 Good evening and welcome to the McGowan Theater at the National Archives here on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Welcome also to all of you that are watching on screens large and small on our YouTube channel online. I'm Cara Blonde. I'm the Director of the Office of Presidential Libraries here, and it is my pleasure to introduce tonight's panel based on the recent book Mourning the President's Loss and Legacy in American Culture. We are really pleased to present this program in collaboration with the White House Historical Association. And tonight, that partnership has also brought us a very special VIP in our audience, our brand spanking new archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogan. Dr. Shogan, just this morning, I was honored to watch, took the oath of office as the 11th archivist of the United States, affectionately, AODIS around here. And she's the first woman who's in the role. She most recently served as the Senior Vice President and Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association. And it's just a delightful coincidence that her first program as the head of the National Archives is a collaboration with her former colleagues. Just on a personal note, Dr. Shogan, I have about a year's head start on you and learning this organization and it is a pretty tremendous place that you're taking the helm of. And we're just all super excited to work with you to move its mission forward. So welcome. So with that, I wanted to just before we get to tonight's program, tell you about two upcoming programs that we have scheduled that you can watch on our YouTube page on Thursday, May 18th. That's tomorrow at one o'clock. Author Adam Mendelssohn will discuss his book, Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War, the Union Army. And the book examines the collective experience of Jewish soldiers during the Civil War. It recovers their voices and their stories through letters and diaries and soldiers listings and newspapers from the time. So we hope you can join us for that. And on Tuesday, May 23rd at one p.m. Chris Saliza will discuss his book Power Players, Sports Politics and the American Presidency, which explores how modern presidents play sports and how they also use sports to play politics. So to find out more about our upcoming programs and events, join us, visit us at our website at archives.gov. So tonight's program promises to be, I'm excited, a really fascinating conversation about how different generations and communities of Americans have eulogized and remembered U.S. presidents since George Washington's death in 1799. Here at the National Archives, we've been documenting our presidents and their passing through the archives of our nation from this perfect penmanship report of the assistant surgeon general who happened to be at Ford's Theater on the night of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and was the first to attend to him, to the letters and memos from all over the world responding to the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the height of the Second World War. And of course, we hold the stories of presidents, their deaths and legacies at our 15 presidential libraries across the country, where many of our modern presidents have actually chosen to be buried. Their funerals, their graves are literally a foundational part of our story. So let's get to the program. Before we bring our panelists to the stage, it's my pleasure to just tell you a little bit about each of them. First, our books co editors are Lindsay Trevinsky and Matthew Costello. Dr. Trevinsky is a senior fellow at the Center for Presidential History and at Southern Methodist University. She's a prolific writer and the author of the award winning book, The Cabinet, George Washington and the creation of an American institution. And she's working on a forthcoming book on John Adams. Matthew Costello is vice president of the David M Rubenstein National Center for White House History and senior historian at the White House Historical Association. His first book, The Property of the Nation, George Washington's Tomb, Mount Vernon and the memory of our first president was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. Joining them is Andrew M Davenport, public historian at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and director of the Getting Word African American Oral History Project. He is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University. And David Wolner is professor of history at Marist College, senior fellow and resident historian of the Roosevelt Institute and a senior fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College. He's the author of The Last Hundred Days, FDR at War and at Peace. And finally, we're almost there. Moderating tonight's discussion is Kate Clark LeMay, historian at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. She's a Fulbright scholar, a presidential counselor to the National World War II Museum, an advisor to Panorama, the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and an advisor to the Women's Suffrage National Monument Foundation. Please welcome our panel to the stage. Thank you everyone so much for coming tonight. I have the pleasure of engaging with these outstanding scholars about their book that was edited by Lindsay and Matt, mourning the president's loss and legacy in American culture. And I'm thrilled to be able to do this because it took me back to thinking about memorials and why they matter and how mourning really distinguishes and marks time. Actually, since the presidents with their four year terms or eight year terms for the nation essentially do tell us the history of the nation. And to consider mourning as part of that story for me is really new. It's really fresh. It's exciting. So I wanted to just start off by asking Matt and Lindsay, what brought this topic to your minds? And what was the motivation behind writing and organizing a book basically about death? Go ahead. So our motivating principle was it occurred in November of 2018 when former President George H.W. Bush passed away. And there was this incredible outpouring of grief and mourning and legacy for him. And people were phrasing their descriptions of who he was and his legacy in a very particular way. I believe that he was a kind and decent man. I believe that he brought stability to the international stage. I believe that he had a sense of humor about politics and himself. But a lot of those phrases in particular were selected to draw a contrast to where we were at that moment as a nation. To emphasize the things that people felt like were missing in our politics were lacking were maybe present at a different time. And it was it was really more about the American people than it was necessarily about former President Bush. And so Matt and I were talking about this and we were thinking, you know, is this a unique circumstance? Is this a moment where the American people are responding in a particular way or has this phenomenon happened before? Where the mourning process says an awful lot about the American people and sometimes more about where the nation is than maybe the President. And so we decided to try and put together a volume to answer that question of, you know, has this happened before? When has it happened? What does that say about the country? And then we had the great privilege of bringing together a bunch of experts to answer that question and to explore it at different moments in the nation's past. I love the subtitle of the book, Lost and Legacy in American Culture. Did you come up with that? Is that something that you were kind of debating over? Well, I'm terrible at titles. I am too. Horrible. So we had mourning the President sort of as like a placeholder to say, like, let's see if we come up with anything else we like. And then we workshopped the subtitle with our editor. But I'm pretty sure it was Matt's creation because I am gasly at coming up with that. Yeah, I'm going to take full credit on that. You know, and also when you're working with an editor and academic press, you know, it's got to be sort of punched up and it needs to have some of these key words that really helps, you know, drive interest and sales. And when we were thinking more about the volume, it kind of bleeds over into this idea of when we're talking about differences of mourning and history and memory and legacy. And so Lost and Legacy, you know, the idea of the immediate loss of a leader or a former president, and then how that legacy changed and evolved over time. And, you know, American