 So please move around as quietly as you can. Mary, let me start with you because I've mentioned you a couple of times. About the inevitability or the lack of inevitability about TR's presidency. What do you say to all of that? I think I have two different takes on this. On the first, which is where you had started, that is, had McKinley not been assassinated, would Vice President Theodore Roosevelt have managed to be, at some later point, the Republican nomination? And I think that's not unlikely, but would have been difficult. Precisely because of his difficulties with the mainline leaders of the party. After all, he was put into the vice presidency with the work of major party leaders who wanted to get him out of the New York governorship because he had opposed the interests of the Republican Party organization, particularly work regarding paper, so that he would have had a stroke. But there's another take I have of this. And that is, it seems to me, if you think about this, does it make sense to take the handful of people who've been American presidents and to go through them and ask the question, were they seen early as wounded? In other words, were they predicted to be presidents? Perhaps the turning this around makes more sense to ask rather if we can think of a large pool of people who are at their early mid-age, perhaps even younger, thought of as presidential-level politicians, which is hundreds and hundreds of Americans. There is the pool of possibilities. This ranges across those who are road scholars, those who are the young comers in the military ranks, the young colonels who made it quickly. I think we find lots of people like this. In other words, people of great talent, energy, whose co-fort, look at them and say, wow, this is going to be somebody who's a star. I don't think that's that great. That's not that great. I'd like to give you some examples of this. A while back, this is a long time ago, although we're old enough maybe an old Mr. Member, many so many of us, Esquire Magazine, years ago was during the early 70s, mid-70s, had an issue with a long essay and asked the question, why are presidents such dull, unpromising people generally? And then it went on with this long list of really great Americans, a live veterans, a presidency that personally put on the cover was the CEO of Cummings Diesel, who was also president of the National Council of Churches. He was a major philanthropist. He had made of his hometown of Columbus, Indiana a kind of museum of great modern architecture. He was a hell of a guy. And Esquire was asking, why wasn't he getting the presidential nomination? The answer is simple. It's not the way around the politics works. We loaded dice towards the doll. We're suggesting it's flippant over. We looked not at the end of the party, but at the end of the party. And we see lots of, I think, interesting people, a bit like T.R. as the other man. I want to moderate this as little as possible, so jump in and talk to each other, and we'll take questions here. I think that the very concept of inevitability flattens history in a way. I mean, historians like the messiness of any causes and accidents. That part of Roosevelt's greatness as a president comes from the fact that even if people did predict it when he was young, that there is this accidentalness and that the passage you read earlier of his greatness and anything to do with Brianism is inviting chaos and revolution. He was really, you know, trying to put fear into people's hearts about Brianism and suggest he spoke danger. And then a few years later, a Republican president, Roosevelt, is enacting some of the reforms that Brian had talked about, and that's the maverickness of Roosevelt. I don't know if it had been more predictable or more inevitable if he could have had that maverick. Perry, I want to ask you just kind of a follow-up question because one of the things I enjoyed so much in your book is your talk about his administrative mastery. He's the U.S. Civil Service Commissioner under two administrations of two parties. That's interesting that he managed to hold on across a party election. Then he's the New York police commissioner. He's had a lot of administrative activity before. He becomes president. If you were Roosevelt and you wanted to be the president in the United States, as Bill Clinton did from the age of 16 on, he says, that doesn't sound like a very promising path. No, that's a very interesting point, I think, as we're talking about a career track that leads to the president's side. What I saw as distinctive as I researched my book and tried to figure out what characterized Roosevelt's presidency as a style of leadership, and certainly as really unusual that this talented, energetic man was following an administrative path at a time as the American administrative state, at least the executive branch, was of minimal importance. So if you could look back at his career, we could suggest that he was, for whatever reason, placed into precisely the right points of the administrative state, which was just beginning to emerge, that would give him an experience and a leverage on the issues that would be high on the agenda after 1900. And so, instead of being the patronage boss of the post office, for example, which would be a pretty nice plum for the later 19th century, he was putting it to the agency that most politicians thought was either the devil's lair or a joke, the civil service commission. You mean, get rid of spoils? Spoils? Pincredition? Was the mother's milk of the American politics with the party's milk on it? So this would seem much more important. And so, to tile some of this stuff up, what you're talking about, you do have to wonder, if we do want to think of the Roosevelt career as inevitable in some way, it wouldn't look circa 1880s, early 1890s, that he was making the right decisions about his career path. In the short, in the immediate context, those positions don't look like they have leverage over important influence in party politics, and you need that influence to get a nomination. And as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, he didn't follow a politically savvy path, he was, say, dangerously impulsive. Well, we're committed to civil, we're committed to the merit system, and he openly clashed with members of the cabinet who were committed to using patronage in their agencies, particularly the postmaster general, and any clashed with