 This is our fifth annual Theodore Roosevelt Symposium. We're absolutely thrilled with the turnout tonight and with this year's registration. If you haven't registered and you want to come to events tomorrow, they're free of course. There's a registration fee if you want to come to the banquet tomorrow night and on the field trip and so on, and you can register after this event tonight or tomorrow morning, but we're just delighted that you're here. I'm Clay Jenkins and I'll be the host and moderator for the next couple of days. And our theme this time is Theodore Roosevelt, the President in the Arena. And it's my great honor tonight to introduce Perry Arnold, who is our keynote speaker. But let me begin by welcoming you on behalf of President Richard McCallum. Dr. McCallum so wanted to be here tonight, but there's a mandatory State Board of Higher Education meeting up in Botano and he felt compelled to be there. I'm glad to be here in the morning, but he asked me to greet you on his behalf and to welcome you to this campus. You'll hear a lot more in the next 72 hours about the Theodore Roosevelt Center. The Theodore Roosevelt Center has been in existence now for four years. Here's what we're doing in a nutshell. We've decided to digitize every known scrap of Roosevelt's writings. Roosevelt was the writingist president in American history. He wrote 40 books depending on how you count and innumerable articles. And the paper trail of his presidency is immense, not as immense say as that of Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon, but for his time it was gigantic. And we are going to digitize every scrap of all of the historical documents relating to Roosevelt cartoons, scrapbooks, photographs, films, audio. Whatever there is that can be called Rooseveltiana, we here at the Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State are going to digitize it, we're going to catalog it, we're going to index it, and we're going to make it available to the world. So that you could be in your bathrobe or pajamas in Tampa or Trieste and 24 hours a day search the Roosevelt papers and get the benefits not just of everything that's in the Library of Congress relating to Roosevelt, but everything that's at Harvard relating to Roosevelt and everything in the National Park Service relating to Roosevelt and much more down to the Glendive Montana Historical Museum. And so we're absolutely thrilled about that and you'll be seeing some of the fruits of that over the next couple of days. Roosevelt, the president, that's our theme. He was an accidental president in that he came through the back door. He was Vice President of the United States and when President McKinley was shot on September 6th, 1901 and died a week later, Roosevelt ascended into the presidency. He was the youngest president in American history, 42 years and 322 days at the time of his inauguration. He served as president for seven years and 171 days. One of his deepest desires was to be elected in his own right. He did not want, he said, to go down in history as an asterisk. He wanted to be elected as president himself and he worked very hard at it at a time when it was not really acceptable for a sitting president to campaign on his own behalf. You'll hear a little bit more about that tomorrow. And he had reason to be anxious about this because there had been four previous vice presidents who had ascended to the presidency on the assassination or death of the sitting president and not one of them had become president in his own right. John Tyler became president in 1842 on the death of William Henry Harrison. He did not run for election. Zachary Taylor died in office in 1850. His vice president, Millard Fillmore, became acting president. He lost the nomination when he ran. Andrew Johnson became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. As you know, he was impeached but not convicted and he was not nominated for a term in his own right. And Chester Arthur became president in 1881 after the assassination of James Garfield and he was not nominated to serve a term in his own right. So when Roosevelt looked at this phenomenon of vice presidents who have ascended to the presidency it gave him a sense of gloom and desperation. Well, as you know, he was elected in his own right in 1904. It was the largest majority in the Electoral College up until that time and the largest plurality in the popular vote up until that time. He regarded that as a resounding endorsement of himself and his policies. We say he was an accidental president but he appears to us to be a natural. I mean, think of the qualities that Theodore Roosevelt brought to the office. I think it would be fair to say that he brought a unique combination of qualities to his presidency. He may have been intellectually the best prepared president in American history. Certainly he ranks with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in that category. He read a book a day all of his life. He was a deeply read man. In fact, after his presidency he went on a kind of grand tour of Europe and he lectured in Germany at German universities on German literature in German. That can be said of no other president in American history. John Kennedy was able to squeak out Ich bin ein Berliner for which he was regarded as a Renaissance man. Theodore Roosevelt could actually speak German and he read German literature deeply. So intellectually he was a very well prepared man. He was also a bona fide war hero like Ulysses S. Grant and President Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy and a few others. His time in Dakota had been extraordinarily important to this. He had come out here and effectively refashioned himself in a very self-conscious way. He came out as a New York aristocrat with a Harvard degree and a Harvard accent and some snobbery born of that birth and upbringing and he came here deliberately to immerse himself in the frontier life in the manner of his friend and hero Frederick Jackson Turner and he refashioned himself as a rancher and a cowboy and a frontiersman and that certainly served him throughout his career. Something I read in Perry Arnold's book adds a fourth element. He had already achieved great administrative mastery. He had been for six years a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner. He had been the president of the New York Police Commission and he had served as governor of New York. We think of him as a consummate politician and war hero but he had already achieved extraordinary administrative mastery before he became president and finally he was not afraid of power either constitutionally or temperamentally. Thomas Jefferson for example was both temperamentally and constitutionally afraid of executive power. No such inhibition or diffidence lived in the breast of Theodore Roosevelt and so he brought a combination of qualities unique up until that time and probably unique in the history of the United States. We regard him as a natural but not everybody did as you probably know when he was nominated for the vice presidency in the McKinley election campaign of 1900 the kingmaker of Ohio, Mark Hanna who had helped to make McKinley president said and I quote, now look what you've done. Now there is only one life between that mad man and the presidency and he actually