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People. | |
| I'm actually thrilled that this time in Washington Journal, I'm getting a lot of really substantive questions from across the political aisle. | ||
| Our country would be a better place if every American just watched one hour a week. | ||
| They could pick one, two, or three. | ||
| Just one hour a week, and we'd all be a much better country. | ||
| So thank you for your service. | ||
| Coming up here on C-SPAN, a marathon of our new series, America's Book Club. | ||
| In just a moment, our interview with author Stacey Schiff at the National Archives about her biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams. | ||
| After that, author John Grisham discusses his early life and novels. | ||
| Then Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett talks about her view of the Constitution, followed by our conversation with author David Gran at the Folger Shakespeare Library. | ||
| All that and more. | ||
| Just ahead, right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation. | ||
| From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein. | ||
| As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could. | ||
| Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more. | ||
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Now from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., winner of the Pulitzer Prize, best-selling biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams and Cleopatra, Stacey Schiff. | |
| uh stacy uh what i'd like to do is go through your background a bit and then how you came to write the various books that you wrote But let me say at the beginning, you have a very eclectic group of books you've written about. | ||
| Benjamin Franklin, The Salem Witch Trials, Cleopatra, the author of The Little Prince, among other things, the book on Vera Nabokov, who was the wife of Vladimir Nabokov, the writer of Lolita. | ||
| So how do you pick subjects? | ||
| Because I can't figure out how you figure out who you want to write about. | ||
| I think there's a hidden thread in some ways, invisible to the naked eye and often to me among the books. | ||
| And here's a perfect example since we're sitting in the National Archives. | ||
| I went to France, moved our kids and our family to France for a year and a half so I could research the book about Ben Franklin's years in France, which are the years of the American Revolution. | ||
| He's there for eight and a half years, the most difficult assignment, most taxing assignment of his life. | ||
| And the paper for those years, which is in the State Department Archives in France, is two and a half times as great as the rest of the documentation we have for Ben Franklin's life. | ||
| I would say moreover that it is not necessarily as beautifully preserved as some of our documentation is here, and that French archivists, unlike American archivists, go out on strike. | ||
| And also the room isn't heated. | ||
| Did I mention that the light is bad? | ||
| So it was a very difficult book to research. | ||
| And I think after that many years, that much time in those archives, I realized two things. | ||
| One, I didn't really want to research my next book in France. | ||
| That was the third time I had done so, because I found the systems extremely difficult to navigate and sometimes the documentation very difficult to request. | ||
| But also that I was more comfortable with the question of doubt than I had been previously, because you can read through those mountains and mountains of Franklin material and still not have essential answers about parts of his life, like who was the mother of his son. | ||
| And I think that made it possible for me on some level to think about a book about a woman for whom we have no documentation whatsoever, which is to say Cleopatra, where we have possibly at best one instance of her handwriting. | ||
| And I thought I could write a book where you actually were able to say on the page, we don't know, or we will never know the answers to certain questions. | ||
| And I don't think I would have been ready to do that had it not been for the monumental Franklin documentation. | ||
| So the book you wrote on Nabokov's, Vera, why did you pick that particular subject? | ||
| Because I could see maybe somebody writing a book on the author himself, but his wife, now she was an author too, but she wasn't nearly as famous. | ||
| So you picked his wife, and were you surprised that you won the Pulitzer Prize for that? | ||
| I picked her because I was thinking about marriage, and I wanted to see if it were possible. | ||
| I was trying to increase the degree of difficulty, which was idiotic on my part, but I thought I had written about one individual. | ||
| Was it possible to write about a relationship? | ||
| And I think I thought about a whole bunch of different combinations. | ||
| I think at one point I was thinking about the Marx brothers, and somehow that led directly to Vera Nabokov. | ||
| And she's very much present on every page that he writes. | ||
| Every book except for one is dedicated to her. | ||
| His biographers had both written that there was a hole at the center of Nabokov's story and it wouldn't be, and you couldn't get your hands around until you wrote about her. | ||
| And that was like a red flag. | ||
| It was like, wait a minute, why is there this hole? | ||
| Why doesn't somebody talk about her? | ||
| And I thought it was possible to understand him better if you understood, if you turned the carpet over and could see the other side. | ||
| So for me, it was really a book about him as much as it was about her and about how this machine that they had built together, which was Vladimir Nabokov, worked because it took two people. | ||
| When you won the Pulitzer Prize, they call you the night before and say, we're going to announce her. | ||
| How do they tell you you're going to win the Pulitzer Prize or you won the Pulitzer Prize? | ||
| It will amuse you that you get it. | ||
| Those days you got a telegram. | ||
| And needless to say, you don't get the telegram before someone in publishing calls you or NPR calls you and says, did you know you've won a Pulitzer Prize? | ||
| And then you think that must have been a prank phone call pretty much, yeah. | ||
| Now, when you write a book, do you write an hour a day, two hours a day, three hours a day, and call it quits? | ||
| Or you write a certain number of pages? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| I write from the minute I hit my desk until the caffeine gives out, and that is approximately three and a half hours. | ||
| Three and a half hours. | ||
| And I think anyone who says that they write for longer than that is either supernatural or lying. | ||
| Are you writing in the morning or in the evenings? | ||
| In the morning. | ||
| I used to be an evening person. | ||
| I'm now a lucid in the morning, only in the morning person. | ||
| And you write in longhand or company? | ||
| Do you know my secret? | ||
| I write longhand. | ||
| It's an embarrassing thing to admit. | ||
| I write on a legal pad with a mechanical pencil. | ||
| And I do that because it, I do that for a number of reasons, but it slows me down. | ||
| I type very fast. | ||
| I don't think as fast as I type. | ||
| And there's something about the labor of the pencil that really slows you down. | ||
| Where did you grow up? | ||
| Adams, Massachusetts. | ||
| Junior Samuel. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And were your parents in the writing world? | ||
| My mother was a college professor, so writing adjacent, and she had a PhD in comparative literature. | ||
| So, you know, there was a lot of, there was a lot of discussion about French literature. | ||
| And did you want to be a writer when you were in high school? | ||
| I think if we're outing all secrets tonight, I probably always wanted to be a writer, but it was a very hard thing to say, and it was a hard, it's a hard profession at which to start. | ||
| And so I started out in publishing and made my way from publishing to writing. | ||
| So where did you go to college? | ||
| Williams. | ||
| And did you do writing there or not really? | ||
| I was a philosophy and art history major. | ||
| Okay, so when you graduated, what did you do? | ||
| You're now going to tell me it was useless, because I know you've told me that before. | ||
| So when you graduated from Williams, did you say to publishers, I could be a good editorial assistant or something? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How long did you do that? | ||
