 For those of you who are not from North Dakota, welcome to the Badlands of North Dakota. What a perfect autumn day we're going to have here. This is the kind of weather we really most love in North Dakota. So we're so thrilled that we're going to get to show you Roosevelt's Little Missouri River Valley on an absolutely quintessential North Dakota fall day. So what we did last year at this time was have a kind of a round table discussion featuring all the scholars who were still around and people could ask questions and it's more informal, as you see. One of the things we don't particularly like about May Hall Stichne Auditorium is that it has that proscenium feel and the audience is so much removed from the presenters. That's not a good way, I think, to present symposia. So in the long run we'll have better facilities, but this is really fun. And last year we just had a great time, but we're going to begin with Dr. James Martin. And this is something that I'm really, really excited about because Stacey Carterie is a Roosevelt scholar and Betty Boyd Caroli is a Roosevelt scholar and so on, Roosevelt scholars, and that's what they do and that's why we brought them. But we wanted to have a historian who's interested in family and in children but who was not particularly a Roosevelt expert. I think come to the symposium and listen and read some books about this and read letters and sort of just absorb what has been going on here and then to provide a perspective about the Roosevelt family dynamics but not as somebody who's so far into it that it's impossible to see it fresh. And so that's your role and we're really excited about that. You probably had a chance to read a little bit about Dr. Martin. He's a South Dakotan. He is a professor and chair of history at Marquette University. More intriguing to me is the founding secretary-treasurer of the society for the history of children and youth and the current president of the Society of Civil War historians. He's written or edited more than a dozen books. You've seen at least one of them here, the Children's Civil War which won the Alpha Sigma New Jesuit National Book Award for History in 1999 and was named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice Magazine. So if you would just take some time, Dr. Martin, and step back and sort of tell us what you've heard and tell us what you see and tell us how the Roosevelt's fit in the world of family and childhood at the beginning of the 20th century. Dr. James Martin. I'm glad you made my apologies for me. I don't know much about the Roosevelt's. A lot of you have the right Roosevelt at least to talk about. I got that much sprayed. I also missed the memo at the Capitol Saturday, a little overdress. So I'm not quite what you had in mind. Anyway, one of the things about coming last in the program is that all the good lines have been taken. You're going to hear some things that you've heard already. In fact, one of my favorite quotes that I've found with my research is on the brochure. But anyway, I'll be saying anyways, bear with me as you hear a few things that you might have heard before. And I think earlier speakers talked a lot about the favorite of our children's response to him. Some of the bitterness that some of the bitter comments had made to Dick, Reese, and others, and Edith's ambivalence about certain things. And so some of what I'm saying fits into that very nicely. And also this is a very formal talk. I don't know anything about it, so I have to write it out. So what I've written about is kind of a Roosevelt notion of himself as a father and how he sort of applied that to policy issues and so forth. And so the way that I'm going at this is at the children's historian, looking at some of the sort of an ethos going on in America in the late 1890s and the very point of the century. And I think Roosevelt fit in this very nicely in a lot of ways. He's a progressive, he's going to be progressive, one of two progressive presidents. The progressive era also the time when there's a great deal of child welfare reform going on. And that's the context that I'm going to try to place this for you. So while I'll tell a few Roosevelt stories, my job is really to provide a larger context than that. And I appreciate the invitation. So this is great to be, I've never actually been to North Dakota. I grew up in South East and South Dakota. We drove through twice when I was a kid, the part Eastern on the way to Canada a couple of times. And so I'm looking forward to seeing your bad lines, which I think are kind of more like naughty lines compared to our bad lines. But I don't know. Jury's out on that, so I can be convinced. Something different. But it's great to be here on this. I don't know whether it's great to be here on that kind of a day, which we, not in my part of South Dakota, but in the cool part of South Dakota is also fun. What we have right to expect the American boy, Peter Roosevelt in the May 19th issue of St. Nicholas magazine, this is a juvenile magazine, is that he's going to turn out to be a good American man. And the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, not really a shirk or a prick. