There is no such thing as free labor right . That doesnt make sense. Could you help us understand, what do you mean, what do scholars mean by free labor . Mr. Luskey thanks for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this book. It is a question my students, even after having me teach the concept to them, they still have trouble understanding. Free labor ideology came together as a set of ideas, most clearly in the 1850s, around a new political party, the republican party, and what the ideas at the heart of this ideology proposed was that wage labor, as it existed in northern states, was a superior economic and social system to southern slavery. It was a system, in its ideal form, that allowed workers the opportunity to make a contract with the employer of their choice, and to save their earnings to become independent. And this was something that was not available to enslaved people in the southern states. It is art of an attempt to rehabilitate wage labor, which many white northern workers in earlier decades, in the rolling out of industrialization, a process that changed labor and the ability of workers to advance in northern society, some of those workers refer to wage labor as wage slavery, in an effort to combat the detrimental effects of industrialization that brought them into competition with a wider variety of other workers, immigrant workers, women, even children. This is an argument white workers in the north used to try to highlight their predicament, the fact that wage labor from their perspective meant that they were dependent. Dependence and independence are important political keywords of the civil war era, if not throughout american industry. They are at the very heart of understanding citizenship and in many cases, what it meant to be men. By the 1850s though, with the encroachment of the political power, the slave power republicans coalesced in opposition to, this was an effort to try to privilege the rights of northern white men to be able to move west on free territory in order to become independent landholders, and employers of labor there, and in competition with a system of slavery, which would tend to make white northerners dependent if they had to compete with it. Very quickly, tell us how abe lincoln epitomizes the concept of free labor. Mr. Luskey we might think of it in reference to Horatio Alger and the rags to riches story, or at least rags to independence. He talked about his time as a rail splitter, doing difficult manual labor and his rise, through saving end through education and through perseverance and through hard work, he became a respectable, gentleman lawyer. So he and many of his followers pointed to lincoln as a quintessential example of the promise of free labor. Lincoln proposed that this was a threestep process. He believed that wage workers were never in the north, within the free labor system, fixed to their position, and that was an argument he made against southern politicians, who argued that every society and every economy had a mudsill class, lower to the floor, and that is why southern slavery was superior to wage labor, because according to them, when wage labor became surplus to requirements, they simply fired them and left them to fend for themselves. I would hasten to say that proponents of both of these economic systems were making a very strong case for themselves, because they were in a political struggle with the other. So they glossed over the injustices, the coercions of their competing economic systems. John, before your question, brian, i think a book we all lean heavily on is free soil, free labor, free men. It is his second book. Mr. Luskey i believe it is his first. I think the book you are holding was published in 1970. His biograpy tom payne and revolutionary america was 1976. Host eric foner is a distinguished writer, to say the least. Most people know him for his reconstruction book, but this more than anything else helped me understand the idea of political economy. As brian alluded to, they are words that are difficult for our students to grapple with, probably difficult for even general audiences. But as a way of understanding the relationship between ideology, politics and economy, the concept of political economy and looking at how free labor functioned in the north and shaped attitudes in the south and played an integral part in the creation of the republican party. It is a book that i cant say enough good things about. Brian and pete, i have a degree in accounting. I went to business school. One of my favorite classes was Macro Economic theory, believe it or not. When i read your book, i went, this is microeconomic theory, the class i got a d in. But the way you presented period microeconomic there was very well done and readable and i theory was very well done and readable and i appreciate it, because as i said, i got a d in that class. But the one thing i really enjoyed, i like your touch on how art was utilized. People come into a tattoo store, we should talk about art, and you put it into the book where you talk about posters for markets and marketing, but then it is used later for the early civil war days recruiting. Would you like to touch on that for me a little bit . Mr. Luskey to start, i want to step back and say, one of the arguments in my book, in some ways building from foner, foner identifies two contradictory aspects of free labor ideology. On one hand, it focuses on ideology on the opportunities available for wage workers to advance to independence. But it also talks about, and lincoln is one of these people, there is no opposition to capital within free labor ideology, because one of