| I did that for about eight years. | ||
| I was in publishing for about eight years. | ||
| And when you read other people's works, did you say, hey, I can do better than these people? | ||
| No, but what you learned, what I think I learned very quickly in publishing, was how to write a really good book proposal. | ||
| So I think I could probably write a book proposal for pretty much anything you could name right now. | ||
| That's the one sort of, for me, that was the one essential takeaway. | ||
| And I spent a lot of time, I had a side gig, as you often do when you're a young editor because you can't make a living. | ||
| And my side gig was excerpting books for the New York Post. | ||
| And that meant pulling five days worth of 1,000 or 1,500-word excerpts of the most salacious part of the books that they were buying. | ||
| And that was an extremely good exercise. | ||
| What was your first book? | ||
| The first book that I wrote. | ||
| First book you wrote? | ||
| Santic Subari, the book about the author of The Little Prince. | ||
| Little Prince. | ||
| Now, I read recently that the book, The Little Prince, is the most translated book in the entire world. | ||
| The Bible is the most important. | ||
| The Bible is the most translated. | ||
| But this book has been interpreted or translated into more than 500 languages. | ||
| Why is it that popular a book? | ||
| You're absolutely right, to the point where it's translated into every dialect of every country you can imagine and Klingon. | ||
| I mean, and in ancient Greek and Latin. | ||
| I mean, there's not a language you can name in which you can't read The Little Prince. | ||
| I think because it's a fable and it lends itself, it has a universality to it. | ||
| It's an extremely adaptable tale. | ||
| It's all about the foibles of humankind, what could be more universal. | ||
| And it's an exceptionally flexible story. | ||
| I mean, you can make it, it works on it, it works for children, it works for adults. | ||
| And I think it's largely written. | ||
| It's interesting when you look at how it was published, you can see that the publisher had a lot of trouble figuring out how to market it. | ||
| Was this a book for adults or was this a book for children? | ||
| And they kind of tried to straddle the line. | ||
| That book was written in, I think, 1943 or something like that. | ||
| So when that was done and you finished that book, what was the reaction from your readers? | ||
| If people love that book and the publisher say, give me another book? | ||
| That would have been a really nice reaction, wouldn't it? | ||
| I think it sold maybe seven copies, but it was a finalist for the Pulitzer. | ||
| That was nice. | ||
| Although I should have said when you asked about the Pulitzer, when I did when that book was a finalist for the Pulitzer, I was very excited. | ||
| It was the most amazing thing that had ever happened. | ||
| And I called my agent to say, Lois, can you believe this? | ||
| I was a finalist. | ||
| And she said, Stacy, that means you lost. | ||
| So, you know. | ||
| Well, okay, so your next book was what? | ||
| My next book was the Nabokov book. | ||
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Okay. | |
| And how long did it take you to write that book, a research and write it? | ||
| It pretty much always takes me five years. | ||
| Five years, so whatever the book is, it's always five years. | ||
| The Adams book took a little longer, and I don't know if that was because it was COVID and I was ordering pureel around the clock or archives were closed, it was harder to get material, or if I was just slower. | ||
| But usually it's five years. | ||
| Now, some writers do a lot of research and they sit down after all the research is done and write. | ||
| Some research, write, research, write. | ||
| What is your style? | ||
| So the smart ones are the ones who research, write, and research, write. | ||
| I belong to the other school. | ||
| I do all the research for three or three and a half or four years and then I sit down and write. | ||
| And then inevitably, I sit down to write and I realize that I failed to research what it was like to live in Paris during World War I or something and I have to go back into the archives. | ||
| And when you write, how do you avoid the distractions of emails and texts and telephone calls and things like that? | ||
| I'm hoping you have the answer to that question. | ||
| Phone calls are no longer an issue. | ||
| I mean, email has chipped away at my focus just as it has at everyone else's. | ||
| I find it really hard to resist email and I don't know what exactly I think I'm waiting for from my email, but I can write three good sentences and then think I must check my email like everyone else. | ||
| Okay, and so when you do your writing, do you ever go back the next day and look at this and say, how did I write this? | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| I'm going to rewrite it. | ||
| Every single day, yes. | ||
| That's what writing is, right, isn't it? | ||
| And do you ever show what you're doing each day to somebody? | ||
| I don't show what I'm doing each day. | ||
| I, chapter by chapter, have two great first readers. | ||
| One is my husband, who reads for logic and flow, and this is idiotic. | ||
| And he's very candid. | ||
| And the other is a novelist friend, Eleanor Lippmann, who writes romantic comedies of the first order and who reads for all the other things. | ||
| And so the two of them are very complimentary readers in the sense that they're reading at very different levels. | ||
| And they get usually a chapter or a couple of chapters at a time. | ||
| And how did you come to write a book about Cleopatra? | ||
| What was the appeal of that subject? | ||
| It was an idea that we were literally sitting at dinner one night, and the question of what did Cleopatra do all day came up. | ||
| And this became kind of a family joke of like, you should write a book about what Cleopatra did all day. | ||
| And then the joke became when her diaries turn up, you can do this. | ||
| And it just kind of got tossed around. | ||
| It was on all my lists of possible subjects for a long time. | ||
| And then, as I said, I went to France and wrote and researched and wrote the Franklin book. | ||
| And somehow at the end of that process, I thought, you know what? | ||
| The idea of someone where there's a great deal of just give around the edges of the story where we don't really know the narrative was an interesting narrative challenge. | ||
| And I went back to read Plutarch, as one does, and realized that we have like actual quotations of, we have actual speeches between Mark Antony and Cleopatra. | ||
| And that's when I thought, you know, we have, if we have dialogue of some kind, you could maybe write an episodic, you know, Cleopatra in five scenes kind of book. | ||
| And then the more I researched, the more I realized there was actually a fabulously rich vein of material, and that if you wrote the book with a certain, from a certain angle, you could actually weave a complete narrative. | ||
| So there was a famous movie about Cleopatra played. | ||
| Which I've never seen. | ||
| Okay, Elizabeth Taylor. | ||
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Elizabeth Taylor. | |
| I've heard. | ||
| I've heard about that movie. | ||
| But the theory was that Cleopatra was the most beautiful woman in the world and so forth. | ||
| That's why Elizabeth Taylor, I guess, was picked to play her. | ||
| She was also thought to be beautiful. | ||
| And she was. | ||
| And was Cleopatra, was Cleopatra really at the time thought to be the most beautiful woman in the world? | ||
| Or what was her appeal? | ||
| You see, that's one of the reasons to write a book about Cleopatra. | ||
| No, decidedly not. | ||
| And all the ancients are very clear on this subject, that she was not a beauty. | ||
| But, as Plutarch writes, the contact of her presence was bewitching, that she was charming beyond all measure, spoke nine languages, and the tenth was flattery, that she was incredibly charismatic and incredibly ingratiating in her manner. | ||
| So there's a real, I mean, you definitely get the sense of a woman who changes the temperature of a room when she walks in it. | ||
| I mean, it helped that she's the richest person in the Eastern Mediterranean, hands down. | ||
| She had a relationship with Julius Caesar and also with Mark Antony. | ||
