H.W. Brands: "The Golden Age of the Senate"

[Applause] thank you for that warm welcome for our distinguished speaker tonight good evening and welcome to the Ford Presidential Museum my name is Elaine DDA and it's my privilege to serve as the director of the museum here in Grand Rapids and the library in Ann Arbor on behalf of the archivist of the United States welcome tonight tonight's program is made to you with support from our parent organization the National Archives as well as the Gerald Ford Presidential Foundation and the Hauenstein Center of Grand Valley State University we always appreciate the opportunity to co-host programs with the Hauenstein Center and I have to say that despite our multiple partnerships on both sides of the state Colin Stein and Grand Valley are our closest partner and it's always a pleasure tonight's program is being videotaped by c-span for later broadcast so I would ask your cooperation to turn off all cell phones and other electronic devices thank you also following the presentation our speaker will be taking your questions from the stage as you know Bill brands is a master teacher and tonight ladies and gentlemen we are all students in his class he will be we'll ask that you repeat the ask your question from the seats and bill will repeat them so that they can be included on the tape following the program we invite you to a reception in the lobby and also you'll have the opportunity to meet our very distinguished speaker before beginning the program I want to take this opportunity to alert you to some upcoming programs at the Museum on march 13th garret graph will be here discussing a very provocative book titled raven rock the story of the US government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of us if that doesn't get your attention I don't know what to say a very challenging book looking beyond that to more happy things April 8th is Betty Ford's 100th birthday and you are invited to free admission at the Museum all day and the next that week on April 10th or Tuesday there will be a ribbon-cutting and grand opening for our new Betty Ford Centennial exhibit which is titled in step with Betty Ford and of course starts with her early background in dance as you might appreciate so our curator staff is very busy working right now on the final stages of design and writing so Abby we've been cutting your welcome is on April 10th and then the next day April 11th the Ford Foundation is sponsoring a luncheon at Meijer Gardens featuring Susan Ford bales along with special speakers among them former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton first daughter Linda Johnson Rob and moderator Andrea Mitchell tickets are limited and have been going fast and I would ask that you contact the Ford Presidential Foundation for further information and finally this spring scheduled now on May 15 Scott Kauffman will be here he has written a new biography on President Ford entitled ambition pragmatism and party so as you can see we have a very full roster and in the lobby are flyers voila so please pick up and mark your calendars the flyer also exists includes programs to be offered at the library as well so you're not limited to coming to programs at the Museum you can come over to Ann Arbor and see other good programs now tonight as I said we're partnering with the Hauenstein Center and as you know they have a very distinguished record for bringing in diverse and intellectually challenging and informative speakers tonight's program is no exception and if you haven't heard bill brands before I think that you'll be delighted and if you have come as in the past as I know many of you have you're in for another treat so please join me in welcoming my colleague Gleaves Whitney who was director of the Hauenstein Center to introduce our speaker [Applause] well thank you very much Elaine for that warm introduction praise of the Hauenstein Center we really treasure a partnership with the Ford it's always a treat and we will continue to bring you excellent programs that stimulate the mind and the heart for public service and love of our history happy Washington's birthday to our c-span audience and also to the audience here at the Ford it's really a neat to be here recognizing Washington's birthday this is one of the reasons we wanted Bill to be here on this special day it's always a pleasure to host Bill brands we've had him back to West Michigan so many times I have lost count but it's been enough that he should be awarded a lifetime tenure award at Grand Valley State University now I've probably personally introduced you build more than a dozen times and each time I go back and check his biography I learn something new and I wanted to share some of those new things with you tonight you've probably heard me say that Bill's formal name is H W brands but did you know that the H W stands for history Wizkid you've heard me say that bill earned his master's and PhD in history but did you know that he also had a master's degree in mathematics he knows something that no historians know and that's that if you multiply two negative numbers like a minus three and a minus four you end up with a positive though he understands things like that you've heard me say that Bill is the author of more than two dozen books but did you know that they've been translated into French and German Russian and Chinese Japanese Korean and haiku maybe he'll explain you've heard me say that a third of bills books are devoted to the presidents you go back and look at Jack's and grant TR Wilson FDR Ike and Reagan but did you know that he's also dined with the presidents in the White House you've heard me say that bill met long lived well Palin Stein for the first time at one of our events back in 2004 and they got along famously swimmingly but did you know that Ralph urged bill to revise his studies of Ben Franklin in Andrew Jackson since ralph knew both of them and he was a child and speaking of childhood you've heard me say that bill has three children but did you know that one of them hell is a historian in his own right who teaches at johns hopkins finally you've heard me say that bill has an enthusiastic fan base around the United States indeed I would say around the world because of all the translations it's no surprise because many of his books end up being Pulitzer Prize finalists but did you know that his most die-hard fans are right here in West Michigan ladies and gentlemen bill brands [Applause] Thank You Gliese for that very kind introduction you've taught me some stuff I didn't even know about myself you mentioned that you mentioned my son health who is a historian and some of you in the audience perhaps can appreciate that there's nothing more gratifying for a parent who goes into field - well initially how got a little bit of boost from sometimes being confused with me because he was going to the field now I get a boost from being confused with him and I'll get questions from reporters saying oh I think you've got me confused with my son he's the expert on that topic anyway it's a delight to be back and I've seen many friends from previous years I'm thrilled that you liked it enough last time or the time before something to come back and I especially like the fact that this is an audience where I can try out ideas where I can tell you about new stuff now to some extent you owe this to Gleaves because Gleaves makes a point of anticipating everybody else he doesn't just wait until the book is out and I've already been giving the talk for a while he asked me to talk about the book even before it's finished and I wish actually though Gleaves that you had asked me to give this particular talk maybe a few months ago because I just finished proofreading the the galleys of the book so the book has already been set in tight and it's - the it's it's reached the point where I really can't make any changes in it and so one of the reasons that I like to teach history I teach history to 500 freshmen every semester and it requires me it encouraged me it allows me to think in terms of the big questions of American history and very often I find that my teaching is a real boost to my writing because when you try to explain something to someone who doesn't really know anything about it and a lot of my students and I don't I certainly don't mean to disrespect my the students that I that come from high schools in Texas and I'm saying that they don't know any American history actually they don't know enough but they they know some but I have a whole lot of international students who've never taken an e American history at all so I have to explain the civil war in 40 minutes and you know you really have to zero in on what the big questions are but so I like might the chance to sort of work through these projects in explaining them to people who aren't specialists in the subject this is one of the reasons I insist on teaching one of the reasons that I insist on teaching introductory students and I like speaking to groups like it because most of you are not professional historians and so if I can make something understandable to you then maybe I can make it understandable to my readers but I've reached the stage with this particular book because I've said it's basically locked in to type I can't make any changes so if while speaking to you tonight I come up with a brilliant insight that I could have used in the book you will see a grimace pass across my face because everything oh dang I could have used that so I will try not to be insightful tonight and it's entirely out of my own self-preservation but I am going to tell you about this project that I've been working on and as Glee's pointed out I've written on presidents and it is kind of ironic that Here I am on the birthday of the first president speaking for one of the first times on a subject other than a present because this book that I'm is going to be published in November available in bookstores near