 Theodore Roosevelt and the American West. And what I thought I would do is something slightly different from what I had originally intended to do. I thought I would try to back this story. We all know the story. It's a part of American mythology. And in a certain sense, I think that's what Dr. Taylor was objecting to earlier today, that the story is too pat. It's too mythic. It's too celebratory. It hasn't been examined rigorously enough. And it's not that I pretend that I know how to do that. But I do want to sort of unpack it a little bit. Because as the story goes, Roosevelt comes out to the American West. And he falls in love with it. And he buys into ranches. And he's transformed from it. And he later attributes his rise to the presidency from that experience. And I do think there's a truth to it. But I think that it deserves to be for us to step back a little bit. And so here's what I'm proposing to do. I'm going to talk about why Roosevelt came west in 1883. Not what happened. You'll get that tonight if you come to hear Theodore Roosevelt, but why he came west. And what sort of intellectual baggage or what were his conceptions on in the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt that led to this? But before I do, I want to say that I'm sort of dedicating this to Douglas Sprinkly. Because I think he's doing such an extraordinary work on Roosevelt and naturalism. And I loved it when he said, we really need to read Roosevelt as a naturalist first. I can't wait for that book to come out. But I just want to say a couple of things. One is about Alice. You heard earlier kind of a discussion about Roosevelt's relationship with his first daughter, Alice. And I didn't agree with that at all. And I feel very strongly about it because I'm a father. I have a 12-year-old daughter who is the light of my life. And when I think of her, I have these two characters that I've spent a lot of my time with. Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson had a really interesting, tight, loving relationship with his daughter, Martha. And Roosevelt had a really interesting, slightly more volatile relationship with his daughter, Alice. And if I got to choose, I would want my daughter to be Alice, not Martha. Alice is one of the most extraordinary women of the 20th century. And she's almost sort of single-handedly proof of the gender revolution that has occurred since. Because she was very much her father's daughter. I mean, she had that mighty, great vitality. And she was ebullient and opinionated. And she couldn't repress herself. And she wanted adventure. She wanted to be in the arena. But she was a woman. And the number of roles for a woman of that sort at this time were very constrained. And she chased it. TR, it's very complex to watch their relationship. TR wanted her to behave. He wanted her to be a good daughter, to be a president's daughter, not to get in the newspaper so much, not to be a source of also kind of admired it. And he understood it, at least. He was not, they did not have a broken relationship. They had a complex relationship. And he didn't abandon her in 1884. And he didn't come immediately out to the Badlands. He went back up to Albany. And he entrusted her to his sister Anna Bami, who was this marvelous woman. And Bami raised Little Alice for a couple of years. And then when TR fell in love with Ea again and decided to marry her, he said to Bami, whose feelings he thought would be shattered by the loss of this girl that she had raised and who was her only child at that time. He said, don't worry, you'll get to keep raising Alice. But Ea said, no, we're taking Alice. And that was tough. That was a tough one for Bami. And it was a tough one for TR. But it cannot be fairly said that he abandoned this child. And in fact, he made trips back to New York specifically to see her during this period. And it wasn't an agent where the father played a significant moment-by-moment role in the raising of any child. So I just think that it's really unfair to say that either the Roosevelt's relationships with her were deeply disturbed or that Roosevelt abandoned her at this time. And she actually became a tremendous political asset to him. They became wonderful after presidential years. He sent her on foreign trips as his ambassador, as his representative. He used her politically and she was glad to be used in certain capacities. Then she, there's a great story about Taft when Taft became president. She did not like Taft. She actually buried a voodoo doll in the garden of the White House. She has this voodoo doll of Taft and she put pins in it and buried it in the garden to sort of curse him and she loved to mess with her father. For example, you were hearing from Patricia O'Toole that he was concerned about race suicide, that the Anglo-Saxon people wouldn't breed enough and that the Slavs and the people of the second and third world were breeding prolific. And so he felt that the Teutonic peoples were going to be swallowed up by the proliferation of others and it really upset him. And so he was constantly preaching that people should have four, five, six children. And he once said to a man that you're a better man than I because you have nine children and I only have six. And so he preached to anyone who would listen about this question, the race suicide problem. And so Alice bless her heart and her pals formed the race suicide club in which they pledged not to get married or have children just to mess