American History Tellers - California Gold Rush | Gold Mountains | 5

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

News of the 1848 discovery of gold in California spread quickly, and thousands of Chinese migrants flocked to California to seek a better life in the place they called "Gold Mountain." But the reality awaiting them was a far cry from streets paved with gold. Despite facing racism and incredible hardship, many ultimately found opportunities to prosper in the Golden State. On today’s show, author and historian Lisa See joins host Lindsay Graham to discuss the Chinese experience of the gold rush, and her own family’s journey to California, which she chronicled in her book On Gold Mountain.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's a summer evening in Sacramento in 1851. You're a barber and you're finally closing up your small shop after a long day of cutting hair. You hum a familiar tune from your childhood back in China as you sweep up the clippings. You're looking forward to a quick dinner and then head into bed. Behind your shop, you have a small back room with a bed and a stove. It's not much, but it's better than the flimsy tent you lived in when you first arrived in California. You went straight to the goldfields, but white claim

jumpers kept harassing you. When you'd finally had enough, you quit mining and used your meager savings to open up this barbershop instead. Just as you're finishing up, a customer enters, a white miner with a thick beard streaked with gray. I need a haircut. Sorry, I'm closed. Maybe your English ain't so good. I need a haircut. I understand you, but it's past eight. I'll be open again in the morning. Well, I can't wait till morning. I'm getting married then. I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not asking. Should I come back with some friends? The edge in his tone makes you freeze. You know from past experience that miners gang up on Chinese folk all the time. Things could get ugly

if you don't give this man what he wants. All right, please, hop in the chair. Well, that's more like it. You drape a cloth over him. How should I cut him? Just a, you know, general trim. Need my beard shaved too. You groan silently. His beard is thick. You'll have to cut it with scissors first, which will double the time it takes. But you swallow your complaints and get to work. The miner looks up at you with a grin. Yeah, getting married tomorrow, would you believe it? After months of slinging mud, I finally hit gold on my claim. Well, you're one of the lucky few then. Congratulations. The miner looks at you quizzically. Well, dang, your English is pretty good. I grew up in Hong Kong. Hong Kong? Yes, a British colony in China. Lots of English

speakers there. The miner grunts and then falls silent. You work quickly to clean him up. Afterward, his face has a funny sunburn pattern from the beard, pink forehead, pale cheeks, but he doesn't seem to mind. He pays you five dollars and admires himself in the mirror. Well, you cut hair pretty good, too. My bride won't even recognize me. You grab your broom and start sweeping up, but then you notice something. Amid the beard clippings, there's a glint, a flake of gold, several of them. The bits of precious metal must have gotten caught in his beard and he didn't even realize it. You're tempted not to say anything, but you were brought up to always be honest. Sir, excuse me, I think these are yours. The miner squints down at the

flakes and bursts out laughing. That's not even work bending over to pick up. I've got a whole gunny sack full. I guess you just enjoy your tip. Then the miner leaves, and you bend over to pick up the flakes. A dozen altogether. Then you hurry over and lock the door. You've had enough excitement for tonight. Kill List is a true story of how i ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger follow kill list wherever you get your podcasts you can listen to kill list and more

exhibit c true crumb shows like morbid early and ad free right now by joining wandry plus have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In the early years of the California Gold Rush, word of the immense riches being discovered drew people from all over the world. Many of those would-be fortune seekers came from China.

Fleeing poverty and unrest at home, thousands of young Chinese men undertook a four-week journey across the Pacific Ocean to California. They flocked to the gold fields, only to find them soon crowded with white miners arriving from the eastern U.S. Despite the Chinese immigrants' hard work and determination, their race made them a target of abuse and unfair treatment in the gold fields. Many white miners would jump the claims of these Chinese miners. And in land disputes, local authorities seldom sided with the Chinese. So many Chinese immigrants were forced to find other means of making money. Instead of mining, they opened up businesses to serve the growing population of cities like San Francisco and Sacramento. Chinese immigrants soon owned laundries, restaurants, barbershops, and other retail establishments that catered to the same

white miners who had pushed them out of the gold fields. My guest today has written about her own family's extraordinary journey from China to California in the aftermath of the gold rush, and their struggles and triumphs as they established themselves in a new country. Lisa See is a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Association of Southern California. She's written many works of historical fiction, exploring Chinese characters and cultures, as well as a nonfiction work called On Gold Mountain, The 100-Year Odyssey of My Chinese American Family.

