is here this morning see were giving consent for your voice for broadcast. we will end with a signing add to this table and anyone who purchases a copy of the book they cue to support your local independent bookstore and the this authors series. please join me in welcoming leo damrosch. [applause] >> thank you very much. rachel it is a pleasure to speak at this wonderful store for the last 20 years. as she described it a nine month journey oliver the united states under primitive conditions in 1831 through 1832 tocqueville and his good friend who took that trip with him were in their mid-20s hunted magistrates with a career they hoped was a lot and government but the 1830 revolution had just happen but because they were aristocrats by birth and the families are intensively conservative wanted the monarchy back of the employers were suspicious of there loyalty and they thought it might be good to get out of france and thought what could be good so they had the arrangement to go steady the american penitentiary system which is not going to be a good system but then it was a breakthrough jails all over europe were holding tanks were prisoners of both sexes charged with everything from picking pockets to killing people were thrown together teaching each other criminal techniques in the a.d. at dave prisoner may repent might come out a better human being was a novel program. in france the prisons were totally controlled from the central administration it was inconceivable and in america there were local arrangements and that was the idea. but really they wanted to study democracy. they both believed deeply that it was the future and it would not be reversed and where francis seemed frighteningly unstable but was a dirty word because everybody remember the terror of the french revolution collapsing into and the parents missed by three days going to the guillotine because when rose pierre felt they were led out instead of killed his father was 21 and his hair had gone completely white then the father of the dictatorship of napoleon despotism. why was america so stable? this was ready to close agenda. it was my own voyage of discovery that we devour books about the founders of really don't read so much about jacksonian america which is totally different from any recent history and from that quite old-fashioned view of the world founders' he was the first populist president in office since 1828 expanding enormously from the hinterland and extremely commercial and also egalitarian to say that tocqueville saw this from the start however the gulf between rich and poor but you were born into a status of which you might not rise. the principles might change their life and this was the ideology really that the new to him but almost inspiring. partly because one of tocqueville city favorite authors and i will mention how that was so. but what has always interested me is ideas which seem like abstractions always a rise from people's experience which is certainly true as we try to show in the biography of him and it was true of tocqueville. bedroom in his own the but what he learns from american people. democracy in america was written deliberately in the remote way and meant to be dispassionate to intervene with a very turbulent politics. but tocqueville was a complicated rather volatile, a somewhat melancholy character. but with many more sides to his temperament than the perfected style he had for his political rating and incredibly good listener. so much that informs democracy of america it is not through the meditation that comes directly from the people he talked to all the way from john quincy adams about to enter the house of representatives, probably the american that impressed tocqueville the most of the way to india and chief the pioneer for mercy listen to anybody to tell him. as shawn said in that review, they were very human young men and interested in women and flirted all the time with american girls. i saw that tocqueville was into hot american checks. [laughter] but what struck them that american women were much freer with men than the heavily chaperon french girls, they did not seem to act upon it. there was not proved but a more repression in america that they tried to understand. it developed into a deeper insight. i will not go into this topic at length but to the family is given a moral centrality, emotional heart of american experience as a counterweight and the way sexual relations were treated he thought was of so we generated by this social demand and not just inherited from the plurality the way people thought to. a little bit about the breaking misdial translates to these translations were stodgy and staff because he did cultivate a very classical french style balance and rather abstract if you put it straight into english should does sound dull but it is very eloquent and french in his riding who will and other places often quite romantic and quite eloquent i have tried hard to make him speak with a more human voice i would try to give you a more examples later this evening pri realized what an advantage that was most were middle-class englishmen and women and without meaning to be it snobs they fed every american is someone is the of which will guarantee it just three to on their ears so they fervor put americans down in ways that are unjust and inappropriate one of the worst is frances trollope wrote a book denouncing america after she went home which is the famous novelist and she collected americanism she paid to them goes whole hog. keep cool mother i know a thing or two. what is so bad about that? tocqueville liked it because he did not have the in newalliance but it is of the intelligent foreigner and a lot of the british visitor stock they receive religious when it was obvious they had their legs pulled a wonderful exception deserves to re-read more than it is. talking about right teeing in a stage coach hearing about somebody is a smart fellow and said he could not see through a ladder. [laughter] but he was interested in the terminology that had no translation in french because he saw how profoundly symptomatic it was. for example, in france and the adult mail he was very struck how the term had evolves to and said they don't have the word peasant. not someone who can own his own band or a sharecropper ready to survive at these subsistence level. said americans prefer to be called the help. they're doing their part and the employer is paying them and not born into the servant class and certainly don't have the word lackey. americans don't have masters with the of the exception of the slave owners to see terminology