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Melanie Kirkpatrick on Unveiling Thanksgiving's Hidden Heroines · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  Roger Ream: Hello and welcome.
• 0:01
  Roger Ream: I'm Roger Reem, and this is the Liberty and Leadership Podcast a conversation with T-FAS alumni, supporters, faculty and friends who are making a real impact in public policy, business, philanthropy, law and journalism.
• 0:19
  Roger Ream: Today, I'm excited to be joined by Melanie Kirkpatrick.
• 0:23
  Roger Ream: Melanie is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, having previously worked for three decades at the Wall Street Journal, rising from copy editor to opinion editor, member of the editorial board and deputy editor of the newspaper's editorial pages.
• 0:39
  Roger Ream: Melanie is the author of several books, including, most recently, lady Editor Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman.
• 0:50
  Roger Ream: Thanksgiving, the Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience.
• 0:55
  Roger Ream: And Escape from North Korea the Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad.
• 1:01
  Roger Ream: We'll discuss all three books, plus her work in journalism.
• 1:05
  Roger Ream: Melanie is a supporter of the Fund for American Studies, so I may also ask her about that.
• 1:11
  Roger Ream: Thank you for joining me today, melanie.
• 1:14
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It's great to be with you, Roger.
• 1:16
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I'm glad that you've invited me.
• 1:17
  Roger Ream: Well, I think this is an appropriate podcast for the month of November, especially because of your book about Thanksgiving, which we'll get to.
• 1:26
  Roger Ream: But could I first ask you to just talk a little bit about your 30-year career at the Wall Street Journal and in journalism?
• 1:34
  Roger Ream: How do you get your start in journalism?
• 1:37
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I got my start in journalism a little late compared to lots of my colleagues in journalism.
• 1:43
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I was really interested in journalism in high school and was editor of our school newspaper.
• 1:49
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But when I got to college I became very academic.
• 1:52
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I spent most of my life in the library rather than being out doing things.
• 2:00
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And it was only when I went to graduate school that I realized after all I didn't want to be a professor.
• 2:07
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I wanted to do something that was more rooted in the present.
• 2:13
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So I went off to Tokyo with Princeton and Asia, which was and still is an organization that places graduates of any college in positions around Asia, and they put me with Time Life Books, which was a great entry into the world of writing.
• 2:35
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And when I was living in Tokyo I also was asked to co-host a TV show for junior high school students who were studying English, but the story is a little too long.
• 2:47
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But then I went back to my hometown, buffalo, new York, where I was able to get a job on the local newspaper.
• 2:54
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And from that that journalism experience and that Asia experience I applied to the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, which was a new edition of the Wall Street Journal, and off, I went to Hong Kong to work for them.
• 3:13
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So that was how I got my start, and then the rest of my journalism career was with the journal in Asia and here in the States.
• 3:22
  Roger Ream: How long were you in Hong Kong?
• 3:23
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I was in Hong Kong for six and a half years and in Tokyo for three and a half, so a total of 10 years in Asia.
• 3:31
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And then I was also sent back there to do by the journal, to fill in for various people or do some writing, reporting and writing.
• 3:41
  Roger Ream: We had a program at the Fund for American Studies in Hong Kong for just over 10 years and sadly had to shut it down there when things changed very dramatically the last few years.
• 3:53
  Roger Ream: Hong Kong was just a great city.
• 3:57
  Roger Ream: I'm sure you found it that when you were there Did you have the opportunity to meet Jimmy Lai when you worked for the journal there.
• 4:05
  Roger Ream: I know he's a leading journalist.
• 4:08
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Yes, jimmy was a friend.
• 4:10
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I actually met him a few years after I left Hong Kong, when he was becoming a little more active in his thinking and in his public presence.
• 4:23
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But he is an amazing man.
• 4:26
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: As you know, roger, he is in jail in Hong Kong right now.
• 4:30
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He was a newspaper publisher a publisher of the most popular newspaper in Hong Kong and it was pro-market and pro-human liberty which got him in deep trouble with the authorities, who were looking on from Beijing, and eventually his magazine was shut down, everything confiscated and he was thrown in jail, where he's been now for, I think, three years.
• 5:02
  Roger Ream: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:02
  Roger Ream: It'll be sadly three years in December that he was put in jail and we were pleased to honor him last year in New York at our annual journalism awards dinner, which a big part of that dinner is to introduce our Joseph Rago fellow, who has the opportunity to work at the Wall Street Journal, and we love that.
• 5:25
  Roger Ream: You've been able to come to some of those dinners.