Here's our conversation. Lisa See, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. So in your book On Gold Mountain, you trace your family's history from China to California in the mid-1800s. But before we get to the specifics of that story, let's talk a little bit in general about life in China, in the villages of China, like the one your great-great-grandfather came from. What was the drive for people to want to leave China at the time? There were several things that were going on in China that helped to

push people to leave. And, you know, with immigration, it doesn't matter where you're coming from. There are these push and pull factors, the things that push people out of their country and the things that pull them here. And so in China, this was a time of tremendous upheaval. You'd had the first opium war of 1840, then the second opium war of 1860. And then also happening in that same time period from around 1850 to 1864 is the Taiping Rebellion when about 35 million people were killed. On top of all of that war and upheaval, there was also, you know, these huge rains. And so there was famine. They were really desperate.

And so when you're in that desperate situation, you're really looking for where can I go to improve my life? And, of course, in the very early days, you have the big thing that pulls people here is the gold rush. The gold rush, I suppose, that got everyone the fever to move to the United States. In fact, Chinese immigrants called the U.S. Gold Mountain. How did this idea of California live in their imagination? So that idea of Gold Mountain, and that is just a direct translation, gamsang in Cantonese, is actually something that's shared by many immigrant groups. That idea that you could come here and the streets would be paved with gold or you would find gold nuggets on the street, you know, the size of babies. And so this was not unique to the Chinese, but they certainly

did embrace it and embraced it even in the name that they gave to the United States. So how did word of gold in California spread to China? And after it did, how long did it take for Chinese prospectors to get there? The obvious way that the word spread is that somebody came and said, guess what? Gold has been discovered in California. So it's going to pass person to person. But most people were illiterate. My great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, they were illiterate.

And so it's not like they were going to go read a newspaper. So this all had to have been passed orally. Now, really the first group that got here in a big way were people from China. So for the Chinese, all they had to do was get on a boat. It was a one-month journey. So instead of being called the 49ers, the Chinese who came were actually the 48ers. So in just four years, you go from having just seven Chinese in San Francisco in 1848 to over 25,000 in 1852. So these Chinese immigrants, like your own family, took a relatively short journey by ship, arrived in California, and then what? Did they immediately go out into the gold fields, prospecting with everyone else?

Yes, they did. And it doesn't cost much to become a gold miner. You need a pan. You need a pick. You need a shovel. Maybe you get a horse. Maybe you walk and you find a spot on a river. One reason that the Chinese were so successful panning for gold was that they were

most of them farmers. And so they had a lot of experience with irrigation. If you think about rice paddies and some of the earliest dams built in the world were built in China. So they were able to use that expertise that they had as farmers in panning for gold. So it sounds like these Chinese immigrants had a lot of advantages. They were often the first movers, able to find claims that are untouched. They had brought with them experience. But that wasn't really the end result for the Chinese miners. How did their lot in the gold fields change?

