I am the Vice President of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library purposes of privilege for the library to host tonights program celebrating mike wallace new book. The longawaited sequel to his previous book goff of. Picks of the story at the turn of the last century with his son paralleled growth and expansion and consolidation when infrastructure was developed and many institutions were founded including the New York Public Library. Incidentally the we are were all seated it is part of the reservoir there is a great before and after illustration in the book and it is a special honor to host but only because of the importance of the book and subject matter but because mike wallace to is a fellow and a scholar in Residence Research to a good deal of the book right here in the archives the Archival Holdings are vast and include collections from the New York Times and the waldorf astoria even your city miscellaneous. [laughter] but it is the of painstaking work of scholars that brings the contents of this collection into a life through a meticulously researched book so we are thrilled to welcome you back to share your research with us and to moderate the conversation were honored to have another distinguished historian writer and scholar his piece in the new yorker as a staff writer providing a steady stream of intellectual and emotional nourishment to many of us seeking to understand todays Political Climate with a historians perspective to help Current Events and i just have to say the peace that you wrote yesterday what happened in las vegas was my morning and nourishment today. Thank you for that. Also greasing the state john occasions and last spring he gave an outstanding lecture to the center entitle the halflife of American Freedom available for download on the of libraries podcast and should be required listening for anyone to make sense what is happening in America Today we are grateful he has joined us this evening. At the Public Library programs like this are the extension to provide people of the city of new york with access natalie to great books also a forum of discussion of the Critical Issues facing community in city and country in world. When you read mikes book in particular a quotation by london i will not give away you will learn that is always the case here at the library to view of Services IncludingPublic Programs as a lifelong educational journey if youre interested in your city history or any subjects we will touch on tonight the library is your partner to get deeper insight into those issues i encourage you to visit your local library get a library card and check out a book or five where there will be hundreds of thousands of books that can be downloaded for free. [applause] good evening. Thank you for that introduction and i wanted to to start, i guess, on a slightly somber note just acknowledging what is happening in las vegas right now. Its a tremendous opportunity and really privileged for us to and really privileged for us to together and enjoy discussion and trust fellow citizens and for us to enjoy the company of each other and thats something that has been taken away from a large number of people in las vegas and i wanted them to keep them in our thoughts as we start this evening. So part of this, mike and i talked, when was that . About a week or so and so we kind of got into a long sprawling conversation and i was saying to myself, save it for next week, save it for next week and so we try to cover some of the same ground but one of the things that was really interested to me was the story of the book itself, the story that the book tells, but theres an equally interesting story of how you came to even being involved with writing the second volume of this now, so i wanted for you to talk about how these two books began . This really is a collective project and to set in context, we have to go back aways. Im a child of the 60s, 40s, actually, but and the 60s was a moment of historical revolution as social and economic people and in fact, the two were related in tandem. The 50s take on the narrative of American History was unrecognizable now, not that, you know, yes, there were blocks in American History, George Washington carver, and there were the slaves who were happy and there were more or less women, betsy ross sewing the american flag. No significance violence because there was no significant tensions across class race and ethic lines. The view about u. S. Position in World Affairs was totally benign, it was all flaws and then came the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement was calling for a transformation position in contemporary society and it had a correlate that at the same time people wanted to change the president , they began to change the past, the people in the past which was so limited in its definition of membership. The histories that were written about the United States focused on the notorios guys and affairs of states and business, social and economic history were sort of by the boards. So now African Americans were not only protesting to state of affairs at the workplace, ballot box, here and there, everywhere, they were protesting their absence from the historical narrative and historians, black and white, intandem began to insert blacks into the narrative. When you did that, you werent just adding, you were, in fact, considering now racism as major force in american life, contradiction between declaration of independence and reality of slavery and racism. So just going on the massive transformation, w. B. Dibois and the Womens Movement erupt. That started filling in those blanks, if