From college. We stopped off in connecticut. I had been corresponding with the big expert on the earliest for motor cars in the world, and the country certainly. I had some technical issues i wanted to get right. Start . An early car we all know you have to crank them, but how do you do the other things . We roll in suburban connecticut to say hello. He has a garage full of model cs. From the 1900s, mr. Fords earliest cars. Carlton took a shine to forrester. Before we know it, he is letting him drive the modelc. I get in the back wondering why this was a good idea. [laughter] we have a nickname in the family for forrester speedy gonzalez. He is behind the wheel. And these things were not called cars yet. They were horse carriages. You are sitting as high as an suv but it looks as though somebody has cut the reins of forces. Horses. There is no dashboard, there is a windshield. So, carlton cranks it, moves the clutch, gets the fuel flow in. We start zipping down this back road. We pass lawns and trees. It is a quiet suburban. Chugging. Ing, one of the really unusual things is it is swaying. The schhocks are more of the wagon era, more springs. You have this awaiting thing and the wind is starting to blow. Carlton said mr. Ford and his engineers do not really work out the breaking system very well braking sy stem very well. We are beginning to pick up some speed. How do you stop, i said. It is kind of hard, said carlton. What, i shout. The big thing is to avoid obstacles. I gom, thats great. He is like toad in the wind an d the willows. I hang onto a little strap on the side. If we hit anything, i am airborne. Mailbox and he starts yelling. I am flashing back in teaching and teaching forrester how to drive. We are all yelling. We missed the mailbox by about this much. We are all laughing. It is exhilarating. It is incredible. This feeling i feel like i have never felt speed before and here i was. Intoxicated by that. It got me back to thinking to this book, what was it like, what was it like for the first people to feel this for the first time in history this kind of speed . Fast, have ridden horses they have sledded, been atop of steam engines but a car was a whole different kind of thing. Fasterent you can go than a horse. You can maintain that for a long time. You can turn. Thyou felt the g forces. You can stop at will most of the time. W orders a whole ne of things for americans at the turnofthecentury. You know when you are driving down the road and the scenery blurs . People were writing about this almost like a religious revelation. Oh, my gosh. You dont believe what happens. Idea of people trusting themselves to get on something that was not an animal or was not powered by your own muscles was something that was so new at the turnofthecentury. These were crazy going too fast, too dangerous. This was a culture that was dominated by a horse. The reassuring rhythms of core strong traffic horsedrawn traffic and the car would change everything. Thisresult of that, incredible moment in American History. Womeneeded brave men and to climb aboard these newfangled machines and show people how it was done. Push the cars as fast as they can go. Explain it to them. Oft is where the subject Eddie Rickenbacker comes in. He was born to impoverished swiss german immigrants in columbus, ohio. So poor they couldnt afford coats to go to school so they didnt go to school a lot during the winter. In 1890 when he was born, five years later, people generally think that was on the first practical car came about. Gasoline, internal combustion car. They averaged seven miles per hour. Not too dangers yet but that was changing. For a kid like Eddie Rickenbacker who was four and had few opportunities, driving and racing cars provided a way he can get ahead, become known. Records byeak speed winning records. Nobody could tell him he was a nobody. This was a motivating factor in his life but it was very dangerous. This was the dawn of the modern age. America needed new icons of manhood. Thelumberjack, the cowboy, civil war era calvary leader, these would not do anymore. Personify ando really give definition to the new icons of this modern age, the racecar driver and later the fighter ace. He would be the real first right stuff. Americans being who they are with cars, the first thing they wanted to do was see how fast they can go and that led to racing. Like in europe, the first car races took place on roads. Racey famous roadra took place in long island. It drew a lot of International Attention and people from all over came and they had picnics all along the side of the road and waited for these cars to come speeding by. Oa course marshall would shout car coming. And a crowd would come pushing into the road oblivious of police as to the danger. They went right onto the road and these cars were racing. People still were not used to terrestrial things going so fast. Andthe cars would go by then they