Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Linda Hirschman about her new book, The Color of Abolition, which examines the alliance among Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman in the fight to enslave her in the United States. In the authoring conversation is Margaret Sullivan, media columnist at the Washington Post. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up next month on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, April 5th, at 1 p.m., four days after the National Archives releases the 1950 census to the public, author James R. Gaines will be here to tell us about his new book, The 50s and Underground History. Gaines argues that they were not a decade of conformity by the time that sparked movements of change in gay rights, feminist rights, civil rights, and the environment. And on Tuesday, April 12th, at 1 p.m., Costa Kennedy brings us his unconventional biography of Jackie Robinson titled True, which focuses on four transformative years in Robinson's athletic and public life. The letter Robinson wrote after an incident on a bus while he was second lieutenant of Fort Hood, Texas, is on display in the east rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and online through April 20th. In the decades before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass emerged as the foremost orator and writer for the abolition movement. Abraham Lincoln said of Douglass that there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. And at Lincoln's second inauguration, Douglass sat near the president. How Douglass came to be on the side of the president is a story told in the color of abolition, our featured book for today's program. Linda Hirschman describes how the team of Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman successfully promoted the anti-slavery cause in the 1840s. By the early 1850s, however, Douglass joined with those who actively engaged in politics to achieve abolition and rejected the non-political means espoused by Garrison and Chapman. The New York Times reviewer William G. Thomas III calls the color of abolition a fresh provocative and engrossing account of the abolition movement. And in the Boston Globe, reviewer Lydia Mullen declares Hirschman's book is a wonderful cataloging of Americans, white and black, who devoted their lives to ending slavery. Then the Hirschman is the author of Reckoning, The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment, and of the New York Times best-selling sisters-in-law, Hal Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the Supreme Court and changed the world. Margaret Sullivan is the Washington Post media columnist and author of Ghosting the News, Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, and the forthcoming memoir Newsroom Confidential, Lessons and Worries from an Ink-Stained Life. Now let's hear from Linda Hirschman and Margaret Sullivan. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much for coming to this session. I'm very pleased to be here with Linda Hirschman who is a dear friend of mine and a brilliant author. Her book is wonderful and I'm looking forward to this conversation with her. So I'd like to start off with sort of a general question and one that perhaps is appropriate given that our audience and our sponsors here are the National Archives. Tell us, if you would, how you came to research this book and particularly how you came up with one of the aspects that has gotten so much attention, which is the role of the female protagonist, which really wasn't well known before, and how did organizations such as the archives and libraries, which are so precious, play into that discovery process? This is the first book that I have ever written which is said entirely in the past. So I didn't have any living people to interview, which is a big asset. Having living people is a big asset when you're writing a compelling story. So I knew it was going to be hard and I did what I think a lot of us do. I started with the secondary literature. So I read what other people have written about the period. And then when they said something that interested me, I followed their trail back into the archives. And I quickly learned that there was a staggering wealth of archival material about the abolitionist period. Let's say from 1830 to 1865, like consecutive inaugural. And it's located in a bunch of places, including here in the National Library of Congress. But one of the books I read was a little, a slim volume about the Western family of Boston, the Western family. And one of the Western sisters is Maria Weston Chapman after she married Chapman. And so I was alerted to Maria Weston Chapman's seemingly important role in the abolitionist movement. And yet there was nothing about her. So the author of that book alerted me to the fact that the Boston Public Library had a collection of the Western letters, a huge collection of the Western letters. These women did nothing but write letters to one another and the other people on the abolitionist movement. So I knew that if I could go to Boston and use their archival material, I could find out who Maria Weston Chapman was and try to figure out why she'd been neglected. But of course there was the pandemic. And luckily for me, the Boston Public Library had put all the letters online. So I had complete computer access to all of this rich correspondence among the many players in what turned out to be my story. And since the pandemic confined me to my home, I could spend all day every day looking at these illegible letters and trying to figure out what they were actually saying to one another. This book is a tribute to the power of archives. There is no chance I would have understood what was going on or how important she was without her. That's wonderful to hear. So tell me what your feeling was, what your emotion was when you realized that Maria Weston Chapman could be a major character in your book and that she really hadn't been written about before. I mean, was it a Eureka moment and did you see all of a sudden how this could play out and did it change your approach to the project? It was a Eureka process. I pitched the book as being about Garrison and Douglas, the interracial alliance. I'm very interested in how people overcome the things that divide them and act collectively. So originally, Maria Weston Chapman was not a very important character in the book at all. But as I slowly realized how important she had been and how underrepresented she was, she just grew out of my topsy. I mean, she was just, it just went up in an arc. And I have to give my editor at Houghton Ifland High Court now, wearing her books at HarperCollins, Deanne Irmey, a shout out. Because about halfway through the process, I docked back a version of the book from my editor. And she said, you know, I think you should feel free to make more of Maria. And of course, once unleashed, I had Maria, the woman who ran the bazaars, right? I'm the daughter of a rug merchant. So I love the idea of this high society woman running the bazaars. So I could really run with it. I don't know if someone who's a professional historian would have so quickly realized that she was underserved because this is not my specialty. My degree is in philosophy. And I'm interested in collective action. That's what brought me to this historical story. And so I'm not part of the club. So I was like, well, this is an important person. There's no books about her. Why would that be? Maybe because for generations, most historians were men, specifically white men, and they didn't notice her. And we're very glad that you did. I've always been fond of the subtitle of your book, which I'm going to recite for a moment, which is, How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation. So tell us why you use those three nouns. And particularly, I suppose, the Contessa, which is a wonderful word, and a kind of a real draw to how can you not want to know about that? Exactly. So my dad told Puppets, and I wanted to sell books. And Contessa was her nickname. I didn't make this up. She was nicknamed the Contessa because in that rather modest movement, she was wealthy, and she was beautiful, and she was gorgeous with dress. So it was kind of understandable that those sort of snobbish Bostonians wouldn't name her the Contessa. Her adversary is called her Lady of Bath, and that's also a noble title. And I wanted to tell the reader, even in a casual glance, that the role of printing and prophecy, which is mostly spoken words, and social power came together to make the abolitionist movement. So the subtitle conveys a lot of information, as well as being a little hook. Right. It is a hook, and it's a great one. So you do, as you have said, and as we can tell from your past work, which has to do with women coming onto the Supreme Court with gay rights, and with the Me Too movement, you write about social movements. What is it that ties these movements together? What are the necessary sort of, what is the necessary underpinning? And what are the, what's the foundation for social movements? How does it work? So I only write about America, which is a self-governing republic. To this moment, this is a self-governing republic that is a state of the Enlightenment West. So that's my specialty. And in those circumstances, there are conditions that give rise to movements for social change. And I specialize in movements that try to make the world better for people who are less powerful. I was a UN inside labor lawyer when I passed this law. I'm very interested in the distribution, the wider distribution of power and wealth and meaning and opportunity. So I only write about those. And what you look for is that there's a crack in the establishment. There's a change in the media technology. Goes all the way back to the invention of movable type in the Protestant Reformation. People have enough maneuvering room, enough security, material security and political security. They're not like threatened with the gulag, so that they can see the horizon. And usually there's a charismatic leader who understands that the oppression is not a law of nature, but is a decision, a political decision by other human beings. When those circumstances are present, then the soil is right for social change. And then I look at what works, right? So there's conditions for it, but it doesn't always take root. For example, Occupy Wall Street has been a very unsuccessful so far movement for social change. So I'm looking at what works. And I have, over the many years that I've looked at a lot of moments, I think developed some ground rules for what works. Do you want to hear the ground rules? I do. I think I'm fascinated by this. And as I'm listening to you, I'm putting this in the context of this moment in American history, which I think your book is so timely, though it is a historical book. It is so timely because of the civil rights reckoning that we have been through in the past a couple of years. Well, one thing I'm wondering, listening to you talk about this, is are you essentially optimistic about social change? And yes, I would like to. So maybe we can come back to that. But yes, what are the requirements? What are the underpinnings for a successful social movement? So I reverse engineered them, right, to get these rules. I didn't make this. I didn't come to it with this in mind. One is they have to take the moral high ground. Social movements that rely on relativism are rarely redistribute power. They might change the distribution among the powerful, but they rarely redistribute it to the less powerful. So if you go all the way back to Martin Luther or Karl Marx, there is a very potent moral argument in favor of the change. And the second thing I look for now is that they have revolution is a change in the media technology. And they exploit the change in the media technology going all the way back to the invention of mobile type. And they have regular meetings, right? The churches taught that. The potent power of regular meetings.  