So at the beginning, when the Chinese their lot in the gold fields change? So at the beginning, when the Chinese were working in the gold fields, they had it pretty much to themselves because they came so early. But then as, in particular, white laborers or miners arrived, they started being pushed out. And one of the reasons is that

the majority of miners who came weren't coming from New England or the middle of the country, which was still barely settled. They were coming from the deep south. And they brought with them all of their prejudices and all of their beliefs about race. You see this especially, you know, over time in the lead up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, that the Chinese are dirty, that they're going to pollute our women, that they bring with them diseases. They eat crazy things like shrimp and abalone, but also squirrel and dog, and they smoke opium, they gamble. I mean, all of these really negative stereotypes are stuck as labels onto the Chinese, and they were seen as being less than. And so white laborers come, they want it for themselves, and they begin to

push the Chinese out. And this happens in a couple of ways. It's not just that somebody arrives and can physically push someone out, shoot them, beat them up, but that also it's happening through laws. So you have the passage of this law that no foreign miners can own a claim or can file a claim. That wipes out opportunity for Chinese. The other one is the Chinese miners' tax. Those things become real deterrence, and yet Chinese still made up a very large percentage of the miners, not just in California, but throughout the West. The miners were making money. You know, they were finding gold.

They could find enough to pay that 20 a month as a tax, but still be able to save money so that one day they could go home, you know, hopefully with their pockets lined with gold. But I imagine the social and political animosity, not to mention these new taxes, was driving many of the Chinese out of the gold fields, that their original mission in America seemed to be becoming more difficult. What did they turn to? It's interesting how you phrase that because, yes, there is an aspect to them being driven out, and that is going to be a pattern that will continue for decades. But there is another factor, which is that mining was seasonal. So in the off-season, they would do all kinds of

other jobs. They would work in the fields. They would work in cafes. They started laundries. They worked in fishing. They worked in cigar factories. They worked doing sewing, things like that. So actually, a lot of jobs that they would not have done at home, things that might have been what you would call women's work, sewing, for example,

laundries as another example, were things that they could do here in part because it didn't require much capital to start a laundry. You just needed a bucket, a washboard, a clothesline, an iron, and you were on your way. I don't know if you know this, but at that time, until the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, so until that point, there were very few women here in California. It was such a hard journey to get here. And so people who had money would send their laundry back, well, either to Hawaii or all the way to China to be washed. And so fresh laundry, you know, would take two months and the fresh laundry would arrive in San Francisco. Everybody would look good for a few days and then it was downhill after that. But since there was no one here really

to do the laundry, this was an opportunity for the Chinese. So given the realities of the experiences of these Chinese immigrants in the gold fields, how do you think their existence measured up to the dream of Gold Mountain that they had hoped for. As hard as it was here, I think they could see a kind of bigger picture of, I can save up some money and I will return home and I'll be able to provide a better life for my family. And this is something that is kind of unique to the Chinese, especially in those early days, was they weren't coming to become Americans. That wasn't the goal. It wasn't like, I'm coming here forever, and I'm going to make my new life here forever. They came as sojourners with this idea, and this was the number most people had in

their heads, was as soon as I save $1,000, I'll go home. So the intention was never to stay here. Like you're weighing these things of, I'm actually working towards achieving this goal that will change my life and that of my family and that of even my village, which, you know, is what happened with my great-grandfather, was he would go back. It wasn't just about our own family. My home village, Dim Tao, those were all Fongs. They're still all Fongs. You know, so, and he did so much for the village as a whole with what he'd been able to earn here and bring back there.

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That's correct. He was an herbalist. I'm not going to say he was a big, fancy, well-trained doctor. He was what they called a barefoot doctor. He and his sons would sort of travel from village to village. They'd perform acrobatics and, you know, roll out a mat. And then people would come up and say, oh, I have a boil or I have a sore throat or, you know, what are you going to do for my tuberculosis? And the railroad company needed people who could treat Chinese. So it made sense

for the railroad company to bring in Chinese doctors who, first of all, were much cheaper than a Western doctor, but also the laborers would trust them. And so my great-great-grandfather and two of his sons came to work on the railroad. He was a doctor, but he also was a laborer, and all three of them were laborers. So for this new wave of Chinese immigrants and laborers, and those who abandoned their mining and joined the work on the railroad, it probably was a very different California in 1867 than it was in 1848. Do you characterize what might have changed for these immigrants? Well, San Francisco was a much bigger city, of course. And, you know, San Francisco from its earliest days had a reputation of being quite cosmopolitan.