would close up right after right on the road in the middle. This one guy describes it a black spot in the distance grew larger as the roar deepened. The glaring radiator numeral smashed you in the eye. Lames came out of the exhaust. Here was speed that you can feel as well as see. Speed that burned your cheeks, filled her eyes with oil, and your nostrils with the stench of gas. It, but they also in this particular race, and this was on october. People died. 42 spectators were wounded. People were hit and thrown into the crowds. It was a nightmare. So much so the governor of new york canceled the race permanently. No more road racing. You begin to see now the evolution of the indianapolis 500 getting on track and moving away from road races. In these early races too, i didnt know much about this until i started looking at it, it wasnt just the driver in the car. They drove with what was called a macintosechanition. Job, it was so loud and they couldnt talk even though they were sitting iast tight. They had not invented rearview mirrors yet. And seewas to look back who was coming behind if somebody was passing. They had a code. The other thing he did was to pump and oil pump. Thatdidnt have a oil pump mechanized. Just like a little bicycle pump and he would keep the oil pressure up. They also had not really figured out the roads. The indianapolis 500, they called the brickyard, they put bricks in but that was pretty expensive. Most of the races took place on horse tracks. They would pour hot oil over gravel and dirt until he got nice and hard. The problem with this is that it would start breaking up. Somebody compared this to driving on corrugated iron. He would talk about how we feared for his kidneys. He was shaking so much. He would take burlap and get it wrapped around his waist up to his arms and hold tight when he was driving. At the end of the race, it would be loose. That was the shaking they were doing. One journalist took us been in the mechanics eat and wrote my insides were up against the back seat and the next they were flat against the seat of that speed engine. There was always a vacancy in between. The only connection was my backbone and that came near snapping several times. No time in car racing and car racing today is still a very difficult sport but at no time has it been as hard as it was then. The cars were very heavy. They did not have any power steering, power geared steering at all. They did not have windshields. The wind was bad. Eddie said you have no idea how a breeze forces a fellows cheeks back and distorts his face when he is going fast. Look like they had really bad facelifts in the pictures. Drivers of the squeeze their steering wheels from keep their cars from leaping off course when they hit a bad bump. Tight springs on the clutch and accelerator exhausted your cap muscles calf muscles. The shock absorbers were really were pretty worthless. These guys were driving for hours and hours. Thefirst indianapolis 500, guy one in 6. 5 hours and today it is 2. 5 hours. Is first car races this when the whole culture started happening. The first people in it were rich and amateurs rich am ateurs. It is a expensive to have a couple of cars. Eddie was one of the first to really was a professional. He started to look at sports and risk and the whole thing differently than these amateur millionaires who often were in it for the glory. Eddie was in it for a different kind of thing, he wanted to win. There was an interesting case of a 1914 300 mile race in sioux falls. Would give you a character of what these races were like. One of the favorites was this guy named spencer, he couldve been right out of a he couldve been in hollywood. His father had given him a whole bunch of cars and you married a debutante from indianapolis. A big powerful car. Eddie drove a much less powerful car. Eddie knew you could not compete with them at all on the flats. He was not fast enough. But if you drove fast on the kurds if he drove fast on the curves. If he took the corners very fast in a way he couldnt get too big, he had a chance to win. 17 cars and started up and they lined up in three lanes. The track looked good. That but hot oil over and steamrolled it. The temperature is about 91 degrees. Eddie, in addition to the burlap, wore his favorite headgear which was a womans a sock underneath his helmet to keep breathing together. Mechanition was wedged against them and they blasted off and a thick cloud of dust. There was a blistering pace in nearly 80 miles per hour. Dust on the track was more pebbles which started to build up. It battered faces and goggles. The wind started picking up. Their sweat they didnt have any outfits that were cool. It was hot. Bad, iibrations were so was reading over and over again, it would leave blisters on their palms and black and blue on their back from getting bumped around. These big heavy cars, big heavy tires, they started to tear