 This is Carl Ackerman, the host of History is Here to Help here on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we are lucky to have drawn someone as far away as Massachusetts, the wonderful biographer Mark Schneider. So, Mark, we welcome you to this Think Tech Hawaii show. And my first question to you, with no more further ado, is tell us a little bit about yourself. So, I'm sure you weren't born a biographer, so you'd like to know a little bit about your biographical information. Yeah, I'm 75 years old. I grew up on Long Island and went to college at the University of Buffalo doing the height of the war in Vietnam and became an anti-war activist as an undergraduate and then kind of committed the next decade of my life, or actually two, to social justice issues. And I worked on Mexican American justice issues in California and in Texas where I held various blue collar jobs, mostly working as a bus driver in San Antonio while helping to organize a national Mexican American Conference on Immigration in 1978. I then moved to Boston and maintained my interest in Latin America and volunteered as a very active in the movement against the United States support for the Contras in Nicaragua and for the military in El Salvador. And I went to Nicaragua as a volunteer coffee, brigade picker. And you know, during the 1980s and for the next 30 years, I had a regular blue collar job as railroad worker, and I went back to college in the late 80s, became a, got a PhD and became a historian. And I wrote three books on African American history and then shifted my interests to the United States and the public and foreign policy. The two books that we're going to discuss today came out of my concern about the, you know, long-term provincialism of American, of the American public. And the first subject I chose was Joe Oakley, who is a blue collar guy with very little education, who became a congressman and later in life got very interested in the situation in El Salvador. Well, let me, let me pause for a second and take you back before we go into Mr. Oakley, or should say Representative Oakley, who is there forever in Massachusetts as a representative. You know, why biography? I mean, what attracted you to biography as a form of historical discourse? Yeah, good question. So, you know, I wrote three traditional history, African American history books, previous to this, that were further back in the past, you know, my dissertation was on the legacy of the abolitionists in Boston during the Jim Crow era. And then I wrote a longer book, I mean, a longer book, but on a shorter period, the history of the NAACP in the 1920s and then another book that's used as a textbook in a series in the 1920s. Now, I had a friend who is a presidential historian. And you know, we get together quite a lot and I could see how much fun he was having. He only did, you know, presidents who were either still alive or recently dead. And you know, he's doing lots of interviews with living people and I could see how much fun it was for him and how energized it made him. So I thought I would try my hand at this. And Oakley was a perfect character for me. I had written a bridge book that never got published that I self-published about the American public and foreign policy, focusing on various individuals who were, you know, not necessarily college educated people who had some kind of connecting project somewhere else in the world. There was no central character in the book and no publisher was interested in it and it was kind of a flop. But Oakley, you know, it's a biography, you know, it's kind of more interesting. It's focused on one person with an interesting life story and so that really jumped out at me. Now, in addition, I was teaching as an adjunct at Suffolk University where Oakley had sort of got to law school and had gotten a sort of a law degree there and his papers were there. So it was perfect. Well, you know, this is an important quality. I mean, you found a place where his papers were so, you know, that's the field day. I mean, that's half the battle is getting all the material. Were you, you know, I should ask you this question before we move on about Oakley. And this question is, was there a particular person besides your friend who, you know, got too interested in biography, you know, I was deeply influenced in my own writing by Robert Carroll. And you know, I read The Power Broker and I thought it was the best biography about Robert Moses. Well, it was about Robert Moses, but it was just so well written. And you know, he spent, you know, an eternity writing that book. But were there other things, were there other things that you read that inspired you to write this first biography about Representative Oakley? Nothing in particular, but, you know, biography is a really compelling way of learning. You call it the spice of history, I think that's great. It's, you know, people love personal stories where you kind of investigate human being who's involved in what become important enough historical events for somebody to decide to publish your book about them. So no, there wasn't any one person in particular, but I always enjoyed reading biography all the way through. I had been an English major as an undergraduate, you know, often you, you know, those are always deeply personal stories and novel, so sure. There were other, you know, I have remember hearing Carol speak in a story in a conference and they know it was really terrific. And yeah, that would have been an influence on me too, I'm sure. Another question is, it kind of fills in with your or allude to your work in Latin America. You know, Oakley had a commission, Riel Salvador, and I was wondering, that seems to have been, you know, a major focus of your book. So what did he do and what was that commissioned about in terms of his work in