• 5:27
  Roger Ream: You knew, joe.
• 5:29
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Yes, I knew him.
• 5:31
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: We worked closely together While I was still at the journal.
• 5:35
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He started out as one of the assistant op-ed editors and then moved into a full-time editorial writing job.
• 5:46
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He died suddenly when he was in his 30s of natural causes and it was a huge loss to journalism.
• 5:55
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He was already a star.
• 5:57
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He had won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing and he was moving on to, I think, bigger things at the journal.
• 6:07
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So it was a great loss.
• 6:11
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He was a soft-spoken man but he had a powerful pen.
• 6:17
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He really could dive deeply into subjects.
• 6:23
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He was a great researcher and his writing had such a flair, a humor, interesting vocabulary, and all I can say is that I still miss him.
• 6:38
  Roger Ream: Yeah well, it was great he was recognized while he was alive with the Pulitzer Prize for that editorial writing and I'm so pleased that in partnering with his parents, paul and Nancy Rago, in the Wall Street Journal.
• 6:51
  Roger Ream: Now we've had six Joseph Rago fellows there, two of whom were hired full-time at the journal after they completed their fellowship.
• 6:59
  Roger Ream: A third was just hired by the Boston Globe and our sixth has just started at the journal and she's already had a piece that she wrote up here in the paper and is having a great experience there.
• 7:12
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Well, they couldn't have a better role model than Joe Rago.
• 7:15
  Roger Ream: That's right.
• 7:16
  Roger Ream: That's right.
• 7:17
  Roger Ream: Well, let's talk about your three books.
• 7:19
  Roger Ream: The most recent is Lady Editor, and it covers the life and legacy of Sarah Josepha Hale, who I had not known about until you wrote this book, and it's a fascinating story about a woman who had a tremendous influence on 19th century American culture.
• 7:40
  Roger Ream: But she's connected to Thanksgiving as well, another book you wrote.
• 7:44
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Yeah, she's known as the godmother of Thanksgiving and she was responsible, through her work as editor of Gaudi's Ladies' Book, to push for a National Thanksgiving Day.
• 8:01
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And here I need to back up a little bit in history.
• 8:04
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Before, lincoln called a National Thanksgiving Day in the middle of the Civil War in 1863, before that, americans celebrated Thanksgiving, but not on the same day.
• 8:18
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Thanksgiving was called by the governor of the state, and sometimes the governors didn't call a Thanksgiving Day, but by the middle, the second quarter of the country, most of the states and territories were indeed celebrating the holiday and Hale thought that the holiday.
• 8:43
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Every American should celebrate the holiday, and do so on the same day.
• 8:48
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: She thought it would be a unifying factor for Americans to give thanks for their own blessings but also for the blessings of America, of their country, and it was kind of a quasi-patriotic holiday for her.
• 9:08
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And so in the late 1840s she began a campaign to editorialize for Thanksgiving to be a national holiday.
• 9:20
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And since her magazine, gaudi's Ladies' Book, was the most widely circulated magazine in America at that time, it was a national magazine and it had the unheard of circulation of 100,000 readers, plus, when you add the pass-along rate, many, many, many more.
• 9:45
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So she editorialized for Thanksgiving Day and in addition to that she conducted a private campaign among what we would call influencers.
• 9:58
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: She wrote to every member of Congress and the House and Senate.
• 10:04
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: She wrote to every governor, and she did this.
• 10:07
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: These were all handwritten letters, so you can imagine what a task it was.
• 10:12
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: She wrote to other people in the country who were well-known and urging them to join her campaign for a National Thanksgiving Day.
• 10:26
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: She also rose to presidents of the United States and because she was such an influential, well-known person, they wrote back.
• 10:35
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And those letters are fascinating because they explain what the objection to Thanksgiving was among people who knew the Constitution.
• 10:51
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: She's one letter she received from President Millard Fillmore spelled it out particularly well in which he said look, I'd love to have a National Thanksgiving Day, but this is a power that belongs to the governors, not to the president.
• 11:11
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So it wasn't until 1863, when she wrote to Lincoln, that he, I guess, decided you know, there may be constitutional objections, but there was a broader issue at stake and that was the health of the Union, and the American people needed a reason to unify.
• 11:35
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And he wrote this beautiful Thanksgiving proclamation, which I urge you and all your listeners to read if you haven't already.
• 11:47
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And it's almost like the war didn't exist.
• 11:52
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He was and he was thinking about what America would be like after the war.
