Beverly Gage details her 22-year Yale tenure and Pulitzer-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover, revealing his unauthorized wiretapping of MLK and intimate bond with Clyde Tolson while enforcing anti-gay policies. She contrasts this with her upcoming road trip book exploring American memory and discusses teaching methods that prioritize physical archives over AI or digitized texts. Gage emphasizes student enthusiasm for the 20th century despite its distance, noting a balanced gender dynamic in her classes and rejecting the pigeonholing of female historians. The episode concludes by examining Library of Congress artifacts, from Walt Disney's handprints to 1930s road maps, underscoring the enduring relevance of historical primary sources for understanding modern myths. [Automatically generated summary]
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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.
Now, from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., best-selling author Beverly Gage, a professor of American history at Yale.
Her book, G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Making of the American Century, received numerous literary awards and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Her most recent book is This Land is Your Land, a Road Trip Through U.S. History.
Join us now for a stimulating conversation between Beverly Gage and our host, David Rubinstein.
Well, today we're going to be in conversation with Beverly Gage about her incredible number of books that I've won prizes and about her life as a historian, including her most recent book, This Land is Your Land.
We're coming to you from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
And we are in the Thomas Jefferson Building, which is the first building built for the Library of Congress, the original building.
It opened in 1897 under budget.
It's hard to believe it was built for under $10 million.
And it's named for Thomas Jefferson because he sold his library to the United States government when the United States government's Library of Congress lost all of its books in the burning of Washington in 1814.
Thomas Jefferson sold his entire collection, which was the largest collection of books by any private individual at the time.
So thank you very much for being here.
And I want to go through a lot of your books, but let's talk about your background for a moment.
You are a professor of history at Yale University?
That's correct.
And did you grow up as a little girl saying, I always want to be a professor at Yale University in American history?
I did not know there were such things as professors of history, but I discovered it.
I always loved history and I loved exploring it.
I grew up in just outside of Philadelphia, which is a big history town.
So where did you grow up?
I grew up in Delaware County, so that is a suburb of Philadelphia in a town called Wallingford, which is right next to Swarthmore, where Swarthmore College is.
And were your parents interested in history or where did you get your love of history?
They were not interested in history.
There's no evidence that anyone in my family was interested in history.
My father was an accountant and an accounting teacher, and my mother was a homemaker.
So not sure where it came from, but from the world around me.
You must have done pretty well in high school to get into Yale wasn't easy, right?
I did pretty well in high school.
Yeah, I liked school for sure.
And did you major in history at Yale?
I majored in American studies, which really was cultural history.
And when you graduated, you got your PhD at Columbia?
I did.
I spent a few years as a journalist, and then I went back to graduate school.
Okay, so then you decided you wanted to be a professor and eventually you wound up at your alma mater as a professor of history.
That's right.
It was actually the first job talk that I ever gave was at Yale and then they hired me.
So I just went right back there and have been there for 22 years now.
So the first book you wrote was about an explosion in Wall Street.
It's called I think the day that Wall Street Exploded.
And it's about an explosion that occurred in 1920 but it's still unsolved.
Can you explain what the book is about?
Yeah, it's about an event called the Wall Street bombing and it happened on September 16th, 1920.
Just after noon, a horse-drawn cart exploded in the middle of Wall Street right next to the Morgan Bank and it killed 38 people, wounded hundreds, shut down the financial markets, was this huge event in its day.
And what got me interested was the fact that I think like a lot of Americans, I had never heard of this.
And so I both was interested in the mystery of the whodunit, which as you say is still sort of unsolved.
But I was also interested in what it said about that moment in fights about Wall Street and capitalism and American politics more broadly.
As of today, in 2026, the mystery is still unsolved.
It's who was responsible, is that right?
It is mostly unsolved.
Yeah, I think there is a good theory, which I would accept as the most likely theory, that it was someone who was in the same circle of anarchists as Sacco and Vanzetti, who were very famous figures of that moment, and that they were the ones that set the bomb off.
They had definitely set off a lot of other bombs.
When you wrote that book, were you teaching at Yale then?
I was not.
That was my dissertation.
And then when I went to Yale, I turned it into my first book.
Now, when I went to college hundreds of years ago, about 8% of undergraduates around the country were history majors.
Today it's about 1 or 2%.
Why is history not so popular among undergraduates these days?
Well, I'm happy to say it's still pretty popular where I teach, but it is not as popular as it was for sure.
And I think a lot of it is pressures of the job market that students are told that you need to have a particular set of technical skills if you want to enter the job market.
I think maybe historians might be a little responsible for it.
I think maybe there are ways that we could teach history that are more engaging.
And so I've tried to experiment with some of that in both my teaching and writing.
Well, when you teach at Yale, do you find the undergraduates say, is this going to be on the exam, which is what they used to do when I was an undergraduate?
Or do they say, I really want to learn more about history?
You know, they're surprisingly enthusiastic.
I mean, I have great students in my classes.
I teamed up this semester to also teach a course with two of my colleagues, Joanne Freeman, who teaches the American Revolution, David Blight, who teaches the Civil War.
And we decided we were going to do all 250 years of American history in one semester, team taught, and there were three or four hundred undergrads in that class.
We brought in lots of community members to participate.
So there's a lot of appetite for it out there.
Nobody asks anymore, is it going to be on the exam?
They still, okay, they still ask that, and they still want good grades.
So let's talk about today a book that you wrote that won the Pulitzer Prize.
And I did interview you about this before it won the Pulitzer Prize, and I said to you, this book deserves the Pulitzer Prize.
I remember that moment well.
I wasn't on the committee, but it certainly deserved it.
Let's talk about the book.