told McKinley that McKinley's duty was to keep breathing for the next four years and after McKinley's assassination Mark Hanna upon watching the ascent of Theodore Roosevelt said I told you so now that damned cowboy is the president of this country. So that by way of I hope setting up our discourse for the next couple of days in which we examined Roosevelt's presidency in a whole range of perspectives we're so honored tonight to have Perry Arnold to provide our keynote address. He has a BA from Roosevelt University in Chicago a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 1993 and 94 he was a visiting Compton research professor at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville he has many articles but two books remaking the presidency Roosevelt Taft and Wilson published in 2009 and by the way when this program ends tonight he'll be in the lobby at our reception we invite all of you to stay you can buy this book and he'll sign it for you if you wish remaking the presidency Roosevelt Taft and Wilson 191 to 1916 I'm going to end my introduction by reading a short paragraph from it and his other book is making the managerial presidency which was published in 1986 and which won the Academy of Public Administration's 1987 Brownlow Award we are so glad to have him here tonight let me just give you one little piece of flavor of the book this is from his conclusion about Theodore Roosevelt from page 68 Professor Arnold writes Roosevelt became a highly visible public communicator and he associated his public image with his policy agenda in other words we might think of Roosevelt as innovatively making the presidency a stage not just a bully pulpit upon which he would model the importance of his policy goal past presidents understood the office's symbolic importance but Roosevelt was the first to use that office's symbolic possibilities to promote substantive policy goals that is most obvious in the case of the United States Navy his self presentation as the heroic warrior gave him a potent veracity in promoting naval strength his actions in assembling fleet level exercises which he attended made publicly visible the grandeur of naval power finally of course the remarkable chutzpah to use the most appropriate word of ordering the Atlantic fleet to sail around the world by way of the west coast and then Japan at a time of unsettled international relations was a gesture of operatic grandeur please welcome Professor Perry Arnold thank you Clay well it's really a pleasure to be here and have people say nice things about my book you know before I start foreign languages and presidents I don't speak German but I am told by colleagues who do speak German that and some of you probably heard this that John Kennedy's Ich bin Berliner refers to a jelly donut called the Berliner so if that's true he stood bravely at the wall and said I'm a jelly donut so but check that it's wonderful to be here I've never been to the Badlands or to western North Dakota and so I was pleased as punch to get this invitation and I want to thank Clay Jenkinson and the organizers of the symposium for inviting me I want to thank Sharon Kielzer for the logistics of bringing myself and the other scholars from afar to Pickenson and I want to thank you all for being here and particularly perhaps the students who have been forced to be here there must be some of you out there being a teacher I know well what it's like to force students to come to lectures I hope that I make it not too painful for those students well, what are we going to talk about in terms of this unusual president that Clay just described I've titled my talk a novel president because what I want to stress is that what is striking about Roosevelt is not just his personal peculiarities and interesting features that we could go on and on about but what is even more interesting I want to suggest has an institutional quality to it that is there's no president like him before him there's a novel presidency not just a novel president and that's what's that question how does he get to be a novel president in a way is what drew me to the project that led to the book that Clay described what we might say about Roosevelt is that he comes out of nowhere with a set of behaviors that we sometimes, you've heard this will refer to as like a modern president but that's the paradox he's not a modern president presidency was not a modern presidency so the interesting puzzle is where did he get the wherewithal the resources and the openings so to speak in political space to become that extraordinarily unusual president let me begin this way to try to kind of place him in our historical memory how many of us, except for the historians amongst us how many of us have a mental picture of those presidents between Lincoln and 1901 Theodore Roosevelt how many of us could think of and have a picture of Hayes a picture of McKinley I mean with some detail we have a picture I suspect for most of us it's this doer grey man who when he spoke if he spoke at all tended to talk in a kind of formalism about the greatness of America and the Constitution and then Roosevelt comes along and Roosevelt's radically different now he's radically different I want to suggest initially in the most plain way we have an image of this man that's an a f*** whoops, sorry that's a familiar picture to us that is we understand this toothy aggressive, smart and policy driven president as somebody we have in our historical memory as an important president well that's another way of saying this is a novel president very different than his predecessors so my job for tonight is to talk about this puzzle a bit and try to explain it at least try to get some purchase on what makes Roosevelt novel first of all what makes him different is not I want to suggest obvious we might initially think I'm going to speak this tongue in sheep we might think we have an explanation the explanation is a testosterone hypothesis he was more manly he was more the cowboy he was more aggressive than prior presidents but that doesn't get us very far and it begs the question now I think there is a personal story here and a psychological dimension to the story so that we should think seriously about Roosevelt's biography and you folks more than most people can do that after all part of the Roosevelt story is right here is the Badlands and the Badlands does shape this president's political persona but that's not a sufficient explanation by itself we have to go farther than that what led Roosevelt to not just become a kind of imperial rancher in the Badlands what brought him to the White House and that's the more complicated story first of all what I want to suggest to you is I want to use two simple models two simple sketches of the presidency to suggest that something dramatic had happened in that very small space between McKinley and Roosevelt so what I want to suggest and this is the kind of distinction that political scientists use and historians a blanchette so excuse me I want to describe Roosevelt's predecessors as presidents of the party period now we might quickly think McKinley, Harrison, Cleveland Cleveland vetoed a lot and he's kind of famous for that but he vetoed a lot because he was a failing president and he was using that negative power because he had no other power