Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies and brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. And now on booktvs after words program, historian pamela haag provides a history of guns in america. Host were here today with pam a la chicago, author of a new book called the gunning of America Business and the making of american gun culture. Hello, pam a la, how are you . Guest hello, im fine. Host pamela, exactly why did you write book, and when did you decide that we needed a book like this . Entering well, its an interesting story. Today most people who talk about guns love guns or hate guns. But when i started this project, i had never owned a gun or even used one. Nor had i been involved in gun control politics. Instead, i came to this story through a ghost story. When i was in graduate school in new haven, a friend of mine told me the story about Sarah Winchester who was Oliver Winchesters daughterinlaw. Now, Oliver Winchester was known as the rifle king and the manufacturer of the winchester repeater rifle. And according to ledge legend, sarah, his daughterinlaw, believed she was being haunted by the spirits of everyone killed by winchester rifles. She was a spiritualist and believed ghosts were haunting her. I began to pursue leads on sarah, but she was an elusive subject, and i set the project aside to work on another book. Then newtown happened, sandy hook, and after that massacre my mind wandered back to Sarah Winchester. Only this time i thought that maybe i was starting with the wrong end of the story, that maybe the more interesting story here, the more mysterious story wasnt sarahs ghost story, but the story of the gun industry itself. About which i knew nothing. And i wanted to know more. So being trained as an historian, i began to look into it and followed the trail of the money of the gun industry. Host follow the money. Fascinating. Theres i want to read a paragraph to you from your book on page xxi. Quote, writes pam a la chicago pamela haag, the tragedy of gun violence emerged from the banality of the american gun business. The forgotten but ironclad logic that gunned america was the amorality of business, not diabolical intentions of the merchant of death or the add have beentures of the gunslinger. The gun culture developed out of a perpetual quest for new and larger markets that had exceptional social consequences. Even so, the thrust of gun politics is toward the mystification of the gun. American gun culture is explained as a legacy of the Second Amendment, militias, wild west gunslinger, cowboys, the frontier, american individualism, gangs and the ma big significant charisma of violence, video games, manhood and hollywood. It is explained, in short, as the legacy of almost everything but what it always was and still have, a business. Unquote. That seems, to me, to capture a lot of the thrust of this book. And i just wondered if you could talk about how gun culture being propelled by business is underappreciated and underexamined in our culture today. Guest yes host historically. Guest uhhuh. I would say if the reader takes away any message from this book, its that the history of our gun culture has a few elements. One, indeed, is exceptional, and thats the Second Amendment. Thats very unique among nations. But large parts of the history of our gun culture come from very unexceptional things; the gun industry. Guns in this country were not just about the Second Amendment, they were also a commodity that was sold and designed to be sold, produced to be sold and was treated very much like an ordinary, unregulated commodity in key years of its existence. So to really understand why we ended up such a heavily armed nation, its important to understand the unexceptional part of that legacy which is that the gun industry acted like an industry, behaved like an industry, followed the ordinary trends of all other industries in our history and had the same aspirations as any other industry. Once agains began to be produced industrially and in larger numbers, it was only natural that the gun industrialists with every generation had to revisit the question who is going to buy all these guns. Simply sitting back and dealing with pr preexisting demand wouldnt have been enough. I think it strains credulity to believe that the element of our gun culture that had the very most to gain by selling and promoting and celebrating their product is the very most invisible when we think about guns. Instead, much of the political talk today is exclusively about interpreting the Second Amendment. The gun industry has become almost invisible in that history. Host well, if i were Ely Eli Whitney or Oliver Winchester or any of the historical gun manufacturers and i were reading this book, i might be inclined to push back on a word you use which is that you describe this as the product, gun culture, as the product of the amorality of business. Now, my question is if a manufacturer then or today is creating a product that is totally legal and purchased in large numbers by Police Departments and the military to do all kinds of things theyre authorized to do and for citizens to hunt or protect themselves with, how is that a reflection of amorality in business . Guest well, what i i mean by amorality is that the first gun captain lusts, the first gun capitalists, the first gun industrialists werent thinking about their product as a good product or a bad product. Today we live in a an age of more conscious capitalism. Theres a little more talk about Business Ethics and corporate ethics. But for the first generation who really built the gun industry, amoral simply means that they looked at guns more as a product to sell. They didnt trade it with a lot of malignancy or worry about that, or nor did they really celebrate the gun as something more than what it was. They had a very empirical view, and its interesting because, of course, most of the first gun zions started doing other things. You know, oliver moved from making mens