One more question, please. Everything i read about lynn or saw on twitter it seems like the pace is nonstop. In one part of the book someone asked him are you ever going to slow down you write like you are running out of time and he said i am. Do you share that same work ethic or was it hard to keep up with his pace as you were working with someone who literally never stops . We do kind of share the same work ethic. We didnt have choice. We had a deadline they set and had to keep turning out words as fast as we could. But you know, he is a very special man. The speed of his brain. It comes out when he was free flowing. He is funny and comes up with things moving. You have to be on your toes but he is a friend and that is one of the things i love about the guy. It never stops. Thank god because if it did maybe we would not have hamilton. I have to say everything jeremy just said about lin i would say about jeremy. Really, he is remarkable and i am so honored to know him and that he was here to tell our story. So thank you very much. [applause] jeremy will be signing books. These beautiful, beautiful books right outside. Thanks. And thank you once again on behalf of the printers row lit fest. You can find out more at printersrow. Org and give us your feedback there as well. Thank you. [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. I am looking forward to reading alexander hamilton. I am one of the lucky few who got to see the broadway show before it became an impossible to get a get. It wet my appetite to read the book and see how it was transposed into a play. It will be a Good Opportunity to sit down and enjoy alexander hamilton. Booktv wants to know what you are reading this summer. Tweet us the answer or post it on our Facebook Page at facebook. Com booktv. [inaudible conversation] good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to barnes and noble on the west side. I am the pleasure of inducine introducing sean wilent who is a professor and the author of many works. He brings us his new book, the politicians and the egalitarians in which rereminds us the commanding role Party Politics have played in our struggle against economic inequality. At the nations founding americans believed wealth extremes would destroy the revolutionary experiment in a republican government. That idea has sense shaped National Political conflict. Sean wilent transforms our understanding of the political character. Gates junior writes he writes with a vast knowledge of the american past while exploring the interplay between raw Party Politics and the ebb and flow of reform efforts. In offering his take on pivotal figures wilent challenges us to challenge ideas in the way that honors the best democratic system he waz written about throughout his career. Even when i most disagree with him his arguments are always vigorous and passionate lively and engaging. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming author sean wilent. [applause] well, thank you, maya for that introduction. Thank you for coming out on this rainy night. It is great to be back at barnes and noble on 82nd. I am back home. It always seem to rain when i am here. I dont know why that is. At any rate, okay the book is the politicians and the egalitarians. A few words of background. I am going to read a fair amounts because that is the best way to get across what this book is about. A little bit of background, though. Sometimes you write a book without realizing you are writing it and that was very much the case with this book. Back in 2001, i wrote an essay about egalitarianism in american political life and it was about economic egalitarianism call the loss of the galitarian tradition and came out just after 9 11 and it bombed. Some years later i was thinking about politics and post partisanship and at the time when the president was beginning to become more partisan, that kind of fell away, too. But i realized in fact those two essays put together actually had an argument to them. And the more i thought about that argument the more i realized i had been making that argument for a very long time in one way or another. In a variety of essays and reviews and all sorts of things. I looked over that a lot and thought with a fair amount of work there is a book here on this team of politics, egalitarianism, Party Politics and how they Work Together and how they have worked together in the american past. So here is it. This is the result. The politicians and the egalitarians. Two groups and maybe the key to the entire title, provided by it publisher who is here is this wonderful ampersand in the title. That is about the and. Very often americans think of political life as pinning the politicians against the egalitarians and the egalitarians against the politicians. They are always at odds. Politicians wont do anything unless pushed and the galitarians think the politic n politicians are a bunch of crooks but they work the best when the two groups converge. You can understand the great events in political history are those moments and they are very unusual and dont happen all of the time. When the politicians and egalitarians actually converge and that is what this book is about. But it is a book of parts. It begins actually, and i want to open this up, it is not simply about hard headed politics but it has a mall purpose that is outlined in the epiigraph. It really sums up what this book is about so i will read it. It pay be well for the statesman to know that stateship changes to an opportunity and that cannot be distinguished from dishonesty but the prophet ought to realize the higher prospective and uncompromising judgment had a note of it. Fran francis of asisi might have been nor is there any reason to believe lincoln was inferior to garrison the prophet. The achievement of the statesman must be judged taking into account the limitations of human toyota which the