>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Pause ]   >> Good afternoon everyone.

I'm Guy Lamolinara from the Center for the Book here
in the Library of Congress.
And for those of you who don't know about the Center for the Book,
I'll just tell you a little bit about what we do here
and we're a very small office and we are the offices responsible
for promoting books, reading, libraries, and literacy.
And we do that here in Washington DC, but also we do it nationwide
and we do it through our affiliated state centers for the book.
And we have a state center for the book in every state
in the US plus we have one here in the District of Columbia
and also in the Virgin Islands.
So anywhere you go across the country,
there's a state center for the book.
Another thing we do is we play a very important role
in the National Book Festival,
which this year will have its 12th Book Festival on the National Mall
on September 22nd and 23rd.   So please do attend and plan

on attending our National Book Festival.
But what the Center for the Book does is we arrange the authors'
program, we invite the authors to come and speak.
And last year we have more than 200,000 people at the festival
so it's a really great time.
I also like to invite you to go to our website Read.gov.
There you'll find a lot more about the Center for the Book programs
and all the different things that we do to promote books and literacy.
You'll even find digitized versions of classic books
that you can read online for free.
Before we get started, I just want to ask you
to please turn off all your electronic devices and I want
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All our webcast are on Read.gov and there are more than 200
of those author discussions on this site.
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over on the table following her presentation.
Sometimes people ask us how we determine which books we feature
in our author series and the most important criterion we have is
that the book must be based on research that was done here
at the Library of Congress and that was definitely true
of today's author.
And we learn of many of these books through our various divisions
and today I want to thank our Serial and Government Publications Division
because they brought today's author to us.
And also want to thank especially Teri Sierra who's going
to introduce our author today.
Teri is the Assistant Chief of the Serial
and Government Publications Division and she's a long time library staff
for who's ably held so many different roles here.
So please welcome Teri Sierra.   [Applause]

>> Okay, [laughs] all right.
So here I am and thank you Guy for your kind remarks.
I am delighted to be able to introduce Amanda Smith today
who will be talking to us about her second book, The Newspaper Titan.
For some of us who live in this newspaper world,
this is a significant book especially because our heroine is
such a remarkable woman in every respect even before she was a
newspaper publisher.
She certainly wasn't the first woman to be a newspaper publisher
in the United States but I think she is probably the more notable one
of them all and the one that we all kind of have heard about or know
about in some way or another.
After this book, we will already know all about Cissy Patterson.
I don't want to take her remarks away,
Amanda but I was just totally taken by reading what you have
in your first slide, "I would rather raise Hell than raise vegetables."
And as I thought about that,
I thought I have spent too much time raising vegetables [laughter].

I'll just leave it at that 'cause I think for hell, it's too late.
So anyway, for again, for-- this book has been reviewed
and reviewed very well coast to coast by every newspaper.
As is, Amanda's first book,
a compilation of her grandfather's letters and edited by Amanda.
You may know her grandfather, you may have heard
of him, Joseph P. Kennedy.
So she probably had an insight into all
of that although I haven't talked to her long enough to know.
For some of us librarians,
the Washington Herald is a wonderful newspaper.
Cissy brought the circulation up to 100,000 in less than 10 years
when it was handed over to her by William Randolph Hearst.
She had it to the point where at its peak;
there were 10 editions of it daily.
That's a librarian's nightmare [laughter] along
with the title changes.
It went from the Washington Heral, to the Washington Times-Herald
to the Washington Post and Times-Herald, and now,
we know what else the Washington Post and one more iteration
or you can correct me, Amanda, if I'm not totally right about that.
So we're going to enjoy what Amanda has to tell us.
She is a resident of the district which as a resident, I am very proud
to announce, if you didn't know it, and I don't know a lot
about Amanda except that she has written two wonderful books
at her very young age but, you know, she's a graduated
at Harvard University, magna cum laude.
Hmm, I don't know if we can top that.
But anyway, so having said that, I--
one more thing Amanda before you come up, I want to thank the staff
of the Serial and Government Publications Division
for their continued and enthusiastic support of the newspaper collections
that are in our custody and I want to specially thank Amber
who pulled this off together, have the idea
and this would be a good thing to do and did it all by herself.
So thank you, thank you Amber.
And having said that, I'm going to let Amanda come up but Deb,
[phonetic] you'd want to know she loves chronicling America.
Yey, so [laughs] and she's been to our division numerous times
and of course it's easy for her, she's a district resident,
she can get here in no time but we love having her.
Thank you very.   Amanda, please come up.

[ Applause ]
>> First of all, I'd like to thank the Center for the Book
and the Library of Congress for inviting and me and it's great
to be back here and it's great to be up here
with a finished book in hand.
And I love working with the original documents and with the newspapers
but it's nice to have it all compiled into a final product.
And then also I like to thank Amber Paranickwho helped me a lot even
before the book came out with finding illustrations and pages--
complete pages from the old Times-Herald
that Cissy Patterson published in Washington between 1930 and 1948.
And [Inaudible Remark] Can you not hear me?
[Inaudible Remark] Okay, so anyway, I'm very glad to be here
and I said I'd read you a few selections from Newspaper Titan
and reintroduce Cissy Patterson
to a world watch [phonetic] has forgotten about her largely.