senators. I mean, that seems like a recipe. But it worked. And so, by sitting in committee, he gained the experience that then became so potent for him. Questions for any or all? Yes. Professor Jacobson, can you say anything about Rudyard Kipling's prediction that he would be president? Well, there was a Kipling, there's a long list of other people's responses to TR, and some of them were negative, some of them were positive. Kipling was one of those who said that he was in Roosevelt's presence, and he found himself spinning around in the orbit of Theodore Roosevelt, and he thought of him as the coming man. And Roosevelt admired Kipling too. Kipling was a little miffed that Roosevelt was the center of attention, and he Kipling wasn't when they were together. This was a very common experience of many people who knew Roosevelt. Benjamin Harrison, who placed Roosevelt in the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and was really skeptical. I mean, there's always skepticism at every point in Roosevelt's career. McKinley was skeptical about making him the vice president. So was Mark Cannon. McKinley was skeptical about making Roosevelt the assistant secretary of the Navy. And he accurately predicted that Roosevelt would be too pugnacious. But Harrison said of Roosevelt, the problem with this guy is he wants to reform all the evils of the world between breakfast and 5 p.m. And there was that quality to Roosevelt that people that were, McKinley is a solid, solid, centrist, an establishment figure, as you could imagine, all these people look on Roosevelt and they get that he's talented and he has extraordinary energy and that he is righteous and kind of amazing and charismatic but they find something disquieting in him but against their better wishes they wind up putting him in positions where he does exactly the thing they most feared that he would do. But Kipling was impressed by Roosevelt and did other questions. Yes. I was thinking about taking all these administrative jobs. He needed a job and how do you need it? He was not welcome. I mean he may have a well too but he was not welcome. Didn't he need those jobs? Maybe that's one for you. Didn't he need these jobs? He needed a job after he lost a boatload of money ranching in his territory. You know, in 1950, Theodore Roosevelt's grandfather was listed as one of the 10 richest men in New York City. You know, when Cornelius Vansap Roosevelt died, he left each of his surviving sons a million dollars. So, Theodore Roosevelt was not Cornelius Vanderbilt but he was not a poor guy. He was not a middle class guy. He was very well to do. His father inherited a million dollars at the time of his death. He gave approximately half of his money to charity and the other half was divided among his wife and their four children. So, Theodore Roosevelt inherited a fortune of something like $135,000 at a point when a dollar meant something. He lost approximately I think 75,000 of it in his ranching adventures. So, he did in fact in the 1890s with growing children need a job and it's one of the reasons that he stopped pursuing writing and took the civil service job. But he also took the civil service job I think as a way to honor the example his father had set in his life. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. is in my mind the person in American history most deserving of a really good family. He's part of that generation of New Yorkers who created the city that we know today. That it's not just that he was a founding member of the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum he was a founding member of things like the Fresh Air Fund which is a group that gets city children out into the country this summer time. The Children's Ordinance Hospital was a committee that raised the money to build a base for the Statue of Liberty and he was just incredibly active in the philanthropic life of New York City and he used to go and visit what he called Newsboys Homes. He was the sponsor of one of the series of Newsboys Homes which were basically hostels for children living on the street and this came from a place to live, they would go out and earn pennies a day selling newspapers and to make some money and to have a way out of poverty. When Theodore Roosevelt Senior was dying there was an announcement in the paper in 1878 and somebody had a crowd of 500 boys gathered in the street outside the Roosevelt home. He was incredibly popular in New York City and in the 1870s Rutherford B. Hayes was less than boring but he was also committed to reform and he asked Theodore Roosevelt Senior to accept the position of head of the New York Customs Office and the reaction from the partisan press of the political machine was huge and violently negative because Hayes wanted to appoint him to reform the office but the New York Customs Office was the biggest source of graft. It was the best way to enrich yourself because you could make a fortune skimming money from people trying to bring things into the country basically and there were terrible attacks in the press that he was accused of wanting the job in order to enrich himself that they were all sort of made up stories about how he'd swindled these philanthropic organizations he'd been involved in the nomination actually didn't get through the Congress because of these attacks they happened at the same time that Theodore Roosevelt Senior was suffering from cancer and was undiagnosed but he died about eight weeks after the nomination failed and there's some evidence that TR sort of associated this violent reaction when he's attacked the press with his father's death and he wrote in a letter to his mother or his brother Ellie maybe after his father's death about how he wanted to do something to honor his name and this is the time when he started to be called TD or Thee and he asked his sister to call him Theodore I really think the first four is into New York politics to go into the state legislature it's interesting that a lot of the people he's trying to get exposed and arrested and put to jail part of that little group that was attacking his father and TR Senior's last letter to his son said something to the effect of I despair of the state of government and I don't know how the country can survive with so much corruption and I really think that going into civil service and rooting out corruption and putting in a merit system was probably very much a monument to his father I think, you