So there was no way that Occupy Wall Street was going to succeed without doing the hard work of retail politics. I call it walk and talk. In the abolitionist movement, the women and the men, but it was heavily run by Maria and her women troops, would knock on people's doors and get the signatures on petitions to abolish the slave trade in the national capital. And in that retail political movement, they would walk and walk the streets of all the cities of Massachusetts and knock on the doors of the houses during the day. It was the women who were at home. They couldn't even vote, but they would get their signatures on the petitions because you don't have to have the right to vote to petition the legislature. And then those women would be converted to abolition and then they convert their families. So my rules are take them all by ground, have regular meetings, walk and talk, do retail politics. That's fascinating. Is retail politics different now in the age of the internet? Does it actually not require shaking hands but sending things out on Twitter? I think that is not true. I think that the internet is the media technological change that is driving a lot of the current social movement. And I completely recognize and respect that. But I want to draw attention to the difference between 2018 when indivisible and a bunch of resistance movements to the Trump administration did retail politics in the living rooms of women all over this country. And 2020, when the Democrats took the White House, but they lost seats in the House of Representatives and they did not, in important ways, take the Senate. And then in 2020, of course, the pandemic precluded the kind of retail politics that I'm talking about. So I think you have to have both. The new media technology plays a huge role in terms of organizing and bringing people to street theater, which is another very important part of social change. Gathering people on the streets is very much tied to the new media technology. But you don't get them to come to the voting booth unless you knock on their doors. And the classic example of that is Stacey Abrams registering Black rural voters in Georgia and flipping Georgia. That is okay. I think it's both. Yep, it's got to be both. Well, that's a little bit refreshing in a way. I wouldn't like to think that social media could take over for face-to-face contact. And it's a very different kind of thing. I want to mention to our audience that I'm very happy to submit or to tell your questions to Linda. So feel free to submit them, I think, in the chat or in whatever way looks like the way to do questions here. And we'll integrate those into the conversation. I can talk with Linda endlessly, but I would love to ask her your questions as well. So please feel free to submit those. So if you would, talk a little bit about how the timeliness of this book now, can you put it in the context of the murder of George Floyd, the reckonings that we're seeing in, for example, newsrooms and other institutions? What's the relationship here? There clearly is one. So I will say this. I started out on this book years and years ago. And the question that I was interested in was can you have an interracial alliance? Right? I've always been interested in abolition. Abolition is the single most successful social movement in American history. So someone like me wouldn't actually want to say something about it. But there's been a tremendous amount of writing about it. So I thought what I could bring to the party is a current question, which is, how do you have an alliance across racial divide? A very, very important question. And I didn't think when I started out that it would be so relevant. I'm actually not all that glad that it's that relevant because you may recall of the period that I wrote about and this new book ended in a civil war. So the deep divide in American politics and the anger and hatred in American politics now was not something I would have wished for. I was hoping to tell a happy story of how black men and a white man worked together in abolish slavery. But here we are. And I would say that it is so relevant because after the, I would say, disappointing results of the 2020 election. I was disappointed with the results. And I was glad that the Democrats won the White House, but I was surprised actually and disappointed that they didn't do better in the state legislatures and so forth. So I want to say the most important message that I can convey to the public from what I've done is that this is a marathon and not a sprint. And the abolitionists were faced with adversarial conditions that are much worse than what we're looking at now. Four million people were caught in the terrible system of enslavement in the slave states. And the cotton was the single largest export that the American Republic had to send. And all of the financial institutions in New York and Boston were completely enmeshed in the financing of slavery and dependent on the cotton crops to make their fortunes. So it was, and the Constitution, a slave document, right? I mean, that's not an exaggeration. The Constitution was written to preserve the power of the empty rural slave states. So the situation for the 12 men in a basement of a black church in 1832 bounding the first anti-slavery society was profound and terrible. So I want to say to people now, it's not as bad as it was then. They thought they had a marathon and not a sprint. It was 33 years from the founding of the first anti-slavery society to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In social movement time, that's not a long time. So we need to take the lesson that you have to run a marathon and be committed, deeply committed. And in order to be deeply committed for a marathon, you have to have what the abolitionist movement had. And that is a clear understanding of the morality of your position. And in my opinion, progressive politics now stands for the survival of the oldest modern self-governing republic in the history of the human species. Could you have a higher moral purpose than that? And we have to remember that that's our purpose and not allow other kinds of side issues to get in the way. And we need to use the moral power. What could be more honorable than helping people to govern themselves and its endanger? And that's our moral lesson, just like the iniquity of enslavement and how it violated both the Christian religion and the Declaration of Independence was their moral high ground. And we have to use the new media technology in the abolitionist movement. It was the invention of the term table, movable press, and later the steam driven movable press. There were more than a dozen patents taken out for improvements in printing during the 10 years before the founding of the modern abolition movement and the following 10 years. So from 18, let's say 12 to 1842 say in those period, there were dozens of patents for improvements in printing. In our case, it's the internet, but it's also the public funding and the philanthropic funding of local newspapers. So I don't need to tell you this, but one of the really important things that happened in the abolitionist movement is that there were little abolitionist papers founded all over the North, especially after 1846 when the first telegraph line was laid from Washington to New York. So by the speed of the telegraph, news could go to the hinterlands and people found an abolitionist newspapers and like Indiana that had never been there because of the new media technology. It was usually important. We need to take advantage of the new media technology. We need to have regular meetings. I hope that the pandemic has retreated enough so that the institutions of progressive politics and saving the American Republic can once again start to have like Monday nights at the Gay and Lesbian Center in act up was absolutely critical. And the abolitionists learned that lesson from the Christian church. And we have to have people who are willing to knock on doors, to walk and talk and to keep going back. The abolitionists kept going back. They would sit, they had speakers call. They would spend, send a speaker to a town and he would stay, they learned this from the Revivalist religion. He would stay until the area was abolitionized and then he would leave. We need to have human beings talking to each other in person and at your door, just like the abolitionists do. Makes sense. Here's a question in the chat. You said that Maria Weston Chapman managed Frederick Douglass's speaking tour. How common was that role for a woman of that time period and how much money or how successful was she at it? Did she raise a lot of money for the movement? So she both managed it and she raised a lot of money but not from the speaking tours. So now I got to give William Lloyd Garrison a lot of credit. He understood that women were your best allies if you were going to make a political movement and he reached out to them. He heard that the Black women, of course, had preceded him by founding a Black female anti-slavery society and he immediately asked his female acquaintances, Lydia Maria Child was already in the movement, to found a female anti-slavery society and he stood by the women when the other branches of abolition didn't want to have women speakers and stuff. Garrison was a faithful ally to women so I give him a lot of credit and for that reason there were a fair number of women in the abolitionist movement. Abby Kelly was one of their most successful speakers and it was her presence on their delegation to the big meeting that broke up the anti-slavery movement because the New York branch didn't want to have women participating and managing it. So Maria was not the only one but she was the manager. She didn't like to speak in public. One of her public appearances had been mobbed and she found that very traumatizing even though she was incredibly brave but she was a fantastic manager and so as soon as she came into the anti-slavery meeting, her first meeting, she was so boardlessly dressed, they thought she was a spy. So she came in, she looked around, she saw they weren't running it very well and she was unbelievably competent, just took over and she started both running the tours. She often ran the liberator newspaper because William Lloyd Garrison was often having some hypochondriacal illness or vacation so a lot of what we attribute to Garrison is actually Western Jackman running the paper. She ran the speakers tours. These were like, it's the left. So these men of the left were a little, shall we say, disorganized and she came in and organized them and figured out who would go where and also she was this letter writer. So since there was no telephone or no email, all of the negotiations and stuff went through letters and so people quickly figured out as they wrote to Maria something would happen and they wouldn't get a letter back and they're all in the Boston Public Library archive. So she took over because she was so competent. She also took over the anti-slavery bazaars so that's where the money was. Okay, the money was in the bazaars and she raised so much money she paid the anti-slavery society's debts. She enabled the abolitionist movement in Boston to keep the lights on for years and she was so smart about it. I being a merchant's daughter, I loved this. She looked around and said, well, we'll make more money if we have richer customers. So she got all of her acquaintances in Europe and stuff. Remember, she was a very fancy lady to shop around for stuff for her to sell at the bazaars and that then attracted the rich women and men of Boston and they would come and spend large amounts of money and she would give it to William Lloyd Garrison to free the slaves. Pretty clever. Would you say that all three of the people you focus on were charismatic in their way or not really? I mean, certainly we know Frederick Douglass was. Oh, William Lloyd Garrison was also very charismatic. It's interesting. It sounds like you're saying that so was Maria Weston Chapman. She was tremendously charismatic but she did it sort of behind the scenes. She wasn't