Masters of Leadership: U.S. House Whip James Clyburn

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Webinar Summary

The Masters of Leadership series, hosted by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)® and the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), featured U.S. House Whip James Clyburn in conversation with CTA President and CEO and NVTC board member Gary Shapiro speaking about education, making decisions in difficult times and more. 

Webinar Transcript

Announcer:

Good morning. Thank you for joining the Northern Virginia Technology Council and the Consumer Technology Association for our virtual Masters of Leadership Series event. Please welcome Rich Montoni, the Chairman of NVTC and the Vice Chairman of MAXIMUS.

Rich Montoni:

Well good morning all. I am delighted to welcome you to our virtual event today. We have an exciting program with U.S. House Majority Whip James Clyburn and Consumer Technology Association President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Shapiro.

Rich Montoni:

First before we get started, I have a few housekeeping matters. Everyone has been muted. During the question and answer portion, if you would like to ask a question, please use the Q&A button to write your question for the speakers. It is located in the middle of the bottom bar on your screen.

Rich Montoni:

This series is made possible by our co-producer Consumer Technology Association, our premier sponsors CoreSite and SAP, and our support sponsors. They include Amazon Web Services, American Systems, CGI Federal, CNSI, Cresa, Iridium, Micron Technology, Morgan Stanley, NTT Data, Raymond James & Associates, Transformation Systems, Inc., and Verite Group Inc., also known as VGI. Thank you for all your support. If you would like to join them as a sponsor, please connect with Yolanda Lee at NVTC today.

Rich Montoni:

The next two events in this series will be on Friday, July 7, with a Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James, and on July 29th we have Best Buy Chief Executive Officer Corie Barry, and that will happen at 2:00 p.m. Registration is open for these events on the NVTC website.

Rich Montoni:

Now it is my honor to introduce today's moderator, Gary Shapiro. He is a NVTC board member, and is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Consumer Technology Association. CTA is the U.S. trade association representing more than 2200 consumer technology companies, and which owns and produces CES, the global stage for innovation.

Rich Montoni:

It is through his New York Times bestselling books, television appearances, and as a columnist whose more than 1000 opinion pieces have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post, that Gary has helped direct policy makers and business leaders on the important of innovation in the U.S. economy. He is considered an influencer on LinkedIn, and has more than 300,000 followers. Please welcome Gary Shapiro.

Gary Shapiro:

Thank you Rich, and thanks to the NVTC and especially to Bobbie Kilberg who I think this is her last formal session as President and CEO of the NVTC. What a great enterprise you built Bobbie, thank you. And also the great team at NVTC who's helped put this together.

Gary Shapiro:

Now this is indeed a pleasure to me because Congressman Clyburn is so special and has done so many amazing things I can't begin to say, but I will say that he has an incredible book out. It was a disappointment to end it because it ended. It talks about his life, it's an autobiography, and all the amazing things that he's done. He's held so many jobs. He's the highest ranking African American in Congress, he's the number three person U.S. House Majority Whip, and he's just done a phenomenal job in terms of being the first in so many areas, but being fair and judicious and balanced, and willing to work.

Gary Shapiro:

And this is a leadership series, so I want to talk about leadership. But Congressman, in the limited time you have with us, I want to cover a wide variety of areas, but I want to start out with more of an open question. Given the recent events in the last couple of months, what would your 20 year old self be most surprised about today?

Congressman James Clyburn:

Thank you very much for having me, and thanks to you Tiffany and all the rest of your team for the tremendous insight you all have given me over the years. Every time my daughter Mignon comes back from your big to-do out there on the West Coast, she tells me why I should've gone. And so I'm looking forward to hopefully things getting to a new normal and maybe I can attend sometimes.

Congressman James Clyburn:

When I think about what's going on today and my background and experience, I think about growing up in the little town of Sumpter. My father was a fundamentalist minister, and my mother a beautician who was very, very active in the NAACP. And we grew up in a pretty closely-knit family dealing with the here and now as opposed to life after death.