"Our patience has come to a breaking point,"
Chancellor Adolf Hitler bellowed in the frenzied crescendo
of his address to the Reichstag on December 11, 1941.
A plan prepared by President Roosevelt has been revealed
in the United States, according to which his intention was
to attack Germany by 1943 with all of the resources
at the disposal of the United States."
In declaring war that afternoon, it was less the case
that Hitler had awakened the sleeping American giant
than that he had taken the first stateful stab at retribution
after discovering its stealthy predawn preparations for battle.
Indeed, for several years grim auguries had reached Berlin
suggesting that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was perhaps less committed
to American neutrality in the face of the conflicts raging
around the globe than he professed to be publicly.
Having long suspected the "insane"
and "particularly despicable" president of the United States
of promoting the "work of hatred and warmongering" throughout the world,
Hitler had recently been presented with what he took
to be irrefutable proof that his mistrust had been well justified.
The fuhrer was not alone in questioning the sincerity
of the president's long-expressed unwillingness
to entangle the United States abroad.
A week before the German declaration of war,
eager to galvanize isolationist sentiment nationwide,
two of the most stridently anti-Administration members
of the American press had jointly published
in their respective Chicago and Washington, DC newspapers,
what appeared to be confirmation of their own fears that
"President Roosevelt was lying the United States
into war with Germany."
This "monumental scoop" consisted not only of excerpts
of the leaked top-secret "Rainbow Five" plan, the Army
and Navy's joint estimate that the United States would be ready
to launch its own multi-pronged assault on Germany by July 1943,
but perhaps even more damning,
a copy of the president's own letter ordering the assessment.
The German Embassy wasted no time in cabling a copy
of the astounding revelations to Berlin upon the story's publication
in Washington on December 4, 1941.
A week later, Hitler would bark to the Reichstag that,
despite his many efforts at peace, the recently published proof
of Roosevelt's sneaking belligerence toward Germany left him no
alternative but to declare war on the United States.
On December 14, 1941, the German high command would present the
fuhrer with its radical strategic reassessments, based likewise
on the so-called Anglo-Saxon war plans which became known
through publication in the Washington Times-Herald.
In November 1946, nearly half a decade
after the Washington Times-Herald's
"Rainbow Five" revelations had been cabled to Berlin,
Collier's Weekly magazine would venture,
"One day the movies will doubtless get
around to filming the fabulous life of Eleanor Medill Patterson."
Earlier that fall, Eleanor Medill Patterson had been selected
to fill the void left by the recent death of her brother,
Joseph Medill Patterson, as chairman of the board
of the New York Daily News.
After launching the Daily News in 1919,
Joe Patterson had made it not only the United States' first viable
tabloid, but the newspaper with the largest daily circulation
of any tabloid or broadsheet in the nation
and the widest Sunday circulation of any in the world.
The choice of the late publisher's sister had not been an exclusively
sentimental one.
In her own right, Eleanor Medill Patterson was already owner
and publisher of the most widely read daily in the nation's capital,
the Washington Times-Herald, called by many, both inside and out
of the profession, "the damndest newspaper to ever hit the streets."
According to popular journalistic axiom, the Pattersons,
like their first-cousin Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick,
had "printer's ink blood."
Their grandfather, the firebrand abolitionist, Joseph Medill,
had been editor-in-chief and eventual principal owner
of the Chicago Tribune from the tense years immediately preceding
the Civil War until his death in 1899.
By the mid-1940s, under nearly three decades
of Colonel McCormick's sanctimonious, anti-Roosevelt,
isolationist direction, the Tribune had grown
into the most widely read newspaper in the Midwest
and the most widely circulated full-size daily in the nation.
Eleanor Medill Patterson, as both the youngest and the only girl
of her generation among fractious boys,
had been her grandfather's darling.
As such, she had inherited a disproportionate share
of Tribune Company stock and a considerable fortune.
Bypassing Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Clare Boothe Luce,
Dorothy Schiff, Emily Post and every other prominent American woman
of the 1940s, Collier's Weekly contended that with her patrimony,
her own attainments and her latest accolade, "Cissy Patterson,
no one calls her Eleanor,
is probably the most powerful woman in America."
It added, "And perhaps the most hated."
Cissy Patterson's upbringing was like something
out of Henry James or Edith Wharton.
She was a young American heiress with connections abroad.
Her uncle and aunt were posted first in Vienna and then
in Saint Petersburg, he is the American minister and Cissy's aunt
as the American minister and then ambassador's wife.
So Cissy went to Europe as a young woman.
She had no particular expectation of participation in the Tribune Company
or in journalism in general.
And she was a curious, very intelligent, young woman.
She fell in love with a young bachelor
in Vienna called Count Gizycki and she was just weighted
from marrying him by her family who felt that he was an adventurer
and was clearly only interested in her for her fortune.
He was handsome, he was debonaire, he was certain mysterious
and it would turn out later that he was rather unstable as well.
She was presented by her family who investigated his background
with concrete proof of his gambling habit, of the many children
that he had fathered and of his terrible financial predicament.
He was about to go bankrupt.
And she insisted on marrying him anyway saying
that she was in love in him.
And also for her, at the turn of the century when she was about 20,
Eleanor become a countess, held a great charm for her.
Said, this is-- this section of the book is from the early part
of her marriage and one thing I should mention since we're here
at the Library of Congress is that some of the documents
from this section did not come from the Library of Congress
but they came from a really extraordinary source which was
that they were preserved in the files of a body
in late Imperial Russia that was called the Imperial Chancellery
for the Receipt of Petitions which was a sort of super legal civil body
that these are presided over himself to allow couples to divorce
or to settle custody issues when the Orthodox Church didn't permit the
dissolution of marriage as at the time.
And so I'll explain in a bit why was that this body became involved
but basically, I'm much of the documentation about her marriage
and its aftermath, it survived in Saint Petersburg through evolution
and two world wars and communism and it was a great surprise to find
that material but also a great testament to I think the power
of benign neglect as much as anything else.
Sot this is from the early days of Cissy's marriage in 1904.
"Well, the first trouble was about six weeks
after we were married," Cissy recalled.
The pronounced changes in her husband's behavior toward her
since their wedding day not withstanding.
A stone broke over Vienna early one morning in late May in 1904, Cissy,
who would slept fitfully all night,
wondering where her husband had gone once again was jolted awake
by frenzy banging on her door.   The Count had returned.

He would then out gambling, he told her feverishly
and he'd lost a very serious sum.   "Of course I can get some money.

