Malcolm Gladwell - David & Goliath - Woolwich Counselling Centre Fundraiser

you thank you for that nice introduction Rick it's a bear real pleasure to be here to come home I am means a lot to me to come back to the place where I was brought up I actually went for a run today and went up to wallenstein because I knew I thought I would be remiss if I came to Florida and did not also visit wallenstein on this trip I'm aware of the long-standing antagonism between those two communities hi I'm adults like to thank Fred retic off for hosting this I was more than delighted to say yes when he asked me when I said that this community is very close to my heart I was speaking not figuratively but literally don't be alarmed how did I forget that punchline I have to now look presentable for the rest of the evening so I wanted to talk about one of the chapters in my new book David & Goliath and it's a chapter about a conflict that many of you will remember which is the troubles in Northern Ireland the 30 years of conflict between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and I tell the story of an incident that happened at the very beginning of that conflict which is in the summer of 1970 there was a British Army imposed a curfew on a Catholic neighborhood in Belfast called the Lower Falls and this was at the very beginning of the conflict it was only about a year old at that point and for an entire weekend but the British Army shut down this neighborhood and no one was allowed outside of their house upon pain of being shot not even to get food or water or anything and in the end after several days that curfew was ended because a group of Catholic women who lived up the hill from the Lower Falls in another neighborhood thousands of them gathered together and linked arms and walked down the hill singing we shall overcome and came closer and closer to the barricade set up by the British Army that were manned by soldiers carrying machine guns I got closer and closer and closer and finally the soldiers panicked and fled and the women came into the town and liberated labour hood had liberated it and if you talk to people who are students of the conflict in Northern Ireland they'll tell you that the liberation of the Lower Falls by that group of women was one of the pivotal moments in that conflict it was it was the incident that turned that from a simple summer of violence into 30 years of conflict it was the moment at which the IRA really received popular goddess its popular support I mean in the Catholic community and I wrote about it not because I was attempting to explain the entire conflict in northern island which is beyond it's so complex that it would be beyond me and beyond one book to do that nor was I trying to explain who I thought was right or wrong in that conflict because I think at the end of the day there were no right or wrong sore winners or losers in that conflict everyone I think was worse off as a result of it I simply wanted to understand what motivated those women to do what they did why on earth would a group of women who had no arms no resources no weapons no armor no tanks no nothing what would motivate them to walk down the hill with nothing but each other and confront a group of soldiers who had every weapon in the world at their disposal in other words what is it that causes underdogs to fight why do people challenge Authority in those kinds of circumstances because that's one of the stories of our time right our world is full of people who take extraordinary steps to challenge much more powerful foes and the question is why do they do it so that's the story I wanted to return to this evening which is to try and understand what motivates people in that kind of context situation to fight but I didn't want to tell the story of the retell the story that I tell in my book because the more I tell you about my book the less incentive you have to read it so I thought what I do instead is tell a parallel story a story that doesn't appear in the book but which I think reflects very strongly on this same theme of what causes underdogs to fight and it's the story of a very remarkable woman named Alva Val Vanderbilt who I think is one of the great unsung heroes of the 20th century and the fascinating thing about Alva Vanderbilt is that midway through her life she takes a radical turn she decides to stand and be counted to take on people much more powerful than her and the question that is that that action that turn in her life raises is why does she do it because there was absolutely nothing in her life to that point that would have predicted why she would have taken such a radical turn and I thought if we could understand what motivated Alva Vanderbilt in that moment to do something that remarkable maybe we would have insight into the broader question of what motivates underdogs in general to fight not just in Northern Ireland but in other places as well so Alva Vanderbilt actually has three names her Elvis Smith was the name that she was born with Alva Vanderbilt was the name that she became famous with and alpha Belmont is a name that she died with she was a she was from she was born in Mobile Alabama in the mid 19th century her father was a prosperous cotton merchant and when she was quite young her family moves to New York City and she really grows up in New York and the best way to describe Alva as a girl and a young woman is that she was a force of nature she was completely uncover noble she did nothing but pick fights with other children she was violent she was she was she had she was a she behaved appallingly she would take direction from no one she was domineering she was dictatorial she was a goat istic 'el she never was she never grew beyond about four foot ten even as an adult she had a very very severe face and a friend of hers intending to be nice said she resembled a Pekinese which i think is inaccurate I've seen pictures and I think she really resembles a pit bull she had long hair that went all the way down to her back and that was that was great I'm she was in her late 20s and in in her memoirs that she publishes at the end of her life she refers to the fact that she was always governed by this kind of force which compelled her to pick fights with anyone that she encountered she is a she's a real piece of work and she has great ambitions for herself in New York society and her own family while well-off is by no means wealthy and she realizes that if she wants to do what she wants to do if she wants to accomplish what she set out to accomplish in the world she's going to need money so she sets her eye on all of the eligible young men of New York society in this period