| And she manages amazingly to have children with both of them, which is an extremely strategically smart move. | ||
| If you're trying to get the Romans to back your empire, did those children rise up and become rulers? | ||
| They have pretty unhappy ends for the most part. | ||
| By the time she is conquered, it is impossible to let her children survive her. | ||
| So they come to pretty miserable ends. | ||
| And several thousand years after she lived, do we know where she's buried? | ||
| There's a search currently underway, as I'm sure there has been for years. | ||
| This search has been 20 years in the making for her tomb. | ||
| It's really hard to figure out where it could be. | ||
| The entire coast of the Mediterranean around Alexandria has changed. | ||
| We know she's buried in an ISIS temple. | ||
| There were something like 300 ISIS temples at the time. | ||
| We think she was buried with Mark Antony, and we know that that was within a day's ride of her palace. | ||
| So, you know, it does limit the possibilities, but it also gives you a tremendous amount of terrain over which to search. | ||
| Did she ever write who she thought was a better lover, Julius Caesar or Mark Antony or something? | ||
| She leaves one word to us, or one expression to us, and the expression, which is one word of Greek, is let it be done. | ||
| And that's the only thing. | ||
| And even that may not be in her handwriting, but that's the only word of hers that we have to this day. | ||
| Okay, so as we get ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of this country, you've written books about the colonial period or post-colonial period of time. | ||
| And why don't we go through those books for a moment? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So let's talk about Benjamin Franklin. | ||
| You wrote a book not about his entire life, but you focused on a time in France. | ||
| For those people who aren't Benjamin Franklin experts, how much time did he spend in France? | ||
| So he spends eight and a half. | ||
| He goes to France in December of 1776. | ||
| The feeling, the Declaration, let me just go back a step. | ||
| The Declaration from a certain perspective is like an SOS. | ||
| The Declaration is indeed what the colonies would like to broadcast to the world about their feelings of having been abused by the Crown, but it is also an attempted outreach to the rest of the world for someone else to support them. | ||
| And they realize they cannot fight this rebellion, this revolutionism, or revolution yet. | ||
| On their own, they must have some kind of benefactor. | ||
| And the question in Congress in these months is, do we declare independence first or do we seek an alliance first? | ||
| So the Declaration is made in July. | ||
| Franklin is dispatched. | ||
| The job is accepted in October. | ||
| He's dispatched in December of 1776. | ||
| And the mission is essentially to get France to underwrite this nascent republic, which is a pretty interesting assignment. | ||
| He's being sent to an absolute monarchy to solicit aid to found a republic. | ||
| Now, Benjamin Franklin, born in the United States, born in the Boston area, later moved to Philadelphia. | ||
| He was a person who went to England and lived there for 10 years or so, I think, before the Revolutionary War. | ||
| At that time, he was a citizen of England, he would think. | ||
| What was he doing in England all that time before the Revolutionary War? | ||
| So it's 16 years in all, which is startling. | ||
| 16 years in England? | ||
| 16 years, back and forth, but it's a total of 16 years. | ||
| And how long did it take to go back and forth in those days? | ||
| Three months. | ||
| Three months. | ||
| It could be faster, but three months is what you could pretty much count on. | ||
| It isn't something one did lightly. | ||
| The accounts of making that passage are really hair-raising. | ||
| In any case, he's there for a long time. | ||
| He's the founder with the greatest international experience. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why he is the person who was dispatched to France in 1776. | ||
| A, he's understood to speak French, which was kind of true. | ||
| B, he has experience of being in France. | ||
| He's gone to Paris and he knows the scientific community there. | ||
| And C, he has this tremendous international status. | ||
| Having spent so much time in England, you could say he might be really partial to the English. | ||
| When he came back, though, did he not support the Revolutionary War in ways that his own son didn't do? | ||
| You know, it's really interesting. | ||
| When he comes back, he comes back, the news of Lexington and Concord reaches him, would have reached him on the high seas. | ||
| He comes back to the news that the first shots have been fired. | ||
| And no one is certain at that moment if he's going to, which side he's on. | ||
| Is he going to be, you know, along with his friend Galloway, someone who is going to resist what's happening, or is he going to throw himself into this conflict? | ||
| Remember that months earlier he has been roundly denounced in the Privy Council, roundly humiliated. | ||
| That may have had some part of his thinking. | ||
| It's pretty clear if you go back and read what he's writing that he's watching what's happening and he's very much on the side of some kind of revolt or some kind of redress in any case, that his heart is very much in America at this point. | ||
| Remember that it's one country. | ||
| When we say he was a citizen of Great Britain, everyone is a citizen of Great Britain still. | ||
| But his loyalties at this point have definitely shifted to the colonial side. | ||
| When he was at the Second Continental Congress, which drafted and passed the Declaration of Independence, did anybody think you've lived in England so long, we really think you're probably British? | ||
| When he first comes back, Arthur Lee and a few others think he must be a spy. | ||
| I think Samuel Adams even has a little hint of distrust of Ben Franklin. | ||
| Very quickly that evaporates and it's clear what side he's on. | ||
| It's difficult because as you mentioned, the son is the royal governor of New Jersey, remains very loyal, extremely loyal to the crown and in fact to, you know, he's a counter-revolutionary in many ways. | ||
| And Franklin breaks with his son over politics. | ||
| When he went to England and later when he went to France, he was then the most famous American. | ||
| This is part of the stature that Congress never really understands. | ||
| Congress sends Franklin for the reasons I just mentioned because he has this international experience. | ||
| They don't realize that they are dispatching to France basically a kind of walking statue of liberty. | ||
| This is a man whom the French revere because of his scientific foundings. | ||
| Now, Benjamin Franklin, when he's in France, how many years did he spend in France? | ||
| Eight and a half. | ||
| He leaves in 1776, comes back in 1776. | ||
| Eight and a half and a half. | ||
| And 16 and a half in England? | ||
| 16 in England. | ||
| So 25 years overall overseas, that's a lot. | ||
|
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That's a lot. | |
| All right, so when he's in France, does he remain very focused on his job, no socializing, no womanizing, none of that? | ||
| I don't like the tenor of that question, David. | ||
| So it's France. | ||
| It is work is socializing. | ||
| Socializing is work, right? | ||
| And that is something that John Adams, to whom you owe your question, does not understand. | ||
| Franklin understands that in Philadelphia, it's very important to appear to work hard and to work hard. | ||
| In France, it's very important to work hard and not to appear to be working at all, because that is the gracious and graceful way to do business. | ||
| So he's very much keeping up with the obligations of a hideously expansive job. | ||
| I mean, he's playing the job of ambassador and consul and purchasing agent. | ||
| He's really doing everything himself, but he never appears to bend under the burden. | ||
| And a lot of this, in fact, is soliciting the goodwill of the French aristocracy who are the ones who are helping to call the shots at Versailles. | ||
| So some would say he had a libertine type lifestyle. | ||
| Well, John Adams would say that, yes. | ||
| If you actually read Thomas Jefferson, you see that Thomas Jefferson was not impressed with Ben Franklin's wine cellar. | ||
| John Adams was. | ||