Congressman James Clyburn:

But my dad focused very much on the here and now. He kept three books in his pulpit: the Bible that he read often, the Hymnal that he could not sing from, but he also kept a little book that he put together. It was a list of registered voters in the precinct that we lived in. And he would talk to me often about leadership. He was absolutely developing me for leadership, but I think he thought it was going to be in the church.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so when I went away to school thinking that I would spend four years at South Carolina State and go on to the seminary, after around the third year at South Carolina State and I started participating in sit-ins, going in and out of jail. I ran home to tell him that I changed my mind and I didn't think I was going to the seminary.

Congressman James Clyburn:

My dad said to me on that occasion, "Well son, I suspect the world would much rather see a sermon than to hear one." And with that, I set out upon my life's work trying to make sure that people saw in my life a good, productive sermon. And throughout all of that, I always remember one fundamental that he taught me over and over again. He would always say to me, "Son, you lead by precept and example. You don't just pronounce that precept. You live that precept. Be an example. And that's how leadership is."

Congressman James Clyburn:

So when all of this started to happen, I thought about those days spent sitting in, marching. When I first met John Lewis October, 1960, on the campus of Morehouse College when we were having a second meeting of what became known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. John and I often talk today about how that movement got hijacked.

Congressman James Clyburn:

We were doing a lot of good, positive things, challenging the status quo. We sat in at lunch counters. We waited in. We did things to break down barriers. Getting off the back of the bus. And then we woke up one morning and the big headline was, "Burn Baby Burn." That hijacked the movement, and we still talk about that.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so I have been working very diligently throughout this effort. When I saw what was happening around the country, the reaction to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I saw an opportunity for us to pick up where we left off in the 1960s and really complete the task of making this country's greatness accessible and affordable for all of its citizens.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so I spoke out against this new slogan, the hijacking attempt of this new movement defund the police. I just wish I had someone sitting in the Congress and other places throughout city and county government who I could go to back in the '60s and get some response from. Today, there is someone sitting, and there are a lot of someones sitting in the Congress and city and county councils, trying to provide leadership, and there to receive the benefit of any request for guidance.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so what I've been doing, and what I feel strongly about, is making sure that young people today get the benefit of that experience. That's what my book is all about, blessed experiences. And I say in that book with all my experiences have not been pleasant, but I consider all of them to be blessings. And I try to share those blessings with others. I don't want to see this effort get hijacked by sloganeering. I want to see what's coming together with business, with government, once moving once again, to fulfill their promise of this country, and that's why I'm trying to do what I'm doing.

Gary Shapiro:

Well thank you. That's very powerful. Just back to your father for a second, and because this is about leadership. One of the things that he did which impressed me, and you said impressed you, was that when he was running for Church of God president and he presided over the vote, and he wasn't going to vote unless it was a tie and it ended up being a tie and he ended up voting for his opponent and shocked everyone.

Gary Shapiro:

And that was a big move, and he said, "They will want me back," and he ended up being right. But a lot of what you've done, and I don't know if it came out of this in other lessons, is is you've reached across the aisle, you've reached out. You've been a leader that's always been willing to talk to people that even disagree with you on other issues. Is that a lesson there?

Congressman James Clyburn:

Yeah. It is why when I was first elected and in our caucus, you run for these so-called special committees like Appropriations. When I got elected to the Appropriations, I stepped off of it, and it shocked everybody including my good friend Senator Fritz Hollings. In fact when I did it, he publicly said he didn't understand what I was thinking about. We'd worked all these years to get someone from South Carolina back on the Appropriations Committee, nobody had been there since Carol Campbell was on the Appropriations Committee from South Caroline, and I stepped off of it.

Congressman James Clyburn:

Well I stepped off of it because I learned a lesson from my dad when he voted for his opponent when he was running for reelection to be President of our church's presbytery. He said to me at the time, "When things are this divided, nobody can really lead. You need to step back. They'll probably want me back," he said. And they did. They came back to him, and he stayed there until he retired and they asked him not to retire when he did.

Congressman James Clyburn:

So I did that same thing. I thought about that when Dick Gephardt was laying out a procedure in our caucus that I knew would divide our caucus in such a way we might not recover from it. And I told him what I thought his decision would lead to, he asked me if I had a better idea. And I said, "Yes I do." And he said, "What is it?" I said, "You can have my seat. I'll step off the committee so you can have this seat. That will solve this problem."

