Slash history. Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in washington d. C. It sits on the ancestral home of the mikati people. It is my pleasure to welcome you to todays conversation with Suzanne Boyle and kevin boyles new book, the shattering. Before starting out like to talk about two programs coming up on our youtube panel. David keane will tell us about his new book, watching darkness fall. Which recounts the rise of the third rank in germany and the were ill to roll before key western wrecking capitals. London, berlin, rome, paris and moscow. On tuesday february 1st at 1 pm we will hear from sara pollack who will discuss her book fdr in american memory brazil in the making of an icon she analyzes roosevelt as a cultural icon in american memory, and historical leader who carefully and intentionally built his public image. Kevin bail because his look at the 1960s with this story of ed cahill, who in 1961, organized his neighbors to deck their houses with american flags for the fourth of july. Boyle is inspired by a photograph of cahill, and his neighbors, that he had seen years before and a book published by the National Archives. The book, which reproduced more than 200 images from our 40 graphic holdings was called the american image. Boyles book about america in the 1960s, the shattering, it took us a decade beyond the american image and focuses on the periods transformative conflicts. The New York Times calls the shattering a rich layered account of the 1960s. History is not simply the unfolding of events but it is the story of individuals behind the events. In the shattering, boyle introduces us to the people that propelled the changes. The Washington Post review declares that boyle has a gift for synthesizing and translating the often dry arguments and analysis of former scholarship into artful and empathetic storytelling. Kevin boyle is the William Smith mason professor of American History northwestern university. His previous book, arc of justice, when the National Book award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. He is also the author of the uaw, and the heyday of american liberalism. And coauthor of muddy boots and ragged aprons. His essays and reviews have appeared in Washington Post, the New York Times, baltimore sun, chicago tribune, and detroit free press. Suzanne e smith is professor of American History at George Mason University and teaches opera and American History, 20 century culture history, history of death in america, american popular music, and African American religious history. She is the author of dancing in the street, motown, and the cultural politics of detroit. Now lets hear from kevin boyle and suzanne e. Smith. Thank you for joining us today let me begin today simply today let me begin today simply by letting you know the professor smith was and able to join us. At the last minute there were complications of made it impossible for her to join us, and i am very sorry that she is not here. I would love to be sharing this afternoon with her. But i am honored to be sharing it with you. I just want to say how much i appreciate the National Archives giving me the opportunity to talk with you today, im particularly i want to thank Susan Clifton for putting together todays program. I want to start today by doing one of those things that i think you are not supposed to do when you talk about your book. I want to start with somebody elses book. In particular, but i want to do is i want to start with a book by a woman who has been in the news a bit lately because of her passing. I want to start with joan didions second book of essays, the white album. In particularly, when i want to do for a second, i want to read just the start of it. It is a famous start. This is the start of the very first essay of the white album which is a collection of essays that didion wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is what she said at the start. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to free see shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. Such a beautiful, elegant way of describing what historians really do. What we do as historians is we take all of the fragments, the complicated pieces of the pass, and we tried to shape them into a coherent story. And then overtime, we start to wonder whether the story can be shaped is really the best way of telling the events of the past. And so we start to think that we might need a new story. And that is what the shattering is. It is my attempt to take the phantasmagoria of the 1960s, this extraordinary sprawl of events, and to reshape them into a new story of the 1960s. And a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. In the book duels with a considerable extent the president of the 1960s, john kennedy, lyndon johnson, richard nixon. And to my surprise, Dwight Eisenhower, who hovered over the 60s to an extent that i had not realized when i first started working on this book. It deals with those people who tried to become president. Barry goldwater, bobby kennedy, hubert humphrey, george mcgovern, George Wallace who runs through so much of the 1960s. He talks about Supreme Court justices, a general or two, and talks about the we are so see it with the 60s. Dr. Martin luther keane junior, malcolm x. But if theres one thing that animates my sense of the pass, my sense of myself as a historian, i also really believed that ordinary people are central to history too. Ordinary people who we dont know help us understand the past in a new way, and ordinary people in the american past changing this nation. And so alongside all of those famous people who run through the shattering, what also try to do is tell the stories of ordinary people. What i want to do today, i just want to tell you four stories. And this is the first