest about green pacs and abraham lincoln. Guest yes. Lincoln doesnt have a lot to do with greenbacks. His secretary of the treasury from ohio is the one who comes up with the idea x. The unions job in the civil war, one of their main problems was to fund the war. And chase comes up with a number of methods to fund the war. He starts the first income tax which is soon ruled unconstitutional. He borrows a lot through u. S. Bonds. But he also inflates. He turns on the Printing Press. And the greenbacks were a part of that effort to inflate the currency. Unlike National Bank notes which were created in 186263 which had to be backed by gold and silver, greenbacks had that famous line on them that our money has on today, this note is legal tenderer for all debts public and private. They were not backed by gold and silver. So it was a deliberate inflationary view. They issued 480 million of them. It does not inflate in the north for a lot of reasons. A, they are convertible into National Bank notes which are convertible into gold and silver. B, 480 million sounds like a lot, but in terms of money its not that much money in the north. And, c, genius of chase, he accepted both National Bank notes and greenbacks as payment for taxes. The confederacy does not accept confederate notes for payment of confederate taxes. By doing that chase imbued even the paper money with some value. Because you could always pay your taxes in it. In the south confederate notes had no value whatsoever. You couldnt even pay your taxes with them. Host but, Larry Schweikart, wasnt there a lot of problems with counterfeit bills prior to a National Currency . Guest yes. After the National Bank and currency act. But prior to that time you had, as we talked about earlier, competitive money. And competitive money, and youd have your Printing Press and why would people take your dollars . Well, because you always redeemed them in gold and silver. And word gets out, i had in one of my books on banking and the American South i had evidence of a, an atlanta bank whose notes were the sole circulating medium in chicago in the 1840s, as i recall. Could be the 50s, i think it was the 40s. But because you always backed them in gold, and because they had a great reputation. But it wasnt just the reputation. They had in the day something called Bank Note Reporter which was a telephone book, be you will, of all the the notes that were out there. And you could immediately turn to, okay, ive got schweikart bucks from dayton, ohio, how valuable are these . Well, theyre only selling for a. 3 discount, theyre okay. And you could immediately find out if any money was of any value or, hey, if its 50 discounted, dont take it. Host ron, huntington beach, california, you are on booktv on cspan2. Professor Larry Schweikart is our guest. Caller good morning from southern california. Guest hi. Caller my question has to do with you wrote a book, i believe you said what would the founders say, my question has to do with Political Parties and, um, just a little context. Jefferson said that if he had to go to heaven with a party, he wouldnt go there at all. George washington wrote about the baneful effects of the pitter of party. Madison the spirit of party. Madison in federal 14 wrote all sorts of nasty things about factions and parties. You know, just in the context of their effect on the separation of powers, because, you know, you have democrats and the executive branch, you have democrats in the legislative branch, and, you know, politicalization of the Supreme Court based on, you know, the executive and the mettive branch legislative plan with. Working together to put people on the court. The choice on election day, you know, you have two small minorities that decide the choices on, for the general election. And the election, you know, the effect on representatives, representative democracy, i mean, do we really live in a democracy because of the effects of Party Leaders and such . My question would be what would the founders say about Political Parties . Im curious about what your response would be. Guest okay, yeah, thank you. And you mentioned some of the most appropriate quotations there, but you did not mention what madison went on to say after he denounces Political Parties. He then says but theyre necessary. He said let ambition check ambition. Madison was the first one to say that we need competition among, in the political process among different groups. Now, madison had in mind dozens of factions that would thoroughly diminish the ability of any one group to control the government. This is where our friend Martin Van Buren comes back in. Van buren gets it down to two parties, and the way van buren does that is that when he sets up the spoil system, he makes it so you have to appeal to a large segment of the American Public to get elected. We have a twoparty, winnertakeall, singlememberdistrict system unlike, for example, israel or france where you have proportional representation. This takes away the extremes. Thats the good news. Bad news is it pushes all parties toward the middle, and so third parties, im sorry to say, dont have a hope in hell. Because over time due to the spoils system theyre not going to have any seats in congress, theyre not going to have any control of the executive. Hence, they wont have jobs to give away. And without those jobs to continually give away to your supporters, they arent going to continue to be supporters. So, for example, the libertarians might elect a single, you know, ron paultype to a single district, but over time youre not going to vote libertarian for presidency if you want to actually get anything done and or if you want to see your friends rewarded, which was the basis of van burens system. Is so so you can thank van buren for the party system but, unfortunately, its what we have, and its what were going to have to live with. Host okay, a couple of tweets. Jose says, okay, buying this one is a nobrainer, american entrepreneur, wish i could say that word. And brian tweets in that executive order 11110 is about silver certificates, not vietnam, and he went to wikipedia to find that information. Guest okay. Host so thats all we have at this point to work with. Guest that might refer then to the notion that you could no longer Exchange Silver certificates for gold or silver. This isnt made official, of course, until the nation takes until nixon takes the nation off gold in 71. But that probably is the context there. Host tane in king george, virginia, please go ahead with your question or comment. Caller hi, many schweikart. Guest hi. Caller in doing research for my book, i came across a question im hoping you can answer. I included in the apep dix for my book the various conclusions for ratification from the original constitution. And in looking at those and in looking at how the final bill of rights was written, theres a huge disconnect. Has anyone done a study or published anything that explains why the bill of rights used the language that they did . Guest yeah, and i cant name the books off the top of my head, but there are a number of good, scholarly books out will that deal with not only the ratification of the constitution, but the bill of rights. I think the first draft of the bill of rights, i could be wrong, but i think it had 13 different rights enunciated . It was 12, okay, i was pretty close. And, yeah, i mean, i think that theres some good stuff out there. If you just go to amazon and put in ratification and bill of rights, i think youd come up with probably the top ten scholarly books in a heartbeat. Host this is our monthly in Depth Program on booktv on cspan2. One author, his or her body of work. This month its history professor Larry Schweikart. A patriots history of the u. S. Came out in 04. Americas victories in 2006. 48 liberal lies about American History, 2008. Seven events that made America America was his next book. American entrepreneur also came out in 2010. What would the found orers say a patriots answers to americas most pressing problems, 2011. The the patriots history reader, and a patriots history of the modern world, basically the first half of a two twopart series on that one. Again, very quickly, why the use of a patriots history . Guest the term was, first of all, to identify with the reader that this is not going to be a volume that bashes america. Its going to present an optimistic, proamerican approach to history. It doesnt mean we dont include warts. We have plenty of warts many there. But its not going to be my country always wrong, i think was the line that mike allen wrote in patriots history. Its not my country right or wrong, but its certainly not my country always wrong which is where, for example, zinn goes. Host patriots history. Com is your web site. Guest all one word. And you can see the film at www. Rockinthewall. Com. Host and which film is that . Guest thats rockin in wall, and you can see i started a Little Film Company since we did that, and you can see all of our film trailers at rockin the wall studios. Com. Host so a couple different web sites. An hour and a half to go in our conversation with professor schweikart. Every month the producer of this program, tonya davis, likes to send