 This is what the humanities do. They bring together extremely serious and thoughtful intellectuals and they wrestle with these questions. You know, a lot of us celebrate Roosevelt with almost pure awards at Roosevelt, but he was a very complex human being and he wrote him off a lot. He did a number of things and he grew up and he wrestled with questions of his time, the context of his era, the intellectual currents that were flowing through. But between Thursday night, it seems like about a month ago to me now, and this morning I think we've had just a really, really remarkable set of talks and I hope that one thing we can do is to transcribe them, because this was discourse that matters in Roosevelt's studies. It's not just me, but I hope you will agree it's been a wonderful symposium. So I'm going to start with, I'm going to go straight to your questions here, but let me start with Dr. West, because listening to this, there's one microphone to hand around. One of the things that Patty talked about was the potency of the word and inevitability, so can you just reflect her moment? Sure. Is this on? Yes. First of all, just to refresh a bit about what happened Thursday night, depending on the email all the time, there was no planning for this, I believe it or not. It's mostly about mostly jolts. I'm not sure if that's what Patty does, but the other thing that turns out, and this happens pretty often, it turns out that we were both fascinated, I think essentially by the same thing, is that Roosevelt was a very complicated man that especially in his younger years that he reflected the dominant views today, including those on race, including those on the economic nature of the West. And yet he would back in, see these seeds of complexity, and when you follow this man forward and watch him mature to his leader, this very celebratory figure in American history, you see that he becomes increasingly complex, he's increasingly divided and on issues, on issues like race. And I think the point to take away from that is, as often as he is portrayed as a sort of cartoonish character, he's very cartoonable. He's not. That's very misleading. In terms of inevitability, I was thinking that Patty was talking because this is one way in which he said he did not cheat. He was very much caught up in this idea of the proper conquest of the West. Within that, as Patty said, all these complexities, all these contradictions. And but on that point, I think he held, he held that ultimately this was for, this was for good. And inevitability, I'm not sure, but I think he looked back on it and saw that it was pretty much that way, perhaps just imposing his own beliefs on it. This was putting good in there for this gospel. But I think the point that I was saying to listen to Patty was, I think the stories today looking back on this would find that part of the bolstering apparatus because the one of the important themes among Western historians today is not inevitability, but something quite different in its contingency. Looking back on this, there were so many points along the way which this could have gone very, very differently. And what you see, I think, in Roosevelt's generation, he was one of the first presidents not to have served in the Civil War. He was really the first of those national leaders who emerged after this, this very bloody, conflicted history of the 19th century. But it's his generation's job, I think. They see it as their job to look back on this and to impose this notion of this was bound to happen. This was part of the reason. To give a sense, I think, of unity of bringing the nation together, turning us into this one great people, affirming that. I think best of this view of history and inevitability and inevitability of history, I think, is important. Just touch each other with what you want to talk about. I don't want to make it too formal. I know you're bursting with questions for the whole week, so who would... Yes, please speak up. One of Roosevelt's well-buyer about TR is that Roosevelt lived in conservation. And I wonder how he would view the oil and development machine out here now. The oil and development tool for the broader area, but it's not going to price you most of all. How do you do that? The oil boom that is now consuming the question of food. I was perfectly enough to where I thought, oh, that's going around the Williston, and I didn't expect the most of the Williston. We're so running the bus over to me, but it's just amazing because I haven't been a lot about it. The Flurry is, I think, as Roosevelt and I both both said about the Flurry and the resource that we could use otherwise. I feel that the key question there, and this is so unknowable as a thing. He was certainly enthusiastic for resource production. He was also enthusiastic for river preservation. There was some kind of calculation going on in his mind about when there was enough left of the value that he would preserve. And if that was a sufficient amount, you could preserve this number of animals or this number of acreage, and then you could, in a lot of things, which in any human being said, better have that kind of calculation in mind. So we're going to be very cool in the letters and start. So he was making those calculations very carefully. So when he now, with the current continuation of development after his time, that he's saying, now we're in a scene where we're really dependent. We have to be much more gradient-less in choosing what we give up and holding the line. In the bus over here you couldn't tell but think of, would you be disturbed because the landscape that was once so open is now interrupted? If we are to be disturbed, why are we still most of us driving fossil fuel cars? And so I think, I would be cool. Well, I think he would, I don't know, I think that his calculation of how much we had lost and how much we still could hold on to or we could move on, I think that would have shifted over time and he might, or he might for national security reasons say