It's called G-Man.
It's about J. Edgar Hoover.
How many years did you research and write that book?
It took about 12 or 13 years from the moment that I really began working on it in earnest to the moment it entered the world.
And in the middle of that, did you say, this is taking too long?
I mean, 13 years of your publisher say 13 years is a long time for a book.
Yes, both of those things happened.
And I thought, why am I spending the best years of my glorious adult life with this man, J. Edgar Hoover, who was not always the most open and interesting interlocutor?
Now, did your publisher say Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in just seven years?
He didn't say that.
They didn't give me such a hard time.
Okay, so why did you want to spend 13 years of your life on J. Edgar Hoover?
For those people that may not have been alive when he was alive, who was he and why was he so important that you wanted to spend 13 years of your life on him?
J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI for 48 years.
So from 1924 to 1972, that is Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon.
And part of what interested me was this vast span of time in which he was here in Washington.
His first job actually was at the Library of Congress, and he grew up just a few blocks from here on Capitol Hill.
But he was this creature of Washington.
He's someone who had his fingers in just about everything that happened in American politics and government over this incredible span of time, which is the period that the United States is really building the federal government in the ways that we know today and in which it's beginning to exercise all sorts of new power in the world.
So he was just in the middle of everything.
That's what drew me.
But was he trained as a lawman in the sense that he knew how to operate a gun?
He had arrested people.
How did he rise up to head up such a big organization when his background was really as an accountant, I thought?
Well, he was a lawyer.
He went to law school and he got his first job here at the Library of Congress, really learning to process information and sort books and do all of that.
And then he entered the Department of Justice straight out of law school in 1917.
And he was always a very white-collar, kind of legal-side bureaucrat.
He was not a cop.
He was not a policeman.
He did not make arrests.
He did not shoot his weapon.
But that was what they wanted as the Bureau was starting to grow.
The FBI got a lot of national attention when there were bank robberies.
I guess it was the 1930s or so.
And the most famous bank robber, one of them was John Dillinger.
And the FBI found him coming out of a theater in Chicago and shot and killed him.
And did J. Edgar Hoover take a lot of credit for that?
He took a lot of credit for everything.
That was one of his signature traits.
But the 1930s, they're this fascinating period because you take this bunch of lawyers and accountants and suddenly they're told you got to go after kidnappers and bank robbers and kind of become the FBI as we know them today.
So Dillinger was one of their big cases.
Hoover wanted all the credit.
He was a little upset when one of the men who led the investigation named Melvin Purvis tried to take some of the credit.
And so he promptly fired Melvin Purvis, kicked him out of the FBI so Hoover could get it all.
During World War II, Hoover's power increased because he was given authority over espionage matters, among other things.
How did he get all that authority under FDR?
FDR really liked the Bureau.
He liked J. Edgar Hoover.
And when the war came along and it was clear you were going to need somebody who could deal with espionage and sabotage and a variety of intelligence-related threats, they looked around and said, oh, hey, no one in the United States knows how to do this stuff.
So Edgar, why don't you figure it out?
So it's another fascinating period when they had to take on a whole new set of duties, figure out how to do them under incredible pressure pretty quickly, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully.
When Roosevelt died somewhat unexpectedly, Truman becomes president.
Does Truman have the same admiration for Hoover?
He did not.
So there are two presidents who really didn't like J. Edgar Hoover.
One was Harry Truman, the other was John Kennedy.
And Truman, writing in his diaries, said that he was worried the FBI was becoming a Gestapo.
He was very concerned about civil liberties questions.
But he didn't really make any move to try to push Hoover out either.
I think he understood quite rightly that by that point, Hoover had at least as much power in certain areas as he did, that it would be a big drama to try to force him out.
And so Hoover lasted through the Truman years.
Hoover became during World War II and subsequently a large, very strong anti-communist person.
And was that part of his popularity in Congress because he was seen as so anti-communist?
It is in many ways really the cause of his life, anti-communism.
His first big job in the Justice Department when he was just 24 years old was running something called the Radical Division, which was surveillance of left-wing radicals, especially communists.
And so he really kept that throughout his career.
And then in the 40s and 50s, when this became the issue of American politics, lots of people turned to him as a reliable narrator, or, you know, not everyone agreed on that front.
Well, he took a lot of credit for escorting out of the country a radical in that period of time, Emma Goldman.
And he personally said, I escorted her out of the country.
Was that overblown?
Did he really do that?
That was one of his first big triumphs.
Yeah, he helped in 1919 when he was this 24-year-old recent law school grad to get Emma Goldman deported.
So he really was in it, and he really did go down to the tip of New York and talk to her and say, you know, goodbye and watch her be sent off to Russia.
Now, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it was often thought that Hoover kept personal files on members of Congress or people that might be president of the United States even, and that was a source of his power.
Did such a files ever exist?
They did exist, and Hoover brought in all kinds of information.
He was a very careful and serious power broker, and a lot of the power that he wielded was the information that he had about people.
Now, some of it was kind of innocuous.
They just kept kind of clippings on anyone who was important.
But if you look at the files on important people, it also has a lot about their sex lives, their accusations of alcoholism, their political machinations, all sorts of things are in there.
One of the people that he really was not very much of a supporter of was Martin Luther King.
He felt he was a communist, or at least had communist, let's say, staff members.
Robert Kennedy and the FBI00:09:30
And what did he do to get the right to wiretap Martin Luther King?
Did he go to President Kennedy or Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General?
How did he get the right to wiretap Martin Luther King?
And what did he do with the information he found?
The FBI during most of Hoover's reign had a lot of discretion about what it was doing.
And so a lot of things were done very secretly.
