her nomination. and join us next saturday at 7:00 p.m. eastern for "america and the courts." $ >> she will be the first latino american and only the third woman on the supreme court. you can watch all of the senator's speeches on judge sonia sotomayor and the vote at cspan.org. join us next week for "america and the courts," saturday evenings at 7:00 eastern on c-span. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008] >> from the chicago public library, this is about an hour and a half. >> and now i think we're ready to begin. good evening, everyone. my name is mary demsey. it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the chicago public library for this very special program, "our histories and our stories. " first let me start by thanking juliana richardson and the history makers and g.g g. choza of roosevelt high school for telling these wonderful stories to us. we're delighted to have them here for this very, very special evening. of course, we're disietded to ee dr. henry lewis gates back here at the chicago hub library with rick hogan. it is an exciting night for us because the chicago public library has had the privilege of working very closely with a number of institutions this year, including the chicago history museum and the american -- the abraham lincoln bicentennial commission to celebrate the centennial of the birth of abraham lincoln. the bicentennial of the birth of abraham lincoln. and this is one in a series of programs that we will be offering this year. as you came in, you may have seen a program guide, "land of lincoln readers." this is our adult summer reading program. our children's program is also based on his life. but our adult programs are also intended, like this one, to explore the very controversial, complex, and creative man who was abraham lincoln. tonight's program is a collaboration between the chicago public library and the abraham lincoln bicentennial commission and, of course, all of our fellow conveners. i want to thank especially eileen macovich and her team for their assistance in making tonight possible, and we very much appreciate the participation of everyone who's involved in this. as i said, please be sure to pick up your copy of the "land of lincoln reader's guide." our major cultural partner throughout this summer is the chicago history museum. they have been a tremendous collaborator starting last spring working with the chicago bar association to present a reenactment of the lincoln-douglas debates. we were very privileged to work with the history museum on the presentation of doris kearns goodwin earlier this year with the chicago bar association. just last week we had harold holder here as well. and tonight's program with dr. henry lewis gates is really one of the stars of this entire land of lincoln programming. we are delighted to have the history museum as such a strong partner of the library in so many things but never more importantly than this year in the celebration of the bicentennial of the birth of abraham lincoln. so please welcome the president of the chicago history museum, our dear friend, gary johnson. [applause] $ >> thank you very much, mary demsey. i thank all of you, thank the sponsors, conveners. i'm very proud that chicago is hosting this important event. as mary demsey said, the chicago public library in particular is putting on what i think is the highest impact lincoln event of the summer. the summer reading program, when all is said and done, will involve over a million books read and reported on involving lincoln. now, that's impact. we're delighted to be part of that. chicago, by the way, was also very important for abraham lincoln himself. we can confirm 24 visits to chicago, and i suspect there were even more. and when you look at the record, chicago was the city that was the proving ground for his ambition, the place where he tested his skills in dealing with communities of different kinds than he met in downstate illinois, meeting different kinds of political leaders. and we're very proud of the connection of chicago and abraham lincoln. and chicago has been the setting for wave after wave of lincoln events this year. since the actual day of the bicentennial. but it's a whole year. and in particular, i'd ask you to mark your calendars for october 10 of this year, because on that day, two institutions are going to open major exhibi exhibits. october 10. the newbury library will open the library of congress's exhibition on the lincoln bicentennial, "malice toward none." and at our own chicago history museum, we'll be opening two exhibitions side-by-side with a powerful theme. the first is "lincoln transformed," on the issue of slavery with treasures from the chicago history museum. secondly, i'm proud to say there will be an exhibit on lincoln's contemporary benito juarez, president of mexico, sometimes known as the lincoln of mexico. and some of mexico's national treasures will be here in chicago so that we can examine and compare these two great leaders. so i thank you all for being here and i look forward to a wonderful program. [applause] >> good evening. i'm congressman jesse jackson jr. as a member of the abraham lincoln -- thank you. as a member of the abraham lincoln bicentennial commission, i welcome you to this town hall meeting. thank you for being here. i'd like to thank the many organizations that worked together to convene this town hall, especially commissioner demsey and her staff. i'd also like to thank the fetzer institute of ca kalamazo, michigan, for its significant support of this town hall practice. the bicentennial has given rise to exciting new scholarship about our 16th president's life, leadership and legacy. the national commission town hall program entitled "lincoln' legacy: race, freedom and equality of opportunity," encourages us not only to read the latest books and watch informative documentaries but also to talk about what we've learned. to do something to help complete the unfinished work lincoln spoke of at gettysburg. there is no civil war but great tasks that remain before us. today, the u.s. supreme court decided a case about race. two weeks from today, hearings begin on the first la teen latia nominated to the high court, judge sonia sotomayor. tens of millions of americans lack adequate health care. too many students do not have access to an equal high-quality public education. and americans are losing their jobs and homes, probably have personal ways of defining equality of opportunity. combine all of these issues, add your personal experience and you have a story that is not only shaped by history but helps shape history. join me now in welcoming the leaders of our town hall on our history, our stories, rick cogan, one of chicago's best writers and interviewers. [applause] $ >> and our very special guest, scholar, film maker and author, henry lewis "skip" gates. [applause] >> i don't want them to think that i'm a jinx of any kind but the last time i was on this stage was studs turkel and he had a cane. [laughter] >> and inevitably, i will have a cane. dr. gates, before we get to barack obama and sotomayor and maybe even the gay pride parade, what's your history? >> what's my history? >> yeah. >> first i want to say, i love chicago. [applause] >> i do, i really do. when i was beginning my career, i was an assistant professor at yale and i really wanted to move to chicago. and i applied for a job at the university of chicago in the english departmenti didn't get it. [laughter] $ i never let them forget that. but i would have done anything to live in chicago. and the crowds -- and isn't this a great library? give it up for the library. [applause] $ >> an >> and my presented friend, conn jesse jackson jr. we took every once in awhile. we talk about everything. you're a good man, jesse, and i really admire you. anything i can do for you, i would. you're lucky to have them as your representative. the republicans didn't clap, did you hear that? >> there are no republicans in chicago. [laughter] >> left. and finally one more thing. the history makers, where's the wonderful person? oh, there you are. isn't that an amazing, amazing project, the history makers? and i didn't plan to do this, my daughters will probably kill me, but i'd like to donate $1,000 in honorarium to the history makers. just to help you. >> just so i don't feel like a freak, i'm not getting an honorarium. but there's another thing about the history makers. don terry, some months ago, a former colleague of mine at the "chicago tribune," did a wonderful magazine piece on that. you can probably get that -- i don't know much about computers -- through the archives too. but it's a remarkable, remarkable thing. >> oh, it is. >> the last issue of the "tribune magazine" was sunday too. i want to get to that too. >> every city should have a history maker project like this. >> i couldn't agree with you more. i could not agree with you more. and were they to have one and you -- see, you have everything on computer. this is fab tas i can. >> there you go. >> who is that? >> no, you asked me what? >> your history. >> i got interested in my own history, which i realized later was african-american history, in june of 1960. and it's the day i first saw this photograph. so here's the story. it was the day that my father's father -- my father is 96 years old, ladies and gentlemen. he would have been here but he had a date. [laughter] $ $ >> my father loves women. but he is a total darling. he plays bridge six days a week and has a 70-year-old companion. so you can't beat that. [laughter] >> edward saint lawrence gates was my father's father and he died in june 1960. i was nine years old. and it was the first time i had ever stood next to a corpse, you know, went to see the viewing. and we had the funeral at kites funeral home in cumberland, maryland, which is about three hours west of washington, d.c. and my father's a second son. i'm a second son. my father is very funny. >> that must be genetic. >> yeah. look, my father makes red fox look like an undertaker. my father is very funny. so we were standing there, just my father and me, looking at my grandfather's corpse, and my grandfather looked like a white man. and this is -- i'll show you, this is his father. that's his father, who was born in 1857. and the -- and his son, this is -- that's my grandfather's baby picture. now, he doesn't look white, i don't know what is. >> yeah, no kidding. no kidding. >> yeah. and so we're standing there looking at him, and, i mean, my grandfather was so lie complected, behind his back, we called him caspar, you know, caspar the friendly ghost. i thought he looked ridiculous. i didn't know what to do and i thought what i heard was my father laughing. and i thought well, this was a joke because they had made him too white. and i started to laugh and i looked up, and my father with huge tears welling down my father's face and i was mortified. because the whole colored people of cumberland, maryland, were all in this funeral home. and i was afraid they had seen me laugh at this sacred moment. and i was so shocked at that and shocked to see my father cry that i started to cry too. and fortunately everyone was so mesmerized at my father's tears that they didn't even notice me. so we took my grandfather to rosehill cemetery which is an episcopalian cemetery. we have always been episcopalian. we buried him and then went back to the family home. and this woman bought cash -- she paid cash for the house in 1870. >> did you -- that was not the first time you'd ever seen this picture, was it? >> we went back to the gates family home and my father took my brother and me upstairs. now, i don't know about you, but when i was growing up, you didn't go upstairs -- i didn't know my grandparents had an upstairs, they had a bedroom. you wouldn't go to your grandparents bedroom. you wouldn't sit on the bed. >> sure. >> so we go up, it was like going to mars, seeing the upstairs of my grandparents' house. and my father took us -- they had a sun porch right off their bedroom. and he took all these bank ledgers. my grandfather and my great-grandfather had a chimney sweep and janitorial business, and my grandfather had all these bank ledgers which my father was pulling. and i didn't know what they were. turned out they were scrapbooks, and they were full. war casualties from world war ii, all kinds of stuff. so, you know, all of this is unfolding. we had just buried my grandfather. and my father stops and says -- he calls me boy. he still calls me boy. he said, boy, this is what i wanted you to see. my brother is five years old. he's chief of oral surgery at bronx national hospital, a very distinguished surgeon. and we look down, and it's the obituary, january 6, 1888, of the "cumberland evening times," cumberland, maryland. and it says, "died this day, jane gates, an estimable colored woman." an estimable colored woman. and then he wanted us to read it. and he pulled out the picture, and as you can see, she was a midwife. that's her uniform. and her -- she had five children. they were all fathered by the same man but she would never reveal who that man was. but he was a white man, obviously, and we now know from my d.n.a. that he was irish because i have something called the uneal type. so i'm descendant from irish. so give it up. you've heard of the black irish? well, this is it. and the very next day -- the very next day, i got out the composition book and i went downstairs in our house and i asked my mother what her mother's name was, when she was born and her mother and her mother, and i did that with my father. and since that day, i have been obsessed with my own family tree and with the collective family tree of the african-american people. and that's a true story. >> that's amazing. the thing that strikes me about that story is in many ways you were very, very lucky, because there is this photograph when many, many, as you well know, other africans, there's no kind of record, there's make a name. so you saw it in your fabulous work for television, there's maybe a name, there's maybe a hint. is it difficult when you are exploring the past of someone, trying to get the history when the record is absolutely illusive? >> oh, it's horrible. it's horribly difficult. but there are certain tricks. so that's why now i've written two books. >> right. >> "in search of our roots," which is -- both of them are outgrowths of my african-american life series. our people -- for those of you who don't rntion slaves, you could -- a slave could call themselves george washington madison johnson jones, but the law didn't call him or her anything. >> right. >> because they weren't real human beings. that was a fiction that the law claimed so that our people who -- all of us are descendant from slaves, the only question is when your slave ancestors became free. i've known african-americans that say, my people were never slaves. like rubbish. there are three big myths. the three big myths in african-american genology. the first one is my grandmother was a native american cha chero. how many african-americans in this room believe that you descend from a native american? be honest. raise your hand. yeah. well, none of you-all have native american in you. [laughter] $ but do you know what? if we did the d.n.a. of all the black players in the nba, 30% of the black men in this room, 30% of all black men like me can trace their ancestry to a white man who impregnated a black woman in the civil war. isn't that amazing? that's 1-3. but rather than deal with the fact of in forced slavery -- in forced sexuality under slavery, at best -- there were a few exceptions of rape at worst -- we fantasized this native american mythical -- my grandmother had high cheek bones and straight black hair. every negro i know makes that claim. hair down to her behind. it's like total rubbish. it just didn't happen. less than 5% of the american people have one drop of native american ancestry. the other myth, large myth, is that i'm -- nobody in my family was a slave. but we were all slaves, all descended from slaves. some of our ancestors were freed earlier than others, but 95% of our ancestors were only freed not by the emancipation proclamation. the emancipation proclamation we figure most generously freed about 500,000 of the 3.9 million slaves. it was the 13th amendment that freed the slaves and was finally ratified in december of 1865. and that abolished the institution of slavery. so the 1870 census is where all of our ancestors appear for the first time with two names, with a first name and a suriname. so you start with you and you work backwards every ten years trying to trace your ancestors through the censuses to get to 1870. this is like the sound barrier. remember "star trek?" remember there was the edge of the universe and the captain was always trying to penetrate? that's the edge of the universe for black people in genology. then what you do, you look -- let's take oprah winfrey. >> sure. >> so we knew we could find constantine winfrey, which we knew was oprah winfrey's great-great-grandfather living in mississippi in 1870. so then we went to the 1860 census, where, remember, slaves don't have any names. but we looked for the white people in the same county who owned slaves. and then you look at the slave schedule. and constantine winfrey was 31 in 1870. we looked for a winfrey who was white who has a slave, a male in 1860 who was 21. and chances are, that was the same guy. well, it turns out that there was a white man named absalem winfrey, he had a 21-year-old back male slave, and he's living next boor in 1870 co- constantine winfrey. looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. what then you look for, estate records for absalem winfrey. because the