and he was using it largely for partisan purposes against patronage Republican patronage so these look like presidents who don't have much of an impact in American politics that's a mistake what we misunderstand is they represent a different kind of institution these are presidents whose primary responsibility is in relationship to their own parties they are managers of faction they are extraordinarily experienced politicians, electoral experts so to speak and their job was to be loyal to their parties and to generate the resources of the national government in ways that sustain and strengthen their parties they were not advocates of policy but one might want to quickly note so list the policies of the federal government circa 1885 well there's not a lot unfortunately there are policies that are distributive supporting the railroads with land grants giving away land through the Homestead Act etc etc in other words the national state was not yet regulatory and so these are party politicians in a party political universe Roosevelt wasn't and that's I think the mark difference personality aside, Roosevelt enters the office and takes it as something else now that suggests then that it's not enough to talk about Roosevelt we have to talk about its context that the personal skills the personality of this president itself aren't enough to speak ludicrously so what would Lincoln be if Lincoln occupied the presidency when Cal Coolidge did well he wouldn't be Lincoln right context is really crucial to understanding leadership so what's Roosevelt's context well it's very quickly it's not the party period so that Roosevelt enters the presidency at a moment that is a seam itself between this dominant mass parties and an immersion pluralist political and economic system parties don't disappear they remain important but they become competitors with interest groups in a much much more diffracted and interestingly complicated modern political system one that looks rather like our political system today and Roosevelt was the right politician for that system and so this is a key part of my argument I want to fit Roosevelt's background and skills with that new context so here's my hypothesis it's a counterfactual so I can't be wrong right if McKinley had not been shot by an anarchist in Buffalo in 1901 nothing would have changed he would have remained context be damned he would have remained McKinley there would have been rather little difference in the way the presidency was used in 1901, 2 and 3 because he couldn't recognize the context his background was the party period now what does that mean? a few markers so think about this what did every president from after Andrew Johnson to Theodore Roosevelt except for Cleveland share they were major officers in Civil War they were, so to speak, heroes of the bloody shirt so they're men who came to their political maturity in the context of saving the Union and that of course is the foundation of the Republican Party and so the Republican Party for them certainly was a patronage machine but it was a patronage machine with a soul and the soul was the Union and that's their political universe and preserving that party and maintaining it against those Democrats the party of the South the party of disloyalty and disunion was this grand political project there were also every one of them of course an elective politician men who'd spent their whole careers seeking office and then along comes Theodore Roosevelt a babe during the Civil War who except for several one year terms at the beginning of his political career in the New York State Assembly which were marked by the way by his conflict with party bosses and party regulars except for that he held no elective office until the governorship of New York in other words his whole public career is non-elective and administrative and what I want to point out is that if there is a characteristic of government that is parallel to the emergence of this post party period system it is the rise of the American administrative state the beginnings of the civil service the beginning of expert agencies like the Forest Service that's the system that Theodore Roosevelt had been socialized into he'd worked in it he'd held important offices in it and so he enters the American political scene and the executive branch in the presidential role in exactly the time that it was open to somebody with his skills and sensibilities so as to create a new kind of president so McKinley couldn't have but Roosevelt could because he understood it now that's the beginning of an explanation I think but why did he take the opportunity to become so different a president than McKinley had why did he become a pursuer of public policies that no president had ever sought before like antitrust it's because the context is not only one of a changing organizational structure of interests and power it's also what we all know is the progressive era it's a period of increasing dissatisfaction on the part of middle Americans with the nature of American society and economy so let me say a few more things about that system so what is the progressive period what are we being by it let me quote a distinguished historian from a book of his on the progressive era he says in this rapidly changing economy and society circa 1900 at the turn of the century middle class man and woman radicalized and resolute we're ready to sweep aside the power of the rich and build a new progressive America in other words it was a period when people like you and me were being radicalized now radicalized in interesting ways not so as to go out and build the barricades but radicalized rather as McGeer has it to try to make all of America middle class to try to create stability and order and good schools and find communities that all Americans should live that way and the rich don't and the poor don't and they must be changed and a significant point of change is the American economy so what are the main targets of anxiety here well first the so-called trusts that is these economic organizations that monopolized industries this is a period in which the American economy very rapidly and confidently became dominated by very few firms so there weren't tobacco companies there was a tobacco trust American tobacco company there weren't sugar companies sugar refiners there was the sugar trust there wasn't there weren't many steel companies there was Carnegie and then US Steel and then you know about oil there were oil companies and so over a period of 1898 to 1902 there are 2,653 mergers of companies in the American economy and this is what was called the trust process these companies were essentially organized under an overarching board and management and coordinated in effect for monopolistic purposes Americans looked at that and said there's nothing good about that this leads to higher prices this leads to even more misuse of labor and this leads to a society very much like one we do not want to be part of a second related issue was the tariff a term that seems really archaic to us there are we don't use the term any longer we do use some taxes that look like tariffs but they're actually out of fashion we are all free traders today right well we weren't free traders at the turn of the century we weren't free traders for most of the 19th century