I can get it but it's very difficult."
He entered desperately, adding "I have to have it tomorrow morning."
Believing it to be more convenient for Cissy to set up housekeeping
by buying what she needed in Europe rather
than by bringing domestic items with her from the United States,
the Pattersons and McCormicks, aunt and uncle,
had pointed they given the bride rather than the couple,
wedding presents amounting to sum 12000 dollars in cash.
That's Count Gizycki.
To calm her frantic husband, Cissy offered the entire sum,
all the money to which he would have access for sometime as well
as the last vested appear independence without hesitation.
"Just give it to me for a few days and save me sometime,"
the count suggested hastily as he pocketed the bills.
In June 1904, the Gizyckis made at last
for the count's storied ancestral lands, castles
and so-called model dwelling houses
for the people employed there in [inaudible] Ukraine.
Arriving at the [inaudible] of railway station
in the road [inaudible] of Padolia, Cissy was disconcerted
by the small crowd that assembled to meet the master,
one of the nearby states and take the measure of his American bride.
They clutched at her sleeves and dropped to their knees
to kiss the hem of her dress while Gizycki in neared
to such [inaudible] put his hands in his pockets
and elbowed forward expertly repulsing what he called the touch
of dirty fingers.
In her [inaudible] Cissy though she imagined too that one
of the small children pushed forward from the throng by his mother,
looked on cannoly like her husband.
At twilight, after a dusty five-hour drive northward into the region
of Volynia, they came with inside
of Gizycki's ancestral lands at Novosielica.
As the couple is weaker work rich goes swayed closer,
the states surrounding villages to which the count had
so often referred emerged into clear view.
Utterly devoid of the rustic charm, Cissy had imagined,
this settlements were in fact a small grouping
of miserable mud [inaudible] for lonely
as a fatherly cowed one against the other.
The Gizyckis trotted down the muddy man road,
passed the scavenging dogs, the ragged children and a number
of whom she would assume noticed remembrance to her husband as well
and their impassive mothers onward to the gates of the park.
From there they would at last cross the drawbridge into the midst
of the battlements and pointed turrets, Cissy presumed
of the marvelous castle that had been the subject of so many
of her romantic robberies in about
which her husband to told her so much.
Once through the gate, they passed the low stables
from which several barefoot village boys, he served his groom
to the count's hunters and racehorses, look out shyly
as their master and his new bride rolled by.
"Coming around the corner, screen by an avenue of beautiful poplar trees
and clumps of enormous blooming lilac,
the castle revealed itself today's toward Cissy,
as a wide bare weight building gone and dignified,
uncurtained, unshuttered windows."
The general impression of a building left unfinished
but long since begun.   Castle, Cissy wondered at the time.

The interior of Novosielica,
a similarly unadorned [inaudible] structure held still greater
challenges to Cissy's prenuptial fancies.
After meeting the household staff, several man servants,
several local boys and an ancient butler in addition
to the count's estate manager, an Englishmen who oversaw his stables
and broke and trained his horses.
She was given a tour of her new home.
The house was not simply unfurnished and commodious
and dank but tumbling down.
As Gizycki let her through its bare rooms, the wallpaper hanging
in strips where the plaster was not starkly wipe washed.
The few frilly or comfortable details she noticed caused her
to shrink with a fascinated nausea,
the certain hallmarks of a woman's touch.
The count's room was consistent with the rest of the building
and its austerity with the exception of the broad table by the window
which Cissy found to be as she put it later in legal documents covered
to the last inch with framed photographs of women dressed
in every variety of costume, court dress, street dress, morning dress,
ball dress, fancy dress, silk and tights
and ballet dress, riding habit, undressed.
Bold signatures flourished across the shiny cardboard from side
to side where initials or dates or monograms upon the various frames.
Elevated in their midst stood the plaster cast of a woman's foot
and about the ankle hung loose a tiny golden chain.
Alone on the table in Gizycki's spare dressing room stood one
more photograph.
This one affectionately signed in English
of a slim woman holding a toddler in her arms.
Agonized now by sickly dread,
Cissy mounted the ramshackle stairway connecting her husband's
suite to the rooms that would be hers.
At the top of the stairs,
she steeled herself before crossing the threshold.
Though, she had been told repeatedly about by her desperate relatives
and many others about Gizycki's conquest
about the Englishwoman he kept at Novosielica
about the child she had born him,
Cissy is determined indifference only now crumbled.
Gizycki's mistress of some five years had been dispatched along
with their small daughter shortly before the newlyweds' arrival.
Her room's now Cissy's had been left exactly as before.
The previous inhabitant's bed was made up as she preferred,
her pillows and flounces, her trinkets and bric-a-brac
and even a few hairpins in the sliver of her soap bar remained.
Taking the blotter from the writing table,
Cissy held it up to the mirror and write her predecessors last letter.
"Well, that is cruelty" she would reflect more than a decade later.
If he'd had any kind feelings
at all he would have had that house cleaned.
As a 22-year-old bride far from home, however, Cissy was stricken
at the recollection of the steps she had taken to arrive at this point
and she reeled at the unblinkered prospect of the married life
that stretched before her.
So you think you can see where this marriage was headed?

Cissy stayed with her husband for about four years until 1908
when the marriage broke out spectacularly.
Cissy's husband was trying to refurbish Novosielica
and his other homes basically on the Chicago Tribune dime
and through Cissy's parents who finally decided to cut them off
and give them no more money.
At that point, Gizycki became violent,
he'd always been very volatile.
He was Austro-Hungarian Cavalry Officer who turned out,
he'd had a bad fall from a horse during his cavalry training
and had become even more erratic and violent after that point.
When Cissy was pregnant with their child Felicia, the family moved
to Moravia because Novosielica was at that point 1905,
there were revolutionary peasant groups that formed part
of the revolutionary sort of impulse
of 1905 throughout the Russian territories.
And so they stayed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire
for Cissy to have her baby.
The week that the baby was born, Cissy ransacked her husband's desk
and found diaries of all of his extracurricular activities,
all of the peasants on his states whose wedding nights he had horned
in on.
All of the prostitutes, all of the mistresses, all of the young women
that he had deflowered over the course of their--
then four-year marriage or no, only two years then.
So she-- the baby was born in the midst
of great upheaval within their marriage.
Within two years, Cissy's parents cut them off
and Gizycki begun beating her up.
And she finally left him in the middle of the night
when they were wintering in the south of France in 1908.
Cissy fled with the baby and she was actually still bleeding
at the time that she left the house.
She fled with their toddler Felicia to London but Cissy,
like many abused women, began to-- over the weeks that followed,
began to think that it was her fault and got back in touch
with her husband and tried to reconcile by going to Paris
where the count threaten to kill her once again but only
after he had managed to twiddle their daughter's address
which she was staying with her nanny outside of London.
He went to the address, took the little girl
and with telecommunications being what they where in 1908,
Cissy was unable to reach the nanny in time and so the count
in effect kidnapped Felicia and held her for ransom for 18 months.
It was at that point, their bizarre and the Imperial Chancellery
for the Receipt of Petitions became involved in the case
in an effort to-- finally, what they had to resort
to is threatening the count with the loss of his Russian states which now
that his marriage with Cissy had ended where his sole source
of income and that was what managed to get the little girl back.
Gizycki would later make accusations of Cissy
as having kidnapped the daughter after she was returned
because he claimed that they had an agreement not
to bring the little girl outside of Europe.
But Cissy brought her back to the United States
to a much sensational newspaper coverage including
in her own family paper, The Chicago Tribune.
Cissy-- at that point was very intelli--
she was an intelligent sort of sporadically educated woman
who had artistic leanings and so she acted for awhile which was
at the time moderately scandalous.
She also had some success as a dude rancher.
She was at one point considered
to be the finest woman shot in the United States.
And she became a great advocate in aficionado of the American West
and she bought a large ranch in Jackson Hole
and spent a lot of her time up there.
She also had some success, it was actually the best selling novelist
for her to "autobiographical novels," one of which was
about a young American engineer who goes to Russia
and marries a dastardly Russian prince who treats her badly
and the other was a sort of "Romansa clef" of scandal in Washington
where Cissy had moved in the mean time.
She-- in 1923, she took over her mother's mansion
on Dupont Circle Patterson House which is still there,
it's the Washington club now.
And was actually loaned by Cissy in the first years
of her second marriage to as the temporary White House
and it was actually from that balcony that you see there
that Lundberg when he returned
from his transatlantic flight addressed the adoring American
throngs who greeted him in Dupont Circle.
Her second novel, the "Roman a Clef of Washington Life" was--
is thought to be a sort of chronicle of her ongoing feud
with Alice Roosevelt Longworth who is a girl
who had friend enemy of Cissy's.
And later, somebody that Cissy made a point of making life difficult
for she was said to have had an affair with Nicholas Longworth,
that was Longworth's husband and with the great love
of Alice Longworth's life Senator Borah.