and finally lands on a young man named Willy Vanderbilt who is handsome spoiled charming a playboy and who just happens to be the grandson of Commodore Vanderbilt who is then the richest man in the world and so Alva starts to follow him around and realizes that he's going to go to a spa in Sulphur Springs West Virginia and she follows him down there and one night a dinner she dresses up in this extraordinary black dress for stuned with goldenrod and she comes down the stairway into the dining room and a Willie Vanderbilt looks up and sees this vision and he's smitten and she goes and she sits down next to him and she lies about her age and she charms him and in short order they're married and she produces three children for him a daughter named Consuelo and two young sons and then she sets out to become the most conspicuous consumer in the history of conspicuous consumption and for all of us who've lived through the first 13 years of the 21st century I think we know that the competition for that title is considerable so she goes out and she buys eight eight hundred acres in Long Island and has the most prominent architect of the day a man named Richard Morris hunt built this fantastic house in shingles overlooking the water and then she buys an entire city block in the middle of Manhattan on the corner of 52nd and Fifth Avenue where the Rockefellers enemies today and she hires the same architect to build her a French chateau and the French at the cost of construction of this house is three million dollars in 18 $90 which works out to a couple of hundred million dollars in contemporary money and to give you a sense of witness house it's like I'm gonna quote to you the following passage from one of the many books that have been written about Alpha Vanderbilt's houses all of which are exercises in what might be called real-estate pornography this is a brief description of the interior of the Chateau and a corner of 52nd fifth everywhere was everything walls of red African marble of stamped leather walls hung with blue silk brocade with red velvet embroidered with leaves flowers and butterflies enriched with cut crystal and precious stones ceilings of mahogany of bronze of colored glass a bamboo wainscoting of rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl and brass ebony inlaid with ivory polished ebony inlaid with satin wood and Grecian oriental Elizabethan Renaissance French and Victorian touches in crowded rooms bursting with bronze stained glass marble and mosaics then she decides she wants a yacht and not just any yacht by the way the largest yacht ever built to that point 285 feet a yacht so large that once when she was sailing around the coast of Turkey the Turkish Navy mistook her yacht for an enemy cruiser and fired two shots across its bow and she calls the yacht the Alpha of course then she decides she wants a country cottage and so she goes to Newport Rhode Island and builds a mansion there and I won't go into details about it except to say that she had to build a special Derrick in Newport Harbor because she was importing 500,000 cubic feet of white Italian marble just for the facade so now she has the city house the country house the country cottage and the yacht and her and her attention turns to her daughter Consuela now Consuelo has gone to be this very very shy retiring girl and Alva has the highest of expectations for her and she insists that Consuelo wear one of those old-fashioned corsets at all times that has like a metal rod up the back to keep her back straight and then another metal rod across her shoulder blades to keep her shoulders back and Consuelo is permitted to only speak to her parents in French and every Friday for reasons I don't understand she is required to recite a poem to her her parents from memory in German and if she does the slightest thing wrong and public she's immediately corrected by alpha because alpha has this vision of what she wants her daughter to be and as Alva enters as Consuelo enters adolescence Alva gets it in her head that what she really wants to do is to marry her daughter off into English royalty now this is not a as wild an idea as it sounds because in this period the 1890s it was a quite a common practice for the very wealthy daughters of American robber barons to be married off to the penurious sons of English aristocrats there was even a term for it it was called cash for class and there were hundreds hundreds of these forced unions but Alva in very typical fashion sets her sights on the most eligible of all of the penniless sons of English royalty a young man a young 23 year old man named Charles Richard John Spencer Churchill otherwise known as Sonny who is the first cousin of Winston Churchill the lineal ancestor of Princess Di and the heir to Blenheim Palace which was and still is one of the largest and most ostentatious private homes in the world the main buildings of which comprise seven acres and she learns that Blenheim Palace is falling apart and that the Duke hasn't got the money to fix it and she immediately realizes that he will make a perfect match for her daughter now there are two problems with this idea the first is that sunny is not in fact sunny he is the furthest thing from sunny his his father was considered to be one of the least Pleasant men in the 19th century English aristocracy which if you know anything about the 19th century English aristocracy you realize is saying something he he's best known for selling off over the course of his life from his private family collection eighteen paintings by Rubens two Rembrandt's one Bruegel eight Van Dyke's and a couple of Titian 's all to finance various eccentric schemes in his garden his mother was known as goosey and she was both very beautiful and very famously very dim and she was she was fond of of performing various practical jokes all of which I think are best to understand understood as exercises in extreme passive aggression such as she would place ink pots on the top of doors so that when her guests would walk through them the ink would fall on their head and also once famously she placed a very a very pink toy doll under the silver dish for her husband's breakfast on the morning after his mistress Lady Alfred had given birth to his son you never quite recover from parents like that and and Sonny did not Sonny he was petulant and self-absorbed and malicious Consuela once wrote this of him his hands which he used in a fastidious manner were well shaped and he seemed inordinately fond of them now I mentioned that because in the many tens of thousands of words that Consuela wrote in her memoirs about her life that is the nicest thing he ever said about sunny