| So, you know, it depends a little on your perspective here. | ||
| So in the end, when the war, when the Battle of the Revolution of War has ended, or the fighting has ended at Yorktown, then it takes about two years to get the treaty done. | ||
| The war, the last battle was in 1781. | ||
| And 1783, the Treaty of Paris was agreed to. | ||
| So for those two years, was Franklin working on the treaty? | ||
| Was he the principal person working on the treaty or who else did he have helping him? | ||
| Those are the years when we have this astonishing collection of firepower in France. | ||
| And for the most part, everyone gets along. | ||
| For the most part, everyone gets along with each other, but not with Franklin. | ||
| And it's an interesting question because he's a fundamentally benevolent, serene, genial man, and yet he's a terrible team player at times. | ||
| And that's a perfect example, except for Thomas Jefferson, who gets there at the end of Franklin's tenure. | ||
| He doesn't really get along with any of his American colleagues. | ||
| He gets along brilliantly with everyone else, but less so with the American colleagues. | ||
| Who was in charge of negotiating the treaty? | ||
| Franklin, John J. Franklin, John Jay, John Adams. | ||
| Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams. | ||
| They were. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And did they fight with each other or they got along? | ||
| It is clear that John Jay and John Adams would like to proceed to make a peace without consulting with the French, which is precisely the opposite of what the earlier treaty and Benjamin Franklin had agreed to. | ||
| Franklin reluctantly goes along because he realizes he cannot really outvote his two colleagues. | ||
| And so in a somewhat underhanded way, the peace is made with England, not somewhat underhanded, in an underhanded way. | ||
| The piece is agreed upon and then reported later to the French, and that mission is entrusted to Ben Franklin. | ||
| All right, so when the treaty is agreed to, the Treaty of Paris, does Franklin say, okay, I'm done, I'm going back to the United States? | ||
| He tries to, and he can't seem to get Congress to demand his recall. | ||
| So he spends two very frustrating years basically saying, I'm old. | ||
| If I mismanage affairs, it's your fault because I might be in over my head. | ||
| Please may I come home? | ||
| And it takes him basically two years to get congressional permission to do so. | ||
| He was old? | ||
| Nothing has changed. | ||
| Old by the standards of those days, but today he would seem to be young. | ||
| But how old was he when he was in France? | ||
| He was in his. | ||
| So he's 70 when, sorry, I'm sorry, he's 70 when he goes, and he comes back at 79. | ||
| 79. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So he comes back at 79, and then later he participates in the Constitutional Convention. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| In the description of his grandson, however, he is a lovely description. | ||
| Two of his grandsons are with him in France, and the younger one says, My grandfather is not like other old people. | ||
| They're always peevish and complaining, whereas he is always cheerful and amusing. | ||
| So, I mean, the serenity does follow him everywhere. | ||
| Now, a movie was made, a TV movie was made of your book. | ||
| And who got to play Benjamin Franklin? | ||
| Well, you know, the many years I spent with Ben Franklin, I always thought this is Michael Douglas, and that's who plays him. | ||
| I'm only kidding. | ||
| It's Michael Douglas. | ||
| And did you get to meet him? | ||
| Did he ask you questions about Franklin? | ||
| Yeah, we talked about it a lot. | ||
| Okay, so do you admire Franklin more than you did before you began this book or less? | ||
| I am in the, I think, happy position of being a little obsessed with Benjamin Franklin. | ||
| He's exquisite company. | ||
| There is very little on which he does not have a really smart and modern take. | ||
| He feels, as we all know, more human, I think, than some of the other founders. | ||
| He's amazingly inventive and forgiving, despite the fact that he can't get along with his colleagues. | ||
| And I'm actually working on a new book about Ben Franklin, as you perhaps just guessed. | ||
| So if you had a chance to have dinner with Benjamin Franklin, what question would you want to ask him after spending this much time researching him? | ||
| What would you like to ask him about? | ||
| You know, I really would like to know who the mother of the son was. | ||
| I mean, just because it's annoying that, like, nobody, over all these years that nobody's spilled, right, who was the mother of the son with whom he was so close. | ||
| I think the real question would be: at what point does he throw in his lot with the colonies? | ||
| He writes a very angry 196-page letter on the trip home in 1775 from England. | ||
| And it's clear from that letter, if you read it closely, that he's already lost his respect for London, for the Crown. | ||
| But what is the thing that actually turns the tide for him? | ||
| Because he's tried really with every ounce of ingenuity, of which he has a great deal, to hold what he calls this noble China vase together, and he fails. | ||
| What is the thing that finally makes him concede defeat? | ||
| Now, after the book on Franklin, you wrote a book on the Salem witch trials. | ||
| For those people that aren't familiar with the Salem witch trials, briefly, what were the Salem witch trials? | ||
| So in 1692, two little girls, a nine-year-old and an 11-year-old girl, start to suffer what we would consider to be hysterical symptoms. | ||
| And fairly quickly, what they are suffering from is diagnosed as witchcraft, and fairly quickly after that, three women are named as the culprits who are in some way afflicting these little girls. | ||
| And in the following nine months, those accusations against those three women blossom into accusations against hundreds of people in 24 different Massachusetts towns. | ||
| So in the course of that epidemic, a witchcraft court is formed, and some of the accused and jailed witches are brought to trial. | ||
| Now, were there witch trials throughout Massachusetts or just Salem? | ||
| You know, Before 169, there were always witches, I should say. | ||
| Witches came to America with Puritans who came to America. | ||
| They came from all of those counties in England where there had been previous witchcraft epidemics. | ||
| Were there witches, witch trials, anywhere else other than Massachusetts? | ||
| There were Connecticut trials. | ||
| Connecticut. | ||
| Connecticut trials. | ||
| But this is the sole real epidemic. | ||
| In no other place did things spread this fast and over so much turning. | ||
| And to be a witch, you had to be a woman? | ||
| No, interestingly. | ||
| You could be many things. | ||
| You could be a woman, you could be a man. | ||
| You could be the sort of outcast of society, or you could be the richest man in town. | ||
| You could be a minister. | ||
| The person who is ultimately fingered as being at the center of this satanic conspiracy is actually a minister who had previously served in Salem Village. | ||
| Did any men get tried? | ||
| Men got tried and men were executed. | ||
| So in the end, it's 14 women and five men who were executed that year. | ||
| How many Salem witch trials were there, total trials in Salem? | ||
| Were there? | ||
| The trials go through the summer of 1692 and there are separate hangings. | ||
| And the interesting thing, I think, about the way it proceeds is that it begins as a simple case of garden variety witchcraft as it was understood in 1692. | ||
| And remember that this kind of witchcraft is not Margaret Hamilton witchcraft. | ||
| This kind of witchcraft is someone is attempting to, in confederacy with the devil, someone is attempting to attack your soul. | ||
| And this is actually a religious offense. | ||
| So that when the Massachusetts Bay Colony is founded, the first, in the penal code, the second offense you could create was witchcraft. | ||
| And I think the third is blasphemy and murder comes forth. | ||
| So, you know, this is a sense of what we're talking about. | ||
| The concept of witch trials, did that originate in England and they have them there? | ||
| It originated in almost every country you can name, there had been witch trials over the previous hundreds of years. | ||