could we keep this to a time when it's when it's more, quite a few more necessary. But my hope is that since he said things so forcefully, and he then do focus groups and he would ask us to do what I just proposed to mention that we're not doing, look at our own cabinets in relationship to what is happening in the landscape. Still look in the mirror and say this is our consumption. We have to pay attention to the size of production. We cannot go around in that disconnected way. I would hope that he would be the person who would say that which no other figure dares to say to us that it's really about us and our consumption. Others? Go ahead. I'm starting to think about Roosevelt and Roosevelt's generation and his attitudes about likening the plunders and trappers to the utter failure of that generation and many successive generations to understand the different ways in which Native American jobs use land from the centuries to the European sellers to the European sellers as they emerge successfully over the country the and it's been put in the United States about a process in which Johnson versus Macintosh that the Indians the tribes don't own land nobody's been in this. That the tribes don't own land. They don't own land they don't own land because they don't enclose it they don't cultivate it in the European map. Now the tribal one of the great contributions to the western history that's occurred since my first edition of my book is the work by anthropologists and ethnologists that has been component actually Patty's work draws on this work draws on the ways in which these are non-literally conventional sense they don't have written languages and so it's taken anthropologists and ethnologists to unearth these conceptions but when they are revealed they end up being utterly incompatible with those of 18th and 19th century western Europeans so the settlers assume wrongly that the native tribes have no particular interest in owning the land because they don't cultivate of course a lot of do a lot of farm that they move around but the actual the tribes have affinity for certain spots so the whole conception of the inevitable march of civilization is driven and Daniel Boone doesn't own Kentucky because he doesn't cultivate the land that he lives on is driven by these irreconcilable conceptions and consequently what we have established and by the time Roosevelt is president is being the western European views of land usage and the western European views of land usage when unregulated are essentially extract as many resources as you can from the land for your own personal profit and Roosevelt ends up retrospectively becoming one of the first people to see well wait a minute some of these natural blurances go away I'm brought back to the fact the first reason he thinks about conserving these large areas is that so his son can continue the hunting expeditions I turned off my mic Simon you have an advantage over the three people to your right because you spent a significant portion of time in Western North Dakota last year talk a little bit about what we're seeing as the magnitude of one of the themes that's pretty clearly come through and Professor Limerick mentioned it as well in TDR's presidential address of 1912 is that he's a moralist, he sees the world through a moral lens I can't help but wonder that one of the calculus is to use your word one of the ways that he would perceive how we are using our resources would be in a moral sense and that is where can we say well we don't need this development because it's not morally acceptable what other sorts of development should we be looking at and what struck us in the five months that we were here is how rapidly this area is changing it really is an industrial landscape it was as Professor West made clear on Thursday it was an industrial landscape already the railroad came through the massive grain, privately held often by eastern capitalists ranches of the day but obviously industrializing the production of beef and of wheat and of other grains but in the short time that we were here we saw those wonderful punk jacks popping up all over the place and there are piles and piles of the debtors of industrialization there are planks everywhere in in March the road that goes north of Dickinson to Kildere just a few miles north of Kildere collapsed highway 22 had to be closed and it caused a diversion of what was it about 80 miles people had to divert in order to get to where they wanted to go north of Kildere so there's a tremendous impact on the infrastructure on the people there are lots of people in Dickinson who don't mind what's going on and of course on the environment what we sense was that this is a landscape in a tremendous transition and I like the fact that we're questioning the word inevitability because there's nothing inevitable about it it's a human construction it tried to happen 15 or years ago the price of oil tanked and it was stopped so there's nothing noteworthy about this sort of thing that's happening around here we use the word inevitability with apologies to TR but the use of the word inevitability is a kind of a lazy historian's byproduct for I don't really know and so I either don't have the resources the documents and so I'm just going to say it was inevitable there's nothing inevitable about it but it certainly is happening it's happening on a massive scale I'm going to try to go back to Thursday a little bit and go back to the address of the inevitable I'm kind and although TR was only 24 at the time what we know of TR is that he was very observant because all of his prior studies at birth and otherwise he was an extremely observant man and so although he probably had a it was immaturity at the age of 24 I'm wondering if he wasn't and having seen what he saw up in the East and when he comes in the West and as you said there was industrialization and so would it perhaps be as possible that without totally being aware of his conclusion that he might have thought that some