the spoke to the american character. a little bit about the trip began in new york city and had to do those people far and away the biggest in america and boston was next but not the new york that we no. the streets and did not exist everything north of canal street was farmland with a deer road and at one point somebody met on a ship coming over invited them to the east river there is no skyline. is just one single story as far as the eye can see but already a commercial beehive inouye the way anybody talked about scrambling to make a fortune that the same time exhilarated did not care where it came from and the entrepreneurship and tocqueville actually responded and warrant warmly about a and it is a very interesting passage it was just both maybe if the workers came out everyday in the gaming san broke stones there would be doing something useful for society as long as they never spoke. amazingly enough under threat two of a ferocious lashing the natalee never open their mouth her not even expose -- supposed to exchange glances santo the was fascinated of the thousand prisoners in a moment could have jumped to the guards and kill them all we're kept in subservience because they were helpless to gather together and make a play and. in the midst of the land of the free was the it under despotism eighth puzzling paradox he wrote about it at some length what he was seeing is the penitentiary was not just a form of incarceration but the symptom of modern bureaucratic organization with modern surveillance like a spider in the middle of the web to see what is going on every where. it was structural and a conceptual development not just a place to put criminals. after that they were desperate to get out and see the hinterland of was once driving with a friend he said recall that the home office every have the almost unexplored middle of the continent was thrilling. grown up reading the novels of cooper and desperate to see native americans and the first ones they met were very discouraging. iroquois showed up in buffalo to give their paycheck word just appallingly frighten away drunk and c&s civilization was destroying what was a noble race but when they got into the north woods, they saw the chippewa indians living exactly as the ancestors had with complete confidence in a forest where we would have starved to death because we did not know what to do reversing the power of the relationship of civilization. they sought day no ability to assimilate it might mean they might to eventually lose everything but their way of life was too important. he was impressed by that he and beaumont hired horse is a and went about 100 miles into the north would scott s. rs pontiac fur trading post and on the way they had a sense of what the continent was like when only the indians live there and tocqueville wrote a moving account 15 days 22 weeks in the wilderness it is a very human center word but to have the word wilderness it is a very beautiful volume and poetic us say. is also adventurists and lost in the dark and as day approached the theater that rises up where they keep bears for the watchdogs coming in and welcome the ems as for the course is to see it introduced two the bair and later after they were up two pontiac speaking french or english and the bair agreed to us like old friends. but it was time to get on with their trip. to give you a sense from a different voice of the one you have had. this is in the middle of the forest. bid day when the sun beats down, oslo here at a alongside the plaintive cries that goes into the distance it is the last of the dying wind then all-around do everything subsides into a silence so profound that the soul is penetrated and fell luck to the beauty of nature and at peace with yourself in the midst of universal peace with the steady beat team of your arteries seems to mark the passage of time drop by drop into eternity. big issue out of sight into this extraordinary man. thought this was the best of the old france but then came to boston telling you about that saying it was much more like paris not like new york failed of the class not like oliver wendell holmes. but what struck them however privileged to the people were in the beacon hill mansion nevertheless there were fully integrated the way french aristocrats were refusing to be including their own families in fact, the ancestors had created very well informed people asking questions much like there's that of silly underpinned said democracy in america. four examples quickly. john quincy adams, was an example of the old and dying by deal of civic virtue that you give your life selflessly for your nation, a party, a faction are noble and a new kind of populist potash garnering majority rule that jacksonian van yearend administration was repellent and tocqueville admired him rather than compromise the principal and really was an impressive noble monument of a man but at the same time a bit of a living fossil he no longer sit-in and very uneasy about the future of this country. having serious talks about slavery, a very many people told tocqueville one way or another this will lead to a catastrophic civil war 30 years before it happens but the initial tectonics' shocks were happening in the 1830's. quincey was president of harvard they did not visit it was just a prep school. giving the idea of that was sentral that the colonies were self-governing. how could they not be? it took month and a half for a ship to get here. it could not we micromanage milan told the americans conducted their own affairs and the american in township was self-governing and existed before they ever gathered together to be massachusetts sell under democratic self-rule, a couple centuries-old but in france they tried to do it overnight changing the months of the year and it caved but francis lieber as a distinguished political scientist he had fought at the battle of waterloo and shot through the neck and chest and left for dead and revived a and sent back to germany and thrown into jail for political radicalism than when he got out immigrated to boston for he became an editor, writer and a student of american politics and culture as the intelligent outsider who would mired american it and gave tocqueville the concept that democracy is a state of mind not just the legal system, not the constitution as a formal set of promises, and emotional face. a bonding and commitment to the spirit of the whole and this is much like the social contract that says the only way to be a true social contract a real shared commitment has to be if everybody feels in some way it speaks for them, a common