you makes a wonderful holiday gift for all your friends are interested in history and even the ones who don't know they're interested in history yes bulk discounts are available ha I'm just kidding but it is book about three members of Congress three senators and these are three senators who were the rock stars of their era it was at a time I could ask this question to you leaves doesn't count because he's a specialist in presidents but why is it that of all the presidents in the 19th century nearly all of them are quite forgettable okay some people will remember Jefferson yeah I mean but Jefferson's really remembered not so much for his presidency because he wrote the Declaration of Independence and then you jump forward to Andrew Jackson alright he's a controversial figure but he's okay we'll remember him and of course Lincoln and then who else in the 19th century and the answer is I'm a specialist in this and I have to think carefully about now wait a minute when was Franklin Pierce president you know and Zachary Taylor wait was it Zachary Taylor or Winfield Scott and there's a reason for this and the reason is that the American Constitution was not written with the presidency at the center of American politics if you pull out your pocket constitutions and I assume you all have them you'll be reminded that the presidency is described only once you get to article 2 of the Constitution article 1 the the most substantive the longest article is about Congress and the framers of the Constitution assumed and intended that American politics American the rebel the American Republic and eventually American democracy was going to be driven by the representatives of the people the members of the House of Representatives and the Senators and the president was a chief executive his job was to execute the will of members of Congress presidents were not expected to take the initiative they were not expected to drive policy they were not expected to be the centerpiece of American politics that's what was fully expected that's what was intended and so the fact that it's hard to remember presidents from the 19th century is exactly what James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and George Washington Benjamin Franklin is the Constitution would have said that's what we were aiming for we want these people to be unmemorable the stars of the show are going to be members of Congress and so I decided to look in on the three most noted members of Congress during the first half of the 19th century and this was part of I will admit my continuing recovery from writing biographies some of you who've been here more than once will know that for a while I was I had this long-term project of writing the history of the United States through biography and I eventually wrote six volumes in this collection and the six volumes began with Benjamin Franklin and then went to Andrew Jackson Ulysses Grant Peter Roosevelt Franklin Roosevelt Ronald Reagan and if you read those biographies they link together to form a history of the United States from the 18th century to the 21st century and I when I started off I thought this is gonna be a great idea and I still think it's a pretty good idea you say I recommend it to all of you every house should have a cassette but one of the things that I concluded by the time I got to the end of this was that there are certain things that are hard to tell there's certain stories that are important but hard to tell if you can find yourself to biography and some of it has to do with the fact that if you were writing about presidents and I didn't intend to write primarily about presidents but I eventually did because if you're trying to tell the story of the United States the president is a very convenient character to hang your story on but there's a lot going on that presidents don't if the president is your focus that you can't really get at and a lot and someone has to do with sort of the the give-and-take the thrust and parry of what goes on at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue the other thing was that when you write about a president when you write about it but when you write a biography of any kind you cannot help but give the impression that the world or at least the world of your book revolves around one person and the world does not revolve around any one person so I thought let's broaden things out now when I was here last year some of you who were here heard me speak about my sort of first foray in this direction where instead of writing about one person I wrote about two people the book is called the general versus the president about Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur and the fight they got in this time I decided to expand it even more because one of the the nice things about writing about two people is you can give sort of two sides of the argument and you don't have to focus on one side and then just bring the other one in by indirection so I could focus on MacArthur and Truman and they had this titanic battle and by allowing myself both characters and bringing both characters up I can tell this story and I think do justice to both sides so this time I decided if two is better than one then three is even better than two but there's another reason for this and that is that these three men during their lifetime were often called the great triumvirate of American politics and the term was not always intended complimentary because you remember that the the various trumpets were in Rome when members of trimers are trying to subvert the Republic so in fact this was the intention of some of the people who called these guys the great triumvirate but also because well if you remember your days from junior high school you might remember that a relationship between two people whether it's sort of friends or a romantic relationship if they're two people involved that's one kind of relationship but it gets a whole lot we're interesting when you add the third because there all sorts of complications that ensue and who's up and who's down and who's allowing with whom and that's exactly what I was looking for and in fact that's exactly the way it turned out in these guys lives now from the standpoint of me as the author they were very thoughtful in the timing of their lives so I'll tell you a little bit about them because I realized that my three characters although household names during their lifetimes more famous than most of the presidents of their lifetimes they're not exactly household characters these days so the three men are Henry Clay John Calhoun and Daniel Webster they all began in the House of Representatives Henry Clay accomplished the feat never accomplished before and never repeated he became Speaker of the House the most powerful individual in the House of Representatives on his very first day in the house of representing pressive and he was he essentially created the role of Speaker of the House a role is very important to this a day Henry Clay was from Kentucky he was born in Virginia but as a young aspiring lawyer after getting his training in Virginia he decided that he would have better prospects as a lawyer by moving west to Kentucky which originally had been the western province of Virginia and he set up shop in Lexington and he went into politics at a fairly young age this also what was what ambitious young men did and there was an attraction of doing in a place like Kentucky because Kentucky was a new state it was writing a new constitution it was electing new members to Congress electing new senators one of the main reasons that people went West was the professions they were interested in were crowded in the East it was hard it would have been hard to break into politics in Boston or in New York but you go out to Kentucky and everybody else is new so you can get a start as well so this is Henry Clay John Calhoun was from South Carolina John Calhoun like clay was a lawyer he was born in South Carolina he was educated at Yale he went to law school but he returned to South Carolina South Carolinians did that in those days in the early 1800s and late the 1790s the early 1800s it wasn't out of the question and it wasn't that unusual for a southerner to go north for education but they really stayed in the north usually they came back home and South Carolinians are very proud of their South Carolina roots and Calhoun was one Calhoun like clay began by being a lawyer but being a lawyer often involves people it certainly did involve people in matters of public concern so the connection between law and politics was well established in those days and Calhoun decided to go into politics he married well married well usually mantha you married somebody with some money and so he didn't really need to make much of an in and he could he could indulge his political interests and he like Henry Clay was elected to the House of Representatives this is pretty much where everybody got started and he was distinguished from early on by his very incisive mind his ability to make forceful arguments he was a strong partisan he was a member of Jefferson Thomas Jefferson's party the Republicans these days are often called the Democratic Republicans to distinguish them from the Republicans of the 1850s that we have until today but in those days they simply called themselves Republicans so Henry Clay was a Republican John Calhoun was a Republican the third member of my trio is Daniel Webster Daniel Webster was born in New Hampshire he was he became a lawyer and he was probably the most gifted of the three Daniel Webster is probably the greatest orator in American political history one of the things that drew me to these three guys all three of them were very powerful speakers very persuasive speakers and one of the things that drew me to write about them was that I'm kind of a sucker for for people who know how to use the language now I'm a writer so I mean that makes me interested in that stuff but also