But Cissy's great love was newspaper publishing
and as I mentioned before,
her cousin run Tthe Chicago Tribune during this time and her brother,
Joe Patterson, who I think is a great, not quite unknown
but little known American newspaper genius who basically for better
or worse imported the tabloid, the picture tabloid from Brittain
to the United States in the wake of World War I.
And if you think of demographic changes that were taking place
in the wake of World War I, you know, you see both in Britain
and the United States the expansion of suburbia
and people commuting longer distances to work
on public transportation.
So the, you know, if you think of it,
the tabloid in it's much smaller form with punchier headlines
and the shorter articles is an ideal thing to be reading
on a commuter train, you know, you don't need as much room,
it's got a lot of pictures.
And Joe Patterson had a kind of knock for this.
It had been his forte, he had tried to stir The Chicago Tribune
in that direction in the 1910 so when he worked there
and then managed to get seed money from the Chicago Tribune
to start a new fangled British-style picture tabloid
which eventually became the New York Daily News.
And as I mentioned before,
the New York Daily News actually still holds circulation records
to this day as the most widely read paper in American history.
And Joe Patterson's New York Daily News was a really kind
of irresistible amalgam of comics.
He actually had a great love of comics and was said
to have engendered Lulu Arfin' Nanny, Dick Tracey and a number
of really popular comic strips that originated
in the Chicago Tribune in the 1910s.
And then in his New York Daily News, there are a lots of pictures
of pretty girls and all sorts of stories about murder and crime
and horoscopes and, you know, the dastardly doings of high society,
gossip columns and, you know, you see that nowadays in the modern day,
New York Daily News but in the '30s and '40s, it was--
if you look back at the old copies from that period,
they're really delightful.
Also, Joe Patterson was a-- although he was a young millionaire,
he was also a card carrying member
of the American Socialist Party although it didn't stopped him
from continuing to play polo throughout his 20s and he had gone
to Groton for boarding school with Franklin Roosevelt whom he'd liked
when they were there and he made a really extraordinary promise
to Franklin Roosevelt on inauguration day in 1993,
he published in the New York Daily News
that given the current economic crisis,
that the New York Daily News would refrain from making any criticism
of the administration or the New Deal for one year
and so delighted was Joe Patterson with the First New Deal
and with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency that he renewed
that pledge for a second year not to criticize the administration.
He admired Roosevelt and really supported the administration's
policies through the late 1930s but the thing that in the end,
drove the two apart ideologically was the issue of intervention
into the second World War.
Joe Patterson, like the rest of his family, Cissy and Colonel McCormick
of the Chicago Tribune were very staunchly isolationist
and their belief was that the United States have been founded by a group
of people who were very self-consciously separatist
and who had established a new government separate and apart
from Europe that had not permitted an aristocracy
to grow up in the United States.
They had their own form of democratic government
and also the family, like many isolationist at that time,
believed wholeheartedly and the provision say that Roosevelt--
that Washington and Jefferson, for example,
laid out in their farewell addresses wanting the United State's going
forward against entangling foreign alliances and so they're--
they felt that it was not the right thing for the United States to go
into the war and after Pearl Harbor, Joe Patterson went
to the White House and offered his services to Roosevelt who took him
to task and said, "I want you to go back.
What you can do for me is go back and read every isolationist article
and every isolationist [inaudible] piece that's appeared
in the New York Daily News for the last two years, and, you know,
that will show you how wrongheaded you were."
Joe Patterson left vowing to outlive that bastard, which he did actually.
And Cissy who was also delighted to jump into somebody else's squabble
and who happened to agree with her brother, took it upon herself
to maker her Washington Times-Herald as vicious
and vitriolic towards the administration
in personal terms as she possibly could.
In the meantime, Cissy had-- after her doubts as a novelist
and an actress, become very interested
in writing for newspapers.
She couldn't find any particular outlet,
her cousin wouldn't let write for the Chicago Tribune.
Her brother let her write a little bit for the New York Daily News
but she wanted to actually manage a paper of her own, so instead,
her family's great enemy, William Randoph Hearst, who was very gallant
and who had, for the time, a very high opinion of female competence.
He was the son of a very formidable, very competent mother and often,
within the Hearst administration,
there were actually a lot of women executives.
And Hearst also enjoy rankling his enemies and so by hiring the sister
of the publisher of the New York Daily News and the cousin
of the Chicago Tribune, he was sticking it to him essentially.
Hearst had a presence in Washington in the 1920s and '30s in the form
of two newspapers at the time, The Washington Times
which actually has no relation to the modern day Washington Times
and that was his evening paper.
His morning paper was the Washington Herald.
At the time in DC, there were six papers throughout the day
and that gives you a sense of, you know, how important newspapers were
to people that a town or quite a small town comparatively could
support that many publications.
And within Washington, the two Hearst papers were running fourth
and fifth at it in the six paper market so Hearst had very little
to lose by hiring a woman with, you know, sort of newspaper cliche
to run his morning Herald, the fifth place ranking paper.
And Hearst was of course,
always aware of any good opportunity for publicity stunt.
And at the time, it was quite a publicity stunt to put a woman