Congressman James Clyburn:

And he said, "Would you really do that?" I said, "Yes I would, so long as I get a good response to this page and a half memorandum I'm going to send you." And I sent him the memorandum, I did get a good response, and the rest is history.

Congressman James Clyburn:

But I want to know if I would've ever done that if I did not have that experience with my dad on that Saturday afternoon in that little church in Darlington, South Carolina. So yes, I learned a lot from my dad.

Gary Shapiro:

Yeah, and you've also in your career you've been able to take a situation and come up with a third alternative. You certainly did that when you were running to be President of the Freshman Class and the two finalists that were you and another African American member of Congress. And you came out with a way of splitting it.

Gary Shapiro:

I've also seen you do it in terms of how you resolve other issues that have confronted you involving the confederate flag. You actually did your research and found out that what we call the confederate flag really wasn't the confederate flag, it was a naval flag.

Congressman James Clyburn:

That's right.

Gary Shapiro:

You also learned from your mother who was a beautician and entrepreneur. She also got a college degree, and she had to choose between the two but she said, "I'm not choosing, I'm doing both." And she had a customer ask you about your dream, and your dream was that you wanted to go into public service and be a politician and make the world better. And her customer responded very negatively to that, and your mother gave you some advice. What was that advice?

Congressman James Clyburn:

My mom said to me on that day when the lady that she grew up with - adjacent farm - little Lee County, South Carolina, named for Robert E. Lee by the way. When I came home from school that day, my mother had a rule that we all had to stop in the beauty shop to announce that things had gone well for the day. And when I stepped in that particular day, this lady that she had grown up with looked at me and says how much I had grown.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And she just asked a question that everybody asked in those days, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And I start telling her I'm going to finish high school, I was going to college, and I was going to get involved in politics and government because I had started studying Harry Truman in my preteen years. And so I just wanted to do what Harry Truman did, overcome the kind of odds that he overcame.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And that lady looked at me that day and she said, "Son, don't you ever let anybody else hear you say that again." Well she knew what the experiences black people had in politics in little Lee County and throughout the south, and she wasn't trying to throw cold water on my dreams. What she was trying to say to me was, "If you got those kinds of dreams and aspirations, you better keep them to yourself."

Congressman James Clyburn:

But that night when my mother closed the beauty shop, she called me to the kitchen table and she says, "James, don't you pay any attention to what that lady said to you today. You hold onto your dreams, you study hard, stay out of trouble, you'll be able to fulfill those dreams."

Congressman James Clyburn:

And that's what I thought about the day I was sworn into Congress, fulfilling a dream I had since my days studying Harry Truman. And it has made all the difference. And even today, I find myself thinking about moms who finished college while she was running that beauty shop. She did it all in three years, and took that diploma and hung it on the wall in the beauty shop.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And I asked her why had she done that? She said, "Because I always wanted a college degree, but I'm going to still run this business." And my mother went on to have not just one beauty shops, but two beauty shops and about 16 operators. She was a very successful businesswoman, but never used that college degree to do anything more than learn how to deal with the public.

Gary Shapiro:

So I want to stay on that just for a second because you say in your book that, "Emily and I were both fortunate to have grown up in two parent households." At that time, three out of four African Americans were growing up in two parents. Today it's one out of four. And no, I don't want to say that ... I mean there's a lot of great people, including many on my staff, who grew up in a one parent household.

Gary Shapiro:

But why is there a generational difference? What's happened? What have we done wrong as a society or as America, and how can we fix that?

Congressman James Clyburn:

Well I wish I knew the answer to that question. The fact of the matter is tolerance is not today what it used to be. I remember when I was growing up, divorce was the last thing that anybody would think about. Today, it seems to be the first thing that people think about when something goes wrong. Emily and I stayed married for 58 years, and I'll always believe it is because divorce was the last thing that we ever thought about. And what I see today, as I said earlier, people seem to feel the first time there's a challenge, you walk away from it.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so, we are in a sound bite world. Technology's a great thing. When I was elected Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, I set out to make my caucus very cognizant of technology. I took the first delegation according to what was told me in the oath, when we took the whole Congressional Black Caucus to Wall Street. I think there's a picture in the book of me ringing the bell opening up the session there.