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all comers. It's only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom America can be really proud. Reading that article published a couple of months before Roosevelt would be nominated for vice president about 15 months before he became president, it's hard not to picture Roosevelt just checking off a list of boys and manly qualities that he most admired himself, but it's also pretty clear that he's sincere. This little four or five page article that you wrote establishes several expectations for American boys to a certain extent. He's putting the burden of becoming the kind of man whom America can be proud of squarely on the shoulders of the boys' subscribers to the magazine. But their parents and teachers and other adults also had a burden to create the kind of world in which those qualities could be nurtured. When we ask what kind of burden children and family were to a man like Roosevelt, I think it's important to look at two complementary impulses. First, he believed he needed to protect his children while at the same time expose them to everything life had to offer. He based his conception of what their lives should be like on his own childhood, which he remembered had been almost and literally happened. I never read a more happy version of the childhood than he writes in his autobiography. That commitment to raising his daughters and sons through fruitful adulthood was more a happy responsibility than burden, I suppose, but he also apparently accepted responsibility by extending that possibility to children and families less fortunate than his own. Roosevelt's second impulse then was to join the Bertrand-Schildelfer movement in the late 19th century. Like he's saying, I know Roosevelt's scholar, but his sympathy for the goals and the movement seems to have been a natural inclination of that transcendent political population. Roosevelt was certainly not famous as a child reformer, or perhaps bigger ideas prior to his agenda for policy, economic opportunity, conservation. But he was famous as a father, perhaps more so than any previous president. I should be noted from anyone else here. There we go. It's worth noting that this was an era in which Americans were accustomed to seeing young children in the White House. Unlike presidents from most of the 20th century, whose children were mostly grown up before their fathers became president, most of Roosevelt's immediate predecessors went back to Abraham Lincoln, had been fathers of minor children while serving as chief executive. I think we have the Lincolns, the Garfields, the Clevelands, the Grants, according to counterclockwise. The nation mourned the death of the son Willie during the Civil War, a U.S. brand of poor children from the ages of 10 and 18, when he assumed the presidency, because in his wife's writings in his children's memoir as a kid he was a very warm father. Wofford v. Hayes had several sons and one daughter, who was only 200 father took office. All of her James Garfields, five surviving children, were under the age of 20 during his brief presidency. Grover Cleveland was one famous child in the legitimate study of responsibility for the bachelor when he was before he was president and five children by his young wife. The first two were watched closely by the press according to urban legend, that's apparently true, his daughter Ruth was the inspiration for the big Ruth Candy Bards. While Esther was the only presidential child that was born in the White House. Grover was perhaps the most famous White House father, his first dad moved his family from Hyde Park in Pennsylvania Avenue. The first family moved into the old house in 1901, apparently brought with them unprecedented energy. When the longtime staffer once encouraged the surplus of self-expression and personnel as a kind way of putting what he talked about, that the Ruth was brought to the mansion. While another said, a nervous person had no business around the White House in those days. And again, although T.R. had a couple of brief appearances in my book on children during the Civil War, his recollections of being aware of the war as a very young boy, having a little army uniform that he wore playing running the blockade, as though he was one of his mother's Confederate brothers, his viewing of the procession of Lincoln's body would pass through New York in a swayed spring field. I don't know if you're just talking, this is an upper right hand corner, you try to find your way to run the blockade. I think he was actually talking about a made-up game that he did, and this is a famous question, suppose he's one of the leaders up here watching Lincoln procession, the jury's out on that, but I'm not to say it, but that's his grandfather's house again. This is a kind of famous painting from just after the war celebrating victory in Gettysburg. You see little kids playing at army and so forth. And I have imagined that being sort of a class and the spirit of the Roosevelt household during the war. His work on childhood fit nicely into some of the arguments I made in that book, the somewhat attached experiences of the northern middle-class children during the war, the politicalization of even very young children and commercialization of the war experienced from the youngsters, but also fits into the idea like childhood that he describes in his memoirs. As you've already heard, Roosevelt was famously devoted to his own father and he seemed to want to replicate his romanticized relationship with Peter Roosevelt Sr. as he grew up with his role as father to his own children. In many ways he was a model of a modern middle-class father to the interests of intellectual and physical development of his children or a mother and a servant to manage the household in many of the particulars of the children's lives. He was especially representative it seems to me, in what one historian calls his most important role for 19th century fathers had their children's playmates he could make this up other men were doing this as well. But what Roosevelt might have been as the same historian writes, the progressive era's paragon of realty and upright manhood that same commitment to action and his strenuous life fit perfectly into his enthusiastic play with his children indoors and especially outdoors. As he said, children are