up the track. Pieces of it started flying. It was almost like skiing. They would take corners and piles of dirt which was accumulating. It got really bad. The drivers called of this when pieces of the tractor thierry rated, they called it deteriorated, they called it gumbo. Some got as big as baseballs. If you can imagine this oil held together by gravel and dirt, pretty leave. Thal stuff. Eddie, who found himself right under fire, said it would hit us like a stream of fire but it was gumbo. Did bloodied his elbow. Theece of gumbo shattered goggles of another guide the guy kept driving with luck running kept driving with blood running down his cheek. Another guy waited for it to cool down and jumped in and got back into the race. As the race wore on, the strain andn to tell on drivers machines and all precautions for safety were forgotten by the men crotch behind the steering wheels of their cars urging them to limit of their capacity. The ruts finally broke. Famous firm is guy guy. Nothing mattered for him other than the yellow mercer. Each quarter became a painful repetition of the last. Take a curve too fast and you are likely to crash or take it to slow and lose. He says now he can make his move suddenly his oil pressure stopped started plummeting. He couldd his partner, not take his eyes off the track, what was he doing . The pressure continued to drop. He rested his eyes away from the steering will, looks over, a his partnerbo hit rightly head and knocked him out cold. The blood was going down his face. He decided to pull over. We have been in this too long. So he reaches over and starts pumping while he is driving like this even though his arms were like jelly. His is still bloody. He gets low so we can avoid this gumbo that is shooting right off the tires. After nearly 15 minutes, odonnell, his mechanic, wakes up and grabs a thing and they are off to the races again. Wishhart. Es after three hours and 39 minutes, eddie goes past the checkered flag nearly two minutes ahead of spencer. Speed demons annihilates space, announced the los angeles times. Eddie and his mechanic could hardly stand after climbing out of that car. By 1916, at was number three driver in america and making good money. By world war i which broke out in 1914 in europe, it had become increasingly harder for the United States to ignore. France was on the ropes. Germany looked like it was on the verge of rolling into paris. England and france begged america to come in and save the day. When it became apparent that the u. S. Would go to war, eddie got an idea. You would put together a volunteer squadron of racecar drivers to fly planes, these early biplanes for america. Who could handle danger and engines the way his fellow racers did . He recruited stars on the circuit. He went to washington to propose this idea. Him where was his college degree. He said, i have an engineering correspondence course. Id fly too well. He left seventhgrade when his father died of to earn a living. Getting into the flying program had College Degrees but also ivy league degrees. The military brass took one look at this man rough around the edges, his grammar was anything but perfect. When he pointed out his unmatched Mechanical Engineering experience, they countered that a flyer who knew too much about technology would not risk his life by getting airborne. And that is the whole point, said eddie. As he did many times in his life against class hostility. Eddie was a survivor. Leaveered he took his vowing to find another way. When he would meet those men a couple of years later, they would have laughed in his face. They would call him sir. Join ant an invite to American Expeditionary force which was heading over to france to begin to organize. He was called as a driver and chauffeur. Sho one on excursion, he was driving Billy Mitchell. Billy was going around northeastern france to look for a place where we can have our a we canhar airbase have our airbase and so the training facilities. Billy mitchell likes to go fast and never going around when the engine started banging and started like a hammer. It turned out to be a burnedout connecting rod bearing. They continued and they couldnt go anywhere. They turned into this little town, Little French town. And he mitchell off by the hotel and found a tiny garage whose mechanic had no idea what he was talking about when he was talking about a bearing. It was not going to be had. Eddie found some metal, soft alloy. He melted it with a blowtorch. Improvised with astounding exactness. Scrape the bearing any that thing down, put it back in and it worked like a charm. A couple of those things, Billy Mitchell was really impressed with this incredibly innovative, take charge kind of guy Eddie Rickenbacker. Finally, with a little pressure and conniving, he was appointed fieldengineer that the mitchell identified which was going to be americas biggest airfield in france. Eddie through