statesman must and the prophet need not consider. That is the moral underpinning of this book. I lay it out in the introduction and i will read more from there. There are two keys to unlooking the sear secrets of american politics. Current historians have mislaid these keys and now they are hidden from sight. Once recovered and put to use the keys demonstrate their usefulness. The first key is to recognize both the permanent reality and the effectiveness of partisanship and Party Politics. Americans have been known to believe these things. The founding generation distrusted parties. The framers of the constitution designed a National Government they hopeded would avoid partisanship and destructive tendencies. More than a hundred years later, reformers of the progressive era distrusted parties and tried to replace them with independent commissions of experts. Americans in our own time think like wise. We want government conduct in a lofty manner without confrontation and chaos. But more than 200 years of anti partisanship has produced nothing. This is because despite their intentions the framers built a political system which inspoored partisan politics. After badly needed constitutional tinkering the system fostered the rise of mass based parties. A nation as large and diverse as the United States requires parties to turn discontent into laws and institution and prevent chronicle political breakdown. Americans devised election rules that insure a two party system in which third parties dont last. Partisan politics is built into human nature. It is certainly built into the american version of human nature. Partisan politics survived because in the United States it has worked well or well enough. Historians nowadays dismiss this basicing truth and regard the Political Parties as a hindrance and glorify outsiders and social movements. They point with justice to the countless and unending episodes of corrupting politics and sustaining social wrongs but the great histories in history have been settled from the convergence of protests and politics. Party democracy has exceeded even addressing the most oppressive american problems like slavery that could only be solved by blood. Anti slavery partisan and politicians built parties of their own and the carefully rigged party system fell apart and the election to the presidency of one of those antislavey politicians, lincoln, forced the crisis that led to the slaveholder rebellion and in time emancipation. Every since, all of the Great American social legislation from the regressiveive area to the new delta the Great Society has been achieved by and thew the Political Parties threw. The second be key is the recognition from the very start americans have recognized and sometimes been consumed by the need to combat economic privilege and strengthen the true vast hold of wealth. The struggle against economic inequality has been a great subterra subterrainian river in the past. Sometimes breaking through the surface and sometimes going underground. Americans have fought about the meaning of democracy and Government Authority and rights and social justice. Running through these fights has been an occurring insistence that vast material inequalities threaten democracy. This too we have been reluctant sooz. The founders believes that sound Political Institutions would sustain a just and harmonious society. We dont read about it in the declaration of independence, constitution or bill of rights but it is in numerous speeches and the correspondence of jefferson and madison and conflicts dominated american politics and National Politics from the battles between jefferson and hamilton to the clashes of the era of andrew jackson. Slavery stunted and then deformed democracy and its legacy is complicated and sometimes disrupted economic inequality. White racism sustains and de deepens great disparity, economic inequality has become a symptom of racial injustice. Thus when antislavery forces attacked human bondage as immoral it was the cornerstone of economic privilege as exerciseed by the slave power and the northern accomplice. The war was a war of emancipation but a fight to vindicate american democracy against a domineering and the wealth and power focused in the hands of a tiny elite. After the egalitarian impulses of the civil war dissipated, White Supremacy is big business subdued talk. Efforts by blacks and supporters to lay full claim were crushed after the overthrow of reconstruction and created a new class of Industrial Workers that separated harass repression. The socalled movement brought the issue of inequality back front and center as did Lynden Johnsons fight for economic quality to the one to racial justice. In the late 1960s the egalitarian politicians began loosing steam and loosing its way. The long conservative era hailed by the election of reagan to the presidency in 1980 seemed to reputation and launched a divisive and politically devastating culture war based on race and religion. Dissecting galitarian politics beclaim claims of racial identi identity. Hundreds wondered why so Many Americans were willing to vote against their economic interest . Historians tried to explain the shortcomings and failures of economic egalitarianism in american politics. Yet the issue of economic equality has been the great millennial question in American History and came back into the focus since the great crash of 2008 compelling republicans and democrats to decry the growing divergeance between americans and the rest of the country. It prompts us to look where we didnt want to look where considering past politics in the United States and see things we had failed to see. So with the Party Politics and the underlying question of economic privilege and inequality the whole of american political history emerges more clearly. In the beginning democracy in america rested on the proper proposition that vast