the free labor ideology freedoms is for employers to be able to hire workers of their choice. At the time, people who believed in this ideology believed there was a harmony of interests between laborers and people with capital. They had the same interests, that workers were just capitalists in the making. It seems to me that the story of the war is a story that highlights the ways in which, from the perspective of northern employers, the war seemed an opportunity for them to become more independent by virtue of employing people of their choice. And the war gave them wider options of who to employ. We can come back to that, to your point, john, i want readers to understand that free labor ideology emerged in a culture in the north that valued speculation and ambition. And we can see that very clearly in the advertisements of the era. Business owners, competing with each other in difficult economic times, particularly at the beginning of the war when southern debtors refused to pay off northern creditors. So northern firms who were owed that money were, in the lingo of the time, in panic. The financial panics of the era, certainly the secession crisis should join the panics of 1819, 1837, 1857, when we talk about economic downturns where credit grandiose promises about cheap access to goods, trying to encourage customers to buy. At the time the war began, many of the firms that printed these advertisements would use what were called check ends, the images in the advertisements. These included depictions of american flag, and these businesses would say, you can get access to cheap goods at war prices, or secession cheapens the price of goods, so this can work for you even if it is not working for the nation. But those same images printed by the same printing firms in cities philadelphia found their way into recruitment posters. And from my way of looking at it, these recruiting ads emerge out of a culture of advertising which tried to get readers attention. These were broadsheet advertisements that were sometimes one and a half to two feet by three feet in size, so they were plastered to the side of buildings. They wanted to get peoples attention. And from 1861, the federal government was offering a 100 bounty. We often think of early war recruitment being totally about volunteerism, civic virtue, citizens rallying to the cause of their nation. And of course that is true, but i would argue that it is something of a fools errand to try to pick apart the political ideology or reasons why, the motivating factors for recruitment are nearly all ideological. Pulling those apart from economic concerns, enlisting men, worrying about whether their families are going to be able to survive while they are gone. And many of these men are taking a pay cut to become a soldier. So that economic concern was there the hold time. And i dont mean to devalue the ideological reasons to fight, it is just that these economic reasons were also there. To speak to your point, these recruiting posters look like they do in part because they were part of a culture of business, of commerce. Host i am holding up one from your book right now, a good example of what you are speaking of. Mr. Luskey indeed. I have forgotten which town in pennsylvania ramages store was in. This is a small town in western pa. He is the one who touts war prices. And the flag and he mixes it altogether. Mr. Luskey i have to acknowledge my ignorance of whether these advertisements work. What ramage as a businessman is hoping for is that soldiers will enlist, may be in his store. A lot of stores served as recruiting offices. They would buy goods on their way out, maybe with some of the money they received from enlisting. Host i want to make a general assessment about your book and feel free to push back. That would be great. I hoped that would lead to some of the really powerful stories that you have in this book. What you have done so skillfully is that you have been able to take what i would call micro histories, you drill down into the stories of individuals and they are stories that are compelling, they have action and ramah, but they are stories that even though you say, reader, i dont want you to think that i believe that the Union Soldier in 1861 wasnt ideological you are saying, the soldier was ideological. But i catch up at times when i read your book to think, this is a dark side of the war, a sordid side of the war. This is a war for patriotism, for ambition, not for the nation, but ambition for the south. What you revealed to me and i think the readers is that this northern war effort which we have no suddenly put on a pedestal because in the current day, we have to smash all things that are confederate and demonize all things confederate. And i say god almighty, where can i find a civil war story which is truly uplifting . I am hoping maybe 1 of you can maybe one person you can speak about is charles brewster. My big question, and one of your stars in the book, how you might be able to respond to my reaction to your book. Mr. Luskey how do you define the dark turn which is a phrase that has been bandied about by most of our colleagues . Host john, why dont you go first . How do i define the dark turn. Mr. Luskey that is what pete is getting at. Pete americans in general like bedtime stories when it comes to the civil war, something reaffirming about the men who went off to fight for duty, cause and comrade. You have said it very well and i am not trying to be difficult, because in your book you acknowledge that idealism and high ideals did matter. The label dark turn impedes our understanding more than anything else. Instead, i would say what