one of the things that I constantly tell my writing students is there are sort of styles of language there are ways of writing depending on who you're writing for who your audience is what you're trying to accomplish and when I chose to write about the three guys I knew that I was going to be transported back to a time when political rhetoric was really important now this because well to put it very bluntly there wasn't a lot else going on at the time and so when Daniel Webster was going to give a speech this was high entertainment this is why for example some of you will know or know of the lincoln-douglas debates of 1858 this was the big deal in American political life in the summer of 1858 now how many of you have read any of the lincoln-douglas debates okay a few and those of you have read will know that boy it's a tough slog because they would get up and speak four so one of them depending who went first if Douglas went first he'd speak for an hour then Lincoln would respond for an hour and a half and Douglas would get thirty minutes to finish up and so it would take all afternoon and it was like going to a double feature of the movies well you know I'm back in the 1930s when people went to double features nothing else to do he might as well spend all afternoon the movies here same thing was true with political debate but although the lincoln-douglas debates have - while they get kind of tedious they get kind of tedious you read all seven on you know why they get tedious because they repeated themselves from one debate to the next why did they repeat themselves because they weren't recorded the audience hadn't heard it before so it was new which meant that by the time you got to the seventh date you could really have this thing down but the other thing was and this is one of the reasons that I was so intrigued by my three characters this was a time when political speech mattered I don't know if any of you are well we're on c-span so I should say that you're all fans of c-span and I'm sure you're glued to the c-span cameras when c-span is covering Congress and you will know that you can turn on c-span most of the time during the week and you can see people giving speeches in Congress now I'm probably not giving away any state secrets to tell you that if they pan the camera you would realize there's nobody in there nobody's listening they're speaking simply to the camera because we live at a time when American political institutions have sufficiently matured one could say they've grown so rigid but they they have evolved in a way so that political decisions are not made on the basis of speeches given in the Senate or in the House of Representatives political decisions are made for other reasons sometimes having to do with party considerations some buy it sometimes because of the effect of lobbyists but the decisions are not made there in the house and in the Senate on the basis of who said what we live in a very mature again maybe ossified system but in the days of Henry Clay and John Calhoun and Daniel Webster this was not so the we had very immature institutions and when institutions are immature then the role for individuals is much greater and when Henry Clay gave a speech he really did change minds when Henry Clay would debate John Calhoun and then Daniel Webster would rebut the both of them people listened and they listened carefully as a sideline these speakers would write out their remarks after they had given them and put them into print and sell them as pamphlets and they had a side income in doing this so this was a time when if you listen to Henry Clay talk about the need for a protective tariff he was Pro tariffs he thought American industry needed to be protected from foreign manufacturers and then you listen to Daniel Webster opposed this one of the striking things to me is how sophisticated these arguments were in fact I probably give more time to these speeches to these arguments then maybe I should have simply because I was very impressed by the the details by the insight of the arguments and how modern they sound so if you listen to Andrey clay argue in favor of protective tariffs it's essentially the same argument although I will say with no disrespect for the president coming out of the White House a whole lot more sophisticated than the argument that Donald Trump makes for protective tariffs and when you hear Daniel Webster say this is a terrible idea his arguments could have been used and have been used by advocates of free trade which has been America's general policy since 1945 so I'm gonna digress a little bit to say that one of the reasons I study history and one of the things that I try to get across to my students is and why anybody should study history is to be reminded that we are not the first generation ever to walk the earth you know it's really tempting to think that what happened before doesn't matter and our problems are gonna be solved by us well you know you can everybody wants a time machine now most people want a time machine to go to the future to find out what the future is going to be that doesn't work we don't have those and even if we had such a thing they they're kind of contradiction in terms because if you could go into the future and you can see what the future was then you come back and change this moment and then that would screw up that future but we do have a time machine and it goes back to the past and we can see how previous generations have dealt with difficult issues now the tariff was a minor issue for most of this time but it also became a very acute issue at a particular moment so I've introduced my characters clay Calhoun Webster now notice that calhoun is from the south south carolina so the the most southern of the southern states and from the standpoint of those looking ahead and knowing that there is tension between north and south it's south carolina where the tension always starts and as south carolina of course was first to secede it's the scene in 1861 daniel webster is from the north he was originally from New Hampshire but when he was trying to expand his law practice he moved to Boston and so he is a member of Congress a senator who is claimed by both New Hampshire and Massachusetts but he is the spokesman of New England which is sort of the most northern part of the north so we got the most southern part of the south the most northern part of the north and Henry Clay is from Kentucky Kentucky's a border state can Conte he was considered the West at the time so we've got this regional arrangement among the three and because I said these threesomes are kind of unstable one of the striking parts of the story is the the alliances the shifting alliances among the three because at any given time two are lined up against the other and which two it is depends on the time depends on the issue at the same time each one is ambitious each one well each one would love to be president now this is kind of an interesting aspect of this story because as I've said these guys the three of them were more influential than all but a couple or three presidents of the United States but there is something about ambition that says it's great to be one of well so there by 1850 there were sixty senators okay so it's great to be one of sixty but to be one of one to be President of the United States even if the presidency wasn't as big a deal as it would come as it would become nonetheless it was tempting and all three of them are trying to figure out how can I become president so part of it is personal ambition part of it is representation of their particular section so John Calhoun eventually becomes the spokesman among all spokesmen of the south and Daniel Webster becomes a spokesman for New England and Henry Clay is the one who's trying to bridge the gap between the two so this is these are my dramatis persona these are my characters my story unfolds between the war of 1812 which is how I begin the story and the compromise of 1850 the war of 1812 believe it or not begins in 1812 and so two of my figures to my figures are in favor of the war they're called war hawks this was a relatively new term in American politics and Henry Clay and John Calhoun are beating the drums for war the United States is going to confirm its independence of Britain by going to war against Britain because Britain has been preying on American commerce and kidnapping American sailors and doing various things that annoy people like Henry Clay and John Calhoun and they believe that it is necessary for American pride American sense of self-worth to take on the British in to win to confirm American independence Daniel Webster is very skeptical of this project Webster believes that Henry Clay just wants to conquer Canada get more land in the West in John Calhoun John Calhoun is part of this conspiracy to boost the the fortunes of his political party the Republican Party Daniel Webster is a spokesman of New England but also of the Whig party well originally is sorry of the Federalist Party first and the Federalist Party is the party that well this is this is this is where things get complicated that's one things that leaves and I talked about is that one of the things that tracks me to history the study of history is the fact that history is like an onion and you peel it and you think you see the what the the situation is you peel it and there's more inside you peel it again there's more inside it's always more complicated than you think but anyway so Webster is a spokesman of New England which has closed commercial ties with Britain and New England is very dubious about the project of war with Britain to the point where and this is where the story gets complicated and interesting and important for the future Daniel Webster becomes a spokesman for potentially the Secession are of New England from the Union now we think of secession as something that the south did in 1861 1860 says he won the broad on the Civil War but one of