know, it's easy for us to talk about someone being thinking about the presidency and I think that certainly in the beginning of his career he wasn't thinking of himself in his future so much as maybe of completing his father's work but that's just it I just want to ask all of you to speak pretty directly into the microphones apparently they're killing a yak or something sorry if you can't hear, just cup your air and I'll make sure that they speak up a little more loudly David, you've been making some notes No, I'm learning a lot about New York and its presidents Andy, let me ask you a follow-up question since you're on that topic to reflect on last year's theme with family and we heard a fair amount about that from you but TR and his father on the first day in the White House he's signing bills and he realizes his father's birthday and he says it seems so moving and appropriate and I wish my father had lived to see this and his father didn't serve in the Civil War, and Roosevelt did serve in Cuba he said now I've indicated the family I think I've given my children something to be proud of can you just talk a little bit about we think of his ambition to sort of free-floating but a lot of it as you say was to please the memory of his father The year Roosevelt said that his father was the best man he ever knew I think throughout his life he admired him as a child you know they used to compete for who got to sit next to the father you know every morning the year Roosevelt senior would sit down with his four children and they'd have a little catechism or Sunday school class where they'd read something together and the children would would fight who's going to get to sit next to dad I think David McCullough in his book speculates that some of Theodore Roosevelt's asthma attacks as a child they seem to increase once he sort of realized that he could get his father's undivided attention that maybe he would go for a ride in the carriage with dad alone and so you know McCullough speculates that there was some not planned but interesting coincidence there the whole thing about Theodore Roosevelt in Civil War I don't ever think that Theodore Roosevelt was embarrassed or ashamed that his father didn't serve in the war I really don't I think that his father was in a hard position with his wife being from Georgia and her two brothers being in the Confederate Navy and her being terrified that somehow they would meet in the field of battle and kill each other he was very active in the Civil War he was a member of the Union League Club he raised money for two New York regiments to equip them and send them off to battle including a black regiment and he went to Washington and worked on various projects during the war he came up with the idea for the allotment system which was basically nowadays soldiers pay can be automatically sent under their families and they get a portion where they are but during the Civil War when men went off to battle their salaries went with them they were paid in camp they weren't as paid back at home so their families could run into a lot of hard times economically and TRC came up with this idea of letting soldiers sign allotments to send part of their salary home directly and traveled he was one of three New York State commissioners of different military encampments to get the soldiers to sign up for that and he worked on helping to convert the military medical system which was not up to par yet into an effective system to meet the soldiers needs he worked with Dorothy at Dix and he worked with Clara Barton with Red Cross so it's not like TRC was sitting at home eating bonbons and polishing his nails or something so there's never any evidence that TRC was embarrassed by that other questions? Yes, sir? we've talked about the gray character of the president before Roosevelt what about the shadowing of Roosevelt himself like his success? they seem to be fairly gray often until a quarter century later from then the same name was suspiciously similar and they came and the great force of personality can somehow escape the shadow is there a shadow that Roosevelt cast a shadow on the president's and follow? what kind of a legacy shadow did TR cast on the president's and follow? I think that I want to answer that question by addressing something a little bit different which is I think one thing that's come up a bit in our discussions that might be touched on more fully is that a lot of Roosevelt's greatness comes from the progressive movement and the progressive movement itself was fascinating but really messy and complicated movement one historian said it was the first social movement that was experienced by every American but one of the complicated things about progressivism was that it was really it had really two different impulses one was social justice the Jacob Rees kind of thing and the other was social control prohibitionism getting rid of alcohol getting disenfranchising African Americans or immigrants because they seem impure elements in the body politics and I think that part of Roosevelt's brilliance was that he could play both sides of that progressivism in a way that no future president really could I read one document by him when I was working on my first book where he said clearly his strategy was to play back and forth from reformer to conservative he said something like I cannot wait I'm gonna bewilder the conservatives by looking like a reformer and then I'm gonna turn around and I'm gonna bewilder the reformers by acting like a conservative and that's how I'm gonna get my way in the end and even in the Panama canal I mentioned briefly that he tried to bring progressivism to the canalism to the construction project and one of the ways he did that was by bringing a reformer who represented the National Civic Federation which was a progressive middle of the road progressive organization he brought a woman who worked for that organization to the canal zone to investigate and suggest reforms and she did a very thorough job she interviewed everybody she investigated thoroughly for several weeks and then wrote a lengthy report on the government to make a zillion changes and the people in charge of the construction project were completely aghast and thought who is this woman coming here and telling us what to do Roosevelt himself thought that her suggestions were all fine except one she said that there were common complaints that there was graft and