better than books but their interests first and ever possible emphasize and ever possible as we've been hearing the last day or two. TR's frequent references to children throughout his autobiography his own children, children of friends and relatives children of impoverished laborers or adventistries child labor legislation children suffering from diseases or evictions of war children enjoying play in books in other classrooms. A search of the Google books version of autobiography brings up references to children as well as 17 for child and this doesn't include the times to refer to children by name or other terms. Of course, many of these references to children appear inside and anecdotes crammed between descriptions of safaris and the way to political issues. Yet he consistently referred to his autobiography and other sources to the importance to him of his role as a father. Although he would have been disappointed that he lost his lecture name before he wrote and both of the peers it's not one of my research though for the symposium that no matter how things came out a really important thing was the lovely life I have with mother and with new children that compared to this home life everything else was a very small importance. The origins of this apparently sincere love of being parent began in his own childhood which he particularly loved to recall. He described it in using detail rather than a comfortable quotation of his childhood home on East Plain Street where he followed the city house. But he had to really rapidize about his family's long summers in the country which offered a round of uninterrupted and sprawling pleasures as he described them. They included running barefoot child-sized portions of farm work a gable of pets and freedom from scratchy upholstery. For one of the delights the long winter spent cooking up the city was Christmas which he called an occasion of literally delirious joy. He loved the presence and as a father he was trying to reproduce them exactly for my own children. He seemed to have felt that he had very large shoes that would make him father. My father isn't simply the best man I ever knew. His moving description of theater seniors quality suggests the kind of man that every boy should aspire to become the kind of man boy he described and said that this article would become. He combined strength and courage and gentleness and greatness and selfishness with great love and patience and the most understanding sympathy and consideration he combined insistence and undisciplined. Yet we children adored him. We used to wait in the library at evening until we could hear his teeth rattling in the latch at front hall and then rushed out to greet him and we would troop into his room while he was dressing to stay there as long as we were permitted eagerly examining anything which came out of his pockets. Although Bill Brands, who got no grasp of the senior idea that Roosevelt may have idealized his father to a nearly unselfish degree it also seems to be true that his desire to emulate his father, however impossible to achieve animated Roosevelt's desire to be perfect by his children and in some ways to all children. Again, it's difficult not to think that the younger Roosevelt was really describing himself or an ideal version of himself. When he wrote about his father that I never knew anyone who got greater joy out of living than did my father or anyone who more wholeheartedly performed every duty and no one whom I have ever met approached this combination of enjoyment of life and the performance of duty. Teddy was 20 years old when his father died at age of 46 and he still had been able to observe his father's devotion to quote every social reform movement and his involvement in an immense amount of practical trouble work himself. He was a big powerful man and wrote films of gentleness for those who needed help or protection. The children sometimes they come in and give to the news boys' lodging house on Thanksgiving they would help serve dinner. He was a particular friend and a supporter of Charles Bowen Breaks who he heard yesterday started his own society which established various institutions for homeless children in the origin of the orphanage of the West. Seeking to match this title was first and apparently relished. Roosevelt had taught a study school class at a local mission which inspired and something good to say for several years before and while it was in college. And it is not a stretch to see the second TR's enthusiasm for social reform as an all event police commissioner governor and president the desire to match his own assessment of his father's built property interests. This is the the lead story in St. Nicholas in May 19 when Roosevelt's picture appeared on the frontispiece of that issue. In addition to the mainly descriptive insights into the appropriate childhood that appeared in his memoir St. Nicholas's article suggested some of what he must have expected of his own children. He also highlighted several common themes for child welfare reformers. Those approach seem to be more in the context of old fashioned burgies. People of each generation faced both tendencies for good and for big evil and saw signs in modern life that would help their rising generation to make the right choices. He applauded the growing importance of athletics and physical exercise which had become the effeminacy and luxury of the Americans born into rich parents. He advised not to allow the competition to become the most important thing in playing games. Physical exercise engaged in creating stronger bodies and a sense of rules and fair play with the fall of success and the impact of the development of countless values. An example he gives of this is the British upper