• 12:01
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Gettysburg the Battle of Gettysburg had just happened that summer and the tide was turning.
• 12:10
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It was pretty clear at that point that the Union was going to win.
• 12:14
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And in his proclamation he didn't speak to just, you know, northerners.
• 12:23
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He spoke to everybody and talked about the country coming together with one heart as one people, a beautiful image and which I think still holds today.
• 12:39
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: That's what Thanksgiving is about.
• 12:40
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It's at the heart of the holiday.
• 12:44
  Roger Ream: He wrote a marvelous book In 2016, I think it was published by Encounter Books Thanksgiving the holiday at the heart of the American experience, and it's it's a timeless book, so people should find it and buy it Big and read it in November, especially to learn about Thanksgiving it.
• 13:06
  Roger Ream: It's wonderful you start out with the story of the newcomers school in Queens, which I'd never heard of and a Visit you paid there and I worry.
• 13:18
  Roger Ream: I have a daughter who's a has been a teacher and I know the emphasis in her school system is not Really on all aspects of Thanksgiving.
• 13:27
  Roger Ream: It's about the Indians who participated in it, the Wampanoag a tribe but I think it's so important that Americans learn the story of Thanksgiving In all aspects.
• 13:39
  Roger Ream: Like you tell it in that book what, what first saw, what prompted you to write the book?
• 13:44
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: the Attacks in New York on September 11th.
• 13:47
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I was downtown, just outside the World Trade Center at that time and it, like as with every American, that had a profound impact on me and my thinking, and I started thinking more deeply about what it meant to be an American.
• 14:04
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And as Thanksgiving neared, I went to the section of William Bradford's, the first, one of the first governors of Plymouth Colony, the what, and he wrote a History of Plymouth Colony.
• 14:23
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And I went to the section where he talked about the first Thanksgiving.
• 14:27
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It's only a hundred words or so, but it it painted a picture of what Thanksgiving still is people coming together to give thanks, share a meal and In a always a friendly, peaceful way.
• 14:48
  Roger Ream: I grew up the son of a congregational minister, so Thanksgiving hours was my favorite holiday and we would have a Thanksgiving service at our church every Thanksgiving morning and and we kind of follow the traditional Order of the Puritan service, except my dad wouldn't give a two to three hour sermon, he'd read George Washington's Thanksgiving proclamation.
• 15:15
  Roger Ream: He's often share some of William Bradford's writing as well, and so that was that's always been my favorite holiday.
• 15:22
  Roger Ream: But I love that story at the start of your book because you, you were at a school of immigrants and you at you know you anticipated it would be difficult to get them to speak up when you went into the classroom to talk about it and then you tell the and hopefully that would be true today.
• 15:39
  Roger Ream: But these, these immigrants, like like the pilgrims before them, really had an appreciation for the ideas around Thanksgiving.
• 15:47
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Yes, that's exactly right, and I should point out that newcomers high school is a public high school and and Thanksgiving, at least at the time and probably still today, was not on the curriculum.
• 15:58
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And there were, there was a tee.
• 16:00
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: There was a high school history teacher in a high school ESL English is a second language teacher who thought that the students really needed to know more about the holiday and they, for immigrants, and, and traditionally the Thanksgiving has, the celebration of Thanksgiving has been a kind of Entry into the American life.
• 16:26
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It's, it's a, it's part of their pilgrimage to accepting America and being American.
• 16:32
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So these kids were Just dying to talk to me often, and usually in imperfect English.
• 16:42
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But there was one boy who said he was from Tibet, which is, of course, a region of China and hasn't existed as a country for more than half a century, but he said he was like the pilgrims.
• 16:59
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He said I am a pilgrim too because he left because his family was persecuted For being followers of the Dalai Lama in the Tibetan Buddhist religion.
• 17:11
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Then a girl spoke up and she was from Egypt and she was a copped, which is an ancient form of Christianity, and said that her family had to leave Egypt because they were Persecuted for their, their religion, egypt of course being a Muslim country, a mostly Muslim country, so the kids really took the holiday very, very personally.
• 17:39
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And Just one last anecdote when I asked, kind of facetiously, do you have to eat turkey on Thanksgiving?
• 17:48
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And like it was like, they answered in unison yes, it's the tradition.
• 17:54
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So they were very keen to taste turkey and Participate.
• 18:01
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So I found it very hard.
• 18:04
  Roger Ream: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:04
  Roger Ream: Is there anything in in researching and writing the book?
• 18:08
  Roger Ream: That surprised you.