exception to what i said earlier to the slaves not having a name is let's say that you had 50 slaves in 1850 and you had five children and you wanted to distribute your estate equally among your children. you would then file the proper papers to do that and you would have to list the slaves by their first name. >> gotcha. >> so if you're lucky, you could find a record of an estate division and it would say my 21-year-old slave constantine, blah, blah, blah. and you all know may jemison, the first male black astronaut, we found her grandfather that way in 1852 in the papers of a white man who owned him. it's just -- it's incredibly lucky. >> how do you feel when you can't do it, though? >> it's very, very frustrating. >> yeah. >> quincy jones. i love quincy jones. quincy jones is descended from a white man named lenier who impregnated a black woman 15 years after slavery ended. and it's a very prominent family. you're very lucky to be a lenier because they have a very narrow trunk on the family tree. they -- everybody who's a lenier is descended from the same. and quincy on his white side -- we did this for him -- can trace his ancestry back to the 13th century in england to one of the kings of england. but on his african-american si side, we could only go back to just before the civil war. so it's tremendously, tremendously frustrating. i was very lucky because we had jobbie sury, who's a brilliant genologist, who works out in provo, utah, who works with the mormormons. they're the for most experts on genology. i love the genology research and the family history library is just a rush for me every time i go there. and we've -- we've filmed there. and they did my family tree, which is part of african-american life 1 and 2, and because jane gates, the gates branch of the family -- well, here, i can show this to you. she was a slave until 1865. but on my other branches, they were able to -- i'll show you my family tree. just bear with me for a moment. they were able to find three sets of my four great-grandparents. and it's very hard to see, but that's me right at the bottom, number one. and at the top are three sets of my fourt pour great-grandparent. and they were all free. two sets were free by 1776, free negroes, and the third set on my father's mother's side, jill and sarah bruce, were freed in 1823 by a white man named abraham van meter. and we have his will. and i didn't know any of this. and they -- all of these sets of my family lived 30 miles from where i was born and where i grew up. and they were right there, all my roots buried in these court records. and the mormons gave me my family back. it's one of the most incredible things that ever happened to me. and one of my four great-grand fairntgreat-grandparents, john d redmond, fought in the great revolution. and some fought in the civil war. so i was so amazed to find that i had a patriot ancestor that i started a project at harvard when we are going through -- there were 80,000 pension applications for soldiers from the continental army, and all you do is match the names against the federal census. federal censuses started in this country, as you know, of course, in 1790. and censuses always listed if a person is black or not. so we are matching these -- i run the voice institute at harvard. i've been very lucky to be able to do that. we have this project there under the direction of genologist jane yale and we're matching all those 80,000 pension applications to the censuses. and already she's found 5,000 black men who fought in the american revolution. isn't that a great thing? >> wow. >> isn't that a great thing? >> yeah. what strikes me in many ways, and your television work has been so powerful, ando watch, just as you did here, some of those people learn immediately what their past was like. >> and they cry. >> yeah. well, with good reason i think. >> yeah, i cried actually. >> it doesn't matter to most people, do you think, whether the history is a proud history or a criminal history. >> no. >> just the knowing is all that matters. >> absolutely. yeah, some people say -- $ >> i don't want to know. >> -- i want to know. >> i want to live with this cherokee long-haired fantasy. [laughter] $ >> and i asked a couple of prominent african-americans who said they didn't want to know. >> really? >> yeah. my friend -- i admire colin powell tremendously, and one night i had sent him a letter, and i got an e-mail from general powell, 7:22 -- i kept these -- 7:22 p.m. saying i'd be delighted to be in what became african-american lives 1. 7:26 i got another one and it looked and it said, i've changed my mind, i have enough cousins already. [laughter] but i don't understand that. i think to have -- there was a documentary in 1968 that bill cosby narrated my senior in high school. it's called "black history: lost, stolen or something else." and it was the first time i had seen any documentary on african-american history, what we now call african-american history. and since then, i have been just hooked. i want to know all i can about the african-american past, whether it's good, bad or indifferent. i just want to know. and i think most of us are that way. >> yeah. but i also -- there are a few people, though, and i think that's the interesting thing about history, written, oral, whatever kind, many people manufacture their own histories. >> oh, sure. >> from pieces of truth. and the history to satisfy them or satisfy their face on the planet. >> but when you're starting to do your family tree, the first thing that you do is go home and interview everybody. everybody who claims they have a story, just -- write it down. do not challenge anybody, just write it down before they die. that's the most important thing. start with the oldest persons, for obvious reasons. and then systematically investigate using census records, et cetera, et cetera. and you'll find often that there's a part of the truth. >> it's a wonderful puzzle, in a sense, then. >> yeah, it gets transformed in the telling. and you know that parlor game, when i whisper to you and you whisper. >> sure. >> imagine that over the generations. and in my mother's family, they'd say well, the way i heard tell it, so and so and then the cherokee and then this and george washington and all of these stories, none of which are true. but they're fascinating and they are part of the lore. my cousin, we were raised to belief that the wife man who fathered jane gates' children was named samuel brady, who was irish, and who because my great-grandfather, his obituary said he was born at brady junction, which was brady farm. and that was the story. well, when i was doing african-american lives, we tracked -- we put an ad in all these gen geology web sites sayg that pbs was doing a documentary of descendants of samuel brady. what we didn't say was it was about the black descendants, namely me. and two guys answered this ad. they lived in california. they were first cousins, direct male descendants of samuel brady. so my fellow executive producer said these guys showed up, what do we do. and i said we've got to tell them the truth. so they loved it. [no audio] >> i want to be their cousin too. so we did a d.n.a. test. we swabbed their cheeks and my cheeks. and the a doctor at the university of chicago, dr. rick citles, who founded african d.n.a. -- africanancestry.com. and he revealed the results. he said here's the y d.n.a. which you inherited from your father. you pass down the y d.n.a. father to son. and the other you get from your mother and it's also identical. these are genetic fingerprints so you can use them forensically to track your ancestors. and he said on camera in front of 20 million people, you have absolutely nothing in common with samuel brady or samuel brady's descendants. so i then had to go and tell my father, who at the time was 91, and my great aunt helen, who was 89, and i said, aunt helen, daddy, i told them about the d.n.a. and they said yeah, yeah, yeah, what's the bottom line? and the bottom line is we are not bradies. and my aunt helen told dr. rick kittles and the d.n.a. establishment where they could put that result. she said, i have been a brady 89 years and i am still a brady and i'm going to die a brady. and i love that, because they're parallel narratives and we need to preserve all the narratives. >> this has nothing to do with anything but how -- how old were your dad's companion when he was only 91? 40? 50? [laughter] i want to meet your dad. i don't know about the rest of you. the importance of telling history, in laying it down and -- and discovering the d.n.a., then what -- what is one supposed to do with that? do you know what i mean? >> well, for me, it's just incrediblely satisfying. >> yeah. >> it marriag helps me to undero some extent why i am who i am. my mother used to say, you come from people. you come from people. and i didn't know what that meant. and she knew some of this. like my great uncle clifford was put on a stamp. and he was the first black man admitted to the bar in the state of west virginia and he cofounded the niagara movement and he had his own newspaper for 37 years in martinsburg, west virginia. and i knew about him. we were raised to know about him. but i didn't know about all of these other ancestors, but she knew that we came from a long line of free negroes who owned property. because in the state of virginia -- remember, west virginia was in virginia until 1860. mine, they were the same state until 1863. if your master emancipated you, they had to give you land. they end up inheriting the estate and 1,000 acres of land. the land is 20 miles from my home in west virginia. so it's very satisfying just to know. and my brother and i were inducted -- and my brother's son inducted into the sons of the american revolution because they found john redmon who had fought. and it was really funny, when we went down to texas to be inducted, we walked into this -- $ [laughter] $ i'm telling you, this was wild. it was their annual convention. everybody was dressed up, you know, like a patriot. >> was there any anxiety before taking this? [laughter] do you fear you're being set up for something? >> when we walked into this room, it was the whitest group of people. >> i can imagine. >> and my brother is really funny. he looked at me and said, are you sure we want to do this? [laughter] $ and so i gave the -- pbs was filming the induction ceremony. and when i accepted our membership on behalf of john redmon, my fourth great-grandfather, i announced the project i just told you-all about, the black patriots. and he said, my brother, in a year, we're going to find so many black patriots using this method that in a year, this room is going to look just like harlem. [laughter] and nobody laughed. nobody. [laughter] $ i said, i was just joking. i was just joking. don't kick me out. [laughter] $ but the main thing is that our history was systematically stripped from us. >> sure. sure. >> and that's why i want every black person in america to do their family tree. we are developing at the duboise institute -- and, congressman, we're going to be talking about this, because i want some money, congressman. [laughter] we want to reform -- when jesse was growing up, and i'm considerably older, but when i was growing up, the blackest thing you could ever be was an educated woman or an educated man. and something terrible, something terrible has happened to a large segment of the african-american community. because for too many of us, getting straight a's is white, speaking standard english is white, succeeding is white. what's that? if bull connor and george wallace had been sitting around in 1963 and said, well, you know, king and them are going to take over. what evil germ could we plant among the -- among them to let them self-destruct. they couldn't have come up with a more sin cali plot than to turn striving and learning and achievement into something not black. the blackest thing you could ever be. [applause] th $ the blackest thg you could be is he ha educated. frederick douglas said as slaves, we had to steal a little learning from the white man. we would defer grat fiction because wgratificationbecause we future. we believed we could sacrifice and our children would go to spellman or morehouse. and then when the white schools opened up, they would go to white schools, i call harvard and yale and those places. and now since the onset of affirmative action, which really it starts with lyndon johnson and now richard nixon was, you know, a demon for black capitalism. very curious but it's true. the black community is bifurcated. we have the largest black middle class in history, which has quad renewablrenewablehasquadrupled n dr. king was so brutally assassinated, but when you look at the percentage of black children looking at or near the poverty line the day dr. king was killed, if i'm remembering correctly, it was about 37%. and if i'm remembering correctly, today it's about 35%. and it's amazing. no model predicted this outcome. and we need -- my colleagues and i at harvard are trying to develop a curriculum. when we go into inner city schools and we change the way we teach science and history, the way we teach science, we go in -- if you and i walked in and said today's lesson is watching helix and d.n.a., the kids would say get out of here. but we walk in, we hold up a cotton swab and said everybody in this class is going to swab their cheeks and we're going to send it off to a laboratory in arizona and in six weeks, we're going to be able to tell what you tribe you came from, your ancestor, and what percentage of european and native american and african ancestry that you have. and while we wait for the results, we're going to teach you what d.n.a. is and what double helix is and what base pairs are, et cetera. and while we -- we go over to the history class and we say, we're going to teach the history of the slave trade to the same group of people, how africans were disbursed from africa, 12.5 million shipped to the new world between 1514 and 1867. curiously enough, only about 450,000 were shipped to the united states. all of the rest of the africans came to the new world were shipped to the caribbean and to south america. isn't that amazing? 35 million african-americans are all descended from those 450,000 people. and then when the results come back, each person's going to -- in the class is going to do a power point on where their ethnic ancestry came from in africa or on the slave trade. we want to revolutionize the way we treat science to inner city black and brown kids and history in the inner city black and brown kids. and when we do that -- $ >> well, i, for one, would be all over that. and as you know and as the congressman knows, the problems are a little deeper than that. i remember charles osgood and i once went in a classroom at farin school, which was at about 50th and state street across from that horrific robert taylor homes, we spent a couple weeks in a second grade slas roo clasm there. and at the end of that time, seven little kids, seven beautiful, undamaged so far, for a present for us, were told to draw something they wanted to see in the future. and one little kid grew, like, a crude kind of spaceship and another very shrewd kid drew something like all green and i said, what is that, is that a garden? and he said, no, that's money. [laughter] $ i wonder what that guy's doing now. but the most mysterious thing and haunting thing was a little girl drew a tree. and we were saying what is it, honey, is it a magic tree? what kind of tree is this? and he said, no, just a tree. and we moved to the next kid. and walking out the door, charlie and i said to each other, i said, what do you think of the tree one, what was that about? and we walked out the door of that building and we looked around and there was no tree. there was -- her life was walking across a crack filled, condom-filled empty lot to her horrifying place in the taylor homes where she had to sleep on a -- on the 14th floor, 7th floor, i said naively, why are the mattresses not on the bed in here. and there's a lot of shooting at night. i don't want my babies to be killed. that kind of thing. and i wonder, i want to get to lincoln, what in god's name would lincoln -- as complex intentions, what would he think, if you can even imagine if he walked back now and was sat down in the middle of boston, or the middle of inglewood? would it break his heart? >> well, lincoln was very complex. >> yeah, i know. yeah, yeah, but -- $ >> the tree strands, what i tried to do to some extent in my documentary more explicitly in my book "lincoln on race and slavery" was to read everything lincoln said about black people, about slavery, the colonization, and then separate it into subcategories. because there are three separate discourses lincoln had about what we would call race. one was equality. they didn't think black people were equal to white people. the answer is no. the second is slavery. was he opposed to slavery? he was unalterably oppos opposeo slavery. but being opposed doesn't mean you like black people. that's the confusion we have had. the third is called colonization. what's comization? shipping the newly freed slaves back to africa. he was consistently opposed to slave rim. and he gets all the props in the world for that. he reluctantly, or slowly i should say, came to respect some black people as potential intellectual equals. and two things happened to change his mind. lincoln was opposed to letting black people fight. i mean, frederick douglas and all the abolitionists pounded on the white house for years. and it was only the fact that the north was losing to the south and the fact that lincoln was giving them both -- excuse me, the winning case more on how the