Before the womens march last year that said this was the boldest most intersectional platform that is ever come out of any march historically, and that was one, the moment i was most proud. After words airs every saturday at 10 p. M. Eastern and sunday at 9 p. M. Eastern and pacific. Founded in 1747, its one of the oldest libraries in the country. This building is essentially the first purpose built Library Structure in america. We often talk about franklin and his Library Company of philadelphia where, we are a freestanding purpose built librarystructure so thats important. Unlike any of the others, we are still operating as a lending library. People have been coming for that building 270 years. I have said and ill say it here that besides a church, the library is the single oldest Cultural Institution that is unbroken to the colonial period so when you walk inthat door and you borrow book, youre doing it as theyve been doing it for nearly 3 centuries. Newport was of course one of the key five commercial ports of colonial america. It was on par more or less with adelphia and new york andothers , charleston and so in many ways the Redwood Library is a sort of culminating civic structure that represents the ambitions, the aspirations of newport as a city that isnt just a mercantile powerhouse but also an intellectual center. That was really the conception. Then and now, money and commerce is always tainted with a certain kind of greed, its too commercial so there was a strategic decision to in a way civilized newport and its mercantile operations. And make it not only a Financial Hub but also a learning hub, so to speak. The library was built between 1948 and 1750, conceived in 1747 and it is the first of about 15 years of sort of discussion among the newport intelligentsia. Its the forerunner of the Redwood Library was the central tropical society founded by Bishop Berkeley who came to newport in 1729 in the hopes of eventually gathering his thoughts, his resources to create a college in bermuda. He made it to the check of england but never came but in his friendships , he created a group that would meet weekly and discuss philosophy , pressing issues of the day and over time that became a sort of core group including Abraham Redwood that pool their resources and conceived of the library and 47, 48, 49 and it opened in march 1760. Abraham redwood was a plantation owner in the caribbean. He owned a sugar plantation in antigua though he was indeed a slave owner. As you can imagine, in colonial times, america was tied culturally to england, especially and also the continent of france and italy so newport being an english colony, the book trade very much centered in london, the major European Centers so Abraham Redwood had an agent that was sent over to london with a booklet and its important to think about redwood was practical and they had pressing needs for knowledge and learning, so we have the kernel of the collection and of course as you can imagine, antique texts, 18th century additions both in the original language and in translation of important antique texts, then theres also a more practical strand of the original collection which includes such things as beekeeping, Animal Husbandry , carpentry and all that kind of thing. So its very democratic in that sense, very deliberately democratic so that, but of course it wasnt. 46 of redwoods friends all of a certain class, white males of the commercial class. But in their intent, it was to provide a forum where interested citizens could come and get basic learning on just about anything. It is important to note that literacy in colonial america was just picking up after 1760 so the Redwood Library is part of that movement and it was open to everyone but with the sort of tacit understanding that it was men of a certain stature. It was opened on thursday afternoon for two hours. And you would come in and put a deposit down on books and you could only borrow onebook at a time. And it was in that way very much a community resource. Although one has to, a public then is not public now and that has always been the critique of the public sphere in the 18th century in the enlightenment is that it was in fact exclusive in a lot of ways. Over the years there has been a renewed cycle and attention on maintaining the library and thats an important point. Redwood library is of undeniable importance. The oldest continuously operating, earliest in the classic structure, all of that but it has in normas symbolic value today when we are besieged with fake news, tweets, soundbites. It really stands for intellectual pursuit, lifelong learning, curiosity and ultimately really for an educated citizenry as being the basis of democracy and thats what redwood intended and thats what we try to continue in the mission that we are pushing currently. We are outside of Newport City Hall in Newport Rhode island finding more about the areas literary scene. We speak with author peter cannon about his book american mojo. Particularly for an economy like the one we have in the United States, the middle class has been the centerpiece. Its our dna. It has become our Central Nervous system and when it prospers, the rest of the economy prospers and when it doesnt, what it tends to do is create sort of a barbell effect where a few people get really rich and the poor get really poor. And the balance between these two, the key fulcrum position is the middle class. Any questions about the size of the middle class have made compounding the tricky because its almost impossible to identify now. In the beginning in the 50s and postwar 40s , the middle class was kind of a chunk of granite that waslargely white. It could be defined easily by what people earned , where they live and frankly what they spent and with two or three indicators you could say here is the middle