the only other fact worth mentioning about setting is that his second wife Emily Deacon used to sleep with a revolver by her pillow in case sunny should come to her in the middle of the night so that's the problem with that's the first problem sunny Sunny's not sunny the second problem was that Consuela was in love with someone else her heart had been given to a young man named Winthrop Rutherford who otherwise known as wintry who was everything sunny was not warm charming handsome gregarious he was an Adonis an extraordinary dancer here he was from one of the best families in all of New York and he begins to woo Consuelo in earnest and on her 18th birthday she receives a single long-stemmed Rose and she knows there's no letter attached but she knows who it's from I'm not long thereafter a wintry goes on a bicycle ride down Riverside Drive in Manhattan with Consuela and the two of them are biking along and of course Alva is along as well as the chaperone and as they approach a bend in the road wintry looks at Consuelo and they they they send each other a secret glance and they bicycle ahead and go around the curve ahead of Alva and in that moment when she turns to Consuelo and says will you marry me and she says I will and Alva realizing something that's up is up you know bicycles as fast as her little legs can carry her to catch up and she looks in the eyes of wintry and looks in the eyes of her daughter and she realizes something's up so the next day she whisks her daughter off and takes Consuela to Paris and wintry sends letter after letter to his beloved in Paris and every one of them is intercepted by Alva and finally Winfrey shows up because he wants to see Consuelo and Alva puts guards by the front door and forbids him from entering and then Alva takes Consuelo to the house in Newport Rhode Island and once again when she shows up but but Alva keeps Consuelo locked up like Rapunzel in the castle I won't let her to see her beloved and finally Consuelo has had enough and she she cause she Betsy but one day goes to see her mother and climbs the opulent marble staircase into her mother's extraordinary bedroom where there are there are sculptures of cherubs on the walls holding shields force tuned with the letter a well done and she says to her she stands up before her mother and says you have no right to do this to me I have the right to marry the man I love and Alva looks at her and says no you don't you're going to be a duchess and the two of them just embark on the most extraordinary quarrel they're screaming at each other it's Vanderbilt on Vanderbilt violence and finally Alva Vanderbilt just blows her stack because no one talks to her like this and she turns to her daughter and she says in the coldest terms if you let that man ruin your life I will shoot him on sight and Consuelo knows enough about her mother to know that is not an idle boast and she goes back to her to her room and she cries herself to sleep and in the morning there's a knock on the door and the doctor the doctor says to her your mother your mother Alva is very sick she's had a heart attack and I greatly fear that if you have another quarrel with her today she'll have another heart attack and she won't recover and Consuelo realizes it's no use there is no way you can stand up to Alva Vanderbilt and so on on November 6th 1895 New York witnesses what has was probably the grandest wedding before or since in its history though the heiress to one of the wealthiest men in the world marries the most eligible bachelor in all of England and Alva takes over st. Thomas's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and she hires 80 decorators to fill it with flowers and she invites every famous successful wealthy prestigious person in the country and they show up two hours ahead of time to make sure they get a seat and the crowds are lined up five and six deep from 72nd Street all the way down to 50th Street and the police are trying to hold them back because they're all straining to get a look at this extraordinary procession going to the wedding and every single newspaper in the country sends a reporter to cover this extraordinary event and finally the door is open and Alva sweeps up the aisle with her two young sons by her side dressed in an extraordinary dress of blue satin with a border of Russian sable and she stands at the front the church and every eye is riveted by her and she stands there and she waits and she waits and she waits first five minutes then ten minutes then fifteen minutes and Consuela doesn't show up why because she's at home weeping console' ibly into the arms of her father and finally they pull Consuelo together and they clear away her tears and they put her in a carriage and they take her to the church and she the minister pronounces sunny and Consuelo man and wife and Alvo whisks the two of them back into the vestry and they sign the marriage contract and and sunny is promised 2.5 million dollars in cash up front and $100,000 a year for life and they climb into a carriage and they go off down Fifth Avenue and sunny turns to Consuelo and he says you have two responsibilities first to fix up Lenin Palace and second to bear me in air and back at the church Alva is standing in a window looking at the carriage received down Fifth Avenue and a tear comes to her eye because it's her moment of greatest triumph right the little girl from Mobile Alabama is now the mother of a duchess right her life's work is completed or so she thinks because things are to get interesting now you can see I think why I said that Alva was an unlikely radical women who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on houses and who wear blue satin dresses with borders of Russian sable and who marry their daughters off into English royalty are not likely candidates for radicalism it would be as if one of the Kardashian sisters pulled up stakes and moved to the Middle East and joined Hamas it's not something it's not something likely to happen right so how do we account for it well before we get into the details of this I think it's worth taking a step back and talking a little bit about our theoretical understanding of why people choose to defy authority and fight for yours has been a standard answer to this question and has been that people will defy authority based on the theory of deterrence they'll they'll break the rules they'll disobey when the costs of disobedience are low and the benefits of disobedience are high right they do a kind of weighing of the of how much this particular act of disobedience is going to cost and if the risk benefit in their analysis is positive then they'll break the law so the classic example