Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Westward Expansi

CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Westward Expansion November 23, 2017

Headquarters during weekends. Our authors will be signing their books at the signing tent on the war memorial plans after this session was you can purchase their books at the Parnassus Book area and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the festival. Our first speaker is daniel sharfstein, a professor of law and history at vanderbilt. He has twice won the loss collapse outstanding professor award. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and before law school he was a journalist. The director of the social justice problem, professor daniel sharfstein. You can hear me in the back . It is wonderful to be here again at the southern festival of books, my hometown book festival. A real honor to be introduced by andy bennett. In a decade plus i have lived in nashville i have presented as an author, been a host and most of all, a member of the audience, sharing this panel with roger hodge gives me the best of all worlds. Love the range of conversations we have at the festival. I look forward to hearing from all of you. I will talk about the nez perce war and how i came to write my book about chief joseph, what my conflict tells us about america after reconstruction and the current moment, a war the us fought in the summer of 1877, a small group of nez perce indians who refuse to move from their traditional lands to the reservation. The fighting began in the rolling prairies and deep canyons where oregon, washington and idaho meet but the nez perce families, men, women, children, alternately 900 in all fled east through the mountains into montana. They moved along the controversial divide, the ragged border between idaho and montana, they went into wyoming across the newly created Yellowstone National park where they took the first tourists there hostage and finally they turned sharp north, buffalo planes trying to reach sitting bull in canada where he had fled after custers last stand the year before. For 31 2 months, over the roughest mountain terrain, the Northern Rockies, the nez perce families out ran the army but in early october 18, 77, soldiers trapped them just 40 miles south of the border. The families were starving, they were freezing, they were devastated by months of vicious battles. It wasnt a big war but people have been writing about it almost constantly from the moment it happened. Why is that . Because in its aftermath, the nez perce leader who surrendered, chief joseph, became a national celebrity. He was hailed both as a military genius, wrongly it turned out because other men were the war chiefs but also a man of extraordinary kindness and feeling. Thousands of people visited him in exile, schoolchildren recited his words, people packed his speeches and adapted them as poetry. Josephs pleas to restore his people to their land inspired generations of activists for civil and human rights. I was interested in the nez perce war from the moment i could read words on a page. When i was 6 years old my mother gave me a childrens biography of chief joseph as part of the classic biography series where they gave you a bit of everything. Abe lincoln, George Washington carver, helen keller. I never forgot those books, but what compelled me to write about chief joseph in the first place wasnt joseph. It was the general who led the army forces against the nez perces. A man named Oliver Otis Howard. Howard was a main yankee west point graduate, someone with a truly terrific rippling beard. One of the challenges of writing this was very quickly run out of synonyms for bushy. Much to the displeasure of his men, he was a teetotaler evangelist. He was known as the christian general. During the civil war he had commanded a union army brigade and became an ardent abolitionist, who early on knew that he was fighting a war to destroy slavery. In june 18, 62, he lost his right arm above the elbow and the nez perces would later call him cut arm. But he quickly recovered and he wound up as one of William Tecumseh shermans commanders during the march to the sea and the final push through the carolinas. As the war was ending howard was cast to lead a bold experiment in governing. Congress had created a new agency, the bureau of refugees, friedman and abandoned land. The agencys job was to redistribute confiscated rebel property and help nearly 4 Million People navigate the path slavery to citizenship. The bureau build schools, they build hospitals, orphanages, asylum, set up entire court systems. This was the first big federal silverware social Welfare Agency in history, truly a radical test of what a government could or should do for its people. As head of the Freedmens Bureau howard was a crucial player in giving concrete meaning to the concept of liberty and equality. These are concepts the emancipation proclamation and the 13th and 14th amendments boldly proclaimed to be the twin pillars of our reborn American Republic. When congress, in 1867, chartered a new university for African Americans in washington dc it was a given that it would be named for howard, howard university. In southern history, Oliver Otis Howard is a hero. A flawed hero to be sure, someone who embodied the limitations of the federal governments efforts to remake the rebel south. But still a dedicated and true warrior for blackie quality. Then, as reconstruction was collapsing, howard was sent to oregon to command army forces in the pacific northwest. He is a hero in southern history and africanamerican history but in western history, in native american history, general howard is a villain. His decisions all but sparked the nez perce war. Men following his orders wound up massacreing women and children. The nez perce war is not just the story of one civil rights hero, chief joseph. Rather, it is the story of how howard, himself a civil rights champion, made vicious war on another civil rights champion. In a way it is a quintessential story of america after reconstruction. In the decades between the end of the civil war and 1900 are a story of an extraordinary pivot in american values. In 1865 a us was a beacon of liberty