the author a questionnaire to get some more background on the authors. We want to show you the answers that she got. Host and as we continue in depth for this month, our guest is professor Larry Schweikart, university of dayton. Want to start off with this email that weve received from james in tyler, texas. Given that you listed quite a few musical greatest influences, he says as a fellow drummer i would like to know your opinion as to the greatest rock drummer of all time and who was our greatest president. Guest well, um, its a tough question only because its like when you talk about greatest guitar players. You have to always throw in people like bebe king. Even though theyre not with Eleven Distribution or Clapton Hendrix or clapton. So i always go to ringo starr. Ringo was a great drummer, and most drummers will cite ringo starr as a great drummer. Most nondrummer musicians will say he was lame, which is kind of funny. That said, in terms of just at his peak, carmine apiece hofstra nil la fudge cactus, he backed up ozzy osbourne, rod stewart. When he was in his prime, he was by or far, if my view, the best. John bonham of led zeppelin said that he learned most of his stuff from carmine. I really like ginger baker of cream, but its interesting that baker said in his own biography that he was not a rock drummer, hes a jazz drummer. By the way, hes a very good polo player, too, did you know that . He was not a rock drummer, he was a jazz drummer. So i would go in horde probably with carmine, ginger baker, ringo starr, john bonham and i love the guy from the tubes, native arizonan, prairie prince. Coolidge kept his hands off everything. We were at peace, we had a phenomenal economy. The only thing that i criticize coolidge for is he was a little too noninterventionist, and i think contributed very, very slightly to the rise of nazi germany and the japanese in terms of not wanting to get involved with some of the things. Host professor schweikart, you list under favorite writers the pendergast series by Douglas Preston and lincoln child. What is that . Guest yeah. Pendergast is a fbi agent. I, the sense i get from their books is hes very tall and almost an albino. Very interesting looking guy. He can use a gun, but hes one of these guys that more often solves crimes with his mind. They wrote a whole series, one of the earliest ones was cabinet of the your cowsties which is your curiosities which is a tremendous book. They then got the relic which was made into aoff i have, but it doesnt feature pendergast even though hes in the book very slightly, and then they have a series, dance of death and wheel of darkness and a couple of others. Those are tremendous fiction books. Host are members of steppenwolf still alive . Guest i dont know. Host what was their biggest hit . Guest of course, born to be wild. And we got them on their reunion tour. And it was all the original members, you know . And growing up in rock and roll, and these were some of the earlier guys, so by then hendrix and the fudge and zeppelin and all the rest were out there, you look back at those early guys, the soap bubble all those guys were so lame and when i heard hem in concert them in concert, my jaw dropped at how tight and professional they were. We just had newfound respect after that. Host who is paul johnson, and why do you list him as one of your favorite authors . Guest paul johnson is a british author. He was the editor of one of the large british newspapers or magazines, i cant remember which. You probably know this, right . Host cant remember offhand either. Guest okay. But he saw every news article that came across his desk for 30 years, and he internalized all of it. And he wrote a book called modern times, came out in the late 80s. It was a history of the world from the 20s to the 80s that was just masterful in going through World History. He got everything. But he would make allusions to tough that students to stuff that students today would be very helpless. The names he throws out and just assumes because youre a wellread person youre going to know who, you know, the third president of tanzania was or Something Like that. At any rate, it was revised and updated in 91, so its now a history of the world from the 20s to the 90s. I cant really use it for world civilization classes. Its just too deep. Theres just too much there. Host and paul johnson has been a guest on this program as well. You can go to booktv. Org, type in paul johnson in the search function, and you can watch it online. In this tweet for you, professor what is your opinion of Alexander Hamilton and his relationship with George Washington . It comes from somebody tweeting under the moniker horoscope of usa. Guest im a big fan of hamilton. This torques off any number of my conservative friends, but i like hamilton a lot. The biography of hamilton is masterful. Hamilton put people in their context, right . Hamilton came out of a mercantilist background. He did not know capitalism. It was fairly new to him. And so when he seeks solutions for the american economy, they tend to drift toward bigger government solutions. However, as i show in what would the founders say, hamiltons first challenge was a panic in 1791, a bank panic. He refused to bail out thomas willing, i think his first name was thomas, who was the perpetrator of the panic. He didnt pull a gm bailout. He said, sorry, bud, youre on your own. But in keeping with his kind of mercantilist background, he quietly went to all the private banks in new york city and said we want you guys to lend to each other because we dont want this to become a citywide panic. So i thought that was a Perfect Blend of not using government power to bail out an individual who had messed up, but using the Governments Authority to encourage people to bail each other out. I think hamilton is a tremendous secretary of the treasury, and he was very close to washington. He wrote all of washingtons speeches as i alluded to earlier. Quite brave man. He charged the bunker at yorktown, and he was one of the two men to charge one of the guardhouses at trenton. Host laura tweets in this professor cant be conservative if he supported bush who doubled the size of government and used terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Guest thats your opinion. Host jeff emails in to you and, by the way, if you want to dial in and talk with professor schweikart directly, well put the numbers up on the screen in just a second. 2025853880 for those of you in the east and central time zones. 5853881 in you live in the mountain and pacific time zones. This is an email from jess. Some historian said, and i paraphrase history is a prism by which we could understand the present and see broad outlines of the future. My question, from the way its going on all fronts, economic, political, moral, demographic, etc. , where do you see america situated in the next 50 years . Guest um, you know, yoda said always in motion, is the future. And, um, im torn. Because if you go down a linear model of his prism, i think hes right. Were in, were in trouble. Certainly, we cannot keep up with 16, 17 trillion debt. You have a sequester battle over either 1 to 2 depending on whose numbers you accept of the growth of the federal budget, not just 12 of the budget. And its heralded as the end of the world. How are we ever going to tame a 17 trillion debt if we cant deal with that . So on the one hand if you just go by a linear progression, youd have to say by 2050 we probably wouldnt even be here. The other side of me sees how rapidly in history, literally overnight, things can change. For example, in may 1942 we were in deep trouble. The japanese had yet to lose a single battle in the pacific. They controlled onethird of the pacific, more people and territory than any empire in Human History. They had blown all of our battleships out of the water. They had already sunk one carrier. We only had two carriers actively left in the pacific at that time. And yet within one month they essentially lost the war. After the battle of midway, they could not win the war. Might not lose they might not lose if we gave up trying to prosecute the war, but they could no longer win the war just one month later. And so i think and you can do any number of these things to see how rapidly history turns on just one or two sudden events. I mean, van buren whom weve talked about a lot forms the American Party system in less than four year, and its continuing to shape us still today. Host bill from manhattan beach, california, is the caller. Go ahead, bill. Caller hello, professor schweikart. Youre a hero to me primarily because you insist on the truth, and i dont mind hearing about the warts as long as we can figure out a way to not do that or solve it. But i have a bonn the pick a bone to pick. Coincidentally, both issues are about roosevelt. You straightened me out when you took apart mr. Stint nets book about the day of deceit. Roosevelt knew that pearl harbor was going to be attacked and so forth. And i respect your research and so forth, so i stand corrected. But when you get onto the Federal Reserve and you say it was a good thing that we got off the Gold Standard, that, sir, is a disaster. Guest no, i