rather we used the tariff to protect American manufacturing but progressives said look at those trusts we're protecting them so the tariff becomes the mother of the trusts this wall of protection the Republican Party's holy shroud was the tariff it was the central real policy aims that had tied together the Republican Party protection of American manufacturing and this becomes extremely troubling issue during the progressive period and then corruption at this period cities were corrupt the national government was corrupt business owned much of government at every level the senate, remember the senate prior to the 17th amendment is appointed by the state legislatures and what that really meant in most cases was very rich people bought senate seats for themselves distributed money to the state legislatures and the senate was a corrupt place and that became increasingly widely known another aspect of the progressive era that we would recognize is it's a period in which national magazines become important just as they are today so people would buy magazines that would have stories like the shame of the senate that is close journalism following the evidence of corruption in the senate for example and then there's waste of natural resources as in the context of the end of the frontier Americans saw the world the country being one of increasingly now limited resources tainted food and drugs and the list goes on these waves of new immigrants coming in were very unsettling to middle class people they were uneducated they brought violence to the cities etc so there had to be change change that's Roosevelt's opening it's that agenda of issues that give Roosevelt as this novel kind of president the opportunity to break with his party in many respects and to it's not an overstatement I think to say to become the first president who operates as if the presidency as an independent political institution apart from a tie to party unlike the party period presidents now if we look back at that at the years before Roosevelt it will strike us that these issues were at stake in the election of 1896 they were spoken to by the democrats and William Jennings Brian a populist and those appeals were not interesting to middle class Americans they were western they were agrarian they spoke to the unsophisticated and so McKinley of course wins in a landslide in 1896 and the republicans pay little attention to those issues and Roosevelt enters in 1901 and it's a different kind of president and these issues become central for him now so at one of the same time Roosevelt saw an opportunity in the economic reform anxieties of the progressive era to address issues that had been unaddressed and in doing so to build a constituency for his own presidency not to simply appeal to republicans but to be the progressive president and in doing so he in fact built that constituency and became what we might call the first personal president that is the first president who uses the office in a way that is a personification of himself now finally I want to turn to a couple of cases of his policy innovation to try to deal with the question of how do we do this keep in mind the presidency we might say that Roosevelt looks modern but the modern presidency is an institution an executive office staff of about 2,000 people Roosevelt had two secretaries then some servants and some clerks in other words there is no presidency yet of an institutional organized way a sense like the modern presidency so how did Roosevelt achieve efficacy so I want to use two cases very briefly to try to track this the first is anti-trust so we all know there's a Sherman act right 1890 it's the anti-trust act but the Sherman act in many respects was an empty shirt there were 18 Sherman act cases between 1890 and 1901 four of them, if I recall are against labor unions so there are 14 of those cases were brought by the attorney general or out of the top of the administration they were all initiated by US attorneys in the states so the Sherman act hadn't been used as a piece of national policy it in many ways was itself a symbolic gesture to earlier Granger's disconcerns so Roosevelt his first annual message December 1901 says, shockingly for a Republican we have to address this problem of great corporations but not to eliminate them that would be the popular solution we have to regulate them we have to watch over them and that was a shocking thing to say there was business disconcerned by that there were editorials against Roosevelt in this regard and then shockingly in February 1902 he did something that hadn't been done before he and his attorney general announced an antitrust suit under the Sherman act and it was against one of JP Morgan's trusts the northern securities company this was a trust put together to end competition on the northern routes of the transcontinental railroads there were two main lines serving Minnesota the Dakotas and they were in competition with each other which meant they couldn't maximize their profits in fact they were in both financial trouble JP Morgan's solution was a monopoly we'll join them that was the basis of the northern securities suit this is a violation of antitrust the response to that was horrifying that this this cowboy this this this rough rider who rode up the hill to make himself a name now was going to ride up the hill against American business that this is nothing but a kind of clown dangerous one a kind of story about Roosevelt Roosevelt consulted with nobody except his attorney general Knox about this suit which itself was curious it fits the fact that he had no staff who was he going to consult JP Morgan but the background of this is as governor of New York he was governor of New York after the Cuban story so that he came back with his uniform as a hero and got elected governor as governor he initiated antitrust policy with consultation of a number of leading economists and so he already had the expertise to do this and he was confident of it which would distinguish him from any of his predecessors he actually knew something about policy and he initiated this suit now this story is complicated by the complications of antitrust early antitrust law let me just say one thing about it that I think underlines how adventurous Roosevelt was if we ask most lawyers in 1902 could you undertake this suit they would have said probably not because the supreme court greatly weakened the Sherman Act in a case called night versus US which the sugar trust was found not to be in violation of the Sherman Act so that this didn't look like a very smart suit but Roosevelt was convinced that this was going to not only be victorious but that this would clarify the Sherman Act and would do something else it would bring antitrust into the executive branch it would be another weapon of the presidency his presidency particularly now a couple of interesting things that I want to mention about the innovations entailed in the northern securities case something that just was the right word something that charmed me enormously about Roosevelt at this point is that an opening occurred in the supreme court now at this point the supreme court filled on the criteria of partisanship a president appoints a judge of his own party that's not different to regional well state identity so that a Massachusetts