classes touched upon something which he kind of took for their core performance in the war of war in South Africa. Play should have a constructive effect on all aspects of life. I believe that those boys who take part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for horse play in school. While they study, they should study as hard as they play football in a match game. Hard, fair play will nurture honesty and modesty as well as kindness and a contending for cruelty. The boy can best become a good man he wrote by being a good boy. Not a goody-goody boy, but a plain good boy. If the rhetoric of fatherhood that Roswell frequently employed seems almost impossible of us as he could not always be a perfect father. He was frequently gone and sometimes worried about his absences. When the children were very small they were frequently with relatives or servants or with their stepmother all the years away from home. Brian remarked at one point that fatherhood was growing on him and the way Roswell described himself was that he became a father immediately and was a perfect father all along and his idealized notion was reality. But that wasn't the case. I think he may have projected his speaking guilt about absences from Alice and on to other children later on into the fun of his brother Alia. His addictions and affairs that only threatened the ruin of the family name also displayed a complete rejection of his parental responsibilities. Then the anger that Roswell feels for Alia has to be wrapped up in how badly he's treating his family during his his escapades. So while our sincere Roswell was in his statements about his children they are inevitably idealized to have their lives together. We'll be in exaggeration to suggest that Roswell had a philosophy of childhood but he certainly had a question deeply held beliefs about appropriate ways to raise children in appropriate ways for children to behave. Simply put, Roswell believed that childhood should be fun and purposeful. His life and the lives he tried to create for his children seem to embody a frame that child welfare reformers like to use during this period. First coin when the social worker was finally on the slide it asserted that all children deserve a right to childhood and that the future of the Republic depended on creating a system by which that right could be protected. Well there's no evidence that he was familiar with the source of Kelly's words which were published in a very statistic heavy academic tone when you sort of see the phrase at the top of the slide. Roswell never suddenly more liked a child welfare reformer than his own childhood or the ideal childhood that he briefly described in the St. Nicholas article. In fact, Roswell by most progressives was much more interested in boyhood than girlhood. When the most pressing social issues in the urban United States in the early 20th century believed according to reformers was the boy problem as they followed it. Adolescent and pre-adolescent males who lacked healthy outlets for their energy were without order or guidance in the search for vocations and could not participate in older positions like being in a practice. Meaning that great progressive era reforms for children, playgrounds expanded opportunities for attending high school, doing all court systems and various programs intended to bolster boys' morals. Perhaps the only historian in the room to have co-directed a state version of the play back when I was teaching high school in Iowa a year ago. I can't remember just mentioning that the whole premise of the con in the music man set in small town Iowa in 1912 was to provide wholesome and distracting entertainment in the form of a brass band for boys who might otherwise turn to playing cool and small things. Exactly the sort of thing reformers wanted boys to be doing instead of digging their rhymes with tea. I don't think a professionalized T.R.'s current thing with it and he felt that children's historians had been exploring for some time. The spirit of the time in this time period T.R.'s father and children came to be seen differently than they had before. These ideas seem to be reflected in T.R.'s system itself as a product as well as in his interest as a politician and a policy maker. T.R.'s events is certainly seen as a leader in child welfare reform because personal beliefs and styles certainly seem to have reflected the idea that inspired this movement. Roosevelt K. became president just a few months before L.N.P. on the left, a Swedish sociologist published a book whose whistful thinking nevertheless inspired a generation of reformers and decades later a generation of historians and childhood. She called her book The Century of the Child and it was less a reflection of reality than a call to arms to policy makers, teachers, parents, manufacturers, employers, everyone really to put the interest of the children and the priorities of childhood at the center of family, of community, of government policies. T.R. would never have agreed with T.R.'s socialism her acceptance of free love her harsh criticism of personal Christianity in a larger sense the president and the sociologist were parts of the same art and evolution of ideas about childhood would have approved a firm rejection of the idea, quote, that things must remain just as they are since human nature remains the same he might well have admired a philosopher only by acknowledging the holiness of generation and the coming generation with society truly advanced I don't think he would have disagreed with her assertion that the future development of human beings could not be left too accident civilization she wrote should make man conscious of an end in responsibility in all spheres where the president has acted only by