corruption going on in the construction project and he immediately wrote her and ordered that she take that out of the report before it would be released publicly and he said he made a really revealing comment he said to say that there is graft or corruption it's rather like saying that someone's wife is a flirt and an adulteress it may not be true she may not be but once the charge has been made the damage is done and so on those grounds he ordered to take it out so I think that he was extremely strategic extremely skilled at playing both sides of the progressive movement and I wouldn't say I think that Woodrow Wilson was not in Roosevelt's shadow I think he was he had very much his own vision and he's an annoying figure in some ways but you know what president isn't but I don't see him as in Roosevelt's shadow however I do think that he never learned to play both sides in the skillful way that Roosevelt did but you say let me ask you just to follow that up a little bit or anyone else who wants to you say he wasn't in Roosevelt's shadow clearly he was his own man but he was a very smart man and a historian and he saw the taft had miscarried I mean Wilson must have thought a lot about how do you follow Roosevelt in Taft and how do you position yourself to succeed as president yeah I think he did you know I think that to me it comes back to the maverick character of Roosevelt I think that Wilson was sometimes too thoughtful sometimes too much wrapped up in his own mindset and not as much of an energetic actor as Roosevelt was and that limited Wilson's impact I think sometimes David I don't know if you're comfortable with this question just tell me if you're not but you know you've spent a lot of time talking about TR and race and I think you've shown us that it's very complex and in some ways a problematic issue but Wilson had a very problematic presidency with respect to race too I guess the interesting thing about Wilson is that a number of people do voice and other African Americans supported him in the 1912 election and we're very disappointed because Wilson's emphasis really became or Wilson's legacy became the segregation of most administrative offices in the executive branch of the White House and in addition to that obviously he became a symbol for racism being both a southerner and also enjoying birth of a nation and you know saying that it was like history written like Galitany and I think what's striking is that as far as race relations are concerned Theodore Roosevelt remained popular among the masses of African Americans a majority of them probably supported him in the 1912 election and he was lucky and the nation was unlucky that he was surrounded by people who weren't active on race at all and who weren't really interested obviously in ensuring justice for the African Americans but for those who don't know or have forgotten to say a little bit more about Birth of a Nation it was a film Birth of a Nation was obviously the film that was based on Thomas Dixon's novels and where it really emphasizes the role that Reconstruction played in threatening white southerners and it emphasized the corruptness of African American legislatures that were elected in South Carolina and Mississippi and at the center of that is that if you give African American political powers they're going to end up menacing white women and raping white women and there's a famous scene where a woman jumps from the top of a mountain rather than allowing a black former union soldier to rape her so it was in many ways banding the worst discriminations against African Americans and the president wasn't so far from distancing himself from that he praised it precisely and it really portrays the Ku Klux Klan as the creators of American national identity and I taught the film once and I used to teach a class on American history and film and it's a really brilliant film but it's a scary film because it's so brilliant that you find yourself at a certain moment and get a rooting for the Ku Klux Klan and I was teaching it and I was asking my students how they felt about it and one student said well when I watch a film I just try to shut off my brain and not think about anything and watch and I was like you have said exactly what I hope this class will get you to rethink Other questions? Yes, here We're going to ask the other questions that will be managed from what we've been talking about to international things and security and that kind of stuff There was a new drunkard who I was going to get into forest law a banker in New York State was held again and was appointed to the first Secretary of War who would be given to the Secretary of Defense who died tragically but as a remembrance I think coming from New York State appointed by FDR World War II and actually someone who might admire very, very greatly did that connection of the Franklin Cousins Roosevelt Does anybody know if James Forestall actually heard his famous about because he was trying to guess but I wasn't talking about that now, does James Forestall have a greater connection with the theater Roosevelt? James Forestall and the Roosevelt does anyone want to? We'll look at it another time Other questions? Is there a chance? Yes The other question about the theater Roosevelt is that outside of nature and we never start with that he had a base of power in the Congress Is that kind of a direct assessment of that? And then they speak to the reason why he may or may not have had a good time He's going to be president in his own right And the question about his outside or nature and how much of a base do you really have in Congress? I think that you're touching on something that is real about his political career that he's an outsider but we have to qualify what outsider means and he wasn't that far outside so that I spoke with Roosevelt in my talk as someone who had he was just a very early example of a president going public establishing a public profile that he could use essentially against the political inside so that I'm thinking of the governorship now so that when Roosevelt broke with be very careful to not break fully with Thomas Platt the boss of the state Republican machine Roosevelt and whether the issues of conflict or state policy regarding the issuance of franchises that is essentially monopolies such as transportation Roosevelt wanted to clean that up and charge much more money for those franchise rights and make them shorter live this