you do that, you have to deal with sexism, sexuality, the whole range of things that were simply not on the table, stone wall, gaze, that hadnt been an issue before, unthinkable thought, now again both particular and large scale Dynamic Forces and this was in the middle of the resistance of the vietnam war and suddenly americas discussion seemed not as clean as it had professed. I was a child of the 50s in that i was very nervous. My mother convinced me that hoover had been watching my every move. [laughter] and i went to colombia in 1960 and i was shy about getting involved in student movement, there wasnt much in 1960 but as they came on, i was cautious beyond belief. I did actually go down after selma to partake in students who were going to mississippi and replaying in 65 freedom summer of 64. At one point i found myself marching in a parade next to Norman Thomas who i had never heard of actually. And then came the 68 strike in colombia in which i was probably the oldest person in the occupied buildings and and had many ramifications for me. Suddenly the notion of history as political fact was on the table in a way that it had not been before and i was converted in midstream my doctor, changed course. Looking at the same issue, Political Parties from now different perspective and that became a collective, there was a group of students, colombia and the history department, there were colleagues in harvard and in wisconsin, here in there and we coalesced and we signed on through a project of redoing American History, nothing less, we started a journal of radical history review, im not involved with it anymore, but its many decades on down the road, we had conferences, we had trying to integrate with political movements as well. There was a collateral movement in public historys terrain, so Colonial Williamsburg which had been for decade the temple of liberty where jefferson once traveled the earth and now African American community and the historians, how about the 50 of population of slaves and everything was up for grabs and we did a lot of organizing around the reconstructing narrative business part because knives the middle of the matrix. I had the sense that we had rewritten the narrative but nobody knew it outside of specific arenas because there was no accessible overview that presented the totalization that we had come up with and made it accessible in plain language for ordinary folk. So youthful enthusiastic i set out to write the history of the United States but the whole usa, my colleague ted burrows, long essay, short isnt my middle name. [laughter] the American Revolution and we set out to do this in narrative style but with footnotes and arguing and explaining the debates, the discussions, we like x and we dont like y, et cetera, and we worked in for several years and we had many hundreds of pages and looked like we hadnt gotten out of the 17th century which we had not because we were telling the story and the perspective of european imperial expansion, the framework which you have to understand happened in the u. S. And it was born in on thaws this would takes 1 lifetimes and we only had two to spare. [laughter] so after another year of being depressed, i thought, well, lets decant all of this stuff into something more manageable. History only of one city, new york. An important city but the thing was to set it in global and National Context that we had already worked out. So we did. It took a while to change course and a lot of the work that we had done was available but a lot new work had to be dont and we did it. And now we have an, effect, gotham2 and the question that immediately arises, who is volume 3 going to be . Itll be 2042 before you get around to it and mildly reassuring, to say that, in fact, we had i had now because it was a solo operation i had thought that the second volume would go to world war, 1945 and it became clear that another reason thats so bloody big compared to the other one in given time duration, there was an avalanche of work thats been done on all of the arenas in which i tried to keep up, economic history, political history, cultural, social, architectural, flood of new work and also this is perhaps not the appropriate place to say this but i spent decades in the ellen room which was the New York Public Librarys great gift to scholars. It was the pipeline into the great hard of material thats here. The thing is that i tried to avoid doing primary research as much as possible because the idea is if you got stuck on researching anything as opposed to waiting for other people to do the hard spade work and [laughter] integrating it with with history is grand larsoning and then came google which digitized everything. This had the fortunate or unfortunate impact of saying that, well, whereas in the old days i would not have gone to read irving bushs autobiography what he thought he was doing, wound of the revolutions of this period, now quick and its on screen, so the temptation to do primary research was overwhelming, which is another reason that slowed the process down. Anyway, it was clear and i had written a lot, in fact, the Second World War was done before the first world war, partly because nobody had really grasped the experience of the city during Second World War and i was bored so i just jumped. Theres, in fact, a great deal thats been written through second war and while i wont go on record predicting when volume three might thud into place, it wont take 20 years because a lot of it is done already. You gave me a date but i shouldnt say it. [laughter] so this book, volume 2, picks up in 1898 which is a pivotal year because