did not say that. I didnt say that. I said that the Federal Reserve can work so long as you have a system of competition whether its private competition, i think other states can, you know, the yen, the peso, whatever, can work a little bit toward that. But i didnt say that we should have gone off the Gold Standard. I said that when the fed was conceived, nobody thought that a Federal Reserve would act without a Gold Standard in place. Does that help . Caller but look at the book by wayne jett on amazon, its called the fruits of graft. And itll tell you in there with Good Research from morgan thaw, roosevelt caused the depression by buying gold and then rallying anytime the sense that he didnt create currency to match it. And that drove down our money supply, and that was the cause of the depression. Roosevelt knew it. Look at fruits of graft, please. Guest well, let me give you a slightly different take on that. I certainly would agree, certainly, with burt fulsome my friend who did new deal or raw deal. I would certainly agree that roosevelt exacerbated a temporary recession and turned it into the Great Depression. I have a friend, former colleague at uc Santa Barbara, hes retired now. Steve did a paper that very few people have or ever cited, yet ive never seen anybody really refute it in which he argues that the minimum wage law which first came into effect in 1934 as a temporary measure drove down hiring and Business Expectations to a catastrophic level. And we never would have gotten out of the depression as long as the minimum wage law made it such that an employer had to pay where he formerly would pay ten employees a dollar each, now he had to pay 2 but he could only hire five employees. Okay . So i certainly agree that roosevelt had a major role to play in exacerbating the depression. I would argue that when roosevelt took us off gold, he did the country major favor for this reason the world was on the gold start at the time in the 1920s, but slowly nation after nation had gone off the Gold Standard while the u. S. Was on the Gold Standard. Well, you know greshams law, bad money drives out good. And what was happening was other countries were redeeming dollars in gold. Gold was flowing out of the country. Gold is the reserve or was the reserve for our nations banks. We were drastically destabilizing the nations banks by allowing an outflow of gold. So what roosevelt did was by taking the country off gold he stopped that outflow. I think thats one of the few really good things roosevelt did. Let me mention to you since you brought him up ten ets book. I did a review in a journal called continuity. Since that time a number of other things have come out such as the one i mentioned by Phil Jacobson that showed that, in fact, the research was off. What i showed in my review, i went through every single phrase where stennet said something, what i would call an active and conclusive sentence such as this means roosevelt knew. In every single unstance i found in his book, i think i counted 147, he said almost certainly or roosevelt should have almost certainly known, surely roosevelt knew. He couldnt say with a single l footnote one time a piece of evidence that showed roosevelt knew about the pending attack on pearl harbor, and thats when i said this books full of it. Host alan lazarus emails in from shreveport, louisiana your guest misspoke when he attributed the phrase entangling alliances to washington. Guest jefferson. Host jefferson used it in his first inaugural. Washingtons phrase was permanent alliances. Guest i think though, sir, if you look at the drafts, i could be wrong, but i think if you look at the drafts of washingtons speech that hamilton wrote, im pretty sure entangling alliances was in the draft. Either way, they both shared the view that at least for the time being we could not form an entangling alliance with somebody else. Host what was the gilded age . Guest gilded age, roughly 17801900. Its a derogatory term. Well, all these people were getting rich, kind of at the expense of everybody else. The fact is during the gilded age the wages of the average American Worker skyrocketed. People got to be better off faster than at any other time in Human History. It was really quite remarkable. And this is all, almost all due to the efforts of people like vanderbilt, carnegie, rockefeller, morgan, you know, the socalled robberbarons who i think were, in fact, captains of industry. Host and thomas henderson, fyi, just tweeted in what was your view of the robberbarons . Do you want to expound on that at all . Guest sure. Ill give a plug to burt fulsome, he has a great book called myth of the robberbarons. And i think he shows that these guys were indispensable. Carnegie was worth more to america and its future than all the people, unfortunately, who worked for carnegie. He did something no one else could do. He found a way to make lowcost steel that was good and sell it. Rockefeller found a way not only to make very lowcost kerosene for home illumination, i argue rockefeller saved the whales, that he did more to save the whales than greenpeace ever did. Because interior illumination of the day was whale oil. But after rockys kerosene, whale oil was out. Whaling came to a dramatic not total end, but it fell off dramatically. I tell my students that i think if James Cameron ever gets to the bottom of the marianas trench, hes going to find a statue to john d. Rockefeller erected by the whales, and once a year they do a pilgrimage to the statue and do the whale thing. Host doug in mercer island, washington, please go ahead with your question or comment. Caller good morning, gentlemen. I very much appreciate what cspan does. Im hoping to give a little ammo to the professor for his myth about jfks assassination being due to a conspiracy to continue the vietnam war. I had a radio show many years ago called relooking history, and i had donald kagan of yale and walt rostow who was National Security adviser both to kennedy and johnson for a while and asked him that very question. And he said, bunk. He said jack kennedy, before he died, had no intention of withdrawing from vietnam. Thank you. Guest no, youre absolutely right. And, um, im sure many of of our viewers have seen jfk, the oliver stone movie, and the premise of that is that johnson has kennedy killed in order to sell more bell helicopters, because bell helicopters were used in vietnam, and they were made in texas. Now, theres a small problem with that. Nobody even thought of using helicopters in a widespread, antiguerrilla move until 1966 which is made famous in another book, we were soldiers once and young, when the seventh cavalry began using helicopters to drop troops into hot zones. So the notion that three years earlier johnson has the prescience going to be needing some bell helicopters here soon, its just nonsense. Host next call comes from cliff in claireton, pennsylvania. Caller yes, professor. Guest hi. Caller yes. You mentioned that you werent a conspiracy theorist on the Jfk Assassination. Guest right. Caller i was wondering if you were aware that howard hunt, former oss, former cia and watergate burglars on his deathbed made a taped confession that he was a back bencher on it and that cord meyer from the cia ran the assassination . Guest yeah. Theres all these deathbed confessions that come out, for example, jack ruby on his death bed apparently told a fellow convict that it was all Lee Harvey Oswald and nobody else. You know, who do you believe on all this . There is a conspiracy book out there, a more recent one that i think adds a little bit of light which is, um, im drawing a blank. Big, brown book. And the guys argue that kennedy one of them, okay, let me back up. One of my main arguments against conspiracy is that Bobby Kennedy was attorney general, the top Law Enforcement officer in america. His own brother was killed. If thats the case, if its my brother, im going to move heaven and earth to find out who did it. Yet bobby doesnt. So either bobbys convinced it was a single shooter, or theres Something Else in the works. Well, this new book, i think its called legacy of secrecy, um, that has come out has some revealing information that the kennedys were involved with a guy nameddal maid da, a cuban general whom they were backing to replace castro when and if they assassinated castro. And theyre, in this book, their explanation is that bobby did not go after a pullscale investigation a fullscale investigation because it would have outeddal med da and exposed him and revealed the source. Again, a tidbit, i dont think that proves the point, but i think its interesting. Host jim emails in, and he talks about a new cspan series. Very quickly, theres a new cspan series that just began a week or two back. Its first ladies. And each week well be looking at all the first ladies. Well go for the entire year, coming up this week is abigail adams. Mondays, 9 p. M. Eastern time live on cspan. But his email is in conjunction with the new series on first ladies, did the british ever contemplate attacking mount vernon or kidnapping Martha Washington, and who is your favorite or most influential first lady . Guest well, um, i dont know of any british plot to invade