i think you have done and what others have done is, you have been able to get beyond the grand narrative of a war in which there are highs and lows and ultimately we see the cause of liberty being advanced, because the men in the Northern Army as well as the people back on the homefront know there is dissent and disagreement, but by and large they are committed to the union and committed to suppressing the rebellion. That grand narrative, and i think others are punching holes in it. That is a good thing. The phrase dark turn, im not sure where they get it, but i would like you to tell us how brewster is maybe one way of understanding that the war wasnt this grand, heroic narrative. Mr. Luskey i guess i would say that earlier works, recent scholars who followed or chart a historical change over time and see a different outlook on the war these days than in previous days point to mcphersons battle cry of freedom, and talk about a struggle that involved suffering, injustice, with an ennobling consequence, emancipation. Certainly those older works talked about the injustices and great deal of suffering that was caused. My contribution to a rethinking of the war is to look at the economy from a perspective of the middlemen, these labor agents who shaped that economy and some of the outcomes of the war. Very often in economic terms, if you look at a Macro Economic level, we are talking about huge business firms coming into greater pervasiveness and prominence after the war, like railroads. And they are given some of the credit and blame for changing the economy afterwards. In looking at it from this individual microlevel, i want readers to understand that it is not just economic forces that are changing it, it is the actions of ambitious men who try to make the wars transformations work for them, because they believe in free labor ideology, and because they believe, they are still dependent. They are not as independent as they want to be. I am more describing this than taking a side. I think what they do is pretty lousy. But let me just say that they are acting on events like emancipation and thinking of it in ways like, how can i become more independent . And it is going to be employing people who have just been emancipated. And it speaks to points made by historians like amy taylor in their books, manning, amy taylor, about the fact that emancipation did not mean freedom, or he did not mean or it did not mean freedom as we would understand it. And that creates opportunities and closes off opportunities to emancipated people, because they have to deal with the ambitious sorts, who i talk about in my book, like Charlie Brewster. Pete what did brewster do . How does he become an agent of emancipation, but he sees the war as a way to be an agent for himself. Mr. Luskey Charlie Brewster is from northampton, massachusetts, a store clerk before the war. You are holding david whites edited collection of his letters that i used at length in this book. Brewster is one of four or five characters that i take through the war to show how they participated in these changes. Brewster joins the 10th massachusetts, becomes a junior officer, Second Lieutenant in one of the forts outside d. C. In the first winter of the war. And becoming a junior officer gives him a perk enlisted men dont have. He can now hire a servant. And brewster and other Junior Officers in this area have their pick of fugitive people, running away from slavery in maryland primarily. When brewster hires a young man named david to work with him, he talks about defending david from recapture by his master, who is constantly coming into camp wrightwood looking for him. But at the same time, david is doing labor that brewster no longer has to do. And brewster says, i cant tell any difference now when i am an officer from when i was noncommissioned. He came in as a sergeant, i guess. He said he cant tell the difference, but in fact, he tells his mother, i used to have no money and a lot of work and now, i have lots of money and no work. So i think you can see there that the way he understands emancipation, and it is a process that is contested within his regiment, other officers saying weve got to drive these fugitives back to their masters and get rid of them, and people like brewster sticking up for these men and trying to explain away their selfinterest in the case. Later in the war, brewster becomes a recruiter of africanamerican men living around norfolk, virginia to fulfill the draft quotas for the state of massachusetts. By summer 1864, rules of recruitment had changed such that formerly enslaved people in the south could be recruited by agents in the field for northern states to serve for those states quotas. It is that kind of rapacious activity, trying to offer good bounties to secure the services of men while you are competing with other states to do so that brewster is importantly involved with, and that rapacious, ambitious activity by northern entrepreneurs and a great many northern families back home, who want formerly enslaved people to work as domestic servants in their homes, this reflects the interests of the northern middleclass coming into and trying to make out as best they can during the war by virtue of seizing some of this available labor. That helps explain what happened after the war, with the rise of the Freedmens Bureau that operates an Employment Agency in washington and farms out former slaves to northern households, and in some of the labor conflicts and the retreat from reconstruction we see in the 1870s, when a lot of white northern employers turn away from helping formerly enslaved african americans, in part because