class. The face of america has changed so dramatically in the intervening 60, 70 years that all of the attempts to map out the middle class have gotten much more compounding. Theres some people who do it on earnings power area but earnings power is an imperfect guide because what you earn in new york to be a middleclass person is different than what you might need in tempe arizona or montana. The other pieces some people say what can you earn plus borrow area and the trouble is availability of credit comes and goes so i think the most effective definition came from a task force that president obama and Vice President biden set up where they took a look at all the ways that youd imagine looking at the middle class. The Heritage Foundation says break the entire population in 2 5. Cut up the top fifth and bottom fifth and Everything Else is in the middle class. I get that but what the biden panel came up with was theres a useful way to answer the question which is lets use aspiration as a way to define this group. What did they aspire to . What are the aspirational elements of the middle class . I house, a car. College education for you and your children. Great healthcare. Vacation, retirement and one more thing. The satisfaction of knowing theres a high likelihood that your kids will be better than you are. I think thats a much more useful definition. Most people watching this will be or have been members of the middle class. But its become a much more dynamic organism. Theres much more flowing in and out of the middle class. Everybody knows there are Something Like 40 to 50 million poor people in the United States which is entirely too many. But whats changed is that just above the seam of the poverty line, there are another 40 Million People at least who are what i call hovering poor who are just a twist of life away from an experience in poverty. One of the leasing causes of bankruptcy in the lower middle class is a cancer diagnosis. It can be a car accident or illness with your child or loss of a job so whats happening is the middle class has gone from being an chunk of granite to a very dynamic kind of molecule with people coming in and out of the middle class there are charities and Public Policies set up to say lets take people and push them above the poverty line and then we can say our job is done. That no longer is sufficient because this hovering poor will find many, many people in our nation having an experience with poverty so some 40 percent of our children were in some part of their life beyond food stamps or supplemental nutrition assistance programs so that volatility, that moving in and out makes working with the middle class a lot more difficult. One of the things you ask is how did the middle class happen . One of the great things i discovered in researching this book is ive had in my own notion that the middle class in america is so intertwined that it must be a natural thing. If you are in america with our economy you must be in the middle class. Nothing could be further from thetruth. Postworld war ii, when 16 million american men and women returned from various theaters of war or wherever they were working on the manufacturing cycle, suddenly everybody came back and when they came back , they faced something extraordinary. The rest of the worlds manufacturing was largely in ruins. Moms or some form of elimination and all are mainland cities were being attacked but what happened at the time was there was an overwhelming sense across every demographic, across business, government, the law, education, religious, everyone had a sense that we need to do Something Special out of respect and a sense of duty to these 16 million men and women. As an extraordinary demonstration of unity, we all pull together as one. There was everyone feeling we want to welcome these people home and give them a chance so we invested in their education across the board. We invested in many ways to help them build, create, buy homes. We did things to help these people start out. What did the American People do . They rose to the occasion. And as we saw our Economic Growth from just after the war to the next several decades, we went from a 200 billion gdp to a 500 million gdp in 30 years and kept going so by the endof the 1950s we were the number one agrarian power in the world. No one had more agricultural produce. We were also the number one in manufacturing power. And by the late 1950s we were the Number One Service provider in the world. So by 1958, most of the people who went to work in the United States were whitecollar. These were middleclass jobs and people educated and work and found their way out with lots of support from the government. It was anything but a Natural Organic thing. This was a self designed and created attempts to bring these 15 million men and women and later their children into the flour of the middle class. It was created and thats important when you look and see what other nations around the world are doing now today we are letting our middleclass founder for itself. Were not spending a lot of time or a lot of vocalization about tax cuts for the middle class but tax cuts alone will begin to satisfy the need of this middle class that i described. The first crack in the facade of the middle class happened in the 60s and it began with social unrest. There are a lot of people who were basically uninvited to the middle class and it was an africanamerican issue at first and then it became a youth issue as people began to divide along the lines of vietnam and the ways that racial and other kinds of equality were being embraced. Women and other types later became the same sort of issue and that is you cant have a chunk of people who are supported by all to be in the middle class and a lot of other people with their noses pressed against the glass. What happened at the