mount vernon. This is well into virginia. Youve got to remember that the british liked to stay fairly close to the big torrey cities like new york city. The further they got into the hinterland as they found in the south once they left charleston, the more casualties they took. And thats why its almost a race to get up to yorktown and get away from the armies and be resupplied by the british navy. So i dont know anything about that, but ive never heard of that plot. Could be. Ive never heard of it. In terms of influential first ladies, um, Martha Washington was not a very influential first lady. I think Dolly Madison kind of sets the table for an active and somewhat aggressive first lady. One of my favorites is lemonade lucy only because she stands up to the Washington Party crowd and says no parties here, were going to serve lemonade. Host lucy hayes. Guest yes, im sorry, lemonade lucy hayes. Host robert in lancaster, pa, email how has the composition of the academy changed since you began teaching . Would you say there has been a suppression of conservatives and their views within Higher Education . If so, how has this affected you in your teaching career . Guest thats a great question. Um, i think that on most campuses there has been a rather dramatic change. I think that when the new left, um, academician came in, the old left would respect you if you published and if you did your work and it was solid, youre welcomed as a colleague. They differed with you, but youd be treated with respect. But the new left began to come in late 60s, early 70s, and it became all about ideology. And all of a sudden conservatives, we have these various testimonies of people, in essence, being driven out of jobs because theyre conservatives or they had conservative viewpoints. Had to include raise, class, gender. Those are all categories of left. They succeeded for example in doing away with period history in most universities. Theres no longer jacksonian era or a constitutional, even at you d. Wonderful school we havent talked civil war during the day to students in 20 years. Youre doing away with classical interpretations of history. How we view history, and replacing them with much more raise, class, gender orientation so every course has to have a raise, class, gender aspect, every dissertation has to have that and it is difficult to break out of that mold. Host less than an hour left with this months in debt guest Larry Schweikart from the university of dayton. Good afternoon. Caller professor schweikart, i really enjoyed a patriots history of the United States from columbuss discovery to the war on terror, a tremendous refresher after all the other histories that have been published. Guest oneill. Caller first volunteer cavalry. Also, a student my mentor at the university of texas. As well as being a retired Intelligence Officer who is in pakistan, i have a real interest in teapotsism. You said we defeated the ideologies of nazism, therefore we can defeat islamism or jihad is some depending on what were you when to use. But in order to defeat those we had to totally decimate their societies. They believe islam can be defeated without massive kinetic destruction . That is a pressing point. You have got to separate what the fundamentalist radicals for the majority of socalled moderate muslims. It can be done but the first step is you have to be willing to define your terms and you have far too many politicians and even now people in the military who dont want to define radical islam for what it is. Love for hood shooter is categorized as a place of workplace violence. That is nonsense. It was clearly an act of jihad and once we get to the point we can define that we will have a better chance at encountering at. That said, i have a number of middle eastern students in my classes, we are sent over to learn americas freedom of speech and all these kinds of things. They do want to learn, in some ways be like us, not in all ways. We have to be careful about sharia law. It is a threat, is being imposed in parts of england and other places. Host would you find your students are most interested in . Guest dans story. They like stories. This is history, stories. As long as you can frame a point within a good story, they will listen and they will internalize it. If it is just a series of names and dates they are going to have trouble with it but you have got to make a story about people in the past. Host craig hoff, north las vegas, emails following the u. S. S. R. Collapsed the files of the former soviets were opened and these documents changed the story of the recent u. S. History and the appraisal of our politicians. Certainly they have changed guest our assessment of how deeply the kgb was involved in american politics. We have found through the winona files and others dozens and dozens of kgb agents, the highest place of which was the assistant secretary of the treasury harry dexter white. One heartbeat from being secretary of the treasury. White was being touted as a vicepresident ial candidate if Harry Wallace won the democrats nomination. Or if he had stayed on as roosevelts theme and ascended to the presidency, this is very serious stuff. And alger hiss is without a doubt exposed as a communist agent, the rosenbergs have been totally exposed. Even Nikita Khrushchev said we couldnt have done it without rosenbergs and we have to take his word because he is the communist. The fall of the soviet union has shown to all but the most radical on the left that in fact we had been deeply penetrated by soviet intelligence. Host next call, michael and westland, michigan. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Mr schweikart, the General Motors bailout twice during this appearance, you piqued my curiosity regarding the decision to below General Motors the money, also i would like your feelings toward that. Before you answer can you take into consideration the enormous contributions General Motors made during the world war ii eckert and the spectacular success that is undeniable of saving over 1 million american jobs, many in the ohio, and the ability for General Motors, corporate icon in American History, continue. Guest i will give a plug back to cspan. Just before i came on your previous show at the current chairman, former chairman of General Motors and he made an excellent case. Here is the criteria i use, the criteria used in what the founders say when we talk about hamilton and i discuss these bailouts. I thought the chrysler bailout was legitimate back in 84 host 79. Guest i thought that bailout was legitimate and the reason was chrysler was the only manufacturer of am 1 tanks, i thought the lockheed bailout and the 70s was legitimate because we needed lockheed to produce military aircraft and only they could produce certain types. I did not think the bailout of harleydavidson was legitimate because we dont send troops into battle on harleys unless you are the sons of anarchy. I think your criteria needs to be not jobs saved. There will be jobs lost and pain that the only criteria is is it constitutional for the government to bailout company . The criteria that needs to be used is is it necessary to National Security . Absolutely gm was critical in world war ii. I tell my students of ford motor co. Out produced the entirety of italy in world war ii. No doubt about it. The question cant be will this cause pain and suffering as a result of a freemarket failure which is what gm was going to that point but is it constitutional that we put the burden on all the other taxpayers to step in and save a particular company . Host Larry Schweikart, when you look at todays budget and sequestration battles here in washington is very time in history that comes to mind in American History . We will let you think about that if you dont want you want to think about that . Guest i did have one in mind the other way what i want to remember how i phrased the argument. Host we will take this call from nick in monroe township, new jersey. Caller thank god for cspan. We love it. The professor i am sure is familiar with the ringling brothers book decision in philadelphia. In one section, they comment on their position about manage reporting of the events at the convention where according to their research Charles Pinckney of South Carolina essentially or originated the plant of the constitution. Their position is that he was not given credit for that because management as the secretary for the convention didnt record it. There phrase was i believe madison, James Madison suppress it and therefore madison historically took credit for the or origination. I would like to know the professors position on that. Is there some veracity to this position . Guest i dont know. I am not a constitutional scholar. It is not my area of special interest. It is possible but also remember the pinckneys have their own historical position to a search. It is like it is not the votes that count but who counts the vote. In the case of the history of the constitutional convention, it is not what really happened but what madison said happened. He is our only source on that. I dont know what to tell you. There is a book called miracle in philadelphia that there is an excellent review of