one. This is the 4th of july, 1961. On the 6100 block of west any street in the northwest corner of chicago. The day before, ed cahill in his neighbor, clarence mitchell, draped their block in 38 flags. That is a lot of flags given that there are only 36 houses on the entire block. And ed, being ed, had written to the chicago tribune, one of the major newspapers in chicago, to announce what they had done. And the trip decided that they would send a photographer out to take a picture of this block. And so the neighbors are gathered on the lawn, right next to ed cahills house. And and got clearance, thats ahead right there, that is clearance right there, and two of eds kids, he had three children, two of his kids got into the picture too. That is his son, terry, standing at attention up on the top of the steps. And that is his daughter katie. Win back, right back there, you can barely see, there is eds wife, Stella Cahill. Smiling into the 60s. Still had good reason to be smiling. Stella was born a couple of days after christmas in 1916, deep in the polish ghetto of chicago where she, where her parents lived, and water father managed to bring home from his trade. She had an older brother, chester, and the four of them lived in a tenement deep inside the ghetto. Just about two years after her birth, her father died, killed by the spanish flu, which was then raging through the poorest neighborhoods of american cities. And her mother, with two young children, face the aspect of tumbling into the worst forms of poverty. She tried to break the families fall by getting married again in 1920. She married another polish immigrant, this time and then who did not have a trade that her now deceased husband have had. He made his living as an unskilled labor, meaning that he made his living on the power of his back. A power that he tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking that he could not control. And so all through the 1920s, stella, her brother and now stepfather lived on the edge of poverty, and there is no clear sign that from the sign that they moved every single year, every single year, all the way through the twenties, they lived in this part of town, that part of, town and in that part of town the way that poor people do. And, then 1929, the economy collapsed around them by the spring of 1930 stella stop father was unemployed in the family was getting by and the family was getting by whatever money her mother was bringing home boxing candles in a candle factory. It was not enough. Within a year or so, stellas older brother left school to take a factory job that he was lucky to get. That one in just enough money that they could keep stella in school between the two years of a commercial course that she was taking it to chicagos public schools. In the middle of course was over, they pulled her out and sent her off to work too. She was 15. Stella met and cahill on a blind date in 1938. The cahill family, they were hardly wealthy. But in the working class world of chicago, they were a step above stellas family, a considerable step above. As father who had been born in downstate illinois of irish immigrant parents, his father worked as he foreman for a Construction Company that did road work for the city of chicago. What that meant, especially in the 1920s, was that work was steady. In a way that it had never been for stellas family. And with that stead work eds father earned enough that in the late twenties, he was able to buy a house on the 6100 block of west eddie street, the black you are looking at right now. In those days, it was a half finished brandnew Development Going way out on the outskirts of town. It was a completely white neighborhood. Much of the new developments that were going up and chicago in the 19 twenties where wrapped in restrictive covenants, the little closets that developers put on their deeds to say that this property can never be sold to a negro, and oftentimes to a jewish american. But i have no evidence whatsoever that when eds family bought that house, that they thought at all about race. Chances are that they took it naturally, as a natural thing that neighborhoods are going to be segregated. That is how deeply that Racial Discrimination was written into the fabric of american society. What they saw was that they were buying a 900 square foot house with an unfinished attic up above, they could finish off, and the boys can have a place to sleep. And what they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard, a little front yard, and it wasnt half finished neighborhood and it was six blocks away from a brand new catholic parish that they could join, st. Ferdinands. But it did have a great school where eds brothers could go. As part of the commitment to the cahill family, the deep commitment to the cahill two catholicism. And that is where ed grew up. Adam and stella got married in may of 1940. 1940, to they had their first child. A baby girl they named judy in november of 1943, when judy was about a year old ed got drafted. He was gone for two and a half years. Most of that time he spent in europe. In the signal court, trailing along behind the front line troops as they marched towards berlin and the end of the war. And stella stayed home with a newborn. Now, stella knew on some level that ed was safe. She knew that we from the letters that he wrote home. These sweet personal letters that he sent as often as you possibly could. But you have to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in chicago in 1943, 1944, 1945, living surrounded by war. Living surrounded by death. By the gold stars that she would see in the windows as she walked that baby along the streets. For the prayers for those boys who had gone missing, the prayers and sunday mass. For the boys who had gone missing from that