a speaker and we often assume that her writing was extremely charismatic like Garrison's. She was a very, very charismatic writer. And remember, print and letters really mattered then in a time when there wasn't no television and stuff. So even though she wasn't a charismatic speaker like Frederick Douglass was, she was charismatic in this print medium and she was also extremely funny. She pointed very, very funny limericks and stuff. But Douglass was the speaker and he's known for his charismatic speeches and there's nobody like him. There hasn't been anybody like him in the history of the American Republic. Full stock. He was the most important American in the 19th century. So, but people don't know that William Lloyd Garrison was also a very charismatic writer. Very charismatic writer. And he deployed the printing press to free the slaves. And he was also a pretty charismatic speaker and he gathered people ador him. He gathered people around him and they were faithful to him and the abolitionist movement could never have gotten started if they hadn't had such warm friendships with William Lloyd Garrison. They treated him like a father figure in the Boston movement. I love it. So here's a question in the chat. Since many abolitionists initially advocated universal suffrage, did the Maria Weston Chapman papers reveal any interest by her in the suffrage movement? No. She was not, although she was, a feminist. Okay. So here's a great feminist story about Maria. Two of the most effective speakers on the abolitionist speaking tour were Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who had been the daughters of sugar planners and enslavers in Charleston. The Grimke sisters left their slave family moved to Philadelphia, converted to Quakerism and became two of the most effective speakers on the circuit. And the man, the conservative men in the abolitionist movement did not want them to speak. They thought it was inappropriate for mixed audiences of men and women to listen to a woman's voice. Is this starting to sound familiar? And so when the Grimke sisters came to Boston, Maria Weston Chapman organized their speaking tour and all the Western sisters got together and guaranteed that they would have huge audiences in their speaking and men came because they wanted to hear these famous speakers and it broke up the moment. I mean, the conservative power of anti-slavery would not tolerate it. So Maria acted like a feminist. And she wrote a wonderful hilarious poem, if you want to read it, you can buy my book, about how a women speaking was such a scandal and she defied her own minister. So she acted like a feminist. She did not indicate interest in the suffrage movement by the Seneca Falls Convention. She had inherited her dead husband's fortune and moved her family to Paris. So she really was gone. And she does not have that crossover record that Lucy Stone and the others had over into a feminist of slavery, although she was a feminist. Do you, having written about these social movements, I started to ask you this before but I do want to come back to it. They have been, the ones you have written about have been vastly successful. They have really changed society. Does that make you an optimist? Can you be, you know, do you feel optimistic about where we are now, knowing what you know about these movements in the past? I think we're on the cusp in the midterm elections of 2022. And especially if the Supreme Court of the United States intervenes and makes it harder to vote or supports gerrymandered electoral districts. The Supreme Court of the United States can still play a role in the election this November. This midterm and then the presidential election 2024 represent a kind of inflection point in the survival of the progressive self-governing republic that I have always been writing about. But I will say there were inflection points in abolition, Margaret, which looked so bleak, the war that the United States have with the, that the United States annexed the slave state of Texas and then went to war with Mexico and acquired a great deal more potential slave land, let's say, in 1846, looked terrible. It looked like a terrible moment. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which initiated a reign of terror in all the black communities of the north. And so many black Americans, fugitive slaves or free blacks had to flee to Canada, just like the Russians are fleeing from Russia. Now Americans had to flee to Canada. So we have had inflection points in the past, which looked dire. And yet we taking America as a marathon and not a sprint, the forces of progressive politics were able to organize and to use those defeats in order to ultimately come to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. So I have, I'm holding my breath to see what happens in this election and the next election. But even if it is tantamount to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, I still will be hopeful because I saw in abolition a movement that surpassed many terrible setbacks by healing to the fundamentals of the American Republic, which is a kind of that every individual is entitled to dignity, whether from God, as Thomas Jefferson said, or from the manual kind. And also from the principles of the Declaration of Independence. All right. Well, I'll take that as a modified, I'll take that as a modified form of optimism. I'm searching for it. So I'm glad to hear that. You know, I'm very interested in the subject of heroic people in movements and in history and at this moment. And I wonder, and this is maybe a little unfair to spring this on you, but I know that your mind is very facile and you can jump into any question. Are there modern day versions or analogs of the three people that you write about or any of them? Are there are there people, whether in in the world or in the United States, who are charismatic figures who represent a moral stance and who can change the world? Like who are who are the versions today of these three people? Are there any? There sure, of course, there are. Of course, there are. I would go back to books to Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Sotomayor. I regard her as a charismatic and heroic figure. And she was, of course, right when she said that a wise Latina woman in the fullness of her experience might come to a different conclusion than a white man who had had a different experience of life. And when she got on the Supreme Court of the United States, even though, as with the current perspective, Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, she was not going to claim a majority, right, Sotomayor. But she has used the media and the possibility to be a charismatic leader of change in America. Her beautiful autobiography was an example of that. If you go and see her speak, she's a speaker that the abolitionists would have been proud to have in their speaking court. She's an incredibly charismatic speaker and she takes the microphone and she walks into the audience like Oprah Winfrey and you cannot get near her. It is an old-fashioned revival, meaning I have been watching her since I wrote about her and sisters-in-law and I would regard her as fitting the question that you asked. I am very interested in three up-and-coming political characters. I can't give a long description of each of them, but I like the combination of John Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock in Georgia. I think that both Georgia, I'm about to buy, there's a new book about Georgia flipping out that just came out. I'm about to buy it. I'm interested in Georgia and I think that the Warnock Ossoff interracial alliance, hello, and the way they managed to work together what made it greater than the summer experience. So I'm very interested in them and I'm very interested in AOC. I have thought that AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Portez, was a possible new Frederick Douglass since then. First commercial for her primary campaign for Congress in New York.  And in the meanwhile, she's proved herself to be quite astute in the way she expresses herself, just similar to Douglass, the battles that she chooses, which is similar to Garrison and her ability to galvanize, hitherto disempower people, which is similar to Maria Weston Chapman. So she interests me greatly. And from the prophetic point, from the prophet, from my prophet, I would give you my friend, Ellen Listl, Justice Correspondent for the Nation, whose new book has also just come out. Allow me to retort. Allow me to retort. And I was blessed to meet Ellie in a social context years ago. And the first time I heard him speak, I was transformed. On the world stage right now, there's a great deal of attention to Vladimir Zelensky as a kind of, you know, some people have said that he has become a kind of moral leader for the world. How do you see him in, you know, I know your specialty and what you write about is America, but I'd love to hear you riff on him a little bit. Does he have some of these characteristics? Well, and does he use, I think he does use, the media revolution and technology in a very interesting way. So, you know, how does he fit in? Ukraine, in its modern incarnation, not when it was still under the thumb of the Russian-linked previous leader under Zelensky. And it's since the rebel, the rebel revolution, wherever they call it there, is more like a state of the Enlightenment West. And therefore it falls roughly into my wheelhouse. So if you would ask me about, you know, Japan or someplace that I know nothing about their culture, I would say I can't speak to it.  He did, but, you know, it's like that. So this is accessible to me. And I would say the violent thing. Volodymyr Zelensky has many of the characteristics that I would look for. Okay? He's educated. He is a lawyer. He's educated as a lawyer. So he understands the categories into which a lot of important Western social change fits. He is an actor. And in the attention economy, which really started with Ronald Reagan, he has an asset. I actually don't devalue it. I think it's an enormous value to have that kind of lesbian skill at the inner time of profound attention economy. And he's also a moralist. He's taking the moral high ground in a way that is almost intolerable to watch them suffer since he put such a moral frame around their struggle. So yes, I would say he fits into my categories. He also fits into my category in that at the end of the day, the abolitionist movement could not succeed without the Union Army. And so we'll tie that back to him. What are you saying about that? Because of the military aspect of this? Yeah, right. I mean, my work doesn't normally involve shooting wars. It involves usually verbal wars and battles at the polling booth. Blessedly, but in America, as it happens, my most recent book ends in Zoroa. And it was the Black soldiers that Abraham Lincoln needed because his incompetent generals could not beat the Southern Army. So he needed the Black soldiers, and that is why he passed the Emancipation Proclamation and why Dr. Frederick Douglass in the first place. So at the end of the day, it was about who had the... Someone said to me about my book, about the Civil War. Someone said to me about the Civil War when the farmers go to war with the engineers. Sooner or later, the engineers are going to win. And what Zelensky needs now is the product of the engineers more and more effective arms. Is there often a period of backsliding after a major social movement victory? Is that part of the sort of pattern? And do you see that in the different things that you've written about? It's almost inevitable. In the Gay Revolution, after the Hawaii Supreme Court found a right to marry in the Hawaii State Equal... Constitution Equal Rights Amendment. And that was, of course, broadcast all over the nation. The numbers of people supporting any kind of rights or equal status for gay and lesbian people went way down. There was an immediate backlash in response to the Hawaii Supreme Court opinion. And it took a long time for the gay movement to