founders used black soldiers in the american revolution. and he was very much impressed by the founders and precedent as a lawyer. >> sure. yeah. >> and he met frederick douglas. and he had never met an intellectual equal in black face, as it were. he had never met anybody. he knew a few. you know, he knew billy the barber in springfield. but that's not a relationship of equals. he had a val laet in washingtona very good man that he cared about. but that's not frederick douglas. and he blew his mind. and he looked him in the eye, he was a towering intelligent inte. the last speech that lincoln gave, we forget that the emancipation proclamation included a provision that black men could fight in the civil war. and he -- lincoln believed, he called them his black warriors and he believed that the tide of the war turned because of his black warriors. so in the last speech that he gave april 11, 1865, at the white house, comes out on the ball corner, the north had won, balcony, the north had won. and many it, he says all the appropriate things. but he says he's thinking about doing something which we would say was revolutionary. he's thinking about asking congress to allow his 200,000 black warriors -- this is a direct quote -- "my 200,000 black warriors and the very intelligent negroes to vote." now, there were 4.4 million black people in the united states when he gave that speech. so that's 20 200,001. i guess the very intelligent negro was frederick douglas. that's 2 million black men who would not have had the right to vote. ironically, as kyl westburg knows, ironically, who's in the audience, who's standing on the grounds of the white house when he gives the speech -- the speech is revolutionary -- it sounds -- it doesn't sound revolutionary to us but it was the first time that a president of the united states abdicated any black man have the right to vote. and who's standing on the ground? john wilkes booth. and he said, that's it, that means nigger equality, and i'm going to run him through. and four days later, he killed abraham lincoln. so literally, abraham lincoln gave his life for black suffrage. >> that question of mine was idiotic in terms of what you just said. >> no, just let me finish. >> okay. >> i'm sorry. i'm giving -- $ >> i called myself an idiot an. >> no, no, no. it's a good question. because those 2 million black men who couldn't vote, there's scholarly debate about whether lincoln ever really changed his mind about shipping them back to africa. and i think that lincoln would not have been surprised that, you know, given the fact that he thought there were only 200,000 black warriors and a few black people anyway, i think he would have thought that there would be a bi furcation, which is what happened. so i think he would be more shocked that there's a black man as president. >> yeah, i bet he would. >> because it never occurred to lincoln -- i mean, he came to admire frederick douglas. they had only met three or four times. it's not like they were hang out and slapping fives. he never invited douglas to have -- lincoln never had dinner with a black person. ever. >> you know, one. thingone of the thingsthat thisu said we forget that lincoln did this, we forget this last speech. part of the problem -- and i'll be the first to admit -- there's much i don't know. it's not that i've forgotten this sort of peripheral way that lincoln was covered in whatever grade i was taught abraham lincoln and didn't pursue it. that strikes me as -- as -- as scary, that lincoln the myth is what's taught. >> well, ironically, african-americans were as complicit in the creation of the myth as lincoln as the -- the philosopher king of race relations. >> yeah, right. >> and the reason is we needed a great white man to beat up on the lesser more racist white men by the turn of the century. you see, we think that jim crowe was around forever but jim crowe was really created in the 1890's. civil war was 1865. reconstruction is 1866-11987. then a period of redemption. and with redemption, the south rises again. by the 1809's, all these black men have risen and plessy v. ferguson. so bookie t. washington and everybody else virtually create the myth of lincoln as the ultimate pure white man because they wanted to say, you guys have fallen away from the ultimate president, the greatest president. frederick douglas at the dedication of a memorial in 1876 said lincoln was the white man's president. president grant was there, the whole supreme court, the whole cabinet. it was the first monument dedicated in memory of abraham lincoln and it was funded entirely by ex-slaves. it's the first time a black man had an audience like that. and what's douglas do? douglas said, from beginning to end, abraham lincoln was the white man's president. what he did in terms of the slaves was to benefit white men. so it was -- they were shocked. and douglas did not -- douglas went on at other times to say lincoln was a great man, et cetera, et cetera, and he said it in that speech. but even reprinted that speech in the last two editions of his autobiography. so how he really felt. it was really nuanced but he wanted people to know that lincoln opposed slavery not because he liked black people -- i was ready to believe abraham lincoln loved black people -- it was because he thought it created unfair advantage to white men who owned slaves in the marketplace. so slavery discriminated against white -- what we call white working-class people. like his father. and his father had to leave kentucky because he couldn't compete in the marketplace. he goes to indiana and then illinois. so the truth about lincoln makes him more fascinating to me. more of a hero because he overcame his own racism. and lincoln was a racist at the beginning of his career. i mean, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. he used the n-word. callehe called jokes. but then he moved. and who knows if lincoln had lived how much further he had had moved? >> sure. >> but he was basically john brown by the end of his life compared to what he was when he was fighting -- when he was debating stephen douglas in this great state in 1858. so i find him more fascinating. and the first -- the very first scene that i shot for -- in "looking for lincoln" was at walter peyton charter school in kyl westbrook's class. and we have some of the class members here. and he -- i want you to stand up. give it up to this young brother right here. stand up. and i was nervous about that. i had just interviewed lerome bettis. and he thinks lincoln is the biggest racist in the whole white world. and i admire him very much but i gave him his say in the -- in the film. or, actually, i went to your class first and then i did lerome bettis. and kyl, what you did for me and your students -- and two of whom i gather, at least, are here -- and two of the people you can see in the film, they were both white and both women and one of them said, it just makes me like him more. it makes -- to understand his complexity makes me admire him more, that he couldn't -- and you saw it in the trailer. that he couldn't be john brown and be elected president of the united states. that he had to make certain compromises. he had to move through it. and i thought, wow, and these kids know the truth about lincoln and still admire lincoln. and that's what i wanted to do. and i learned that from you. so i appreciate it. i want to acknowledge that right here. thank you. >> we could talk for hours but i'm going to ask one last question and then open it up for some questions from some of these students and you, the general audience. you say that lincoln would be terribly surprised to find that barack obama -- $ >> if you brought him back from the grave, he'd die all over again. [laughter] $ >> what about you? what about you? >> i'm amazed. >> yeah, you are amazed. >> i'm astonished. i didn't think barack -- i didn't think that america would elect barack obama, no matter how wonderful i think he is. >> yeah. >> and i also, full disclosure -- the president knows this, because he reminded me of this -- i supported hillary clinton at the beginning because hillary clinton is a very good friend of mine. and the president, president clinton. and i'm a very loyal person. they were friends of mine. so what do i do, you know? i admire barack obama. i had had the first party for barack obama when he was running for the senate right after his great speech at the convention on martha's vineyard. >> right. >> and it's a big whitehouse that my familwhite housethat my. and i said, senator, welcome to the white house. and everybody cracked up. oprah had this great party and invited, what my daddy calls, all the big negroes and one little academic, me, to go out there a couple of septembers ago. and she seated me across from him. there were like 200 people there. and i admire him. i didn't know him when he was at harvard but i remember when he was elected president of the law review. i was really proud of him. i didn't know how to say his name but i was really proud of him. but it was iowa. i went to sleep waiting for the iowa results. i was living out at stanford on iis ais he bat cal. sabbatical. and i always watch leno, now conan. and i woke up and he was giving that victory speech. and do you know what it made me feel like? like what bobby kennedy's speeches used to make me feel like. and i jumped out of bed. i didn't want to miss t. it was. that was one of the truly great speeches. everybody talks about the convention speech and the acceptance speech but that iowa speech was truly great. so i didn't want to leave hillary, not -- i didn't work for her. i'm an ack item i can and i'm also the editor-in-chief of theroot.com, owned by "the washington post." so i couldn't really be active in the campaign. but i was rooghtd for the rootie brother, i wanted him to win. i didn't allow myself to celebrate until 11:01 on election night when wolf blitzer said, it's official, you know, he's president of the united states. [laughter] $ i jumpei jumped up. you know, you never know what white people are going to do. everybody black knows that. i didn't know if they were going to vote for the brother or not. [laughter] >> my portion's done. i want to invite some people up here. we could talk forever. you're a fascinating guy. book buy the books, buy the stuff he did for tv. >> buy many of the books. >> you'll see, there are many books out there. my last question is, has your father ever met oprah winfrey? >> no. no. but he loves her. >> yeah. >> no. >> she could be your new step-mom. >> my mother used to tell me -- god rest her soul -- oprah started in baltimore. we're close. cumberland is three hours west of washington, d.c. all of our cable -- yuppies think it was invented for chicago and manhattan. he was invented for eastern maryland, western maryland and eastern pennsylvania in 1940 and 1950. so we always had able. that's the only way -- i lived in the allegheny mountains and there was no antenna big enough. so all our tv programs came from d.c. and baltimore. and when i was off at yale, i guess i was teaching at that time. my mother used to talk about this black woman named oprah. and i had never heard of anybody named oprah. and i said mom, what are you trying to say. what kind of name is oprah? oprah what? and she said, this woman is a genius. and she was right. oprah winfrey is one of my -- i admire her so much. she's one of my heroes. she's a great person. >> one of my great heroes and one of the great historians in this city, i want to acknowledge my buddy tim black is here. >> oh, that's great. [applause] $ $ >> a great man. >> you know, i put mr. black in a film. i -- i did a film on me,, behind the color line. and one hour is about chicago. i made the last documentary in the robert taylor homes right before they tore them down. i put mr. black in the film. you're lucky to have him in your community. >> he's a great man. i'd like to welcome first to the microphone, madeleine schwartz. she was in this cool guys class at walter peyton high that you helped film. madeleine? >> hi. >> how are you? >> i'm good. >> please. >> you're all dressed up tonight, man. not like high school. $ >> well, i was just wondering, have you, in terms of just race, have you both as an academic and just socially noticed a difference in the way that people talk about race and discuss it, like i said, academically and socially? >> yes, i think that's a good question. i think that we're -- with a black man and woman in the white house, you have to talk about race more openly just by definition than we ever have before. though it's still -- we have a long way to go because we still comport race with class. for example, i'm a product of affirmative action. i went to yale in september 1969. 96 black kids. i was one of 96 black kids to enter yale that year. class of 1966 at yale had six. what was there a genetic blip in the race that all of a sudden there were 90 smart black people? of course not. yale and historically institutions had race quotas. and my father is working class. he worked two jobs, worked the paper mill in the day, was a janitor in the evening. so i wouldn't even have had the class -- no matter how intelligent i may or may not be, i wouldn't have had the class profile within the race. you couldn't just show up at white institutions. you had to be prescreened. everybody black in here knows what i'm talking about. rosa parks -- if you believe rosa parks is just some tired, poor black lady who spontaneously sat down on that bus? there's a bridge that i'll sell you that connects brooklyn to manhattan. rosa parks was very well educated. she looked the part. she wasn't too dark. she had a certain text you're toutexture hair.she had been trn nonviolation. give me a break. claclaudette colvin did spontaneously sit down. there were high stakes. class and race have always been inflated. and no one was more clear about that than black people within the race. why should my two daughters, who were born at yale new haven hospital, raised on the campus of yale, educated at the finest private schools in the united states, why should they benefit from affirmative action? i think we should introduce -- congressman, i think we should introduce a class element in affirmative action. and i think it should apply to poor white people, poor brown people, poor yellow people, poor red people -- poor people. my kids are going to get i into college. we need to start -- be more nuanced in how we think about it. and also it will make affirmative action more positive. i grew up with poor white people in the hills of west virginia. poverty is colorblind. and the culture of poverty is colorblind. same kind of dysfunction, obesity, pregnancy, out-of-wedlock, body abuse, spousal abuse. it is the same culture that we see among inner city poor black people in rural appalachian white people. ..$. no amount of historical, romantic wishful thinking is going to change that. we need a history of america taught in our textbooks like kyle is doing with lincoln, and those guys will survive. thomas jefferson was still a great man, he just was wrong about black people. no matter how many of sally hamings's children he fathered. i think -- sally hemings's children he fathered. i think that barack in the white house can do a lot to continue that, and also the browning of america -- there are so many brown people here now. when we were growing up, race was black and white, and now race is infinitely more complicated. much more nuanced. it's brown, it's red, it's yellow, it's -- it's fascinating. it's a great time, i think, to be a person of color, and a great time to be confronting the historical problems of race and racism and economic exploitation in america if only we have the courage squarely to face it. thank you. >> well put. stephanie jamelo is another student. i'm going to ask you a question. get up there. what was that -- >> thanks. >> yeah, remember you're on television, don't be shy. >> no. >> this could be your big moment. >> he sounds like a very cool teacher. he's going to be up here in a second. having dr. gates in the room, did it change in any way, the way you and your friend talk about race? >> our class had had a few prefatory discussions about lincoln -- >> nothing could quite prepare you for this. >> no, but i think it made everyone think about their answer a little bit more -- you know, going to class at 9:30 in the morning, no one's really on the top of their game but -- so you know, you can kind of throw out an answer there to get five, but with professor gates there i think everyone really sat down and thought truly what they thought about lincoln. it was -- it was no more that they had to have a generic answer -- you know, that lincoln was a great president, he did what no one else could do, people kind of had the opportunity to -- you know, we had a bunch of reading material, we -- dr. gates talked to us about the different issues surrounding lincoln, and we as a class kind of learned for the first time that it was ok to not just see lincoln as a hero of the black people -- that he might, you know, had been something different and he's still just as prntd to history but -- just as important to history but -- you know, lincoln isn't just what everyone paints him out to be. >> that's great. where do you go to school now? >> i go to washington university in st. louis. >> good for you, good for you, good for you. thanks. >> ok. now, obviously, the greatest teacher on the planet, kyle, coming up here. >> my man. >> and you sense it from dr. gates, am i getting it just from you, two, and these bright students, you've got to make history exciting to sell it, don't you? >> absolutely, and i think part of the power of what you said tonight in your work