On the staff and we will be happy to give you one of these buttons and that will get you into the Museum Galleries for free today. And finally come a quick thanks to our friends from cspan who are filming the session today. They are great supporters of all the programs we do. Just a little talk about how the session will go. The author will speak for roughly 30 minutes. She likes to do things very interactively. She will speak to you about the process of doing this book and how it came about and then is open to questions from the audience. She would love to take as many questions as possible and we will have you come up to a microphone so cspan can cut catch youron question. When the question and answers are overcome i will take her to the bookstore will she will be happy to sign all of the copies of this book you will want to buy. You knowd me to let the forgotten man graphic edition is now three weeks at the top of the amazon list and New York Times list for graphic books. She is chair of the Calvin Coolidge foundation. She is author of the forgotten man, a fulllength graphic version of her bestseller that came out several years ago and came and spoke at a reading festival. She is also author of coolidge, she writes a column for forbes, teaches at Nyu Stern School of business, and i believe shes also a fellow with our Sister Library the george w. Bush residential sister in dallas. Everyone welcome. [applause] im going to push this back. Can you hear me . If you cannot hear me, stop me. I am so happy to be here today. Im going to ask mr. Clark to give me that book though. Im grateful to mr. Clark, whom i have known a long time working on various projects. This is an awesome library. Job,one of us has the same to share information about president s in history. No library has been as pleasant to work with as this one over time. Ofm here to tell you a story a work project. Im almost like a contractor telling you how i build a certain house but im also eager to hear how you build your house is, how you tell your stories. I know some people in the room are authors themselves or questions you have. Some of your educators. If we fail to produce work that educators can use, we fail. We let you down so you cannot do your work. These are some of the things i would like to talk to you about today. I put this picture up here because its kind of fun. Here we are at the Franklin Roosevelt library. Before i launch into how i wrote a graphic novel with a brilliant artist, i thought i would give you president roosevelt and ask you how do you think how many of you think he is to mean in this picture . Did our artist do that . Raise your hand if you think hes too mean . No one thinks so . Anyone thinks hes too nice . Does anyone have an objection to the cigarette . [laughter] did we get the cigarette wrong . Some people said we drew the wrong kind of cigarette holder. Did we get it wrong . So when we first drew this picture, he had no pupils in his eyes. It was sort of more blank. Unknowable because he couldnt see anything behind the glasses. Genius, andwho is a i spoke back and forth. I kind of had the impression that to make him have no eyes was to make him too creepy. I didnt like it. My aim with this book is to convey knowledge, not just opinion. I dont think roosevelt was a creep. When you have a creepy looking somedent, that attracts readers, right . Readers like violence, sex, villains and heroes. Its much harder to have characters that are in between in a book like this. Thats a tradeoff. Were thinking about doing a book now that has cannibalism in it. That appeals to a certain part of the brain, right . An early american settlement when people didnt have enough food. Things and have sex or cannibals or villains do sell better. I show you this picture because here we are and we settled on this fdr. If we were to give an additive, i would describe him as mischievous, which im at peace with. I do think he was kind of mischievous. These were hard calls. Im not an artist, i am a bookworm. I learned a lot from the artist and from this process about the president , about how to depict him. Thank you for listening. Now im going to go back to the beginning. What are we trying to do . You try to reach more people or ourselves maybe we like picture books. When i came to the fourth reading festival. My history of the great is a long book full of intellectual arguments. What i discovered when i went back to the 1930s was that maybe the new deal didnt help the economy enough, nor did president hoovers work. That was a bunch of content, mostly economic and historical. It was executed in this book and were all very proud of it. My husband is in this room. All authors worked together with their friends and families. It was translated into a few languages. I am lucky about that. I clearly not reaching younger people. Im interested in younger people i again think we fail if we only write old print books they dont read. I could see that millions of young people were not going to read this book. I see that from my experience at New York University stern school of business. Theyre really smart people, they can make awesome powerpoint. They would die laughing looking at this powerpoint because its so primitive. But they can run regression. Readers. Not big there more analytic and interactive. Here are some smart people i would but to get to with some knowledge that ive acquired through research and i have failing to do so. So i said im going to try to make a book, a cartoon book. I dont have slides for them and im sorry to say that but some of you may know a cartoon book called mouse. Does anyone know this book . Lets talk about that briefly. And he wasis here the editor long ago other newspaper called the forward. Right . Where are you . And there was a cartoon, and editor there who liked cartoons seth said if i my editor likes cartoons, i will publish cartoons. Who was a artist worked in the forward on this cartoon story where the oles were mice and the p were pigs and the germans were cats. My first reaction was offensive. Thats offensive. As someone whos part all of those three things. We are not animals. In it, the jews are mice. Telli saw was you could the story of the holocaust from a heart to that cartoon in very serious