rebuild its support. So it's not at all uncommon. As soon as Wayne Lloyd Garrison started... Well, actually a little earlier, when Nat Turner had his rebellion in Virginia and then Garrison started the liberator at the same time, there was a backlash in Virginia, and they passed a hideous slave code, much worse than the hideous slave codes that had preceded it. And when there got to be a handful of abolitionists in Congress, John C. Calhoun started talking seriously about deceiving. So there is almost always a backlash. Yes, you know, backlash is a word we get from Susan Filoni, who wrote a famous book, Backlash, about the backlash to the feminist movement, which is the most potent and consistent of all the backlashes I have seen has been to the feminist movement. And my students used to ask me about this. They're like, why is this so hard, Professor Hirschman? And I said, you know, you can't move to the suburbs and get away from your why. So the feminist movement threatens male patriarchy everywhere. And so the resistance to it is potent. And did you see that as well with the Me Too movement? Yeah, so we see it now with the Me Too movement. It was almost immediate. This whole cancel culture thing is actually a response to the Me Too movement, right? Women were standing up and saying, I actually don't want you to put your hands on me. And the response to that was, are you trying to cancel me? So now the phrase theology, as it will do when the hands of the right, has been applied to every progressive social change, every request for progressive social change. People do not want to listen to the n-word in the workplace, newsflash. I'm guessing they always felt that way about it. But when they started saying they didn't like it, it generated in the people, in power, use the phrase cancel culture to resist it. But the origins of that are in a resistance to the Me Too movement, because you can't move to the suburbs and get away from your life. If you want to put your hands on women and they say they don't like it, you're going to resist it. I think it's useful. It's not a perfect analogy, but when I hear the words cancel culture, I like to just broaden the way I think about it is to just substitute the word accountability. And that puts a different spin on it that I think can be very useful. Have people lost their jobs? Have they lost some of their ability to do what they were doing before? Yes, they have. Is that being canceled in a negative way? Maybe it's accountability, which has a much more positive meaning. You know, all enlightenment societies have a concept of accountability, right? I mean, we have a criminal justice system. That's nothing of not accountability for the illegal things that you do. We have a civil justice system. People pay fine civil fines and civil penalties and damages for getting drunk and driving your car into Albert Schweitzer, right? I mean, we have always had accountability. And what's interesting is that each time a very deep old and fundamental concept like accountability is applied to people who have formally been immune from accountability for their acts, they find it horrifying and unfamiliar. So I think your phraseology is perfect because you're drawing on a fundamental concept in any civilized society, right? I'm glad you like it. I have one more question and it's a big one before we wrap things up. I hear a lot of people predicting that because we have such a polarized and hyperpartisan situation in the United States that we're on the brink of civil war. Given your study of this time period in the color of abolition, are we on the brink of a civil war in your opinion? If we are, it will be more like the Civil War in Lebanon than like the American Civil War because there is no easy Mason-Dixon line to divide the free soil of the North which raised an army, right? And mass manufactured guns and the enslavement soil of the South. We don't have that. So it will be scattered. It will be polling places around the country. It will be school boards around the country. So it will be, if it turns to violence, well, it's already turned to violence, right? We have to check on the nation's capital. It's really hard to be more of a civil war than that. So if we see repetitions of the violent attacks, they will be scattered. It will not be concentrated. And they will be somewhat less formal than the conscription of troops by the United States government, right? And the government of the United States of America. It's going to be informal. It's going to be scattered. It's going to be more like guerrilla warfare. I would not be surprised if there were violence, if that's really what you're asking, because guns are endemic and constant and widespread in American society. So everybody's armed. And that is always a dangerous spectrum. And both sides disagree down to bedrock, as they did in the period that I am writing about. So they disagree about where to get their information from. That's bedrock, right? You can have your own facts. That's the deepest divide you've been in. And they disagree about what it means to be fully human and honorific human. And they disagree about how to live together in political society. So those are the wide and deep divides. The nation is armed. It's scattered. And so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see violence. So we really do need some heroes, don't we? We need some heroes. We do. And we need people who are willing to guard the polling places the same way that the abortion clinics had coverage of guides to let the women who were seeking their needed help here get into the clinic. So that's the closest we've come to what I'm seeing now. And I'm Hop Scholar. I think we're going to need heroes. Linda Hirschman, thank you so much for this discussion. Linda is to my audience. Linda is brilliant. Her book is brilliant. And I recommend it highly. I also want to tell the audience that this discussion will be posted for all time on the National Archives YouTube channel. So you can find it there or send it around to your friends. And many thanks to the National Archives for hosting us here and to Linda for the great answers. Thank you very much. And thanks for those of you who came to watch and listen. Thank you, Margaret, for a wonderful conversation, as always.


Our next and final lecture for today is going to be given by Dr. Robert Higgs. Dr. Higgs is a scholar with the Independent Institute and the editor of the Independent Review. I always wanted to establish the nickname Dr. Doome for myself, but with Dr. Higgs around, that's just not going to happen. As you can see, his talk tonight is on the catastrophic impact of war on liberty. Would you please help me welcome Dr. Robert Higgs? Thank you, Mark, for that very gloomy introduction. And thank all of you for being out here to listen to my talk. And I'll also say thank you to all those people who may be watching and listening somewhere else via the live feed that the Mises Institute has provided for this conference. It's really quite nice. I was in my room this morning watching some of the talks in that way, and very pleasantly surprised to see what nice quality the transmission was. So to those people who are in Iowa for this lecture, you're welcome to. The organizers of the conference gave the title War and Power to this session, and I have a slightly more definite title I like to use. And one might think that no extensive argument is required to maintain that work is catastrophic, but at the same time, if that's true, one has to wonder why so many people favor war, often on such flimsy grounds, so quickly, without much thought. Americans like to describe themselves as peace-loving people, for example. Maybe everybody does that, but certainly Americans consider themselves peace-loving people. And yet, despite that belief, I think sincere belief in many cases, this country has been at war in more places and more frequently in the world than any other for the past 113 years. And so one has to wonder, is this cognitive dissonance that's taken hold of the American people, have they never stopped to think about their own history? And yet, every time some little pretext for war arises, shockingly, many Americans rush to support the states going to war once again. And most recently, the adventure in Libya laid on top of three other wars already going on. So war is definitely a critically important part of our history and most other nation's histories as well. The libertarians have thought about, written about, argued about war for a long time, and indeed, eventually, one of the libertarian mantras became a statement from Randolph Bourne, which he wrote in 1918 shortly before his untimely death. And he said, along with a lot of other things that are well worth reading, that war is the health of the state. And in the essay where this statement appears, he explains why that is so. And so this essay, which you can find on the web quite easily by just searching Randolph Bourne and war is the health of the state, is well worth your attention, well worth your attention still, even though it's almost a century old. Long before Randolph Bourne, however, others had recognized the same fact of life. In 1795, in a letter, James Madison wrote, of all the enemies to public liberty war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. A few years later in 1798, in another letter, Madison wrote, perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad. And finally, one more quotation, this one from Bruce Porter, who wrote a book called War and the Rise of the State, which I recommend. It's a survey of 500 or 600 years of Western history, not just the history of the United States. But Porter concluded from this massive survey that a government at war is a juggernaut of centralization determined to crush any internal opposition that impedes the mobilization of militarily vital resources. This centralizing tendency of war has made the rise of the state throughout much of history a disaster for human liberty and rights. Again, that conclusion rested not simply on the history of the United States, but on basically the history of all the countries that make up Western Europe. So the relationship between war and the loss of liberty has long been recognized, but continues to receive too little weight, especially from people who think of themselves as conservatives. But they are certainly not in a class by themselves, as we've seen since Barack Obama became president of the United States. His supporters who formerly made a lot of noise about George W. Bush's wars have fallen strangely silent since their own man took the helm. Well, I want to talk to you about how this relationship between war and the loss of liberty has worked out, especially in American history. But before I do that, I want to walk you through the logic of why this relationship exists. It's not a coincidence, and it's important to understand the logic because it'll help you to accept the fact, I believe it is a fact, that it doesn't matter why the war is being waged. Every war is going to have to some extent the same logic in its prosecution. And one aspect of that logic is the culmination in the loss of liberty. Often the government represents itself, of course, as waging war to preserve our liberties. But as we look back through our history, we find that invariably, every major war has left the American people in the possession of fewer liberties when the war was over than they had before the war began. Okay, what is going on here? When government goes to war, or prepares to do so in an accelerated way, it has to divert resources from their current uses to military uses, often in massive amounts. The United States historically did not have a large standing army before World War II. So when a war was entered into, the government basically didn't have the means to carry out a war and had to build those means up abruptly. So it would have to take resources that currently were being used for civilian purposes and divert them to military uses, indirectly military uses, if not direct military uses. Can it change the allocation of resources to support its war enterprise? There are three possible ways for the government to do this. The first way is it could call for gifts basically, it could accept donations of resources. The government could make an announcement. We've decided to undertake a war to do this. We need a certain amount of money, for example.  