and equality to the world, but by 1900 all that political and policymaking energy was being redirected to a vast project, jim crow was the rule of the south and much of the rest of the country, every two or three days and africanamerican was lynched at the border. Chinese immigrants were and. 1900, the nation had become an imperial power with territories stretching from san juan to manila. A person with dark skin was is likely to be a colonial subject as a citizen. From 1865 to 1900, from emancipation to empire, this is a quick and stunning turn in our sense of america and the purpose of our government and the crucial moment for america. When the foundation was laid for battles we are still fighting over the contours of liberty and equality, the relationship between race and citizenship and over the proper size, scope and role of government, the story of this turn from emancipation to empire goes through the west. The last decades of the 19th century involves a massive exercise of government power to take land and wealth from one group and give it to another. The west was the staging ground for empire. It was where the logic and the politics, the vision of what our government existed to do were worked out. What is amazing is so many of the people who fought for emancipation wound up playing key roles in building the new regime. I wanted to explore how real people saw and experienced this epochal transformation. Howard went west in 1874, nearly a broken man. He had been a lightning rod for years of opposition, reconstruction, constantly investigated for corruption, turned into a national joke, as i traveled along with transcontinental railroads, he hoped his time in the west would be his great second chance. A big part of his job would involve forcing native americans on reservations. Were howard, reservation policies and acted a fantasy of reconstruction. During reconstruction, if you hadnt been able to give away 40 acres and a mule to africanamericans even though he tried, in the west, could give away small plots of land and this could be a pathway to citizenship. He convinced himself is was an extension and not a betrayal of reconstruction values, it was an enlightened way to protect indians from genocidal wars, and he encountered joseph. By the time he met howard in the spring of 1875, two years before the war, he was a seasoned advocate for his people, he was a young man in his early 30s, outranked by many leaders who long experienced hunting buffalo and fighting rival nations to the east but then ranchers started encroaching on his Ancestral Lands in oregons will all of valley. They told joseph rightly, 1863 treaty the valley was put into the Public Domain and had already been divided in the homestead. No one in the valley had been represented at the 1863 treaty council. The leaders of other totally separate nez perce 100 miles away seated the land for them. I presented joseph with a real challenge, it is a story for our time, when so many people today are wondering if there is anything to change our nations direction joseph had to figure out how to move the federal government, how to find and connect with american power, how to change official policy and convince people that the 1863 treaty didnt apply to his band and that is a tall order especially when we consider that he is native american, and native americans did not get much respect for claims they made to land. And whats more, he was an incredibly isolated Mountain Valley surrounded by towering peaks and canyons deeper than the grand canyon, hard to get in or out and he didnt speak english, he did his talking in nez perce, regional trade language. What did joseph do . How did he get his words to swim upstream . Joseph decided to plead his case to every federal official he could find, local indian agent, regional supervisor for indian affairs, congressman home from recess, he pressed his claim until those officials reported to washington that joseph was right. In the process, joseph was discovering how the American Republic worked after the civil war. It had many faces, many competing authorities how it was split and remained split in countless ways. Among federal, state and local governments, legislative executive judicial branches and among all kinds of overlapping agencies. What joseph found, was a fluid core of american power. Nothing is ever quite resolved once and for all. It is never over. There is always someone else to turn to and often persistence in this process could be leveraged into rights. You just have to keep fighting. He figured it out and had remarkable success getting his peoples land claims reopened again and again both before and after the war. In the course of his advocacy, joseph developed a set of arguments about liberty and equality that howard would have immediately recognized as ones that he had made about freed people during reconstruction. Howard refused to see joseph as one who was participating in a new american process but instead he saw joseph as someone showing disrespect for his authority, someone who could only be governed by brute force. And his drive for redemption, howard was singleminded as he pursued the nez perce families through the Northern Rockies but military victory did not mean redemption for howard. Almost immediately he recognized this was the moment of josephs surrender, it was almost as if howard realized he was no longer the hero of his own story. That is a tough thing to recognize. Ultimately, howard wound up playing a key role in making a place for joseph in american culture, in the days and weeks that followed the war, howard and his aid publicized josephs surrender statement. In the decades to come, howard couldnt stop writing about joseph. In the end it was joseph and not general howard who would be remembered as a great civil rights figure. Josephs rhetoric is so poignant, so moving that it is easy to overlook but he wasnt simply making a plea for a full package of rights as an american, what we might call citizenship. More specifically he was trying to define citizenship for and age of big government. He was claiming the right to participate in contentious struggles baked into our modern way of governing, the right to speak to the state and