Congressman James Clyburn:

I took the entire caucus out to California to Silicone Valley. Took them to the northern Virginia corridor, technology corridor, because I wanted them to get in tune with what I knew we were headed for. But that same technology that's been so good, in so many instances we have not met all the challenges.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And one of the things is we have devolved, and I'll say devolved, it may be evolved but to me - devolved, into a soundbite world, and we tend to react to the sound bites rather than thinking through whatever the situation might be. How many times we find ourselves today having to apologize for reacting to the sound bite rather than look behind the sound bite to see whether or not there may be something lacking in substance or some substance that need to be added to it.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And it happens in the home, in families. And so I think we're going through this, I think we'll get through it, and I think that families of the future will be different in that the kinds of things that we walk away from, people are walking toward these days. And so the 21st century family is going to be totally different than the 19th and early 20th century family, and I think it's because we're going to work through all of these traditional things to accept the new kinds of families that will keep people together rather than driving them apart.

Gary Shapiro:

Yeah. The other big value is education, you and your two brothers started school early. You had a very strong mother that made sure that happened. And you also yourself you missed graduating college on time because you were involved with other activities. But you went and you became a teacher, you taught history, but you also took on the toughest kids, and you also worked with kids that had perhaps the ability but not the money or the direction.

Gary Shapiro:

And you got over 400 younger poor kids into college. You also were the one who started the Boys and Girls Club in South Carolina. Boys and Girls Club we support, we're very happy to do that as an association. And also, my favorite charity is the Ron Brown Scholar Program, which takes the top graduates, valedictorians, and makes sure they get a great college education and scholarship and mentoring along the way, with 99% success rate.

Gary Shapiro:

But education is something which is still in the news. On Friday, the Trump administration said that they are not going to require a college education for certain information technology work, that the apprenticeship program that they've pushed and with democrats as well have pushed very hard, now it's one of the things IBM has been behind, we've been behind as an organization, trying to get apprenticeships. How can we improve our educational system so that everyone has an equal opportunity?

Congressman James Clyburn:

I'm really glad that you raise that. I was just thinking this morning that I finally found something that I agree with with this administration, and that's it. The fact of the matter is I have been saying to my caucus for almost 20 years that we have to learn that we have to broaden our discussion of education. I cringe when I hear people saying, "You must be able to earn enough money to send your kids to college."

Congressman James Clyburn:

No. You have to be able to send your kids to post-secondary education, it may not be a liberal arts college. When we think of college, we immediately think of liberal arts. We have to think more broad than that.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And let me give you an example. I often talk about an experience I had at a job corps center in a little town of Bamberg, South Carolina, in my Congressional district. I went down there at their invitation one day to do a Black History Month speech. They asked me to come early so that I could be taken on a tour of the facility and get an appreciation for what they were doing there.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And as we were going on the tour, we came upon a group of students who were having a little discussion, you might call it an argument, about which one of them was being trained in the profession or the vocation that was most important to society. And I listened as one of them that had been trained as a plumber was talking about how important it was to be a plumber. Another one was arguing how important it was to be an automobile mechanic. One was being trained in the culinary arts.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And I stood there and eavesdropped on their conversation for a little bit. So when I got to that auditorium that day, I took that little well-researched Black History Month speech I had, I folded it up, and I put it in my pocket. And I said to them in the auditorium that day, I shared with them what I had just heard in the hallways of that facility.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And I said to them, "You know, when I stop back to Columbia today and something happens to my automobile, I'm not going to call a doctor. I'm going to call an automobile mechanic. If I get up in the morning to turn on my water faucet and no water comes out, I'm not going to call a lawyer. I'm going to call a plumber. The most important person to me at that particular juncture in my life would be the plumber."

Congressman James Clyburn:

And I closed by saying to them, "Doctors need plumbers. Plumbers need lawyers. Lawyers need automobile mechanics. We all need each other, and no one of is any more important than the other. Our importance to society is based upon what time it is, what the circumstances are."