Here's the address. Well, if you've read some history, you've probably noticed that this is not done. And the reason it's not done is that very little response would come forth if the government asked people to donate. There is a kind of exception to what I'm saying and that is that sometimes the government asks for soldiers to come forth and some people do voluntarily come forth. So in effect, because they're typically not being paid the same wage that they would earn if they remained in their present occupation, they are in effect donating some of their labor services to the government to help it carry out a war. So voluntary, truly voluntary enlistment is a kind of donation. But voluntary donations usually don't get the job done. And besides labor, the government needs a lot of other things, many of which require money to purchase. So the donation option is not very promising. The second way is that government can buy what it needs to carry out the war. And the third way is that it can demand transfers. It can order people to hand over resources or money. Now, it's interesting that when we consider the fact that not many people are willing to donate funds for the government to carry out a war, that very fact is telling us something. I've never seen any mainstream analysts stop and ask, what is that telling us? Instead, they invariably provide an answer to the unspoken question by saying that because of the free rider problem, you couldn't just go ask people to donate because everybody would want a free ride. That's what mainstream economists think people will always do in a situation that involves collective goods or collective action. Well, of course, people will free ride. That's the quote-unquote rational thing for people to do in a situation like that. But if that's true, why do people voluntarily donate and sometimes donate so massively for the attainment of other collective purposes? Churches don't have any ability to threaten people with confiscating their money if they don't contribute to the support of the church. And yet churches receive massive amounts of money from people for their support. All kinds of public-spirited actions and organizations, activities appeal to the public for support and get it. So there's something askew here when the government finds it can't just ask people to cough up what it needs to finance a war because it knows they won't. And I think what that fact tells us is that the government is trying to carry out a war that really is not supported very much or very deeply by the population. If they really cared deeply about it, and if enough of them cared deeply about it, they would be willing to pay for it without thinking their way through some excuse of fighting, but they don't in general. So the government now has the option of only buying what it needs or commanding with threat of violence what it needs to carry out the war. Buying goods and services for war creates difficulties because the government is bidding against other people for the use of these resources in free markets. And if it does that, it will tend to bid up the prices. So it's making the war more expensive by trying to carry it out. And it may find that if it's trying to divert a large quantity of resources quickly, prices are bid up greatly. This was discovered at the beginning of both world wars by the U.S. government that tried to go out and purchase various raw materials, for example. The prices rose very rapidly. And so the government was always appalled, but we can't do that. We can't pay these high prices. That creates all kinds of other trouble for us. So how do they go about dealing with the necessity of buying resources to carry out war? And the answer, of course, is they have the usual ways of getting funds, which is they can levy taxes or they can borrow. Now, if they raise taxes, they've got some more problems to solve because abruptly increased taxes are certainly going to be resisted to some extent, evaded, avoided. People are going to try to get out of paying much higher taxes, at least many people will. That's why they weren't willing to donate in the first place. They don't place value in what the government is doing. And so even when the government threatens them with penalties for failure to pay taxes, some of them will try to wriggle out of paying taxes. So just getting all the funds the government needs by taxing people enough, to literally carry out a large-scale war, creates a terrific compliance problem for the government. And of course the government will threaten people with fines and prison terms for convictions of tax evasion, but nonetheless the greater the increase in taxes, the more non-compliance we can expect to see. So it can try to solve this problem of rapidly bidding up market prices by rigging the markets. It can use its coercive power to put on some kind of price controls. And we see great examples of that in World War I. The price controls in World War I were not comprehensive. They were only on a selected group of goods. And one time or another several score goods were subject to government price controls. And if you look at what those goods have in common, they're quite diverse. They have one thing only in common, and that is they were all goods the government was trying to buy for its war program in great quantities. So the government was obviously putting those controls on not to protect the public from inflation, which was sometimes the storyline, but to protect its own budgetary ability to carry out the war. And of course when price controls are put on, there's a compliance problem there because price controls create incentives for people to avoid those controls and to make dealings at illegal prices in black markets. And so they have to do that and the government has to look around to find the black market activity and try to suppress it and put evaders in prison and whatnot. So every step the government is taking here to divert resources creates a train of additional problems the government has to solve to get the job done. So we usually do see this market rigging through price controls, use of formal priorities, physical allocations of certain raw materials and so forth. So we've got the government raising taxes, rigging markets and trying to resolve the compliance problems, but all the time there's pressure remaining on prices because they're being held below market levels. And so there's always a strong motive for the government to borrow rather than trying to get tax revenue to pay for its war. So all the American wars, the large ones, have been financed mainly by borrowing. Over time the government got a little better at collecting taxes, but even in World War II about 60% of the war spending was financed by borrowing. Now that's not trouble-free either. Even though the people buy the bonds voluntarily, they won't buy them on any terms whatsoever. And the government finds the more it wants to borrow the better the terms it has to make. It has to offer what amounts to higher interest rates to the bond purchasers. But when it does that, once again, it's raising the cost through debt service of carrying out the war. And there's a limit to how far it can go there too. So it distorts the capital markets, it ends up having to put controls on investment very often, and controls on raw materials and controls on what projects can be undertaken, what have you. And ultimately you can get an almost fully controlled economy as we had during World War II because of the succession of interventionist problems, each one growing out of the preceding one. As I say, the government can just command the use of resources by drafting them. It can draft raw materials, it can draft land. There's always been a fair amount of land confiscation or condemnation, as is legally known, during wartime. The war department or the Navy department just go out and ask the judge to condemn a certain property because it wanted to build a base there or naval yard or put it to some other use. And it was a done deal. They would take the property and the court would pay what was deemed fair compensation to the owner. And finally, of course, you can draft people, which the U.S. actually did long back, but at the state level for the militia draft and started drafting people during the war between the states directly and then kind of mastered the art of drafting or close to mastered it during World War I and then did it much more successfully during World War II and on a very large scale. So most of the people who served in the armed forces in World War II were draftees. And eventually toward the end of the war, the government had pretty much stopped accepting enlistments altogether. They drafted everybody. They assigned them to the air corps and the Navy and the Marine Corps and all the rest of it, not just to the army. So the government uses all these methods to suddenly divert resources to war purposes. And when that happens, there's various forms of resistance. I've already mentioned the black markets, the evasions of the price controls, the attempts to get out of the draft and so forth. So the government needs to suppress the resistance and in doing that, it needs to suppress efforts people are making to encourage resistance. And this means that it takes a number of actions that amount to the suppression of liberty. It issues threats against resistors. It restricts rights of assembly, speech, press, petition for redress of grievances and due process of law. The populace is whipped up to act as informants to tell the government about those who are violating the government's new rules and to intimidate resistors. And the government often ceases control of the means of communication and the means of spreading information about the war, how it's going, what how censorship was used quite extensively during the world wars. And then, of course, there are show trials that can be used to make examples of people who didn't cooperate with the government's efforts. And the upshot of all this is that liberty takes a beating during wartime. Because the government is trying to make people do things they don't want to do. And all its attempts to pound them into line create new problems with their resistance. And ultimately, the government resorts to more or less full-fledged suppression of liberties in order to carry out its war program. Now, many people are of the idea, especially Americans, that although this may be true of how government goes to war and carries out war, this is all temporary. The war ends, wartime measures are dismantled, the government stops suppressing liberties and everything is hunky-dory. Oh, that it were so, but it never is. Because legacies always remain different kinds of legacies. Economists have long talked about a fiscal ratchet effect when government spending runs up during a war, a peacetime national emergency. The emergency ends, but the spending never falls back to the pre-crisis level. In fact, it doesn't usually fall back even to where it would have been if it followed the previous growth trend. There's always some gain with each crisis. But the ratchet effect I argue and have been arguing for 30 years is not simply a fiscal phenomenon. It's much bigger than that. There are ratchets in taxation as well as spending. There are ratchets in regulation. There are ratchets in laws and legal precedents. There are ratchets in institutions. Government organizations and bodies that are built for war purposes don't always disappear at the end of the war. They take on new missions or they creep into new activities or they weddle themselves into old departments that are permanent. So the law and the government organizations are changed permanently. And finally, I