judge retiring ought to be replaced by a Massachusetts a judge from Massachusetts and there's little there's really nothing in the history of the court and the president in the 19th century to suggest that there's much by way of policy intent but we get the first case I think or at least the first case I've ever seen of a policy regarding appointment a results oriented appointment so Roosevelt in his correspondence with friends is considering Oliver Wendell Holmes for the court and he's saying to his friends you know I think this is the right guy he'll rule the way I want him to rule in northern securities in labor cases because he is a moderate to a liberal judge and he appoints Oliver Wendell Holmes of course Roosevelt's great chagrin was that Holmes voted against him on northern securities but nevertheless Roosevelt won and Roosevelt by the way never felt friendly to Holmes again he was a man who carried a grudge but most important is the kind of is the kind of presumption that we see in Roosevelt that appointments to the court ought to be modeled on the basis of differential policy goals rather than thinking of the court as a totally independent branch now boy that sounds modern doesn't it now with the victory in northern securities Roosevelt in effect makes antitrust an executive branch priority and an executive branch tool now the result of all this was shocking to the business community stocks had fallen when the suit was announced when Harper's Harper's Weekly showed this cartoon not totally sure that it like this Roosevelt the line tamer of corporations the New York Times editorialized if corporate enterprise in this country is to be dependent hereafter for the untrammeled conduct of its business not upon the plain reading of statutes but upon the will of the president so is presidential discretion now going to be the rule that guides the economy so we see some of the same references and ideas about presidential power and discretion that we see in later American history about presidential power and discretion and so in this sense too Roosevelt seems to be breaking modern ground in some respects but again, he was doing it alone he had no staff what he had was an enormous amount of presumption that he could do it and in fact he managed it second case I want to move reasonably quickly so we have time to talk naval modernization Clay mentioned that another character of Roosevelt's presidency is he engaged with the navy no president had ever done that now the navy had had administrations that had brought some change there was a point at which ships had steam engines now they didn't put their sails away because the navy was really committed to having both sails and steam but they got steam engines there was a point later that some armor was put on some navy ships so there was change but no president had ever been involved in this there had been a couple of secretaries in the navy who had been interested in the navy and done something now Roosevelt was in a very different situation first of all he is what we might call with some qualifications in imperialism at a time when theorists like Admiral Mahan had argued that the projection of power in the world must be through naval power and he had been assistant secretary of the navy for a little less than a year admittedly and he had written a little book his first book on the naval warfare of 1812 so he had this long interest in the navy so he enters the presidency and he becomes he becomes something that is unlike anything we'd ever seen not like an assistant secretary like a secretary of the navy not like an admiral he manages, he manages the navy so he changed fleet tactics in fact there had not been fleet tactics he ordered there be fleet level and squadron level exercises he became an innovator this really is so to speak but important he became an innovator of gunnery practice of American ships absolutely adamant that American gunnery accuracy must improve he was involved in the choice of the technical question of armor in American ships and then most importantly in the wake of Britain Dreadnought this revolution in battleships he did something that congress didn't want to do the older, the more senior parts of the navy didn't want to do which was to match Dreadnought with the great American battleship which was called the all big gun battleship and he won and he won because he was able to circumvent these key policy makers traditionally policy for the navy was made in congressional committees and Roosevelt circumvented them now how did this happen how could he do this and the answer is simple but not but not visible he developed a proto staff he developed in other words a group of people who were not tied to him who were not part of the White House but were young modernizing officers in the navy who were very very discontented he had met some of them as assistant secretary of the navy and so he developed direct lines of communication with officers who were committed to battleship development, improved gunnery practice, etc. and he used their information to leverage change that sounds a lot like a modern president but a modern president does that with the staff with for example the national security council or the joint chiefs of staff and their staffs but Roosevelt has none of that so he improvises a staff system to effect great change now and of course the bottom line on that story is the great white fleet so I mean this is a wonderful a wonderful end to the naval case so at the very end of his presidency Roosevelt decided and we had diplomatic troubles with Japan and Roosevelt wanted to project American power generally he decides he's going to send the Atlantic fleet to the Pacific that itself was a great challenge because there was no Panama Canal yet it was around a very dangerous southern course below South America and then when oh the ships were painted white and then when they got to the Pacific he ordered them to go around the world no fleet had ever done this of modern ships so it was an utterly striking fact the United States was sending the contemporary version of think of ICBMs or strategic air command on a route that had never been done before we had arrived we'd beaten Spain but beating Spain was like kicking sand into the eyes of kindergarteners it was already the sick man of Europe but now we put ourselves on the stage with more than France and Italy with Germany and England Japan as well we'd become a major power poetically the great white fleet returns as Roosevelt leaves the presidency he goes out on a ship to greet them coming back into Chesapeake Bay and that ends Roosevelt's presidency what I want to do now as a kind of coder to this is to use a kind of natural experiment so is it the man, is it the context how do we weigh each well we do have a way of testing part of that Roosevelt chose his own successor didn't he William Howard Taft was the man Roosevelt wanted in the presidency he was Roosevelt's secretary of war he himself had had a distinguished career Roosevelt said of Taft that he was while Taft was in his cabinet he's one of the two most accomplished public servants he's ever met the other was been secretary of war before Taft and so Taft was the perfect successor and what Roosevelt said was that in choosing Taft as president he was going to