shirts into the rifle. Eli whitney, of course, invented the cotton gin, then found himself broke and took up a contract in 1798 to make muskets for the u. S. Government. That was something to do with his machine. So amorality really describes a world of man, a tight knot of men who are responsible for starting this industry who were more interested in the means of making things than the particular thing they made. So they were interested in getting up a machine. They were on the vanguard of american industry, in fact, not just the gun culture. So in some ways, they were surprisingly neutral about their products. Host did any of these men and i believe they were all men the key gun manufacturers of history, did any of them express in the research pg that you did, and you did an amazing amount of research. Guest thanks. Host and i should mention this is a definitive and provocative and fascinating history of the gun business. But did any of these men share any doubts or moral qualms about what they were doing or what they had donesome. Guest well, thats a great question. Theres a lot of ways to tackle that. At first Oliver Winchester very much saw his rifle as a weapon for the romance of war, as he called it. So, and thats not unusual. Many of these gun industrialists and Many Americans, actually, in the 1840s and 850s still very much thought of the gun as an implement for war. They werent thinking about it as much in the commercial or civilian sense. But its important to realize that when guns are being produced by private industry and not for public defense, the logic is very different. Samuel colt was a very ambitious capitalist, and he had very, he was very rapacious about figuring out how to sell his guns. And for him things like war which are, you know, horrible for civilians was more like advertisement. You know, this was something that could promote his rifle. He looked at the cessation of war as a time of great difficulty. In 1838 in the seminole war, his colt revolver was used, but when the war was overred, he complained it had happened so quickly that his market had been destroyed. So the logic of making guns in a private industry was very different than the logic of guns used in war. So they looked at it from a business calculus. Interestingly, Oliver Winchester wrote somewhat frequently about what he called the moral effect of his rifle, how would it affect the person who had that rifle. And he commented on the coolness that it could impart to the gun owner. And he looked at it as a weapon that could multiply the power of one individual and make him equal to a troop or equal to a group of men. Toward the end of his life when he was really developing the u. S. Commercial market in the 1870s, he talked very provocatively about his weapon as perfect for single individuals traveling through a wild country. He was beginning to develop very much the mystique of the rifle as one of selfdefense against violent conditions and circumstances. But in terms of regrets, no, i dont think that they expressed samuel colt sold guns up until the very last minute to the south before the civil war and was called a base trader by all of the new york papers and was certainly excoriated for that. But his comment was make hay while the sun shines. Host i want to get to Sarah Winchester in a second, but before we do, you mentioned advertising. There are two theres a part of your book that totally amazed me. Page 324. Id like you to explain to us what this is. Guest uhhuh. Host quote, picture a redhaired picture a redheaded boy in the front row of the movies. Hes on the edge of his seat, eyes popping out of his head as the end is written across a big game film were the star speakers. Up flashes your ad, boys earning winchester sharpshooter medals. Whats the next thought in that boys mind . Whats he going to save his quarters for . A winchester, of course. Guest right. Host thats continued on page 337. Now, this is an ad. You know your son wants a gun. But you dont know how much he wants it. He cant tell you, its beyond words. [laughter] what is that . [laughter] and who wrote that, and what does it signify in the history of the gun business . Guest great question, and those are very provocative quotes. One of my favorite sources out of the winchester archives are the Confidential Sales bulletins. Those are both from the early 1900s. The first, i believe, is from 1917 and the second quote is from a literary digest ad for guns in 1921. And what these really signify is a huge change in how the gun industry was going about its business at the turn of the century. Big things were happening in america. We were an urban country, we were more modern. Most importantly, this was a postfrontier era. So like any other industry, gun makers needed to figure out, well, how do we create value for this product . They were also swimming in the currents of modern advertisement which are much more interested in emotional appeal and tapping into dmond demands and desires and feelings about products, not just needs. So that first ad is from a massive Winchester CompanyMarketing Campaign that they shorthanded in the Company Records as the boy plan. And the idea was they were going to sell letters to all their retailers to send to boys, and they had an exact number they wanted to reach, it was 3,573,000 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, and the company felt this was their new niche, their new target audience. And its surprising to us today, but they thought that boys who saw that winchester ad at the end of a saturday matinee movie would be saving up their quarters and going to a local dealer and buying their winchester rifle. The company was aware that some states had age limits on who could buy guns, and they urginged their sales force to urged their sales force to write back to headquarters if they lived in a state that had age restrictions on when you could buy a gun. But they also, as indicated in the second ad, were becoming very emotional. They