argue that perhaps the most important kind of ratchet of all is an ideological ratchet, which is to say that people's thinking about how the government should act, where the lines should be drawn between public and private, what is proper for government to do and not do changes when the government is for years on end doing extraordinary things. People get used to things. They even get used to things that seemed outrageous to them in the beginning if they go on for years. And so they begin to fall into a kind of thinking where they're more easily persuaded that these powers ought to be for some laudable reason continued. The government should still be allowed to exercise what was once viewed as an outrageous extraordinary power. So that kind of ideological ratchet effect is the most dangerous of all because fundamentally, every government stands or falls on the ideological acceptance of the mass of the people. If most of the people despise the government and hate its actions and believe it to be acting outrageously, they're going to be ungovernable. To make them governable, you have to make believers out of them. National emergencies have been in American history the best ways to break ideological resistance and to move the ideology to a new level, more forgiving of government. Well, this has been fairly general. Now I want to get more specific and talk about particularly the two occasions that were most important with regard to the relationship between war and liberty in American history. This is a subject that could be discussed in relation to many countries. There's not enough time for me to do that here tonight. It could be discussed in relation to other wars such as the war between the states. But again, I'm going to confine myself to the two world wars for the most part because I believe they were the most important for illustrating this relationship. Despite expansion during Woodrow Wilson's first term as president, the federal government on the eve of World War I remains small. In 1914, federal spending totals less than 2% of GDP, 2%. The top rate of the recently enacted federal individual income tax was 7%. On an income over $500,000, which adjusted for changes in the purchasing power, the dollar would be equivalent to roughly $10 million today. And in 1914 virtually no American had an income that large, maybe Rockefeller and a handful of others did. So the top income tax rate was really more theoretical than real in the beginning. 99% of the population paid no income tax in 1914. There were 402,000 federal employees, civilian employees, and most of them worked for the post office. All of them together constituted 1% of the labor force. Who says there was never a golden age? The armed forces comprised fewer than 166,000 men on active duty. And although the federal government meddled in a few areas of economic life, including prescribing railroad rates and bringing any trust suits against a handful of unfortunate firms, the federal government was for most citizens remote and unimportant. They had nothing, whatever to do with it, other than picking up the mail. In the U.S. entry into the Great War, the federal government expanded enormously in size, scope, and power. It virtually nationalized the ocean shipping industry. It did nationalize the railroad, which is the largest industry in the country. Telephone, domestic telegraph, and international telegraphic cable industries. It became deeply engaged in manipulating labor management relations, security sales, agricultural production and marketing, the distribution of coal and oil, international commerce, and markets for raw materials and manufactured products. Its Liberty Bond drives dominated the financial capital markets. It turned the newly created Federal Reserve System into a powerful engine of monetary inflation to help satisfy the government's voracious appetite for money and credit. In view of the more than 5,000 mobilization agencies of various sorts, boards, committees, corporations, administrations, contemporaries who described the 1918 government as war socialism were well justified. That was the term at the time, war socialism. During the war, the government built up the armed forces to a strength of 4 million officers and men drawn from a pre-war labor force of 40 million. Of those who added to the armed forces after the U.S. declaration of war, more than 2.8 million or 72 percent were drafted. Men alone, however, did not make an army. They required barracks and training facilities, transportation, food, clothing, and healthcare. They had to be equipped with modern arms and great stocks of ammunition. As the mobilization began, the requisite resources remained in the possession of private citizens. Although manpower could be obtained by conscription, public opinion would not tolerate the outright confiscation of all the property the government required to turn the men into a well-equipped fighting force. Still, ordinary market mechanisms threatened to operate too slowly and at too great an expense to facilitate the government's plans. The Wilson administration therefore resorted to a vast array of interventions as mentioned a minute ago. All of these may be seen as devices to hasten the delivery of the requisite resources and to diminish the fiscal burden of equipping the huge conscript army for effective service in France. Notwithstanding those contrivances to keep the Treasury's expenses down, taxes still had to be increased enormously. Federal revenues rose by nearly 400 percent between 1917 and 1919 and even greater amounts had to be borrowed. The national debt swelled from a little over $1 billion in 1916 to $25.5 billion in 1919. So almost 25-fold increase in the national debt took place in two years' time. To ensure that the conscription-based mobilization could proceed without obstruction, critics had to be silenced and there were many critics in World War I. Many. The Espionage Act of June 15, 1917 penalized those convicted of willfully obstructing the enlistment services by fines up to $10,000 and imprisonment as long as 20 years. That is to say, if you were out in the street corner saying, don't join the army, don't join the army, you could be fined $10,000 and sent to prison for 20 years. Yelping about your first amendment rights wouldn't do you any good. An amendment to the Espionage Act known as the Sedition Act passed in May 1918 went much further, imposing the same severe criminal penalties on all forms of expression in any way critical of the government, its symbols, or its mobilization of resources for war. So if you stood out on the street and told the soldier going by, that looks like a monkey suit. He being in uniform, you might end up with a 20-year sentence in federal prison for speaking your mind. Many men were sentenced for speaking their mind to long prison terms. Those suppressions of free speech subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court established dangerous precedents that derogated from the rights previously protected under the First Amendment. The government further subverted the Bill of Rights by censoring all printed materials, preemptorily deporting hundreds of aliens without due process of law, and conducting and encouraging state and local governments and vigilante groups to conduct warrantless searches and seizures, blanket arrests of suspected draft evaders and other outrages too numerous to catalog. In California, the police arrested Upton Sinclair for reading the Bill of Rights at a rally. In New Jersey, the police arrested Roger Baldwin for publicly reading the Constitution. Land of the Free, the government also employed a massive propaganda machine to whip up what can only be described as public hysteria. The result was countless incidents of intimidation, physical abuse, and even lynching of persons suspected of disloyalty or insufficient enthusiasm for the war. People of German ancestry suffered disproportionately, up to and including death. Foolish things were done. Orchesters stopped playing Beethoven, other German composers and music, for example. Schools stopped teaching German language in their classes. This was the old world of Europe. The old world of the 19th century with the free trade and the gold standard and easy travel across national borders. Hardly any nation on earth required a passport of people entering the country. You could use gold to make purchases in any civilized country in the world. Capital flowed readily all over the world. People moved readily all over the world to find better jobs. You'll recognize that the map of Europe was changed forever by the war. Versailles Treaty and other post-war treaties after the war, of course, split up the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire into pieces. And either made new countries in their stead or created in the Middle East mandates, which were quasi-colonies for France and Great Britain. The trouble that caused is not ended yet. The Ottoman Empire was reduced to a much smaller nation of Turkey, which led to new troubles between Turks and Greeks, for example. And the map was generally redrawn in all sorts of ways by people who purported to have the wisdom and knowledge necessary to do this intelligently. Fatal conceit is what Hayat called this kind of presumption.  We had a remaking of it in a way that even contemporaries in 1919 recognized was nothing but a recipe for a timeout in the war. And later, of course, it did resume again in 1939 and went on for six years. And again, the world was remade in various ways, and the Communist Empire was pushed deeply into central Europe, and four decades of Cold War were set in motion. Of course, the biggest winner of World War II was Stalin. So if you're one of those inclined to think this was a really great idea, bear in mind what you've got for your money. There were some data to show you something about the extent to which government grew during the war. If you look, for example, in the first two columns there you see the federal receipts and outlays. Before the war, the government was balancing its budget pretty much. It ran up huge outlays during the war, multiplied more than 20 times. It's spending level at the peak, and then as you see it came down after the war, but not back to where it had been before the war. You see the giant deficit that was run in 1918 and 1919, the run-up of the federal debt, the money stock grew very rapidly to accommodate the government's fiscal actions. Between 1915 and 1920, you see an exact doubling in this definition of money stock, which is the M2 definition, and you also see in the GDP defliter an exact doubling of the general price level during that same five-year period. So if you ever believed in the quantity theory of money, here is that perfect example of the quantity theory of money. This is how the Fed made it possible. What you see here is that huge run-up in discounts and advances. The rules for Fed lending were changed early in the war so that instead of requiring commercial paper as collateral for its loans to banks, the Fed was now allowed to accept U.S. government bonds. So a bank would buy a bond, use that bond as collateral to borrow a comparable amount of money from the Federal Reserve Bank, and the interest rates were quite low considering the rate at which money was depreciating in purchasing power. In fact, they were negative in view of that. So banks had a great incentive to keep turning this cycle over again. Buy another government bond, use it to borrow a comparable amount, keep going, because every time they got a gift in effect from the Fed, a loan at negative rate of interest, and so the banks pumped up their holdings of investments in U.S. government bonds, and the whole financial system became flush as a result of this Fed action, and a lot of that flushiness spilled over into the purchase of government securities, which was the idea that was the goal of what the Fed was doing here, and it did achieve its goal. So you can't say the Fed can't do anything right. It can do the wrong thing right, and that's what it was doing