succeed himself Taft would continue his presidency and Taft understood that he was going to be a Roosevelt and well he was going to continue the Roosevelt policies and admittedly Taft was going to be a different man but they were of one mind about this well Roosevelt left the presidency Taft of course won the election of 1908 Roosevelt took his gun and went to Africa to kill some animals and then go to Europe afterwards to give some speeches and foreign languages and so he was gone for most of that next year Taft was in the presidency and Taft got in a serious trouble so not only didn't he fully continue the Roosevelt policies but he fired Roosevelt's best friend in the government of Gifford Pinchot the head of the Forest Service and so in what was a battle beyond description this became one of the great battles of the progressive period the Pinchot Ballinger dispute with big congressional all kinds of newspaper articles all of which made Taft look like an adult but in fact he really wasn't and probably was right in his judgments in this conflict but so Roosevelt was out of the presidency and here's a cartoon that suggests the way Roosevelt's leave taking was seen so here's a president who had spent all of his time back and forth and with people who would copy his words and turn that into law or turn that into new books or turn it into letters and speeches in other words the presidency as a machine that never stops well nobody thought Taft was a machine that never stopped once he entered the presidency so another cartoon same cartoonist the text is small but I'll describe it to you so these are a bunch of reporters who are standing around and they're talking to each other the balloons and they're saying I haven't had a story to file in months or I just filed a story it's the first one this year in other words government wasn't doing anything again picking up this theme that Taft was a different kind of president now just by way of footnote on this there's a lot of ways in which Taft in fact continued the Roosevelt policies he was a much more active pursuer of antitrust than a Roosevelt was for all of his battle with Gifford Pinschot the conservationist Taft maintained conservation policies by and large that were Rooseveltian but he could not maintain the politics of it so what I want to show you is two things first is finally a last thought about Roosevelt which published in The Washington Post The Washington Post's assessment of Roosevelt being quite consistent with the way we're talking about him he establishes a new claim upon the esteem and confidence of the American people he'll be regarded as the champion of the oppressed as the chief magistrate as substituted action for the hair-splitting platitudes of the past a new kind of president well Taft couldn't be that and Roosevelt after being away from almost he here came back from Europe on this ship and the ship was coming into the harbor and poor Taft sent Roosevelt this letter this is an excerpt so he was trying to communicate to Roosevelt that he felt bad about not being Roosevelt so what does he say I did not follow up my letter delivered by Archie Butt to you on the steamer he said a letter as Roosevelt was leaving almost a year earlier for reasons I did not wish to invite your comment or judgment on matters at long range that Roosevelt was abroad or to commit you in respect to issues that you ought perhaps only reach a decision upon after your return that's a different Pinchot issue and so he says as it is now a year and three months since I assumed office and I have had a hard time I do not know that I have had a harder luck than other presidents but I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than of others so Taft is telling his predecessor I have blown it I am feckless I mean this is an act of such abnegation of such psychological servitude in some way but it reflects I think the point simply that I want to make this gives us evidence that it is a set of skills in a context and not just the context that elevates Roosevelt into a distinctive kind of president so in that sense the man met the time and gave us an unusual moment in presidential history remind you of there have been earlier insights on that issue so scripture and Machiavelli the good and the bad maybe the race is not to the swift Ecclesiastes but not yet favored a man of skill but time and chance happen to them all what happens to us is a function of time context and Machiavelli pointed out I believe the prince will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times and so it is not inconsistent with what we understand in political theory our understanding of leadership generally that to understand Roosevelt must understand his context and not surprisingly since he is an intellectual Roosevelt understood this so finally some words of his from 1910 if there is not the war you don't get the great general if there is not a great occasion you don't get a great statesman if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace no one would have known his name if Roosevelt hadn't succeeded by luck of his an assassin's bullet Machiavelli at the opening of the progressive era we would not know Roosevelt but he did succeed Machiavelli and he had the toolkit for the right moment and we well know Roosevelt we are here tonight let's talk about Roosevelt very much has some questions for you we have plenty of time for questions please just raise your hand and then stand up and speak boldly let me ask you a first question to get things started so Roosevelt retires on March 4th 19 9 and goes off on year long safari in the grand tour of Europe had he stayed in the United States either in oyster bay or Washington DC but he could have helped Taff how things might have had different that's an interesting question to think about but let me respond with an initial question Taff different from Roosevelt in his relationship with the key leaders of his party in Congress was much more comfortable with them but in his second term he was also his own family history was much more orthodoxly artisan than Roosevelt's and so the problem Roosevelt would have had if he was here was that he remains very sensitive to the winds of the time yet Taff's propensity was to be pulled into a stable relationship with the stand pat republicans he didn't want to be a case that I treat my book in this regard is Taff's attempt to reform the terror to lower levels of the terror he had a quite courageous bright goal he just couldn't maintain it once he got resistance from the stand patters he just folded because he didn't want to break his own leadership and so I think that Roosevelt's presence wouldn't have helped very much so that's my take on that question he writes that letter to Roosevelt saying essentially I haven't faced any difficulties greater than other presidents have faced but for some reason I have failed wouldn't Roosevelt have been able to buck him up on those occasions and say you're going to have to break with the old stalwarts I'm not sure what was the dinner with it Roosevelt's lesson to Taff while Taff was in the cabinet was that you could work with Speaker Taff you could work with Albridge the Jordanian leader of the Senate they're fundamentally good guys even though they're crooks that's Roosevelt that is there's this kind