was a major source of money through the Republican party however payments from payoff from these companies and Roosevelt at that point went public with his appeals to greater fact and so I think what Roosevelt was able to do was to find an equilibrium between the party and his public image that made him difficult to ignore by the party rather than being totally an outsider in other words there's a kind of strategic genius about his behavior it was as a result of a time when there was no political mechanism for someone who was totally an outsider to gain access to the power he had I think again as it relates to the governorship it's very difficult to think of Roosevelt gaining the nomination for the governorship but he hadn't arrived back at Montauk at the end of all my life with his rough riders and then self-dramatized himself as the hero with his uniform and at the same time the party was in deep trouble the last Republican governor the existing Republican governor was deep in trouble with corruption and the party was going to go down to defeat and here was the hero at the end of Long Island approaching himself as the best nominee and then drawing a business group speaking of outsider drawing a business group in New York City to want to form an organization to nominate him as an independent which of course immediately realized that's too far outside but it forced the issue Republicans gave him the nomination first ballot in other words he was a genius at using an outsider status but keeping the door locked went too far outside let me ask you a follow-up question that comes out of what you're saying you've used the very strong term strategic genius and in your talk the other night in your book you talked about the sort of matrix the world that Roosevelt was trying to make move he was like an Archimedean lever trying to move it in a certain direction as you reflect back on his seven years 171 days as president did he do you believe he made the most of the possibilities of the government of the United States in his time or could he have had a different strategy that might have made more of that period any president could in dreams do more so it's possible but one of the I think a comparison that's useful here is to compare Wilson's first term in Roosevelt's McKinley term the unelected term Wilson was an extraordinarily productive legislative leader of probably the most well this is the president who achieved more legislatively than any of his predecessors he was able to perform as if he were a prime minister Roosevelt had nothing like that accomplishment legislatively in his first term or in his presidency now what Wilson was able to be a prime minister he had a strong majority in his first term and it was a majority of Democrats who weren't quite sure how to be a majority in both houses that is they hadn't held that kind of power characteristically and so he was they weren't divided now none of that's true of Roosevelt Roosevelt had this very divided government party with a minority of progressives a majority of stand-paters and the only way Roosevelt perhaps could have achieved much more to get a Wilson-like possibility into passing legislation would have been to do something that would have been unperfect for him it would have been to try to put together a cross-party reform oriented coalition and neither that does not fit funeral Roosevelt's view of partisanship but it also doesn't fit the style of party politics in the period so in short I don't think he in practice could have done much more under the legislature yes I have a question about the conservation ethic PR deserves his place as a grandfather setting aside public land and so forth and the great work he's done there but in some respects maybe I should ask the area this yesterday he could have done so much more if he is aligned in some close with John Dewar to use them in different picture ones and I just wonder why in for example putting Forest Service in fact instead of keeping it in a real symbolic and important gesture he didn't go all the way the question is about his mighty achievement in conservation could he have gotten more had he been more of a purist more of a murite how TR's limited conservation was I think that in the time period that he's living the frontier may have been closed as Frederick Jackson Turner said but there was so much pressure in the west especially now that people are here we have to make it livable we have to make it useful and when you look at TR's writings on natural resources he did see them as having a utilitarian function needing the natural resources to help build the country build the communities in the west you know one of the things that we talked about before Service we talked about the bird revenues and something but TR had really expanded the building dams and the water projects and its water management is the issue in the west and how to get water to these communities and so there are dam projects all over the west under TR I think you know again we might be looking at this with a hundred years perspective on it that when TR was looking at the west there's so much of it it's so undeveloped that natural resources seem endless and it's interesting there's a quote I think after his African safari where he talks about looking at across the belt insane herds of wildebeest and how they're just endless and they seem that there was an endless herd of wildebeest but then he sort of makes a connection between what it must have been like when they were buckling on the plane and he understands the concept of losing species but I'm not sure that maybe in his mind losing open space was going the same way it's so much of what he supported was practical the whole debate over the Hatchatchee Dam in California and how Muir fought so much to try to preserve that valley in San Francisco City Council of Water Commissioners in California just like we have to bring water to the city and this is the only way we can do it so I think there was always a real practical how do we make community work aspect to Roosevelt's point of view I'll just make a quick one I disagree with the premise because I think that going back to Perry's term strategic mastery of genius Roosevelt squeezed as much conservation out of this country in Congress and the executive branches could possibly be squeezed and more he was extraordinarily successful and he was brilliantly well prepared for this because if you know the