And much to the shock of the old Hearst--
the crusty old Hearst crew at the Washington Herald,
Cissy Patterson came in and redecorated the publisher's office
and chants to their horror and hired women--
a number of women and remade the paper and avoided all the Hearst
which Cissy called "the cannon stuff
that the Hearst papers published coast to coast," put much more
of an emphasis on Washington news and particularly on gossip
which her enemies said was indicative
of the shallowness of the paper.
But I think what Cissy actually understood was in Washington,
of all places, there's a real catch-up parties
and society affairs are real nexus for policy in some ways.
And she would have-- she ran four or five different gossip columns
at once which I also have to say are really kind of addictive
if you read old copies of the Washington Times-Herald
and you can't wait for the next day's installment of, you know,
there are sorts of hints.
Not very subtle ones about who is sleeping with whom or, you know,
who is the illegitimate child, that is or, you know,
who had a fight with whom.
And she had a real nose for that sort of thing,
for political intrigue, for feuds, for,
you know, basically, for politics.
And the, you know, the field on which it plays out in society
in DC She also-- at this point, Felicia,
her daughter who had been a kid had grown up and was sort
of a reluctant debutante.
Cissy was trying to launch her in society
and just Felicia didn't want to do that.
And at some dinner party, Cissy forced Felicia to come to a saying
that she should be more sociable.   She sat her next to a young up

and coming newspaper man called Drew Pearson whom you may remember
as Jack Anderson's predecessor and also is the basically,
the person who invented the political gossip column.
He wrote or co-wrote two books in the 1930's called
"Washington Marry-go-Round" and "More Washington Marry-go-Round"
which are also very engaging but it perhaps exaggerated accounts
of Washington political intrigue at the time and were very scarless
but they were also of course best sellers.
It was revealed that Drew Pearson was one of the authors,
he was fired from his job as a reporter as a result but he
and his partner Bob Allen founded a regular Washington Merry-go-Round
political column that was very slow to take off because editors
around the country were worried
about defamation issues and libel suits.
But Cissy, although she had been mentioned in unflattering terms
in More Washington Merry-go-Round or actually in both books,
understood the value of a column like that
and how popular it might be in Washington.
And it was actually her Washington Times-Herald was the first paper
to subscribe to the Washington Merry-go-Round even though Felicia
had by then married and divorced Drew Pearson.
So basically, not by the end of the 1930's,
the Hearst Empire was beginning to crumble.
Hearst was going bankrupted, overextended himself.
And although Hearst like to boast that Hearst papers are not
for sale literally or figuratively, his financial situation forced him
to accept Cissy's offer to buy both of his newspapers.
She then combined them, the Washington Times
and then the Washington Herald into the Washington Times-Herald
which became the first round-the-clock daily in Washington.
As was said before, she published 10 editions daily
with features being sort of, you know, the same throughout the day.
She had the gossip columns going and stuff like that.
But also the wire services allowed them to change, you know,
the more topical news according to the situation for the next edition.
So basically, in her first decade in newspaper publishing,
Eleanor Medill Patterson had taken her slack lister Herald,
a chronic tale ender in circulation and advertising
as Newsweek described it and transformed it
into the dynamic salacious opinionated eye
catching Times-Herald.
The dumbest [phonetic] newspaper ever
to hit the streets would hold a decisive and unassailable lead
in the capital market during her lifetime.
The effect of the merger in 1939 was electric.
One veteran reporter remembered, "Washington went
for the combined product like in the trout for a fly."
At the close of 1940, the combined circulation
of the two former Hearst papers allowed her Times-Herald
to dominate the local daily newspaper market with some 187,000
in circulation to the store's second place 144,000.
The following year, Cissy noted with satisfaction a few dashes
of blank ink were appearing on the ledger.
Eugene Meyer's Washington Post followed in third place
with 126,700 although the posters reported
to have lost an estimated 200,000 dollars in 1941
which was actually a considerable improvement over the 300,000 dollars
in red ink on its books the year before.
Time Magazine would declare Meyer's resurrected post
to be the capital soul Big League newspaper,
a journal of national importance, a reading must on Capitol Hill,
an institution of high character and independence,
a force for good in its daily wick.
The Scripps Howard paper's news ran fourth
in the now four paper local market with a daily circulation of 81,590.
If Cissy had fulfilled beyond anyone's wildest dreams,
her early stated goals of raising the Herald circulation
and advertising numbers, she would far surpass her brother's even
stricter measure of success by operating the Times-Herald not only
in the black but at a profit initially
of some 44,000 dollars in 1944.
Within 12 months, the Times-Herald's anti-war, anti-Roosevelt,
anti vivisectionist tabloidism would net more
than a million dollars in profit in 1945.
Although Cissy Patterson's Times-Herald shared the vitriolic
isolationism of the other family papers prompting charges
of the existence of a "McCormick-Patterson Axis"
from both rival press outlets and the Administration,
it did not share their ownership structures.
Whereas the Tribune Company effectively owned both the Chicago
Tribune and the New York Daily News, they did not share--
oh I'm sorry, Cissy alone owned the Times-Herald.
In many regards the paper's success was a direct result
of its unique corporate structure or lack of it.
As sole proprietor, the tempestuous redhead, who,
according to one veteran reporter remembered
"sported an equally red pedicure and temper to match," had no board
of directors, no trustees, no stockholders, either to scrabble
with or to hold her accountable.
As editor Frank Waldrop put it, she owned the Times-Herald
in "exactly the same way in a legal sense
as she owned her clothes and her houses.
She wore it and ran it that way, too,
and every day we risked her entire property
and her very stubborn neck."
As publisher, Cissy enjoyed none of the protections
that the incorporation of the paper would have afforded.
The salty Times-Herald led the capitol newspaper market not only
in circulation and revenues, but also in the number and size
of the libel judgments rendered against it.
These, Cissy paid out of her own deep pocket
as she did the torts liabilities the paper's staff incurred
in the course of doing business.
The Civil Dockets of the District of Columbia from the 1940s are
as much a testament to Cissy's devil-may-care attitude toward
defamation as to the zeal of her circulation manager
and his burly truck drivers in completing their appointed rounds,
whatever or whoever might stand in their way: other vehicles, pets,
elderly pedestrians or children.
[Laughter] Cissy had placed herself in a position
to produce exactly the paper she had long envisioned,
editorially and aesthetically.
The Times-Herald was a pungent hybrid
of the most irresistible characteristics
of the ordinarily-rival Hearst and Medill family publications combined
with other syndicates' material, and her own unique touches.
Hearst editorials and regular columns ran alongside Tribune-News
Service items, the latter's syndicate provided the bulk
of the Times-Herald's comic strips and much of its commentary.
In make-up and typography the Times-Herald was unique.
Cissy scrapped most of the old, Hearst typefaces in favor
of the lighter "Ryerson" which later almost renamed
"Patterson" in her honor.
She increased white space in the paper and printed it
in dark grey rather than black ink for the sake
of elegance and readability.
Early on in her tenure, Cissy recalled, "I was forever quarreling
with the managing editor's choice of pictures, poor man.
I try to have a clean paper."
To clarify that she did not refer to the Times-Herald's content,
she added, "Clean in typography only."
In her constant efforts to keep the paper entertaining
and to boost circulation,
Cissy devised some countless beauty contest,
giveaways and publicity stunts.   At her insistent, several members