culture, because it wasn't just some chapters focus more on historiography, others focus more on historic sites, parks, some focus on material culture, different communities of Americans. So we wanted that idea of legacy to be very open-ended so that people could define it as they see. I love that because it is a multifaceted kind of topic. It's not just only about the presidency. It's often that the office itself represents much, much more than just the single person. And you did mention the words history and mourning and legacy, and they are intertwined. I mean, they're very much interrelated, but how do you draw some distinctions between them and what maybe blends between them? Well, I think of the mourning process as what happens immediately afterwards. And it is really important that we draw distinctions between what takes place right around a funeral and what happens later. Because people often, you know, want to only say the very best things when someone has first passed out of respect for their family or their loved ones. And so there is naturally a tendency to try and put a little bit of a rose-colored lens over someone's life and legacy. And then the history and the legacy part should take time. It's going to take time to analyze, to develop. In the case of a president, it's going to take a while for their documents to be declassified for security reasons. It's going to take a while for maybe the emotional tenor of living through that moment to recede a bit so we can analyze their life and their contributions with a little bit more objectivity. I don't think humans can ever be purely objective, but we can try over time. And so the history and the legacy part is going to take a while. And it's going to develop over generations. As new generations ask questions differently, think about things in a different way. New voices are included. That's something that Andrew's wonderful chapter represents. And as we get access to more information. And I think there's also this conflation often between history and memory. Certainly they interact and there's a dynamic between the two of those. I think here in the United States, oftentimes we see these debates swirling around things, such as statues and the naming of places and streets and parks and schools. And I also think that this volume is very much a reflection of us grappling with presidential legacy in 2019, 2020, 2021. Because as we point out in the forward, family, politics, and race have been very instrumental in shaping presidential legacies, even going back to George Washington. This is true. I'm thinking about also just the fact that there's so much material covered. I mean there are 12 presidents, there's 12 chapters that the two of you organized. How difficult was it to choose these presidents above others? And are there any parallels, Lindsay, that you found as you were editing and working with the scholars? Yeah, it was definitely a bit of a game of Tetris putting together the volume because we felt very strongly about having chronological representation. We're both early American historians by training and believe strongly that there are centuries before the 20th and they should be represented accordingly. So we really wanted to have some of the earlier presidents. We wanted to have some of the big name presidents. You can't do a volume one morning without JFK and Lincoln. That would be ridiculous. But we wanted to have some presidents that people didn't know as much about so we could contribute something and teach people something. We wanted to have different voices representing the breadth of the historical profession. So everything from people working at libraries to historic sites to graduate students to tenured professors. And we wanted to have a variety of approaches and I think it took little maneuvering to get all those pieces right. But what I like about that approach is that it did start to bring out a couple of parallels for us. So if you could move to the next slide please. One of the first parallels that starts with George Washington is that the president can lay out their best wishes of what they want to have happen when they die. And then once they pass it's kind of out of their hands. And maybe their families can kind of enforce the plan that they had laid out. But it's really up to the American people to make of what they will of that particular moment. And they're going to draw symbolism and significance from it in different ways. And so for Washington it was the father of the country was dying and was the country going to survive without the father being there. That was a really terrifying moment. And citizens across the country attended over 400 mock funerals to show their respects to be able to mourn in this process. Could you go to the next slide please. When it came to Abraham Lincoln we see one of these parallels which is that people drew a significance from Lincoln in a way that maybe we don't necessarily appreciate today because the numbers of the dates are a little bit lost on us. But Lincoln was shot on Good Friday. He then died on Saturday and Sunday was Easter. And Martha Hodes who's the author of the Lincoln chapter does a phenomenal job of demonstrating that people at the time felt this emotional connection to the religiosity of the weekend and to the sense that Lincoln had really been sacrificed for the nation since. One other parallel if you could go to the next slide please is the role of technology. As technology has evolved over the last two centuries whether it's the railroad or the telegraph or the newspapers or telephone or television. It has made the morning process more concentrated in that people get the news faster and they can kind of all experience it at the same time. And it has taken the morning process across the nation. So Lincoln's body went, didn't go everywhere, didn't go to the south for maybe understandable reasons. It went north on the train and several other presidents have had national morning experiences since then. I was going to say the train got phased out but it was George H.W. Bush who brought it back. If you probably remember from his state funeral in 2018 he loved trains. Warren Finch has a great chapter in the book where he talks about the funeral planning and Bush is asking like what are they going to serve for lunch on the train. They're kind of like well what are you so worried about like you're not going to be eating. But that was his idea. He would see it through all the way. And so even though primarily it's been airplanes now and motorcades it was kind of an interesting throwback to see locomotive 41-41 in Texas going to the presidential library. And it was George H.W. Bush the antiquarian. I'm also just kind of curious since you guys are talking about the overall book did you learn anything that really surprised you as you were putting together this history. Something that maybe you thought you knew and you read a more deep dive into it or something else that just kind of took you maybe a back. I think that I think struck me the most is it actually came from David's chapter which was that I objectively understood that FDR was an office for as long as he was. I'd be a very bad historian if I hadn't picked up on that fact. But I didn't really fully appreciate for certain generations who were maybe you know young or young ish that he was the only president they knew like what that actually meant in lived reality. And especially given that he was president through the Great Depression and then World War II when he died it was almost like a repeat of the Washington situation in that it was the only patriarchal figure a lot of people had known in the White House. And to die at such a pivotal moment I hadn't really fully anticipated the sort of fear and the ground you know shattering feeling that that produced for people at the time. I think for me you know it really made me take a step back and think more about these traditions and the precedents and you know whether or not these are necessarily are these are these good things. You know I mean as a historian it's great because I mean usually I mean usually these events there's lots of different types of perspectives accounts photographs you know you get some more recent presidents now we're talking about like live streaming live tweeting. I mean this is like a treasure trove of real time information about how people are responding to the death of a former president. But it also begs the question is this obsession with these moments is this you know is this respectful of the institution is this where we should be in terms