| What happens with this case is that Massachusetts, as I've said, which is a fairly, you know, has brought these ideas with it, has not understood that there is now skeptical literature on the subject because the ministers who very much control the flow of information have made it impossible for anyone to read a book that in any way undermines the belief in witchcraft because to undermine the belief in witchcraft undermines the belief in religion. | ||
| And so there's this sort of lock on the understanding of the community. | ||
| If you're accused of witchcraft, you get a trial. | ||
| Or you confess, in which case no one really knows what to do with you, but you don't get a trial and you stay in prison for a while, then ultimately, in theory, you get let out. | ||
| All right, so if you confess, you stay in a prison, they didn't kill you if you confessed. | ||
| But suppose you didn't confess and you have a trial and you're, did anybody have a trial and found they were innocent? | ||
| The startling thing about that year is not that people were accused, but that everyone who is accused and walks into the courtroom is convicted. | ||
| It's a 100% conviction rate. | ||
| So everyone who goes to trial that year is found guilty, which tells you something about the court procedures and how much the deck was stacked against you and how fervent was the belief in witchcraft. | ||
| What was the punishment if you were found guilty? | ||
| You go to jail or they kill you or? | ||
| Were you hanged? | ||
| Hung. | ||
| They hung. | ||
| How many people were hung? | ||
| I'm trying to remember, 14 women, five men, and then one person, one very valiant person who refuses to enter a plea, so he therefore can't be taken to trial, is pressed under stones, which was the rather medieval torturous method of dealing with someone who refused to enter a plea in court. | ||
| Okay, so when did they stop the trials? | ||
| What year do they stop this? | ||
| It's nine months essentially from start to finish. | ||
| So by October, the court is kind of stuttering to a halt. | ||
| And why did they stop? | ||
| It's a really good question. | ||
| A lot of reasons. | ||
| Partly, it's October. | ||
| They've got to go harvest their crops. | ||
| They can't sit in the meeting house and listen to witchcraft testimony much longer. | ||
| The trials have gotten out of control. | ||
| People have been accused of every walk of life in so many communities, and ultimately at a fairly high level, people who were fairly respectable were beginning to be accused. | ||
| The newly installed governor reaches out finally to another colony, reaches out to the New York ministers and asks if the Huguenot and the Calvinist and the Huguenot and the Episcopalian minister and the Dutch Calvinists in New York can answer some of his fundamental questions about witchcraft. | ||
| That begins to sort of undermine some of what the court is doing. | ||
| So did they have Halloween then and kids didn't dress up as witches, I assume, right? | ||
| It's really funny that we have somehow conflated this horrific, you know, massacre of innocents with a holiday where we get to get candy, isn't it? | ||
| It's kind of an astonishing thing. | ||
| Don't go to Salem in October, is my advice to you. | ||
| So after the witch trials are ended and people go about their business, does eventually Massachusetts say we made a mistake and we're going to vindicate these individuals? | ||
| Has that ever happened? | ||
| Very slowly. | ||
| And to me, one of the most interesting things about Salem is how quickly a silence falls on the entire episode. | ||
| And you can really read how much guilt and shame there is in how the record goes cold. | ||
| And I mean, startling things. | ||
| Like there's a fabulous Boston minister named Samuel Willard who publishes a book called The Complete. | ||
| It's basically a complete compendium of his sermons. | ||
| From April of 1692 to August of 1692, there's a lacuna. | ||
| There's no similar lacuna in 1691 or 1693. | ||
| The church record book is expunged for those months. | ||
| Personal correspondences are missing. | ||
| Diaries jump from 1691 to 1693. | ||
| It's as if the year didn't happen. | ||
| So there's this tremendous, you can just read in that throbbing silence how much pain there is. | ||
| Slowly, a few people begin to sort of apologize for their roles. | ||
| They are looked down upon by their, one of the witchcraft judges apologizes, and his colleagues very much disapprove of what he's done. | ||
| A little girl who had accused almost everyone who hangs apologizes. | ||
| The apology takes the form of essentially the devil made me do it, which is a pretty good way of putting it. | ||
| And then finally, early in the 18th century, some of the families are encouraged to apply for reparations for their dead relatives. | ||
| And what's interesting even then is that they apply for these reparations in like 1710 and 1711, but the word witchcraft is missing from their application. | ||
| So they'll say something like, in the recent unpleasantness, we lost my mother. | ||
| There's still an inability to be able to name names or point fingers. | ||
| And I should say that the belief in witchcraft doesn't end in 1692. | ||
| They just think they've murdered innocents, but they haven't necessarily got the right people. | ||
| I mean, there's still witchcraft at work, and that survives for a little bit longer. | ||
| But in eventually, in the 20th century or 21st century, did Massachusetts eventually say it was improper to do all this, or they never said that? | ||
| I think the last woman was cleared by some high school class maybe five or ten years ago. | ||
| She was someone who had slipped through the cracks. | ||
| Her family had never And this group of Massachusetts kids did so. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, let's talk about your most recent book, Samuel Adams. | ||
| Now, growing up, I heard a lot about John Adams, a very famous person, first vice president of the United States and second president of the United States. | ||
| And Samuel Adams, when I was thinking about another Adams other than John Adams, I was thinking he was a beer company. | ||
| There was a Samuel Adams beer company. | ||
| So was Samuel Adams really brewing beer mostly, or what was he really famous for? | ||
| And why would you think he deserved a book more than John Adams deserved a book? | ||
| I will just tell you one thing about John Adams, which explains something of the animosity he has for Benjamin Franklin, which is that when John Adams goes to France to join Franklin, or not really to join Franklin, but to work alongside Franklin, people think he's Samuel Adams. | ||
| And they say, oh, the famous Mr. Adams, and he has to say, no, that's somebody else. | ||
| And you can imagine how that felt to very vain John Adams. | ||
| So in the day, Samuel Adams was the more renowned of the two Adamses. | ||
| If you had asked any of the founders who the leading exponent of the revolution was, it would have been a contest between George Washington and Samuel Adams. | ||
| He's completely, he's utterly, I mean, as Thomas Jefferson says, he's the earliest, the most active, the most persevering man of the revolution. | ||
| All right, so Samuel Adams grows up in Massachusetts. | ||
| He goes to Harvard. | ||
| And eventually, what does he do when he graduates from Harvard, which then trained ministers, but he did something different. | ||
| Yes, he did something different, which is to say he failed at pretty much everything he tried. | ||
| He very briefly considers a business career and manages to lose a lot of money. | ||
| He's attracted to the law, but his mother thinks that's a terrible idea because lawyers were suspect at the time, which might explain Salem. | ||
| He just, he can't get traction. | ||
| He's loitering his way toward his future. | ||
| And slowly he begins to write for a newspaper, and that's kind of the beginning of the political career. | ||
| And so he starts writing, but he writes anonymously. | ||
| He doesn't write in his own name, largely, is that right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But that was very much the standard of the day. | ||
| You wrote pseudonymously. | ||
| He becomes the chief propagandist, really, of those early 10 years leading up to the revolution. | ||
| And that was one of the hardest parts of it. | ||
| Did he have a government job at some point? | ||
| He's a tax collector, which is pretty funny since he's pretty inept with finances. | ||