People had come from all over the world to be there. There was in San Francisco a thriving Chinatown. But by this time already, there are Chinatowns in other cities, Marysville, Sacramento, Los Angeles, all up and down the West Coast, wherever miners had been, some of them very small, but some of them, like the one in San Francisco, quite significant. So it's still a bachelor society. Very few women of any type, but very, very few Chinese women. Not everyone is a laborer. There are merchants. In China, that merchant class had really been looked down on just in terms of like Confucian ideology. Merchants were ranked very low. But here, you know, if you could become a merchant, this was a path to prosperity. And there were traveling merchants who would go out into the gold fields to different types of mines, but also up into the Sierras

to the different camps where there were Chinese laborers. And so instead of just being completely by themselves, there were traveling musicians, traveling acrobatic troops, traveling even Chinese opera troops that would travel around to these different places. And I suppose this is, if we can return to your family story, your great-great-grandfather was one of these merchants eventually. He was an herbalist, and he started a store in Sacramento. Is that right? That's correct. After the railroad was completed, he went to Sacramento and started his first store here. And it was an herb shop. Now, I like to think of this man as one of the original deadbeat dads. You know, you were supposed to come here, save money, send it back to your wife and family in China.

Not my great-great-grandfather. He had a fondness for women and gambling, and as a result, he didn't send money home. And his wife, my great-great-grandmother, was so poor that she used to carry people on her back from village to village to earn money to support her children. Finally, someone took pity on her and lent my great-grandfather, Fong Si, who was just 14, the money to come to the United States.

He found his father in Sacramento. He said, Dad, you're a bum. Go home. And he did. And my great-grandfather stayed. And he did a lot of the jobs that immigrants do even today. He worked in the fields. He swept up in factories. He worked in restaurants. I mean,

you know, he did all of the kinds of things that people do today. But by the time he was 30, in the 1880s, he had his first business in Sacramento, which was a factory that manufactured crotchless underwear for brothels. That's an outrageous detail that there was even enough demand for such a thing. Well, of course there was because, as I said earlier, you know, not a lot of women here. Most of the women were in the world's oldest profession, and they were too busy to be doing laundry, and they did need to have a lot of undergarments. factories, little tiny places in California that were in the business of making fancy underwear for fancy ladies. That's what we called it in my family. And they even had their own guild. It was called the Guild of Bright Colored Clothing. So your great-grandfather, the son of your great-great-grandfather, sent his father home to pay attention to his family,

which he'd been neglecting, but he himself remained and started a business in this very niche market. How did he find America, and what was his career trajectory? I think he saw pretty early that to have your own business and to become a merchant was the way to go.

I have a photo of him from about 1882. He's in a very nice Western-style suit. He's got a really nice hat. He's got what looks like a little, you know, like a diamond lapel pin. It's probably just glass, but he was looking very prosperous, but also very Western. So, you know, here he has this shop to sell underwear to brothels. And one day into his shop came a young woman who I think of as being quintessentially American, Ticey Pruitt. And Ticey Pruitt's family had come west on the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon. They homesteaded in Oregon. We know so much more about that American pioneer life than we do about Chinese-American history, certainly.

And we know how hard it was and how hard it was particularly on women. And so her mother died when she was a baby. Her father died when she was seven. And she was raised by brothers who were reputed to be quite cruel to her. When she turned 18, she ran away from home. She couldn't afford San Francisco. She ended up in Sacramento. She went everywhere looking for work, but she did end up in Chinatown begging my great-grandfather for a job, and he did hire her to sell fancy underwear to fancy ladies. And she had a real gift for selling. By the time they meet, the Chinese Exclusion Act has already been passed.