material. That was the insight. That very serious material can be conveyed in cartoons. I think that cartoon media might even be better for a topic as difficult as the holocaust. There isnt a lot of graphic murder in mouse. There are some terrible hangings of mice but it was more by allusion to. Some of you have seen a book about the iranian revolution in cartoon. Topic. Fficult there is some torture, mostly not depicted but alluded to. It got to millions of people. Millions bought it. I thought this is an interesting medium. Or even just for fun for basic material, its for tough material like economics. People dont like economics. So i began to run around looking for an artist who might draw forgotten man in graphic. I did speak to one man i didnt end up working with that he said this is known to us cartoon people. He was one of the people who goes up to White River Junction where there is a cartoonist colony and he said cartoons are the gateway drug to content. [laughter] i love that. Im going to say it, tweet it. Content. Drug to that is true. Whether you are right wing or left wing, thats true. So bill bennett said on his radio show first i read classic iliad in cartoon and then i read then i read the real thing. So i was intrigued. He lives in canada and has won many prizes. The cover of this book already won a canadian prize and he made the cover. These are men marching. I like the way the mice did march and we even made men marching. We did it with men but i have to say i probably wouldnt have thought of that if i hadnt seen a lot of posters. Accident. Pauls parents came from russia. They came from other places. This kind of colorful, grownup cartoon book is much more accepted overseas. Aybe some of you know you stop reading cartoons when youre in for the great, right . They never look back and they ish,der it baby something they got passed. But in europe, they dont think that way and i became convinced i would not think that way because many grownups like this kind of thing. Paul and i went along. I will show you some of the things we true and some of the errors. Fs or clark is going to let me know how many minutes i have from time to time. One of the things about cartoons a picture paints a thousand words. I learned pretty fast. It takes 1000 pictures to convey a concept sometimes. Sometimes, you cannot have too many ideas. This is what i would consider a half successful, half failure page. The concept involves herbert hoover. Pair. Ned a bad republicans did that a lot in those days. Hoover particularly new better because he had made his career in international trade. He lived in london, asia. He knew how to increase prosperity. Yet he kind of talk himself out of vanity into signing. So we said how can we show that hoover goofed by signing . Of all people come he should have hesitated more. We look for imagery and we know he played with medicine balls. That was his sport. Like a big, heavy ball. The doctor there found him a medicine ball and he would heave it around with whatever staff were lucky enough to get to play with and. With him. A little bit funny. A nonyoung person acting on module about sports and working out that way so we played with that. This is too small for you to see and thats one problem. You can see hoover in the bottom row of frames. He is thinking he can catch the ball but actually what happens, he gets knocked over by it. So this is a way of capturing the goofiness of it all and also but wherethe tragedy the steps that led to the great depression. When of many bad decisions that cause the great depression. We had all kinds of people to draw. Wrote tore caines roosevelt a number of times. As being oncaines roosevelts side because he was for stimulus. Basically the father of all modern stimulus. In fact, he was a very subtle guy ended this and in this tter he wrote you should not be so mean to business because it will be too tired and worn out to higher. 1930s. About the later we had a superhero in this book, the utilities industry. Caines says to roosevelt you are wrong to think very able villains or wolves. Really, businessmen are domestic animals. You should heard them. You should make use of them. And caines last at his own joke. What china they had in england at that time. These words are mostly written in a letter that was printed in the times. You can see how much work you put into it. Another scene where he the china as well as have jokes about drips of money. Puns are an acquired taste but i think people respond to them and thats part of the story. Pages is likeese a scene from a play with a little joke at the end. Sometimes its a lame joke but that helps the reader along. How do you depict Iconic Images from the new deal, iconic events . Perhaps the most important photograph of the period. They had a show here about this at some point. By a greatphotograph photographer. What i discovered in my print thought dorothy ang worked for life magazine but she worked for the government and she had a specific assignment to capture poverty and photographs. She worked for him and he was very good at visual images. He sent out the photographers to look for images of poverty. Thatly, to make the case Government Spending was necessary. Was the poverty real . Totally. Propaganda also . Yes. Thats what i capture in the book. We tried to draw that in this cartoon book and heres what paul came up with. I think he drew her beautifully. Yes great ability to capture pain. Migrant mother was not having a good day, right . It was a terrible time. The pages before and after where the photographer got the assignment and ran off and photographed and what the photographs were used for. There also used to document the need for federal spending that could be called public choice theory. I was looking for ways to picture it. This is a long way around to conveying economic distress. This is another hero of my book. Hope when you do your graphic novel, you dont do your cast of characters as an afterthought but he built it into the business plan. Needs even more careful after material for education. This was a hero for me. William sumner. We think of roosevelt so often, the forgotten man is the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. I think even the audio of that may be over here in