the major current of my story is that this idea of what does the Union consist of what are the obligations of the States to the rest of the country this was something that was in flux from the beginning now the fundamental question that gives rise to the Civil War oh one thing I should say is that when I'm writing my story I try to forget that I know what's coming and I this I'm I'm quite serious about this because the only way you can understand history is abandon hindsight because if we know how it's going to turn out then we don't pay attention to what it was like to live through it to not know what's going to happen now I know that by the end of my story the union is doomed that the Civil War is going to come and that it's going to have to be fought over to be maintained so I know this is coming but I have to resist that knowledge because my characters didn't know that and they were doing well two of them were doing their best to prevent the wreck that they saw potentially ahead the third John Calhoun was doing his best to make the wreck happen but that's part of the story anyhow so when we look back on the 19th century talk about secession we think of the South leaving the Union and if most of you perhaps I'm guessing most of you are from Michigan do we haven't just out of curiosity you have any southerners in the audience ok we got a couple so I won't expect unanimous vote on this but you know it's probably fair to say that most people in the north today think that secession was a really bad idea I mean I live I've been living in Texas for 35 years and most Texans even today acknowledge that secession maybe wasn't such a good idea I might overstate this glades like I don't wanna speak for you having grown up in Texas but but the fact of the matter is I mean we associate this with something that Texas is assuming that the south did but the first part of the country to seriously talk about secession was New England and it wasn't over slavery it was about war policy and the fact that the war against Britain was destroying New England's trade and when you lived by trade you can't farm very well in New England you can fish and you can engage in trade and New England traded a lot with Britain and the vote in favor of the war of 1812 didn't include New England's votes and New England states especially when the war was going badly during all but its last two weeks said this was a lousy idea to go to war and you know what maybe the union was a lousy idea and so Daniel Webster who had a very keen legal mind started making the argument for secession New England secession now after Andrew Jackson miraculously won the Battle of New Orleans Webster would rethink and starts a backpedal really quickly but one of my broader themes is that this question of is secession legitimate can the states interfere with the enforcement of federal law again this is going to be pinned on the south in the 1860s and this is the justification for Abraham Lincoln in the Union fighting against southern secession but it came up first for my guys in the war of 1812 it came up a second time in the early 1830s when South Carolina threatened to leave the Union not over slavery not over war policy but over attack a tariff and you might think people can get that worked up over a tariff and the answer is yes because let me ask you if you had to summarize the causes of the American Revolution in a slogan of enforce slogan of forwards what was the slogan actually that's not a bad one but no taxation without representation the American Revolution was all about taxes people took taxes seriously in those days and South Carolina was all set to leave the Union because they didn't like a tax bill that Congress had passed and this because well people like John Calhoun had this well articulated theory of how the Union had been created by the states and Calhoun laid the groundwork for secession based on this theory of states rights and you know the question the underlying question here is and it's a question that is still with us although thankfully not in such an you form the question is in our federal system we have a central government and we have state governments which level of government is supreme what push comes to shove do the states get their way or does the national government get its way well the Constitution is rather vague on this and at the extreme end can states leave the Union can States constitutionally leave the Union the Constitution is silent on this why is the Constitution silent on this you know how to construe it it everybody at the Constitution convention knew this could be a difficult issue this could be a problem but they remain silent you know why they remain silent by the way why do politicians remain silent pilot Asians are not a silent group why do they remain silent because they would needed to get it done they knew if they wrote in that you know what there's an escape clause here well that would ruin the whole project because the whole project was create a stronger government but if they said you can't leave well in the States half the states wouldn't a sign so they deliberately fudged this and they kicked the can down the road they left it to my group my three guys and their generation the title of my book is going to be heirs of the founders the people who inherited this project so one fundamental problem with the Constitution that they had to deal with is what is the nature of the relationship between the central government and the states the second issue which is going to be the one that dominates discussion starting in about 1830 is the other fundamental flaw in the Constitution now wait a lot of people like to revere the Constitution and it it's a big step forward from the Articles of Confederation but the framers of the Constitution knew that there were two huge fudges or basic what should I say pregnant silences in the Constitution one is this question of when a conflict arises between the states and the feds who wins and they deliberately left that side of it because they knew whatever they said it would screw up their project and second one was how does slavery exist in a republic a republic is based on the will of the people and political power is supposed to emanate from the people the government supposed to represent the people that how can this coexist with a kind of system of labor mobilization that says that four million people by the time of the Civil War not even people at all they're not citizens they're not represented and the framers knew that this was a fundamental problem why didn't they deal with it why didn't they say let's get rid of it again because they wouldn't have gotten their constitution in 1789 if they had answered this so what did they do well they basically took the position that Benjamin Franklin articulated when he came out of the Constitutional Convention and he said this is not a perfect Constitution but it's the best we can do under the circumstances and we will leave it to our heirs to fix the problems and you know they've come a long way since 1776 to get to 1787 but they knew that they hadn't finished it and there was work to be done so the work was done by my guys and I will tell you that they well I would say they did their best maybe to the extent that people who are ambitious people who have strong opinions people are torn by the kinds of personal tugs on professional accomplishment do these are these are strong-willed people and my story progresses through from the war of 1812 through the crisis of 1833 - it culminates my story culminates with the compromise of 1850 the compromise of 1850 s called the compromise because well people on both sides northern South had to compromise their issues to come to some kind of agreement that wouldn't blow up the union in 1850 and this gets at this gets at that I'll call it the underlying moral question of this whole story and one of the reasons that this story I think continues to have residents leaving aside for the political aspects of it but the question is this it's a question that's most clearly personified by Henry Clay Henry Clay is somebody who in our way of thinking is a contradiction in terms he is an emancipation astray holder he owned slaves and he does not believe in the institution of slavery now again what what about this how does that work well Henry Clay inherited slaves and Henry Clay lived in a society he lived in Kentucky which was a slave state where this was the way work got done but he believed that slavery was bad for slaves no surprise there he believed that slavery was bad for slaveholders he believed that slavery demean manual labor and that it was going to be a problem it was going to be worse than a problem it was going to be a continued peril to the Union and he tried again and again to get Kentucky to end slavery but he didn't win he didn't win the argument yet he continued to work against slavery even as he worked to hold the Union together Henry Clay had to make this decision and it's a fundamental question for anybody who lives in a democratic political system it's really a question of anybody who lives in a community what do you do when you believe that your community your country your state it's doing something fundamentally wrong it might be it might be simply misguided it could be downright evil what do you do do you sort of throw up your hands and say I have no responsibility for this and chart your own individual path well not if you are someone who believes that there is a role for Statesman because Henry Clay believed that slavery would slavery must disappear from the Union it would but he also was one who fundamentally disagreed with abolitionists who said that slavery has to end now because clay understood that if the abolitionists had their way if slavery were some if Congress could somehow vote to abolish slavery right now then 30 seconds after that a war would break out between North and South and Henry Clay believed that as bad