| And the way the tax collection worked at the time, it's a job nobody wanted, so there's some desperation implied in the fact that he wanted to do this. | ||
| The way tax collection worked is that you collected taxes and you, the tax collector, got a premium on the monies that you were able to get, but you also were on the hook for the monies that people didn't cough up. | ||
| So after a year or two of this, Samuel Adams was by far the most indebted of the tax collectors in the town of Boston. | ||
| Yeah, so you had to pay the government or somebody if you didn't collect taxes. | ||
| But being a tax collector. | ||
| He wrote something like 8,000 pounds after two years, which was like a fucking. | ||
| But being a tax collector couldn't make you very popular, right? | ||
| Well, it could if you didn't collect the taxes. | ||
| But did he not have a lot of debt that he inherited from his father as well? | ||
| He inherits a certain amount of debt from his father because his father had been part of something which is a sort of, it's almost like a preview of the American Revolution, which was a bank that his father is very instrumental in founding, which Parliament shuts down. | ||
| And it's this kind of, I mean, if you really, you know, groove on Massachusetts economic history, it's a fascinating chapter. | ||
| But it's a moment of parliamentary overreach in which a group of, after which a group of Massachusetts businessmen, not the elite, but the middlebrow businessmen, actually consider violating an act of parliament for the first time. | ||
| So it's really interesting. | ||
| So he's involved in writing anonymous or under pseudonym things about why the British taxes are unfair. | ||
| He's very vocal about it. | ||
| Does he participate in the Boston Tea Party? | ||
| I would say, no, he does not. | ||
| He most markedly does not participate in the Boston Tea Party. | ||
| I would say that it is his masterpiece, however, because his fingerprints are all over it. | ||
| And you see that. | ||
| We know that at the moment that the tea is being tossed into the harbor, Samuel Adams and John Hancock and a few of their friends are very conspicuously back at the meeting house where they had been discussing what to do about the tea. | ||
| But when 12 sailors are then deposed later in London, they point their fingers directly at Samuel Adams. | ||
| So when the British say that the colonies are not listening to them about the importance of paying these taxes, the British send some troops over eventually. | ||
| They call them regulars. | ||
| And eventually they're not happy with Samuel Adams or his colleague John Hancock. | ||
| And so, as I understand it, the regulars were sent to capture them in around 1775 or so. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And that was one of those things where you, you know, at three in the morning, you wake up and you think, oh my god, this is where the book has to start because we know Paul Revere's ride, and we know that Paul Revere is out announcing that the British are coming, but where in the world was Paul Revere actually going? | ||
| And the answer is to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of their imminent arrest. | ||
| So that is the other side if you actually think about, you know, Longfellow misses that part, but why is he riding into the countryside? | ||
| It's because those two are the two most wanted men in America. | ||
| And that and that speaks to something which I don't think we talk about a lot, which is the misconception or the complete cluelessness of the British ministry, who think that if they could simply arrest these two malefactors, they could really shut down this whole, you know, troublesome revolt. | ||
| So ultimately, the colonies have a Continental Congress, the first one, the First Continental Congress, and Samuel Adams is a delegate there, is that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| And does he overshadow John Adams at that time there? | ||
| No, by no means. | ||
| And it's interesting to see what the Massachusetts delegation does at those congresses. | ||
| They're very much working behind the scenes. | ||
| As they have made their way, these are very provincial men, and these are very divided, heterogeneous colonies. | ||
| So as they make their way to that Congress, they are being told by everyone they meet in the New Yorkers and New Jersey, you have to really be careful because people think that you're a bunch of, you know, obstreperous, hot-headed vandals. | ||
| And they get the message, and they realize by the time they get to Philadelphia that they need to work behind the scenes and let Virginia basically take the foreground. | ||
| And that's very much what happens. | ||
| You see Adams, you see Samuel Adams working behind the scenes, negotiating things, and then you see that all the major decisions were left to the Virginia. | ||
| John Adams, also a delegate to the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress, did he ever feel that he was more junior than Samuel Adams and deferred to him? | ||
| I think he always, I mean, he's 12 years younger, so he obviously, and he looks up to Samuel Adams in a very starry-eyed way. | ||
| I mean, Samuel Adams is the person who has, as he has with many young men, brought him into the cause. | ||
| Samuel was the person who, if you gave a tremendously good Harvard oration on American rights or liberties, he would be on your doorstep the next morning. | ||
| And so he had very much, very much enlisted John Adams. | ||
| I don't think there was a sense of being overshadowed at all. | ||
| All right, so ultimately the Congress issues a Second Continental Congress issues a Declaration of Independence. | ||
| We break from England. | ||
| Does Samuel Adams fight in the war? | ||
| No, he's in Congress the entire time. | ||
| He's on an endless number of committees. | ||
| So he never actually. | ||
| I remember that he's older, too. | ||
| He's older and he's not in tremendously good health. | ||
| He's on every committee, including committees at which he's useless, like the Ceremonial Committee. | ||
| Older means he was in his. | ||
| He's born in 1722, so he's in his 50s. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So ultimately, we win the war. | ||
| The Americans win the war. | ||
| What happens to Samuel Adams? | ||
| Does he get elected to something or another? | ||
| Nothing great. | ||
| No, that's not his shining moment. | ||
| His shining moment are really those years of opposition, the years of being able to identify and articulate and broadcast these ideas about the invasions of American liberties. | ||
| Once the country is founded, once we're on a steadier footing, he's a part of this old world. | ||
| He's very much antiquated by this point. | ||
| He talks about the ancient purity of principles. | ||
| He's an old New England Puritan, and the country is rushing on to this very commercial, very opulent future in which he plays. | ||
| I mean, he's a governor of Massachusetts, but by default and not out of any competence, more just as a gesture of thanks. | ||
| Now, in his personal life, his first wife died early, and he had how many children at that time? | ||
| He has two children in the end, yeah. | ||
| And then he remarries. | ||
| More children? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so how does he support all these children? | ||
| Was it a brewery? | ||
| He doesn't have a brewery. | ||
| He seems to live on air. | ||
| And if you look very closely, I think you see that he lives on the handouts of friends. | ||
| And that is, I think, largely part of his relationship with John Hancock is extremely hot and cold. | ||
| It's a very vexed relationship. | ||
| And I think a lot of what you see with Samuel Adams in terms of familial support were handouts from John Hancock and other friends, but largely Hancock, who's extremely rich. | ||
| Now, John Adams goes on to be, you know, President of the United States. | ||
| Does Samuel Adams resent the fact that his younger cousin is president of the United States and he, Samuel Adams, is almost forgotten? | ||
| I don't think he's a man of resentments in any way. | ||
| There's a real disagreement between the two of them about essentially what is important. | ||
| Samuel Adams is really set on these Republican principles and this idea that everyone should participate in a democracy, that a democracy can be undermined very easily by men of avarication and ambition, avarice and ambition, is very, very sensitive to the invasions of rights. | ||