So their campaign against Martin Luther King was one of the most outrageous things that Hoover ever did.
And some of it was conducted without the knowledge of people in higher office.
But the wiretaps on King, on his office, on his home phone, those were approved by Robert Kennedy.
And the FBI really escalated the campaign over many, many years, planting bugs in King's hotel rooms.
Those were not explicitly approved by the Attorney General, gathering information about his sex life, trying to peddle that, discredit King.
I mean, they really went after him in just about every way possible.
Now, what about the sex lives of presidents?
It was said that John Kennedy had a long file in the FBI.
They knew every one of his girlfriends, or supposedly that's what they said.
Is there any truth to that?
I don't know if they knew all of them, but yeah, there's a lot of information in there.
It was, you know, hard to keep track of everyone.
But from the 1940s, when he had an affair with a woman named Inga Arvad, who was thought to maybe be associated with the Nazis, the German government, some people thought she was a spy.
From that moment onward, there's an awful lot of material in there.
Well, in your book, you point out that the head of the Chicago mob had a girlfriend, and that girlfriend also turned out to be, let's say, a good friend of President Kennedy's.
Did Robert Kennedy get informed about that by J. Edgar Hoover?
And what did President Kenny do about that?
It's a little hard sometimes to follow exactly who knew what when, but it is a kind of amazing moment in American politics when the president and the head of the Chicago mob had basically the same girlfriend.
And so there were warnings issued and that relationship was more or less cut off.
Now, speaking of people's personal lives, J. Edgar Hoover kept his own personal life very, very private.
He never married, and he had a close association with the deputy director, Clyde Tolson.
Can you explain what that relationship was about?
Right.
The most important person in J. Edgar Hoover's life by far was this man, Clyde Tolson.
Tolson was the second in command at the FBI for most of Hoover's time there.
He was someone that Hoover had hired and cultivated and brought in.
And so they had a very tight professional relationship, but they also had a very tight personal relationship.
They were out on the town together all the time.
They had every lunch and every dinner together.
They traveled together.
And so the big question of Hoover's life, his personal life, is exactly what did that relationship consist of?
Was it a sexual relationship?
Was it a romantic relationship?
And we don't know exactly, but it was certainly the deepest and most abiding, intimate relationship of either man's life.
And in your book, you didn't come to a conclusion on that subject, right?
I do not know what their sexual lives were, but they were very loving toward each other and they mattered to each other.
The relevance of this for the purpose of the book and for history was that during those years that Hoover was the FBI director, for many of those years, if you were gay, you would be fired automatically from the federal government.
You'd have to be caught doing something.
You just said you were gay, you get fired.
And J. Edgar Hoover led the effort to fire people in the federal government just because they were gay.
Is that fair?
Yeah, in the 40s, 50s, and into the 60s, it was the policy of the U.S. government that you could not be a federal employee and be gay.
So I don't know if it's fair to say that Hoover led that in the sense that he didn't make the policy, but once that policy was in place, he was one of the main people who enforced it.
So we often talk about the red scare of the 40s and 50s.
Well, there was a parallel scare going on that's now referred to as the lavender scare, and he was certainly one of the big figures in conducting those investigations.
And when President Kenny was assassinated, Robert Kenny, the Attorney General, was then in Virginia.
Who is the first person that tells him that your brother has been shot?
So it was J. Edgar Hoover who called Robert Kennedy.
Robert Kennedy was his boss.
He was the attorney general at the time.
And it's sort of a famous exchange because Robert Kennedy really never forgave Hoover for it.
He said in a very deadpan and very cold way, the president has been shot.
And that was about it.
Usually, Hoover would report to people who are attorney generals who are older than him.
Robert Kennedy became attorney general.
He was 36, and Hoover was probably then in his 60s, I guess.
So I guess he didn't like reporting to Robert Kennedy.
But Hoover was very concerned that people, according to your book, would think that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been an FBI informant or somehow connected the FBI.
And what did he do to try to make it clear that wasn't the case?
The Kennedy assassination is so complicated and has produced so many theories over the years, in part because Lee Harvey Oswald was a very strange character.
He had been a defector to the gone and lived in the Soviet Union and come back and been mixed up in all sorts of strange political movements here.
And then, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed.
So you weren't going to have a courtroom trial and have the ability to air all of this.
So Hoover was very concerned, and there were lots of rumors about this, that because of Oswald's strange background, he would be thought to be an FBI asset or a CIA asset or to be working with the government in some way.
And so the Warren Commission really was set up to try to sort all of this through.
Hoover worked with the Warren Commission, but he was very suspicious of them.
He didn't want them to criticize anything the Bureau.
Well, did he say to President Johnson, we need to have a Warren Commission, or he didn't want a Warren Commission because he said it was done by Oswald.
We don't need to do any more research.
Right.
Well, what Hoover said was, you don't need a commission like that.
The FBI knows everything.
I say it's Oswald.
People will just believe me.
And Lyndon Johnson said, well, will they believe you, Edgar?
I think we need some other voices on that.
Lyndon Johnson is succeeded by somebody that's really close to, for many years, J. Edgar Hoover, and his name is Richard Nixon.
How did they get to be so close?
Nixon and Hoover knew each other from the 40s onward.
And though they seem like maybe, in our narratives and imagination, the two most friendless men in American politics, they really liked each other.
They were very good friends with each other.
They kind of got started in the anti-communist politics of the 40s around the Alger Hiss case and other things.
And then they just kept working together.
They partied together.
They traveled together.
They double-dated.
It was, you know, it was quite a friendship.
So the irony is that no president was able or even thought about firing J. Edgar Hoover, but the one person who said, I've got to fire him, was Richard Nixon, who was his buddy.