that you might want to check. Otherwise i dont know what to tell you. I did come up with an answer. Right before the civil war, we were at a total deadlock to the point that the house of representatives could not even elect a speaker which we still do today. They could not even elect a speaker so there have been times in our history where we have had such diversions, the groups that the government was almost at a standstill. I will give you one that does not result in the war. In 191112, the all leafing congress was concerned with, almost the only thing was a revision of the tariff bill. Very similar to our modern tax rebates. The debate was so horrible that a group called the insurgents tried to unseat the existing speaker of the house. They failed. William howard taft costumes of reelection to the presidency by going back and forth between the insurgent and traditionalists and not taking the side and Teddy Roosevelt comes out of retirement and run against him and splits the vote and wilson gets elected. The point is the tariff was never passed into law. It is a wasted four years where absolutely nothing happened. So this happens from time to time in our democracy. It appears to be a little more exacerbated today because of the news mia and the pressure on for example the republicans to constantly moderate their views and compromise but we will see. Host next call for Larry Schweikart from stanford, connecticut. Caller dr. Schweikart, i am thoroughly enjoying your interview. My question has to do with abraham lincoln. Wouldnt he be a greater president had the lead us out of slavery with our work . I understand one third of the human race were slaves in the tenth century. You alluded to a lot of those slaveholder in here as. More americans were killed in the civil war than all the wars combined, the Economic Cost was tremendous of that war. Many countries compensated emancipation, brazil, the British Empire, the spanish empire etc. You also mention countries who regulated the treatment of slaves. Similarly today, pure capitalism didnt work for us. We had to put in laws and other things to regulate capitalism. Some will say lincoln had to go to war because of fort sumter but theres some evidence he precipitated that war after only a few weeks in office. I understand one horse was killed, does the emperor have all the clothes we given credit for . Guest i think clinton did everything he could to avoid war. Nobody wants to blame the criminal in this case which was the confederacy, the one that wrote slavery into their constitution not once but three separate times. Lincoln had been one of the first to argue for compensated emancipation, but the economic reasons i gave earlier on the show, it wouldnt work. Why did it work with britain . Britain had no slaves in england. All of the slaves were in the tiny part of the British Empire that the British Government could easily control. That is not the case in the south where the south made up one half of the American Land mass if not more, made up more than a third of the American Population and let me bring another book to your attention here, historian out of oklahoma James Houston has of book called calculating the value of the union and houston made a phenomenal argument about the Capital Value of slaves. We always tend to see slavery in terms of its labor value. Slaves picking cotton is the standard image that comes to mind. That was profitable. What people forget was that slaves were property and and as property, they had a great deal of value. How much value . Glad you asked. They had more value than all the railroads and textile mills in the north put together. We were earlier talking about what does a man go to war over . They go to war over 0. 40 a year . In this case the south went to war over something that constituted easily half of its entire Capital Assets in 1860. The answer is i dont think there was another way to get rid of slavery and other than the war. In large part this is due to the fact that capitalism couldnt work. It wouldnt work but it couldnt work because the government, here we are with government again, the government was ensconced in the southern states, protecting and preserving slavery. For example the government required ablebodied males to be involved in posses that would chase down runaway slaves as a government by spreading to the taxpayers the cost of bringing slaves, runaway slaves into court and so forth, spread the burden of a running a slave on to everybody. There were innumerable ways houston points out that government was involved in perpetuating slavery in the south. Not the federal government but the State Governments. This is what clinton had to deal with. Host leonard warns scene, high. Email, do you know him . Guest i know hmmm. Willow Canyon High School is in shadow remember. Host what state . Guest it doesnt say. Host what are your views and feelings about the decrease history instruction time in american middle schools and high schools as a result of no child left behind and raise the top and common core. Should instruction of history be dependent on a standardized test . Should history teaches the english and math teachers . Guest these programs are disastrous. No child left behind at as most Government Programs do a Good Intention which was to institute a series of tests and threshold over which every person should pass. Everyone should know certain things when they get out of high school, get out of junior high, whatever. It usually becomes more about telling teachers what they must teach and therefore restricting what they cannot teach and as a result it looks as though History Education has fallen further behind. There were recent polls that showed that students could not put major historical figures in the right century anymore. It is disastrous. That said, i am not opposed to teaching to the test. I did that all the time. If you are a paratrooper you are taught how to pack a parachute. You teach to the test and you better be able to pass the test because when you pull the rip cord the parachute better open. It should not be the federal governments job to administer it these tests because the federal government constitutionally does not have a role in education and should not be involved. We are on the same page with this. If i know you, this has been something with Good Intentions that went badly awry and were worse off than we were 20 years ago. Host go ahead, christine. Caller i am really enjoying the program. I have a question. If i am hearing you correctly i believe you were not opposed to our going into iraq and i think it is a war that cost in the vicinity of half a trillion dollars. What i am wondering is the war was questionable and i believe it got questionable results. If we took that half a trillion dollars and invested it into our infrastructure and leveling the Playing Field in our own country, and the best idea, putting the u. S. Ahead of the curve in terms of the new Technology Inventions etc. That would be the strongest vote for our way of thinking, and our freedoms system, would that be a far better use of half a trillion dollars . Youre mixing apples and oranges, national defense. And it is something government should be doing. There is a threat there. We ended up in theory. And it came from iraq. No president in his right mind, theres no chance out i could have gotten a weapon of mass destruction from saddam hussein. You cant just say because we dont spend it here on something that is constitutionally approved. And the government should be spending money on roads and resources and for the first twenty or thirty years of our existence government spent no money on roads and bridges, those were all privately funded companies. I realize today would be hard for a company to get its revenue back on a freeway and if you dont pay your bill let your car shutdown, understand that. The point is just because you dont spend it on space doesnt mean you are going to spend on roads or bridges or because you dont spend it defeating al qaeda doesnt mean youre going to spend on education. There are Different Things used in different ways. Host from 48 48 liberal lies about American History that you probably leaned in school , no terrorist weapons of mass destruction were hiding in iraq. News article 2000, i want to say 2009, 550 tons of enriched uranium was processed out of iraq. And was hidden until was processed out. I dont know what you call enriched uranium except wm ds in the hands of saddam hussein. From your book seven events that made america and profound and fathers were right all along, one of those events, Larry Schweikart, is president obama and the media in 2008. What is that event . How do you include that . Guest for the first time the media failed to do with job. Bernie goldberg had the book called big fat slobbering love affair or Something Like that. Charlie rose was one of the first to say what he believes. And it is your job to go know and did that stuff up. He wasnt vetted on any of this stuff and to a large degree still has not been that a lot of this stuff. That is a shame because if we dont know how you can sit in reverend wrights church for 20 years and not hear what the man had to say or how you can reference