So i wouldnt say it plays an enormous role in their work. Any other questions . Im sure the research into this was enormous and the many sources but if you could i mean is there the top three or four that come to mind as sources of research that you went to for this book . 70 roughly of the book and it was just invaluable. The twain stuff. There is such great scholarship around twain. You can go to marc twain projects. Org and see all those letters from i think until 1881 and they are wonderful additions of his correspondence so when it comes to researching twain its actually ready straightforward. I think these other characters i had to dig deeper into the archives because their work securely Charles Warren stoddard are not as widely known. That was a little bit more of the detective work which i really enjoyed but the bancrofts had most of it. I was in l. A. At the huntington. I was here the San FranciscoPublic Library and the oakland Public Library and a couple of collections on the east coast but i was moakley and mostly in brooklyn. Any other questions . Thank you so much for having me. [applause] i will be here signing books so if you want your book signed i will be right here. Thank you for coming. Richard brookhiser was a guest on booknotes in 1991 to talk about the way of the wasp how it made america and how it can save it. So to speak. In the book mr. Brookhiser argues that wasps or white anglosaxon protestants formed the american character and he says if we dont preserve wasp ideals america lose its way. Cspan richard brookhiser, author of the way of the wasp how it made america and how it can save it. So to speak, why do we need this book . Guest well, i think countries need to understand where theyve come from and if they know that, they can know where they might go. I dont think countries can pick virtues out of thin air or just off a tree. The character traits a country has are given to it by its history, and the character type a country has is, therefore, also given to it by its history ours, i think, americas, was put in place by wasps, by white anglo saxon protestants, 200 and 300 years ago, and thats the hand history has dealt us, and it behooves us to study it and understand it. Cspan you start out with a special note upfront and you say, since in this book i will be making a number of unwaspily blunt identifications, in the interest of waspy fair play, i shall begin by identifying myself. First thing you say is, the brookhisers were german catholics. Why are you doing this by the way . Guest well, partly for the fun of it. I think its a sort of a wicked thing to do because no one does it. I mean, people are, i think very, very chary of stepping out and talking about their backgrounds unless they have some ax to grind, unless one belongs to a victim group, and theres some advantage in identifying yourself. People are polite, which is a wasp virtue, so we all sort of obey that. But i figured since i was going to come out and write this book and then beat the drums for a particular set of values, i thought it would be only fair to show where i was coming from. Cspan lets go through as much of it as possible. Again, the brookhisers were german catholics. My fathers mothers maiden name was gleason, which wasnt irish but a respelling of claesgens, another german name. They tried to anglicize it, evidently, and didnt get it quite right. My mothers maiden name was stark, thats english. Her mothers was quilhot, french protestant. What are we getting in richard brookhisers. Guest well, all i was trying to prove there was that im not writing this as an wasp myself. I mean, im not an andover, harvard, Porcellian Club graduate whos just writing about what he grew up with all his life. Like most of the people in this country like the overwhelming majority of people in this country im not a wasp. Im half; im not a full fledged one, literally speaking, although i think if you look at the way i live or the way i was raised, again, like the overwhelming majority of people in this country, i am a wasp by behavior, which is the most important thing about wasps. Its not who they are any longer, who they are literally. Its how they behaved 200 and 300 years ago and how that still affects us today. Cspan the rest of this is, i was raised in the Methodist Church from which i have lapsed. Guest well, im not going to boast about that, but its true. Cspan what does that mean . Youre just no longer a methodist . Guest right. No longer an active one. Cspan i grew up in middlemiddle class suburbs and went to yale. Getting close, though, on this. Guest maybe i was on the outskirts a little bit. Cspan my wifes maiden name, which she has kept, is safer, russian jew. What happens to someone with your background when you marry someone whos jewish . What does that do the combination of. Guest oh, its fun. Well, i eat better. Cspan what are the children . Do you have kids . Guest no. This is something everybody has to work out and, obviously, its a very difficult thing or it can be. I mean if either or both of the parents care about their religious background, its quite a difficult thing. But we dont have kids, so we havent faced that. Cspan let me finish this off. For 13 years, i worked at National Review, catholic. Why did you say that . Guest not that National Review is officially a catholic magazine because it isnt, but just because bill buckley and so many of the other editors over the years have been catholic. Cspan in the whole city of new york, i know two protestants; rather exprotestants. One of them is japanese. Now whats that all about . Guest a little hyperbole there. I probably know more than two protestants but i was looking at my very closest friends. New york is not a city that has lots of wasps running around in it. Cspan why is that . Guest well, new york is the great portal for immigration. This is where so many of the steamship lines ended, so if you were coming from germany or ireland or odessa or sicily or naples or wherever all through the 19th century, you would quite likely have arrived in new york or maybe baltimore, but new york had a majority of people