has been the way in which you've made history personal. i think that's a theme that sort of runs throughout this evening, is the way in which all of our lives intersect with history, and part of, i feel like, our task as teachers and as educators to help students realize the way in which all of our personal stories are connected with history, even if it isn't such that i have an ancestor that fought in the american revolution, there is still something about my history and about my story that reaches back to that time period. and i don't think we do as good a job as we should as educators in helping students to connect their stories -- their stories to history and to the broader history that is not just this collection of facts and dates and things that you sort of talk about that just sort of flew over your head. >> yeah, right. >> we don't do that enough, i think. >> that's well put. >> i agree. >> thank you. >> i -- >> secretary of education, congressman jackson, when you get to the white house. >> i had some good history teachers, but not anybody as good as kyle -- in fact, he's inspired me so much i'm going to let my hair grow. >> my pal, james grossman is the vice president of research and education at the newbury library on the show sunday and we had a marvelous time talking about how exciting history can be. jim, you're a really smart guy. what did you think of this conversation? >> the first thing i think is that when i came to kyle's class, i don't think you took two days to have them prepare for me, so -- when we talk here about status -- i also want to remind nearly everybody here that the kind of research that we're talking about, genio logical research, you have to -- geneological institution, you can do at the newbury library, we have specialists in african-american geneology. so you can do this kind of research at the newbury. you don't need to go to salt lake city. it's nice to go to salt lake city but you can do it right here in chicago. >> and through ancestry.com, once you get some toolage -- >> you can do a whole lot of it on the internet. >> i'm curious because you have read a lot more lincoln than i have, and the other part of history that's interesting aside from the personal stories is the complexities. >> yes. >> and that's what we often don't get, especially the kind of history that rick was talking about, and the complexity for lincoln in terms of thinking about what lincoln would have done are in some ways about values that competing values that we all think are good, so i would be curious. how many of you think that after the civil war healing was important, that that should be a high priority, is healing. how many think that justice was important? what people often don't think about is that after the civil war and after lots of wars healing and justice can be competing interests. you and i have read a lot of stuff, our mutual friend. i'm curious, as much lincoln as you have read, how do you think he would have approached that conflict between healing on the one hand and justice on the other? >> i think it's a great question. >> thank you. >> i think that -- you know, i don't -- we're all raised to think that had lincoln lived, everything would have been different. had lincoln lived, had lincoln lived -- certainly, lincoln wanted to reconcile -- forgive and bring the south back into the union, but i think that would have been at the expense of black rights. >> uh-huh. >> and i don't think it was an accident that he only advocated those 200,000. i think he was willing to sacrifice -- this is heresy to a friend of mine like harold holzer. if he were here he would jump up on the stage and like beat me with my cane but i don't think he was there -- there were 200,000 black warriors and there were these very intelligent negroes, maybe the 400,000 free negroes, maybe at most, and these other people, i don't think he knew what to do with them -- the idea -- think about, how are you going to absorb into society peacefully 3.9 million slaves overnight? that is a daunting task for barack obama, abraham lincoln, george -- anybody, many people wanted to ship these people back to either panama, or to haiti, or to west africa -- when i say "back," they were all born in the united states. do you know that -- so there was no back to it. they were americans. 75% of all of our african ancestors had arrived in this country by the day thomas jefferson wrote the declaration of independence, and by 1820, 99.9% of all the african slaves that came through the united states had been here. we are an american people of african descent but lincoln for a long time had this that we were determined -- a bit like the government in world war ii taking the japanese americans and saying you're more japanese than american no matter if they had been here for 100 years and we're going to put you in these concentration camps. i think as the tensions between a reconciled south and north emerged, and they would have emerged as they did anyway, i believe that the commitment to black rights would have eroded even -- or just as quickly as it eroded anyway -- if there was a commitment to black rights more or less for 10 years and then reconstruction ended. the freest time in our people's history was the 10 years between 1866 and 1876. so i think we're always at the bottom of the totem pole. our rights are the most dispensable. justice for some is not justice for all. and when they have to decide who the "some" is, we -- our people collectively have not been in that some, and i don't think had lincoln lived it would have been significantly different. i hope that i'm wrong. the fantasy that the great emancipator would have integrated all these ex-slaves into the economy and the society and voting -- i just don't see it happening. i think lodgistically it would have been extraordinarily -- i think logistleally it would have been extraordinarily difficult to pull off and look at history -- we're still trying to integrate the descendants of the slaves into the american society. still. >> i think this gets back, then, to the theme of [inaudible] about how the stories that we tell about history then affect history going forward because what happened then was that what was done during and after reconstruction became a story of healing, which is a good thing -- in other words, the notion that healing, which is warm and fuzzy, was what we did without people also seeing that healing required injustice. so the justice part got thrown out. >> the healing of white america. >> exactly, exactly. >> by the turn of the century -- by the centennial of lincoln's birth -- we just celebrated in february the bicentennial. at the centennial, slavery had been so deeply buried in the american memory -- the collective memory -- the american historical imagination that w.e.b. dubois, the hero of so many black intellectuals and his contemporaries had to demand that lincoln be remembered as the man who freed the slaves. because people were embarrassed by that in 1909. it wasn't about lincoln the great emanc parent, it was the man who saved the union, and that shift was a very, very important shift -- they wanted the negroes to go away, they didn't want this man to be associated -- so booker t. washington -- it's like he put a bear hug on abraham lincoln and washington issued this series of lithographs, would have a big oval of him in the middle, and over his right shoulder would be frederick douglass, over his left shoulder abraham lincoln. it's like they had a baby and his name was booker and he did that because he hated dubois and dubois hated him and he wanted to say he had the mantle from douglas and lincoln but he also did that to make lincoln useful in the larger struggle for black rights against this -- we can't imagine how horrible it was to be black at the turn of the century in america. it was horrible. imagine george wallace and bull connors everywhere. basically that's how it was. >> charles branham is the senior historian at the dusabo museum of american history, a place not visited by enough white people. i find it is a shame -- it is a great, great museum. >> that's where i interviewed le'ron bennett right after i came from your class, so it was great. >> when did you get -- i want to -- you're his -- when did you and how did you get hooked on history? >> i was just thinking about the references you were making. you and i went to college about the same time. i grew up in tennessee and you grew up in maryland and i wasn't expecting that question, but there were so many similarities including the fact that i developed an early love for history, i think because i had such a terrible history teacher who was the coach and i remember all of my history classes being in the dark because they were all movies that were being shown reel to reel. and then one day -- remember, this was in the south, this is during separate but equal, this is when african-americans could go to certain stores but they could buy shoes but they couldn't try them on. >> right. >> i remember that we devoted one day to talking about african-americans. now, this has been an all-african-american high school, the second oldest high school in the city and i think it was probably against the law for him to do it but he said, "ok, we're going to talk about african-americans." everybody did a report on booker t. washington. >> really? >> that was the only african-american we knew and if you went to the old malco-theater they didn't say white and colored, you knew to go to the side and you knew to climb the stairs to go to the balcony because they had a picture of booker t. washington. >> that's a great story. >> i want to ask another question because i'm bringing it back to the day and i'm thinking about bernie madoff. even though i'm a historian and i love history -- >> he's not black, he's a white man. >> from what i understand but we haven't done his d.n.a. studies. >> that's true. >> presumably. but i'm thinking about your interpretation of lincoln's motives in terms of his views on slavery, and you are absolutely right, but as we know, and the more you study lincoln the more you read about lincoln, the more you appreciate the complexity as one of the students just pinpointed out so i think there is another element here that might be some contemporary importance if we get back to the issue of class, an issue that you brought up and an issue that i think has tremendous relevance given what's going on economically in the society and also given the fact that we are now having realigning coalitions in large measure brought about by at least in part the election of barack obama. you're absolutely right lincoln was concerned about preserving the privilege of free workers at the same time he had the distaste for -- he did not like his father and his father would pull him out of school, and lincoln loved to read, and make him work and basically made him -- would hire him out as a laborer. "we need more money, young man. you don't need that education. go out there and work for two or three days." you look at his record. he didn't really care that much for farmers -- even as a legislator in illinois, didn't really pay much attention to farmers. he hated the idea -- he loved to read. he loved education. he hated the idea that somebody would profit from the labor of others -- one of the most progressive things he ever said was "a black woman is my equal." not in the sense of racial equality but in the right to earn from her own labors. >> and put bread in her mouth. >> i also think in the age of bernie madoff and an age where americans are become being increasingly sensitized to exploitation in which people can invent wealth out of whole cloth with new and new complex derivatives, what lincoln might say and how lincoln might feel about the economic crisis that we face, especially as it effects the -- as it affects the average working -- and this includes a great deal of african-americans because african-americans are the most unionized people in the country, as it might affect african-americans and other people of color. >> that's fascinating. i think that he would be horrified at the larger economic exploitation of individuals like us by this tiny group of unscrupulous people, is the simplest way to answer it. >> fascinating, sunday's "new york times" cover story is about -- instead of the death of the black middle class in detroit as a result of the -- >> right. >> go visit the masabo museum, ladies and gentlemen of the audience, if you have a question, please come down, step up to the microphone and fire away. young lady. >> first of all thank you both for being here. i happen to be one of the convenors so i thank this illustrious group that i am honored to be a part of -- i thank you very much for including me, teresa caldwell, wherever you are. i have a question. the lincoln bicentennial is halfway over. we're halfway through 2009. illinois, fortunately, is one of the states that is continually doing recognition of abraham lincoln during this year which is fabulous. however, that's not happening across the entire country where we had so much going on in every state but not constantly like in illinois. six more months of recognizing abraham lincoln as complex as he is, where do we go from here? what do we take from this bicentennial now? where do we go with lfrpg and all of his complexities? >> that's really good. i hadn't thought about that. most of the celebrations peaked in february. >> right. >> and we're doing way more in illinois every -- >> but we're doing another event in miami in november. like the similarly structured. for me, all i want is for people to be honest about lincoln's complexity and to understand -- to paraphrase shakespeare, he was all the better for being a little bad -- that he was greater for being flawed, instead of pretending that he was the american jesus, you know, who walked on -- walked on water, the curious thing about lincoln is that each successive generation of americans has reconstructed lincoln in its own image. when we look in the mirror, we see lincoln reflected back. it doesn't matter if you're fidel castro's hero is abraham lincoln, ronald reagan's hero is lincoln. how could fidel castro and ronald reagan have the same hero? but they don't have the same guy. it's a different guy. and lincoln has this uncanny capacity in part because he was martyred to reflect back what is projected onto -- onto him. and i think to be able to teach him as kyle teaches him all across america would be doing everyone an enormous favor because i disagree with my friend harold holz. i don't think we need the myth of the perfect person, and then we suppress evidence when they're -- you know, it doesn't fit the myth. i think that we need to understand it was a man, and that i like him better having lived with him for the last two years. >> and thank you for living with him as you have. we all benefit. >> thank you very much. >> how about you two young guys. >> i want to kid up here. i would love -- >> she's a kid. >> well, this is my favorite kid. >> oh, ok. >> thank you very much. >> how are you doing? >> fine. >> good to see you. you look younger than the last time i saw you. >> i'm going to keep getting younger because i've got a very young wife. >> sounds good to me. >> thanks very much, rick. >> good to see you. >> there have been discussions upon the issue of there are those who say lincoln didn't free the slaves, the slaves freed themselves. >> uh-huh. >> now, you indicated the economic factor that may have been involved between the europeans who were coming from europe in large numbers and the slave rebellions that were going off all across the country. would you do me a favor, and i think it would help our audience to get your ideas of that kind of contradictory statement, lincoln did not free the slaves, the slaves freed themselves? >> ok. it's a really good question, and what mr. black's referring to is the fact that there were many revisionist historians who say, "forget that emancipation proclamation, these slaves were agitating for their own freedom, they were ones who escaped behind the union lines, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera," but the truth is more complicated than that -- what lincoln did was enormously important. to say -- weigh forget often that the emancipation proclamation didn't apply to all the slave states, it only applied to the confederacy, and lincoln, to his credit -- i mean, in all fairness, lincoln thought that it was unconstitutional for the president to abolish slavery. he thought he didn't have the power to do it but he thought that with war powers you could confiscate property, this was his argument and he was so afraid that the supreme court was going to nullify the emancipation proclamation, so -- the first thing that happens to african-americans is that when we find out that there were the border states in which slavery remained legal during the civil war, it's a shock, so you think why didn't he do that? because he couldn't because he was afraid kentucky would -- or maryland would go back -- would join the confederacy and that would have been -- that would have been -- that would have been the end. but without the agitation of black abolitionists like william wells brown and william c. nell and harriet tubman and their role as journalists and writers and speakers and orators and agitators really between 1831 when william lloyd garrison founded "the liberator" newspaper and the end of the civil war, without the black abolitionists and the highest level black society, and then without the slaves running away, oppressing -- you know, joining the union, when the union forces liberated their areas of the south, and without lincoln being opposed to slavery simultaneously -- without