in the quid pro quo. He said he wants to be the check chief engineer but he wanted to learn how to fly. He rubbed noses with a lot of the ivy league young flyers who came over. He hacome over here. He had been clearing rocks out of the airfield next the german prisoners. They didnt like that. Eddie, this tough guy. Eddie would sneak out. He would listen to a little bit of the lectures the other fly boys were getting. He would get a plane out and he would take it up by himself so low. There were no manuals. There was nothing about what the tolerance of the airplanes were. You would practice on his own he would practice on his own. I guess he didnt think twice about it in terms of how dangerous it was to really learn on the fly and by the seat of his pants. In these airplanes, they are really box kites with an engine on it still. They were called chicken coops because there were so many wires you could put a chicken in and a chicken could find its way out could not find its way out. It was candace over a wood for it canvas over a wood frame. They were flying pfires. Lovely letter from Teddy Roosevelt youngest son. Tragically, he would died later. Everybody loved him. He wrote about how he hit taken a plane up to practice and how mud had kicked up. Petrol,ed his started to catch fire. And took him 30 seconds to go down. He jumped out of the airplane and his pants and sheepskin boots were already on fire. Boom. Altitude. t at out t going up on one of these planes delivered a disorienting cocktail of dizziness, vertigo, pounding noise, extreme cold, and always fear. They were open cockpits. There were no radios. It was difficult to take maps up so you had to memorize things. People were constantly getting lost. They didnt have gauges on their fuel so they had to estimate their fuel consumption. The federal Aviation Administration today wisely prohibits flying without supplemental oxygen over 10,000 feet. The air would get pretty thin. Your judgment gets impaired. Itude isys were alt what gave you an advantage. That would be at 17,000, 22,000 feet. Judgment started to suffer a little bit up there. It was also cold. It dropped below zero very quickly. They wore these furlined teddy bear suits. Pilots would talk about having to peel their fingers individually off their joysticks because it was so cold against it. In early engines were rotary engines. They spun and were lubricated by castor oil. I dont know if you know what castor oil does to your insides but it was a lubricant for these rotary motors. They exuded about a gallon of the stuff in our. An hour back into the face of the pilots. It really does bad things. Only for their fashion statement that they wore silk s carves. It was to wipe off the oil from their goggles among other things. To make matters worse, the pilots knew that they might have to make a very terrible decision. This is the first time in warfare anybody had to think about this in a matter of seconds. The prospect of catching fire terrified everybody. There all kinds of mentions in their writings and letters. They didnt carry parachutes. Why, you ask . Parachutes headquarters had not a very smart decision in retrospect, that you didnt want to give a pilot a parachute is in the first kind of trouble what would they do . They would jump out of the airplane. [laughter] basically, they were defeatists. Without parachutes, they are up. From their engines and they catch fire three miles above the earth. The plane, if they caught fire from somebody shooting at you, from a malfunction, would burn up in a matter of minutes right there and you are miles above the earth. These kids, they were young men, had this decision. Some said i would try to write it down. Ride it down. Boutwas risking a terrible of burning. Some people decided they would jump. That was the last initiative they would take. Other people brought up their service revolvers. All too often that happened and not a very glorious part of the war at all. We entereds allwar fairly late and had these great ideas that we would make a lot of airplanes really soon because we were this powerhouse and that didnt really happen. It wasnt easy to do. Designs were changing so quickly. Lueprints. No bre we never made airplanes in the last year of the war that we were involved. We bought them from the french and the french gave us some that were serviceable were not the best. But were not the best. The early planes we flew had a pretty bad design flaw that didnt typically show itself until you were in the middle of a dogfight. A dogfight was a newly minted term for how ferocious it was when biplanes got in the air and all hell broke loose. In may 1918, Eddie Rickenbacker found himself in enemy occupied territory in france near the medieval city. Altitude was everything he wanted. He wanted to get up as high as you could. Use but at three german all the he spotted three german outlooalbatross. He went for it. He threw