• 18:09
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Well, yes, there were actually quite a few things, but One having to do with what we call the first Thanksgiving, that is, the pilgrims and the Wampanoon Indians.
• 18:21
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I found it curious that William Bradford and other pilgrims who wrote about it did not refer to this as a Thanksgiving.
• 18:30
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: To them it was just another day.
• 18:34
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: They were celebrating the harvest.
• 18:36
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And the first Thanksgiving in Bradford's writing was A day a couple of years later, in the middle of July, when a Rainfall ended a drought that was seriously impacting the colony and and their crops.
• 18:57
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So he called a Thanksgiving Day in celebration of that rainfall.
• 19:03
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And you know, the definition of Thanksgiving has.
• 19:08
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: The definition today is really an amalgam of a lot of traditions, so religious tradition, of course, and not just the pilgrims, in the Wampanoag it's, there were Europeans and and Native Americans celebrating Thanksgiving's prior to the arrival of the pilgrims, and that was a very interesting chapter for me to research in Texas, in Florida, in Maine.
• 19:38
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So that was one thing that surprised me, I guess I I also was surprised to hear about the spat in the 1940s, before the World War II began in America, about the date of Thanksgiving.
• 20:03
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Sarah Hale and those who supported her campaign all pushed for Thanksgiving Day to be the last Thursday of November, and that had been the case until the late 30s when FDR Franklin Roosevelt, the president, said he was going to change the date of Thanksgiving.
• 20:26
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: He wanted to make it earlier in the month of November so that there was more time for Christmas shopping and supposedly, under this not very clever economic theory of his, if Americans had more, had another week to shop, they'd buy more.
• 20:48
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Well, of course that wasn't the case.
• 20:51
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Americans didn't have the money to purchase more.
• 20:56
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So this turned into a big fight among the states and what happened was that half of the states, primarily those with a Democratic governor therefore they would have been supporting FDR.
• 21:11
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Those Democratic states, for the most part, chose to celebrate on FDR's designated day, and everybody else, especially in New England, were outraged that he would tamper what they saw as the sacred date and they decided to celebrate on the traditional date, which was the last Thursday of November, and this threw the whole country into a state of debate and annoyance.
• 21:45
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: My own mother from Buffalo, new York, a Democratic state, was at school in Boston, a Republican state, and, of course, the state where the so-called first Thanksgiving had taken place.
• 22:01
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So for four years for four years in college, she couldn't go home for Thanksgiving because her days off were a week later than the days off back in Buffalo.
• 22:14
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Fdr saw that it was clear.
• 22:16
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: His idea was going nowhere and eventually, in 1941, in the autumn of 1941, congress passed a resolution which made the Thanksgiving Day official, and that's how we now vote.
• 22:38
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It would not be possible today, or would not be easy at least, for states to choose their own day, because up until now, as a result of all of that, we have an official date of Thanksgiving and it's decided by the president.
• 22:57
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Well, it's decided by law.
• 22:58
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I take that back.
• 22:59
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: The president issues a proclamation, but it's Congress that has set the date.
• 23:06
  Roger Ream: Yeah, that sounds like faulty economics that FDR was using to try to change the holiday, especially at that time and the situation the country was in.
• 23:16
  Roger Ream: Let me ask for Americans who do cherish Thanksgiving as a special holiday, what can we do beyond eating turkey and watching football games to connect to that tradition of the first Thanksgiving and the pilgrims and the importance of showing thanks?
• 23:36
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: One of the things that has changed drastically in our lifetimes, roger, is that most religious institutions don't have Thanksgiving Day services on Thanksgiving Day itself anymore.
• 23:50
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: They may give thanks the previous Sunday or even have a separate service earlier in the week, and that's a big change.
• 23:59
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: At the same time, one survey shows that if Americans are going to say grace before a meal, they do it on Thanksgiving Day, and my anecdotal experience has been that a lot of families stop to give thanks for various blessings.
• 24:19
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Many even go around the table and ask participants to mention one thing for which they are thankful.
• 24:28
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But I'd like to see I guess I'd like to see more emphasis on the thanks part of Thanksgiving, and not necessarily religious, but to help bring us back to that first Thanksgiving I like and I close my book with this I'd like to suggest a revival of a tradition that took hold in the 19th century and it's called Five Kernels of Corn, and the tradition which we follow in my own family now is to place five kernels of corn on the Thanksgiving table, and the five kernels of corn are in memory of the starving time that the pilgrims experienced when they first came to America and the grace with which they accepted, according to legend, five kernels of corn that were handed out to them as food.