industrialization that the Westward movement was in that sense inevitable because man would be a man essentially and that perhaps that was an element of what drove him to be to think about conservation and you know preserving what pockets of wilderness that could be preserved I mean making the calculus that to me it's just I'm not quite sure that it strikes to me that he would just be unaware of the kind of reaction he did later but that Absolutely and he's certainly my impression is that certainly overestimates the question is on this question of inevitability did the young TR as he grew older and matured when that East developed since we need as conservation come apart I would say from the kinds of industrialized forces that we see in the East was a very fond deep loving interest but I saw it as a young man Sir of course that's absolutely part of it one of the striking castages in Rancho is at the end of one of the opening chapters I don't think I quoted from it when he said that this is the way life is passing there's nothing different logically but there's no sense of we need to be careful and preserved from this that comes later and I think exactly what you made are the ones that moved in that direction and to I think builds upon the conservation that was in part a sense of inventory of what we had figuring out what we need to say what we need to say but there's other much more morals moralism comes into it as well this is worth saving simply because this is worth saving and I can't think at that point I can't think of something getting anything out of board sure of that Roosevelt in this sense in this moral sense if he can somehow look back on this his blood balance he's having sure of that hope and I'm really serious I was expecting to find more evidence of I'm coming concentrationism and winning in the West I thought LeMence over the burdening of the trees there's nothing but that doesn't seem to be there I don't know it seemed whatever I thought I was going to see oh here comes theater Roosevelt who will do the National Forest and you know that you think it wasn't the reason I couldn't find it wasn't it just wasn't in his mind yet you can see the theater Roosevelt will be a conservationist the enthusiasm in which he talks about honey and it's not the voice of someone who would be happy of that I'll also say the other thing that's really interesting about him as a person LeMence has a very elaborate fashionista description he's really in clothing and back was the clothing and you can kind of see that the whole batch with him and his tunic and so on that he's really quite conscious about clothing but it doesn't have to do with menstruations so the funny thing is there I think what compromises the experiment here is that he got to 1807 and so he was never violent when he was west very much on me it's really it was in part and out so a lot of the stuff where we might be able to see what his experience in the west was there's a lot of jumps and when he was west we're doing the first to his own experience here to illustrate something about backwards and their character but because we don't have those why even though I'm not I'm really here for the part on California and the Gold Rush I really wanted to know what would he make of the California Gold Rush because it was so not the very advance that it was it was such a short term extraction thing and so as you see some which is there but it's just very frustrating isn't it I mean open up papers that happen but I understand by the hope that he's somewhere in this country there's no possible that he actually gave us the template for what North Dakota needs to be thinking because if I understand it you're the professional historians but he wanted to take some parts of the west that were so extraordinary slime, magnificent unusual, unique and draw up ombris around them and say we're going to preserve these and play it off to the economy no industrial zones for human economic activity national parks, certain national lines and we're going to take the rest of the public lands and we're going to have wise use policies to sustain we're going to live that human economic activity by way of regulation but we're not going to prevent it, we're just going to try to create a scientifically sustainable path for it and then everything else have at it because that's the American system didn't he teach us that if we were to question North Dakota's this large energy precedent we should decide those parts of it that are so magnificent that we want to make sure they don't get damaged and then we minor a number of acres in TR's mine and then for the larger the Missouri National Grassland more than a million acres make it a light footprint from North Dakota the lightest possible footprint that still allows wise use and then for the larger area I can say if I stand for you Ambrose Wild Rose and so on that's sort of what we have at it so still with human regulations we're not with the same sense of aesthetic or landscape sensitivity didn't he give us just that gameplay I think that is very accurate I've for seven years straight I've attended the Colorado Oil and Gas Association about the strategy conference every summer so I think I have a lot coordination with gas and oil and gas but I understand their devastation that any time they have a site they would like to develop an environmental group will call that a special place that they particularly treasure and there is not one unloves for an inch are a number of at least a national gas field especially with independence I think I know a few people at some companies who would say well okay if you said here are the places that they really must be reserved they would say alright then but since it's so mobile as a concept the moment that the size of evidence is good it becomes a place where someone has a spirit quest a place where somebody can't bear to see a site compromise where they're not the first to run through I mean it's just it's impossible to find any of those and yet