himself down. A screaming dive. He squeezed the trigger of his machine gun and could see the guy slumped over and the guy went into a tailspin and died. The exhilaration only lasted a second because the other two enemy airplanes were swooping on him. They had the height advantage. Eddie, the dogfight was breaking out, he jerked back onto his joystick and went like this to try to get up and throw them off his tail. With a loud crack, the fabric on the top of his right hand, the top wing fell off. This turns out they found this was a design flaw on how they attached this to the fabric of the plane. It was flapping like a wing. It took him into a spin. Guys have ever been in a spin, it is one of the most terrifying things you can ever imagine. You are upside down, plummeting like you are revolving this and you were spinning inside all of the same time. One winghimself had left and the other didnt. It is hard to even describe. His engine cut out. Most people at that moment would have kind of given up. It is so disorienting. Eddie, something settled into him. What was it about this guy . He kicked into action. He move the stick from side to side, you try to kind of get out of thit. Nobody had remember really done the physics of a spin. It was a very scary thing. Used to say 20 or 30 years ago, you had to practice spins, but so many people were dying. This is modernday. Dying from a thing they knew how to get out of. So many people were dying that you dont have to know how to get out of a spin. Here is eddie. Wrote later that is whole life went through his mind. He saw german soldiers on the ground. Imagine in slow motion how he would pick off his body. He envisioned his mother opening the door to their little house in columbus to receive the telegram announcing is that. Something kicked in. He only had a few seconds left. There were no emergency procedures. Only remained a crippling reality of a wobbling, disorienting spin into the earth. He then through all his weight to the lefthand side over to the cockpit and jam with the controls and jam the engine wideopen. An explosion lifted it with blue flame. The whole thing vibrated violently. It went off on one wing heading towards france. He probably did not want to turn on the engine because it would spin you more quickly to your death. It was just enough lift to free him from the spin. He had really just you just limped home he just limped home. He got home. He landed and he went up immediately and throughout. Threw up. There is this picture of him. You can see his face and it is something. It is in my book. Day, he got aboard a different plane and did it all over again. Not the wing flapping thing, you knew that he knew to be careful. In september 1918, right towards the end of the war, he was appointed to the 94th squadron. It would become famous. He beat out many others who had College Degrees, who served longer than he did. Everybody seem to know he was the god who you wanted. He was the guy we wanted. The germans were doing an all out effort against the allies. The role of the airplane along the static line between had become very important. Eachicularly, to mask site set up these great hydrogen balloons behind the line and these were where these observers got up. Downcould look in a radio and they radioed down. If you could paralyze the then you could then move with impunity around the battlefield on the ground. This is what happened finally in the campaign which is what the culminating campaign of world war i. Eddie turned that squadron around. Most of his friends had died. The morale was terrible. He trained it in a manner of six weeks to become the most effective american Fighter Squadron of the war and they flew more than anyone else. They made more kills. He build morale. He changed tactics and he worked with the tactics on establishing the real early Risk Management as it related. It is incredible. I dont have too much time to get into detail about that, but it was very dangerous to shoot down these balloons that looked pretty easy to shoot down. Hadthe antiaircraft guns dialed into that range so when they came in, it was a very dangerous thing. It is a very effective squash information being used squadron formation being used. I submit fairly significantly to the end of the war whic. These were up against the red barons at that point. All the people he trained. Green and yellow biplanes of the German Air Force were quite formidable. War adie returns from the bona fide hero. He would go one. N. He went on in the zydeco are. And designed a car. It was the rickenbacker. He bought the indianapolis speedway. He would go want to build Eastern Air Lines into a powerhouse in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and finally worun it. I think this is one of the greatest adventure stories in American History. We Flash Forward from his world war i hero. He is the head of Eastern Air Lines. It is world war ii in