• 25:40
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: The legend is probably not is probably a legend, not rooted in fact, but the spirit behind it was certainly true and the idea is that even during hardship, we are able to give thanks as a community for what little we have.
• 26:07
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And that tradition took hold in the 19th century and people would place the five kernels of corn on their Thanksgiving table as a memory of that, and I'd like to see that tradition revived.
• 26:23
  Roger Ream: Excellent, excellent.
• 26:24
  Roger Ream: I like that idea.
• 26:25
  Roger Ream: Well, let's.
• 26:26
  Roger Ream: In.
• 26:27
  Roger Ream: The time we have remaining, I definitely want to talk about your 2014 book on North Korea Escape from North Korea the Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad.
• 26:38
  Roger Ream: I know it was brought to my mind just in the past month when I read that China had sent quite a few refugees who'd escaped from North Korea back to North Korea to who knows what fate they faced not a good one, I'm sure, and at least some.
• 26:59
  Roger Ream: The United States government, I think, and other governments called out China for doing that.
• 27:04
  Roger Ream: But you tell quite a story in this book.
• 27:08
  Roger Ream: First of all, what inspired you to write it?
• 27:13
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: As we mentioned earlier in this hour, I spent a lot of years in Asia and became interested in North Korea over that time.
• 27:23
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I also visited South Korea a number of times and wrote stories about its remarkable achievements in the economy and in its culture.
• 27:36
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: In the late 90s I began hearing reports of people who were escaping from North Korea.
• 27:44
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It's a crime to leave North Korea without permission.
• 27:49
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And yet there was a famine going on and tens of thousands of North Koreans illegally crossed the northern border into China.
• 27:58
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And at the same time China had been opening up a little bit.
• 28:05
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It had diplomatic relations with South Korea, so South Koreans could go to China, and of course, americans had been going to China since the late 70s.
• 28:22
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But what happened was a lot of religious people, missionary pastors from America and South Korea started setting up operations in northwestern China northeastern China, excuse me to help the North Koreans who had settled in China, to help them get out of China along a kind of underground railroad.
• 28:50
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: There were also brokers, often not very nice people, who would help North Koreans escape as well, and under South Korea's constitution, any Korean who made his way to the south could stay in South Korea and was considered a citizen of South Korea.
• 29:12
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So these escapees began turning up in South Korea and their stories became known.
• 29:19
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: It was an ordeal to leave.
• 29:24
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: People could not go directly from north to south.
• 29:28
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: They had to go thousands of miles across China, usually crossing the border on foot, into a Southeast Asian nation that bordered the country, sometimes going north to Mongolia, again crossing by foot.
• 29:43
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But they were desperate to get out and in Escape from North Korea.
• 29:48
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I interviewed many North Koreans who had escaped from their country and I also interviewed their rescuers and it was a fascinating experience for me, a very powerful experience, to talk to these people who were so desperate to escape.
• 30:13
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: They told stories about children dying in their arms of starvation and many other terrible things, but they had hope and they were able to somehow manage to get out and create new lives for themselves.
• 30:38
  Roger Ream: Yeah, it is quite a story that you tell in your book, and the witness of some of these people, some of whom are in the United States now speaking about their experience, is powerful as well, and you capture that in your book.
• 30:52
  Roger Ream: I like to tell young people to open up their search browser and put into it Korea at night and look at those satellite images, which I know you've seen, that show half of that peninsula illuminated in light of civilization and the other half in darkness.
• 31:11
  Roger Ream: Why do you think the Kim family has been able to maintain such a hold on power so many decades?
• 31:18
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: That's a tough one, roger, but one of the reasons is the lack of information that North Koreans have about life outside their borders.
• 31:30
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: The Kim family has controlled access to the country for 70 years now.
• 31:37
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: To give just one powerful example, there are only an estimated thousand or so North Koreans who have access to the Internet.
• 31:49
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: North Korea has its own intranet and of course, it can control what North Koreans see.
• 31:58
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: All this is changing, and there is a chapter in my book called the Information Invasion, which has been going on now for more than a decade, and North Koreans are beginning to find out more about the outside world through videos that are videotapes that are smuggled in, or access to international radio broadcasts, for example.
• 32:25
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So that's one reason lack of information about the outside world, and, I should add, perhaps even more importantly, lack of information about the Kim family regime, which is highly secretive and most North Koreans know very little.
• 32:42
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: They are required to have pictures of the Kim leaders in their homes and to dust them, and they worship, in a way, the Kims, but they don't know very much about how they operate.