El Salvador? Well, that was the climax of the book. So with the Oakley book, you know, if we're talking kind of technically about crafting of biography, this had this, his life story had the fortunate circumstance of a big climax at the end of his life that really did not have a lot of connection to anything at the beginning. So Oakley came to the subject of El Salvador, only somewhat incidental. During the beginning of the Salvador War, all of the Central America activists, I was in that crowd, typically would go and visit their congressman and say, look, here's what we'd like you to do something to stop aid to El Salvador. And the activists who visited Joe Oakley, you know, kind of expected him to say, yeah, yeah, you know, you guys are OK, sure, yeah, I'll do something and blow him off. But he didn't. He had a quality that was rooted in his earlier life, where first of all, he didn't like bullies. He had grown up, you know, in a tough neighborhood himself. And he'd, you know, been in some physical fights, you know, as a kid and he had been a boxer, you know, he could kind of sense this, even if his concerns were very locally based in the beginning of his legislative and congressional career. So we did. And he had this young kid working for him, 20-something guy right out of college named Jim McGovern, who's now a congressman and has been for many years, was very interested in the subject. So we had Jim McGovern go and look into this. Now, when I was beginning the book, I thought to myself, you know, if this was Jim McGovern's deal, and Oakley just said, yeah, you go do this and let me know what you're doing. I wasn't going to write the book, but it quickly dawned on me that, no, this was heartfelt for Joe Oakley. So the first, he made three major contributions to ending the war in El Salvador and getting justice. The first one was he ten year-long came out of a pain. Different name for ten years before that. But in other words, people who were here in the United States would fled and entered the country illegally, could be deported. Oakley wanted them to have temporary protective status so that during the war they wouldn't be deported. If they were caught. And it took ten years to accomplish that over lots and lots of obstacles. You've got to remember all this stuff has to go through the House, through the Senate, and he built its past, goes to the conference committee. Very complicated. You didn't get that done. The second one was that as a result of this work, in November of 1989, six Jesuit priests, spent five of them Spanish, and their two custodians were murdered by the military. This was a long and complicated story. And I had several chapters on this. This was really kind of the main thing that Oakley did. The George H. W. Bush administration initially went along with the Salvadoran military story that the guerrillas did this. Okay. Oakley knew, everybody knew right away. This was not true. They had been, you know, the military who did, you know, do this crime, planted some fake evidence that would indicate that it was the guerrillas, that they used an AK-47 to kill them, that kind of thing. Now, the United States was paying eighty-five million dollars a year to support the Salvadoran military and the House appropriated that money. Gary Stutz, who had been on the Foreign Relations Committee, Oakley, by the way, was on the Rules Committee. You know, if you're on the Rules Committee, you don't have another assignment. Stutz had been previously on the Foreign Affairs Committee, had a paper interest in this. Well, the Speaker of the House at that time, Tom Folly, and said, we have to set up a Speaker's Committee to see that the money that we are giving these people, that they are doing a fair investigation, which, of course, they weren't, of the murders of the Jesuits. And he said, the guy that lead this is Joe Mowkley. Now, Mowkley, unlike most liberals in the House, had cashier with centrists, because on social issues, he was with himself. He was a religious Catholic. He was not in favor of abortion, you know, that's who he was, you know. And he could talk to pretty much every Democratic congressmember. So the Speaker appointed him to head this committee. And they went to El Salvador. They conducted some really tough interviews, both with the military and with people in the military who knew what happened, wanted to talk, but were afraid that they get killed. If they get killed, they had a bunch of secret meetings with these people. At one point, they had a guy in El Salvador who was protected by the American Embassy, the ambassador of a man named William Walker. And this guy couldn't themselves, but, you know, who knew what happened. You know, a lot of criminal investigations work this way. At one point, this man, Lionel Gomez, had Jim McGovern, in one of his studies, it's a guy called Bill Woodward, swim out to a place of water where the guy would be gambit who had done this. Now, Mowkley was never able to prove any of it. At the end of the establishment of this commission, after two years, they issued a report that pointed in the direction of what had happened. In El Salvador, there was a fake trial of six or eight, I think, lower-ranking military guys who had clearly been promised that they were going to take the fall for this, they'd go to jail for a short time, and then get released, which is basically what happened. The perpetrators of the crime were identified by Mowkley in a later report. A year later, there was United Nations Commission, which wrote the same report that Mowkley wrote, saying that it was the heads of the military who ordered this assassination, clearly no lower-ranking colonel, which is the guy who took the fall for this, was going to do this on his own. It ends a very dramatic story. There would be a great potboard. Mowkley had one