as slavery was and as demeaning as slavery was the meaning of republicanism it wasn't as dangerous to personal liberty and to for the welfare of humanity as the destruction of the Union for Henry Clay almost any compromise was acceptable in order to hold the Union together because he looked at the Union the Union that he and his other contemporaries had inherited from the likes of George Washington said we need to preserve the Union the Union is the surest guarantor of personal liberty and if we have to compromise with a slaveholders for a while longer we will do that I maybe even not gonna give much away when I say that Henry Clay was the model what the bottle of what Abraham Lincoln wanted to become Abraham Lincoln was one who also believed we have to hold the Union together if we hold the Union together we can eventually get rid of slavery we can preserve American freedom if the Union falls apart then all bets are off the story ends for me with the compromise of 1850 which is this great effort to solve all the problems confronting the country it was this big package deal and all sorts of issues were tied up in Henry Clay believed that it was the great accomplishment of his career he had held the Union together in fact the Union didn't hold together very much longer my guys they died in the course the three of them they died within about 18 months between 1850 in 1852 I'm not going to say that if they had lived things had been different but in fact Henry Clay's hope for the Union was dashed on the rocks of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the secession of the beyond that in the Civil War and so well I'll stop there in part in part because you want to know what I told leave this I haven't told anybody else that but I'm working on a sequel which is gonna carry it up to the Civil War so I'm gonna leave you all hanging at the end of the book and what's gonna happen next Hey yes what anyway I want time for questions so I'm you're gonna ask a question and I will repeat the question so that everybody in the audience can hear and everybody in the television audience did here so right here sir I'm glad you asked the question the question is what about the third branch of government you mentioned John Marshall other people would call it the judicial branch but in fact in this period John Marshall is the judicial branch in fact this is a very important part of my story because I devote a chapter to daniel webster and john marshall john marshall was Chief Justice the United States from 1801 to 1835 he essentially created the modern Supreme Court and especially he created the idea that the Supreme Court should stand in review of the actions of the legislative branch and the executive branch at the Supreme Court the judicial branch is the one that gets to say ya know yes constitutional unconstitutional who created well basically the Supreme Court we have today and he did it I'm not gonna say out of whole cloth but it was it would have shocked and surprised the framers of the Constitution that what the courts get to tell Congress what Congress can't do it's not written in the Constitution John Marshall has to work between the lines to come up with that and his principal collaborator one could almost say his co-conspirator was Daniel Webster Daniel Webster was the most celebrated and the most amply compensated constitutional lawyer of his day and in fact Webster on some days he would in the morning he would go and argue a case before the Supreme Court and then the afternoon he would go give a speech in the Senate and so the story of Webster and Marshall and the creation of what you could call sir modern judicial nationalism the idea that the Constitution really is as strong as it's going to become owes to John Marshall and knows to Daniel Webster and it also demonstrates Webster at his oratorical finest so I have Webster arguing one of he argued a whole bunch of important cases but one was the Dartmouth College vs. Woodward case in which Webster was an alum of Dartmouth College and he was brought in Webster was basically a hired gun who would be brought in to argue before the Supreme Court because he was such a powerful speaker and he would follow the case fairly casually and then he had jot down a few notes and he'd come in and speak for four hours and would mesmerize the audience in the court and would sometimes freeze the justices and in the case of Dartmouth College his speech was so poignant that there was a Yale Law professor who went to watch because he knew that Webster was this very powerful speaker but he also knew that John Marshall wasn't a pushover for anybody and he had heard that Webster sometimes tried to play on the emotions of his audiences and he thought boy this isn't gonna work with John Marshall so he goes down and he watches and he just he's mesmerized and he sees that the members of the court are mesmerised as well and when it finally comes to the end when Webster says it is a small college but there are those who love it speaking of Dartmouth College which he argues of being beaten up taking advantage of by the the state of New Hampshire and at the end when Webster has concluded this skeptical the Yale Law professor looks and he sees to his amazement that John Marshall is weeping that Daniel Webster had that effect on people so it is an important and it's a large part of my story somebody else had a ghost yes sir right yes in fact I think would be farther along than we are today and I'll give you my reasoning obviously I can't prove this but I'm gonna argue a counterfactual and this is something that Henry Clay was hoping for and was counting on Henry Clay again being from a border state Kentucky being a slave holder who didn't believe in slavery hoped that slavery would go away observed slavery in his lifetime go away in the North when he was born slavery was allowed in every American colony and in every American state upon Independence but gradually the north ended slavery often it was phased in emancipation so in New York New York ended slavery but there were still slaves in New York as late as the 1830s so it was a phased kind of emancipation which is what Henry Clay was arguing for immediate emancipation would be unfair to all sorts of people starting with a slaveholders but it included some of the slaves themselves if you're a 65 year old slave and all of a sudden you're emancipated you get thrown out of your house you get thrown out what can you do so anyway but Henry Clay believed that the North had emancipated its slaves not out of any fit of philanthropy but because the northern economy no longer found slavery profitable or to put it another way every one of the framers generation George Washington Thomas Jefferson all the slaveholders in the eighth and the 1780s believed that slavery was a necessary evil they believed it was an evil but they couldn't figure out how to run the southern economy without it and many Northerners took the same view except they figured out how they could run the northern economy without it and so they could focus on the evil part of it but Washington Jefferson Henry Clay all hope that slavery would become anachronistic in time and this is what Henry Clay said after the compromise of 1850 he had been the author of the Compromise of 1820 the so called Missouri Compromise that resolved the issue of slavery in the western territories and that held for over 30 years and he said if this compromise hold for 30 years then we will have resolved the problem because he saw the Industrial Revolution coming and the Industrial Revolution really was what ended slavery more precisely it ended slavery in other countries think about it for a minute the United 1800 nearly every country in the world allowed slavery to exist legally and most countries thought no big deal that's just the kind of the way the world works in 1900 essentially no countries in the world allowed legal slavery so between 1800 and 1900 slavery disappeared it was only in the United States that the ending of slavery required or seemed to require this horrible war that killed over 600,000 people so you have to start thinking that maybe there was a way you could end slavery without a civil war and clay thought there was if we could simply keep the Union together for another 20 or 30 years then southerners would have come to the same conclusion that northerners had already come to we don't need this institution anymore and if you indulge me for a moment further if the South had ended slavery without it being imposed by the North without the need for a 13th amendment it didn't require 13 a minute for Massachusetts to free its slaves or for Pennsylvania and so wouldn't it have for South Carolina or any other kind of any other state and if southerners had freed the slaves on their own then opposition to things like education for the former slaves wouldn't have been seen as a badge of Southern Honor anything that gets imposed by heat from the outside by those northern aggressors is something that patriotic southerners will be able to resist and as you know until the 1960s southerners didn't like the idea about being told what to do on race relations but if southerners had been allowed the time to conclude on their own that slavery was a bad deal then they would have had an incentive to invest for example in the education of the former slaves so I'm not trying to guarantee that that would happen but there is an alternative scenario and this is actually what Henry Clay was aiming for and I should say that by the 1850s it's exactly what by 1850 he died in 1850 this is exactly what John Calhoun was hoping would not happen because by 1850 John Calhoun had already concluded that South Carolina and the south must leave the Union and he was simply hoping for an excuse to do it and the excuse came with the election of Abraham Lincoln more on the book that I'm writing about I'm gonna write about Abraham Lincoln and John Brant so it's gonna be a