with him. So I think it's a rich, lovely, complex, delightful relationship. I think they both thrived on it even though they probably maddened each other to a certain degree. And then I just wanted about the death of Quentin. I don't think that when Quentin died in July of 1918 that TR became an anti-war advocate in any sense of the term, it did shatter him. It's a horrible story. He made sure that all of his sons got into the war and got to the front and he desperately wanted to be there too. And Quentin who probably was his favorite child, he certainly had a lovely fondness for Quentin. Quentin was one of the first aerial warriors and he was shot down over Germany and the news came to TR in retirement. He's quite old and not very good health at this time but he's avidly watching the war from Sagomore Hill in the news, the telegram comes that Quentin is dead. So just imagine that. And he went into a room alone for a fairly long time and then he came out and he said to his aide, I must now do the most difficult thing that I've ever done in my school, tell Edith. And he didn't live very much longer after that and it was a deeply harrowing thing but he was immensely proud of Quentin and I think it's very complex but I certainly don't think that he turned on war or on that war because of this loss and he knew that death is an inevitable part of war and that in sending four sons and getting them to the front he greatly increased the chances that one of them or more would perish and that that was part of the equation. And in a certain degree, Roosevelt himself wanted to die in France. He had been so critical of Wilson that I mean just unmerciful on Wilson, really in an irresponsible way I think and then he said when the war finally happened, he went to Wilson and asked if he could put together one more harem, scaram group of rough riders, a cavalry unit and go to France. George Clemensow actually wrote a letter, an official letter from France requesting honor for France that the TR allowed to lead a command into the front. I think at that point TR wanted to die in Europe and die at the epic hero and it really upset him that Wilson wouldn't do it. Wilson had good reasons in pure military terms and because of this enmity between them but it would have been a nice thing for Wilson to go let TR die in France and it would have been a really fitting end to this story. Anyway, I bring that up because I wanna start with something that may be controversial and I don't mean it to be, I really do deeply admire TR but let me say, Tweed started the day by saying if you aren't Roosevelt, it's pretty hard to understand Roosevelt and that puts me in a really difficult position because I have to confess I've never killed anything willingly in my life. I haven't killed a pheasant and I haven't killed a deer and I haven't killed a rabbit and I've killed a few things on the road by mistake but I always lamented it. So I mean I'm sure that's not true of many men in this room but I've never killed anything on purpose and Roosevelt, I'm using this term neutrally, I don't mean it to be a horrific term but Roosevelt was a killer and in some sense he wanted to kill one of everything, literally. He wanted to work his way up the chain of being and he started with birds and small rodents and things and then he worked his way up and when he got to Dakota he went up to another plateau and it began to be quadruped. He was here, he started with a buffalo and then he wanted to kill a big horned sheep and he wanted to kill a mule deer and a white-tailed deer and antelope and he sort of checked these things off and then he got his grizzly bear out in Wyoming and elk and he wanted a mountain goat and he just keeps working his way up into the more arcane and rarefied air of big game hunting and then of course he gets a chance to go to Africa where he really just surrenders to it and kills not one of everything but many of certain things and then something that Candice Millard was suggesting last night, he went to South America in part to keep killing. He wanted a jaguar and he wanted a peccary and he had a hard time with those but he did get some during the pre-ordial phase of that journey so in a certain sense, I know this sounds kind of stark but Theodore Roosevelt was a man who wanted to kill one of everything, including, may I say, a man. You know, he sounds horrible but Roosevelt wanted to kill a man at the top of the food chain and he had two chances while he was out here and he wisely ducked both of them. He had a chance to join the vigilantes of Granville Stewart and he and the Marquis de Morez went off on the train to Miles City and they said to Granville Stewart, let us join your vigilantes and the vigilantes were really serving two purposes at the time they were rounding up horse thieves and desperados but they were also, they represented big ranching interests as against small ranching interests and there was kind of a class war, Johnson County sort of war going on too and Roosevelt and the Marquis really wanted to be a part of this because it seemed righteous and romantic and great adventure and they, of course, they too had economic interests in maintaining the larger ranches. Granville Stewart wisely said, no, you're both A, too prominent to be in a vigilante group and B, you talk too much. You know, so this is, this is, there has to be a coat of silence in this vigilante group and neither one of you looks like a really silent sort of killer.