by bill ayers and not have an opinion on what should happen with bombers. This was the economy of Martin Van Burens system. Why i use that . Comes full circle. This is back to the partisan press. In this case the press overwhelmingly is liberal, democratic you want to use that phrase, there is the minority voice press, fox news, Rush Limbaugh and so on and so forth but it is a minority voice, and the phrase low information voter, low information voters are not going to hear a lot of that information. Host jack, dear harbor, washington, thanks for holding, you are on with professor and author larry weicker. Larry schweikart. Caller a long wait but worth it. I have been a fan of booktv since its inception on television and your guest today reminds me of many that i have seen for the past years. They come on your program full of impressive credentials and well disposed with knowledge and facts and cheryl lot of valuable insights and many things he has said today that i enjoy, but in the middle of such discussions sometimes baffling statements are not absolute falsehoods. I referred earlier today when he called thomas paine and atheist. He died broke, forgotten, a few other things. In the bible period of his life when he was writing the great works, in his book the age of reason, on the very first page, he clearly states and i am quoting, i believe in the quality of man. I believe in one god and no more, and i hope for happiness beyond this life. I have to ask how can any right minded person construe these words as that of an atheist, thank you very much. Guest i think what people believe varies from time to time during their life. I use the example of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton early in his life was extremely devout. One of his College Roommates set i have never seen anyone for a as much as hamilton does. By mid like hamilton was all but an atheist. He simply had if you asked him he would have said i dont believe in god. By the end of his life and admitted he didnt know it was coming to an end, close to the end of his life he began a transition back to god and so i think there are people at different points in their lives have different religious experiences and you just have to reference them. And christian voice among the founders. Host kerri in brooklyn, new york. Caller great to watch different perspectives and get a different perspective on something you believe in. And dont remember his name, he was an expert on Lyndon Johnson and he said towards the end johnsons term in 68 that johnson had a solution, a treaty just about to be worked out and somehow Richard Nixon was able to torpedo that answer budget. Considering the death between 68 and 72 when the war was finally ended why isnt that mentioned more and peoples recollections of nixon, he is known for watergate. At toomey is a worse sin that possibly he let the war continue for four years just to get back at johnson for some reason. Of your comments, it is sold for about all the work in the beginning, so hard, the carrying of equipment. Looking to a guy called jerry nolan, heartbreakers, one of the great dramas. Guest i would say this. If johnson had a plan to end the vietnam war he wouldnt have resigned. Certainly johnson was powerful enough and clever enough, he took a backseat to no one, certainly not Richard Nixon who had no official authority at the time. Nixon didnt even have an elected post in 1968. So i find it hard to believe that johnson would have had a way to get out of vietnam that he didnt employ. Host that caller was probably talking about robert caros book on lbj. Guest have you host have you heard that story before that that caller shared . Guest i have not heard that one. What i find interesting is nixon gets so much blame for vietnam and he takes us from 545,000 troops to 70,000 when he leaves office, when he resigned. Host what about the cambodian bombing . Guest certainly if you had Victor Hansen on the show, somebody like Victor Hansen would say why didnt they do that earlier . I have students in my classes, not so many now because their age is changing the ten years ago students who served in vietnam and i remember one student said my dad was serving near the coach team in trailing used to tell me he could see the north vietnamese coming down the trail with a rifle range and he was prohibited for shooting him knowing that the next day they would be on the south side of the border and he would have to shoot them them or they would shoot him. Host ray in orange county, calif. Please go ahead with your question or comment for professor schweikart. Caller you said fdr took us off of the Gold Standard. Why was it Richard Nixon did the Gold Standard when he was president . Guest we were put back on gold after the war under britain, the dollar became the worlds reserve currency, backed by gold. There is a difference between backed by gold and convertible into gold. Technically we were on the Gold Standard but you could not go into any bank and take a 20 bill and say that the gold dollar. Didnt work that way. It was still privately held gold was still prohibited in the market place. I remember buying my first cougar rams in 1973 or 74 and made a killing on them but i to a good vantage of being able to get gold at the time. There is a difference between gold as a reserve currency which was not under roosevelt and gold being in private hands. I hope i didnt muddy the water. Host you mentioned when you were arguing with Milton Friedman on the danube that was your only trip to europe. Guest havent had a desire to go back. Host you also report when we ask what you are currently reading you say you are working on your next book which is patriots history of the modern world volume ii and reading scripts and screenplays. What does that mean . Host since rockandroll came out in 2010 i have started a little from company that you can go to rock in the wall studios stock, and see our trailers and we have been developing or currently completing a second documentary about musics part in opening up of rest parts of the world. We have a heavymetal band from inside pteron, cambodian rapper on his countrys death list and celebrities like your ronny and Buster Rhymes and clint black and so and so forth, that movie is almost done but i have been reading a lot of scripts and screenplays for other things that we might produce and do, one of the things on the near or rise and that some of your viewers might like is we want to make a patriots history of the United States from columbuss discovery to the war on terror into a Television Series like the men who built america or the pacific and we have a terrific trailer on the web site. You are interested, by all means get in touch with me and we will talk. Host dennis, orange city, florida, hello. Caller how are you today . Did i read that you are at the university of dayton . Caller i am a buckeye, graduated ohio state in the 70s. Isnt as leftleaning as some of the other. I started ohio west land. Let me get to my point. I am watching cspan maybe a month or two ago and oliver stone and his associate come on. Oliver stone is a hollywood movie guy. He is presenting himself as the history experts. What it was was a rewrite of history. He and his cohorts are lamenting the fact that truman wasnt making nice with stalin. That if only truman would have been nice to stalin, things would have been dramatically different. We wouldnt have had to drop the bomb and numerous other things further lamenting that wallace, that is the right back, our economy, that he wasnt elected, that things would have been dramatically different if only the trumans of the world wouldnt have torpedoed stalin. I have a hard enough time trying to reeducate my nephew who went to ohio state and various other schools in ohio and here you come with a complete rewrite. What in the world is oliver stone doing . Is the dedicated economy . Guest i wrote two reviews of two of the episodes of oliver stones the untold history of america is the correct title. One on jfk and one on Lyndon Johnson. The errors were overwhelming. The insinuations were stunning. You can find these on frontpagemagazine. Com where i wrote these reviews. I am perfectly fine with stone producing and showing whatever you want to show. My argument is lets get the other side of the story of. Lets get a patriots history of the United States from columbuss discovery to the war on terror out on film so people can see another version. Like i said before, we will win that competition every time. I am convinced one on one, our ideas will triumph. Host Larry Schweikart, world citizen is a little upset with you regarding your remarks about fox news, several tweets but here is one. Fox news has divided the country in a way not seen since the civil war. Guest that is just silly, and why would that be . Would it be because the mainstream news organizations had a total monopoly on news . Rush limbaugh makes a great point when he came out, the news organizations were in a a tizzy because for the first time, their view of what was news was challenged. Now we have several places aware that view of what is news is challenged. What we know longer have is that middle voice that tries to come up