But what happened to the effort to fire J. Edgar Hoover when Nixon was given that task?
Right.
When Nixon became president, he thought, this is great, my buddy Edgar, this is all going to work out well.
But partly because Hoover was getting pretty old at that point, and then partly because they ran into friction around a number of things that Richard Nixon wanted Hoover to do.
And even J. Edgar Hoover said, I'm not sure that's a very good idea, Richard Nixon.
They ran into some conflicts.
But yeah, Nixon sat down with Hoover and had a whole script written by his staff that said, you know, Edgar, it's time for you to retire.
And he came out of that meeting saying, oh, he's not going to retire.
And in fact, we've come up with a deal where we're going to expand part of the FBI.
When did Hoover actually die?
He died in May of 1972.
So he was 77 years old, still on the job.
The second he died, everybody in Washington says, where are the secret files?
What happened to the secret files?
And were there actually secret files?
There were secret files.
So there were the main FBI files, and then there were a couple of collections: one, the official and confidential collection, one his personal collection that had some, we think, official materials.
And one of them survived and the other didn't.
So he asked his secretary to basically destroy his whole personal file.
And she went ahead and did that.
So we don't know what was in there.
Now, when biographers spend five years, 10 years, 15 years or so with a person, they often fall in love with them because they spend so much time with them and they see the best attributes of them.
Did you fall in love with J. Edgar Hoover, or did you come away saying, Jesus is not as good as I thought or wished he was?
I did not fall in love with J. Edgar Hoover.
It's safe to say.
Restoring the Confederate South00:15:29
Nor did I think that I would.
It's true that people often say, why would you write a biography about someone that you don't particularly like?
And to me, I was just fascinated by him the whole time.
I thought that he was important.
And I thought that he was really an interesting, complicated character.
We mostly know him as a villain.
And I did find that he was much more complicated than that one-dimensional portrait.
Where is he buried?
He is buried in Congressional Cemetery in D.C.
So he lives his entire life.
He was born in D.C., worked in D.C., and he's buried in D.C. 100%.
Yep, most of it on Capitol Hill, though he did live on the Northwest for a while.
Now, tell me, for those people who haven't won a Pulitzer Prize, which of course is me, of course, I haven't won any.
And for those people who are watching who haven't won any, how do you find out do you want a Pulitzer Prize?
You find out when everyone else does.
So there's no advance notice at all.
And I was just, I knew when the announcements were going to happen, but you don't know that you're a nominee and you don't know if you're a finalist and you don't know if you've won until the whole world finds out.
So I was just on my laptop.
But of course, as you can imagine, my Wi-Fi went out.
And so I kind of had to run into my front yard with my phone.
And anyway, it was complicated, but that's how I found out.
I see.
Well, let's talk about a new book that you've written called This Land Is Your Land.
And it's a really interesting story about how you decided to tour the United States looking at historical sites.
You weren't going to beaches necessarily.
You weren't going to see the typical tourist sites that people might want to go see.
You're going to places like Colonial Williamsburg or let's say Fort Sumter or in Los Alamos where the A-bomb is developed, the atomic bomb is developed, or things like that.
So what gave you the idea about doing that?
Well, as you said, I had spent a long time writing the Hoover book, and I wasn't quite ready to plunge into another decade-long project like that.
So in 2023, I started thinking ahead and was thinking about the 250th anniversary of the country and knowing that I wanted to do something.
And as a 20th century historian, mostly, I thought, I'm not going to write about the American Revolution.
But I had always loved doing this kind of travel to historic sites, both grand and famous and incredibly obscure.
And so I thought, what if we could just do all of American history as a series of trips that anyone could go on?
Let's suppose I say I've never visited the United States, I'm a foreigner, and I have two or three days to visit some historic sites.
Which ones would you recommend that I see?
Let's assume I can travel anywhere.
What are the two or three most impressive historical sites that you visited for your book?
Well, most impressive is a hard category.
If you were only the places that were off the beaten path.
So, as you said, there are lots of pretty famous historic sites like Independence Hall and the Alamo that I went to because they are fascinating in their own right.
But I ended up really liking places like Medora, North Dakota.
Anyone?
Okay, so Medora, North Dakota is a tiny little town in the Badlands where Theodore Roosevelt spent a little bit of time when he was just coming of age as a young man and trying to sort out what he cared about and what he thought about.
And so now there's this little tour.
You visited the house that he was in.
Exactly.
He has his cabin.
His cabin is still there, and there's a whole little town that's sort of built around the legend of Theodore Roosevelt.
You walk around and there are Theodore Roosevelt impersonators there.
There's a whole big outdoor musical about these things.
So that's the kind of thing that I got attached to and interested in.
Is it the most impressive?
I don't know.
What about Mount Rushmore?
Would that overwhelm you or had you seen it before?
I think Mount Rushmore is really a wonderful place to visit.
So I went to South Dakota as well.
I went to Mount Rushmore.
I went to the little town of Deadwood, which is an old mining community and that has been sort of both preserved and reconstructed as a Western gunfighting town, basically.
One of the most interesting places you visited, I thought, was Stone Mountain in Georgia.
Stone Mountain is an unusual geological feature.
I think it's the biggest piece of granite coming out of the earth anywhere in the earth.
But what is there now?
So Stone Mountain is the largest Confederate memorial.
It is this big piece of granite, but it has a bas-relief of three Confederate figures there in large scale.
And one of the things that's interesting about Stone Mountain is that throughout its history, it has been contested and it is being challenged, and that debate is still going on.
When I was going to Atlanta, every chapter in this book is both a place and a period of time.
So Atlanta is my new South chapter, the 1890s through about the 1920s.