history of the national parks one of the ways that this work was it was easier to build a national park where there was no perceived economic value if it was a place that didn't have mining value or any mining value at that moment and any agricultural value or any other economic possibility that was a perfect place for a national park because then you could in a sense build up the public domain that was to be developed by private enterprise and that was one of the criteria for national parks for a very long time that they needed to be magnificent places of no other economic value and Roosevelt says that in a number of his statements was something I had in one of the slides yesterday about his understanding of Yellowstone and Yosemite in the Grand Canyon so that he had that understanding and then he used executive orders with just unbelievable skill and boldness to create the national federal bird sanctuaries being the first 51 of them he took the Antiquities Act and not only expanded its scope and definition and named some things that strictly speaking weren't intended by the enabling legislation but then he used he cleverly used the national antiquities and monument system as a probationary first start towards eventual national park status I think it would be he went so far on the National Forest for example that Charles Fulton Senator from Oregon and Congress tried to stop it by placing a rider on an appropriation field to prevent PR from naming any further national forests in six northwestern states and Roosevelt reluctantly signed that legislation but he used the interim to name another 16 million acres of forest in those very states and I don't think any president in American history has been more effective in using the tools in his political tool chest to further the agenda of American conservation and I think any other president who had been president between 1901 and 1909 would have gotten far less accomplished in conservation than Roosevelt I don't know if anyone disagrees with that but I think that this was if you talk about strategic genius if this exemplifies the strategic genius on trust and on domestic policy and the economy and the railroads it's a sign of one of the great masterful presidents of American history I would just want to add this is what you're saying Mira was an extremist and he may be an extremist in life but he wanted to close off development of large swaths of the west and no president combined that and it wasn't really feasible and so I think he represented what couldn't be done by Roosevelt and Roosevelt wasn't going to do if politics is the art of the possible he made the most of it I mean I think that debate that he had with Mira about preservation and conservation is oversimplified because I think Roosevelt was both a preservationist and a conservationist he was strategically trying to get whatever he could but he certainly was a utilitarian at heart and he would have regarded Mira as a dangerous extremist if Mira had any power today are meat and do they have any kind of relationship how would you put animals for do they have any interaction did all the lay of bull in TR know each other and have any overlap I don't think so Valerie anybody lots of questions now building up Forester, lay of bull sorry Amy by the way you came to the Navy basically the Secretary of the Navy before Secretary of War defense which is another of his Navy there's a question here Amy you touched on his or TR's financial losses in Dakota but also could you or the other panelists address the financial burdens of being a member of of society that TR and his family were in terms of not just prior to becoming Vice President but what the looming financial burden was observing four years as Vice President with the social obligations the social obligations of the financial expectations of serving in Washington and high office for the Roosevelt family well by the time TR became President the family finances had evened out so to say right in the early 1890s an uncle of Edith Roosevelt died and left her a considerable amount of money which I mean they'd actually been talking in terms of possibly having to give up Sagmorne Hill or Luthorne Violet which TR did not like but you know between having a steady job as civil service commissioner or police commissioner and Secretary of the Navy sales from his books and articles but by the time he was President their finances were fine and obviously he got a salary as President and Edith was happy about that too even a higher salary than Colonel of the Army got so there were a lot of social obligation the family's finances and the White House obviously they paid their own expenses food and clothes and things like that for their children but they also had an entertainment budget for running the musical events and the other social obligations in the White House in terms of living when they were living in New York and they were private citizens the Roosevelt's actually weren't that social they went to lectures and musicals dinner parties and such but they don't seem to have been interested in going to balls and fancy parties TR was on several occasions very disparaging about the Newport crowd and he didn't like the idea of just going to be seen somewhere and to party just to party he was interested in learning things or meeting interesting people and so it's obviously less expensive to have a dinner party than it is to have a ball for 400 people and that's sort of where TR is interested in Yes I just like to share something with you there's a great site sponsored by the University of Michigan in an audio video you can kind of log on and listen to his presidential speeches going back to Benjamin Harrison I think he was the first recorded president in the pinning and cleaning and there were plenty of those people you're saying University of Michigan Yes on that website you can kind of log on and it's great stuff University of Michigan what else after that do you say presidential you can kind of just do a search there is a name of this library you can log on to the university and the presidential speech library or something like that it's Google and I'm sure they'll find it pretty easy to log on to some of the university old parts of Kennedy and so my question is kind of around he has started to make a kickoff about talking about his understanding of power that he really understood and how to use it so I guess I would like to count on