here. But of course, as a result of these actions, it caused the purchasing power of the dollar to fall by half in less than five years. Here we see something about what happened to the overall economy and the government's role in it, and what I'd like to call your attention quickly, because time is short, is that if you take private gross domestic product and adjust it for changes in the price level, that's in the far right column, what you see is that the peak was actually reached in 1916, and then 17 was lower, 18 was lower. So what we're seeing here is not what most economists and economic historians have described it to be, which was just a general war prosperity period, but it was a perfect case of guns being substituted for butter. Private products declined by more than 10% while the government's war-making apparatus and production munitions went up enormously to fill that gap. So that was the story there. When the war ended, the government abandoned most, but not all, of its wartime control measures. The draft ended, but the armistice, when the armistice took effect in November 1918, by the end of 1920, the bulk of the economic regulatory apparatus had been scrapped, including the food administration, fuel administration, railroad administration, war industries board, and war labor board, but some emergency powers migrated into regular government departments such as state, labor, and treasury and continued in force. The Espionage Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act remained on the statute books, and indeed they are there now. Congressional enactments in 1920 preserved much of the federal government's wartime involvement in the railroad and ocean shipping industries. The war finance corporation shifted missions, subsidizing exporters and farmers until the mid-1920s, and wartime prohibition of alcoholic beverages, which was a purported conservation measure, transmogrified into the ill-fated 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. And most important, the dominant contemporary interpretation of the war mobilization, including the belief that federal economic controls had been instrumental in achieving the victory, persisted, especially among the elites who had played leading roles in the wartime economic management. It was hardly surprising that 15 years later, in the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government employed the wartime measures as models for dealing with what Franklin Roosevelt called a crisis in our national life comparable to war. Let's move ahead to chapter two of the Thirty Years' War. When World War II began in Europe in 1939, the size and scope of the federal government were much greater than they had been 25 years earlier, owing mainly to World War I and its peacetime progeny the New Deal. Federal spending now equaled 10 percent of GDP of a labor force of 56 million. The federal government employed a little over 2 percent in regular civilian and military jobs and another 6 percent in emergency work relief jobs. The national debt held outside the government had grown to nearly $40 billion. And most important, the scope of federal regulation had increased immensely to embrace agricultural production and marketing, labor management relations, wages, hours, and working conditions, securities markets and investment institutions, petroleum and coal marketing, trucking, radio, broadcasting, airline operation, provision for income during retirement and unemployment and many other objects. Notwithstanding these prodigious developments, during the next six years, the federal government would assume vastly greater dimensions. In some respects, its greatest size, scope, and power ever. During the war, the conscript-based Armed Force, which ultimately comprised more than 12 million men and some women, required enormous amounts of complementary resources for its housing, subsistence, clothing, medical care, training, and transportation, not to mention the special equipment, arms, ammunition, and expensive weapons platforms that now included tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, and naval aircraft carriers. For the Treasury, World War II was ten times more expensive than World War I. Ten times. Many new taxes were levy. Income taxes were raised repeatedly until the personal income tax rates extended from a low of 23 percent. Remember when the high was seven back before World War I? Now the low during World War II got to 23 percent and the high 94 percent. So if you were a very high income earner, you got to keep six cents on every additional dollar you earn. The income tax, previously a class tax, became a mass tax as the number of returns grew from 15 million in 1940 to 50 million in 1945. Even though federal revenues soared from 7 billion to 50 billion between 1940 and 45, most war expenses still had to be financed by borrowing. The publicly held national debt rose by 200 billion dollars or more than five fold. The Federal Reserve System itself bought some 20 billion dollars worth of government debt, thereby serving as a de facto printing press for the Treasury. Between 1940 and 48, the money stock M1 definition increased by 183 percent and the dollar lost nearly half of its purchasing power. The authorities resorted to a vast system of controls and market interventions to get resources without having to bid them away from competing buyers in free markets. By fixing prices directly allocating physical and human resources, establishing official priorities, prohibitions, and set-asides, then rationing the civilian goods in short supply. The war planners steered raw materials, intermediate goods, and finished products into the uses they valued most. Emphasis. They valued most. Market prices became essentially irrelevant during the height of World War II. They were not any longer in a significant way serving to allocate resources or inputs. Markets no longer function freely and in many areas they did not function at all. Entire industries were ordered to close, including by that time the largest American industry, the automobile industry, which had to cease production of civilian products in March 1942 and convert its facilities to the production of tanks, airplanes, and other munitions. World War II witnessed massive violations of human rights in the United States, apart from the involuntary servitude of military conscripts. Most egregiously about 112,000 blameless persons of Japanese ancestry. Most of them U.S. citizens were uprooted from their homes and confined in concentration camps without due process of law. Those subsequently released as civilians during the war remained under parole-like surveillance. The government also imprisoned nearly 6,000 conscientious objectors, three-fourths of them were Jehovah's Witnesses, who would not comply with the service requirements of the draft laws. That is to say, they wouldn't even work in non-combat capacities. They simply said, we will not serve you, God, not you. Signaling the enlarged federal capacity for repression, the number of FBI special agents increased from 785 in 1939 to 4,370 in 1945. Scores of newspapers were denied the privilege of the males under the authority of our old friend, the 1917 Espionage Act, which remained in effect. Some newspapers were banned altogether. The Office of Censorship restricted the content of press reports and radio broadcasts and censored all personal mail entering or leaving the country. And that included Canada. The Office of War Information put the government's spin on whatever it deigned to tell the public, and the military authorities censored news from the battlefields, sometimes for merely political reasons. The government seized more than 60 industrial facilities, sometimes entire industries, including the railroad industry, bituminous coal industry, and a meat packing industry for varying lengths of time. Most of these seizures were in order to impose employment conditions on employers favorable to labor unions engaged in disputes with the management. At the end of the war, most of the economic control agencies shut down, but some powers persisted, either lodged at the local level, like New York City's rent controls, which, as altered, still exist today, or shifted from emergency agencies to regular departments, such as the international trade controls that moved from the Foreign Economic Administration to the State Department. Federal tax revenues remained high by pre-war standards. In the late 1940s, the IRS's annual take averaged four times greater in constant dollars than in the late 1930s. In 1949, federal outlays amounted to 15% of GDP, up from 10% in 1939. The national debt stood at what would have been an unthinkable figure before the war, 214 billion in constant dollars, roughly 100 times the national debt of 1916, just 30 years earlier. I have some data that we don't have time to do much with because of our time constraints, but here you can see, for example, how the government solved the unemployment problem. You've all heard that the war got us out of the Depression. Here it is. Look at columns one, two, and three. Any fool can get you out of a Depression if you're willing to draft 20% of the labor force and take another 20%, put them to work building weapons for those people you drafted. That's what happened during World War II. It's just no Keynesian miracle, that's for sure. This was the miracle of force. And after the war, you see when the government drastically cut back its spending, cut it by more than 60% in two years' time, and all the Keynesians forecasted doom as a result of that. You'll see that what happened instead was that the non-military employees blossomed. They increased from $39 million to $56 million in a single year. So that was a telling episode, but a widely misunderstood one. We're all told that there was a miracle of production. Here you see that civilian hours worked during the war. This comes from an article of mine and libertarian paper a couple of years ago. Increased between 1940 and 1943 at the peak only by about 20%. And if you think you can increase the civilian labor force by 20%, at the same time you're replacing prime-age male workers with teenagers, old men, and women with no previous labor market experience, you'll see that. You'll see this labor market experience and get anywhere from 60% to 90% increase in output as the official data tell us, you're nuts. Can't be done. Wasn't done. Bad data. Here's some of those bad data from one of my articles and if you look at the bars which measure private output, non-government part real GDP, what you see is that from 1941 on private output failed substantially, did not recover until the war was over. And then in 1946 leapt up during the demobilization, more than any other year in American history, at least 30%, because of the way the data are all fouled up, we can't put a precise number on it, but it was at least 30% increase in private output in one year. So there was your miracle. It's too bad that most economists never recognized it. It was part of the way the government got away with this by rationing civilian goods, as you can see it's very ordinary stuff, things that virtually everybody was accustomed to buying. And here we see finally some information on the federal government's fiscal situation, its huge run up in spending and taxing, gigantic deficits incurred during the war, and the way the money stock was increased with Fed policies to accommodate this. The prevailing interpretation of the wartime experience gave unprecedented ideological support to those who desired a big federal government actively engaged in a wide range of domestic and international tasks. To many, it seemed that a federal government capable of leading the nation to victory in a global war had a similar capacity to remedy peacetime, economic and social ills. Accordingly in 1946, Congress passed the Employment Act, pledging the federal government to act as America's permanent macroeconomic warden. Unfortunately, the government has undertaken to carry out that charge ever since. Thank you very much.