everybody is still driving possible fuel vehicles and the number that electric will be able to get you out of the energy business where electricity comes from then we're back in the role field so that's not the best thing after your list but even when you need a rare burst in monogamy you'll produce it so there's nothing there that consumers are going to get what they want of the oh now we have an energy source with no damage at all and I mean that's where Jim Roosevelt's just the right list of queries at the risk of taking all the fun out of this conference I have a fundamental difficulty with investing historical figures as guides for the president I think they make their remarks in a different consciousness one of the things Clay is an expert on Jefferson and he was making the reference to me yesterday and he made me think about people asking from time to time because I have to be at the University of Virginia with Mr. Jefferson think about these things and my first impulse is to say well he wouldn't think about any of all because he's deaf and I have problems with the direct translation of historical figures and attitudes to present controversies I mean to the extent that Roosevelt thought about conservation he thought about conservation in the first few decades of the 20th century we have an utterly different economic world we have a different landscape and things don't translate very well so it may be a fun exercise to speculate on do we have time travel what would be of our Roosevelt be doing at this point just to have the possibility of well moving North Dakota but he's a policy maker from a different world and I think it's better to understand these figures as historically cabin in their home I just think there's nothing more professors than say that is so dangerous the fact is Mr. Jefferson lives with us they created institutions that were still given their impact is witness in this world plus they are our elders and if we live as many people in this country have lived in amnesia when an individual is stricken with amnesia and cannot remember anything from the past we rush that person to an emergency room when a society does that he's saying on the next trip I mean the stories so I think there is only the greatest respect in turning to our elders down and alive and saying what did you say that might be a value for us at this moment not pretending that they are waiting to come out and tend to rally with us or anything like it but I just think especially people with such enormous influence in shaping our world either go to the emergency room and get treated for amnesia or pay close attention to them and consider how it might have varied from beginning that you have their endorsement from the obama reelection and this is that is not what you just said at this point that we are on the precipice here of a very significant long debate not whole here when we go over this precipice there's no way in the elsewhere can you hear me? I just want to mention that every place is valuable and every inch is large but I don't think people want to develop resources ever saw a place where there was a resource that they didn't want to develop numbers and when you get to the outdoor plan and when you can hear the oil wells at this beautiful piece of place this place of history you I think will be concerned that we don't have enough protection of space but if we do in our organization we have an opportunity to speak up and make a difference and I hope that you will and I personally feel that history tells us a lot I feel that fear or other transformation interests do mean a tremendous need to hear about what he demonstrated by protecting the many parts of our environment for the present we can't say oh he said absolutely this no we can't be specific but we certainly can generally draw what his attitudes were about preserving the land because of his comment I'm just saying that history he's just left us a little on that because how many have been to Grand T John? but we're all indebted to the Rock of the Rock of the Rock of course I was running at Grand T John about four hundred years ago and I stopped and I thought son of a gun I am enjoying this beautiful view because of John E. Rockefeller Jr and the oil fortunes so it's just a sensation that they're so tangled up in history and I wish they weren't but that happens to me let me introduce to you the star of stage three in the documentaries David Piper of course I think Roosevelt and Pinchot gave us the model for land management and public land ownership and my question to the panel is if the Badlands were so special to Theodore Roosevelt why didn't he and Pinchot draw that line on the map back in the early 1900s we had to wait for other lands for overgrades and farms and then they became magical so so I hope to address that to Theodore Roosevelt my answer is a concrete answer it's an illustration of the point I was saying earlier that is people who are actors at a particular time cannot see the future they may think they can see the future but they can't because things change it's like appointing someone in the Supreme Court of the United States on a set of issues consistent with the time of his or her nomination and then for most of a career we can deal with early different issues so people say well gee the president was disappointed in this nomination well it's just a different world so I just I think it's fine for people to invest Professor Lerner said earlier the operative trace for me was we can use them as we choose to use them what we make of them is operations of us but in the end it's about us working separately let me make a little program out here we have five minutes I just wanted to share and beg for a little slack and she said absolutely not I apologize to all of you I know that you're not having enough time and I know you do want to keep debating this I just want to say that it's not to be the cowboy it's not the cowboy that's got a big factory that's thinking I can't turn that into a car Very