twosome instead of a threesome in the back sir okay so and I'll broaden it so the question is what about the the campaign at Yale University to eliminate John Calhoun's name from one of the buildings or it's a college or something like that and I'm don't remember how far along that road they are okay but anyway Calhoun attended Yale and so he was a 1time he was considered a distinguished alumnus of Yale College and these days of course John Calhoun is seen as the arch apologist for slavery I'll just tell you that my general view of erasing names from buildings taking down statues is to be very skeptical of this and I'll tell you why I'm skeptical and I teach at the University of Texas and in the University of Texas there were did in the 1920s a series of statues honoring heroes of the Confederacy and following the shootings at Charlotte's ville was it here before last the administration at the University of Texas decided the time has come to take down these statues honoring the Confederate heroes and my first thought was I do not like the idea of erasing history because there is no end to this and I predicted that if it stood a sort of Confederate heroes tomorrow it's going to be Thomas Jefferson and then there will be George Washington and you know how is that going to work if the capital of the United States is named for a slaveholder if we try to go back and impose the standards of the present on the past then there is no end and very often I'm going to say in the thinking of those people are most in favor of this there is an incipient perfectionism that if these people are bad on this score then there's somebody else who's bad on another score and then I would despair of putting up statues to anybody for anything because however however much a model citizen they might be today I can guarantee you that the people who honor John Calhoun John Calhoun is still one of South Carolina's two statues in Statuary Hall and the Capitol and they're not they're not really trying to poke a finger in the eye of anybody else and they're not a bunch of white racists you're saying but but John Calhoun was an important figure in the history of the United States but I had this modest proposal but I actually proposed to the president my university I said don't take down the statues just make a very modest change to each statue and go around to each statue and put a small plaque maybe about this big that simply has the year in which the statue was erected and I thought do this and all of a sudden I've got this outdoor history lesson and so people can walk around and they can see that the statue that was put up to Jefferson Davis on the UT campus was erected in 1929 what does that tell us Jefferson Davis was not a Texan but Texans in the 1920s we're trying to make a political point by recognizing Jefferson Davis but that does two things one it tells us when this went up and it gives us an idea of the mindset that people put it up but it also absolves the present of the responsibility for these things that went up 100 years ago and sort of this is the this is the justification for taking down all the stuff for changing these names we don't want this generation to be seen as honoring these people whose values we don't share and that's fair enough if you're if you're putting up something new today okay you know Yale or the University of Texas wouldn't erect a statue to Jefferson Davis her name at college or John Calhoun today but to somehow pretend that it never did I think that does well it does a disservice to my history students if only because so on the campus of the University of Texas there used to be these Confederate statues well since the Confederate statues went up there are statues to Martin Luther King there's a statute of Barbara Jordan a black congresswoman from Houston there's a statute as Caesar Chavez and if these statutes were all still there with the dates then you could walk around and you could see what the administration of the University of Texas valued at different times in history but now you go around and you know I'd like them I like to think I'm teaching history to my students and I think they do but we learn a lot about history from our environment and if the environment says there never was a civil war there never slavery never existed you know but the fact that you could see Jefferson Davis honored in the 1920s and then Barbara Jordan the grand great-granddaughter of slaves argued honored in the 1990s that says something about the history of the state of Texas so so that's my long-winded answer to a short question I got a question yes okay so Jefferson Davis and in fact there's a separate argument as to the artistic merit of these statues and these particular statutes included some there were by a very distinguished sculptor who did a lot of stuff in Texas and and so this it would be it would have been an artistic shame almost on artistic crime if the statute simply then melted down so Jefferson Davis has moved into a museum on campus and there is something to be said for that but there are two things to be said against one is that my students they I'm not going to say yeah I'm gonna say if they avoid museums like the plague they will never see that statue otherwise they had to walk past Jefferson Davis every day the second thing is this is maybe a minor point but statues are designed you know the statutes of golf on pedestals they're designed to be seen on pedestals I'll give you one example so my older son Hal who mentioned who now is a distinguished professor but it used to be a little kid and when he was a little kid there was a moment when Texas I live in Austin and the state of Texas whereas refurbishing the Capitol and on top of the Capitol is this sort of it's not quite winged victory it's the goddess of Liberty and this white statue this I don't know 14 feet tall or something like this and it's designed to be viewed from well at the top of the Capitol and you're down below but it was the day when they were going to take the statue down and they were gonna get one of those big heavy duty double rotor helicopters and so it was a big deal a announces they're gonna lift it off and so Hal was about four years old I took him the stroller and off we went and we watched as a helicopter and they they put the cables over the statue and they're tugging away and the throat mmm the statue stuck and so they and everybody's got this actually gonna happen or not so finally they yank it free and they bring it along they fly it around a little bit and doing very dramatically and then they lower it down onto the grass of the the Capitol grounds and so I was able to make use of my little kid say little kid here he wants can we get into the front so he can see it he's just in you short so he works already to the front and Hal takes one look at this statute and bursts into tears because I don't know are there any Lyle of it fans in the house so why I love it has this song I think the song is called she's hot to go or something like this and he sees this woman from behind and so he's portions hot to go she's ready and so on and he goes on and on like this but then at the end of song he comes around and this is this probably wouldn't pass muster in this day and age but he comes around he says but she was ugly from the front actually though and then there's this female voice that comes in and turns him ugly too and and I love his father they want to you know cast stones but but anyway but the point was that when Hal saw this statue it was ugly now why was it ugly because it was designed to be seen from 400 feet away and an angle of declination of 45 degrees it's like it's like stage makeup if you ever go up close you know it's supposed to be seen from the last row of the theater and so for these statues I've been to see Jefferson Davis up close in the museum and he's ugly from the front so but but the larger reason is that you take them sort of out of their native environment and it sort of solves the problem but not really because you said you said very aptly this is quite true that it was created to say we're in favor of segregation of the races but I want my students to know that there was a time when the university they intended was run by people in their section of the country that was in favor of segregation because it you know if you believe in progress you have to know where you're progressing from and there's no historical memory so against which to judge otherwise the fact that Martin Luther King has a statue on the UT campus well big deal it is a big deal because that statue would not have been placed there sixteen years before and that's why my little suggestion just putting the time stamp it was rejected and the statutes went down yes Oh actually I know I'm sorry I need to get somebody else but we could follow up maybe later yes sir yeah oh we did in fact so you're up on their story so each one eventually went into the executive branch and John Calhoun was one who was kind of the sneakiest one in the sense of succeeding where Henry Henry Clay was the one who came closest to being president here we are in an event in a Presidential Library sponsored by a presidential studies Center trivia no it's not trivia course an important question for you there have been two people in American history who are three-time losers for their party as nominees of their party in races for president and one was Henry Clinton who lost in 1824 in 1832 and 1844 who is the only other three-time loser in American history and I don't get to count Harold Stassen who is a 16 time loser yes William Jennings Bryan there you go and there's something actually important in this this is no longer the case but there are any baseball fans in the audience there was at one time a phenomenon is actually did happen you know being a 20 game winner used to be the standard of excellence but what was really strange was occasionally there were 20 game losers now you might think how do