to be heard. He represents a set of ideas, just as important we, a set of methods we need more than ever. I will finish by reading a little bit from the book. In the book i try to foreground the words and experiences of joseph and many other native american nez perce survivors of the war. Josephs surrender speech has made him a celebrity. I thought i would read his surrender speech and then just read a little bit of a speech he gave in washington dc a year and a half after the war. Here is the surrender statement. The first thing that ever went viral. Tell general howard i know his heart. What he told me before i have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed, Looking Glass is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He believed the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. Little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run to the hills, no blankets, no food, maybe freezing to death. I want time to look for my children and see how many of them i can find. Maybe i shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my cheeks, i am tired, my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, i will fight no more forever. But the thing is we have to remember joseph never stopped fighting. Here he is a year and a half later in washington dc. To make his argument was to tell the history of his people among whites. Much of his talk he gave countless times for the war and his tribe long project United States, the injustice of the 1863 treaty, the pledge he made his father never to abandon the law. But it was the most recent chapter of the story that transformed him and his audience. According to one reporter as his account of the war unfolded his voice developed its flexibility and joseph began gesturing in miming which break grace and appropriateness would have done credit to a frenchman. Listeners gasped as he remembered the war, laughed when he described the raid on the army mule train in the meadows, wept as he told of the broken promises of the surrender. The audience then heard a message that had fallen out of favor with the end of reconstruction, an appeal for a new commitment to the basic values of liberty and equality. If the white man wants to live in peace with the indian he can live in peace, just said. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike, give them all the same law, give them all an even chance to live and grow. He called for an equal citizenship defined by broad fundamental liberties. Let me be a free man, he said. Free to travel, free to stop, for work, free to trade where i choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion among others, free to think, talk and ask myself and i will obey every loss or submit to the penalty. When he finished the simple declaration this is my story and here i am. The theater for the motion. Thank you very much. [applause] roger hodge is a Deputy Editor for the intercept which is internet news source. Former editor of the oxford american in harpers magazine and his writings are so numerous i dont think i will try to list any of them here. He has written a book that is, i think, part memoir, part reporting and part history. Here is mr. Hodge to talk about his book, texas blood. Thank you. Its really an honor to be up here with dan and he is a real historian. Im a journalist and that means im a [inaudible] historian. There is a lot of history in my book but there is a lot of personal history, Family History and a lot of traveling. The book begins and ends on the devils river in west texas where my family has branched for generations. When i was growing up i worked on that ranch every weekend, spent all my summers out there working and i had no idea how historic this place was. I took everything for granted. I would find the arrowheads but i would play cowboys and indians when i was small but i didnt really understand how long people had lived in that landscape. I didnt really understand my own culture and didnt understand the ranching culture. I took that for granted, as well. I assumed i would always be a rancher and that was my destiny and there was no choice and thats what i wanted to be and that was it. There would always be sheep and goats in those hills and there would always be cattle in the bottomland and that was the way it would be. But when my father figured out that was what was in my mind he had a talk with me. He explained that ranching was dying and that the way of life that i took for granted was going away and passing away and i had to have some other way to make a living. We would always hold onto the land the land was not going to be were not going to live off the land anymore. This was the trauma but eventually i made my way to new york city and became a journalist, became a writer and editor and if you know any writers it is if there is a something had happened to you to make you do this because it is not easy and sometimes i think it was the trauma of not being able to have that life that sent me into writing. As i was in exile in new york i thought continuously about my home landscape and wanted to figure out a way to write about it. But i was busy and editing a magazine and i was consumed with the new cycle and in 2006 a novel came out called no country for old men by Cormac Mccarthy and Cormac Mccarthy had been one of my he consoled me in my exile because he was writing about my home. All those border novels happened right there in my home and no country for old men came out in that opening scene that if you have seen the movie the shootout, the drug deal gone bad, that was on my familys ranch. The geographical markers were unmistakable. It was just west of note the canyon. That meant it was just west of my familys eastern fence. I had to write about this. I wrote about mccarthy and all of his novels and i wrote about his encounter with the borderlands and that took me deeper into the borderlands themselves and in the history and the landscape in the whole 14000 years of human habitation in that place. But it took a while and i realized and what i had to figure out and what i wanted to understand was the transformation that had overtaken this place that was so import

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