other contribution, which is that he helped to end the war by going into guerrilla-held territory on his own, on his own initiative, and it's signaling, by that means, to the guerrillas, the war still on, that he had some power. He was in a position to use it to cut off all the aid to the military, and the guerrillas read their signal. Peace talks began. This all happened. The murder of the Jesuits, which I consider one of the great crimes of the 20th century, was overshadowed by the fall of the Berlin Wall at exactly the same time. So ultimately, a peace agreement was reached in January of 1993, and Joe Mowkley made a great contribution to this. Well, you know, what's interesting is that you kind of transitioned into your other biography by mentioning his name, the other representative that you wrote about. And so do you want to talk about him for just a bit, because this is another example of, you know, your your biographical intent? Yeah, so I gave a couple of talks, you know, typically at libraries, you know, about the Mowkley book, and one of them a guy came up to me and said, well, why don't you write a good biography? Gary Stutz. And my first there was now, I'm not doing that. You know, the story of his life was a gay man who came out of the classic Wellington Congress. And I thought, you know, I've written books about African-American history. This one, you know, I'm going to get things wrong. Then I thought about it a little more and I thought, no, no, I could do this. And so I did. Stutz, so the circumstances here were somewhat different. And that Stutz had written his own memoir and his husband was still alive. And his husband walked me through a lot of Gary Stutz's life and pointed me in the direction of people to interview, you know, and he did that. I think I'll take just a second to kind of digress here, you know, about the process of writing biographies about people who are recently deceased. Typically, you're going to be talking to the people who work for them, who are that person's friends. And the biographer has to be careful not to produce a hakeography in which you just kind of go, yeah, I was a great guy. Here's another story about this great guy. You know, you've kind of have to keep your guard up, you know, but this is compounded typically by the typical problem that most biographers choose subjects that they like, which is really true for me in both these cases. Now, so yes, so there was a link between these people, but their storylines were very, very different. Stutz was a cosmopolitan person more like me than Mowgli, although, you know, personally in my own life, I really did work for the railroad for 30 years selling train tickets. So I had a little bit of the locally based working class person, too, that a lot of the people who worked for Mowgli could sense about me. But Stutz, you know, was, you know, he's a reader. You know, he'd come up to Yale. He had worked in the State Department. He'd been a history teacher at a school. And he ran for con boss with anyone again in 72 without having any background in politics. He had the part, his background in politics was a little bit interesting in that in 1968, he'd been a history teacher at St. Paul's and Concord. And he supported McCarthy, Gene McCarthy, in the presidential primary. And it was Stutz who kind of convinced Gene McCarthy to really run that he could do well in the New Hampshire primary. And McCarthy had not decided to do that yet. So that was a pretty big deal. And that kind of did show Stutz that he had some chops as a political organizer. And nobody thought Stutz had a chance in any of his elections. Everybody thought Mowgli had a chance in running for Congress. But it was the war in Vietnam that kept Stutz over the top because he was the only one who featured that in his election campaign. Now, when he won election in 1972, you know, you take office in January of 73 and that's when the war in Vietnam ended. So Stutz now, you know, the issue that he had run on wasn't an issue. But he very quickly understood that the key issue in his district, which comprised Cape Cod, the South Shore of Massachusetts and New Bedford, which is America's largest fishing port, was the sea and conservation and the fishing industry. Stutz, to get elected, he had this pre-natural language ability. Learned to speak Portuguese, which is what a lot of people in New Bedford still spoke then, especially the fishing. And it made him really popular with those guys and their families. So he focused right away on the biggest problem that the fishermen faced. It had been a transformation in the industry in that factory fishing mushrooms during the 60s. The United States did not do that because they didn't have an industrial policy that fostered it, but all the other countries that fished did. So Russia and Japan, in particular, fished in what would later become American waters with these huge factory trolling operations that sucked the fish out of the sea. And Stutz got a 200 mile limit pass right away. He was very popular. It lasted, you know, for the whole beginnings, first 10 years of his career in Congress. But that's not the real story. That's not the reason people remember Gary Stutz today. He was dead. He hid it all the way through at his whole life. He buried it deep down inside him. He suppressed all his erotic urges. And when they came out, they came out in the wrong places. So when he was elected to Congress, oddly enough, he wasn't his private life was more private than it was when he had been in a community. And he began to attempt to seduce congressional pages, typically 16 and 17 year old boys. His staff members told him, you better not do this. You got to stop it. And he took one of them with him as his driver to Portugal. That guy never raised a complaint against Stutz. When they came back from