coming there. Even today, people from europe and from the third world stream into new york. Its the historic gateway of immigration and of the first steps of americanization. Cspan now if you go back and study the 13 original colonies and the makeup of the people, what would it have been like . Guest well, you would find that although there have always been people in the United States and what became the United States who werent white english protestants by the way, anglo saxon just means english in terms of this discussion. I dont like the phrase anglo saxon. I think its vague but its what were stuck with in the acronym. But, ill use it so long as we understand what i mean by it is white english protestant. Cspan when i read this, i circled a number of things including anglo saxon which you describe, and then right above it, you tell us what white means and then in the next page, you tell us what protestant means. Guest even though you always had people who werent white anglo saxon protestants, you had lots of german amish in pennsylvania. Theyre still there today, they still speak german, theyve done it for 300 years. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the people in the 13 colonies were white english protestants, and not surprisingly so since they were or became english colonies. They were also englishmen and protestants of a certain kind. The english character is more complicated than the american character. Theres more to it and we didnt get all of it. We got people who politically were whigs or liberal in terms of the day, libertarians, believers in egalitarian, nonhierarchical governments. We also got protestants of a certain kind. There were anglicans who lived in the 13 colonies but they were less establishmentarian than the anglicans who stayed home. There was never an anglican bishop for the 13 colonies. Vestries did a lot of the work that curates did in england. The overwhelming majority of the protestants, apart from the anglicans, were baptists, quakers, presbyterians, congregationalists people of a very low church sort of protestantism. The combination of that libertarian style of politics and that low church style of religion had very important effects on the institutions and the behavior of americans. Cspan under the protestant section, you say, early america was a country of protestants in 1785. Out of a total population of three million. Guest approximately three million. Cspan there were 24,500 Roman Catholics, white and black, fewer than quakers, and no more than 3,000 jews, a tenth of one per cent of the population. Its changed, though. Guest oh, sure. The largest denomination in the United States now is the Roman Catholic church. Thats been the case since 1850 actually. Thats when the Catholic Church became the largest single denomination in this country. Now there still are more protestants than catholics. Its about 2to1 and there are problems with counting, but it seems to be about 2to1, and the percentage of jews, of course, has risen because of the great immigrations from Eastern Europe at the end of the last century. But, even so, protestantism remains a majority, but more important than that is that the nonprotestant religions in this country adopted a lot of the churchstate notions that the first protestants had put in place. Jews in america, catholics in america, americanized themselves very quickly, and they did it because they saw it was in their interests to do so. It was in their interests politically and religiously to adopt the american attitude toward churchstate relations, and when they did, they flourished. This caused a lot of puzzlement back home, especially for catholics. Throughout the 19th century, on into the 20th, time and time and again, rome would sometimes scratch its head at what was going on over here and wonder what its flock over here was doing. Well, what they were doing was they were settling into a situation which was unusual in the history of the Catholic Church, which is to say they were living in a country which had a majority of noncatholics but which did not persecute catholics. And so, they discovered quite soon that this was a good thing they wanted to be a part of it and they became so. Cspan let me ask you some things about yourself. First, politically, can you describe yourself politically . Guest oh, sure, im conservative. Cspan what kind of a conservative . Guest paleo. I was for goldwater in 64. I was nine years old, so who cares . But, you know, i was. That probably locates me. Obviously, i think that shaped the approach i took in this book, but this isnt just a conservatives look at this situation. I think wasp values can go in a number of different political directions. Over time, there have been wasps who were isolationists and wasps who were imperialists. There have been wasps who were social darwinists, free marketeers of the most rigorous sort, and there were wasps who were prairie socialists. Wasp ideals can form different varieties of society. However, theyre all within certain limits. There are certain types of society youre not going to get in a wasp country. Cspan who is your favorite president in history . Guest george washington. Cspan why . Guest no question. Well, not only what he did but, as important, what he didnt do what he did was to win the war of independence and to guide the country during its deliberations over its constitution and then to embody those ideals as the first president. Thats what he did do. What he didnt do was to become a man on horseback to become a dictator, to identify the state with himself. After he served two terms, he stepped down. Its an interesting thing. George washingtons favorite play was a roman costume drama by the english playwright john addison. It was called cato. And the two most famous lines in cato are tis not in mortals to command success, but well do more, sempronius; well deserve it. Washington must have been familiar with those lines, since it was his favorite play, and i think thats a key to a lot of washingtons behavior and very waspy kinds of sentiments, i think. Cspan second american president on your list. Guest