And when I was going there, I realized that Confederate Memorial Day was happening at the base of Stone Mountain.
So I went to see that commemoration and the counter-protesters there too.
The interesting thing about Stone Mountain, among other things, is you've got Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and I guess it is Jefferson Davis.
It's Jefferson Davis.
Yeah, carved in there.
It took a long time to get it done, but the dedication is 1970, and the person who comes to do the dedication is the Vice President of the United States, in effect, saying a Confederate monument is a great thing to honor.
Were you surprised that people were still in love with the Confederate leaders?
Well, I think it's interesting.
The idea for Stone Mountain comes out of the kind of peak years of Jim Crow, so the 1910s and 20s.
But then it doesn't get completed partly because of the Depression.
And so it's in the 50s, into the 60s, and as you say, into 1970 that it's actually being completed.
It's being completed in part, I think, as a reaction in that moment to the civil rights movement.
And one thing that people may not realize that is so historic is upstate New York.
You went to upstate New York and you saw a lot of sites that I hadn't really realized were quite so historic.
You want to mention one or two of them?
Yeah, I love the trip through upstate New York.
So that's chapter five.
So we've gotten into the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s by then.
So a lot of it's about the Erie Canal, which is built during those years and kind of opens up all of these new communities.
But upstate New York becomes this amazing laboratory of reform up there.
So Frederick Douglass lived there, and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and John Brown, and they all knew each other and they were all working together.
So it's not the most beaten path in terms of historical tourism, but there are fascinating little sites up there that reveal this whole history.
Now, you point out that there are two areas that were kind of competing for a while to be the restored South.
One is Charleston and one is Colonial Williamsburg.
Can you describe when they came about and how they were kind of competing with each other?
So Colonial Williamsburg gets started in the 1920s and it's funded by John D. Rockefeller.
And that money is going to kind of preserve and then represent this 18th century town.
It had been the capital of Virginia, the colonial capital.
And Rockefeller thinks if we put this money in, we can create this patriotic experience for Americans starting in the 1920s.
And so that is a standalone, pristine 18th century village or town that's being reconstructed.
Charleston, by contrast, decides around the same time that it wants to preserve its historic district, but as part of the active and living city.
So Colonial Williamsburg is sort of a set-aside tourist attraction.
Charleston decides the city itself is going to be the history and the attraction.
So they're two different models, and they sort of battle it out with each other about which one is America's most historic city during these years.
Now, because of the fame of the Oppenheimer movie in the book that also won the public surprise, the Oppenheimer site, or the site in Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was developed, was a place that you regarded as historic, and you visited that.
What was it like to visit that?
This is part of the chapter that goes through the southwest, so mainly New Mexico, but other places around there too, to tell the story of World War II and then the Cold War, because so much of that military development happened there.
So Los Alamos was really fascinating.
There's a whole museum and preserved site.
You have to go really far up into the mountains.
And when I was driving up there, all I could think was how did they, in the 1940s, with not very good roads, get all of the things up this mountain that you need to create a nuclear weapon.
But it was really a fascinating place.
And then I left from there and went to a place outside of Roswell and spent the night in a nuclear missile silo that has become an Airbnb.
Now, Roswell, New Mexico is known for some other things, maybe a UFO sightings or so forth.
You didn't see any UFOs when you were there in Roswell, did you?
I did not, but I understood why people might.
So Roswell became a big set center for military development during this period.
And so there were all sorts of strange things in the sky and falling out of the sky.
And, you know, it's a really, really stark and quite beautiful desert-like landscape.
And then the missiles are hidden in the ground.
Now, you know, you're getting old when historic sites are in a book like yours, and they were started when you were alive.
So you visited Disneyland.
I did.
And that was started in the 1950s, I guess it was.
So what was Disneyland, the original Disneyland, like, and why did you visit that as an historic site?
The book starts in Philadelphia with the Revolution and ends in California, right?
Like a road trip, though it goes in different places along the way.
But I ended in Disneyland in part because I think Walt Disney has been one of our great historical mythmakers.
A lot of early Disneyland was really planned around these stories of the American past, frontierland, even tomorrowland, kind of thinking about the tech boom of the 1950s.
And so I was fascinated by Disney as a character, and I was also fascinated by his rival, Walter Knott, who started the much less successful nearby theme park, Knott's Berry Farm.
So I was very disappointed to read in your book this: you go to Disneyland, and a person who, when I was growing up, was a hero of mine, Davey Crockett.
Anybody remembers that?
He was a person who was elected to Congress from Tennessee, and supposedly was a great outdoorsman and so forth.
They had a whole TV show on Davey Crockett, and you asked the tour guide about Davy Crockett, and they didn't know who Davy Crockett was.
I was disappointed to read that.
It's true.
It was a sad moment.
I don't think this is what most people spend their time doing at Disneyland, so we can maybe forgive this staff person.
But it's funny, Davy Crockett, I would never have imagined it.
He became sort of a through line for the book.
There's a chapter on Tennessee and Andrew Jackson, and that's David Crockett's world.
Then he goes to Texas and he dies at the Alamo.
That's the next chapter.
And then there he is, at least in theory, in Disneyland.
And of course, there was the big Disney show of the 1950s about him.
So when we're talking about California, there's somebody that came out of California that you're thinking about writing another book on.
And the book would be about Ronald Reagan, who was actually born in Illinois but spent much of his career in California.
There have been plenty of books about Ronald Reagan.
Why do you think the world needs another book on Ronald Reagan?
Well, I think there are two reasons.
One, to me, writing a book about Reagan is partly a sequel to the J. Edgar Hoover book.
I'm very interested in the influence of anti-communism on the politics of the 20th century.