Congressman James Clyburn:

And I feel very strongly about that, and so I'm glad this administration is going to focus on that because I really believe that if I were, when I was teaching history in the public schools of Charleston, South Carolina, if I could earn as much money as the plumber earned who put my facilities in my house that I built down there, I might still be teaching.

Congressman James Clyburn:

The fact of the matter is we have to learn that people should be valued by the fulfillment of their dreams and aspirations rather than what we may superimpose upon them. And so if someone grows up wanting to be a plumber or an electrician or a landscaper or a carpenter or a bricklayer, whatever that person wants to do, we must make it possible for them to fulfill those dreams and those aspirations, and demonstrate by the pay that they are important to society.

Congressman James Clyburn:

So I'm glad that here we are in the fourth year, and I finally found something I can agree with with this administration.

Gary Shapiro:

And I like what you said, I'll use it with my wife, who's in health care and says, "When someone's sick on a plane, no one says, 'Is there a lawyer available?'"

Congressman James Clyburn:

That's right.

Gary Shapiro:

This is a time of uncertainty for the country, and a lot of the business executives in the office are dealing with a lot of issues right now just trying to survive, keep their businesses, keep their employees, give them some sense of normalcy or some future. And making a decision in a time of uncertainty is something that I want to go back to your mother if I can.

Gary Shapiro:

When Mignon, who I know her as a wonderful FCC commissioner, amazingly not only smart but personable and open to new ideas, when she was born your mom said to you, "When are you going to get a real home?" And you said, "I'll get one when I can see my way clear."

Congressman James Clyburn:

Yeah.

Gary Shapiro:

And she said, "Son, let me tell you something. If you wait until you can see way before clear before attempting anything, you'll never get anything done." Can you talk about that in the context of the decisions we all face now with the coronavirus, the race relations, how do we move forward and get things done when people are well-intended as Tiffany always tells me and they have good intentions, but they want to do the right thing? Especially I'd ask for advice for business executives in terms of race relations because I think almost every American is well-intentioned here, but they just don't know what to do right.

Congressman James Clyburn:

That's a very good question. I tend to ... When my mother told me that, that might've been Mignon's first Christmas. Mignon was born in the month of March, and I think my mom had come to Charleston during the Christmas holidays and we invited her to dinner. And that night after dinner, she asked Emily to excuse the two of us, and we went back into the extra room we had in the apartment, it was a bedroom that we didn't have any money to buy furniture for.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And we stood in that room and she said to me that, "Son, now your family's growing. You need to get out of this apartment and put them in a house and make a real home." And I said, "Yes mom, I'm going to do that just as soon as I can see my way clear." And she told me, "If you wait until you can see your way clear before you attempt anything, you will never get anything done."

Congressman James Clyburn:

I reflected on that as I was writing this book, and then I thought about what my dad would've said. He would've probably referred me to Hebrew 11:1, Faith, the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. And I really learned a lot from that discussion with my mother.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And really, I say to people today that I know how dark and dreary things can sometimes look, sometimes seem. But I really believe that most people are in fact well-intentioned. I think that most people who are challenged by circumstances tend to respond in a well-intended way. But not enough people have the intestinal fortitude to fight through obstacles that may be placed in their way, not enough people understand those little fundamentals that many of us learned early on, that when stumbling blocks are put in your way, turn them into stepping stones. These little things that people just may not have had the kinds of experiences that will allow them to take these challenges on and fight through them.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so as we look at what's going on in this country today, you never see it. You have to stay focused and you have to stay in pursuit. That's why you see a turtle here on my wall that I keep right above my head. And the caption under that turtle is, "Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out." If the turtle keeps his neck under the shell, feet under the shell, he may be protected to some extent, but will never make any progress.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so that's my favorite reptile, the turtle. It may be my favorite non-human thing is the turtle because I think we have to sometimes get beyond what I call our comfort zone.