of this is the famous Montreal police strike of 1969 some of you will be old enough to remember that for 19 hours in the summer of 69 the Montreal police go off on strike and in that window of 19 hours montreal descends into mayhem there are so many bank robberies that the banks have to close people start shooting each other in the streets I don't even know they were guns in Montreal in 1969 they must have gone to America gotten guns brought them back in order to shoot each other during this particular window right that's that's used by by by criminologists as evidence of the theory of deterrence for that nineteen hours there was no cost associated with breaking a law so peep broke the law in droves now the problem with deterrence theory though is that there are lots and lots of cases where it doesn't seem to explain behavior so think about a very another very common kind of law-abiding behavior that all of us have to engage in which is paying our taxes if you look at all of the countries in the Western world you will see an extraordinary range of honesty on tax day there are certain countries like Greece and Italy with a number of people who cheat on their taxes on tax day is incredibly high maybe as many as a third to a half of people are actively hiding their income from the government in comparison a place like Canada or more particularly a country like the United States has very little cheating on tax day in fact our understanding of American taxpayers is that they are about as honest as tax payers can be now what would the theory of deterrence tell you about or predict about that situation what it would say is that the reason Americans obey the law on tax day is that the costs of cheating on their taxes are really high and the benefits are really low right in other words there must be really really serious penalties to that are dissuading people from cheating on their taxes in America is that true no in fact Americans have some of the lowest penalties for cheating on their taxes of any country in the Western world basically if the American tax authorities catch you fudging your taxes they make you pay back the money you owe plus a fine they very rarely send you to jail and by the way their chances of catching you are incredibly low because America has the lowest rates of audits of personal income taxes in the Western world so the it's a puzzle the theory of deterrence would say under those circumstances people would cheat all the time and yet Americans don't so an answer to this puzzle another group of criminologists have said you know what deterrence is not a good explanation what we need what we work better is a theory that they that they call the theory of legitimacy and what legitimacy theory says is that people will obey the law when they feel like the way in which the law is administered is legitimate now what does that mean well it means legitimacy is defined in three ways a law is considered legitimate when it treats us with when we feel the law treats us with respect respect means I can if I have a problem I can stand up and I can be heard someone will listen to me a law is also considered legitimate when it treats us fairly when there isn't one set of rules for people on this side of the church and one set of rules to people on that side of the church right when we think that everyone is being treated roughly the same way we're inclined to follow the law and the third criteria we use to judge a law is legitimacy is trustworthiness we will follow a law when we feel like the way the law looks today is a good predictor of the way the law will look tomorrow when we know there's not going to be some radical arbitrary u-turn in the middle of the night that's gonna change the rules and we won't know what system we're operating under in the morning where laws are where they where they meet these three criteria people are in are inclined to follow them so with these principles in mind think back to the example of Americans and their taxes why do Americans pay their taxes because they believe their system to be legitimate if you have a problem with your taxes if you think your taxes are too high can you stand up in America and complain and be heard absolutely they have an entire political party which is devoted to nothing but listening to people's complaints about how their taxes are too high right is the American tax system fair pretty much I mean it has some problems here and there but compared to other countries in the world yes it treats everyone pretty much the same is it trustworthy well it is trustworthy you may disagree with the form that it takes but no one's changing rules in the middle of the night you know pretty much what your taxes are gonna look like tomorrow based on what they look like yesterday now contrast that to Greece what happens in Greece is their system does their system treat taxpayers with respect no it's one of the most corrupt tax systems in the world people are subject to all kinds of have to pay bribes and you get special deals is it fair the farthest thing from fair huge parts of Greek society have been exempted from taxes because they bought off politicians is it trustworthy no furthest thing from trustworthy the rules change all the time if you and I lived in Greece chances are we would think twice about paying our taxes as well right where there is no legitimacy people choose to disobey authority to deny someone respect and Trust and fairness is serious blow to their views about the legitimacy of the system that they're operating in which brings us back to Alva Vanderbilt so here was this woman who against all expectations becomes a radical right and that's hard for us to understand at least on the surface because she's this insanely rich woman who sis goes around the world building extraordinary houses and yachts and by incredible clothes and ordering around a fleet of servants what on earth could her a complaint with her Society be well it turns out that she had all kinds of complaints with her society because police beneath the surface the world that she was a part of was actually an extraordinarily narrow and oppressive place she belonged to the upper echelon of New York society but in New York society women could play only the very smallest and most constrained of roles they could have dinner parties they could raise their children and they could order around their servants but that was it they couldn't vote they couldn't participate in public life they couldn't get an education they couldn't speak up and be heard in any meaningful way they were expected to stay at home and keep our up a respectful distance from the rest of society the man meanwhile