his early 50s. They want to make him a general and they give them that. He says, no, i want to travel around. He does war bond efforts. He goes around the world. You get people focused on fast he gets people focused on winning this war and goes out there as you hero th as a hero. The president had a problem general douglas macarthur. Douglas macarthur had some ideas didnt like fdr that much and had some problems with authority. They decided they needed to send somebody down to talk to macarthur and tell them to cool it. He was in new guinea. The only person they could think of who could stand up to macarthur was a fellow medal of honor winner, Eddie Rickenbacker. Instructions. Al nothing was written down. He flew on a b17 from pearl harbor down to new guinea. Inwas with seven other guys in uniform who were going to take him down. They missed their refueling stop which was canton island, at very small point of land. They put down in the middle of the central pacific, not too far from where Amelia Ehrhardt was lost. The only food they had was the pilot was savvy enough to put four oranges in his flight suit. They landed and these eight guys ended up on three rafts. No food, no water. They had not been able to figure out the radio to tell anybody where they are. They were 2000 miles in any direction from land. No food, no water. Off of the guys had taken their pants and shoes and socks because they thought they might be swimming. That turned out to be a bad idea. When sun came out, they got sunburn. Skin broke out into open source. The salt water came over on them. On their backater sides. It was pretty awful stuff. Huge sharks were always swimming around. The sharks like to rub their backs underneath the very thin opening. Hey wereest ones t jammed together. The shards would slap their tails. This office but they could not catch them. They toyed openly with doing things like cutting off the pinky or an earlobe for fishing. They didnt really quite know what to do. On the eighth day, and miracle happened. Fedora. S wearing a gray a bird landed on his head and he knew something had landed on his head. They are pretty out of it at this point. Boat werees of the looking at him. He grabbed that bird and they ate it. The key thing that saved them them was the intestines. They caught a mackerel and a sea bass. Spit water that they collected in their buckets into. Heir may wes they got knocked over from waves and nearly drowned. Two weeks in, it is still bad and getting worse. Men cannot take it anymore and 190 july the over and slides over. Eddie and pulls him back into the boat. The next morning, a guy says, eddie, they cannot talk to o well. Says i am not shaking your hand, you coward. He castigates the guy for being a coward because he had threatened their survival by jumping over the side. From that moment on, he took control. There were senior officers, all sorts of people. The pilot was a very capable guy. Eddie jumped down the throat of anybody who started talking about committing suicide. They were praying for death coming quickly. Eddie jumped down their throats. All of these guys pretty soon were plotting on how to throw him over the side. [laughter] you know what . They were not thinking about that anymore. Eddie had come up with an unorthodox thing. Years later, everybody survived except for one guy who drank too much salt water and his kidneys failed. They still didnt really like him that much but they all said that without that they would not have survived. Toos kind of a love story,. His wife, two weeks after they have been lost or two weeks, she gets the notification from the secretary of the navy that they are going to call off the search. Is in the middle of the war in 1943. She goes down to washington and ryan act. Rio he extends the search to one more week. On the last day of that last week, a plane finds Eddie Rickenbacker and his crew. They were a little far apart but they found them and they brought them in. He had started outweighing 180 pounds and he had dropped down to 120 pounds. This experience Eddie Rickenbacker on top of doing so much he stated in the face. He landed on life magazine. People were sermonizing about this miracle. This bird that landed on his head. It was incredible stuff. He never gave up. Right then, when america was in a moment when we were looking at going from island to island in the south pacific, literally digging out every japanese soldier who was going to fight to his death. Eddie showed america with his courage what we were all about. You dont give up. That is why i named this book enduring courage. He had it. Lincoln had it. Grant had it. They would not stay down when they were beaten. They found unorthodox solutions to challenges. I hope you guys have a chance to read it. I have given you a little bit of a taste of it but what a character. Thank you for having me tonight. [applause] do we have time for questions . Please come