Congressman James Clyburn:

Let's take somebody that everybody here, especially in technology, would know about, Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison, according to all of our studies, is the person that gave us the light bulb. That's 50% correct. When Thomas Edison was doing all of his experiments up there in New Jersey, he could get the light bulb to come on, but he couldn't get it to stay on.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And it was not until someone approached Thomas Edison and told him about a guy up in Boston, Massachusetts, named Lewis Latimer who invented something called a filament. And Thomas Edison, the white guy, was able to get outside of his comfort zone and go up to Boston and find Lewis Latimer, the black guy, the son of former slaves, who had escaped to Massachusetts. And he got Lewis Latimer's filament to put into his light bulb. That's how he got the light bulb to stay on.

Congressman James Clyburn:

Both Thomas Edison, the white guy, and Lewis Latimer, the black guy, had to get outside of their comfort zone and realize that if they worked together, they could light the world, and that's what they did. Unfortunately our textbooks and our history books do not give proper credit to Lewis Latimer, but those of us who understand what it is to get outside of the comfort zone, who understand what it is to really do what is necessary to bring light to the world, we must do it.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And that, to me, is what is going to be required in this environment today. Get outside of your comfort zone. Don't hesitate to stick your neck out. Stay focused. Keep moving. And who knows? The world may light up one day. I don't believe anybody here today would've believed they would live to see Mitt Romney walk in a public demonstration and look into a camera and mouth, "I'm out here marching today because I believe that black lives matter." Mitt Romney has gotten outside of his comfort zone, like his daddy George before him.

Congressman James Clyburn:

See, I'm old enough to remember George Romney, who left Lansing, Michigan, and went to walk the streets of Detroit, Michigan, after King's assassination. And it was George Romney from who I learned early, I know that a lot of you may get a little nervous about that, but I did learn early from George Romney why it was necessary to sometimes look behind what people are presenting.

Congressman James Clyburn:

When Romney stopped on the streets of Detroit to talk to people who were burning the place down, he wanted to find out what would make you do this? What brought you to Detroit? And he kept running across the little county in South Carolina, Williamsburg, the town of Kingstree really built. And when he announced his ill-fated run for president, Romney made his first trip to South Carolina, and Strom Thurman took him to Kingstree.

Congressman James Clyburn:

Now I'll never forget what he said that day. It was very instructed to me. He wanted to see what were these people running away from? What would make them leave home and go to a strange place like Detroit, Michigan. I will say to all your readers today read Ms. Wilkerson's book The Warmth of Other Suns, and you will get a much better understanding of what is going on in our inner cities today and why it is that we must use technology to penetrate rural communities throughout this country to get broadband out there so they can have telehealth, to get broadband out there so they can have online learning, to get broadband out there so that they can be brought into the mainstream of this country's greatness. That to me is what our challenge is today.

Gary Shapiro:

That's very powerful, and I just look at what I got out of that with so many things take a risk. I also got a new candidate for our Hall of Fame. I honestly, even though I've been in my job for a long time, I did not know that story about the filament, so thank you for sharing that with me. Also, the Romney connection and what you've done with Hollings and others is important.

Gary Shapiro:

But you also have a phrase that you've been using, it's on your billboards, and you talk about making America's greatness accessible and affordable for all. What does that mean to you?

Congressman James Clyburn:

It means simply this. When I was growing up, we used to recite the Pledge every morning, the Pledge of Allegiance, and it closes with a simple phrase, "With liberty and justice for all." Over the years, I have tried to pursue what I call that value system, that vision, for the country. And in pursuit of that vision, I've come up with all kinds of tools, and always trying to make things a little bit better for those who are destined to come after us.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And when I started doing research, as I often do it every cycle, I will look and see what the headlines, and I will look behind those headlines to see can I find in our history George Santayana admonished us, that if we fail to learn the lessons of history, we are bound to repeat them. And so I go and look for history lessons.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so when I was getting ready the year before last for the upcoming elections, I started rereading Alexis de Tocqueville's great book, two volume book, Democracy in America, which I think those two volumes are summed up in one sentence in those books. He said that, "America is not great because it is more enlightened than any other nation, but rather because it has always been able to repair its faults."