you get to be a 20 game loser well you have to be good enough to be in the regular rotation and be bad enough to lose 20 games or at least play for a lousy team and so that's sort of accounts for clays three times losses but John Calhoun managed to be present I spread of the United States he was he was one of five people running for president in 1824 five people running yeah because the first party system of federal Sen Quigs had broken down and the second party system of Democrats and I'm sorry a federalist and Republican is broken down and the second party system of Democrats and Whigs hadn't originated had emerged and so people could and groups could nominate whoever they want to serve her five people running John Calhoun realized he wasn't going to make the finals so he dropped out but let it be known that he would be delighted for number two slot and so he managed to leverage that into the support of both he got the support of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams and they all agreed that he was going to be vice president and so he became vice president under John Quincy Adams he wanted to run again in 1828 the 1824 is when Jackson was the plurality winner of the electoral vote and the popular vote but didn't win when the race went to the House of Representatives but Calhoun is thinking okay I'm number two and you never know President might die or this might be a launching pad to something so he manages to finagle his way onto the ticket of both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson when there's a rerun in 1828 so it's the only case in American history where a vice president under a president of one party becomes vice president immediately of the president of the other party but it gets complicated because meanwhile behind the scenes calhoun is conspiring in the undermining of federal authority and so as vice president calhoun is secretly urging those South Carolinians who want to secede from the union and Jackson is doing everything you can to keep South Carolina from seceding from the Union and the the climax of the tension occurs when it's on a Jefferson Day dinner event in April the Jeffersonians Republicans that are about to be called Democrats they met every year I don't think I think maybe they gave it up a while back because jet eventually they became Jefferson and Jackson Day dinners and both Jefferson and especially Jackson have become at least mildly toxic to most Democrats so I don't think they do it do they do it anymore you know Jefferson Jackson Day dinners okay like Presidents Day instead of Washington's Birthday okay anyway so at the Jefferson's Day dinner in 1832 at the 1930 excuse me when the the crisis over South Carolina is developing they they all the Democrats assume you will call the Democrats they all get together and they toast Thomas Jefferson and the principles on which the Union is based and these toasts indicate their position on various events of the day so those people who support South Carolina they endorsed Jefferson's Kentucky resolves now we're getting in a little bit into the weeds it's in the book where Jefferson in 1817 98 argues in favor of the rights of states to determine the constitutionality of federal laws it was in response to the alien Sedition Acts at 1790 which were an egregious violation of the First Amendment but the Supreme Court hadn't yet declared the principle that we get to determine constitutionality so Jefferson and James Madison who did the same thing for Virginia they say states get to be the ones to do this and that's exactly what calhoun was claiming for South Carolina the right for South Carolina to declare on the constitutionality of law in this case the tariff of 1828 so some of the some of the toasts are in favor of the Kentucky resolutions and this is sort of an indirect support for Calhoun but that climax of the night comes when the President of the United States Andrew Jackson is going to speak because they're the scheduled toasts and then they're the unscheduled toasts and the president didn't always attend this event but Jackson did on that night and he was he made very clear that he was not going to let the Union be broken up and so when Jackson stands up as president he's the first one in the unschedule toast so everybody looks at Jackson what's he going to say and Jackson by this time he's showing his age and he's not in good health he never was a public speaker and so he didn't speak loudly hidden speak forcely he was no match for clay or Webster even calhoun but he stands up and the audience is bigger than this it's in a hotel in Washington and everybody is absolutely silent to see what Andrew Jackson is going to say and Jackson holds up his glass and says and while staring exactly at John Calhoun he says our Federal Union it must be preserved so Calhoun is up next and he's the vice president and he's got to answer Jackson he sort of has to answer to Jackson as well and so Calhoun is trying to think on the fly because because Jackson hadn't said what he was going to say and he had a chance to prepare in advance but Calhoun has to figure it out on the spot and everybody's looking at him he really is on the spot so he's thinking about it a little bit and he says he raises his glass and he says the Union and for a moment everybody thinks my gosh he's capitulated Andrew Jackson has carried the day but he says he repeats the Union next to our Liberty most dear well that's quite a qualification it's at that point the Jackson decides that Calhoun has to go now it's complicated by a story that is almost absurd when I relate it even to you but basically the wives of the members of Jackson's cabinet could not get along this because one woman Peggy Margaret Eaton was I don't know how to say this without sounding kind of catty but she was prettier than the other members of the other wives of the cabinet she also grew up in an inn and she didn't have a mother so she was her father ran the the in the hotel and she grew up there and she was kind of flirtatious she got better tips if she flirted and so she was seen as this woman of loose morals and because she had loose morals and then she subsequently married a guy who became a member of Jackson's cabinet then the other wives of the cabinet members refused to attend her dinners refused to be at receptions with her and the ringleader of this opposition to Peggy Eaton was Florida Calhoun John Calvin's wife and this was this was the start of why Andrew Jackson never forgave John Calhoun you might think it was a matter of high policy and eventually it was but it started because well as Cal as Jackson saw it that Calhoun could not control his wife and his wife and therefore through his wife Calhoun himself was casting aspersions on Peggy now this requires me to tell a little bit about Jackson's personal story with women his mother died rescuing him from a prisoner of war camp in the Revolutionary War and Jackson believed that his mother was a saint and then his wife died because she had been slandered during the campaign of 1828 and under the strain of all of this criticism she had a physical breakdown that ended in her death so as a result of this Jackson could not stand the idea the defenseless women would be famed and if Jackson had been alive today he would have said I believe the woman and this was Jackson's view and when Peggy Eaton said she was blameless and John Eaton who was Jackson's personal friend said my wife is blameless Jackson said I believe you and all these people who are saying that she's not they can't be part of my administration but Jackson wasn't a czar and so he couldn't fire his whole cabinet eventually he did he couldn't fire everybody at once and the cabinet was paralyzed and you might think my gosh the business of the United States can't go forward because there is this fight among the women it was called the petticoat war but so this is this is part of the story but I'll just conclude I should probably draw a conclusion here but I'll just say that Andrew Jackson is one of the major subsidiary characters and Jackson's attitude he didn't have much in particular against Daniel Webster but Jackson was asked on his deathbed he was dying in 1845 he was asked what he would do differently could he live again he said if I could live again I would hang John Calhoun and shoot Henry Clay so believe it at that well I have one one more thing to mention you're about to hear from that you're about to hear from a group that is going to honor Ralph Hauenstein and I just want to say a word that about Ralph Hauenstein what he has meant to me and mostly through the Hauenstein Center and I was privileged as Gleaves mentioned to be able to meet Ralph this was now what 15 years ago were there bats and I really didn't know anything about Ralph Hauenstein minato not from Michigan but I came to learn about his fascinating and important career and I was particularly interested in what Ralph had to say about his commander during World War two about Dwight Eisenhower because I my first book was about Dwight Eisenhower and I spent a lot of time studying Eisenhower at the Eisenhower library leaving everything I could read about Dwight Eisenhower and trying to sort of recreate the man from the paper trail that's left behind and at the time I was writing there weren't very many people left who had known Eisenhower so I didn't really get a chance to talk to people who knew him and for the historian that can be absolutely crucial there are times when it's utterly impossible when I wrote about Benjamin Franklin nobody was alive and who Benjamin Franklin so you know but it so you know you do what you can but when I met Ralph Hauenstein and he could tell me what kind of commander aizen era was I'd heard other people talk about but her see here's somebody that I could actually ask questions up and who could tell me about basically to fill in the the personal human detail that often falls between the cracks of the