they still have a lot of misgivings that laborers arent obedient enough. Pete what you just described in brewsters case, you noted recruitment of former slaves into the union army and that the practices utilized were often coercive or deceptive, and that these other labor agents were able to funnel not just formerly enslaved laborers to the north, and domestics, but they also used former confederate prisoners as well, trying to find them jobs up north. I was struck by this book, also dismayed because i have had over the years, especially when i worked at national parks, visitors coming to me with a lost cause view of the war. And with that lost cause view, they time and again said that regulars were composed of men who are often there against their will. What if i were to say to you that this book unintentionally reaffirms some of that lost cause dogma, how would you respond . Mr. Luskey im pausing. [laughter] i guess my argument is that white northerners, in the main, fought the war to vanquish slavery and the power of slaveholders. They were fighting against the cabal of the most wealthy men in their society who lauded all of the political power over them. In fact, to bring up hammond, a lot of white northerners took on, in an ironic way, took on the label mudsill for themselves. Charlie brewster is one of them. We were the bone and sinew of the north, the white mudsills mowing down these cavaliers. People like brewster wanted access to the souths resources. He talked with his family about, downoiled the soil here in virginia is wonderful. He is not alone in saying that. I want to tell uncle edward he ought to move here and i am thinking of getting a farm down here. This is when we can have independence. That is going to mean utilizing the labor of former slaves. Now, there is never any doubt in brewster and other northerners minds that they are going to pay wages to these former slaves, but understand that wage laborers during the war were somewhat ambiguous. I talked a lot about benjamin butler, the general who, at various moments during the war, commanded the department of virginia and later the department of virginia and North Carolina. 1863, he initiated a plan in which he set the highest wage that an africanamerican man could make at 10, a number your audience will know was at that point the monthly wage for africanamerican soldiers. And he did that to funnel men from other, perhaps more remunerative work, which seems hard to believe, but in the quartermasters department, black men were making more than that per month. Butler was trying to get those men into his armies, into his department. So there were ways in which commanders could fix the promise of wage labor by saying that there is a ceiling to what you can make. The first people to be upset about that were other employers in his department, who complained to very little effect. Butler got his way, and these men did start to enlist, because there were fewer and fewer opportunities for them to do anything else. He says that impressment is not permissible under this general order, but one of his subordinates does that very thing. I talk about the subordinates, john nelson, and how he was trying to recruit the 10th usct, his regiment, through underhanded means. And the testimony at his courtmartial, for having done this he was brought up on courtmartial for impressing black men to serve in his regiment. What i find is that the men who were dragooned at Bayonet Point into this regiment talked about a mixture of things that reflected the power, ideological or cultural power, of both consent and coercion. These men would say, when asked, did you come here of your own accord to enlist . No, this gang of zouaves forced me to leave my own crops. That isding stunning to me, reading some of these stories, in that these men say they already were independent, they were farming, maybe a government farms, occupied farms, but feeling some sense of ownership over what they were doing, and some independence in what they were doing, and they would ask, can i bring my corn in before i go . Like, im willing to go, but on my own clock. They believed that their consent mattered, so they will say things like, i was made to come here but i was also obliged to be a soldier. They are just trying to figure out how they can conceive of themselves as citizens, which we often think about being about rights. But it is also about obligation. They understood that obligation. One guy said, he was forced to come to this camp, and he said, i am here to fight for my country. Pete confederate soldiers had the very same conception, did they not . I have an obligation to my nation and also a responsibility to my home and community. At the time, they were going awol, going from army to home and back and forth, it isnt any different than any of these usct volunteers and what their idea of duty was. Mr. Luskey i didnt really answer your question about the lost cause view. I guess i would just say it is complicated. Even in a situation in which men were impressed, they could feel like in some ways they might want to be there. Maybe under different circumstances, so it is hard to say. Certainly i would react strongly against any assertion that these men purely did something that they didnt want to do. Pete you did answer, because you made the point they got wages. You also made the point they got to arbitration, it could be a courtmartial, but there still was some arbitration. It is clear that their status as free people, maybe not the freedom some of us would like for them to have had, had what and what we can imagine, but you make it very clear it is not slavery. Mr. Luskey