impulse without responsibility she called this a scientific view of humanity late in the bullshit criticized society the generation of young people who have lost their ideals without being new ones in their place because of the development and power of the civilization leaving us younger members cynical and empty but she wrote when the young generation is inspired giving them having great acts to do a new century begins that would be the century the child was writing about she said a lot like him he was more visionary than a fortune teller because in many ways the 20th century could be seen as being far more deadly and complicated for children any century before given her ideas inspired a number of countries to take their responsibilities for children more seriously leaving the starting reforms that have culminated in many European countries from the United States vast network of policies and programs for children and mothers in the United States while child welfare reformers have been campaigning against child labor promoting better health other is baby contest at that contest we bring your baby in the healthiest ones, the prettiest ones we get awards at safe areas organizing groups like the boys club and the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts regulating newsboys and milk production extending school year into school day sending public nurses into poverty-stricken neighborhoods and offering countless other ideas to better materialize especially the children this is all happening in about a 15-20 year period pediatrics have become one of the first recognize specializations in medicine like the 19th century social workers have begun earning professional degrees in the University of Chicago to turn the century and dozens of settlement houses have been established in American cities during late yellow days for most of these programs and campaigns are put forward by private associations or state or local governments the federal government would not make a serious effort to address specific problems and opportunity to childhood until 1909 and what happened this is a key book provides one convenient bookend to the beginning of this administration so does the 1909 White House conference in the care of dependent children to provide a convenient and meaningful bookend to the end of this administration the conference was not Roosevelt's idea child welfare reformers regularly held conferences on health and legal issues playground development nutrition education like whole house sponsors workshops for welfare workers and parents alike but the general federation of women's clubs the national congress of mothers advocated for more federal support for children's issues will attend a child welfare exhibits where the displays of both the problems and solutions to urban problems like the children were mounted in New York City and Chicago in 1911 hundreds of thousands of people came to the exhibits the men and women who followed these organizations attended their conferences and wrote for their publications with professional journalists, social workers and experts in a number of fields with urban life modern American might call them policy wants to have broken free from an amateur religious oriented reformism of the 19th century they were less judgmental than previous generations more interested in the well-being and the souls of people they were trying to help and dedicated to bringing the resources of local, state and federal governments as well as private interests and social problems and Roswell had a close relationship with a number of them among the originators and participants in the Washington conference were a number of men and women with whom Roswell had worked in New York including social workers, policy makers and political supporters they included Charles Warren Brace Jr son of the founder of the Children's Aid Society Elmore Ellsworth Brown Roswell's appointee of the U.S. Commissioner of Education Homer Folks head of the New York State Sherry's Aid Association at certain various boards and committees related to mental illness and health issues Edward T. Devine editor of the reform magazine Sherty's in the Commons and a close political associate John Joy Edson who has served in several housing and welfare communities of TR and on the Honorary Committee for the President William D. Wall founder of the Henry Scree settlement in New York and of course in the middle of the bottom Jacob Reese of the New York Sloan that inspired Roswell to be a police commissioner other than including Owen R. Lovejoy the senator of abolitionists the child labor activists who had worked with Roswell for a progressive party in 1912 and Jane Adams who would second his nomination for president in that same year and now I want to be the president for the question that he convened the conference the reformers quoted Roswell Semestership Congress in 1904 as a protection to Roswell for years about childhood childhood in which he recommended the creation of a juvenile court in the District of Columbia and said no Christian and civilized community can afford to show a happy and lucky lack of concern of the youth of today for if so the community will have to pay a terrible penalty of financial burden and social degradation in the tomorrow and that sounds very funny talking about the future with these kids now this is kind of amazing the letter goes out in the senate meeting January the report goes out in February things don't work that fast in bureaucracy anymore this is a few weeks for Roswell to leave office there's nearly 200 very serious men and women discussed how best to care the struggling number of children and youth living institutions including 93,000 orphanages and group homes, 50,000 foster homes perhaps 