| He doesn't believe in institutions, and it is up to John Adams and the first couple of presidents to build the kinds of institutions in which Samuel Adams has no particular interest. | ||
| But when the Samuel Adams beer was started 10, 20 years ago, they must have put Samuel Adams' name on it because he must have been involved in the beer at some point, no? | ||
| I don't think I'm getting the story wrong, but I think that Jim named the beer because his fifth grade history teacher, civics teacher, was very infatuated with Samuel Adams. | ||
| Actually, he may go further. | ||
| She was infatuated with Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and Jim thought that a Samuel Adams made a better bar call than a John Hancock. | ||
| Adams had never been involved. | ||
| The family had been malsters, which meant that they prepared the barley, but they were never brewers. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And if they had been, he would have failed at that too, right? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So how long does he live? | ||
| He lives into his 80s. | ||
| He's quite, I think there's a little bit of senility at the end. | ||
| He's quite frail. | ||
| And the last comment of John Adams is that we have about him is about how he doesn't want to end the way his cousin Samuel had ended in this kind of hideous. | ||
| Was he honored during the latter years of his life or people didn't pay much attention? | ||
| Well if you go to the National Statuary Hall, you see that Samuel Adams is standing there, right? | ||
| In the 19th century, he's considered one of the two most important men ever born in Massachusetts. | ||
| I think we've increasingly lost sight of him. | ||
| And there are all kinds of good reasons why, one of which is that he liked to stand behind the scenes. | ||
| Now, John Adams had a son who became president of the United States. | ||
| Did Samuel Adams have any progeny who became famous? | ||
| He has a son who dies during the Revolution. | ||
| He's a doctor who dies during the Revolution. | ||
| And it's the only time in Samuel Adams' life that he actually is financially secure because he gets the son's military pension. | ||
| So ironically, he loses the son, but at the very end of his life, he finally is financially secure. | ||
| Now, some authors are very, I'd say, superstitious about saying what their next book is going to be because they don't want to tip off anybody. | ||
| Well, they don't want to have to write it. | ||
| So, but are you in that category? | ||
| Are you working on another book? | ||
| And can you tell us what it might be about? | ||
| So when I pitched this book to my publisher, they loved the idea. | ||
| And now when I talk about it, I think people's eyes glaze over. | ||
| So I'm not sure how to describe it. | ||
| It is a book about Ben Franklin, and it's about the last years of his life. | ||
| And it's really the summation. | ||
| It's Franklin's sensibility and the Franklin who comes back from France, still very vital, enormously wise, the presiding genius in many ways at the Constitutional Convention, and a man until his very last days who is, in this case, writing a satire against slavery. | ||
| He lived to be how old? | ||
| He's 79 when he comes back. | ||
| He dies at 84. | ||
| And at the Constitutional Convention, he's one of the few people who was both at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he signed it, and signed the Constitution. | ||
| Was he, by that time, he was in his early 80s, I guess, and he went there, as I remember it, by people carrying, he couldn't walk anymore. | ||
| I hate to tell you this. | ||
| He has a sedan chair, and he does go to the convention, but I don't think he goes to the convention by sedan chair. | ||
| I know, I think I wrote that in my previous book, too. | ||
| He walks to the convention. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He walked. | |
| No, walks. | ||
| It's not very far from where he lives. | ||
| But he was not carried. | ||
| He had a sedan chair in which he was carried. | ||
| At one point, someone writes him a letter. | ||
| I'm sorry to harp on this. | ||
| It's one of those stupid things. | ||
| He has a sedan chair because at one point another woman in Philadelphia says, may I borrow your chair? | ||
| But it's very clear that he's walking to the convention on a daily basis. | ||
| His son, illegitimate son, was later the governor of New Jersey, and he's jailed because he supports the British. | ||
| Whatever happened to that son? | ||
| It's a really sad story. | ||
| The son, before he's jailed or in the course of being arrested and jailed, does some rather nefarious things which lead to him being in further disfavor with George Washington. | ||
| So he's thrown into a dungeon where he spends eight months in solitary confinement, ultimately is exchanged for another prisoner and sent to London. | ||
| And then will spend the rest of his life trying to somehow arrange for reparations as a leading loyalist. | ||
| Franklin, who's in Paris during many of those years, will read about the activities of his eminent loyalist son, this loyalist hero who's in London. | ||
| And finally, only in 1785, on his way back to America, will the two meet again for the last and only time. | ||
| And remember that Franklin has with him in Paris two grandsons I mentioned. | ||
| One of them is the illegitimate son of Franklin's illegitimate son. | ||
| So he has kept Temple Franklin from communicating with his father in London for those years when he's in Paris. | ||
| So there's a lot of illegitimacy in that family, right? | ||
| Yeah, and the illegitimate grandson has an illegitimate child too, if you want to continue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems to run in the family. | ||
| He was closer to his illegitimate grandson, wasn't he? | ||
| He seems to have, I don't think I'm overstating this, he seems to have made a certain substitution. | ||
| He knows he's lost his son. | ||
| It's extremely, obviously, you can imagine how wrenching it must have been. | ||
| He puts none of this on the page in any way, but he consoles himself with this grandson, whom he turns into a little bit of a Frenchman, interestingly, because during his formative years, Temple Franklin, Williams' son, is in Paris with Franklin. | ||
| So writing a second book on Franklin, you must admire him. | ||
| I assume you don't want to write two books on somebody you don't admire, but you do admire him. | ||
| I feel as if he is in all ways admirable in so many ways, just the essential DNA of America. | ||
| His voice is the voice of America, literally. | ||
| The prose is impeccable. | ||
| Literarily, I don't feel as if we could have had Mark Twain or even Holden Caulfield. | ||
| I mean, it's so much the voice of American literature in many ways. | ||
| And he's admirable as a human being, except perhaps for the familial relations on so many fronts. | ||
| He was never legally married. | ||
| He had a common law wife, is that right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And did he have any real affection for her that you can see in the letters or anything? | ||
| It seems to be a very, despite what I think some scholars have said, it seems to be an extremely tender and agreeable relationship, yes. | ||
| I don't think it was a deep passion. | ||
| I don't know if he was capable of a deep passion. | ||
| All right, so somebody is watching this and says, I want to be Stacey Schiff, I want to be a writer. | ||
| You might be thinking, I want to be David Rubenstein. | ||
| Did that occur to you? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Somebody says, I want to be a writer. | ||
| I want to write books about famous people. | ||
| What is the best preparation? | ||
| Is it to be an English major or a history major or just work in publishing for a while? | ||
| What's the best way to get started for somebody who wants to do this? | ||
| I think reading and then rereading and then re-reading is probably the only requisite. | ||
| Did you read a lot when you were young? | ||
| I did read a lot when I was young. | ||
| And I, you know, if left to my devices, I would be home right now with a novel, probably, yes. | ||
| But I just feel as if you're speaking back to the books that you're reading. | ||
| It's all about what you're saying to the page, how you're ingesting the page, how you're metabolizing this. | ||
| And that's the thrill, I think, of what not just what we do, but I don't know, that's the magic of what a book can do. | ||