mean in describing something much like that with american democracy. and also coining the phrase habits of the heart. but as it is emphasized not just the motions but the values and attitudes in believes that make up the culture. of a guy named jared sparks gave to both the adm of the majority, the enormous power of the majority to control if not the actual thinking of everybody but to make them uneasy about rocking the boat because they may be ostracized to feel that they be long. and sparks was irritated. he just said the majority in the legislature may pass a law. let them win the next election day he found something more important. the way in france there is a very rigid governmental repression you could ban the all kinds of crazy political ideas around because nobody thought they would be put into practice but in america you could not advance ideas that nobody shared. that was the inside. they went to philadelphia that was less interesting to them but the place that turned to tocqueville on and more than any other was ohio. we find a democracy without limit to say boston was a traditionalist coulter with a cast a custom 22 privilege even if it did to cooperate in a way with the people the whole of the aristocrats in france would not put cincinnati was full of people who just got there yesterday the streets were named. everything was in turmoil prevent the beginning of the 19th century had 50,000 people and now had 1 million and of them had just come from somewhere else. a perfect example that you could never know this. there was a 23 year-old lawyer who just arrived from new hampshire and put off by the crassness of the frontier life because it was literally almost the frontier and thinking of going into politics purpose so degrading you cannot get elected unless you get drunk and tocqueville roche believe there not people in this part of the country have elected a person called david crockett who cannot even read. but it is possible at the national level things will be more hopeful. his name was the senator from ohio then the governor then lincoln's secretary of treasury and the chief justice of the u.s. supreme court. and tocqueville saw that a person like that had an opening too any kind of possibilities and the west he probably would not have had back home. somebody told him that at that time 36 members of the house of representatives were born in connecticut. it only had five representatives of its own so the rest have spanned out to make careers and had done it successfully. one of the brilliant things he put his finger on is the importance of the frontier that turner made the center of a famous book it was not just a line on the map but a way of being and kept advancing further westward and made possible the egalitarian energy and hopeful the sec could not have existed even in america bacchae sell abraham lincoln that was completely unknown teaching myself math lincoln and injured jackson came from complete property had minimal the gold training and deduct audience of the history that is what tocqueville was perceiving would be possible. the trip continue to have the romantic aspects. they traveled mostly on steamboat's. the highways were hopeless. the water raise is how you moved about the country. they were thrilling because it was the most brutal winter in 50 years unfortunately and ohio froze solid just before they were shipwrecked and they thought they would drowned they shook hands and said farewell and then it landed on a rock so they said you better get two the mississippi to go to and negative go and it was up through their waste tocqueville got a terrible fever they had to spend one week in a log cabin and finally got to memphis, tennessee was still frozen and to spend one week shootings parakeets now that is probably the extinction of the parakeet that no longer exist. and here is a person from serendipity. just as the capt. tries to make up his mind what to do with the beating of drums the bedraggled men come emerging from the forest one of the very first installments of the infamous trail of tears been deported to oklahoma so the captain except the wages to take these people aboard they're almost dying of cold and tokyo is appalled and fascinated by the spectacle. are read wonder two sentences of his description estimate the era of destruction something that felt like a final furrow of no return in one could not look without a polling of the heart. the indians were somber and silent one of the new english rice and wire them the being their country? he said to be free but i could not get him to say anything more. it was a coincidence that prada is here to witness the expulsion follow last remnants of one of the most celebrated ancient american nations. then to talk about serendipity, as they put the indians ashore on the arkansas side a big man on a white stallion came galloping up and took passage with them and it was sam houston who had been governor of tennessee but left there after a miracle scandal not yet the hero of texas and new them very well and had taken a native rear kin, lavalife on his way to washington to persuade injured jackson to greet -- treats the indian people better and they have long conversations and found him to be an extremely thoughtful person and it was the heart of the 100 page chapter on race relations. at one extreme is the indian who cannot surrender total liberty, and never ordered around and will not accept it he will lose his life rather than surrender. the other extreme is the black slave to do is not know what it would be to be freed or to make a conscious choice and it is tragic they have lost their religion internet to their ancestral language, not assimilated into the white people who will not accept them and do not belong anywhere with a number of moving stories. when it brought back to france, he needed to do a lot more reading and thinking with plenty of materials full of books he had collected but he wanted to understand much more deeply than is called the second to turney and took him four years to finish the first half of democracy in america which was a first time hit and another five years for the second half so it is no wonder it is a prodigious monument flow of ideas that not only deepen but demerged as he went on reading and thinking during the final years and a couple of examples, one he celebrates clearly the thing that that was most inspired which was the local initiative that in france if you wanted to of the town hall you had to go to paris to get a and officials ruling and mountains of red tape and it was two years later and in america they do it if we deci