both those things, slavery wouldn't have been abolished. maybe it would have been abolished eventually -- remember, it lasted in brazil until 1888. it would have fallen sooner or later, but it fell much sooner because these two forces worked in concert and i think that's the fairest and most nuanced way to address the situation. all these black -- you know, we -- we exaggerate how many black people ran away to the north. even john hope franklin at most counted 50,000, and that includes people who were just run -- who would just run down to the swamp, hide out for the night and come back. it was hard to run away to the north. there were not millions of black people in the underground railroad. we tend to think of the underground railroad like penn station or grand central station. it wasn't like that. it was incredibly difficult to escape from slavery, and aus know, mr. black, many of the free negroes stayed in the south. did you know, in the 1860 census there were 440,000, about, free negroes -- i mentioned that earlier -- more than half lived in the states tharp the confederacy and the border states where slavery was free and they stayed there, ladies and gentlemen, unmolested including my family, in eastern west virginia. they stayed there because that's where they had their family and that's where they had their property. they had to be given property in virginia and many of these other southern states. what are they going to do? go to new york? live in harlem? hang out and listen to jazz with charlie parker? they stayed where they were raised. many of them -- this is the dirtiest secret in african-american history -- thata surprisingly high percentage of the free negroes in the south owned slaves themselves. we explain it away saying but they only owned their mother -- yeah, they owned their mother, they owned their sister, they owned their wife and they owned some other workers too -- a great -- a surprisingly high number owned workers who they did not liberate throughout the south. there were enough black -- free negroes who supported the confederacy that they voluntarily formed a regiment in the state of north carolina to fight for the confederacy, and black confederate troops are featured on the cover of "harper's weekly" in 1863. frederick douglass used this as an argument to make lincoln allow black men to fight because remember, lincoln didn't want to do it. lincoln made a famous statement in 1862. he said, "i suppose we could arm them, but if we did their arms would end up in the hands of the confederates within a week" because he thought that they were incompetent and not smart enough to win and eventually, as i said, the north was losing the war, frederick douglass was agitating and this book by casemore persuaded him to change his mind incrementally. so again, we -- it's not only the myth-makers who idealized lincoln, we have our own myth-makers in the african-american historical establishment. all the egyptians looked like michael jordan. all our people were black gods and kings. you know, we were not complicitous in the slave trade. there wouldn't be a slave trade -- africans sold other africans to white people. that was the slave trade. that's the first thing we honestly have to admit. remember the story of stanley livingstone -- dr. livingstone. the reason that was important was almost no white men had penetrated the interior of africa. what was there? no roads. snakes. mosquitoes. death. malaria. right? the white people were along the coasts. it was black kingdoms like queen ajenga's kingdom, ghana, dalma, they grew rich from the slave trade. they would go to war just to sell other black people to white people. this is something we have been so ashamed about we pretend it's not true. it is the nasty, dirty secret of african-american history. we are just as corrupt and despicable as any other people and if we have the right to oppress we will oppress just like the white man oppressed us. that's human nature, unfortunately that's just the way it is and the only way to overcome that is to be honest about it, be honest about it, admit the truth and then all try to do better as my main man cornell west says, "we're all recovering racists." "we're all recovering racists." >> dr. gates has to leave, timmy -- dr. gates has to leave so there will be no questions, i'm terribly sar, i could sit here for hours. i feel enlightened. it's a pleasure to know you. a pleasure to know you. >> henry louis gates and rick kogan, congressman jesse jackson jr., thank you for being with us, the abraham lincoln bicentennial commission, thank you for being with us. goodnight. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] >> our history coverage will continue with interviews with pearl harbor survivors. and later, weekly online addresses from president obama and bob mcdonald, the republican candidate for governor in virginia. tomorrow on "washington journal" michael scheuer, former bin laden unit chief discusses reports that a militant was killed in a strike this week. andrew selee previews the upcoming summit of trade with the u.s., mexico and canada and then a roundtable with john mashek along with stuart leury on the anniversary of the resignation of president richard nixon. on c-span. >> sunday, frank rich reflects on 15 years of political columns for "the new york times." including his look at the future of the internet from 1995, the whitewater hearings and his column following 9/11. >> on the morning of december 7, 1941, japanese submarines and planes attacked the u.s. pacific fleet at pearl harbor in hawaii. eight american battleships including the u.s.s. arizona were sunk or badly damaged, roughly 300 american aircraft were destroyed or incapacitated and the following interviews with military veterans of the attack were conducted by the national park service which overseas the u.s.s. arizona memorial. this is about an hour. >> we were in a hurricane for nine days, coming over for san diego -- here you have a rather green crew, but we got into honolulu, and some of us got liberty. we took a taxi in to the army-navy y in downtown hawaii and i walked across the street. i ordered a soda. and the lady said, "you're from the u.s.s. ward. and i said "how do you know?" she said, "you're all that delicate shade of green." the u.s.s. ward was the guard ship -- or part of destroyer division 80 which consisted of four old destroyers, the ward, the schley, the allan and the shu. we rotated duty. the regulations were that on all the charts of the world was an indication that no submarine must approach pearl harbor within 100 miles without coming to the surface and requesting a destroyer escort on the surface to approach any closer to honolulu or pearl harbor. we had oftentimes been called to general quarters when the sonar man believed that he heard screws. the captain backed up the sonar man all the time. if the sonar man heard screws, we went to general quarters and it was our responsibility and we knew it to sink any sub that was attempting to reach pearl harbor submerged. the antares supply ship was coming in to pearl harbor at0635, or a little before that, towing a barge, and between the antares and the barge, this little two-man sub was trying to sneak into the harbor. looked like a 50-gallon oil drum on top of maybe three or four of them that were laid down below it with a broomstick, sticking up. and, of course, that broomstick was the periscope and i'm sure that the man on the bridge could tell that there was something like your prism so that at the top of this broomstick they could see the periscope but it was too far away for us to know that it was anything like that. we thought it might have been a toy or who knows. we had never heard of or seen anything like a two-man submarine before. the folksle of the ship was rolling and -- the focsle of the ship was rolling and pitching and the rounds weighed 75 pounds, here you are staggering on the pitching deck with live ammunition with fuses on the nose and you're kind of afraid of that kind of ammunition. we fired, and you could watch down the end of the barrel and you could see that the projectile just barely missed the sub. i thought if it had another coat of paint on the sub it might have activated the graysed fuse. that's how close we came. the gun hit at the base of the conning tower and i'm sure it killed the japanese commander of that sub. the captain said stand by to ram," he made up his mind he was going to get that submarine one way or another, it was not going to get through, he found out later that it not only had two torpedoes but it also had a 500-pound detonation charge in the stern and that the skipper of that sub was supposed to come alongside another ship and blow himself up along with the other ship. we were a little surprised to find a submarine that close on the surface. so we knew that it was -- wasn't supposed to be there. i think my impression was that perhaps the submarine might have been one single reconnaissance effort. i had no concept at all that it was going to be followed up with major combat until i saw the planes coming, which was an hour and 20 minutes later. >> i was a crew member of the utility squadron two on the luke field side of ford island. that particular sunday, i had the duty, and i was actually at the hangar at the time that the attack began. i was waiting to muster the ongoing duty section. we thought a plane had crashed. so we ran out of the hangar -- our hangar, looking across the runway, we see the smoke coming up from the hangar. we still didn't know what was happening, and about that time here come the plane diving out of the sun. he dropped two bombs and he pulled out of his dive. we could see the symbol of the rising sun under his wings, and then we knew we were being attacked by the japanese. i start looking for a place to hide. we didn't have any bomb shelters or anything. i was still looking for a place to hide when here come the japanese planes flying from south to north up on the west side of ford island, and they were flying so low i could actually see the goggles on the rear gunner's helmet as he swings his machine gun around and began to strafe us with machine gunfire. i look out there and hear all this splattering concrete where the bullets are hitting, just splattering puffs of dust -- concrete dust -- and i jumped behind this tractor that was parked there and it gave me the protection i needed. i noticed a couple of my shipmates had picked up the.45 caliber pistols that had been used on watch the night before, the guys had just taken their pistols off and laid them on the table to exchange with the ongoing duty section and a couple of them grabbed these pistols and started shooting at the japanese planes with these pistols. i discovered that there is a motion that's more -- that there is an emotion that's more strong than fear. that's shame. i began to feel so ashamed of myself, i said, "here, i'm trained to be a gunner and i'm hiding." the lord gave me enough guts to leave my hiding place and go into the armory where the machine guns were stored. by this time, some other ordnance men had gathered so we put them on the mounts of our guns on the ground. it was in the waist high of a catalina patrol boat gunner, and i got behind that gun and manned it for the rest of the attack. i think everybody has a little coward in them, but once you can get over that -- and by the way, this is where i praise the training of the united states navy. they train and train and train, and you do it over and over and over. when the time came, we just did what we were trained to do. we didn't have to think. you just did whaufs trained to do. i was angry. so see, my feelings went from fear to shame to anger. if i could have, i would have shot every one of them down. that's the way i felt. there was still mixed in, there that fear was in the background now but it was still there. planes were just everywhere now like bees around a hive, you know. i don't know how they kept from running into each other. i'm sure it was all planned out. they had rehearsed it and rehearsed it. by this time you could close your eyes and shoot in the air and you're bound to hit something because they were everywhere. this particular plane, i'm thinking about, had dropped a bomb or a torpedo, one, on probably the california because he was sort of pulling out of his dive and he was coming right across the runway headed over our hangar, and all of our gunners including yours truly was shooting at him. and we could see our tracer bullets penetrating his fuselage and he burst into flames, with flames of smoke trailing out of his tail looked like he was going to crash right out there in the channel. but he got in the middle of the channel and all of a sudden he does a little arcing dive and purposely crashes on the crane deck of the u.s.s. curtis. and that became known as the first kamikaze of world war ii. it was uncanny what they were able to pull off there. just like yamamoto said, they woke a sleeping giant. >> we were going on a picnic at the naval ammunition dump that the marines were doing guard duty at, and the previous week the port -- the starboard side had the picnic and this week we were going, we were looking forward to it because i had been there a couple months earlier and we had a nice time and i was look forward to drinking beer, playing baseball, pitching horse shoes. there were planes flying down like if they were -- not like if they were, we assumed they were doing target practice because out at sea we would have pulled a target behind us, probably, maybe 100 yards or so, and the planes would dive bomb at it and practice dive bombing, and we watched them, and we says, "hey, what kind of emblems are those? we couldn't understand why are they doing this on a sunday? this is the first time. then in port. we didn't realize. we discussed this among ourselves. which in the few seconds that we had -- then across the bay, we seen a ship afire -- smoking. so the officer of the day was on the quarter deck also, and he had the bugler sound fire and rescue. we were going to drop what we had and go up to our ace mates and get ready, whatever we had to do, then there was a call, "belay that call" and then short -- a few seconds after that we heard the familiar -- that was general quarters music. it didn't dawn on us those are japanese planes. when we said "general quarters" only thing we could think of then were the japanese because there was so much talk about what was going on between japanese and our country. many things flashed through my mind. one of them was "what is my mother going to say if i'm killed?" that was my biggest concern. there was oil on the ship. i never could climb that hawser in school that you could climb up in the gym, but that day this was oily, so i climbed that up even with the oil, and you know how hard you've got to grip. that's just like trying to hold onto a greased pig, so you can see what you can do when there is anxiety or when there is fright or when there is anger or danger or whatever you want to call it. let's say time heals everything. that's the way i look at it. in time -- how long can you hold your anger? are you going to die with it? i don't want to die with it. let's say we did the opposite. did they forgive us about hiroshima? if they forgive us about hiroshima, i think they should forgive -- i think it saved lives on both sides. >> i took my bugle and ran up to the bridge. that's where my battle station was. it couldn't about -- a couple minutes before 8:00. i didn't even sound colors, so i'm really not sure. then captain bennion came up, and this is a little after -- a couple of minutes after 8:00 and he come up there and said, "my god, we're at war" and the next thing i remember, there was a tremendous explosion on the tennessee near number two gun turret. and there was shrapnel all over the place, then i looked around and captain benion was laying on the deck -- he had most of his -- he was almost tore in half, and we made him as comfortable as we could, and this was just a little bit about eight or nine minutes after 8:00 and we stood up and all of a sudden i saw the arizona explode, and i tell you, i never was so scared in my whole life. you could feel the tremendous heat and the concussion blew us back into the pilot house. came back out and captain benion was laying there -- i think it was a signalman went down and got hold of our executive officer, commander helincotter, he came up and captain benion was still alive, he looked down and said, "captain, what are my orders?" the only thing captain benion said, he says, "the ship is yours. i'm not going it make it." that's all. then we stayed up on the bridge until all of the torpedoes and strafing and then commander helincotter said "what the hell are we doing up here? let's get down below where we can help out." we stayed aboard and fought fires and rescued some people from down below in the officers -- i was with a group, three of us, we went down and busted one of the doors open because everything was sprung shut, and we got two officers out -- we got them top side, and then the water was about up to our navels, so we climbed up on the quarterdeck, the fire was just -- we did everything we could. some of the guys coming up through the -- by frame 87 -- their clothes were burning, and we threw them down on the deck and rolled on top of them and tried to pat the fire out. finally the tennessee fired up her engines and to push the fire from the water, pushed it away from the ship, that helped a lot, then a tug boat came up and started to squirt us with water and then command helincotter said "abandon ship" so we passed the word "abandon ship" and that was about 9:30. then we fought our way back because there