• 33:01
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So that's another example.
• 33:05
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: But a third is the brutality of the regime is unprecedented in the modern world, and so that discourages people from speaking out.
• 33:20
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: The Kim family regimes over the 70 years have threatened people with punishment of their families for crimes of an individual.
• 33:35
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So if an individual North Korean is found to have escaped illegally from the country, his family is often punished, and so that's a powerful deterrent from trying to speak ill of the regime.
• 33:58
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Or you just want to keep your head down and out of sight.
• 34:03
  Roger Ream: Well, I don't know.
• 34:03
  Roger Ream: I recall a story that it might be in your book or I may have heard you, in giving a talk about your book, say this, but I don't remember the source.
• 34:11
  Roger Ream: But it was about a North Korean who was a diplomat and was sent to a Middle Eastern country for a posting and when he arrived there he was shocked to see that people wore shoes, because the story he had heard in North Korea was that only in North Korea do people have shoes to wear.
• 34:31
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Wow.
• 34:32
  Roger Ream: And it was just an amazing story.
• 34:34
  Roger Ream: And you know I guess these books we're talking about Thanksgiving and Escape from North Korea in a sense are companions, because if you read Escape from North Korea you know you have a lot to be thankful for.
• 34:46
  Roger Ream: If you were either born in the United States or you live here now as an immigrant, you have so much to be thankful for that you weren't born in North Korea.
• 34:57
  Roger Ream: At the Journal I know you had responsibility for the index of economic freedom which the Wall Street Journal has published in partnership with the Heritage Foundation.
• 35:08
  Roger Ream: That is a powerful teaching tool.
• 35:11
  Roger Ream: It shows that the freest countries are also the richest, the cleanest, the healthiest and that the most totalitarian countries, like North Korea and now of course Venezuela and Cuba and many others, are among the most powerful.
• 35:26
  Roger Ream: They are among the poorest and least healthy and least well educated countries.
• 35:34
  Roger Ream: But I think your book on North Korea, that satellite image, that index, are all just great teaching tools for us to have in the classroom, to teach young people today about the importance of liberty.
• 35:47
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: You said it well, roger, and I experienced it when I lived and worked in Asia.
• 35:54
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: I saw what was called the four tigers Singapore, taiwan, south Korea and Malaysia become no, yes, I guess that's the four grow from poor countries to prosperous and that's the case of Singapore, excuse me and in the case of Taiwan and South Korea into democratic, free societies under a rule of law.
• 36:24
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: So there is a connection and you speak well of it.
• 36:31
  Roger Ream: Well, and I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal last week that showed a significant exodus of Western companies from Hong Kong, with the least loosening of the rule of law, of course, and pulling back from democracy.
• 36:50
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Well, china was first opening to American businesses in the late 70s and early 80s, and American businesses would require that any dispute be resolved under Hong Kong law, not under Chinese law, and that was because they felt they could trust the British legal system that was in place there, as indeed they could.
• 37:24
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: And now Hong Kong, being under the thumb of Beijing, has become a much more risky place to do business.
• 37:36
  Roger Ream: Before we conclude, can I?
• 37:38
  Roger Ream: I'd like to ask if you have another book underway?
• 37:41
  Roger Ream: I hope the answer is yes.
• 37:44
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Not underway, but underthought.
• 37:46
  Roger Ream: Okay, wonderful, wonderful.
• 37:48
  Roger Ream: Well, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
• 37:52
  Roger Ream: Thank you for writing some fantastic books that I hope people will still go out and buy.
• 37:57
  Roger Ream: I'm sure they're all available on Amazon and they're fascinating reads, and especially in this month of November, I hope people will be mindful of the things we've talked about today and that Melanie Kirk-Packard has written about with regard to Thanksgiving.
• 38:13
  Roger Ream: So thank you very much.
• 38:15
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Thank you, roger, and thank you and your colleagues at the Fund for American Studies for all that you do.
• 38:21
  Melanie Kirkpatrick: Teaching young Americans to value our nation and our nation's history are extremely important activities and I applaud you for it.
• 38:35
  Roger Ream: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 38:38
  Roger Ream: Please don't forget to subscribe, download, like or share the show on Apple, Spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcast.
• 38:48
  Roger Ream: If you like this episode, I ask you to rate and review it, and if you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email.
• 38:56
  Roger Ream: At podcast at tfastorg, the Liberty and Leadership Podcast is produced at K-Global Studios in Washington DC.
• 39:05
  Roger Ream: I'm your host, Roger Rean, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.