And that was a big theme of Hoover's life, but he only got me to 1972.
And so Reagan is another way to tell that story that will get to the end of the Cold War.
There's also a lot of great new archival material that is opening up.
And so I think.
But this isn't a 13-year project now.
This probably is something like a decade, which is why I had to write the little book in between, because I couldn't go from writing about one guy to the next.
So let's talk about your writing style.
For somebody that wants to write American history, as you do, but wants to be like you, what's the best thing to do?
Is it to do all the research and then write, or research and write, research and write?
And how do you do that?
It depends a little bit on the project.
But for the Hoover book, I knew that I could not do all the research and then sit down and write a book of that size.
So I did it pretty episodically and I really liked that process.
I like doing the research for a little bit, taking some time, processing.
I wrote it out of order, actually.
I started in the parts of his life that I thought were the least interesting.
And I saved the most interesting things for the end so that I would have some incentive to finish the book.
Let me ask you about how you actually do the writing.
Some authors say, I write in the morning, I write two pages, three pages, I'm done.
Or I write for an hour or two hours, I'm done.
Some authors say, I just keep writing until I just go to sleep at night.
How do you do it?
Do you write in the morning or write in the afternoon or night?
And how much do you have to write a day to feel you've had a successful day?
I'm definitely a morning writer, so that is where my best energy is.
And I have played around over the years with how much is enough.
So I end up with about 500 words when I'm really in writing as my minimum.
Now often I get beyond that.
But I'd say the most important thing about my writing process is that I really tend to sort of sketch the whole thing out and have it sort of half written in sentence fragments or I know which story goes where and what the transitions are and I do all of that and then I sit down and I turn it into proper prose.
And so it's sort of a multi-stage process that's not just from not writing to writing.
Women in American History00:15:56
Now Ron Chernow famously, when he does his research, he does all of his research, then he writes, but he has everything on an index card.
And I think for the Mark Twain book, he had 20,000 index cards.
How do you keep your research in one place or easily organized?
For the Hoover book, I used what is a glorified electronic version of index cards, which is a program called FileMaker.
And so FileMaker allows you to make this elaborate database, but where you basically have something like what you would have for an index card and lots and lots of check boxes and date fields that allow you to sort your research.
So I put all of my Hoover research in that one place and there were something like 23 or 24,000 entries.
So when you're teaching and you're also trying to write a book at the same time, isn't that a little bit difficult?
You have students calling you and saying, is this the one to be on the exam or something or another?
Or can you give me some advice?
And you're trying to write, say, you know, I'm writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning book here.
Leave me alone.
You don't say that to people?
I do sometimes say that to people, but not quite that way.
Actually, I find that teaching and research go pretty well together, not always in terms of time commitment, but in terms of conceptualizing what I'm doing.
I often design classes that will help me think about the things that I want to think about.
And I also try to write the way that I teach.
Teaching is about distilling information down and communicating it and being in conversation.
And so I try to write that way as well.
Now, Yale has very good students, but are you surprised that they do not know as much about American history as you think they should when they get there?
Or they actually know a fair bit when they already get to Yale?
Well, it varies, of course, a little bit.
They are terrific students and lots of fun to teach and really quite enthusiastic about history, at least by the time they get to me.
I'd say the thing that's surprising about teaching is that you keep getting older, but they stay the same age.
And so I teach the 20th century, but mostly I am now teaching that to students who were born in the 21st century.
So not only do they have no memory of, say, the Cold War, they don't actually have a living memory of 9-11.
And we're moving further along there.
So that, I think, what is history to them versus what is history to me is sometimes different.
Now, as we're talking, we are in the semi-quincentennial year, which is hard to pronounce for some people, but it means the 250th anniversary.
What do you think Americans should be doing to celebrate or mark or remind themselves about the importance of the 250th anniversary?
Well, I think they should go on road trips and go out and see the country and visit its historic sites.
But seriously, I did write the This Land is Your Land book, geared to the 250th, not only because I wanted to learn some new things and experience some of these places, but I'm really hoping that other people will take the almost literal roadmap that is in that book and go out and do some adventuring.
Now you're a 20th century American historian, would you say?
So if you could interview anybody that has lived in the 20th century who was a great American leader, political leader, governmental leader, scientific leader, whatever it might be, who would you really like to interview?
And what would you like to ask them?
I think I'd have to go with Franklin Roosevelt because I think that he both witnessed and managed so much history through the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and also because he died in office.
And so he actually was not able, unlike most presidents, to narrate his own life and his own experiences.
And so I guess I would sit down with him.
Let's talk about two people that you have written about and are writing about.
If you could interview Jay Edgar Hoover and you had one or two questions, what would those questions be?
Well, I would definitely ask him about Clyde Tolson, but I don't know that he would answer that.
And what would the other one be?
You know, I think that I might ask him about the Rosenberg case, actually, the atomic spy case, because there's a lot of interesting material suggesting that he did not want the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to play out in the way that they did.
I think your book, if I recall your book, I thought he was maybe OK with Julius Rosenberg being executed, but not Ethel.
Right.
And let me ask you, why wouldn't you ask him, what do you think of G-Man?
That's the book you should answer.
That's the one explanation.
I don't think, I would not ask him that because I don't think that, you know, J. Edgar Hoover was not a fan of Yale professors.
He had a hard time talking with women.
So I'm not actually sure how well this conversation would go.
And Ronald Reagan?
Ronald Reagan, if I could talk with him about anything, that's a good question.
I've just started doing that research.
I think maybe I would talk to him about the theme that is most interesting to me, how he sees these kind of through lines of anti-communism in his life.
But I think Reagan also, quite famously, is someone who biographers had a hard time getting at his personal life.