him pushing the law pushing and cleaning the speakers because they really want to get something done Julie a lot about that French cutting off the French it wasn't I think they're not correct but he had handed that as well as the sort of using Canadians so it's desperate now but we're certainly very aware of that in my office now in terms of whether or not our politicians are going to be pushing too much into power and we need to pull them back so we're being asked to reflect on misuse of power or negative uses of power in my theater Roosevelt well that's a really interesting deep question I don't know if I'm maybe too cold to think as deep as he wants me to go no I really appreciate that thank you that's really interesting I do think that I think one of the interesting things about Roosevelt is that in some ways he was so the Maverick and like with Panama Canal he just did what he wanted to do he had some quote which I play you might remember exactly something like I just took Panama and then I let them debate it afterwards I took Panama and now the Senate can debate me for the next two years that's good I like that so he definitely had that ability to just do what he wanted to do and William Appleman Williams the great historian of U.S. foreign policy once said that Roosevelt's taking of the Panama Canal was the most crude and imperialistic act of any president in U.S. history I don't know he's got some competition there so I'm not so sure about that but it was a very controversial act at the time and Roosevelt played it really well by that as Clay had the quote just doing it and making people deal with it afterwards at the same time I think one of the things that makes Roosevelt interesting to me is that although at this conference we've seen much to praise about his political strategizing and reforms he pushed for what I keep coming back to is that in many ways what's brilliant about Roosevelt is the way in which he managed to be a middle of the rotor you know he I mean especially in his presidency with the bull moose party he became what people at the time would call advanced progressive meaning at the far end of progressivism but in his presidency he was what was really brilliant about him was his ability to take the reforms that he could make work and that he could succeed at and not push too far I think about there's a little story about William Jennings Bryan that I think can reflect something very important about Roosevelt maybe a lot of you know that I grew up in Nebraska my grandfather in the first decade of the 20th century would go to Sunday school and his Sunday school teacher was William Jennings Bryan and my grandfather wrote in his memoirs that he once the lesson for the day in the Sunday school class the topic was success and my grandfather said I was a young lad and I thinking of Mr. Bryan having run for the presidency several times and failed I raised my hand and offered up that success didn't really matter what mattered was how hard you tried and what your vision was and I was roundly criticized by Bryan who said to me that I was absolutely wrong and that the only thing that really mattered was success and I think I think Bryan is also fascinating but here's where Roosevelt had beat Roosevelt knew how to succeed and that's why we're all here talking about Roosevelt and not about William Jennings Bryan Roosevelt once called William Jennings Bryan a human trombone let me ask you a question you gave that brilliant careful lecture yesterday about Roosevelt and you didn't play your own hand very much you really just told us what Roosevelt's race career looks like but if we're talking about abusive power it would seem to me that the Brownsville incident is a clear abusive power in retrospect that a president of the United States could have let that be devolved he could have let somebody else handle it he could have compromised when the facts began to come out can you give us sort of an analysis or reflection today about how you really see his record on race in terms of we know that it was complex and it was riddled with ambivalences but how do you finally evaluate it? I guess I'd like to start by just discussing the issue of power an interesting thing about Roosevelt and power on race relations is that at the beginning of his presidency his use of power and his refusal to back down from arguments really served African Americans well when he made the appointment of prom and there was so much opposition to it when he spoke out against lynching very bravely at a time to do so was very unpopular when he defended many cocks in Mississippi all of which in many ways were politically losing battles for him but the striking thing is we see also the counter part of this in Brownsville and that is when he's backed into this situation he refuses to compromise he refuses to step back and think carefully about himself and I think it's striking that in that case we see both the potentials of using power especially to help people outside of the political process and don't have a lot of influence for example in Congress that a president can really help people in that way and African Americans really embrace that I guess in my talk I wanted to avoid taking sides and lecturing the people but I think that my own feelings are similar to what I think many African Americans decided about Theodore Roosevelt is that fundamentally his goal of focusing on promoting opportunity for a small number of high achievers among African Americans fundamentally that was ultimately doomed when there's an assumption that African Americans are unequal when there's an assumption that there's a tendency of disloyalty among African Americans or there's a tendency towards criminality and I think my emphasis on the growing up black opposition to Roosevelt I saw provided me an opportunity to point out that contradiction in Roosevelt's policy and I think that we often think that we can solve problems especially racial problems by dealing with individuals in a fair and open matter in a fair and open manner I think in many ways that's what Roosevelt was trying to do but at the same time if we don't pay attention to the larger structural inequalities if we don't pay attention to some of our stereotypes among African Americans who aren't as successful some of the African Americans we might see on television shows if we don't really try to understand all groups among African Americans and the challenges they