parish that she was a part of. And you have to believe, i believe with all my heart that deep in the night, that fear came creeping up to her to. That it would have been impossible for her not to imagine the Western Union messenger coming to her door with that notice. And if that were to happen that she would become her mother in 1918. A too young widow with a toddler at her skirts, and her life collapsing around her. That is not what happened. Ed got through the war just fine and he came home in the spring of 1946 as part of the mass of the mobilization of that year. Within a few months, to no ones surprise, stella was pregnant again. And ed decided that with the new baby coming, she couldnt really afford to take all the benefits that gi bill was providing him. He needed to go get a job, and he did. He got a job as a clerk in the front office of the back of the vacuum can company of chicago. Vacuum can company a chicago made industrial strength coffee urns. And one of their major clients was the United States military. The u. S. Military really liked their coffee urns as did the army. Asked if in 1948, while their son was born in 47, thats terry. And 1948 this now young family, ed and stella and their two kids, moved into his fathers bungalow on west eddie street. And they moved in partly to take care of him, his wife had recently died and everybody knew he couldnt take care of himself. And i think partly because ed had such a powerful sense of place. He wanted to go home. And so they did in 1948. And that neighborhood was still have finished. Half the houses on the block was not even been built yet because a development that had started back in the 20s had stalled during the depression and then stald again during world war ii. Over the next few years, from 48 on into the early 1950s, the neighborhood started to fill out as developers came back to put in small reasonable houses. On to the empty lots. Houses that they then sold overwhelmingly to Italian American and polish americans who were moving out from the center city of chicago in a process we called white flight. As the neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it became a more prosperous area. In the mid 1950s developers built a brand new Shopping Mall not that far from geddes street. One of the first Shopping Malls from chicago went in, not that far from geddes street. And that catholic parish that was so important to ed, finally got the church that it had never had. A gorgeous Beautiful Church wrapped in marble. A place for families like the cahills to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood had never had. And the cahills started to do well for themselves too and started to move themselves up in the vacuum can company until by the end the 1950s he was the head of sales. They had a third child in 1952, that is cathy down here. And the cahills were not extravagant people. But they had more money than ever before, so in 1953, 54, they bought their first car. Never had a car before. But now they didnt see the need for ed to take the bus all the way down to the vacuum can company down in the center of the city anymore. And in 55, they bought a tv and put it in the little living room. And when the kids were old enough they sent them all off to the parochial school, the grade school that was connected to their perished of saint ferdinands. And then when judy their oldest daughter got a High School Age they centered to a Catholic High School and when she finish there, 1959, they sent her to depaul university, one of chicagos two large catholic universities. There is no doubt that this was a parochial world that the cahills lived in. They lived inside this tight upper working class, lower working class catholic world. There is no doubt that this neighborhood, out on west eddy street, was wrapped around racial exclusion and discrimination. You can see that just in the picture of the folks standing out here in 1961. And the cahills at least, their prosperity, their ability to buy the car and the tv, and some are kids up to schools private schools was paid for, in part, by the vacuum cans connection to what Dwight Eisenhower would call the military Industrial Complex. Because the military Industrial Complex wasnt all about missiles systems and bombers, it was also about industrial strength coffee urns. But you also have to think, just for a minute, about what this world looked like for Stella Cahill. Here was a woman who grew up right on the edge of devastating poverty, who never had a stable place to live, and now she and ed own their own home out on eddy street. Here was a woman who in her early days of her marriage and of motherhood wasnt sure whether her husband was going to come home. Now living in this extraordinarily Stable Family centered world. Here was this woman who in 1961 had her older daughter in college. When she had had to leave school at 15. Is it any wonder that Stella Cahill was smiling into the 1960s . And already that world, built around eddie street, already there were cracks in the exclusions that that world had created. None more dramatic, none more important, then the one symbolized by this young woman Elizabeth Eckford. Elizabeth eckfords story would have been fundamentally different if her mother and father had had a phone. But they were working people and they had six kids to raise and they couldnt afford that sort of extravagance. And so, on the day before school was to start in 1957, september 1957. On september 3rd of 1957 the eckfords didnt get the phone call from the National Association for the advancement of colored people, the nations leading civil rights organization, the eckfords didnt get the call telling her that elizabeth was supposed to meet with the nine other kids who were going to desegregate little rock central high