of our deference to the office the presidency. It's something that I've been thinking a lot since the volume came out is we talk a lot about these different things but whether or not it's a good thing. So let's ask the panel David and Andrew what do you what do you think about this kind of focus on on the morning of a president when when they hear she hopefully she someday passes. And you know when did we start having elaborate roles and what is this tradition really pointing to. Yeah I mean from a from a larger perspective I mean we shouldn't forget that the president has two jobs. He's the head of government but he's also the head of state. And so there is this you know amalgamation of offices. I even thought about that when I was writing the last hundred days you know for FDR has to do all these functionary things that a head of state has to do while he's running the war and trying to run the country. So you know in some respects I think some some of it's necessary I think because of the stature of the office within the United States and going back to what Lindsay said earlier you know I think a lot of us are kind of harkening for that degree of respect for the institution itself not necessarily for the person in the office but you know that we should hold the office in a certain amount of respect and I think in some ways the funerals are indication of that. On the other hand you can kind of go over the top you know so it's a legitimate question. Yeah I think we're maybe in a ratings war with the British narkical funerals and of course our television networks have to play with that. But I do think that we can maybe check some of the pomp and circumstance of course being respectful of the head of state and their passing and particularly of their family and loved ones while also recognizing that we are a Republican democracy and that just because a former chief has passed does not mean that we should go overboard with our morning celebrations that could maybe be seen as something of a throwback to our colonial origins that we should do well to reconsider our perspectives on a president and not so much the president their death so much. Yeah I agree with that I mean I think there's also it should be a distinction between if a president dies in office and the head of state has just passed and so that is that is I think an important distinction to draw and and worth considering and does sort of make the argument to have a separate sort of state versus versus the function of government. I have always been of the perspective that rather than celebrating presidents and their entire lives or even their birthdays which they had no control over we should celebrate the great things that they do. So we should celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation which is celebrate civil rights. We should celebrate Washington returning his commission to the Continental Congress and turning over excuse me the Confederation Congress and turning over power for the first time or the farewell dress if you prefer that instead. I think that would be more small our Republican in our ethos than celebrating the lives of people which we should we should be honest the funerals themselves are relatively harmless but I do think that it causes us to think differently about the people and what privileges and status that they carry in the nation and are they somehow some other category and under a republic they are not supposed to be Andrew brought up the point of Queen Elizabeth passing and we did a previous book event at the Association and I had somebody come up to me afterwards and was talking about the Queen and and they're like oh this seems very similar to presidential funerals and the thing I could come up with on the spot which I think is still true is that well but we are guided by tradition we are not captive to tradition. And so we look to the past as a guide for how these things work but you know we are not tethered to that and I think monarchy is an entirely different system where you do have that sort of connection and and to Andrew's point. It's actually interesting because in Roosevelt's case he made a distinction in his instructions to his son about his funeral was only in case he died in office. It wasn't he hadn't been in office he had no instructions but it was only if he died in office so that's kind of interesting to think about. And Matt has made this point before that as we as we've talked about these these practices we've talked about how they have evolved over time which means they are not static which means they have changed and they can continue to change and so that's actually I think an encouragement to all of us as American citizens to think about what do we want to see with this sort of thing what would be useful and helpful to the nation and and be guided maybe by tradition but not bound by it. I will say if Obama passes well if I happen if you happen if I happen to outlive him I will be in mourning for a while. Take back everything that I said. We all have the ones that we're attached to. Yeah. But just to play devil's advocate you know if you think about the enlightenment and the emphasis on individuality and individualism. John Locke for example and you know obviously the United States is broken away from Britain in the colonial era but these emphasis and these values are with us to this day the belief that the individual can make a difference in their lives. So there's a cult of personality that emerges around the president in honor of the office but really it's it's something that I'm I'm not sure we can really get away from. So so what are your thoughts about kind of this this inherent social value that we have about life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. You know these these very foundational kind of beliefs that come out of a shared culture that we have with Britain. I love this point because we you know the break in this in the long span of history happened pretty quickly. And the cult of personality was very much around the monarchy was called the cult of monarchy in the 1760s. And the biggest purchasers of items that depicted the royal family or the crest or something were the colonists. They were the most ardent members of the cult of monarchy. They were obsessed and when you take that away something has to replace it. And so for example, just two years after the start of fighting of the Revolution, the army was celebrating Washington's birthday because they were no longer celebrating the king's birthday. And someone had to be celebrated so they will make it Washington. So I think you're right that there was there was this break but you have all of this culture that has developed and the people haven't changed. And so there is a lot that we still sort of grapple with of how are we different but there's so much that's still the same. That's I mean as a historian at the portrait gallery we are the keepers of all these portraits of presidents. And so I know that Washington I mean he was just made into this myth. I mean this people had no idea really what he looked like because they kept remaking sort of you know his body and and his face and just making him into this. Very well worshipped kind of figure. So I also think it's interesting to think about the material culture that sort of springs up around the presidents as they pass. Has anyone seen the movie Jackie from 2016? Anyone in the audience? Star has done Natalie Portman and I see some nods. It's all about her Jacqueline Kennedy's experience and realization of you know that her husband has just been killed, assassinated and she has to deal with his legacy like right there. So it's and the music is by Michael Levy and it's really really beautiful. So I encourage everyone to check it out. I guess I'm a movie buff. Are there other ways though that television or technology has changed the course of of mourning to the point that it impacts the legacy. Like I was just mentioning these portraits of Washington that sort of we made his his figure almost completely. What do you guys think? Well the picture behind me is of the of course the Kennedy funeral as well. And I don't think I included this one but I'm sure people have seen or if they remember there's the picture of Jack Jr. saluting his dad's coffin. And that moment became so ingrained in our national memory because it was televised. And so I think that as we you know and and Jacqueline Kennedy was a master at this as we think about how legacy shaped often our first images are the ones that are the most powerful. And with photography and with television