face I think it's very hard ultimately for us to be fair to any individuals like an Indians yesterday but you started to talk with that devastating statement he made that I won't say the only good Indian is a dead Indian but it's true 9 times out of 10 and I wouldn't be too sure about the 11 it's pretty hard to think of a statement more damning and extreme than that one by a major figure on this question but then he boasts that in the Rough Riders there were Native Americans that he knew this Indian and that Indian liked them very much in the Rough Riders of any sort but then he was able to like this individual or that and you're saying that even though that's better than not liking them period that that's a very limited problematic way of looking at race Oh definitely and it's interesting because Martin Luther King Jr said at one point that he preferred facing off with the member of the Ku Klux Klan to Southern moderate because often times giving people a half measure of something is a way of diffusing diffusing anger diffusing resentment and one of the striking things often one of the striking things if we look at Southern history is for example after the race right there was an attempt of interracial cooperation that whites really promoted as a way of restoring Atlanta's image in the national press and also because whites became fearful in Atlanta that African Americans were going to rebel there was a lot of black defensive violence stirring the riot but what ended up happening is this moderation turned national attention away from Atlanta and Atlanta became famous as a problem. Throughout Atlanta's history this interracial cooperation would continue and continue and continue but what's striking about it is it prevented Atlanta in many ways from having the sorts of African-American anger that we see in cities like Birmingham and so during the 1960s and even today Atlanta is actually one of the most segregated cities throughout the entire south especially residentially and it has among the greatest economic inequality in the south and what happened is African-Americans who might African-American leadership work very closely with whites and their close work with whites prevented violence over and over again they made compromises there were reforms in the police department but it did it without addressing the larger structural problems and the black leadership became so tied in in many ways to the power structure in Atlanta that they found themselves compromising to make short-term gains rather than confronting racial injustice directly in order to create greater change in the long term Edith I don't have time for this Amy we're just about out of time say a few words about if you want to talk a little bit about TR and the dark side or abuse of power I think the problem we have looking back at Theodore Roosevelt or any of the story figures it seems to just say that of those other presidents they were dull, boring, gray men but you know Theodore Roosevelt was a real boy as you say he wasn't a no-key he wasn't a paryonet and he wasn't a superman he had his good side he had his bad side someone referred to the really really bad treatment he gave Woodrow Wilson in the teens that he just hated Woodrow Wilson and just ranted against him and we tend to overlook that now you know I don't understand why he was so hostile towards most of the people but he was TR is like any of us that he got all of us on people and there were some people just rubbing the wrong way he had good days and he had bad days and then he did things that inspire us and then he did things that really disappoint us and I think that as historians living a hundred years later you know it's our responsibility to remember that he's a real person and not to do him this service of expecting him to be a head on a mountain or face in a portrait that to try to remember that he's a real person and to give him all sides of his character and to remember his flaws as well as his accomplishments I love what you said about that I think the world goes one of the hardest presidents to remember that he's an actual human being because the myth is so big and his self myth is self apologizing, self fashioning self dramatics kind of take over the discourse and the anecdotes alone are so colorful that he's an actual politician who goes to the office and does actual things in the real world in the arena and I love what Julie said and all presidents are annoying in some way but absolutely first three things to say it kind of helps us get through the next weeks here but I'm going to bring Sharon up it's time to close unfortunately it's sad for me to think that we just can't carry on I just want to stop and ask you to reflect the audience on this for a minute North Dakota permanent population 80 people it's a town of 80 people and we have four extraordinary nationally admired historians and scholars who have come all this way to see us and have given endlessly to us in a typical symposium a scholar flies in, gives her talk and is out to local people and so on because they're very busy they etc etc we are so fortunate that we're able to attract people of this capacity who come and talk in this informal way with this sort of candor and this generosity of spirit and I just want you to appreciate what you've just seen here at this moment I just want to add a comment thank you to you and the staff but thank you to all of you I don't know when I've ever attended an event conversations with all of you so thank you it's really been splendid here here I want to second that it's been a wonderful experience thank all of you now you know how to find us you now know that the weather here is spectacular you know that our hospitality is terrific we're going to have lunch here in a minute I want to thank Valerie Naylor for hosting us here and a lot of us want to see the cabin so before the day is out the Maltese Cross Cabin it's a one physical relic of Roosevelt that we know exists in western North Dakota it's on the interpretive site it's just outside the headquarters of Theodore O'odham National Park we'll be able to see that today for the hikes and you know this great afternoon to come and we'll culminate with the reception of the North Dakota Callaway Hall of Fame which is just a few steps from here so thanks to Perry thanks to Julie thanks to David thanks to Amy thanks to Valerie for a great morning thanks to you for your questions and now Sharon