the trip, the guys told Stutz, look, that was fun, but I won't do this anymore. Goodbye. And Stutz forgot about it. That happened in 1973. And 10 years later, several congressional pages came forward complaining that they had been homosexual harassed. The Congress set up an investigation into this. They found that there was nothing to it. But they found that there was a sitting congressman, a Republican named Crane, who was having an affair ongoing with 17 year old girl. And they were bad to release that report when they kind of figured this is not going to look good. It's a Democratic controlled Congress. Can't we find somebody on the Democratic side? And they had heard some rumors about somebody somewhere 10 years ago taking a page to Portugal. They kept pressing. They tracked it down. They found the page. They dragged them in, picking and screaming. He said, no, nothing bad happened to me. I'm not complaining against anybody. But finally they got him to confess that it was Gary Stutz who had taken it to Portugal and they brought censure charges against both men, a reprimand charges actually against both men. Newt Gingrich got up in the back. He was back benchered, nobody heard of and said, that's no good. You got to kick both these guys out. And so that position censures the mid ground. Congress voted to censor them both. Now, the climax of Gary Stutz's career really came in the middle of it. In 1980, this broke in 1983, and now Stutz had a big decision to make. He had confessed, you know, he admitted that he had done what he had done, but he claimed in a speech in Congressional floor that it wasn't wrong. So now he had to decide if he was going to run again and he did. A lot of people told Stutz, you're going to lose. Do not do this. You're getting nothing but pain out of this. And he went forward and he ran and he won. Against a Democratic Party primary challenger, who made this the only issue. So this was the big, made him the first openly gay Congress person. And that was a really big turning point in his career. Now, from a biographer's point of view, what happens when the climax of your story comes in the middle? You're then left with another 12 years of basically, you know, anti-climax. He did a lot of interesting things after this, mostly having to do with the fishing industry. You know, but there is a kind of narrative challenge that I didn't face, you know, with the Mowgli book, the climax came at the end. But I hope readers found the remaining chapters interesting. You know, your point about no hagiography is an important one. And I think that, you know, even if you admire someone, you can point out, and I think you can do it nicely. I mean, in this latter case, I'm not sure you can do it nicely. I tried to point out errors and what choices the political person had in front of them. Right. I tried to show this from every point of view. So let me just ask in concluding, including sort of today, what I'd like to do is just to ask you to make an overall commentary about the enjoyment or not enjoyment of your biography writing, because you began our discussion by saying, hey, you know, I have a friend and he seems to really enjoy this. So I tried it. So how do you feel about that? And do you have something else in the works? Or is it now past prime and things like that? What do you have to say? I deeply enjoyed writing both books. It was a real pleasure to write both books. I love the process of interviewing people who remember these important historic events. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And just one more thing, just running a little bit over time. And that is, you know, in the process of writing, can you describe just a bit about how that works? Is it in that it looks like maybe a basement that you're in right now or in a special room? I noticed that you have the doors drum set behind you. But I'm wondering, do you have a special place to write or is it all over the place? Or is it, is it, is it, you know, a special office that you go to? I mean, you know, again, going back to Robert Caro, I read his book about historical writing and he said that he had an office that he went to. I think connected to the New York Public Library if I'm not mistaken. But how did you, how did you write specifically and where did you write? I only write right here in my study. Yeah, the drum set is mine. I'm a little dead, but I still play. And my, the way I work, which, you know, I'm sure everybody does it differently is. I did the interviews in order of the life story. I have friends who told me, no, don't do it that way. Interview the oldest people first. So I wrote through the interviews, write a chapter, interview more people, write a chapter, and then of course revise at the end. Well, thank you, Mark. This has been absolutely wonderful. And I just wanted to leave you with the last blinds if you wanted to address our audience in any way. Well, biography is a great read. So I encourage the readers and the writers in your audience. Yeah, go ahead, go do it. It's, it's more fun than archival work. Although, you know, in a biography, you have to do the archival work. And certainly if you're writing biography about someone who is long gone and which you cannot do interviews, you know, the archival work is the way you're going to move your storyline forward. But it's a lot of fun to write. But, you know, you know, a little probably more intriguing than working your way through the census and writing those social histories that win all the awards at the Organization of American Historians. You know, it's fun. This is a great way to end. And, you know, the title of the show was biography is the spice of life and apparently it is a great spice in Mark Schneider's life. Thank you. And a Huey ho Mahalo from history is here to help. Thanks very much, Carl.