could do whatever they wanted they could especially if they were as wealthy as these men were they could work they get education they could run for public office they could speak up they could start businesses they under the divorce laws of that time a man could divorce a woman merely by accusing her of infidelity for a woman to divorce a man she had to prove infidelity and physical cruelty a man with wealth could go wherever he wanted and satisfy every whim in fact the men in the New York society at that time - all had yachts and they would go off with on their yachts and have wild parties until the early dawn they would keep their mistresses in houses in Manhattan and Willie Vanderbilt Alvez husband was no exception it's exactly what he was like he was a Playboy didn't work for a living didn't have to he'd inherited millions and millions of dollars he was this handsome charming man who could do it every wished and that's what he did he had one affair after another over the course of his marriage to Alva so on the outside Alva may seem like this happy fulfilled women woman but on the inside she was suffering she would later describe the years leading up to consuelo's marriage as the most unhappy of her life she and Willie had really begun to argue as the weight of his infidelities had gotten heavier and heavier and finally an attempt to save her marriage and her family she turns to Willie and says let's go as a family to Paris for the summer hoping that by getting away they can patch things up but they go to Paris and it's a nightmare the minute they get to Paris the first thing Sonny does is start up a very public affair with Al his best friend and then he simultaneously starts a very public affair with a very famous prostitute in Paris and he's seen with her all around town right and Alvin is completely humiliated you know later in her life she writes her memoirs and there's this extraordinary paragraph where she describes what it was like to be a woman in that kind of situation and she says is this I'll reach ooh she says it was considered religious dignified and correct for the wife to withdraw into the shadows while her husband paid the family respects to the sunshine and then she writes and this is the line I find heartbreaking a woman was supposed to get her sunlight by proxy through her husband and I think that phrase sunlight by proxy helps to put a lot of her behavior into perspective you know here is this brilliant ambitious driven woman in today's world she would be out in the business world right she would have started a company she would have started a Counseling Center she would have she would be in politics she would be out in the world on a grand scale participating in public life but in 1900 none of these options are available to her she's trapped in her home so what does she do well she goes out and she builds grand houses and in retrospect that seems like an act of ostentation and conspicuous consumption but robots a very narrow way of reading it because remember she has no other outlet for her energy and ambitions there's no other way she can express her extraordinary drive and intelligence and desire to put an imprint on the world this is a woman who needs a project in a challenge and society her society has given her only one way to express that those houses are not symbols of conspicuous consumption they're symbols of frustration I think this also makes sense of her seemingly excusable behavior around her daughter consuelo's love for wintry Rutherford you know Alva loved her daughter more than anyone else she had paid extraordinary attention to how her daughter was raised and educated at a time when young women were marginalized were not permitted to participate in the intellectual which they were apart halma made absolutely sure that Consuelo had access to all of the great books and tutors of the day she made sure that her daughter was taken to Europe and got a sense of the world that she lived in she wanted a daughter who was going to be a spirited thoughtful intelligent worldly woman she wanted a woman who would stand up and be counted and when she looks at wintry what does she see well when when she was pursuing Consuelo Consuela was 18 and when she was 33 he spent his days playing golf and polo at the Newport Country Club when he dies years later his I read his obituary on the obituary writer is clearly working incredibly hard to find even a single thing interesting about winter 'is life and the only thing he could come up with is that wintry has Fox Terrier kennels that were known the country over that's the best he can do and when he couldn't marry Consuelo what does wintry do he just marries another rich heiress and that richer has happened to die you know what did wintry do he just married another rich heiress when Alva looks at him she sees another version of the man she married Willie Vanderbilt write an idle decadent Philander fer philanderer who will sentence her daughter to a lifetime of misery and uselessness by contrast what did Sonny represent well sure he was a miserable person but at least he was a miserable person in another country far away from this incredibly narrow constraining society of which Alva and Consuelo were apart and as his wife Consuelo would be the Duchess of Marlborough she would be someone who would have a formal position in the world she would be able to speak up and be heard people would take her seriously she wouldn't be dismissed the way the women of New York were dismissed now to our modern ears that sounds like an impossibly cynical calculation on Alfa's part because today we marry for love and Consuela was absolutely in love with wintry but in the late 19th century when women were a little more than property of their husbands Alva felt that love was a luxury her daughter could not afford you know Consuela was her great hope was this was her beloved she had a real mind and she had a real spirit and she Alba felt that she could not let her daughter squander her life the same way that Alva felt her own life had been squandered so what does Alva do well the first thing she does in those long difficult years is she she kicks Willie out she says enough I I will not be humiliated anymore and she demands a divorce now of course a divorce in this era is something particularly at that level of society that is unheard of and the minute she says that she is ostracized from New York society and vilified she goes when she comes out of the church where she's gone for her entire adult life people who she thought were her friends turned their backs on her and would no longer talk to her right the next thing she does is that she rises to her full