lincoln. This is not a startling list. Im not going to pull out Millard Fillmore or chester arthur. Lincoln because lincoln had to deal with the great sin that wasps committed, the great crime that wasps committed historically, which was slavery now, this was a crime, i think doubly so, in the first place because it is wrong and immoral to own slaves; in the second place, because it really is a violation of wasp approaches to politics. The best thing you can say in defense of wasps is that all the time there were slaves in this country or in the colonies, owned by wasps in most cases, there were also wasps, white english protestants, who recognized that slavery was wrong and that it should end. Jefferson, who was a slave owner, nevertheless wrote the declaration of independence and the rhetoric of freedom which became the basis, the justification, for abolition. Washington, even though he was a slave owner, when he died, he freed his slaves. It wasnt a matter in those days of just doing it. You had to have to set aside x amount of money for each slave so he could set himself up in some sort of profession. Washington planned for that, and he did it when he died. And then on up to the civil war when lincoln preeminently made the case against slavery and brought it to fruition. Cspan third. Guest third, ah, now youre pushing. No, no third. Washington first, lincoln second, the rest behind. Cspan what did you think of Ronald Reagan . Guest oh, i liked him. I was for him in 76, and i think he did important things important things in terms of the world, certainly. I think a lot of the liberation in Eastern Europe would not have happened but for reagans convincing the soviets that they couldnt keep on the way they had been going under brezhnev and chernenko, andropov and those people, that there had to be glasnost and perestroika. Thats a major achievement. But, in terms of our own history, i think you have to say washington, lincoln, and then the rest are not nowhere but. Cspan how many of the president s have been wasps . Guest well, the one who clearly wasnt, and, in fact, there was a question whether it would be an issue, was jack kennedy, and he was catholic the first catholic to be elected president , only one. All the others were either literal wasps or people who were so assimilated for a long, long time that they might as well have been. Roosevelt and van buren are dutch names, but the dutch had been in new york, rubbing shoulders with wasps for hundreds of years, so it kind of didnt count. Eisenhower and hoover were german surnames, but their families had been here since the 18th century. They were very assimilated. But even in the case of jack kennedy, who was a catholic, his father sent him to choate and to harvard, and when he went in the service, he went in the navy, very sort of blue Blood Service to pick. So, he was being deliberately directed by joe kennedy to get a brahmin, upper crust eastern seaboard wasp education and upbringing. This is what has happened to nonwasps over and over again in american history. Its assimilation. You know, when the wasps realized that they werent going to continue to be the majority in this country, which was very clear that they couldnt possibly be, what happened was new wasps were created, and they were created out of all these millions of people who came here with an inkling that it was going to be better. Then as they intuited why it was better then where theyd come from, they waspified. Cspan you write for the new York Observer . Guest yes. Cspan what is it . Guest thats a weekly paper in new york city. Cspan what kind . Does it have an idealogy . Guest its very heterogeneous. Youve got me and youve got regular columnists for the nation and youve got Hilton Kramer doing the arts, the neoconservative voice. Cspan who buys it . Guest i suppose people who like a lot of yelling. Cspan is it mostly new yorkers who buy it . Guest yes, its new york. Cspan you also write talk of the town sometimes for the new yorker . Guest right. Cspan now whats the idealogy or the politics of the new yorker magazine . Guest well, i dont write the political stuff for talk of the town. I write about new york events and local things and happenings, so i dont get into the politics. Cspan your name doesnt go on it though when you write it. Brookhiser; well, those are all unsigned, so, no it doesnt, but theyre a lot of fun. Cspan is that a hard thing to do, an unsigned piece . Guest thats the style. Theyre fun to do, and its always a thrill being in the new yorker, so i have a great time. Cspan thirteen years with the National Review. How come the attraction to the National Review . What is special about the publication . Guest well, gee, our family subscribed to it since i was like 12 years old. It was just sort of the air, and it was a lot of fun to read. It seemed to be correct, but also it was correct in a fun and interesting way. Cspan how has it changing that bill buckleys no longer directly involved every day, or is he . Guest no, the editor now is john osullivan. I think the main difference is that the magazine is more journalistic now, perhaps, than it once was. Part of the reason for that is theres no longer such a need to make the ideological case for this issue or that issue. A lot of thats been done. You know, Ronald Reagan was elected president , so some of our efforts have come to fruit. You dont have to keep hammering away at the same old things over and over again, so you can afford to be more journalistic, more interested in daytoday events or weektoweek, monthtomonth sorts of stories, and so the magazine is. Cspan whered you grow up . Guest rochester, n. Y. , upstate new york, so i have made the biggest cultural shift it is possible in this country to make to move to new york city. Listeners out there in kansas or alaska or hawaii, you may think it would be a big shift to go and move to new york, but i must tell you that upstate new york is the part of the United States which feels itself most alien from new york city because were in the same state. We were always thinking about it, how they were taking our taxes and whatnot. The one t