25,000 in functional institutions in a report to congress a month later Roswell endorses recommendations and argued that the interests of the nation are involved in the welfare of this army of children no less than our great material affairs Roswell may not have been the first president to suggest to let the well-being of children with a good faith in the nation but he was the first one to make specific recommendations in congress to accomplish this he asked congress to help the government to develop best practices and standards for caring for dependent children that would focus on home for the institutional care so that they could recognize Roswell's own belief in nurturing value and equality of home and heart he also asked them to establish a federal children's bureau his main priority would be conducting research on these questions relating to childhood he heard congress pass laws that would bring the practices and policies of all the states and territories along with federal standards such as legislation was he's wrote not only important to the welfare of children immediately concerned but important as setting an example of a high standard of child protection by the national government the children's bureau which he's talking about, which is urging congress to pass was finally established by congress in 1912 as a small agency within the department of commerce and labor it's been overshadowed by other Roswell initiatives in fact it was less an initiative than an idea but it marked the first time the federal government created a permanent agency devoted to a single class of Americans at least those not looking at new renovations or disabling soldiers Julia C. Laffer was being his first director and although she had a 20 budget only $25,000 in this first year and a small staff over the next 30 years the bureau connected research on child labor and health issues published pamphlets on child rearing and nutrition and sponsored events celebrating infant and children's health women's successes was commissioned congress to pass the shepherd counteract in 1921 which appropriated $7,000,000 that was local departments of maternity and infant hygiene during its three decades of existence the bureau always scores a study so it includes the page of law and child health and child labor some historians in the bureau are critical of its focus on a narrowly built class of values and assumptions and on its framing of child welfare women's issues as opposed to family issues but these approaches as well as the failure of the federal government to support its program to that degree sources can affect the bureau and its eventual absorption into a larger agency and that but one of the top stressors is the special limitations the bureau that Roosevelt helped found was an important marker in the development of federal policies on children and over the legacy of TR's presence and it's a perfect example of a progressive era of dropers statistics, experts line of research to figure out what problems are and figure out ways of addressing them these two bookends through Roosevelt's time in office, the notion of the 20th century at the center of the child the first federally sanctioned professional conference on issues related to children established both the philosophical and the scientific links to a new century of thought about American childhood and children so specifically drawn to the issues he must have found a huge gap between the kind of childhood he and his children enjoyed and the childhoods endured by millions of other American children difficult to accept the pictures I'm showing you here are pretty famous pictures by Lewis Hines who was a tire for an anti-shell labor organization who traveled around the country and you've probably seen some of these and this sort of was picked by how much alike this girl working in a mill in South Carolina is dressed like the two Roosevelt girls in the little pictures this is one of the the approximately the child laborers that are kids working in mines this is a miner who is probably about 13, 12, 13 years old I love you guys I don't know who your business is but there's no good, certainly there's nothing going on that's the whole bunch of pictures that's great working but apparently they're working guys there's three guys wise guys, no doubt and also not the kind of boy that we Americans would be proud of according to the state of the United States this is my favorite picture of kids in the city that I've ever seen they're living in the gutter with a dead horse nearby I mean they were in places where it was about the 1890s horses still when you see horses in the background and they were dropping the harness and one of the adults with some of the city worker came and got him and these kids are like that paid much attention to or perhaps they're paying lots of attention to what even works in some ways but this is the sort of scene that Roosevelt has not been driving very far from his house in Manhattan City on the border of the South is that in New York? yeah, that's in New York he's driven by being Roosevelt as he has decided the process of growing a child of the adult it seems that his own children took search of the line of St. Nicholas which he said he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy Peter Jr. was a successful businessman governor of Puerto Rico in the Philippines and a highly decorated army officer who died in France for going ashore when the first waves of defeat I always think of Harry Potter from the longest day movie characters in the I don't want to think about the Roosevelt Kermit, despite his civic childhood became an avid outdoorsman accompanying his father to Africa and then to the Amazon years later he also started his own shipping company