those first images are shared more rapidly and I think only acquire more power. And so it takes longer maybe for a more analytical approach to kind of take over you know start to start to reassess. We've talked before if anyone likes to look at the C-SPAN presidential rankings that they do every four years. I think the most interesting thing is the change over time to see how you know how presidents have sort of fared in our international memory and some go up and some go down. And Kennedy recently I think has started to go down a little bit and partly that's because people are looking at different factors. But I think it's also that some of the power the emotional power of the imagery is starting to release its hold a little bit. When you brought up Jacqueline Kennedy I mean a number of the different chapters touch on how first ladies play a former first ladies play a pivotal role. As however you want to call it guardians gatekeepers shapers of legacy. And you know it was Mrs. Kennedy who was the first one to sort of coin the Camelot idea that then gets picked up by a lot of Kennedy supporters. And historians since then some have fallen more into that camp others have become more critical of that. And I think that also is part of what Lindsay has said of the C-SPAN rankings is to see Kennedy sort of slowly slide is you're seeing more critical assessments of Kennedy. And I think as we get further away from his assassination and his death people don't know this as well because maybe they didn't see it. They didn't experience it. So again it speaks to the idea of when we get further removed from a historical moment. It brings sort of a new set of eyes and ears to what happens. Yeah maybe fresh perspective or more more jaded. Like Lindsay was saying we can't always be objective as hard as we try sometimes. It's interesting in contrast Jackie with Eleanor Roosevelt because of course you know she would go on to serve at the United Nations and chair the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which she deserves enormous credit for. In fact she received a standing ovation from the General Assembly I think one of the rare times that ever happened. But you know from her perspective not to take anything away from Eleanor she felt that she was fulfilling her husband's legacy. That was her way of serving in the United Nations and drafting the Universal Declaration was in a way kind of completing his great project. That makes sense. You know someone that well it's sort of I don't know partnership. Andrew I wanted to ask you because race also plays a role in mourning and in your chapter in the book you examine how the white family of Jefferson had sort of one reaction that might you know well represent a white consciousness sort of writ large. But the African American people that were living in Monticello who were enslaved had a completely different relationship with his death. And you know Andrew's writing really fills in those gaps in the history and I'm just wondering how you came across this information and like your approach to this history and maybe the lessons that you carry forward from using this kind of method. That's relatively fresh and new especially considering Thomas Jefferson. Sure. I think when I had that when Lindsay first reached out to invite me to contribute to the volume. And she explained that Matt and and she was focused on race family and politics had decided that be in my best interest to follow the editor's suggestions and pursue that path. But as I was gathering evidence and reading across Jefferson biographies I realized that there was a disjuncture between what has been written about Jefferson's death particularly the way that his his white family mourned him and the nation mourned him and how the 200 enslaved people that that he had owned about 130 of whom were at Monticello and about 70 of whom were at his other plantation poplar forest which is about 90 miles south near Lynchbury how they experienced his death. And I think that the tell for me was trying to find a firsthand account of Jefferson's funeral. And there's just one in existence and it's from about 50 years after it's by an under former undergrad at UVA who came up from Charlottesville. His name is Andrew Smith and he comes up for what Jefferson had hoped would be a very small intimate family ceremony and Smith joins and he in this letter that he publishes in 75 in Charlottesville newspaper. He remarks that there were 30 or 40 people present and he describes the exact kind of circumstances of of the reading of the book of common prayer of a couple of other folks who are present and present including he names his fellow student at the time Edgar Allen Poe being there as well. Whether that's true or not I'm not quite sure but he said it so there you go. But I realized knowing what I know about Jefferson Randolph family funerals particularly Jefferson's daughter who dies in 1836. We know that enslaved people were also present. And even after emancipation when Jefferson's granddaughter in law Jane Nicholas Randolph passes away we know that African Americans were present there as well. And so when Smith says they're 30 to 40 African American 30 to 40 people present I thought to myself well that can't quite be be right. And so then I did a deep dive into well how did African Americans mourn not just Jefferson but themselves and their own families because the critical point here is that yes Jefferson died. Yes his family mourned him. Yes the nation mourned him. But the enslaved community was it was a catastrophe. And is the greatest fear among enslaved people when an enslaved would pass because their families would be disrupted divided and forcibly transported not just locally but regionally or even much farther into the into the lower south. And as it began kind of collecting these sources I realized there's an interview. It's a recollection by Lafayette's assistant Lafayette visits Monticello in 1824. It's this famous reunion of the two revolutionaries. They're both in their in their 80s at this point. And Lafayette's assistant goes out into the fields and he actually interviews unnamed African Americans who he records in his memoir as saying that given their circumstances as enslaved people they were OK. And Lafayette is so long as Mr. Jefferson lived. And that's two years before he died. And if you keep looking at sources you realize that this was on the minds of enslaved people for many many years previous to Jefferson's death. In fact when he returns even from France in 1789 you can see in based upon the recollections that enslaved people are are are welcoming him home. Not because of who he is but because he survived. And it means that their black community will persist for much longer. Obviously a transatlantic journey they would have had critical knowledge of what a transatlantic journey meant. And it could have meant death to him and to their loved ones in their relationships. And so as I gathered the evidence there's one particular firsthand account from from a child and saved child named Peter Fawcett who was 11 years old when he was sold. And his seven siblings were sold as well including a sister who was sold in New Orleans. And what Peter Fawcett says Jefferson dies of course on July 4th. Jefferson had sublime timing any number of respects and he actually has a newspaper account that comes out just basically on the day that he dies. It says all eyes are opening to the rights of all eyes are opening or opened to the rights of man. And this is grounds for hope for others. What Peter Fawcett says 70 years after he sold for Monticello he says sorrow came to the homes of two great men. Thomas Jefferson John Adams both of whom died on July 4th. But sorrow also came to the slaves of Thomas Jefferson. And that was kind of my jumping off point for considering how African Americans remember that experience. They were not mourning Jefferson. They were mourning each other. It's very sobering really the reality and the account and how I mean as someone who's working at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and you're you're doing all this work with oral history. How are you reconciling you know Jefferson the author of the Declaration of Independence which is here in this building somewhere I'm assuming with this you know very difficult reality and also frankly a history that's been erased almost. Yeah you know first I can say this is my first time here since I was eight and my mom brought me on pilgrimage basically to see the Declaration of Independence and I was in the retina earlier. I left from