of her personal staff began writing for the paper.
A culinary column, ghost written in a folksy southern dialect appeared
under the byline of Cissy's cook, Rebecca.
To the renewed astonishment of the old Hearst crew,
the equilin column penned by Cissy's Prince George's County neighbor
and some time barn manager [inaudible] proved
to be extremely popular in the Capitol situated as it is
between the Maryland and Virginia horse countries.
It was Cissy's own journalistic contributions
that gave the paper much of its notorious bite
and drew much of its readership.
She continued to indulge her peaks and print
by attacking old friends who had fallen away.
Likewise, as her patience with the new deal
and Franklin Roosevelt worth in particularly
as American intervention
in the European War appeared increasingly likely.
A few members of the administration escaped the
Times-Herald's exploration.
Having ignored her brother's warning to avoid that publishers graveyard,
Washington, DC, Cissy had gone on to disregard another mentor's council
against producing a women's paper.
By the Times-Herald trumpeted its hostility
to American intervention abroad, its true focus,
its detractors noted accurately was predominantly on matters closer
to home or actually in the home.
The Fustian combines of Hearst or City Room found themselves besieged
by the goggles of duly post debutantes, local IT girls sought
after young matrons, society leaders
and gentle Pollyanna Spinsters whom Cissy hired
to review local dramatic productions,
cover the parties they attended and gossip about their friends in print.
She hired society reporter Ruth Jones away from the Post in 1930.
In 1932, Cissy added to the Herald's roles an attractive Lake Forest
divorce recently arrived on the Capitol.
Martha Blair's these charming people column soon attracted a devoted
following for its uncanny penetrating coverage
of high political society especially
after the author became romantically involved with Arthur Krock,
the New York Times Washington Bureau Chief.
In 1973, Cissy succeeded in persuading Evalyn Walsh McLean
to write a regular column.
She was the lady who owned the Hope Diamond
and who had originally owned the Washington Post,
to write a regular column.
My say in parody of Eleanor Roosevelt's nationally syndicated
my day.   Kathleen or Kick Kennedy,

the daughter of Cissy's friend Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy began
work at the Times-Herald as an assistant and graduated
to write the papers did you happen to see column in the early 1940s.
The tradition would continue even after Cissy's death.
Kick Kennedy's future sister-in-law Jacqueline Bouvier,
the slim Dow eyed brunette whom the Times-Herald crowned debutantes
of the year in 1947 would go
on to become the paper's inquiring camera girl in 1951.
Although untutored as journalist, the growing ranks
of female staff members were cheap to employ and drew a wide following.
So Cissy went on in that vein with a very salacious paper,
she had a very spectacular falling out with Drew Pearson over the issue
of intervention where she-- and she putted herself on paper
and began relegating his column to the back of the paper
by the patent medicine adds and sort of pulling it apart.
She did the same to Walter Winchell.
And so the two columns which were managed
by the same syndicate severed their contracts with her.
But not without her, not releasing the columns for the 6 months
that each of those contracts had to run so that basically,
she paid for the service but didn't allow it to be published
in Washington while she went about attacking Walter Winchell
and Drew Pearson in print.
At the same time, she began to grow increasingly erratic.
She had always been a rather volatile character.
But it was reported that she drank increasingly and she also fell
in with a very peculiar character,
a white Russian immigrant doctor called Eugene Desavage [phonetic]
who had, it was rumored a wide following among ladies who launch
in Washington for receiving injections of various sorts.
And she became during the same period very erratic.
There are also legal documents indicating that she paid
for Doctor Desavage's services, sometimes several times
in the course of one day during the same period.
Doctor Desavage was later run out of town during an FBI narcotics inquiry
and ended up moving to England.
But in any case, Cissy had about one night in 1943 where she fell faced
down on her soup and Doctor Desavage came and basically put her
in sort of a twilight state.
When she emerged from the twilight state during which Desavge had moved
into her house and drank up all of her Champagne, she complained later.
He wouldn't allow anyone access to her.
After that, she sued him and also a spectacular fashion
but she developed a kind of paranoia
about people's intentions towards her.
In the meantime, she had become estranged from her daughter, Felicia
and her granddaughter and began worrying that she would die alone.
Towards the end of her life in the late 1940s,
the Washington Times-Herald had become very valuable
and she began buttonholing people at parties and saying in effect,
you know, "I like you, I think I'm going to leave you my newspaper."
And she also take people side and say, "You know, I if happen to die
under peculiar circumstances,
it's my cousin Colonel McCormick who's trying to get hold of my paper
and he's going to murder me.
And of course, people, you know, patted her on the shoulder and said,
"I know that's not going to happen."
But lo and behold and she told a lot of people
that she was going to change her will.
She had also in the time told a lot of people that she intended
to leave the paper not to any member of her family
as had traditionally had been done by newspaper owning families
in American history but to the seven men who formed her executive board.
Some of whom had a long history in the newspaper business going back
to the circulation wars in Chicago in the 1910s which were sort
of precursor to the gang land activity of prohibition
and involved, you know, actual gangsters
and people died and that sort of thing.
So Cissy told a lot of people including these seven guys who stood
to inherit the paper that she was planning
to change her will on a certain date.
She went our to her country house in Prince George's County.
And the night before she was due to meet with her lawyer,
her household staff remembers that her--
she had a pack of her unruly poodle who used to go to the office
with her, and bite people and run a mock.
And that the poodles behave very strangely and howled all night.
And everyone-- her staff was rather frightened of her
because she had a pension for firing people in a limb.
And so, when she didn't wake up the next morning,
the staff was understandably sort of afraid to go
into her bedroom and see if she was okay.
In the meantime, she was getting a lot of calls
from the Times-Herald offices about edits she was supposed to make
and about stories that were going to run.
So finally, her butler tip toed down and discovered her sort of upside
down tangled in a bed sheets and that she had some sort of attack
in the middle of the night.
There was no indication in particular a foul play
but her daughter Felicia returned after she heard of the death
and said, "Oh, I think my mother once said she wanted
to be cremated."
So the body was cremated and then Felicia herself wrote
in a memoir later.
Well, I guess after that you can't check whether she's been murdered
or not.
And in the meantime, Colonel McCormick was--
had possible deniability because he was away in Paris at the time
but his own wife recorder that when Colonel McCormick heard the news
of Cissy's death from a reporter over the telephone, he--
his wife said that he got a phone call and then he said, "Oh,
this is big news, isn't?"
He had to kind of restrain himself and [Laughter] and so, well, yes,
it's very tragic, and then he started singing a little song