quickly A quick comment on the Winnie the West and I'd like to respond to Professor Lerner I was extremely surprised when I read the Winnie the West to see how heavily food-known it was the number of citations in the sense of bibliography including private papers and private libraries and how often Theodore Roosevelt found inaccuracies, or what he deemed to be inaccuracies. So that when you read that segment about Indian Savagery, for me, rather than finding a high rhetoric, I thought that each and every one of those instances was probably included because he had factually read in the term that that was accurate, and elsewhere throughout that volume, he hesitates to write any more because he says it would be too graphic or too disturbing. So is it high rhetoric? Because we look at it with our modern sensibilities? I felt it was, and I clearly didn't make that point clear, so I'm going to go for it. Now, I thought it was high rhetoric because the language evolves into this happened all the time to everyone. That it's not just this happened in a number of places, which would be the, and I agree with more on the impressiveness of the research. At first, you think he didn't have any time to go to all those archives, but then you think, oh, it's Theodore Roosevelt. So he's trying to get him to work out the context. So you're asked about it. My trouble with that passage is that it is one, he creates, it's rhetorically not great, because he creates one person, and then all the targets of the dam occurred to that one person who has been presented as a chemical frontier. So this one person has his infant child, batched at, his sister has to wear a necklace. So it's sort of like, oh, that's really having it on there. But I don't think there's any question of those incidents happen. Scale and typicality, that's a hard of a story question, and he just goes out and wins in that paragraph, so. But I think very quickly, yes. So, regarding the usability of resources and TR and moralists, I sometimes wonder if we create the one that's where he didn't have a dilemma on that in regard to his righteousness and constant preaching I think, I want to hear your thoughts on considering that he was constantly as a politician, balancing so many things and also trying to do the right thing for the greater number of people. And so that is just looking at a particular people group or profession, whatever it is. He was always looking at the greater and the greater amount of time. What are your thoughts on that? I guess I'm not going to say he was a politician. He was doing what he was doing. He was always looking at the results of it. And then to get back to this very green view that was pointed out while he was in the press, that was worth sizing, believe me. You'll see it. You'll see it. Those were the places that he was considered to be the greatest chance of the day. How do you really understand that? Gratitude is a very important view as a matter of fact. Gratitude is to a catch point. It's our later understanding of the moralist. Even greater appreciation of beauty in the press. It explains why it's now being concerned. Politically, this was not a viable issue. Well, the way that I know how deep my respect for you is when you say that I have a lot of work to do sexy, maybe you have a low standard of sex here. You know, it's our Teton national. We think of theater Roosevelt as being both a historian and looking back to the past. You see, I noticed in his children, he was talking about, you know, Caesar's 10th legion and, you know, the Catholic history and the Catholic nation was remarkable, you know. To what extent do you think being placed in the past, present and future? In other words, psychologic, it would be a future. T.I. talks about, we must do this for future generations, but where was he? Past, present, future. How much was he really truly a futurist? Okay, I'm going to go to Patty. Briefly, I'm going to sign them to give a last word. Okay, I feel that it all comes together, your question all comes together, in that he was a very unusual human being for having in an era of rapid change, a long, deep sense of time. And if you take the distance past seriously, and I will tell you, the thing I'm proud of is that at St. Mark's West now, that I think theater Roosevelt would like most, is we're doing a project on perotids and how you need perotids in St. Mark's West. He would be our keynote speaker for the Roosevelt. So, but I think if you clip your sense of time backward as much as he did, and take those people of the ancient world so much too hard, you then have a capacity for flipping your sense of time to the future. And so you can be thinking of the long haul there. So I think those things are very harmonic, but the stretching beyond today and the day after tomorrow and beyond yesterday, I think that's where he is truly at. That's it, he seems like a inspiration to us. Just a program about time is going to say something. I'm so apologize that we don't have a lot more time. That's the nature of the sort of thing. We want to take a little break and spend the afternoon and this discussion and the day, keeping it if we can on Roosevelt. But don't leave when they stop because Sharon's going to come up and introduce our folks from Chicago. There'll be presentations about the next in the next year in symposium. And then she'll give you your marching orders and you really shouldn't march without Sharon giving those orders. Sorry, sir. Well, I'm actually going to take this back 30 years to talk anyway, to remind us on Thursday night that he spoke about how TR was able to be friendly to both the genocists as well as the author of the melting pot. And I think we have to remember that there's that kind of attitude of narrowingism in TR's ability to understand arguments, many facets of arguments. And that certainly is something that we can remember ourselves and hope that Alpina's leaders at some point in the near future will come to realize is important. Let's thank our staff.