and served in both world wars like his brother's archival service distinction in both wars unlike his brothers he survived and worked for many years as a Wall Street broker Quentin followed his brothers in the service for the first world war and was shot down as you know and killed a few months before his 21st birthday the two dollars cannot serve their country so formally although that didn't work for the Red Cross for the first world war they seem to have carried the Roosevelt burden by developing strong personalities and unique characters they were an edible cause I sort of gave your list of the positive parts of the burden the burden of that being a Roosevelt place on at least some of his children the legend of Petty, as you've heard many times is famously complicated has the old list of the ones that have been deserted when the Greeks took in Roosevelt's request he proudly felt as if that burden's intensity more than any other, more than get the shoulder as Bill Brands writes the guilt that Roosevelt felt that the people of Athens announced that their responsibilities surfaced the intensity of his brain bultrishness with them in the highs in terms of possibly high standards he set for them by both the expectation and example this is another quote before I believe it was exceedingly interesting and a practical and successful businessman or railroad man, or farmer or successful lawyer or doctor or he somewhat sliding into need with the catalog again of all the interesting things he had done a writer, or a president, or a ranch man or a colonel while fighting he didn't get better and better he goes along, I think it's mine or it took gritty bears in alliance however, for unflagging interest and enjoyment household and children of things go really well certainly makes all other forms success and achievement blue with their importance by comparison I actually think he means this yeah, no expert but my reading of him and his actions and the way he I heard actually this this weekend just that while there are so many ambivalencies about him and his children and the childhood and the general I don't think he's making it up but he says that he thinks it's better to be a father but certainly it's equally important to be a father that's to be all these other things the father was a burden, Roosevelt wore it lightly and took it seriously and characteristically brought that seriousness to his efforts as a social efforts as a social reform and I think in the context of childhood and child rearing, the burden of being Roosevelt was trying to figure out how to extend at least some of his privileged enjoyable childhood to others the 20th century turned out not to have been within his child although, admittedly, childhood in the West especially so improved standards of living and greater expectations of that right childhood that Cornice Kelly had written about but many of the challenges facing children while Roosevelt was raising his sons and daughters and while he was developing a heap of ethical policy in children remained huge obstacles for many American children poverty, access to health care and good schools, disruptive families those traditions were never really a burden and Roosevelt's many generations really had effects there's some of the burden facing most children of any era thank you very much we have time for a few questions then we're going to take a break so you can all use the restrooms and coffee out and then we'll have a round table discussion but questions for Dr. Martin the point I'm trying to make is not that Roosevelt really had an effect personally on how we think about childhood he's reflecting that thought about childhood that's very important he's visited this this rowing appreciation of children as a simple part of the society there's a book called President Price's Child which is about losses wrongful death insurance companies this is in the 1920s in which the shift in the 20th century from people thinking of children as being commodities I mean I'm starting at a point negative sex the sort of if the child died what would that child's work in infest me cases fathers got their children usually in the 1970s because fathers had the business the children would be coming up with or at the farm the children would be working on and that changes because they stopped being a little bit of price on the usefulness of the child as they became less useful until they were adults and so you have much bigger awards given by jury because of the emotional loss of the child and so that's kind of a far field here but Roosevelt has reflected a set of ideas about children more than creating them like that now you kind of talk about games and plays that's actually again part of I don't think he invented that either the playground movement the rise of high schools and formal activities of high schools going on at the same time he's writing about these things and I think the exaggeration is sort of decided more the fact that he's saying this is the right way for a childhood to be is a very important thing and I can just reply to that thank you for the question over here I'm just wondering if we can get a thought Teddy Roosevelt sounds like he was probably a pretty strong Dutch reformer president, jury and sort of guy other than now there's been many indications that kids were rebellious about his I guess it's wrong to have beliefs and those kids were growing up was there any indication that they just sort of looked for his faith system or his belief system I told you everything I know for Roosevelt no lie the children were always more focused on urban is absolutely focused on urban oh sorry the question was about the difference between rural and urban efforts at child welfare reform the fact in some