[Laughter] And lo and behold,
he eventually did acquire the Times-Herald briefly but didn't--
wasn't able to run under profit and eventually sold it
to Eugene Meyer at the Washington Post.
But in the meantime, this incredible story unfolded
about Felicia's challenge to Cissy Patterson's will.
And they were all-- there's all manner of [inaudible] that seems
to have taken place, there was wiretapping, there was, you know,
tampering with evidence and that sort of thing.
Felicia managed to secure the testimony of Cissy's--
a former columnist of Cissy's and of her former book keeper to say
that Cissy had been the victim of fraud and coercion during the time
that she made the will in question.
And that Cissy was not of sound in mind in the last years of her life,
during the time that she had made this will.
And both of those witnesses committed suicide the very morning
that Felicia officially brought suit.
And it also seemed that both--
in both cases, their personal papers have been ransacked.
So it's a very peculiar case and it struck me that it was just
like Cissy to cause turmoil even after her own death.
But anyway, I'm-- I appreciate your indulgence
in letting me go on so long.
And Cissy was a very powerful, very interesting woman and of the reasons
that I was interested in writing the book was
that I think it's an amazing thing about the United States
that we have a great long memory and a very proud heritage
of historical work in this country but we also can forget very quickly.
People who at one time or another were significant figures
and Cissy struck me as one of those lost figures,
who is very representative of a particular moment
in American history but whom we don't think so much of now.
And I hope you enjoy the book
and I appreciate you coming to hear me talk.
[ Applause ]
And I'm happy to take any questions, if anyone has any.
Yes?
>> You mentioned the Lundberg connection,
you mentioned the isolation of [inaudible]
and was she probably Nazi?   Was she anti-semitic, [inaudible]?

>> She was an anti-semite although that,
I don't think was what underlay her isolationism,
I think that that particular--
her family was very much committed to isolationism.
You know, if you go back to the 1930s and beyond,
if you look at Public Opinion Post, the United States was overwhelmingly
against the intervention abroad until Pearl Harbor.
Her family was very much--
her grandfather Joseph Medill who was an early editor and publisher
of the Chicago Tribune felt very staunchly
about the United States not intervening abroad.
At the same time now they did happen to be anti-Semites.
It was often said in the press about her
that she was pro-German although I could find no particular evidence
of that.
And actually she was so grateful to some of the friends she had made
when she was married to Count Gizycki who helped her get Felicia
out and home from, you know, being kidnapped by her father.
That, Cissy actually was, in a very quiet way and did a lot
of relief work for Poland during the second World War,
and to me her reaction to the invasion of Poland
in September 1939 was a very interesting one
and she was horrified at Poland's being invaded yet again
and particularly at the brutality of the blitz and the blitzkrieg.
But she felt it was, why it was tragic
and there was something she could do in a personal way
that it wasn't right for the United States to intervene even on behalf
of people she considered her friends
and whom she thought she had a real that of gratitude.
And that to me was very telling
about her attitude towards isolationism.
Anybody else?   Oh, I'm sorry.