the library exhibit. Roosevelt was living, there was another forgotten man known to them but mostly not. He was described by professor at yale. Once to help x, the men at the bottom. But sometimes they coerce a thirdparty into funding their government project. D is the forgotten man, the man who prays. And i discovered the americans debated was forgotten man is it . I have the better forgotten man forgotten man hurts my forgotten men and so on. Some of the story is lost to us. These are just more pictures. This is the soviet union. Were spies. They were definitely influenced by what they saw in russia, which seemed promising at the time. Well, the mostg radical new dealers. This is about the romance of the economy scale. A lot of us love the idea of china because its so big. Sometimes big is it better. The same phenomenon was going on in russia. I think paul drew this exquisitely. You get an idea of the detail of it. I hope its accurate. I bet it is because a russian scholar did it. He gets discussed because americans chew gum and it grossed him out. He actually did say that im a trotsky in this meeting. He was a younger man living in believe. I this was a real meeting that took place. That was a real quote. He was really disgusted with them but we had to monopolize it a bit. E it a bit. We have this debate today. This is really a scene about when you as an expert know something is wrong but you know the president is operating in politics and needs to make his own decision. In economics, we know job sharing doesnt increase productivity. It isnt a great idea for the economy but both parties often do it because we love to give people jobs. Between tugdebate well and roosevelt. This is a union theme. Thats john l lewis. Punched the carpenter right after the wagner when themous scene Industrial Union came into power. You wanted to draw how frightening it was. You can see lewis is very tall. A wonderful man to draw because he is so big. This is a display of the new power. His is a simple page i think in cartoons, you need to give readers breaks. Different from print books. The question of how do you convey narrative. I have narrative all over the place. What i learned is you have to tell the stories one at a time. Theres a famous case in the new deal called schecter. They were Little Chicken butchers and the government came right, in brooklyn. [inaudible] rules ofy broke the one of the National RecoveryAdministration Codes and they were prosecuted and targeted. The administration demonstrated the constitutionality of the nra and they really want after them. I tried to draw this story. This is a joke that the artist came up with. The Health Inspector is coming to inspect the health of the poultry and the Health Inspector is sick. Thats the kind of thing you would add that i had hesitation to add. I think it kind of works. What were trying to get at is the inspector was egregious. He doesnt have any eyes. Ive no hesitation to make him look like a villain. He is a minor character. And came in and they were scared. I was trying to convey what its like when you are investigated by a regulator. We all know how this is, its a creepy feeling. We do it page by page. One of the things that happened in this case that i discovered was the government worked hard to intimidate them. This is an example of this actual line in the testimony. The government says you are not an expert, how do you know you are right . That gives you an idea. Frames justhad 65 about sector poultry. Of one, the Supreme Court sided with the sectors. Must d the new deal the nra must fall. They used a chicken metaphor when they turned down the nra. Roosevelt got a little angry and so on. I am going to stop there and talk to you about what you want to talk about. Thank you for your time and hearing about this experiment. [applause] please come up and asked her questions. How long to this project take you . Amity shales many years. Have taken four years, but if id known how to it takes two days to draw one of the six panel pages. You also have to write the book. As far as i can tell, the process is extremely unforgiving when it comes to revision. We storyboarded as if you are writing a movie, a screenplay. The pictures were not drawn. You want to have time for the artist to draw every picture with a pencil, so the content author can think about that. Two years, really, one to two years. It took for because that was the first time. Four because that was the first time. Ckson wrote it in a fashion. This. En there was was that. Here i did like that. I did not like that. We made a superhero character who held the story. That is the novel lies to part. Ized part. Ie i know a lot about wilkie. He went from one thing to another over the course of the 30s. That was a real difference for sortstandard adaptations, of like wizard of oz, when you make the movie, its not like the book. Pageity, you showed one , and the lowerdr two panels, fdr is shown in silhouette. I notice there is a lot of him either in silhouette or not shown completely. Is that a throwback to when, in that time. That time period, youd never see the president fully, or is this a commentary on him being inscrutable . Amity shales thank you. He is actually just finishing a , about what was happening in germany at the same time. The Different Directions country took. , actually, i fdr dont want him to be in the book too much, because the economics that make the most since to me say, the economics of bureaucracy. People played a role in it. Him of ade character, it wouldve taken away from the economics. There are some ebooks where he is the whole story. Books where he is the whole story. Who were the other people . I tried to minimize roosevelt without demeaning him. He is dark here, not because i dark in him, but because da because anyt president will hear good advice and ignore it. The president is realistic. It is not perfect economics. It would not win a nobel prize. Thatof the other things might be done, and i could be either party, i tried to minimize him. The issue of disability came up. I decided we would not ignore it, but certainly not play it up. It distracted from our story, because of what happened to the economy in the great depression. We tried it to do that respectfully without