it is not slavery. I would also say though that wage labor had its own coercions, which in many ways were substantial. I can tell you a story about another soldier who was accosted on the streets of philadelphia, a guy named aaron willet, 42 years old, africanamerican man accosted by a white recruiter named joseph peck, who offered him passage by train to philadelphia and new haven, where peck said you could join my regiment for a 400 bounty in and the state of connecticut will kick in six dollars a month for your wife and two dollars a month for each of your kids. And he said in testimony later on, you know something bad is going to happen because i know about this through courtmartial testimony, but he said, i couldnt believe connecticut would pay someone from another state to serve in one of the one of their regiments. But this was a deal that was too good to pass up. We should also know that workers were not gullible, but they were looking for bargains, they were looking for opportunities, and no one was ever paid before they did work, so you had to have at least a modicum of trust to people who offered you jobs. So he took an overnight train to new haven where he was met by a man named benjamin pardee, who posed as, he said he was the colonel of the 29th connecticut. At that time, peck informed willett that the 20, the cost of his train trip, would have to be forfeited out of his bounty, and we are going to pay you 200, not four dollars. Not 400. Willett said, im not doing it, that is not the bargain we made in philadelphia. Pardee at that moment says, you are going to get 75 more when you actually muster into the regiment. In camp. Pardee also tells him, that there are thieves around the camp, so if you want to do, if if you wanted to, if you thought it was a good idea, you could leave your bounty with me for safekeeping. Can you imagine this . You know what is going to happen. Willett thinks he is talking to his Commanding Officer so he says, ok boss, here is 170. And pardeese peck are not officers in the 29th connecticut, they are leading the effort that is sponsored by the states governor, william buckingham, to recruit africanamerican men for connecticut regiments. So they are still officials of the state, but they are totally misleading the men they are recruiting. In fact, connecticuts bounty 300, not 400, but they had to promise philadelphia men 400 to get them to come with them. In alexandria, virginia, they only had to promise men 100. So pardee has this network of agents working for him to bring africanamerican men north to connecticut. The courtmartial proceedings were initiated by john dix, who commanded the department of the east in new york city, and he ruled men like pardee had to be stopped. We have to give bounties directly to enlisted men. It was at this very moment that , thengham, as governor Provost Marshal and the secretary of war said to general dix, you cant do that. We must have recruiting agents, these brokers to get these men for us, or we never get any men at all. I think that case speaks directly to the problem, the problem of wage labor and how Northern Leaders understood how wage labor and some of its coercive and fraudulent aspects had to be employed in order to win the war. Willett ends up running away from service a couple months later. He is docked at six months pay. He comes back into the military in the fall of 1864, only to die basically penniless in service in december, of disease. So you can see in that one case, i talked about consent being important and this guy in some ways consented to this, and revoked his consent and then was duped into making a new and much less advantageous bargain that ultimately led to his death. One thing i thought about when i was reading through your book was a phrase i heard many times in my family, because i am descended from appalachian hog farmers, people who either volunteered or were drafted. It has always been rich mans war, poor mans fight. William marble touched on this in his book about lincolns mercenaries. I wonder if you could touch on the paradox of union men fighting against southern aristocracy, yet they are still under the control of this overarching institution. And then the institution tells them, you can get out of it, but you need so much money to do so. And you touched on that, talked a lot about that in the book. It is kind of like the elephant in the room with the conversation we are having, the bounty system, as far as getting yourself out of service in 1863 and post 1863. How do you think the idea of rich mans war, poor mans fight, because of the bounty issue, may have taken an effect on the service of others or men deserting, are something to that effect. Mr. Luskey good question. We need to define some things. Part of the enrollment act passed in march 1863 by the u. S. Congress, that was the draft. It created different classes of men and put them in rank order to be drafted, if communities did not meet their quota. The first thing to say was that communities could enlist men to meet their quota through other means. One of the means they took was collecting higher taxes to raise bounty funds locally through bond issues and other ways, to raise the money necessary to recruit, to encourage volunteers to enlist so that there wouldnt be a draft in their community. But the draft also had a clause called the commutation clause, which offered drafted men the opportunity to pay 300 to avoid service. They would pay that to the government. They could also hire a substitute to serve in their place. The justification behind the commutation act goes straight up to president lincoln, that setting