>> I'm sort of interested there.
I was reading something about the biographer of a Carl Sanders
and [inaudible] and she-- forgot her name, but she was talking
about how she started out here in the a research and she found
that the biography found her.
Now, I was wondering when-- maybe you've already said this
but what got you interested in her?
What made you think you could write a biography or be obsessed
with the death curse and [inaudible] it was like.
>> The question is how I did stumbled upon Cissy Patterson.
I found the same thing with the subject finds you
and as I said before of my first book was an addition of letters
of my mother's father, Joe Kennedy, which were sort of sitting around,
writing in the attic in the house in Heainesport.
And I'm-- there were some papers at the JFK Library but I started going
through them when I was in grad school and I knew about--
something about the preservation of documents.
And so during my summers, I started doing the preservation work
and trying to persuade the family to give them to the national archives
and I got really engrossed in it.
I mean, you start to read about somebody's life
and you know it's going to happen to them whereas they don't necessarily.
And so, letters take on a real poignancy.
And so basically, it was through that book that I have first found
out about Cissy Patterson.
She, like my grandfather was a very vociferous isolationist and very--
by the early 1940s, very anti-Roosevelt.
And that coterie of people very, very colorful group of people,
they're really prominent isolationist like Senator Borah,
Alice Longworth, the great love of her life or Lundberg
or William Randolph Hearst, or Colonel McCormick.
They're not necessarily a very likable group of people
but again they're a part of American history that I think we tend
to down play whereas they were very prominent at that time
and their views were much more widely held than I think we
like to acknowledge now for better or worst.
And, anyway so I was and going through those papers
that I first found out more about Cissy Patterson,
this is in a socialite who bought herself a newspaper
and actually had kind of a knock for running it.
And also, one of my mother's sisters, Kick Kennedy had worked for
and I found Kick's letters to Kick, was her sister who fell in love
with an Englishman when the family was in London just before the war
and eventually joining the American Red Cross and went back to London
and married him and then he died with his unit
in Belgium about 6 weeks later.
And they have waited, you know, 5 or 6 years to marry him and he--
they finally did get married and he died.
But I'd become very interested in her and she died very young too.
And so, I was particularly interested in her letters
and her life and she had worked for Cissy Patterson and the view
of Cissy Patterson that come
through her letters was a really engaging one, you know,
this is kind of wacky, unpredictable woman who had whatever strange knock
for a selling a newspaper.
And one of the things that really interested me about Cissy was that,
you know, she's remembered if she was remembered--
if she remembered at all now is a, you know, sort of a daily talk
and not made in the case, but if you actually look
at her circulation statistics she-- her paper out sold,
everybody else is and the history of ownership of those two papers,
the Times and the Herald are very interesting because the Times
for example was owned by a very famous Hearst lieutenant,
let say called Arthur Brisbane, who was basically credited for
or faulted for creating the era of yellow journalism isn't
because he was he who introduced color to the comic strips.
And he was kind of a whiz bang circulation fix it man
that Hearst hired to improve circulation throughput his chain.
Brisbane sold the Washington Times
because he couldn't make it run to Hearst.
Hearst couldn't make a profit out it.
So, he let Cissy buy it eventually
and then Cissy combine it with the Herald.
After Cissy, the seven guys who finally inherited the paper,
after all this called the agrarian challenges to the will,
they had been running it for her for, you know, decades basically
or running it with her, but it begun loosing money immediately
after she died.
And lost something of it's, I don't know effervescence or its venom
or I'm not quite sure what but it just didn't survive after Cissy.
So, then they sold it to Colonel McCormick to I'm,
sure to Cissy's dismay who-- although he run the Chicago Tribune
which had the lot wide of circulation in the midwest,
was loosing money with it.
And so he sold that to Eugene Meyer and then Post basically sort
of subsumed it and through the Watergate,
actually The Washington Post was published just The Washington Post
and large type Times-Herald.
And the Times-Herald put shrink and shrink and shrink
until it just disappeared.
But it was interesting to know basically
that Cissy had succeeded well of these very imminent,
very successful newspaper man had felt with this one particular paper.
Anybody else, yes?
>> You've mentioned that she met a lot of enemies and a lot
of people who were afraid of her.
Was there anyone that she felt that was close to her, that likes her,
that did want to stuck with her
or did she just really not have very many like one friend?
>> Yeah, not really, she was in-- [Laughter] Yeah, I mean she made
up with Alice Roosevelt late in her life but I think--
but then Alice had her number and stirred clear of her.
She was very close in the end to Evalyn Walsh McLean.
In part, what Cissy would say that it was
because she has this much money as I do
and she doesn't want anything from me.
So Cissy was somebody who was about very needy and very suspicious
and I think, you know the whole family had a really kind
of strange genius for selling newspapers whatever that is
and the Patterson branch of the family had a really genius
for tabloids like Long Island Newsday was also started
by Cissy's niece and Alicia Patterson, Joe Patterson's daughter
and they, you know, whatever, I don't know if it was learned
or inherited, whatever kind of strange ability they have
but they were good at selling tabloids basically.
But Cissy made a lot of enemies and she enjoyed--
she was basically sort of a mean girl who got herself a newspaper
and said whatever she wanted about people.
And, you know, in some ways it was very incisive,
in other way it was just self-indulgent and she made a lot
of enemies that way and the end of here life was afraid
of dying alone and did die alone.   Yes?

>> I was reading about the sources and these journals


Do you find much in them?
>> Yeah, actually, I mean other than chronicling America
which if you've never looked at it online is really fantastic
and in terms of like personal papers I think the most useful word,
the McCormick family-- or the Hanna-McCormick Family Papers
which were basically the papers of Cissy's cousin Medill McCormick
who is Colonel McCormick's brother and who was a one term Senator
from the Illinois and his wife Ruth Hanna McCormick
who eventually became a congresswoman among other things
in her own right.
And those papers are really fascinating
and they have a lot to do.
There's a lot of correspondence with Cissy's aunt, the one who first
who brought her to Europe and who introduced--
or with her when she met the count.
But there are also, they're telling about sort of the tenor of life
within the family, I mean they were nothing
if not pugnacious, this particular family.
Joseph Medill had two daughters; Nellie Patterson, Cissy's mother;
the younger one and Kate Medill,
I mean Kate McCormick who is the older one.
And they furtive throughout their lives
and they're actually here in this building.
There's like a notebook of Nelly Patterson's where, you know,
she keeps accounts of how much she spent, you know 1908 when she went
to Paris and stuff but she also keeps tallies
of like all the fights her sisters had with people [Laughter]
and what dates they took place and stuff like that.
And they really, you know, kept score and so there's a lot
of corresponds with them and Kate McCormick's, I mean it was fun
to write about if you're, you know, a hundred years later
when you're just looking at the documents
but to actually interact I think with these people there,
I remember reading Kate McCormick's correspondence with her son
and Medill McCormick whom she called,
she addressed as "darling flirter" in her correspondence
and she was very jealous of his wife and those are very,
very hard to read because she was so manipulative and so crushing
in a way she wanted him to take over The Tribune and he was a very kind
of delicate, nervous persons who eventually committed suicide
and he was actually, you know, but made really valiant efforts
to improve like he knew he had to get out of The Tribune
because he couldn't live with his mother, hovering over him like that.
So he went into politics which he loved
and in the meantime he had a serious of nervous breakdowns
in the first decade of the 20th century and he went to see Dr. Young
at one point and it was Dr. Young's first great triumph
and he actually was--
Medill McCormick was in some ways responsible
for Young's introduction into the United States.
Like he introduced Young to another patient, Vanderbilt,
who was a vague relative of his, who had some sort of phobia
of railway stations and she went and she saw Dr. Young
and they rode a train together eventually and she was so delighted
by the progress she'd made apparently
that she bought the station.
[Laughter] And there are letters from Fred
to Young during Young's travels around America where--
Fred makes kind of rye reference to, you know, the great success meaning
like you're making a lot of money here
in America of, you know, Young's tour.
But yeah I mean there are lot of documents here
that have been fantastic and there's such a varied collection that,

you know, reassembling the mosaic
that eventually becomes a book is our great joy to be able
to do it all in one building.
I mean what an amazing resource it is to have this here.
It's really, that's sort of staggering.
Anybody else?   >> Thank you Amanda.

>> Thank you very much.   [ Applause ]

>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.