was not as much fire forward as there was aft by the arizona, because she was just one big ball of fire. one guy, in particular, orville, he said, "my gosh, i left my money in my wallet. my wallet's in my locker." he fights his way back through all of the fire. now, in the casemates, we had five-inch shells sitting along the bulkhead to use, and if those got hot they were going to blow up, so he fought his way back through the casemates, gets to his locker, opens it up, gets it out, puts it in his pocket, fights his way back out to the focs'le, he was making knots, he took off all of his clothes, folded them nice and neatly, laid them on the focs'le, swam to ford island and all of his money stayed right there. i'll never forget that. it's strange. i remember the focsle, i remember diving into the water and i remember climbing on ford island but that 50 or 60 yards, it's gone, i don't know, and i can't tell you. i don't know. that night about 7:00 we heard these airplanes coming in, we thought they were japanese, and they were off the enterprise, and i wasn't the first one to open up. as they were coming in it looked like the 4th of july. we shot down the six -- we killed three of the pilots, and one of the guys that was coming in as he was landing -- i put my machine gun and i filled his airplane full of holes and i didn't realize that it was one of ours, and the guy's name is -- i don't know if you have ever met him or not, jim daniels. he's a good friend of mine. but he said if he could have caught me that night he would have killed me. i believe he would have, too. you couldn't sleep, you were on watch all the time, if not eating sandwiches, the eight hours you're off you're supposed to sleep but you can't do it -- your nerves are just right on the edge. and i think it was about -- i think wednesday or thursday, i fell asleep, and, of course, it was a while before i could hear from all of those torpedoes -- we took nine torpedoes, and the arizona blowing up, and the tennessee was completely firing their five-inch guns, and god, i said, "i'm going to be deaf." of course, i wear hearing aids today, but it was -- it was about a week before i could really hear. then if somebody come up behind you and clapped, why, you would jump 15 feet, you know. we had 106 dead. about 300 -- a little over 300 wounded. and, of course, our captain received the congressional medal of honor -- captain benion. i played taps for him the next night there in the warehouse where we stayed, you know, for his death. it was the most beautiful taps i ever played in my life. >> pennsylvania was flagship of the pacific fleet and we were also i believe at that time flagship of the navy. it was admiral kimmel's ship. he didn't happen to be on it that day. when we used to go out on patrol, general quarters, the saying used to be "the japanese are attacking," we would run to our battle station and most of us knew that eventually we were going to have to fight the japanese. where that trickled down from, i have no idea -- i suppose from the politicians to the officers, the officers to us. we expected to fight them eventually. we just didn't know when. there was no need for radio communication. it was obvious to all the ships in the harbor that we were under attack. so they had us carrying ammunition out to the three-inch 50 on the fantail. i had just been handed a three-inch shell, and i was getting ready to run it out to the gunny, and the next thing i knew i was flat on my face. something went through my right thigh and out my rear end and i had a six-by-eight-inch piece blown out of the left thigh, i had five pieces of shrapnel in the left leg, my right hand was shot open, i lost part of the left elbow, i lost part of the muscle out of a bicep. they finally put me into a bunk, and i was lie ing there and i saw one of the third-class radiomen go by, and i said, "hey, osmond," he looked at me, and he says, "who are you?" and then i -- then i realized that either something's wrong with me or something's wrong with him." so i said, "it's highland." and all he did was go, "oh, oh," and walk away from me. i found out that the navy had these listed as superficial wounds. it seems that their big problem was trying to keep me alive because of the burns. when the bomb went off -- the blast just took all the skin off our legs, arms, face, because we had shorts and t-shirts on -- that was our combat uniform. my brother was a sergeant with the marine detachment on the indianapolis, and they were out on patrol. he saw me about a year later and he said that when he came in, i guess it was wednesday after the attack, he came over looking for me and they had me on the missing list, so at that time we had this large naval hospital in the navy yard. he went over there looking for me. and he said he finally found a group of us all lined up, and they had tagged my toe already. that's how he identified me. but he said even he didn't know me. he said we looked like roast turkeys lined up. the pearl harbor story is important to me because people should be made aware of these things that they really did happen, and hopefully, they won't happen again, but, of course, that's dreaming. because it happens in the world every day. somewhere. >> we came in port on fwrdz afternoon, december 5th, and we waited in mid-channel for the lexington which at that time was the world's largest aircraft carrier. as soon as the lexington got under way, we took her place. monday, the ship was scheduled to come back to the states and then i would have gotten out and i would saved like $400 and i was going to go to medical school. the day before is noneventful except that i didn't go anywhere. i didn't go because honolulu, in those days, was not -- waikiki was not a favorite port because there were no women. there were 2,000 men to every woman so we liked it stateside better. somebody said, "what are all those planes in the air? what are all those planes doing out on a sunday morning?" and i could hear vaguely a droning, you know, which was not unusual because ford island was a naval air base. naval air station. i saw i'm almost positive six of them, i stood there and saw the bombs drop and i saw this huge red flame and black smoke and i thought, "oh, my god, somebody really goofed because those are real bombs." we were used to being bombed with duds, and i thought, "my god, somebody really made a mistake. those are real bombs." and just about that time i felt the ship lurch. so we were being hit by torpedoes on the opposite side, which, of course, i couldn't see that side. when the torpedo hit, i actually felt the ship lurch. see, even when we were hit by dud bombs, the ship was somewhere around 22,000 tons, and we would go below the decks, of course, during bombing runs, we weren't walking around, and when the bomb would hit you could feel the ship. it was a downward feeling. this was kind of an outward feeling. and i'm sure there was a torpedo -- there is some question about whether the bombers got there first or the torpedoes but i'm sure that lurch was a torpedo. it was a matter of seconds before the bugler sounded general quarters -- that's where you go to your battle station, so i grabbed my first-aid kit -- i was a pharmacist's mate and my battle station was amidship, and as i was running down -- running down the passageway, the ship lurched again. now, this time, i don't know whether it was a bomb or a torpedo, but it knocked me through a logroom door where they kept the records, so i went this way and my first aid kit went that way and i got up a little dazed, you know -- and you don't have time to think, but anyway, i dived down the ladder below -- see, our battle stations were below the armored deck, but we no sooner got down there that we could already tell the ship was listing. that was a matter of one, two, three minutes and everybody was looking around, "what in the world is going on? what's happening?" and we were there, i'm sure, not over a minute or two, and then the bugler sounded "abandon ship" and the boatswain was sounding "abandon ship, abandon ship" and we had taken on ammunition in san francisco for the fleet, and the naval ammunition and we were with all this ammunition and i thought we were going to blow up and i wanted to get away from there fast. these things occur to you in a matter of seconds. by then, the ship is like this. so i was going to run and dive way out, and about then the ship really jerked. well, i thought at the time, and for some time after that it was another bomb orator pedo, but what it actually was was the mooring lines. see, there is 22,000 tons, these great big lines holding the ship tied to the quay, you know, so when the ship -- as the ship was sinking, those lines snapped, and when they snapped that threw me off balance and i landed on my fannie and scraped across those barnacles on the side and the bottom. when i got in the water, when i bobbed up and tried to get my bearings, you know, which way is up, and i saw this motor launch, and there was a coxswain, a bow hook, a boat hook and he was pulling these guys out of the water, so i started swimming towards that motor launch, and about then a strafer came by and i could see the -- you know, the ping, ping, ping in the water, the bullets hitting the water -- ahead of me, but in line with that motor launch. so it didn't -- you know, you make decisions in seconds and i figured, "now, that's going to be a target but they're not going to pick poor little old me by myself" so i changed course, instead of going that way i headed straight for ford island. and if anybody else tells you who was first -- he was first on the beach tell him he's a liar because i was first on the beach. when the ship was sunk, i was transferred to the hospital and we would get these aviators, japanese aviators for days, weeks, even, and they would be brought to the morgue, and when they were stripped we found these maps, and where the utah was, they had in big letters -- there was a lot of japanese writing in the margins. . >> ever since i was in the fourth or fifth grade, i had the idea about going to see and seeing the world. about two weeks after graduation and from high school, i enlisted in the coast guard and when to port townsend, washington for basic training, then decided that aloha land would just be wonderful, with whom girls and all that kind of thing. on december 6 of 1941, there were about 13 of us that were still together who had enlisted in omaha and come to port townsend. we were 17 or 18-year-old kids. we decided we would go to the bar to really celebrate. it was the black cat. the black cat had a huge menu above the bar. a is for ale, b is for beer, w is for whiskey. we said we would make a night of it, so we started with the a's, and wouldn't would all have a round of whatever a was, then we had a b, they see, that the. i do not know how far we got. we were 18-year-old kids. we did not care if we did not have the money to buy it. at 7:55 a.m., i was in sick bay, talking to a friend of mine who was a pharmacist. i asked what he had that would take care of this, and then the bombs started coming. i really did not know whether this was something i was imagining, the thumping, and all the rest of these things are going on in my mind. this signal is clang, clang, clang, clang. this is the way of the landing party, general quarters, this is everything. nobody knows what it is, bang, bang, bang. we have 300 guys running around, saying what are we doing? this was fire and rescue. ok, i will go to that station. i get there and say where are you going? this is general quarters. someone else said this was something else. we were all running around run during what the devil to do. we were so confused we had known for idea of what was going on than anything. all we ever worked with was a dummy, ammunition, loading and going through all this. down below, about five or six stories, way down in the magazine, is locked. it is a summary court-martial to open that, a summary court- martial to open that unless you have an officer. we are up on top saying my god, they are here and flying around. they are coming. cent of live ammunition. the guys said you are all drunk up there. i am not going to get a summary court-martial. some of the officers are ashore. no one is going to open this thing up. we are screaming back and forth and back and forth, then the live ammunition starts coming out from under. and we start firing. at time -- at that time, there were not world tensions. he did not really think about having a war. for instance, when the japanese attacked, we said it would probably take two weeks and we would blow them out of the water and we would all go home. some said they would not shave until we won the war. others said they would not let their hair grow until we won the war, and that kind of thing. there is a whole different kind of thing, a whole different idea, concept, feeling. one of our men was there for some official reason or another and came back and told us of the sinking of the battleships, and of course, we thought he was out of his mind. it could not be. we never expected it, never thought it would happen, and the japanese paper tiger kind of thing. we will get them. >> i had a chance to go home for a weekend pass, and it was on that sunday morning we heard all this explosion going on and wondered what was happening. i looked up in the sky toward the direction of pearl harbor. it was a bright, nice morning, and i could see all those bright puffs. we heard over the radio, calling all military personnel to report to their stations immediately, that the japanese had attacked pearl harbor, and this is war. naturally, everybody was shocked. at that time, we had our bus station at the army and navy ymca which is located right in honolulu. from there, as we were traveling over to the barracks where i was stationed at that time, i looked down into pearl harbor and i saw a head a panoramic view of the destruction. the arizona was blazing in flames. all the other ships were a fire, and what stood out in my mind was the oklahoma had capsized. it was on a side, and i saw sailors aboard the whole of the ship, scrambling on it. that was for them to keep out of the fire, because all the water was on fire. i was shocked, needless to say. we were expecting the japanese navy to come down and invade us by sea, but it turned out they did invade us, but it was by air. it was a total surprise. i just could not get over it. in the infantry we had a big group of japanese boys as well as filipinos, chinese. they were worried that they were going to take the japanese -- anyone with the japanese name, or that you did not have to be japanese. if you had a japanese name or were adopted by someone with the japanese name, you were automatically taken along with them. when i got wind that they were going to do that, take the japanese boys out, i figured that was a big mistake, because i felt that the 298th infantry was one of the best fighting units. we were prepared, we were trained well for defense, but as soon as we got word that that happened, our morale went down. i figured that in my particular case, i might as well get out of there. i was able to, being an electrician before. i went to the signal corps area and ask the man in charge if they needed an electrician, and for them to put a request over to the infantry, which they did. we were training in the military, and we got to be animals. we were not human beings. i look at it from this point of view, because we thought like animals. death was nothing to us, as long as it was an enemy death. we could picture ourselves as being there in that person's vote. >> i had never been on a destroyer, never even seen the inside of one, but i knew that is where i wanted to go. when i was in school in new york and got orders, the early morning of december 7, starting at midnight i was the ood on the quarterdeck, so i had to watch from midnight to 4:00. after that, i turned in, and i was asleep when i heard the general alarm on the downs next door. just then, my roommate came in who was just coming off lunch. his name was wesley pete craig. he had just been relieved. the watch is ordinarily relieved a quarter before the hour. he was then shuffling around the room, and i heard the alarm go off. he said some dunderhead must have sounded a general alarm. the general alarm on all ships in the navy in those days was used to call the crew to quarters, or to muster, at 8:00 in the morning, every day except sunday. however, it was not unusual to hear an alarm sounding some place across the harbor, because somebody would forget it was sunday and turn on the general alarm, so it was not a surprise. i rolled over and thought nothing about it. within two or three minutes, craig was back again and speaking in a pretty severe voice said wake up, get up, we are being bombed. the japs are bombing us. i put on my helmet and pistol and got out in a hurry. i ran into the skipper on the main deck and he was in a hurry to get the magazine's open so we could get some 5 inches ammunition out. we soon realize our guns were out of commission. so there was not really much for me to do, so i went on top of the bridge to the director platform. the thing remember most is the high-level bombers in a be shaped formation going from left to right as i observe them. were less in line with where the battleships would be. we could very clearly see the bombs falling. the sun reflected from the bombs as they fell, and we could see them as they came down, especially when they first let the airplanes. it got very noisy where we were. we were being strafed and bombed. i remember seeing a pretty good fire start back on the port side of our ship. i remember seeing men on their hands and