Charlottesville this morning so I traded one dome for another here. But you know I think the critical thing for us to remember is that Jefferson was a paradoxical figure and a divisive figure in his own lifetime and very much so. Of course African American insights give us that knowledge but imagine how King George III thought about Jefferson. Imagine how an American loyalist thought about Jefferson. Hamilton I mean musicals have been written about this right. So it's very it gives me sucker to look back on the past and realize that he was paradoxical in his own lifetime. But as a an apostle of freedom and apostle of liberty as FDR said it's it's his best ideas are worth championing. And like any of us his worst ideas Jefferson was obviously in the state of Virginia clear about his beliefs about racial inferiority his worst ideas deserve to be to be relegated to history and to be criticized. So what you see in front of you on the screen is Jefferson's gravestone. It's his obelisk. It's at Monticello above his above his above his grave and he designed this himself. It's an obelisk and he wished to be most remembered. He said for three principal things that he's the author of the Declaration of Independence. The founder of the father of the University of Virginia and also the author of the religious statue of Statute of Religious Freedom in Virginia. That's what he wished to be remembered for those three key ideas or key accomplishments. But of course there's this whole other side that's not on this obelisk to Kate's point. I heard Darren Walker this summer speak in Monticello and he said the fourth cornerstone of Jefferson's legacy is racism and it is slavery's legacy. And we must in totality consider all of these in one comprehensive understanding of who Jefferson is. And how he affected his time but also our own. And if we can see Jefferson's legacy and reputation as something of a mirror for ourselves and to extend the Republican ideals and criticize what needs to be criticized, then I think we'll all be better off. Matt, you also wrote about a fraught historical figure, Theodore Roosevelt. And there's these memorials to him that have been disputed especially by Native Americans and the Badlands, the Mount Rushmore homage to presidency. And I'm wondering about how that history is something that you kind of, you know, how did you tackle that? And you also suggest in your chapter that there's possibly a middle road in the sort of commemoration of Roosevelt that should be considered. So I'd like to hear a little bit more about your work. Can we go to the next slide? Andrew, if you wanted to talk about this one first. Would that be okay for you already? I mentioned Peter Fawcett. He was sold for Monticello aged 11 in 1827 along with his family. And 70 years later as an elderly man, he's 85 at this point. The New York world interviews him. He's at this point a Baptist preacher in Cincinnati. He helped found a church, First Cumminsville Baptist Church. And in this interview that he gives to a reporter, he expresses a desire to return to Monticello to his home. In fact, his congregation raised funds so that way Peter Fawcett, 85 years old, sold away from his family. His family sold away from him, could return to where he was born at Monticello. And he did so. He was welcomed through the front door by the then owner's Jewish American family, the Levies, in about 1898 or so. And so there's this element here of the possibility for return. Jefferson wrote that African-Americans' griefs are transient. That's in the notes on the state of Virginia in 1785. And what I hope my chapter would do would obviously point out that lie here that someone like Peter Fawcett and the 200 other enslaved people were mourning each other and kept mourning each other, right? And even though Fawcett had been, had these experiences, he was enslaved for 25 more years after being sold until funds were raised to purchase him around 1850 or so, he did return to the site of, on this place, the West Lawn in Monticello, the likeliest spot where about 130 people were sold from Monticello after Jefferson's death in January 1827. He returned to the place of his birth. And with my work with the Getting Word Project at Monticello, we host regular reunions of descendants of enslaved people. And every time that we host a reunion, we go back to that spot on the West Lawn where folks' ancestors were sold from. And we re-imbue it with life. And you never forget, obviously, but it becomes a space of love and recondextualization rather than exclusively one of loss and mourning. Wow. That's really significant. Thank you. Are we going to the next slide? Next slide, please. So my chapter began with the controversies that were swirling around the sequestering statue of Theodore Roosevelt in New York, which if you don't know, it's no longer there. It was voted to be removed by the city. And I'll get to where it ended up, because that was really where my question started, was the controversy over the statue, which if you haven't seen it, it depicts Theodore Roosevelt on horseback and what appears to be an African man on one side and a Native American man on the other side, almost sort of walking alongside Roosevelt as guides. And of course, he's much higher up. He's on a horse. So you're seeing sort of like these, it almost has that racial hierarchy field to it. And the statue was made in 1940, which... James Earl Frazier, right? James Earl Frazier. And so I started with that question because I was trying to figure out for the life of me why there was going to be a Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota. And what I found was when I started looking deeper into these stories around Roosevelt and these invented sites of memory, is that there was a great push by Roosevelt supporters, individuals, organizations, and privately organized organizations to essentially construct or reconstruct places of memory. So for example, his birthplace in Manhattan, that is not his original birthplace. It was actually next door. It was demolished in 1916, but with the support of the Roosevelt family, the Theodore Roosevelt Association is able to work with a... There's a women's Theodore Roosevelt Association, there's a men's, and they join forces and they build a reconstructed Theodore Roosevelt birthplace in home. We see the same thing with the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park in Oyster Bay. We see something very similar with it. We start heading further west with Mount Rushmore, which of course has its own very unsettling history. But as I started moving further west, what I found was that there is an explosion of these different types of monuments, memorials. In fact, I would encourage anybody, if you haven't seen Monument Lab's work to document all these different things, you can actually see the spatial representations. But that Roosevelt became this major public figure in the immediate aftermath of his death and that people were erecting statues, markers, monuments, places he visited, places he went. It was really unusual, especially for the early 20th century, that kind of activity, that outpouring of private support for creating things in public spaces for Roosevelt. And so the tail end of this is that Roosevelt statue was removed in New York. It's now been placed on a long-term loan and it's heading to North Dakota. And it's going to be part of the Presidential Library there in North Dakota. And a key piece of their interpretation of Roosevelt is that Roosevelt was heading towards the direction of Franklin on many different issues. So they've found a way to sort of be able to bridge both maybe more traditional Republican conservative ideas and policies with what appears to be more progressive-minded ideas as well. And what is driving this is this new interpretation of Roosevelt and they are going to use the statue as a means for interpretation. We're going to talk more about Roosevelt's legacy in terms of racism, in terms of his views towards African Americans, towards Native Americans. And of course, I think the real irony here is that you're sending the statue of Roosevelt out to North Dakota and obviously he spent a lot of time in North Dakota. But Roosevelt also, when he set aside federal lands, this also impacted indigenous communities. He broke some treaties. So it'll be very interesting to see how this interpretation plays out. But I think it's important at least to acknowledge that the theater Roosevelt Presidential Library is taking that step. They plan to convene a council of scholars, both indigenous and African