were really deepening the mystique of the gun. You know, the gun was something that maybe in the 1800s was needed but not loved. But in the 1900s, the gun is something thats loved but maybe not needed. So the Company Started tapping into the emerging language of psychology and subconscious desires, and they started making the gun really more an object of emotional fulfillment, more of a luxury and something that could tap into emotional needs be not practical needs. If not practical needs. Host theres a word weve not yet mentioned, and thats hunting. Now, for the last since america was created, there is a significant portion of the population in rural and western and mountain and plains area ares, of course plains areas, of course, who if they didnt make a living or put food on the table through hunting, they enjoyed it as a sport and still do today. My question is how does that connect to your history, and is that totally separate and apart from the military and crime components of the history that youre telling, the hunting part of it . Guest right. Well, thats a good question. Oliver winchester was so enamored of his rifle being a military weapon that he didnt develop that hunting market until later, really in the 1900s. The larger point you raise is that in the 19th century its somewhat saw a laishes to talk about a gun culture. I think there were eclectic, heterogenous gun cultures, and the gun industry in the 1870s and 1880s was very attuned to these eclectic cultures. And one of them, certainly, was the recreationallist reached through ads in shooting and fishing and magazines like that. At the same time, they recognized what the Winchester Company called the ordinary shooter, their idea of the average shooter and the ordinary shooter was a farm boy, a farmer, farmers boy. They were reached through american agriculturalists or the rural new new yorker. And they were seeking out military markets through the army and navy journal. So really in the 19th century you can see a whole variety of different kind of gun subcultures that coexist. In the 20th century, politically the gun kind of gets unified as one thing, as one object. And it gets unified politically. But more most of our list for most of our history, weve had very eclectic use of guns, and Many Americans look to guns more as toolsment thats a major point in my book. A big transition here from the 1800s to our time is the gun kind of moving from a tool to something thats more of a totem that has much deeper political value, social value, ineffable value, indirect value. Host Sarah Winchester had a house. Tell us about her house, and tell us about her ghosts. Guest yes. So as i said, Sarah Winchester was Oliver Winchesters daughterinlaw. She was born in new haven in 1840 and was celebrated as the belle of new haven. She married Oliver Winchesters only son in 1862 right after antitam, in fact, and she had a series of misfortunes in her life. She lost several or babies several babies to stillbirth. One baby who was born alive died after a month very tragically. And then in 1881 her husband died of a very gruesome case of tuberculosis. Now, legend has it that sarah was a spiritualist and believed that the world of ghosts and the world of the dead overlaid the world of the living. And its a doozy of a ghost story, and as with any ghost story, the ghosts usually have a message for us. And in this case, sarah according to legend went to a medium who told her that she was, indeed, being haunted by the spirits of all of the winchester rifle casualties and that she needed to atone for this by building. Perhaps building a house for them. We dont really know what she was to do. [laughter] but she was never to stop building. She was to build nonstop using her rifle fortune she had inherited to do so. So zaire are moves out sarah moves out to san jose in 1885, some of her sisters had already moved out. On a whim, she buyed a plot of land, it was a modest cottage at the time. And from that point on, she built an extravagant, fabulous house that really made no sense. Its like a riddle. And she did not stop until her death in 1922. Today host how many rooms, how many rooms were there, and what did it look like, and why did she get so carried away with the house . Guest yes. So before the earthquake, San Francisco earthquake in 1906, it had over 200 rooms. The earthquake collapsed part of front of the house. And there are a few explanations for what she was up to. The most profane explanation is that she was just an architectural hobbyist, but she didnt know anything about architecture. So she made a mistake. She would just build a room on top of another room. She built a staircase that led to the ceiling, it led nowhere. She would build very small rooms with very small twofoothigh doors next to huge cabinets that had much bigger doors but that went nowhere. She designed the house very much like a maze. When youre in it, youre disoriented. Youre not sure where youre going. Its easy to lose your way. The ghost story says that she was doing this to try to evade the wicked spirits or atone for the winchester casualties. But in my research, i found one or two enticing clues to suggest that she might have, indeed, believed in ghosts, but i cant say that i have absolutely proved that. Host well, you have a picture in your book of her seance room, is that right . Guest uhhuh. Thats right. This is host and guest uhhuh. Host yeah. Go right ahead. Guest yeah. So thats one of the things that kind of makes me believe the ghost story about Sarah Winchester. In the late 1800s, one of the ruses of mediums is that they would perform, they would perform seances in rooms that had special cabinets built where they could pretend to be a spirit, you know . They could create an illusion for the person sitting there that a spirit was actually materializing before them. And it was also recommended that if somebody wanted to become a better medium, they should spend hours a day sitting in a spirit cabinet, a very sm