Congressman James Clyburn:

That is what the greatness of America is, repairing our faults. COVID-19 has opened up a fault line, and the greatness of America requires that we repair the fault line in health care delivery, a fault line in education, a fault line in energy conservation and energy production. And so that billboard that I have established throughout my district simply says, "Our challenge is to make this country's greatness accessible and affordable for all."

Congressman James Clyburn:

This is a great country. With all its faults, it's been a great country for a long time. We do not have to make this country great again, we have to make this country's greatness accessible and affordable for all. That's simple. We got a great health care system, a great educational system, a great energy-producing system, we got it all, but inaccessible and affordable.

Gary Shapiro:

Well you're in a position to do something. I mean what you said is very powerful. You've just been made Chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the coronavirus crisis. Can you talk about the purpose of the committee and how you're going to attack the very problems you talked about?

Congressman James Clyburn:

Well we're learning a whole lot from a similar committee that was setup back in 1941 that we call the Truman Committee. The Truman Committee was set up by Harry Truman, then a junior senator from Missouri. He went to the senate, explained to the senate that he thought that in preparation for rebuilding after World War II, we could learn from what the country did after World War I. And World War I, which ended in 1918, same year of the Spanish flu, so while we were trying to recover from World War I, we were being challenged with the Spanish flu, the worst pandemic that we have had until this one.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And Truman convinced the senate that this committee could do the work of 116 committees that were set up after World War I. So I'm studying the Truman Committee. Nancy Pelosi first approached me about this and said that she wanted to pattern it after the Truman Committee. She knew that I was a big fan of Harry Truman, she knew that I studied Harry Truman. I think that's the main reason she asked me to do this because she wanted it to function like the Truman Committee.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And all the research says that the Truman Committee cost the country about $1 million, but returned to the country's coffers around $16 billion. And one study said they saved thousands of lives, especially the lives of little children. So I've been trying to pattern this. That's what I'm looking at what we can do with this $2 trillion we've already appropriated, this $3 trillion that the House has now passed. Some people says it's too much, but Chairman Powell of the Fed says $3 trillion may not be enough.

Congressman James Clyburn:

I don't know how much we're going to end up spending in order to overcome the effects of this virus. This virus is like the Spanish flu, but this racial problem we're having is a little bit like World War I. See, we had a double whammy back then, we got a double whammy now, and the question is will Congress respond using the three E's that I've laid out? Will we be efficient in our response? Will we be effective in that response? And will we be equitable with our response?

Congressman James Clyburn:

That's what this committee is doing, and I am going to do everything that I can to make sure that we carry that out for the people of this country because we're going to get through this, but we got to get through it in such a way that we're better off as a result of it.

Congressman James Clyburn:

See I'm old enough to remember the polio vaccine-

Gary Shapiro:

Me too.

Congressman James Clyburn:

The polio vaccine came out, there were two big vaccines, a lot of people don't realize that. Jonas Salk came up with a vaccine, the first one, that was a shot in the arm. Albert Sabin came up with a vaccine that was a little drop of serum on a lump of sugar. And I remember what happened with those vaccines. I was in the neighborhood where the shots went, the least effective and the least desired was to get a shot. The most effective and most desired was that serum on a lump of sugar that got into the stomach and was a much more effective deterrent to polio than the shot. The shots came to my neighborhood. The serum and the lump of sugar went across town to the white neighborhoods.

Congressman James Clyburn:

Part of my job is to make sure that equity is employed right along with efficiency and effectiveness in carrying out my responsibilities with this committee.

Gary Shapiro:

And so very forward looking as well. One of the things that we see with the coronavirus, there's a silver lining to the coronavirus cloud in terms of technology. We've seen it with telehealth, tele-education, as well as telework. We've seen all these things just explode quickly. And I'm curious, do you think it's important for Congress to try to reap the benefits of some of that, especially in the telehealth area which allows doctors to work across state lines to get information from low-cost technology so older people especially don't have to come to the office as much and have caregivers taking them

Gary Shapiro:

Is this going to cause a revolution of how we do things once we get past the physical challenge of this virus?