American, and different types of public historians, curators. And so it appears that they see that there's much more to tell with the statue and they want to be able to interpret it out there. And how far along is the library in terms of bricks and mortar? So they've announced the architectural firm. I think they've released the schematics and what it'll look like. I believe their plan is to open either in 2025 or 2026. Interesting. So that's the middle ground, you think. Is this sort of compromised in terms of his legacy to reinvent him a little bit? I think so. I mean, to me, at least in terms of geography, Roosevelt was not someone who was really defined by just being New York based. Right. He wasn't that way during his lifetime. He wasn't that way when he was born immediately after his death. And he certainly wasn't that way this many years later. But I do think it's important, spatially speaking, that those conversations take place in the physical place where a lot of these transgressions happen. Right. There's a whole show at the National Portrait Gallery. You have to plug about Roosevelt and expansion and the U.S. imperialism. It just opened. David, I wanted to ask you about what happens when a sitting president dies. And particularly in the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a wartime president, I mean, this was shocking to not only U.S. citizens and residents, but also the world. What was that like? And what was the... Yeah. Well, I guess we've got the slide up here. I think in terms of Roosevelt's death, I think it's the shock of the death. It's very similar to JFK or to Abraham Lincoln. Roosevelt, of course, died of natural causes. But as Lindsay said earlier, he'd been in office for 12 years. He had brought the country through the Great Depression and the Second World War. He was the commander-in-chief at the moment when we were deeply involved with this gargantuan struggle against fascism, and 16 million Americans were under arms when virtually every family in the country was touched in some way by this struggle, this terrible war. And I think people just couldn't conceive of the idea that he wouldn't be there to see them through the Second World War. He was a very strong figure. One of the things that's really fascinating, of course, about FDR, is his disability and the fact that, I think, maybe the next slide, go one more, one more. Keep going. There we go. You know, the reality of FDR's life is here on the left. This is the only picture where he was ever taken of FDR in a wheelchair. It was taken by his dear friend Daisy Sukley. And, you know, he's allowing her to take this photograph. But the public perception is the cartoon on the right. It looks like leadership is really going to lead, and he's dragging Congress behind him, and there are cartoons of him jumping over the Grand Canyon and racing trains. He's a vigorous man of action. It's a fascinating story, though, because there is no question that people understood that he was disabled. But they just didn't, you know, they didn't realize the extent of it. And, of course, part of that is the fact that it's extraordinary. He asked the press never to take a picture of him in a wheelchair, and they didn't do it. You know, that also says something about the respect that he somehow commanded with the press. So, you know, his death, as I said, came as a tremendous blow. And not just for the people of the United States, but right around the world, because here was this central figure in the struggle of the Second World War, the man who had articulated the Four Freedoms, the man who was championing the United Nations. You know, this had deep meaning in the colonial world and in all parts of the world. And that voice to not have it present, you know, was a huge void. And so I think the shock was very real. Was that shock present in the funeral and, you know, the sort of immediate aftermath? Was it tangible? Yeah, the story of his funeral was really interesting, of course, because, and we'll talk a little bit about his own desire for his own memorialization. But, you know, the Roosevelt's are actually the Franklin Roosevelt family. And I think probably the Theodore Roosevelt family, too, they're pretty unassuming folks. And his instructions for his funeral were not that elaborate. I mean, he did want any eulogies. He did want a lion's state with a closed coffin in the east room of the White House. And then he wanted to go to the Capitol for a day and have the diplomatic corps come. You know, he chose a few hymns. There was going to be no speeches, no eulogy, just a few hymns. And then go to Hyde Park and Lion State in the house so the neighbors could come and see him. And then he wanted his grave dug by the people who worked on the various estates in the neighborhood, by working men. None of that happened, of course, because when he died, Eleanor Roosevelt was also in a state of shock, although people knew he was dying. I mean, he was clearly gravely ill. But, you know, she's in the White House. She's trying to organize what to do and who comes but General Marshall to give her his condolences. And she basically turned to Marshall and said, can you take care of this? A great logistician. And bang, you know, 2,000 troops lining the road from Warm Springs. Just, you know, if we could go back to that original slide. 2,000 troops lining the here, leaving Warm Springs. He didn't want to be in a hearse, by the way. That was violated. He didn't want to have a hermelically sealed coffin or reembalmed. That was violated. A lot of things. But, you know, and the other ironic thing about this is he did leave instructions, which I also think would be a real contrast to, say, President Bush, George H.W. Bush, because those instructions are on a single piece of paper, handwritten. And he gave them to Jim Roosevelt right after his fourth inaugural. You know, again, the head of state functions were exhausting to him. He didn't want to go to the Capitol. He really didn't want to have to stand up in his steel braces. It was very painful. It's the last time he does so. It's his fourth inaugural address. And after the inaugural, he basically leaves his Eleanor and others to do all the socializing. He went to a private kind of little reception with a few close friends. And then he took Jim into his study and they had this private conversation about his will. And he wrote it out and he gave them those instructions and said, it'll be in my White House safe. And it's only if he dies in office. And, you know, it's to James Roosevelt. So when he died, Eleanor Roosevelt was completely unaware of this and would not have opened the envelope anyway because it was dressed to James. So she just had to kind of add lib. But the military bearing comes from Marshall. This is the Commander-in-Chief. And I think it was justified. I mean, all those millions of people around the world, you know, feeling as if as many soldiers said they lost their own father. They couldn't believe that they had lost. Anyway, it was almost good, better for those people to have a funeral, to witness a funeral that was much more stately than what Roosevelt had requested, maybe. But what do you think of his memorial that he wanted versus, you know, what the other one at least? Yeah, I think if we keep going on the slide, there we go. So it's wonderful to have the new Archivist of the United States here. Of course, FDR felt he had a very special relationship with the National Archives. He, of course, signed the original law in 1934, which created the position, the Archivist of the United States. So he was very proud and kept a pretty close track of what was going on in this building. And it's a very interesting story. He had just attended the funeral of Eleanor's brother, Hall Roosevelt, who died kind of tragically, really, of alcoholism in 1941, September 41. And Felix Frankfurter was, you know, he sent word to him he wanted to come to the White House before court was in session and so forth. And so Frankfurter came over to the White House and, you know, Roosevelt was kind of talking away and he was wondering, you know, why am I here? And then finally, Roosevelt said that he had something he wanted to talk to him. He said, you know, you're going to probably be around here a lot longer than I am in Frankfurter. He said, you mean at the Supreme Court versus the presidency? He said, no, no, I'm going to shuffle off long before you kick the bucket. And there's something I want you to do for me. He said, if everybody wants to put up a memorial to me, you know, that little green triangle out in