with some sort of objective news understanding that that is impossible. It was a standard to the Mainstream Media for about six 60 or 70 years from 1900 to 1960. In the journalism books that you dont have, there was a code of ethics from journalists from 1913 and it had some things, lets see if your support of these other news organizations holds to these, you should always get the other side of the store. I cant remember them as nbc ever getting the other side of the store. You shall always have more than one source for every quotation, that all sources needed to the public, you could have no anonymous sources. Right there most of the news media is out the window in terms of their own standard of ethics that was adopted in 1913. I dont think fox has divided the country but provided a muchneeded voice. Host joseph in omaha, neb. Good afternoon. Caller good afternoon. I have a question for you. And the statement also. Give them what they want and they will take it. Your greedy few win. Control, keeping what you have if you win. You are bent on gross style. A chance to in afghanistan, why didnt he do it . Guest roosevelt . Caller dick cheney and the war goes on in middle east right now. Guest you said roosevelt had a chance to catch Osama Bin Laden . Do you mean host read talking about president bush . Caller yes, sir. Guest if you read tommy francss book and dont just go by what you think happened, francs made it very clear that he could not deploy 10,000 troops necessary to the tour of borrow mentioned mountains in time to seal off for a bora. Knowing the military the way i do i dont find that unusual. I totally disagree with your statement about war greed. We proved that with the revolutionary war. In fact fees men went to work even though it was only costing them 0. 40 a person a year. Why did they do so . Ideas were important, the rights of englishmen were important, your third point about it control, it is interesting the United States is the only country i am aware of that wants to conquer some place gives it back. I referred to the teller amendment that says five years after conquering cuba we needed to give cuba back to the cuban people. The amendment placed in the war resolution. Host alan emails some say the Second Amendment was put into the bill of rights to allow citizens to shoot at our government. Others say it is there to allow citizens to chase off burglars or shoot dinner. What is your opinion . Guest both. I will give another prop to stephen how brookes book that every man the armed. The goes into an excellent analysis of what the English Version of the term militia men, leading to up to the American Revolution and the constitution and it is pretty clear english understanding of militia is the militia was an armed body of men apart from and separate from the Standing Army who could oppose and unnecessary fight the Standing Army of the government. Is also interesting coming down from the arms of 1182 henry ii said that every man should be armed and in fact the mayors job was to go through the town and mark on doors and not too a Gun Buyback Program that is a are you on . If not give that man any weapon he should so needed. I doubt youll see mayor bloomberg going door to door saying can i give you a shot gone . The Second Amendment was put in for both reasons. People will be able to oppose tyranny and be able to protect themselves. Host susan emails i live in new york and new jersey my entire life but and the u d 78 graduates and she is happy that there are conservatives at our wonderful catholic university, but her point is she agrees with you on most everything except when it comes to the monetary system. Guest you are not alone. There are a lot of gold bugs out there, people who think we need to a go back currency, and i spent, had to be in the late 90s, i went to 8 liberty fund symposium, a three day meeting with several scholars, most of them conservative and very devout libertarians, studying a book by a Lehman Yeager called the fluttering theyll about the Gold Standard and at the end of three days the libertarians and conservatives could not come up with a single monetary standard, gold platinum Market Basket or whatever that would actually work and they were surprised they couldnt do so. Our current gold supplies are totally insufficient to back money. Philosophically i dont necessarily want the Gold Standard. I want to competitive standard. I want money to compete and the best money to win whether it is private or government. Host dave in atlanta, you are on booktv. Caller during the early 70s, there was a pervasive amount of communist propaganda that was along with the Peace Movement and i have come to believe that the left these days was affected by that more than they would like to admit intellectually and what the professors feelings are on that . Guest you are right, there was a dedicated effort to influence people in american institutions. I have never seen anything but showed they attempted to control or place people in such institutions. Was always necessary, people like angela davis and without much control at all. The soviets were very active but there were also targeted in what they did and you were asking earlier about the fall of the soviet union and the archive barking up, one of the question is it and one of the things we found was they were spending 70 of their propaganda budget in the 80s on star wars. Why would you specify all of your propaganda to stop something that, quote, wont work . If im a football coach india this side is running an up the middle play and i stuffed it every time i am not going to try to get him to switch to a pitch or pass . I will keep running that way, we will stop every time but the soviets were desperate to stop star wars. That should tell people that they new star wars would work and they had done extensive work on lasers and stuff in the 70s. We talk about this in another book we dont mention called trident. As a result i think they didnt need to target americans hippies as you call them or liberals. They kind of felt they had the mall ready. Their propaganda budgets were going elsewhere. Host Mary Ann Brown emails earlier you made a comment that howard zinns book premise was in history america got it wrong. I disagree. It is a manifestation of the african proverb, quote, if lions had historians the tale of the hunt would not always glorified the hunter. Guest i ask anyone who reads that book and thinks it is reasonably accurate as a portrayal of history. Forget American History. Most people would agree that 90 of Human History has been war and combat. How do you write a history of the United States without going him to the impact or the battlefield occurrences of a single battle . He doesnt discuss a single battle and yet the greeks fought military history was the most important of all history. Prof. Hanson would agree with this. One day at antietam did more to change america than all the social history that has ever occurred. All the i love lucy episode for whatever it they may show about the role of women or suburbia or cubans, none of that had the same impact on america that a single day on the Antietam Battlefield did and how you can write a history of anything loan history of america without discussing work and the impact of war is beyond me. Host brian emails could you please respond to this statement quote, more so than any other founding father we are the country we are and the people we are because of Thomas Jefferson, because of the declaration of independence and the louisiana purchase. Guest theres a lot of truth to that. I would not say not more than anyone else. When i go to a founding father jefferson is there but he wasnt at the constitutional convention. I think that is crucial, that he wasnt there. I can to look at washington as the person who set the tone for what america is and what it should be. Certainly he was the indispensable man, the one guy that everybody agreed had to be the first president. Not jefferson. It is interesting everybody didnt want jefferson to be the first president. More than half to 20 to be president at all. Absolutely the declaration is critical but lincolns greatness was that he tied the declaration to the constitution and said there is a reason that you have all men are created, the constitution is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, that yes, we have this body of laws but they have to enforce jeffersons laws. I would not want to minimize jefferson in any way but im not sure i would say he more than anyone is responsible for who we are. Host ten minutes left with our guest Larry Schweikart. Next month, amy goodman will be our guest. Larry in minneapolis, you are on with Larry Schweikart. Caller what branch of the Armed Services that you serve in and when did you serve, what was your specialty . Guest i didnt serve. I was 4 f. They wouldnt take me. Guest wide u. S. That question . D you have a followup . He is gone. We are going to move on to mike in lisbon falls, maine. Caller in an argument with several of my friends. Did the south ever happen out of the constitution as it was ratified, was there extension of the confederacy and extension of the American Revolution . That is a great question and