the commutation fee where it was stopped a more free and chaotic market in substitutes. So if you set a commutation fee at 300, you would never pay a substitute more than that. So there was an economic reason for that. The criticism came from those who didnt have 300, and friends of people who didnt have 300, and that is where the concern about this being a rich mans war and a poor mans fight came from the north. I think will be here you probably hear that phrase more in the cell. But in the north, a day laborer in new york city is still making one dollar a day, and making maybe 200 a year in seasonal work. A drygoods clerk might make 500 or 600 or 800 a year. So there is a range. This commutation fee could look different depending on which perspective you are coming from, what your occupation was, what your Family Savings were, so this certainly did create inequities. What i would say about william marbles lincolns mercenaries is that it has been based on census research. Marble has done painstaking work in sources that list occupations and real estate but other than that, dont really tell you a lot. He has a lot of interesting information and to make the argument that it was a rich mans war and a poor mans fight. You see a lot of men on the listingcome scales in enlisting from the beginning. He often treats people with similar amounts of capital, defined here by census tallies of personal estate and real estate the same, even though there occupational aspirations their occupational aspirations may be completely different. So he ends up treating textile workers working on looms and so on in mill towns in new england the same as an urban drygoods clerk who might want to, if you if he can, become an independent businessman, who might be very wealthy and might have wealthy parents, for instance. The way i come down on this question is, it is a war that for northerners seemed to be a war in which they could become rich, because the war revealed that other americans were poor. So it is about class, for sure, but it is about a northern middleclass trying to succeed in their own revolution against slaverys capital, even if that means taking advantage of vulnerable workers, both north and south. Let me pause and let you interject, but i know i havent quite answered all your question questions yet, john. I was wondering about the bounty system and i have heard a lot of confederate memoirs and diaries and they say come we and they say we cant have this many slaves, and they were of course the first to have a draft. That caused that discrepancy. That possibly leads to desertion rates and such. It would be a really interesting comparative thing to see if that also happened in the Northern Army. Mr. Luskey the thing that changes in 1864 is the commutation act, because of all this criticism, is repealed. That creates a market in substitutes where draftees would have to pay over the moon for a substitute. That leads to this development of a class of labor brokers called bounty brokers who declare for drafted men and might want to serve as substitutes, that they have information for drafted men and those who want to be hired in an anonymous system of labor. I gave you guys one of the letters of one of those bounty brokers to post, in which he refers to men as cheap, and that is where i get the title from my book these men linked with rural and urban people, people from the west and east, they had substitutes for surgeon to recruiter until they could get them into the service. They employed bounty jumpers with the understanding they would receive the lions share of the cut. Certainly there is a problem of men collecting bounty, absconding, and in listing again for another bounty. My Research Shows a lot of those and enlisting again for another bounty. My Research Shows a lot of those men were employed by these brokers. So even that relationship wasnt just about the ambitions of individual soldiers, but they were kind of employed by the brokers themselves. These substitute brokers would misrepresent the men they brought for enlistment. They would use paper credits that had mens names on papers but didnt really correspond with any living human being, so they were enlisting people just on paper, so they were cheating town commissioners who were coming into big cities like new york and brooklyn trying to fill the community quotas. And they were also getting men drunk and and listing them, and and enlisting them, and stealing the lions share of their bounties before they could sober up. Pete the other thing you pointed to is, it is Human Trafficking that is occurring with these labor brokers. Human trafficking something we often dont think about when we reflect upon the northern war effort. What your book has done so brilliantly for us is that it opens up these underground economies, and it is a point john and i have touched on with a number of our other guests, that the regional scholarship you have done can only be done by going into the archives. And we talked about differences between scholarly work and work that is more for a public audience. This book, men is cheap, it does both. It advances our knowledge and challenges our history and does it in such a way that you see, thanks to brians skillful writing, you see historical actors at work doing things. They are stories and people that the reader can connect with, but at the end of the day, this book can only be done if you do the backbreaking research. That is going to the archives. How many years did it take for you to do the research for this book . Mr. Luskey a long time. It took 10 years from conceiving of it as a book about soldiers economies and melding