front of the National Archives? That's where I want it to be. And he said, and I want it to be about the size of my desk here. I don't care if it's granite or marble or limestone or whatever. And he just wanted, in memory of, and his name and dates. And that was it. To me, it looks like the stone of remembrance from the British Commonwealth War cemeteries. I don't know if anyone else is as nerdy as I am about war cemeteries, but that is, you know, it's very much this very simple kind of homage to... It's the same thing in Hyde Park. I mean, it's virtually identical. Except in Hyde Park, it's just the dates of his life and the dates of Eleanor's life. There's no inscription whatsoever. No accomplishments, no nothing. And he wanted it dug by the guys who worked in the neighborhood. That's quite extraordinary. That is quite different. Well, I think I want to open up the questions now to the audience. You've been a great audience. And we do have the Archivist of the United States. So we're very, very honored. If there are any questions, we can bring the microphones probably to you, or you can also get motivated and go to the... Go to the stairs. Yes. Can I just speak from here? I talked about a number of presidents, Washington, Jefferson, the Roosevelt's. Who would you say is the least known president that's in your book that had an impact on the country? Let me just repeat the question for the online. So the question is, who is the least known president that is included in the book that has had an impact on history? Well, I think the two least known in the book are Zachary Taylor and Andrew Johnson. They're not the ones you usually think of when it comes to morning practices. I think maybe not so much his morning, but his legacy. I think Andrew Johnson usually is at the bottom of those c-span polls we've talked about and for good reason. I think one of the great what-ifs of American history is what if Abraham Lincoln had lived after the Civil War? Because Andrew Johnson was spectacularly ill-suited to manage reconstruction and bungled it terribly. I would say a lot of people, the only thing that they hang on to Herbert Hoover is the Great Depression and that's just sort of it. Nobody else talks about Herbert Hoover, but you'd be surprised to find out that Herbert Hoover lived another 30 years and he lived at the Waldorf Astoria and he was very vocal and critical of different policies of Roosevelt, but he was also very active with different commissions, with Eisenhower, with Truman, and so when he passes away in I think 1964, he has really sort of like a, it is like a state funeral and the condolences pour in and a lot of them are from an international crowd because of all of his different humanitarian work and he also very specifically asks and helps design his final resting place at the Hoover Library out in Iowa and the author of that chapter, Dean Kolotsky, he makes the point that, you know, Hoover is in, he's rehabilitating his image and he believes by really sort of playing up this idea of him as a humanitarian, as somebody who was doing his best with government bureaucracy to try to help people that he was and, you know, to his credit, you know, he helped people who were starving, you know, during a lot of people during World War I, he also moves his presidential library back to what is his, I think, his childhood home in Iowa. So instead of being buried in, you know, California near Stanford where the, you know, the Hoover Institute is, he picks Iowa, which I think is very interesting because it really speaks to his, the storytelling that he does, that he is essentially sort of a poor farm boy who against all odds rose, became very successful and ultimately president of the United States. So I mean placement of burial also matters and placement of the libraries matters. Is that one of the surprises that you learned when you were organizing this book? Do you think? Specifically about Hoover? Well, just going back to my question very early on tonight when I was like, what's surprise to you about this book? I mean, it sounds like that was kind of, you know, I definitely thought Dean's chapter was one that there's a lot more to Hoover than I think people know or assume. There you go. You need to buy the book. Are there any other questions? We do have time. Colleen and then the gentleman in the back. So I think I've heard a discussion of this book and new things come out every time. I want to ask a little bit about what you alluded to in the beginning, which is really, what I was very interested in was the relationship between mourning and legacy. And this gets to the George H.W. Bush story that you told about, you know, what were people going to be eating on the train. And it's funny, but it's also serious too because I think probably George H.W. Bush correctly understood that this was by scripting his funeral and all the different things that would take place who would speak. I mean, the sequence of events where the different events would take place, the different ceremonial events would take place that the mourning period is the first variable that affects legacy. So in the book you have, in talking about FDR and Jefferson, you have presidents that have been deceased for many, many years, but then you also have presidents who have been more recently departed. What is that relationship between mourning and legacy? And when you look across the 12 presidents, does mourning have an effect on eventually what the legacy is or is it just eventually after 20 or 30 years it's attenuated and all your careful planning of your funeral really was nice maybe for the very first period of history, but over time it's been overtaken by historians that didn't know you, maybe never watched the funeral, you know, all those types of things. So I really want to know about that relationship. So the question is what is the relationship between mourning and legacy and how much does mourning actually impact legacy and do presidents, can they really control it in the example of George H. W. Bush who maps out his train ride luncheon? Does that really matter in the legacy? I think, you know, the critical question really on that score is timing. And you know, one of the most interesting quotes about Roosevelt's death comes from Winston Churchill. You know, he said, obviously FDR, and he was speaking in the House of Commons after he died and he said that Roosevelt's loss was a bitter loss to humanity, of course, but he thought he had died in enviable death because he brought his country through its heaviest of toils and had died in harness, battle harness, like his sailors, soldiers and airmen at the very moment when victory had surely cast its steady beam upon him. You know, so, and it's very interesting because Ben Cohen, who was the only guy within the Roosevelt administration to argue that Roosevelt should not run in 44, he wrote this long memo saying if the president stepped down in 44, people would remember him for all that he had accomplished. He would be leaving office at a high point. If he stays on, he was worried that a sort of, he called it an intellectual apathy would set in and his legacy and his vision for the future would have less impact. And he sent it to Roosevelt, which is extraordinary. And Roosevelt said, this is very interesting, very well done, very good analysis, except you've ignored my own personal feelings. But I think, you know, the timing is really important. If you think about Lincoln's death, for example, or you think about Kennedy's death, I was really struck reading the book myself how strongly the African American community feels about President Kennedy. And again, he gave this very important speech a few weeks before he was assassinated on civil rights. And yet, you know, Johnson is really the president who carries through that mission and that goal. And we know a lot more about Johnson and how serious he really was about civil rights even before he became Vice President. And yet here it is, again, the timing, I think is really important. I think that really affects the legacy as well, if that makes sense. I agree with that. One of the other examples that we, of the lesser known of the Zachary Taylor chapter is he had been this extraordinarily celebrated Mexican-American war general. And when he died, he hadn't been in office for very long, and the country was going through a really terrible sectional crisis over slavery and what to do with the new territory that was brought into the country through the victory in the war. And he kind of refused to play any role in solving that crisis. And so