Congressman James Clyburn:

Absolutely. That's my dream. My late wife spent almost 30 years battling diabetes. I went with her one time to visit her doctor, and I watched her doctor sit at his desk in Columbia, South Carolina, and diagnose the ailments of a gentleman 126 miles away down in Beaufort Country. Telehealth has got to be employed if we are going to deliver healthcare efficiently and effectively.

Congressman James Clyburn:

We've got to have online learning if we are going to have our children ... We don't know how long this pandemic is going to be there. I'm convinced that a vaccine will not be here by Christmas. I'm not too sure when it could be here. Looking back on history, history tells me it's going to take much longer to come up with an efficient, effective vaccine than people are now declaring. So if we're going to do that, what are we going to do about the education of our children?

Congressman James Clyburn:

And so yes, broadband has got to be the order of the day going forward. Let me share with you a little testimony that I've been sharing with a lot of people. There's a story told when the rural electric co-ops were developing their 50th anniversary of rural edification, they came up with a tabletop book that they called The Next Greatest Thing.

Congressman James Clyburn:

And the reason that book is called that is because way back in the 1940s a gentleman, farmer, down in rural Tennessee, stood up in church one night and said, "Brothers and sisters, let me tell you this. The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart. But the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house." I believe that the next greatest thing for the 21st century is to have broadband in every home. That will revolutionize healthcare and education and energy in this country.

Congressman James Clyburn:

So I am pushing broadband. This $100 billion that we're going to vote on here tomorrow or the next day, I know there's going to be challenges to getting it. We may not get it all this year, but I guarantee you that that expenditure is going to be made for this country to move forward. We're making all of its greatness accessible and affordable.

Gary Shapiro:

Absolutely. We're seeing that on our own Zoom calls, our employees that are [inaudible 00:49:02] have broadband and some don't, and it's a challenge. The haves and the have nots even among our own employees, which is too bad, and I look forward to being fixed. I mean in the early years of the Obama administration, the democratic Congress, there were billions given for the same purpose. It only ended up getting a few thousand more people on broadband. What makes this effort different?

Congressman James Clyburn:

Well I think that the scabs have been pulled back on healthcare. We didn't have the benefit of COVID-19. Now you all might not call it a benefit, but the experience is a benefit. The experience, as I said, is a blessing for us. There's no benefit in seeing George Floyd lose his life, but it's instructive and it's turning out to be a blessing for all of us.

Congressman James Clyburn:

So I believe that we were being shortsighted during the Obama years when it came to this. We were shortsighted. I can't tell you, it took me six years to get the Rural Energy Savings Program going. As much sense as that makes, it was six years to get them to approve that. I just believe that we're going to get this done simply because of the experiences people are now having, and we know now that certain things have got to be done that we did not do before, that if we are going to have a successful future for our children and our grandchildren, if we are going to leave this country in a better place then we found it, that's what's going to be required.

Congressman James Clyburn:

If we don't do it, retrogression will set in, and we will find ourselves reliving history that we thought we had gotten beyond. So that's just simple as it gets.

Gary Shapiro:

Well I appreciate that. You know, I know you have-

Congressman James Clyburn:

There's a vote on that I'm about to miss, so-

Gary Shapiro:

The final question is how do you want to be remembered?

Congressman James Clyburn:

He did his damnedest.

Gary Shapiro:

Okay. Well thank you very much Congressman for your time.

Congressman James Clyburn:

Thank you.

Gary Shapiro:

Thank you for your service to the country and your service in government, and you've been phenomenal. I urge everyone to follow up. There's a lot of parts of the career, whether it's the burning down of your home or the challenges you had as Head of the Human Rights Commission in South Carolina in being fair and just. There's just so many things. You've led the way, you're an inspiration for public service, you're an inspiration to all of us about how to lead a good life and make a difference.

Gary Shapiro:

So thank you all, it's been a great session, and I'm sure you're going to vote the right way.

Congressman James Clyburn:

Thank you very much, appreciate you.

Announcer:

Thank you Congressman Clyburn and Gary for that fascinating discussion. Our next upcoming events in the series are Kay Coles James on July 7th, and Corie Barry on July 29th. Registration is open on the NVTC website, nvtc.org. We hope to see you there.

Announcer:

In the meantime, please stay safe and healthy, and have a great rest of your day.