it, bringing it together with another project on an institution called the intelligence office, the place where antebellum employers and employees went to find information about the labor market. So it took many years of research, and then writing to bring it together. Pete brian, our time is coming to an end. Thank you so much for coming this evening. I remind our viewers that if you go to the university of North Carolina presss homepage, unc, you will find bryans book and other books in the civil war american series. John has the code for us, hero1dah40. Put in that code and you get 40 off bryans book. Thank you again, so much. Any final words before we part . John i wanted to let anybody know again the information about the book and the 40 off is in the description above. Im sorry we didnt get deeper into the intelligence office, officers, because i felt like that one time when i had to go seeking a job. And i ended up at a warehouse. It is something. It was a fantastic read. Luckily, i got the book last night at 10 00 and almost pulled an allnighter. It was a great book. I did a short video on instagram for you as well, brian. Mr. Luskey thank you very much. John absolutely, and all the information is in the description, and brian, you opened some eyes in the comments. Thank you. This is American History tv on cspan3. Each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan three, go inside a Different College classroom and hear about topics from the American Revolution to civil rights to u. S. President s. With most College Campuses closed due to the impact of the coronavi transfer teaching to a virtual setting. Gerber job gorbachev did most of the work, but reagan met him and supported him. Madison originally called it freedom of the use of the press. It is freedom to print and publish things. It is not freedom of what we refer to as institutionally the press. Lectures in history, every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Find it where you listen to podcasts. New york citys Lower East Side Tenement Museum takes us through reconstructive dwellings that show how immigrant families dealt with poverty and crowded conditions. Here we are. We have taken a leap forward to 1945. You will see that around you in all of these wonderful amenities the family would have enjoyed. They had electricity. They would have been able to listen to the radio. They have electric lights. Top, which is installed on top of the coal burning stove. We see the bathtub in the kitchen, which is typical of those days. The family emigres here after the establishment of ellis island. They had a great deal more bureaucracy to deal with going through the immigration process. Not least of which was the u. S. S Immigration quotas. These dictated the number of immigrants who were allowed to come to the United States based on nationality. There were fewer italians allowed then there were immigrants from other countries. They knew this. The immigration quotas, which the u. S. Government was using in those days, were based in part on what we would consider a pseudoscience called eugenics, which is the theory that not all human beings are genetically equal. Some people are inherently superior to others. They were preparing to immigrate here, they worried his wife would not be able to follow him if she went through the proper legal channels. The family does not know for how his wife eventually winds up here in the u. S. , but to the best of our understanding, she works around the system. We talk about this to think more clearly about how immigration is discussed in the present day. Her experience is similar to presentday immigrants. We like to put faces to names. We share family photos to illustrate. The familyo, matriarch. They lived here with their two children, josephine and johnny. Josephine plays a special role in this museum because later in life she discovered the tournament museum. I think that mustve been so strange for her to see her childhood home had become a museum and tourist attraction. She was excited about the museum and shared her memories with us. I have audio of her memories living here. I remember sitting around the table in the kitchen under the us,ow, whatever mom made the radio always playing. Italian music, italian soap operas. My mother crying all the time. She used to miss her family. She left her whole family in italy, came here as a young girl. She never saw them again for many, many years. She never saw her mother or father again. [singing in italian] learn more about the Tenement Museum sunday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern, 3 00 pacific on American History tv. American history tv is on social media. Follow us at cspan history. Next, a conversation with james baker about leadership and his career. He served as Ronald Reagans white house chief of staff and treasury secretary. Hes interviewed by attorney and historian talmage boston, Baylor University law school hosted the conversation and provided the video. Brad hello. My name is brad toben, the dean at baylor law school. Thank you for joining us today as we have a virtual frontrow seat to listen in on a fascinating discussion between our friend, talmage boston, and former secretary of state, james baker iii. As you know, secretary baker was a powerhouse in washington, d. C. , in the beltway, and literally around the globe as he served as the United States secretary of state and also further served four United States president s over the course of three decades. Secretary baker was scheduled to be our capstone speaker at the 2020 vision for leadership
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