| Now, do you have children who want to be writers? | ||
| You know, since the time you last asked me that question, and now I might have a winner for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yes, the youngest is a writer. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| An immensely talented writer. | ||
| We'll see if she becomes a writer, though, to your friend. | ||
| And do your children read your books and tell you how great they are, or do they tell you? | ||
| Do your children tell you how great you are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| No, they have read my books. | ||
| They have read my books. | ||
| And the pleasure that you get out of writing is that you're creating a legacy for American history and people care about history. | ||
| Is that why you enjoy what you're doing? | ||
| I just feel like you don't understand. | ||
| I mean, just for the American books, you can't understand who we are and where we've come from if you don't. | ||
| I mean, if you don't know that Samuel Adams is somehow encoded in the Declaration, right? | ||
| If you don't know what that passage is about, how do you understand who we are? | ||
| How do you understand what the country was, what these principles on which this country were founded? | ||
| And I just think if you can find a life that can somehow illuminate one of those chapters or some of that sensibility, it's a remarkable thing. | ||
| And I like to read history through the life of one sensibility. | ||
| I like biography for that reason, because it gives you a very intimate view of events that you might not approach in quite so, that you might not be able to see quite so close up. | ||
| Now, did either of your parents or both your parents live to see your success in winning a Pulitzer Prize? | ||
| My mother was a mother was alive when I won a Pulitzer. | ||
| And did you call her up and say, guess what? | ||
| I just won the Pulitzer Prize? | ||
| I think I called her up and said, I think I just won a Pulitzer Prize. | ||
| And she said, well, did you or didn't you? | ||
| And you call her and eventually you told her you did. | ||
| I think I must have, yes. | ||
| I don't think I kept it secret, if that's it. | ||
| So today, as you do your research, do you do it online or do you actually go to the archives or the Library of Congress or a place like that? | ||
| Or now so much is online, you don't have to actually travel as much. | ||
| I wish that were the case. | ||
| I'm in the archives, is the answer to your question. | ||
| So I was at the American Philosophical Society the week before last. | ||
| I'm there again next week. | ||
| I can't, most of the stuff is not digitized. | ||
| I mean, certainly the French materials with which I was working for that Franklin book probably now are online. | ||
| They are so difficult to read. | ||
| Remember, they're in French, in 18th-century handwriting and sometimes not entirely uncode-decoded that you almost would need to see the document. | ||
| And I just like to be able to see the original. | ||
| And who do you like to read? | ||
| Whose books and history do you like to read or biography? | ||
| So I kind of began reading the obvious, the Robert Carrows and the David McCulloughs. | ||
| And I think I admire David for the breadth of field. | ||
| And that's why I didn't feel as if I had to stay always in my burrow and I could venture out in different ways. | ||
| But I also read a lot of the British biographers who I think write biography in a more original and with a broader range than we do. | ||
| So the Claire Tomlins and the Michael Holroyds and Richard Holmes in particular. | ||
| I've enjoyed reading all of your books. | ||
| I appreciate your putting this much time into those books and also into this discussion. | ||
| And thank you very much and congratulations on your success. | ||
| Thank you, David. | ||
| Such a good one. | ||
|
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America's Book Club host David Rubenstein and biographer Stacey Schiff visited the vault of the National Archives to view the Treaty of Paris and other priceless documents. | |
| So these are oath of allegiance from Valley Forge. | ||
| So the Continental Congress passed a resolution in February 1778. | ||
| They wanted Army officers to sign an oath of allegiance to the former United States. | ||
| So we still have oaths today. | ||
| Today, our oath, if you work for the federal government, politician on the hill, if you're in the military, our oath centers around the Constitution. | ||
| This predates the Constitution, so it's a very different type of oath. | ||
| So the irony is that they sent these pre-printed forms to George Washington to fill out the paperwork for the verbal version of the oath signed by the officer, witnessed by another officer. | ||
| The irony is that his army's coming out of the famous horrible winter of Valley Forge, where they can barely afford to feed them, clothe them, house them, supply them with arms and ammunition. | ||
| We're like, here's all the paperwork. | ||
| Great time to ask because I'm going to fill out the paperwork. | ||
|
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And return. | |
| So we've always been a bureaucracy founded on paperwork. | ||
| So this is in his hand. | ||
| The army number thumb. | ||
| So Washington is number one. | ||
| George Washington, Commander-in-Chief, the Army of the United States of America, to acknowledge the United States of America to be free, independent, sovereign states, declare the people thereof owe no allegiance or obedience to George III, King of Great Britain. | ||
| So very different than our oath today. | ||
| So today we say swear or affirm. | ||
| There's a space in the middle of the pre-printed form where they had to pick swear or affirm. | ||
| There's a few religious groups. | ||
| There's a passage in Matthew in the Bible they take very literally that says you can't swear. | ||
| So don't you swear. | ||
|
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So they affirm Washington swore. | |
| Do the utmost of the power of support, maintain, and defend the said United States against the said King George III, his heirs and successors, and his or their bettors. | ||
| Whole royal family covered. | ||
| Signed by Washington, has sworn before me, camp at Valley Forge, May 12, 1778. | ||
| Major General Sterling witnesses Washington. | ||
| Washington ends up witnessing most of the major generals, so Charles Lee, Nathaniel Greene, etc. | ||
| So you actually have three. | ||
| And this is the Treaty of Paris. | ||
| So this is the exchange treaty. | ||
| I would have loved to have shown you the American original that had Benjamin Franklin's signature, but most of those are out because of America 250. | ||
| It's like the most excuse everybody wants for announcements. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| So this is England's skip it. | ||
| So this one you can actually see is still connected. | ||
| So it actually goes in the side there and then comes out. | ||
| You can see it right there. | ||
| It comes out the side there. | ||
| And then again, sewn in the side. | ||
| This is on parchment. | ||
| The first page is all the various titles of the King of England, George III. | ||
| He's over most of the world, like that's what he's telling you. | ||
| And then when you get to the last page, same thing where it has D. Hartley and then Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams on the original. | ||
| And then because it's the signature of that country, this is George III's signature. | ||
| This is the Treaty of Paris. | ||
|
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This is the Treaty of Paris. | |
| So this is the exchange treaty. | ||
| How many treaties of Paris? | ||
| One for every country? | ||
|
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So they'll have our exchange treaty, we'll have their exchange treaty, and then we have two American originals. | |
| We have one that's horizontal and one that's vertical. | ||
| They will have these three signatures on them. | ||
| Sorry, four. | ||
| They'll have D. Hartley and then the three representatives from the U.S. are on those. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
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See more with Stacey Schiff in the vault of the National Archives on America's Book Club, The Treasures, available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page. | |
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