height of 4 foot 10 and she tells her daughter Consuelo that she cannot throw her life away by marrying when she Rutherford and then she marches up the island st. Thomas you know with her sons by her side and in her blue satin with the Russian the border of Russian sable and she waits for her daughter to arrive for five minutes then 10 minutes then 20 minutes while every eye in the church is on her and she is absolutely humiliated right and she stands there and waits why because she knows her daughter is at home weeping inconsolably into the arms of her father and when sunny and Consuelo pull away in that carriage after their marriage and a tear comes to Alva's eyes not a tear of triumph it's a tear of real tragedy this is a woman who has been forced to make a series of him possible choices her husband has publicly humiliated her and she has decided to leave him as a result and has been ostracized by the society that she thought she was a part of her daughter has made a disastrous choice in in love and she has prevented her daughter from marrying the man he loved and in so doing alienated her daughter from herself he lifted the one person she loves more than anyone else why because she's trying to save her now under normal circumstances people who face those kinds of that kind of social pressure they give in they don't fight they finally they say you know what it's not worth it they say to Willie I'll I'd rather be humiliated and stick with you than face this kind of ostracize ation and vilification they say to their daughter all right do what you have to do I'm not gonna fight you on this they slink away ordinarily and they declare defeat but alpha doesn't do that and why because she does not accept society's judgment of her on either of those two fronts as legitimate they have not treated her with respect they have not treated her fairly and they have not treated her with trust and Alva at that moment is at the same moment that all radicals are at the point of their transformation and that is that she's angry now I said at the beginning that one of the things that I want to talk about was why underdogs choose to fight why do they choose to go up against overwhelming odds and I think we have in this notion of legitimacy the beginning of an answer to deny someone respect fairness and Trust is to sow anger them and to sow enrage them on some fundamental level that they are willing to tackle overwhelming odds they're willing to do the the unimaginable to try and get some measure respect back and I think this is what lies at the heart of the troubles in Northern Ireland you know the British Army goes to another Island in 1969 and they have the very best of intentions the Catholics and the Protestants are at each other's throats they're burning down Belfast is in flames in the summer of 1969 Protestant mobs are roaming the streets burning down Catholic homes thousands of people are refugees fleeing from one part of the city to another so the British Army goes in and they're they want to be peacekeepers keep these two sides apart and in the beginning it's important to understand that in the beginning in that first year they were welcomed with open arms particularly by the Catholics they were seen as people who were who were saving the day so what happens to sour the relationship between the Catholics of Northern Ireland and the British Army well I think that but the simplest explanation is the British never understood the importance of this idea of legitimacy the guy who was heading the British military presence in Northern Ireland was general by the name of Ian Freeland who was a general of the old school square jaw straight back piercing blue eyes all that stuff and the first thing he gets he does when he gets to northern island is he says the patience of the British Army is not inexhaustible we will meet force with force right he says that his mandate is to deal toughly and to be seen to deal toughly with thugs and gunmen he's gonna crack down he's a believer in deterrence so he thinks the reason that Belfast is out of control is that the costs of misbehavior are not high enough right so in the summer of 1970 he gets a tip someone says that there's a house in this neighborhood called the Lower Falls where I think there are weapons and some illegal weapons and so Freeland acts instantly and he gathers together a group of policemen and a group of soldiers and he sends him to the house and they searched the house and they come up with all these weapons and they come out of the house after searching with all of the machine guns and hand grenades and as they have been searching the house a crowd has gathered outside and the crowd is very angry with him as you can imagine and and there's some kids there and the kids start throwing stones at the soldiers and the policemen instead of leaving as perhaps they should have they decide no we're gonna stay and we're gonna show these kids who's boss right the days when you could get away with the stuff are over right so the army starts lobbing teargas back at the kids and of course that only makes the crowd angrier and people come running from other parts of lower falls and the mob gets bigger and bigger and bigger and the violence gets worse and worse and worse and someone turns over a bus and sets it afire and finally Freeland has enough and he gets in a gets a helicopter and he flies over the lower falls and he says says in a through a megaphone everybody in their house now don't leave or you'll be shot and the streets empty and then he brings in 3,000 troops and he searches every single house from top to bottom starting that night and ending at 4:00 in the morning and in the morning when he when the when the when the search is over he has a flatbed truck and he loads it up with local policemen with local politicians and reporters and he rides around the deserted streets and he says to them look I've solved the problem and he honestly thinks that by imposing that curfew he has permanently solved the troubles in Northern Ireland and he says to all the people he belongs he's with we're gonna be home by Christmas we're out of here right and of course they weren't home by Christmas they were at home for another 30 years right so why does it go on for another 30 years why doesn't that act of deterrence work well think back to those principles of legitimacy if you were living in the Lower Falls would you have thought that you were treated with respect what does respect mean it means that I can stand up if I'm being mistreated and be heard well the whole problem in Northern Ireland from the very beginning was the catholics never felt they could stand up and be heard