of there's always a double take and so I think Roosevelt's teaching the Taff would be comprehensible to Taff Taff is too in some sense I don't mean stupid but simple minded let's take some questions who has a question for Barry Arnold please raise your hand please speak up Dr. Arnold in 1907 while TR is hunting bear in Louisiana a run is made on Wall Street certain trusts are failing in his nemesis JP Morgan orchestrates the saving of some of these trusts and specifically Carnegie purchases the stock of Tennessee iron and coal company and increases his domestic share of steel production just your comments and how you read the presidential allowance for this with the Arch-Dominus legacy your last phrase is really key to this this wasn't happening behind Roosevelt's back Roosevelt encouraged taking over Tennessee iron and coal and as a nemesis complicated stock deal that then strengthens the market because there's a major stock firm that was failing because of the panic and had a lot of stock in Tennessee iron and coal so it was kind of like what 2008 but 1907 instead and the bailout is a private bailout right so it's JP Morgan bailout the financial system rather than the US government Roosevelt was a privateist he saw a way to get to solve the problem he sent a secretary of commerce in the middle of the panic to JP Morgan to meet with the bankers in New York to try to encourage them by liquidity to take over some of the risk see the problem at that point is we don't have a federal reserve yet so that there is no real capacity for the federal government to do what it did last year and so this sophisticated for the time president who understood what a panic looked like I think understood that somebody had to be mobilized to initially start throwing money into the hole and JP Morgan and other bankers did that and then Carnegie and Tennessee coal and iron now there is a follow-up in the story tapped that accuses Carnegie and I trust and Tennessee iron and coal is the crime committed and that other way it hurt but you know the bottom line in the story is I think this is my book is 1913 and Wilson and the Federal Reserve it was the 1907 experience that made it clear to everybody that whatever it looked like there had to be a central bank a lot of fighting over what the bank would be but there had to be such a bank and Wilson gets one put in place another extraordinary but you know it goes back to what you said about Roosevelt and I know you were slightly excited but there are crooks that we can deal with and they're good guys he lets Morgan save the economy in a certain sense but he trusts Morgan to do the right thing but famously there's another moment in which I forget the case but Roosevelt is publicly accusing Morgan of some and Morgan's response he sends a message I'll send my people to be with your people that's right okay that's right I'm a sovereignty and I'll leave you as a sovereignty and I'll just brush them aside but he understood Roosevelt understood power and he understood the economy and so the 1907 case I think is one that illustrates how subtle he was and willing to deal with the devil if J.D. Morgan is the devil to get the job yeah I don't think he actually thought of it other question yes here speak up please yes the question is that right now we talk about Teddy Roosevelt he was a great leader I want to know about Roosevelt's success because if Trump was a great leader he appeared to have everything that he needed to be done he would still be talking about Roosevelt and how great he is now that's a good question that a much more successful president would be be talking so praisefully about Roosevelt the nice thing about questions that can't be answered factually I can't you're wrong yeah I think that we would we would speak of Roosevelt in very similar ways but we speak of tax differently and these three presidents of the progressive era would then attack it and successful whatever that means we would see Roosevelt actually more positively establishing a line of executives presidents who had leveraged power in a way that had never been leveraged before but with tax failure Roosevelt increasingly looks like a single thing looks like a one-off with tax failure right after him and Wilson's leadership being founded on very different grounds very different kind of political strategy so VV Roosevelt is something that will one-off president good question questions here I'm just wondering what what gave you your interest in the first place there's probably some funny answers I can give to that but the much of my almost always scholarship has been on the American executive branch in the 20th century so I'm interested in the development of the executive branch how an institution goes from here to here and through that work in some way I've always saw over my shoulder that there was this puzzling period in the early 20th century when presidents seemed to behave differently than their predecessors and I didn't understand why and so that led me then to have some progressive period in the executive branch and in that work I began to realize I got to know more about these individuals as personalities and as skill sets so I started as a result I got in mesh in the field of Roosevelt but that wasn't my original aim my aim was understanding the institution and understanding change for the rest of us yes Eric please carry it well one point that's been argued about for instance the Obama campaign recently was his taking advantage of internet as a way of promoting his political cause and we could say that Kennedy is lauded for his embracing television in a way that his predecessors had not do you think that that's a big question in general that is I think it's very important to think about new movements politically and new innovations of leadership in among other things relationship to media I think it's likely that this is a hypothesis that changed in media new technologies in media are in some ways to represent to new political movements new forms of leadership and for Roosevelt it's the rise in the several decades before of these major commercial newspapers no longer merely partisan but particularly the quality papers serving the middle class quite the New York Times and maybe more for the National Magazine which found to be a very profitable business and so fueling the fire and radicalizing the middle class I think without that kind of communications technology Roosevelt would not have had the political reach he had so that is an important part of the story of the emerging media the cartoon and the photograph unprecedented don't put it this way early form other questions I have one for you about context you said at the beginning of your lecture something very interesting you said McKinley for all of his qualities as a civil war veteran could not recognize the context of Roosevelt that enabled him to recognize the context let me qualify what I said just a bit McKinley recognized a different context the context that was established of the political power structure of the party period of civil war the reason that Roosevelt was so much more sensitive to claims of reform there are several the first is this administrator background his first administrative appointment was to the civil service commission the first real civil service in other