knees, trying to scramble away from the flames. i thought certainly we have lost some people here. the fires were really raging. our skipper, a lieutenant commander at the time, said abandon ship. that is what we all did in a hurry. there was no place to hurry to, really, so we just tried away from the ship. there was no hurry to get any place, because you may be running into more problems than you were running away from. how was with a man, i do not recall his name but i would know him if he walked into day. we were 30 or 40 yards from the ship whenever an explosion behind us. it was a hit on the side between the ship and where we work. i have a picture of that that shows a yard workmen standing in it. some of that debris hit me on the helmet. somebody came along and wanted to know in a hurry where or how they could get to the fuel docks or the controls that allow the field to be pumped into a ship. for some reason, i knew something about that. i do not know who he was or where he was going, but i took him. reflag a car down and went toward a submarine base and i got this guy to where i thought he wanted to go. then i went on to the submarine base. there were several torpedo boats roaring their engines alongside the submarine base pierre. i stepped about -- stepped aboard one and ask if i could go along. the skipper of that ship was lieutenant j. g. harry parker. he looked at me and said what can you do? he said my torpedoman is not here, come with us. as we were abreast of the shawl, it detonated, and some of it came down on pt 22 and went through the engine room, through the main deck and into the engine room. it must have been for 10:00 that a japanese plane came down fairly low over the harbor and we took a shot at it. that was the last plane i saw. there was a commander on the beach there and he looked at me and he could tell that i was not a pt boat for because i was still wearing whites. he said what shipper you from? i told him, and he said the casson is no more. he said you go into the submarine base and go to the first office on the left and turn that pistol in. i saluted him and went up the side wall to the submarine base office, right past the office he tell me to go in, up the stairway, back a long hallway to the other end of the building, down the stairway, and out. i returned to the wreck of the casson in not number one with my pistol. i think roosevelt was so hungry for us to get a good war and have us all united, and this was undoubtedly the best way to do it, so that was the goal, and he got it accomplished. my brother told me all about how good a ship that was and how you could learn something there. he was right, i learned a lot, everything you would ever need to do to repair another ship or anything else electrical or anything, we did it. i wanted to put in my years there to learn something. i did not plan on pearl harbor, though. we got a call from somebody that wanted some work done on the arizona. i think it was some work on the evaporators. it probably had another few things that we would do. we had been alongside 5 or 6 days or something like that. i had before-8 watch in the morning on sunday morning -- i had the 4-8 watched on sunday morning. i was relieved of my watch, went down to the guy who was supposed to relieve me, and he was almost asleep, but i gave him my pistol, went up back on deck, and i heard planes and i heard booming noises. my brother, being in the battery locker on the vessel, the battery repair, and i ran back there to get a cup of coffee. i did not get my copy. i told him that something was happening, and i heard the quartermaster say that those were japanese planes. well, i told my brother and the coffee drinkers in the battery locker about that, and i do not know whether they believe me or not, but they rang the fire drill. i saw fibers coming by, strafing everything in sight. what got us was the high-level bombers, the same thing that hit the arizona. these were 16 inch naval projectiles. they had modified them with tenfins. we were in the wrong place, and we got hit aft. it went all the way through the ship and began to flood the aft part of the ship. along about that time is when the same type bomb came through into the arizona magazine. that was quite a bit of noise there. we sure heard it. rocked the ship pretty bad. that is when it blew quite a few people from the ship over the side, and of course there were a lot of flash burns from the fire. our captain went back there to see why the darned gun would not work. he should not have been there either. he got blown over the side. then one of the officers, i am not sure which one, and it does not make the difference now, ordered abandon ship. we had casualties, and they had taken most of them to the radio room. everybody was either going over the side, or i was headed for the stern, hoping to get to a motor launch. i noticed these injured in the radio room, so i got another guy and i and we carried the guy that i knew who had been heard in the back, shot with shrapnel in the back, and we carried him. he weighed quite a bit more than i did. we carried him down and back to the quarter deck and put him in the boat. by that time, our captain had come back aboard and he countermanded the or to abandon ship. so we went back to our battle stations. normally when you are in this condition, you don't have enough steam up to maneuver. you have enough to run a generator or alternator and the power and light's, but you do not have this thing. so all that time that had gone when they hit and we were to get out there, we could not do it. we would have been right down there along with the arizona, except for a tug that came by. i forgot which one it was. it drew a line to us and began to pull away. the fires on the arizona, of course they had no power. they could not operate the aircraft guns, not normally. they tried to do it manually, and i know this because i saw them. they were firing their 5 inch guns, at least once in awhile. the fire had spread, so it was just about all around them. i am not sure whether it was my imagination, and i do not think it was, but i sell those gunners fire all around them, trying to train those guns around, and they were dying there. i mean really. i have tried to suppress that idea as much as i can, because it would bother me quite a bit. i don't even like to remember. 55 years later, i don't like to even think of it. to me, it happened. those on the aft part of the arizona were fortunate, because they did not get killed by a concussion or lack of oxygen or whatever. that may have gotten a lot of oil it over to our ship, but they were fortunate. that is about the only ones to survive, of course. >> the japanese miss a lot of chances. really, they did. they missed that pyro, which was loaded with a lot of 16 and 14- inch ammunition, and everything else smaller. they missed it by about 10 feet with a bomb that went through the dock where they were tied up. that was one thing. another was the oil storage tanks. we operated on oil. if we did not have oil, we did not operate, and they did not get those. if they had got those, they would have flooded the harbor with running oil. they also missed the gasoline on for island. they did not get that. a lot of us that were at pearl harbor -- we blame roosevelt for a lot of this. the government wanted to get us in the war so we could go against germany, and that has been a lot of us, our opinion is that knowing about or almost plans to allow the japanese to do this. i guess history will not support that too well, but to me, it sure makes a little bit of sense, that we could have been notified, alerted, so that we would not have had all those people killed. it bothers us. >> we knew sooner or later we would have an altercation, because tojo had signed a pact with hitler. we were sending convoys over in europe, and we had been helping the chinese over in china, chiang kai-shek, trying to keep the chinese from getting butchered over there, which they were doing a pretty good job of. we have lost a gun but there a few years earlier up in the yangtze river. we knew sooner or later would have a problem. we did not think it would be at pearl harbor, that was too far away. on 7 december 1941 i was serving on a tugboat. all tugboats are named after indian tribes. we were up working already that morning when the attacks started, because we had to meet a ship that was coming into port to take a barge away from it. as we were clearing the channel, we saw the destroyer that was on patrol duty dropping depth charges. again, there's nothing exciting about this, because these patrol things out there used to drop depth charges. they would pick something up on their sonar and drop depth charges. in this instance, what he picked up was a submarine, and he dropped debt charges. the submarine service, and award sank it with gunfire. this is about an hour before the attack on pearl, but a submarine attack a mile out, does not tell us we are going to have an air attack at pearl. there is no correlation. hardly anybody was scared until after that, until after everything stopped, because we did not know what was going to happen next. were they going to come back and try to invade, or what? we did not know. while the attack and everything was on, everybody was just mad, believe me. all you wanted to do was get at the japanese. that is all you wanted to do. all the time the attack was going on, these bombers were dropping these bombs. you could hear them coming down. we would just completely freeze, and it would detonate somewhere. then we would run back, doing whatever we are doing. >> we had a party all scheduled for sunday. we had an automobile. an officer was allowed a court of booze a week. we had that. someone had little black vote of girls' names, and we were headed over to a party on the beach. it never happened. we were sound asleep. i had a bomb made and we were asleep. the building started rattling -- i had a bunkmate. we did not think too much about it, but when we heard a big boom, we thought we had better get up to see. we went downstairs and looked out and saw that it was more than what we thought. we did see a jet plane go up. we went back and got dressed and came down to the water's edge, which was roughly 100 yards. we watched the arizona sank in nine minutes. we were just fell down and could not think what to do. after the ship blew up, the sailors started coming to shore with their skin peeling off their back and their arms, all full of oil. we helped them out of the water, and i remember distinctly taking one man named flanagan down to the hospital. when you get to the hospital, there was a doctor. the first doctor would look the man over, and if he thought he could save him he said go here. if he thought he could not save him right off, he went down to the second line, and that was the fellows that they did not think were going to make it. the rule right now was that if you were physically aboard the ship on december 7 collier remains to be interred on the ship. we are working on a program so that anybody that was out of the ship's crew on december 7 could have that privilege. that is number one. the second thing is that way back in about 1981, or before that, my son was an ensign on a ship here in 1976. i thought it is just too bad that nothing has ever been done so that the fellows that were on the ship december 7 could not go back here and have a memorial service or something like that. so i worked on that, and succeeded. in 1981, we probably had about 75 or 100 people who were either survivors of the arizona court former ship's crew, going way back to 1960, or their relatives. we got that thing started, and we repeated in 1986, and in 1981 we had 300 people out there. this is the way it is. yesterday we went back to the ship for the reunion, which i always do on the first day we went in -- first that again. we had a beautiful memorial service. how to get the government -- in 20 years i learn how to get the government to do things i did not know before. we had a beautiful ceremony, and because we were the uss arizona, they closed the memorial, and all the flags were flying, just like on an important day. beautiful. >> president obama used his weekly online address to review critics of pitting health care legislation. the republican address this week is given by bob mcdonnell, a candidate for virginia governor. he talks about the economy, job creation, and the federal energy bill. >> on friday we received better news than we expected about the state of our economy. we learned that we lost 247,000 jobs in july, some 200,000 fewer jobs than we lost in june, and far fewer than the nearly 700,000 a month we were losing at the beginning of the year. of course, this is little comfort to anyone who saw their job disappear in july, and to the millions of americans who are looking for work. i will not rest until anyone who is looking for work can find a job. still, this month's job numbers are a sign that we have begun to put the brakes on this recession and that the worst may be behind us, but we must do more than rescue our economy from this immediate crisis. we must rebuild it stronger than before. we must lay a new foundation for future growth and prosperity, and a key pillar of the new foundation is health insurance reform. reform that we are now closer to achieving than ever before. there are still details to be hammered out. there are still differences to be reconciled, but we are moving toward a broad consensus on reform. four committees in congress have produced legislation, an unprecedented level of agreement on a difficult and complex challenge. in addition to the ongoing work in congress, drug companies have agreed to make prescription drugs more affordable for seniors. the aarp supports reform because of the better care offered to seniors, and the american nurses association and american medical association, which represent the millions of nurses and doctors who know our healthcare system best, all support reform as well. as we draw close to finalizing and passing real health insurance reform, the defenders of the status quo are growing fiercer in their opposition. in recent days and weeks, some have been using misleading information to defeat what they know is the best chance of reform we have ever had. that is why it is important, especially now, as senators and representatives head home and meet with their constituents, for you, the american people, to have all the facts. let me explain what reform will mean for you. let me start by dispelling the latest rumors that reform will promote euthanasia or cut medicaid or bring about a government takeover of health care. that is simply not true. this is not about putting government in charge of your health insurance. it is about putting you in charge of your health insurance. other reforms we see, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan. while reform is obviously essential to the 46 million americans who do not have health insurance, it will provide more stability and security to the hundreds of millions to do. right now we have a system that works well for the insurance industry, but that does not always work well for you. what we need, and what will happen with pass health insurance reform or consumer protections make sure that those who have insurance are treated fairly and that insurance companies are held accountable. we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups and preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies, or foot exams for diabetics, so we can avoid conditions that cost so much money. i'll never forget watching my own mother as she fought cancer in her final days, worrying about whether her insurer would claim her illness was a pre- existing condition. i have met so many americans who worry about the same thing, and that is why under these reforms, insurance companies will no longer be able to deny coverage because of a previous illness or injury. insurance companies will no longer be allowed to drop or water down coverage for someone who has become seriously ill. your health insurance ought to be there for you when it counts, and reform will make sure it is. with reform, insurance companies will also have to limit how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, and it will stop insurance companies from placing arbitrary caps on the amount of courage can receive in a given year for a lifetime, because no one in america should go broke because of an illness. in the end, the debate about health insurance reform boils down to a choice between two approaches. the first is almost guaranteed to double health care costs of the next decade, leave millions more americans without insurance, leave those with insurance vulnerable to arbitrary denials of coverage, and bankrupt state and federal governments. that is the status quo. that is the health care system we have right now. so we can either continue this approach, or we can choose another, one that will protect people against unfair insurance practices, provide quality, affordable insurance to every american, and bring down rising costs that are swamping families, businesses, and our budgets. that is the health care system we can bring about with reform. there are those who are focused on the so-called politics of health care, trying to exploit differences or concerns for political gain. that is to be expected. that is washington. but let's never forget that this is not about politics. this is about people's lives, about people's businesses. this is about america's future. that is what is at stake. that is why health insurance reform is so important. that is why we have to get this done, and why we will get this done by the end of this year. >> i am bob mcdonnell from