So maybe I'd ask him a few things.
As a 20th century historian, what would you say is the most significant thing that actually happened to this country in the 20th century?
The Depression, World War II, World War I, Vietnam War.
What would you say is the most important thing that happened in this country for the good and maybe the worst thing that happened in this country in the 20th century?
I'd say World War II.
World War II was such a massive event that touched every aspect of American life from the economy to the government to the U.S. role in the world to race and civil rights and the role of women.
And it is, yeah, I'd say it's the defining event of the 20th century in lots of ways.
And what would you say is the biggest mistake the United States did during the 20th century?
Is there something in the 20th century that you think we did poorly and the United States wishes could do over again?
Oh boy, there are so many.
I guess I would, I guess I would take on the question of race and racism, which has been a very complicated part of the 20th century and there have been high points and low points, but I think that I would think about that.
So at Yale right now, is the 20th century a very popular course or people are interested in learning more about the 1700s, the 1800s?
What are students seeming the most interested about when they're talking about history?
Well, I think there is a lot of interest in the 20th century for a couple of reasons.
I mean, it's the recent stuff, and so people can see very clearly how it's shaping the world that we live in.
As I said, today's students have no living experience of the 20th century.
And so I teach a big course that's on the 20th century overall, and then a couple of smaller courses that are a little more geared to my interests.
And there seems to be lots of enthusiasm for that.
Honestly, the later you go in the 20th century, I think the more interest there is, and the less students seem to know because their AP U.S. history class will get to like World War II or Vietnam, and then it doesn't get much beyond that.
So early on in the 20th century and for much of the 20th century, American history was written by men.
Now, in recent years, fortunately, we have a number of women historians who've written great books about American history, obviously your books, Doris Kearns-Goodman's books, among others.
So, are you surprised that more and more women are interested in this subject?
And in your classes, do you find your classes 50-50 in terms of men and women, or is it more women or more men?
And are women today as interested in American history as you were?
My classes are pretty evenly divided.
You know, there's a lot of range.
And yeah, I think the history profession has become very, very open to women historians.
I think one of the things that is nice that's happened is that for the first generations of women historians, often they were expected to and committed to writing about women in particular.
But often we're sort of pigeonholed into doing that, whether it was their primary interest.
And that certainly isn't the case anymore.
I mean, as you can see, I just wrote a whole giant book about a man who basically barely spoke to women who were not his secretaries.
So you ever thought about after Ronald Reagan writing a book about a great American woman of the 20th century?
And if so, who might you be interested in writing about?
I have thought about that, actually, and I think that if I were ever to do that, and I'm not sure that I will, because I think I might write some things other than biographies, but I think it would be Jane Addams.
Jane Adams?
Jane Adams, Hull House.
Yeah.
And for those who don't know, what did she do that was significant?
So Jane Addams was one of the kind of great figures of the late 19th and early 20th century.
And she was this amazing American reformer.
She's best known for Hull House, which was a settlement house in Chicago that provided education and various services to mostly poorish immigrant families in the neighborhood.
But she went on to help create the NAACP.
She helped to create the ACLU.
She won the Nobel Prize.
She wrote lots and lots of books.
And so she's just this big figure and a big character.
Now, sometimes parents who have professions have a hard time convincing their children to follow them in that profession.
And so in your book, you had your son with you.
Was he as interested in these subjects, or do you try to drag him along to these historical sites?
Well, I would say as a child, he was a good sport.
But as he got older, I think he got quite interested and now is quite interested without anyone forcing this on him.
So for somebody watching today who wants to learn about American history in the 20th century, is there one or two books you would recommend for kind of an overview of the 20th century?
Is there a textbook you use from the 20th century American history at Yale, or is there no such book and you have to read a lot of different books to catch up on the 20th century?
Yeah, I don't assign textbooks in my classes.
We mostly look either to more targeted monographs or works of history or just go straight to secondary, I mean primary sources.
So we're reading from that moment.
For my class that I taught when I was working with my colleagues, I had four weeks to do the whole 20th century, and so I had to pick only four books for that, but they were primary sources.
So when you're teaching and you assign people to write, students to write a paper, how do you know it's not written by artificial intelligence?
I mean, what is the way that you can tell this is written by ChatGPT or some other artificial intelligence?
I've always wondered what professors are doing, so you must have a trick now to figure out who's writing something and who's not really writing it.
Right.
Well, I have redesigned my classes to some degree around this question.
But for the research papers, the first thing that I do, not only because it gets out of the AI trap, but because I think it's the most exciting way to do history, is that I send students to the physical archives that we have, in this case at Yale, but in places like the Library of Congress, because actually most of what historians do is not digitized at all anywhere.
And so they're in these amazing paper collections.
And so I send students to do that.
And they do real research in the archives.
And if students ever complain that their grade wasn't high enough, they ever come, does that ever work?
And they say, I really deserve this.
My mother will be upset if I don't get an A. Do you ever hear that?
We don't get the my mother will be upset, but yeah, people can test their grades, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly.
So have you had to do it all over again?
Are you glad you didn't go into private equity, hedge funds, or something like that?
You're glad you went into American history?
I am glad.
And you know, there are various kinds of capital, and there's a lot of intellectual and cultural capital over where I am.
So that's my kind of capital.
Well, I think the country is glad you went into American history.
Your books are great.
And thank you very much for being here today.
And I highly recommend your latest book, This Land is Your Land.
Thank you very much, Beverly.
Thanks, David.
After the interview, Beverly Gage and David Rubenstein viewed artifacts from the Library of Congress's archive.
Well, these are some things I think that the library has about things relating to your new book.
Oh, this is great.