words his job was to clean up the mess and then he was brought to New York to the New York police commission because of a reform mayor wanted to try to clean up the corrupt New York police force this experience not in elected political worlds serving parties but rather in roles of the state as a set of administrative structures gave him much greater sensitivity to the goals of the performers than McKinley could have had McKinley's commitment was to use patronage to support the party and to raise as much money as possible for the party so try this metaphor it's as if they saw different contexts they were wearing different glasses different lenses and saw the world but Roosevelt saw the world as a place that needed to be reformed this was background when he was trained to be reformer but add to that the fact that his background is aristocrat the sort of not just aristocrat he comes from a family of significant money but a family that is of the Nicaraguans that is that formerly that group called the Nicaraguans who disdained the very rich who saw the Vanderbilt's for example as kind of the new old rich these were the people of the Hudson River aristocracy they knew how to use money and they were modest and so he could look at new capitalism and think there was much that was wrong with it and he wrote a lot about that so he was very skeptical about the trusts and business greed so he had a mental set as well a value set that made him quite quite prone to see and be sensitive to the claims for reform white man at a great time other questions yes please where does that have come up in the last few questions I'd like to ask about Roosevelt not only coming to the president with presidency with a different skill set it's also to a certain extent even look at him as the first certainly a technocrat of its times and a both a social scientist and a biological scientist and that's a long way from the party presidency that came earlier he agrees with him well you said well I told you the background of the party period presidents and is he a social scientist really is it but his story is educated man and curious and omnivorous about him meaning that he understood that there's a relationship between problems and information and he knew how to get information and that makes it extremely different there's a time for a couple more yes go ahead this is all really fascinating and it's really fun to hear your thoughts on Roosevelt doctor I'm I'm wondering about the legacy of 1896 when the both parties almost split there were silver republicans and gold republicans and gold democrats and that part of Roosevelt's smartness was in seeing that split and seeing that he could kind of play both ends of the spectrum in a sense and so I wondered to put it sort of more provocatively some populace saw Brian as taking their agenda and going light with it to get votes and I wonder if in a sense Roosevelt took brianism and made it light brianism is about the legacy of 1896 brianism though brian price in 1804 that everything was stolen from him as he runs against Roosevelt the 18 I'm not easy to deal with this because 1896 is a really critical moment and it is it reshuffles the electorate in some ways and it's the last best chance maybe populism might but it's the last best chance of populism and abuses but part of the question then becomes as I understand it is so how does some of the populist agenda morph into and find appeal in the progressive agenda and which is another way of seeing that when brian in the early 20th century saw these republican reformers co-opting his agenda he was enraged by it and didn't know what to do about it but he understood something strange is going on and now at one and the same time what I think is important but also undermined is that Roosevelt was issue oriented problem oriented but he had no ambition to speak to democrats because one of the things that remains interesting to me about Roosevelt is how traditionally hardest would be hardest so that if you could draw some democratic votes in congress that's fine but he let me use an office in case that's similar in time clearly Wilson saw realignment as a goal for 1960 that is Wilson looked at the 1912 results he wanted about 42% of the vote but there was the second candidate was TR if you put the progressive vote and the democratic vote together you create a majority party Wilson understood that and sought to mix the vote up to create a new progressive majority in 1960 that would have been foreign to Roosevelt who was endlessly prone to talk about the importance of party royalty even though it hampered him in some ways so I'm not so sure that Roosevelt fully understood the implications of the 1996 I think that he had a partisan blinker that confided him a bit from seeing that from asking something like the following maybe everything's been killed up for grabs I don't think I've seen that let's do one more and then I have a question for you can you ask her did your comment that Roosevelt was trained to be a reformer rather than a spontaneity of his part would you... the question is was he trained in the early formers to come from this spontaneous character in the center of the world you used the phrase what I mean by that is that what we are is how we're formed a decision in 1902 to try to use and essentially push forward anti-trust policy the Northern Securities case didn't come from some spiritual place it came from a set of political experiences that he had in his career so that he was shaped to do that he was trained in another way no I don't think Roosevelt was and I don't think any politician is a naturally gifted actor who acts out of some great inspiration I think you've got to have a skill set to do it by trying you don't mean that he was handled by handling I don't mean that he was a monkey I mean rather that his own background shaped him gave him the training in a way a skilled surgeon has trained him to do surgery as opposed to just taking up a knife and being inspired I would look beyond that I'm going to ask Sharon because of an announcement I have many more and I know the audience does too who will have some other chances to ask you questions in the next couple of days but I want to ask you a question about Roosevelt's luck or what appears to be luck you mentioned a number of key cases Northern Securities the Great White Fleet the Anthracite Coal Strike the Alaska Boundary Settlement if those had failed if Northern Securities had backfired he'd lost if his intervention in the Anthracite Coal case had been a humiliation if the Great White Fleet had broken down he was a very fortunate man for the boldness of the show but against political success is in part a piece of lucky results of oldness sure but I think we could go through that list in the long run and identify some of Roosevelt's failures or very modest successes rather than full successes to see how quickly he could brush aside his a result that wasn't the result he had he was a resilient politician another factor I think of successful politicians is they get up and brush themselves off and go off to embarrass themselves again and Roosevelt certainly had that Professor Perry Arnold we'll begin again for our symposium we'll begin again tomorrow at 9 we hope you all come back if you haven't registered there's still time