up to this microphone here. Is that ok . Yeah. In addition to his courage, was there something about his ethnic origin and socioeconomic origin that added to his popularity . Yeah. At the beginning, it did not add to his popularity because it was a germanic name ,. There were some very bad german seven dodge saboteurs. Inis called black explosion new york city harbor that blew up 2 Million Pounds of gunpowder. It was very bad. Rickenbacker found it pretty german. Englanda boat over to and two Scotland Yard guys were with him. When they got him over there, they took him to a room, they tackled him, they stripped off his clothes, put lemon juice in on him. Toey private the heels see if there were any messages. This was a time when we were so paranoid. I found records that people havent really come up with about how well into the war, right up until when he was an , there were americans spying on him trying to see if he was really so, this was another thing he had to overcome which was a terrible thing. He had to show his patriotism. When the pledge of allegiance came out, memorial day not memorial day, but the pledge of allegiance became something that was done in schools. Eddie took his patriotism very seriously. Thank you. I heard your program a few weeks ago so that is how i heard about this event tonight. The one question that comes to mostis in the 1920s, the famous pilot was charles bloomberg. Charles lindbergh. But to me, the feats that this guy did, why is his name not mentioned either above or in the same sentence as Charles Lindbergh considering that he was a hero in a world war. That is a good question. Indbergh did it, the result different culture of personality and talkies, the movies and everything. He did one incredible event. He was a very talented guy. A very talented guy. Quiet handsomeness. Eddie rickenbacker clot up from poverty. Up from lindbergh went to college and his mother when hit with them went with him. Partly because america was ready for that kind of hero. I dont have all the answers for that because the more i look into this guy, the more i am astounded by it. It is at the edges of peoples periphery. That is why a want to bring him back up and say lets take a look at this guy. Yes, sir . Did he have any relationship with Billy Mitchell after will war one world war i . Was there any effort to draw him into politics after both wars . ] he came back, people were talking about him running for president. He got up in front of a microphone. [applause] [laughter] after five minutes, people said, nope. He was not that interested. He didnt have the eloquence. Education. De the other question was . He did. They remained friends and he was an outspoken Billy Mitchell as some of you might know got courtmartialed and kicked out of the air force for his outspokenness. Eddie went to bat for him really hard. It didnt turn the tides on that so they did remain friends. Remember when Billy Mitchell died. One of them was that each others funeral. And played a role in that. Thank you very much for this opportunity to talk to you all. I really enjoyed it. [applause] you are watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan 3. To join the conversation, like each week, American History tv sits in on a lecture with one of Americas College professors. You can watch the lectures saturday at 8 p. M. And midnight eastern. By 1830, annual Alcohol Consumption in america reached four gallons per person, the most in the nation before or since. Next, university of californiadavis professor alan ylor talks about how consumption spurred the Temperance Movement of the 1850s. This is about 50 minutes. Ok, we have been talking in this class about the american republic, which is a radical experiment for its time. There were very few republics in the world. So, this is a risky venture, because it expects a lot of people. In a monarchy, the duty of the people is essentially to obey. But in a republic, the citizens must anticipate. They need to vote. They should follow issues. They should be involved in campaigns. Mucho, a republic asks more of people. And this is the foundational generation for this american republic. Yet, this is also the peak. Period for Alcohol Consumption in america. So, there is a paradox in which the political thinking, the l ideology said we need a republic with a virtue. An electorate where the people are committed to the wellbeing, the common good of the country and should be willing to set tode their self interest advance the common good. That is virtue. Yet, this is a time when people are drinking as never before, and you can see the statistics here that historians have come up with. Capita alcoholr consumption in the United States, in the equivalent of gallons of 90 proof alcohol what does 90 proof mean . Everybody knows the answer to that. [laughter] i ask you about alexander policy, andiscal there are crickets in here. I ask you what 90 proof