virginia. times are tough in our state, and in yours. yesterday's jobs report is yet another reminder that families and small businesses are struggling as unemployment remains high. here in virginia, we face unemployment rates at a 25-year high. as i travel throughout our state, i listen to our people who are concerned about the jobs they have, worry about finding the jobs they need, and concern about what jobs will be available for their children in the years ahead. as a father of five, i share those same concerns. that is why our main goal in virginia is to bring people together to create new jobs and more opportunities all across our state. we want government at all levels to be a partner in promoting small business and entrepreneurship. as republicans, we believe you create those new jobs by keeping taxes and regulation low and litigation at a minimum. americans succeed when government puts in place positive policies and encourages more freedom and more opportunities. right now, virginians are particularly worried about cap and trade legislation in washington. this would amount to a huge new national energy tax. if implemented, electricity rates would skyrocket and jobs would be lost. two weeks ago, i was in covington in western virginia. i visited an international packaging company, the largest employer in the area, providing 1,500 good jobs. they tell me that cap and trade, if passed, would threaten those good jobs. mark george, the vice president of the facility, told me this. i feel that the next governor of virginia and every representative we have should care about keeping those good jobs in virginia. i agree. we must do everything we can to keep and grow jobs in virginia and in every state in our country. that is why we strongly oppose cap and trade, a job-killing energy tax that would put american companies at a tremendous competitive disadvantage with employees in other countries. is the wrong policy for a nation struggling with the worst economy in generations. that is why we fought against the job-killing card check legislation that is being pushed by big national labor unions and democrats in congress. and we are committed for all americans to get the health care coverage they need, not through nationalizing the system with a costly government-run plan, but by supporting free-market incentives to help small business owners make coverage more accessible and affordable, and assuring that americans can keep their individual private policies. government must be more efficient and more counseled, which is why we are calling for an end to the new government spending that is leading to an exploding deficit and burdening our children with the new debt they will have to repay. the cornerstone of our founders' system of federalism is that the states are the laboratories of democracy, where new ideas can be tried and new innovations unleashed. in virginia, i am calling for an -- offshore drilling, selling state-run liquor stores to put more cash into transportation, and expanding access for beginning students at our colleges. i said that the president is right in his call for real education reform, with more charter schools and more performance pay for great teachers and principals. that is a bipartisan reform that will help all our children get the education they need today, to get those good jobs of tomorrow. together we will use innovation and free markets to bring new jobs and more opportunities to virginia and america. have a great weekend. >> tomorrow, president obama begins his trip to mexico to discuss the economy, border security, and trade. he will first meet with president felipe calderon, after that dinner with the canadian prime minister and president stephen harper. then there will be a news, and guadalajara. we will carry that here on c- span. >> you are watching c-span, public affairs programming courtesy of america's cable companies. up next, remarks from newt gingrich on the future of conservatism. then our history coverage begins with henry louis gates, jr., on how personal stories have contributed to the mets about president abraham lincoln's presidency. later, interviews with pearl harbor survivors. >> remarks now from former republican house speaker newt gingrich on the future of conservatism. he spoke at a conference hosted by the conservative young americans foundation. this is about an hour. >> thank you very much. first of all, i want to thank young america's foundation for bringing it together and giving me a chance to come and chat with you. we worked with him very closely over the last year in developing a movie with citizens united called "ronald reagan, ronald it would destiny." it really is a very powerful introduction to why president reagan was so effective and to how he finally turned around things in this country. it was an interesting time. if you see the reagan movie and you think about what we are living through, there are certain parallels that kind of eerie. when reagan was running for office, we had a liberal democratic president who seemed out of touch with reality. he had a program in favor of much larger government. he had an economic program that was not succeeding. it is very confused about foreign policy. when you see the reagan film and you watch six and a half minutes of jimmy carter, you have an understanding of how reagan got to be president by contrast. i want to talk about the decision generation will be intimately involved with. i want to do it in a way that will encourage each of you to go back to your campus to be an activist, to be directly involved, and to reach out and do several things that i think it really helped turn around the country. one of them is to encourage debates on your campus. i think the more often we can get conservative principles a liberal principles on the same platform and give people a chance to see the contrast, the better off we are. i also believe if you look at what we are doing at american solutions, you will see a set of ideas and proposals that will give you a good opportunity to go out in your community and talk to people across the board and offer them a better future. i will talk about those in a minute. i think having people locally provide activism is a very important part of this. i think that the most important political government slogan in next 10 years is of very simple phrase. two plus two equals four. that may seem obvious to most of you, but in politics, it is not. the first time i encountered it wasn't looking at the polish people when they began rebelling against the soviet dictatorship. they may posters that said to plus two equals four. it partly comes out of george orwell's "1984." and novel in which the state torture recess to the innocent citizen, if the state tells you id = 5, it equals five, and if they tell you = 3, id = 3. they said what if it actually equals 4? he was making an assertion that it was an objective fact that it was true, no matter what the government tells you. they use it as a very effective advice to say to the people of poland that it is time to be honest about polish history and about poland's future, and the soviet dictatorship cannot do that. let me give you an american analogy to a 2 plus 2 equals 4. i will give you the first half of an equation, and you tell me the second half. if you cannot afford to buy a house -- there seems to be a general consensus. how many of you would agree, if you cannot afford to buy a house, you should not buy a house? raise your hand. you are now in fundamental conflict with the last 20 years of american politics. on a bipartisan basis, by the way. the last 20 years, we said, it cannot afford to buy a house, how about if we give you a no interest, no down payment opportunity to move into a house temporarily before you go bankrupt? because of course, you cannot afford to buy a house. it turns out buying a house is a lot more than being able to move in. it is maintaining the house, fixing it if any repairs, a lot of things involved in buying a house. let's take that a stage further. if you want to take the 2 plus two calls for arguments, one of the most expensive schools and america is the detroit public schools. a graduate 26% of their entering freshmen on time, so they cheat three out of four young people in detroit from the kind of education they need in order to have a job in the modern world. as an example of two plus two equals four, you could set a principal that the purpose of schools is for people to learn. it would be bold, it would be out on the edge, but it would allow you to then contrast that with bureaucracies were their purpose is to get money from the public to maintain the people who are getting money from the public so they can get more money from the public, whether anyone is learning anything not. [applause] let me give you a direct example of that. one of the proposals i have been making, if we want to accelerate learning and reduce costs, is that if students can graduate from high school in three years, we give them the fourth year as an automatic scholarship to go to college or vocational technical school. if you could have earned the cost of your going to high school for a fourth year as an automatic scholarship and the graduating in three years, how many of you could have graduated three years in high school? look around the room. two-thirds of you, three-fourths of the. how many he could have graduated in two years? i once asked one year, and a student in the back of the room asked, how big is the reward again? i am trying to drive at a fundamental point. if our goal is to maximize learning, then we ought to have reward mechanisms for people who learn. we ought to focus on maximizing learning. a fundamentally different model. the president of the school of the ozarks is here, which is a work study college. to go to the school of your folks, -- the school of the ozarks, he have to -- there is no student loan program. you work to pay for school tuition and books. if you work in the summer, that pays for room and board. 92% of the students at the college of the ozarks graduate with zero debt. 8% graduate owing about $5,000, almost always for buying a car their senior year. one of my proposals has been that every governor in the country should found one work study college and one work study vo-tech school. you could say to every student and the state, it is not a question of money. if you are willing to learn and study and work, we guarantee you can get a degree. it is a fundamentally different model. it is not just doing slightly more slightly less. it is doing something fundamentally different. we have the same challenge with the economy right now. it is fascinating that obama won the election in part with the support of people under 30, and if this economy continues its current form, that will be the group that would have the hardest time finding a job. all of your friends and neighbors have a big vested interest in figuring at how to get the economy growing again. i believe that requires a fundamentally different approach. i don't think that having the federal government spent $787 billion in a bill that nobody read is a very effective way of getting the economy going. it is affected been borrowing from your generation, building up federal debt to transfer the money to state and local governments so that politicians can avoid change. if you look around the country, that is what happened this year. in state after state, city after city, county after county, where the declining economy would have led to serious decisions. all those decisions were postponed until next year. they had a big enough check from the federal government, they did not have to make the difficult decisions. in some states it is even worse. they added to the size of government. new york state next year will have a worse budget that it has this year. that poses a real challenge for your generation. if you go to american solutions, you will see for proposed tax cuts for economic growth. you can go out and talk to people around your college or people back home where you live and i think you'll find a very interesting reaction. the first tax cut is to the social security and medicare tax. we propose to get the economy growing again that we have a 50% reduction in the social security and medicare tax for the next two years, both for the employees and for the employer match. our reasoning is very direct. if you want to stimulate the economy, don't give the money to bureaucrats. allow working americans to keep the money themselves. allow them to have more cash flow. we may be in an economy where it is hard for people to get a pay raise, but is not very hard for people to get a take-home pay raise. if you have a 50% reduction in the social security and medicare tax, every working american will get an increase in their take- home pay. if you allow the employer to keep their match, you hold every small business in america have more money in their cash register, a greater ability to hire more workers. three of every four new jobs are created by small business. they are not created by government or big business. they are created by small businesses. [applause] here is a simple first project. go out either back home or back at your school and go to buy or 10 or 15 small businesses and asked the owner, if we cut the social security and medicare tax by 50% for your employees, will they be happier and have more money? if we let you keep the big dipper sinsyne match, how much more money -- if we let you keep the people% match, how much money we have to create new jobs, buy new equipment, and be more competitive? you'll be having a down to work conversation about economic growth and opportunity with the widest possible range of small businesses, whether you are a latino, african-american, asian small business, a woman business owner, you will have an immediate interest in a program that stimulates the economy by cutting taxes and giving you the money so that you make the decisions. you do not have to apply to any politician or fill out any red tape. just by the act of changing the irs with colin, we put that cash back in the economy for people or working and for people who are hiring. the second change in tax policy directly relates to all of you. the number one economic competition you will have in your lifetime is with china. the chinese are legitimately working hard. we should not feel bad about this. they have every right to pursue happiness and every right to roll up their sleeves and go to work, too. we propose that we match their capital gains rate, which is zero. if we had no capital gains tax, the rate of investment you would see in this country, creation of jobs and investment in technology, would guarantee that your generation would have an explosion of economic opportunity and an explosion of opportunities both to create businesses and to go to work for businesses. our third proposal is to match ireland as a corporate tax level. the charge 12.5% corporate tax rate. in some states we are charging corporations over 40%. imagine you are a ceo. you are trying to decide where to build your next factory. they come back and tell you they have to places. one will take 12. by% tax and the other will take 40%. which one do you think you will invest in? this is not complicated. no liberal likes to learn math. [laughter] the liberal says why is that bad business going to arlen or china? liberal laws and liberal taxes are driving the business is out of the united states. [applause] if we repeal the liberal laws and the liberal taxes, this is the most desirable country in the world to be in and to compete in. it is the most complex economy. it is a much bigger economy than china, but we are making it prohibitive to compete. i was first turned on to the irish tax rate when it was pointed out that microsoft files all their licenses in ireland, because they are not stupid. why would you pay 40% tax when you could pay 12.0%. finally, we would abolish the death tax on the moral ground that we believe you should not be required to go to the undertaker and the irs the same week. economically, we recognize that building, working hard, saving for your family, building up all your lifetime is a positive thing to do, and we want to encourage parents and grandparents to save for their children and grandchildren. we do not want to discourage them. we would literally have zero death tax, so that people were able to pass things on to their children and grandchildren. [applause] i outlined those four because i want to show you the fundamental difference. this has been a great mistake in the last few years for conservatives and republicans. we have no interest, and the country has no interest in being a milder version of a really bad idea. they are enthusiastically bad, and we would be quietly bad. that is not the right approach. there is an honest, big government, semi socialist, european welfare state model that currently people like speaker pelosi and senate majority leader read and president obama believe in. they would like america the become france without the wind. -- without wine. that is a very american model. the american system is based on the idea that we are in doubt by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. the pursuit of happiness is an active verb, and this is a country defined by the work ethic. we want to have a very dynamic society where people go out and actively work to create a better future. a fundamentally different world view. they would like to make sure that why you are decaying, you are doing it with the government's help. we want to make sure that you are prospering and actually creating new jobs and opportunities and using new technology to develop a new future.
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