ways at rural areas you already have some suspension service I don't know if they can help I'm sure there are extension outposts up here but the ag schools set up in the 80s, 70s, 80s and after there's a lot to child welfare I mean that's how they do it 4-H is just like the Boy Scout only for country kids in terms of things to do I came on 4-H Star it was a little later than that but you know it's a well it's not much later though 4-1-1 I think anyway I was a top kid I went on 4-H for 6 months I'm never ever proud of it but we didn't have paths how can you be in 4-H to have a path but anyway there is a rural counterpart that's going on it's absolutely the urban kids it's the immigrant kids it's what the slums are developing there's still some kids out west on trains in a lot of cities so the impulse is that city life is bad this is a real big generalization and they didn't make this generalize country life is good it's clean work what child labor legislation doesn't cover farm kids any day ever I was growing up in my class when I was 7 years old and that's silly and obviously working stuff I shouldn't have been working out long before I was a baby it was a complicated so yeah there are parallel movements but the formal child labor reformers were all sick people and they were focusing on many came with back Jay Adams from the small town of Southern Illinois she applied her small town values and ideas about family and childhood to what she liked perfectly we kind of tried to do a breakout for immigrant kids but what's that there's some other questions here last night we heard about TRM why should we not to speak this better to the middle of the children how many did corn and straighter cheese often did can the child have more care for the children do you think about TRM do you think that's our conflict do you think that's our conflict I think most problems and others do but again I haven't read those paper documents myself hold those questions people the panel's here after the circuit with apologies to Kathy M. Belton Wikipedia says 1900 is the year for the birth of Forex very quickly you know Peter Roosevelt and other children as well as the general study of children and the history of children do you see the popularization of sort of this father point of this kid to the very in the media and everything do you think that's sort of the birthplace of modern quality time concept absolutely there's a there's a small but growing field in sort of man the history of men's history and we have women's history I think it's logical to say that men's history is the fiscal law but in terms of turning men as men not as politicians, not as leaders and so forth and so I think and as it's in three stocks one of the things that when we're controlling the Civil War I found that the father's writing home it's back to a bunch of diapers by giving breakfast I don't think the father does this every day but it's not the line between mothers and fathers what the rules are about it's completely unprocessable but as they thought about it almost any book or writing about how people think about being a mother or a father or a child is based on advice books based on kind of idealized versions because this is plus message it's the only way to read from the grips of it but certainly this quality kind of idea is something that Rosewell I think actually with his children he was around how many hours, how many days a week but he'd been around his kids but when he was there, he was there with those kids and this will leave my quality if I'm being present when you're with your kids now he's sitting in a chair while they're watching TV and that certainly is what we're talking about but certainly we're talking about American boyhood and American childhood we're in some sort of transitional phase that that period the recognition of Americanness as being embraced as distinctive but yet at the same time those are the wealthier classes we're taking as grand to where we're going to do our same in the case of Germany but we in the early 20th century I know we see a transition to celebrating unique and American art forms like baseball and jazz like the jazz age how do you see as a historian have you applied it on this the idea about this transition to Americanness and where did it come from I haven't thought about that much but I think it's an expansion of the growing belief in the 19th century of America to be quite this republican in a social sense this is also as you said artistic forms are coming out bubbling up out of various places at the independent art exhibits an American education becomes somewhat different you have public schools private schools in England and so there are many things about I think the independence of America and the independence of Americans that translates into how they put children too each of them have always become Americans by being hard players hard workers independent thought but still good team players that's how alone he is talking about so that Europeans are much more about institutional age of children than they think about this so I think there's a separation from your question I would like to put there certainly is a part of this desire throughout the 19th century especially as America becomes the industrial country to separate in other ways and become more independent of the European culture to a lot of university colleges starting this time and again the rise of public education becomes a real hallmark of how Americans set themselves in European but nothing like that in Europe especially high schools and by 1923 most America go to high school and that's not really the year out of the school it's under 12th grade in Europe that's why I got to put what we've been repeating after thank you Jenny Martin