time was our economy started to falter just as other economies in the world were coming on stream and we didnt adjust very well. Then in 1973 something happened that shivered all of our timbers which was the Arab Oil Embargo and suddenly congress is locked in a battle with the preuglies. And from the 70s to the 80s we faced double digit unemployment. Double digit Interest Rates. And in the end, doubledigit inflation. Those three uglies conspired along with social unrest to bring some of the middle class narrative to a grinding halt and ill give you an example doesnt get reported, 30 years after the crash of 87, we are very good at analyzing crashes that happen in one or two days but if you look at it from a broader context which is how i like to write my book and think about this, from 1966 till the early 80s, the stock market lost 25 percent of its value. Thats a big number and thats pretty toxic but when you factor in doubledigit inflation, when you look at it in real terms and in real terms, a dollar invested in 1966 had lost more than half of its value in 1982. That was a longterm agonizing crash you will not see widely reported because it happened an inch at a time. So here you have an economy thats stuck and worse, you have wages and inflation and a whole lot of other things taking off and so the economists were totally be welded. They said what can we call this . They came up with the name stagflation. It was stagnant as other things are taking off and we dont know what to do about it. How does that show itself west and mark it shows itself in appointed way. That inflation is runaway and yet wages for year after year or decade after decade are flat. You have this incredible gap thats created where all the things you want to buy cost more money and in fact, their prices are going up over a percent a month and your wages stay essentially flat for three decades. That wedge, that wedge came home to roost on the heads of the middle class and that was part of the big issue that brought us in the position like, what do we do now in the early 80s . One of the things Ronald Reagan figured out when he got into office was you cant have wages flat and unemployment at double digits. And Interest Rates at double digits. And inflation at double digits and hope to do anything other than pontificate from your bully pulpit. What weve got to do is take some difficult, austere measures. So he and his team decided, paul booker particularly was that the first and ugliest of the three uglies we have to take on his inflation. You can have prices going up a percent a month because that builds an expectation that my income has to go up like that i have to figure out another way around. What he did is he said were going to do what every candidate does which is slow the economy down. Not just the United States but he says slow the economy down. Used like Interest Rates so Interest Rates, the prime rate went to 21 and a half percent. If you were borrowing to buy a house or a car, your Interest Rate which might be two percent or less, your Interest Rate went up. It was a two percent per month payment. If you bought a house, you had to pay basically 25 percent of the value of that house every year. Naturally, what it did is it killed any business that required borrowing to prosper so the Automotive Industry went right to health and as you know prices ultimately failed but the housing industry came to a screeching halt and people were just provided impact. But the extraordinary thing and reagan gets maligned for a lot of things but the extraordinary thing is inflation went 12 and half, 13 percent so by 1983 it slowed to three percent. People are saying what can we do . How can we, we have no one else to send to work. Youre working at donald but we dont have a way to create more income. How can we as we entered the 90s , how can we possibly sustain our middleclass lifestyle . Then like a song on a clear day, the idea came to them. Borrow. So in 1957, there was but a handful of credit cards. By 1957, there were 100 million. By 2007, there were over 1 billion credit cards. By 2008, Consumer Debt was at 12 point eight five trillion. And last month, from 2008 it went down, weve now exceeded that number so were talking about 13 trillion in Consumer Debt. That means every american old well over 15,000 and some obviously a great deal more. They borrowed their way out. That what worked well. You could continue to sustain your lifestyle and if you add the virtue of owning a home, the value in your home was so great you can refinance. And you can reborrow or do a home equity loan. You can borrow and borrow and that worked fine until 2008 and the bottom fell out. That was the most single devastating thing that happened to the middle class because the one percent came through that just fine. But they were crushed before and only more crushed after. But the real pain, the real agony that people felt after 2008 was the middle class. And if you look at and dissected by some of the members, as i told you middleclass is a lot more amorphous and more like a molecule. You look at the africanamerican middleclass, they lost a generation of wealth. With no apparent real signs yet of their return. The hispanic middleclass and there are 50 million hispanics in this country and 16 would qualify by any measure we talked about as members of the middle class. They retreated as well and the recuperative power was not even across the middleclass. Certain parts of the middle class rebounded pretty well since 2008 to today and others are still struggling so what happens with public policymakers when they talk about middleclass , like its one big giant thing that behaves the same, nothing could be further from the truth. So one of the great frustrations when people talk about jobs, they dont really do it from a sophisticated perspective