Things are very difficult for the Chinese. Sacramento is the state capital, so certainly a center for anti-Chinese sentiment. And so after they get married, they decide to come south to Los Angeles, and they arrived here in 1897. Then they were still in the underwear business for a while, gradually Curios, and by 1901, they had switched entirely to Chinese antiques. That business is still going today. It has a variation of the name of my great-great-grandfather's herb shop that had started in Sacramento. And so it is one of the oldest continuously owned, family-owned businesses in California. It was against the law for Chinese and white people to marry in this state. And so what they did was they went to a lawyer who drew up a contract between two people as though they were forming a partnership. My grandparents and everyone in that generation went to Mexico to get married. It's only my own parents who were only the second

couple in my whole extended family to be legally married here in California. There was a time period that if you were white and you married someone who was Chinese in this country, you would lose your American citizenship. That didn't happen to my great-grandmother or to my grandmother. I think they sort of slipped through on one side of that law or the other. Well, I can imagine that this is a difficult time for both of them. I assume that they are living in a Chinatown, and perhaps most of their friends and neighbors would turn the other way or give an understanding wink to their arrangement.

But legally and in greater or more Western-influenced society, this is not a condoned relationship. How did they manage their business and social lives in Los Angeles? In many ways, they were very isolated. Of course, they could only live in Chinatown. There were, in addition to the anti-miscegenation laws, there were also land laws that a Chinese down to a quarter could not own land in California until 1948.

So you had to live in Chinatown. I mean, there wasn't another option. I don't think that there was a whole lot in the way of socializing. There were very few families even because it was so hard to bring a woman in from China. And most of the women who came had been bought or sold, kidnapped to be brought here to work as prostitutes. I have been doing research on another project recently in Los Angeles in 1871. And the census of 1870 says there were 34 Chinese women in Los Angeles. Half of them were wives of merchants, and then the other half were in the world's oldest profession. And then one other factor on here about why people would feel isolated, not have a lot of companionship, is that in the Chinese tradition, wives aren't supposed to go out. You know, one of the things Confucius said, a good woman never takes three steps beyond her door. So you're not supposed to go out. And in addition to having that kind of tradition

that everyone's grown up with, it was dangerous to be a woman on a street, you know, whether you were a white woman or a Chinese woman, but particularly if you were a Chinese woman. So obviously my great-grandmother was a white woman, and she was quite adventurous in her own way. But it's not like she had a lot of companionship of other wives at that time, because the Chinese wives are locked, you know, kept in seclusion. I'll just give you another example. My great-grandfather had a total of four wives. Ticey is just one of them. She's the only American. All the other three were Chinese. When he was in his 60s, he went back to China and brought home a 16-year-old girl who was his

third wife. And she really never left the apartment in Chinatown unless it was for a wedding or a funeral. So you have that kind of cultural tradition. But on the other side, you know, of why Ticey isn't making a lot of friends, so she can't really meet the other Chinese wives. And then on the other side, white women weren't going to have anything to do with her because she was married to somebody who was Chinese and lived in Chinatown and had half-breed children.

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But I imagine it got a bit harder in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act when it was passed. How did that impact your family? There's a period that leads up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. So the railroad is completed. What once took six months to two years to get from the East Coast to the West Coast is now reduced to seven days. And during the time of the railroad wars, people could make that journey for a dollar. That was the price of the ticket. So all of a sudden, you have this huge influx of white labor. And the white labor felt like they were entitled to the jobs. And this

is what leads to the period of the driving out when Chinese are literally driven out of communities all up and down the West Coast. They're loaded onto rafts in Seattle, Tacoma, and just set adrift at sea. In Los Angeles, there's a riot where 19 Chinese men and boys are shot, stabbed, hung. In Redlands, the Chinatown is burned down. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, Chinatown is burned down. In Tucson, people would tie a Chinese onto the back of a steer and send it out into the desert to die. So this is all part of the driving out of the Chinese. And it eventually leads to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act that bars the immigration of all Chinese immigrants to the United States except for four categories, merchant, minister, student, or diplomat. And of those four, there's only one that you can fake. So this is where my great-grandfather was able to help so