its the year of consolidation of the five burrows into Greater New York city and, you know, tremendous change and tremendous implications of that and i wondered if you could just talk about the dynamics of, one, how this incorporation happened and who were the primary movers dedicate today making dedicated to making this happen . You would have thought that this being a political merger, first largest, fourth largest city in the United States plus many communities that were, in essence, grouped around the harbor, not the new jersey harbor, that was screwup by somebody who still hasnt recovered from. [laughter] it was a political consolidation and it was thought out the political process but it wasnt initiated by the political elite. It was a phenomena that corresponded with the economic elites decision to reconstruct american capitalism. To understand is you have to understand that this is the era of rockefeller, jpmorgan, et cetera, these two really didnt like one another at all. But they were as wrong in being convinced that Free Enterprise capitalism was the pits. You had competition between firms. You had competition between firms, price wars, cut throat price car wars, build them up again, you cut union, wut labor cut labor unions, labor unions are crushed through force and violence which leads to socialism movements who overcome capitalism itself. So as far as corporate elite was concerned, this was maddens and the solution was to bring as much competition as possible out of the economy and between 1898 and 1904, short space of time, thousands competing firms are merged into hundreds of gigantic corporations which the United States steel is the preem nant example example, was a progressive move. Morgans and rockefellers were convinced not entirely without reason that this would allow a more rational economy and would get above and allow for longterm planning and making money to people who i dont ever saw the Corporate Movement but it was also an ideology, a culture had emerged that argued this this was good in a variety of arenas and one of them was the lunatic competition between brooklyn and new york and other towns around the harbor when they should be concentrating on combine to go deal with the problems of the harbor, to deal with problems that were area wide, deal of the challenge of chicago which was going by leaps and bounds and were afraid it might become the new economic capital of the United States and the europeans would bypass new york and go downhill and end the nightmare of villains, so they oversaw the consolidation of the political units into Greater New York. Thats why its called Greater New York. Its not chauvinistism. Maybe a little bit. The cultural correlate of that was to do many consolidations and libraries consolidated and formed the New York Public Library and housed themselves but there was a movement to turn this consolidation on paper into a reality and there was an explosion of energy and creativity thats been rarely matched in our history. You talk about this because there are two Different Things as the political act of consolidating brooklyn and manhattan, then, of course, the bronze, queens and Staten Island and then the other actual physical structure that has to go into making these desperate into an actual city. There are several things that happened, one of them is that theres a movement that better connects new york to the global arena. So the rail tunnels are built under the hudson and allowing you go to pen station, youre linked to the mainland has strengthened, the docks are built, chelsea piers for titanic operations, bridges are thrown across the rivers, the subway is dug throughout the entire arena. Populations are free to move without boundaries of any sort so the subway system, miraculous transformation, reminiscence of old colonial and they are rapidly replaced, real estate booms take place, bring the end by the end of this period, bronx is worth considered as being independent entity, sixth largest city in the United States. In brooklyn, the deagriculturization process but brooklyn was a fruit basket and vegetable basket for the city and now subway lines, elevated lines, housing subdivisions instead this sense that you can bind this on paper entity into a reality if you build enough trackage, if you develop the water system, if you develop the electrical grid. Enormous infrastructure operation that makes this possible. Mirrored in the private sector by the explosion of sky scrapers. These are, in fact, the physical of the corporative organization. They represent themselves enormous amounts of capital, henry morgan got together which collects and pools capital and puts them into the the skyscrapers. One of the things thats notable to me about the book is there are parallel stories like youre telling this story of physical geography of new york, you can begin to see what the adult version of this entity will look like and at the same time youre telling the story, thats one of the political elites and the physical landscape also the social and Cultural Landscape and the population and what they are experiencing of this gigantic metrop and new york looked like the plan to create better new york, looked one way to architects who were taking all of this and another way to the people who were actually living in the midst of all these changes. Right. I have try today break it out into sections, focusing on different aspects of the struggle over the provision of social justice, of public goods, housing, health care, et cetera. Appears to me that theres at least 4 broad schemes and one of them is ethnicity, one of them is race and the ot