paper record was immensely valuable to me actually it's a little bit too late I wish I'd known him when I was writing the book about Eisenhower but he was wonderful to talk to he was very approachable and you'll hear more I think about his career but I would just say that for all the good work that he did while he was alive as good work continues in the endowment that funds the Hauenstein Center and so I I had a chance to know him during the last years of his life but I can say that I have been a great beneficiary of the great work that he has done for Michigan for Grand Valley State for the Hauenstein Center and indirectly through anybody who's interested in World War two and anything related to Dwight a snare so you're gonna hear more about that but that's just my two cents on the subject thank you very much you've been a wonderful [Applause] tonight well what a wonderful job it's always great to have you join us here in Grand Rapids and certainly the wonderful relationship we have with the gel our Ford Museum they are drilled our Ford presidential foundation in the Holland Stein Center at Grand Valley we just couldn't do the things we do without well out this great relationship I'm Joe Calvary's executive director of the Gerald Ford Presidential Foundation but tonight I'm here as president of the Michigan Historical Commission appointed by the governor legislature leaders and the Commission for over a century been key to the preservation and recognition of Michigan's wonderful history those of us on the Commission received no financial compensation simply put we receive one of the greatest rewards possible the privilege of serving the people of Michigan by helping to promote a precious Michigan history joining us in the audience tonight is Vice President Brian James Egan Laura Ashley Commissioner Tom Prescott Commissioner and Sandra Clarke representing the state of Michigan Michigan Historical Center in the Department of National Resources this day focuses on extra rnai Michigander Colonel Ralph Hauenstein who changed our history our country and the world we lived in the Cowles an iconic symbol of patriotism entrepreneurship and community supporter ralph lived an extraordinary life looking to the age of 103 and by his own admission he never retired in particularly it was an advocate and benefactor for his community his country in the world Ralph has been internationally awarded the Order of the British Empire by the British government as well as a French Legion of Honor by the French government when your Corral's burst Michigan leaders showed imagination and foresight by establishing a Historical Commission that were enshrined are irreplaceable stories during 2013 centennial the Commission launched a signature award for visionary public service to the cause of Michigan history hoping to inspire others to a lofty standard we call it the mak award the Mack award it evokes a glorious achievement that links our two peninsulas and has become to symbolize our state the mighty Mack bridge this Mack award is named after three of our greatest public servants here in Michigan a reviewed senior statesman governor William G Milliken our own 19 former commissioner with 54 years of public service Elizabeth sparks Adams in our state's former chief lawyer Attorney General Frank J Kelly with 37 years of public service who sometimes been nicknamed the eternal general like these three public servants after which the ward is named the contribution of Colonel Ralph Hauenstein to Michigan history into our country is marked by grace devotion and determination that those three individuals had crossed ibogaine became a city editor of the Grand Rapids Herald at the young age of 27 supervising 16 seasoned reporters in Ralph Spock intelligent was my life co-written by Donald Mackley it says he unwittingly learned the art of developing quote all-source intelligence end of quote and little did he know what role that would play in his life Ralph joined the military for the second time a year prior to the attack of Pearl Harbor as chief of intelligence branch of the Army's European theater of operations he worked under General Dwight Eisenhower in 1944 and 45 he travelled to the European continent he was among the first Americans into liberated war-torn Germany and Nazi concentration camps wealth help the right history is an integral part of breaking the German code which is an invaluable part the Allied forces winning in World War two wealth also helped to preserve history in World War two by assuring the European antiquities were safely held from destruction reflecting on his wartime experiences the highly decorated colonel said and I quote in the 20th century I saw my own eyes the worst that leaders are capable of in their 21st century I want to encourage the best possible leadership so that the world would be a better place for my children's children al Holland Stein's entrepreneurship and business career brought to us goldfish crackers Andes mints and wind mail cookies it was part of a history as a member of the team supervised in the first free elections in Russia join him over notable individuals and to name just a couple Alexander Haines Haig James woolsley and his dear friend from Grand Rapids Peter Cook he supported the Grand Rapids Public Museum as well as a gel our Ford Presidential Museum with his time talent and philanthropy cleaning the Holland sign Center for presidential studies at Grand Valley University brought together his belief of preserving history and making the world a better place for his children's children's their mission to inspire new generations of leaders devoted to public service one of the initial things that initiatives that the hon Stein Center did was to provide preserve history in one room all the books written by the US presidents recognized by the Library of Congress is a neke valuable asset and here it's at Grand Valley Thank You Governor Rick Snyder sent me a letter yesterday he wanted me to pass along to the family tonight and I'd like to share a couple sentences with you and I quote the governor I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the family of the route late Ralph W Han Stein and being awarded the Milliken Adams Kelly award by the Michigan Historical Commission this outstanding accomplishment required great preparation hard work and is rewarded with ursa States sincere respect and admiration end of quote four years of pub making and being part of history educational efforts for future generations volunteer services and extra eyes sport to preserving history the commission has unanimously bestowed on Colonel Ralph W Han Stein the 2017 William G Milliken Elizabeth s Adams Frank J Kelly award join me on stage will be my fellow commissioners represented from the state of Michigan as well as we accepting this on behalf of the Holland Stein family mr. Brian Holland Stein thank you [Applause] thank you very much everybody I do have a few words here we would like to share I'm truly delighted to be able to receive this well-deserved an honorable award on behalf of my grandfather posthumously and in the presence of many family members that are here today it's true that over the last century he has helped shape our history as a community as a nation and globally in ways that we can scarcely imagine a myriad of his stories have been shared through his book and with his friends but there's a mysterious side of Ralph's grandpa much of those stories will remain untold perhaps indefinitely what I can share with you today is that he was as much a leader at home with his own family as he was in his public life several of us here today including my siblings my cousins my parents we all remember the many gatherings that he worked so hard to create for our family every assembly was special but we all distinctly remember the many st. Patrick's Day parties that he held and his place on Woodcliff weekends when he pulled together such creations as green popcorn and all sorts of edible green things as we walked in the house we would wonder what's next what's grandpa going to pull together there was one time I remember distinctly he had taken a chicken egg and poked a hole in the top and the bottom and blew out the yolk and the whites and then painstakingly entered green jello into the mold of this egg and he waited for us all to arrive in the house and see this this great creation as we peeled away this green jello I don't think any of us ate that though at our annual pig roast parties you never knew what papa was gonna do next we all called him papa as her as the grandchildren endearingly turned him it was at one of these events that he taught us how to catch and clean and prepare frog legs my summers will never be the same since that date it's my pleasure to share this evening for the first time to announce the public in partnership with a grand the event of public museum we will be launching a temporary exhibit of Ralph Hauenstein in his life of leadership opening July 21st of this year the exhibit will cover his amazing journey from the Grand Rapids Herald city editor to his philanthropic efforts later in his life we all hope that you can make your way there later this year to enjoy in his life story with us thank you and have a great evening Thank You Bryan and the hon Stein family for sharing this evening with you because ralph was an amazing individual and it was an honor and privilege to be part of tonight please join us in the lobby bill Brandt's is going to wander continue answering questions join in with a Holland Stein family a little housekeeping if you left your coat on the second floor you will now find it on the first floor by the restroom so so thank you so much for coming please enjoy the reception

Channel: Hauenstein Center

Views: 6,948

Rating: 4.9310346 out of 5

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Id: C7pfCkiqEFU

Length: 102min 25sec (6145 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018