So what's summer now?  It feels great to be back. I love to be back, but I'm actually back here for a reason. Those of you who don't know, I posted a video a couple weeks ago talking about how to make the most of your summer. So go check that out if you haven't yet. But on that video I got a ton of questions asking, hey Josh, like what are you doing this summer? Which, it's a fair question, it's a fair question. Of course I wasn't just gonna answer that question in a YouTube comment section when you know I could make a big video about it. So that's what I'm doing right here. Let's get into it. I moved out of Yale on May 9th. I had my last final the night before and then I packed a bowl of stuff and just moved out. I probably wondering why I've still been posting Yale videos. Well, I had a ton of footage from the past five weeks just like I promised. It's taken me a while to kind of put it all together and edit them all into like individual vlog. As soon as school lit out I was actually home for two and a half weeks and got to relax and kind of recuperate from the past semester.  I've also been working on some programming stuff now that I finally had time. Maybe I'll talk about that in a future video. But most of all I spent a lot of time studying. You're probably like, Josh, why are you studying during the summer? Well, actually on May 26th I actually left my home to come back to Yale for four weeks to do a Yale study abroad program for French. So the program consists of four intensive weeks of French classes here at Yale and then the class moves to Paris where I'll have four more weeks of classes except they will be in Paris and I'll get to explore the city every day and we have like planned activities and stuff. It'll be a great time. I'm excited because I'll get a chance to live with a host family and get to speak French pretty much 24-7. This really worked out perfectly.  One of those being language. I took French in high school and the placement test stuck me in level three French here at Yale. Therefore I'm required to take two semesters of French here at Yale, L3 and L4. I knew I was considering doing a study abroad program at some point so rather than just jumping straight into L3 my first semester I decided to push it off till the summer and now I'm doing the L3 L4 program all during the summer and I'll knock out my entire language requirement and I won't have to worry about taking any more language classes at Yale which is great. I'm back at Yale now I'm living in Berkeley College with all the other study abroad kids from the Spanish and the Russian programs as well as a bunch of kids that are here doing research. It's definitely cool living in a different residential college than TD. I eat in Morse for every single meal which I did a lot during the year but it's kind of cool to see a different side of the whole residential college system during the summer because the only colleges that are open are Berkeley, Morse and Stiles. As soon as I finished my classes up at Yale I jump on a plane to Paris. I'm really excited because I'll have a couple hours of class in the morning but then after that I'm really just free to explore the city. I'm excited to go on a lot of runs you know maybe even perform some street magic in French. Definitely drop a comment down below if you'd like to see that. That definitely quite a challenge but I'm down to try. I'm just glad it worked out because some of the language programs were pretty selective and cut a lot of people so I'm glad I got a spot I'm glad I get to go to Paris for the summer and I'm excited to make a lot of videos there and continue making videos here while I'm back at Yale. So the whole French thing takes up all of June and July then I have a couple weeks free in August but then the week before I go back to school I am a counselor at. If you'd like to see more videos kind of me chilling out here at Yale like I think this is SSS Hall up here I don't know if you can see it. Gigantic tower on the corner of Prospect Street I'm just chilling here in the courtyard filming this video for you guys. If you'd like to see more videos out here at Yale because it's like empty right now because of summer session definitely don't know. Definitely let me know in the comment section below and subscribe if you haven't yet because you're missing out and I'll see you guys in the next video.


Let's solve a question on direction of acceleration and velocity now here We have at t equals to zero the velocity and acceleration of a particle is v That is plus five meters per second and a that is plus one meters per second square From t equals to zero to t equals to t naught the acceleration Decreases from one to zero point five meters per second square and the question is to figure out How does the speed vary during this period? How does the speed change during this period? We need to choose one answer out of these four options At this point why don't you pause the video read the options and and give this one a try first All right, hopefully you have given this a shot now Let's try to show all of this with a diagram. So at t equals to zero we have a particle Let's let's take a ball. We have a ball which is moving with a velocity of plus five and an acceleration of Plus one. So first, let's decide which direction can we take as positive which direction is negative Let's say the right direction is the positive direction So velocity of plus five meters per second square that means it is moving to the right with five meters per second And acceleration is one meters per second square Which means acceleration again to the right because both of them are positive This is one meters per second square and at time t not at time t not the ball would be over here And at this point the velocity, we don't know what that is really But we do know that the acceleration decreased from plus one to zero point five meters per second square But this is still positive So I will draw the arrow to the right and this is zero point five meters per second square All right, now let's look at the options. We need to think about how is the speed changing? So the first option says the speed increases and then decreases When does a speed increase and when does a speed decrease speed will increase of any object that is moving speed will increase When the acceleration and the direction of speed or the velocity when both of them are in the same direction So we see that happening at t equals to zero the acceleration is to the right Even the velocity is to the right this acceleration is supporting the velocity. It is increasing the velocity Will slightly increase it will be more than five meters per second at a time instant after t equals to zero So let's say let's say at let's say after one second when t is when t is one and then let's say the ball is somewhere over here Now at this point, we don't really know what the acceleration is how the acceleration is changing But we do know that the velocity at this point Acceleration at t equals to zero was one meters per second square then after one second The speed will increase by one meter per second So now the speed could be could be six meters per second And now maybe the acceleration at this point. Maybe it is less. Maybe it is zero point seven five Meters per second square. It is decreasing, right? So now again after one more second when t is two Then let's say that let's say the ball is over here And now the speed will increase by zero point seven five meters per second in one second So now the speed it became 6.75 meters per second So you see what is happening even when the acceleration is decreasing the speed is still increasing It's not increasing by the same amount because it increased by One meters per second in the first second then it increased by zero point seven five meters per second in the next second That is because the acceleration itself is decreasing So even though the acceleration is decreasing here the speed is still increasing constantly Not increasing by the same amount every other second, but still still increasing So in this journey in this journey the speed will constantly increase and that is only because the acceleration and the velocity They are throughout. They are throughout in the same direction So we can say we can say that speed will really just increase in this journey and generally we can say that speed decreases when Speed decreases when velocity and acceleration when velocity and acceleration Have opposite signs when they have opposite Opposite signs So when one is plus the other is minus there will be decrease in speed So for instance if this one meters per second square was in the opposite direction Then after one second this five meters per second would have become four meters per second Then the speed would have decreased when v and a are in the opposite direction when v and a have opposite signs So the first option is wrong and by the similar by similar reasoning even a second one is wrong The speed is constantly increasing in this journey And it's it will keep on decreasing when v and a have opposite signs throughout So that is not the case in this one. So option d is also wrong Now you can try more questions from this exercise in this lesson And if you're watching on youtube do check out the exercise link which is added in the description


One thing I'm often asked is what my favorite part is of being a patent attorney is the initial excitement of meeting with an inventor, understanding the invention, looking into the prior art, trying to see if their idea is actually new and identifying the strategy that we're going to use to get this patent through. That's all exciting but there's a long, suspenseful wait as we're waiting for an examiner's decision and then there's this back and forth with the patent office on trying to get the patent allowed. Nothing compares to the feeling when you get our field is called a notice of allowance and that's a patent examiner's acceptance that their client's idea is patentable and that they're going to grant a patent.