inequality in wealth was dangerous. But now it fits into Party Politics which hasnt always been easy to do. Political leaders hostile to economic privilege have been crippled by slavery and jim crow. Relations have been fraught in the absence of capable leadership they have become disruptive. The driving force in american political history has been the effort to curve the power of concentrated wealth whether the power of had slaveholders. Egalitarians berate politicians and they talk about the obl obliviousness they have. It is figvital politicians do a they can to advance equality sometimes to the point of amending the constitution as with the final destruction of slavery. It be be understood as the politicians and the egalitarians and the faithful times when their labors converge. I should stop them. That is basically it. That is what i came here to argue in this book. But there is a lot more. Basically arguing in the end this comes to nothing. The second essay is updated to get through 2008 and show the idea that in fact these studies of wealth will ruin american democracy. How it changed, how it altered, how it threaded through American History sometimes plunging underground and sometimes back up as it has since 2008 and is evident in the current president ial campaign. Having done that in two essays, i move on to look at specifics. We have chapters on thomas jefferson, starting with thomas pa pane, a piece on john quincy adams, two chapters on lincoln on through to johnson. What i think i will do before taking questions and how much more time have i got . Is maya out there . How much more time . Fiveten minutes. What do you want . Jefferson or dubois . Du bois fits in the middle of the book and he is important because you will see. In his mysterious education, printed in 1907, the aging henry adams ushered in the 20th century with a prophecy of expanding chaos and accelerated time. A few years later, a the young du bois wrote the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. Both prophecies still live with as much importance in the century ahead as the one that passed. Adam left his teaching post 11 year before du bois arrived there. Their temperaments were different. One was the chronicler of insider hood and the other was the chronicler of marginality. Yet their careers bear comparison. Both trained in berlin, as well as harvard. Neither intended to become a historian and both wrote master works of American History fixed on what each believe was the crucial passion in the political development. The administration of Jefferson Madison and for du bois reconstruction. Both men had autobiographical who wrote of living double lives. Long after his death, adams was remembered as an important historians but read by professionals. His reputation revived 60 years ago mainly because of the education. The post world war ii vogue for american studies picked up adams as the great of the guilded age and the education became an undergraduate of book sensitivity in the 1950s. A declaration and request for illumination to refine on the road. I will keep going. Du bois has been enjoying a different rival. Celebrated by the souls of black foot and admired for what became the Civil Rights Movement and his pan africanism. He died on ghana on the eve of the march on washington and the head of the National Association for the advancement of color people, when du bois helped to found informed the news and remarked in the later years dr. Du bois chose another path than theirs. Gus wall, walter and others spoke out. It took until the late 1960s and the two decades of continuing rationale turmoil for a new generation of professors and activists to repair the reputati reputation as an organizer and intelllect. The early incarnation of what became the early africanamerican study deserves credit for the retrieval of black history and belongs in any election of classics. Campus and off, the writings were so respectful they were impossible to avoid. Du bois books and essays are inshrined and they are devoted on the cover line. His wife was the subject of a two line autobiography both volumes of which won the pulitzer prize. So he has become a big deal. But he was a big deal back then, too. I want to make that point. From the moment it appeared in april 1991, the souls of black folk caused sensation. Johnson claim it had the greatest impact in uncle toms cabin. William james, the mentor at harvard dispatched a company to henry who praised it back handedly as the only southern book of distinction. Du bois is from massachusetts but never mind. They announced a splended effort and went to work finding a translat translator. Within two years, du bois american publishers arranged for a third printing with the exception of the white newspapers and those antagonists to Booker T Washington for a collection of reworked published essays on Race Relations by a young black historian at atlanta university. It was a success and unprecedented in the history of american letters. The part of the controversy was the books third essay of Booker T Washington and others. Du bois once admired washington and praised him but he moved in a more radical direction. Du bois was political and scorn about racial inequality but they were culture. Like washington, he was dismayed by the negro masses out generation out of slavery but washington thought about the worth of the cultural resources. He had little faith their potential extended beyond gaining the most Practical Knowledge about raising pigs and getting on in the world. Du bois who was all for Practical Knowledge, washingtons pessimistic behavior was a high. Elevating a materialism that denied black folks soul or more precisely their souls. The plural was critical to the books larger purpose of establishing black americas cultural presence and identity. Du bois, mounted essays with a precision that was very exact about th