they had no voice in their government the government was almost entirely made up of protestants right there's i'm gonna quote this is a passage from a soldier who was involved in the curfew that evening in two searches that evening describing what went on when they searched house-to-house that evening the yes serious i knew full well that a lot of lads were taking this opportunity talking about soldiers to vent their anger heads were being cracked and houses trashed from top to bottom everything in the houses became a mass of rubble but out of the blur of little sharp details still cut through school photos smiley family pictures cracked trinkets and crucifixes snapped kids crying crunching on the glass of the Pope's picture unfinished meals and bad wallpaper colored toys and TV noise and radio crackle painted plates shoes a body in the hall flattened against the wall this is when I felt like we'd invaded that's not respect right and was it fair that's the second condition of legitimacy you have to feel like you're being treated the same as everybody else in your boat well that was also a problem in the Catholics of Northern Ireland they never felt they were being treated fairly the Army in Northern Ireland in 1970 was May or the the police force in Northern Ireland in 1970 was 95% Protestant that was the same police force that freeland used to do the searches in the Lower Falls the previous summer when Protestant mobs had roamed through Belfast burning down Catholic neighborhoods the police had stood there and watched they were reports of Protestant people in the mobs God Protestants going up to the police and asking to borrow their weapons do you think that people in that context felt that they were being treated fairly no of course not well after two days of this after the mounting anger of two days of massive element illegitimate see the women from the Catholic neighborhood up the road decided that enough was enough right and they linked arms thousands of them and they marched down the hill and they sing we shall overcome and they get closer and closer and closer to the soldiers with behind the barricades with their machine guns and the soldiers finally panic as you would faced with 3000 housewives from Bala Murphy and Belfast and I think you can see why so many people date the insurgency in Northern Ireland to that moment because normally women unarmed women with children at home and husbands do not march on armed men but they do and they been denied legitimacy because what happens to people when they are denied legitimacy they get angry and one of the mistakes that those in power make again and again in our world is that they forget what an extraordinary and unstoppable and incredible force that kind of anger can be the spark that ends up setting off the powder keg that is Alva Vanderbilt turns out to be her daughter Consuelo Consuelo is transformed by her time in England she has she bears Sunnie two sons as she would say an heir and despair and the significance of this act cannot be overstated because had had Consuelo not born sunny and air then Blenheim Palace would have passed to Winston Churchill and that burden of taking care of that extraordinary monstrosity would have been such that Winston Churchill would probably never have had the chance to run for public office and we would all currently be under the Third Reich so you can thank Consuelo and after 10 years of enduring this utterly unspeakable man Consuelo leaves him but she does so with such grace and dignity that everyone in English society rallies around her and not around sunny and with that separation from sunny comes a transformation she had been kept almost captive in Blenheim Palace for of those many years but when she's free of Sonny she begins to blossom and she begins to use her standing in English society to become a powerful force for good and she becomes one of the leading philanthropists in all of England and one of the most powerful advocates for social change in all of England the shy bookish girl from Manhattan has turned into this charismatic powerful engaged person on in British public life and in the spring of 1908 she decides to go home and she comes back to New York and she gives a very famous speech at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan and all of the society ladies attend hundreds of them and Consuelo stands at the front of the room and she gives this extraordinary speech this is extraordinary because she does not mince words she basically says to them you're wasting your life she says here you are women of intelligence women with real material resources and what do you do all day you plan parties and you hide behind your husband she says I come from England and in England we're a generation ahead in England is considered perfectly appropriate for women to stand up and be heard on matters of importance you know and she says she tells them what she's been doing in England for 10 years and she says it's time for you to step up and do the same thing she calls them lazy and irresponsible and you cannot imagine the effect this speech as it sends an electric lightning bolt across the country every cut every newspaper in the country covers it it's front-page news Consuela becomes a kind of celebrity is finally the woman with the guts to speak truth to power in a erricka and as she's giving this famous speech who's standing in the front row her mother Alva right and you could only imagine how Alva feels a decade before 15 years before she sent her daughter away in tears because she thought that only by leaving New York for England could Consuela be saved and now Consuela was back and she saved and after the talk Alva and Consuelo meet together in the back of the room and Consuelo turns to her mother and says you know in spite of everything I'm glad I married an Englishman and it's as if a weight has been lifted off Alvez shoulders and every one of her sins has been absolved and not long after that and she she thinks about what her daughter Alva whatever daughter Consuelo has said and Alva realizes that Consuelo is right that she - Alva has been one of those women who has not stood up and been counted has not asserted her position as she has the right and the opportunity to do and so she goes back with Consuelo to England and she goes and she goes to a to an evening at the Royal Albert Hall where a woman named Emmeline Pankhurst is giving a speech and Emmeline Pankhurst is of course one of the most famous suffragettes of the entire early 20th century she was that a time when women almost nowhere in the world who had the right to vote Emmeline Pankhurst was leading the most militant arm of the