a point that is debated might neo confederate types of historians and there are not that many anymore but more of those types and libertarians in the present time. Here are the two argument. One argument was the government of the United States, it the union, was the mens club. And in this mens club, anyone could pick up and leave the mens club anytime they wanted. The other view of this is that the union was a body. This was lincolns view that you have a body and you can no more severe and arm or leg from the body without doing horrible damage, possibly killing the body. The answer is it depends on which of the two views you take . It is very interesting. Jefferson going back to the previous caller, jefferson is quite influential and one of his most influential acts was inspiring the Land Ordinance of 1785 and this is in our reader and one of the most crucial laws ever passed in america. It put property into the hands of the people. Jeffersons argument why we needed such a law was he had virginia unload all of its property from what was called a landed say, land going all the way to the pacific whereas states like delaware and rhode island were trapped. Jefferson said we virginians need to give up this land to the union and sell it off because there are going to be said there is going out there and at some point the settlers, if we dont make it possible for them to become citizens toward us and a part of the government that are our they will become rebels as we were to england and they will rebel against us. I say that to get to this. In that argument jefferson said that these new lands needed to be loyal, they needed to sign a loyalty oath or take a lower loyalty oath to the constitution. And to the congress. I would not go that far but it is interesting that jefferson said these lands all have to be obedient to the constitution. Host if you enjoy history are reminded that cspans new first lady ceres is every monday night at 9 00 p. M. On cspan. You can go to cspan. Org firstladies and look up the whole series and see the whole schedule every monday night at 9 00 p. M. Eastern time. Larry schweikart, events, a johnstown, pa. Flood. Why do you say that made America America . Guest these and other most import events in American History but that delineate our character, say who we are and the interesting thing about the johnstown and dayton flood of 1913 is in both cases the people did not look to the federal government for relief or support, they didnt even look to the State Government for relief or support. Johnstown, they immediately as soon as the floodwaters assuages the little they e immediately cut out ten starnes for 70 deputies, 70 men to stand guard over the town. There was no looting. They immediately began to get relief supplies from all over pennsylvania. Carnegies famous manager captain bill jones personally paid for an entire Railroad Train full of relief supplies to go into johnstown. They got as far as the road would go into conover land with horses on their shoulders if necessary and they told the National Guard stay out. We dont need you. In dayton in 1913 the same thing. They told the ohio National Guard stay out, we dont need you. Mr. Patterson, National Cash register, immediately turned his company into a vote building business, 400 small boats, he would send a couple of employees to sale around dayton and rescue people who were stranded, pick up people in the water, deliver food stuffs to people who couldnt otherwise coming and turned in c r headquarters into a giant aid station and again stay out, we dont need your help. Was days before the ohio National Guard came in. Federal troops never got there at all. Host john in parkersburg, west virginia, go ahead. We have a minute and a half left. Caller i see that you teach at a catholic university. With all that is about to happen in rome, i would like your thoughts especially the fox of young people. For as i read the new testament, i see that christ was sort of not even recognized after his resurrection by his own. If he were dressed up like these cardinals he would have been recognized. What is the link between the simplicity, the simple life that christ lived in the new testament with what is happening in rome with all the pomp and circumstance and ceremony and gold and banners and all that. Host we have to get an answer from our guests. Guest i am not a catholic. This is one of the excellent things at the university of dayton that they allow all faiths to teach there and be part of the community and they have been good to me in that respect. In terms of who jesus was and what his life was all about i think it would take another three hours and i am not prepared to go there. Host what about the pope as a political figure . Guest the pope is an important political figure who played a key role in the demise of the soviet bloc. The three key figures were reagan, Margaret Thatcher and john paul ii without a doubt. Host pa. 30 seconds. Caller i will talk as fast as i can. I think this is a fantastic show. I watch cspan, mr. Schweikart is unbelievable. I have gone to the library tomorrow to pick up as many books. Guest by the books did that dont go to the library by adam caller enjoy it very much. I appreciate it. Host if you were to suggest one book for our viewers to go to the library and or purchase, which one would it be . Caller you want an easy read introduction it would be 48 liberal lies about American History that you probably leaned in school or seven events, if you want to know american patriots history of the United States from columbuss discovery to the war on terror. Host the books, 20 plus that Larry Schweikart has author or coauthor with and to show you quickly, eight of them, discovery to the war on terror, americas victories, 48 liberal lies about American History that you probably leaned in school , seven events that made America America, American American most pressing problems, patriots history of the modern world from americas exceptional ascent to the atomic bomb 18981945, the first half of a patriots history of the modern world from americas exceptional ascent to the atomic bomb 18981945, in december of 2013 the other half will be coming up. Website is patriotshistoryusa. Com, the author, Larry Schweikart. This is booktv. Visit booktv. Org to watch any of the programs you see your online. Fight the offer or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. You can share anything you see on booktv. Org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. Booktv streams live 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. Booktv. Org. Original people, navy seals, the alamo, our environment, journalism, panels and discussions from this years tucson festival of books, live this weekend on booktv starting today with dr. Timothy egan on the photography of curtis, and Barbara Horowitz on health and healing. Tomorrow live starting at 1 00 eastern, afghanistan followed at 2 birdy by eric larsen on social security. Panels and office from the tucson festival of books, part of booktv on cspan2. That should make you encouraged about the power of probability and statistics in general. Now i am going to make you scared. This is the end of the book, a question, of the questions i went to earlier. Who gets to know what about you . Last summer we hired a new baby sitter. When she arrived in the house i began to explain family background, i was a professor and my wife was a teacher, she cut me off and said oh, a i know. I google you. I was simultaneously relieved that i did not have to finish my spiel and mildly alarmed by how much of my life could be cobbled together, short internet search. Our capacity to gather and analyze huge quantities of data, things are referred to earlier, the marriage of Digital Information with cheap Computing Power and the internet is unique in Human History. We are going to need some new rules for this new year. Lets put the power of data in perspective, just one example from the retailer target. This is a story in New York Times magazine summarized. Like most companies targets strive to increase profits by understanding its customers. Very good thing. To do that the Company Hires statisticians to do the, quote, predicted analysts described earlier in the book using sales data combined with other information on consumers to figure out who buys what and why. Nothing about this is inherently bad. It means when you go to target your likely to be carrying things you actually want to buy. Lets drill down for a moment on one example of the kinds of things the statisticians working in the windowless basement at Corporate Headquarters can figure out. I dont actually know about the windowless basement im assuming. Statistics pale when working underground. Target has learned that pregnancy is a particularly important time in terms of developing shopping patterns. Pregnant women, retail relationship that the last for decades. As a result target wants to identify pregnant women, particularly those in their second trimester and get them into the stores more often. A writer for New York Times magazine fall of the Predictive Analytics team at targets as it sought to find and attract pregnant shark is. I am sure target deeply regrets