Look at this.
Amazing.
And then we're going to end.
I know you kind of end your journeys on the road a little bit in Walt Disneyland.
So we brought out, this is Walt Disney's handprint, which is sort of just a delightful snapshot of just the wide array of things that we have here in our division and also at the Library of Congress.
And we have this handprint of Walt Disney, and I know it's just really hard to resist the urge to put your hand right over it and see it.
You're not supposed to do that.
I'm not supposed to do that, unfortunately.
Walt Disney has his handprints at the Library of Congress because we have the papers of a woman who is probably the leading palm reader of her age.
Her name is Nellie Simmons Meyer, and she wants to try this thing called what she calls scientific palmistry.
So where she thought that other palm readers of her generation were sort of cranks and would make stuff up about how they could predict the future.
What Nellie Simmons-Meyer wanted to do was to understand why people became successful.
So she took the hand and prints of a lot of famous people.
We have Walt Disney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, Amelia Earhart's hands all in the same collection.
And so she took their handprints in order to read their poems to understand: oh, these are the characteristics that make somebody successful.
And for Walt Disney, she discovered that, in fact, he had this bottomless well of joy that he could draw upon and that he had an original and active imagination.
One might expect a pretty good description from just a palm print.
It's a very good description of Walt Disney, isn't it?
Wow.
Yeah, we don't usually think of Walt Disney himself as being deeply interested in American history, but he really was.
I mean, he sort of built his parks at least a little bit with American history in mind.
Absolutely.
We brought you some items as well from the Geography and Map Division, and we thought it could only be appropriate to start off with an ode to the great American road trip.
Mapping the Road Trip Nation00:02:13
I was going to say, it's a road trip map.
It's beautiful.
Glad you like it.
Yeah, so this is probably something you recognize: a classic gas station map.
This particular one is from the 30s, and it's utilitarian as well as fun, pictorial, and nostalgic.
On the front side, we have facing up, you can see great attractions across America, national parks, other sites that you will certainly recognize, and many that appear in the book.
And on the back of it, there are highways, so it is still a utilitarian map in a way.
And so we brought this out thinking it's, of course, a great ode to the book and to the topic of the book, but also just really fun, I think, to see that history is already a lot of fun as a playground on its own for people, even almost a century ago.
And I think that you can really see the nostalgia in the image at the lower right, where you see that there's an automobile that is overshadowed by a faint silhouette of a wagon train.
So that pioneering American spirit is really spoken to here.
So we thought we could only start here, of course.
It's kind of amazing to see the road trip being invented and then reinvented.
This is pretty early in car travel, and you say there are a lot of highways on the back, but there aren't highways the way that we know highways if this is the 1930s.
Indeed.
In my book, I tried to start each chapter with someone traveling from one place to another.
And you see the ways that travel itself changed over these 250 years.
It was pretty miserable in the 1780s, and whatever miseries there are now, they're a lot less daunting.
Certainly.
And of course, still always sights to see, no matter the impact map.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And then we brought you a place that is not only on that map, but of course, very prominent in the book.
A good starting place for any road trip, especially as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation this year, is a map of Philadelphia.
And this particular map is pretty special because it's the first known depiction of the statehouse, which of course became Independence Hall after independence.
But this was the map produced in 1753, so it long predates those events of 1776.
But also, the building itself wasn't even completed when the map came out.
Democracy as an Unfinished Creation00:03:27
So it seems that the map makers were working from plans and they knew this was going to be a really important map to be, or a really important building to be able to document.
So a good starting point in Philadelphia.
See more with Beverly Gage and the Library of Congress's artifacts and watch past episodes of America's Book Club at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, April 5th, with our guest best-selling author, Arthur Brooks, who has written 13 books about finding purpose, connection, and cultivating lasting joy.
His books include Love Your Enemies, Build the Life You Want with co-author Oprah Winfrey and his latest The Happiness Files.
He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
So what's the key to having a happy marriage?
The answer is not passionate love, but what we call in my business companionate love.
Companionate love, which is best friendship.
You know, I told my kids that, who are now, you know, two of my kids are young married, and my son Carlos said, companionate love, that's not hot.
And I said, well, trust me, it's got some hotness to it.
Watch America's Book Club with Arthur Brooks, Sunday, April 5th at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
Only on C-SPAN.
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
As a follow-up to the most recent BookNotes Plus featuring Seth Harp on his book, Fort Bragg Cartel, we are replaying an interview from June 12th, 2012.
The guest on QA, the television program, was 31-year-old Michael Hastings, author of the book, The Operators, which he said is what the special forces call themselves.
It is based on a Rolling Stone article that allegedly led to the dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal, who is a commander of the Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008.
One year almost to the day after our interview with Michael Hastings, he was killed in an automobile accident when he was driving in Los Angeles at 4.25 in the morning.
We revisit an interview with author Michael Hastings about his book, The Operators, the wild and terrifying inside story of America's war in Afghanistan.
Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb, is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
The Sanctuary of Democracy00:01:20
Democracy is always an unfinished creation.
Democracy is worth dying for.
Democracy belongs to us all.
We are here in the sanctuary of democracy.
Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies.
American democracy is bigger than any one person.
Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected.
We are still at our core a democracy.
This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.
Next, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer fielding questions from members of the House of Commons during the weekly Prime Minister's Question Time.
He discusses energy policy, anti-Semitism and the cost of living, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict and US-Iran war.
We come to Prime Minister's questions, Kat Smith.
Question number one, Mr. Speaker.
Prime Minister.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
An attack on Britain's Jewish community is an attack on all of us.
Mr Speaker, I'm pleased to say that London ambulances have now replaced the Hatzoller ambulances.