suffragette movement in England and she was not a woman who shrank from any kind of challenge she was famous for a Stuart assault police officers she would break windows she would burn down buildings all in an attempt to make the cause of women's suffrage real in the minds of the English public and Alva listens to her and she's mesmerised this is her kind of radical right and she says later It was as if a million lightning bolts had been hurled it at some kind of solution and she thinks back to what Consuelo says and she realizes you know what Consuelo didn't go far enough it's not just that women need to be less passive it's that women need to reshape the very foundations of their society and she thinks about all the problems that she faced those impossible choices she had to make the dilemma she had over losing her daughter in order to save her the humiliation she suffered at the hands of her husband and she realizes that the root of those impossible choices was the fact that she lived in a world that did not treat women as legitimate and she realizes that until women get the right to vote nothing they do will ultimately make a difference so she returns to New York and she's ready for battle and she looks at the state of the American suffragette movement and she realizes it's in shambles nothing's happening it's demoralized they have no they got no resources they have no urgency they have no visibility and she realizes that she has urgency and visibility and resources in abundance and so she does the same thing she's done her entire life she just barges in and she takes over and she turns she finds out that the suffragette movement is headquartered in some little town in Ohio and she says this won't do when she buys them a big fancy headquarters on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and then she goes back to her fancy home in Newport Rhode Island the one with the 500,000 cubic feet of white Italian marble just for the facade and she says this would make a really great convention center for the suffragette movement and that's what she does she turns that into the meeting place where all women from all parts of America would gather to plot the overthrow of patriarchy in America and her fancy neighbors jump up and down an outrage but she doesn't care and she opens a Washington office for the suffragette movement and hires a lobbyist and you would not believe the kind of flack she gets for that people denounced her and say it's not ladylike to hire a lobbyist for your cause and Alva shrugs and she says I don't care I haven't been ladylike in 40 years right and then in 1909 the garment workers of New York the female garment workers of New York go on strike and these are the most downtrodden oppressed underpaid mistreated workers in the entire city and they they are over the course of the strike they are mistreated horribly by the police the picketers are arrested and roughed up and assaulted and their clothes are torn from them and Alva stands up and says enough and she leads a march down the Bowery on behalf of the striking garment workers and holds this huge fundraiser bigger than this even in this giant Hall in downtown Manhattan and then she goes to the courthouse where the picketers are being held in prison and she sits there and she stares at the judge and stares at him all night until he finally gives in and that's them free right and then she turns her attention to african-americans because there was a black suffragette movement in this period but of course at the turn of the last century black and white didn't mix but Alva says this is ridiculous we're all women and she stands up and she invites the black suffragettes to join the movement and when the some women some suffragettes say to her you know Alva you're moving too far and too fast you're going to antagonize men Alva says men never worry about antagonizing men why should i right and throughout the long years of the First World War many in a suffragette movement said you know when our country is at war this is no time for us to be fighting for the cause of equal rights and Alva says that's nonsense this is exactly the moment in our history when we should be fighting for the cause of equal rights and she makes sure that every day of the First World War the picketers stay outside the white house reminding the American public that they have disenfranchised 50 percent of their population she puts every ounce of her dictatorial manipulative domineering egotistical controlling ambitious personality into the cause and you all know what happens on August 18th nineteen 20 the 19th amendment the United States Constitution has passed and women for the first time in American history are given the right to vote alpha wins and the lesson of that victory is as important today as it was back then and that is that if you deny people legitimacy they will one day by one means or another rise up and defeat you one last thing Alba dies in January of 1933 from a stroke and her funeral is held at st. Thomas's church in Fifth Avenue in Manhattan the same church where Consuela was married so many years before and it's just like the scene when Consuela was married crowd stretch 20 miles 20 blocks uptown and their five and six rows deep and the cops are keeping them back and every famous person in America is there and every limousine is lined up and down Fifth Avenue and the every that her pallbearers are 20 of the most prominent suffragettes from all around the United States and the congregation during the service sings three hymns the first is by Harriet Beecher Stowe that great feminist hero the second is the suffragettes battle song which is called the march of the woman and the third is a hymn composed by Alva herself which is the perfect summary of the life of this strange and wonderful woman and the hymn is all about how when Alva gets to heaven there is no way she's gonna let a man like Saint Peter stand in judgment of her and it begins no waiting at the gates of paradise no tribunal of men to judge the watchers of the tower proclaim a daughter of the king you

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Keywords: Malcolm Gladwell (Author), david and goliath, david, goliath, woolwich counselling centre, fundraiser, alva, vanderbilt, belmont, alva vanderbilt belmont, floradale, floradale mennonite church, cinematix video productions, cinematix, book signing, book launch, talk, underdog, overcoming, malcolm, gladwell, blink, what the dog saw, tipping point, outliers, misfits, the art of battling giants, giants, battle, conquor, overcome

Id: 8wFzICJ0ZYY

Length: 63min 47sec (3827 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2013