many people because he was a legitimate merchant. But even as a merchant, you had to provide to the government every six months a list of your partners. And he did have a standard list of his partners that included his father, his brothers back in China. But there are times when I found these documents at the National Archive where he might have as many as 25 partners in a six-month period. These were all people who had paid him to get on that list so that they would qualify to come in as a merchant under the new law. So while the Chinese Exclusion Act had a tremendous effect on so many people, for my great grandfather, it actually became a way to make money. So for your family, this moment of turmoil turned out to be okay, but certainly probably was not a

good moment to live through. But I wonder if you could describe some of the ways in which the Chinese people and culture have helped shape the identity of California itself as through this period. What would you say are some of the enduring contributions that people like your family made? Well, I think there's some very obvious ones. Absolutely food. Our basic infrastructure for California, so much of it was built by the Chinese, not just the railroad.

But once the railroad was completed, those laborers fanned out in every direction, and they built bridges. They built the levees around in the Sacramento Delta that are important all the way to today. And this is the richest agricultural region in the whole country. And it only functions because of those levees that were built by the Chinese. There are other kinds of things that might seem less tangible or direct,

but I think they're very much a part of society and culture today. Traditional Chinese medicine, you know, so many people will go to an herbalist or an acupuncturist. Certainly ideas about feng shui and how you use that in your home or your business. I mean, you know, we talk about the United States as a melting pot. And in many ways it is because people come from all over the world and they're bringing food. They're bringing their hard labor backs and sweat. I just saw something yesterday about immigrants working in the California celery fields. And I was sort of thinking about, you know, 100 years from now, will one of their descendants be in a room like this doing an interview like this about their great-grandparents. And so we know that that's part of this American story is that people come from everywhere. And

maybe your family used a coffee pot and my family used a teapot, but that we all come for those same kinds of push and pull reasons that we talked about at the beginning, but we're also bringing our cultures with us, and those become part of the fabric of not just California culture, but American culture. I'd like to return to, I guess, the story of your family. And, you know, the name for America the Chinese had back then, this concept of Gold Mountain. Would you say your great-grandfather found Gold Mountain here in America? Oh, absolutely. He was the first Chinese in America to own an automobile. He had multiple businesses. He had 12 children. He lived to be 100 years old.

He was the, I always hesitate to use this word, but, you know, the godfather of Los Angeles, Chinatown. Maybe patriarch is better. He was the person that people came to for advice. They came to him, you know, to help them start businesses. They would come to him and say, should I marry this girl or not? Should I send my child to college or not? He was illiterate from a tiny village. He came here with nothing. And he really built a life not just for himself and not just from my direct line, but for his brother and all of their descendants. today in Los Angeles, I have about 400 relatives,

you know, who came, you know, really come from this one little family. And I think that Fong Si especially, but his father before him, they worked hard and they suffered a lot. But it's on their shoulders that I'm here, and so are the rest of us and our family. Lisa See, thank you so much for joining me today on American History Tellers. Thank you so much for having me. That was my conversation with author Lisa See. Her book, On Gold Mountain, The 100-Year Odyssey

of My Chinese-American Family, was a national bestseller and a New York Times notable book. From Wondery, this is the fifth and final episode of California Gold Rush from American History Tellers. In our next season, in the wake of his infamous 1804 duel with Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr was a wanted man. With his political career in shambles, the disgraced vice president began hatching a plot that would return him to power by any means necessary. He would eventually become the highest-ranking American official ever to be charged with treason, leading to a sensational trial that would reshape the political landscape of the young republic. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on

Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. Additional writing by Sam Keen. This episode was produced by Lushik, Lotus Lee, and Polly Stryker. Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Managing producer is Matt Grant. Senior managing producer, Tanja Thigpen. Senior producer, Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery. book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as

the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition wherever you get your books.