when he died, everyone was pretty honest that he was kind of a president. But it was this moment of crisis, and so they celebrated him as this general almost as a unifying force, as a way to find something positive to celebrate because there was nothing really positive to say about his presidency. And I think that that does shape the legacy because I don't know that most Americans could name Zachary Taylor as a president, but if they know anything about military history, they probably know that he was this super famous, super successful general. And we haven't really, I think, interrogated that all that much as historians, and that did absolutely shape the legacy process. Yeah, I mean, I think in the, obviously in the short term, there's an impact there, but legacy takes time. It takes time to be further removed from the moment to have more of a discourse develop, to have people take a more critical look at these types of things, to look at the documents, look at the archives. And to use an example from the book, we haven't mentioned it, but it's an excellent chapter. There's a chapter on Ronald Reagan and looking at his, you know, the long farewell when President Reagan announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And he was essentially stepping back from public life. And that decision, you know, Reagan writes in his letter, his handwritten letter, that him and Nancy agreed that it was important to share that because they wanted people to understand that he had this and that maybe it could lead to a better understanding of Alzheimer's and all the struggles and pains that come with it. And, you know, he announced that in 1994, he passed 10 years later, but that is sort of his farewell. And so when he passes away, so much of the state funeral that's associated with that becomes much more about Reagan, the Cold War hero. It becomes more about Reagan who helped defeat the Soviet Union, brought an end to communism, and, you know, champion his Reagan principles. People don't really talk about his diagnosis as much, because that's not how they wanted to remember him. It's not how Nancy Reagan wanted him to be remembered. And I think it's another example of where we see a First Lady or a former First Lady playing really essential role in the performance of it. And I think depending on that performance, how it's arranged, you know, 2004, now we're talking about this, there's television coverage. People can watch this in real time. You can reach more people. Again, it speaks to that theme of technology, how it opens the idea of mourning. And then I think ultimately, if we all buy into that, then we all have, you know, a part in the legacy piece, you know, whether it's then 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later. The gentleman had a question. Which one of them will be mourned a much different life than we think of them today? So the question is of the six living presidents at this moment, which of them will be mourned in a way that we do not expect? Bush will be remembered as a great painter. He's done that. Well, you know, I will say that... A great deal to try and make sure that that happens. One of the most attractive things about being a historian is that we don't have to worry about future predictions. So, and we are generally not very good at predicting the future. I don't know. I mean, post-presidency lives are much longer now, right? I mean, this is a totally different thing that, you know, we're not in the 19th century, if you got out of the presidency, you usually didn't live much longer. But now that we've seen people live to much older ages, we're seeing former presidents be much more active and involved in a variety of different causes. You know, obviously I think most people think of, like, President Jimmy Carter as, oh, that is the successful post-presidency career. I think Jimmy Carter would say, no, no, no, I want you to remember my presidency. Don't remember my post-presidency career. And even that, I think that speaks to how former presidents also play a role in the beginning of this debate about how they want to be remembered. And I think we'll certainly see that. But as far as predictions, I don't know. Lindsay, do you have a... Well, it is an impossible question. Because I think that had the events of 2016 to 2020 not happen in the way that they did, we wouldn't remember necessarily Bush 41 the way that we do. I think that Obama poses a really interesting question because, you know, one of his favorite quotes is the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. And I think there is a pretty widely held sense that one of the factors of the rise of former President Trump and the social movements surrounding his presidency was a backlash to Obama's presidency. Depending on what happens next is going to tell us a lot about that arc. And so I think it could go one of two ways. One is, I think, a fairly dark and perhaps a violent story and one is a much more optimistic story. So I do think we're at a turning point. I'm really dodging, and I'm not saying which one I think is going to happen. But I do think his legacy I think has potentially the most interest to me in terms of it could really go one of two ways. I'm going to be very Rooseveltian and say I'll defer to my editor. Following suit. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, I think you're already starting to see a little bit of this with Bill Clinton. Obviously his legacy has evolved and shifted over the past 20, 25 years. But I think, again, as we get further removed from the time they were actually in office people do tend to remember some of the positives more than the negatives. And I think with Bill Clinton, as we've moved through these different times of political turmoil and unrest, for all of his indiscretions he was a pretty steady hand in terms of the office, the presidency. And I think that was a big reason why George H.W. Bush. Everybody talked about his stability in governing. That became a very sought out attribute all of a sudden. The people were really fixated on. And so I think Clinton also had that attribute as well when he was governing. So, you know, we'll see what happens. But I could see him being more positively viewed. And of course, seeing the two of them work together. George H.W. Bush and President Clinton. And the other thing that's interesting and one thing I didn't mention earlier that I should really mention is in terms of legacy is that, you know, Roosevelt has now become our only wheelchair president. Whereas, you know, 20 years ago if we had this conversation or 25 years ago many people probably would have not even known that he really had a disability. They would have thought that he could walk and so forth. And, you know, when his memorial was unveiled in 1997, the disability community in the United States raised this huge protest saying that he should be depicted in a wheelchair. I was actually sort of tangentially involved in all of that. And eventually that decision was made. And he's now become, you know, that's become an icon for the disabled community. And he's become an icon for the disabled community in a way that I don't think he could have ever imagined. Although I think he would endorse it because, you know, he launched the March of Dimes and he had all these efforts that he was working behind the scenes to try to eradicate polio from the face of the earth. But so there are aspects of presidency that pop up, you know, almost completely different. Exactly. It's hard to predict. But one of the things I was thinking about, you know, because we are reevaluating past presidencies based on our more liberal understanding or progressive understanding of race equality, of political equality, these, you know, gender equality, things that are really important to our values today. But what about something like drone warfare? You know, just to pick something kind of random but pretty significant that Obama introduced during his presidency or, you know, just the way that things are going in terms of national security, is that going to affect his legacy in ways that we just, you know, can or cannot predict? I don't know. Those are some of the things I was thinking about. We'll have to have a sequel volume. Yes, we'll have to have a sequel volume. We have time for one last question. It looks like we have a happy audience. Well, thank you very, very much to the panelists. Thank you all for coming tonight. This has been a real pleasure. And I hope that you will stay for the book signing. And yeah, we'll see you afterwards if you have any more questions.